Yes, it’s that time again: asking for donations [BUMPED UP: Scroll down for today’s new posts]
It’s been a while since I’ve asked for donations. In the meantime, many readers have donated anyway, and I thank you all profusely. Some of you even have a setup whereby you make a monthly payment, which is also great. I appreciate it so very much, and it helps to keep this blog going.
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I’ll probably keep this post at the top of the blog for the next week.
Those aristocratic Bidens
I came across these passages written by Hunter Biden in texts to Devon Archer in 2019. At the time, Archer had been arrested by the DOJ. I find the texts quite revealing:
Every great family is persecuted prosecuted in the us (sic),” Biden wrote. “You are part of a great family — not a side show not deserted by them even in your darkest moments.”
“That’s the way Bidens are different and you are a Biden. It’s the price of power and the people questioning you truly have none whereas you do through perseverance and poise,” Biden added, appearing to refer to the DOJ.
It reminds me of his father Joe’s strange quote, “My word as a Biden.” Who talks about themselves and their family that way? Now, there are indeed some families in which political and/or financial power (or both) has been wielded for many generations – political or financial dynasties. Historically, we’re speaking of perhaps the Rockefellers, the Kennedys, the Bushs, the Vanderbilts, or in Europe royalty like the Tudors or the Romanovs or the Windsors.
But the Bidens? No. One person, Joe, has been a senator for umpteen million years. And then at the time Hunter was writing that, Joe had been a vice president for two terms, having been selected by a popular president for that role even though Joe was quite unpopular with the public. And that was it.
And yet Hunter speaks of being a Biden as though it is some sort of aristocracy, a “great family.” And at the same time he presents them as targets because of this – yet in what way had they been targeted at the time? In no way at all, as far as I can see, except for what Archer (a non-family member) was complaining about, which was his own investigation.
Trial date set in the Jack Smith case against Trump
And – surprise, surprise – the scheduled date “could have a crucial impact on the 2024 race for the White House.”
Fancy that. What an odd coincidence:
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan’s decision sets the trial in the middle of the Republican presidential primaries and the day before Super Tuesday.
The prosecution had wanted the trial to start in January, and Trump’s lawyers said after the election in April 2026. So Judge Chutkan set the date two months later than the prosecution wanted and right smack in the middle of the primaries. Not to mention the fact that Trump is fighting four potential and actual cases, at the very least. The DOJ has unlimited resources paid for by our taxpayer dollars; Trump has to get lawyers and prepare for the cases on his own or with donations from supporters. And of course, his lawyers now know they are subject to prosecution as well.
Sounds fair.
More from Judge Chutkan:
Chutkan said that Trump will have to prioritize the trial and that she wouldn’t change the trial schedule based upon another defendant’s professional obligations, say, for a professional athlete.
The public has an interest in the fair and timely administration of justice, Chutkan said.
Indeed it does. But of course this trial not only is not about justice – except in its glaring absence – but there’s another little thing the judge is ignoring: the public interest in having the leading candidate of the Democrats’ opposition, the Republican Party, be able to campaign and be heard without all these show trials dragging him down. Half of American voters support Trump; what about their rights? What about OurDemocracy™?
The left continues to act as though there will never be any repercussions against them for their lawfare against Trump. I have been convinced for quite some time that they are convinced that once they get into office in 2024, they will be in power for the foreseeable future and these things will not come back to bite them. Whether they are correct or not remains to be seen.
I have also long said that the recent lawfare against Trump has two purposes. The first is to elevate him as the GOP leader and probable nominee and to simultaneously hurt him come the general. The second – which doesn’t really contradict the first, although it may seem to do so – is to destroy him and imprison him. That would not be occurring prior to the election, although the trials might. It would occur after the election, which they believe he will lose. Through means fair or foul, they will see to it.
Roundup
Here we go again with a roundup.
(1) The DOJ is targeting Elon Musk in a suit that makes little sense on any level except as political retaliation. Then again, that’s what the DOJ specializes in these days.
(2) And speaking of the DOJ – which we were – apparently Weiss and the DOJ may have colluded to keep information from Congressional investigators.
(3) Ukrainian prosecutor Shokin, fired by a bragging Biden, has given an interview:
I have said repeatedly in my previous interviews that Poroshenko fired me at the insistence of the then-Vice President Biden because I was investigating Burisma.
