Entire books could be written about each one of the cases. I've followed them mostly through Robert Gouviea and Viva Frei except where the actual video feeds were available in Georgia.

Better than anything on TV, but less believable somehow.

Yeah, there's simply too much detail to add. The entire case revolved around a known convicted liar and something that, almost certainly wasn't even a crime.

Also, of all the lawfare cases against Trump, this is probably the least insane one. Unless you count the crazy E. Jean Carroll rape accusation, which is just run of the mill crazy woman accuses someone of rape-which-a-woman-would-never-falsely-do-totally-pinky-swear-for-realsies.

There is no TL;DR. He wasn't charged with paying "hush money" -- he was charged for making normal payments to a lawyer in a manner that was, if you make a lot of assumptions, illegal.

Donald Trump's lawyer (Michael Cohen) used his own money to pay off Stormy Daniels to sign an NDA that states she wouldn't publicize allegations that Trump had slept with her.

(aside: There is very good reason to believe that any claims that Trump had slept with her were false, and this was just a shake-down to try to score some quick cash. Apparently it's a very common extortion con that places like TMZ pay for exclusive rights to stories, then offer the subject of the story the chance to pay them off to not run it. So sign an exclusivity deal with Accuser for $10k and then give Accused a chance to squash it for $100k)

But anyway, after that, Donald Trump continued to pay Cohen his retainer fees and his accountants recorded them as "legal expenses". The courts decided that these retainer fees were actually a repayment to Cohen for the Daniels pay-off fees.

Because these retainer fees were monthly payments, they were written down in the company ledgers every time they were paid out.

The prosecution (Alvin Bragg) alleged that these expenses should have been counted as some sort of campaign-related payments, because they were made to try to get himself elected, and because they were mischaracterized, it was a campaign finance violation.

The court case and the 34 counts essentially amounted to, "Trump wrote a check, then he wrote it down in a ledger, then he gave the check to Cohen." And he did that 11 times because the payments were over 11 months. I forget exactly what the 34th count was.

Normally these would all be misdemeanors unless there was a predicate felony that the documentation errors were used to cover up.

The prosecution did not charge Trump with a predicate crime. They just asserted that he had committed a crime that he had never been convicted of.

The judge (Merchan) disallowed any defenses witnesses, including (IIRC) a former director of the FEC that stated that Trump had committed no campaign finance violations. He also allowed Stormy Daniels to basically get up on the stand and testify to all sorts of other things and denied all of Trump's lawyers objections for relevance and only finally stepped in to stop the testimony when she basically accused Trump of raping her. The star witness was Michael Cohen, a man who has been convicted of perjury multiple times and whose story has changed repeatedly.

After the show trial, the judge instructed the (biased, New York) jury to basically decide for themselves if Trump was guilty of any number of felonies (that he had not been charged with) and if so, they were allowed to find him guilty of all of the other felonies that Bragg had brought against him.

Also, the judge's daughter is a well-connected Democrat fundraiser who raised millions of dollars for the party.

Also, Bragg had initially declined to bring any charges because he thought it was a very weak case.

Also, Bragg changed his mind and decided to prosecute after the #3 man from Merrick Garland's US Department of Justice decided to make the inexplicable career move of taking a massive demotion to go work as like a clerk or some bullshit for Bragg's office. Roughly the equivalent of going from a COO position at Walmart to being a store assistant manager.

Also, Michael Cohen's personal lawyer was not allowed to testify that Cohen had told him, explicitly, that Trump had committed no crimes after Cohen had waived attorney client privilege.

Also, amazingly, Merchan is some sort of provisional judge and not actually a "full" judge in New York, but somehow, against all odds, he was chosen for this and multiple other Trump-related cases.

Anyway, I'm sure I've gotten a few details wrong and I know I've left out many. It was a clear show trial from start to finish.

Amazing how opportunists change their tune.

Amusingly, South Korea is rampant with cosmetic surgery specifically to make them all look like a very well-defined ideal. Both men and women.

