Trump hit with seven indictments — violation of Espionage Act and obstruction of justice — and that’s just the beginning

While everyone is focused on Trump’s indictment in Florida federal court for violating the Espionage Act and obstruction of justice, that’s just the beginning!!

GEORGIA

Remember that telephone call in which Trump pressured Georgia officials to find more vote for him?  Indictments in that case likely will be released in August.

JANUARY 6

As the January 6 Committee determined, Trump was up to his neck in plotting and carrying out the attempted coup on Jan 6.  Special Counsel Jack Smith is likely to indict Trump for his role in Han 6 for trial in DC federal court.

Trump indicted for violation of Espionage Act and obstruction of justice . . . and the far right loses their minds!!!

While a number of Republican lawmakers rushed to comment on their disgust over the indictment of former President Donald Trump for his mishandling of classified documents, the far-right took a different route, diving into the deep end of hyperbole without a flotation device.

Male supremacist and racist Michael Cernovich was desperately triggered by the news, saying that it was like “the JFK assassination all over again.” He later explained that it was the “deep state” that killed JFK and they did it with bullets. The Justice Department is doing it in the case with the law.

White nationalist Stephen Miller appeared on the Fox network to say that the most important thing that must take place is that every Republican must rally around the former president. It’s not know yet how opponents of Trump’s in the 2024 race will respond to that.

Donald Trump’s lawyer Alina Habba, who once referred to the New York attorney general as a “Black b—h,” and would use the N-word regularly, also appeared on the Fox network. Speaking to Jesse Watters, she explained, “I’m embarrassed to be a lawyer at this moment. Honestly, I’m ashamed to be a lawyer.”

Her comments come fewer than five months after she and Trump were forced to pay nearly $938,000 in penalties for a “frivolous lawsuit” against Hillary Clinton and 30 other defendants. The judge in the case said the lawsuits were “drafted to advance a political narrative” and should “never have been brought.”

Republicons have epic meltdown over Trump indictments

Former President Donald Trump immediately took to the internet to rage against the legal system after he was indicted on Thursday in the classified documents probe.

But he wasn’t alone. Republican pundits and politicians also immediately reacted with white-hot fury over the news — many of whom made spurious accusations of President Joe Biden and argued he should be arrested as well.

“Today is indeed a dark day for the United States of America,” tweeted House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA). “It is unconscionable for a President to indict the leading candidate opposing him. Joe Biden kept classified documents for decades. I, and every American who believes in the rule of law, stand with President Trump against this grave injustice. House Republicans will hold this brazen weaponization of power accountable.”

“I never thought we’d see the day when the U.S. President deputizes the DOJ to arrest his lead rival in the middle of an election,” tweeted Trump’s presidential rival Vivek Ramaswamy. “Obama shamefully tried to deputize the FBI to infiltrate Trump’s 2016 campaign, but they’re leaving nothing to chance this time around: the federal police state is outright arresting Trump. This is an affront to every citizen: we cannot devolve into a banana republic where the party in power uses police force to arrest its political opponents. It’s hypocritical for the DOJ to selectively prosecute Trump but not Biden.” Ramaswamy concluded with a vow to pardon the former president if elected.

“Sitting president indicts leading challenger. Totally normal,” tweeted Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) along with a GIF of a line of banana-wielding dancers. “Joe Biden has used his Justice Department to go after parents as ‘domestic terrorists,’ to spy on Catholic parishes, to terrorize & harass prolife Christians – and tonight to indict his top political opponent, Trump. He has trampled the rule of law to benefit himself. He has led the country into profound danger,” tweeted Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO).

GOP pundits, too, flew into a rage.

“I’ve given up trying to explain to the left why burning the world down to obtain justice is a bad idea,” wrote right-wing blogger Erick Erickson. “I’ll just say if Biden loses in 2024, he, Hunter, and many others better have lawyers asap. The Rubicon has been crossed. Guilt won’t matter. The pain of litigation will.”

Right-wing youth group leader Charlie Kirk, meanwhile, had a call to arms for Republican activists.

“Every ‘Republican’ running for President should suspend their campaign and go to Miami as a show of support,” wrote Kirk. “If you don’t, you are part of the problem. Either we have an opposition party or we don’t. GO to Miami Tuesday, and show solidarty [sic] or we will mark you as part of the oppsition.”

