☕️ KAFKA LAUGHED ☙ Tuesday, May 28, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Biden preps post-conviction address; Trump trial preview; legal issues; betting prefers Trump anyways; Powell beats disbarment; Buttigieg loses billions on green tech; South Park slams medicine; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! I hope everyone enjoyed a thoughtful and reflective Memorial Day, even though some high-ranking U.S. officials don’t apparently know the difference from Veteran’s Day. This week will close out the month of May, and may see a verdict in the Trump Trial. So today’s essential news roundup includes: Biden prepares big post-trial Oval Office address; Kafkaesque Trump trial update-slash-preview; commenters pounce too fast on Supreme Court precedent; the odds trend toward Trump benefiting from conviction; Trump election lawyer beats disbarment in Texas; Buttigieg sent up for losing eight billion in the federal couch cushions; and South Park once again says the inconvenient stuff everybody is thinking about our healthcare system.

🗞 THE C&C ARMY POST 🗞

🪖 Note: I was honored to be invited as a guest speaker to the upcoming National Association of Christian Lawmakers’ (NACL) 2024 National Policy Conference, to be held at Liberty University in Lynchburg, VA, from June 6th to 8th, 2024. It will be an irreplaceable chance to help move the needle and guide an optimistic narrative.

The 7th NACL Conference will discuss our nation’s most critical challenges, including: US border security and national security concerns, vaccine injury legal issues, election integrity, abortion amendment debates, protecting women’s sports, restoring faith in America, and more.

If you’re interested and it works for your schedule, some C&C presence at the Conference would be awesome. For more information, visit this link: https://christianlawmakers.com/june-2024-conference

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🔥🔥 He’s so excited that Joe’s even been having trouble falling asleep at his normal bedtime of 6:30pm. He can’t wait! The New York Post broke the story Friday, headlined “Biden plans to address Trump ‘hush money’ verdict from the White House: report.”

Per unnamed White House sources, as soon as the jury renders its verdict in former President Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial, current President Robert L. Peters plans to give a totally not-political, televised national address from a “White House setting.”

Get the idea? It’s for the contrast. An orange man in an orange jumpsuit versus a man in a custom Chinese business suit in the Oval Office.

As far as the trial goes, closing arguments begin this morning, not streamed, so we must rely on live updates and post-argument summaries. I expect closing arguments will confuse the jury even more, if possible. Politico listed five ways the trial could end: conviction on all 34 counts, conviction on some counts but not others, acquittal, a hung jury, or a directed judicial verdict dismissing the case (still under review).

In one of the most hilarious facets of this ridiculous political show trial, trying to jail Trump for up to 134 years for victimless bookkeeping offenses, prosecutors have offered three different possible underlying crimes as the predicate to transform Trump’s brief check stub notations from misdemeanors into a life-sentence felony.

In other words, the trial is over, and Trump still doesn’t even know exactly what crimes they’ve charged him with.

Like hot dishes on a statutory Golden Corral buffet, prosecutors have served jurors with a cafeteria of underlying crimes — it could be a violation of state election law, federal election law, or a tax avoidance crime, you choose! According to a truly awful ruling by Judge Merchan, jurors can pick one, two, or three of the offered crimes, or can even dream up a whole different crime they thought of themselves — and they don’t even have to agree.

They only have to be unanimous in agreeing that something bad happened.

This sort of hazy and malleable view of culpability makes the trial literally Kafkaesque. Like Josef K. in Kafka’s disturbing novel, Trump can never quite pin down the precise nature of the case against him. The jury can find Trump “guilty” in a general sense without specifically defining the crime.

Commenters quickly pointed out that under federal law, the jury can’t just willy-nilly scoop underlying crimes off an all-you-can-charge buffet of possible offenses. Under established Supreme Court law, jurors must unanimously agree on exactly which underlying crimes were committed. Even a major U.S. governor weighed in Friday:

Of course, there’s a catch. If you’re now wondering whether Judge Merchan is off his rocker, Greta’s helpful case citation was a bit of a hot take, and was not completely accurate. The case of Richardson v. United States is helpful, logical, and persuasive, but since it applies to federal law and federal juries, it does not bind state court charges like Trump’s.

Unfortunately, Byron York’s much more detailed takedown of the murky panoply of claims levied against Trump noted that Trump’s lawyer already admitted New York state law does allow for mix-and-match underlying crimes: “Bove conceded New York law allows a jury to take its pick of unlawful means, but this is ‘an extraordinarily important case’ for which ‘there’s not much, if any, precedent.’”

That link to Byron’s article also included a video clip (11:31) worth watching if you are interested in the particulars.

Let’s return to Biden’s rumored plan to give a big speech right after the jury verdict. The speech would undoubtedly confuse the news and muddy public reaction, especially in the unthinkable event Trump is taken into custody. Biden would paternalistically counsel the Nation to peace and acceptance, express his deep, abiding regret for Trump’s unhappy outcome, and remind everyone what happened last time to the January 6th protestors.

