"Let me preempt the Hamlet routine... around whether Trump will take the stand in his own defense: He shouldn’t, and he won’t."

Writes former prosecutor Elie Honig, in "Will Donald Trump Take the Stand?" (NY Magazine).

We can already see Trump’s subtle but unmistakable retreat from bluster to sanity. At first, Trump boasted that he “would” testify in his own defense. Note the careful word choice: Would, which includes an element of conditionality, isn’t quite the same as will. Days later, he prudently stepped back: “Well, I would if it’s necessary. Right now, I don’t know if you heard about today. Today was just incredible. People are saying — the experts, I’m talking about legal scholars and experts — they’re saying, ‘What kind of a case is this? There is no case.’”...

[Trump has] two ironclad reasons not to testify. 

"Everyone’s going to say 'Joe Rogan was right.' No, Joe Rogan was saying – yeah, he was right – that’s not what matters.

"What matters is, the entire medical community knew that Ivermectin couldn’t hurt you. They knew it … I know they knew it. How do I know? Because now I’m doing nothing but talking to these clinicians, who at the time were overwhelmed by COVID, and they weren’t saying anything!... My doctor was using it during COVID on her family and on her patients, and it was working for them. So. They were wrong to play scared on that. Didn’t know that at the time. Know it now, admit it now, reporting on it now."

Said Chris Cuomo, quoted in "Chris Cuomo Makes Ivermectin About-Face After Denouncing Its Use for COVID: ‘I Am Now Taking a Regular Dose’" (Yahoo News).

The woman who says she's the Martha from "Baby Reindeer" — which Netflix bills as a "true story" — gets cornered by Piers Morgan.

I'm jumping to a point 34 minutes in where Morgan questions Fiona Harvey about the tens of thousands of emails the writer Richard Gadd says she sent to him. Harvey, a lawyer, is threatening to sue, and she knows that if the emails were sent they will be produced in that lawsuit. "These are easily provable things," Morgan says. "He's either got them or he hasn't." Watch the dramatics and tell me if you think she's credible. Either she or Gadd is lying.

Yes, Gadd is an artist, and he should be able to use his own life as source material and to process it into an interesting show, but he has stated that the story is true and the show, which is very successful, is promoted as a true story. Gadd has asserted that he has changed things to protect the privacy of real people, most notably "Martha," a vivid and fascinating stalker, but Martha was easily identified as Fiona Harvey. Direct quotes used in the show appeared in Harvey's social media.

The obvious complexity is that Harvey is saying both that she is and she isn't Martha. You have to first identify her as the character before you can accuse Gadd of lying about her. If you watch the clip, you'll see how difficult her position is. But maybe she's a liar and a stalker. If not, what is she? Should she be on TV explaining herself, cornered and (to my eye) terrified? If she is Martha — and if Gadd's presentation is true — she has serious mental problems.

"A Virginia school board voted to restore the names of two schools previously named after Confederate leaders...."

"The Shenandoah County School Board voted 5-1 to call the schools Stonewall Jackson High School and Ashby Lee Elementary School, four years after the board — under different members — changed the names of the institutions due to their ties to Confederate leaders Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee and Turner Ashby."

WaPo reports.

"And yet the relentlessly wholesome story that Jill Biden tells about herself, and possibly to herself, doesn’t quite add up."

"She hitched her wagon to a man who, even when she met him in the 1970s, had world-historical ambition and was angling to become president. (Joe and his siblings openly discussed this plan, and his two brothers took Jill to dinner to be certain she was on board with it.)... In American Woman, Katie Rogers, a reporter at The New York Times, sees Jill Biden as a one-woman force sniffing out her husband’s political enemies, bearing the Biden family grudges, and weighing in on everything from campaign strategy to cabinet hires. More recently, Jill, seventy-two, was reportedly crucial in urging her eighty-one-year-old husband to run for a second presidential term.... Jill Biden has done all this without ever seeming calculating or ambitious.... Rogers depicts a harmonious codependence between the president and his wife: the couple typically spend evenings together in the White House residence reading their briefing books. She’s a confidante and gut check, though her influence has limits. 'Stop it, stop it now, Joe,' he recently said she told him about the slaughter of Palestinian civilians in Gaza."

