I don’t see why she couldn’t take the money and get off the jury. It’s not like the briber is entitled to illegal money. At that point she could just make sure the money ends up where it needs to go.
She was already paid by people with the resources to do the thing, they gave her the money (whether she agreed to it or not or had any knowledge).
She can’t give it back. How could she? Handing it to the authorities sends the message she didn’t keep the payment.
If someone gave you that much money and said do this thing (commit a crime to protect other criminals) it would probably be super intimidating generally. What do you do?
I don’t know. I saw similar situations recently in the Narcos series on Netflix. Innocent people were placed into situations in which they had to either (a) break the law for considerable compensation or (b) not break the law and suffer horrible consequences. I guess in that situation, the best you can do is to pack up as soon as possible and hide somewhere. There’s really nothing else. If someone has the financial means and audacity to bribe a juror with $120k over a case with 70 defendants defrauding $250 million from the government, they likely have the means to order a hit on you and your family. It’s a terrible situation to be in, and I would love to know how this has been handled in the past, how they are going to handle it now, and what the outcome will be.
There’s no indication that this group attempting to bribe her are violent, and there was no explicit or implied violent “or else” threat, at least none mentioned in the AP and Star Tribune articles.
I think the act itself implies the threat. If they have those resources and are willing to brazenly break the law like that no actual threat is needed.
Even if they aren’t violent and have no intention of being so the implication is there.
I hate defending the Mafia, but at least they have the courage to show up in person. These faceless cowards release personal information from the comforts of anonymity.
I mean this in all seriousness: I haven’t seen Beetlejuice the Musical, but that just seems like the kind of play that getting a handy during would give me an aversion to hand-jobs. Add all of the ensuing discourse and news, I’d probably have some serious intimacy issues.
Then again, hooking up with Boebert isn’t exactly symptomatic of a healthy personality.
They also know that loyalty is a two-way street. You do something for me, and I’m going to reward you with loyalty in turn. If you look back over the series of events that led Michael Cohen to testify against Trump, it’s pretty clear that Trump doesn’t work that way.
“Tattle” “Chidlish behavior, I know better behaved children”
The person who gave testimony against one of the most dangerous people in the world just had the whereabouts of their spouse and children leaked, and your response is 'wow, look at the tattletales, how childish"
That’s fair. It’s also fair to say that appealing to the Supreme Court isn’t begging. I was using similes to liken their tantrums to childish behavior. See, I did it again.
I didn’t mean to minimize the impact, but ridicule their behavior.
Actually progressive or “biden is the most progressive president in recent US history” progressive? I’ll take either over the alternative, but I’d love it if it was more than former than the latter.
At least he’s talking about the views of a justice he might pick, rather than what race and sex they’re going to be as though that’s the most important criteria.
Yes, but he’s also shown himself willing to say anything to get support and votes. He had a lot of big progressive talk during his campaign when he was against Sanders, but then dropped that facade pretty much within the first few months and started giving out corporate handjobs.
I’ll take anyone who isn’t a corporate careerist at this point. The people sitting on the supreme court shouldn’t be expecting to leverage it to make an exhorbitant amount of money.
Enough consecutive Democratic wins and both parties will be forced to shift further left to capture more of the vote. That requires people to show up and vote in all elections, not just presidential. You can blame Bush and his shift of the Overton Window on the disenfranchisement of Gen X, but it’s starting to sound like young Millennials and Gen Z are willing to let Israel justify an even larger shift to the right.
i don’t get the logic in expecting leftists to vote for someone who neither represents or respects their views and solely use some ultra vague promise that some hypothetical candidate will represent them in some equally hypothetical future.
taking action right now is what matters to leftist and choosing between 2 candidates that share the same view, but only to different degrees, is the crux of the issue.
And that short-sightedness will not only fail to yield results, but will allow for a shift in the opposite direction. They’re not the first generation to face this problem. They could be the first generation in decades to do something about it.
If it’s short-sighted as you call it, then please educate us on when this has ever happened in the past.
Please explain how the Democratic party dominating the political landscape will make them abandon their ways and move to the left. Do you think winning elections will make them abandon their political donors? If anything, losing to Trump in 2016 should have driven the party further left but instead we got another Republican-lite candidate who barely beat Trump. The same person who lost to Clinton in the primaries previously and that is who we have as a candidate once again. “Winning” doesn’t usually make people reflect on their actions and decide they need to change.
It’s not an immediate shift. As I said in my previous comment, we’d need sustained representation in multiple branches to shift the Overton window. It wouldn’t be difficult if we just showed up and voted. That’s where Democrats fail, time and time again. Republican success is directly tied to voter turnout. It’s the reason why Trump advocates don’t try to convince you that he’s great, they just try to get you down on Biden so you abstain.
