<<Refused FSR
chancho
saffy
HeMateMe
Plang
nok
Rdb
keypusher
stone free on lie
pervicious
al wazir>

What do they all have in common?

1.e4 e6 2.d4 d5 3.Nc3 Bb4 4.e5 c5 5.a3 Bxc3+ 6.bxc3 Ne7 7.h4 Bd7 8.h5 h6 9.Qg4 Qc7 10.Qxg7 Rg8 11.Qxh6 cxd4 12.Ne2 Nbc6 13.Qd2 dxc3 14.Qxc3 Qxe5 15.Qxe5 Nxe5 16.h6 N7g6 17.Nf4 f6 18.Nxg6 Nxg6 19.Rb1 Rc8 20.Rxb7 Rxc2 21.Bb2 Ne5 22.f4 Ng4 23.h7 Rh8 24.Bd3 Rc8 25.Rh4 Ne3 26.Kd2 Nc4+ 1-0>

<Michael Cohen's legal adviser, Lanny Davis, identified what he called a "smoking gun" in former President Donald Trump's ongoing criminal trial in Manhattan.

On Monday, Davis published a story in RealClearPolitics that discussed the ongoing trial against Trump. The former president is accused of arranging for Cohen, his ex-lawyer, to make hush-money payments to former adult film star Stormy Daniels.

In the piece, titled "Smoking Gun in Trump's New York Prosecution," Davis mentions the "Weisselberg Document," and calls it the "most crucial document in the entire trial."

"In [former Trump Organization chief financial officer] Allen Weisselberg's own handwriting, a memo shows that a total of $210,000 was to be reimbursed to Michael Cohen for money owed to him by Donald Trump, including the $130,000 in hush money Cohen paid to Stormy Daniels on Trump's behalf because he was worried her revelations would harm his campaign [according to Trump friend David Pecker and top Trump aide Hope Hicks, among others]," Davis wrote, describing the document.

Davis then goes on to state that Weisselberg doubled the $210,000 to equal $420,000 on the document so that Cohen can pay taxes on "the total "reimbursement" at an estimated 50% tax bracket."

"Then Weisselberg, a former executive in the Trump Organization, does the elementary school math to arrive at Trump's monthly installment payments over a year to repay Cohen—$420,000/12 equals $35,000 per month," Davis wrote.

"Yes, $35,000. The same amount as Trump's checks that are in evidence. It's just simple math: $210,000 times two, divided by 12 = $35,000. Nothing is mentioned about legal fees."

Newsweek has not been able to verify Davis' claims and has reached out to a Trump spokesperson via email for comment.

Monday, May 20, marked the beginning of the sixth week of Trump's criminal trial in Manhattan. The former president was indicted by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg last April, who said that the former president "fraudulently falsified New York business records to conceal crimes that hid damaging information—including a $130,000 hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels—from the public during the 2016 presidential campaign."

Trump has continued to deny any wrongdoing in the case, including Daniels' allegation that they had a sexual encounter, and has repeatedly said it should be dismissed.

In his article, Davis wrote that while it is unclear if the jury in the case will conclude that the "Weisselberg Document" shows that Trump lied when he called the payments "legal expenses," he noted that "the inference is as strong as the classic example of convincing circumstantial evidence."

Newsweek's Katherine Fung, who has been inside the courtroom, reported on Monday that Cohen affirmed during his testimony that Trump knew nothing about the Daniels payment when the story broke in early 2018.>

<There is a silver lining to Donald Trump bulldozing a major political party — Americans get a chance to see inside the wreckage of the old GOP.

Evangelicals claiming to uphold family values were long ago exposed as their principles fell away to allow them to justify support for a candidate known to talk of grabbing women and consorting with pornographic actresses.

But now Trump’s demolition of the GOP is nearly complete with news that he has put an end to FreedomWorks.

FreedomWorks once led roaring conservative opposition to President Obama’s health care plan, the Affordable Care Act. At Tea Party town halls organized by FreedomWorks, the principal complaint was that ObamaCare was big government interference in private sector health insurance.

Principled support for free market economics does not fit with Trump’s embrace of big tariffs.

Principled conservative opposition to big government also went out the door when Trump’s tax cuts helped to explode the national debt by $8 trillion.

