Attorney Alina Habba was scolded by a judge on Thursday after she claimed that her client, former President Donald Trump, is part of a “protected class” because of his Republican ideology.
During a court hearing in New York, Trump attorneys tried to convince state Supreme Court Judge Arthur F. Engoron that members of the Trump family could not be subpoenaed in connection with allegations that their company illegally manipulated property valuations.
Habba told Engoron that Attorney General Letitia James is conducting an improper investigation into Trump because she does not like him.
“She has such disdain for this person because he was president, because he is Donald Trump and he could probably win again in ’24,” Habba said. “He has First Amendment rights. He’s allowed to be a Republican.”
The Trump attorney demanded to know if James is going to “go after” Hillary Clinton, citing claims that the former president was “spied” on.
“There’s no viewpoint discrimination,” Engoron said. “I’m just saying there is none.”
“He’s a protected class,” Habba insisted.
“Ah!” the judge reacted. “What protected class is he a member of?”
“His political speech,” Habba replied. “If he was not sitting as a Republican and was not a former president who might run again, this would not be happening. So she is discriminating against him for that.”
The judge’s clerk stopped Habba to point out that the term “protected class” is usually reserved for race, religion and sex discrimination.
“The traditional protected classes are race, religion, etc.,” Engoron agreed. “Donald Trump doesn’t fit that model. He’s not being discriminated against based on race, is he? Or religion, is he? He’s not a protected class. If Ms. James has a thing against him, OK, that’s not in my understanding unlawful discrimination. He’s just a bad guy she should go after as the chief law enforcement officer of the state.”
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Capitalism would rather create a trillionaire than pay labor thriving wages.
Shareholder economics is destroying everything in its way. People and the planet.
That’s correct…median income went down for the first time and this was before COVID. Sorry to inform you, #BrokenCapitalism won’t fix itself. #Activism https://ift.tt/MRCO206
Scoop: At a mandatory anti-union meeting today in NYC, an Amazon union buster told warehouse workers they could see their wages reduced to the minimum wage if they unionize.
The US government should be able to do more than one thing at a time. So the government can address gun violence at home and address Russian aggression abroad. The fact is every time the Democrats try to do common sense gun regulations the Republican party at the request of the NRA has stopped them. Not even closing gun show loop holes for back ground checks could get past the Republicans that were blocking it. Now that the NRA has self destructed I wonder if there can be sensible gun rules / regulations enacted.
Republicans want to break education in order to protect white supremacy. They can’t defend their position[s], so they look to cancel the conversation/debate/dialog.
“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
‘Enslaved people’ in America is a white construct.
Breaks her heart? What heart?
She is upset that kids, in theory, could be taught that different colors of skin have different experiences, and she clearly identifies with the racists in history and feels the shame.
This shows that it is not what is in your heart or how you live that their god cares about, but it is the rituals that are important to that deity. Being a good person not needed, the correct words for a a man made ritual ceremony is necessary.
Religion spreads by violence, not truth.
Not sure where this one is going?
Make no mistake. If Germany follows through with shutting down the gas pipeline, that is 40% of the Russian economy. I think that would hurt Putin.
Again very few police departments have had funding decreases and almost all police departments have gotten increases or demanded them. Police are organized gangs now shaking down the public for money.
The right wing media is going crazy to push back on something that not only is collaborated but that is something tRump has done all his life in his businesses. One right wing guy keeps telling me to prove it, when I mention eye witnesses he claims that is not proof.
Biden doesn’t set the price of gasoline. The US is a net oil exporter. Biden has pushed energy independence from the beginning but the GOP stands in his way. Coal is dead.
Every time the Republicans need to hide some bad news story about them, they trot out Hillary. The right has been demonizing her for 30 years. Okay, now that all conserve cartoonist have played the same false accusations, we await the next ranting points from Fox Spews.
The Durham report doesn’t say that. The right needs to shift the focus away from Trump’s many scandals. Trump is in trouble for tax fraud, tried to get people to overthrow the government, he tried to replace real electors with phony electors, he wants Hillary Clinton killed, and has connections to Russia. Smart people know the right is just generating a smoke screen and are ignoring the phony scandals involving Hillary Clinton. President Biden will be running for re-election in 2024 so Hillary Clinton won’t be running.
The right wing has become energized and are trying to take over the school boards all across the country. Then they will remove anything they dislike, stop the kids from learning crititcal thinking, and install indoctrination propaganda.
