Judge Merchan schedules Trump sentencing hearing for January 10

The New Neo Posted on by

And yet he also seems to be signaling that the case will be discharged without jail or probation. If that’s true, why do this at all?

Simple, says Jonathan Turley:

The sentence will finalize the case and allow for an appeal. However, it would also label the President-elect a convicted felon just before he is sworn into office. It is the final cathartic act for lawfare warriors…

For many months, Democrats have repeated over and over that Trump is a convicted felon, as though that has any meaning. It’s lack of meaning isn’t just because until the sentencing hearing it’s not technically true – it’s because he was convicted by a kangaroo court and anyone studying the case objectively realizes that the conviction only condemns the Democrats rather than Trump.

However, this is also true as far as it goes, although dismissing the case would have been far better:

Merchan said that “while Trump could have faced up to four years behind bars on each of the counts, ‘a sentence of an unconditional discharge appears to be the most viable solution to ensure finality’ and [indicated he will] allow Trump to pursue his appeal options,” according to the Post.

The case has been a travesty from the start.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) The Las Vegas truck bomber was not a terrorist, but rather a veteran intent on suicide who wanted to publicize his views and get attention:

A highly decorated Army soldier who fatally shot himself in a Tesla Cybertruck just before it blew up outside the Trump hotel in Las Vegas left notes saying the New Year’s Day explosion was a stunt to serve as a “wake up call” for the country’s ills, investigators said Friday.

Matthew Livelsberger, a 37-year-old Green Beret from Colorado Springs, Colorado, also wrote in notes he left on his cellphone that he needed to “cleanse” his mind “of the brothers I’ve lost and relieve myself of the burden of the lives I took.” Livelsberger served in the Army since 2006 and deployed twice to Afghanistan.

“This was not a terrorist attack, it was a wake up call. Americans only pay attention to spectacles and violence. What better way to get my point across than a stunt with fireworks and explosives,” Livelsberger wrote in one letter found by authorities and released Friday.

(2) I noticed nearly twenty years ago that the free speech protections in the US are more robust than in Europe, including the UK. It’s only gotten worse there – recently, much worse.

(3) How Israel penetrated Hezbollah:

(4) Revisiting the UK’s child abuse coverup. The scale was huge; thousands of innocent children were sacrificed on the PC altar. The details are ghastly, and who was the prosecutor who failed to bring charges? Why, the current PM of Britain, Keir Starmer.

(5) Mapping the bedbug genome might help us fight the nasty little critters.

Johnson is elected Speaker

The New Neo Posted on by

There was really no other possibility, and all the objections were merely theater. Trump had – wisely, I think – endorsed Johnson. With the GOP’s razor-thin majority, unity was necessary and no other candidate was viable.

Here’s the story:

Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana was re-elected speaker of the House of Representatives on Friday on the first ballot after two of the three fellow Republicans who initially voted for other caucus members switched to him.

Reps. Ralph Norman of South Carolina and Texas’ Keith Self flipped their votes to Johnson after huddling with him near the House floor as the chamber’s clerk kept the ballot open for more than an hour.

Only one Republican, Rep. Tom Massie of Kentucky, voted for someone else — Rep. Tom Emmer — in the final tally, which gave Johnson the minimum 218 votes he needed to win.

In other news, Matt Gaetz – who spearheaded the previous rebellion and resigned from Congress a while back – has a new gig on One America News Network.

Fundamentalist Islam provides an out for people who are suicidal

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve sensed from the start that both the New Orleans car attacker and the Las Vegas truck bomber had one thing very much in common: an impulse to suicide. The latter seems to have carried off his demise without seriously harming anyone else, whether that was his intent or not. But the former clearly wanted to kill as many people as possible – a classic jihadi impulse.

Jabbar, the New Orleans killer, had experienced a sharp downward trajectory in his life:

In a YouTube video he posted in 2020 for his real estate business, a clean-cut Jabbar described himself as a reliable, trustworthy native Texan who spent 10 years in the military, which taught him “the meaning of great service.”

