RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/wheres-the-jury-charge/

It is now Friday evening at the start of the long Memorial Day weekend, so it’s getting safer to assume that we will not be getting the jury charge — i.e., the legal instructions that Judge Juan Merchan will give the jury prior to deliberations — in former president Donald Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial.

Interesting thing about that. It’s obvious that Judge Merchan does not want to give the commentariat an opportunity to pore over and publicly dissect what he plans to say. But that raises the question of why Merchan sent the jurors home after both sides rested on Tuesday, giving them a full week to marinate in the intense out-of-court publicity and feel pressure from family, friends, and acquaintances. (The jurors are anonymous as far as the public record is concerned, but it would be naïve to believe their identities are unknown to many people.)

Why didn’t the judge proceed with closing statements, the jury charge, and deliberations until a verdict was reached, as is customary in criminal trials? Presumably, he did not want to risk the wrath and potential defections if the jury were forced to deliberate during a holiday weekend. (If any commitments were made to the jury at the start of the trial about not working over this weekend, I have not seen that reported.) I believe the judge has been putting his thumb on the scale in favor of the prosecution, and experience teaches that when juries are inconvenienced, they tend to blame the government and the court; they may sometimes blame the defendant if it seems his lawyers are stalling, but they generally grasp that the defendant is not a voluntary participant in the trial and has the least control over its scheduling.

I want to make another point, though. If the judge does not want to make the jury charge public because of the intense media coverage, that can only be because of fear that the jurors might be exposed to that media coverage. Otherwise, there would be no downside to making public what ought to be, and routinely is, made public. If the big concern is intense media coverage, however, then why would Merchan send the jury home for a week outside the courtroom, where they’re apt to be bludgeoned by media coverage and other outside pressures? Why not have kept them in the courtroom working and shielded them from publicity and outside pressures until a verdict is reached?

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

In The Forgotten Founding Father Joshua Kendall wrote: “Recognizing [Noah] Webster’s knack for getting Americans to think of themselves as Americans, [George] Washington relied time and time again on his trusted policy advisor.” We tend to think of colonial Americans as being solely of British heritage, and certainly they dominated. But languages spoken in the American colonies in 1775 included German, Dutch, French, Swedish, Polish and Hebrew, along with numerous dialects and myriad languages of indigenous Americans. From its beginning America was diverse, unlike the more homogenous countries from which immigrants had come. The Founding Fathers wanted the people to become a melting pot.

Noah Webster[1] understood the value of developing the unique character of an American. His spelling books were designed to help people read, write and speak a common language. In the June 29, 2019 issue of the San Diego Union-Tribune, Richard Lederer noted that Webster’s dictionaries had “an array of shiny new American words, among them bullfrog, chowder, handy, hickory, succotash, tomahawk…” Today, in this English-speaking country, those not fluent are disadvantaged, yet not all are encouraged to learn English.

Integration, in this nation of immigrants, was slow, as could be seen in many New York City neighborhoods that remained distinctive into the 20th Century: Little Italy; China Town; Yorkville (for Germans); Spanish Harlem; Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant and Manhattan’s Harlem, home for black Americans, and Lapskaus Boulevard in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn where many Norwegians settled. But assimilation became increasingly common in the first and second halves of the 20th Century, first through inter-ethnic marriages and later through interracial marriages.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/staff/don-feder/

History teaches us that the best way to avoid a war is to prepare for one.

After World War I, another global conflict was unthinkable, the leaders of the democracies declared. Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese imperialists thought otherwise.

In the 1930s, Britain effectively disarmed, and France relied on static defense. The United States embraced isolationism, relying on two oceans for protection, while Germany rearmed and Japan invaded China. The cost of that lack of imagination was another world war and 75 million dead.

When World War II ended, shortsighted politicians rushed to downsize our military, even as communism advanced on four continents.

After Vietnam, the peaceniks who had taken control of the Democratic Party couldn’t wait to put our armed forces in mothballs. Then came Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, 9/11, ISIS, and radical Islam’s war on the West.

The Biden administration’s death march of folly began with the disastrous withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, with 13 service members dead, thousands of Americans stranded and $7 billion in military equipment left behind. The weakness we displayed to our enemies set the stage for the next round of aggression.

President Biden is Neville Chamberlain, George McGovern and Jimmy Carter rolled into one.