Republican states have a murder problem

Quoted from:  Third Way

Republicans have made crime a major selling point over the past several elections. In 2020 and 2022, they ran ads accusing Democratic candidates of wanting to “defund the police”– a position held by only a handful of fringe Democratic officeholders. In October 2022, one-quarter of ads from Republican candidates and PACs focused on crime. Republican-aligned Fox News aired, on average, 141 segments on crime across weekdays in the two months leading up to the midterms. In the week after the midterm, their coverage of violent crime dropped by 50%.

In March of 2022, we released a report that found murder rates in 2020 were 40% higher in Trump-voting states than Biden-voting states. In this follow-up report, we studied homicide data going back to 2000 to see if this one-year Red State murder epidemic was an anomaly. It was not. Despite a media narrative to the contrary, a wide and widening Red State murder gap has spanned the past two decades.

In this study, we collected homicide data from 2000 through 2020 for all 50 states from the Center of Disease Control Wonder’s National Center for Health Statistics Mortality Data. Data is based on death certificates collected by state registries and provided to the National Vital Statistics System. We chose CDC data over FBI data because it’s more up to date and does not rely on voluntary reporting from counties and states. All states are required to report mortality data to the CDC; they’re only encouraged to report crime data to the FBI. The United States Department of Justice has acknowledged that CDC data is more accurate. (There were four states with several years of missing data–New Hampshire, North Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming. In these instances, we relied on FBI numbers from the Uniform Crime Statistics.)1 To allow for comparison, we calculated the state’s per capita murder rate, the number of murders per 100,000 residents, and categorized states by their presidential vote in the 2020 election, resulting in an even 25-25 state split.

We found that the murder rate (from 2000 through 2020) in Trump-voting states has exceeded the murder rate in Biden-voting states every year this century. Cumulatively, overall murder rates since 2000 were on average 23% higher in Trump-voting states. For the past 21 years, the top 10 murder rate states have been dominated by reliably red states, namely Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Missouri. Even when we removed the county with the largest city in Trump-voting states (and kept them in for Biden-voting states), murder rates were still significantly higher in these red states.

Republicans and “conservatives” in general are bottomless pits of senseless, stupid outrage

If you’re a corporate marketing officer concerned over what’s happening with Target, let me make something abundantly clear: You will never appease anti-LGBTQ extremists. But moreover, there’s a colder truth at play here: They don’t want to be appeased, they want to be angry.

Corporations need to understand something about these people: their objective is not really to gain any ground but to find an outlet for their rage at the world changing around them. They are starving for outrage and will feast on any scrap. They would rather be perpetually angry than be mollified. They are furious that anyone would ask them to learn about others.  And deep down, they know LGBTQ people are never going away. The closet has been permanently opened.

These people long for an America that always catered to those who look and act like them—that is: white, heterosexual, traditional families. They use religion as a shield for their bigotry. They don’t really care about what Christ taught; he’s just a convenient vehicle.

But that America is long gone, and it’s never coming back. We are witnessing the very long and painful last gasp of that world. And boy, are they furious. Enraged. They’ve had to keep quiet about it for so long, but in the past several years, the quiet part became very loud.

They are angry, and beneath that, they are very, very scared. They will claim they’re not scared. But they’re terrified. None of this works without fear. Fear of what? Uncertainty over their place in a changing society that increasingly doesn’t defer to them.

When cornered, a frightened and desperate rat will . . .

Donald Trump is a cornered and frightened rat.  His entire life has been a lie.  He has never been held responsible for a thing — his father bailed him out when his businesses failed; he backstabbed his siblings to get the bulk of his father’s $400 million estate; he used bankruptcy seven times to escape business failures; and when American banks refused to support him any longer, he turned to dirty money from Russia.  But now his bluster and threats are not working as prosecutors with the power of state and federal governments behind them are closing in on him.

 

The “stable genius” of Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump, is once again demonstrating the stability that has become the hallmark of his abhorrent personality, or lack thereof. When he isn’t throwing temper tantrums for perceived insults, he is whining about not being sufficiently praised for things he never did. And he is, after all, the most fabulous whiner, in his own words.

On Monday morning Trump took to his floundering Twitter ripoff, Truth Social, to lash out at the Department of Justice and other legal entities for having the audacity to hold him accountable for committing a multitude of crimes. How dare they try to administer justice against America’s foremost political cult leader who has never done anything wrong? He simply will not stand for it, and woe be to anyone who attempts it.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Trump’s lawyers met with the DOJ to beg that he not be indicted. But judging by Trump’s postings, that didn’t go very well. In a series of frenzied outbursts Trump revealed both his fate and fear. He began by raging that . . .

