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justinspoliticalcorner · 13 days

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Dean Obeidallah at The Dean's Report:

Donald Trump’s first of four criminal trials is scheduled to begin Monday in New York. After what is expected to be two to three weeks for jury selection, Trump’s criminal trial—where he is facing 34 felonies--is predicted to take six weeks. That means by mid-June, Donald Trump will be a convicted felon. It’s really that simple. Is there a chance Trump is not convicted? Sure, as a former trial lawyer, I can vouch firsthand that juries can surprise you. But based on the evidence developed in the criminal investigation and disclosed during the pre-trial portion of this case, it is clear that Trump falsified documents to conceal other federal and state crimes. Thus, Trump committed numerous felonies. Everyone knows the core allegation, namely that Trump—via his then lawyer Michael Cohen--paid $130,000 shortly before the 2016 election to stop Stormy Daniels from going public with the tale of her affair with Trump. Now, if Trump had paid Daniels solely to keep his wife from finding out about his affair, that would be one thing. It wasn’t.

Trump paid Daniels the money because he feared that if information went public at the time, he would lose the 2016 election. That at the very least made the secret payment a violation of federal election laws—which is one of the felonies Cohen pled guilty to committing in 2018, telling the court he made the payment “in coordination with, and at the direction of,” a presidential candidate who was Trump. This is why Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg has repeatedly stated the “core” of this case “is not money for sex,” it’s election corruption. Indeed, the very first line of the Statement of Facts that details the basis for the charges against Trump tells us that, “The defendant DONALD J. TRUMP repeatedly and fraudulently falsified New York business records to conceal criminal conduct that hid damaging information from the voting public during the 2016 presidential election.”

When you look at the timing of when Trump first hatched this scheme to pay off Daniels, you get why this was all about the campaign. The charging documents tell us point blank: “About one month before the election, on or about October 7, 2016, news broke that the Defendant had been caught on tape saying to the host of Access Hollywood: “I just start kissing them [women]. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything…Grab ’em by the [genitals]. You can do anything.” The political firestorm caused by the release of the Access Hollywood tape is why just three days later, Trump—with the help of Cohen and his publisher friend AMI Editor-in-Chief David Pecker-- moved swiftly to pay off Daniels. They heard she was shopping around the story of her affair with Trump. And Trump, former Trump aide Hope Hicks (who the State will be calling as a witness), Cohen and others knew that it would have been devastating for his campaign if voters learned in the midst of the Access Hollywood tape backlash that Trump had an affair with a “porn star” a mere four months after Melania gave birth to their only child.

Indeed, the statement of facts tells us this was all about the campaign: “The evidence shows that both the Defendant and his campaign staff were concerned that the tape would harm his viability as a candidate and reduce his standing with female voters in particular.” That is why Daniels was approached on October 10, 2016, with a deal to “prevent disclosure of the damaging information in the final weeks before the presidential election.” Under the agreement, Daniels was paid $130,000. But here is where the crimes come in. As the pleadings explain, Trump “did not want to make the $130,000 payment himself” so he asked Cohen to come up with a way to do that. “After discussing various payment options,” Cohen agreed he would make the payment and Trump would pay him back. It all worked as planned, Daniels never told America about the affair and Trump won the election.

Then, “shortly after being elected President, the Defendant arranged to reimburse” Cohen for the payoff he made to Daniels on Trump’s behalf. The plan they came up was that Cohen would be paid monthly for “legal fees” until the amount he advanced was repaid. In reality, as the pleadings note, “At no point did Lawyer A [Cohen] have a retainer agreement with the Defendant or the Trump Organization.” Yet Cohen still submitted monthly invoices to Trump’s company for legal services. Some were paid by Trump’s company while nine of the reimbursement checks to Cohen for fabricated legal services came from Trump’s personal bank account and Trump “signed each of the checks personally.” And as alleged, “The Defendant caused his entities’ business records to be falsified to disguise his and others’ criminal conduct.”

Dean Obeidallah wrote in his Dean's Report Substack that Donald Trump will likely have the words "convicted felon" attached to his name by sometime in June or early July should the jury find him guilty in the Manhattan election interference case. Most of America wants to see charges levied against him.

