Dershowitz and Jarrett (Gregg, not Valerie) understand what’s going on here:
And this is a good way to put it, too:
We've reached the point where your political beliefs combined with what venue your case is heard are the primary determinants of the outcome; not the facts of the case!
It’s truly sad what’s happened to our country and I hope others see it before it’s too late to correct course!
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) February 16, 2024
For example, this legal travesty:
A New York judge ordered Donald Trump and his companies on Friday to pay $355 million in penalties, finding they engaged in a yearslong scheme to dupe banks and others with financial statements that inflated his wealth.
Trump won’t have to pay out the money immediately as an appeals process plays out, but the verdict still is a stunning setback for the former president.
If he’s ultimately forced to pay, the magnitude of the penalty, on top of earlier judgments, could dramatically diminish his financial resources.
No one was duped and no one complained. This is a transparent scheme to hurt Trump, and if it’s not reversed on appeal, it will be an even sadder day for America. All Americans – even Trump-haters – should agree, but of course they don’t.
Trump, one of 40 witnesses to testify at the trial, said his financial statements actually understated his net worth and that banks did their own research and were happy with his business.
“There was no victim. There was no anything,” Trump testified in November.
During the trial, Trump called the judge “extremely hostile” and the attorney general “a political hack.” In a six-minute diatribe during closing arguments in January, Trump proclaimed “I am an innocent man” and called the case a “fraud on me.”
Indeed.
Russian authorities said famous Putin critic Alexei Navalny died on Friday:
“Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most famous opposition leader, died on Friday after collapsing and losing consciousness at the penal colony north of the Arctic Circle where he was serving a long jail term, the Russian prison service said.
“Navalny, 47, rose to prominence more than a decade ago by lampooning President Vladimir Putin and the Russian elite whom he accused of vast corruption, avarice and opulence.
Authorities placed Navalny in the IK-3 penal colony known as “Polar Wolf,” located in Kharp, which is above the Arctic Circle:
Navalny, who was serving a 19-year sentence on charges of extremism, felt unwell after a walk, according to the Federal Penitentiary Service, and lost consciousness. An ambulance arrived to try to revive him, but he died. It said the cause of death was “being established.”
Most people think this is a case of Putin offing him. It is, however, within the realm of possibility that this was a natural death. I wouldn’t bet on it, though.
It’s not absolutely official yet, but there’s this:
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) announced Friday that he will not run for president, ending long-running speculation that he would mount a third-party bid.
“I will not be seeking a third-party run. I will not be involved in a presidential run,” Manchin said in remarks at West Virginia University.
“I will be involved in making sure that we secure a president that has the knowledge and has the passion and has the ability to bring this country together,” he said.
The West Virginia senator, one of the most moderate Democrats in the Senate, already announced that he would not seek another term for his Senate seat, but he had previously not ruled out running for president.
Is this good news or bad? Most pundits seem to think that a Manchin run would have hurt Biden more than Trump, so perhaps this helps Biden. But I’m not at all sure they are correct. Manchin was a wild card, and it’s possible he would have drawn votes equally from each candidate. I don’t pretend to know, but I doubt anyone else does, either.
But he’s out. Was he ever in?
Willis must be very surprised that her little grifting scheme with her boyfriend has seen the light of day and is getting her into trouble. She’s used to being a powerful person in the courtroom and elsewhere, and I assume she thought she could get away with this and be the great Trump-slayer as well. It seems to me that she felt immune from discovery or being called to explain herself.
But her plan has hit a possible snag. No need for me to go into the details; I’ll just link to some bloggers covering the story quite heavily: there’s this and this from Ace; this and this at RedState; and this and this at Legal Insurrection.
Willis and Wade are a disgrace. But it’s not at all clear whether they’ll have the Trump case taken away from them or not, and what sort of censure – if any – they face from the legal community.
Trump has sometimes been lucky in his enemies. But I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
The title of this post is a play on the Mark Twain book called The Innocents Abroad:
The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrim’s Progress is a travel book by American author Mark Twain. Published in 1869, it humorously chronicles what Twain called his “Great Pleasure Excursion” on board the chartered steamship Quaker City (formerly USS Quaker City) through Europe and the Holy Land with a group of American travelers in 1867. The five-month voyage included numerous side trips on land.
The book, which sometimes appears with the subtitle “The New Pilgrim’s Progress”, became the best-selling of Twain’s works during his lifetime, as well as one of the best-selling travel books of all time.
