Combine this with the recent footage showing Trump waving to literally nobody so his team can edit that footage later showing him waving to enormous crowds.

unwinnable court cases.

Under any other Supreme Court regime, I’d agree with this.

But under this Supreme Court…remember that a lot of these previously-unwinnable cases are being brought up at the urging of Clarence Thomas and others on the court who have openly said they’d like to “revisit” these cases. We are talking about a court who has used foreign countries’ laws, and medieval history to justify their rulings, and there’s no reason to believe they won’t do it again. Remember, they just got finished conjuring up the idea of near-absolute Presidential immunity out of thin air.

The case is definitely not unwinnable.

If Trump gets into office again, that’s on all of you, and you’re gonna be part of the problem if you aren’t part of the solution. NOBODY else is gonna do it for you. NONE of the other names that might appear on a ballot in your state will have a snowball’s chance in hell. If you don’t like Harris, that’s fine, you don’t have to like her, but choosing not to vote for Harris is giving your vote to Trump.

I have a cousin who insists on voting for Jill Stein because she doesn’t want to vote for Trump but “I could never in good conscience vote for a Democrat”. I know people who buy into the “I have to withhold my vote (or vote third party, or whatever) because withholding your vote is the only way to force change and bring about ranked choice voting”. I know people who won’t vote for Biden over Afghanistan or the Israel conflict while fully acknowledging that Trump would be exponentially worse, but saying “Voting for Biden (now Harris) would be endorsing his actions, so I can’t do that.”

And sadly, I do wonder how many of these people are just closet Republicans who are down with the racism and bigotry, and use those reasons to justify the fact that they just really wanted to vote for Trump in the first place but aren’t ready to admit it yet.

Some of these people don’t know how the system works, and others don’t care. They believe they’re taking some kind of “principled stance” and think that somehow, in a two-person race (none of the other independent candidates even appear on enough ballots to make it to 270 in the first place), they can get people to not vote for Biden (now Harris) but still somehow not end up with Trump, as long as they Jill Stein hard enough.

They don’t understand…One road leads to Harris. All other roads lead to Trump. There are no other candidates that could even mathematically make it to 270. As the song goes, “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.” Voting third party, or not voting at all in ‘protest’, is just voting for Trump with extra steps.

So get off your lazy ass for a few minutes to help save the world for what looks like it might be more than the next 4 years; it could be for a lot longer. And while you’re at it, if you keep voting Republicans into Congress, State, and local governments, (where most of the power ACTUALLY is), then they will keep working us all toward this kind of position. Stop putting them in power. Period.

And this is where you can tell who are the closeted Republicans. If they’re voting D at the top of the ticket, then voting R downballot, they’re a closeted Republican. They may not want to have to justifty their vote when they’re sitting around with friends and family talking about the President, or your state governor, or whatever, where voting for Trump may still be considered embarrassing. But they’ll have no problem voting for the bigot to sit on their local school board because they know nobody’s gonna talk about who voted for who in the school board election of East Bumfuck, Nowhere.

It’s why all but the most extreme (and often unemployed, violent felons) Proud Boys or Klansmen won’t show up in public with their faces exposed. They want all the racism and bigotry, they just don’t want to be covered with all the stink that goes along with it. So they quietly vote these people into power so they can get what they want while still pretending to be Democrats until they think they don’t need to pretend any more.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again because I have seen no reason to believe otherwise: These issues will never go away until we address the systemic racism in this country at a grassroots level. And we have not even achieved step 1: We need to acknowledge that there are a lot more racists and bigots in this country than we were comfortable admitting to, and those people see everything that Trump has to offer and are saying “Yes, we want more of that.”. But as a country, we are not willing to admit how deep the problem is and have spent the past 60 or so years pretending to solve the problem when all we’ve really managed to accomplish is sweeping it under the rug and pretending it doesn’t exist, and we are now seeing the results of pretending that a significant portion of our voting base that is just as racist now as they were back in the 60s and before are just some fringe lunatics that can be safely ignored. They are not. There are a lot of them, and Trump has successfully coralled them into a very powerful voting bloc. And until that is addressed, this problem will continue no matter how many band-aids you try to stick on it. I’m not even saying I have any kind of a solution to that problem – I’m a straight, white guy after all, but I do know enough to be able to say I don’t know what the solution is, but I do know that what we’re doing isn’t it.

and what he says and does makes perfect sense.

Only if the 5 year old spent those 5 years eating lead paint. In a meth lab. While on meth.

His chances were essentially nil to begin with. The only reason he’s even being discussed at all instead of being lumped in like the other no-hopers is because he has juuuuuust enough support to be able to make either Trump or Biden’s math slightly more difficult.

I still want to know how an NDA that says you can’t talk to law enforcement is (a) allowed, and (b) enforceable. If I were an investigator and heard about that, I’d want to know exactly what the company needed to hide so badly that they had to add that clause in.

And I said this in another post, but if you are ever asked to sign an NDA that says you can’t cooperate with law enforcement, hand in your resignation and seek legal counsel. They’re not asking you to sign it to protect you. They’re asking you to sign it so when shit hits the fan (and it WILL hit the fan), you’ll be the lackey who’s stuck falling on their sword unless you want to be subject to a penalty that far exceeds what you were offered when you signed the NDA in the first place.

If they’re saying “Here’s a shitload of money, don’t talk to the cops.”, there’s a reason for that. And it’s probably not going to end well for you.

Title seems to be misleading.

Per this article, it blocks the Fearless Fund from awarding grants only to black women. I haven’t read the Post article because it’s paywalled, but their version seems to have forgotten that very important detail.

