Shady Menendez. Prison on the horizon, the Senate in his rear vice mirror. Caitlin Yilek (CBS NEWS) reports:
During the first five weeks of Sen. Bob Menendez's bribery trial, his attorneys have peppered government witnesses with questions aimed at shifting the blame to the New Jersey Democrat's wife, Nadine.
Legal experts say Menendez's strategy is not unique, but could backfire with jurors.
"An
empty-chair defense when a spouse is involved is somewhat risky,
because some jurors can view the defendant blaming their spouse
unfavorably, and that potentially can affect the overall perception of
the defense," said Luke Cass, a former federal prosecutor who handled
corruption investigations into government officials.
Scott Hulsey, a former federal prosecutor, said blaming his wife "carries a whole different sort of baggage" for Meneget a ndez than if he were to fault someone else.
"To blame the person you're married to
for something that went wrong could offend some people's notion of what
marriage is and what it's about," Hulsey said.
You get it now, don't you? Nadine's breast cancer is not the reason that she's not being tried with him. It was her excuse so that he could have a legal defense of some kind for all the bribes he took. He couldn't very blame her if she was on trial with him. She should have been though.
But it just goes to show you exactly how trashy Shady is. He's not just blaming his wife, he's blaming his stage-3 breast cancer wife.
Don't know about you but I believe that's an automatic referral to hell.
The thing I liked best about the trial? When the proseutors passed around a gold bars to the jury so that they could hold them:
Last week, in Sen. Bob Menendez’s trial, newly released photos provided a peek at the gold bars the FBI seized from his residence as evidence of alleged bribes. The senator and his wife, Nadine, along with three co-defendants, each face multiple federal felony charges. Menendez and his wife are also charged with acting as foreign agents of Egypt. They’re alleged to have received cash, diamond jewelry and other valuable items in exchange for the senator performing certain official acts as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The New Jersey Democrat has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
During the trial, federal prosecutors permitted jurors to handle some of
the 13 gold bars, reportedly weighing over two kilos and valued at over
$150,000.
This is C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"
Field insisted on breaking John Marshall's record of 34 years on the court, even when he was no longer able to handle the workload. His colleagues asked him to resign due to his being intermittently senile,[14] but he refused, at one point John Marshall Harlan urged Field to retire. Finding him dozing in the robing room. Harlan later related what happened next: “The old man listened, gradually became alert, and finally, with his eyes blazing with the fire of youth, he burst out, ‘Yes, and a dirtier day’s work I never did in my life.'”[15]
In March 1896, he wrote what would be his final opinion on behalf of the Court, but remained on the bench for another twenty months, finally retiring on December 1, 1897.[16] Field would become the last veteran of both the Taney Court and the Chase Court to remain on the bench. He would remain the longest serving member of the Court until his record was surpassed by William O. Douglas, who served from 1939 to 1975.
We need laws changing this from a life time appointment because for the American people this is now becoming a lifetime sentence -- where we have to wait for these corrupt bastards to die in order to get justice.
When Crooked Clarence refuses to properly disclose, he stains his own image and he stains the Court's image. This should not be allowed to happen.
Let's note this from Ava and my "Media: The lying pundits with a focus on Jonathan Turley:"
MEDIAS TOUCH is a good outlet and produced good content. But we cringed over one this week where a woman wanted to talk about the assault on women's rights.
We don't think the assault exists?
We
know it does. And it's a good topic for a commentary -- for many
commentaries. But the woman seemed to doubt that or to feel that she
needed to shore up the case by citing an attack on Civil Rights.
Citing? A whispered aside, at best. And why do that?
There's more than enough reason to make a commentary on the assault on Civil Rights -- many commentaries (and Roland S. Martin regularly does a great job with those commentaries on his own podcasts). The way the woman utilized this was confusing and weakened her presentation.
