Nixon was not immune from the law, but the high court seems unsure about Trump…

No doubt the U.S. Supreme Court has a hot potato in its hands as it is asked to decide whether ex-president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump is immune from prosecution.

In the election interference case against him, Trump claims he has presidential immunity.

Trump is charged with trying to get phony votes and interfering with the election process by inciting a riot on the capitol and other illicit actions.

In an unsigned order, with no indication of dissent on the ideological-divided nine-member panel with a right-wing majority, the court agreed to view a lower federal court ruling that Trump lacked immunity.

But, it won’t hear the case till April. Observers say the delay could push a trial past election time next November. Of course the court’s generally friendly-to-Trump majority could rule in Trump’s favor. But if it does not, Trump might legally pull the plug on any federal case against him if the trial has not concluded before he might take office.

(Authorities claim that constitutionally Trump could still hold the presidential office with criminal convictions and even from jail, absurd as that sounds.)

A past president trying to get re-elected while facing criminal indictments (Trump has several) is unprecedented. It puts the high court in an awkward position.

If a seemingly large portion of the public supports Trump, making a ruling that might hinder his political campaign might cause the high court to lose its legitimacy. But ruling he is uniquely immune from criminal law, even out of office, might do the same.

Silly me. I thought that the court set the rule decades ago when it held President Richard Nixon was not above the law.

But the current court majority is not immune to breaking precedent.

Still, in a way, the final check will be with the voters, a majority of which could reject him, albeit he might once more sneak in by way of an Electoral College majority.

With President Biden’s problems, I guess a true Trump majority in the popular vote could happen.

Trump has proven that he has no regard for the rule of law. Many of his supporters act as if he were the law.

It’s not policy, or ideology, of which Trump has no clearly-defined type, what’s at stake is democracy itself.

You either support the rule of law, of which democracy depends upon, or you support Trump.

If the two major political parties still had control, they’d resolve the whole problem by nominating two candidates for president, neither named Biden or Trump.

That wouldn’t mean Trump should not have to face the consequences of his actions, but the threat to our democracy would be lessened.

Trump is getting a fair shake, though, and then some.

IRONIC: AMONG THE FEW POLITICIANS IN THE REPUBLICAN PARTY WITH COJONES ARE NIKKI HALEY and LIZ CHENEY…

Metaphorically speaking of course.

And how about this as the 2024 presidential
contest?

Republican Nikki Haley vs. Democrat and current vice president Kamala Harris.

Despite the fact Haley is way behind in the primary polls, DonaldTrump is in a legal mess and is highly dependent on Democrats and undecideds, deciding for rule of law, not voting.

Haley seems like she has the relative youth and vigor and just enough moderate appeal to wallop or at least beat the elderly Joe Biden.

(Haley is 52, Harris 59, Liz Cheney 57, President Biden is 81.)

The ostracized but bravest anti-Trumper in the GOP is Cheney, who would have perhaps have been a good candidate for the more traditional Republican Party, albeit maybe too conservative in the traditional sense.

On the Democratic Party side, Harris would need to completely transform her-not-ready for-prime-time image.

Maybe she needs the pressure to do so. And the pressure has to be on her now.

I know it’s a GOP device or scare tactic to say the contest is really a Republican candidate vs. Vice President Harris because the odds are old Joe will not make it through or even into a second term, the idea being Harris is out to lunch or just too liberal.

But the betting odds of Harris now becoming the first American woman president seem in her favor what with Biden’s decline.

Meanwhile, Haley seems the only Republican left with the moxie, willingness, ability, and monetary support to stand up to Donald Trump.

My political projection skills are not good. So be it. I’m just saying.

In the middle of the night I read an opinion column in the Wall Street Journal. I may well have missed the point. It was a ramble mixing strategies in the Korean War, Ukraine, WWI and II, with some seeming hope for Harris. Yeah, I didn’t get the connection either.

But the headline read:

It’s Time for President Harris

The piece was by By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

(I’ll have to re-read it.)

Salad days are supposed to mean good times, but Harris needs to leave her word salads behind and use her prosecutor’s skills, her empathy as a woman for personal body rights, and her belief in the rule of law, and her progressive convictions, to unite her party.

Let the best woman win!

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I’m feeling both major political parties need a good old-fashioned brokered convention.

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As a perrenial Spanish student I was surprised that my reference sources on the web indicate the correct spelling of the slang word is cojones, not cajones, the latter having a legitimate non-slang meaning. I often don’t know what I don’t know.

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TRUMP AND THE BANKS ENGAGED IN A FORM OF CRONIE CAPITALISM TO THE DETRIMENT OF OTHER INVESTORS AND CONTRACTORS…

Seems to me that the argument that Donald Trump should not have been penalized for fraud by inflating the value of his assets to secure loans because the banks didn’t lose any money is faulty:

1. Apparently he broke New York State Law. Laws against fraud are important but useless if not enforced.
2. He received special treatment from his bank cronies, who may have turned down more honest potential borrowers.
3. Trump has a history of not paying contractors. Trump’s lenders enable him to carry out his dishonest business practices.
4. Trump has openly admitted using the bankruptcy courts, not as a last resort but as a business tactic. That’s not what he was just convicted of, but it proves his lack of ethics and disrespect for the law and that his fraud hurts others.

