It’s unfortunately understandable that the Senate confirmed Jay Clayton as Director of National Intelligence by a 51-47 vote. After all, he wasn’t nearly as much of a mutt as most Trump appointees, and was far better than monumentally unqualified real estate nepo baby, Bill Pulte, whom Trump made Acting DNI even though the law would have the deputy assume the acting position in the absence of a confirmed nominee.

There was some concern when Clayton showed he lacked the guts to tell the truth when asked who won the 2020 election, playing the “certified” card so as not to make his patron sad. But  while he lost any hope of bipartisan support, this didn’t prove to be a game changer for Republican senators. So what if Clayton didn’t possess the qualification for the job, extensive experience in national security. The Senate has long since gotten past such trivial concerns in confirming Trump nominees. Continue reading →

In his zeal to coerce the Senate to pass the SAVE Act, an ill-conceived and ill-concealed effort at voter suppression under the misguided belief that it’s the only way to assure free and fair elections, Trump has pushed Senate Majority Leader John Thune to “nuke” the filibuster so it can pass by mere majority rather than the 60 votes needed to overcome the filibuster.

Continue reading →

Despite whatever wacky nonsense MAHA Czar RFK Jr. comes up with, it’s hard to argue that something must be done to deal with the unhealthy eating habits of Americans, in general, and American youth, in particular, when the president’s favorite food is the Big Mac. Clearly, it hasn’t done much to help Trump’s expansive girth, but he’s old and can eat whatever he wants. So what if he’s large. The same isn’t so easily said for kids who find themselves suffering from Type 2 diabetes. That’s not supposed to happen.

Bryce, then 16, was bewildered. He’d developed obesity early in childhood, but until that chest pain, had no other sign anything was wrong with his health. He hadn’t even realized kids could get Type 2 diabetes.

Back home, he searched online for information about his illnesses, devouring news articles and videos. He learned that American children live in dysfunctional food environments, where the least healthy options tend to be the most affordable and accessible. That as parents took on more working hours, there was less time for cooking than in previous generations. That food companies filled the gap with convenient, ultraprocessed food, containing industrially manipulated ingredients that you wouldn’t find in home cooking. That these foods are often full of salt, sugar, fat and additives. Bryce was shocked that regulators didn’t vet all food additives for health and safety, and that companies could slap healthy labels on nutrient-bankrupt junk.

Continue reading →

When lawyers started using ChatGPT to write their papers, resulting in hallucinated cites and non-existent quotations, not to mention arguments premised on the inability to grasp basic legal principles like jurisdiction, they got caught, bench-slapped and often sanctioned. I thought they would learn. I was wrong.

I called these lawyers lazy and greedy, unwilling to put in the time needed to craft winning papers, but all too happy to charge clients as if they did for work they didn’t perform. Hell, they couldn’t even be bothered to check their papers written by AI, which could have saved them the humiliation of a judge calling them unpleasant names. And yet, lawyers continued to use AI, including biglaw, charging shamefully high fees for baby lawyers for work that was farmed out to the computer.

Learn from mistakes? Oh no. Then judges started using AI to write their decisions. Perhaps it was their law clerks who did the dirty, and judges were too busy to check the work and signed off on it, even though it was AI slop with the same hallucinations for which they would hand a lazy lawyer their butt. Surely, this teach the legal profession the error of their artificial ways, right? Oh, sweet summer child, hardly. There was still other demands of the system that had yet to aspire to easy-peasy failure. Enter the court reporters.

Although “[t]rial records are rarely if ever perfect,” Ben-Yisrayl v. State, 753 N.E.2d 649, 662 (Ind. 2001), the Transcript in this case is far from the best.

The Transcript contains various types of errors. There are numerous typos that change the meaning of the testimony, question, or objection. See, e.g., Tr. Vol. II at 137:18, 144:10, 147:10; Tr. Vol. III at 6:13. In some instances, witnesses’ and trial attorneys’ names are reported incorrectly. Tr. Vol. II at 220:5; Tr. Vol. III at 142:15–20, 143:15, 162:4–5.

At one point in the Transcript, a motion, presumably made by the State, is attributed to the trial court. Tr. Vol. II at 107–08. At another point, an objection, presumably made by Williams, is attributed to the Bailiff. Tr. Vol. II at 177:15. At yet another point, the State’s closing argument is attributed to the trial court. Tr. Vol. III at 228:1.

