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The Overzealous Prosecutors of January 6

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Ted Rall
            “Government,” observed the 14th century Arab political theorist Ibn Khaldoun, “is an institution which prevents injustice other than such as it commits itself.” Draconian prison sentences handed down to those involved in the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot highlight this truism.             Though he didn’t enter the Capitol that day, Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes, 57, received 18 years in federal prison for seditious conspiracy under a law whose retrograde origins and vague definition ought to worry those who care about due process. Florida chapter leader Kelly Megg will serve 12 years for the same offense. Peter Schwartz, 49, who attacked police officers at the Capitol with a chair and then chemical spray, got 14 years. Richard Barnett, who was photographed with his feet resting on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk, received 4½ years. The Department of Justice has obtained prison sentences in at least 250 of the thousand-plus January 6th-related cases it is prosecuting. DOJ is also undermining…
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Ron DeSantis, Torturer and Future President

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Ted Rall
Hello. I’m Ron DeSantis and I approve of the following message. As you may have heard, I’m running for President of the United States. You could only have heard it because I announced it on an audio-only platform called Twitter Spaces, which my friend Elon Musk assured my staff is futuristic and will therefore appeal to hipster kids. We also like it because no one got to see my face and my face scares people. I own it: I have the face of a torturer. That’s because I am a torturer. If you see my face, there’s a chance you are being tortured. So audio is better. Some guys say they didn’t choose the torture lifestyle, torture chose them, but that’s not true about me. I was obsessed with the movie “A Few Good Men,” which takes place at Guantánamo. When Jack Nicholson barked at Tom Cruise, “you can’t handle the truth!” I was hooked. Like Tom Cruise, I became…
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Bring Back New York’s Transit Police

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Ted Rall
            Visitors to Bath, England learn that the town’s namesake first-century spa deteriorated following the collapse of Roman authority in the fifth century. Unmaintained, the reservoir silted up and blocked the drainage system, burying the facility and surrounding buildings under yards of mud.             Trained by the Romans, the local English initially knew how to keep the baths running after their imperial masters returned to Italy. Habits changed; the English didn’t bathe as often as the Romans. Time passed and knowledge faded. Eventually, even if the locals had developed a hankering for a hot-water dunk, no one was left who would have been able to get the system working again. Basically, the English forgot what they knew.             The latest headline-making violent incident in New York City’s declining subway system, the choking death of Jordan Neely, a 30-year-old unhoused schizophrenic, at the hands of 24-year-old ex-Marine Daniel Penny, has me and other older New Yorkers pining for the New York…
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Joe Biden and the Democrats: A Slow-Motion Train Wreck of Their Own Making

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Ted Rall
           A new Washington Post-ABC News poll places the President’s approval rating at a record low, 36%. In the modern era, no president has been reelected with numbers like these.             58% of Democrats want their party to nominate someone other than Joe Biden in 2024. Of Democrats.             If the election were held today, Donald Trump would beat Joe Biden by four points.             Only 32% of voters think Biden has sufficient mental sharpness to do a president’s job.             This, as grim is it all is, is the good news. Enjoy, Democrats! Because it’s downhill from here. The economy is, as usual stupid, the biggest issue; just as the campaign begins this fall, so will a recession, according to the Federal Reserve Bank. Then there’s Hunter Biden’s pesky laptop, the gift that keeps on giving to the Republicans. Whether Joe proves to be “the big guy” who gets slices of kickbacks or the $13 million that mysteriously wound…
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America’s Bizarro Take on Guantánamo: Punish the Victims, Reward the Criminals

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Ted Rall
           A country that loudly and repeatedly expresses what it purports to be its principles, yet cavalierly ignores them on a whim, rightly earns the contempt of its own citizens and those of other nations, especially when the hypocritical government of that nation criticizes others for failing to adhere to their pompously proclaimed rules-based international order.             Guantánamo Bay concentration camp epitomizes this phenomenon.             Now in its third decade of operation under four presidents, Gitmo still houses 30 men. None of them has ever been charged in a court of law. Indeed, none of them ever will. It is a bedrock principle of American jurisprudence that we are all, citizens and non-citizens alike, presumed innocent until proven guilty. Which makes all 30 prisoners, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, as innocent as a newborn child as far as the law is concerned.             For whatever it’s worth, the Pentagon itself says it has no evidence that half of these people committed…
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Biden’s Reelection Campaign Begins Unimpressively