Well, Carlson is Carlson, and Twain is Twain, and never the twain shall meet (couldn’t resist). I also just discovered via a search for “Idiots Abroad” that there’s a British guy named Karl Pilkington who currently has a humorous TV show and book entitled An Idiot Abroad, with Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant.
But I digress.
I’ve written about Tucker Carlson many times. I never watched him much, because (a) I watch little TV news, finding most of it at best shallow and simplistic and at worst simply wrong and/or duplicitous; and (b) Carlson in particular has long annoyed me because I disagree with him on quite a few things but predominantly on foreign policy.
I wrote about his Putin interview in this recent post. Now I see that, as part of Tucker’s visit to Russia, he was ooing and ahing over the prices in a Russian supermarket, taking his place in a long line of useful idiots abroad. Most of them have traditionally been on the left, but these days the attitude is expressed by Carlson, who is on the isolationist wing of the right:
At the World Government Summit, Tucker Carlson told a gathering of world leaders that Moscow was “so much nicer than any city” in the United States. “It’s radicalizing for an American to go to Moscow,” Carlson went on. “I didn’t know that. I’ve learned it this week, to Singapore, to Tokyo, to Dubai and Abu Dhabi, because these cities, no matter how we’re told they’re run and on what principles they’re run, are wonderful places to live that don’t have rampant inflation.”
If you’re wealthy, I imagine, Moscow is pretty great. This is true of most European cities. When you’re an American tourist, you tend to stay in clean and beautiful city centers, eat at the best spots and wander around the most attractive areas of town. In Europe, you get to see onion domes that were built by serfs dotting the skyline. I’m sure it’s neat.
It is also true that if you’re an average person, Moscow is awful. The average Muscovite is most likely to live in some grim outlying apartment complex, many of which were built during the Soviet era. That’s if they’re lucky. Many Russians live in Novosibirsk, Ekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Omsk and Ufa. Russia’s per capita yearly GDP is around $13,000. In the United States, it is around $83,000. It’s around $46,000 in Mississippi, our poorest state. Most Russians are living in what most Americans would consider poverty.
There probably isn’t a single quantifiable economic measure in which Russia bests the United States. None of this is even to mention that Russia is an extraordinarily corrupt place, the price of which is embedded into virtually every business transaction. I’m not sure Americans appreciate how little graft they deal with in their everyday lives. Then again, Russia ranks in the vicinity of Uganda and Togo on the corruption indexes.
The only thing more pervasive than bribery is alcoholism and suicide.
Much much more at the link.
Here’s another article about Tucker’s visit:
After checking out, Carlson is floored by grocery prices in Russia. He said in the video that a cart of groceries that he thought would cost $400 actually cost $104.
Americans will frequently be impressed by how far their money goes in foreign countries. It’s expensive to travel abroad, but once you actually get there, a lot of stuff seems really cheap. That’s because American tourists benefit from a strong dollar, and they have high incomes by global standards. It doesn’t really tell you much about the quality of life for people who live in the foreign country.
That’s especially true the past few years. In 2022, the dollar was trading at 20-year highs relative to other currencies. It’s down slightly from that today, but it is still very strong.
Tucker Carlson isn’t dumb. At least, I’ve never thought he was. Perhaps he’s blinded by his own need to get viewers and stir up controversy, and his anger at what he sees as too much aid to Ukraine and too much support of the Ukrainians in their battle against Russia. At any rate, this is not his finest hour.
I’m not sure I agree with her. But it’s an interesting question:
Many Western countries are pro-Palestinian, but Ireland is one of the more extreme. There have been many articles over the years that attempt to explain this.
Here’s Melanie Phillips on the subject back in 2019:
The essence of this Irish passion for the EU is that Ireland doesn’t understand what it means to be an independent nation. Like so many cultures with a shaky sense of what they are, with an outsize chip on their shoulder and infantilized by being almost entirely dependent on others to survive (their “Palestinian” friends fall into that category too) the Irish hate Israel, the paradigm nation state of a people with an unequivocal sense of itself.
So, of course, Ireland bought wholesale into the whole farrago of lies and distortions that make up western left-wing globalist discourse about Israel, which is shared by the EU itself. …
In the 1970s, Sinn Fein publicly supported the Palestinian cause. The IRA and the PLO became extremely close, training together and sharing terrorist strategies and tactics. The IRA received substantial funding and military aid from Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi, and also collaborated with Hamas and Hezbollah. …
During the Second World War, Ireland was neutral. Upon learning of Hitler’s death, its Taoiseach or prime minister, Eamon de Valera, visited the German Embassy in Dublin to express his condolences.