From "Dr. B/Jill Biden is a barrier-breaking national figure. What are we to make of the wholesome, at times bland story she tells about herself?" by Pamela Druckerman(NYRB)

"The court heard how the defendant's 'Eunuchmaker' pay-per-view website advertised services including castration, penis removal and the freezing of limbs."

I'm reading "'Eunuch-maker' mutilator jailed for 22 years" (BBC).

I first read about this case in The Daily Record, and it was so ludicrously, shockingly lurid that I didn't think I could write about it. But then I saw the BBC was covering it, so it became bloggable.

But for the sake of decency, I will put the rest after the jump:

At the Magnolia Café...

... you can write about anything you want — including how you think this magnolia isn't the right kind of magnolia.

"Sonny and Cher sing 'All I Ever Need is You' as the device destroys some of the most beautiful objects a creative person could ever hope to have, or see..."

"... a trumpet, camera lenses, an upright piano, paints, a metronome, a clay maquette, a wooden anatomical reference model, vinyl albums, a framed photo, and most disturbingly (because they suggest destructive violence against children's toys, and against the child in all of us) a ceramic Angry Birds figure and a stack of rubber emoji balls" (from rogerebert.com):

 

The NYT reports on the backlash and Apple's caving to (hydraulic) pressure: "Apple Says Destructive iPad Ad ‘Missed the Mark’/People in the creative world widely panned a commercial showing a giant hydraulic press squishing objects ranging from paint cans to a piano":

RFK Jr. would give women full control over the decision to have an abortion — "even if it's full term."

Here is RFK Jr. affirming his commitment to China-style full-term abortion, without limits, nationwide:

RFK: "I believe we should leave it to the woman, we shouldn't have the government involved."

STEELE: "Even if it's full term?"

RFK: "Even if it's full term." pic.twitter.com/i6GrXkPrlK

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) May 9, 2024

I think his feet were supposed to be off camera. I don't like seeing his stocking feet in this context. It's too serious, too deadly. 

"Necheles notes that in [Stormy] Daniels’s book, she describes the early part of the encounter, writing that she made him her 'bitch.'"

"Necheles seeks to suggest there’s an inconsistency here, because Daniels wrote about being aggressive with Trump but then testified that she was intimidated when he approached her for sex. Necheles is in extremely dangerous territory here: She could convince jurors that Daniels was inconsistent. But these jurors may also understand how complex these types of situations — and memories of them — are. Necheles eventually cuts right to the point of her cross-examination about the sexual encounter: 'You made all this up, right?' she asks. Daniels responds forcefully: 'No.'"

From the NYT coverage of the the cross-examination in the Trump trial. Nechelles is Trump's lawyer, Susan Nechelles.

From an earlier point, there's more about this "complexity": "Stormy Daniels’s story of her sexual encounter with Trump is very nuanced and complex, and Daniels describes a lot of different types of motivations and a really conflicted approach to the whole episode.... Susan Necheles, I think, is going to attack her mixed motivations directly, making her seem as if she was lying about how much she wanted to have dinner with Trump in 2006, and how she understood the encounter."

"Daniels smirks as she looks at celebratory tweets she sent on March 30, 2023, the day Trump was criminally indicted for the first time."

"She posted about drinking champagne and selling 'Team Stormy' merchandise.... So many of Stormy Daniels’s retorts are versions of 'so did Trump.' He calls her 'horseface,' so why can’t she call him an 'orange turd'? He sells his merchandise, so why can’t she sell hers?... Watching Susan Necheles attempt to pull Stormy Daniels apart, I am reminded of a point we made in coverage about Trump not long ago. His goal is not to make people think he’s pure so much as his goal is to suggest his antagonists are all impure.... The defense’s playbook is very clear: Portray Daniels as a money-grubbing, sleazy, dishonest operator who tried to use Trump to get fame and riches from the anti-Trump resistance.... Trump is leaning forward and staring at the screen showing the exhibits of Stormy Daniels’s merchandise, including t-shirts and comic books. He is seemingly very interested in her efforts to make money off of her account of the liaison with him. Necheles brings up a '$40 Stormy Saint of Indictments Candle,' with Daniels draped in a Christ-like robe. Trump recently made news by hawking a Bible for $59.99...."

From the NYT live-blog of the cross-examination.

