Succinct legal assessment of Trump’s ‘oily’ arguments.

I know y’all are getting tired of seeing news about Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. But you have to keep on top of this stuff. Both men represent such existential threats to so many things we take for granted in our cushy, insulated western world. Freedom. Democracy. Free speech. Independence. Open borders. Free press. Justice. Here’s a snippet from a recent Huffpost article. It succinctly lays out the ‘oily’ arguments and shape shifting theories Donald Trump keeps presenting in his relentless drive for power and wealth at the expense of all else.

A former president is facing a criminal trial “for the first time in our history,” Katyal (Obama-era acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal) noted to O’Donnell, before spelling out Trump’s audacious “seven-fold” argument against prosecution. Trump before his 2016 victory tried to cover up his alleged liaison with Daniels and the later payment in a bid to win the election, said Katyal. Then, secondly, once he was president, he claimed he couldn’t be indicted for past crimes while in office. Thirdly, Katyal said, Trump committed “more crimes in office” but claimed immunity, and then fourthly committed even more while trying to overturn the 2020 election result and stay in said office. “So then, fifth, they try and impeach him and he gets impeached by the House of Representatives. And then he says he can’t be convicted because the remedy is actually to prosecute him after he leaves office. He shouldn’t be impeached,” Katyal explained. “Then, sixth, he leaves office and he’s prosecuted. And he says, ‘I can’t be prosecuted because I was president at the time and I’m absolutely immune for acts I took while I was president at the time.’” “And then, seventh, finally, for acts for when he wasn’t president, he’s now saying he can’t be prosecuted for those either […] because he’s running for president again and is a presidential candidate.”

Trump is a snake. Pray that the American legal system will find a way to stop this madness!

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Jordan Peterson’s right to freedom of speech quashed by judiciary!

“It has had a chilling impact on members of regulated trades and professions covering a large percentage of the workforce, who will now be reluctant to debate political and social issues for fear of losing their license to work.” Howard Leavitt from Toronto Sun interview.

No matter what you might think of Jordan Peterson’s point of view, he has to be admired and respected for his single minded pursuit of our right to free speech. I’ve written at length about this champion of free speech so you should know by now who he is and what he stands for. He is ready to abandon his license to practice psychology rather than surrender to his licensing body that has demanded he undergo what they refer to in Orwellian/Stalinist terms as ‘social media reeducation’. Read the following Toronto Sun article and reflect on the “chilling impact” (as his lawyer H. Leavitt comments) the Appeals Court decision will have on our freedoms in Canada. I hope Mr. Peterson will pursue this issue to the Supreme Court of Canada. It is that important for all of us.

https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/peterson-court-decision-impacts-freedom-of-expression-for-all

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Soon to be a collector’s item

Destined to be a collector’s item? This marketing postcard (not photoshopped, I have a hard copy) was issued years ago by a manufacturer/seller of souvenir items in Prince Edward County, where Canada’s first Prime Minister first practiced law. At the time, we celebrated Sir John A’s connection to ‘The County’. Unfortunately his name and legacy is being expunged from Canadian history, another victim of cancel culture. I fear that years from now, this great man will be compared to Adolf Hitler. Sounds absurd today, but that is where this country is headed. Anybody who has a past that is even remotely associated with awkward and uncomfortable elements will be ostracized and deleted. Now, my alma mater McMaster University, has apologized for including Sir John A MacDonald Day in its printing of a 2024 calendar. They call it a “grave oversight”. We are headed toward a polarized society, where there will be no room for critical thinking or dialogue. Kind of like the USA where it’s either ‘my way or the highway’. Perhaps we are already there. Is it any wonder that populist movements are gaining ground around the world? 

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America has no problem with speech. It has a problem with listening.

Some excerpts from my favorite publication “The Economist”.

