These situations make me wonder what I can do to help these people out. Besides echoing my frustrations, there’s nothing I can do except vote, which clearly doesn’t matter anyway. Well, I’m not a local, either, but hypothetically…
It makes me want to become a vigilante but that’s a poor choice, not that I’m even capable.
I wonder how much it would cost to hire a 4-5 blackwater type guys to run ‘security’ for him. Just go collect everything from the previous ‘admin’ and tell them to f-off.
MoCo, for the unaware, is huge—as a county it has a population of over 1,000,000—so even with a few caveats this still applies to quite a lot of people:
An amendment crafted by Luedtke will exempt from the bill any unit owned by a “natural person” landlord, as termed by the legislation. That means an individual—as opposed to a corporate entity—who owns four or fewer rental units in the county will be exempt from the legislation. Another amendment will provide a 15-year exemption for buildings that “have been substantially renovated or rehabilitated,” per the amendment language.
It could, because the requirements will be laughable. This is just a way for them to obfuscate their investment via a third party while virtue signaling.
It’s also a way for them to finger point during election season.
Holy moly this is a wild story. I really hope people don’t get murdered, and Braxton gets a positive outcome from the legal system. But beyond the shock from reading this, I’m left with anger.
The sheer audacity of these racist clowns, and the fact that its working!? Like, courts just refuse to hear cases on a lot of the discrimination that happens surrounding elections, so even though it might be illegal its the white courts that decide that. And they BURNED DOWN LEWIS’ HOME! Holy shit is that terrifying, and we know nobody’s ever facing any consequences for it.
One thing that is truly inspiring amidst all the racism and systemic violence is the mayor himself. This guy is out here practicing mutual aid, organizing community events, and fighting to get food for his community. One of his goals with becoming mayor was to get a grocery store in town, huge respect for this guy.
Fuck White Supremacy, fuck the State, but hats off to this man. I hope he gets what he’s fighting for.
Agreed, and this couldn’t be said better. This made me angry just reading it, that we still have some parts of the country living like its the mid 1900s.
My wife is a (seasonal) arborist, when I saw the news yesterday I decided not to show it to her because she already struggles with how people treat trees and this would just leave her angry.
Even I, a layperson, saw the job that was done and thought to myself “holy shot they mutilated those trees”.
Judge clarifies: Yes, Trump was found to have raped E. Jean Carroll
Aaron Blake4 - 5 minutes
After Donald Trump was found liable for sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll, his legal team and his defenders lodged a frequent talking point.
Despite Carroll’s claims that Trump had raped her, they noted, the jury stopped short of saying he committed that particular offense. Instead, jurors opted for a second option: sexual abuse.
“This was a rape claim, this was a rape case all along, and the jury rejected that — made other findings,” his lawyer, Joe Tacopina, said outside the courthouse.
A judge has now clarified that this is basically a legal distinction without a real-world difference. He says that what the jury found Trump did was in fact rape, as commonly understood.
The filing from Judge Lewis A. Kaplan came as Trump’s attorneys have sought a new trial and have argued that the jury’s $5 million verdict against Trump in the civil suit was excessive. The reason, they argue, is that sexual abuse could be as limited as the “groping” of a victim’s breasts.
“The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape,’ ” Kaplan wrote.
He added: “Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”
Kaplan said New York’s legal definition of “rape” is “far narrower” than the word is understood in “common modern parlance.”
The former requires forcible, unconsented-to penetration with one’s penis. But he said that the conduct the jury effectively found Trump liable for — forced digital penetration — meets a more common definition of rape. He cited definitions offered by the American Psychological Association and the Justice Department, which in 2012 expanded its definition of rape to include penetration “with any body part or object.”
Kaplan also flatly rejected the Trump team’s suggestion that the conduct Trump was found liable for might have been as limited as groping of the breasts.
The reason? Trump was not accused of that, so the only alleged offense that would have qualified as “sexual abuse” was forced digital penetration. Beyond that, Trump was accused of putting his mouth on Carroll’s mouth and pulling down her tights, which Kaplan noted were not treated as alleged sexual abuse at trial.
“The jury’s finding of sexual abuse therefore necessarily implies that it found that Mr. Trump forcibly penetrated her vagina,” Kaplan wrote, calling it the “only remaining conclusion.”
Kaplan also noted that the verdict form did not ask the jury to decide exactly what conduct Trump had committed, and that neither prosecutors nor Trump’s lawyers had requested it to do so.
“Mr. Trump’s attempt to minimize the sexual abuse finding as perhaps resting on nothing more than groping of Ms. Carroll’s breasts through her clothing is frivolous,” Kaplan wrote.
He added that the jury clearly found that Trump had “ ‘raped’ her in the sense of that term broader than the New York Penal Law definition.”
The motion was a part of Trump’s efforts to appeal the verdict against him. That’s an effort that will apparently continue as he faces a separate defamation lawsuit from Carroll, dealing with claims Trump made about her allegations while he was still president.
But for now, Trump’s effort to push back has led to a rather remarkable clarification that severely undercuts his main talking point.
For real. These trees represent decades of investment by the city to provide essential services (shade, clean air, etc.) that has now been permanently damaged by these fuckheads. And their “justification” is the most dishonest and despicable part. As an arborist I can tell you that no reputable arborist would trim these trees this way. Ignoring the legality, trimming them this way makes them more dangerous, not less, and any arborist should know that. Shame on them.
I don’t know much about ficus, but I know if someone did this to a silver maple or a ginkgo, it’d be a death sentence for that tree. There’s almost no foliage left to even photosynthesize with, and the surface area of the cut ends is massive; it’ll take months to seal up those wounds, during that whole time, the tree is losing water. If it managed to survive just the environmental issues (water, heat, light, etc), it’ll be extremely vulnerable to diseases and pests. Unless ficus are the tarragon of the tree world, they look to me like they’re doomed. Universal should have just cut them down, for all that.
Ficus is very tough so I do expect they will survive but they will be permanently deformed and more likely to drop branches in the future due to poor structure and injuries that may decay before healing properly.
You really love to see yet another unsuspecting victim accidentally invoke the wrath of tree law. Really makes that old episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force (S1E2) hit different. Ain’t no joke!
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