If she was attempting to note the reality that the fright-wing wishes to strip all of us of our rights (which is, in fact, true), she left out the LGBTQ+ community and that's a huge omission because that community is and has been the test case for the fright-wing in their efforts to destroy rights and to create a climate of hate.
And it has been with those efforts that the hate mongers have shown their hand; however, too few want to see reality -- or maybe their own latent homophobia prevents them from seeing reality.
The Supreme Court is a dishonest and crooked body that has handed down outrageous rulings over the last four years. And, yes, DOBBS is one of those outrageous rulings. So were the rulings in ALEXANDER V SOUTH CAROLINE NAACP and SFFA V HARVARD/UNC. They are disgusting rulings that ignored precedent and trashed settled law.
But the worst attack on Americans came in 303 CREATIVE LLC V ELENIS.
And this is where Turley comes in. He had already begun his flirtation with The Federalist Society. Within a few years, his exposure had led to full blown hate. He began offering pro bono help behind the scenes to many offensive and disgusting cases. On CREATIVE LLC, he began insisting that Lori Smith -- the homophobe -- was being denied her religious right to practice homophobia. He worded differently but that's the reality.
Lori was a known liar who had no standing to sue and her case was a joke that only became more outrageous after the verdict when it was learned that the person she cited in court papers as having requested she make a same-sex wedding site for him (a) never made that request, (b) was straight and (c) was married to a woman and had been for over 15 years. She's just a cheap little liar and you have to wonder how she justifies that in her so-called faith?
The verdict in that case created two sets of citizenship. Straight people are entitled to all rights but gay men and lesbians only have rights if those rights do not offend the homophobia of some religious nutcase. That's what the verdict was.
Turley went all in on that case and you can read his Tweets and his columns -- even if he kept hidden his interactions with Lori Smith's attorneys. With DOBBS and the other cases?
He was less vocal and had to keep things hidden. In our society, sadly, you can fully attack the LGBTQ+ community and get away with it. Turley and the fright-wing know that they have to step more lightly when it comes to attacking others. So with attacks in other areas, these are steps to eliminating rights. Steps. Affirmative action has largely been struck down in college admissions due to the Crooked Court. DOBBS? It, as Turley repeatedly insisted, turned the issue over to the states. Many of these states,Turley failed to note, had already prepared for this day and had laws in place to destroy reproductive rights.
They chip away at a specific right. But with Lori Smith's case, they went back to overturning equality and all the decisions that involved equality over the Court's history to argue that gays and lesbians only have rights if 100% of America agrees they should have them.
That's what they want to do with reproductive rights and with Civil Rights but they know they have to move slowly there. And part of the slow move is to lie and attack the rights of women and people of color in an attempt to soften public reaction to the coming onslaught.
The fakery is part of the process and the plotting and scheming start long before we're aware of it.
Little also claims that he is opposed to the flag because it has been “featured prominently during Gay Pride parades around the world, including those in which adults wear little to no clothing while in the presence of children.”
Excuse me, Los Angeles lifeguard says what?
Has the good captain not noticed how many people are running around L.A. beaches nearly naked on your average sunny day? I mean, you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference between a bikini and dental floss these days. In fact, it’s sometimes hard to tell who is wearing a thong and who is actually naked.
But hey, as long as they don't ask for your sexual orientation while you are caught in a rip tide, even lifeguards are allowed to be bigots, at least in private.
Imposing their religion on the rest of us is where I draw the line, though. Same-sex marriage was legalized in 2015. Gender is not binary. Trans people exist and deserve respect. Flying the Pride flag is a symbolic way of saying, "You belong too."
