What the actual

First things first:  We have a new date for the Trump Restoration!  On November 23 Pillow Mike promises to initiate yet another marathon presentation of all the evidence for "the biggest cover-up for the biggest crime in history."  Mike has his very own digital internet thing called Frank.com but nobody watches it so he announced the big news on the podcast of Old Contemptible Bannon.  And Bannon was pumped.  He is on the record as a devotee of chaos to destroy the "administrative state" (i.e. American democracy) but that doesn't mean Pigpen has forgotten about the little people.  He wants to break up families, too!  At the dinner table!  "What I love about this, they said hey, if you just get Trump out...you can start having holidays again without arguing at the table and at each other's throats.  But Mike Lindell comes in and he's going to go...on a marathon so you can go back and have fistfights!  The family squabbles!  Lindell, you're a genius!"  Pigpen was raised by feral hogs.  And Pillow Mike still has his sights fixed on the Supreme Court, which he believes has magical powers.  God bless us, every one.

The mainstreamers have covered the shooting on the set of Rust from every possible angle but one.  Unless you read Erik Loomis at Lawyers Gun & Money you would never know the movie was being made by a non-union crew.  All the problems were in evidence, including long commutes, non-payment of workers and safety concerns that had already led to a walkout.  It wasn't only the inexperienced "chief armorer."  "Bosses don't care about worker safety.  Unions do," Loomis wrote.  "When employers who don't care about workers hire scabs, people die.  And yes, Alec Baldwin is a producer on the film and thus one of the bosses."

The two men shot and killed by whitewing hero Kyle Rittenhouse are not victims, or anyway are not to be referred to as such at trial.  "The word 'victim' is a loaded, loaded word," ruled Judge Bruce Schroeder (as in "loaded AR-15"?).  Because the defense plans to introduce evidence that the -- dead guys? -- were engaged in "arson, rioting, looting" although they can't very well defend themselves, and that made it perfectly all right for the adolescent vigilante to kill them.  The prosecution said nothing because they were already composing the appeal.  

The trial of the three men who lynched Ahmaud Arbery is not going much better.  There is no allegation of "arson, rioting, looting" which had to be redressed by armed civilians.  Arbery was jogging on a leafy street in suburban Brunswick when Travis and Gregory McMichael and William Bryan decided he needed to be citizen-arrested for a burglary committed at some point in the past, by someone.  Arbery was probably unaware of the law giving them this authority because it was passed in 1863, when Georgia was not technically part of the United States.   Of course, it's not really about burglary, which may be why jury selection is taking so long.  I'm just saying don't be surprised if these good old boys celebrate their acquittal with Kyle and his mom, maybe at Mar-a-Lago (sorry, no comps, cash bar only).  I wonder if the judge will let Arbery be called "the victim."

Elsewhere in the Peachpit State, a US Marshal and a Clayton County police officer have been indicted in the 2016 killing of Jamarion Robinson.  Robinson was no Ahmaud Arbery; there was a warrant for his arrest when he pointed a gun at the officers and fled.  The grand jury seems to have been startled by the fact that the two shot him 76 times, which may be a state record.  Fulton County DA Fani Willis has yet to indict Donald Trump but she got this case moving after her predecessor tried to bury it.  Elections matter.

Every week another senior member of the administration has to go up to the Capitol and subject themself to the incoherent ravings of the Sedition Senators.  Today it was Merrick Garland's turn to be insulted and confused.  C-Span has the whole four-and-a-half hours he won't get back but there's no reason for the rest of us to waste our time.  Today they were outraged that former Deputy AG Andrew McCabe will be getting his full pension after all (you may recall that Trump fired him hours early to save our Great Country a piddling amount of money because he is a jenius at business, and also spite).  They were furious that the DOJ might respond to school board members pleading for protection from violent Trumpanzees, and Tom Cotton thought the attorney general should somehow fire/prosecute/assassinate Anthony Fauci for conspiring with China to make covid.  It was like that, interspersed with Democrats wondering politely when they can expect some action on the mob that tried to kill them last January.  At least Garland had a good laugh at the absurd Johnny Kennedy.  (Parents of "special" children, please don't name them Dorothy Parker, Oscar Wilde or John Kennedy.  They feel pressure to be witty and it's just...sad.) 

Can you handle one more legal item?  This one is safely in the past, mostly.   A memo surfaced written in 1952 by William Rehnquist, then a clerk to Justice Robert Jackson, Jr., while the Court was considering the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case.  Not  surprisingly, Nixon's future Chief was on the wrong side of history, citing the essential correctness of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) which upheld the constitutionality of segregation.   Two years later Justice Jackson voted with the Warren Court majority despite the memo.  Why did he hire this white supremacist?  I don't know, good grades?  Maybe Jackson repented after Nuremberg, where he was the lead US prosecutor.   But as the man said, the past is never dead.  Rehnquist rammed through Bush v. Gore in 2000.  His death on September 3, 2005, resulted in the only good joke about Katrina:  "That's no hurricane.  It's Satan coming to collect Rehnquist's soul." 

Mort Sahl died yesterday.  I will write about him and other cultural topics tomorrow.