Posted on May 31, 2024 by Steven Hayward in Podcasts

Podcast: Ricochet Again, with Glenn Loury

Not sure if there is going to be a regular episode of the Three Whisky Happy Hour this weekend. John is now in Venice, while I am still in Budapest (hanging out this rainy day in Cafe Scruton), while Lucretia is nine time zones behind us in her bunker, no doubt lockin’ and loadin.’ And I am sure regular listeners want to know whether she is spitting mad, or megaton-level furious, at the Trump verdict.

In the meantime, I sat in again this week for Peter Robinson on the Ricochet podcast, with a very special guest: Glenn Loury. Glenn has a brand new memoir just out, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative. It is a staggering piece of writing. I knew vaguely that Glenn had experienced some difficulties in his personal life over the years, and he confesses to it all in this extraordinarily candid account of his own moral failings, alongside the intellectual story of his academic and political twists and turns over the years. I told Glenn off-air that I thought it could truly be compared to the Confessions of St. Augustine, but he demurred that this syrup was a bit too thick. I found it all deeply moving.

For those of you who avoid the Ricochet podcast because Rob Long is an anti-Trumper, I did manage a way to bring up this passage from late in Glenn’s book just to give Rob heartburn:

I liked Trump. I understood what people found appealing about Trump’s sparring with the press and his hectoring of the elites. Not only did I understand it, I felt it. I got visceral pleasure out of watching Trump standing on stage and hurling insults at smug, self-satisfied liberals and conservatives who had lost touch with the people who support they relied upon. None of the disqualifications of Trump that his critics listed—ceaselessly, day after day, year after year—could negate the gut-level satisfaction I got from watching him. Sure, he lied constantly, but Americans had become so inured to the dishonesty of their politicians that is was actually a relief to hear someone lie with brazenness and glee, instead of prevaricating while pretending they had a claim on moral authority. Trump revealed the hypocrisies of the political class for what they were even as he embodied them. His behavior was an indictment of the failures of that class as much as it was an indictment of himself.

Now, he backtracks in the next paragraph—January 6 and all that—but I have little doubt how he is going to vote in November.  But in any case, this episode is marked safe to listen to.

So listen here, or over at Ricochet. And stay tuned for a regular installment of the 3WHH, plus a few bonus editions with several people John Yoo and I recorded this week.

Posted on by Scott Johnson in 2024 Election, Democrats, New York City, Trump Prosecutions

Implications of conviction

The trial of Donald Trump on jerry-rigged charges produced the foreordained outcome. Trump was found guilty by a Manhattan jury of 34 felony charges. It couldn’t have been otherwise. This was a show trial.

It would have been more efficient — it would have saved a day or two in show time — if Judge Merchan had simply directed a verdict of guilt and sent the jury home when the parties’ rested. It would not have been more unconstitutional than having the jury pick from Column A, Column B, or Column C for the “other crime” that was vital to the case.

Instead Merchan let the prosecution run wild. He constrained the defense. He all but stripped Trump’s defense to the charge of federal election misconduct to which Michael Cohen had pleaded guilty.

He gagged the defendant. He excluded evidence that might have helped the defendant, say with respect to the allegation of misconduct under federal election law. He crafted jury instructions that adopted the show-trial theory of the case.

And the jury performed predictably under the circumstances. In this case its role was ministerial. The guilty verdict on each of the 34 charges was for show.

The show trial lacked certain elements of the Stalinist show trials of old. Most notably, the defendant did not confess or repent. He has not professed to accept the opinion of his accusers. He may even prevail at some point on appeal after the election.

But appeal is irrelevant. As in the show trials of old, the point of the case is political, not legal. Democrats have achieved their immediate political objective. Trump is now a convicted felon.

As if to put an exclamation point on this aspect of the case — for dummies — Judge Merchan has scheduled sentencing four days before the Republican convention this coming July. The finality of the verdict on each of the charges yesterday is only seeming. The show’s not over in this show trial.

The Democrats are guilty of every sin they attribute to Trump. Election interference — this is how it’s now to be done, with a strong dose of humiliation, a patina of legality, and the threat of incarceration. The threat produces an erotic effect on the Democrats and their media allies, but that is not the point. The point is to take down a political adversary. The point is the electoral effect — the point is political.