The Thomas More Society has been aligned with the presidential administration of Donald Trump.[37] Trump appointed Sarah Pitlyk, a special counsel to the society, to a federal district judgeship.[38]
In 2020, after Trump was defeated by Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, the Thomas More Society established the Amistad Project as part of an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.[6] Trump repeatedly and falsely claimed that the election was marred by voter fraud.[6] The project was led by former Kansas Attorney General (and later Liberty University professor) Phillip Kline,[6][39] although his law license was suspended.[39] The effort was tied to Jenna Ellis, a senior legal adviser to the Trump campaign who was also special counsel to the Thomas More Society.[6] The Amistad Projects filed lawsuits on behalf of supposed "grassroots" groups (with titles such as the "Pennsylvania Voters Alliance" and "Wisconsin Voters Alliance") in the swing states won by Biden (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin). All the suits were rejected or dismissed by the courts.[6] Ellis's tie to the society and the project suggested "a coordinated effort to flood the nation's courts with repetitive litigation" allowing Trump to continue to claim that the election results remain contested.[6]
On December 14, 2020, ahead of the electoral college vote, Amistad Project attorney Ian Northon accompanied a group of self-described "Republican electors" in Lansing who were attempting to cast Michigan electoral votes for Trump, despite Biden winning Michigan and being previously certified as the winner. Northon claimed the "electors" were "fulfilling their constitutional duty."[40] The fake "votes" cast by the pro-Trump "alternate electors" have no legal standing.[41][42]
On December 22, 2020, after the electors had cast their votes, the Amistad Project sued in D.C. federal court on behalf of a variety of plaintiffs: ten voters, five organizations, and eight state legislators. The two Michigan legislators listed as plaintiffs later requested to be dropped from the suit, feeling that the suit that was filed differed too strongly from what they had agreed to.[43] The project sued, among others, Vice President Mike Pence, governors, election officials, and legislative officials in the battleground states; the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate, and the electoral college itself.[44] The group asked the court to (as the district court later described in denying the request) "declare unconstitutional several decades-old federal statutes governing the appointment of electors and the counting of electoral votes for President of the United States; to invalidate multiple state statutes regulating the certification of Presidential votes; to ignore certain Supreme Court decisions; and, the coup de grace, to enjoin the U.S. Congress from counting the electoral votes on January 6, 2021, and declaring Joseph R. Biden the next President."[45] The suit was derided by legal community for the substance of its arguments, the broadness of its goals, and for naming the Electoral College as a defendant, with notes that the Electoral College is not something that exists, but a process that happens.[46]
On January 4, 2021, U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg denied the society's motion for a preliminary injunction, noting that plaintiffs lacked standing, the case was filed in the wrong court, and that plaintiffs made no effort to serve the other side. Boasberg wrote that in addition to those procedural problems, "the suit rests on a fundamental and obvious misreading of the Constitution. It would be risible were its target not so grave: the undermining of a democratic election for President of the United States."[47]
Michael Gableman, the former justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court who led a state-funded investigation into unfounded allegations of fraud in the 2020 presidential election in Wisconsin, was hired by the Thomas More Society[48] after being fired by the politician who hired him, Speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly Robin Vos, in August 2022.[49]
We've got so much to cover but we have stop for a moment for Barbra Streisand. Some people are e-mailing the public account insisting that I'm not calling her out when I should be. If you missed it, this week Barbra made a statement about the mythical rapes of October 7th. I really have more important things to do -- as should you -- then get caught up in that. It was a stupid comment from an uniformed woman. If you've missed it -- and maybe this isn't in the media? -- James Brolin and his woman-beating son Josh have been all in on go-go-go Israel. So she's surrounded by that. THE NEW YORK TIMES -- her gospel (because she's an idiot) has repeatedly pimped the lie of rapes. (Again, no woman has come forward. There is no proof. The allegations made were just more lies from a corrupt government.)
Barbra is an idiot. She reads NYT, she praises it. She even praised Frank Rich when Bully Boy Bush occupied the White House. If you're not familiar with Rich's body of work, before politics he did movie reviews. And no one, not even John Simon, trashed her more than Frank Rich. But there was idiot Babs praising him and linking to him because he said what she wanted to hear about Bully Boy Bush. Despite the huge and preening ego -- or maybe because of -- Barbra praised a man she should hve ignored.
