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Roundup — 12 Comments

1. The Biden administration has resumed the sale of 500 lb bombs to Israel, after a 2 month pause. Possibly one was used to take out the formerly elusive Mr Deif.
   If one were cynical, one might conclude that Biden/Blinken/Obama is calibrating American support to ensure that the war continues, but at a level low enough that the ruckus from Dearborn does not get too intrusive.
   Might somebody be making a buck or 2 from the ongoing disagreemetn?

2. Looked bigger to me West Tx, more 2,000lb-ish. One of the few, if not perhaps the first that the IAF has delivered into Gaza, despite the constant lying claims of Biden and Co., or even, perhaps because of those lying claims, as in a manner of emphatic refutation along the lines of Crocodile Dundee’s famous line: That’s not a 2,000lb bomb! This is a 2,000lb bomb!

3. It looks like they killed Mohammad Deif and another very important commander out a guy whose name was Rafa Salameh. This is a time for rejoicing! If past is prologue, Hamas is not going to be fast in admitting that he was killed, but if he survived, they would be crowing about it.

4. part of the quartet

   https://www.thejc.com/news/israel/israel-offers-up-to-400-000-for-information-about-yahya-sinwars-whereabouts-b46852b4

5. }}} (2) Involuntary manslaughter charges against Alec Baldwin have been dismissed due to egregious prosecutorial misconduct.

   And yet, strangely enough, none of Trump’s charges have been dismissed for this same reason…?

   😀

   Yes, is facetiousness and sarcasm. 😛

6. Even more hilarious is that subtext in the CNN piece about how all these “powerful Dems” just “didn’t know” Biden was actually doing that poorly.

   OW!!
   It HURTS when my eyes roll that far back.

   SMH.

   NOW they’re attempting to suggest that they were all clueless and ignorant, that the WH people were “keeping them in the dark” about how bad it was.

   Yes, and I have LAND for sale, if you’re buying into that line of equine excreta…

7. Indeed, it is truly impressive…how they lie so effortlessly….
   (To be sure, in their defense, they were/are impressively clueless and ignorant WRT the INEVITABLE BACKLASH to their “cluelessness” and “ignorance”…but I guess that’s what happens when one’s history of SERIAL COVERUPS of COVERUPS of COVERUPS—ad nauseum, ad infinitum—is ALWAYS SO IMPRESSIVELY SUCCESSFUL…)
   – – – – – – – – – – –
   Speaking of “impressive”, Emmanuel (i.e., “God is with Us”) Macron has just—rather impressively—plunged his country into some—potentially—impressive chaos.
   “Leftist Union Threatens Macron With Olympics Strike Chaos”—
   https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/leftist-union-threatens-macron-with-olympics-strike-chaos/

   (Talk about “Olympic spirit”….as Kamala Harris might phrase it…)

8. (2) Involuntary manslaughter charges against Alec Baldwin have been dismissed due to egregious prosecutorial misconduct.
   ==
   AFAICT, the misconduct was that the prosecutor did not inform the defense that some rando from Phoenix had dropped off some bullets at a local police station three months ago. It’s not clear what the provenance of the bullets, why they could be considered exculpatory evidence, or why the judge could not grant a continuance until the defense had an opportunity to examine them. Outside my wheelhouse, but it looks as if the judge was hankering after an excuse to dismiss the charges.

9. Catfight: When your 70’s Penthouse fantasy becomes a horrifying reality 50 years later.

10. Ref (1) – The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) confirmed that it killed Hamas Khan Younis Brigade Commander Rafe Salamah in the southern Gaza Strip on July 13. – ‘The IDF said on July 14 that it is still assessing whether the airstrike killed Hamas’ top military commander, Mohammad Deif.’ Good news that Salamah is now confirmed dead. Deif is probably dead also but Hamas is trying to hide the “results.”

11. On the Baldwin decision, I’ve read/saw that the bullets were turned in and assigned a case number-the wrong case number. Oops! Case dismissed. Happens more than once in a Blue Moon. BUT, to dismiss with prejudice so Baldwin can’t be tried again? Really? Little odd there.

12. @ JFM and Art Deco > the comments to the LI post Neo linked are informative, and I have seen other pundits make some of the same arguments.

    The prosecution, for whatever reason, busted their own case.
    Incompetence and complicity were both suggested in that thread.

    Representative of the Case for the Defense:
    https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/07/judge-dismisses-involuntary-manslaughter-case-against-alec-baldwin/#comment-1547052

    TheOldZombie | July 12, 2024 at 6:51 pm
    As much as I would have liked to see him convicted and sent to prison this was the correct decision by the judge.
    The prosecutor should have entered the bullets into the case just to CYA themselves. Putting it under a different case number and than not telling the defense when the defense saw all the other bullets was just asking for a problem. Baldwin has top notch attorneys working for him. The moment they find out something like this of course they are going to hard at it.
    Those attorneys earned their money.

