It’s going to be ugly, but I don’t see an APR. Like any other addict, I need to put the comments somewhere.
Having survived the rockets’ red glare when my rural neighbors decided to give proof through the night that they were still there, I need to give my own proof that I am still here, too, and still reading — mainly the legal news.
Mine are longish, as they were designed as comments, where a “minimize” arrow would allow easy skipping.
I. Brookings Remains Conservative, Pretends to Be Moderate
That makes it worth reading Lawfare sometimes. “Cassidy Hutchinson’s Testimony Changed Our Minds About Indicting Donald Trump” by Alan Z. Rozenshstein and Jed Handelsman Shugerman, on the other hand, applies trial standards to the latest televised testimony, and the authors are simply independent and hard minded about the first amendment.
Their article pertains solely to prosecution for seditious conspiracy. It does not address the conspiracy to defraud the United States (false faith electors) or conspiracy to obstruct government function.
Here is something important. Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony about Donald Trump saying
“I don’t fucking care that they have weapons, they’re not here to hurt me. They’re not here to hurt me. Take the fucking mags [magnetometers] away. Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here; let the people in and take the mags away.”
is not all hearsay. She testified to hearing those comments herself directly from Donald Trump and she reporting hearing from others that he had said them. (She directly heard him say to take the mags down. She heard from Ornato the other comments.)
However,
These utterances by Trump (as alleged by Hutchinson) were not political speech. They serve as additional proof of intent and context, and—crucially—a material act to increase the likelihood of violence. This easily distinguishes Trump’s speech at the rally from other kinds of core political speech that should never be criminalized.
In other words, there is no privilege, and the speech is criminal. Further, it is not used to ascertain the truth of a proposition or deed, but to establish motivation and mindset, and therefore, “Even much of that portion of her testimony that did constitute hearsay might still be admissible under the relevant evidentiary rules.”
These are careful attorneys, and they have been swayed by the evidence.
Why didn’t they think there was evidence enough before?
Hindsight is 20/20, and before Tuesday, we both believed that hindsight bias was causing too many commentators to leap from Trump’s remarks to the violence that followed, and that a criminal prosecution of the speech itself would run afoul of foundational principles of First Amendment law. In particular, we were skeptical that Trump’s speech would satisfy the stringent requirement of Brandenburg v. Ohio,
We were reading the remarks at the Ellipse through the events that followed (hindsight bias), and thus we were seeing the speech as “obvious” evidence, when we should not have. The first amendment protects speech from such retroactive assessments.
Our concern was that if prosecutors could indict Trump for the content of his speech alone they could also indict lower-profile politicians and even community activists and organizers for such common rhetoric—especially if a crowd independently got out of control, and especially in parts of the country wanting to suppress certain kinds of political speech.
We can imagine 2020 coming again and DeRay McKesson being jailed when “umbrella man” goes to work after a BLM speech. However, I felt then and feel now that their academic disagreement required ignoring too many specific circumstances that had gone into Ahmet Mehta’s decision in the civil suit against Trump for incitement to riot (it wasn’t words alone).
This is a good article by two thoughtful people on the side of civil liberties. They also believe that Cassidy Hutchinson has changed the landscape for Donald Trump. His horizons just drew in much closer.
===========
II. I Thought It Was a Joke. Instead, Its Author Was.
Yes, Rudy Giuliani really did tweet out
[of Cassidy Hutchinson] “she was never present WHEN I ASKED FOR A PARDON.”
Liz Dye has a screenshot for you, if you want one, in “That Woman Wasn't Even In The Room When Rudy Asked For That Pardon He Never Asked For!” at Above the Law. (When the world gets to grim, we can always look at Rudy and laugh, and then weep.)
Soon enough, it was deleted and replaced by another post, clarifying that everyone else wanted him to get a pardon, because “the lying radical left” would probably try to “frame innocent people.” But Rudy stood strong, because he knew he was pure as a newborn babe lying in bed with his hand in his pants next to an ostensible 15-year-old girl.
Rudy and truth have an elastic relationship. Unlike his Peppermint Patty, Donald Trump, Rudy does not respond to being caught in a lie by merely screaming more loudly and launching lawsuits. He instead tries to baffle the truth with explanations and deflections and super-heated aluminum foil tossed into the air.
Let the record reflect that the witness vehemently denied requesting $20,000 per day from the Trump campaign for his election ratf*cking services, only to concede that he had done exactly that when an email from his, umm, associate Maria Ryan confirmed the ask. There was also that recent unpleasantness in the supermarket when he only survived a vicious back-patting by dint of his superhuman strength and cat-like reflexes.
He tries to create an Expressionist film of his life, where how he feels about his experiences are the expressed (so that an “attaboy, jagoff” back slap feels like a thunder clap and therefore is a mixed martial arts attack), but shared reality intervenes. When shared experience intervenes, he goes with the next expression of his feelings as reality:
His replacement tweet said that he didn’t need a pardon because HE DIDN’T DO ANYTHING WRONG OR ILLEGAL. It’s just that the Russiahoax Democrats would witchhunt him.
Of course assembling seven states of false faith electors is neither wrong nor illegal? I believe “defrauding the United States” is probably a crime. John Eastman thinks so. Pat Cipollone thought so.
Calling Tommy Tuberville during the incursion into the Capitol and telling him that “we” just need a little more time and that ten days would be all that’s needed isn’t a crime, right?