In an election marked by unusually high turnout among Asian-American voters, where the most heavily rejected candidate was called out for her history of offensive anti-Asian tweets, where a principal issue was the Vincent’s efforts to reduce Asian-American representation in elite programs, where the incumbents were criticized for disproportionately appointing white women to boards and commissions, where white mothers make up an unusually low share of the electorate, Lisa Benson declares the victory belongs to . . . white women like herself.
All this shows is that people want to get things done. The principle sin of the Board Members who were kicked out was that instead of making sure the children of SF were back in school during a pandemic, they were more interested in changing the names of schools. Republicans should take note. If your only policy is to make liberals cry, sooner or later your voters are going to wonder when you’re going to get things taken care of.
That was the seed of the recall in San Francisco, where two parents launched the effort in January 2021 after the school board kept schools closed. San Francisco public schools took longer to reopen than most in the country, and almost all of the district’s 50,000 students stayed in distance learning until the fall.
Meanwhile, the school board spent its time on what many critics called misplaced priorities, including a months-long effort to rename 44 schools instead of focusing on reopening them.
Parents and other residents of San Francisco, one of the most liberal cities in America, do not dispute the need to reexamine the historical figures schools are named for, but the effort was criticized for poor research, historical inaccuracies and bad timing. It became one of several examples critics cited of the board putting progressive politics over the needs of children.
The political tracking website Ballotpedia identified 96 school districts in more than a dozen states where race in education and masks were part of the debate in 2021.
Many see that as a prelude for this November’s midterm elections, pointing to the example of San Francisco, a famously tolerant city that lost its patience when progressive politics took priority over pandemic needs.
Carter managed to get things on the right track. He got derailed by the hostage crisis and got outdone by an b movie actor, the same way Hillary was outdone by a third rate tv personality. It would be a big help if more members of Congress would put on their big girl/boy pants and stand up for the country and Constitution.
A new Johns Hopkins University study finds lockdowns only prevented 0.2% of Covid-19 deaths and were “not an effective way of reducing mortality rates during a pandemic.” I can only wonder about the reason for lockdowns and those people who advocate for these measures. Especially because of the negative impact on the young.
@HskrPhanBut the study is not definitive. The research represents a non-peer-reviewed “working paper” by three economists affiliated with Johns Hopkins University. The institution did not endorse the study.
“The university hasn’t taken a position on this and typically wouldn’t in such a situation,” university spokesperson Jill Rosen wrote in an email.
“The working paper is not a peer-reviewed scientific study, and its authors are not medical or public health researchers,” Joshua Sharfstein, vice dean of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told PolitiFact in an emailed statement. “To reach their conclusion that ‘lockdowns’ had a small effect on mortality, the authors redefined the term ‘lockdown’ and disregarded many peer-reviewed studies. The working paper did not include new data, and serious questions have already been raised about its methodology.”
And one of the authors is a fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, known to be critical of all things governmental.
Have you noticed that despite all this ‘alleged’ “socialism and social welfare”, the billionaires and top 1% have never been wealthier? Do you not notice
Biden is expected to ask Congress for another $770 billion+ for next year's Pentagon budget. That’s more than 4x the size of the Build Back Better bill. So where’s the reporting on the effects of this spending on the national debt, or on inflation, or whether it’s even necessary?
I not only don’t watch the Olympics I couldn’t care less about them.
1939 again?
A great reason to get off fossil fuels as soon as possible.
China wont destroy Taiwan per say. They will blockade it and take it over destroying the democratic government. China wants control over the entire area and all those in it. Ideally they want control over the entire world, but so does the US. The question becomes does the US and the world care about democracy as they use to say they did or not? We can see with the situation in Ukraine which is a democracy being threatened by a dictatorship that presents itself as a pretend democracy that the world really is not as forceful on the subject as they once were.
What is really funny is the idea that tRump would know what was a server and what was a copier. This goes back to the filing by Durham which was nothing new but is an attempt to investigate the investigators thing to find something to negate the findings in the Russia / tRump probe.
This is pure bull. The truckers were allowed to interrupt the economy and society for two weeks and some. I am all for a protest, but not for shutting down peoples lives and stopping normal activities of a large portion of the city for weeks, disrupting the home life and families of people not even involved.
The GOP’s Durham ‘bombshell’ is a bust
Even though Durham never directly said in his motion that Clinton coordinated a campaign to “spy” on Trump through Joffe, The New York Times noted, conservatives have been quick to draw such conclusions, accusing liberal media of being biased for not covering the alleged scandal.
