Good morning, C&C, it’s Thursday, the penultimate day of May! Your essential news roundup includes: Trump trial update — hurry up and wait; Biden plays footsie with nuclear armageddon, Putin responds, and corporate media ignores him; more historic sun activity appears to be inbound next week; and the justice system provides a negative example of what not to do in court.
🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞
🔥🔥 Fox ran its Trump Trial update story at 4am this morning, headlined “NY v. Trump: Jury to continue deliberations for 2nd day in unprecedented case.” The sub-headline showed Trump’s long-enduring exasperation, explaining “'Nobody knows what the crime is,' Trump lamented after court adjourned Wednesday.”
Welcome to waiting for the jury to finish deliberations. You have it easy. For the lawyers, it’s when time dilates and the minutes stretch into hours. After the jury gets its instructions and files back into the plainly adorned conference room where they work, the attorneys are ordered to stand by. They must hang around in or near the courthouse.
Which kicks off the most dull, thrilling, and agonizing work session in a lawyer’s career.
The trial lawyers can’t leave. They can’t go anywhere because stuff comes up. As it did yesterday afternoon. Twice, Trump’s jury sent notes back to the judge asking questions to clarify the insanely complicated instructions. Once, they asked for sections of the trial transcript where certain witnesses testified about particular subjects. Whenever these kinds of requests occur, the judge calls all the attorneys back to the courtroom and holds an impromptu hearing on how to respond.
How to respond is a perilous razor’s edge. The judge would prefer if the lawyers agreed on how to respond, because if the judge makes the call, and makes a mistake, it could create reversible error. There’s no possible error when both sides agree, to prevent sneaky lawyers from manufacturing error.
As a lawyer waiting around during jury deliberations, whenever your cell phone rings from the judge’s chambers, your adrenaline instantly spikes, and you wonder is this it? Is this the call to say the jury is ready to deliver their verdict? Then you just find out it’s another question and you race back to the courtroom to argue some more. And then you’re done arguing, and you go right back to wait some more while tirelessly obsessing in microscopic detail over the jury’s frame of mind to have asked a certain question or asked for a particular item of evidence.
Trump’s jury finished yesterday without a verdict and resumes deliberations this morning. Last night, Judge Merchan hopefully suggested the jury would be allowed to stay late today, if they think they can get it done.
Talking heads always say the longer the jury deliberates, the more likely there will be an acquittal or a hung jury. By the time they start deliberating, the jurors have elected a foreman. After getting snacks and drinks, sitting down, and reviewing the verdict form, the foreman then immediately holds a straw poll on each verdict-form question, to see whether there might already be unanimity.
If not, the jurors start discussing the questions, one by one. That’s when the notes start flowing back to the judge.
Notes usually mean the jurors are remembering things differently, either the instructions the judge read to them (apparently criminal juries aren’t given written instructions in New York and must rely on memory), or the jurors argue, differently remembering bits of evidence or testimony. So they write their questions on a legal pad or a post-it note, give the question to the bailiff, who brings it to the judge, who will respond sometimes hours later with a written answer.
Sometimes the scribbled questions are hard to read. Sometimes the questions suggest the jurors have lost the trail and are wandering in the tall weeds. Like if they asked for the name of the bellman who checked Stormy Daniels into the hotel. But other times, the questions betray the verdict. Once, one of my juries asked, “Do we add the damages from section one to section two, or are they the same?” We instantly knew we’d won and the jury was trying to figure out how much to award my client.
But most of the time, the questions just give the lawyers and clients something else to obsess over while they wait.
Alvin Bragg’s team of prosecutors hoped the jury would decide quickly. It’s good news for Trump they are taking longer. If the jury was in the tank against Trump, minds made up, and didn’t care about the optics, the verdict could have been rendered in a couple hours; bing, bang, done, home in time to start giving interviews.
If you apply normal trial metrics, since the jury has now deliberated for over a day, and have asked several questions, it suggests they are thinking hard, debating, and especially, trying to do a good job.
But this is not a normal trial, so all bets are off. The jurors could just be going through the motions or creating material for the novels they plan to write. Still, there is no way to handicap the verdict. When it comes to Trump, whatever happens is almost always something nobody saw coming.
🚀🚀 In a story that is actually about what must either be the incalculable stupidity or planet-sized mendacity of the United States government about the single most important debate of our lifetime, a debate that is not being held, the New York Times ran more war propoganda yesterday headlined, “Blinken Hints U.S. May Accept Ukrainian Strikes in Russia With American Arms.” Antony Blinken is everywhere these days. He’s like the Pale Rider of Revelation, dragging Hell and destruction everywhere he goes. The headline is wrong; Blinken didn’t just hint. He said them; the most provocative and escalatory words ever uttered by a Secretary of State.