You still haven’t explained how this shifts the Overton window. You speak as if the only reason why they can’t get anything done is because of Republicans yet the Republicans somehow get their shitty agenda passed time and time again while making up a similar percentage of the legislature.
And Trump supporters do try to convince everyone that he’s great. That’s what the ‘G’ in MAGA stands for on the hats they all wear…
If Democrats repeatedly win elections, they’ll begin competing more aggressively in primaries to capture more of the vote. The more progressive the winners of the primaries, the more the window shifts. Republican candidates will have no choice but to come closer to center to capture the moderate votes. They’re in control of the right-wing propaganda machine, so they’ll continue to shift the narrative to whatever encompasses their candidate while pointing a finger at opposition, and their loyal supporters will follow suit. That’s how they got the lemmings to the edge of the cliff in the first place. They’re the only ones that can reel them back in.
You can’t really expect logical consistency from any large group of people. It will always be trivial to find 2 people with conflicting views, so trying to paint the group as hypocritical is worthless.
But Republicans are indeed worthless shitcunts, so it’s never hard to find an individual being hypocritical. Unfortunately, the accusation means nothing to them. They don’t care if they’re hypocritical, immoral or bigoted, they only care about getting what they want – and there’s nothing they won’t say to get it.
Whether he actually had sex with her or not is irrelevant. He issued a hush-money payment to her not to talk about the encounter, and then committed business fraud to cover up that payment, and because it was during an election, that also constituted election fraud.
This is the whole thing that’s ridiculous to me. It’s not the fact that he had sex with her, it’s not even the fact that he paid her to shut the fuck up, it’s the fact that he covered it up and committed fraud. He could have just boasted about it publicly and it’s unlikely anyone would have cared.
Exactly. If he just paid her out of his own pocket, he wouldn’t have any legal issues. This whole thing is a perfect example of penny wise, pound foolish.
The defense argument is that there was no sex, so the payments to Michael Cohen were not hush money but legal feels and Cohen acted independently. So arguing there was no sex supports their defense.
The sex proven in court might be a clause in Melania’s prenup. She and Baron might have a get out of jail free card; it makes sense why trump keeps demanding there was no affair.
I sure hope she couldn’t. Mother Theresa was a fucking monster that literally kept her patients willfully in pain because she believed the pain kept them closer to her deity.
Giving her a pass for fucking a porn star and using campaign funds to pay her off would be even more insane than giving a racist rapist a pass.
As someone who struggles with mental illness, but has been lucky enough to not need intervention or hospitalization in my life so far, this seems like another good time to say ACAB.
It’s never a bad time to say ACAB. Occasionally, one does something decent, but even a serial killer might occasionally hold the door open for somebody at the post office or whatever.
Every time I see a positive police story, I suspect copaganda. They are class traitors, restricting our liberties in order to protect capital, and it’s by design.
I’ve dealt with cops during bad mental health episodes. Honestly I’ve been extremely lucky - assuming ALL cops were bastards I’d 100% be dead right now.
Yeah, antagonize the people that have your father’s fate in their hands. As usual, just more projection, also, clowns have more integrity than the Trump family.
They’ve been instructed to avoid reading or looking at anything about the trial as you probably already know. I just wonder how effective that really is. Like you wonder, how sequestered are they? Especially in the Information Age where the entirety of human knowledge is in our pockets.
Not only that, but if any of them are on any kind of social media AT ALL or hell even listen to the radio or watch TV it seems like it would be damn near impossible to avoid a random headline here and there. This trial has been covered ad nauseam by both US-based and international news outlets. Hell on a Windows PC if you open up Bing with the default settings you get a news page in your face.
They’re not sequestered. If they were, they’d be stuck in a hotel somewhere without internet access. It’s super rare, but you’d think this case of all cases would qualify for that level of isolation. There’s probably a good reason not to, I mean imagine the logistics for the 12 jurors and all the alternates (6, I think). Most people can’t just disappear from their lives for a month. That said, it’s a Manhattan jury, so they know this fool regardless.
By the letter and spirit of the law they can’t have read about it because the Judge said not to, and so there CAN’T be tampering charges, right? Right??
I would like to point to the Clown Code of Ethics, which ironically is stricter than the Supreme Court’s. Although Clarence Thomas is making an excellent attempt at number 7
Lesse… in 2020 we had a .5% CoL and up to 2% performance because of economic uncertainty… most people didn’t notice because of CERB (Canadian PPP)… In 2021 there were concerns about economic stagnation so it was a 1% CoL and up to 1.3% raise. 2022 we had a bad sales year (commissions were supplemented to retain sales) so 1% CoL, up to 1% raise and .75% bonus. And this year our PE firm is clamping down so 1.5% CoL, .5% performance raise and a 1% bonus due to continued inflation grumbling.