FreedomWorks lost it all because the party is now defined by the Trump’s agenda. The organization got run over for refusing to “basically prostitute themselves,” to Trump, Matt Salmon, the former Arizona Republican congressman, recently told The Washington Post.

FreedomWorks’ leaders agree.

“If you are out of step with [Trumpism], how are you going to raise money,” asked Adam Brandon, the president of FreedomWorks.

Paul Beckner, a member of the group’s board, told Politico that “conservative donors” have gone from supporting right-wing principles to asking, “What are you doing for Trump today?”

The Trump bulldozer has also reduced to rubble the once-sacred GOP belief in the U.S. as a champion to the world for democracy. Trump wants no part of that and takes an isolationist approach, turning his back a conservative principle once held high by Republican presidents named Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush....>

<....The principled GOP belief in America as a welcome home to people fleeing oppression is also on the trash pile. Trump long ago discarded Reagan and Bush’s effort to update the immigration system to welcome newcomers to a nation of immigrants.

FreedomWorks is just one of the right-wing groups being buried by Trump’s cult of personality.

Americans for Prosperity, the Koch-funded group, has also been reduced to an afterthought. The business-first group spent tens of millions of dollars supporting former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley’s bid for the GOP presidential nomination. Trump beat her and the group had nowhere to go.

The same goes for the Heritage Foundation, once the leading think tank on the right, framing policy decisions around conservative principles. Now they have been exposed as a Trump satellite, reduced to housing “Project 2025,” a group of Trump supporters writing plans for how Trump can gain maximum power over the government if he wins a second term.

Trump’s acolytes are using Heritage as a front while looking for ways to justify “turning Trumpism into a governing agenda,” as Robert Borosage put it in the Nation. Heritage, he added, is now just a Trump-approved site to “recruit, train and plant MAGA operatives throughout the government and arm them with clear marching orders.”

Several other formerly leading lights of the old party have abandoned past principles to join with “Project 2025.” The Claremont Institute, Turning Point USA and Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America are all part of this rush to identify executive orders that Trump can sign without congressional oversight.

“That’s really what our meat and potatoes work is — that playbook where we are doing diagnostics on each federal agency…[preparing] executive orders, or perhaps even regulations, new guidance,” the director of Project 2025, Paul Dans, told Semafor.

“Chapter by chapter, Project 2025 offers a how-to manual for the conversion of our democracy to an authoritarian style government,” Dick Hall wrote in a column for The Oklahoman.

In today’s Republican Party, there is little evidence that conservative principles matter to MAGA base voters consumed with grievance and anger. How else do you explain elected Republican members of Congress rushing to New York to show solidarity with Trump while he is on trial for falsifying business records to pay hush money to a porn actress?

Last week, a new group called “Our Republican Legacy” launched, in a last-ditch effort to counter the party’s abandonment of traditional conservative principles. The new organization highlights five principles of old-line Republican conservatism: the Constitution, union, fiscal responsibility, free enterprise and peace through strength.

Their supporters include former Vice President Dan Quayle, former Speaker John Boehner, Former RNC Chairman Michael Steele and scores of former Republican senators and congressmen.

“We can’t predict whether Trump will win or lose the election,” said Former Republican U.S. Sen. John Danforth, a founder of the new group. “But we can predict that he will lose much of his support either way. If he’s defeated in November, he’ll be seen as a two-time loser. If he wins, he’ll quickly overplay his hand and become even more indefensible.”

“For those who boast that traditional Republicanism is dead, we issue this challenge: Tell us — tell the nation — precisely how and why you disagree with this group’s five defining principles,” members of the group wrote last week in the Washington Post.

But rebuilding the party will be an uphill struggle while Trump has the bulldozer on full blast.>

<Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has been putting in a lot of hours into trying to convince Texas voters, specifically Hispanic Texas voters, that there’s much more to him than the trolly, argumentative, hard-right hysterical persona he’s carefully crafted throughout his career in the Senate.

