Philip Rosmarin

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

If at first you don’t succeed, here are Alabama’s favorite idiot son’s best excuses to try, try again:

10. He’ll show Congresswoman Frederica Wilson how a real cowboy wears her hat.

9. High hopes to wave his tiny little pistol around at the speakers’ podium. Maybe even take out his handgun.

8. With Donald Trump, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh, would form perfect Sad Survivors of Sexual Assault/Harassment Accusations Support Group.

7. Social Security just ain’t gettin’ the job done.

6. Alabama keeps taking away his other day job.

5. Can’t wait to try that thumb thing John McCain did.

4. Heard U.S. Senators get complimentary little blue pills.

3. Has important contributions to make to subjugate the inferior races.

2. Prized black velvet edition of the Ten Commandments would look just great on his Senate desk.

And the Number One Top Ten Reason Roy Moore Is Running for Senate Again?

1. Probably his last chance to score a Senate page.

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

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

I can’t think of a worse way to observe Memorial Day than by pardoning war criminals.

Yet that is what the commander in chief of the armed forces of the United States is making plans to do. He can’t risk his hair in the rain to visit the graves of our war dead, but if he can rehabilitate a few soldiers whose only crimes are that they murdered a few people who aren’t even white (women and girls maybe, boys and old men, but not white), he’s ready to party.

First up for pardon is a man who hasn’t even been tried yet (hasn’t stopped the President from pardoning like-minded pals before). This man is a Navy SEAL turned in by seven other SEALs under his command in Iraq. Among other things, they witnessed him stab a defenseless teenage captive to death, use his sniper rifle to shoot a school-age girl and old man for target practice, and fire rockets and machine guns into neighborhoods for fun. He certainly sounds like he deserves a presidential pardon, at least from this president.

Other possible pardons are of a Blackwater contractor who massacred ten women, two kids, and two men who might have been an actual danger to him, had they been armed and known of his intentions; a soldier already hailed by Trump as a “U.S. Military hero,” who summarily executed a captive because he thought the man might make bombs for the Taliban; and a whole group of Marines shown on video urinating on the corpses of suspected Afghan fighters (not the President’s first involvement with a pee tape).

Are these the sort of heroic actions the president imagines he himself might have assayed but for the pesky (if imaginary) bone spurs that kept him out of military service?

What kind of man pardons war criminals? But then I’ve wondered this kind of thing before. What kind of man lies with nearly every breath he takes? What kind of man incites violence against political foes and journalists? What kind of man steals children at our southern border, cages them, lets them die in his custody?

Wait…we already know. Vladimir Putin’s kind of man.

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

Nine hundred sixteen former federal prosecutors have done what few American voters, and apparently only one Republican Congressman, have: they’ve read the Mueller Report.

And every one of them would have indicted the Russian stooge who is president of the United States for the multiple felony crimes described within.

These are not left-leaning CNN commentators. These are prosecutors. Republicans and Democrats who have served every administration going back to Eisenhower. Line attorneys, supervisors, special prosecutors, United States Attorneys, senior officials at the Department of Justice. The only ax they have to grind is the ax they ground their entire careers: justice.

“The Mueller Report,” these nine hundred-plus prosecutors write, “describes several acts that satisfy all of the elements for an obstruction charge: conduct that obstructed or attempted to obstruct the truth-finding process, as to which the evidence of corrupt intent and connection to pending proceedings is overwhelming.”

Trump, they say, tried to fire Mueller and then falsified the evidence that he did. Tried to limit Mueller from investigating his conduct. Tampered with witnesses, threatening them and dangling pardons.

The prosecutors say a decision to indict Trump — not taken by Mueller because Justice Department policy precludes indictment of a sitting president — wasn’t even a close call: “to look at these facts and say that a prosecutor could not probably sustain a conviction for obstruction of justice — the standard set out in Principles of Federal Prosecution — runs counter to logic and our experience.”

Unchecked obstruction of justice, they say, which allows intentional interference with criminal investigations to go unpunished , “puts our whole system of justice at risk.”

