Politics

Guns, authoritarians, and regulations.

[View here as a Twitter thread] Hi, Craigsuperstar. Well, okay. Maybe it isn’t obvious that a gun rights, and a desire to sweep away regulations “entitlements” is authoritarian. So I’ll explain. Let’s start with regulations. 1/ Regulations are anti-authoritarian, because regulations say that everyone lives under the same rules. This is also known as rule …

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Are members of Congress guilty of crimes if they help Trump cover up an “ongoing conspiracy with Russia”?

[View here as a Twitter thread] Spoiler 1: Probably not. Spoiler 2: The solution to the GOP shielding Trump (most likely) won’t come through criminal justice. We have a political problem. 1/ Helping someone cover up a crime can be a crime. “Accessory after the fact” means you know a crime happened and you shield …

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The Larger Picture

[View as a Twitter thread] I updated the main page to include the Roger Stone indictment, and a brief summary. If you like everything in one place, here it is. 1/The Roger Stone indictment establishes that senior Trump officials engaged in criminal activity in the 2016. Senior Trump officials knew emails were stolen. They had …

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Reading the Roger Stone Indictment

[View here as a Twitter thread] Four crimes / theories of liability are listed in the indictment: 18 USC 2 principals; aiding and abetting  1001: false statements 1512: Witness tampering. 1505: Obstruction of justice 1/ Now for the list of unnamed people: Company 1 = Wikileaks Head of Wikileaks=Assange “senior Trump Campaign officials.” Notice that …

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How to beat authoritarianism

[View here as a Twitter thread] @champasoft asks how we can repair in 2020 with Trump stacking the courts. I hear despair in that question. Despair comes partly from not understanding our history and thus thinking: “This never happened before!” and then feeling doomed. 1/ For example, about those judges: Through most of U.S. history, the …

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Getting out of this mess

[View as a Twitter thread]. Hi, Patrick, I think that, in the end, the only real way to save liberal democracy is through public opinion and elections. It’s easier to write about how we got into this mess than to chart pathways out. (A crystal ball would be helpful) 1/ By “this mess” I mean …

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Trump’s “legal” defense

[View here as a Twitter thread] I mentioned that Trump has no legal strategy or defense. @sdterp pointed out that Trump has lots of lawyers & looking for more, so he must be preparing for a legal battle. I suspect Trump will never have a traditional legal defense. Here’s why. 1/ Trump, Giuliani, Sarah Sanders, etc., …

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Why Manafort’s crimes matter

[View here as a Twitter thread] Yesterday, Special Counsel filed a memo with the court describing Manafort’s lies (for the purpose of showing that Manafort violated his plea agreement). A lot of the memo looks like this: But we learn a few new details. 1/ I’ll work the new stuff into what we already know …

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