The Democrats lack confidence in their ability to defeat Trump at the polls. The point of the rigged trial is the rigged election, and not in the “who’s voting” or “who’s counting the votes” departments, although there is that too. The intended audience of the show trial is the few voters who occupy the middle of the road and could go either way in November. If they move them to one or two or three percent to Biden, as seems plausible and even likely, that is the point. This is the Democrats’ objective in the medium term. Intelligent readers can draw a straight line to infer the long-term objective.

Every metaphor descriptive of what is happening here falls short of the moment. “Crossing the Rubicon,” “sowing the wind,” and so on, have a remote and clichéd quality that fails to capture what the Democrats have done. In political terms, one might think of Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton. But that is too remote as well.

One has the sense that Democrats do not fully grasp what they have done. If the Democrats’ show-trial moves only enough voters to swing the election to Biden — a not implausible outcome that is what the case is all about — how can the outcome be acceptable to the many who understand what the Democrats have done. The show-trial bears seeds of alienation, discord, turnabout, and violence. That is the point buried in the clichéd metaphors. That is the implication of the conviction rendered in the show-trial.

Posted on by Scott Johnson in Laughter is the Best Medicine

Thoughts from the ammo line

Ammo Grrrll recounts SUSAN’S VERY BAD, NO GOOD, TERRIBLE DAY. She writes:

Why does it seem that when one thing goes to heck, that a clump totaling three will follow? I have written about bad days before – one during my first year of columnizing included rinsing out the pitcher part of my blender without realizing that with the bottom off, it makes a perfect funnel. Sadly, pointed directly at my t-shirt. Cute. And very, very wet.

Another bad day involved getting stung on my main driving hand by a scorpion the night before a 2500 mile car trip. Alone.

So you can see when I speak of a “bad day,” I mean trivial things, not life-altering disasters. At my age, almost every day brings news of friends and acquaintances dealing with REALLY bad things, not mere annoyances.

But I am a humorist and there is nothing funny about facing down strokes, cancer, and the loss of loved ones. On the very day before I started writing this, I encountered an acquaintance on my morning walk whom I had not seen in years. She spoke of loved ones with grim diagnoses, a mother put in memory care, and their house flooding from a water leak under the concrete block. All you can say with that kind of news is “I’m so sorry; I will pray for you,” not, “Well, tata, have a nice day!”

If you are like me, only taller, what you hate most about your Bad Day is the degree with which you had agency in that outcome. Am I right? I am MUCH harder on myself than on anybody else in my vicinity who might have contributed to something going off the rails. We all like to think we are still smart and competent and doing stupid things that would contradict that assessment affects our self-esteem and confidence. Especially MULTIPLE things as we shall soon see. Multiple, because of that stupid “Rule of 3.”

It all began in Sprouts market. But on the way there, I stopped at our bank of mailboxes to get the mail. Oh, yay! Inside my mailbox was a key to the lower set of boxes wherein the postman stashes packages of cool stuff you have ordered. In this case, three new pairs of jeans in a smaller size! Woohoo!

I was feeling “up” and proud of myself after doing both my 10,000 steps AND lifting my puny weights. (Parenthetically, Holy Cow, did you see the video of Marjorie Taylor Greene doing a clean-and-jerk many times with what looked to be 50 lb. weights on a barbell? Impressive! Much more impressive than long fake eyelashes…just sayin’.

Anyway, at Sprouts, I bought the things I had written on a list that I had conveniently left in the back pocket of different jeans and a few (“read”: many) impulse items. I think of Sprouts and Trader Joe’s as Disneyland for foodies. The total came to $78.00 for two small bags. I reached into my purse for my VISA. What the heck? NOT in its usual pocket in the purse. Not in ANY of the pockets in the purse. Uh-oh. Luckily, I did have enough cash to cover it.

But that still left the disturbing question, “Where is my VISA?” Oh well, I thought, it will surely turn up. I drove home and attempted to carry both Sprouts bags – one of which had 10 bananas in it – AND the package of jeans at the same time to save a trip back into the hot, smelly garage. (This is what’s known in a mystery as a “clue.”)

I unpacked the bags, refrigerating contents when appropriate, and checked my belt loop to see how many steps I had garnered on the shopping trip. WUT? No “clicker” was on the belt loop. Now even though I have two backup clickers in my desk drawer, because it is SUPER important to me to know how many steps I do every day, I was extremely disappointed that apparently yet another thing was lost. Had I entered a Twilight Zone?

