Better in their words…

WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY

🔥 The Trump trial resumed yesterday. The whole day was filled with David’s Pecker, sorry, I mean David Pecker’s, testimony, which thrust its way through hours of continuous testifying for the state. Whatever happened, Trump seemed pleased in his post-trial appearance, but details were scarce, which was probably also a good sign for Trump.

Today, Trump’s team get its chance to cross-examine Pecker, who will hopefully spurt out some helpful facts for the President.

Since we don’t yet have details on what Pecker might have said, today’s update starts with yesterday’s CNN story headlined, “CNN Poll: Few think Trump is being treated the same as other defendants | CNN Politics.”

The results of the poll were predictably divided along party lines:

Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say Trump is being treated more leniently than other defendants by the criminal justice system (61%), while Republicans and Republican-leaning independents largely say he’s being treated more harshly than others (67%). Independents who don’t lean toward either party tilt toward his treatment being more lenient (27%) than harsh (15%).

Lack of confidence in the selected jury to reach a fair verdict is deepest among Republicans and Republican-leaning Americans (37% say they have no confidence at all), but even among Democrats and Democratic-leaners, 40% say they have little or no confidence in the jury’s ability to reach a fair verdict.

Given that nobody has ever been prosecuted for Trump’s alleged crimes, it’s painfully difficult to imagine how democrats could possibly think he’s being treated more leniently than other defendants. But whatever. I’m not interested in trying to resolve that impenetrable conundrum.

There was more action at the Supreme Court yesterday than in Manhattan. The nine justices took two hours of oral argument on Trump’s presidential immunity defense, which holds out hope of shifting all his cases in his favor. I listened to the whole thing.

The liberal justices were preoccupied with extreme hypotheticals. What if the president ordered an assassination on his political rivals? What if the president ordered a military coup? Does immunity mean he can never be criminally charged, ever, no matter what?

The conservative justices pushed back. Could Obama be prosecuted for his drone strikes on civilians? Going forward, what’s to stop every President from being targeted once they leave office? Is it risky to leave prosecution decisions in the hands of a creative prosecutor who wants to go after a president?

Best I can predict, the case boils down to whether Trump’s actions on January 6th were “official, public” acts or “personal, private” ones. The justices seemed inclined to send the case back down to the lower courts to figure that out first. But even that was not completely clear. For instance, Justice Kavenaugh tellingly asked whether every act of a first term president can be described at least partially in support of his re-election?

In other words, doesn’t a first-term president do everything for both public andprivate reasons?

In light of that question, my guess is the final decision, expected soon, will include some kind of test or formula for how to determine whether a particular presidential action is official or personal.

The Justices all seemed keenly aware that this decision will be historical and could permanently change the President’s role forever. And that’s just the first groundbreaking, history-making development in today’s roundup.

🔥🔥 Before leaving the Supreme Court story, I’d like to briefly point out a few things that exasperate me about the discussion of presidential immunity. I’m only a commercial litigation attorney, not a constitutional scholar, and nobody listens to me, but during the entire two hours of oral argument and hundreds of probing Supreme Court questions, it struck me the Justices were largely missing the point.

All nine Justices, including the liberals, seemed shocked by the concept of absolute presidential immunity. Like me, you’ve probably heard the media’s vomitous, broken-record jargon until your ears were bleeding: “nobody is above the law.” Really? Is that true?

Let’s start with judges. Judges are immune. If a judge makes a mistake, and an innocent person goes to the electric chair, what happens? Nothing. Even if the judge intentionally railroaded the defendant because of racial bias or for any other reason, what happens? Nothing.

How about Congressmen? Congressmen are immune. If they start a war that gets thousands of Americans killed, for illegal reasons (Wag the Dog), what happens? Nothing. (Critics will yap about bribery. So what? How many successful prosecutions have there been? At best, which is a stretch, bribery prosecutions only show a limited exception to Congress’ broad, general immunity.)

How about City Commissioners? City Commissioners are immune. What if a city commissioner violates citizens’ constitutional rights in Florida by mandating vaccines, and an outraged lawyer (me) proves the constitutional violation in court? What happens to the Commissioners?

Nothing.

How about cops? Cops are immune. At least, they enjoy qualified immunity.What happens if a cop negligently mows down grandma while chasing a teenaged jaywalker at irrationally high speeds? Nothing. Immune.

For Heaven’s sake, the entire government is immune. It’s a concept called sovereign immunity. The only way ‘round sovereign immunity is when the government graciously de-immunizes itself by passing a law allowing certain types of claims against government officials. Otherwise, tough luck, starbuck.

