Tell me America has two justice systems using a current event: https://t.co/4aJqhn5Bre
— Joy-Ann (Pro-Democracy) Reid ? (@JoyAnnReid) October 26, 2021
For some, the teenager who shot three people on the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin, during protests that followed George Floyd’s death has come to personify America’s polarization. Kyle Rittenhouse’s trial will begin Monday with jury selection. https://t.co/ZUhzAzYQcm
— The Associated Press (@AP) October 30, 2021
Kyle Rittenhouse is a spottily-educated teenage lumpen-prole who killed two people and wounded a third, using a gun he shouldn’t have had in his possession, in a place where he shouldn’t have been. Those facts are generally agreed; the argument is whether the killings should be defined as ‘murder’ or ‘self-defense.’
Rittenhouse has been badly served by every authority in his life — from his feckless parents, to the Kenosha police who let him walk away without so much as confiscating the weapon, to the rightwing publicists currently using him as a fundraising tool and all-purpose prop in their war against American democracy. I do not foresee much of a future for him, regardless of any (every) eventual verdict. Possibly he will be incarcerated. Or he will walk ‘free’ and continue to be manipulated by his proudly fascist-adjacent friends, until they find some newer mascot or (my personal bet) he is emboldened by his ‘celebrity’ into committing further crimes that he won’t be allowed to walk away from.
Bruce Schroeder, the judge (currently) in charge of the trial set to begin Monday, has done Truth a favor by setting his thumb, fist, forearm, and full body weight on the scales. Per Paul Butler for the Washington Post:
… Schroeder’s decision to prohibit the use of the term “victim” is unusual but not unprecedented. The judge in former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s trial for murdering George Floyd discouraged the prosecutors from referring to Floyd as a victim, but he did not forbid them from doing so.
But Schroeder crossed the line from jurist to advocate when he forbid prosecutors from saying “victim” because, he said, it’s a “loaded” word, but allowed the defense to say “arsonist,” “looter” and “rioter” — as if those words aren’t just as loaded. Schroeder’s decision supports the defense strategy of putting the victims on trial, to make it sound as though they got what they deserved.
Indeed, Schroeder went so far as to say that the defense lawyers can “demonize” the three men who Rittenhouse killed if they think that will score points with the jury. This is judicially sanctioned slander.
Over the objections of prosecutors, he will allow the jury to see a video of the police thanking a group of vigilantes and handing them bottles of water. The defense will use the clip to suggest that not only was Rittenhouse entitled to be in Kenosha with an assault rifle, the local police were actually glad he was there.
Yet the judge turned down prosecutors’ request to admit as evidence video of Rittenhouse beating up a teenage girl who got into a fight with his sister. Nor will the judge allow video of Rittenhouse stating, 15 days before the Kenosha shootings, “Bro, I wish I had my [expletive] AR, I’d start shooting rounds at them” about people he suspected were shoplifting…
Rittenhouse has a credible self-defense claim, even if I don’t find it ultimately persuasive. If there is reasonable doubt, the jury must acquit him. But especially in a politically charged case like this, the appearance of justice is nearly as important as justice itself. This week, in Schroeder’s courtroom, justice failed to appear.
Who is the judge in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial? https://t.co/EP7Qdwz2ul
— WISN 12 NEWS (@WISN12News) October 26, 2021
The judge presiding over Kyle Rittenhouse's trial bars use of the term "victim" during trial until someone is convicted of a crime.