With great hope, I rushed back to the hot and smelly garage (wherein resides the garbage can whose contents merrily roast more each triple-digit day) and – Yay! It turned out that wrestling the 3 large bags in an awkward position had snapped loose the clicker and it was right there in the trunk. Dodged a bullet there. Joy! Gratitude! A prayer of thanks!

After trying on all three pairs of my new jeans and finding they fit perfectly, except in the length which has been my burden for all my life – YOU try turning up the cuffs on bell-bottoms – I decided to empty my entire purse in search of the elusive VISA Card.

And, after cleaning out each and every zippered pouch – there are FOUR of them – I took out my flash-roll of cash (mostly 5s and 10s, alas) and there, hiding right in the middle of the roll, was the pesky jokester VISA! All’s well that ends well, right?

But a nagging thought intruded – the one thing I ALWAYS put back in exactly the same place in my purse is my mailbox key, which is attached to an extra house key. And IT WASN’T THERE!

It took me only about 10 seconds to realize with horror that I had left it IN THE LOCK ON THE MAILBOX when I became overexcited about the package in the bottom part of the bank of mailboxes. Did I mention that the jeans are a Size 6?

Oh, Holy Cow! Not only would an extremely lucky thief have access to my mailbox, but also to my house and all its contents, my casita, my garage with the car in it, and, had I not lost everything in that unfortunate boating accident, a considerable number of guns and ammo.

With a heavy heart I ran to the garage and, to my horror, the car wouldn’t start! What NEXT??? Oh, of course, the car won’t start, because I left my purse on the counter with the stupid fob in it without which the car will not start. Duh. FOCUS!

Back to the kitchen to grab the purse. I even remembered to raise the garage door as I tore down the street at speeds illegal on a highway and for sure in our Geezer Enclosure. I screeched up to the bank of mailboxes, and there, a sight for sore eyes, was a key ring with a house key and mailbox key dangling from Box #4. Praise God!

So the bottom line was the VISA was found; the clicker was found; the fob was retrieved so that the car could start and, most important of all, my new jeans were a Size 6. No, seriously, most important of all, the mailbox key was undisturbed. MANY the time that I had seen other people’s keys stuck forlornly in the locks, and had thought unkindly, “How stupid would you have to be to get your mail and forget your key?” Well, now I know how stupid. Pretty stupid.

Sometimes, after a day or two, a kind soul would take the key ring OUT of the lock and put it on top of the bank of mailboxes. We look after each other here in the Dusty Little Village. For there, but for the grace of God, go we.

Remember when you were a little kid and you kept losing your mittens until your Mama would buy the kind that were on a string and were threaded through the sleeves of your winter coat? Yeah, that. I need some kind of Geezer String that has ALL my important possessions attached. Even though everything turned out alright, it took me a long time to forgive myself for these lapses. In my entire life, I had never once lost a credit card or a key. And everybody has a bad day. Let it go. You aren’t senile and hardly ever slur your words until the 3rd Chambord Margarita at Z Tejas.

Comics are a strange breed. A guy comic can look kind of glum and you ask what’s wrong and he’ll say, “Oh, my father passed away,” and then add, “But, I think I got five good minutes of material out of the funeral.”

So not only did everything resolve beautifully, but I got a column out of it as well. May all your bad days work out as well.

Posted on May 30, 2024 by John Hinderaker in Crime, Democrats, Donald Trump, Trump Prosecutions

Guilty

A grotesquely biased jury of Trump-haters, led by a judge who put service to his party above his judicial responsibilities, has returned guilty verdicts against Donald Trump on all 34 counts with which he was–absurdly–charged.

What this shows is that the most important variable in any case is who decides it. Here, the Democrats knew that they could impanel a rabidly anti-Trump jury in Manhattan, so they did so. It is very much like the lawsuit that Michael Mann brought against Mark Steyn and others, of which I observed some of the latter stages. The defendants were properly happy about how the trial had gone, but the facts didn’t matter. The Democrats had chosen the right venue, Washington, D.C., and a biased jury found for Mann. Same thing here.

What to do now? First, it is now absolutely essential that Trump be elected president. The Democrats cannot be allowed to get away with this effort to turn America into a banana republic.