#Donald Trump #People of New York v. Trump #Donald Trump Trial #Trump Indictment #Alvin Bragg #Juan Manuel Merchan #Stormy Daniels #Michael Cohen #Stormy Daniels/Donald Trump Affair #2016 Presidential Election #2016 Elections #Trump Organization #American Media Inc.#David Pecker #National Enquirer #2005 Trump Access Hollywood Tape

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prodgermmath · 2 months

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Hi. Me and my wife saw you accross the bar, and we really hate your energy. Your vibes are just *chef's kiss* rancid. Please go to this address and have a threesome with my nemesis and his husband.

#2016 presidential election #across the bar

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ytcomments-archive · 7 months

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#sherlock #youtube comments #sherlock fandom #bbc sherlock #tjlc #queerbaiting #i like this ‘actually Moriarty was just being dumb not crazy’ theory #the secret sherlock episode #2016 presidential election #got #game of thrones #danny phantom #somewhere in the afterlife sir conan doyle is pissed #johnlock

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theculturedmarxist · 8 months

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Democrats lately have been basking in good news. The fourth Trump indictment! Continued success for abortion rights (the defeat of the Ohio referendum)! Good news on “Bidenomics” (slowing inflation and strong job creation)!

The sentiment seems to be: we got this! How could we lose to a candidate (assuming it’s Trump) who’s under a blizzard of legal scrutiny for undermining democracy and represents a party that wants to take away women’s right to choose—especially when we, the good guys, are doing such a great job with the economy?

This “how can we lose?” attitude is uncomfortably reminiscent of Democrats’ attitude in 2016. Then too they thought they couldn’t lose. And yet they did.

Perhaps it’s time to take out an insurance policy. It may be the case that a multiply-indicted Trump is now toxic to enough voters and abortion rights such a strong motivator that even a candidate with Biden’s weaknesses will beat him easily. But it might not and that’s where the insurance policy comes in.

Consider that right now the race looks very, very close. The RealClearPolitics poll average has Biden ahead of Trump by a slender four-tenths of a percentage point. If that was Biden’s national lead on election day, he’d probably lose the presidency due to electoral college bias that favors Republicans.

In the latest Quinnipiac poll, Biden has a one-point lead over Trump consistent with the running average. Among white working-class (noncollege) voters, he’s behind by 34 points, considerably worse than he did in 2020. If Trump (or another Republican) does manage to prevail in 2024, we can be fairly sure that a pro-GOP surge among these voters will have something to do with it.

States of Change simulations show that, all else equal, a strong white working class surge in 2024 would deliver the election to the GOP. Even a small one could potentially do the trick. In an all-else-equal context, I estimate just a one-point increase in Republican support among the white working class and a concomitant one-point decrease in Democratic support (for a 2-point margin swing) would deliver Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin (and the election) to the Republicans. Make it a 2-point increase in GOP support and you can throw in Pennsylvania too.

So an insurance policy to prevent such a swing is in order.

The problem: these are very unhappy voters. In the Quinnipiac poll, white working-class voters give Biden an overall 25 percent approval rating versus 70 percent disapproval and 72 percent have an unfavorable opinion of him. On handling the economy, Biden’s rating is even worse—24 percent approval and 73 percent disapproval. Just 20 percent say the economy is excellent or good, compared to 79 percent who say it is not so good or poor. By 63 to 16 percent, these voters believe the economy is getting worse not better. Evidently they haven’t yet heard the good news about Bidenomics.

The temptation among Democrats is to ascribe the stubborn resistance of these voters to Democratic appeals and openness to those of Trump and right populists to misinformation from Fox News and the like and, worse, to the fundamentally racist, reactionary nature of this voter group. The roots of this view go back to the aftermath of the 2016 election.

As analysts sifted through the wreckage of Democratic performance in 2016 trying to understand where all the Trump voting had come from, some themes began to emerge. One was geographical. Across county-level studies, it was clear that low educational levels among whites was a very robust predictor of shifts toward Trump. These studies also indicated that counties that swung toward Trump tended to be dependent on low-skill jobs, relatively poor performers on a range of economic measures and had local economies particularly vulnerable to automation and offshoring. Finally, there was strong evidence that Trump-swinging counties tended to be literally “sick” in the sense that their inhabitants had relatively poor physical health and high mortality due to alcoholism, drug abuse, and suicide.

The picture was more complicated when it came to individual level characteristics related to Trump voting, especially Obama-Trump voting. There were a number of correlates with Trump voting. They included some aspects of economic populism—opposition to cutting Social Security and Medicare, suspicion of free trade and trade agreements, taxing the rich—as well as traditional populist attitudes like anti-elitism and mistrust of experts. But the star of the show, so to speak, was a variable labelled “racial resentment” by political scientists, which many studies showed bore a strengthened relationship to Republican presidential voting in 2016.

