☕️ FREAKY SINKING ☙ Wednesday, May 29, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Jury deliberations begin today in Trump's Kafaesque show-trial; dems are freaking out; Biden's pier back in the news; two front war seems unlikely; baffled scientists wonder about weather; and more.

Good morning, C&C family, it’s Wednesday! Time for your essential news roundup: Closing arguments completed in Trump Trial and jury set to begin deliberating; freak outs plague distressed democrats; more Biden Pier news as the distressed humanitarian bridge sinks beneath both the real and political waves; questions arise about US military readiness to fight on two major fronts; tornadoes baffle scientists and threaten cities; and a failed actor gets a fabulous reception in Manhattan.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🔥🔥 Appropriately at midnight last night, CNN ran its Trump Trial update with an over-the-top apocalyptic headline: “Judgment day looms for Donald Trump in New York.” Closing arguments finished late, after 8pm last night, with the prosecution getting four times as much time as the defense, which was required by a strange New York law to go first, before hearing what crime the prosecution would come up with. The jury will receive instructions this morning at 10am and then begin deliberating. Jonathan Turley called the day “otherworldly.”

CLIP: Jonathan Turley on NY v. Trump trial: What I saw today was outrageous | Fox (8:53).

In trying to sell its jumped-up p*rn case as something meaningful, the prosecution rankly speculated (at best), or cited facts not in evidence (at worst):

I wasn’t there, but as an attorney that highlighted line seems highly objectionable and maybe even grounds for a mistrial. The prosecution never put on any evidence that the check notations affected the election. They could’ve called an elections expert had they wanted. But they didn’t, so it seems downright batty they could be allowed to speculate about the various expenses’ electoral effects in their closing argument, jamming that wild notion into the jurors’ minds with the stamp of judicial officialdom.

Nevertheless, CNN cemented this case into history, not just because it was the first criminal trial of a president, but because it was the first criminal trial where, after all the witnesses had testified, after all the evidence was in the record, and both sides had finished making their closing arguments, the jurors still don’t know what crime the defendant stands accused of:

Another crime? What crime?? CNN’s article doesn’t say, and there’s a good reason for that. They don’t know, the jury doesn’t know, the judge doesn’t know, Trump doesn’t know, and even the prosecutors don’t know. The prosecutors are hoping the jury will figure out what crime happened.

As Professor Jonathan Turley explained in the clip above, Judge Merchan let the prosecutors repeatedly call the Cohen payments “illegal campaign contribution violations,” which prosecutors never even tried to prove, and which the payments couldn’t possibly have been anyway, since there is no limit to a candidate’s contributions to his own campaign.

🔥🔥 Sometimes a story accidentally hits a high point and echoes, and then mockingbird media chirps the echoed phrase all through the rough-hewn political slot canyon. It happened yesterday, after Politico ran the story that fired off a media chain reaction, headlined “Dems in full-blown ‘freakout’ over Biden.”

The thesaurus-like article was jam-packed with gloomy literary gems like “a pervasive sense of fear,” “a joyless and exhausting grind,” anxieties “morphing into palpable trepidation,” and, ironically amidst freak flood season, “surging worries.”

Meanwhile, Trump is drawing record South Bronx crowds of every stripe, color, and persuasion, and some joyless democrats have noticed:

But as for Biden, the long knives of political deicide are sliding out of their sheathes, with anonymous informants skittering out of the democrat woodwork and racing for first place predicting a titanic disaster. But anonymously, mind you, because nobody wants to be that guy:

And that was when Politico’s gong of doom struck its magical frequency, sending a dire ripple of disaster straight through the reality matrix. The same anonymous operative tossed out the word “freakout:”

That freaky phrase ripped through media’s reality matrix, metastasizing into headline after headline, and even winged its way into the White House itself, where a reporter asked super-diverse Press Secretary Karine Jean-Van-Damme to deny the freakout:

The White House denied Tuesday it was freaking out over President Joe Biden‘s chances at reelection.

“What are you talking about?” press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said when asked about a Politico story that claimed Democrats are in a “full-blown freakout” over Biden’s bid for a second term. Jean-Pierre claimed that Biden is the better choice, saying “he’s going to continue to fight to make sure that corporate greed doesn’t continue to take hold.”

Uh huh. But the operative who coined the influential bon mot wasn’t exaggerating; if anything he understated democrats’ deteriorating mental state. The anonymous operative soberly informed Politico, “This isn’t, ‘Oh my God, Mitt Romney might become president.’ It’s ‘Oh my God, democracy might end.’”

That’s what SHE said.

One bright spot amongst all the rotten political bananas was I never realized how much democrats cared about democracy, in spite of all the love they used to lavish on China’s autocratic president, who can get things done with the stroke of a pen. Representative Eric Swallwell (D-CA), who literally loves Chinese people, famously said this to MSNBC in 2020, and I have not forgotten:

"You know, we've seen China take dramatic and draconian measures to stop the spread of the virus. They've essentially locked down more than 50 million people. We're not there yet, but we could learn something from them. This is a country that has a leader who can do whatever he wants. He doesn't have to go through, you know, the legislative process. He can just do it."

So I guess now, post-pandemic, the democrats see themselves as the saviors of democracy, which is called “the old switcheroo.” But I digress.

Politico’s article cited all sorts of political trouble for Sleepy Joe, not least that Trump — who is literally hours away from a potential prison sentence — is crushing the democrat’s smartest man both in fundraising and battleground polling. But the gist, or nub, came down as it always does to peoples’ personal perceptions: we were all happier when Trump was President, even democrats:

Along the same lines, another New York Democrat, Representative Ritchie Torres, apparently defied the Biden Campaign, which denies inflation exists. But Torres not only believes inflation exists, he thinks it’s the real problem:

That is called a fractured narrative.

