What will probably become known as the Stormy Daniels trial began yesterday. There was much effort to delay it. There was wailing and gnashing of teeth as the good book says. Barring any unforeseen developments, the justice system has finally arrived at a place that it should have upwards of 40 years ago.

There is one nagging question that MAGA is asking and it deserves to be answered. Aren’t these prosecutions politically motivated? We’ve been ducking and side-stepping that question long enough. The simple answer is yes. They are politically motivated. However, I’m not sure if the details behind that answer really line up with what MAGA thinks it means.

The fact is that all of this is a prison of Donald’s thinking. Even if we take the facts from this particular case, we’d have to reach that conclusion. Would he have lost the election if the voting public found out he had a fling with a porn star? My guess is that it wouldn’t have had much of an effect at all. After the Access Hollywood tape came out, there was no doubt about who he was.

The defense is essentially the same one we give to the police officer when we get pulled over for speeding. Look at all the other people speeding. While that might seem persuasive, we cannot deflect from the obvious point that we were in fact speeding. Similarly, Richard Nixon could point to dirty tricks that others had pulled throughout history as some sort of relative defense, but he was caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

I surmise that at least half of these prosecutions wouldn’t be happening at all if he weren’t running for president again. Of course, that observation cuts both ways. A normal president would have accepted defeat, went back home, and made a killing on the lecture circuit. He would have sold books or been a guest professor at some prestigious university. He likes golf. He could have played every day on just about any course he wanted.

History has seen this happen before and history has seen similar deals go awry. Most of western Europe made a deal with Napoleon in order to get him out of power without bloodshed. That didn’t work, Appeasement didn’t work with Nazi Germany. I suspect that overtures were made behind the scenes to broker a similar deal with Trump. Just return the documents and move on with your merry life and no one would be the wiser.

The Donald cannot accept defeat even if it is the prudent thing to do. That’s all this has been about and all that it ever will be about. He lost in 2020 and couldn’t accept it. He continues to lose and can’t accept it. He lost for decades in business and refuses to accept it or learn from it. It is essentially hubris mixed liberally with idiocy. A wiser man would have walked away a long time ago.

Donald is not most people. I suspect most of us wouldn’t have sex with a porn star when our wife was pregnant. I suspect most of us wouldn’t consider stealing confidential or secret files from our place of work. We certainly wouldn’t hide them from the authorities after the fact. Donald is clearly not most people. So, would you or I be prosecuted in a similar situation? I suspect just about anyone else wouldn’t be in this position in the first place and that is kind of the whole point.

OK, here’s a hypothetical. Say that there is a highly placed legislator who decides to do a podcast to create an online presence. Then, a major media company gives the legislator a leg up to increase the podcast’s visibility over their nationwide media network as well as to triple the legislator’s weekly episode output.

Then, the media company funnels advertisement revenue from the thrice-weekly shows to an independent political action committee whose sole purpose is to see that the legislator is re-elected.

Then let’s say the same legislator, who sits as the ranking member of a powerful committee with oversight of commerce, science, and transportation, sponsors a bill to prevent auto makers from excluding AM radios from the cars that they make. But, hold on, the same media company that sends all of that money to the legislator’s independent PAC owns 250 AM radio stations nationwide.

Isn’t that, at best, a conflict of interest? Wouldn’t just that be enough to warrant a hard pass at the ballot box the next time the legislator is up for re-election?

Now imagine that it’s this guy.

Someone really smart once said that the universe bends towards justice. I’m not really sure if the universe bends at all. I’m just a mere cog in the machine of life, so no mysteries have been revealed to me over the years. However, it seems that things in the financial world might be trending that way. I’m certainly not an expert in the stock market or investment game. I let our broker handle our retirement accounts and all of that. However, I can do some simple math and the whole hubabaloo around Truth Social and the parent company that went public just wasn’t mathing as the kids say.

According to reporting, Trump owns 60 percent of the stock and it opened with a 5.1 billion dollar evaluation just for his share. My crack math skills (and fingers on my calculator) tell me that meant that the company opened with an evaluation of around eight billion dollars. It’s been awhile since I taught Economics, so the details might be fuzzy, but it seems to me that eight billion dollars is a lot of money. It seems fantastical that a company that doesn’t really produce anything, is hemorrhaging cash, and losing users left and right would somehow be worth that amount of money. Then again, I thought Elon Musk paid too much for Twitter by a factor of ten.

Apparently, I wasn’t alone in this thought. A stock that opened at 71 dollars a share is now barely over 30 a share in less than two weeks. Now comes the funny part. According to the details of the deal, Trump cannot sell his shares until six months after the company went public. Even then I think there are some rules in place that will make it somewhat challenging. Of course, I am not a corporate lawyer or financial expert, but it seems to me that 30 is less than 71. It also seems that a company that has never actually made money and has nothing really to sell is likely not even worth 30 dollars a share. The stock has been bleeding between five and ten percent value every day it has been traded.