This is a woman, please note, who has bragged for years about her lack of education and laughing about how she was close to 30 before she knew who won The Civil War. And not just bragged about to those of us who know her, you can find her bragging and laughing about it to the press.
So, no, the fact that Barbra has hopped onto the lie about the mythical rapes does not surprise me. Nor should it surprise anyone.
Now we are jumping into Jeffrey St. Clair's latest COUNTERPUNCH column:
The bodies of children and women, the old and young, shredded by shrapnel, riven with bullets, some with severed limbs and others with perforated eyes.
“There were children everywhere, there were women, there were men,” said Karin Huster, who was working at Al-Aqsa with Médecins Sans Frontières. “We had the gamut of war wounds, trauma wounds, from amputations to eviscerations to trauma, to TBIs, traumatic brain injuries. Fractures, obviously, big burns. Kids completely grey or white from the shock, burnt, screaming for their parents — many of them not screaming because they are in shock.”
The tempo of the attack increased. The bombings and the gunfire and the tanks and the helicopters. The frenzied sounds of a war machine at full-throttle. For thirty minutes it went on. For an hour. For an hour and a half. It seemed interminable for those seeking shelter on the ground, cowering in buildings and the hospital. And then it was over, finally. And there were only the cries for help from the shattered streets and collapsed buildings. The cries of parents carrying dead children in their arms, the cries of children looking at the gutted bodies of their parents.
What had just happened? Why had this refugee camp at Nusierat, home of so many homeless people, so many Palestinian families who had been displaced by bombs time and time again, come under such a savage sustained attack from the air and the ground, an attack that destroyed 90 homes and apartment buildings? An attack of such fury that it left the streets scattered with severed arms and legs, the bodies of children and their mothers and grandfathers left to bleed out in the marketplace that seemed to be a target of the attack. What could possibly justify this slaughter, this killing, this destruction that one Palestinian refugee in Nuseirat said felt like “Doomsday”?
When the Israelis finally left, they took four people with them, four hostages who had been rescued by Israeli commandos and evacuated in helicopters that were stationed at or near Biden’s hapless “humanitarian” pier that had, coincidentally or not, just been reassembled and re-moored to the beach in central Gaza, after breaking apart in high seas last month.
When the Israelis finally left with the four rescued hostages, who’d been captured by Hamas on October 7 while attending the Nova rave just outside the Israeli security fence that pens in and isolates northern Gaza, they left behind 274 dead Palestinians, including 64 children and 57 women. They left behind 700 wounded, many in critical condition, many of whom seem likely to die in the coming days and weeks.
The great rescue mission turned into the worst massacre to date in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, leaving the streets of Nuseirat, in the words of Abu Asi, “halls of blood.”
This morning, ALJAZEERA reports:
Medical sources have told Al Jazeera that 20 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli raids on different areas in the Gaza Strip since dawn today.
Al Jazeera’s Hind Khoudary reports that Israeli forces targeted a house in Deir el-Balah, and killed at least two Palestinians. Four others were critically injured, among them children.
“Talking to the parents, they said they were playing in the courtyard when the air strike took place,” Khoudary said.
“There has been a couple of targets in Nuseirat and Bureij. The air strikes are ongoing from north to the south, despite the ceasefire negotiations.”
THE NATIONAL notes, "Three women were killed in an attack on a home near Hedar roundabout, in western Gaza city, and a child was killed in bombardment on the city, sources said." And THE GUARDIAN notes:
In the north of the Gaza Strip where Palestinians have been hit hardest by hunger, residents say they are surviving on bread alone due to acute shortages of vegetables, fruit and meat.
Reuters reports that food that can be found in markets is being sold at exorbitant prices: a kilo of green peppers, which cost about a dollar before the war, was priced at 320 shekels or nearly $90. Traders demanded $70 for just a kilo of onions.
