MSNBC and a few other media outlets are urging us to watch them 24/7 for news of the Trump indictment. The premise seems to be that it would be awful if I didn't hear about it until, oh, maybe five whole minutes after it's announced. And I just heard Jim Jordan on some channel claiming that this whole paying-off-a-porn-star matter is just a "bookkeeping error."
Seems to me that if there's no evidence that it was intentional falsification, the charges would never have been brought. If all it turns out to be is that, Trump will go free to say, "See, I told you it was all a witch hunt and so are all the other times anyone says I did anything wrong."
So everyone, including Trump, expects Trump to be indicted and in some sense of the word, arrested. No one except maybe those in the District Attorney's office knows when this will happen though it'll probably be soon. No one except those in that office knows the exact charge or precisely what the supporting evidence may be.
And now that I've written that, I can put my mind on other things for the rest of the day.
Hey, remember back in this post when we attempted to identify all the people in a photo from one of the trips that the staff of MAD magazine took way back when? There were a few unidentified folks and there's now some evidence that one of them was probably E.L. Doctorow, who you know best as the author of many acclaimed, big-selling novels including Ragtime, Billy Bathgate and The March.
Anders Moe, who describes himself as longtime reader of this blog who lives in Oslo, points out to me that in a MAD collection, MAD About the Sixties, it said "E. L. Doctorow edited MAD's first four paperback anthologies (published by Ian Ballantine) and therefore found himself trekking Virgin Islands beaches with Gaines and his motley crew." Sergio says he met Mr. Doctorow at several MAD functions and that Doctorow was a close friend of MAD's art director John Putnam.
So E.L. Doctorow is probably one of the people we couldn't identify in that photo. Which one might be him is anyone's guess.
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