The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

 

The good:

Polish opposition leader Donald Tusk declared the beginning of a new era for his country after opposition parties appeared to have won enough votes in Sunday’s election to oust the governing nationalist conservative party.

That party, Law and Justice, has bickered with allies and faced accusations of eroding rule of law at home in its eight years in power. It appeared that voters were mobilized like never before, voting in even greater numbers than when the nation ousted the communist authorities in 1989.

If the result predicted by an exit poll holds, Law and Justice won but also lost. It got more seats than any other party but not enough to being able to lead a government that can pass pass laws in the legislature.

The Ipsos exit poll suggested that Law and Justice obtained 200 seats. The far-right Confederation got 12 seats, a showing the party acknowledged was a defeat.

It also showed that three opposition parties have likely won a combined 248 seats in the 460-seat lower house of parliament, the Sejm. The largest of the groups is Civic Coalition, led by Tusk, a former prime minister and former European Union president.

“I have been a politician for many years. I’m an athlete. Never in my life have I been so happy about taking seemingly second place. Poland won. Democracy has won. We have removed them from power,” Tusk told his cheering supporters.  [snip]

At stake are the health of the nation’s constitutional order, its legal stance on LGBTQ+ rights and abortion, and the foreign alliances of a country that has been a crucial ally to Ukraine after Russia launched its full-scale invasion.

LGBTQ+ rights activist Bart Staszewski called it the end of a “nightmare” for himself as a gay man and others.

“This is just the beginning of reclaiming of our country. The fight is ahead but we are breathing fresh air today,” Staszewski said.

Environmental activist Dominika Lasota was emotional with relief, saying “we have our future.”

Law and Justice has eroded checks and balances to gain more control over state institutions, including the courts, public media and the electoral process itself... (our emphasis)

Sound familiar?  You can think of the Law and Justice Party as the Christofascist Republican Party of Poland (much like the Fidesz of Viktor Orbán in Hungary).  So, if this holds, good work, Poles!  Meanwhile, speaking of the Christofascist Republican Party...

The bad:

Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, a Republican with strong ties to former president Donald Trump, won his state’s gubernatorial race on Saturday night — a major victory for the GOP in a southern state that has been run by Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards for the last eight years.  [snip]

A staunch supporter of Trump and a hard-line Republican, Landry ran his campaign on a tough-on-crime platform and has consistently pushed conservative policies in the state, including a ban on gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth and a near-total abortion ban. The state’s contentious abortion ban has no exemptions for rape or incest.

Landry also was among the 19 state attorneys general who signed a letter in June demanding that the Biden administration allow their offices access to information about residents who received gender-affirming or abortion care in other states...

Beyond the fascist personal freedom denying, Landry is a MAGAt election- denier.  Any time one of them takes over a state, even a Malignant Loser- friendly state, it's a bad day.  Meanwhile, speaking of the Malignant Loser...

The ugly:

Two weeks into Donald Trump’s bank fraud trial in New York, it’s clear that the former president has no intention of actually trying to win the legal battle at this stage.

Instead, Trump’s legal team is working diligently to repurpose the trial as pretext for a future appeal—not to mention warping the proceedings into both a fundraising spectacle and an excuse to skip out on his other court dates.

For nine straight days, Trump’s defense lawyers have littered the court with legal landmines, objecting to nearly every bit of evidence submitted by New York Attorney General Letitia James and warning New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur F. Engoron that each decision he makes will be closely scrutinized by appellate judges—and likely reversed.  [snip]

Team Trump is still irked that they have to defend real estate deals stretching back a decade because the judge hasn’t yet explicitly drawn a stark cutoff in 2016 or so that could shrink the attorney general’s case—something an appellate court instructed him to do before the trial began.

Now, Trump’s lawyers are objecting to anything that even hints at older material, even emails presented by James’ office that make references to the distant past.

But Trump’s defense team has also adopted a comically and deliberately irritating tactic. Anticipating a massive and detailed appeal, they have been asking long-winded questions about each line in each document—and repeating each question for every year from 2011 and beyond...

As Carl Sandburg said, “If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell,” to which we would append, "and use frivolous objections to delay ad infinitum."