I (the other poster) did not insist anything. I copied a direct definition - which I now acknowledge could be too restrictive:
www.google.com/search?q=define+insurrection - a violent uprising against an authority or government.
Saying that, I don't see how the possibility of an insurrection being non-violent changes the discussion. The insurrection of January 6 was not passive or peaceful. It was direct and violent.
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In any case, no, those who breached the Capitol did not have guns with them. Why not? That's a good question. I have possible answers:
1) If they had firearms, they would be shot. They had the numbers, so there was no need for firearms, so they didn't bring any.
2) If they used firearms, their cause would be "sullied", and the assault would have worked even more against them in terms of public opinion.
3) The military might be called in, and that wouldn't suit their agenda, either.
These are all guesses on my part. But, as the link above demonstrates, it was a violent insurrection. If people had done the same to protest George Floyd at a police station, we know what would have happened, especially if the people who did it weren't light skinned.
Now, this is not to say that everyone at the "event" was an insurrectionist. I actually saw a video of a Trumper at the uprising who was very concerned. He told a cop to keep them in check and that they meant harm. Let me look for the video... Can't find it. Oh well. Anyway, like I said, not all people there were insurrectionists. But a lot were. And some members of Congress were in on it.
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And of course vice versa.
However looking from somewhere roughly in the middle, the right, not even far or extreme, tends to present more cause for concern.
The seeds for much of the discontent present in your country were sown long ago.
Too many people see everything in binary, B&W, points of view, and point the finger at invisible, fantasy driven, enemies.
Last time I looked, the world is full of colour. If you can't, or choose not to, see in colour, then you are really missing life. Intelligence, or better, wisdom, isn't about 3 R's (obviously they help). It's about opening one's eyes, one's perception - seeing the wood for the trees - and in life, there is always another forest beyond the current one.
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Yeah -- thinking someone should be prosecuted for taking classified documents and not returning them when told and that someone should be prosecuted for attempting to overturn an election is real extreme leftist shit, isn't it? And, yes, Trump did try to overturn the election:
www.factcheck.org/2023/08/what-trump-asked-of-pence/
In an interview hours after former President Donald Trump was indicted for an alleged conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election, one of his attorneys said that all Trump had ultimately asked his vice president to do was “simply pause” the Electoral College count at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
On Fox News the following night, Aug. 2, former Vice President Mike Pence called that claim “completely false.” Pence said Trump and his “gaggle of crackpot lawyers” asked him “to literally reject votes.”
“I think it’s important that the American people know what happened in the days before January 6,” Pence said. “President Trump demanded that I use my authority as vice president presiding over the count of the Electoral College to essentially overturn the election by returning or literally rejecting votes. I had no authority to do that.”
For those who might doubt him, Pence urged them to “read the indictment.”
And then there's the phone call to the Georgia Secretary of State:
To say that there is not enough reason to put Trump on trial for these abominable acts is more than a little telling.
I stand corrected! However, had the insurrection happened exactly as it did, but the insurrectionists were Blacks and/or Muslims, then I stand by my statement that things would have panned out very, very differently than they did.
I'm not aware of any "reforms" currently going through and implemented. The last major "reform" was "Common Core", which, in my opinion, is a disaster. I'll be happy to go into detail on that, if you like, or anything else related, for that matter.
First, the county assessor is assessing market value (that, apparently, is how Florida property tax works), not a special value for tax purposes. The judge acknowledged that different valuers often give different assessments but there is a limit to the range of values - here we have 30:1 - and Trump appealed the county valuer's assessment on the basis it was too high. And yes, the bank sends an appraiser, but the appraiser works from information given, or in this case not given. The information not given was that Mar-a-lago had placed on it a deed restriction, that it was not to be used as a residential property. This deed restriction made its market value greatly lower than it would be had it been available as a residential property. The deed restriction was put in place so as to lower its market value for property tax purposes - that is, it was a tax dodge. However, not informing the bank's assessor of the deed restriction is fraud. Now you might argue that the bank appraiser is not doing his due diligence by not researching restrictions on the property, and I would agree. That doesn't alter the fact that failing to disclose a deed restriction which substantially alters the value of the property is fraud.
