Trouble With Lawyers, Republicans Go Low
Monday, February 1, 2021
Vol. 10, No. 27
Fool for a Client: Just a week before his Senate trial is set to begin, former President Donald Trump has parted ways with five lawyers he had retained to represent him. He announced he hired two new ones yesterday.
Maggie Haberman from The NY Times reports that at least one source told her part of the rift stemmed from Trump’s insistence that his defense should be based on what he believes to have been massive election fraud that denied him a second term. What that means is that he’d have to argue that his stirring of the Capitol insurrection was justified.
Haberman also reports that “Trump has insisted that the case is ‘simple’ and has told advisers he could argue it himself and save the money on lawyers.” His minions say he doesn’t mean it.
Trump was impeached on a single charge of inciting the Capitol takeover. He’s expected to file a formal response with the House on Tuesday.
One of the new lawyers, Bruce Castor Jr., a former district attorney in Pennsylvania, said, “The strength of our Constitution is about to be tested like never before in our history. It is strong and resilient. A document written for the ages, and it will triumph over partisanship yet again, and always.”
Opening Moves: A group of 10 Republican senators led by Maine’s Susan Collins have proposed a $600 billion coronavirus relief package, much less than President Biden’s $1.9 trillion. In a letter to Biden the senators said they were offering their proposal in recognition of his “calls for unity.” They wrote, “We want to work in good faith with you and your administration to meet the health, economic and societal challenges of the Covid crisis.”
This is a challenge to Biden and the Democrats. They might possibly ram through the President’s plan while shattering any hope for future cooperation from the Republicans, who are sticking to their line of fiscal conservatism even in an economic crisis. On the Democrat wish list is a federal minimum wage of $15 an hour, a potential poison pill to the Republicans.
The Democrats have regrets about compromising with the Republicans back during the Great recession in 2009 when they settled for too little to spur the economy.
Viral News: Australian authorities locked down the city of Perth in Western Australia for five days after a security guard at a quarantine hotel tested positive for the coronavirus. Perth’s two million residents will be allowed to leave home only for essential reasons. In a year of pandemic, the state of Western Australia has escaped community transmission.
Here in the US, the Centers for Disease Control issued an order that, starting next week, everyone travelling on public transportation — planes, trains, ferries, and buses — must wear a mask.
President Biden said, “The experts say by wearing a mask from now until April, we’d save more than 50,000 lives going forward.”
One year since the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a global health crisis, 26.2 million Americans have been infected and 441,331 have died, 97,000 of them in the month of January alone.
Coup: The military in Myanmar has toppled the democratically-elected government of Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, who was detained along with other leaders of her National League for Democracy party in early morning raids. The army said it acted in response to “election fraud.”
Pravda: As many as 5,000 people were arrested throughout Russia in protests supporting the jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny. In Moscow, thousands of protesters were met with phalanxes of riot police in plastic armor that made them look like black Ninja Turtles. For the second week in a row. Navalny’s wife Yulia was pulled from the crowd and detained. In St. Petersburgh, even journalists were among those knocked down and carried away.
Navalny, who’s awaiting trial in jail, was actually able to release a video statement in which he said, “I want to express my full support to all those who come out in the streets because only they are the last obstacle to complete degradation of our country, the last obstacle for those in power to steal everything.”
Weather Report: A major winter storm has moved into the East Coast, already blanketing Washington and Philadelphia with snow and threatening to drop up to 20 inches or more in the Northeast. High winds are expected, up to 70 mph in coastal Massachusetts and Maine.
It’s groundhog day and he’s not likely to see his shadow.
The Bulletin Board: Donald Trump raised $255.4 million in the eight weeks after the election during which he claimed to be the victim of vote fraud. — Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, the loud and perpetually-angry defender of Trump, says he’s not going to run for re-election in 2022. — Twenty-one of the 150 people arrested so far in the Capitol insurrection are current or former members of the military, CNN reports. That’s more than double the percentage of service members and veterans in the adult population.
The Obit Page: The musician and music producer known simply as “SOPHIE,” died at age 34 after an accident in Athens. The Scottish-born producer who worked in Los Angeles was known for a mix of sounds in underground dance music including house, techno, trance, and pop. SOPHIE, who was transgender, also was in the avant-garde of whatever the hell is going on with gender identity these days. — Sonny Fox, who was host of the children’s television show “Wonderama” Sunday mornings from 1959 to 1967, died on January 24th in Encino, California. He was 95. The show shot before an audience of 50 children was an entertaining mixture of cartoons, spelling bees, games like “Simon Says,” joke-telling ,and even dramatizations of Shakespeare.
Word Trophy: Among the far right “patriots” and conspiracy mongers, the potential undercover agents who the wingnuts fear may have infiltrated their ranks are known as “glowies.”
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