But when he carried out the terror attack — one of the deadliest since 9/11 — Jabbar lived in a squalid trailer park on the outskirts of Houston that is home to mostly Muslim immigrants.

Geese, chickens and sheep roamed freely in Jabbar’s yard when The Post visited hours after the attack. …

He had … been divorced twice, and the failed marriages apparently left him in financial ruin.

It’s logical to think that Jabbar was depressed, and depressed people often turn to religion. That can work out nicely, but with fundamentalist Islam there’s a trap and Jabbar apparently fell into it: justification for murder/suicide as a heroic act which brings enormous rewards in the afterlife. It’s not hard to imagine how seductive such a belief system would be to someone already filled with rage against others as well as shame about how his own life is working out.

That’s apparently what happened with Jabbar:

While the FBI was looking into his “path to radicalization,” evidence collected since the attack showed that Jabbar was “100 percent inspired by ISIS,” said Raia, using an acronym for Islamic State.

Jabbar, who authorities said acted alone, was killed in a shootout with police.

His half-brother, Abdur Jabbar, said in an interview that Jabbar, who had worked for audit firm Deloitte, abandoned Islam in his 20s or 30s, but had recently renewed his faith. …

… [B]oth international and U.S.-based extremist groups follow a similar playbook to draw in new recruits.

The groups use social media to push their message and then move discussions to encrypted app such as Telegram, which could evolve into one-on-one conversations, Snyder said.

“Then people feel like they’re part of a community,” said Snyder, who left DHS in December and joined the race to chair the Democratic National Committee.

Recruits could either receive direct orders or self-radicalize to take action, Snyder said.

Individuals susceptible to recruitment “might have lost their jobs, might have had a mental health crisis, might have just concluded that however hard they’ve tried, they never belong,” said Edmund Fitton-Brown, a former British diplomat who led a U.N. team that monitors Islamic State and al Qaeda.

That last paragraph may sound like an excuse for murderers. However, it’s not. But it’s part of the explanation for what draws susceptible people in.

Liz Cheney gets a medal

The New Neo Posted on by

Biden – or the people dictating to him at this point – is having fun in his last few weeks as president distributing largesses. Hunter was just the beginning. Then the 1500 pardons and the 37 death sentence commutations.

And now it’s Liz Cheney. He can’t put her back in her old position in Congress – the voters rejected her with great vigor for what she did while there. But he can do this:

President Joe Biden on Thursday awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal to former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, honoring one of President-elect Donald Trump’s most outspoken critics at a White House ceremony less than three weeks before Trump is set to reclaim the presidency.

The medal, given to those who have performed exemplary deeds of service for their country, is the nation’s second-highest award, after the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Biden also gave the medal to Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Mississippi), who along with Cheney led the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol.

What a lovely thought. And an even lovelier one might be one of those pre-emptive pardons for Cheney and even for Thompson:

Mr. Biden is considering blanket preemptive pardons for prominent critics of Trump from both parties to protect them from possible “retribution” or legal prosecution by the incoming administration, multiple people familiar with the ongoing discussions told CBS News earlier this month. Among those who were under consideration are Cheney, Sen. Adam Schiff of California, who served on the Jan. 6 select committee while in the House, and retired Gen. Mark A. Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who has called Trump a “fascist.”

Not to mention a pardon to Cheney for witness tampering:

Former Rep. Liz Cheney is facing calls from GOP legislators that the FBI investigate her for “potential criminal witness tampering” related to her former role on the Jan. 6 House Select Committee, according to a report released Tuesday by House Administration Subcommittee on Oversight Chair Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga.

“Based on the evidence obtained by this Subcommittee, numerous federal laws were likely broken by Liz Cheney, the former Vice Chair of the January 6 Select Committee, and these violations should be investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” states the report, which was provided to Fox News Digital. “Evidence uncovered by the Subcommittee revealed that former Congresswoman Liz Cheney tampered with at least one witness, Cassidy Hutchinson, by secretly communicating with Hutchinson without Hutchinson’s attorney’s knowledge.”

