Month: July 2024

A republic, if you could’ve kept it

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that former President Donald Trump is entitled to immunity from federal prosecution for official actions he took while in office, a landmark decision at the height of an election season that could further delay the start of his criminal trial in Washington, D.C.
The 6-3 decision along ideological lines tosses out a ruling from the federal appeals court in Washington that concluded Trump is not entitled to broad immunity from criminal charges stemming from an alleged scheme to hold on to power after the 2020 election. The justices sent the dispute back to the district court for further proceedings, and gave the court guidance about how to move forward.
The ruling expands presidential power by extending immunity from criminal prosecutions to former presidents for their official conduct. Never before had the Supreme Court considered whether a former commander in chief could face criminal charges as a result of conduct that occurred while in the Oval Office.

All this time people have been worried about Trump possibly becoming president again when evidently we should’ve been focusing on the Supreme Court… sigh. The barrage of tweets at the top are because someone on the Puzzle in a Thunderstorm FB group linked to the Twitter thread (saying this looked like the US’ 1933 Germany moment) and someone else asked could someone do screenshots for people who understandably refuse to look near Elonland, so I took that task upon myself cos I thought I could post them here and save myself at least a bit of effort writing… I hope that friend Dirk’s analysis is overstated and overwrought, and yet I fear it won’t be.

Of course, some people are now quite excited that, if Trump can no longer be held accountable for “official” crimes, neither can Biden cos the SCOTUS judgement does specifically mention “the president” and not just Trump… therefore if Trump can get away with murder (probably literally and not just figuratively, too), so could Dark Brandon. Alas, those people are deluding themselves…

…and that’s not just me being pessimistic. Oh well, America, it was nice knowing you, at least sometimes…

Kaos vs Hollywood

I frankly never had any interest in watching Ballistic: Ecks vs Sever, though I also had no real idea as to what it was about or anything like that… just that it acquired an almost immediate reputation as one of the worst films ever made. But I watched this the other day, this is a video which looks at just how and why it acquired that reputation… and I must say the backstory of how Ballistic was made and unmade by the studio to blame for it is compelling, almost certainly better than the film itself. Maybe not quite the catastrophe of the second Highlander film, but even considering everything that went wrong there, I don’t think the producers of that were actively scamming investors out of tens of millions of dollars like Franchise Pictures were doing…

I don’t think I’d ever heard of Franchise before, but it does turn out I’ve seen quite a few movies produced by them and at least heard of a few others; apparently studio head Elie Samaha’s modus operandi was picking up scripts that the major studios were dilatory about, that he then made cheaper than the majors because he refused to pay the people involved what they were normally worth (often on the grounds that, like John Travolta with Battlefield Earth, they were so desperate to just get their passion project made they’d do it for less than their usual fees, if not nothing at all), and which then got released to cinemas and generally bombed cos they were kind of shit. I still don’t have much desire to see Ballistic, but the story of what was happening behind the scenes is kind of amazing; the fact that Elie Samaha still has a job in an industry from which he should’ve been banned for life years ago is kind of appalling.