Philip Rosmarin

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

Donald Trump has been found in contempt of court — in just his current criminal trial — ten times now.

Of course he has: contempt is his go-to, perhaps his only, real emotion.

In his first speech as President of the United States, he uttered his contempt for the country that elected him, coloring ours a nation in carnage.

He’s shown lifelong contempt for women, verbally and physically abusing them at will. Nominating Supreme Court Justices whose only qualification for him is that they believe women ought not have dominion over their own bodies.

Lifelong contempt for our military, buying his way as a youth out of personally serving with them, and when Commander in Chief calling those who died for their country — your friends and family and mine — suckers and losers.

Contempt for the poor: only the rich qualify to be his vice president — look at the lapdogs he calls to the stage with him, to the courtroom with him.

Contempt for democracy: how else can you describe a president who engineers an insurrection, steals his country’s secrets, would suspend whatever parts of the Constitution that annoy him, and proclaims that if reelected he will be dictator on day one?

Contempt, above all, for the rule of law, his whole adult life spent with middle finger raised to every concept of justice that dare attempt penetrate a brain somehow frozen in development at middle school.

So that Trump can call a judge, who has done everything he can to avoid properly jailing his sorry sorry ass, a railroading highly conflicted crooked and corrupt Trump hater.

And why has this judge done for this person what he would never have done for any other? Not because he thinks Donald Trump the man deserves better treatment — no one who has ever known Donald Trump honestly believes that. But because he has something Donald Trump had four years to find and never found.

Respect for the office of the presidency of the United States.

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

Genocide is a word I rarely use without thinking of the decimation of two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe, by Nazi Germany. It is a word no one used until after then. It was coined by a Polish lawyer who could find no existing word to describe what had been done to his family, to millions of families like his.

Scholars have since applied that word, under the legal definition of the 1948 United Nations Convention on Genocide, to describe conflicts forward and backward in time, forty-nine times. The scope of conflicts range from as few killed as the forty by the Uruguayan Army in 1831 to eradicate the last of the Charrúa, to as many as the seven million Jews of the Holocaust.

Some would add a fiftieth to the list: the Israeli grandchildren of the Holocaust. Grandchildren of the Holocaust responding to an attack last fall by a Palestinian-elected government whose chartering document calls for extermination of the Jews particularly in Israel but also anywhere in the world.

The Israeli government says the war in Gaza is an existential defense against a Hamas government that vows slaughter inside Israel again and again until every Jew is dead or driven from the land. The Hamas government, and increasingly world opinion, believes that Israel doesn’t care if it has to commit genocide to save itself from genocide.

If the Israelis are intending a genocide of the Palestinians, they are doing a terrible job. John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, believes

“Israel has taken more measures to avoid needless civilian harm than virtually any other nation that’s fought an urban war.

“In fact, as someone who has served two tours in Iraq and studied urban warfare for over a decade, Israel has taken precautionary measures even the United States did not do during its recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Spencer says Israel first provided days, and then weeks, of warnings before starting its major attacks of urban areas. They called and texted civilians ahead of airstrikes, and began those strikes with a practice called roof-knocking: dropping small munitions on building rooftops so people could get out before the big ones came.

“No military,” Spencer says, “has ever implemented any of these practices in war before.”

Hamas, on the other hand, is doing a much better job at killing Palestinians. Its whole military-industrial complex is set up with the intention that civilians die before they do. They hope to draw fire while hiding behind women, children, and the elderly. They count on it. The more civilians who die while soldiers scurry tunnel to tunnel beneath them (relative safety they deny civilians), the better.

The more children maimed or killed, the better.

And, it seems to be working. Most of the United States and much of the world initially were appalled at the Hamas slaughter, rape, torture, and kidnapping of innocents. But most of the United States and much of the world suffer from ADHD: that was last October’s news. Today’s news is that a thousand Palestinian kids are amputees. We know Hamas won’t stop that: Hamas put those kids in harm’s way.

Americans in particular seem uninterested in the why of this war, more in the what. And what we’ve seen is the one day of Hamas evil, and months of Israeli painstaking response. One day of burned and beheaded babies is very low on the American scale compared to months of having to watch the Palestinian suffering courtesy of Hamas.

