POLL: Can the Wisdom of Crowds tell us which member of the #TrumpCrimeFamily is going to see the inside of a jail cell first?

WEEK-LONG POLL:
Will the first member of the #TrumpCrimeFamily to be indicted be Papa Don, Baby Don, Eric, or one or both of the halves of the glamorous criminal couple known as 'Javanka'?
(Retweets will help to harness the infallible #WisdomOfCrowds)

— True Blue Liberal (@TrueBlueLiberal) February 23, 2018

A True Blue Liberal POTUS & SCOTUS Poll

Here's a poll that will be up on the @TrueBlueLiberal Twitter page this week about President Trump and two of his favorite judges:

POLL:
Due to his very, very GREAT respect for the American justice system, the next judge whom @realDonaldTrump plans to elevate to a seat on the Supreme Court, if he gets the opportunity, is...

— True Blue Liberal (@TrueBlueLiberal) November 14, 2017

Harnessing the judicial wisdom of crowds on the Trump-Russia scandal

Twitter should really provide more than four spaces in their polls, because the following list should have about ten names on it, but I'm starting with Paul Manafort, Mike Flynn, and Rudy Giuliani as my likeliest suspects for the earliest #TrumpRussia indictment. If your choice is Carter Page or Roger Stone or Jared Kushner or Ivanka Trump or Jeff Sessions or... , then please reply to the tweet with your favorite Trumpster.

What's your gut feeling about the identity of the first Trumpster to be indicted over #TrumpRussia-related charges?

— True Blue Liberal (@TrueBlueLiberal) April 18, 2017

I'm leaving this up for seven days, so please spread the word to increase the size and wisdom of our crowd.

"It was the old old story of the sacrificial lamb."

Channel 13 in New York broadcast Judgment at Nuremberg on Saturday night. The following scene with Burt Lancaster as German judge Ernst Janning stuck out to me as having some contemporary significance, so I'll simply share it without further commentary.

Legal Strategy 101 for War Criminals

With the Senate report on CIA torture during the Bush/Cheney years being released today, it's important once again to remember that Administration's intense opposition to United States participation in the International Criminal Court as soon as they came into power in 2001 (long before September 11th of that year). It's almost as if they knew that there might be Americans committing war crimes in the near future.

I couldn't find any lengthy statements from George Bush or Dick Cheney about their principled opposition to a permanent Nuremberg-inspired war crimes court, but I did find an interesting video explanation from the Captain Kangaroo they placed as their recess-appointment ambassador to the United Nations. John Bolton puts the reason the Iraq Warriors objected to the ICC clearly in the following lines delivered about three minutes into this video:

"And yet, the threat of prosecution -- the threat of being accused of being a war criminal -- can have an inhibiting effect. And since there's no accountability for these institutions, it could pose a threat to the United States -- or to the will of American friends and allies -- to take actions that they should undertake for their own self defense." --John Bolton [Emphasis Added]

Isn't that the point of all police and prosecutors and courts? To have an inhibiting effect on potential criminals?



And without American participation in an International Criminal Court, shouldn't even Bolton agree that it's therefore incumbent on American judicial institutions to look into and possibly prosecute the people behind the numerous war crimes listed in the report released today?

Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, May 6, 1937 -- April 20, 2014

The first trial was a pig circus and so was the re-trial in 1976 that took place after Bob Dylan's hit song. I attended a couple of sessions of the second trial in Paterson and it's the young railroaded John Artis I remember most clearly. The fact that John Artis was still his "longtime friend and caregiver" when Rubin Carter passed away in Toronto today is a piece of information that I find simultaneously heartwarming and heartbreaking. R.I.P. Hurricane.

It may be cruel, but it's not unusual in the USA.

The real news out of the Supreme Court today is not that the Justices decided children shouldn't be sentenced to die in prison, but that four members of the court -- John Roberts, Sam Alito, Tony Scalia, and Clarence "The Silent" Thomas -- voted to uphold the right of states to impose life in prison without chance of parole for children 14 and under.

"Determining the appropriate sentence for a teenager convicted of murder presents grave and challenging questions of morality and social policy... Our role, however, is to apply the law, not to answer such questions. The pertinent law here is the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits 'cruel and unusual punishments.' Today, the court [majority] invokes that amendment to ban a punishment that the court does not itself characterize as unusual, and that could not plausibly be described as such."            -- John Roberts

Read more: http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2012/06/25/Court-No-life-without-parole-for-teens/UPI-69051340639955/#ixzz1ypXQTTpS

He didn't say that life in prison without the chance of parole for a 12-year-old wasn't cruel. Therefore a punishment that is both Cruel AND Usual -- ie, enforced by 29 of our most backward states -- is not unconstitutional in the minds of the four dissenters.  This sort of judicial logic would have upheld slavery.

A liberal watching SCOTUS, even on days when the decisions go the right way by a thin margin, has to be a masochist akin to those on the left who watch Fox or listen to Rush, hence today's anagram: Roberts, Scalia, Alito, Thomas = To Roast a Liberal Masochist. 

Loyalty is a Vice

Back in the Brownie and Harriet Miers days, I questioned whether loyalty to friends and cronies was the worst of George W. Bush's "virtues".

Now, with his statement yesterday, Mr. Bush -- never known to coddle criminals or consider even the most excessive sentence "excessive" -- shows that loyalty is now a vice, maybe Dubya's key vice.

I respect the jury's verdict. But I have concluded that the prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive. Therefore, I am commuting the portion of Mr. Libby's sentence that required him to spend thirty months in prison.
[...]The Constitution gives the President the power of clemency to be used when he deems it to be warranted. It is my judgment that a commutation of the prison term in Mr. Libby's case is an appropriate exercise of this power.

--G.W. Bush (from whitehouse.gov, 2 July 2007)

The simplistic code of loyalty that drives him can be seen on every level. He knows his family is nice, and good. He knows his friends are nice, and good. He knows his America is nice, and good, and blessed by God. If he doesn't know you? Watch out. You may very well be mean, and evil. And it may be his duty to ignore your pleas for gubernatorial clemency from death row. It may be his Presidential duty to lock you up on a island prison camp with no recourse to the American legal system, or to bomb you and your family and your godforsaken desert home.

I have nothing against Lewis Libby. He's a stooge. He was only following Dick Cheney's orders, and of course George knows that. But don't commute Lewis Libby's sentence unless you're willing to throw the real criminals behind bars, or until you're willing to give the same compassionate consideration to the MILLIONS of Americans who are behind bars -- many with longer sentences for lesser crimes than Scooter's.