San Juan, the capital city of Puerto Rico, is a neat place. It’s one of the few cities I’ve visited that felt old, dirty, fresh, and alive all at the same time. We docked in the port downtown and waited for our tour guide. The day’s mission? A cooking class, which delighted my twelve-year-old daughter.

Traipsing through the streets of San Juan, one gets a sense the city is rather proud of both the mishmash of cultures and capitalism that seems to make Puerto Rico so interesting. Everything’s in Spanish, yes, but there’s a lot of English signs and speakers to get where one needs to be if necessary. Continue reading →

After Judge Leon issued a preliminary injunction against Trump’s construction of the monstrously huge, yet tastelessly gaudy, ballroom, Trump took to the tube to explain that the judge’s allowance of construction limited to national security meant he could build anything he wanted.

Carving out a narrow exception, Judge Leon wrote in his order that “actions strictly necessary to ensure the safety and security of the White House” could continue, to prevent any risks from an open work site next to the president’s residence.

The problem, as Judge Leon saw it, was that the White House now had a gaping hole where once the East Wing stood, and it was not unreasonable to allow construction to secure that hole. But give Trump an inch and he takes whatever he wants. Continue reading →

I’m not a gambler. Sure, I’ve been to casinos and played games of chance. Sure, I played in the longest running floating poker game on the Long Island Railroad. But that was just to kill time, not to win money. I haven’t been to a casino in years and have no desire to go. I don’t have a gambling app on my Jitterbug. I tell you this not to demonstrate my virtue, but rather my bias. If gambling ceased to exist, it would not cost me a moment’s sleep.

Yet, David French strays down a slippery slope here.

What is the problem? We are making virtue more difficult and vice easier to access. By the time young men enter adulthood, they’ve been conditioned by a world that makes it ever easier to place a bet and harder to go to college. It’s easier to watch porn and more difficult to form real relationships. And the social results of this gigantic national experiment are exactly what you’d expect them to be.

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Two of the the three judge panel, both appointed by Trump, decided that their efforts were better put toward the painful parsing of Judge James Boasberg’s words than upholding the duty to comply with the order of the court. Writing for the majority, Judge Neomi Rao held that Judge Boasberg’s pursuit of criminal contempt was a “clear abuse of discretion.”

The widening gyre of the district court’s investigation again calls for the extraordinary remedy of mandamus to halt the judicial “impairment of another branch in the performance of its constitutional duties.” Cheney v. U.S. Dist. Ct. for D.C., 542 U.S. 367, 390 (2004) (cleaned up). The district court proposes to probe high-level Executive Branch deliberations about matters of national security and diplomacy. These proceedings are a clear abuse of discretion, as the district court’s order said nothing about transferring custody of the plaintiffs and therefore lacks the clarity to support criminal contempt based on the transfer of custody. Moreover, the government has already provided the name of the responsible official, so further judicial investigation is unnecessary and therefore improper. In these circumstances, mandamus is appropriate to prevent the district court from assuming an antagonistic jurisdiction that encroaches on the autonomy of the Executive Branch.

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Who could have possibly guessed that Trump’s defamation suit against that radical left lunatic rag, the Wall Street Journal (not to mention my old pal, Joe Palazzolo, one-time author of the WSJ Law Blog), for a whopping $10 billion over Trump’s “fake hoax” Epstein birthday book note would end up getting tossed?

The Complaint also alleges that President Trump told Defendants that the Letter was a fake before they ran the Article. President Trump argues that this allegation shows that Defendants acted with serious doubts about the truth of their reporting and, therefore, with actual malice. The Court disagrees. To establish actual malice, “a plaintiff must show the defendant deliberately avoided investigating the veracity of the statement in order to evade learning the truth.” Continue reading →

Over the past few years, judges have increasingly indulged in cutesy, gratuitous and inflammatory rhetoric in their rulings. It’s not just about using exclamation marks like a rebellious teeny-bopper, but bluntly calling out the government’s failures, from compliance with orders to factual assertions that were facial lies.

I’ve been critical of the methods, on occasion, but whether such writing is appropriately done is a separate matter from whether it’s ethically proper for a judge to do so, whether you like the rhetoric or not. Renowned ethics prawf Stephen Gillers argues that not only is this ethically proper, but it’s ethically encouraged. Continue reading →

The en banc opinions of the Fourth Circuit in AFSCME v. Social Security Administration, dealing with the Temporary Restraining Order issued by the district judge against the SSA providing DOGE with unfettered access to the personal, non-anonymized information of pretty much everyone in America for no particularly good reason, was ultimately stayed by the Supreme Court for no particularly good reason.  It is an exercise in legal masturbation in its purest form.

The majority, in an opinion by Judge Toby Heytens, with three concurrences and a partial concurrence and a dissent, took the position that there was no new irreparable harm, warranting a TRO, and that any harm could be cured by compensation, and therefore wasn’t irreparable. Continue reading →

Our next stop on the Caribbean cruise was St. Thomas, or as the locals call it, “Santo Tomas.”

They don’t actually call it that but it will get you some fun reactions if you refer to this spot in the U.S. Virgin Islands as such. Try it next time you’re there!

Anyway, today was to be a rather light day in excursions. We found a sky tram that takes tourists from the bottom of the island to the top of its mountains, where one can see some spectacular views. While walking to said tram, my wife and I noticed something very off-putting for us both: our ten-year-old son had basically worn through the only shoes he’d brought on the cruise to the point where he walked on the sides of his feet. Continue reading →

It was an unusual sight, the First Lady of the United States striding up to a lectern with the presidential seal affixed, the scene oddly reminiscent of the president mere days before. Melania Trump, The Donald’s fraught third attempt at monogamy, then gave a speech denying her relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and his “accomplice,” Ghislaine Maxell.

Perhaps there was someone, somewhere, pointing a crooked finger at Melania, but if so, it eluded most of us. So why doth she protest too much? Continue reading →

Karoline Leavitt told the White House press corp that NATO was “tested and failed.” She further stated that Trump would be discussing with the NATO secretary general the possibility of the United States withdrawing from NATO.

Trump, in all caps as is his way, issued yet again his grievance that the NATO allies didn’t come running to back him up when he, without having gotten their prior approval or commitment, decided to attack Iran and after his denigrating, mocking, tariffing and challenging our former friends, demanded they come to his aid. Continue reading →