[Poroshenko] understood and so did Vice President Biden, that had I continued to oversee the Burisma investigation, we would have found the facts about the corrupt activities that they were engaging in. That included both Hunter Biden and Devon Archer and others.
I do not want to deal in unproven facts, but my firm personal conviction is that, yes, this was the case. They were being bribed. And the fact that Joe Biden gave away $1 billion in U.S. money in exchange for my dismissal, my firing – isn’t that alone a case of corruption?
The White House responds by saying these claims have been “debunked” over and over. No, they haven’t, but the White House counts on the MSM to keep saying it, and for people to keep ignoring the charges.
(4) A majority of NY registered voters don’t like the direction in which the state’s been going. Shouldn’t they blame themselves, though? In what way has Governor Hochul been a surprise? As far as I can see, she’s governed exactly as expected, and the same is true of the legislature.
(5) RIP, “Joe the Plumber,” dead at 49 from pancreatic cancer.
Open thread 8/28/23
Just the other day:
Age and singing voices
Some singers who have clear and ringing voices, especially in the upper register, find that as they age they just can’t sing that way anymore.
But some can (by the way, Elvin Bishop wrote the song and is playing the guitar, but the lead singer is Mickey Thomas):
That was 1975. This is 2011; I believe Thomas is about sixty-one years old here. He looks pretty good, too, considering. Unfortunately the audio quality isn’t as clear as the first clip, but I think it’s easy to tell his voice has held up nicely (the song starts at :46, but for some reason I can’t cue it to start then):
ADDENDUM:
I managed to find a video of Mickey Thomas singing the song just a few months ago, in March of 2023. That means he’s 73 here. Still looks and sounds darn good. The guitarist isn’t Elvin Bishop, though:
From Giuliani
In all the brouhaha about Trump, it’s easy to forget that Giuliani posed for his mugshot too (see this), and had quite a bit to say:
Faced with the same number of charges as former President Donald Trump, with a number overlapping the president’s as well as the other 17 co-defendants indicted by the state, Giuliani was stopped by the press on his way to the airport to offer some words.
After recounting his record as mayor and as a state’s attorney who “took down the mafia and made New York City the safest city in America,” he expressed, “I’m fighting for justice. I have been from the first moment I represented Donald Trump, and as a man who has now been proven innocent several times — I don’t know how many times he has to be proven innocent and they have to be proven to be liars, actually, enemies of our republic who are destroying rights, sacred rights.”
“They’re destroying my right to counsel — my right to be a lawyer. They’re destroying [Trump’s] right to counsel. It’s not accidental that they’ve indicted all his lawyers. I’ve never heard of that before in America — all the lawyers indicted,” the mayor continued before voicing concern to the public.
“Now, whether you dislike or like Donald Trump, let me give you a warning, ” said Giuliani. “They’re gonna come for you. When the political winds shift, as they always do, let us pray that Republicans are more honest, more trustworthy, and more American than these people in charge of this government. Because if our government is conducted this way and the system of justice is politicized and criminalized for politics, your rights are in jeopardy and your children’s.”
“Donald Trump told you this,” he reminded. “They weren’t just coming for him or me.”
One of the worst things about the Georgia case is the arrest of Trump’s lawyers for giving him legal advice.
Identifying the Maui victims
Here’s some relatively good news at last:
Within a day of Maui County releasing 388 names of people unaccounted for following the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century, more than 100 of them or their relatives came forward to say they’re safe, the FBI said Friday.
The agency is reviewing the information they provided and working to remove the names from the list.
“We’re very thankful for the people who have reached out by phone or email,” Steven Merrill, the FBI’s special agent in charge in Honolulu, said in a news conference. “As we get someone off of a list, this has enabled us to devote more resources to those who are still on the list.”
For a while there it seemed as though well over a thousand would be among the dead. That seems less likely now. I remember something similar in the Paradise fire, and sure enough I read this:
Something similar happened after a wildfire in 2018 that killed 85 people and destroyed the town of Paradise, California. Authorities published a list of the missing in the local newspaper, a decision that helped identify scores of people who had made it out alive but were listed as missing. Within a month, it dropped from 1,300 names to only a dozen.
Already, more people are known to have died in the Maui fire than the total of the Paradise fire. I think it’s pretty clear why the death toll was higher in Maui, and it’s not because of the relative virulence of the fire. I believe it’s because escape routes were blocked by police, supposedly because of downed electrical wires and also (perhaps; I can’t get good reporting on this so far) because some routes may have been blocked by the fire itself. In Paradise, as I wrote the other day, the main route out of town remained open although dangerous. In both cases, the fire was wind-whipped, extremely fast, and extremely hot.