ADDED: "He is seemingly very interested in her efforts to make money off of her account of the liaison with him" — that makes it sound like a challenge for the contestants on an episode of "The Apprentice." Imagine him coolly assessing the merchandising effort. Perhaps in some secret way, in his businessman/showman mind, he admires her dogged effort to work with what she had.

The loophole Stormy Daniels didn't see... or declined to take.

From the NYT live-blog of the cross-examination of Stormy Daniels, 25 minutes ago:

The defense is now showing a statement that was released in January 2018, in which Daniels said that she did not have an affair with Trump. But [Trump's lawyer Susan] Necheles did something clever, changing the wording to suggest she denied having sex with Trump — and Daniels agreed, not splitting hairs about the wording here....

So I take it the idea is that Daniels could have said: The statement is true. I did not have an affair with Trump. I had sex with him on one occasion. That is not an affair. 

Did Daniels miss an opportunity? The NYT credits Necheles with cleverness: She got Daniels to admit that she made an inconsistent statement by denying that she ever had sex with Trump. 

If Daniels had seen the loophole and chosen to take it, it would also have hurt her credibility. She'd look like someone who is crafty with word choice and issued a phony denial, claiming no "affair" and reserving the power to say that she did or did not have sex with Trump — whichever better served her interests.

"To be creative, you want to feel like you're getting away with something."

Also: "You spend all your life trying to save time, but when you get to the end of your life, there's no time left, and you'll go to heaven, and you go 'But wait, I had velcro sneakers, no-iron shirt, clip-on tie. What about all that time? It's gone.'"

And, though Seinfeld won't show you his Star of David necklace, he says "Yes, I wear a Star of David necklace, because it makes me feel closer to the people of Israel that I feel close to and that's why I wear it."

He reveals his favorite word: "quintessence." He discusses the meaning, but I wanted the OED meaning: "The most essential part or feature of some non-material thing; the purest or most perfect form or manifestation of some quality, idea, etc."

But that's the figurative meaning.

"We’re told the decision to act this way came last week but that Biden wanted to keep it quiet until he delivered his speech commemorating the Holocaust...."

Writes John Podhoretz in "Biden’s Shameful Betrayal" (Commentary).

Last week, the administration’s line was that it needed to see a plausible evacuation plan from Rafah—a statement indicating that it still supported the overall aim of eliminating Hamas and that the problem going forward was primarily logistical. So that might simply have been a lie....

But if his primary aim is to limit civilian casualties, his methods of doing so are insane. The munitions he is holding back would in part allow Israel to hit sites and areas in Rafah with great precision. That is how you limit casualties. Which leads me to believe that Joe Biden is literally trying to freeze the conflict in place permanently....

And why does Biden want this anyway? To what end? Unless your purpose is to prevent an Israeli victory, it’s nonsensical. And if he doesn’t want an Israeli victory, why did he spend months pushing for aid? Why? Why?...

I hesitate to attempt to answer, but my working theory would be that Joe Biden has prioritized his own reelection. And he's not even performing well at that. Ironically, his reelection theme seems to be that he — and not Trump — is a man of integrity. I would recommend that the old man step back from the tawdry exercise of getting reelected and actually behave with integrity.

But I suspect he's too far gone to give us that. May I recommend:

"If we have to fight with our fingernails, then we’ll do what we have to do."

From "Biden-Netanyahu rift causes ‘tremendous anger’ in Washington/US fears its goals for Gaza — freeing hostages and aiding Palestinians — do not align with Israeli PM’s desire for political survival and an invasion of Rafah" (London Times):

Biden has reiterated that America’s support to Israel remains “ironclad”, but has warned Jerusalem against a full-scale land invasion of Rafah, fearing it would lead to a civilian bloodbath. Israel insists that the operation will go ahead and is necessary to find and kill the architects of the October 7 attacks.

It then emerged that the US paused a shipment of weapons to Israel last week, consisting of 1,800 2,000lb bombs and 1,700 500lb bombs. The reaction from Jerusalem was swift. “If we have to fight with our fingernails, then we’ll do what we have to do,” a senior government official told Reuters.

On Wednesday Biden doubled down in an interview with CNN, saying for the first time that he would halt shipments of American weapons if Netanyahu went ahead with the operation. “I made it clear that if they go into Rafah … I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities — that deal with that problem,” he said.

Sunrise — 5:41, 5:44, 5:45.