A great day for America

 Defense lawyers by definition have to talk a lot of bollocks, but there's no need to overdo it.  When your client (Harvey Weinstein, say) is unquestionably guilty but gets his conviction overturned on a technicality, thank the court by all means but don't call it "a great day for America."  It sounds like you think powerful men should get away with rape.  (If you do, Mr. Aidala, Trump interviews lawyers on Wednesdays and Saturdays.)

Politico has a long article about noses being out of joint at the New York Times over the lack of access to Joe Biden and his administration that they feel entitled to.  They haven't been invited to the "insider" briefings or had an exclusive interview with the president where they can assess his fitness for the job as Robert Hur did.  Times coverage is going to be pissier than ever, I suspect, after Biden went to the Sirius XM studio for an interview with Howard Stern.   Among other topics he said he'd be willing to debate Trump and talked of contemplating suicide after the deaths of his first wife and daughter Naomi.  (As a recovering Catholic I can tell you there's no worse sin than suicide.)  Sure enough, the one item the Times took away was Biden's assertion that he was arrested at an anti-segregation event as a teenager:  "...never been any evidence."  They're so unbiased.

Civil liberties are still under fire on US campuses -- after Texas sent the cavalry to UT Austin, police at Emory University in Decatur, Georgia, pulled out the rubber bullets and teargas.  That might be why Israel felt comfortable in arresting Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a Palestinian legal scholar at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, over comments she made a month ago.  The Guardian says Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who is in her sixties, "was strip-searched, handcuffed so tightly it caused pain, denied access to food, water and medication for several hours, and held in a cold cell without adequate clothing or blankets."  In Israel, not Iran or Turkey or Russia.  She has been released but faces more questioning in a few days.  Journalists who displease the government have been subjected to such treatment or even killed, and now it's academics.  

Spokesmodel-governor Kristi Noem has a book out and it sounds like a pip.  She describes in excruciating detail how she tried without success to train a dog for pheasant hunting.  Nothing worked including a shock collar, so she shot it.  Then there was a goat who smelled unpleasant and knocked her children down.  Same fate.  I'm sure none of this was lost on the unfortunate children, who probably wake up screaming, "No, Mama, not the gravel pit!"  "I guess if I were a better politician I wouldn't tell the story here," Noem concludes with a chuckle.  On the contrary, Madame Governor, we all know how Trump hates dogs and he's still looking for a running mate...

NOAA is offering a reward for information about a juvenile bottlenose dolphin shot multiple times and found on a beach in Cameron Parish, Louisiana.  I wonder where Noem spent her spring break.

The Supreme Court sat there with their teeth in their mouths, as my great-uncle Frank would say, and listened to John Sauer, representing Trump, argue that presidents have "presidential immunity" for all crimes they commit in office because otherwise, chaos is come again.  Sauer, the assistant solicitor general of Louisiana and a graduate of the Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., school of public speaking, was willing to acknowledge that ordering the military to stage a coup might be an official act and he would have to be impeached and convicted before he could be prosecuted.  Which would have to happen with armed troops occupying both houses of Congress, I assume.  (Louisiana, you OK with one of your officials spouting this nonsense while you're paying him?  Because it smells worse than that poor dolphin.)  None of it matters because the whole point is to delay the opening of Jack Smith's espionage case until sometime next year.  Or never, if this "immunity" can be dug out of the Code of Hammurabi or some other precedent Alito's clerks are currently researching.

Under a bill passed by the Alabama house, librarians could be prosecuted for "exposing minors" to "sexual or gender-oriented conduct" in the form of books.  They would have seven days to remove anything complained about by some crackpot.  This is shocking.  I didn't know Alabama still had libraries.

Speaking of book-hating crackpots, Keri Blair of Tennessee Moms for Liberty was arrested for shoplifting $700 worth of merchandise from Target.  No way she was spending her money at that woke retailer!

Trump whines constantly about the unfairness of making him sit in a freezing courtroom all day when he should be campaigning.  Here he is Wednesday campaigning in Bedminster, New Jersey.

Trump adviser Jesse Watters brought up the golf idea a few days ago ("He needs fresh air and exercise!") and he should get the credit.  Yesterday he had more good advice:  "They trapped him in a cage.  We call it a courtroom but it's a cage and he's like King Kong.  And what happens with King Kong?  Boom!  It's not going to be good.  So he's going to bust out of this cage eventually."  Startled, other members of The Five had to point out that Kong dies.  Literally, he gets shot on Fifth Avenue and falls off the Empire State Building.  Watters acknowledged that he did not watch until the end.  Trump once tried to buy the Empire State and he has a history of grabbing women against their will, so Watters was on the right track.  (Maybe he's got his phone out and he's TRUTHing some bullshit and Kathy Griffin shoots him, and then Jack Smith says, "Round up the usual suspects," while Griffin and Letitia James walk off to get a Cosmo.  Could work.)  

I need a couple of days off.