The prosecutor they have in mind to punish this behavior? The prosecutor Mueller had in mind when he offered his road map report? The United States Congress, whose Democratic leaders so far seem to be relying instead on the same false promise of 2016: an election. An election tampered with then by Russians on Trump’s behalf, tampering that Trump publicly invited and has no intention of preventing again in 2020.

How many impeachable offenses must there be before the Congress starts an impeachment inquiry? When does the collective fate of the nation outweigh the individual political fates of its members?

Today, Trump turns to blackmail, and says he’ll refuse to do his job until the investigations stop. You can’t investigate and legislate at the same time, he says, ignoring the fact that Congress has investigated and legislated at the same time for roughly two hundred thirty years. Maybe the President can’t walk and chew gum at the same time, but Congress can and has the duty to do so.

Add it to the articles of impeachment.

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

Of course, like many who love music, I’d already heard and appreciated the Blind Boys of Alabama.

I just never knew there were twenty-five of them.

But sure enough, the whole world now has heard from the twenty-five Blind (and maybe Deaf; certainly Dumb) Boys of Alabama — also known as the Alabama State Senate Republican Men’s Choir — who voted yesterday that a daughter raped by her father must bring his grandchild and her sister or brother to term.

Gov. Kay Ivey signed the bill today, calling every life a sacred gift from God. God gifted the governor and the Alabama senators with life, but was stingy about the brains.

There are no exceptions for rape or incest. These senators may well know a thing or two about incest.

Seems like ever since the greater (I don’t mean that term as a compliment) Republican Senate — the one that fouls its nest in Washington — voted to elevate an accused attempted rapist to the Supreme Court, men are feeling newly emboldened to oppress women all over the place. It doesn’t hurt that the President of the United States knows just where to grab the ladies too.

Call it what the President calls it: a power grab. (I may not have completely heard that correctly; the President mumbles and slurs his words when you deliberately slow them down on social media).

Men have been controlling women’s bodies since the first man came up with the ruse that God is some kind of super man whom women need to obey or else. Alabama State Senator Clyde (had to be a Clyde) Chambliss, sponsor of the bill and personal spokesman for that very same God, said this: “When God creates the miracle of life inside a woman’s womb, it is not our place as human beings to extinguish that life.” That’s not some rapist sticking his penis inside you, honey, that’s God creating a miracle.

It should be noted that the pious senator has no trouble extinguishing or otherwise harming that life at any later stage of development, such as by failing to insure there’s enough food to feed that life, enough education and training to secure that life a decent living, enough medical care to keep that life fit for life, or just by ending that life through military folly, police misconduct or capital punishment.

Alabama’s not the only state dedicated to making Margaret Atwood look like the Red Woman. Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Ohio, Iowa, Louisiana, Utah, and North Dakota have all banned abortion at six weeks or earlier. This is before most women will even know that they are pregnant. Missouri just joined the bandwagon to ban abortions after eight weeks, but also without exceptions for rape or incest. One of their brighter representatives defended the law by saying most rapes occur while on a date or by consent anyway; so, that’s all right.

Punishments are worse than draconian. The Alabama law sends doctors to the slammer for ninety-nine years, not a bad thing considering how many prison rapes occur and doctors would feel free to perform inmate abortions without much fear of adding too much time to their sentences; most doctors don’t live longer than a hundred and twenty years anyway.

Georgia’s law would criminalize even women who accidentally miscarry because of, for example, a drug reaction, and if she leaves the state to get an abortion, she’s subject to a charge of conspiracy to commit murder. One Texas legislator has even better plans for his female constituents: his bill would subject his own raped daughter to the death penalty for terminating his seed. Not saying he’d do that, but Tony Tinderholt says his law would really make people consider the repercussions of sex, so I don’t think Tony’s getting any, do you?

Luckily for the residents of at least one Georgia jurisdiction, a very nice district attorney who sees the wrongness of it all says he’s not going to prosecute any woman under that law.

Maybe he sees what I do, what most people with a bigger brain than Tony Tinderholt do.

It’s not our choice, guys.

It’s hers.