But with his campaign appearances at an end, and his legal issues just beginning (allegedly!), America’s Mayor had to get back to work. He’s got a lot of alimony to pay and no license to practice law, even if there were actual paying clients to be had.
She ends with the reassuring notice that Rudy is tweeting about savings to be had at Mike Lindell’s pillow warehouse by using the coupon “Rudy.” Get 30% off!
At least he’s getting some pocket change from his friends still, even if the man he’s going to go to jail for is going to stiff he until the end of time because he “didn’t get the job done.”
— For a musical interlude, a beautiful song for an ugly subject — the Velvets singing about their junky friends:
==================
III. Uvalde’s Chief of Police Has Resigned (now about the mayor...)
I’m sure others are mentioning it, since it’s Breaking News and all, but Law and Crime has “Uvalde School Police Chief Resigns from City Council in Wake of Deadly Massacre: Report.”
I felt like Mayor “you’re one sick son of a bitch” Don McLaughlin (R — Abbott rabbit) told me instantly what kind of a town Uvalde, Texas is, and what to expect of Pete Arredondo. He wouldn’t come clean, and he wouldn’t give up any office he’d been given, and he’d try to out last “those people.”
The chief of the Uvalde School District’s in-house police department has resigned his seat on the Uvalde City Council, according to a widely cited Saturday, July 2 report in the Uvalde Leader-News.
“After much consideration, I regret to inform those who voted for me that I have decided to step down as a member of the city council for District 3,” Pete Arredondo reportedly told the local newspaper. “The mayor, the city council, and the city staff must continue to move forward without distractions. I feel this is the best decision for Uvalde.”
Note that he’s claiming to do this to help Mayor Sicksonofabitch, and he’s not giving up his police position (yet). He is under investigation in that role, and it’s important that no one prejudge the case.
Texas law enforcement officials, including Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw, have harshly criticized Arredondo for — in McCraw’s words — “decid[ing] to place the lives of officers before the lives of children.”
According to a Texas Tribune. . . McCraw, said “Arredondo could have transferred command to another agency, such as state troopers who arrived, but never did so.
He was frightened, and he exhibited the sort of power lust as a personality flaw that killed children. It’s the self-love and the desire to be the big man that is a disaster. It is a common disaster, though.
Speaking of rage, entitlement, privilege, and grievance,
Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin said recently that he believed the legislative hearing that included McCraw’s testimony looked like an episode of the “Bozo the Clown Show.”
Arrendondo’s resignation was forced and not so voluntary as all that. People who have been following the case will remember that the city council was going to grant him a leave of absence so that he could miss more than three city council meetings in a row and not lose his seat, but the public showed up and demanded that it not do so. The city council denied that leave of absence.
Thus, he was going to lose his seat anyway. His resignation is merely taking place a few days before he would have been kicked off the city council for absenteeism.
I don’t want more pain and suffering for anyone in that town, including Arredondo, but there is a sickness in these power structures built around notions of owning offices and deserving to be in charge. We can pray that there be healing of the town’s politics as well as its people.
The essential song for the day, by title: (“I never thought that I would end up here”)
====================
IV. Storing Solar Energy Is What Water Does
One of the problems Germany suffers with solar electric generation is that there’s too much of it sometimes and not enough other times. No, I don’t mean “at night.” I mean “for weeks at a time.” Turning off fossil fuel generators and then turning them back on isn’t easy. That’s why knowing what to do with all that extra solar electricity has been important.
The AP reports “Berlin preps ‘huge thermos’ to help heat homes this winter” as an eye-catching form of the energy storage problem.
With a height of 45 meters (almost 150 feet) and holding up to 56 million liters (14.8 million gallons) of hot water, utility company Vattenfall says the tower will help heat Berlin homes this winter even if Russian gas supplies dry up.
“It’s a huge thermos that helps us to store the heat when we don’t need it,” said Tanja Wielgoss, who heads the Sweden-based company’s heat unit in Germany. “And then we can release it when we need to use it.”
Yes, you could think of it as the world’s largest radiator/boiler, if you want. It’s more accurate to think of it as a form of the many storage solutions. It’s another battery.
Material science has gotten really good with insulation, and at scale. It can transmit and maintain temperature, and it can store for a long time. That means that simply heating water when you have excess electrical capacity and holding it until needed makes sense.
The 50-million-euro ($52 million) facility will have a thermal capacity of 200 Megawatts — enough to meet much of Berlin’s hot water needs during the summer and about 10% of what it requires in the winter. The vast, insulated tank can keep water hot for up to 13 hours, helping bridge short periods when there’s little wind or sun.
13 hr isn’t that long, but we’re talking about a tank that won’t have any energy inputs. It isn’t a water heater, but a Thermos.
“Due to its geographic location the Berlin region is even more dependent on Russian fossil fuels than other parts of Germany,” she told The Associated Press. “That’s why we’re really in a hurry here.”
“The war in Ukraine and the energy crisis teach us that we need to be faster,” said Jarasch.
“First of all to become climate neutral,” she said. “And secondly, to become independent (of energy imports).”
It might seem like $52 million is a lot for 13 hr of heating, but that’s 13 hr at a time for 10% of winter needs for a city the size of Berlin. This is also a free market solution, so it’s profitable.
Meanwhile, my electric utility just requested a 13% rate increase for the next three years.
========
Sorry for the format. It was unexpected. Have a happy 4th, everyone.