A Conman cries. All the judges everywhere hate Donald Trump because he’s trying to save America from all the bad people who want to ruin it. Waaaah. A New York judge called out former President Trump and other Trump Organization executives Friday for their lack of remorse in a civil fraud case over the company’s business dealings. Judge Arthur Engoron ordered Trump to pay nearly $355 million in penalties following a months-long trial last year. Toward the end of his 92-page ruling, Engoron cited the defendants’ refusal to admit to any error. “The English poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744) first declared, ‘To err is human, to forgive is divine.’ Defendants apparently are of a different mind,” Engoron wrote. “After some four years of investigation and litigation, the only error (“inadvertent,” of course) that they acknowledge is the tripling of the size of the Trump Tower Penthouse, which cannot be gainsaid. Their complete lack of contrition and remorse borders on pathological,” he continued in his decision. “They are accused only of inflating asset values to make more money.
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And Joe Lieberman is very sad I’m not sure why he felt the need to tease this for the past year but it’s good that he finally pulled the plug on this nonsense. (Actually, I know why he did it. He’s a diva and he loves attention so he always preens and poses before he finally agrees to do the right thing.) Anyway, Manchin’s out: Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., announced Friday that he is not running for president after spending months mulling a bid that would have shaken up the 2024 campaign. “I will not be seeking a third-party run. I will not be involved in a presidential run,” Manchin said during a speech. “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.” Manchin said that a third party could be viable down the road, but that a bid this year would have been “very challenging.” He added that he didn’t want to be a “deal-breaker” or a “spoiler.” “I just don’t think it’s the right time,” Manchin said.
Beautiful kitties… Snow leopard cub pestering his mom 🆠pic.twitter.com/apawg9fVBM — Apurv Anand (@apurv_anand) February 14, 2024 Snow lepoardpic.twitter.com/fpr9C0iwkD — Vibrant Visuals (@veona_roamer) February 14, 2024
Another debunking years later One of the most infuriating aspects of the right-wing Contract On America is how obvious the cons are. No, that’s not it, either. It’s that we, the reality-based community, dumbly play along as if there’s some factual basis behind them. The collective We give “the miners, and sappers–of returning despotism” the benefit of the doubt. Like parents with a toddler still trying to grasp object permanence, we play along when the child acts as though the red ball we’ve palmed has ceased to exist. So, too, with the right’s allegations of election fraud that time and again prove to be the actual fraud. Why? Because it would be bad form to call out the infant-like credulity of diner-dwelling Real Americans™? Or impolite to brand them liars and cheats and unAmerican, even if justly deserved? The tactic: Lob a “voter fraud” smoke grenade into the news cycle and shout fire. The “news” compliantly plays along, front-paging the false story.
The Devil didn’t go down to Georgia MSNBC just reported jury selection for Donald “91 Counts” Trump’s trial in Manhattan on hush money payments will begin March 25. Washington Post: Former president Donald Trump is in a Manhattan courtroom Thursday for a hearing in one of his criminal cases, while a hearing in a different case is held in Atlanta. In New York, a judge ordered jury selection to begin on March 25 in Trump’s trial related to 2016 hush money payments. The judge also denied a motion to dismiss the case. The Atlanta hearing centers on allegations that Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis (D) engaged in an improper relationship with a special prosecutor she named to lead the case. In Manhattan, Trump faces “34 counts of falsifying business records connected with alleged hush money payments made to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential campaign.” Trump is in the courtroom now. In the Georgia case, Trump and others were charged with conspiring to overturn the 2020 presidential election results there.
I will be shocked if Maryland sends Hogan to the Senate. He was a popular governor but his time has passed. I’m not even sure he can get Republican votes since the rural areas are very MAGA and he’ll have to separate himself very strongly from Trump. It’s a blue state and I think Democratic voters understand the stakes this time. I hope …
One of the more frustrating aspects of this “But He’s Old!” theme that the media has made into this year’s “But Her Emails!” is the fact that Biden is not slipping and we know this because he’s always been gaffe prone. It’s his personality, not his age. I suppose if people really don’t like that about him, that’s legitimate, but then they are back to square one deciding if this guy is the better choice: “When I say that Obama is the president of our country they go: ‘He doesn’t know that it’s Biden! He doesn’t know,’” Trump said Wednesday. “So it’s very hard to be sarcastic.” He went on to say: “I’m not a Nikki fan and I’m not a Pelosi fan, and I when I purposely interpose names, they said: ‘He didn’t know Pelosi from Nikki, from tricky Nikki.’” “I interpose [the names], and they make a big deal out of it,” Trump said. “I said: ‘No, no, I think they both stink. They have something in common—they both stink,’” he added.
This was ultimately what they expected to happen. They wanted the real winners of the election to riot so they could justify calling for the Insurrection Act and put the military on the streets of America. That’s what Trump meant when he said that he pre-authorized the Department of Defense to be prepared to deploy troops in DC in the days before the Insurrection. And, in fact, that’s what Trump and Steven Miller are planning to do in the second term except this time they plan to use immigration as their excuse. They just want to use the military against Americans one way or another. There is no doubt that he will do it this time.
The book banning isn’t going well. Ron is now seeking some adjustments. Seems some members of his anti-woke mob are out of control. Here he is today: “With objecting – if you go to a school board meeting objecting. If you have a kid in school, okay. But if you’re somebody who doesn’t have a kid in school and you’re gonna object to 100 books? No, I don’t think that’s appropriate. So I think the legislature is interested in limiting what the number of challenges you can do, and maybe making it be contingent on whether you actually have kids in school or not. We just want to make sure we’re not trying to incentivize frivolous objections or any type of games being played.” Who could have ever predicted?
Guess what? The Biden administration is meeting its commitment to under served communities There was a bit of a brouhaha on Xitter in the last couple of days when an economic reporter for the NY Times posted that his friends in Brooklyn didn’t know about Biden’s economic successes and when confronted with the fact that the media bore some responsibility for that he fired back that he isn’t the Biden administration’s PR company. Let’s just say it wasn’t well received. Apparently, Biden hasn’t been entertaining enough for them to cover it. He needs to up his “PR” so the news media will feel it’s important to cover it. Having said that, here’s a shout out to Axios for reporting this, which I did not know before: There’s an unprecedented building boom underway in America. With it has come a less-noticed phenomenon: a surge of investment into communities left behind in the last economic expansion. Why it matters: Poorer counties with lower employment rates have attracted a large share of the hundreds of billions of dollars allocated for clean energy projects, semiconductor mega-factories and more.