— JSOnline – NewsWatch (@js_newswatch) October 26, 2021
New @NYTmag cover story: an excellent @chashomans deep report examining events leading up to the Kyle Rittenhouse shootings in Kenosha and a surrounding storm, on social media, radio + TV, of violent rhetoric and disinformation — with ominous implications: https://t.co/YwpW2riGYT
— Jessica Lustig (@jessicalustig) October 26, 2021
Fairly comprehensive long read on actual Kenosha politics and those of the ‘Kenosha defenders’, even though overly biased towards the poor-little-lost-boy defendant:
… They called themselves citizens or patriots, and the demonstrators and media often called them militias, but it would have been most accurate to call them paramilitaries: young-to-middle-aged white men, mostly, armed with assault-style rifles and often clad in tactical gear, who appeared in town that evening arrayed purposefully around gas stations and used-car lots. Their numbers, based on video footage and firsthand accounts, may have run anywhere from the high dozens to the low hundreds, but no official estimates were made. Law-enforcement officers seemed to have broadly tolerated, and occasionally openly expressed support for, their activities, despite the fact that many of them were violating the same emergency curfew order under which dozens of demonstrators were arrested…
But there has been little so far to suggest that Rittenhouse saw himself as either a Dylann Roof or a Paul Revere when he stepped onto the street in Kenosha with his rifle. Prosecutors have yet to produce evidence that Rittenhouse held extremist views or associations before the shootings; his own defense attorneys intend to argue that in a chaotic moment, he simply acted in self-defense. This is likely to center the trial on Rittenhouse’s actions over a series of brief and fateful moments, and not the much larger question of what brought Rittenhouse and so many others to the streets of Kenosha equipped for war.
Throughout the evening, he was surrounded by men who were at times visibly undisciplined with their firearms and much more aggressive and confrontational toward the demonstrators; the Facebook pages and Reddit threads where some groups organized were full of fantasies about shooting people in the streets. There were paramilitaries who loudly advertised notably radical political commitments. But many more seemed, like Rittenhouse, to be basically conventional conservative suburbanites: a limo-company operations manager, an I.T. entrepreneur, a former city alderman — people whose Facebook profiles were thick with photos of family holiday gatherings and fishing trips, not sovereign-citizen screeds. “I’m legally allowed to carry my AR-15 to the event right?” one of them had asked tentatively on Facebook. “I just haven’t carried it since I was in the army and it feels odd to walk outside with it over my shoulder.”…
Nearly every Kenoshan I spoke to who was out that night said something similar: Nobody knew these people. The county court and jail records and federal indictments from that night and the two that followed show that in fact many of the arrests made were of Kenosha residents, but many others were indeed from outside the city — mostly Milwaukee and its suburbs or the Chicago area, each about an hour’s drive away. Occasionally they came from Madison and Minneapolis and very occasionally from points farther east or west. Kenosha was a small city within easy reach of many larger ones, and its local activists, by their own accounts, were inexperienced and ill equipped for the sudden influx of both allies and opportunists, people for whom Kenosha was not a hometown but a battlefield…
Rittenhouse’s current lawyers — led by Mark Richards, a criminal defense attorney in Racine — have crafted a conventional self-defense case that is unlikely to mention the battles of Lexington and Concord or Wood’s prophecies. Many people initially suspected that Rittenhouse was drawn to Kenosha by Kevin Mathewson’s Facebook post and the many bloody-minded comment threads trailing behind it. But a forensic audit of Rittenhouse’s phone conducted by the local police showed no engagement with the post or any of the other calls to arms in Kenosha. Rittenhouse was already in Kenosha by the time Mathewson posted it, having arrived the night before with Dominick Black, an 18-year-old friend who bought the gun Rittenhouse would carry the next day and, according to police reports, met the owners of the car lot he and Rittenhouse would end up defending…
After an early jailhouse phone interview with The Washington Post, Richards, Rittenhouse’s criminal defense lawyer, generally kept his client clear of reporters. Since then, Hancock, a former Navy SEAL who runs a private security firm, had become a de facto spokesman for the Rittenhouse family. In our conversations, he often seemed to be previewing Rittenhouse’s lawyers’ defense: Rittenhouse’s decision to go to Kenosha with a gun was an act of teenage knuckleheadedness derived not from political extremism but from a misguided desire to serve the community, and he acted understandably and legally, if regrettably, in undeniably chaotic circumstances. This argument challenged the claims of Rittenhouse’s detractors, of course, but it also more subtly challenged the more strident claims of his supporters and of other paramilitaries who were there that night, who continued to insist that their actions were a legitimate exercise of civic duty. As one man who guarded the car lot with Rittenhouse that night insisted on McKenna’s show three days later, “We were, like I said, there to help.”
