☕️ PRESIDENTS AND UN-PRESIDENTS ☙ Monday, May 20, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Trump trial resumes, big question looms; Iran loses its president in the mountains; Ukraine loses its president in 'democracy'; Russia-China deal shows Biden failure; La. charts biblical course; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! Your baseline news roundup today includes: Trump trial resumes with more Michael Cohen and a great big question mark; a suggestion for Joe Biden; presidential lives keep crashing into mountains faster than we can keep track; Ukraine also loses a president, mostly, since Zelensky’s term ran out and he’s just squatting in the presidential office; 2024-style historic Russia-China deal torpedoes Biden’s foreign policy ambitions in latest disaster for the Administration; and Lousiana bill figuratively sets democrat hair on fire.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🔥🔥 CNN ran a teaser article this morning headlined, “Analysis: Stakes are high for prosecutors to rescue Cohen testimony as Trump trial enters endgame.” The Trump Trial takes up again this morning, and most commenters assume President Trump will choose not to testify, so they expect the jury to head off to deliberations by midweek at the latest.

I’m not too sure about that assumption. Can you imagine President Trump voluntarily choosing not to talk? Oh, I’m sure his attorneys tell him not to talk, but when have lawyers ever stopped the 45th President? Trump testified voluntarily in his “overpriced real estate” trial before Judge Arthur Engoran. So.

If Trump does take the stand, there’s no telling how long the trial could last.

Today, if he chooses, Alvin Bragg has his last chance to try to “rehabilitate” his star witness, disbarred lawyer and TikTok panhandler Michael Cohen. I don’t see how it can be done, but leaving the status quo could create reasonable doubt. “The judge will instruct the jury: ‘If you find anything that a witness said to be untrue, to be incredible, to be a lie, feel free to disregard the entirety of that witness’s testimony,’” Randy Zelin, a trial attorney and adjunct professor at Cornell Law School, correctly explained to CNN Friday.

I predict all Alvin Bragg will do is ask Cohen whether, though he’s lied many times before, and even though Cohen has sworn revenge against Trump for not making him Attorney General, he realizes this ridiculous show-trial is serious enough that he’s really telling the truth, this time. We’ll see.

Meanwhile the trial doesn’t seem to be hurting President Trump politically. Perhaps the best example appeared in this morning’s USA Today, which ran a bitterly demoralised op-ed:

Maybe, if they prosecute him some more, they can 100% ensure Trump will beat any democrat candidate.

🔥 It’s getting downright dangerous to be a world leader these days. In the same week as the attempted assassination of Slovak’s pro-Russian president Robert Fico, the Associated Press ran a story early this morning headlined, “Iran's president, foreign minister and others found dead at helicopter crash site.”  Controversial pro-Russian President Ebrahim Raisi was killed when his antique, 25-year-old Bell helicopter crashed in the fog, at night, on the side of a steep mountain in northwestern Iran. It took them almost 12 hours just to find the crash site.

Currently, they have no idea what caused the accident. It’s possible the pilot fell badly while moving about the cockpit. He might’ve slipped on a loose hundred-dollar bill left over from one of those Saran-wrapped pallets of cash Biden keeps sending the Iranians for some reason.

While everyone thinks the crash looks sketchy, nobody of substance is saying that or has yet accused the U.S. or Israel of taking Raisi out. Most commenters grudgingly admit it was dumb to fly around the mountains in an old helicopter in pea-soup fog. It sure looks like an accident. But the investigation continues.

President Raisi was both called a bloody butcher and a passive soft-liner. He was bloodied during his time running the country’s judicial branch, which has developed a craving for capital punishment. But articles speculating about his replacement also claim Iranian “hard-liners” thought Raisi far too soft, to the extent of a clear suggestion the hard-liners are happy he’s dead.

Ironically, despite being corporate media’s favorite example of a dystopian autocracy, under Iran’s Constitution, Iranians will now democratically vote for a replacement president within fifty days. Meanwhile, there’s no voting in Ukraine.

🚀 Iran wasn’t the only country that lost a president yesterday. Because the other platforms were too chicken to mention it, only FirstPost noted the occasion yesterday, in a story headlined “Zelensky's term as Ukraine President ends tomorrow. What happens next?” By the time you read this, Zelensky will no longer be president of the world’s flickering-est spark of democracy in Eastern Europe. Not really. He will be something else, something other than a president, something off the constitutional map, something resembling democratic wreckage on the side of a political mountain.

The handful of stories delicately addressing the difficult subject of Zelensky’s ambiguous political status over the last six months babbled on and on about Ukrainian Constitution’s Article 108, which is very clear, written very plainly, and says nothing about indefinite presidential terms during emergencies. But, they say, if you squint at Article 108 super hard, while holding your breath, and imagining scary emergency situations that the drafters never thought of — like Putin — and holding it in the last glimmering rays of sunlight just before sunset, you can sort of see the exception emerge in there, in between the lines, right before you pass out due to lack of oxygen.