But the Post also noted that Biden’s campaign team is desperately praying for Trump’s conviction, since they’ve already prepared a flurry of new campaign ads referring to President Trump as “Convicted Felon Donald Trump,” a discordant melody that will be endlessly repeated by corporate media like a scratched record until the end of the year, assuming the jury does what everyone expects them to.

Since the Post’s story was anonymously sourced, and since a post-verdict Biden speech would seem like gloating, no matter what he says, and would be painfully undignified — even for the hair-sniffer-in-chief — it’s not perfectly clear this unbelievable plan is true. But, it’s 2024. So. Second, if Biden were smart, instead of calling Trump “Mr. Convict” for the rest of the election season, he’d smash expectations with magnanimity, such as by immediately pardoning Trump, explaining it was so the judicial system wouldn’t become election interference or something.

That is what Biden would do if he were smart. But, you know.

📈📈 Meanwhile, the Trump trial doesn’t seem to be hurting the former president yet, as suggested by yesterday’s headline from Newsweek:

Not only that, but people betting their own money widely prefer Trump over Biden. On Polymarket (where you can bet on lots of stuff, like whether Taylor Swift gets pregnant this year), its Presidential Election Betting Page favors Convicted Felon Donald Trump:

Polymarket’s 56% “price” already has Trump’s felony conviction baked into its prediction, since the punters think it’s very likely to happen:

The most mind-bending question is: would Trump’s odds of winning be higher or lower if he weren’t facing conviction?

📉📉 Give a moment’s sympathy for Representatives Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Cori Bush (D-MO), who this weekend both became deeply confused by the nebulous difference between Veteran’s Day and Memorial Day, as were their P.R. teams, who were supposed to vet their now-deleted tweets before this happened:

I blame the public schools.

Hey, they tried. At least they supported veterans. Which, notwithstanding they are both ignorant nitwits, was a tiny scrap of progress all by itself.

🔥 An underreported story quietly published last month held some vindication for a harried Trump attorney and maybe, by extension, all the 2020 election lawyers. Bloomberg grudgingly ran the article headlined, “Sidney Powell Avoids Texas Sanctions in 2020 Election Challenge.”

According to three Democrat judges on Texas’ Fifth District Court of Appeals, the state’s case to disbar Trump election lawyer Sidney Powell failed because the state offered no evidence that Sidney Powell lied about the 2020 elections. “The absence of evidence demonstrating that Powell knowingly made a false statement of material fact or knowingly offered or used false evidence is fatal to the Bar’s claims,” the judicial panel explained.

It’s progress, although it figuratively cost Sidney her left kidney to shake free of this one. Sidney is asking around for where she goes to get her reputation back.

🔥 Newsweek ran another hilarious ‘Biden fails again’ story yesterday headlined, “Pete Buttigieg ridiculed for Joe Biden's $7.5 billion "massive failure”.” On CBS’s Face the Nation this weekend, anchor Margaret Brennan audibly scoffed after diverse Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg finally admitted under pressure that the government has only built eight EV charging stations since getting $7.5 billion three years ago in Biden’s 2021 Infrastructure Act:

CLIP: Buttiegieg impersonates government waste (0:45).

That comes to about a billion dollars per charger. Elon Musk built a nationwide network of EV charging stations for just over one billion dollars, in less time. Just saying. Try to think of a better example of how awfully government does things that private enterprises could do much more efficiently.

Maybe Mayor Pete has been distracted by being a new mom? It’s a lot of work.

🔥 Finally, for your darkly humorous entertainment, nobody has ever deserved a sendup by South Park more than the American Healthcare System, on this weekend’s episode, “The End of Obesity.” It’s like Pete Buttigieg was in charge.

CLIP: Eric Cartman tries valiantly to file a health insurance claim (3:44).

We have the most expensive, most regulated, most complicated healthcare system in the free world, designed by sympathetic politicians for our best interest, and it is factually terrible. Life expectancies in the U.S. keep going in the wrong direction. As the South Park clip ably evidenced, it is difficult to conceive how our system could be any worse. Try, I dare you.

Please fill out the form again! My personal favorite was having to check a box, every single time, letting the staff know whether I think I might be pregnant or not — even after checking the box saying I’m ‘male.’ Never mind the fact that, by my birthdate and age (both required!) I’d be post-menopausal anyway.

The forms are a kind of sanity stress-test.

The good news is that options increase every day for people to opt out of the sick-care madness. For example, the Childers family pays a fraction of the cost of traditional insurance to a great local group of independent doctors and nurses who provide concierge care, and our family never navigates the American Healthcare System. Not anymore!

What do you do?

Have a terrific Tuesday! And navigate back to this location tomorrow morning for another no-forms-required Coffee & Covid roundup of essential news and satire.

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