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Ted Rall
           Coupled with leaks from inside his campaign, President Joe Biden’s announcement video indicates the general tenor and strategy of his upcoming reelection bid.             Biden’s messaging is especially notable for what it’s missing.             Absent from the voiceovers and images is a reference to the COVID-19 crisis. Biden was arguably elected in the first place in large part, if not primarily, in reaction to Donald Trump’s inexplicable attacks on science and common sense in the face of the coronavirus. Biden took office after hundreds of thousands of Americans had died, presided over distribution of vaccines and billions of dollars in federal aid to employers and workers who might otherwise have been financially obliterated, and declared an end to the emergency. You’d think he’d take a wholly-justified victory lap. Perhaps his team believes a mention of the American Rescue Plan would trigger accusations that the stimulus package triggered inflation.             There’s still time. Anyway, like it or not, Republicans will…
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If Jails Can’t Care for Prisoners, Prisoners Should Walk Free

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Ted Rall
            Prisoners are the ultimate wards of the state, which exerts complete control over every facet of their lives. Among the government’s responsibilities to their most vulnerable charges are its duties to provide inmates with adequate nutrition, housing, security and medical care, the latter of which has been codified by two landmark Supreme Court rulings. In the first of these decisions, Estelle v. Gamble (1972), the Court held that prison authorities who deliberately refuse to address the medical needs of an prisoner constitutes cruel and unusual punishment under the Constitution and that “deliberate indifference to serious medical needs of prisoners constitutes the ‘unnecessary and wanton infliction of pain’…proscribed by the Eighth Amendment.”             The death of Lashawn Thompson fits this description to a T.             While awaiting trial on a misdemeanor case of battery last summer, Thompson, 35, was remanded to Fulton County jail in Atlanta, in the psychiatric wing, because he was behaving erratically. “Three months later Mr. Thompson…
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The Unpersoning of anti-Biden Democrats

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Ted Rall
            “Am I real?”             “Do I exist?”             “Do you see the real me?”             Humans have always asked themselves these existential questions. These days, Marianne Williamson and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. have more reason to wonder about their corporeal status than most.             Earlier this week, because I felt that I deserved to suffer, I tuned into a political horse-race discussion on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” Why, host Joe Scarborough wondered aloud about Joe Biden’s oxymoronic announcement that’s he’s not announcing (“I plan on running, Al, but we’re not prepared to announce it yet”), isn’t the President actually, you know, announcing that he’s running for reelection? The April the year before the election ere, ’tis the season for such communiqués.             Front and center in Scarborough and co-host Mika Brzezinski’s speculation was that Biden wouldn’t have any pesky primaries to deal with before the general election; thus he can take his time before declaring. This would come as news…
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No Donald Trump Is Above the Law

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Ted Rall
            In the United States, no man is above the law, not even the President—if his name is Donald J. Trump.             A decade before 1884, when he was elected to his first term, Grover Cleveland fathered a child with Maria Halpin, a widow. Thing is, she testified under oath that Cleveland had raped her. Ambitious and wealthy, Cleveland did what any rich mean 19th century dude would do: he arranged to have the baby sent off to an orphanage and the mother committed to an insane asylum. (It didn’t take. They let her go.) For good measure, he had her smeared in the press as an alcoholic slut. As it happened, Halpin turned out to be an upstanding churchgoer with a good reputation.             No charges were ever filed against Cleveland.             Ronald Reagan’s best-known scandal was Iran-Contra, in which his Administration violated its own sanctions and sold weapons to Iran and broke federal law by spending the proceeds…
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The U.S. Is Not a Democracy

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Ted Rall
            Is a system working as well as possible? Inertia lulls people into believing that legacy products are great—even that they’re perfect—without objectively considering whether it’s really true. The QWERTY computer keyboard works but the 1936 Dvorak version is superior. Skim milk makes you fatter. The U.S. may still be a shining city on a hill but our Constitution has become so out-of-date that new nations no longer refer to it as a template for their own legal charters. Ask yourself: if our political system were created today, by a group of intelligent people, what would it look like? If the real-world system we see now falls short of that ideal, there’s room for improvement.             What if we were to scrap our centuries-old Constitution? What if we built a shiny new government from the ground up, without considering legacy or precedent? This is a complicated question. Only one of out of four Americans would vote to repeal the Second…
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