Some IRA members, such as the high ranking Sean Russell, collaborated with the Nazis. The Fianna Fáil government denied residential visas to many Jews trying to escape Nazi Germany and to Holocaust survivors after the war.
Historically, the Catholic church in Ireland bears a heavy responsibility for this anti-Jewish hatred. Over the years, the church has pumped out stereotypical hatred of Jews as parasitical moneylenders and exploiters of working people.
That history was reversed in many countries, and today Christians in those places – which include the US – are among the most fervent Israel supporters. But apparently not Ireland.
Here’s a post-10/7 article about Ireland and Israel:
The major Irish media and political focus in the days that followed [10/7] rapidly became the carnage in Gaza and presented Israel as the aggressor in a war initiated by Hamas.
In the Irish Parliament all contributions by opposition politicians promoted a narrative demonizing Israel with limited government pushback. Throughout the early weeks of the conflict rarely was any reference made to Hamas’s continuous rocket attacks, to the hostages, nor to Hamas being embedded with civilians and using them as human shields.
Irish mainstream media resisted reporting the existence of tunnels with terrorist infrastructure in Gaza, in particular under or adjacent to schools and hospitals, as it undermined the preferred anti-Israeli narrative and did not acknowledge a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) rocket as responsible for a fire in the car park of a Gaza City hospital (where deaths were first reported by Hamas as 500 and then turned out to be 50 or less).
While in Ireland, Israeli briefings, even those verified by other intelligence agencies, videos, and photos, were frequently disregarded, Hamas statements were too easily given Irish media and political credibility.
And here’s a recent statement by Ireland’s PM:
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has said that Israel has become “blinded by rage” and is not even listening to the advice of its close ally, the United States, anymore.
The Fine Gael was answering questions in the Dáil about the number of Palestinians that have been forced to crowd into Rafah, which was targeted in a recent Israeli military operation.
Labour leader Ivana Bacik said people had been killed or “brutally displaced”, and that there was “nowhere left” for Palestinian citizens to go.
“We’re witnessing Armageddon,” she told TDs.
You can watch a recent discussion of the position of Ireland towards Israel here:
Obama’s CIA head John Brennan was apparently a key actor in setting up Russiagate against candidate Trump:
The report – written by Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag – details how the Obama administration CIA allegedly and improperly called on foreign allies from the “Five Eyes Nations” (the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) to surveil 26 Trump aides as “targets for collection and misinformation.” The journalists got this information from sources close to a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HSPCI) investigation. …
The report says they will have more on Thursday about how a team “hand-picked” by CIA Director John Brennan “relied on “cooked intelligence” to craft that January 6th, 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment.”
I’ve previously written quite a bit on this blog about Brennan. One of the strangest facts about him is based on a story Brennan himself has told, about voting for Communist Gus Hall for president in 1976, when Brennan was 21 years old, as some sort of protest against “the system.” He couches it as a meaningless youthful protest vote, but I found it quite curious and analyzed the move more deeply in this post. An excerpt:
Brennan speaks in cliches of the time: “the system,” for example. Ah, the system! It’s a bit suspect that someone who was so against “the system” in 1976, at the age of 21, is joining that system big time by 1980. Now, that’s not impossible; minds can change, as we know. But that sort of change requires an explanation, one I’ve not seen Brennan offer, although I can’t say I’ve made an exhaustive search for one. I’d certainly be curious to know.
And if you hate “the system” and want change, let’s assume it’s change for the better. Why, then, would you vote for a Communist as a protest vote? By 1976 it was crystal clear that Communism wasn’t going to represent that change for the better. Brennan wasn’t an impressionable child, either, and this would have been his very first vote for president, which is often a time of great solemnity and importance (at least it was for me). To throw it away like that—if indeed that’s what was happening—is the mark of a rather impulsive and immature person, and that’s putting it kindly.
It’s not as though the 1976 election lacked for people to vote for if a protest needed to be lodged. Here were the major alternatives to Ford and Carter:
Roger MacBride, who had gained fame in the 1972 election as a faithless elector, ran as the nominee of the Libertarian Party.
Eugene McCarthy, a former Democratic Senator from Minnesota, ran as an independent candidate.
Ben Bubar, Prohibition Party nominee.
Frank Zeidler, former mayor of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, ran as the nominee of Socialist Party USA, which was founded in a split with Socialist Party of America.
Gus Hall, 4 time Communist Party Candidate.
