"The people call Donald J. Trump" and "Trump plods to the witness stand."
Questioned by Kevin Wallace, a lawyer for the attorney general, Trump answers "in monosyllables."
The NYT writer says Trump "took the bait" when he answered a question about the legal trust that holds some of his assets: "You and about every other Democrat, district attorney, A.G., and U.S. attorneys, etcetera, were coming after me from 15 different sides, all Democrats, all Trump haters." I note the use of freewheeling language in "15 different sides." That's not monosyllabic. He's dabbling in hyperbole.
Now the judge is warning: "Please, just answer the question. No speeches."
We watched that movie last night. "Three on a Match" — selected from from The Criterion Channel's collection, "Pre-Code Divas."
What a crazy movie! I'll avoid spoilers and just say: 1. Fantastic example of a woman who cannot be satisfied with conventional married life (even with wealth and a fine lawyer-husband), 2. Shades of "Reefer Madness," 3. Only 63 minutes long, 4. Who knew there was a boy version of Shirley Temple? 5. Don't expect to see much of Bette Davis, 6. Brief but great shots of Humphrey Bogart, 7. Loved the sad piano playing in the girl's reform school, 8. Don't reveal the shocking ending! 9. Inventive method of communicating with the police, 10. I love the pre-Code era, 11. Made me want to watch more Ann Dvorak movies.
"Frequent visits to the courtroom have also given Mr. Trump familiarity with the unwieldy proceeding, where he projects control, often whispering in his lawyers’ ears, prompting their objections to the attorney general’s questions.
Yet Mr. Trump is deeply, personally enraged by this trial — and by the fact that his children have had to testify, several people who have spoken with him said — and he may not be able to restrain himself on the stand.
The testimony will push Mr. Trump far outside his comfort zone of social media and the rally stage, where he is a master of mockery, a no-holds barred flamethrower who relishes most opportunities to attack foes. He leveraged that persona during his days as a tabloid businessman and fixture of New York’s tabloids and found that it worked just as well in the 2016 presidential race. He has since taken control of the Republican Party, and his style has become a defining influence in contemporary politics.
The witness stand is a different venue. It’s a seat that requires care and control, where lying is a crime and emotional outbursts can land you in contempt of court.... Mr. Trump, 77, has been showing signs of strain and age on the campaign trail.... The test of the former president’s credibility, coherence and self-control could supply his opponents with ammunition on the campaign trail...."
I read that passage out loud here at Meadhouse. Lots of laughter. I said the NYT is milking this for all its worth, really straining to make testifying seem as dangerous as possible. Meade said: "Hey, NYT, this is your one chance to write that purple prose."
By the way, NYT should have edited out the phrase "supply his opponents with ammunition on the campaign trail." Remember when the NYT was involved in blaming Sarah Palin for causing a political shooting because her campaign used a map marked with an image that looked something like crosshairs?
Anyway, the idea that Trump will lose his cool and become enraged on the witness stand is funny. Sometimes he seems like a fictional character, but you sound naive and absurd imagining that he's going to behave like a character in a courtroom drama. I know there will be movies about him some day, but I bet there won't be a single one with anything about this New York case about puffing the value of his real estate.
But go ahead, now's your big chance to act as though Trump will Al Pacino it up....
"Having Marie Kondo’d these rags, I had more room in my bag and could either dress normally en route home, or carry all the souvenirs I’d buy with the $128 I saved being my own suitcase."
I'm blogging this not because — as you might think — it shows how second-rate the travel experience really is but because it uses "Marie Kondo" as a verb and that's something I'd encountered only yesterday — when I blogged that essay about "once-fabulous tits" that had "transmogrified into a bosom" — and because I thought it would be fun to write this sentence.
Research shows that the presence of a gun in the hands of an abuser makes it five times as likely that a female victim will be killed. That inconvenient fact will remain a fact even for a court more attentive to life in 1791 than death in 2023.
The Supreme Court is reviewing a 5th Circuit opinion that that struck down a federal law that criminalized possession of a firearm by someone subject to a domestic violence restraining order.
"That after all this time, anything even approaching a majority of voters see Trump as even a remotely sensible option, can no longer be viewed through the lens of a traditional political calculus. This is now a failure of education, of culture, of common sense."
For Trump haters, the answer to everything is "an indictment."
You can see that Wedge is actively distancing himself from reality. He wants none of it. He won't try to find the sense of it. What's the use?! It's pointless. Chaos.
Wouldn't it be ironic if the reason "Why Biden Is Behind" is that the people who might support him are shrinking away from political engagement? It's just completely crazy — they may think — I'm not going to disarrange my fragile mind attempting to understand what cannot be understood.
Morning-oriented people don't make this mistake. And we certainly don't need advice on "how to make the most of morning light." Just get up, year 'round, based on the coming of the light and the problem of moving the clocks around disappears.
But here's something I love about the article. It calls attention to someone I was going to bring up on my own:
Even in a country where cycling is one of the most popular modes of transportation, many might wonder why anyone would submit themselves to cycling through such treacherous weather conditions. “I wonder that myself sometimes,” Mr. Stoekenbroek said. “There’s a group of people that likes to suffer.”
"'It helps me to feel better,' she said.
Her husband is a soldier, and she worries about him often.... There were many times when Ms. Nigmatulina 'felt scared and stressed, but this series supported me,' she said. 'And particularly Chandler Bing, played by Matthew Perry,' she added. 'I feel like I lost a close friend.' 'Friends' also helped some in the country learn Ukrainian, just as it has aided people around the world in learning English. 'I talk and hear how I am using the words from specific episodes, from that brilliant Ukrainian translation we had,' said Yulia Po, 38, a Crimea native who grew up in a Russian-speaking environment and said she had learned Ukrainian thanks to 'Friends.' As a 13-year-old coming home after school, she recalled, she would have just enough time to fry herself potatoes and get comfortable with a plate in front of the television before the show aired.
She left Crimea after Russia occupied it in 2014, now refuses to speak Russian on principle, and has not been home or seen her parents since leaving, she said.... 'This is just a humane emotion to feel sad — there is always a space for it,' Ms. Po said. '[Matthew Perry] was with me for a long time and gave me many reasons to laugh.'"
"... I took a last look at my breasts in the mirror and—on the advice of a friend—Marie Kondo’ed them. I thanked them for their (purely cosmetic) service, and bid them, in their current iteration, farewell. At the hospital, the surgeon twisted each of my breasts up as if he was about to cut bangs and marked them with a Magic Marker. This was, he explained, a French technique...."
A coalition of intellectual catastrophists on the American right is trying to convince people... that the country is on the verge of collapse. Some catastrophists take it a step further and suggest that officials might contemplate overthrowing liberal democracy in favor of revolutionary regime change or even imposing a right-wing dictatorship on the country.... If Mr. Trump manages to win the presidency again in 2024, many of these intellectual catastrophists could be ready and willing to justify deeds that could well bring American liberal democracy to its knees.
Who's the catastrophist here? The writer of this article or the people he's writing about?
We're not given the full sentence with the phrase "complicit to some degree," just the phrase. It appears in the opening sentence to the article:
Barack Obama offered a complex analysis of the conflict between Israel and Gaza, telling thousands of former aides that they were all “complicit to some degree” in the current bloodshed.
If we are "complicit," what did we do? What could we have done? But Obama, who was President, doesn't even know what he could have done:
“I look at this, and I think back, 'What could I have done during my presidency to move this forward, as hard as I tried?' But there’s a part of me that’s still saying, ‘Well, was there something else I could have done?'"
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