Zelensky is just a squatter now, taking up space in the presidential offices that could be rented to somebody who pays. Now Ukraine knows what the squatting problem feels like. It’s devilish hard to get them out.

You have to give him credit though. Former TV comedian Vladimir Zelensky, champion of democracy, penis pianist, made himself president for life. Zelensky got elected, declared war after Russia’s invasion, ordered it illegal to negotiate for peace, established martial law, suspended elections, stayed in office after his term ended. It was a very neat trick, and he slipped it in right under the noses of all the Western crusaders for democracy.

Zelensky might be more cunning than he looks. (I shall leave that calculus to you, alert reader.)

Now, laughably, Ukrainian men being involuntarily conscripted don’t get to vote in the late, great Democratic Republic of Ukraine. They used to have that right, but in this new and improved incarnation of a glorious Ukrainian democracy, voting is apparently unnecessary. At least, for now. Just keep fighting.

Presumably, they’ll let Ukrainians know when it’s safe to vote again. Maybe. They haven’t said either way. But at some point, sooner or later, they’ll tell the people when they’ll consider maybe possibly letting them vote again at some future point when important metrics, not yet defined, have been properly achieved.

But who will tell the Ukrainians when they get to vote again? Zelensky? Nobody knows! Maybe we need to save democracy from the Ukrainians.

🚀 In the latest disaster caused by the Biden Administration, late last week, the leader of the world’s largest communist country and the leader of the former largest communist empire signed an ‘only in 2024’ historic agreement. The Global Times ran the woefully underreported story, headlined “Xi, Putin hold talks, sign joint statement on deepening ties.” Nothing like this has ever happened in the lifetimes of anyone living, but don’t wait for corporate media to tell you about it. Thanks, Joe Biden. “I did that!”

On Thursday, President Putin, most of the Russian government’s top officials, and the country’s private industry CEO’s went to China for two days of meetings with President Xi and the various Russian officials’ Chinese counterparts.

Obviously, it was a massive sign of a deepening relationship between America’s two largest enemies.

Significantly, the two leaders also signed a carefully drafted, 8,000-word ‘joint statement.’ It was a record-setting development. Generally speaking, the joint statement was a positive, forward-looking blueprint for how Russia and China will work together to replace American hegemony with a multipolar world order.

In other words, this is exactly what Biden’s neocons are flirting with world war to avoid.

US foreign policy has long worked to keep Russia and China fighting with each other, so that they could never team up against the United States. That ‘divide and conquer’ approach has been largely successful since the 1950’s. But after only two years of Biden’s Proxy War and his draconian but unsuccessful sanctions policies, Biden has achieved what was formerly impossible: driving Russia right into China’s open arms.

Biden’s strategy has been so successful for China, in fact, that if I didn’t know better, I’d suspect Biden was secretly working for China.

Regardless, this historic rapprochement between the two long-time adversaries was a catastrophic failure of Biden’s pugilistic foreign policy, if you can call it a policy. To give you an idea, this development is arguably more problematic for neocon aspirations than the BRICS organization itself.

The good news is Joe Biden only has seven months left to go. The bad news is, Biden has seven months left.

🔥 If they can decorate classrooms with pride banners and Ukraine flags, this seems fair. Local Louisiana KJAS ran a great story Friday headlined, “Louisiana could be first state to require the Ten Commandments in classrooms.” After Republicans tweaked the bill to address critics’ concerns, it overwhelmingly passed the State Senate 30-8. It’s now headed to Governor Jeff Landry’s desk, who is expected to sign.

Assuming Landry signs, all of Louisiana’s state-funded public and non-public schools must display the Biblical commandments in a large and easily readable font. The bill avoids violating the First Amendment by describing the Ten Commandments not in religious terms but in light of the ethical directives’ undeniable historical significance in Louisiana.

Lawmakers wove its defense right into the bill. Schools are also required to hang a “context statement” alongside the Commandments that says: “The history of the Ten Commandments was a prominent part of American education for almost three centuries.” The bill’s language also includes a long list of examples of school textbooks dating back to the 1600s referencing the Commandments.

Thus, any overturning court will have to grapple with the fact that the Ten Commandments hung in schoolhouses from the time of the country’s founding until relatively recently.

Ironically, the only senator who spoke against the bill before the vote was a Republican and self-described Catholic. Meanwhile, the ACLU has vowed to sue the second Governor Landry signs the bill into law.

It is good news, even if you’re not a person of deep faith. Secularism has not improved society in this country in any way. Louisiana’s courageous legislature is boldly returning to Biblical roots, even if under the banner of history. It’s a development in the conservative counter-revolution that benefits everyone.

Have a magnificent Monday! And fly back here tomorrow — not in the fog — for another terrific roundup of just the news you need to know.

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