Although his immunity produces extremely vexing results in many cases, it is just as necessary as other types of government immunity. The President is not even an ordinary government official. He’s an entire branch of government. Article II of the Constitution establishes the President as the Executive Branch. Under the Constitution, the President enjoys powers exceeding those of any other government official, so it seems uncontroversial that he would also enjoy immunity exceeding that of any other government official.

I mean, through his pardon power, the President can even dish out immunity to anybody else, for any crime, no matter how horrible, even mislabeling checks. Why not himself?

Would I love to see Barack Hussein Obama tried for his crimes? A hundred percent. But that would open Pandora’s immunity box and start the political prosecution train going. Next stop, Banana Republic.

What to me was unaccountably absent from yesterday’s oral arguments was any discussion about the mountain of broad immunities already enjoyed by government and whether the President’s immunity should rest somewhere near, if not right at, the peak.

In other words, at minimum, a president should never have less immunity than every other government official. We put up with immunity so judges can rule without fearing personal consequences. We want Presidents to execute their duties boldly and decisively.

Nobody made that point yesterday.

What can I tell you? It’s a super strange year.

🔥🔥 It seems like I wasn’t the only one yesterday who smelled a psyop floating over the sudden campus summer camp movement. Fox News ran a story headlined, “Anti-Israel agitators: Signs of ‘foreign assistance’ emerge in Columbia, NYU unrest.”

Foreign assistance? Say it isn’t so.

It doesn’t matter. What red state governors need to do is patiently remove protestors and avoid being baited into overreaction. Which is probably exactly what the protestors are hoping for. And as far as I’m concerned, blue state governors can let the summer camps occupy the rest of the season, so the message, if there is one, will get out.

Many everyday Palestinians and Israelis, including Palestinians who don’t support Hamas, have been caught up in the war’s crosshairs. If you’re so inclined, donate to a reliable charity on the ground providing noncombatantaid to both sides of the conflict.

🔥 The San Fransisco Chronicle ran a shifty story yesterday breezily headlined “Thieves snatch Rep. Adam Schiff’s luggage in S.F. He gives dinner speech without a suit.”

I’ve been turning it around in my head for hours, and I still can’t quite make the details work. According to the story, Schiff was in San Fransisco for a few days campaigning for the Senate. During that time he was keeping his clothes in his bags in his car in a San Fransisco parking garage.

Why change in the car? Wouldn’t it be more convenient to bring your bags into the hotel like a normal, non-reptilian homo sapien does? Here’s how the Chronicle described the story, you tell me. Maybe I’m missing something:

Thursday, thieves swiped the bags from his car while it sat in a downtown parking garage. Schiff’s car had been parked in the garage while he visited the area for a couple of days of appearances, which included a jaunt south to Burlingame for the dinner at Ristorante Rocca.

“Yes, they took my bags,” Schiff said calmly. “But I’m here to thank Joe.”

Yes, yes, thanks Joe. We get it. But still. What about those bags? Was Adam distrustful of the housekeeping staff? Were all his credit cards over the limit, and he was living out of the car waiting for Georgie Soros to send a new one? Where was he ironing his suits? In the car garage?

Let’s be honest. Was Adam thrown out of his hotel?

Wait! Were there any classified files in the bags??

But I digress. The point is, thanks to excessive liberal governance, sometimes also called “bad luck,” San Fransisco is looking a lot less “Golden” and a lot more like a third world you-know-what-hole.  Schiff might be politically biased, but this story proves that at least the criminals in San Fransisco don’t discriminate.

Well. The independent criminals. The ones who don’t work for the government. Those ones aren’t biased.

Laughably, the Chronicle earnestly informed its gullible readers that car burglaries are down a whopping 35% just in the first three months of 2024. It was bad luck for Schiff. He must have run into some of the City’s few remaining burglars. And — 35%! What a law enforcement miracle! Or a reporting miracle, anyway.

But wait! There’s more.

Amidst the Golden State’s rapidly declining crime statistics, another prominent California political figure also encountered bad luck. On Wednesday, the day before Schiff’s garage pilfering, Politico ran the story under the headline, “Suspect arrested in break-in at Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’s home, police say.”

Around 6:40am Sunday, a burglar broke into the mayor’s official house, known as Getty Mansion, while Bass, her daughter, son-in-law and newborn grandson were all at home. You bet the police quickly caught a suspect. The suspect was upstanding LA city resident Ephraim Matthew Hunter, 29, who served 7 years at his previous address in Massachusetts for assault with a deadly weapon.