“Reports are the Marxist Special Prosecutor, DOJ, & FBI, want to Indict me on the BOXES HOAX, despite all of the wrongdoing that they have done for SEVEN YEARS, including SPYING ON MY CAMPAIGN. Biden Crimes go unpunished, including that he had Boxes in Chinatown, in his garage by the ‘Corvette,’ & 1,850  Boxes in Delaware that he won’t allow anyone to see. That is real OBSTRUCTION! They seek retribution for Republicans looking into Biden’s CRIMES! I HAVE DONE NOTHING WRONG. ELECTION INTERFERENCE!”

Needless to say, there is virtually nothing in that rant that approaches reality. Obviously, special counsel Jack Smith is not a Marxist. Nor are the investigators at the DOJ and the FBI. They never spied on Trump’s campaign. Biden has never been shown to have committed any crimes. And the only one who blatantly obstructed justice is Trump.

Nevertheless, Trump went on to yammer incoherently about the prospect of his being indicted while Biden is not…

“HOW CAN DOJ POSSIBLY CHARGE ME, WHO DID NOTHING WRONG, WHEN NO OTHER PRESIDENT’S WERE CHARGED, WHEN JOE BIDEN WON’T BE CHARGED FOR ANYTHING, INCLUDING THE FACT THAT HE HAS 1,850 BOXES, MUCH OF IT CLASSIFIED, AND SOME DATING BACK TO HIS SENATE DAY WHEN EVEN DEMOCRAT SENATORS ARE SHOCKED. ALSO, PRESIDENT CLINTON HAD DOCUMENTS, AND WON IN COURT. CROOKED HILLARY DELETED 33,000 EMAILS, MANY CLASSIFIED, AND WASN’T EVEN CLOSE TO BEING CHARGED! ONLY TRUMP – THE GREATEST WITCH HUNT OF ALL TIME!”

Trump is pathetically reaching back to his moldy oldies about the Clintons and regurgitating his vacuous sloganeering about “witch hunts” and “election interference.” However, the most preposterous part of his spiel is his claim that Biden “HAS 1,850 BOXES, MUCH OF IT CLASSIFIED.” Trump has been saying this for months, despite it being demonstrably false.

For the record, Trump is freaking out about 1,850 boxes of senatorial and vice-presidential materials that Biden donated to the University of Delaware in 2012. So to begin with, these are not things that are in Biden’s possession now, nor have they been for the past decade. What’s more, as reported by CNN, the documents in those boxes “did not have classified markings.”. And the recent search was conducted “with the consent and cooperation of the president’s legal team.”

So, unlike Trump’s brazen lies and defiance of subpoenas demanding the return of the classified materials that he stole, there was no obstruction of justice on Biden’s part. Yet it is Trump who is inflaming hostilities and inciting violence in order to prod his cult disciples into fighting this battle for him and to install him as America’s first dictator.

Trump is using the prospect of warranted indictments as an inducement to start a civil war. It won’t work. but it could still produce some painful consequences for the nation if he is permitted to get away with it. So the sooner he is indicted, convicted, and incarcerated, the better.

Utah school district removes Bibles from all schools because of sexual content

https://www.ksl.com/article/50657730/davis-district-pulls-bible-from-elementaries-junior-highs-due-to-vulgarity-or-violence

FARMINGTON — The Bible has been removed from all elementary and middle school libraries throughout the Davis School District after someone challenged its contents.

A committee tasked with reviewing books that fall under review for sexual content last week determined that the Bible will be retained at district high schools, but removed from all elementary and middle schools, Christopher Williams, Davis School District’s director of communication, told KSL.com.

In lieu of the initial ruling — which came last week — a new appeal to the ruling was filed Wednesday, asking for the district to retain the Bible in all district schools, meaning the religious book will again be reviewed by a committee.

Review committees for the district are made up of an odd number of people and each committee includes a facilitator selected by the district’s teaching and learning director, at least one administrator working in a district department or school, a licensed teacher who is teaching English language arts or another relevant subject in a district school, a librarian who works in a district school and a minimum of four parents with students enrolled in a district school, according to district policy.