Thought for the Day

[Stavros]

In Austin Texas there have been three package bombs delivered to people that have killed two and injured one. The victims have been either black or hispanic and it looks like there's a strong chance that it is a racially motivated terrorist attack. It has started to garner national attention but initially it was drowned out by everything that is going on with the Trump administration.
It appears that the FBI is taking it seriously which is good news. Afterall, they are an organization that does not depend on political forces to do their job. There are some questions in my view about the commitment of Sessions who thought the biggest priority of his Justice Department civil rights group was to tackle affirmative action. And of course the President has not taken a leadership role on this and to my knowledge has not issued a statement. Given the nature of these attacks, he should assure the public that it is a priority and everything is being done to put an end to the attacks and catch the perpetrators.

Vox has this:
On Tuesday, the president is holding a White House roundtable on “sanctuary cities” — a (purported) safety threat he is always happy to talk about. The attorney general of Texas will be among the attendees. It would be an obvious opportunity for Trump to say something about the bombings, with an official from the state affected by them literally sitting in front of him. If the president doesn’t, it will be a deafening silence.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-polit...rump-terrorism

We wait and see, but it seems to me the President is more focused on trashing the reputation of the FBI as an adjunct to the Democratic Party determined to smear him with lies, rather than support it as a law and order agency focused on saving people's lives and fighting crime.

[broncofan]

I understand that libel laws are different in the US and that there is something called 'malicious libel' -but isn't this an example of malicious libel, and why doesn't Comey do something other than write book?

Trump tweeted: “Wow, watch Comey lie under oath to Senator G when asked ‘have you ever been an anonymous source … or known someone else to be an anonymous source...?’ He said strongly ‘never, no.’ He lied as shown clearly on @foxandfriends.”

Trump was evidently watching his favourite Fox News show. Earlier, magazine show Fox & Friends played an exchange from a 3 May 2017 congressional hearing in which Comey was questioned by the Republican senator Chuck Grassley.

Grassley asked: “Director Comey, have you ever been an anonymous source in news reports about matters relating to the Trump investigation or the Clinton investigation?”
Comey said: “Never.”

Grassley: “Question two, and relatively related: have you ever authorised someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports about the Trump investigation or the Clinton investigation?”
Comey: “No.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...ames-comey-fbi

https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/20/polit...ump/index.html

I didn't respond because I wasn't sure the answer but now I think we have it. Comey would probably have a good case, the requirement of malice notwithstanding, but the President has immunity from suit for official acts. Does that include tweeting absurd and defamatory things as President? As strange as it is, I think it might.

Here he is being sued for defamation based on a claim he made during the campaign. He said the woman's accusations that he sexually assaulted her were a "total fiction".

[broncofan]

It's only implicit in the article, but the reason the President definitely doesn't have immunity in the above case is because the defamation he is accused of took place before his inauguration. I found an article that discusses what is "an official act" for the purpose of Presidential Immunity once he is the sitting president, but it's not that clear, except that the most important case on the matter says it includes "acts within the outer perimeter" of the President's official duties. It would be especially contentious here because of how the President mixes the official with the personal though probably he is immune for any stupid statement he makes regarding government personnel.

[Stavros]

It's only implicit in the article, but the reason the President definitely doesn't have immunity in the above case is because the defamation he is accused of took place before his inauguration. I found an article that discusses what is "an official act" for the purpose of Presidential Immunity once he is the sitting president, but it's not that clear, except that the most important case on the matter says it includes "acts within the outer perimeter" of the President's official duties. It would be especially contentious here because of how the President mixes the official with the personal though probably he is immune for any stupid statement he makes regarding government personnel.

Thank you for this. I don't know but I think the difference might be that Presidents don't usually engage in public cat calls with people they don't like using crude and vulgar language, whereas the present incumbent seems to relish the opportunity to insult Americans as if they were purposefully lying, or disloyal, which they might be to him, and to the USA. I think he believes loyalty to him and the USA are the same thing. And I wonder what happens after a time when so many people and institutions are labelled 'fake'. 'liars', 'crooked' and so on, and if people then believe anything they are told. That the President looks and sounds juvenile and a bully is something he doesn't care about, just as either doesn't care about the reputation of the Office of President, or has the longer term intention of degrading the value of the office, just in case Americas elect a person called Jose, or Mustafa or Melanie.

In the UK there is something called Parliamentary Privilege which means an MP can stand up in the House of Commons and accuse another person or persons of criminal activity or lying and cannot be prosecuted -but this privilege is very rarely used and when it has been the accused has often urged the MP to repeat the claim outside Parliament and thus be sued. Tom Watson, the Labour MP used Parliamentary Privilege to accuse Rupert Murdoch of perverting the course of justice in 2011 at the time of the phone hacking revelations; and another MP in the same year used Parliamentary Privilege to name a footballer who had issued an injunction preventing newspapers from identifying him as a man who had cheated on his wife (the footballer is currently manager of the national football team of Wales). The latter MP was accused of self-promotion and was not popular as he in effect undermined privacy law in the UK, but not with much effect as there are numerous injunctions which prevent the press from revealing that one well known football manager was having an affair with a younger woman, and a most famous gay pop singer was alleged to have been involved in some sort of 'sex scandal'.

[vamille]

Trump is a good man .People kill people not guns so fun king stop it with Trump

[trish]

...People kill people not guns...

