sofa king
sofa king's JournalIt's to keep it all on the table.
These are elected officials meeting with a private citizen. Until the law was trampled into irrelevance by the Bush Administration, such meetings were required to be disclosed, and are still required by the premises of good taste and good government, if not also the law.
It is comparatively easy to deduce the overall intent of the meetings, which is that Mrs. Clinton is ironing out some details regarding her expected Presidential run.
The meeting with Biden is actually the more important one. Joe Biden might be considered a dark horse in 2014, but he's also one of the most prominent and qualified warhorses of the Democratic Party. As President of the Senate, Biden has also been unusually adept at helping to coordinate and implement the plans made between the Executive Branch and the Senate.
It's entirely possible that Joe Biden likes his job as chief cat-herder in the Senate, which opens up the interesting possibility that Mrs. Clinton is asking Joe if he'd like to keep his job as Vice President. That's highly speculative at this point in time, but it's worth filing away....
And yet everything broke his way.
Everything from carefully chaperoned public perception management to botched police work to favorable jury instructions to, today, post-trial image repair work, has fallen in favor of this person and his family.
Is not that also far fetched? Yet here it is for all of us to contemplate, if we allow ourselves.
Somehow I doubt that.
The law is designed to protect only the privileged. Rich white kids are privileged, while your hypothetical assailant is not.
This is a corrupt decision, not a functional defense for anyone but the son of a judge. Just like other important but corrupt court decisions, like Bush v. Gore, it will not be allowed as precedent in other cases, because the court system itself will recognize that it's an insider decision and not applicable to the unwashed masses.
Nevertheless, your observation is still quite valid: murdering your adversary and telling authorities the story that best defends yourself is potentially an effective legal tactic... if you have an ace in the hole.
But if you're a minority or poor, it ain't gonna work for you.
It amuses me that one of my favorite bands as a kid, Scream, foretold all of this in a concise double-song during the Reagan era:
They’re never wrong, only mistaken
It don’t replace your rights that have been taken
They throw the book away, you’ve been forsaken
For American justice has just been faking
If you got no money then you’re just out of luck
‘Cause the lawyers and legal aid, they just don’t give a fuck
That’s why the jails are full of the poor and black
And once they get out, you know they end up just going back
Has Greenwald reported anything new at all?
Let us not fail to recall that virtually all of the public revelations in this case were already publicly revealed in 2001-2009, some of them by Greenwald himself, when they were totally illegal, impeachable offenses.
Now they are for the most part legal and totally uninteresting to those of us who remained informed during the Bush years.
So, if you ask me, the real question is, "Does Greenwald have ANYTHING new, that we did not previously know about from the Bush years?"
My current guess is that the only undisclosed factoid out there is both Snowden and Greenwald were duped by the Chinese, who ignited this incident just days after the United States dared to castigate China for human rights abuses.
He'll still walk.
This is going to be an instructive event for you whippersnappers out there. The law represents only money and power, and while Zimmerman doesn't seem to have a lot of money, his father the judge--the judge nobody seems to know, which might suggest he's a FISA judge--has plenty of power.
Zimmerman will stay free for the trial, and stay free on appeal even if the prosecution or the cops don't flop for him. If he is convicted, the appeal will be dragged out for years, and then when things are more quiet, the case will be steered to one of Daddy's pals, the charges will be reversed and the case dismissed.
Mark my words.
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Member since: Wed Apr 14, 2004, 04:27 PMNumber of posts: 10,857