That’s also a negative factor in sentencing.

If it were anyone but Trump, I’d agree with you.

But this is Trump. Even Merchan has allowed Trump to play by a completely different set of rules (violating the gag order 10 times and still not being thrown in jail, as an example). He has also been openly hesitant about the idea of throwing Trump in jail.

Trump not participating was predicted from day one, and I doubt even Merchan expected otherwise. With that said, I still think the chances of him seeing any jail time are all but nonexistent. He will either get a non-incarceration sentence, house arrest, or probation (most likely). And even if he does get probation, there is no chance that he is going to be forced to report to some NY probation officer. Most likely, he’ll end up somehow striking some deal where one of his lackey lawyers shows up on his behalf and pinky swears that he is being a good boy, and after about the 14th or 15th probation violation, he’ll receive his first warning that further violations may someday make them consider the possibility of having a meeting about it.

I remember a joke at the beginning of the war:

“This is actually a proxy war between Russia and NATO. Russia has lost over 10,000 troops already and counting.” “And what about the NATO forces?” “They haven’t shown up yet.”

I think puppies would be a better bogeyman.

Kristi Noem has entered the chat…

To me, it looks like she’s feigning confusion just to give her yet another excuse to shit all over the prosecution. The defense made an absurd request, the judge acted like she was having trouble understanding until the prosecution said something out of frustration and Cannon hopped on him for it.

Serious question. No joke. no hyperbole. Outside of outright dismissing the case (which she already said she intends to do after the jury is seated, so double jeopardy attaches), has she made a single ruling that wasn’t heavily in Trump’s favor? Has a single dispute not ended with her somehow blaming and shitting on the prosecution?

“International law” has nothing to do with it. The US doesn’t even recognize international law.

This is solely about not wanting the war to go nuclear. That’s it. They are concerned about Russia launching a nuke and starting WW3. Whether or not you consider that concern valid is a matter of personal opinion.

But with that said, if nukes didn’t exist, NATO would have been in there curb-stomping Russia into the dirt after the first Russian tank rolled across the border.

She’s not going anywhere. If she splits, she’s off the gravy train. Right now, she can still spend his money while he still has it. She knows she’ll never get a dime from a prenup because he’ll stiff her just like he does everybody else, and tie the case up for years when she sues him.

Noem felt confident enough to talk about shooting her dog, and then double down on it after the backlash, and still has a career as an elected politician. She will be elected to the Governor’s office in South Dakota again, and handily.

I don’t follow South Dakota politics, so I’ll have to take your word on that. I know she’s been banned from every tribal land in the state; how does that impact her re-election chances? Does losing the Native American vote matter enough? And what about the possibility of another Republican rising up and challenging her? (I know there’s no chance in hell of a Democrat winning in SD.)

I agree that there are still limits for Republicans not named Trump (Noem is less likely to be Trump’s VP pick, for example), but even those limits are wildly more lenient than they’ve ever been in US politics.

Oh, absolutely. But even after taking that into consideration, the “limits” for Trump, if there even are any, are even more wildly lenient. Noem at least somewhat hit the limit with the controversy about shooting her dog. If it were Trump, he’d rile everybody up and convince them that the entire breed needs to be exterminated.

I’ll go so far as to say that if he had just admitted that the sex happened, he’d walk.

Let’s be realistic. No amount of jury instructions can override basic human nature. And I’d be willing to bet that almost nobody on that jury cared about anything other than the testimony of Stormy Daniels and Michael Cohen. Had Trump just acknowledged that the sex happened, there would be no reason to put Daniels on the stand and the jury would be going into deliberations over a whole bunch of boring facts and technicalities that could cure insomnia. Instead, they’re going in there with a vision of an orange man with a mushroom dick in his boxers being spanked with a magazine seared into their heads. Her testimony was (a) largely irrelevant relative to what he’s been charged with, and (b) will be given outsized weight with the jury just because of the scandalous details she gave. Right or wrong, that’s just human nature. Keep her off the stand and you’ve got a case that’s about as exciting as the ingredients on a tube of toothpaste.

anything Republicans say or do is perfectly fine with their voters.

No. Anything Donald Trump says or does is fine with their voters. Other members of the GOP aren’t always given such leeway. See Kristi Noem as a prime example. There are limits, but only for those not named Trump.

You know, if the GOP candidate was literally anyone but Trump, they’d probably be running away with this election. Heck, I’d be voting for them.

No, no, no, a thousand times no to this idea.

Do you really want judges making rulings based on what is the reddest of red meat for their base so they can get re-elected? Because that would be a great way for rural states to quickly become live-action versions of the Handmaid’s Tale in record time. Cannon herself would likely be re-elected based on how she’s handled the Trump case so far; if anything, having to worry about re-election would probably make her more brazenly corrupt, not less because it would be Trump’s base that would be putting her back on the bench.

From the article:

“In a brief order, Cannon slammed prosecutors for not following the court’s rules by failing to meaningfully confer with Trump’s defense lawyers about a potential gag order before making the request.”

Maybe it’s just me but this sounds an awful lot like she’s denying the motion because the prosecutors…didn’t ask the Trump team for permission to file the motion? Am I reading that right? The prosecution needs permission from the defense to file a motion for a gag order?

Lawyers, please tell me that Cannon is once again just being extraordinarily stupid. This can’t be normal, right? To me, this is like a domestic abuse victim having to ask the abuser for the right get a restraining order.

Nitpick: Stopped, not broken. A stopped clock is right twice a day. A broken clock may never be right at all.