And it was much worse than the headline suggested. Blinken didn’t just say Ukraine could use American weapons to strike targets in continental Russia. The moronic Secretary of State said we would help Ukraine do it:
Where is the Congress while Blinken is out running his mouth like this? Is there anyone left in government who wants to stop World War III from breaking out over the rubble of Ukraine?
This is exactly what we all predicted would happen two years ago when Biden first drove us into the Ukrainian bog.
In a wordy but meaningless follow-up article last evening, the Times ran another hand-wringing story headlined, “From Allies and Advisers, Pressure Grows on Biden to Allow Attacks on Russian Territory.” The sub-headline explained the ultra-high stakes: “President Biden is weighing fears of escalation with a nuclear-armed adversary as he considers whether to let Ukraine shoot American weapons into Russia.”
Once again, the grotesque parody of a newspaper never quoted a single White House official. The only quotes are from Blinken. Not even Biden. The Times laughably offered Biden’s lack of public comment to his profound reflection on these complicated and important issues:
Haha! They don’t trust Biden to talk about this. And, again the Times attributed one of the most significant decisions of our lifetimes to invisible, unidentified “aides.” Who are these aides evaluating these critical decisions about whether it’s worth risking global thermonuclear war to help Zelensky? Why are they so secretive? Are they like fairies who leave security briefs on the doorstep if you put cookies out before you go to sleep?
Or, is the truth there are actually no ‘aides’ at all, and it is really just Blinken?
Even more hilariously, the Times explained that, even if Biden does decide to give Ukraine the nuclear green light, don’t ever expect him to say so. Why would he? It’s not like it affects the whole country or anything. The truth is they still don’t want Sleepy Joe answering questions about it:
Great. It will be an official unstated U.S. policy. Can you imagine the media outcry if Trump were stage-managing this disastrous train wreck of a foreign policy?
The awful, terrible, no-good New York Times failed to quote a single response from the Russians, in either article, about the proposed change in U.S. policy, even though the shift marks a historic moment, the first time in history a nuclear superpower has ever authorized a proxy and supplied the weapons with which to directly attack the other nuclear superpower. It would be like Russia giving Cuba long-range tactical missiles (able to carry nukes!) and providing all the telemetry and guidance for how to hit the White House.
We have lived long enough to witness the final failure of the long-lauded policy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). It’s been replaced with Mutually Assured Brinksmanship. And at the end of the day, it was us, the United States, that shattered MAD into a million dagger-like fragments.
In yet more journalistic malpractice, despite the unimaginably-high stakes, the Times never even tried to call the Russian embassy for a reaction. It never even went on Twitter. If we citizens wish to stay fully informed about what is happening, we are forced to visit the Kremlin’s website for ourselves.
Putin gave an interview yesterday. In the interview, he responded to this idiotic proposal to fire long-range strategic weapons directly at Russia. The full interview transcript is up on the Russian government website. The Times could easily have found it there, and quoted Russia’s president, but they ignored him, because they are Putin-deranged. Or something even worse.
Since nobody else will provide the life-and-death, critical Russian point of view about the Biden Administration’s ‘evolving’ policy, I will tell you what Putin said. (He’s a little wordy, and it’s translated, so I’ll edit for brevity and clarity.) You can read the original interview for yourself (and you should) at the link above. Here’s what Putin said, not responding to Blinken, but to similar comments made yesterday by UN Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, another intellectually-depleted gasbag.
First off, Putin clearly and logically pointed out the most massive problem with Biden’s proposed policy, totally obvious in hindsight, which of course has been completely ignored by corporate media and the New York Times. The biggest problem is that these high-tech missile systems don’t stand alone. They operate inside vast Earth-space technology infrastructures and networks that Ukraine absolutely does not have. In other words, even with a full belly packed with borscht, Olaf the Ukrainian soldier could not even hope to fire one of our long-range missiles.
Our long-range strategic weapons require a small crew of experienced, highly-trained U.S. or NATO technical specialists, to manage every single step of the process. Meaning, even if a missile were staged for launch from the territory of Ukraine, the United States would be the one pushing all the buttons. They would never let Olaf get anywhere near the costly weapon.
In Putin’s own words:
Concerning the strikes, frankly, I am not sure what the NATO Secretary General is talking about. When he was the Prime Minister of Norway, we communicated often, and I am positive he was not suffering from dementia back then. If he is talking about potentially attacking Russia’s territory with long-range precision weapons, even though he is a civilian like me, he should be aware that long-range precision weapons cannot be used by Ukraine without space-based reconnaissance assistance from NATO.
