What This Blog Is About

This blog is here to, as much as possible, keep the mores of the Trump administration from being the new normal in American presidential politics.
Not since the Civil War has a president sought to abridge freedom of speech or of the press. No president has ever sought to keep extensive wealth in this country and all around the world while being the number one agent for the American peoples' business. Nobody with a decades' long sexual attraction to his own daughter has ever been president. No other president has been elected with the strong help of the illegal acts of a foreign country. No other president has neither held prior office nor has been a military general. No other president has ever claimed that he sacrificed more than a Gold Star family. No prior president has ever claimed a book to be his favorite, and then not be able to say anything about it immediately afterwards. No prior president has had speeches of Adolf Hitler as bedside reading for an extensive period of time. No prior president has been recorded describing an attempt to seduce another man's wife. No prior president has ever been recorded saying that he could just pick women up by their genitals. No prior president's comments about women have focused so much on their physical appearance. No president with a 4-F draft status has ever claimed at age 70 to be the healthiest presidential candidate ever. No prior presidential candidate has spent more than one minute of his debate time sniffing, as if something was coming out of his nose. Since the creation of the Geneva Convention, no president has ever formally disavowed any part of it. No prior president has been divorced twice, each time afterwards marrying the mistress with whom he has committed adultery.
If these things become the new normal, then the American experiment in free republicanism is over. There is some tiny chance that remembering the mores of a free republic can help heal the damage from this savage, brutal, political and military nightmare.

Sunday, January 1, 2017

Trump Announces His Desire to Weaken Freedom of the Press

Donald Trump opposes the present strong freedom of the press in America by making it easier for the rich and powerful to sue reporters and news outlets for libel. Making libel suits easy has been a  traditional way to weaken freedom of the press in America. Many supporters of freedom of the press at the time of the First Amendment had in mind the case of John Peter Zenger, a New York publisher jailed for "criminal libel," that is, for spreading the word that the acts of the government were bad. Zenger was acquitted. This case demonstrated the principle that truth is a defense to libel.
The other great attack on freedom of the press in America was settled by the Supreme Court of the United States in New York Times v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964) Opponents of Jim Crow laws and practices ran an ad in the Times which had some errors in them. E.g., Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had only been arrested four times in Montgomery protests instead of seven. Sullivan-- one of the three Montgomery Alabama city commissioners, the municipal elected officials-- Sullivan won a $500,000 judgment that was affirmed by the Alabama Supreme Court ($3,827,265.37 in 2016 dollars). Had Sullivan won, it is likely that this defamation tactic would have broken King and the civil rights movement. The rule that Sullivan established was that public figures could only win libel damages if they could prove that the defendants were wrong and had an intent to hurt them.
I'm not aware of a president who has seriously objected to preexisting libel law since the second president, John Adams, signer of the Sedition Act which made false criticism of the government illegal, and which was allowed to expire in 1800. 
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