Fly Me to the Moon ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️🌻

Trump Trial:  Yesterday’s Trump trial began with a tete a tete between Judge Merchan and Trump’s lawyers about what prosecutors allege were four more gag order infractions but what Trump’s lawyers say was just Trump campaigning.  The judge didn’t seem concerned about Trump saying that National Enquirer’s David Pecker was a nice guy (wink,wink 😉), but he didn’t seem pleased with Trump’s other posts and comments, particularly his attacks on those “Democrats” on the NYC jury.  Merchan hasn’t ruled yet on these four infractions, nor has Trump stopped making them.  Later in the day, Merchan rejected a bizarre request by one of Trump’s lawyers, one that likely originated from Trump himself, that going forward the judge serve as Trump’s sanity filter, prescreening posts to make sure that they don’t violate the gag order.  By the way, Trump is starting to badmouth his own lawyers which likely contributed to their willingness to push the wacko request.  As to the trial, on cross examination Trump’s lawyers painted Stormy/McDougal lawyer Keith Davidson as a sleazebag in the business of extorting celebrities like Lindsey Lohan, Charlie Sheen, and Hulk Hogan, to squelch sex tapes.  They aren’t totally wrong, everyone associated with this case including Trump whose chosen long time lawyer Michael Cohen was an obnoxiously bombastic fixer and who had a year-long affair with a Playmate of the month and a one night stand with a porn star while his wife was home with their newborn child are sleazes but it’s Trump who greased his way to the presidency by paying to hide his sleaziness and his illegal financial machinations who’s on trial and it’s not like Trump surrounded himself with saints. Also, heard were a few tapes of Davidson and Michael Cohen, some of which made them look bad, others of which made Trump out as complicit.  As to Trump he rejected assertions that he’s been taking naps during the trial, instead saying that he’s just been resting his “beautiful blue eyes.”  Frank Sinatra, the real old blue eyes 👀 is turning over in his grave.

Time and Again:  The current issue of Time magazine features a truly revealing and frightening Trump interview.  Some highlights, or really lowlights, are as follows:  Trump plans to deport and/or throw into detention camps 11 million undocumented people, like domestic workers, gardeners, meatpacking factories and field workers, in other words many of the people who feed the economy and keep the country running; he would let states monitor women’s pregnancies and prosecute those who violate abortion bans because as he’s proudly said his Justices have turned abortion law back to the states and states get to do that kind of thing; he’ll direct “his” Justice Department to punish his “enemies,”  firing those US Attorneys who refuse to follow orders; he’ll pardon convicted January 6 miscreants; he’ll withhold legislated government funding for projects he doesn’t like so forget about the environment; he might not come to the aide of NATO allies if they haven’t spent what he considers enough money on their defense and maybe also because that’s what Vlad wants; and he’d gut the Civil Service by reclassifying thousands of people’s jobs as political, something that would make those holding the jobs disposable especially if they refused to do his bidding. Sure he said some of this last time around, but this time he’s going to surround himself with people ready to implement his plans so no guardrails.  As if that’s not enough in Wisconsin he said that he wouldn’t concede the 2024 election if he didn’t think it was “legitimate.” His way of saying that he won’t concede any election he doesn’t win.  Wired Magazine reported this week that a lot of the militant groups that participated in the January 6 “festivities” have reconstituted their Facebook groups in preparation for the election. Here we go again. 

Abortion Politics:  First the good news, yesterday after Arizona’s senate voted to repeal the 1864 total abortion ban that the Arizona Supreme Court had reinstated, the state’s Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs quickly signed on to the repeal.  The bad news is twofold.  First since it takes a while for newly enacted laws to go into effect, the 1864 law will still go into effect in June at least for a while.  Second, Arizona won’t go back to the more permissive abortion law that existed when Roe v Wade was the law of the land but will instead revert to the state’s post Dobbs 15-week, no exception for rape or incest, ban.  That means that passing an abortion referendum during this fall’s election remains key. In other abortion news, Florida’s onerous 6-week ban went into effect on Wednesday.  As the NY Times pointed out this week, “the gestational age of a fetus is counted not from the moment that sperm fertilizes an egg or from the moment you have a positive pregnancy test, but weeks earlier, on the first day of the previous menstrual cycle.”  That means that a woman is six weeks pregnant just two weeks after she misses her period, a time when many, if not most, women wouldn’t yet know they were pregnant. Judging by calls to Florida’s Planned Parenthoods, a large number of Florida women are so clueless that they didn’t know about the incoming six week ban perhaps because they were too busy leading their lives to keep up on the news or maybe because they only watch Fox.  In either case, some of them were shocked to learn that their reproductive rights had just been flushed down the toilet.  Florida is another state where abortion will be on the fall ballot, which is good, especially if 60% of the voters vote to restore their rights but not so helpful to women right now because unlike other elective procedures, abortions are very time sensitive under the most liberal of laws.  As to Fox, following a threat of a defamation suit by Hunter Biden’s lawyers, Fox has quietly taken down a six-part series that targeted him with a mock trial.  That’s the same Fox that repeatedly pushed the lies promulgated by Alexander Smirnov, the former FBI informant who is now considered a flight risk and is in jail for spreading Russian lies and propaganda about Hunter and Joe Biden.  Fox no longer mentions those lies or Smirnov but still hasn’t retracted them.    

Fog:  Columbia University appears to be under control for now, though UCLA with its sprawling easily accessible campus not so much. Lots of students as well as some outside agitators have been arrested with some really upset about what they believe is police overreach and many others relieved that the universities finally sought police help. As to Columbia, feeding the absurdity of the moment, a small group of pro-Palestinian law school students are now insisting that the university cancel their finals because they’re too traumatized by the police action to sit for exams. Wait until these snowflakes find out about life as a law associate.  As to the situation in Gaza, Israel has confirmed that 49-year-old Dror Or who was taken hostage on October 7 is dead.  His wife was killed on October 7 making their two young children orphans. As of this morning Hamas has not signed on to the latest ceasefire proposal despite a number of concessions from Israel.  Also, Pentagon spokesperson Matthew Miller confirmed yesterday that Hamas “hijacked” a shipment of humanitarian aid being transferred to Gaza through Jordan.  He reported that they were caught and much of the shipment was returned. No comment from any of those “traumatized” law students about any of that.

#BringThemAllHomeNow