Moana? Do you really wanna?

The Maui question may have been settled, but this year, there are plenty of tweets out there asking the internet (and Lin-Manuel Miranda) if it’s OK to dress as Moana for Halloween.

At this point, you might be saying something like: “But, I dressed up as Jasmine as a child, and I’m not a racist!”, or, “It’s just a Halloween costume, please chill the f*ck out.” But one of the best things about time is that it moves forward. You should too. You can (and should) strive to be better than you were 10, 20, or 30 years ago. If you missed the mark when you were younger, maybe think about using this Halloween as an opportunity to teach your kids about the importance of cultural sensitivity. If your child’s dream costume feels questionable, don’t just throw up your hands and hand over your credit card. You’re the parent here, and the onus of what your child wears falls on you. If your kid wears a racist costume … you’re kind of wearing it too.

So your little darling just adores Moana and wants to dress as a Maui princess. Who can blame her? Moana’s adorable, and who would blame a child for wanting to be a Disney character they love? But if you let her, you’re a racist? At least it’s better than the neighbors refusing to give candy to your bigoted kids. Continue reading →

There are some countries in the middle east that are less than friendly to people of less-than-binary sexual orientation. Literally horrifying? One might think, and perhaps in relation to the ordinary cis-heteronormative white male emir, it would work. But it’s not that simple at the University of Texas.

A bisexual male student at the University of Texas–San Antonio said during an informal conversation outside class that he was uncomfortable with Islam because people still receive the death penalty for being gay in 10 Muslim-majority countries.

For expressing this thought, the student—Alfred MacDonald, who no longer attends the school—was instructed to meet with the chair of the philosophy department, Eve Browning.

You will not be surprised to learn that MacDonald was not given an award for his steadfast dedication to the cause of sexual freedom. Continue reading →

Could it be possible that the Louisiana Supreme Court was that desperate to avoid holding invocation of the right to counsel that it burned Warren Demesme over a comma?

“If y’all, this is how I feel, if y’all think I did it, I know that I didn’t do it so why don’t you just give me a lawyer dog cause this is not what’s up.”

That was Warren Demesme talking to the police after he voluntarily agreed to be interviewed over accusations he sexually assaulted a minor. In an opinion concurring with the Louisiana Supreme Court’s decision to deny the man a writ of certiorari, Justice Scott Chricton insists that Demesme only “ambiguously referenced a lawyer.”

Well yes, it could. But it didn’t. The “lawyer dog” cuteness comes not from the 6-1 majority opinion, but Judge Scott Cricton’s concurrence. Continue reading →

This is a subject I have talked to many of my colleagues about to see if my experiences and views are idiosyncratic. They are not. The number one problem with motions in limine in both criminal and civil cases is the same, and after twenty-three years on the bench, I still find it surprising and shocking, but easily fixed.

Rule Number One: Attach the evidence you want excluded to the motion. Simple, yes, but judges could retire early if they had one dollar for every time a motion in limine was filed without attaching the matter the lawyer wanted excluded.

Here are some common examples:

1. The defense moves to exclude the photographs of the crime scene based on Fed. R. Evid. 403.
2. The defense moves to exclude the prior criminal record of the defendant, if she testifies, because the convictions are not admissible under Fed. R. Evid. 609.

Continue reading →

After the die-in, they hung a sign around the neck of the statue of the Great Emancipator.

During a 2016 Columbus Day protest conducted by Wunk Sheek, a Native American student organization, activists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus hosted a “die-in” at Bascom Hall, near a statue of President Abraham Lincoln.

According to The Daily Cardinal, a campus newspaper, the protest ended with the group hanging a sign on the Lincoln monument that said “#DecolonizeOurCampus.”

What made Lincoln a target of decolonization?

“Everyone thinks of Lincoln as the great, you know, freer of slaves, but let’s be real: He owned slaves, and as natives, we want people to know that he ordered the execution of native men,” said one of the protesters.

“Just to have him here at the top of Bascom is just really belittling.”

Continue reading →

Yawn.

The charges against Mr. Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, and Mr. Gates, a business associate of Mr. Manafort, were not immediately clear but represent a significant escalation in a special counsel investigation that has cast a shadow over the president’s first year in office.

Sorry, Matt Apuzzo, but I don’t think “significant escalation” means what you think it does.

That brutal purveyor of unpleasant reality, Scientific American, is at it again.

In a 1946 essay in the London Tribune entitled “In Front of Your Nose,” George Orwell noted that “we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”

Notably, this quote can be used to challenge anyone, any side, any set of beliefs, and often is. Nobody owns Orwell. It’s a truism that will be seized upon to dispute whatever the other side says, because they’re twisting facts to show they’re right, when we all know it’s false.

But ultimately, Orwell notes, beliefs “bump up” against “solid reality, usually on a battlefield.” The battlefield today is college campuses. Continue reading →

The Naxos were back, another march in the hope that the media would remember that they exist and use them as a foil. After all, if a Naxo walks down the street and nobody gives a damn, do they make a sound?

White supremacists, neo-Nazis and fascists descended on a Middle Tennessee town Saturday for a “White Lives Matter” rally, striking fear into communities desperate to avoid the kind of violence that visited Charlottesville, Virginia, nearly three months ago.

But it was met with a heavy police presence and resistance from counterprotesters. A second rally planned for the afternoon in the larger college town of Murfreesboro was abruptly canceled by organizers.

When the tiki-torch bearers made headlines across the nation in Charlottesville, it galvanized the forces of truth and justice, determined to change everything because Citronellanacht was happening. Then it all kinda faded, whether because of the eight-second attention span or because it was so utterly insignificant that moderately intelligent people realized it was just a handful of flaming nutjobs seeking notoriety to justify their existence. Continue reading →

That the Daily Kos’ Laura Clawson couldn’t help but lay it on as thick as possible, just in case its slightly progressive readership was too high to realize the brutally obvious, doesn’t change the fact that it happened, and was caught on body cam.

Kelsey Pierce was riding her bike to work. Someone called the cops complaining that a woman on a bike wearing a black shirt was looking at driveways. Could she be casing houses for a burglary? It’s possible. That Oklahoma City police officer James Herlihy had a reasonable and articulable suspicion to inquire, based upon the call, doesn’t appear to be in dispute. Nor, whether you like it or not, was he wrong to demand identification or to run a warrant check.

But after being handed ID (at 1:15), Herlihy then cuffed her and put her in the cruiser. Pierce complained of her treatment, there being no basis for her seizure. Continue reading →

The New York Times asks whether the Harvey Weinstein revelations will finally, finally, make men stop sexually harassing women. Finally.

Has America at last reached a turning point on sexual harassment? Watching the events of the past three weeks, one can hope.

In the wake of Harvey Weinstein’s sudden and overdue expulsion from Hollywood for his serial predation, hundreds of long-silent women are calling out powerful, influential men at a remarkable clip and accusing them of sexual misconduct: Roy Price, the head of Amazon Studios; the film director James Toback; the literary critic Leon Wieseltier; the restaurateur and celebrity chef John Besh; and the political commentator Mark Halperin, to name just a few.

Are you Weinstein? Besh? Halperin? Probably not. You’re probably not rich, famous, powerful. Women probably aren’t drawn to you by your fame, or the things you can do to further their careers. You’re probably not even a bawdy 93-year-old. Continue reading →