ACCORDING TO THOSE who’ve spoken to him lately, former President Donald Trump doesn’t seem to think he’s actually going to win his defamation lawsuit against ABC News and its star host George Stephanopoulos — but that’s not the point. Over the weekend, Stephanopoulos asserted that Trump had been “found liable for rape and defaming” the victim, writer E. Jean Carroll, by judges and two juries. As a factual matter, a jury found Trump defamed and sexually abused Carroll — and he was ordered to pay $83 million for defaming her again. Trump’s lawsuit claims Stephanopoulos’ comments were “false, intentional, malicious and designed to cause harm.” Behind closed doors, the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee has told confidants and lawyers that a primary purpose of the suit is to make an example of Stephanopoulos, two people with direct knowledge of the matter tell Rolling Stone.
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[This essay was included in every Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS) distribution as a way to instruct server operators (later to be called webmasters) on how to deal with log files. Software distributions can be found https://archive.org/details/freeWAIS-sf-1.0 I am proud of … Continue reading
Top secret papers reviewed by The Grayzone reveal Tony Blair demanded strikes on civilian targets in Yugoslavia days before NATO attacked them. While the UK military acknowledged a NATO strike on Hotel Jugoslavia would mean inflicting “some civilian casualties,” it insisted the deaths were “worth the cost.” Declassified British Ministry of Defence (MOD) files reviewed by The Grayzone reveal that officials in London conspired to embroil US troops in a secret plan to occupy Yugoslavia and “topple” President Slobodan Milosevic […]
The post Kosovo War at 25: Blair’s secret invasion plot to ‘topple Milosevic’ revealed first appeared on The Grayzone.
The post Kosovo War at 25: Blair’s secret invasion plot to ‘topple Milosevic’ revealed appeared first on The Grayzone.
What’s a little scaremongering among Republicans? Donald “91 Counts” Trump is feeling especially vulnerable these days. For good reason. He sees his “empire” under threat on Monday of being seized to cover his half-billion-dollar bond in the New York financial fraud case. If he does not win the presidency, conviction in his other four pending cases could mean he spends the rest of his days in prison. The harshest cut of all is the damage to an ego so fragile it requires constant media and fan attention to keep from melting down. So he and his campaign are in damage-control mode after his big mouth spit out words to the effect of his threatening Social Security and Medicare if reelected. In Trumpian “I know what you are, but what am I?” fashion, Trump issued a panicked “Truth” accusing Democrats of being the party threatening the safety net.
Truthiness doesn’t care about your prescription drug plan People feel what they feel. They cannot be reasoned out of them. But feelings can be manipulated, preyed upon. Con men know this. Too often, the American left kids itself that the truth will set people free, and that our own feelings do not influence our book-learnin’. They do. In a post titled, “Fascism will not be defeated by logic,” Anand Giridharadas considers “the role of emotion in the fraught political life of America in 2024.” Change by the boatload has left Americans anxious. The Ink talked to Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) for his seeming ability “to be both in the arena and up in the stands, observing the whole scene.” Giridharadas writes: They weren’t. Neither was the country (or the world). “You don’t solve a crisis of meaning and purpose by just giving people a little bit bigger tax credit,” Murphy told The Ink (subscription required): I want to start with what you’ve said about happiness.
Has it ever been this bad before? Nope: House Republicans have skipped town for Easter recess with their base enraged, their majority in tatters — and their speaker facing the prospect of a humiliating ouster at the hands of his own MAGA allies. Dysfunction doesn’t even begin to cover it. The Senate’s passage of a $1.2 trillion spending bill at 2 am ET — narrowly averting a government shutdown — was perhaps the least dramatic development in a historic day on Capitol Hill. In a matter of hours: The Republican-led House passed the spending bill just before noon Friday and sent it to the Senate — with more than half the House GOP conference, including many furious hardliners, voting against it. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) — one of those hardliners angry at Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) for helping push the bill — introduced a motion to vacate the chair, calling for Johnson’s removal. Her move threatens to trigger the same type of vote that ended the career of his predecessor, Kevin McCarthy. Rep.
It’s the pandemic, stupid I’ve been writing here for a while that the reason everyone is so negative about everything because of mass PTSD from the pandemic. Here are a couple of eminent psychiatrists making the official diagnosis in The Atlantic: America is in a funk, and no one seems to know why. Unemployment rates are lower than they’ve been in half a century and the stock market is sky-high, but poll after poll shows that voters are disgruntled. President Joe Biden’s approval rating has been hovering in the high 30s. Americans’ satisfaction with their personal lives—a measure that usually dips in times of economic uncertainty—is at a near-record low, according to Gallup polling. And nearly half of Americans surveyed in January said they were worse off than three years prior. Experts have struggled to find a convincing explanation for this era of bad feelings. Maybe it’s the spate of inflation over the past couple of years, the immigration crisis at the border, or the brutal wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
This piece from Josh Kovensky about Manafort is epic. Switch over to read the whole thing. I didn’t know even half of this: Entertain this scenario for a minute: there’s a country sitting on a geopolitical fault line between the U.S. and one of its main adversaries, Russia. Its population is becoming increasingly pro-western; its governing and business elite largely remains beholden to Russia. After years of fraudulent elections, a politician with a mafia past, widely seen as a stooge for Russia, comes to power in this contested country. The rise of The Stooge is seen as a breakthrough moment for Russia, a roadblock in the path of the country toward closer ties with the West. And yet, an American political consultant and insider in the traditionally hawkish Republican Party, who has worked with anti-communist guerillas around the world, has been quietly working his way into the inner circle of The Stooge and his backers. Once The Stooge is in power, The Consultant sets to work.
No, Truth Social isn’t going to save him If you were shaking your fist at the sky damning the fates that Trump is going to get a big cash injection from his lame social media platform, not to worry: Donald Trump is on the verge of gaining what could be a massive windfall from his social media company. But it will likely come too late to save him from the financial peril he’s facing now. Investors on Friday signed off on a deal to allow Trump’s new venture, which operates Truth Social, to be publicly traded on Wall Street, clearing the way for a possible multibillion-dollar payday for the former president. But Trump’s stake will be tied up for much of the year under a so-called lock-up agreement, a normal arrangement for such deals to ensure that insiders don’t bail as soon as a company goes public and push down the stock price. Trump could try to obtain a waiver from that rule, but even then he wouldn’t be able to sell more than a small fraction of his stake at any given time — up to 1 percent of the outstanding shares every quarter.
We are the ones we’ve been waiting for “The man is mentally unstable,” I told my parents over dinner at their kitchen table in 2016. I could not bring myself to believe that Americans were crazy enough to elect a president as unfit as Donald Trump so obviously was. But H.L. Mencken was right a hundred years ago. I don’t wish to make that mistake again. Nonetheless, Republican primary results and the drip-drip of bad legal and financial news for Trump and his 2024 campaign seems to indicate he is losing support. Perhaps it is Trump fatigue. Perhaps his small-donor base is tapped out; his fundraising is ebbing. Perhaps Earth 1 is finally breaking through to the least-committed members of the cult. Trump lately is alternately begging for money and boasting that he doesn’t need any. The Biden-Harris campaign and the DNC are lapping Trump and Team MAGA. If fundraising is a measure of support, Trump’s is slowly sinking. Then again, is still costs nothing to cast a vote, and MAGA minions are busily plotting to steal the fall election. With that caveat….