If he needs to pardon himself or that is even a consideration... he shouldn't be president.

One of many.

Not a good day for criminals trying to use the coronavirus as a "Get Out of Jail free" card-Roger Stone tried to extend his reporting to prison to September and judge said no because there are no cases of the virus in the facility where he will be held. He has to report on July 14.

l
The good news just continues to roll in today

I don't pretend to know if he will, but it wouldn't surprise me to see him go on a diplomatic/fact-finding trip to a non-extradition country days before Biden's inauguration and then just retire there and not come back.

This is kind of a bullshit move by the DOJ. And I think Cohen is a piece of shit.

Here is the gag order that Michael Cohen balked at signing today. His lawyers claim his reluctance resulted in his being remanded to federal custody today. https://t.co/cbDDiai0AA pic.twitter.com/hjF1mA89BK

— Dan Friedman (@dfriedman33) July 9, 2020

Yeah Rainmaker, on the surface this seems sketchy but I don't know if these are the normal restrictions put on somebody going into house arrest or not?

Nate Silver made a good point on this I thought. This probably saves the Democrats from themselves. Having a bunch of hearings over his tax returns while people continue to die from the virus and find themselves out of work won't look good.

Trump isn't going to lose because someone finds out he isn't as rich as he says or took out some shady loans. You either know he's a con man or nothing will change your mind. He is going to lose because he has botched a pandemic and helped destroy the economy.

It is not a normal restriction.

Meanwhile, one of the biggest pieces of shit in this country got let out of prison.

Kids for Cash judge out of prison | wnep.com

Then I would have to say it was an attempt by Barr/Trump to prevent him from talking before the election

Jaime Harrison, Lindsay Graham's Dem challenger with a little good wishes for Lindsay's 65th birthday today:

Jaime Harrison

@harrisonjaime







US Senate candidate, SC





Happy 65th birthday to @LindseyGrahamSC
! As your Senator, I promise to protect your new retirement benefits from Medicare, the program you've been trying to gut for decades.

As a defense lawyer, I will say that those are not normal conditions. But that most defendants are not in a position to profit from writing a book. So that's probably not the right question to ask.

This happens all the time with them. Both hilarious and sad.

SI

Trump says the Walter Reed doctors were very surprised he passed his cognitive test. So are the rest of us. Assuming it's true, of course.

If I am Cohen I would be filing some sort of motion because its clear to me he is being singled out. I have no doubt this is Barr and Co doing this shit.

Aren't parole/house arrest conditions usually based on the individual and their crimes?

And the phase of the moon, and the mood of the parole board.

And parole officers can be as lazy or as iron-fisted as they want to be in regards to actually enforcing the terms. There's very little oversight unless something bad happens, and parole officers are, to put it mildly, not the cream of the crop.

Worked for many years at a company who ran the monitoring / call center for parolees in multiple states. I worked on the software that actually tracked these folks. It's an ... interesting world.

edit: Same company, I built a companion piece of software that did similar for bail bonds companies. The only thing with less oversight and more insanity than the parole system is the bail bonds world. Bail bondsmen can very nearly do WHATEVER the fuck they want.

So, some how Biden's economic plan both plagiarized Trump, and is radically leftist.

Sent from my SM-N960U using Tapatalk

I'm sure they are banking on Trump's supporters not realizing the disconnect.

This is fucking horrifying

Too many Universities and School Systems are about Radical Left Indoctrination, not Education. Therefore, I am telling the Treasury Department to re-examine their Tax-Exempt Status...

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 10, 2020

Pretty safe bet.

Although, because of this tweet the First Amendment violation is obvious if they ever follow through.

So, being a President of law and order, I am sure he follow up with the same for some churches that flout mandates to close and spew far right propaganda under the guise of religious freedom. I mean, it is only fair right?

The judge in the Vance vs Trump case that got sent back to him from the Supreme Court wants to hear from both sides by next Wed how they want to proceed.

Trump - "Bigly slow"

Not contesting you, honestly asking since you are one of our resident lawyers (IIRC) and I certainly am not.

How is 1A violated even if they follow through?
Nowhere does it say that you will receive tax free existence regardless of speech. It isnt a punitive tax, its a repeal of special tax exemption afforded to educational institutions.

