From CBS News: Jimmy Lai, Hong Kong pro-democracy activist, convicted in landmark national security trial

Jimmy Lai, the pro-democracy former Hong Kong media mogul and outspoken critic of Beijing, was convicted in a landmark national security trial in the city’s court on Monday, which could send him to prison for the rest of his life.

Three government-vetted judges found Lai, 78, guilty of conspiring with others to collude with foreign forces to endanger national security and conspiracy to publish seditious articles. He pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Lai was arrested in August 2020 under a Beijing-imposed national security law that was implemented following massive anti-government protests in 2019. During his five years in custody, much of it in solitary confinement, Lai has been convicted of several lesser offenses and appears to have grown more frail and thinner.

Free Jimmy Lai. The Acton Institute produced this movie about Mr. Lai’s life and imprisonment.

Here’s the Bill, courtesy of the Sandra Day O’Connor Institute.

If you don’t defend your rights, you don’t have any. And let’s support those law firms who help citizens in defend their rights.

One of my favorites is the Institute for Justice.

An economist writes a short article for the Wall Street Journal about taxes in his hometown.

Pacific Grove’s Tax Dollars at Work

The city council hires a consulting firm to help it figure out how to raise my taxes.

…Last month, though, Pacific Grove’s City Council passed a shocking measure that undercuts the warm-and-fuzzy hometown feeling. The majority approved an expenditure of up to $141,530 for a political consulting firm to help it figure out how to raise taxes.

The firm is called Props & Measures, and its proposal isn’t exactly subtle: “We work with our clients to identify shared community priorities and values to identify the elements of a successful revenue proposal. We have built community consensus for revenue measures in hundreds of communities throughout our home state of California and many communities across the country.”

It continues: “The partners and consultants at Props & Measures have experience with numerous successful public finance ballot measures that have raised billions of dollars in voter-approved revenue for public programs, services and facilities.”

In short, Pacific Grove’s City Council voted to use our taxes to come up with a strategy to increase our taxes. …

Here’s Jake Tapper in a short YouTube clip: Trump’s Epstein Reversal Is An “Exercise in Theater”

If Congress can pass an act to compel the president to do something that’s already within his power, then it can certainly pass an act to forbid the president from interpreting laws too broadly.

You know, we could have skipped that whole Supreme Court case over Trump’s tariffs case. All Congress needed to do was modify the IEEP (International Economic Emergency Powers) Act to forbid presidents from levying tariffs.

And speaking of Epstein documents, here’s “JMail,” a Google Mail view of Jeffrey Epstein’s e-mail.

You are logged in as Jeffrey Epstein, jeevacation@gmail.com. These are real emails released by Congress.

https://jmail.world/

Ben Sasse asks Trump’s supporters a good question, following the President’s tweet about licensing TV news networks. (Something that doesn’t even exist, of course.)

Question for conservatives:
What will you wish you had said now if someday a President Elizabeth Warren talks about censoring Fox News?

— Ben Sasse (@BenSasse) October 12, 2017

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But the larger point about Trump & his tweeting is how he manages to keep everyone reacting to him. I have to wonder whether he’d shut up if everyone just ignored him. So I liked Charles Cooke’s article asking Trump to keep quiet (even though I think it’s a futile request).

I could write this every day: https://t.co/T09ZNu80dA

— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) October 12, 2017

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“Just shut up and president,” as I’ve said before.

The day Trump kicked over the tweet-hive again, I happened to get email from the Cato Institute about Gene Healy, who wrote The Cult of the Presidency. And the attitude toward the presidency that Healy describes is the root of the matter, IMO. This situation’s been a long time coming.

The Imperial Presidency in the Age of Trump

“I alone can fix it,” Donald J. Trump proclaimed during his unlikely rise to the White House: “all of the bad things happening in the U.S. will be rapidly reversed!” It’s proven to be a bit more complicated than that.

More than eight months into the Trump presidency, the office that’s supposed to be “a symbol of our national unity” is the source of bitter division, as the president vents his frustration with Twitter attacks on Saturday Night Live skits, “so-called judges,” and the United States’ nuclear-armed rivals. Abroad, where the president’s authority is alarmingly unchecked, Trump has already launched some 20,000 airstrikes, threatened North Korea with nuclear annihilation, and refused to rule out a “military option” in Venezuela.

And yet, Donald Trump didn’t invent the Imperial Presidency: he inherited it. As Gene Healy warned in his widely acclaimed book, The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power, the “most powerful office in the world” has become far too powerful to entrust to any one fallible human being. Moreover, “We, the people” bear an enormous share of the blame for the presidency’s transformation into a constitutional monstrosity. As Healy argues, it is the public’s demand for presidential salvation from all problems great and small that drove that transformation: “the Imperial Presidency is the price of making the office the focus of our national hopes and dreams.”