The paramilitaries did not seem to understand what lay beneath the surface of that statement — how much privilege was required to declare yourself the defender of someone else’s neighborhood simply because you owned a gun…
Baud
If he’s acquitted, I suspect Rittenhouse will be the next George Zimmerman.
eclare
@Baud: I agree. If he walks, he’ll be back in jail before long.
Betty
Off and on during the vigilante action of the past year, I have heard knowledgeable people explain that all, or most at least, of the states have laws prohibiting these paramilitaries from operating, but no one is enforcing those laws. Isn’t it time for that to change? Or will the backlash be too dangerous since much of law enforcement doesn’t seem to be on the side of peace?
Omnes Omnibus
FWIW lots of defense attorneys ask that the word victim not be used. It presupposes that a crime was committed so someone must be guilty. The purpose of a trial is to determine those very facts. This judge appears to be consistent in his practice of not allowing the word to be used. As far as arsonist, looter, etc., go, those would to to the defendant’s state of mind. There are counter-arguments, and counter-counter-arguments, and why the fuck was he there with a gun in the first place? But I would not instantly read white supremacy bias into the judge’s decisions without more evidence.
This thread will largely ignore or dismiss what I just said.
Betty
@Omnes Omnibus: I agree. I have read other lawyers explaining this as well. It is new to non-criminal lawyers.
Marshall Eubanks
@Omnes Omnibus: And, what, hurricanes and earthquakes don’t have victims?
Omnes Omnibus
@Marshall Eubanks: It’s a fucking trial. There are all sorts of weird rules that don’t apply to everyday speech and words that have very specific technical legal meanings that do not exactly match what people commonly say.
ETA: How often is a hurricane or earthquake tried for homicide?
MagdaInBlack
This dumb bumblefuk kid comes from the same Northern Illinois chain of lakes area as Gliniewicz, the cop who a few years ago committed suicide ( because he was embezzling) and tried to pin it on black gang members. Quite heavy TFG area.
debbie
@Omnes Omnibus:
I don’t dismiss what you say, but can the defense be stopped from words like “innocent” when referring to their client?
trollhattan
After he was photographed hanging out in a bar with good old mom, why was his bail not instantly revoked?
If the fucker is acquitted can the feds come after him for crossing state lines to commit murder?
Anonymous At Work
Thoughts?
Matt McIrvin
@Omnes Omnibus: I heard the same thing from popehat, so now I’m confused as to whether this is actually unusual or typical practice.
Omnes Omnibus
@debbie: Not if that is the whole premise of their case. One of the other things that comes into play here is the difference between opening and closing statements which are argument and the presentation of evidence with is not. Lawyers are permitted greater latitude in the argument phases than in presentation of the factual case. Basically, it is more complicated than a couple of tweets can express.
Wapiti
So if he had to fire in “self defense”, and there were other armed vigilantes there, but they didn’t feel threatened enough to fire, and there were cops, but they didn’t shoot people, so… was he actually in danger?
Winston
@Anonymous At Work:
I’d say wannabe murderer. His only remorse was the two he killed was that they were white.
Omnes Omnibus
@Wapiti: Hence the trial.
Omnes Omnibus
@Matt McIrvin:
It is this judge’s regular practice, but this judge is in the minority. I would be interested in Immanetize’s and LAO’s experiences if they were around. They’ve done more criminal work than I have.
debbie
@Omnes Omnibus:
Thanks.
Mike in NC
Been glued to my computer since this morning reading the Washington Post lengthy article on the January 6 attack by Trump’s goons. It’s called “The Attack” and is broken down into what took place before, during, and after the insurrection. Everybody needs to read it.
Anonymous At Work
@Winston: Evidence? There’s plenty of it about him being a wannabe authoritarian, penchant for violence, etc. Is there concrete evidence linking his state of mind to racism?
Redshift
@Omnes Omnibus:
But they’re being allowed to use those terms to refer to people who are both not on trial, and are dead and can’t defend themselves. How is the use of loaded terms that presume guilt in any way consistent with the principles that are being applied to the defendant?
quakerinabasement
@Baud: Yeah, maybe they can go on tour together.