Final target selection and ‘launch mission’ can only be programmed by highly skilled NATO specialists who rely on NATO’s space-based technical reconnaissance data. For some attack systems, such as British Storm Shadow, these launch missions occur without help from any Ukrainian military. So who does it? Those who manufacture and supply these attack systems to Ukraine do it.
This can and does happen without the participation of the Ukrainian military.
Other missile systems, such as U.S.-supplied ATACMS, likewise rely on space reconnaissance data. Targets are identified and automatically communicated to the launch crews who may not even realise what targets they are programming the missiles to hit. In other words, the launch mission is assembled by NATO officers, not the Ukrainian military.
If you ask me, Putin’s next warning about the dire consequences was, if anything, highly restrained. Using diplomatic words, he soberly warned that Russia would retaliate against any nation that attacks it, regardless of picky technicalities like which base the missile launched from. In Putin’s careful words:
These officials from NATO countries, especially the smaller European countries, should be fully aware of what is at stake. Before talking about ‘striking deep into Russian territory,’ they should remember that their countries are small and densely populated. It is a serious matter, and we are watching it very carefully.
This unending escalation can lead to serious consequences. If Europe were to face those serious consequences, what would the United States do, considering our strategic arms parity? It is hard to tell.
Do they WANT a global conflict?
Our corporate media loves wailing about how Putin is threatening nuclear war again, but have you noticed they never directly quote him? Honestly, I am no Putin fan, but I still find Putin’s arguments clear, thoughtful, and compelling. I defy anyone to explain how any of it was disinformation.
Do we really expect the Russians to just sit on their hands while nuclear-capable missiles are streaming across their border?
Putin’s interview included even more fascinating information unaccountably absent from our own media’s analysis. One great example is Putin’s precise, lawyerly discussion about why Zelensky is a non-president under Ukraine’s constitution, despite his self-serving martial law declaration.
I don’t know what could possibly be a more important and necessary national discussion than this debate about helping Ukraine attack Russian territory. But nobody except the Times’ mysterious “aides,” spooks, and ghosts appear to be having the debate. And as I said, you should read the whole Putin interview for yourself.
Where is Congress?
🔥 Shifting to extreme outer space weather, Space.com ran a story yesterday headlined, “Massive sunspot responsible for May's epic auroras unleashes major X-class solar flare.” It’s back! And it still looks lively, although nobody seems to know yet how lively. Yesterday there was a solar flare eruption peaking around 10:35 a.m. EST, and causing shortwave radio blackouts across Western Europe and the Eastern United States.
The Big Spot was pointing away from us yesterday, so all that radio interference was just from a glancing blow. The space weathermen predict the giant sun pimple will be bursting directly toward Earth between June 4th and 6th. And they’re openly discussing the possibility of more worldwide auroras now, as if that were just something cool that happens at the end of every solar cycle rather than a flabbergasting sign of astonishingly and historically high levels of solar energy hitting the Earth.
Corporate media gives every big hurricane wall-to-wall coverage, trotting out expert after expert to sagely opine how manmade carbon worsened the latest storm. But as soon as we have actual historic weather, with staggering implications for the climate, corporate media is suddenly struck dumb, silent as the tomb.
It’s almost like media is trying to make us stupider.
🔥🔥 Finally, if you haven’t yet seen this awkward criminal-justice story making the rounds, ABC Eyewitness News Michigan ran the story yesterday headlined, “Man with suspended license appears in Michigan court over Zoom while driving.” Diligent online sleuths tracked the garrulous gentleman to one Corey Harris, whose social media profile ironically says he studied criminal justice at Central Michigan University. But Corey did not, apparently, graduate, for what are now obvious reasons.
CLIP: licence-less defendant attends Zoom hearing from behind the wheel (1:45).
Defendant Corey Harris was navigating a minor charge of driving with a suspended license, maybe for something simple like excessive parking tickets or failing to repair a broken tail light.
He was out, free as a bird, facing a single, minor traffic problem, and even enjoying a court-appointed lawyer who was helping him. But as you can clearly see, Corey handled his court hearing poorly. In the business, we call it a self-inflicted injury. It’s an example of exactly how not to handle a court hearing.
So, what can we learn from Corey’s tragic tale? The many types of valuable lessons appear obvious. Pull over BEFORE starting a Zoom session. Add entertaining and decorative backgrounds to your Zoom. Duh, don’t drive with a suspended license. But now, it can all boil down to this: don’t be a Corey Harris.
Have a tremendous Thursday! Launch yourself back here tomorrow for a jolt of more essential Coffee & Covid.
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