Day-o, Day-o 🌻 🌻 🌻

Shattered at Bergdorf:  Yesterday was the first day of testimony in former Elle magazine writer E Jean Carroll’s civil defamation and rape case against Trump.  The defamation in question here, as opposed to all the other times Trump slimed people, relates to him calling Carroll’s allegation that he raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman’s dressing room sometime in the 1990s “a hoax and a lie” after he left office, not to be confused with the time he defamed her while still in office which is a different case where he may or may not be protected because he was still president at the time of his utterance.  Although the alleged rape took place outside of the statute of limitations, Carroll is able to sue Trump because of the 2023 New York Adult Survivors Act, a law giving adult victims of sexual assault a limited one-year lookback window to file civil lawsuits for financial compensation. Since this is a civil rather than a criminal case, if the jury rules in Carroll’s favor the penalty will be a fine rather than a jail term. That’s better for Trump but what’s worse for him is that unlike in a criminal case, where a jury can find a defendant guilty only if the evidence is beyond a reasonable doubt, here the bar is lower, the jury only has to believe that a preponderance of the evidence has been proven to be true. Carroll is fuzzy on the timing of the assault and didn’t report the rape at the time it occurred, but she did contemporaneously tell two friends, Carol Martin then a local CBS news anchor and Lisa Birnbach, best known as the author of the then popular The Official Preppy Handbook and Bergdorf dressing rooms are frequently secluded and quiet. Birnbach told her to report the rape, the more pragmatic Martin advised her not to, telling her that Trump was a powerful man with lots of lawyers who would ruin her, an observation that was sadly spot on.  Judge Lewis Kaplan who is overseeing the case, held in a Federal rather than a state court, something to do with Trump and Carroll residing in different states, has ruled that the Access Hollywood tape, the one where Trump bragged that he could do anything to women including “grab em by the pussy” can be admitted into evidence.  In addition to Birnbach and Martin, jurors are expected to hear testimony from a former People magazine reporter who alleges that Trump assaulted her at Mar a Lago.  None of this is good for Trump who says he’s too busy to show up in court because he’s running for president, his other legal cases and his planned trip to his Scotland golf courses even though he has had plenty of time to double down on defaming Carroll.  He’s published a series of Truth Social posts calling her allegations a politically motivated “made up SCAM,” something that has not pleased the no nonsense Judge Kaplan who yesterday more or less told Trump’s lawyer to shut him up or else as if or else ever happens to Trump. Naturally, Trump being Trump, he responded by having his son Eric start serving as his shadow poster, something that further raised the Judge’s ire.  For her part Carroll who started testifying yesterday by saying that “I am here because Donald Trump raped me and when I wrote about it, he said it didn’t happen. He lied and shattered my reputation, and I am here to try to get my life back” seemed both believable and worthy of sympathy. The bottom line, Carroll stands a good chance of winning this case meaning that the Republican’s leading candidate for the presidency will be a twice impeached, so far once indicted, rapist.     

Nip and Tuck: The twice impeached guy’s good friend Vladimir Putin must really be upset about losing Tucker Carlson’s Fox timeslot.  Not only has Russian media offered Carlson a job but Putin’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has weighed in more than implying that Carlson’s “curious” ouster reflects a lack of support for free speech and differing viewpoints.  Seriously, Russian dissidents are falling to their deaths out of first floor windows, dying from poisonings and rotting in jail as is Wall Street Reporter Evan Gershkovich, and this is what Sergey has to say.  Sadly, it’s pretty much what Margie Q and Putin’s US based echo chamber is also saying. We still don’t know for sure why Tucker was fired but Rolling Stone reports that Fox has a whole file on him, one that includes all those nasty “c” words he used as well as some things that they believe will keep him from directly disparaging the network.  That said, Tucker has reappeared.  Last night he posted a rambling two minute You Tube video, where he said little but did bash online debates as “incredibly stupid” and “completely irrelevant.” Not so coincidentally earlier this week Trump also bashed debates, suggesting that he has no intention in participating in the Republican ones, or probably any other ones if he’s the GOP’s candidate. Former Arkansas Gove Asa Hutchinson, a mainstream Republican who like the others is anti-abortion and is into voter suppression but delivers his message in a soft-spoken way, is officially running and that other Governor, Ron DeSantis, who is now being sued by The Mouse, is expected to officially announce his candidacy in May if he doesn’t fully implode first. In other GOP news, Montana’s Republican controlled House of Representatives have learned nothing from the pushback and nasty press that their Tennessee colleagues encountered when they kicked out two Black legislators for speaking out against guns while being Black, they’ve banned transgender representative Zooey Zephyr from setting foot back in “their” House because she’s dared to speak out against their efforts to ban gender affirming care.  Apparently, they found her references to young people committing suicide offensive, not the part about them committing suicide, just that she’s talking about it in their House.  It’s only a matter of time before Florida follows in Montana’s footsteps, legislators there are seeking to pass a law that would allow the state to remove transgender children from gender affirming parents. 

Tick Tock: Late yesterday by a vote of 217 to 215, House Republicans passed a bill raising the debt ceiling while fairly drastically cutting federal spending.  Four Republicans, Andy Biggs, Ken Buck, Tim Burchett and Matt Gaetz, voted against the bill.  Nancy Mace who keeps pretending to be rational as well as all of the so-called swing district Republicans, including George of many names Santos, voted for it. The bill, called the Limit, Save, Grow Act, will be dead on arrival in the Senate so its passage by the House has done little to solve the debt ceiling crisis.  Among the items included are large cuts in Medicaid and Veterans benefits, killing new IRS funding, repealing green energy tax credits, adding work requirements for some federal benefits, and cutting funding for train inspectors and FAA employees because who but “socialists” really care if a few more trains spew poisonous stuff while running off their tracks or some of those near plane misses turn into tragic crashes. McCarthy needed a win, he’ll spin this as him solving a bigly problem without any help from President Biden, so he’s happy, at least for now, but since neither Biden nor the rest of the Democrats are going to agree to most of McCarthy’s cuts, the clock keeps ticking.    

Tally me Banana:  Things continue to deteriorate at Twitter.  Over the weekend, the Chief Twit eliminated blue check verification marks for all but the few who paid-up but since few people actually paid-up, he gave certain celebrities back their blue checks to make it seem like they had even though they hadn’t in the hope that their free blue checks would inspire their fans to ante up. A significant number of the “gifted” celebrities then made it clear that they hadn’t paid for their blue checks even though their bio information indicated that they had.  As a result, having a blue check is now considered an indication of pathetic dorkiness or worse.  Elon had hoped to replace ad revenues with blue check subscription fees but with few if any actually paying, he hasn’t succeeded unless more chaos is a measure of success because his policy has inspired a whole raft of copycat accounts with fake government accounts sprouting up and sharing disinformation, a problem for municipalities trying to share critical information and for those who need that information. Twitter’s algorithms are now also prioritizing tweets from Russian and Chinese propaganda outlets something noted by one Russian propagandist who thanked Elon for elevating her voice.