Black Watch: Today’s Top Stories

“Hell,” said Sartre, “is other opinions.” (Actually, he said hell was other people, but six of one, half a dozen of the other.) Despite the lull in hard news: They. Just. Keep. Coming. Proselytizing, admonishing, ridiculing, empathizing, satirizing, analyzing, contextualizing, and on and bloody on.

My fave this morning was the Globe’s Lynn Crosbie, who is about as febrile as they come; a wolverine in hyena’s clothing. Using her usual megaphone prose, Crosbie tells us we all need to calm down and cut the Blacks a little slack. I need to hear this from her like I need a lecture on business ethics from, well, just about anybody. Beyond that, the Globe treated us yet again to Margaret Wente saying twice in four days the same thing she always says in her usual dishwater prose. As always, the interesting stuff was the reporting on the margins: Paul Waldie has a crisp little piece on Conrad’s prospects on appeal, pointing out that Richard Posner, among the most brilliant jurists in America, might sit in judgment. Posner, a radical free marketer and prolific author, once suggested that state agencies should sell orphans on the open market. I’m not sure how this plays for Conrad, but however it goes they ought to put the hearings on pay-per-view. The New York Post, having recovered from their lamentable guarantee that Trump would appear for the defence, are touting the possibility of Black’s wearing an electronic ankle bracelet à la Martha Stewart. The Sun-Times suggests that the defence is looking at a juror’s claim that she and her mates were pissed at learning early in the case that a “foreign” newspaper had labelled the jury “too stupid to understand the complex case.” (Damn you, Worthington!) How this works for the defence in a case where the jury dismissed nearly 70 per cent of the charges is anybody’s guess.

The fall of the Blacks: Lose the repulsive joy [Globe and Mail]… but is ‘beyond reality’ [Globe and Mail]Appeals court a tough battlefield for press baron [Globe and Mail]Black may be ankled [New York Post]Defence in Black case looks into juror’s remark [Chicago Sun-Times]Black stumbled into a common trap [Toronto Star]”