Fox News on Tuesday also noted the amount of media coverage the alleged scandal had thus far received by ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, CNN, and MSNBC. According to Fox News Research, all of these channels have respectively dedicated “0 minutes.”
The researchers were not “spying” on the Trump campaign in 2016 but were instead working at the request of federal officials to investigate Russian malware attacks that had targeted the U.S. government and the White House, said Jody Westby, a lawyer for one of the research scientists involved, David Dagon of the Georgia Institute of Technology.
The U.S. was on high alert at the time after the hacking of Democratic National Committee emails by Russian operatives. The data at issue was from the time Obama, not Trump, was in the White House, according to Westby.
“They were simply doing … research of Russian attacks against U.S. entities, including the federal government,” Westby said, adding, “The motion is unfortunate because it offers a lot of confusing information that is not factually accurate.”
The statistics show that the returns on investments by people in congress is much higher than the general public’s returns. Now that implies that congress uses their knowledge and regulatory ability to create personal gain. It sure seems that for a lot of elected officials, they see the office as a golden lotto ticket to personal wealth. The days of public service and helping the people seems to be long gone. Their should be some sacrifice to serving the public, it should be for the country, not for enriching oneself or personal power.
So anyone who wins an elected office should have to place all stocks in blind trusts managed by a reputable company and no office holder may direct the purchase of sale of any individual stock. That goes for family members in the same household. I would also deal with the legalized bribe system called lobbying. The system has become a way for the well off to bribe the office holders and shut out the voices of the public.
The only complaint I have about the cartoon is it is bias and misleading. It makes it seem as if only one party is doing the stock trading. In fact both parties are and both parties have people ignoring the legalities of filing required forms about their finances and stocks. The majority of elected offices have been filled by wealthy people seeking to increase their own wealth at the expense of the people and the needs of the country.
Another cartoon with the smorgasbord of old failed hits. Just keep throwing everything at the wall hoping something will stick. The misleading right wing media is having to make things up now that the President is an adult who doesn’t have temper tantrums while openly breaking the laws and insulting everyone he can.
The idea that Biden is conducting his anti-war effort in the open is stupid. He and his team have to work behind the scenes out of the view of cameras. To expect some big displays is not reasonable. But then the right never is.
They also demanded that the US remove all military equipment from central and eastern Europe, and threatened a “military-technical response” if demands aren’t met.
Oh, and Putin wants a pet dragon and some fairy dust.
MOSCOW (AP) — Russia has expelled the deputy chief of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Moscow amid escalating tensions over Ukraine.
Pro-Russian forces are desperately trying to draw fire from Ukraine — they’re clearly trying to elicit a response that would give them a “reason” to invade.
Russia-backed forces shelled the music room of a kindergarten in far-eastern Stanytsia Luhanska, Luhansk region, at 9am this morning, according to local reports, local city admin, & NGO Proliska. Children were present but unharmed. Two teachers said to have suffered concussions. pic.twitter.com/8zjX2OvatV
Oh, so the Ukrainian Army just happened to start mortaring pro-separatists *right* as the Russian Army got into their final firing positions and desperately needed a casus belli?
I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see an attack begin tonight — or at least in the next couple of days.
I’d still love to be wrong, but I don’t think I am.
The Kremlin’s claims this week that it had begun to remove troops from Ukraine’s borders were false, senior U.S. administration officials told reporters tonight. Instead, Russia has added as many as 7,000 troops to those already encircling its neighbor, a Biden official said.
It’s like everyone expected Kyiv to be this rundown shithole and can’t comprehend the fact that it’s actually a beautiful, modern city. https://t.co/6hYffgTxRn
Guess who is churning out the most coverage of the Canadian trucker protests? If you guessed #Russia's state media outlet RT, you're correct. pic.twitter.com/AK1KZvQQZd
Purdue Univesity cop John Selke brutally assaulted Purdue junior Adonis Tuggle after a bystander called police to break up an argument Tuggle was having with his girlfriend, who recorded Officer Selke assaulting Tuggle. Purdue PD is refusing to release bodycam footage and claims that Officer
There is no CC and I am sorry for that as this is a really important story. This is about how the far right threatened and took over a town. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were sent from out of town into the political races to run the hard right causes. This is scary.
Just a reminder: Starbucks could give every one of its 383,000 employees a $5000 bonus check and still keep $1,893,500,000 in net income this year. That’s without raising prices. And yet they’re going to raise prices and are actively firing people for wanting to unionize.
