jonberger

jonberger, 5 months ago

@amyfou AI technology has come full circle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA

jonberger, 5 months ago

@amyfou You could write a screenplay about this experience and call it Four Angry Women.

jonberger, 5 months ago

@GottaLaff ...which is Judicialese for "I'm not going to sanction you for lying your asses off in a court document, but I sure could have and I thought about it seriously for several minutes."

jonberger, 5 months ago

@GottaLaff I'd say that the bright side of all this is that he's providing full employment for a lot of lawyers, but that's not really true since most of the lawyers he's employing are never going to get paid.

jonberger, 5 months ago

@GottaLaff His idiot base will certainly send him money for his legal expenses, which will leave him in the position of deciding whether to pay his lawyers or keep the money for himself and ask the IB for some more. I have a theory about which way he'll go.

jonberger, 5 months ago

@GottaLaff "I want to withdraw from representing this client but I'm not going to say why" is generally Lawyerese for "The client is insisting on taking the stand and lying." Lawyers are required to withdraw when that happens, because putting the client on the stand under those circumstances would be suborning perjury. So this move is at least consistent with the notion that Kutti has admitted that she's guilty but is insisting on taking the stand and saying she's not. I don't think it's a payment issue, because if it were, they could have just said so. Failure to pay legal bills is a perfectly legitimate reason for a lawyer to dump a client, as long as it can be done without screwing up the client's case. If it's in the middle of a trial, or very close to the beginning of one, withdrawal really would put the client in a bad position, so sometimes courts won't permit it at that point. But in this case, the trial is eight months out, which seems like plenty of time for Kutti to find another lawyer.

jonberger, 5 months ago

@GottaLaff @colo_lee I freely admit that I'm clueless about civil litigation, but for what it's worth, in the world of CRIMINAL appeals, you CAN'T put on new evidence that wasn't presented at trial. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable about the civil universe will correct me, but I strongly suspect that it's the same over there. The purpose of an appeal is to determine whether there were errors at trial, and then to determine if those errors were important enough to actually make any difference to the outcome. Failing to put on exculpatory evidence isn't an error, or at least not the kind of error appellate courts care about. It's a choice, and the appellate court isn't going to hand out any mulligans as a reward for making it. Giuliani, who was a pretty darn good lawyer back in the mists of time, clearly knows this.

jonberger, 5 months ago

@GottaLaff I'd speculate that Giuliani and his lawyer are on the outs in the aftermath of a very intense discussion about Giuliani testifying. Lawyers are ethically prohibited from putting a client on the stand if they know the client intends to commit perjury. (The novel "Anatomy of a Murder" contains a section about this issue that's so good that it's used in law-school Legal Ethics classes.) If the client insists on taking the stand and the lawyer knows he's going to lie, the lawyer is supposed to ask the court for leave to withdraw from the case. They have to do this without disclosing the reason, but when a lawyer says "I want to withdraw and I'm not saying why," well, the judge took that same Legal Ethics class and will get the message immediately. I suspect that Sibley threatened to do something like that and Giuliani grumpily agreed not to testify but is still pissed off about it. This is purely guesswork; to paraphrase Will Rogers, all I know is just what I read on social media.

jonberger, 5 months ago

@Lightfighter @GottaLaff A damages award that vastly exceeds Giuliani's net worth serves the same purpose as those 350-years-to-life prison sentences you see sometimes. Which is to say none, as a practical matter, but it does demonstrate the level of utter contempt in which society holds the defendant, and that's sort of worth doing. Somehow, "give them everything you've got" doesn't have quite the same emotional punch as "give them a hundred jillion squillion dollars." Giuliani will be broke at the end of this, and Freeman and Moss will have a lien on anything he makes in the future. That works for me.

jonberger, 5 months ago

@GottaLaff And yet, oddly, there haven't been bunches of new "Biden did this" stickers on gas pumps, like there were when the prices spiked. Apparently Biden's magic wand that he can wave and control gas prices only works in one direction.

