Tue: The Simple Way to End Homelessness. Shoot Them.

Cannon Shoots Out an Insane Ruling

Donald Trump's documents trial in Florida continues to be delayed, with Judge Aileen Cannon failing to rule on a number of key issues. According to former federal prosecutor and Alabama Law School professor Joyce Vance, Cannon's filing late Monday night makes things even worse.

In just two pages, Judge Cannon suggested jury questions that legal experts have dubbed "insane," as Cannon wants the jury to consider whether Trump can consider top-secret national security documents, including nuclear secrets, to be his personal property.

"In prosecution of a former president for allegedly retaining documents," Cannon's order states. "...a jury is permitted to examine a record retained by a former president in his/her personal possession at the end of his/her presidency and make a factual finding as to whether the government has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that it is personal or presidential using the definitions set forth in the Presidential Records Act (P.R.A.)."

Vance called the whole thing "perplexing."

"I read it several times, trying to figure out what it means," she wrote. "It turns out it’s two pages of crazy stemming from the Judge’s apparent inability to tell Trump no when it comes to his argument that he turned the nation’s secrets into his personal records by designating them as such under the Presidential Records Act."

The P.R.A. isn't some kind of way around the rules of classified information, and the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals has already made it clear when it overturned Cannon's earlier order that the items seized during the search couldn't be used in the investigation, Vance recalled.

"So Judge Cannon, who didn’t rule for Trump on the specious Presidential Records Act motion last week, essentially acknowledged she intends to do so today," wrote Vance.

Judge Aileen Cannon's 'two pages of crazy' sliced up by former federal prosecutor

Previous Guy Wasn't Calling for Violence.  He Was Calling for Violins.

Regardless, a focus on the one word misses the point. It’s not that this isolated comment is particularly egregious; it’s that it is merely the latest example of this kind of rhetoric. And the rhetoric is often more direct:

Trump in 2016 said that if he were denied the presidential nomination at the GOP convention, “I think you’d have riots.”

Trump in November 2020 responded to an adverse ruling by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court by saying it would “induce violence in the streets.” (Trump later expanded, saying,

“Bad things will happen, and bad things lead to other type things. It’s a very dangerous thing for our country.”)

Trump warned last March of “potential death & destruction” if he were charged by the Manhattan district attorney. He also mocked those who urged his supporters to stay peaceful, saying, “OUR COUNTRY IS BEING DESTROYED, AS THEY TELL US TO BE PEACEFUL!”

Trump warned in August, after the search of his Mar-a-Lago estate, that “terrible things are going to happen.” He later promoted a comment from Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) that there would be “riots in the streets” if Trump were charged.

Trump in January warned of “bedlam in the country” if the criminal charges against him succeeded. Days earlier, he targeted efforts to remove him from the ballot using the 14th Amendment, saying: “Because if we don’t [get treated fairly], our country’s in big, big trouble. Does everybody understand what I’m saying? I think so.”

And this doesn’t even account for the many, many examples of his alluding more suggestively to righteous violence by his supporters. He does this a lot. Sometimes it’s direct; sometimes it’s veiled and carries with it the plausible deniability that he craves.

He Wasn't Promising a Bloodbath.  He Was Promising a Bubble Bath.

With Friends Like These, Putin Needs Better Friends

Czechia is using its Cold War contacts to obtain much-needed ammunition for Ukraine. With US arms aid blocked, ammunition production in the West slowly growing, and Kyiv's stockpiles dwindling, Prague is buying from countries that are allies of Moscow, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Czechia has received about 800,000 artillery shells from various suppliers around the world and has identified another 700,000 units that can be ordered if additional funding is available. So far, the first tranche of 300,000 shells has been secured, with Germany making the largest contribution.

The country's former affiliation with the former Soviet bloc proved to be an unexpected help. Czechia inherited a large arms industry with customers all over the world and good relations with many countries in the Global South that have large stockpiles of Soviet-era weapons and the capacity to produce even more.

Although Prague is silent on where the ammunition comes from, the newspaper claims that Russia's allies are among the suppliers. The trade agreements stipulate that deliveries will be made through Czechia or third countries to hide any direct connection between the countries of origin and Ukraine and to avoid exposing the supplier to Moscow's wrath.

There Goes the Judege.  There Goes the Judge!  To a Koch Retreat.

On Oct. 13, 2022, a handful of the country’s most conservative federal judges gathered inside a wine cellar at a luxury ski resort in Deer Valley, Utah. The surrounding mountains were ablaze with yellow aspens, and the speaker addressing the room joked that the judges were already planning their afternoon hikes.

Before they could roam the slopes, they would spend the morning learning about a tool that could supposedly revolutionize how judges interpret the law. It was called corpus linguistics, and it was simple on its face. A corpus essentially works like a search engine that returns every example of how a word or phrase was used in a select database of historical texts.

But the leading proponents of legal corpus linguistics see it as something more: a powerful new tool to shore up the legitimacy of the conservative legal movement. Now, judges claiming to be interpreting the Constitution as it was originally understood could wield the imprimatur of big data.

“In the beginning, we only had paper, hard copies. Remember those things called books?” the speaker, Josh Blackman, a prolific legal scholars on the right, said to the judges assembled in the wine cellar. “Computer technologies open an entire new world of research.”

The runaway success of conservatives’ decadeslong campaign to dominate the federal courts is not without its challenges. With a 6-3 stranglehold on the Supreme Court and Trump judges dominating federal appeals courts, the right wing has increasingly pushed the legal view that the law must be interpreted based on “history and tradition.” Yet few have failed to notice how perfectly “history,” in these judges’ rendering, aligns with current Republican beliefs on issues like guns and abortion. Corpus linguistics offers one way to dodge these criticisms. A judge who could keyword-search millions of lines of historical text, the thinking goes, is a judge who could ward off accusations that his version of history was invented for a partisan outcome.

Inside The Ritzy Retreats Hosting Right-Wing Judges

Anti-Vax = Pro-Heart Failure

COVID-19 vaccines were found to cut the risk of heart failure by up to 55% and blood clots by up to 78% following COVID infection, according to a new study published in the British Medical Journal.

The positive health effects lasted for up to a year and were more pronounced right after getting vaccinated.

“While there has been concern about the risk of myocarditis and other thromboembolic events following vaccination, this analysis highlights that the risk of such complications is notably higher when it comes from the SARS-CoV-2 infection itself,” said Dr. John Brownstein, chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s Hospital and an ABC News Medical contributor.