Um Mohammed, a mother of six in Gaza City, told the news agency:
We are being starved, the world has forgotten about us.
Except for the flour, bread, we have nothing else, we don’t have anything to eat it with, so we eat bread only.
Gaza remains under assault. Day 252 of the assault in the wave that began in October. Binoy Kampmark (DISSIDENT VOICE) points out, "Bloodletting as form; murder as fashion. The ongoing campaign in Gaza by Israel’s Defence Forces continues without stalling and restriction. But the burgeoning number of corpses is starting to become a challenge for the propaganda outlets: How to justify it? Fortunately for Israel, the United States, its unqualified defender, is happy to provide cover for murder covered in the sheath of self-defence." CNN has explained, "The Gaza Strip is 'the most dangerous place' in the world to be a child, according to the executive director of the United Nations Children's Fund." ABC NEWS quotes UNICEF's December 9th statement, ""The Gaza Strip is the most dangerous place in the world to be a child. Scores of children are reportedly being killed and injured on a daily basis. Entire neighborhoods, where children used to play and go to school have been turned into stacks of rubble, with no life in them." NBC NEWS notes, "Strong majorities of all voters in the U.S. disapprove of President Joe Biden’s handling of foreign policy and the Israel-Hamas war, according to the latest national NBC News poll. The erosion is most pronounced among Democrats, a majority of whom believe Israel has gone too far in its military action in Gaza." The slaughter continues. It has displaced over 1 million people per the US Congressional Research Service. Jessica Corbett (COMMON DREAMS) points out, "Academics and legal experts around the world, including Holocaust scholars, have condemned the six-week Israeli assault of Gaza as genocide." The death toll of Palestinians in Gaza is grows higher and higher. United Nations Women noted, "More than 1.9 million people -- 85 per cent of the total population of Gaza -- have been displaced, including what UN Women estimates to be nearly 1 million women and girls. The entire population of Gaza -- roughly 2.2 million people -- are in crisis levels of acute food insecurity or worse." THE NATIONAL notes, "Gaza death toll reaches 37,232 with 85,037 injured." Months ago, AP noted, "About 4,000 people are reported missing." February 7th, Jeremy Scahill explained on DEMOCRACY NOW! that "there’s an estimated 7,000 or 8,000 Palestinians missing, many of them in graves that are the rubble of their former home." February 5th, the United Nations' Phillipe Lazzarini Tweeted:
We'll wind down with this from Marjorie Cohn (TRUTHOUT):
On June 4, a coalition of active-duty service members, veterans and G.I. rights groups launched a campaign called Appeal for Redress V2 to encourage military personnel to tell Congress to stop funding genocide in Gaza. Israel’s genocidal operation, now in its ninth month, has killed more than 37,000 Palestinians and wounded nearly 85,000.
The campaign is sponsored by Veterans For Peace (VFP), the Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers Guild, About Face: Veterans Against the War and the Center on Conscience & War. It is modeled after the 2006 Appeal for Redress issued during the occupation of Iraq. During that campaign, almost 3,000 active-duty, Reserve and Guard personnel sent protected communications to their members of Congress urging an end to the wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Appeal for Redress V2 was formulated to help G.I.s directly tell their representatives that they oppose U.S. support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
“We will not stand by silently while genocide unfolds,” Senior Airman Juan Bettancourt, an active-duty member of the U.S. Air Force, stated at a June 4 press conference announcing the campaign. “We refuse to be complicit” in the “unspeakable carnage,” said Bettancourt, who is seeking separation from the U.S. military as a conscientious objector.
Kathleen Gilberd, executive director of the Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers Guild and my coauthor for Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent, told Truthout there has been an increase in the number of applications for conscientious objection (CO) and other types of honorable discharge from the military. “Many military personnel have serious objections to the U.S. support for Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians,” Gilberd said.
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