Pint-sized heroes

RO37 of Daily Kos discussed the nasty guy legal team’s claim that a proposed trial date for one of his crimes scheduled for January 2, 2024 is simply unreasonable and that the trial must be postponed until April 2026 (a year after the start of what he hopes is his second term). The reason they want the later date is there are 11.5 million pages of evidence and the defense team would need to review 100,000 pages a day to meet the earlier trial date. RO37 says they don’t know (or pretending they don’t know) how document reviews are done in the computer age. He says that with good authority – he works for a company that reviews documents for law firms. No, there are not 11.5 million pieces of paper and they haven’t been a thing for about 20 years. And with all the tools available to work through 11.5 million documents (including which documents say something similar to others or don’t add anything at all) he and his crew could get through them “in six weeks. Not six years. Not six months. Six weeks.” Handling this number of documents is now routine stuff.

[Judge] Chutkan, of course, is undoubtedly aware of common practices in handling larger volumes of evidence in major litigation. I think she is unlikely to be sympathetic to Team Trump’s claims of the need for a years-long delay. For Trump’s legal team to suggest that such volume requires years of review potentially implies complete ignorance of modern major litigation practices. More likely, it is a disingenuous ploy to undermine the credibility of the court in the public eye when their request is denied. TrumpWorld is all but certain to fall for it—but I know you won’t.

Back in 2010 Mark Sumner of Kos wrote the book, The Evolution of Everything: How selection shapes culture, commerce, and nature. Amazon lists it as limited availability. In this post Sumner applies those same principles to the Republican Party. In almost every democracy is a political party that is pro-business, anti-labor, and for “traditional values” – that being whatever their base believes. These are parties easily tipped into authoritarianism. Up until Reagan Republicans could work with Democrats when it benefited the nation (the Senate overrode Nixon’s veto of the Clean Water Act in two hours). Then Reagan harnessed dissatisfaction with government policies into support for crippling the government. Newt Gingrich went from limiting government to eroding governance – make the government inoperable. Both Gingrich and Reagan did it through emphasizing racism. That means the nasty guy’s ideas are not new. Reagan and Gingrich

applied selective pressure that boosted the candidate willing to adopt the most radical view of Reagan’s racist authoritarianism—even if that meant going to positions even Reagan would find abhorrent.

That selective pressure was (and still is) hate and fear.

That’s also not a new thing. Hate, especially in the form of racism, has long been the most effective means of persuading people to take actions that with any reflection would obviously be damaging to their own interests. Make people hate enough and keep them scared enough, and that reflection never happens. ... Republicans have pushed their racism, anti-labor, anti-environment, and anti-government schtick to a near end game. When you've labeled your opponents satanic pedophile communist cannibals in service to a deep state conspiracy of international (read: Jewish) billionaires, what action can’t be justified? More importantly, what do you do for an encore? Right now, Republicans appear to be running almost entirely on a syrup derived from attacking the LGBTQ+ community, but there’s only so many times you can say “drag queen story time” before it loses its punch. They’ve already consumed the good stuff.

A phrase used by the right is “America is not a democracy.” No they are not misunderstanding that a republic is a democracy. They are paving the way for getting rid of democracy. Taking his evolution ideas a step further, Sumner says there are two possible scenarios for the Republican Party. The first is they go into full fascism. The second is they go extinct. We hope for the second. Earlier this week I wrote about the case in Montana won by a group of 16 kids who had sued for a cleaner environment. Sumner discussed what effect (lots, we hope) this ruling will have on other such cases.

The case is certainly concerning Republicans. As HuffPost reports, Sen. Steve Daines responded with a statement about “[a]ctivist judges … helping far-Left environmentalists push their green hallucination down the throats of Americans.” Yeah, those kids are just pint-sized lobbyists. And after all, it’s not as if July was the hottest month in the history of mankind or something. (Spoiler alert: It was.) Republicans are also calling these kids “pawns.” But there’s a better word: They’re heroes. And we’re going to need a lot more like the Montana 16.