8.31 Joseph Biggs, a onetime lieutenant in the Proud Boys, is sentenced to 17 years in prison after his conviction on charges of seditious conspiracy for plotting the attack the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
8.31 In a filing, the NY AG alleges that Trump and his associates fraudulently inflated his net worth by between $812 million to $2.2 billion each year since 2011. “Based on undisputed evidence, no trial is required for the Court to determine that Defendants presented grossly and materially inflated asset values … repeatedly in business transactions to defraud banks and insurers,” the filing states. “My son Eric is much more involved with it than I am,’’ Trump responded in an earlier deposition, “I think you would have a nuclear war, if I weren’t elected.”
8.30 The largest crowd to witness a women’s sports event filled Memorial Stadium in Lincoln, Nebraska. 92,003 fans watched the five-time NCAA champion Nebraska volleyball team beat Omaha 3-0.
8.30 Mitch McConnell suffers his second public `freezing’ incident.
8.27 E.J. Dionne in the Washington Post: “The weight of the old hung over the GOP last week in the booking of Donald Trump on Thursday at the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta and in the Trumpless presidential debate the night before. Both events underscored that differences in the party are defined in large part by competing loyalties to three political yesterdays: First is the one associated with Trump. The second is the tea party rebellion during the Obama years. And the third — glowing in a sacred conservative stratosphere — is the tradition of Ronald Reagan. Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign song was “Don’t Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow).” The GOP’s 2024 anthem might as well be, “These Are the Good Old Days.”
8.26 Overnight at the Lindstroms.
8.26 Wake in Greenwich CT for Rich Kelly.
8.26 Bob Barker dies at 99.
8.24 Trump is booked in Atlanta.
8.23 Trump, in an X interview with Tucker Carlson: “Jan. 6 was a very interesting day because they don’t report it properly. People in that crowd said it was the most beautiful day they ever experienced. There was love and unity. I have never seen such spirit and such passion and such love. And I’ve also never seen, simultaneously and from the same people, such hatred at what they’ve done to our country.”
8.23 The mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin dies is an airplane explosion near Moscow. Vladimir Putin: “[He] made some serious mistakes in life.”
8.22 Yankees lsuffer first nine game losing streak since 1982.
8.20 Spain wins the Women’s World Cup, defeating England 1-0.
8.17 Fintan O’Toole in the New York Review of Books: “There are big constitutional, political, and policy matters at stake in his campaign to return to the White House. But the kind of authoritarian rule he is trying to establish always comes down in the end to what happens to small, inconvenient people, those who become what Freeman was called in the Trump campaign against her: “a loose end.” They are lied about, criminalized, terrorized, threatened, and smeared—not by private gangs but by a gangsterized government. These are the things that happened to Ruby Freeman. What is at stake in the Georgia indictment is whether those who inflicted these intimate cruelties can get away with it and, therefore, be free to do it again.”
8.16 Courting Mr. Lincoln, by Louis Bayard.
8.15 A Montana court rules that climate change is real and caused by humans and that governments owe their constituents’ children a clean environment.
8.15 On TNT, Pedro Martinez discussed the Yankees. “Early in the year, it was like watching a bulldog beat up on a chihuahua. . . . Now they look like the chihuahuas.’’
8.15 Deaths from the Maui wildfires reach 99. Eugene Robinson in the Post: “What most of us haven’t adequately internalized yet is that this is how it’s going to be. We have changed the climate, which has changed the weather. We need to stop making things worse, which means switching from fossil fuels to clean energy sources. And we need to face the new reality we have forged.’’
8.14 After a two-and-a-half-year investigation in Georgia, Fulton County DA Fani Willis issues a 98-page indictment charging Trump and 18 operatives, including Giuliani, Meadows, Eastman, Powell and Clark with racketeering. Trump now faces a total of 91 charges. The racketeering charge alone carries a 20 year sentence.
8.11 The Rays walked off the Guardians 9-8. Before that happened, the Guardians did something unprecedented in baseball history. They staged a rally to tie the game, scoring three runs without ever putting the ball in play. Here’s how the inning went: Walk, Walk, Hit by pitch, Strikeout, Wild pitch (that’s one run), Strikeout, Wild pitch (that’s two runs), Walk, Wild pitch (that’s three), Strikeout.
8.10 The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder, by David Grann
8.10 We visited the grave of Elmer Ellsworth in Mechanicsville
8.9 Robbie Robertson dies at 80. Greil Marcus in the New York Review of Books: “ the guitarist and a songwriter for the Band, a group that in the late 1960s rewrote the American story as surely as Mark Twain, Mae West, Uncle Dave Macon, or Robert Johnson had done before them.’’
8.9 Rodriguez dies at 81.
8.5 Cara, Ivy and Connor visit.
8.1 Tom McNichol in The Atlantic: “Trump and his media enablers, of course, will fume that any criticism of choices made by millions of voters is uncivil and condescending—even as they paint other American citizens as traitors who support pedophiles and perverts. Trump has made such accusations, and the implied threat of violence behind them, part of the everyday American political environment. This brutish bullying is aimed at stopping the rest of us from speaking our mind. But after today, every American citizen who cares about the Constitution should affirm, without hesitation, that any form of association with Trump is reprehensible, that each of us will draw moral conclusions about anyone who continues to support him, and that these conclusions will guide both our political and our personal choices.
8.1 Trump indicted on four charges: conspiracy to violate Americans’ right to vote, conspiracy to defraud the government, obstructing an official proceeding and conspiring to do so. Peter Baker in the Times: “At the core of the United States of America vs. Donald J. Trump is no less than the viability of the system constructed. Can a sitting president spread lies about an election and try to employ his government’s power to overturn the will of the voters without consequence?”