Search Results for: 2016-08-05

Trump’s presidency has always been one straight out of a cult leaders’ playbook. When late SF journalist Phil Tracy exposed the notoriously narcissistic Jonestown cult-leader, Jim Jones, Jones urged his followers to flee from California to Guyana, South America. When last month, Twitter exposed Donald Trump’s false claims about mail-in ballots, Trump threatened to revoke [...]

The D.C. Circuit held oral argument on Friday on General Mike Flynn’s mandamus to Judge Emmet Sullivan to grant the Department of Justice (DOJ) Motion to Dismiss false statement charges against Flynn (see my preview, discussed here). A majority of the panel seemed to believe Judge Sullivan should take the first crack at deciding DOJ’s [...]

Over the past year, and increasingly in the last few months, the people of Hong Kong have taken to the streets as China has been on a spree of introducing draconian laws, targeting individual civil liberties and constantly threatening Hong Kong’s autonomy, with a new security law being the latest addition. China seeks to bypass [...]

The US Supreme Court concluded oral arguments on Wednesday for the October 2019 term by hearing two cases that may impact the upcoming presidential election. Chiafalo v. Washington and Colorado Department of State v. Baca both ask whether the Constitution prevents a state from requiring its presidential electors to comply with the state’s popular vote [...]

The coronavirus pandemic has created a cascade of horrible effects. As of April 10, there have been half a million cases and 18,000 deaths in the United States (1.5 million cases and over 100,000 deaths worldwide). The pandemic has also created widespread economic hardship, with 17 million Americans newly unemployed within the past three weeks. And [...]

The US Supreme Court added 13 cases to its docket for the October 2019 term Friday, including three cases challenging the Trump administration’s decision to terminate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that protected undocumented immigrants who arrived in the US as children from deportation. The court also denied review of an Alabama [...]

Federal prosecutors on Thursday unsealed a criminal complaint against John Fry, an employee at the Internal Revenue Service, for unlawful disclosure of Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) related to Michael Cohen, the former personal attorney for Donald Trump. The complaint includes a detailed affidavit by Linda Cieslak, Special Agent of the US Department of Treasury. In [...]

On October 24, 2018, New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood sued Exxon for defrauding investors about the business risks of climate change. Of course, Exxon will probably deny that it committed fraud. But, in anticipation of this day, the oil giant has spent the last two years preparing a far more insidious legal defense: that its fraud is actually protected [...]

“The enemy is the unphilosophical spirit which knows nothing and wants to know nothing of truth.” Karl Jaspers, Reason and Anti-Reason in our Time (1971) Yet again, assessments of national security threats to the United States thoroughly contradict US President Trump’s own off-the-cuff appraisals. This time it is about satellite images confirming that North Korea is rapidly [...]

In April and October, President Trump proclaimed his intention to send National Guard troops to the US-Mexico border as an anti-illegal immigration measure. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Customs and Border Protection reported apprehensions of people entering the U.S. illegally at the Southern border jumped by 37 percent from February to March 2018, by 203 percent [...]