So Israel has to stop the war. We somehow have to make them stop the war.

Hamas doesn’t have to win this war they started.

Hamas just has to outlast Israeli resistance to world opinion.

Then they can get back to killing more Jews.

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

I’m pretty sure there are no subscribers to Drunk & Disorderly in Afghanistan. It’s not that there are no drunk or disorderly people who live there. According to the Taliban there are plenty. They don’t mention whether those folks are drunk or disorderly because of the Taliban.

I highly recommend that unless religiously proscribed, people there be both.

It’s partly because of recommendations like mine that the Supreme Leader of the country wants to put the squeeze on half his citizens — the female half. Not “put the squeeze on” in the same sense that the United States’s wannabe Supreme Leader would like, but to purge them of every human right so richly deserved by the other half of his citizens — the male half.

To this end, El Supremo has, since the United States abandoned the country back to him a couple of years ago, banned female judges and lawyers, and halted most services to women. Girls get to go to school, but only till the sixth grade.

Women can’t work or teach at public universities, can’t work for the government. Can’t go to public parks. Sports: not for them. Beauty salons, closed. A male guardian — can’t leave home without one. Inside the home, they’re not supposed to listen to music.

With all that and more, still something was missing. So about a week ago Mr. Supreme revived one of his faith’s best ideas: women who stray from their men will be flogged or, if they’ve really, really strayed, stoned to death. In public. Men who commit adultery may get a stern talking-to; or not.

He mentioned he knew people would call his new edict a violation of women’s rights, but that’s because “I represent Allah, and you (presumably everybody else) represent Satan.”

I don’t use the name of this leader, because there’s a certain uncertainty about whether he is who he says he is. His announcement about bringing Afghanistan back into the stone age was by radio broadcast. He occasionally gives a public sermon, but with his back to the public. People say they can’t really hear him that well. He’s been using the same 1990 passport photo in all pictures shown them.

Either he’s dead, or he just doesn’t look anymore like someone who should be representing Allah.

Me, I’m fine representing Satan.

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

10. Students, scientists, climate fans, and unemployed Russian spies suffered physical fitness hits with fewer political marches. (On the bright side, women’s march physical fitness benefits curiously spiked.)

9. Too many patriots languishing in prisons for misunderstood playful frolicking at U.S. Capitol.

8. Proud Boys are sixty-seven percent less proud.

7. Fewer big loud political rallies where people get to test medical theories about mysterious disease, some successfully.

6. Senior citizens feel like slackers because so many of their tribe are running for president.

5. Because major party candidate sat out primary debates, laughter index also went way down.

4. Newscasts again looking like outtakes of “The Apprentice.”

3. News in general isn’t as amusing these days.

2. Much lower job turnover in top government administrative posts, idling unskilled labor force.

And the Number One Top Ten Reason the U.S. Ranks lower in Global Happiness:

1. Not enough people have sent Donald Trump Cheeseburger-of-the-Month Gift Subscriptions.

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

Congressman Jason Crow wrote the other day to ask me to contribute the $15.79 I’d otherwise spend on Lauren Boebert’s fantastic somewhat new book to his own reelection campaign instead. Between the time he wrote me and the time I am writing this, her book’s been cut to a way more reasonable $5.90, and if I actually contributed to people’s campaigns in other people’s districts, I’d…

Wait…Lauren Boebert’s written a book?

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The 2024 Presidential Greatness Project somehow ranked Abraham Lincoln a greater president than Donald Trump, a close forty-four places behind. The good news was that he didn’t place any lower than the first time he was included in the survey of one hundred fifty four political scientists.

Trump reportedly called the project unfair because this time there was one more president to include, so the fact he went down one place might give people a false impression of his performance.

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The comedic news commentator John Oliver offered Clarence Thomas a million dollars a year to take early retirement. Plus he’s throwing in a two point four million-dollar sexed-up motor-coach so he can dump those boring super-yacht trips.

The Supreme Court Justice has till 19 March to decide if he’d like to spend the rest of his days motoring in the posh tour bus, ethically challenged no more.

One court insider said Thomas hasn’t been so thrilled since he offered Anita Hill a sip of his Coke. But It’s a clear effort to buy off one of the highest judges in the land.

And it’s a crowded field.