As he prepares to go up against Rep. Colin Allred (D-TX) in the fall, Cruz has been making the rounds, trying to message his way into appearing bipartisan. Allred’s challenge appears to be one Cruz is taking seriously, despite Cruz’s lead in the polls, as Allred has been out-raising him for weeks. During a recent Texas meeting of the U.S. Hispanic Business Council, Cruz announced a new “Democrats for Cruz” effort to try to reach more voters ahead of the 2024 election. He also has been recently touting his working relationships with Democrats like Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (NY), Cory Booker (NJ) and Amy Klobuchar (MN).

Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL) obviously stands to do some image rehab herself, after freaking everyone out with her delivery of the Republican response to President Biden’s State of the Union address.

So the two have teamed up to introduce legislation that they claim would, if it passed the Senate, ensure federal protections for in-vitro fertilization, the extremely popular and highly common procedure used to help people facing fertility issues conceive. Both also represent states where the courts have either weighed in on IVF protections in recent months or soon will. In Texas, a pending court case involving a divorced couple’s dispute over frozen embryos could soon have implications on the accessibility of IVF in the state.

And as TPM has previously reported, Republicans have been struggling for months to properly message on the procedure, after Alabama’s Supreme Court issued a ruling that declared embryos to be “children” earlier this year. The decision came down as part of a wrongful death suit, but the fetal personhood ideology underlying the decision quickly became a stumbling block for Republicans who were quick to also vocalize their support for the idea that embryos are babies.

But when it became clear that the ruling would have a chilling effect on the availability of the procedure in the state — an extremely unpopular outcome that would affect voters across the political spectrum — Republicans backtracked, grasping for a way to still claim that embryos were “children” while also declaring their support for the common fertility treatment. That heartburn manifested in the introduction of empty resolutions that proclaimed support for the procedure but that did little to actually protect IVF. Even worse, Senate Republicans blocked the advancement of a Democratic bill that would’ve codified federal protections for IVF, the same bill they blocked when Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) tried to introduce it in 2022, after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling.

So Cruz and Britt, in their hour of need, are returning to the IVF well to try to garner some likability, given how widely supported protections are among voters. Their proposed legislation, they said, would “clear up confusion after an Alabama Supreme Court ruling,” though it doesn’t directly address the ruling. An excerpt of the pair’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Monday, announcing their bill:

To address these concerns, we will introduce a bill on Monday to ensure IVF access is legally protected nationwide. The legislation would require, as a condition of receiving federal Medicaid funding, that states don’t prohibit IVF. While the Alabama Legislature after the court’s decision promptly reiterated that IVF is protected, federal legislation would eliminate any ambiguity that might arise from future state-level judicial interpretations. Our goal is to make sure that any family’s path to bringing a child into the world isn’t compromised by preventable legal confusion.

But as the Daily Kos writer Joan McCarter and others noted throughout the day Monday, it appears the bill does not actually establish IVF as a right or include any actual legal protections for the procedure. It just raises the specter of access to Medicaid funds being cut off in red states where potential bans on IVF may arise. Biden is already seizing on the bill to remind voters Senate Republicans had the opportunity to support the procedure twice in the last two years and did nothing.

<President George W. Bush appointed Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court in 2005. Alito, an obscure circuit court judge in Philadelphia, was Bush’s second choice for the job.

The meaning of the Italian word “alito” in English is breath, as in to take a deep breath. Lawyers were left breathless the other day when it was revealed that an upside-down American flag flew for several days in front of Justice Alito’s home in Alexandria, Va. shortly after Jan. 6, 2021. Previously, there had been little doubt that Alito was an extremist judge with radical right-wing biases. Now there is none.

While the flag was aloft, the court was considering a 2020 election case from Pennsylvania, with Alito on the losing side. The issue in the case was whether ballots cast before Election Day but received by mail within three days after Election Day should be counted. An upside-down American flag is generally identified with a republic in distress. On Jan. 6, it was identified with the “Stop the Steal” movement and the Proud Boys, a far-right organization, which participated in the attack on the Capitol. The claimed “steal” was, of course, a “big lie.” Alito tried to make light of the brouhaha. He said his wife had erected the flag to protest neighbors’ “F— Trump” signs. He said he hardly noticed the flag. Tell me another one.