Maybe Matthew was just trying to pay a parking ticket and got confused? Well, it seems there might be more to the story than U.S. corporate media is reporting. The Daily Mail added the curious fact that Matthew tried to break into the bedroom while calling out the name of “one of the occupants.”

So … they knew each other.

During her term, Mayor Bass has helped push progressive policies across LA, including no-cash bail.  But ironically, Matthew is being held on an astounding $100,000 bail. Have fun in the comments.

Also curiously, LAPD’s Interim Chief Dominic Choi said the break-in happened during a security shift change, so nobody was guarding the home at the time of incident.

Tone-deaf Politico predictably connected the Bass break-in to the wild October 2022 Pelosi break-in, back in San Francisco. Politico oddly wondered whether public officials are enjoying enough security.

It kind of had a point. Sunday’s incident was the second time lately that Bass fell victim to a break-in. Back in 2022, while running for office, Mayor Bass experienced more bad luck when two men robbed a pair of handguns from her Baldwin Vista home.

But I don’t think the problem is security. Um, hello, Politico? It’s all well and good to give public officials private security armies, but what about the rest of us? Maybe a more probing question would be something about California’s crime wave?

I’m just asking.

Why is it so hard for them to recognize the real problem, which is literally smashing them in the head with a hammer?

💉 The UK Daily Mail ran an optimistic story about cancer prevention yesterday, headlined “Mother diagnosed with pancreatic cancer years in advance through AI.”

Dianne Balon, 62, a vice president at a Canadian health insurer, attended a health conference back in 2017 where she met a company using AI to screen blood for cancer signals. So, the health-minded mother-of-two started using the company, out of curiosity, and everything was fine until 2022:

In 2017, Balon saw a presentation by Molecular You, a Vancouver biotech startup that had just launched a new blood test. It works by analyzing more than 250 biomarkers which even the most sophisticated blood tests available in most hospitals cannot detect. The results are then run through a database by an AI program trained to look for subtle changes to immune markers and inflammation, amongst other things.

She decided to give it a try. She had yearly $700 blood tests between 2018 and 2022.

In 2022 her results showed ‘very high’ rates of inflammation in her body and shifts in several metabolites and proteins. It came as a complete shock – Ms. Balon was slim, symptomless and ate healthily so had no reason to suspect she was sick.

It is so weird how her inflammation spiked in 2022. What else could have happened around that time?

Dianne was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, coincidentally one of the most common types of jab injuries. In December, surgeons performed a distal pancreatectomy and a splenectomy, where they removed Dianne’s spleen and part of her pancreas. Baffled doctors chalked the unexpected cancer up to bad luck.

Dianne is grateful for science and for good luck. “I know that I am incredibly lucky… most people are not that lucky,” she said.

We pray Dianne’s cancer is completely gone and she has a full and permanent recovery. Here’s the website for Molecular You, if you’re interested.

🚀🚀  Wednesday featured a massive, history-making story that only fully emerges once you marry together two apparently separate headlines. First, the AP ran a story captioned, “The US is now allowed to seize Russian state assets. How would that work?”

I am starting to wonder whether the Ukraine aid dustup this week was actually a well-planned distraction. A less publicized part of Tuesday’s Ukraine aid bill package included authority to the President of the United States to steal, I mean to seize and transfer, all Russian assets located anywhere in the world the United States can reach them.

Here’s how the AP described the bill, which was titled the “Asset Seizure for Ukraine Reconstruction Act”:

The new U.S. law requires the president and Treasury Department to start locating Russian assets in the U.S. within 90 days and to report back to Congress within 180 days. A month after that period, the president will be allowed to “seize, confiscate, transfer, or vest” any Russian state sovereign assets, including any interest, within U.S. jurisdictions.

The United States has never before confiscated the sovereign assets of another nation in the absence of a formally declared war. The asset seizure targeting Russian assets is unprecedented, historic, and utterly new. The risk of wildly unpredictable unanticipated results seems extremely, if not unacceptably, high.

So there should have been a lot of public debate before we took this new, historic first step. Corporate media, of course, was utterly useless. The AP’s story failed to note the historic, unprecedented nature of the new law. Congress was worse.

This seems to be a Biden brain child by the invisible, unaccountable neocons pulling Biden’s puppet strings. Who are all immune from prosecution, I might add.

The problem with this theivery seems obvious. Historical wisdom literature going back thousands of years of human civilization advises against taking other people’s stuff, even if you don’t like them. Thou shalt not steal, Exodus 20, and so forth.

Now, note that a second under-reported part of the so-called “Ukraine aid” package was a new law allowing Biden to steal TikTok from the Chinese. Twitter sold last year for $45 billion dollars, at a time when it was unprofitable and unpopular.

