VIDEO OF THE DAY: Trump jurors suddenly in danger after guilty verdict
All too predictably, the rabid acolytes of the MAGA cult are none too pleased about the jury doing the right thing and convicting Trump for his crimes — and now the threats, abuse, and harrassment is pouring in.
Take Action: Tell Jack Smith to have the Trump-appointed judge kicked off Trump’s stolen docs trial!
Alvin Bragg was right, his critics were wrong
There was a great deal of doubt from liberals and hysterical condemnation from conservatives when New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg decided to pick up the case against Donald Trump over a hush money payment to a porn star. But he was vindicated with the unanimous decision of the jury to make Trump a convicted felon. "For all the flaws of the criminal justice system, this is how it’s supposed to work. An accused criminal — in this case, one of the most influential and famous people in the world, with an extremely well-funded legal defense — got his day in court, and a jury of random citizens unanimously agreed he did the crimes," writes Ryan Cooper at The American Prospect. There was much hand-wringing and worry over whether or not this looks like Bragg was going after Trump just for the sake of going after him, the fainting-couch pundits alarmed at the idea of Distasteful Politics™ tainting the otherwise pristine objectivity of the American legal system (that was sarcasm, btw.) For instance, this "is like getting Al Capone for paying off his mistress!" whined Jonathan Chait at The New Yorker. But Cooper correctly points out that THAT IS A GOOD THING! "Gangsters like Capone are such a dire threat to public safety that the most important thing is to get them for something...At any rate, Trump poses a threat to the American republic that’s a million times worse than Capone ever did; that is why he is being dogpiled by prosecutors at every level of government. The fact that the partisan hacks Trump installed throughout the federal judiciary have successfully delayed his federal cases past the election (enabled by Attorney General Merrick Garland’s inexcusable dithering), in a flagrantly corrupt effort to help him escape justice, only makes it all the more urgent he be punished for whatever other crimes he’s done," writes Cooper. Donald Trump paid that hush money to Stormy Daniels to keep the scandal from damaging his election prospects; it was a crime committed to interfere in our electoral process and he needed to be punished for it, one way or another.
Take Action: Tell Congress to fight voter suppression as hard as possible!
Brian Tyler Cohen makes MAJOR announcement
Shameless by Brian Tyler Cohen: Everybody's favorite YouTube commentator, podcaster, and MSNBC contributor Brian Tyler Cohen has written a book, SHAMELESS: Republicans’ Deliberate Dysfunction and the Battle to Preserve Democracy! Shameless breaks down the lies and hypocrisies of a Republican Party steeped in MAGA mania and what steps Democrats must take to fight back, with a special foreword by Rep. Jamie Raskin. Pre-order your copy here!
"Did you tase him in the face!?" Inside "Goon Squad" deputies’ group chat
It is astonishing to see the things that people say in the privacy of their group chats — especially when they're police officers in a Mississippi patrol unit that calls itself the "Goon Squad." An encrypted WhatsApp group chat obtained by The New York Times and Mississippi Today provides a yearslong record of the day-to-day conversations of a patrol unit involved in terrorizing residents across a central Mississippi county for a generation. You may remember the "Goon Squad" from an incident last year in which sheriff’s deputies tortured two Black men in their home and shot one of them in the face, nearly killing him. Mississippi Today reports that texts show that "the deputies delighted in the violence they had witnessed and goaded one another to assault and shame people struggling with addiction or accused of crimes. They punctuated the chat with racist comments about Mexicans and memes denigrating women as sex objects, all in view of more than a dozen deputies who were part of the same unit and received the group texts." The horrifying messages included police officers discussing taking nude pictures of a woman they had arrested, making plans to beat up people they disliked, posting a video of a deputy defecating on someone’s bed, and urging each other to use Tasers on the genitals of civilians. Their supervisor was fully aware of this and often JOINED IN HIMSELF.
Take Action: Dissolve the NRA!
Off leash: Inside the secret global far-right group chat
Mercenary boss and comic book villain Erik Prince — who you may remember as the founder of the Blackwater war crime company and guy who tried to get Trump to privatize the Iraq War — has secretly been operating a global group chat of sociopathic, right-wing assholes which includes a menagerie of government officials (one of whom is a German politican descended from Hitler's finance minister), intelligence operatives, arms traffickers, and "journalists." The New Republic got their hands on some of those messages, and they offer a shocking glimpse into global fascism's plans. "The private opinions expressed in the group chat are even more extreme and jarring than we normally see voiced publicly. Participants chirpily discussed the desirability of clamping down on democracy to deal with their enemies at home and regime change, bombings, assassinations, and covert action to take care of those abroad...It was hard to keep track of all the wars, invasions, covert operations, coups, and assassinations Off Leash members favored. It’s impossible not to be alarmed by the crypto-fascist, off the leash views expressed by Trump’s allies in the group chat about exterminating their foreign and domestic enemies and needing to 'find the will to levy the toll,'" writes Ken Silverstein.
Take Action: Hold Trump accountable! Nobody is above the law!
Fentanyl exposure: Myths, misconceptions, and the media
You may remember the slew of stories of police officers claiming that they were exposed to fentanyl and freaking out over the magical, invisible killer drug that apparently throws itself off the floor and into the nostrils of police deputies. The Center for Just Journalism has just published a new report explaining how the police and the mainstream media (looking at you, Fox News) helped create an entirely imaginary national panic attack. As everyone SHOULD know, you cannot overdose from fentanyl without introducing it into your bloodstream. Simply being in the room or even touching it is not enough to affect you. This *should* be obvious, especially to police officers who have been ostensibly trained to deal with drugs. So why does the media continue to promote this entirely imaginary narrative, and what is happening to these officers? "When police officers think they are overdosing and describe symptoms such as heavy breathing, a pounding heart, dizziness, and numbness, and being able to tell someone that they are overdosing, this is a sign that they are not describing an actual overdose. They are describing a panic attack," says researcher Hope Smiley-McDonald. The origin of the fentanyl exposure myth is a 2016 DEA video that told cops that any “exposure to an amount [of fentanyl] equivalent to a few grains of sand can kill you." Cops began giving themselves phantom-fentanyl panic attacks not long after, and the media accepted their stories without question despite there being no toxicologial evidence that this was the case. "Few of the original stories were ever corrected," notes report author Zach Siegel. The report concluded that this is a pervasive narrative because "the vast majority of news articles failed to cite the large and growing body of scientific literature proving that incidental exposure to fentanyl is not dangerous, the vast majority of news articles exclusively relied on police sources and neglected to quote medical experts, and not a single news article presented physical evidence." It's just more evidence that when it comes to the covering the police, journalistic standards are often tossed right out the window even when it's wildly obvious that they are lying — which a lot of police do ALL. THE. TIME. Our media is failing us in so many ways.
Trump's courthouse scheme BACKFIRES on him
No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen: Not great.
Oh yeah that's the good stuff, right into my veins please
Are you kidding me
Hope...
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