Second, the Democrats understand nothing except the raw exercise of power. Therefore, Republican attorneys general and district attorneys should bring criminal charges against Democratic officeholders wherever possible. No Democratic officeholder should be allowed to retire, in any jurisdiction with Republican law enforcement, without facing criminal charges. There can’t be a single Democratic official in America against whom a criminal case can’t be brought that is better than this case against Trump. It should be open season on Democrats in the criminal courts.

Third, the criminal prosecutions should begin with Joe Biden. Unlike Trump, Biden is actually a criminal. He is already known to be guilty under the federal bribery statute, to the tune of at least $20 million. If Trump wins in November, his Department of Justice should immediately indict Biden, and Biden should be hounded until the day he dies or goes to prison, whichever happens first.

Of course, Republicans face a disadvantage that Democrats don’t. Some cases, including, I assume, a federal criminal prosecution of Biden, would have to be brought on the Democrats’ home turf, Washington, D.C. If that is the case, so be it: as Mark Steyn says, the process is the punishment. Biden likely would not live long enough to face a jury in any case.

And attorneys general in states like Texas, Florida, South Dakota, etc., should look into whether Biden’s taking of bribes or other actions could qualify as crimes under their states’ laws. After all, if Alvin Bragg can prosecute Donald Trump for federal campaign finance violations that he didn’t commit, another state official can likely find grounds to prosecute Biden for bribery, which he did commit.

Posted on by Steven Hayward in The Daily Chart

The Daily Chart: Abolish the Ivy League?

Glenn Reynolds has long liked to post the provocation “Abolish the Ivy League” over at Instapundit, and now we have some data to back up the idea (as if we didn’t have plenty of good reason before now). The Washington Monthly notes that most of the pro-Hamas campus protests are happening at our most elite (and most expensive) universities, and it has the receipts:

Using data from Harvard’s Crowd Counting Consortium and news reports of encampments, we matched information on every institution of higher education that has had pro-Palestinian protest activity (starting when the war broke out in October until early May) to the colleges in our 2023 college rankings. Of the 1,421 public and private nonprofit colleges that we ranked, 318 have had protests and 123 have had encampments. . .

Out of the hundreds of private colleges where more than 25 percent of the students receive Pell Grants, only five colleges have had encampments. . . The pattern is clear: Pro-Palestinian protests are overwhelmingly an elite college phenomenon.

Here’s how the data fall out:

Chaser—From Abe Greenwald’s terrific piece in Commentary, “The Woke Jihad“:

There’s another, more insidious, channel of support that bears mentioning: the vast sums of money that foreign governments give to American colleges. The country most relevant here is Hamas’s patron, Qatar. A 2022 study by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) found that Qatar gave, in the form of “gifts” or “restricted agreements,” $4.7 billion to multiple American colleges and universities between 2001 and 2021. . .

There is a statistically robust link between the money and the Jew-hatred. ISGAP’s study found that, between 2015 and 2020, schools that accepted money from Qatar (and other Middle Eastern donors) averaged 300 percent more anti-Semitic incidents than those that did not. And Qatar-funded campuses were also more resistant to traditional democratic norms such as free speech.

Alumni should all ask their alma mater to disclose how much funding they have received from Qatar, China, and other foreign sources.

Posted on by Scott Johnson in Crime, Feeding Our Future, Law, Minnesota

At the Feeding Our Fraud trial

Attorney Steve Schleicher is a partner at Minneapolis’s venerable Maslon firm. He is the firm’s Chair of Investigations and White Collar Defense Group. His colleagues obviously think highly of him.

Schleicher represented the State of Minnesota pro bono in the prosecution of Derek Chauvin. Attorney General Keith Ellison personally recruited him and was thrilled when he consented (as I found in the emails supplied by the AG’s office in response to my Data Practices Act request at the time).

Now Schleicher represents Said Shafii Farah — one of seven defendants in the first Feeding Our Future fraud trial, with several more trials to come. The Feeding Our Future fraud represents the biggest Covid fraud case uncovered so far. It involves the redistribution of some $250 million of American taxpayer funds, mostly to select members of Minnesota’s Somali community.

Schleicher had easier sledding in the Chauvin case than he does in this one. Schleicher’s client here will not testify. Defendant Mukhtar Shariff is the only one of the seven defendants who has chosen to testify. He took the stand yesterday afternoon and his testimony continues this morning.

