Most or all major sources are reporting that the USSC has agreed to hear DJT’s ridiculous arguments that he is immune from prosecution. He is not. This is a win for DJT because it further delays his prosecutions and that further increases his chances of getting out of everything. Maddow on MSNBC commented:
“This is B.S.—you were doing this as a dilatory tactic to help your political friend,” says Rachel Maddow on the Supreme Court agreeing to hear the Trump immunity argument, delaying his coup trial. “And for you to say that this is something that the Court needs to decide because it’s something that’s unclear in the law is just flagrant, flagrant bullpucky.”
I expect the USSC to decide that DJT can be prosecuted for all crimes before (~80% confident), during and after his time in office. But the delay nonetheless significantly strengthens his legal and political positions. It gives the radical right authoritarian propagandists time to demagogue the issue into something it is not.
I interpret this move by the USSC as an intentional overt, political act made in bad faith to protect DJT as much as possible. Even if the USSC decides as I believe they should, that does not wipe away or in any way negate the deep moral rot of political partisanship that gave rise to this unjustifiable move in the first place.
The court waited almost two weeks to issue its ruling on how it would proceed. That suggests there is some support for protecting DJT. The USSC says it will expedite the case. They do that by holding oral arguments on April 22. That fits my conception of delaying, not expediting.
To make this clear, if the USSC had decided not to hear that case, it would have been a precedential decision that upholds the appeals court decision that DJT is not immune. Current prosecutions could then proceed without further delay. By taking up the case, the USSC could signal that there is something wrong with the appeals court holdings that needs to be corrected. Hence my 20% level of uncertainty about the outcome of this lawsuit.
But if the USSC does decide even a little in DJT’s favor, we are probably in immediate, deadly serious trouble with no way out short of a civil war or something pretty close to it. Biden is incapable of rising to the occasion here, even if he did have the power to do something meaningful. I am not sure that he has any power to do anything, alone. TTKP members in congress will defend DJT to the death, so bipartisanship on this is close to impossible and highly unlikely. We will face our corrupt Christian nationalist, plutocratic fate mostly undefended.
TTKP: the Trump Tyranny & Kleptocracy Party, formerly the Republican Party
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TechCrunch writes about social media platform X suing a research organization that studies online misinformation and hate speech:
X goes to court in Elon Musk’s war against an anti-hate research orgElon Musk’s crusade against the extremism research organization the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) will have its day in court on Thursday.
Elon Musk’s X sued the CCDH last year, accusing it of “actively working to assert false and misleading claims about X.” The nonprofit, formed in 2018, conducts research on social media platforms to track hate speech, extremism and misinformation. Its reports are regularly picked up by news organizations, TechCrunch included.
After Musk’s takeover of Twitter, the CCDH published reports about rising hate speech on X and how unbanned accounts, including neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin, stood to make the company millions in ad revenue.On Thursday, the CCDH will make a case for why X’s lawsuit is frivolous and runs afoul of the state’s anti-SLAPP law, which was created to kill litigation intended to intimidate or silence critics. X will defend the validity of its lawsuit, which also accuses the CCDH of illegally scraping data and violating its terms of service through Brandwatch, a social media monitoring tool.
This is an important case. If Musk wins, demagoguery, lies, hate and crackpottery win, while democracy, civil liberties and truth lose.
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A NYT opinion comments (not behind paywall):
Standing over a tiny bundle wrapped in a sheet on a hospital bed, a young father drapes his hand across his face in despair. Mousa Salem, a Gaza photographer who videotaped this sad tableau and sent it to me, said the sheet swaddled 2-month-old Mohamed al-Zayegh, who died on Friday in Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza City. “Nutrition? What nutrition?” a staff member in scrubs says in the video. “The mother gave birth to him during the war.”
“The health of the mother affects the health of the baby,” he added. “This is very well known in the science of medicine and health. And all of this piled on the child and he got sick, he has a weak immune system. “
Another infant, 2-month-old Mahmoud Fattouh, died of malnutrition on Friday at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, according to Al Jazeera, which cited a news agency thought to be close to Hamas. “The baby has not been fed any milk for days,” a paramedic who took the child to the hospital said in a video verified by Al Jazeera.
Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the head of the pediatric department of Kamal Adwan Hospital, said this month he was seeing a number of deaths among children, especially newborns. “Signs of weakness and paleness are apparent on newborns because the mother is malnourished,” he said.
Reports of death by starvation are difficult to verify from a distance. The hunger in Gaza is caused but also partly hidden by a pitiless war that has obliterated hospitals, flooded morgues and damaged communication networks, leaving us to cobble together what’s happening from scraps of information.
That speaks for itself. Also, the death toll in Gaza passed 30,000. That is reported to be a conservative body count.