The court found that this was part of a persistent pattern of behaviour. The other well known example was of the apartment in Trump Tower, which was valued on a basis of having three times the floor area that it actually had. Once again, one might fault valuers for not doing their due diligence, and you'd be right, but this is always the case in fraud crimes. Fraud depends on someone not doing their due diligence - but it's still fraud.
Read the rest.
Strictly not.
Exactly. The phrase 'they left their weapons at home' is true only if you allow for a single category of weapon - firearms. There were plenty of weapons of other kinds. And we know from Cassidy Hutchinson's testimony why they didn't have firearms. They were required to go through magnetometers ('mags') - which are metal detectors of the kind you have at airport security - before going to the capitol. According to this testimony Trump told his staff to "take the fucking mags away", but they didn't.
On what I have seen, yes - but not my decision to make. That is for the appellant court to make, and if the judge has not conducted the trial properly then Trump will be able to make a case as to how he didn't and have the verdict overturned.
Or, we could have a semantic discussion on what 'fair trial' means. I'm using it to mean conducted according to the established laws and legal procedures in a jurisdiction where the laws and legal procedures are broadly equitable. Of course no jurisdiction exists which is perfect, but the courts of the state of New York are certainly not in any way comparable to the courts of the Soviet Union in the time of Stalin, or for that matter the courts of Russia in the time of Putin. Of course, miscarriages of justice occur in all legal systems. We may see evidence to suggest that this was one of them, but I haven't seen it yet. If you think that it was a miscarriage of justice, I'd be interested in the evidence on which you base this.
There is a problem that experts in 'xxxx education' are often people who can't do xxxx well enough to be 'experts in xxxx'. But they can be pretty good at talking about xxxx.
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OK, of course it's complex because it's taxation. I found an information sheet that says how it works. It comes from Florida Revenue, so it should be legit. It says:
*Market (or Just) Value: The property appraiser determines the market value of a parcel based on market activity prior to the assessment date.
Assessment Differential: The property appraiser ensures that annual value caps, established in the Florida Constitution, are applied to the market value (no
more than 3% increase for homestead residential property and 10% for commercial properties).
Assessed Value: The property’s market value with assessment differential for annual value caps applied
Exemptions: Reductions in property tax owed based on applying and qualifying for the exemption (e.g., homestead, military/veteran, etc.)
Taxable Value: The property’s assessed value with exemptions applied *
So let's be clear here. What we are talking about is here is 'Market (or Just) value. That is the property appraiser's opinion of the market value of the property. The assessed and taxable value are irrelevant to this discussion. I can find nothing that suggests other than it is an experts view of the market value - that is what the property would sell for. Another expert's view might be different, but a difference of 2,300% between them sounds unlikely. And it is, because the whole point is that this is not a case of two assessors coming to different conclusions about the same item. They were assessing different items. The tax appraiser was taxing a property on which there was a deed restrictions which meant that its only allowable use was as a private club. This results in a market valuation in which the market is only those wishing to run a private club. The bank assessors were given the value for, and assessed the value for a property with no deed restrictions, which could be used as a private residence, a hotel, split into condos or anything that they wanted to do with it. Such a property would sell into a much larger market and thus its market price would be much higher. Thus those higher valuations were fraudulently applied, because the deed restrictions were omitted from the loan applications and assessors' information.
No. They were both market values. It was simply that one valuer was valuing a property with deed restrictions and the other wasn't. So he did incriminate himself.
As I said, there was a pattern of fraud. In the case of the Trump Tower apartment the tax valuer was valuing a property with 1/3 the floor area of the property that the loan valuer was valuing. It's a simple, straightforward and evident fraud.
You don't get to decide on the legal remedy. It's the law that does that and the judge has to apply the law. However, good for Trump that you aren't the law, because your penalty would mean him losing something that is apparently worth $612M, whereas the judge only penalised him to the extent of $354M, so you would have been $258M more punitive than the judge was.
Let's look back at this thread, where you said
This attitude (though legally incorrect and irrelevant to a case where no-one is being charged with theft) seems to be somewhat at odds with what you've just said. Let's write it in the same language
See the contradiction?
The problem for you is that whilst theft is not an issue in the documents case, fraud in an issue in the NY case, and the laws under which the Trump organisation is charged do not require that anyone be harmed for the defendant to be liable. You might not agree with the law, but that is the law. So unfortunately it's no defence. Trump and his organisation have been tried according to the law, found liable according to the law and would expect to pay the penalty that the law prescribes.