I came down to court to get a sense of how it is going. So far it is slow going. I hope would to see the cross-examination, but it’s going to be a while before we get there.

Walking the downtown Minneapolis skyway into court this morning, I ran into a prominent lawyer who is not involved in the case. I told him where I was headed and asked for his guess about the outcome: “Guilty.”

He added: “I wish someone” — he pointed his finger at me — “would write about Schleicher.” He felt that Schleicher had presented as a savior of the state in the Chauvin prosecution, but that this case showed what it was all about — “publicity,” “money.”

Well, as a famous fictional American once put it, “This is the business we have chosen.” Of course he must have hoped to get something out of it for himself when he contributed his services to the prosecution in the Chauvin case.

At the press conferences announcing indictments in this case, the government featured its clawback of ill-gotten cash and property purchased with the proceeds of the fraud. I would just add that if Schleicher is charging his usual hourly rate and Farah has the cash to pay it, the government may not have exhausted the possibilities.

JOHN adds: My colleague Bill Glahn attended yesterday’s proceedings and is also back in court today. His account on yesterday’s trial day, when the jury finally heard evidence on behalf of one of the defendants, is here.

Posted on by Scott Johnson in Constitution, New York City, Trump Prosecutions

Choose one from column A

A footnote to John’s post awaiting the verdict: Alvin Bragg’s case against President Trump is a Stalinist joke. It is fundamentally lacking in due process. One glaring element of this is the failure to identify the second crime that revives the otherwise time-barred misdemeanor charges and turns them into a viable felony.

What is the second crime and what are its elements? Like ordering from the menu in a Chinese restaurant, the jury can pick one from column A, one from column B, or one from column C, as long as they all pick one. The AP says it isn’t so, sort of, but see if you can figure it out.

The AP seeks to persuade consumers of its “news” that there is nothing to see here, but it doesn’t square with what GWU Law Professor Jonathan Turley teaches in his Criminal Procedure or Con Law classes. That much I can tell you.

In his most recent assessment of the case, former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy puts it this way:

Ordinarily, falsifying business records is a misdemeanor under New York penal law. The statute that enhances the offense into a felony requires proof of fraudulent intent to conceal “another crime.” New York’s constitution forbids such vague incorporation by reference; to be valid the statute would have to prescribe what other crimes trigger the felony enhancement. That is especially true in this case, in which Bragg (a) is claiming the other crime is a violation of FECA, for which Congress has vested the Justice Department and the Federal Election Commission with exclusive enforcement jurisdiction, and (b) is alternatively claiming the other crime is a misdemeanor violation of New York election law. In New York, misdemeanors have a two-year statute of limitations, and the potential penalty is less than a year’s imprisonment; yet Bragg is claiming that if one falsifies records (misdemeanor) to unlawfully influence an election (misdemeanor), the prosecutor can somehow inflate the crime into a felony with a four-year prison term and a six-year statute of limitations. If the business-records-falsification statute were intended to allow such a counterintuitive result, it was incumbent on the legislature to spell that out. Empire State lawmakers did not do so.

Then there is the indictment. It put the defense on no notice of what “other crime” Trump was alleged to have concealed. As I contended yesterday, this was not an oversight; Bragg knew it would be controversial to proclaim in clear terms the power and intention to enforce federal law — against a defendant whom the federal agencies with authority to prosecute investigated and as to whom they decided, for sound legal reasons, not to bring charges. The failure to provide a defendant with notice of the charges in the indictment violates the federal Constitution — and it strongly suggests that the grand jury did not find probable cause of the other crimes that Bragg now alleges (there is no “other crime” pled in the indictment).

McCarthy adds this (emphasis in original):

Without being limited to the charges in the indictment, as prosecutors are supposed to be, they presented the case to the jury as if the charge were conspiracy to influence the 2016 election by burying politically damaging information. To say that this conspiracy appears nowhere in the indictment does not explain the half of it. It is not a crime to conspire to influence an election unless one does so by unlawful means (that’s the afore-described New York misdemeanor), and there is nothing unlawful per se about burying politically damaging information.

Compare and contrast with the AP’s complacent, ah, “misinformation,” to borrow a favorite AP term. As for the contribution of Judge Merchan, it would have been more efficient to render a directed verdict of guilt, not that that would be any more legal than what he has done with the jury instructions.