This variable is a scale created from questions like: “Irish, Italian, Jewish, and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors.” The variable is widely and uncritically employed by political scientists to indicate racial animus despite the obvious problem that statements such as these correspond closely to a generic conservative view of avenues to social mobility. And indeed political scientists Riley Carney and Ryan Enos have shown that responses to questions like these change very little if you substitute “Nepalese” or “Lithuanians” for blacks. That implies the questions that make up the scale tap views that are not at all specific to blacks. Carney and Enos term these views “just world belief” which sounds quite a bit different from racial resentment.

But in the aftermath of the Trump election, researchers continued to use the same scale with the same name and the same interpretation with no caveats. The strong relationship of the scale to Trump voting was proof, they argued, that Trump support, including vote-switching from Obama to Trump, was simply a matter of activating underlying racism and xenophobia. Imagine though how these studies might have landed like if they had tied Trump support to activating just world belief, which is an eminently reasonable interpretation of their star variable, instead of racial resentment. The lack of even a hint of interest in exploring this alternative interpretation strongly suggests that the researchers’ own political beliefs were playing a strong role in how they chose to pursue and present their studies.

In short, they went looking for racism—and they found it.

Other studies played variations on this theme, adding variables around immigration and even trade to the mix, where negative views were presumed to show “status threat” or some other euphemism for racism and xenophobia. As sociologist Stephen Morgan has noted in a series of papers, this amounts to a labeling exercise where issues that have a clear economic component are stripped of that component and reduced to simple indicators of unenlightened social attitudes. Again, it seems clear that researchers’ priors and political beliefs were heavily influencing both their analytical approach and their interpretation of results.

And there is an even deeper problem with the conventional view. Start with a fact that was glossed over or ignored by most studies: trends in so-called racial resentment went in the “wrong” direction between the 2012 and 2016 election. That is, fewer whites had high levels of racial resentment in 2016 than 2012. This make racial resentment an odd candidate to explain the shift of white voters toward Donald Trump in the 2016 election.

Political scientists Justin Grimmer and William Marble investigated this conundrum intensively by looking directly at whether an indicator like racial resentment really could explain, or account for, the shift of millions of white votes toward Trump. The studies that gave pride of place to racial resentment as an explanation for Trump’s victory did no such accounting; they simply showed a stronger relationship between this variable and Republican voting in 2016 and thought they’d provided a complete explanation.

They had not. When you look at the actual population of voters and how racial resentment was distributed in 2016, as Grimmer and Marble did, it turns out that the racial resentment explanation simply does not fit what really happened in terms of voter shifts. A rigorous accounting of vote shifts toward Trump shows instead that they were primarily among whites, especially low education whites, with moderate views on race and immigration, not whites with high levels of racial resentment. In fact, Trump actually netted fewer votes among whites with high levels of racial resentment than Mitt Romney did in 2012.

Grimmer and Marble did a followup study with Cole Tanigawa-Lau that included data from the 2020 election. The study was covered in a New York Times article by Thomas Edsall. In the article, Grimmer described the significance of their findings:

Our findings provide an important correction to a popular narrative about how Trump won office. Hillary Clinton argued that Trump supporters could be placed in a “basket of deplorables.” And election-night pundits and even some academics have claimed that Trump’s victory was the result of appealing to white Americans’ racist and xenophobic attitudes. We show this conventional wisdom is (at best) incomplete. Trump’s supporters were less xenophobic than prior Republican candidates’ [supporters], less sexist, had lower animus to minority groups, and lower levels of racial resentment. Far from deplorables, Trump voters were, on average, more tolerant and understanding than voters for prior Republican candidates… [The data] point to two important and undeniable facts. First, analyses focused on vote choice alone cannot tell us where candidates receive support. We must know the size of groups and who turns out to vote. And we cannot confuse candidates’ rhetoric with the voters who support them, because voters might support the candidate despite the rhetoric, not because of it.

So much for the racial resentment explanation of Trump’s victory. Not only is racial resentment a misnamed variable that does not mean what people think it means, it literally cannot account for the actual shifts that occurred in the 2016 election. Clearly a much more complex explanation for Trump’s victory was—or should have been—in order, integrating negative views on immigration, trade and liberal elites with a sense of unfairness rooted in just world belief. That would have helped Democrats understand why voters in Trump-shifting counties, whose ways of life were being torn asunder by economic and social change, were so attracted to Trump’s appeals.