If Kamala Harris had won the election, my guess is that Cheney would have gotten more than a medal – most likely a position of some sort in a Harris administration. The consensus is, however, that Harris’ decision to make Liz Cheney a big part of her campaign cost her votes:

Unfortunately, while many Democratic tacticians were enthusiastic about Cheney’s jumping on board as a Harris backer, Republican voters couldn’t have cared less. The Cheney strategy was an abject failure that added few if any votes to the Democratic total, alienated voters who have no taste for the former GOP representative’s neocon extremism, and stole precious time from an agonizingly short campaign schedule.

While it is certainly not the sole explanation for why Democrats fared as poorly as they did, the Cheney detour was a political fiasco.

One of the many many things that the 2024 campaign revealed about Kamala Harris is that she has no gift for politics, no intuitive sense of what would appeal to voters, and no ability to carry it out. Come to think of it, that shows she’s got a lot in common with Liz Cheney.

Why poetry matters

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a fellow lover of poetry:

WHEN I speak of poetry, I think of classic poems written by great poets of the past, poetry that modern educationalists think of as ‘elitist’ literature. Such writing may now be largely the preserve of private schools – those privileged places disliked by our Labour government. This is a tragedy. Great poetry should not be the preserve of the few but the birthright of all children. For poetry is the language of the soul (think of the Psalms) and we all have souls. This is a challenging statement for an age of spiritual mediocrity, the age in which we live now, but it matters urgently – if only to remind people that the language of beauty still exists and that if children are exposed to it through the words, the cadences, the rhythms and the imagery of traditional poems they will have a glimpse of the eternal which they will never forget.

Poetry always mattered to me, but I cannot tell you why. It was simply on my wavelength. Even as a child, I felt it speak in a way prose did not and different even from music, which was also wonderful. I started to write poetry in earnest when I was in third grade, and although I stopped for long periods of time I never really stopped. There were also the poems I was assigned to memorize, back in the day when memorizing traditional poetry (some of it quite bad, by the way) was standard in the NYC school system.

I didn’t realize it, but my mother had also been a child poet although she had quit writing poetry in adulthood and confined herself to clever song parodies. Her father wrote advertising jingles for a living.

My father seemed to have no poetry in him, but he once told me that when his own father died at fifty-nine, when they emptied out his pockets they contained some poems. And my older brother was a poetry admirer who sometimes shared poems he studied in school and admired, and so I was exposed to a very wide variety of poetry and thought that was normal.

I was an adult of about thirty before I realized that not everyone loved poetry. In fact, I was shocked to learn that a great many people – perhaps even the majority – didn’t care for it. So there’s something else, some unknown factor, that accounts for love of poetry. I can’t begin to explain it, although it has something to do with a deep appreciation of a fusion of ideas and emotion expressed with an economy of colorful and unexpected – and often beautiful – language.

In other words, many poems make me shiver, either with delight or with wonder or with awe or with dread or with some combination of all of them. And writing a poem – especially a sonnet, a form of which I’m very fond – is a source of tremendous satisfaction.

Can appreciation of poetry be taught, in the way described in that initial quote in this post? I don’t know, although I tend to doubt it and to think that a person either loves poetry or doesn’t, although I agree that all children should be exposed to it. Maybe you can share your experiences along those lines in the comments.

NOTE: Here’s an early post of mine on memorizing poetry. And here’s one on sonnets.

The Las Vegas perp shot himself in the head

The New Neo Posted on by

It gets stranger and stranger – Matthew Livelsberger, the Las Vegas truck bomber, apparently shot himself in the head:

The highly decorated U.S. Army soldier inside the Tesla Cybertruck that burst into flames outside President-elect Donald Trump’s Las Vegas hotel shot himself in the head before the explosion and likely planned to cause more damage but the steel-sided vehicle absorbed much of the force from the rudimentary explosive, officials said Thursday.