Maybe his lenders need some oversight.

A family day at the park, sadly is in many cases so yesterday…

It’s sad, disgusting, and outrageous that a small town, or any town, has to close a city park because unsavory characters have made it unsafe.

I just read that the city council in the town I spent so many years in, high school and after, is considering closing its park along the Sacramento River.

A TV reporter went down there to do a story and wound up witnessing a shooting.

So, why don’t they have police on duty to patrol the park? I ask myself.

But, I don’t think that I’ve actually gone to the park in recent years, maybe driven by.

It had to be as much as 15 years ago or more that I took my older grandson there. There were not many people in the park. It was kind of trashy. As he was playing on the swings — no other children present — some young punks nearby were using foul language, and as I recall, one was maybe threatening the other.

“We’re leaving”, I announced to my grandson, who looked worried, perhaps from the tone of my voice or a sense something was wrong, or both.

It’s a pity. Not many years previous my wife and I had taken the grandkids there and there were many families about enjoying the day. Before that, we took our daughters there, maybe had a picnic with the grandparents. Oh, there was a public pool, I recall (still?). That’s where my older daughter took swimming lessons, maybe my younger daughter too.

It’s a different world now. Children don’t play outside as much. In many places people avoid parks and other public venues.

We’re tied to the phones, the internet, inside or at-home games, and would rather avoid the rabble of the homeless and the violence that we seem to have no power or even will to stop.

Yeah, a different world. How’d we get here?

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On my reference to the homeless: I am not unsympathetic to their plight. I am disappointed that the powers that be do not do more to address the problem. The obvious first step it would seem would be to create safe public shelters, even tent cities, with adequate hygienic facilities and security, rather than putting up with people erecting tents or crude shelters on piles of trash any and everywhere. Public shelters cost. The inaction costs more.

I only referenced the homeless. They are not the main problem concerning the blight and lack of security in our society. We seem to have a vast number of people with either nothing constructive to do or nothing they want to do. And most of these folks are not even homeless.

Wait till AI takes over. It won’t get better. It will likely get worse.

Stop the killing and destruction in Gaza, create an official Palestine already…

There is no official nation called Palestine, but unofficially, it seems, the Gaza Strip has become Palestine.

A terrorist attack on Israel, an official nation state since 1948, was launched out of the Gaza Strip on Oct. 7, not the first, but one called the worst since the Holocaust.

Gaza is run by an outlaw group called Hamas.

So, here we have a nation, even if unofficial, engaging in an act of war on a recognized nation state, Israel.

It seems only natural and predictable that Israel would respond by invading Gaza and going after those who invaded its borders.

The civilians of Gaza, which include a disproportionate amount of children when compared, to, say, Israel, are caught in the crossfire.

But is this not what usually happens in war?

In World War II vast numbers of civilians were caught. In some cases, such as the fire bombing of Dresden and Tokyo, they were the target. Too, civilians were the main target when the U.S. dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

(Should I mention the U.S. in Vietnam?)

But, even so, all of this is not something we just have to say, oh well, and accept.

Israel might have opted for a more surgical approach to getting at the cancer that is Hamas, rather than leveling hospitals and homes.

Israel’s leader Benjamin Netanyahu apparently feels the all-out war approach is the only one with the prospect of success.

Also, he is, and already was, on shaky political ground in his own country where he’s tried to weaken the judicial system in the Israeli democracy. Then came Oct. 7 where Israel’s whole security system was caught off guard.

Netanyahu may need the war now to stay in office or even out of jail (kind of like Trump needs the presidency). In Israel’s parliamentary system he is protected by way of his war cabinet, otherwise he might be ousted.

I’m of mixed minds, except that I deplore the slaughter, seemingly approaching genocide, in Gaza. Telling people to get out when they have nowhere they can go is pretty much murder. On the other hand, do these people live in some kind of vacuum where they don’t comprehend that their own terrorist leaders started it all and are using them as hostages?

Israel and its Western supporters, most notably the U.S., is reaping the results of displacing Palestinians after Word War II in favor of predominantly European Jews to make up for all the bad things society had done to them. The West was also in a contest with the Soviets for strategic oil reserves in the region and the Suez Canal, a vital shipping link in international trade.

In the process there was no separate place set aside for Arabs in the region who identified as Palestinians.

They have been left to reside within the borders of Israel and then in the no-man’s land of Gaza.

Palestinians also reside within what is called the West Bank region.

At one time an entity known as the Palestinian Authority supposedly governed both the West Bank and Gaza.

But weak and corrupt, it was ousted from Gaza.

While the West Bank is nominally a Palestinian enclave it has many Jewish settlements, often referred to as illegal. It is under the thumb of Israel, financially and otherwise.

Ok, the history of the conflict between the Jews and the predominately Muslim Arabs goes back centuries.

Also, from back into the 19th Century there has been what’s called the Zionist movement aimed at reclaiming a part of the Middle East for a Jewish state.

