Categories
crime and punishment First Amendment rights general freedom

Richly Revealing

There is something rich in the latest gag order placed on Mr. Trump.

“Former President Donald Trump on March 27 criticized the New York judge overseeing his ‘hush money’ case and criticized the judge’s daughter,” explains Jack Phillips of The Epoch Times, “just hours after the judge handed down a gag order against him.”

Richly … ironic? 

Apt? 

Idiotic?

“This Judge,” the former president wrote on his own social media site, “by issuing a vicious ‘Gag Order,’ is wrongfully attempting to deprive me of my First Amendment Right to speak out against the Weaponization of Law Enforcement, including the fact that Crooked Joe Biden, Merrick Garland, and their Hacks and Thugs are tracking and following me all across the Country, obsessively trying to persecute me, while everyone knows I have done nothing wrong!”

To them, Orange Man’s very existence is “wrong,” and the thing they most want is Trump to shut up. So, in the course of a trial upon a subject combining campaign finance regulations with more prurient interests, a judge gagging the defendant from speaking in public about his prosecutors is … well, convenient. For them. 

The prosecution is arguably an attempt to silence Trump; gag orders remove doubt. And allow the Empire State to exact the punishment before the trial concludes.

The prosecutors and politicians and major media propagandists who are aghast at Trump’s charges aren’t exactly saying that what Trump says about the judge’s daughter (that she “represents Crooked Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, and other Radical Liberals”) is false

They object … because … what he says makes them look bad.

And what they are trying to do is make Trump look bad.

Just rich. 

With meaning. 

More philosophically minded folks say we have a crisis of meaning these days. I don’t know. I see meaning everywhere!

But it’s not always meaning we like.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Categories
crime and punishment insider corruption

Texas-​sized Trouble

Texas Governor and 2012 presidential candidate Rick Perry has never been exactly “my guy.” But now he seems like a kindred spirit, having been indicted on two felony counts of … well … as the indictment states it, “threatening to veto legislation that had been approved and authorized by the Legislature of the State of Texas.”

The indictment is only two pages. Easy to read.

What seems hard to read is why a prosecutor would bring a criminal charge in a case like this.

Last year, Governor Perry publicly and transparently threatened a veto of the $7.5 million in funding for the Public Integrity Unit of the Travis County District Attorney’s office unless Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg resigned her office.

Why should she resign? Lehmberg was arrested and convicted for driving drunk and still found it necessary to behave badly in the process. Which arguably, per Gov. Perry, clashed with her continuation as head of the Public Integrity shop.

Lehmberg refused to resign and Perry vetoed the $7.5 million.

Now Perry is facing two felony charges from the same prosecutor’s office that has had other high profile cases — most famously the prosecution of Tom DeLay — end in acquittal. If convicted, he could face up to a 99-​year sentence.

Someone more “my guy,” former Texas Congressman Ron Paul, called the indictment “pure politics” and “a joke.”

He didn’t mean it was funny, though. It is a very serious signal of just how out of control our political process has become.

Governors have the constitutional veto power for a reason. Threatening a veto is standard politics. It’s their job.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.