Hard done by white collar criminals - like calls to like.
We’ll have to wait for Fox News to explain it to us.
Trump commutes Blago’s sentence: Oddly bipartisan of him, eh wot?
(What, he couldn’t find it in himself of give a full pardon to the Democrat?)
What do you suppose led Trump to find it in that place where normal people have a heart, to do this?
Was it to support corrupt politicians in general, who Trump sees as being of his own kindred?
Or was it to exonerate (sort-of) the guy who tried to sell that evil Kenyan Obama’s former Senate seat to the highest bidder?
Aha! Perhaps this explains why Trump just zeroed out the budget for Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper.
Trump budget zeroes out funding for Stars and Stripes, the military’s newspaper, David Knowles, Yahoo News, Feb. 14, 2020.
That explains his pardoning of Arpaio and his pet war criminals as well.
I posted this in the How has Trump Pissed You Off Today thread:
Those participants may not actually be members of the American military. (Fake accounts do exist on Facebook—many of them tended by paid operatives.)
I think Trump might have actually fucked up today. I know people are apathetic, and maybe this turns out to be a nothing burger. But I see absolutely no upside to a mass pardon of what amounts to a who’s who of white collar criminals.
Slightly, ever-so-slightly less Chicken Little-ish today, if only because it’s instances like these that remind me that no matter how much his team schemes to rig the system, he will inevitably do something inexplicably stupid to give back whatever advantages he gains.
It’s like he’s assembling his own Suicide Squad, except dumber.
Yeah, that thought crossed my mind when I first posted, but researching it, it looks like the military times is a different organization.
Reading the fine print, it appears that the poll was of Military times subscribers, and was based on a voluntary response so there might be a selection bias. But the trend does appear to be real.
If you assume that most people will hear nothing more than ‘the President pardoned several people’—and I’m guessing that’s a safe assumption—then this will help Trump by normalizing the ideas that, a) white-collar crime is no big deal and we should just let it go, and b) politicians all Do Stuff and none of it really matters.
For Trump, the more people believe things like that, the better.
I think he’s definitely aiming for your item ‘b’, which is to say that he wants us to believe that ‘politicians do stuff, nothing to see here.’ But I’d like to think optics are a thing and that they occasionally matter - even for Trump.
To your point, though, this could be swallowed up by another news cycle - that’s what seems to happen in most of his other scandals.
Still, a part of me wants to believe that this will lower his ceiling even if by just a centimeter - every bit helps.
This is Trump were talking about. I’m guessing pay-offs were made. Put a hundred thousand dollars in a Swiss Bank account with this number and Trump pardons you.
Tell me again how the orange SOB is not turning the country into a banana republic ruled by a dictator:
Well, technically…he could make that argument. It’s just that, according to existing norms that were understood, that wasn’t the case. A different era now, I reckon.
The common thread to today’s activity: they were all Trump supporters and/or had powerful friends, like Sheldon Adelson or people at Fox. He was just doing favors for his homies.
I don’t suppose the state of Illinois could try Blago on state corruption charges, could it?
That would require some research. We discussed this in some thread a while back, IIRC.
The relevant questions were revolved around Double Jeopardy questions.
Suppose you are accused of an act that is a crime in both state and federal law.
(1) If you’re tried and acquitted in a federal court, can you be tried for the same crime in a state court?
(2) If you’re tried and acquitted in a state court, can you then be tried for the same crime in a federal court?
(3) If you are convicted of a crime in federal court and then pardoned by the president, is that the same as being acquitted for purposes of being protected from Double Jeopardy in a state court? (Not relevant for Blago, since Trump didn’t actually pardon him.)
In some Supreme Court case, they ruled that the federal government and state governments are separate sovereigns, so acquittal in one of those courts does NOT protect you from double jeopardy in the other.
Some states, feeling that was a wrongful decision, then passed state laws that acquittal in a federal court DOES protect you from subsequent prosecution in state court. But such laws cannot protect a state-acquitted defendant from subsequent prosecution in a federal court. The states can tell themselves what to do, but they cannot tell the fed what to do.
New York has had such a law. This raised the question of whether all the New York criminals that Trump pardoned were off the hook. So recently and very hurriedly, New York passed a law clarifying that a presidential pardon DOES NOT protect one from further prosecution in New York in the way that a federal acquittal would. At least, I think I’m remembering that right – I’m not sure if that was the final word on it, or what the current status is. (Anyone?)
I don’t know if such a law exists in Illinois. It wouldn’t help Blago anyway.
Does anyone remember nearly a decade of RWs ranting about the tyranny of Obama, complete with various photoshops of him depicted as some despot or another, often including infamous symbology? How the RWs and tea-shirt types raved constantly and irrationally about how corrupt and despicable he was?
It seems to me that the foam and spittle might have been carefully cultivated, specifically far the purpose of devaluing the perception of the opposition. Now that the Rs are in power, they can point to the currently established tradition of the opposition overreacting to those in power. The non-RW response to Individual-ONE, characterized by RWers as “TDS”, is founded upon their own standard of insanity. Just one more shining example of their polished projection.
They have become alarmingly adept at this shell game. Is there an effective means of large-scale combat against this evil shit?
Maybe.