Seldom Balanced – Usually Fair
Judging the Mexican Judge
His aggressive approach, traveling personally into the very heart of criminal territory, was becoming too effective. The order came directly from the crime lords. Kill the chief of United States Narcotics Enforcement.
Like some comic book superhero, he went underground, surfacing only to surprise, battle, and bring down those drug cartels.
From Kathy Gill at The Moderate Voice:
Donald Trump donated money to the political campaigns of two state attorneys general and their offices dropped investigations into Trump University.
Trump launched online Trump University courses in 2005. By 2007, negative reports began surfacing about the sales technique for the three-day course. Nevertheless, in 2007 the Bush Administration gave Trump University an indirect endorsement when the Small Business Administration jointly developed an online course, “How to Start a Business on a Shoestring Budget,” with Trump.
By 2010, news organizations began reporting complaints about the three-day course. The Better Business Bureau gave Trump University a near failing grade of D-
. The state Education Department in New York finally demanded that Trump drop “university” from the name of the company. The new (now defunct) name: Trump Entrepreneur Institute.
From Joe Hagstrom at MadMikesAmerica:
It was with great delight I found that the North Korean press has endorsed my good friend Donald Trump for President. The North Koreans under Dear Leader Kim Jong-Un understand true leadership and power.
Donald’s rants against the press no doubt impressed Dear Leader Kim. Like Dear Leader, Donald understands that freedom means keeping weirdos, hippies and anyone else that agrees with leaders like him and dear leader must be silenced. Sadly all Don has to silence them is fear and insults while dear leader has a secret police that isn’t so secret to shut up the nabobs. But when Don is elected he will be able to exercise true leadership and use the tools of government to silence the freaks and make America greater than North Korea.
From nojo at Stinque:
When Spy magazine first published its fateful description of Donald Trump as a “short-fingered vulgarian” thirty years ago — thirty years ago! — Trump reacted in the most Trumpian way possible: He said he knew people who knew things, and Spy would fold within a year.
Leading Spy to respond in the most Spy way possible: A monthly sidebar quoting Trump’s prediction and counting down the days, headlined “Chronicle of Our Death Foretold”.
From Tommy Christopher at the Daily Banter:
To hear conservatives tell it, Yahoo News anchor and executive producer of the documentary Under the Gun Katie Couric committed high crimes and misdemeanors against gun-nuttery when one of her editors followed a question about background checks with eight seconds of silence, when in reality, the group of gun enthusiasts had given immediate responses. Couric has apologized, because of course she has, but it doesn’t seem like anyone has actually stopped to listen to the answers Couric’s editor cut out of the film, because if anything, she should be apologizing to the families of all the gun violence victims, not the gun nuts. She did the cause of unfettered access to guns a huge favor.
Really, she did them several favors, because not only did that edit cover up the completely insane and stupid answers these people gave, Couric also failed monumentally even in the interview. Here’s the audio of the two minutes following that fateful question, which was, “If there are no background checks for gun purchasers, how do you prevent felons or terrorist from walking into, say, a licensed gun dealer and purchasing a gun?”
From Capt. Fogg at Human Voices:
Quite frankly, nobody is going to make America great again, at least not to any universal agreement. Nor is it really possible to define the word. That’s why it makes such a catchy campaign slogan. Everyone has his own notions about greatness. For some it means to make America white again, for others it means to return to a day when this was a manufacturing powerhouse and assembly line jobs allowed workers to be part of a booming middle class, a time when foreign competition was feeble and public tastes preferred domestic goods. It’s not going to happen and temporal dysphoria, like entropy, will increase. Short of an apocalypse, the world continues to get smaller.
Very few of those with whom I work, or with whom I associate after hours, remember the television program I’ve Got a Secret. It was a panel show in which a group of semi-celebrities asked questions of a guest and tried to puzzle out some secret that only the guest and the television host knew. A couple of those episodes bore some historical significance.
One, aired in 1956, reminds me even today of how close we remain to the history we learned from textbooks as kids. The secret of 95 year old Samuel J. Seymour was that he had been in the theatre audience when President Lincoln had been shot in 1865. Samuel had been 10 years old. He lived to tell about it on national television.
The other episode became part of a different side of history. The show itself resulted in two murders involving organized crime.
The guest on that show in 1952 was Arnold Schuster, a clothing salesman from New York. His secret was that, while riding on a subway from work, he had recognized a wanted criminal. The fugitive was the famous Willie Sutton. Sutton is famous for his answer to a simple question: Why do you rob banks? His answer was simple, “That’s where the money is.”
Willie Sutton had escaped from prison. Arnold Schuster saw him, ran to find a police officer, and pointed him out.
After the secret was finally revealed to the television celebrity panel, and the audience applauded their civic minded guest, Arnold Schuster was murdered on a New York City street.
There was never enough evidence to charge crime boss Albert Anastasia. But one informant told authorities the mobster had happened to be watching the popular television show and had experienced a Donald Trump level of anger. “I can’t stand squealers!” he reportedly shouted. “Hit that guy!”
Public anger was intense and sustained. Nobody knows how much income was lost by crime families, but the crackdown on revenue centers was severe. The financial cost had to have been substantial enough to hurt a lot. Crime bosses had good reason to get really angry at Albert Anastasia for killing that civilian.
When Anastasia was himself assassinated a few years later, that lost income was thought to be the main reason. He should not have had Arnold Schuster killed.
In those days, crime families did not allow the killing of innocent civilians. The cost was too high. The only curb on violence that was stronger than that against killing a civilian was that against killing any member of law enforcement. Public retribution would have been high and profits would go way down for a long, long time. When other crime figures discovered in 1935 that Dutch Schultz had put a contract on the life of New York prosecutor Thomas Dewey, Lucky Luciano and others ordered the execution of Dutch Schultz.