It’s time we put our money in heath care, child care, and prenatal care instead of feeding an endless war machine.
As I keep saying the major cause of inflation is price gouging and profit taking. Private business is sucking every cent they can from the lower incomes to the upper levels. They are going to keep doing it until there is nothing left to take. They are killing the golden goose for short term profit.
There are two different sets of rules for men and women
“We created the liberty institute to make sure only state approved ideas can be discussed” is an exquisite summary of Republican views on free speech. https://t.co/3wQHHLI3DX
Pennsylvania's Fair School Funding trial has chugged along since… at least 1998. Old toon on the subject. Double the amounts (plus some) but same problem. from Philly Daily News when we were pre-color. @edlawcenterPApic.twitter.com/mwq6nrGW0g
Why give Kim the attention and press coverage he craves. Th US knows what he has and what he is doing and he is not a threat to the US. He wants the attention that he got from tRump and misses it. Don’t give it to him
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Misleading right wing media cartoons / memes
Seems to me the government of Canada is winning this situation not the truckers. The government has blocked the truckers funding, the government cleared the bridge, the government has the authority now to yank the commercial licenses, and the authority to seize the trucks.
Because the report on tRump clogging toilets and ripping up papers is collaborated. The Durham fantasy about Hillary is just a conspiracy rehash of spin attempts to validate tRump’s claim that the Mueller investigation was illegal. Durham did not file charges in his new filing, there was no new information. He is trying to charge the guy who provided the information to the FBI with lying to the FBI because he did not tell the FBI he once worked for Hillary and the FBI did not ask. The FBI did not ask him that, so how is not telling them a lie? Every lawyer I have heard on this says it is going to be laughed out of court if it ever gets to one. Durham made a 26 page report on a filing that should have been half a page. All so he could spin a misleading right wing tale.
What we are witnessing is PRICE GOUGING, NOT INFLATION.
INFLATION is when business owners raise prices commensurate with higher costs to make ends meet.
But when corporations are reporting record all-time profits, raising prices is NOT INFLATION, it is PRICE GOUGING to capitalize on supply chain disruptions caused by a national emergency.
McDonald’s profits soared 59% in 2021, to $7.5 billion.
ExxonMobil reported a $8.9 billion in profits in the FOURTH QUARTER ALONE, while it was jacking up prices to new records.
Numerous other companies jacked up prices while raking in record profits in 2021.
Donald Trump crashed the economy, destroyed the supply chain, blew up international trade relations by imposing ridiculous tariffs that hurt farmers and consumers, mishandled a pandemic that exploded into a worldwide economic crisis and now as Biden is putting people back, restoring consumer confidence, which stimulates demand, but the devastation wrought by Trump on the supply chain is taking longer to undo, especially as anti-science right wing nut jobs continue to undermine recovery from the Trump plague.
If there were a hurricane, tornado, flood or wildfire and vendors were charging $20 for a bottle of water, they would be arrested. We need to see some of the corporate heads who have tripled their profits on the backs of consumers being frog-marched into the Big House.
Truth is not important. Smear, innuendo, and outright lies are necessary to outrage and disinform the public. This is the way to absolute power.
Amazing that after 30 years she is still their biggest boogieman. The right trots her out any time they need to deflect or distract knowing she is an easy way to enrage the base. The Durham filing added no new information. It was a screed of conspiracies designed to distract from a serious issue tRump has. Lawyers have publicly said the filing should have been half a page but Durham went on for 26 pages just to spin a misinformation tale. The crux of what Durham charged Michael Sussmann with is lying to the FBI by not answering a question the FBI never asked. Yes that is right, the FBI never asked him if he worked for Hillary as it was not important. It is going to be laughed out of court if it ever gets to one. Sussmann took information from some tech people on a bank from Moscow associated with Putin contacting a dedicated server in tRump Tower. He did not give them his life story, why would he. If you tell the bank about a bank robbery they don’t care if you ever had a bank account. So again an attempt to mislead and confuse, to muddy the water from the true criminal tRump by using a boogieman the right has demonized but never been able to prove did anything wrong.
Scottie's Playtime 
A new Johns Hopkins University study finds lockdowns only prevented 0.2% of Covid-19 deaths and were “not an effective way of reducing mortality rates during a pandemic.” I can only wonder about the reason for lockdowns and those people who advocate for these measures. Especially because of the negative impact on the young.