You understate the situation.

It's a panel of Democrats openly, explicitly, with zero ambiguity, saying, "the law gets broken all the time, so we're not going to follow the law."

"Only like 1 or 2 of the ingredients in the American version are endocrine-disrupting inflammatory poisons."

The poison is designed to be addictive and destroy our bodies' natural ability to feel satiation.

At least teenage boys "pretend" to care about women's issues.

The vast majority of women of any age deny that men (or boys) have any issues at all.

It's no different than any of their other "principles" -- we have to exclude people we don't like to be inclusive, and we have to have conformity to have diversity, and we have to treat everybody differently to have eq(ual)ity.

You are unhinged on this topic, and demonstrated that you're incapable of disagreement without name calling. Half of the posts in this thread are yours. That's TheImpossble1 levels of insane.

I don't know or care much about Sandy Hook, but simply looking at your weirdly emotional responses makes me inclined to assume that there's at least some truth in the "conspiracy theories," though I still don't care much about it.

So good job on that; you've done the opposite of what you set out to do by acting like a lunatic.

That's why I declare enums without a valid 0 value. There is basically no cost to doing so.

That's actually a good idea. I'm going to adopt that for non-flags enumerations.

Also a good option.

You can rely on the initial value for the default case (depending on language).

Hooray for baby languages that have default initialization for everything, even if you're going to immediately overwrite it.

WRT to the screenshot though, I'd allow for one more enum value: "Freak" -- making a bool unsuitable.

Something just doesn't seem right to me about how not one of those families is speaking out against being caught in all this lawfare.

I suspect that they've made their deal with the devil, and now they're getting what they deserve.

/raises hand

Many guns. Never really felt a need to own one previously.

The Sandy Hook families are the ones getting "screwed" in this whole mess because they're never going to see a single penny of their award.

The entire bankruptcy proceeding seems to have been managed in a way that ensures that the InfoWars property loses as much value as possible. This auction in particular, apparently, was a secret bid with no guarantee that the highest bid would win. In other words, they just wanted to dictate who got it.

Their only goal is to strip assets from Alex Jones by any means necessary as quickly as possible, probably before the entire thing gets overturned on appeal because the entire trial was a sham. There isn't even a pretense of making whole the "victims."

She also places the first sign she knew Kamala was going to lose as when she refused to go on Rogan.

That was his first sign? Like a week before the election and that's the first time he noticed, "hey, there's something off with this campaign."

it's a barely disguised rape/subjugation fetish for horny women

That describes all of feminism.

The new border czar (Homan?) is pretty promising as well.

Arguing against patenting this, is arguing against the nature of patents at all.

As someone whose name is on a couple of patents, I wouldn't be opposed to this.

When was the last time you saw a truly novel patent idea that wasn't just some slightly different form factor for some connector that allows some company like Apple to charge $100 for a power cable that should cost $2?

Or, say, the dude who invented a brake for table saws that make it impossible to cut yourself with them. No manufacturers have adopted the tech; most are likely just waiting out the patent duration before they start using it.

The patent system is 100% captured by large institutional players and used only as a bludgeon against legitimate competition.

Real bread is great.

The shit we get here in the US is sugar and artificial chemicals.

Hell, even if you buy your own flour to make your own bread, it's still loaded with artificial shit because it's just sprayed on the grain.

The worst thing about that call is that it was clearly scripted.

These people are incapable of just having a normal human conversation.

Every mammal understands and has a way to mark territory. At a biological level, we understand "our" place and "not our" places.

These people aren't some totally innocent, victims-of-their-situation, hate-the-game-not-the-player immigrants. They know what they are doing, and they know that it is wrong, and they don't care.

Or worse, they relish in it.

Don't forget the Soros-funded lawsuits that we have to pay government lawyers to fight so that Miguel the rapist doesn't have to go back to the shithole he came from that's only a shithole because it's filled with people like him.