Winston
@Anonymous At Work: As I recall he made the remark shortly after the attack and it was reported by witnesses.
Cameron
@Omnes Omnibus: You can’t conduct a trial via Twitter? I’ll be damned. Learn something new every day.
quakerinabasement
@Omnes Omnibus: I hear you.
I have no training or experience in law, but if I was prosecuting and barred from using the word “victim,” then I’d refer to the dead by their first names, frequently. I’d try to paint them as regular folks.
Omnes Omnibus
@Redshift: It would be that Rittenhouse believed that is what they were that would go to his state of mind. Whether that belief was reasonable is an open question. As are many others. These decisions by the judge don’t remotely doom the prosecution. But I don’t have the trial documents with witness statements in front of me so I have been trying to speak in fairly general terms.
ETA: Deleted
Omnes Omnibus
@quakerinabasement: That is what prosecutors do as a general rule.
Other MJS
“Targets”? “Bullet recipients”?
japa21
@Omnes Omnibus: I appreciate your calm, reasoned approach to this issue. Obviously it is one which brings a lot of emotional responses from people. My only question is if a response such as yours is appropriate for BJ. And only half kidding.
Omnes Omnibus
@japa21:
Thanks. But, remember, on other issues, I am a fantasist who thinks that bills will get passed and we have a good chance in 2022. So who knows?
Gin & Tonic
@quakerinabasement: I’m wildly out of step with America, probably, and pretty far off topic, I suspect, but the practice of referring to people one doesn’t know well by their first name really grates on me, and would certainly bother me if a prosecutor did that and I were on the jury.
This is where I bemoan the English-language you as contrasted with, e.g. tú/usted (or similar found in almost every European language.
End rant.
trollhattan
@Other MJS:
“Ammo hoarders.”
Omnes Omnibus
@Gin & Tonic: So we shouldn’t call you Gin? And am I Mr. Omnibus to you?
Raven
@Gin & Tonic: in the south it’s common to call adults “ Mister” and their first name.
Professor Bigfoot
@Omnes Omnibus:, well, dammit, I too am a fantasist who believes bills will be passed and that we do have a shot at 2022, and I am for damn sure NAL, so I have to take your word for it.
But goddamn, it sure does feel like “the poor young man made some mistakes but we shouldn’t ruin his life over them” kind of white privilege.
Gin & Tonic
@Omnes Omnibus: You are certainly Mr. Omnibus, at least until we meet and you suggest I call you Omnes. I, on the other hand, have just one name, like Prince, or Cher.
Professor Bigfoot
@Raven: I was raised that way in Tennessee back in the ’60s and ’70s.
GOD FORBID you refer to a grownup by their first name <shudder>
JoyceH
Open thready stuff – is anyone else starting to get bummed out about the state of the pandemic? For the past week, the decline in new cases has leveled off, so the current low is running 70K cases PER DAY. Which was the height of the summer surge last year. And this is over half a year after vaccines became widely available. My state (VA) is improving, but my county is remaining stubbornly red. I want to get my life back to normal! I want to eat in restaurants! And in my little rural community, they’re holding anti-mandate protests in front of the elementary school by the base’s main gate. I hate these anti-vaxxers SO much!
Gin & Tonic
@Raven: Very common in Slavic-speaking countries. Respectful, but a little less formal than “Mr. LastName.” In those languages which use a patronymic, that’s also an option, somewhere in the same range of formality: “Comrade Vladimir Vladimirovich…”
Omnes Omnibus
@Professor Bigfoot: From what I can see and have heard in WI, he seems to be ruling on things in this case the same way he rules on the same things in other cases. IOW, you may not like the results here but he seems to be consistent.
Baud
I would like to be referred to as Lord Baud.
japa21
@Omnes Omnibus: There are a few of us fantasists, Adam notwithstanding.
Redshift
@Omnes Omnibus: Okay. Using the nouns seems more like a statement of fact than of state of mind, but I guess it depends on context.
Omnes Omnibus
@Gin & Tonic:
Okay. I am okay with formality, but I don’t really insist on it. Except I expect it to be reciprocal. If a doctor, for example, calls me Omnes, then she is Jane or whatever. If she is Dr. Smith, I am Mr. Omnibus.