They did not, but it’s ok because they’re just feeling it wrong this year. Maybe someone should tell them how to feel about the economy so their income and expenses won’t matter anymore.
+19.45% from Q1 2020, which doesn’t help you if rent is +30% and inflation in general hit +9%.
Which means workers are making more overall. You don’t pay just rent, but a complete basket of goods. If wages are up 19% while the basket of goods is up 9%, then workers have more money in their pocket.
There will often be some individual thing that sticks out in the basket. If not rent, then maybe food. If not food, then maybe energy. That can tell us where to focus policy to reduce inflation. It doesn’t tell us that workers make less money in real terms.
But the REAL problem is workers don’t see that gain unless they change jobs. Working the same job year after year you’re lucky to get 4% per year.
This is a big problem. Companies do not value loyalty.
And it’s totally not an average skewed higher by higher paying jobs right?. Us working class people didn’t get shit. I listened to a nurse the other day complain that they were only getting cost of living adjustments instead of a “real raise.” Like holy shit a lot of us got nothing. I’m making the same thing as I was during the pandemic and my money is worth the equivalent of $6 less per hour due to inflation.
You should really read your sources. The chart is not inflation adjusted. The report tells you the 12 month inflation adjusted figure.
Inflation-adjusted wages and salaries increased 0.8 percent for the 12 months ending March 2024.
Oh yeah we beat the pants off inflation! Whew baby! Oh by the way, there’s still the preceding years of wild fucking inflation to make back. As well as the decades of stagnant wages versus inflation.
A. You don’t know how medians work. In a set of [1,1,1,1,5,8,9,9,9] 5 is the median. But you wouldn’t say that’s representative of the average worker. You’re looking for the mode. Which would be 1 in that data set.
B. .8 percent is not the hot news you’re looking for.
Did I say we should make everyone live on the exact same income?
For giggles though if we distributed our GDP equally it would be about 106,000 after the government budget is taken out. And that’s without accounting for not having to pay Medicaid/SSI/SSDI/etc… anymore.
I guess I can see why this is being posted, but if you are entering this era thinking that because you’ve seen a video of something that it must have happened…well, you haven’t been paying much attention and opening yourself up to being easily manipulated.
He got what he wanted. The only thing that will happen is the bus bouncing a couple times after he throws her under it. Source: look at every other person in Donald’s orbit.
From a better solution that actually improves the lives of people.
He’s just advocating for revenge. It doesn’t solve anything.
Let me say it again for the people in the back: it’s better to redistribute these people’s wealth than to throw them in prison without redistributing their wealth.
And yet in the same breath we often point out that prison time doesn’t rehabilitate (think petty crime). I think realistic fines to individuals AND companies that are more than “cost of doing business,” as well as blacklisting the (undoubtedly several) individals responsible from being able to hold that level of power in an industry, not just the company, then there may be a reasonable deterrent, and it won’t be a languishing burden on tax payers to put these guys up in dressed up 4 star hotels.
People deliberately putting children’s lives at risk should be jailed the same whether or not they are doing it from hiding behind a limited liability. And also the prisons should be changed so that they are actually about rehabilitation.
The judge said everyone gets warnings and fines before jail time. If he could, he’d issue a large fine, but he can’t because state law caps the fine at $1,000 per violation. The judge acknowledged that a $10,000 fine for a multi-millionaire isn’t even a punishment, but immediately jailing someone because they can easily afford the fine seemed wrong. Trump violated the gag order 10 times before being officially told to stop, so the judge is lumping them all into a “first” violation. He said the “second” violation absolutely will be punished with jail time. We’ll see.
…but immediately jailing someone because they can easily afford the fine seemed wrong.
No it doesn’t, not even a little bit! Restrictions on their time are the only things rich people understand; they should be jailed instead of fined early and often.
And then they get the case cancelled because it’s clearly bias against them that they don’t get to just pay the same fee as anyone else as a first warning.
You do if it’s Trump and he uses it to question the judge’s neutrality.
How long do you think before they replace the judge and get things started again? If you believe it won’t be long enough to get him elected then I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
This is the second time in this criminal trial (all previous ones have been civil trials), and this me the judge stated that fines are clearly not working and that jail time could be necessary if it keeps happening.
Yes I knew we’ll all believe it when it happens, but it is different now that he’s in criminal court and the maximum fine has been dealt both for the first and second infringement.
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