There also is the terrible challenge of identifying the dead when a fire is so very hot, much as with the 9/11 victims (the link is from 2021):
The New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner announced on Tuesday two new identifications of victims of the September 11th attacks just days before the city marks 20 years since the tragedy.
Dorothy Morgan, of Hempstead, is the 1,646th person and a man whose name is being withheld at the request of his family is the 1,647th person to be identified through ongoing DNA analysis of unidentified remains recovered from the disaster that claimed the lives of 2,753 people.
“Twenty years ago, we made a promise to the families of World Trade Center victims to do whatever it takes for as long as it takes to identify their loved ones, and with these two new identifications, we continue to fulfill that sacred obligation,” said Dr. Barbara A. Sampson, Chief Medical Examiner of the City of New York. “No matter how much time passes since September 11, 2001, we will never forget, and we pledge to use all the tools at our disposal to make sure all those who were lost can be reunited with their families.”
The identification of Dorothy Morgan was confirmed through DNA testing of remains recovered in 2001.
Maui evidently also had a substantial homeless population and some are among the missing, but it’s hard to get good information on them (see this).
And the issue of how many children died in Maui is a heartrending and disturbing one. The imagination comes up with ghastly scenarios, many of which may be true.
RIP to all the dead, and comfort to all the survivors.
Trump’s arrest and the black voter
Trump’s arrest and mug shot in Georgia got me wondering whether black voters – who vote overwhelmingly Democrat – might not be a bit sympathetic to him because of the element of persecution by prosecutors. I think it’s always a bad idea to think that the Democrats will lose a significant portion of the black vote, which is ordinarily overwhelmingly and solidly Democratic. But in the 2020 election the percentage of black men voting for Trump increased somewhat, part of a small trend away from the Democratic Party among that demographic that’s been going on for a while.
I see that commenter “Jerry” wrote:
A bright point: the evening after the mug shot was released one of the news channels was getting reactions. One interviewee was a black, early middle aged man.
“Donald Trump is now officially a Brother!”. Said with obvious positive feeling. I’ve seen similar reactions elsewhere.
What a friggin hoot it will be if Fanni Willis just handed the black vote to Trump!
Well, certainly not the black vote in terms of a majority of black people. But any inroads in that particular demographic would weaken the Democrats.
I also noticed this story, which hasn’t gotten a lot of traction so far – perhaps because the MSM and the Democrats don’t want it to:
One of Donald Trump’s co-defendants in a wide-ranging election-fraud case in Georgia remained behind bars on Friday, after he told a judge that he could not afford a private attorney to represent him and was denied bond.
Harrison Floyd said at his first court appearance that he could not afford a private lawyer and had been denied representation by a public defender because he did not qualify.
Who is Harrison Floyd? If you look at his mugshot at the link, you’ll see that he’s a black man. If you read this article, you’ll see that he was head of something called Black Voices For Trump. Interesting. He’s also a Marine veteran.
What are the accusations against Floyd?:
According to the indictment, Floyd pressured Ruby Freeman, an election worker in Fulton County, after she refused to change the results of the county’s vote in the 2020 election for Trump, with Freeman testifying before the House January 6 Committee last year that she was forced to leave her home for two months and quit her job after receiving threats after the election. …
Floyd had been charged in a separate case in May with second-degree assault and arrested for allegedly attacking an FBI agent who had served him a grand jury subpoena in the Department of Justice’s investigation into efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
I’ve read quite a few articles about Floyd since I first heard about his involvement, and I have yet to read a single detail of the exact pressure Floyd is alleged to have exerted on the worker, as opposed to threats she received from other people. I would be curious to know what he is supposed to have done vis a vis the worker; it’s certainly possible it was quite bad and it’s very possible it was not.
The article has this to say about Floyd’s attack on the FBI agent:
According to a complaint in federal District Court in Maryland, Floyd refused to accept the subpoena, putting his finger to the face of one of two FBI agents who arrived at his residence, yelling: “You haven’t given me anything; I don’t know who the f**k you are.”
Later that night, Floyed called 911, accusing the agents of accosting him and saying: “They were lucky I didn’t have a gun on me, because I would have shot his fucking ass,” the Huffington Post reported.