Anoniminous
I’ll be surprised if Rittenhouse doesn’t walk
Omnes Omnibus
@Redshift:
It does, and it way more complicated than anyone can get into here. Pre-trial conferences where this stuff gets hammered out can be insane.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud:
You’ll get nothing and like it.
Kelly
Gangs. They are just gangs.
eclare
@Professor Bigfoot: About six or seven years ago we had a new hire at my workplace who referred to me as “Miss [first name].” Someone asked me if it bothered me. I replied that I had been called much worse.
Context: I live in the south, TN.
Mallard Filmore
@Baud:
Heavens! Have you given up on being President Baud ???
WaterGirl
@Professor Bigfoot: Sorta like the white athlete shouldn’t have his life ruined by the “20 minutes of fun”. Pretty sure the girl he raped didn’t view that quite the same way.
eclare
@JoyceH: I am convinced it is going to be years of peaks and valleys. In Memphis where I live, thanks to a county wide face mask mandate that started during delta, cases slowed to less than 100 per day in a seven day average. The county health departments reaction? Remove the face mask mandate! Going into holiday season. I have no doubt delta will have a great holiday, and we’ll be masking again, maybe in Jan. Rinse, repeat.
Omnes Omnibus
@eclare: Oddly, some of my older AA clients use Mr. Omnes when talking to me. It sounds weird to my ears, but I know where it is coming from, so I respond with sir or ma’am and everyone seems fine.
Omnes Omnibus
@WaterGirl: I think it is unfair to compare the two judges.
eclare
@Omnes Omnibus: Not surprising at all. And you are correct, sir and ma’am convey respect, trust.
chopper
@Redshift:
the judge stated that the defense can use those terms 1) only in closing arguments 2) only if they present evidence during the trial establishing that the victims were in fact arsonists etc.
a lot of the reporting on this issue has been backwards.
Omnes Omnibus
I hadn’t seen that detail but it fits.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Omnes Omnibus: I do that with my doctor too.
Anyway
@Omnes Omnibus:
Working in GlobalMegaCorp it cracks me up when the head honcho insists on being called Joe or whatever at townhalls and the like to show how egalitarian the culture is… whereas the reality is so different. Worker bees don’t call any shots.
germy
Here comes the judge:
Kenosha County (WI) Judge Bruce Schroeder first started getting noticed early in his 40-plus-year career on the bench. In 1987, he made headlines requiring AIDS tests for sex workers. Told he’d be challenged for violating civil liberties, Schroeder said, “I hope so.”
By 2006, Judge Schroeder had such a bad reputation for his outrageous style – and stiff sentences – that hundreds of defendants had requested a different judge, causing a massive backlog in Kenosha County courts
Schroeder’s highest profile case before Rittenhouse was in 2008, when a man was found guilty of murdering his wife with antifreeze and Schroeder doled out a life sentence. But he botched it. An appeals court tossed the conviction: Schroeder made an evidentiary mistake
But Schroeder’s callous cruelty didn’t change. Just this year, the appeals court overturned the judge for “public shaming” of a 28-year-old woman convicted of retail theft. He’d ruled the woman couldn’t enter a store without telling management about her criminal past
https://twitter.com/Will_Bunch/status/1453156032780374016
Juju
Could the prosecutors call the men who were shot and killed unarmed protesters? I think that would work.
Omnes Omnibus
I am going to go see Last Night In Soho now. Play nice.
germy
lowtechcyclist
@Omnes Omnibus: Colloquially, ‘victim’ means the following:
ISTM that the point of the trial is to determine what these people were victims of: a crime, or self-defense, or a belief that he was acting in self-defense, orwhatever.Now since you say:
This is true: there are words that are legal terms of art, that have specialized definitions in a legal setting.But all you’re doing is hypothesizing that ‘victim’ is one of those words.So I looked it up in Black’s Law Dictionary, and it has two definitions of victim:
1) Person harmed by criminal acts
2) attack target
So as a legal term of art, the three people Rittenhouse shot sure seem to fit the latter definition: they were his literal targets that he attacked with high-velocity bullets.Again, what the jury has to decide is whether the first definition applies as well.
quakerinabasement
@Raven: If I was trying the case in the south, well, maybe I’d refer to the deceased that way instead.
quakerinabasement
@Omnes Omnibus: Quite right. Context enriches meaning.