“I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” Alito said to the New York Times. “It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”

Judicial experts said in interviews that the flag was a clear violation of ethics rules, which seek to avoid even the appearance of bias, and could sow doubt about Alito’s impartiality in cases related to the 2020 election and the Capitol riot.

Alito, a former United States Attorney from New Jersey, knows how to slither out of things.

When he flew to a luxurious Alaskan fishing junket in 2008 on the private plane of Paul Singer — a GOP megadonor and billionaire hedge fund operator with major business before the court — Alito claimed he didn’t know what Singer did for a living and was unaware that Singer’s company had pending a major high-profile matter on the court’s docket involving billions of dollars in Argentinian bonds. Singer had frequently litigated high-stakes business disputes before the court. Alito subsequently voted for Singer in a case that handed him a $2.4 billion victory. He failed to report Singer’s treating him to the plane ride and the fishing trip, although the law required him to do so....>

<.....Justice Abe Fortas was forced to resign in 1969 over a $20,000 retainer from a foundation controlled by financier Louis Wolfson, who potentially had business before the Supreme Court. Alito still sits.

The flag incident is particularly problematic in light of a statement from indicted Trump attorney Sidney Powell. She said that part of Trump’s post-election strategy was to delay certification of the Electoral College vote until Alito, who sits as Circuit Justice for Pennsylvania’s Third Circuit, could issue an injunction further delaying certification so the election could be thrown into the House of Representatives — where Trump had an advantage, as each state would get one vote to decide a contested presidential election. According to Powell, Speaker Nancy Pelosi thwarted the plot by proceeding immediately to the certification once the Capitol was secured.

Alito is set to rule in two cases involving the Jan. 6 riot. One of these is the matter of Trump’s immunity. Alito has already expressed receptivity to Trump’s claims at oral argument. He even suggested as a policy matter that the peaceful transfer of power would be promoted if the outgoing president did not have to fear criminal prosecution for official acts. Where did he find that one in the Constitution?

There is also the obstruction case, where Alito will get to vote on whether the law against obstruction of an official proceeding applies to the events of Jan. 6; this criminal statute is the heart of the government’s case against the former president.

Alito acts like a legislator — a politician in robes. In Dobbs v. Women’s Health Organization, he wrote the opinion overturning a half-century of super precedent — the landmark decision in Roe v. Wade, which had been reaffirmed by the Supreme Court every time the issue was presented. Roe, a seven-to-two decision, had been concurred in by five Republican-appointed justices, and could not have gone the way it did without them. But those were in the days when judges reached conclusions based on the law, not on the policy preferences of the president who appointed them.

Alito has now gone too far. Some are calling for his impeachment or, at a minimum, his recusal in Trump-related cases. Senators are calling for term limits for Supreme Court justices, which Congress could accomplish despite the constitutional provision guaranteeing lifetime tenure.

Even before the new advisory canons of ethics for the Supreme Court, which Chief Justice John Roberts acceded to reluctantly, justices were not supposed to sit in cases where their impartiality could be fairly questioned. Alito is no exception.

There is too much at stake for our democracy to have these important questions determined by a controversial jurist whose bias and partisan policy preferences override the law.

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, called on Congress to enact the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act, which his committee advanced last July. The bill would require the justices to adopt a binding code of conduct; create a mechanism to investigate alleged violations of that code and other laws; improve disclosure and transparency when a justice has a connection to a party or amicus before the court; and require justices to explain their recusal decisions to the public.

Durbin has been vainly calling on the court to enact an enforceable code of conduct for over a decade. He first sent the chief justice a letter on the subject 12 years ago. It’s high time.>

<[Event "7th Eastern Class Championships"] [Site "Woburn Mass"]
[Date "1998.03.08"]
[Round "5"]
[White "DeFirmian, Nick"]
[Black "Perelshteyn, Eugene"]
[Result "1/2-1/2"]
[ECO "B36"]
[WhiteElo "2703"]
[BlackElo "2468"]

<[Event "7th Eastern Class Championships"] [Site "Woburn Mass"]
[Date "1998.03.08"]
[Round "5"]
[White "Treger, Yefim"]
[Black "Cappallo, Rigel"]
[Result "0-1"]
[ECO "C15"]
[WhiteElo "2230"]
[BlackElo "2292"]