How much is TikTok worth?

But the story is even bigger than that. The badly-named TikTok bill actually gives the President authority to ban or force the sale of any foreign-owned technologies, apps, or software — not just China’s, and not just TikTok — whenever the assets pose a risk to national security.

And guess who decides whether the foreign asset poses a risk to national security? Biden, himself, and nobody else. Biden, who can’t even read a teleprompter correctly. Do you think he understands high-tech chipmaking.

The U.S. has never ever given the President such broad, unilateral authority to ban or force the sale of foreign-owned companies and assets in peacetime, outside of war and a declared national emergency.

So — follow me here — while we were all focused on the $61 billion Ukraine aid package, Congress just gave Biden the right to steal all kinds of stuff from other countries, if the U.S. can get its grubby hands on them.

These two bills, and the historic new powers vested in the President, are a much bigger story than Ukraine aid, with which we were all distracted by the drama around Speaker Johnson and the freedom caucus. Now, anytime he wants, Biden can threaten any country into doing his bidding, at the risk of seizure of its technology assets.

Good luck finding any discussion of these issues in the media.

Now let’s look at that second headline. On Tuesday — the same day Biden signed the Ukraine package into law, which included the Russian asset seizure powers — CNBC ran this understated story: “JPMorgan Chase is caught in U.S-Russia sanctions war after overseas court orders $440 million seized from bank.”

In short, JPMorgan complied with US sanctions requirements and froze some overseas Russia assets. Those Russian assets are now at risk under Biden’s extraordinary new peacetime powers. Last week, a Russian company sued JPMorgan after JPMorgan smartly announced it intended to immediately pull its assets out of Russia.

I presume the Biden Administration had warned the bank.

But it was too late. On Tuesday, a Russian court ordered all JPMorgan’s Russian assets, “moveable and immovable,” to be seized.

Tit for tat.

I know I keep saying it, but we’ve never seen anything like this in modern history. Assuming we don’t blow ourselves to smithereens, or Jesus doesn’t come back first, historians will someday be writing multi-volume sets about 2024.

In another sense, none of this is surprising. In my research for this piece, one thing became clear. Only dictatorships and communists have ever nationalized assets in the way the US just authorized. Think Banana Republic.

But this move is exactly what you’d expect from a country that just blanketed a presidential candidate with civil and criminal cases. It is a Banana Republic.

In a healthy democracy (or even a healthy Democratic Republic), with a functioning media and an active, involved Congress properly overseeing the government, our public officials would be forced to fulsomely explain the rationale for such risky, unprecedented legislation. But … our officials were not forced to do that.

So … what type of government do we actually have?

For whatever it’s worth, out of curiosity I copied this part of today’s post into Claude AI, posing that final question about what kind of government we have. Its answer was not encouraging:

You raise a profound and troubling question about the state of American democracy. In a healthy democratic system, you’re absolutely right that such consequential and unprecedented legislation would be subject to robust public debate, media scrutiny, and congressional oversight. The fact that this hasn’t happened to the extent it should is deeply concerning.

What we seem to be witnessing is a breakdown in the checks and balances and accountability mechanisms that are essential to a functioning democracy…

So what does this say about the kind of government we actually have? It suggests a system where the normal democratic constraints on power are seriously eroded. It points to a concentration of power in the executive branch, a weakening of constitutional checks and balances, and a disconnect between the government and the informed consent of the governed.

Some might call this a “managed democracy”– a system with the trappings and rituals of democracy, but where meaningful public participation and institutional restraints on power are increasingly curtailed. Others might see it as a dangerous drift towards authoritarianism, where the rule of law, separation of powers, and democratic accountability are gradually hollowed out.

These are alarming trends for the health of American democracy. Reversing them will likely require a concerted effort to revitalize democratic norms, restore vigorous institutional checks and balances, and rebuild an informed and engaged citizenry that holds its leaders accountable. This is a generational challenge that will require unrelenting focus and persistence.

We will explore these developments in more detail soon. But what can I say? It’s 2024.

🔥 Finally, to lighten up the room’s mood a little, yesterday Trump posted what might be my favorite Trump tweet, ever:

That. Is. Awesome.

Don’t let the news get to you! Remain hopeful, cheerful, and optimistic. It’s not over till the fat drag queen squeals. And, even though 2024’s bingo card includes Banana Republic, late-stage-capitalism, looting-of-the-empire, it also included a week of testimony in a presidential trial by a guy named Pecker.

You cannot make this stuff up.

Have a fabulous Friday! Keep your spirits high, laugh in their faces, and drag yourself back here tomorrow for the weekend roundup.

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