JaySinWa
At least one of the victims is not dead. There were accusations that he was involved in some altercation with police. I don’t know if there were charges or convictions. Can dead people have defamation cases brought on their behalf? I suspect not. But not everyone who was injured died. I would think they were due the same presumption as the shooter.
Obvious Russian Troll
@Mallard Filmore: Lord President Baud has a certain ring to it, doesn’t it?
WaterGirl
@Omnes Omnibus: I wasn’t intending to directly compare the two judges.
I was providing another instance that matched this comment:
edit: It’s a shame that no one can read my mind. //
tony in san diego
the prosecutors should just call them “the people Rittenhouse killed”. Judge can’t object to that.
Citizen_X
@Obvious Russian Troll: He needs to get elected Pope, too. So Pope Lord President Baud.
JaySinWa
@WaterGirl: The Gordon Lightfoot lament. “If you could read my mind love, what a tale my thoughts would tell”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5tr_L31StI
Sure Lurkalot
@JoyceH: @eclare:
Colorado’s COVID cases have been rising for 3 months now, from about 412 cases/day (7-day average) to 2,940. This weekend there were articles in the Denver Post about crisis care rationing, postponing elective surgeries and other hospital capacity mitigations. Because the one thing the state will not do, with a Democratic trifecta no less, is issue any state mandates whatsoever. Reason? The counties where cases are exploding need to issue their own rules. Of course, for the most part, counties where cases are exploding are where no mitigations or restrictions were or will ever be mandated and the vax rates are low.
Parents, don’t let your children grow up to be libertarians (our dear Governor) or idiots (our top state pandemic official).
JaySinWa
@tony in san diego: Again he didn’t kill everyone he hit, he paralysed one of them.
Central Planning
@Baud: Maybe Laud Baud?
I was going for the rhyme, but now that I see it in writing, laud also works.
Winston
@Juju: One of them was armed with a skateboard. The medic who was wounded was armed, though it is not clear that he was a target. The first guy he shot, it isn’t clear on the video.
J R in WV
@Anonymous At Work:
Since the not-victim yet deceased people were also white like Rittenhouse, racism probably won’t be discussed much in the trial.
JaySinWa
I think a lot of the analysis of this trial and the particularly current Unite the Right trial is focused too much on the legal claims and ignoring the jury nullification seeds that are being planted.
JaySinWa
https://www.wisn.com/article/who-are-kyle-rittenhouses-victims/38110794
I am not sure where I got the claim that one was paralyzed(@JaySinWa: )
The medic was shot in the arm according to this story.
eclare
@Sure Lurkalot: Thing is, here in Memphis, business leaders were surprised about the lifting of the mask mandate right before the holidays!
I just want to ask whoever made this decision, so the brakes in your car have stopped the car moving effectively, you going to remove them now?
rikyrah
Says Open Thread.so..
I am bringing my sister home from the hospital right now. Thanks for all the positive thoughts and prayers.
debbie
@rikyrah:
Happy news! ?
Hoodie
@Sure Lurkalot: Just came back from central CO, was a bit surprised by the level of non-masking, even worse than I’ve seen in traditionally red places like South GA. The news was all about overstretched medical facilities, but you sure couldn’t tell that from the amount of people wearing masks to places like the grocery store. I imagine mask wearing is a pretty good guide for discriminating between the locals and tourists. The urban-rural divide may be even worse in places like these parts of CO because you get a sense that locals there resent people from places like Denver, Dallas, California, etc., coming in buying vacation places, jacking up real estate values, etc., even though these areas are ever more dependent on money from these outside sources for their survival (not that many folks vacation in S. GA, so not quite the level of resentment).