Really? Ask a coroner. Arteries severed by bullets passing through flesh, organs exploded by bullets fired by military-style weapons. Wounds kill people.

“When one of the trauma surgeons went to open a young victim in the operating room, there was ‘nothing left to repair’ because a bullet from Cruz’s AR-15 had ripped an internal organ to shreds. The patient could not be saved.” ( http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...uman-body.html )

“The tissue destruction is almost unimaginable. Bones are exploded, soft tissue is absolutely destroyed. The injuries to the chest or abdomen - it’s like a bomb went off.” ( https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/04/h...tims-ar15.html )

“I was looking at a CT scan of one of the mass-shooting victims from Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School, who had been brought to the trauma center during my call shift. The organ looked like an overripe melon smashed by a sledgemammer, and was bleeding extensively. How could a gunshot wound have caused this much damage?” ( https://www.theatlantic.com/politics...n-guns/553937/ )

Bullet wounds kill people. Especially those from military-style rifles like the AR-15 and others. Sometimes those bullets are fired deliberately and sometimes not, it doesn't much matter to the victim. You want to shoot these kind of weapons, join the military. We don't need them and we don't want them.

Trump is a good man .

Okay now I’m laughing. You mean that pussy grabbing, xenophobic sleazeball we have for a president who never honored a contract, cheats at golf, spends all day watching TV and doesn’t have two living brain cells he could get a spark out of even if he rubbed them together? Try again.

[broncofan]

I've had a couple of thoughts today, but none so gleeful as my realization that Sean Penn is the worst writer who has ever lived.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry...ushpmg00000004

Some excerpts:

“Whenever he felt these collisions of incubus and succubus, he punched his way out of the proletariat with the purposeful inputting of covert codes, thereby drawing distraction through Scottsdale deployments, dodging the ambush of innocents astray, evading the viscount vogue of Viagratic assaults on virtual vaginas, or worse, falling passively into prosaic pastimes.”

“Hence, his life remains incessantly infused with her identity-infidelity, and her abhorrent ascensions to those constant salacious sessions of sexual solitaire she’d seen as self-regard."

“While the privileged patronize this pickle as epithet to the epigenetic inequality of equals, Bob smells a cyber-assisted assault emboldened by right-brain Hollywood narcissists.”

On the other hand, I'm glad to see Sean Penn and I share an interest in epigenetics. Maybe we both read the same book

[broncofan]

https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2018/0...-for-the-left/

I agree with every word of this. It's interesting that what what has happened at the top of the party with suspensions actually masks some of the more overt ugliness in the party at the grassroots level. The Corbyn supporters I've come across are some of the most ignorant cranks I've seen in my life; people with no concept of anything that's happened in the last hundred years, people who think the word Zionist sanitizes any statement no matter how difficult it is to ascertain what they mean by Zionist, and who are sure that nobody who criticizes them could do so in good faith. What unifies them is their certainty that anyone who disagrees with them has been bought off or is in some way corrupt.

Beyond that, I heard Deborah Lipstadt is going to be including some of what's going in Labour in her next book. With any luck she'll be sued by some heretofore unrecognized bigot who will only upon the announcement of the verdict be disgraced.

[Jericho]

https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2018/0...-for-the-left/.

Ah, "The Spectator".
Article's about as unbiased as this one.
https://www.thecanary.co/uk/analysis...ermine-corbyn/

[broncofan]

Ah, "The Spectator".
Article's about as unbiased as this one.
https://www.thecanary.co/uk/analysis...ermine-corbyn/

It's an editorial. I'm not depending upon it for facts.

I know you're only posting this as evidence of a biased article but I don't even understand the logic of it. Israel could be paying every person on the planet a trillion dollars to undermine Corbyn and it would not explain what's going on. Could they be responsible for statements by Kirby, Downing, Lezard, Livingstone, and all of the people on twitter who are fans of Corbyn and steeped in conspiracy theories? The problem is I've actually seen it for myself.

I could be in the employ of the Israeli government right now (I'm not) and I couldn't have made the people in the Palestine Live group post the type of stuff they posted. I posted this before. I don't actually agree with all of the author's editorial comments, but what it documents is consistent with what I've seen on twitter from these folks. I fail to see how the type of stuff that got posted in that forum, mostly by people who consider themselves left-wing, could get posted without them being completely desensitized to what's right and wrong.

http://david-collier.com/wp-content/...art1_FINAL.pdf

You have to recall that this facebook group was started by people concerned about the humanitarian situation in Palestine and ended with people posting caricatures, posting the word Holocaust in the Hollywood hills, numerous articles about the Holocaust being a hoax, about Jewish blood making people barbarous, and the merits of Mein Kampf. Some of these same people were active in the protest against the protest of anti-semitism. The party is probably going to suspend some of these people, but I wonder how left-wing movements committed to the principles of anti-racism could fall so far.

Although I agree with Cohen, I'm not as convinced it began with Corbyn or that he has much control over it at this point. But it doesn't help when he acknowledges there are pockets of antisemtism within the party while those pockets are busy yelling it's a smear campaign and starting petitions to try to punish Labour Mps who are concerned about the issue.

Anyhow, here's an article by Hadley Freeman in the guardian that also makes some of the points, though it's an editorial. https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...r-antisemitism