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| Donald Trump highlights a time when he was not convicted. |
Convicted on 34 felony counts by a New York jury, Donald Trump was forced to call illegal transactions that were the basis of his convictions *Business Expenses* because there was no box labeled *Bribes.*
I. The First Sunday Following The Killings
Oh holy and
loving God,
please don't
let this have
happened
II. The Second Sunday Following The Killings
Understanding and wise God,
Grant that we may, without
doing anything different,
be protected from further
atrocities of the sort we
now so earnestly grieve.
III. The Third Sunday Following The Killings
Almighty and everliving God,
if it be Thy will that we
ought in all good conscience to change anything
in thought, word, or deed
to prevent the evil or the mad from
misusing these Thy gifts of semi-automatic
sports rifles bearing
frangible ammunition in
high capacity magazines to
snuff the wick of life from
children and other noncombatants,
grant us a sign--
clear and convincing--
that we may with one mind and heart agree
to forego a portion of our profits and
endure some diminution at the margins
of our precious personal freedom.
So we do now wait on Thee,
pledging that, should some sign issue
unmistakably from Thy hand,
we will lay this matter to rest
even as we have so recently
laid to rest the bodies of
those we grieve this day.
IV. The Fourth Sunday Following The Killings
Patient and enduring God,
One week has passed in silence
since we sought a clear word from Thee
on gun violence.
With that week passed also
400 of your children,
dead from gunshots
along American streets and
within American homes.
How long Lord?
How long must
we wait
for Thee
to act?
The President’s statement to the American people
Today, I signed a pardon for my son Hunter. From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making, and I kept my word even as I have watched my son being selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted. Without aggravating factors like use in a crime, multiple purchases, or buying a weapon as a straw purchaser, people are almost never brought to trial on felony charges solely for how they filled out a gun form. Those who were late paying their taxes because of serious addictions, but paid them back subsequently with interest and penalties, are typically given non-criminal resolutions. It is clear that Hunter was treated differently.
The charges in his cases came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election. Then, a carefully negotiated plea deal, agreed to by the Department of Justice, unraveled in the court room – with a number of my political opponents in Congress taking credit for bringing political pressure on the process. Had the plea deal held, it would have been a fair, reasonable resolution of Hunter’s cases.
No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son – and that is wrong. There has been an effort to break Hunter – who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me – and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.
For my entire career I have followed a simple principle: just tell the American people the truth. They’ll be fair-minded. Here’s the truth: I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice – and once I made this decision this weekend, there was no sense in delaying it further. I hope Americans will understand why a father and a President would come to this decision.
__________
Executive Grant of Clemency
Joseph R. Biden, Jr.
President of the United States of America
To All to Whom These Presents Shall Come, Greeting:
Be It Known, That This Day, I, Joseph R. Biden, Jr., President of the United States, Pursuant to My Powers Under Article II, Section 2, Clause 1, of the Constitution, Have Granted Unto
ROBERT HUNTER BIDEN
A Full and Unconditional Pardon
For those offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024, including but not limited to all offenses charged or prosecuted (including any that have resulted in convictions) by Special Counsel David C. Weiss in Docket No. 1:23-cr-00061-MN in the United States District Court for the District of Delaware and Docket No. 2:23-CR-00599-MCS-1 in the United States District Court for the Central District of California.
IN TESTIMONY WHEREOF I have hereunto signed my name and caused the Pardon to be recorded with the Department of Justice.
Done at the City of Washington this 1st day of December in the year of our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty-four and of the Independence of the United States the Two Hundred and Forty-ninth.
Last week, Fox Business host Stuart Varney reported that one of the president-elect’s aides says that Trump is conducting a hostile takeover on behalf of the American people.
On November 15, the Yale historian Timothy Snyder laid out the conditions under which political cultures collapse, nations collapse. Snyder laid out five indispensable concerns that have to be dealt with in order for nations to thrive — and that crumble when nations are destroyed.