J R in WV
@rikyrah:
So glad for your good news !! Hope she does well at home, will need to change her diet. Next door neighbor had a mild heart attack in late August, needs a new diet also too. Sounds really hard, new recipes, etc.
Best of luck to all your family!
West of the Rockies
@Omnes Omnibus:
Whatever.
//
Jim Appleton
@WaterGirl:
Knew you were going to say that.
topclimber
Oh Lord, he wants to be Lord Baud. Here I thought he was just becoming more of a corporatist dem, at worst a moderate Republican.
I hope the sheeple in jackal jackets who gave money to Baud20xx can get it back.
Not a problem for me. Never voted for the guy.
ETA jackets. Because BJ deserves the very best.
Winston
Grosskreutz was black. Huber was fleeing from the scene and was shot in the back by Rittenhouse. Rosenbaum video is not clear, but Rittenhouse shot him with maybe verbal provocation. There is video online of all of this. Self defense for Rittenhouse is a laffer, but I’m not a lawyer, I’ve just seen the videos.
schrodingers_cat
@rikyrah: That’s good to know! Wishing you all the best. If you need recipe ideas with the new dietary restrictions etc. let me know. It is possible that I may be able to help.
Kalakal
@Baud: Standard way to achieve that is to give lots of money to the Tory party in the UK.
Or become a British High Court judge, then you could be Law Lord Baud, which has a certain ring to it
zhena gogolia
@rikyrah: Still praying! I hope all goes well.
The Moar You Know
I want this spoiled little Nazi to get every break he possibly can so that when the judge has no options but to throw his ass in jail – and he will have to, too much evidence on video – there will be no grounds for appeal.
West of the Rockies
@topclimber:
Baud? Don’t know the guy. He may have brought me coffee once.
Winston
@Winston: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/27/us/kyle-rittenhouse-kenosha-shooting-video.html
Here’s the video that proves my memory is failing. The skateboard guy runs off. Huber tries to disarm him and is shot in the chest. The medic runs up with his hand gun drawn and is shot in the arm
MagdaInBlack
@Winston: Also, Grosskreutz is white.
Cermet
So if right wingers protest during the trial, and anyone shoots the judge (and kills the piece of shit), then the judge is a rioter, looter and arsonist as well. Good. If the verdict goes the wrong way and right wingers protest then I hope that judge is shot and killed and any jury learns he was a looter/rioter/ etc. low life deserving of death. I’d certainly buy that as a juror.
katdip
Wisconsin is a weird place, with a history of progressive, goo-goo politics but a more recent thread of white-grievance-psycho-trumpism (even before Trump). Sounds like this judge fits right in that mold.
Winston
@MagdaInBlack: Yes, that is what the news is today. Back then it wasn’t. This video is much clearer than the one I first saw.
frosty
@rikyrah: Good news about your sister. You did good!
Chief Oshkosh
@Baud: Really? ‘Cause I’d gotten used to thinking “Lord Help Us” when your campaign came up in conversation. ;)
Jim Appleton
Dead thread comment, to which I seem to gravitate.
1. A lot of commentary refers to George Floyd. That’s highly relevant, but the proximate cause of the Kenosha protest was the nonfatal shooting of Jacob Blake.
2. Video of the shootings is going to make it very hard to justify a claim of self defense. The guy shot unarmed people reacting to his belligerence, one of them in the back as he ran away.
3. As many have pointed out, he had no business being there with — or without — an assault weapon.
If he walks, it’s Zimmerman times infinity.
skerry
@rikyrah: Such good news. Wishing you both all the best as she continues to recover.
Omnes Omnibus
@lowtechcyclist: Black’s Law Dictionary isn’t the reference anyone will use at trial. Again, this judge consistently bans the use of the word victim in his trials. Honestly, if that causes the prosecution to lose this case, they had a shit case to bring.
Dan B
@rikyrah: Gold energy to you. You’ve certainly given a lot to your sister.
mario
@Omnes Omnibus:
I don’t dismiss it. This piece of the Rittenhouse story has been grossly misreported, and then unquestioningly picked up by left twitter. It’s embarrassing. Not surprised that someone like Reid just repeats it without, you now, actually looking into it, like a real journalist might.