    This is the best explanation of the judge’s decision that I’ve seen.
    The prosecution apparently had a pattern of slow-walking or with-holding requested evidence, and the bullet-burying was the final straw.

    https://variety.com/2024/film/news/alec-baldwin-lawyers-rust-trial-dismissed-analysis-1236069142/

    Alec Baldwin‘s lawyers have been complaining for months that prosecutors were not sharing all the evidence against him in his manslaughter case.

    They complained about missing forensics reports. They complained about redacted emails. They complained about videos buried on servers. It got them nowhere.

    So when they learned, at some point before Thursday afternoon, that a retired police officer had walked into the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office and dropped off a batch of bullets connected to the case — and once again, nobody told the defense — they did something weird.
    They did not complain. Instead, they waited until the state got to its fourth witness on Thursday, crime scene technician Marissa Poppell.

    And then they sprung a trap.
    [sic- that should be “sprang a trap” – no one uses correct tenses anymore]
    …
    Alex Spiro, Baldwin’s lead lawyer, set the wheels in motion on Thursday afternoon. At the end of several hours of cross-examination, he asked Poppell about a “Good Samaritan” who had dropped off bullets at the Sheriff’s Office. Poppell acknowledged that this had happened.

    Spiro asked why nobody had told the defense, and Poppell said it was not her responsibility to do so.

    “You buried it,” he said.

    This nugget of information had been circulating weeks earlier in the small community of people who obsess about the “Rust” case. Variety heard about it from a film armorer, who heard about it from Jason Bowles, the attorney for “Rust” armorer Hannah Gutierrez Reed.

    At 7:52 p.m. Thursday night, the defense filed a motion to dismiss the case. It was either the fifth or sixth such motion since Baldwin was indicted in January, depending on how one counts it. Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer had rejected all the others.

    But unlike the previous motions, this one was filed in the middle of trial. Had the trial not begun, Marlowe Sommer could have ordered a delay, to give the defense time to analyze the bullets. But once the trial started, that would not work. The jury had been seated, the defense had made its opening statement and laid out its trial strategy. In legalese, “jeopardy” had attached.
    …
    Over the next few hours, an extraordinary scene unfolded, as the judge demanded to see the bullets, donned blue gloves, and cut open an evidence package. She displayed the bullets on a table, finding three Starline Brass rounds with silver primers — an apparent match for the fatal round.

    In a scene that seemed ripped out of “A Few Good Men” or some other courtroom drama, Morrissey sought to explain — and called herself to the stand. By that point, the judge had seen enough.

    “There is no one here that is requiring you to be called as a witness,” Marlowe Sommer said.

    “The information needs to come out,” Morrissey said.

    Morrissey took a seat at the witness stand, the judge swore her in, and Morrissey then laid out her account of the bullets. She said she didn’t believe they were relevant to the case, and did not know that they hadn’t been turned over to the defense.

    Spiro then cross-examined her, asking about a series of people who had dropped out of the prosecution team over the last year — an investigator, a paralegal, an attorney. The last one was Erlinda Johnson, Morrissey’s co-counsel, who had been on the case until some point on Friday. Gasps filled the courtroom.

    “Ms. Johnson didn’t agree with the decision to have a public hearing,” Morrissey said.
    …
    Marlowe Sommer then delivered her ruling, finding that the state’s conduct had compromised the integrity of the judicial system. She noted that since the trial had begun, remedies short of dismissal would not do the trick.

    “If this conduct does not rise to the level of bad faith, it certainly comes so near to bad faith as to show signs of scorching,” the judge said, radiating anger. “Jeopardy has attached… There is no way for the court to right this wrong. The sanction of dismissal is the only warranted remedy.”
    …
    Morrissey was in some ways paying the price for errors that long predated her appointment to the case in March of 2023. From the moment Hutchins was shot, the key question in the case was “How did live rounds get on set?”

    The Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office never answered that question. At the Gutierrez Reed trial in February, Cpl. Alexandria Hancock said she never talked to Joe Swanson, the man who manufactured the bullets. She also never spoke one-on-one with Troy Teske, the man who stored them for years, waiting for law enforcement to come get them, before finally dropping off the bullets to the Sheriff’s Office at the conclusion of the Gutierrez Reed trial in March.

    At the Gutierrez Reed trial, Hancock testified that the source of the live rounds was a side issue.

    “Really what’s important to law enforcement were the circumstances of what occurred that day, and the facts and the evidence of what occurred during the incident,” she said.

    When Morrissey took over the case, she made a “herculean” effort to find the source of the rounds. After a series of prosecutorial blunders that preceded her tenure, she was able to put things on track enough to convict Gutierrez Reed, who is now serving an 18-month sentence in state prison.

    But the failure to disclose Teske’s bullets was the final blunder.

    It’s still unclear whether the bullets would have made any difference in establishing Baldwin’s guilt, had they been disclosed. He was on trial for pointing a gun at Hutchins and, allegedly, pulling the trigger. Whoever supplied the live rounds to set, it wasn’t him.

    But it was too much.

    “I’m just flabbergasted,” Aarons said. “Even if you’ve got a good explanation for why it doesn’t matter, you’d make sure where the heck it was, and disclose it… The whole thing is crazy.”

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