The Court deciding to slow roll Trump’s appeal when it often happily fast rolls topics it’s eager to make law on speaks for itself. It’s also important to remember that the arguments themselves, by any standard of existing legal understanding, are wholly specious. It’s been DOJ policy and conventional understanding for half a century that a sitting president cannot face criminal charges. The president isn’t above the law, the argument goes, but for a mix of practical and separation-of-powers reasons, charges have to wait for after the president leaves office. Trump is arguing that a president can’t ever be charged with a crime. Call it neo-Nixonian reasoning: If the president does it, it can’t be a crime. He’s further arguing, among other things, that if you get acquitted at your impeachment trial you have legal immunity for those acts going forward.

Justice delayed is justice denied. The American republic is waiting for justice. There’s no rationale for this decision other than assisting Trump’s strategy of delay which he hopes, and which may, allow him to end the whole prosecution if he wins the 2024 election.

I very much doubt a majority on the Court has the stomach to actually entertain these arguments. But giving Trump an assist on the calendar? Sure. Absolutely.

I wanted to flag your attention to two articles on Hamas and the Israel-Hamas War generally.

On the fate of the hostages, the Times of Israel reports that senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad tells Al Jazeera that his group is not interested in releasing any more hostages, even for a ceasefire lasting multiple weeks. I take this as more confirmation of the point we discussed yesterday, which is that the remaining hostages, or at least a substantial number of them, are the sole remaining strategic asset Hamas has. Hamas’ leadership rightly see itself as in a war to the death with Israel. So they’re not going to give those hostages up.

Even if many things are bleak, we still get to make fun of the comical dweeb Dean Phillips, the soon-to-be-former representative from the 3rd District of Minnesota. Philips at first claimed he was considering running for president to get someone else with a better shot to get into the race to challenge Joe Biden. It was, he said, not about issues or even about Biden. The party just needed a more youthful nominee and he wanted someone else to jump into the race. That didn’t happen. And somewhere along the way to getting in himself Phillips dropped the “God, it pains me to have to do this” routine for something more like “I’m gonna take this senile old coot down!” Having failed to get someone else to hop in the race Phillips decided his moment had indeed arrived. He got into the race and rapidly moved to challenge Biden from the right. He even hopped on the Hunter Biden-bashing bandwagon.

Following up on what I wrote earlier today about future hostage releases, I think we’re started to see some of what I described. Yesterday, Hamas released a video of three elderly male Israeli hostages. Just a short time ago Palestinian Islamic Jihad released a video of two other hostages, one 79, another 47. PIJ is a separate group. It’s been known since the beginning that a smaller subset of the hostages are in their hands. It’s unknown the extent the two groups are coordinating their strategy in terms of the hostages or how much influence or control Hamas has over PIJ’s decisions about the hostages it’s holding.

So far these videos have basically been the hostages demanding their own release, pretty obviously coerced. In the one just released by PIJ the elderly man appears to have his hands handcuffed or tied behind the chair he’s sitting it. As yet they don’t seem to contain any threats. But we can likely expect more of this. When you’re on the ropes you use what you have. And what they have is hostages.

Today Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones turns 80.

For years it’s been impossible to venture onto social media without seeing memes about Richards’ death-cheating immortality: the often gaunt hollowed visage, the legendary drug use, urban legends about recurrent full blood transfusions. Richards’ legendary junkiedom has been decades longer in the myth-making than the reality. As best as the various histories and memoirs inform us, Richards spent about a decade addicted to heroin, from around the age of 25 to roughly 35. There were recurrent clean-ups for tours, relapses, or just decisions to start shooting heroin again. He eventually kicked the habit in stages after a notorious drug bust in Toronto in 1977, which could have sent him to prison for years. In other words, that supposedly central thing about the man actually ended going on half a century ago. Of course, there are drugs and drugs. Richards continued to drink, smoke grass, snort cocaine for years while seemingly weening himself of the vices over time. He even quit smoking at some point during the COVID pandemic.