Frankly I think all colleges should be treated as the private businesses they truly are anyway.

I'm not a lawyer either, but I expect the problem would be equal protection.

The government is making a content specific decision on funding. The President has just admitted that he will regulate this law based on the political content (speech) of what is being taught at the University. The Government has to make content neutral rules to avoid running afoul of the First Amendment right to Free Speech.

It is just not Trump. The whole party has gone full Trumpian.

This is a lie. The plan was only to send to ACTIVE registered voters. RNC dismisses the case with nothing. https://t.co/ZsDnc2c40k

— Rick Hasen (@rickhasen) July 10, 2020

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...d-lost/613999/

This article from the Atlantic about the cost of Evangelicals supporting Trump is completely on point.

It also completely misses the fact that Evangelicals are inured to this sort of criticism because they will never see themselves as anything other than a persecuted minority. I mean, the entire source text is from the perspective of a persecuted minority.

I say that as a believing Christian.

Wayfair trafficking kids in utility closets has been brought to you from the minds behind pizzagate

I don't think they set aside the tenets of their faith. Evangelicals have been some of the most loathsome people in this country. Devoid of empathy or any morals. Trump is a reflection of what they are.

I'm always struck by the irony of my many friends who work for progressive not-for-profits[1] joining the chorus of folks who want to see churches and religious organizations have their non-profit status exemptions removed.



[1] I'm including community-based mental health organization in this mix. I spent a bunch of years working in drug rehab back in my college days in this environment. To say that this field tends to attract folks of a progressive political bent is probably not surprising, but I figured I should be explicit about my definitions.

Shocking news.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/10/media...eff/index.html

My brother in law is Jamie Dimons right hand man, has a legit shot at being the next CEO. told me a while back he was at an event late 2015 early 2016 with Carlson and he told my BIL Trump was a moron whom he hated but he would be the best thing to ever happen to him.

Seeing as though he's gone from CNN's token conservative nitwit to potential 2024 presidential candidate, I guess he was right.

Perhaps not surprisingly, my experience with this community does not reflect your experience. :)

That said, my experience can only really be about the church communities in which I've been a participant. (I've never been a member of an American northeast congregational church, for instance. Or a member of a deep south Baptist church.) What I do know experientially (and, let's be honest, anecdotally) is that every church I've attended is probably a 65/35 mix of people I'd identify as "true believers" vs. "remedy seekers" or "traditional participants".

Church is one of those funny gatekeeping things that can confuse casual conversations. Because when I talk about the church, I'm not talking about the 70% of Americans (or whatever the percentage is these days) who self-identify as religious. I'm also not talking about para-church and affiliated political organizations. I see lots of people who self-identify as part of the church, but whose lived expression of Christianity doesn't match the sort of markers used to historically (or theologically) identify members of the church polity. (I'm intentionally ignoring issues of progressive sanctification as markers here, since the whole idea of sanctification -- unless maybe you're a southern independent Baptist ;) -- seems to be that there's a learning curve. But being *on* the curve is an essential indicator.)

But, I mean, that's my experience. And I've certainly butted heads inside my own church organizations with plenty of people who have confused their politics, their nationalism, and their religion to the point that Trump is exactly what they were pining for. In some of those cases, I question their claim of salvation, but in most, I just question their clarity and their priority, because the fruit expressed in their lives generally is sufficient to indicate that they have a determined love for the things of God.

After a judge refused to delay Roger Stone's date to go to prison, Trump has commuted his sentence

Law and order! Lol

I have no idea how this is ever fixed.

To me, it's been up there for the most disappointing aspect of the Trump administration (and lord knows there have been a lot). The full throated acceptance by most Evangelicals. Let's just say that I'm much more fulfilled as ELCA than LCMS and that would go about doubly (a milliony) more during the last 3+ years.

SI

Mowing the lawn this evening and doing a bunch of thinking (the lawn and the toilet are my 2 thinking places), it occurred to me that if we do a bunch of mail-in voting and if the election is close, you can expect that either the presidency or some important senate seats are not going to be decided for a couple of weeks after the election due to delays in counting votes and the inevitable lawsuits, and that we may get some clarity right around Thanksgiving - just in time for family get-togethers.