Clark County Sheriff Kevin McMahill said at a news conference that a handgun was found at the feet of the man in the driver’s seat, who officials believe is Matthew Livelsberger, 37, of Colorado. The shot appeared to be self-inflicted, officials said.

Damage from the blast was mostly limited to the interior of the truck. The explosion “vented out and up” and didn’t hit the Trump hotel doors just a few feet away, the sheriff said.

“The level of sophistication is not what we would expect from an individual with this type of military experience,” said Kenny Cooper, a special agent in charge for the the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Among other charred items found inside the truck were a second firearm, a number of fireworks, a passport, a military ID, credit cards, an iPhone and a smartwatch, McMahill said. Authorities said both guns were purchased legally.

He had been a Green Beret, among other things, and had deployed twice to Afghanistan and also served in Ukraine, Tajikistan, Georgia, and Congo.

So, how was the explosion triggered? Perhaps a fuse of some sort which he lit before shooting himself? As I indicated in today’s earlier post, suicide was definitely a goal of his, and now it’s unequivocal. The Tesla/Trump connection seems quite purposeful, as well, although the message is a murky one to say the least. And the structural integrity of the truck serves merely as an advertisement for how well-built Teslas are.

To add to the murkiness, a relative of Livelsberger says that he was a Trump supporter and loved the military, also pointing out that he could have made a far more sophisticated explosive device. His wife, on the other hand, seems to have been anti-Trump, and says she had’t heard from her husband in days.

NOTE: The authorities are now saying that the New Orleans jihadi car attacker acted alone.

The plot thickens: were the New Orleans perp and the Las Vegas perp linked?

The New Neo Posted on by

The answer to the question is that we don’t know, but perhaps:

The bomber who blew up a Tesla Cybertruck outside the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas has been identified as Army veteran Matthew Livelsberger.

Although officers have not publicly named Livelsberger, 37, as the bomber, senior law enforcement sources confirmed his identity to KOAA and KTNV.

Livelsberger served over 19 years in the Army – 18 of which were spent with Special Forces, according to his LinkedIn profile. His current role was listed as a Remote and Autonomous Systems Manager, which he had been in for just three months. …

Law enforcement sources revealed that Livelsberger, who died Wednesday in the explosion outside the hotel, had previously served at the same military base as New Orleans terrorist Shamsud Din Jabbar.

Both attacked on the same day, both used electric vehicles rented from the same company, both were Army vets whose paths may have crossed. What are the chances this is a coincidence? Although it’s not outside the realm of human possibility, it doesn’t seem likely.

And this is starting to make me think of Oklahoma City bombers Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, domestic terrorists who met while in the army. In terms of the destructiveness of their attack, however, McVeigh and Nichols were way ahead of either the New Orleans perp or the Las Vegas perp. The latter only managed to kill himself.

McVeigh detonated his explosives, which were housed in a Ryder truck that had been rented in Kansas, without killing himself. He did this by means of a fuse with a two-minute delay, which he lit before exiting the vehicle. The explosion was enormous and killed 168 people, including 19 children, and injured 684 – with the perps uninjured.

Both the New Orleans and the Las Vegas perps, on the other hand, are dead. It seems to me that for both, part of their intent was suicide. For the New Orleans attack the motive appears to have been jihadi sentiment, and although we know little about the Las Vegas attack so far, politics seems far more likely. This argues at least somewhat against a connection.

What a strange beginning to 2025.

And then there’s the Tesla explosion in front of Trump Hotel in Las Vegas

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s hard to believe that this was an accident – the symbolic associations are so obvious. However, it nevertheless might be an accident:

Police are investigating the explosion of a Tesla Cybertruck outside the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Police said a cybertruck pulled up in front of the hotel on Wednesday near a glass entrance, then smoke started coming from the vehicle and it exploded.

The driver was killed and seven people were injured, police said without naming any of the individuals involved. Officials said all injuries were minor.

ADDENDUM:

Terrorist attack.