“A technical violation of the Constitution is a violation of the Constitution,” he said. “Our Constitution is designed to stop people from trying to overthrow elections and trying to overthrow the government.
“There are people who are in jail for several years for counterfeiting one vote,” Raskin said. “He tried to steal the entire election.”
Even if former President Donald Trump committed a “technical violation of the constitution” by seeking to overturn the 2020 election, that doesn’t make him a criminal, his attorney argued Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press. The comments came following a question by host Chuck Todd about Mike Pence’s repeated assertions that Trump asked him to violate the constitution by moving to stop the counting of valid electoral college votes on Jan. 6, 2021, prompting attorney John Lauro to assert that it is “just plain wrong” to suggest that makes him a criminal. When asked in a follow-up email whether he believes that Trump did violate the constitution with his request, Lauro told NBC that he “never said that President Trump committed a technical violation.” Rep Jamie Raskin (D-MD), a key member of the Jan. 6 committee and an outspoken critic of Trump, later said on the network that the defense put forward by Lauro was “deranged.”
Lauro also repeatedly defended Trump’s fake elector scheme, stating that ultimately “none of these electors were counted” while describing it as merely a form of “political protest,” prompting Bash to note that “they weren’t counted because Mike Pence rejected this scheme.” After Lauro insisted this was just “how the political process works,” the CNN anchor exclaimed, “No, it doesn’t!”
Peter Knight, professor of American studies at the University of Manchester, who has studied conspiracy theories and their history, notes that the link between alternative therapies and conspiracy is at least a century old, and has been much ignored. “New age and conspiracy theories both see themselves as counter-knowledges that challenge what they see as received wisdom,” he says. “Conspiracy theories provide the missing link, turbo-charging an existing account of what’s happening by claiming that it is not just the result of chance or the unintended consequences of policy choices, but the result of a deliberate, secret plan, whether by big pharma, corrupt scientists, the military-industrial complex or big tech.”
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/08/06/economy/florida-convention-business-cancellations/index.html
In recent weeks, at least a dozen organizations have announced plans to either cancel or relocate their upcoming conferences scheduled to take place in Florida, making a statement by having their thousands of attendees and millions of dollars flow into other states deemed safer and more welcoming.
While DeSantis’ office brushes this off as a “media-driven stunt,” tourism officials and community organizations in the state say what’s happening now may be just the beginning.
“Unlike leisure business, which is a very short-term booking window [in weeks or months], conference business is long term,” said Stacy Ritter, president and chief executive officer of the Visit Lauderdale tourism marketing agency in Broward County, Florida. “We’re booking ’26 to ‘30 now, so any impact that this might have is not going to be seen for years to come.”
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/08/05/health/boomers-divorce-living-alone-wellness-cec/index.html
Brown and I-Fen Lin found that from 1990 to 2010, the divorce rate for people over 50 in the United States had doubled. They dubbed it “the gray divorce revolution.”
Prosecutors pointed specifically to a post on Trump’s Truth Social platform from earlier Friday in which Trump wrote, in all capital letters, “If you go after me, I’m coming after you!”
https://mishpacha.com/the-end-of-youth/
I’m going to skip my planned column on Hunter Biden, in favor of writing about my last five days, including two trips to the Shaare Zedek emergency room and the insertion of a stent into one of two blocked coronary arteries on Tishah B’Av.
Prominent Donald Trump supporters have responded with fury after Ron DeSantis said "theories" about the 2020 presidential election "did not prove to be true," in what was widely seen as a rejection of the former president's claims of electoral fraud.
Former Trump lawyer Alan Dershowitz said former Attorney General Bill Barr’s claims that free speech isn’t on trial in former President Trump’s election fraud case is “dead wrong.”
Fox Radio interview Friday. “Everything involves his exercise of free speech. Not just his First Amendment free speech but also his First Amendment right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4138110-gop-statements-trump-indictment-jan-6-remarks/
The epitome of that shift has been Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who said Trump bore responsibility for the riot shortly after the rampage before careening back to the former president’s corner in the weeks that followed. He cemented that position Tuesday, when he accused the DOJ using the indictment of trying to “distract” from investigations into President Biden and his family.
“[J]ust yesterday a new poll showed President Trump is without a doubt Biden’s leading political opponent. Everyone in America could see what was going to come next: DOJ’s attempt to distract from the news and attack the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, President Trump,” McCarthy wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/08/02/broke-state-gop-parties-across-the-country-00109387
“It shouldn’t surprise anybody that real people with real money — the big donors who have historically funded the party apparatus — don’t want to invest in these clowns who have taken over and subsumed the Republican Party,” said Jeff Timmer, the former executive director of the once-vaunted Michigan GOP and a senior adviser to the anti-Trump Lincoln Project.
https://futurism.com/neoscope/leprosy-cases-surging-in-florida
But the CDC says incidences have more than doubled in southeastern America over the past decade, with Central Florida becoming a particular flashpoint: the region lays claim to 81 percent of cases throughout the state and nearly one fifth of all reported leprosy cases across the country.
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-indictment-maga-support-1817448
Representative Matt Gaetz, along with Greene, has renewed calls to defund the office of Special Counsel Jack Smith following the indictment announcement. Also taking to Twitter to defend the former president, he wrote: "Jack Smith and his indictment will forever go down in history as a total disgrace to the United States of America. President Trump defended our democracy, and we have an obligation to defend him against the Deep State's crusade to destroy our movement."