Did he know who they were or why they were there? Why did they need to serve the subpoena that way? Isn’t it usually – in former years, anyway – done through lawyers, for non-violent offenders?
More here:
… [T]he agents first reached Floyd by phone as they stood outside his apartment building in Rockville, over 20 miles northwest of Washington, according to court records. The agents told Floyd they had a subpoena to serve him, and Floyd told them he wasn’t home.
When Floyd returned home with his daughter, he brushed past the agents without taking the subpoena being held out to him, according to a May 3 affidavit by FBI agent Dennis McGrail. It says the agents followed Floyd inside the building and up several flights of stairs.
“Bro, I don’t even know who you are,” Floyd told the agents, according to McGrail’s affidavit, which says the agents made an audio recording of the encounter. “You’re two random guys who are following me up here, into my house, with my daughter. You’re not showing me a (expletive) badge, you haven’t shown me (expletive). Get the (expletive) away from me.”
As Floyd slammed his apartment door shut, one of the agents wedged the subpoena between the door and its frame, the affidavit says.
The agents were heading down the stairs when they saw Floyd rushing toward them, screaming expletives, the affidavit says.
Floyd ran into one of the agents in the stairwell, “striking him chest to chest” and knocking him backward, the affidavit says. Then he chest-bumped the same agent again, ignoring commands to back away. Instead, Floyd began jabbing a finger in the agent’s face as he kept screaming.
The affidavit says Floyd only backed down when the second agent showed Floyd his badge and holstered gun.
Floyd returned to his apartment and called 911 to report that two men had threatened him at his home, one of them armed with a gun.
“They were lucky I didn’t have a gun on me, because I would have shot his (expletive) ass,” Floyd told a dispatcher, according to the FBI agent’s affidavit.
Floyd told Rockville police officers dispatched to his apartment that he didn’t know who the men were. He told them his mother-in-law had called earlier in the day saying two men showed up at her home wanting to talk with him. The affidavit says he showed the officers a text message his mother-in-law had sent of the men’s business cards, which identified them as FBI agents.
Sounds to me like Floyd really wasn’t aware that the men were agents, and was suspicious of them. He also was with his daughter and perhaps extra protective for that reason – how old is she? Obviously, if he had known they were actually from the FBI, he had to have known that his behavior would get him into more trouble than he was already in. It also seems to me that, had he known who they were, he wouldn’t have called 911 complaining.
At any rate, that’s the story so far. Make of it what you will.
ADDENDUM:
On Saturday morning, a legal fundraiser for Floyd, hosted on crowdfunding site GiveSendGo, exceeded $100,000 out of a target of $200,000. As of 12:00 p.m. ET, some $118,592 had been given by 2,554 donors. In an update, Dominion Law Center, which is running the crowd funder, said it plans to go before a judge on Monday in a bid to secure bail for Floyd.
It said: “Yesterday, at Harrison’s initial hearing where no lawyer was present, the judge denied bond because she said he was a flight risk. We do not believe the judge was correct because Harrison voluntarily traveled from Maryland to Georgia to turn himself in. We will be filing pleadings on Monday to rectify this situation in front of the assigned judge, Judge Scott McAfee.” …
According to federal court records reported by The Associated Press, Floyd first appeared before a judge in this case on May 15, after which he was required to surrender his passport. Floyd insists he didn’t realize the two men were FBI agents, and denies any wrongdoing.
As I said before, I think the content of Floyd’s 911 call is evidence he really didn’t think they were FBI agents.
Open thread 8/26/23
And to go with that, you might want to take a look at Robert Frost’s entertaining poem “Departmental.”
Peterson to the re-education camps
As soon as I heard that the Ontario Divisional Court had ruled to fine Jordan Peterson and send him to a College of Psychologists of Ontario re-education camp in order to learn how to be more “professional” in his public statements, it struck me that they’d almost certainly bitten off more than they could chew. Peterson just may be the last person on earth to respond as they desire to that sort of stupid woke coercion, and also the one most likely to make them look like tyrannic fools.
Here Peterson speaks about his reaction to the ruling and his plans to deal with it. If I was one of the heads of the College of Psychologists of Ontario, tasked with the re-programming of Jordan Peterson, I’d opt out at this point and pull an Emily Litella “never mind.” But somehow, I doubt they’ll be that smart.