🚀🚀 Honestly, I didn’t think we’d return to the Biden Pier story so soon, but the massive failure they tried to hide has expanded and beached all over Gaza. It’s a much bigger story now, bigger even than the Navy’s pier-building budget. Late yesterday, CNN ran the tragic story with the bluntly worded headline, “US pier constructed off Gaza has broken apart.” Before / after:

The unimaginably expensive “pier” — which cost more than most Ukraine military aid packages, and required 1,000 soldiers to build — only operated for ten days before it blew apart. CNN hinted at the design flaw:

I’m just spitballing, but maybe it had something to do with the fact the Navy’s freshly-built, battle-hardened pier could be swept away by 4-foot waves or blown over by 16 mph winds.  As someone who grew up near the beach, I can tell you those conditions are considered nearly mild and boring — even in the lakelike Gulf of Mexico.

The Pentagon’s D.C. Pier Designers and its Artificial Intelligence Supercomputer apparently precluded the possibility of anything but the fairest of fair weather, failing to predict or even imagine the Mediterranian Sea would beat the odds in under two weeks. Nor did they predict Russia’s ability to beat Ukraine, but I’ll get back to that in a minute.

If it cost $320 million to build, how much will it cost to fix?

In this irritating clip making the rounds yesterday, you can hear some Palestinians watching a piece of Pier floating around, laughing, and amidst the foreign dialect you can make out the word “Americans” repeated several times between guffaws:

CLIP: Palestinians laugh at America’s most expensive pier (0:21).

Famously, Jimmy Carter’s presidency went down in flames after two U.S. military helicopters sent to rescue the Iranian hostages crashed in the desert.  Will the sinking ten-day-old Gaza Pier, sent to rescue the Palestinians, sink Biden’s electoral chances?

Nevermind Gaza and nevermind Biden, some kind of mental pier has obviously broken apart at the Pentagon. How was this buffoonish boondoggle designed and approved in the first place? It gets worse. The fair-weather Pier — intended (allegedly) for humanitarian purposes — was given a scary name: The Trident. Apparently it was called that because the thing had three smaller docks, or prongs, at the sea end.

Try to follow me here. A trident is a weapon. The angry sea god of mythology, Poseidon, used his giant trident to harass fishermen and wind up the ocean like he was using a gigantic cocktail spear. Not coincidentally, our main submarine-based nuclear missile is also named the “Trident.”

Why would they name a humanitarian pier after a weapon, a nuclear missile? And for Heaven’s sake, why connect the delicate apparatus to the Greek god of bad weather? Who is in charge over there? Was it Biden’s idea? Does Biden even have ideas anymore?

But it gets even more hilariously worse! Calling it “alarming,” “embarrassing,” and “a complete disaster,” the BBC reported three months ago that the Trident missiles we gave the British aren’t working. They even tested it here, off Florida’s Atlantic coast, under US military supervision.

CLIP: Trident missile test fails for second time in a row (7:03).

The next most recent Trident test, in 2016, also failed.

So. They named the doomed, quarter-billion-dollar humanitarian pier after a failing nuclear missile.

Good grief. One wonders what is going right for the Pentagon these days? Four-foot seas beat the most expensive military pier in U.S. history. Design flaws beat our most strategically important nuclear missile. Afghan rebels in caves beat the full force of our military so badly it was forced to flee in humiliating disarray, leaving billions of dollars of weapons and gear behind. Nomadic Houthi desert rebels are beating the Navy with cheap drones. Two weeks ago:

We are getting beaten up and down the world’s block. Based on the parts we can see, it seems obvious our military is in a woeful state. We are nowhere near ready to fight the Russians and the Chinese, which have hypersonic, carrier-destroying missiles that we can’t make or defend against.

What kind of ridiculous game is Biden playing at?

🔥🔥 Speaking of bad weather, take a look at these recent tornado headlines. More scientific bafflement:

If only there were a lucrative vaccine against tornadoes! Then grant-grasping scientists would be certain, they’d know everything that could be known about the novel extreme weather virus.

Next consider this confounding headline from LiveScience:

Something is going backwards, that’s for sure. It is always difficult these days to sift the climate alarmism from the real data. But what the articles reported was that the Midwest’s Tornado Alley is becoming more active and shifting eastwards, out of the thinly populated “alley” toward dense urban areas unprepared to deal with the storms.

First, the number of twisters so far this year is double the national average:

And the storms are migrating from their normal spots to the southeast, toward more expensive-to-repair urban areas:

As the headline reported, the scientists are just baffled about the cause, except they are sure manmade global warming must have something to do with it.

Because science! Shut up!

🔥🔥 Finally, in case you missed all the action, the Biden Campaign sent its emissary of entertainment Robert De Niro down to the Manhattan Courthouse during closing arguments yesterday, to remind the crowd about the horrors of January 6th and encourage them to vote for Biden. But the Trump supporters were not entertained, and the aging actor did not receive an acting award, or anything like that, really. It was a tough crowd.

CLIP: Crowd castigates octogenarian actor Bob De Niro outside Trump courthouse (0:30) (adult language).

Maybe they thought movie fans wanted to hear Bob’s opinion? Who knows. He sank faster than a military pier in Gaza. Compare that clip to the reception Trump received in the South Bronx, where democrats had roundly expected Trump would get the same kind of response that Bob De Niro got.

But instead of being called “washed up” and “a traitor,” like Bob, persecuted former president Trump got “I’m voting for Daddy!”

Good times. And it’s still only May. Hang on to your hat.

Have a wonderful Wednesday! And drift back here tomorrow morning for another delicious refill of essential Coffee & Covid.

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