Lots of choices there, all of them more innocuous than Hall and plenty good for protests, if it was protests Brennan wanted. But somehow it was Gus Hall for whom Brennan decided to vote. Among other things, this was Hall’s position:
“Hall had a reputation of being one of the most convinced supporters of the actions and interests of the Soviet Union outside the USSR’s political sphere of influence. From 1959 onward, Hall spent some time in Moscow each year and was one of the most widely known American politicians in the USSR, where he was received by high-level Soviet politicians such as Leonid Brezhnev. Hall defended the Soviet invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, and supported the Stalinist principle of ‘Socialism in One Country’.”
I found it puzzling then, and find it puzzling now, that Brennan ever was accepted into the CIA in the first place. Then, of course, he seems to have climbed up the ranks to the very tip-top. Here’s how Brennan has explained his applying for the CIA in 1980; the way he describes it, it sounds like a light and frivolous whim:
Brennan attended Fordham University, graduating with a B.A. in political science in 1977. While a college student, in 1976, he voted for the Communist Party USA candidate for president, Gus Hall. He has later described his vote as a way of “signaling my unhappiness with the system”, specifically the partisanship of the Watergate era. After Fordham, Brennan attended the University of Texas at Austin, receiving a Master of Arts in government with a concentration in Middle East studies in 1980. He speaks Arabic fluently. His studies included a junior year abroad learning Arabic and taking courses at the American University in Cairo.
While riding a bus to class at Fordham, he saw an ad in The New York Times that said that the CIA was recruiting. He decided that a CIA career would be a good match for his “wanderlust” and his desire for public service. He applied to the CIA in 1980. During his application he admitted during a lie-detector test that he had voted for the Communist Party candidate four years earlier. To his surprise, he was still accepted; he later said that he finds it heartening that the CIA valued freedom of speech.
But of course, this has nothing to do with free speech. As I wrote in my previous post on his Communist vote in 1976:
[Brennan] describes the [Gus Hall vote] incident as a free speech issue, but that’s absurd. I defend his right to vote for any candidate he prefers at any time. But that doesn’t mean that he should be hired by the CIA or has some absolute right to be hired by the CIA whatever his political points of view. The CIA has every right to screen its potential agents for their beliefs about the US and its place in the world.
More from Brennan’s Wiki page:
Brennan helped establish the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation of Donald Trump’s campaign, which included the use of foreign intelligence, during the period leading up to the 2016 presidential election. Since leaving office, Brennan has been harshly critical of President Trump. In March 2018, Brennan said Trump had “paranoia”, accused him of “constant misrepresentation of the facts”, and described him as a “charlatan”. Following the firing of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe later that month, Brennan tweeted to Trump, “When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but will not destroy America… America will triumph over you.”
Axios quoted Brennan tweeting a response to Trump’s harsh comments about James Comey: “Your kakistocracy is collapsing after its lamentable journey… we have the opportunity to emerge from this nightmare stronger & more committed to ensuring a better life for all Americans, including those you have so tragically deceived.” On July 16, 2018, Brennan tweeted his reaction to Trump’s comments at the 2018 Helsinki summit meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin: “Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki rises to & exceeds the threshold of “high crimes & misdemeanors”. It was nothing short of “treasonous”. Not only were Trump’s comments “imbecilic”, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin. Republican Patriots: Where are you???”
Sounds like a guy who would do anything to implicate Trump in any way possible, and who had the power to do so.
To all my ever-loving readers:
Did you receive anything? Did you give those you love anything? Do you consider this day just an excuse for the greeting card, chocolate, and flower industries to coax us in a rather unsubtle way to buy more stuff (not that there’s anything wrong with that)? Do people (mostly women, I’d imagine) get too demanding on this day? Is it a burden rather than a pleasure? Or do you love, love, love it?
I have an odd relationship to Valentine’s Day. It just so happens that, completely through chance and unrelated to the holiday, I’ve had some hard experiences on that day in the past. So I have no particular affection for it for historical reasons. Plus, as those who read here regularly probably know, for the last couple of decades I’ve been unable to eat chocolate without getting a migraine. Waahh! Woe is me!
But there used to be a wonderful Valentine’s Day candy that I’d look forward to all year: smallish sugar-coated red pectin hearts that were bright in color, cherry in flavor, and achingly, meltingly soft although with a slight toothsome resistance at the same time.
In short, they were perfect. And in due time, they stopped making them. Oh, you still can find cherry jelly hearts galore, but no pectin ones without those little nonpareil thingees on each heart, spoiling the delectable softness with their crunch.
[NOTE: This is a slightly-updated version of a previous post.]