jonberger, 5 months ago

@GottaLaff To be clear -- not that you weren't, but just to be even clearer -- the Supremes still haven't even said they're going to take up the case. This is just them agreeing to decide whether or not to take it up more quickly than their usual glacial pace. I'd guess that they probably will, but at the moment all we know is that they haven't said no yet.

jonberger, 5 months ago

@Teri_Kanefield I think you perceive more daylight than I do between "ridiculous" and "frivolous." I suppose his argument is non-frivolous in the sense that it doesn't directly contradict established precedent, but that's just because nobody's been crazy enough to make it before. If it's not frivolous, it's well inside frivolous's curtilage.

jonberger, 5 months ago

@GottaLaff I thought he would. My theory was that he was going to take the opportunity to deliberately violate the gag order, under oath and on the record. I still think I could have been right. Perhaps Kise, who was an actually competent lawyer at some point in the past and may be again in the future if he can get his nose dislodged from Trump's butt, persuaded him that no, really, seriously, Engoron was going to lock him up for a couple of days if he did that, and that this would involve taking away his cell phone so he wouldn't be able to do his "Letter From Birmingham Jail" cover. Whatever his reasons for backing down, it's hard to imagine that they had anything to do with taking his lawyers' sound advice about legal strategy, something he's repeatedly proved himself incapable of doing.

jonberger, 5 months ago

@Nonilex So, remind me: when exactly was the jury sworn in in the impeachment proceeding? Because that's when double jeopardy attaches, as anyone who has ever taken a Civil Procedure class can tell you, and that includes every appellate judge in the country. Since there was no jury (because, duh, it wasn't a trial), there's no double jeopardy. Any argument to the contrary is just plain silly. Double jeopardy means you can't be tried twice for the same offense; it doesn't mean you can't be held to account for it multiple ways. Just ask OJ.

Let's say a truck flips over and spills some noxious chemical on the highway, and some agency like the NTSB investigates and determines that the driver wasn't at fault, but the local cops have evidence that he was drunk. Can they charge him with DUI? Sure they can. Can he say "you can't put me on trial for the DUI because the NTSB cleared me so that would be double jeopardy"? He can try, but it will do him just as much good as it's going to do Trump.

jonberger, 5 months ago

@CarlG @GottaLaff Almost certainly because Trump intends to make speeches about Engoron's clerk during his testimony. The government lawyers will object to that on relevancy grounds, of course, and the judge can sustain the objections, but the speech will already be made at that point. If it violates the gag order then Trump is in contempt, objection or no objection. I think this has been his plan all along, and I think that Kise is perfectly well aware that he wasn't going to get this delay. They just asked for it because after Trump is locked up for a couple of nights for violating the order, they want to be able to point to Engoron's refusal to grant it as yet one more indicator of his bias and prejudice.

jonberger, 5 months ago

@KissAnne @jeanettepizzurro @That_One_Guy I'm buying it. The water-to-pasta ratio would be super important, though. Too much water and it will turn out to be taco pasta soup; too little and the pasta won't get done. But if the amounts were just right, sure, I can see it. It would take about 20 minutes in the oven for the pasta to cook, give or take, which would be plenty to get the meat cooked. It actually looks like a pretty easy way to put together an enormous tasty party-sized casserole.

jonberger, 5 months ago

@GottaLaff My crystal ball says he'll violate it from the stand. He starts testifying next week, right? I predict an outburst about the clerk, right there with the court reporter taking it all down. Let's see if I'm right.

jonberger, 6 months ago

@Faintdreams My friend the expert baker says that you can go up to about 37 grams of sugar and leave the flour quantity alone. "Flour and sugar do really different things," she says.

jonberger, 6 months ago

@juergen_hubert @germany @folklore If I'd been that guy and the deal had been "the first eight feet," I would have just found a spider. The Devil clearly needs a lawyer to help him draft unambiguous contracts. But where is he going to find one?

jonberger, 6 months ago

@edgeoforever @GottaLaff The motto of the progressive left: turn to your immediate right and shoot.