The five are health, law, administration, defense, and intelligence.
Snyder wrote, "Imagine that you are a foreign leader who wishes to destroy the United States. How could you do so? The easiest way would be to get Americans to do the work themselves, to somehow induce Americans to undo their own health, law, administration, defense, and intelligence."
And he pointed to the threat posed by the earliest nominees to fill cabinet positions and leadership positions within the new administration:
Robert Kennedy Jr. - Health
Matt Gaetz, and now Pam Bondi - Law.
Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy - Administration,
Peter Hegseth - Defense
Tulsi Gabbard - Intelligence
Snyder said this group of nominees — "people who believe that government should exist for the wealthy or not at all" — is setting the table for dismantling American democracy in our 250th year:
From this perspective, Trump's proposed appointments -- Kennedy, Jr.; Gaetz; Musk; Ramaswamy; Hegseth; Gabbard -- are perfect instruments. They combine narcissism, incompetence, corruption, sexual incontinence, personal vulnerability, dangerous convictions, and foreign influence as no group before them has done. These proposed appointments look like a decapitation strike: destroying the American government from the top, leaving the body politic to rot, and the rest of us to suffer.
Is this just Donald Trump trolling the Senate and the American people?
I'm not certain I know the answer to that.
I think there are some in the administration — both the Stevens, Miller, and Bannon — who appear to have the frame of mind to mess with the system, and with the people.
And I think that others in the loop do as well; in particular, Musk, Hegseth, Ramaswamy .. and Gaetz, as an outsider — though he’s gone from Member of Congress, to Attorney General nominee, to making Cameo videos in just over a week, so … maybe not.
I don't think there are any of these people that Trump and his supporters wouldn't accept gladly into the administration if they could clear the Senate, or by going around the Senate if they were able to do so.
I think if they thought they could get away with it, they would overturn the whole thing, and not look twice at the consequences.
And if they can't get away with it, then they might say, "We were just kidding."
So, I think we have to put down markers at the very least.
We have to say, "This is fact. This is what we see happening in the economy, in foreign relations, in the military, in the intelligence community, and the law, right now."
I think we have to drive stakes in the ground, to say, "This is the state of play as the Biden administration ends. And this is what the next administration proposes — and/or is doing — to accomplish the ends they have announced."
At the very least, we need to be able to do what the War Department did in 1945 when they distributed to every officer in the military a discussion paper to go through with their troops, simply called Fascism! — outlining how to recognize fascism abroad and at home, because there were a lot of fascists in the United States then too.
Similarly, we need to be able to say, "This is what we see. This is what we think it means."
That doesn’t include overplaying our hand. Robert Kennedy is not a hundred percent wrong, right?
Americans don't eat well. Of course, in the world of false equivalence, in 2009, when Michelle Obama launched a healthy eating initiative, she was called the leader of the Nanny State. But, apparently, it's okay now, as long as our guy is doing it.
Right?
There are some issues that anybody can see need to be cleaned up, but that doesn't mean the bathwater isn't dirty. There are instances in which not being all wrong is not the same as being right. And that certainly extends to not being right for the job.
So we take the good where we find it; and thoroughly reject the bad where we find it.
We do that one day at a time, yes…. But we do not get caught up in just the tick-tock of it all.
There's a bigger picture. And these nominees are part of that.
The outrage machine in all its grift and glory can get so caught up in individual words and actions that we have difficulty seeing which words are important and need to be marked because they are in the context of a whole sentence … and which actions need to be marked because they’re part of a whole series of consequential actions.
They matter to NATO.
They matter to Ukraine.
They matter to Israel and the Palestinian people.
They matter to all who live in climate distress.
The matter to already marginalized citizens and guests in the United States.
They matter to people who work for a living, whose livelihoods can be wiped out by heedless policy decisions motivated by ideology rather than efficacy in the real economy.
All this matters across the board. And doing our best to take it all in requires the best from all of us for the foreseeable future.
_______________________