Newspapers continue to tie themselves in knots trying to reconcile the politics of their staff with covering a fractious democracy. They tend to default to framing their purpose in terms of protecting the right to speak – as though a publication is meant to serve its interview subjects and op-ed writers – rather than of protecting readers’ opportunity to understand the world…….all Americans can now relax in homogeneous spaces where they hear plenty of speech but nothing that might confound them. Whatever objectionable ideas or information they do encounter will arrive safely filtered through the congenial viewpoint of their chosen cable-news channel, social-media group, newspaper or Substack writer. They can duck the work of hearing alien arguments and sharpening their own ideas of even adjusting them – the kind of work that turns diversity in a pluralistic democracy into a source of resilience rather than a fatally fissiparous weakness.

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It’s now fact. Russia is a dictatorship.

In a terrible year for human rights in Russia, beginning with the imprisonment of the opposition leader Alexei Navalny, the closure of International Memorial stands out for its ruthlessness.

Founded in the late 1980s by Andrei Sakharov and other Soviet-era dissidents, the group took the new freedoms offered under Mikhail Gorbachev and used them to reveal raw truths about the fate of millions of victims of Stalin’s repressions. It was a poignant symbol of Russia’s new openness, but for many the meaning was anything but abstract: Russians discovered the tragic fates of their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents after decades of secrecy and official cowardice.

Memorial’s closure is also a potent symbol – one of Russian civil society being dismantled at lightning speed. Its leadership had hoped that public support, including from prominent Russians such as Gorbachev, would stay the Kremlin’s hand. Or that closing down an organisation dedicated to uncovering Soviet atrocities would be a step too far, even for Vladimir Putin.

But on Tuesday, almost exactly 30 years after the Soviet Union was dissolved, a judge showed otherwise.

“When Russia chose to take a democratic, legal path forward, I couldn’t in my darkest dreams have imagined that everything would eventually start going in reverse,” Nikita Petrov, a historian and researcher who helped found Memorial, told the Guardian last month. “Probably I was naive then.”

It is not hard to see how Putin, mired in historical conflicts over Crimea, Nato expansion and the fall of the Soviet Union, the second world war and more, sees investigation of Soviet history as a threat to national security. He is far more interested in perceived historical injustices committed against Russia than in the uncomfortable truths dug up by Memorial during the organisation’s three decades of work in the Russian archives.

“Our country needs an honest and conscientious understanding of the Soviet past; this is the key to its future,” the organisation wrote in a statement after its liquidation.In place of Memorial, which spoke out eloquently and aggressively about mass atrocities, the state is creating a more manicured and careful presentation of the deaths of millions, one that condemns their deaths more than their murders, identifying victims but not their killers.The Russian government would like to portray Memorial’s closure as a simple, bureaucratic extension of its “foreign agents” laws. But on Tuesday a prosecutor in court made the political motive explicit, saying in an impassioned speech that Memorial was “mendaciously portraying the USSR as a terrorist state”.

“Why should we, the descendants of the victors, have to see the vindication of traitors to their homeland and Nazi henchmen?” the prosecutor asked. A lawyer for Memorial said it reminded him of a 1930s show trial.

Memorial’s leadership has said it is useless trying to understand which of the government’s red lines it crossed to prompt the authorities to shut it down. Some believe it has to do with its archival and historical work on Soviet terror, others with its support for political prisoners such as Navalny.

Yet the truth is that Memorial has continued to do what it did since day one, while it is Russia that has changed again, perhaps ending a brief window when it would tolerate an independent reckoning of its past.

“It speaks to the fears of the government that it is no longer willing to tolerate the honest accounting of its conduct that Memorial provides,” said Kenneth Roth, the head of Human Rights Watch. “If that mirror is too awful to look at, the answer is to change the conduct, not to shatter the mirror.” (Andrew Roth)

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WTA has guts. Nations should take note

The WTA announced on Wednesday that it is suspending all tournaments in China, including those held in Hong Kong, in response to the ongoing situation surrounding Peng Shuai, who accused a senior leader of the ruling Communist Party of sexual assault and was subsequently not seen in public for several days. “In good conscience, I don’t see how I can ask our athletes to compete there when Peng Shuai is not allowed to communicate freely and has seemingly been pressured to contradict her allegation of sexual assault,” Steve Simon, the chairman and CEO of the WTA, said in a statement. “Given the current state of affairs, I am also greatly concerned about the risks that all of our players and staff could face if we were to hold events in China in 2022.”

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