Such understanding was nowhere to be found, however, in Democratic ranks. The racism-and-xenophobia interpretation quickly became dominant, partly because it was in many ways simply a continuation of the approach Clinton had taken during her campaign and that most Democrats accepted. Indeed, it became so dominant that simply to question the interpretation reliably opened the questioner to accusations that he or she did not take the problem of racism seriously enough.

We are still living in that world. Scratch a Democrat today and you will find lurking not far beneath the surface—if beneath the surface at all—a view of white working-class voters and their populist, pro-Trump leanings as reflecting these voters’ unyielding racism and xenophobia.

This is neither substantively justified nor politically productive. Democrats desperately need that insurance policy for 2024 and getting rid of these attitudes toward 40 percent of the electorate (much more in key states!) should be part of it. Think of it as a down payment on the “de-Brahminization” of the Democratic Party. This attitude adjustment might irritate some of their activist supporters, but considering the stakes, that seems like a small price to pay for a potentially vital insurance policy.

#2016 presidential election #democrats #voting #racism #working class

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sleepyleftistdemon · 11 months

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A New York judge has set a trial date of March 25, 2024, for the criminal case against former President Donald Trump, potentially setting up a media spectacle in the middle of the Republican presidential primary season.

The trial date was set during a brief hearing Tuesday in which Judge Juan Merchan read Trump an order on what he can and cannot say publicly about the case and evidence his legal team will get from prosecutors to prepare for trial.

Trump appeared remotely via video feed so the judge could communicate with him in open court.

#2016 presidential election #2024 presidential election #brand safety-nsf crime #brand safety-nsf mature #brand safety-nsf sensitive

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thewarfox · 2 months

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youtube

So, this is a low-profile podcast I listen to, Politics, Politics Politics with Justin Robert Young. The interview he got with Dimitri Melhorn is one of the most insane, chilling, and evil things I've ever seen. Bravo to Justin keeping this guy talking, because he blows the lid off of everything with the democrat financier backing, the superpacs operating on their behalf, their motivations in controlling politics, and the efforts they've already tried, what's succeeded, what's failed, and what they have in mind for the future.

It's easily the most important interview Justin has ever done. I'm not even sure he understands the weight and import of what he has produced here.

#politics #anti trump #democrats #money in politics #super pac #2020 presidential election #2016 presidential election #hillary clinton #donald trump #joseph biden #Youtube

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posttexasstressdisorder · 1 year

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#2016 presidential election #alvin bragg #brand safety-nsf crime #brand safety-nsf mature #brand safety-nsf products and consumers negative

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meandmybigmouth · 1 year

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WHEN ARE THE LIES IN WASHINGTON GOING TO STOP BEING REFERRRED TO AS “JUST POLITICS?” AND THOSE TELLING THEM HELD ACCOUNTABLE?

#2016 presidential election #donald trump #elections (by type)#elections and campaigns #government and public administration

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filosofablogger · 4 months

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There's Method To This Madness ...

Have you found it difficult to concentrate lately, had periods where you just wanted to shut out the political carnage and breathe normally? I call it ‘mind bounce’ when my head goes in 15 directions at one time and I cannot seem to focus on a single topic for more than 30 seconds! I don’t want to read or write or even hear about Donald Trump! I would pay money for a week without hearing his…

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#2016 presidential election #Donald Trump #election coverage in the press #Les Moonves #President Joe Biden #Robert Reich

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dorothydalmati1 · 5 months

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The Simpsons Season 11 Episode 17: Bart to the Future

Written by Dan Greaney

Storyboard by Glen Wuthrich, Steven Markowski & Erik Moxcey

Directed by Michael Marcantel

Directing assistance by Hunilla Fodor

#the simpsons #fox #future #prediction #presidential election #2016 presidential election #hillary clinton

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thenewdemocratus · 9 months

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ABC News: Senator Ted Cruz Discusses Opposition to President Obama's Newtown Gun Agenda

. Source:FRS FreeState Anytime you are real popular in your party even if you’ve only been office for a short period of time, like in U.S. Senator Ted Cruz’s case and you are a Governor or U.S. Senator, you have to at least consider running for President at that point. Because it might be the best shot that you get and you may never get another shot at it. And if you are a U.S. Senator or a…

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justinspoliticalcorner · 14 days

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S.V. Dáte at HuffPost:

WASHINGTON ― Would Donald Trump ever have become president if he hadn’t paid off porn star Stormy Daniels to keep her quiet in the days before the 2016 election? The answer is impossible to know, but the premise of the question forms the basis of the very first criminal trial of a former president in American history: whether Trump’s scheme to keep Daniels’ claim of a 2006 affair with him under wraps was, in fact, a crime for which the coup-attempting former president should be punished. While “hush money case” has become the shorthand to describe the first of Trump’s four criminal cases to go to trial, particularly among Trump defenders who wish to diminish it, that is not how it will be described to prospective jurors Monday at the scheduled start of jury selection. Judge Juan Merchan’s first sentence of a 223-word summary describing the case to jurors reads: “The allegations are, in substance, that Donald Trump falsified business records to conceal an agreement with others to unlawfully influence the 2016 presidential election.”

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who brought the 34-count indictment against Trump just over a year ago, will argue that the ledger entries and other business documents Trump created claiming that he was paying lawyer Michael Cohen for “legal services” when in reality he was repaying him for the $130,000 check he delivered to Daniels, were felonies under New York law. “The core is not money for sex,” Bragg told New York’s public radio affiliate last year. “We would say it’s about conspiring to corrupt a presidential election and then lying in New York business records to cover it up.” Trump’s campaign did not respond to HuffPost’s queries for this report. He has primarily argued on social media and in his campaign speeches that the case was brought to hurt his efforts to regain the presidency, another piece of the “witch hunt” that he claims the “deep state” is conducting against him.

He repeated those claims Friday during a brief news conference. “It’s not even a crime,” he said. “It’s very unfair that we have this judge who hates Trump.” It’s unclear precisely how long the trial will last or even how many days it will take to seat a jury, although estimates suggest it could stretch into June. Merchan, in an April 8 letter to prosecutors and defense lawyers, noted the logistical challenges involved in trying a former president and presumptive major party nominee who travels with a substantial Secret Service detail. “In a case where security concerns are implicated every time anyone enters or exits the courtroom, or mingles around the corridors, moving the entire jury panel is no simple task,” Merchan wrote.

Bragg’s filing accompanying the indictment lays out the plan Trump and his ally David Pecker, publisher of the National Enquirer, developed to “catch and kill” stories that could hurt Trump’s presidential campaign. The scheme also involved paying off a doorman at a Trump building, who claimed Trump had a fathered a child outside his marriages, as well as a Playboy model, Karen McDougal, who also claimed she’d had an affair with Trump in 2006 and 2007. Neither of those payments, though, were made by Cohen, and the actual indictment only involves Trump’s reimbursements to him.

To what extent Trump’s successful pre-election silencing of Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, played a role in his narrow 2016 win is unclear. Trump lost the national popular vote by 2.9 million ballots but won Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania by a combined 77,744 votes, which gave him a healthy Electoral College victory. After watching his poll numbers crater after the Oct. 7, 2016, release of the “Access Hollywood” tape, in which he bragged that his celebrity allowed him to grab women by the genitals, Trump slowly recovered over the coming weeks as Russia’s spy agencies and their ally, Julian Assange, on a near daily basis released stolen emails designed to hurt Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

[...]

Whether it would have cost Trump the election, of course, does not matter in terms of his criminal trial. Prosecutors must only prove that Trump had Cohen make the payment to Daniels for the purpose of influencing the election and that he subsequently created fake business records to disguise the purpose of the reimbursements.

“I think the case is strong as a matter of both evidence and New York law,” said Norm Eisen, a White House lawyer under former President Barack Obama who recently published a book about the New York prosecution. “If Bragg proves that theory of the case, and I think he will, he will establish this was no minor hush-money peccadillo but a serious democracy crime.” Trump faces three other felony criminal prosecutions ― two of them based on his attempt to remain in power despite having lost reelection in 2020. A federal indictment could go to trial as early as late August, depending on the timing of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on his claim that he is immune from prosecution. A Georgia state prosecution based on his attempt to overturn his election loss in that state could also start later this year. An unrelated second federal prosecution based on his refusal to turn over secret documents he took with him from the White House to his South Florida country club has not yet been set for trial.

Today is the first day of Donald Trump's first criminal trial in New York v. Trump to determine whether the hush money payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal made by Donald Trump to falsify business records in order to influence the 2016 elections leads to convictions for Trump.

If Trump is convicted on even one charge, he'll be forever known as Convicted Felon Donald Trump, and that would hurt him at the polls come election day because people who are hesitant on voting Joe Biden again but don't like DJT likely won't vote for a convicted felon to lead the nation.