What a sh!tshow that is going to be for a lot of us. I'm already dreading my parents coming for Thanksgiving. There will be no way to avoid the news if all of this is unfolding near the end of November. If there's anything that can further divide (or sub-divide) us, it will be complete family disintegration during the holidays.

Why is the Stone thing not immediately deserving of something? I mean...get in line with all the questionable stuff he's done, but I thought that even the good people in the opposition party wanted leadership that had some morals, some integrity, some sense of fairness? Without any sort of ethical standards for leadership, and no group to hold that leadership accountable, the standard has been lowered so far that it's outright dangerous. People have to believe in their leadership, all this does is further erode that trust. I don't think we'll ever come back from this. Not in my lifetime. There is not enough good willing to overcome the power freaks. It's depressing. Every day we need more Rage Against the Machine. Now more than ever.

I agree. The depressing and scary thing is not that it's happening but that there is seemingly no way to stop it within the usual backstops we all expect to come to the rescue in a time like this. Now that the system has been broken, all that's left is for the next people in power to continue to exploit it. There's no going back.

Trump has really mastered the late Friday BS move knowing the news won’t even be a blip on the radar come Monday.

They admitted that they were selling their souls (or at least their moral authority) for an imagined golden goose. But instead, they only got 40 pieces of silver.

This makes so much sense to me, despite the fact that I made, in essence, the opposite denominational conversion -- from a more non-denominational/charismatic ethic to a more conservative/confessional/Calvinist profession.

And I think the conclusion I reached is that how well I get along in the context of an instantiated congregational or confessional particularity of the Body of Christ (i.e. "what church I go to") is directly correlated with how seriously they attend to their theological education...and the concept of education generally.

There's a reason that for the bulk of institutionalized educational history that Theology was considered the "Queen of the Sciences". It's complicated stuff (which, you know, you want it to be if the object of your study is supposedly understanding a divine and infinite Being). The more you boil that commitment down to 90 minutes on Sunday morning and the less you engage your intellect to wrestle with the God you claim to believe in -- the more you replace the nuances of reconciliation with God with dogma -- the more prone you are to introducing systematic errors in your thinking.

And that has real consequences for how you engage with culture and what you think you mean when you talk about the kingdom of heaven having arrived.

In other words, if I do what I perceive to be the "right things" that I've received from my religious tradition, that doesn't reflect a right standing with God if I'm doing them for the wrong reasons. And if I know anything about myself as a human being, it's that I've almost always got wrong reasons behind what I'm doing.

Now, I've got plenty of reasons to be critical of the post-modern philosophy that informed my college education and influenced the sort of thoughts that are my default critical settings, but at least it did teach me to think critically about myself and my own representations of reality. How can we be expected to think rationally about God if we won't even be open to the idea of thinking rationally about ourselves and our received traditions?

I've watched my parents, especially my Dad, really wrestle with this the past couple of years. They go to a not-quite-megachurch and I've watched him have such a hard time reconciling the good that he can do with their infrastructure and resources and the hatred that is in so many of their hearts. He's one of their leads on international mission trips, he helps out with their Habitat projects, they do a lot of small group stuff - I can see it gives his so much joy to be able to help so many people and it gives him a purpose in retirement. But he has to balance that against how they basically can't do much small talk at their small groups because something awful - racist, sexist, bigoted, whatever will come out or how he knows some of his offering money is going to causes he strongly is opposed to that he would not consider Christ-like.

SI

I’m with you on this one. I have strong political disagreements with a lot of my friends who were Pentecostal, but they struck me as trying to be good and decent folk. And sometimes it was even at strange odds with some of their percieved policy beliefs. But even then, I did think I could reach those evangelical friends of mine through basic decency.

That has been shattered now. Interestingly a lot of the young Pentecostals I know have gone significantly to the left. They have completely disavowed Trump and White Supremacy Christianity. And it started for many of them because they got disgusted that the leaders they looked up to, who told them being Christlike was to be kind and loving, suddenly took up the banner for Trump. It gives me some hope for the future of Evangelicalism.


ELCA in the House! I was just attending a Virtual Holy Week(end) with a group of young leaders in the church, focused on George Floyd and Black Lives Matter. The youth here in our Church also give me hope.