Wednesday, February 3, 2021
Trump's speech is probably defensible in every court — except, perhaps, the Senate
Even if there is proof that Trump "intended" to cause violence with his speech, and even if there is proof that the violence he intended to cause was the storming of the Capitol, there could be an issue of whether the violence was "imminent" enough to be criminal.
Some will conclude that words like "fight" and "strength" gave the crowd the detailed instructions to violently enter the Capitol. The Senate can still convict even if reasonable minds can differ over those factual conclusions. A criminal jury must be unanimous.
A criminal jury is bound by the reasonable doubt standard. The Senate is not. It is bound by the two-thirds supermajority vote standard — and not much else.
‘We will never concede’: How Donald Trump incited an attack on America
Many top political figures are converging on a stunning consensus: President Donald Trump personally incited a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6, leaving four dead and an indelible scar on American democracy. Those assessments are coming not just from Trump’s political opponents, but also from members of his own party and even former members of his administration.
They include Gen. James Mattis, Trump’s first secretary of defense, who said last night that the “effort to subjugate American democracy by mob rule…was fomented by Mr. Trump.” Gen. Joseph Dunford, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump, also laid blame on the President. Republican Sen. Mitt Romney directly blamed Trump for last night’s events, and Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois this morning called for the invocation of the 25th Amendment, which gives the Vice President and the cabinet the power to remove an unfit President.
Trump’s statements leading up to and during the storming of the Capitol building, however, did not include explicit calls for a violent attack on America’s democratic institutions. Instead, those laying blame on Trump are pointing in part to rhetoric that agitated his followers with conspiratorial lies and instilled a sense of imminent doom—while relying on them to make the final decision to act. This is a version of the “stochastic terrorism” tactics common to authoritarian leaders around the world.
Capitol riots: Did Trump's words at rally incite violence?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55640437
Thousands gathered at a "Save America" rally organised to challenge the election result and they listened as Mr Trump spoke to them near the White House.
In a 70-minute address, he exhorted them to march on Congress where politicians had met to certify Democrat Joe Biden's win. The attack began moments after he took the applause.
Those words have now played a central part in his second impeachment, which happened after a day of debate in Congress.
So what did he say? Here are five key quotes, followed by some legal analysis from Professor Garrett Epps of the University of Baltimore.
'We are lost:' Fox News suffers ratings slump while staffers fret about post-Trump future
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/02/02/media/fox-news-future-reliable-sources/index.html
Here's how The Daily Beast's team described
Fox's "nosedive" on Tuesday: "Signaling a seismic shift in the media
landscape as defeated former president Donald Trump hibernates in
strangely silent exile at Mar-a-Lago, Fox News' two-decade-long winning
streak came to an abrupt end Tuesday while rivals CNN and MSNBC claimed
the No. 1 and No. 2 rankings, respectively, in all of cable television.
Fox News' embarrassing third-place showing is the continuation of a
downward trend in which the right-leaning outlet lost 2020's fourth
quarter to CNN and alienated Trump-supporting loyal viewers by calling
Arizona early for Joe Biden during its election-night coverage."
Tuesday, February 2, 2021
Trump's legal team argues Senate can't convict him, his speech protected by 1st Amendment
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/02/02/politics/democratic-impeachment-filing/index.html
"The First Amendment protects private citizens from the government; it does not protect government officials from accountability for their own abuses in office," they wrote.
Daniel Rosenthal=Gropen Orthodox
https://www.nysenate.gov//
https://nyassembly.gov/leg/?
https://nyassembly.gov/leg/?
https://nyassembly.gov/leg/?
http://www2.assembly.state.ny.
KNOW THAT, YOU KNOW, AMONGST THE PROVISIONS THIS IS AMENDING, YOU KNOW, OBVIOUSLY RELATE TO HOW DIFFERENT PRACTICES ARE -- ARE CONSIDERED IN VARIOUS PARTS OF OUR LAW, INCLUDING THE EDUCATION LAW, SO -- SO THE QUESTION IS, I THINK, PRETTY SPECIFIC. WOULD A RELIGIOUS INSTITUTION LIKE A, YOU KNOW, ALL GIRLS RELIGIOUS HIGH SCHOOL, BE REQUIRED UNDER THIS TO ADMIT A STUDENT WHO IDENTIFIES AS FEMALE, BUT WAS, YOU KNOW, BORN MALE?"
https://nyassembly.gov/leg/?
https://web.archive.org/web/
https://nyassembly.gov/leg/?
Anti-vaxxers and Israel’s own conspiracy theorists
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/anti-vaxxers-and-israels-own-conspiracy-theorists/
So no, Jews are not immune to this insanity, and neither is the Jewish state. And as with Trump in the US, we currently have a highly talented conspiracy king running the country. In this election campaign, we need to be on our guard. Anti-vaxxers could be the tip of the iceberg; we may get to see what an indigenous Israeli QAnon looks like, and who knows, if Bibi loses, maybe even our own ‘Capitol Hill’ insurrection.
It’s Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Party Now
Greene is not the outlier in this party. Kinzinger is.
American conservatism — particularly its evangelical strain — has fostered derangement in its ranks for decades, insisting that no source of information outside its own self-reinforcing ideological bubble is trustworthy.
If you’re steeped in creationism and believe that elites are lying to you about the origins of life on earth, it’s not a stretch to believe they’re lying to you about a life-threatening virus. If what you know of history is the revisionist version of the Christian right, in which God deeded America to the faithful, then pluralism will feel like the theft of your birthright. If you believe that the last Democratic president was illegitimate, as Trump and other birthers claimed, then it’s not hard to believe that dark forces would foist another unconstitutional leader on the country.
There was a moment, after the Capitol riot, when it seemed as if a critical mass of the Republican Party was recoiling at what it had created. But the moment passed, because it would have required the party’s putative leaders to defy too many of their followers. Senator Mitch McConnell floated openness to convicting Trump in a Senate trial, but ended up voting that such a trial was unconstitutional. Fox News, finger to the wind, purged many of its real journalists and gave the conspiracy theorist Maria Bartiromo a prime-time tryout.
McConnell: Marjorie Taylor Greene's views are a 'cancer' for the GOP
"Loony lies and conspiracy theories are cancer for the Republican Party and our country," McConnell said in a statement. "Somebody who's suggested that perhaps no airplane hit the Pentagon on 9/11, that horrifying school shootings were pre-staged, and that the Clintons crashed JFK Jr.'s airplane is not living in reality. This has nothing to do with the challenges facing American families or the robust debates on substance that can strengthen our party."
Monday, February 1, 2021
For 2nd time in day, thousands attend funeral of rabbi, flouting lockdown rules
TV news estimates 8,000 attend Jerusalem burial of Rabbi Yitzhok Scheiner, hours after 10,000 joined procession for Rabbi Meshulam Dovid Soloveitchik; both died of COVID
One third of Israel's coronavirus victims died in January
https://www.ynetnews.com/article/ryMNjXSlu
The ministry said 5,140 people tested positive for COVID-19 on Sunday after 54,737 tests had been conducted, bringing the infection rate to 9.7%. The infection rate in the ultra-Orthodox sector is much higher at 20.1%.