Briefly There is Happiness ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️

Jumping the Shark: With his NY trial behind him and sentencing not scheduled until July, Trump is back on the campaign trail.  Over the weekend during a Las Vegas rally where it was so hot that dozens were treated for heat related exhaustion and six ended up hospitalized, he went even more off the rails than usual after his teleprompter froze leaving him unscripted.  Unable to fill the space with anything coherent, Trump went off into a bizarre soliloquy about electronic voting and sharks, asking “"If the boat is sinking, water goes over the battery, the boat is sinking, do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted? Or do I jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted?” For the record, Trump who as Stormy Daniels once told us is especially obsessed and spooked by sharks would rather be electrocuted by a boat.  All this from a man who is neck and neck with his opponent, Joe Biden who stutters and walks stiffly but never posits about sharks and such. Trump also did his usual hate shtick, attacking migrants, defending the January 6 “tourists,” and projecting his crimes onto the Biden “crime family.”  On the subject of crime, felonious Don is due to meet with his probation officer today.  That meeting will take place over zoom leading me to wonder if Donny boy been given a pass on the usually requisite drug test or is that being done remotely too?  Late Friday, presiding Judge Juan Merchan sent letters to both Trump and Alvin Bragg’s legal teams flagging what was likely a false claim from an admitted 💩 poster on Facebook. The 💩 poster claimed to be a cousin of one of the jurors and asserted that he’d been told in advance of the verdict that the jury would find Trump guilty as charged. Naturally, Fox and the rest of the right-wing echo chamber was all over the assertion, calling for a mistrial and admittedly my heart skipped a beat, but it appears that the accusation was just lots of 💩 and hopefully, nothing will come of it.      

Court Watching:  All eyes will be on the Hunter Biden gun trial this week.  The prosecution has rested and it’s now up to the defense. The Hunter case is truly a sad one.  Hunter briefly owned a gun and lied about his addiction when he bought it. As recovering alcoholic and political journalist Molly Jong Fast so eloquently wrote this week “People who struggle with addiction are sick, not bad. Huge swaths of the country are affected by alcohol and drug addiction that affects not just them, but their family members and people who are even tangentially connected to them — the parents, grandparents and kids and brothers and sisters and acquaintances of the addict. Alcoholism and drug addiction are a disease with a long tail, a disease that ripples through our society in myriad ways.”  Guns, particularly guns in the hands of people with addiction problems are bad too, but addicts, particularly those who don’t commit crimes with their guns should be treated for their addiction rather than publicly hung out to dry because their father is the president.  It’s hard not to feel concern for Hunter who despite all his opportunities has really screwed up. As to screwing up and hiding it, we now officially know that Clarence Thomas really did accept trips and gifts from his billionaire friends.  According to his filing, he received in excess of $4 million and it doesn’t appear that he included the loan for his very fancy RV on his list.  Thomas’s list dwarfs all of the other justices, or at least all of those who’ve reported thus far as Justice “flag flier” Alito has gotten an extension.  Newest Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s filing reveals that she received four concert tickets from Beyonce which pales in comparison to Clarence’s take but still anyone who has tried to get Taylor Swift tickets knows that’s a perk worth studying really hard for.      

Fog: Saturday, in a daylight raid described as extraordinarily daring and disturbingly deadly the Israeli military rescued Noa Argamani, Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov, and Shlomi Ziv, four of the hostages who had been held by Hamas in Gaza.  The joyful reunions of the now former hostages with each of their families were tempered by the news that Arnon Zmora, the leader of the Israeli operation, was killed during the rescue, that Almog Meir Jan’s father died the day before his son was brought home, and that 120 Israelis remain in captivity. Hamas reports that as a result of the rescue operation Gaza experienced 274 “civilian casualties.”  It’s near impossible to know how many Gazan civilians were really killed because Hamas, to put it mildly, exaggerates counts to generate sympathy and outrage but clearly a significant number of Gazans were killed.  However, the term civilian is doing a lot of heavy lifting here given who was holding the hostages.  The three male hostages were held by a journalist who has written and reported for Al Jazeera and for a US registered Washington State based non-profit called The Palestine Chronicle while the rescued woman, Noa Agamani, spent most of her captivity in the home of a wealthy Gazan family. Hamas counts those “nice” hostage holders as innocent civilians.  Spoiler alert, if you are holding hostages, you are not an innocent civilian and that goes double for the journalist.  While it’s great that the four hostages are now home, ending the Gaza war remains a Herculean effort. Getting the rest of the hostages home requires that a lasting ceasefire agreement be agreed to by both sides, hardly an easy task. Over the weekend, moderate Israeli Benny Gantz who had joined Prime Minister Netanyahu’s war cabinet in the aftermath of October 7 resigned from Netanyahu’s coalition to protest Bibi’s failure to develop a “next day” plan for Gaza.  The road to peace remains steeper than ever. 

#BringThemAllHomeNow