Fish Fear Me

Julian Assange, Come On Down...

...You've won an all expenses paid trip to the USA:

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was arrested Thursday to face a U.S. charge that he conspired to hack military computers after Ecuador's government ended his seven years of self-imposed exile and expelled him from its London embassy. 

Police in the United Kingdom dragged Assange from the front door of the embassy Thursday morning.  He now faces extradition to the United States.

Specifically, Assange is charged with one count of conspiracy in agreeing to assist Bradley Manning in cracking a password so he could steal more files under a different username. The unsealed indictment can be viewed here.

The password charge is news to me. If Assange really did that he very foolishly moved from being a publisher of information that had already been stolen to being a co-conspirator. 

A DOJ press release implies that there may be other crimes, but at this time there are no related charges:

During the conspiracy, Manning and Assange engaged in real-time discussions regarding Manning’s transmission of classified records to Assange.  The discussions also reflect Assange actively encouraging Manning to provide more information.  During an exchange, Manning told Assange that “after this upload, that’s all I really have got left.”  To which Assange replied, “curious eyes never run dry in my experience.”

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Assange, through Wikileaks, is clearly a publisher and has 1st Amendment protections against some government prosecution. But if he went beyond actions to receive and publish classified information into conspiring to facilitate its theft, he's going to prison. 

 

Strib Strange

The Mohamed Noor trial opened today and the Strib story on it has another one of those weird things that drive me crazy:

Earlier, during the opening statements, [prosecutor]Lofton said that ballistics testing and an autopsy found that the 5-foot-7 Damond was shot in her lower-left abdomen, suggesting that the bullet may have traveled through the cruiser’s door. “He fired that shot without saying a word,” Lofton said of Noor.

"may have traveled through the cruiser’s door"

Well did it or didn't it? There are plenty of things in this case that are in dispute, but one would think whether there's a hole in the cruiser's door should not be one of them. There's no "may" here. Investigators found a hole or they didn't find a hole.

CBS News is reporting this as follows:

Assistant Hennepin County Attorney Patrick Lofton told jurors that Noor fired across his partner, Matthew Harrity, through an open driver's side window "without saying a word."

I'll think I'll go with CBS on this one, as I can't imagine a prepared prosecutor saying something so stupid in front of a jury. Where the Strib reporters got it and how it got past an editor is beyond me.

The Tax Return Farce

Mathew Walther has what I think is a smart piece on the Trump tax return nonsense today. Key paragraph:

We'll never be able to settle this bet, alas, because the president's tax returns are almost certainly never going to be revealed to the public. If they are, it will be because some IRS agent goes rogue, not because Trump's lawyers agree to comply with the ludicrous request made recently by Rep. Richard E. Neal, the Boy Scout Massachusetts Democrat who now heads the House Ways and Means Committee, for tax records from the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, various businesses entities, and the president himself. As the president's personal lawyer, William S. Consovoy, explained very ably in a letter that has been released to the public, this is nonsense.

Note the link in the last sentence if you want to read the president's legal position on this instead of the bullshit spin in the media.

I don't give a damn about Trump's tax return and I don't think most people do either. Anybody with a brain knows Trump has his share of the accountants and lawyers who have dedicated their careers to helping rich people pay as little in taxes as they can. Shockingly, nearly all Americans feel the same way.

Trump, like all rich people, has access to all sorts of nifty ways to avoid taxes that you and I don't or can't use. Politicians call these tax breaks if the rich person is on their side and loopholes if they aren't. And that's what this is really all about. Democrats want to weaponize the IRS and cynically scream LOOPHOLE! at Trump.

I think Walther is correct that the courts will eventually dispatch this ploy, after House Democrats have wasted a lot of time. And maybe that's a good thing. After all, screwing around with this stuff is time they could be spending on doing real damage to the US.

Crazy

Pretty much every announced Democrat candidate for president spent the weekend kissing Al Sharpton's ring and pledging support for the "study" of slavery reparations in the US. Clearly the best path to improving the lives of blacks in the US and improving race relations is to think about ways to take money from people who never owned slaves and give it to people who never were slaves.

(sigh)

That's madness, of course, and most of the Democrat candidates know that. They are simply pandering to some black voters and haven't the slightest intention of following through. That's why they are talking about a study instead of any substantial measures to implement. 

I think a few are not so cynical. They are looking to move the window some, because they want division and hate within America. Because they hate America. For them, pitting today's blacks and whites against each other is a feature, not a bug.

The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!

Tim Ryan official campaign poster:

Great Moments In "I Can't Even..." (cont.)

The Weather Channel is currently forecasting 10-21" of snow for the Twin Cities from Wednesday night through Friday. Guess the look on my face.

"I think this would be a good time for a beer."

I was going to give my liver the day off, but today is National Beer Day, and to not observe the occasion would simply be wrong.

Buttigieg Bullshit

I think this kind of virtue signaling bullshit...

...is an automatic disqualification to be president. Trump was talking about MS-13, and yes, they are goddamned animals.

Stolen From Twitter

What's Really The Point?

Last Friday the judge in the Mohamed Noor trial, Judge Kathryn L. Quaintance, ruled that video and photos taken in the immediate aftermath of the shooting of Justine Damond would be viewed only by the parties and the jury, not media or the general public:

Quaintance announced the decision at a pretrial hearing Friday, citing privacy concerns in the public seeing video that shows Damond in "extremely compromising situations."

News media have fired back:

In a motion filed Tuesday, the coalition of local print and broadcast news organizations say the First Amendment and common law rights of access to criminal trials prohibit Judge Kathryn L. Quaintance's plan to shield video and photo evidence, including footage captured by police body cameras after the shooting, from public view in the courtroom.

...

In the court filing, [attorney Leita]Walker argues this move will prevent journalists and members of the public from seeing how the jury reacts to the evidence. But it won't accomplish Quaintance's mission to protect the victim's privacy, because the evidence will become available to the public, under Minnesota's public records law, after it is presented to the jury, writes Walker.

Damond suffered a single gunshot wound to the abdomen according to the Minnesota BCA. It is not hard to imagine how life-saving measures may have resulted in "compromising" images that would be distressing to her family and friends. I'm sympathetic to the judge's intent here, but I don't know if she actually has the legal authority for her ruling. Transparency in legal proceedings is a pretty powerful argument.

However, if the news media coalition wins, will the public really get transparency? Or will the news media, having viewed the images themselves, self-censor and not publish the images out of respect for the victim and her family? Sorry people, these images are just to gruesome or disrespectful.

And if they do that, what was the point in the first place?