All this is somewhat complex and open to wide interpretations. The ones you might read in research are often saturated with a single perspective, coming down on the one side or the other.

We cannot undo the past.

But we should stop the senseless slaughter and devastation in Gaza.

In no way does it seem right for our U.S. government to back Israel in its bloody assault and devastation of Gaza.

The U.S. in concert with the United Nations and neighboring Arab nations, albeit reluctant, and hypocritical as they can be, should oversee a truce, return of hostages and prisoners, on both sides, and once and for all the creation of an independent Palestine.

It would be then up to this new Palestine to get along with and accept Israel and for Israel to accept it. Those neighboring Arab states who have for so long claimed empathy with the stateless Palestinians should then be put on the spot to offer aid.

And if this doesn’t work, let them all fight it out, but not on our dime or with our involvement.

Will it be the old, maybe too old, good guy, or, the also old, megalomaniac?

So, the question for presidential voters come November may be: do they prefer the somewhat frail and forgetful old man or the megalomaniac, who is perhaps not as frail, but also elderly and a bit mentaly confused at times?

The comparisons made aren’t fair. President Joe Biden is judged to a higher standard of behavior and ethics because he is conventional.

Biden is 81 now, Trump 77. Both are prone to making flubs in their speech, but whereas Biden has always been gaffe prone and now seems to be slipping a bit mentally, he gets stronger scrutiny. No one expects deep thought or accuracy from Trump.

Ex-president Donald Trump has never displayed anything approaching ethical behavior and therefore none seems to be expected from him.

But, could I say something positive about Trump? Not really, but I’ll try: He might be better at keeping us free from military entanglements. He is not tethered to the old-school policy of America going hither and yon to fight the good fight in the name of freedom and democracy. And looking at our track record on that since the end of WWII, that might seem good. A lot of American blood and treasure seems to have been lost in Southeast Asia and the Middle East for little to no good.

But, I caution, a super power as the United States will likely lose its status if it hangs back too much. The responsibility we have in the world is a burden. But being under someone else’s thumb does not seem preferable.

Trump is threatening NATO again, saying he would support Putin of Russia invading any country that doesn’t pay what Trump considers a fair share.

For Trump it’s all business between tough guys, like mob families forming alliances with each other. Democracy vs. authoritarianism does not enter into his thinking. That’s why he’s so in the thrall of Putin and that dangerous lunatic in North Korea.

On the economy: Trump did ok. He benefitted from former President Obama leading the recovery from the George W. Bush disaster. Bush oversaw the situation of letting banks go crazy and then running to the federal government to bail them out. Trump pushed through tax law that probably gave business intetests increased incentives to invest and thus spur the economy. That upward trend was halted by the Covid pandemic. Trump showed great leadership in spearheading the warpspeed production of the Covid vaccines. But as he saw the pandemic ruining his economic gains, he went into the craziness of Covid denial and the debunking science in a return-to-the-Middle Ages movement.

And, in the end, Trump displayed that he has little to no historical or basic American civics knowledge and no love for democracy. He prefers authoritarianism.

Surprisingly, a larger number of American voters than one might think appear to be good with that too. I don’t in any way believe anything near a majority prefer authoritarianism, but as we know, majority rule does not necessarily apply in our presidential election. Due to our stange Electoral College system, a handful of so-called battleground states who do not have the largest populations but have the winner-take-all delegates system, often decide the outcome.

Biden has done well with his bipartisan approach in domestic legislation. The economy is on the uptick. Biden respects the rule of law, Trump does not. He didn’t accept his defeat at the polls, even after several courts, including the Supreme Court, of which he potentially held sway over by the majority by his appointments, could find no evidence of foul play.

We all saw Trump urge on a violent assault on the capitol, and fail to call off the thugs for hours.

So, back to Biden:

He does seem perhaps too decrepit to handle almost five more years now. Not sure how robust one must be. Mental acuity certainly is needed.

He has the backup of the much younger Vice President Kamala Harris. But, that’s the sticking point. Harris has failed dismally to impress. She often says the right things, but then often has got caught spewing non-sensical word salads as well.

Ironically Trump spews out meaningless verbiage, but his followers are not into the finer points of public discourse. They seem to prefer trash talk. In some cases they just oppose what they consider an elite who they have convinced themselves is ruining or endangering their livelihoods or way of life. If Trump is badmouthing them, that’s good enough.

Biden and the Democratic Party face a dilemma. Biden feels he can’t quit and he certainly can’t replace Harris because of the politics of such a move.

One columnist I just read suggested a solution might be that he could announce just before the Democratic Convention that he’s dropping out of the race. That would let convention delegates tussle over who should be their standard bearers. I kind of like that. (see Ross Douthat, N.Y. Times)

But if it is to be Biden vs. Trump, I am hard pressed to understand, other than by fluke of the Electoral College system, why Trump should win.

I won’t go into all the court cases against Trump, except to say that the law may catch up with Trump yet.

And, third choices and events may occur to replace the Biden/Trump redux. We can only hope.