This hammers home two points every red blooded American should understand before stepping into a voting booth. First, the stock market is not a great indicator of the economic health of the nation. For one, most Americans don’t have enough to invest heavily in the stock market. Secondly, there are enough examples of horseshit evaluations like this one to demonstrate that looking to the stock market for any kind of accurate perception of the economy at large is foolish.

The second point is that justice is not swift even in cosmic world of universal justice. Yet, in this case it is almost better. You had to know that when the stock opened up, the orange menace saw the eight billion evaluation and saw dollar signs in his head. He saw all of his financial woes coming to an end. He was finally going to be a big boy billionaire. A stock drop from 71 to 1 would be hilarious, but it is so much better to see it just leak away slowly every day. It allows him to get into the mode of thinking of “if it stays here I can still be a billionaire.” The best news would be for it to reach that mythical worthlessness just one day before he is eligible to sell. That’s cosmic justice. That’s the universe finally bending to whack him on the ass. May it be so.

Living way outside the path of totality this time, I watched it on TV. Then had to get busy writing to my County Commissioners. The MAGAts are coming for them, and they need back up.

Fort Bend is not the only red county I’ve lived in that has ‘issues’. A little over a year ago I wrote about our Constitutional Sheriff Songer hiring his fellow Constitutional Sheriff, former GOP Senate and Gubernatorial candidate Loren Culp to mind the county jail. Well, the chickens have come home to roost so to speak, and the hen house is in really tough shape. The Commissioners had to call a special meeting, voted to Shut Down The Jail, and contract the jailing to the Northern Regional Correctional facility just across the Columbia in The Dalles. You know, the professionals. If you thought a rural county like Klickitat (population 23,000 or so) should be able to handle their law enforcement and holding facilities, you’d be wrong. Once Mr. Constitutional Sheriff Songer got a taste of national attention, I guess he couldn’t get enough. So here’s what got him more notice.

A year ago, a young Native American man going through fentanyl withdrawal was being held in the jail. No intake examination or medical screening. No medical treatment. No detox protocols. No mental health care. In a solitary cell with means for him to commit suicide. And so he did. Now his parents are suing. The only screening was a risk assessment by a corrections officer, who wrote that the man had no signs of mental health issues, was not acting strange or under the influence, not disoriented or confused, had never attempted suicide, no signs he was vulnerable. Yet other records show he was not fully conscious when he arrived, and his (available) county records showed past reports of attempted suicide. That’s ONE.

Then last fall, a woman who had been in the jail for two months (for a parole violation) ended up in the hospital in deteriorating condition, ”covered in bugs, potentially septic and smelled ‘like dead rotting flesh’ according to an on-scene officer”.  She was treated and has since been released. If you dare, you can find more here, but it’s a tough read. You know these guys hate it when public tv and radio get on their case. And like all good MAGAts, Songer and Culp are blaming the State of Washington for their mess. That’s TWO.

Add to all this a great big bill from the hospital for treating people from the jail who are left to fester, and the Commissioners also have a budget crunch added to the tale of woe. That’s THREE STRIKES, you’re out. So good on them for doing the right thing and proposing to contract out to professionals who can deal with the prisoners humanely. But the blowback from the Sheriff, his posse, armed wanna be LEOs and the red hat crowd is huge. They are overflowing Commission meetings, snagging up all the spots on the zoom links, and scaring the bejeezus out of the rest of us citizens like the commissioners who are just trying to do a good job for the county and all of its citizens.

Damn, I was hoping for a rapture today. But they are still here.

Not to belabor the point, well OK, belaboring the point, did you hear that after learning that their advertisement fees were being funneled to Ted Cruz’s Truth and Courage PAC, a PAC completely devoted to the re-election of Senator Ted “Cancun” Cruz, iHeartMedia advertisers are bailing?

It’s true.

“BP America told the Dallas Morning News it was unaware ad revenues from the podcast benefit the Truth and Courage PAC, a political organization that list its primary goal is ensuring Cruz is reelected to the U.S. Senate. The energy company said it’s since stopped buying ad spots on the show.”

Yes, the oil company that is co-responsible for the worst oil spill in US history was horrified to learn that they were feeding filthy lucre to benefit the re-election campaign of the man who read Dr. Seuss’s “Green Eggs and Ham” to an empty Senate chamber.

They just informed the media giant that they must “…remove our messages from any podcasts that direct advertising revenue to campaigns, PACs, or political parties.”

When you lose the business of the oil spill king of the world, British Petroleum, because they are averse to the idea of politically supporting you, something is seriously wrong with your message.

Pot, meet kettle.