Those were the days, weren’t they?
Times change, and so do the practical calculations of criminal ethics.
Years later, United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and future mayor, Rudy Giuliani took down pretty much every top crime leader in New York. To me that, more than 9/11, makes Rudy Giuliani a genuine hero. I would not vote for him, but he is a hero none-the-less. By that time, assassination had become a distinct, though distant possibility.
For some public figures, the possibility of murder has been more distinct and less distant. Harry Reid was chairman of the Nevada Gaming Commission when he refused to back down to organized crime. His outburst became legend when one figure offered him $12,000 for casino licenses. He yelled, “You son of a bitch, you tried to bribe me!” as he tried to choke the life out of the culprit. Reid was wearing a wire and had federal authorities listening in an adjoining room. FBI agents had to pull Reid off. The suspect was tried, convicted, and sent to prison.
When Harry’s wife Landra experienced car trouble a while after that, she looked under the hood and found a bomb that was improperly grounded and had failed to explode. Even family station wagons, and the families inside, were no longer out of bounds. That was 1981.
Harry Reid eventually became a United States Senator.
20 years later, the trajectory of danger had continued upward. The Chief of the United States Narcotics Enforcement Division had decided to go further than most investigators had ever gone. The agency did not simply cooperate with Mexican authorities in attacking drug cartels. They did not stop at assigning investigators to work on cases in Mexico. The head of the Division traveled to Mexico himself and sat across from thugs with some of the biggest reputations in violent crime.
Although he was born and raised in Indiana, his parents had come to the United States from Mexico more than 50 years before. He was familiar with Mexico, the language, the customs, the nuances of culture. He used that knowledge to hit drug kingpins where it hurt.
And he made progress.
Some of those on his side of the table, Mexican law enforcement officials, were marked for assassination. Some died. With each death, Mexican public opinion turned angrily against the drug trade. That gave law enforcement the pressure they wanted to apply.
As he and his Mexican law enforcement allies destroyed most of the infrastructure of the Arellano Felix cartel in Tijuana and closed in on the leaders, a wiretap picked up a key conversation. It was startling. He had personally been targeted for assassination. The Chief of the United States Narcotics Enforcement Division, Gonzalo Curiel, had been marked for murder by the Mexican drug cartel.
That is how Gonzalo Curiel began operating the United States side of the anti-cartel campaign from hiding. Nobody knew where he was, or when he would briefly show up. It was as if he was some sort of Saturday morning television hero. His orders were consistent. He was in control. His surprise appearances kept the criminal enterprise off-balance.
In the end, he survived and the Tijuana cartel died. Its leaders ended up in prison.
Gonzalo Curiel now presides over the United States Court for the Southern District of California.
One case has become the focus of national interest. A class action against Donald Trump’s Trump University has not been going well for Mr. Trump. He and his lawyers had demanded that most of the documents presented in evidence against him be kept sealed in order, they insisted, to protect trade secrets. Judge Curiel instead ordered that documents in the case be made public.
It is difficult to see the trade secrets. In fact, the documents seem only to demonstrate multiple instances of deceptive practices that overlap into fraud. The victims range from ordinary middle class people to those on the ragged edge of financial desperation.
A furious Donald Trump says Gonzalo Curiel is not a real American. Curiel was born and raised in Indiana. But because his parents came from Mexico in 1946, he should be considered a Mexican. Because he is a Mexican, he should be prohibited from judging any aspect of the fraud case against Donald Trump, who is an American.
It strikes me as unlikely that the seasoned veteran of that dangerous law enforcement battlefield could be intimidated by no more than the angry bluster of a Presidential contender.
Gonzalo Curiel was a hands-on prosecutor in the fight against a major drug cartel, a cartel famous for the ruthless murder of law enforcement officials. He was not intimidated by the cartel or its orders to assassinate him.
But this public spectacle is not about a powerful group of furious drug lords engaged on a battlefield of violence, and murder, and professional contracts to carry out more assassinations.
This angry attacker is a wealthy businessman accused merely of the mean and petty crime of massive fraud against the financially vulnerable.
From Iron Knee at Political Irony:
Some people might argue that the Trump University scandal is old news. That Donald Trump did that back when he was a businessman, so it was ok to swindle people out of their money for his own enrichment. But if he becomes president, he will be our scumbag swindler, using his evil powers to make America great again (whatever the hell that means).
And yet, even now, Trump continues to con people. Remember when he decided to skip one of the Republican debates because Fox News had been mean to him? He held a “fund raiser for veterans” instead, which he claimed had raised $6 million dollars. Then the Washington Post checked into it, and found that far less had actually been disbursed to veterans groups.
So caught lying by the media, Trump did what he always does —
From driftglass:
The fundamental problem with the pundit class is that they have absolutely no personal stake in anything they say. If they get one thing even marginally right, they wear it a Medal of Freedom until the end of their days. But when get something wrong? When they get many things wrong? When they get most things wrong — big things, life-and-death things — over and over again, year after year after year?
Then what happens?
From Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged:
You can read the text of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s speech here. Clinton broke down point by point a handful of the very wrong things that Donald Trump has said with a brief explanation of why he’s very wrong. There might be some areas where Clinton’s perspective about policy and political reality differs from mine, but to see her define Trump as badly informed and of poor, not to say dangerously rash (OK–exactly to say that!) temperament was necessary.
This is something that no Republican primary challenger could have done, because in being knee-jerk opponents to anything President Obama has done, they at least had to support Trump’s constant, if wrong, criticisms. Clinton, as part of Obama’s circle, has an intimate knowledge of why some things were done, and not others.