The Indiana Court of Appeals in Wiilliams v. State didn’t find the errors in the transcript so bad as to impede the court’s review of the underlying case, which involved the sale of drugs and resulted in a 40-year prison sentence, but it was bad enough to be worthy of mention in the footnotes.

Based upon the types of errors reviewed, it appears that generative artificial intelligence may have assisted with the preparation of this transcript. While AI can improve efficiency and be a productive tool for many professionals, it is incumbent upon those using such systems to proofread and ensure the accuracy of the generated product.

Rather than condemn the use of AI, the court extolled its virtues with a cautionary warning. As with lawyers who use AI to do their work, it cautions court reporters and lawyers to “proofread and ensure the accuracy of the generated product.” In the ordinary course, lawyers are always supposed to proof and correct any errors in transcripts. Many don’t bother. Many have no memory of what exactly was said or by whom, and are incapable of correcting the transcript. And when a new lawyer does the appeal, she would have no ability to know what in the transcript was accurate and what was not. Are they supposed to rely on the trial lawyer, who was just fired and replaced?

For the most part, court reporters are pretty good at their jobs. At least they used to be. Sure, there was errors, but they tended to be very minor and easily corrected if they were material to the case. But court reporting was a lot of work, and typing up a transcript was both an expensive and time-consuming project, necessary for appeal though it may be.

In the future, creating a transcript will be fast and easy because the work won’t be performed by busy fingers, but by AI chatbots. Why should the fact that the next 40 years of your client’s life depends on the accuracy of the transcript concern you? Isn’t “efficiency” and a “productive tool” more important than getting it right?

As was noted years ago as technology sought to wiggle its way into the law, just because it makes things easier does not mean it make things better.

It’s not that lawyers are anti-technology, it’s that they are anti-bullshit.

— Keith Lee

Remaining anti-bullshit seems prudent, even if generative artificial intelligence persists in pushing lawyers down the path of incompetency.

If there was anything The Donald was known for around New York City before he became a reality TV star, being one of the few well-known business people who had plenty of time to play one on TV after bankrupting his casinos, it was that his word meant nothing. Most people consider it a matter of honor to keep one’s promises. To Trump, it’s a matter of weakness. Only fools felt constrained by deals made in the minds of the dishonorable, and Trump didn’t want to be anybody’s fool.

Now that he’s president, it hasn’t gotten any better, as Saudi Arabia, who bought and paid for Trump’s love, found it.

A day after the United States signed a landmark nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia, President Trump added a new condition to the sale of nuclear reactors to the kingdom, declaring that the entire arrangement now depends on the Saudi willingness to establish diplomatic relations with Israel. Continue reading →

Regardless of how you felt about Mike Pence’s term as vice president, his refusal to throw out an election for the presidency despite having no authority to do so saved the nation from a constitutional crisis. It was an act of integrity, of bravery, in the face of a president who happily watched as insurrectionists tried to find Pence to place him on a gallows. But that was a presidential election. As David French explains, the same rules do not apply to elections for the House of Representatives.

That’s exactly why we have to be creative now, to see around the corners into the possible future abuses of the law, and I’m worried that a largely forgotten constitutional provision (combined with a relatively vague federal statute) provides House Republicans a legal loophole to abuse — with no one clearly ready (or willing) to assume Pence’s role as the guarantor of American democracy. Continue reading →

Only 50 years too late, the Supreme Court has granted a petition for certiorari to consider whether the asset forfeiture of a $95,000 plane is excessive for transporting beer to a dry village in Alaska. 

In an orders list, the Court granted the petition of Ken Jouppi, a retired 82-year-old Alaskan bush pilot who argues that the seizure of his $95,000 Cessna U206D is an excessive fine under the Eighth Amendment.

Jouppi was convicted of a misdemeanor in 2012 when Alaska state troopers searched his plane before takeoff and discovered that a passenger was attempting to bring several cases of beer to a “dry” village where alcohol is prohibited. (Jouppi was only culpable for a single six-pack of Budweiser that troopers said was in plain sight.) Continue reading →

Much has been made of people in the military, White House, and even the guy running the teleprompter making a quick buck off their inside knowledge in the prediction markets. In some instances, particularly when not a blood or marital relation to the president, using inside information to make money has been frowned upon. But then, it wasn’t officially sanctioned, with the boss getting his taste.

Truth Social, the Trumpian version of twitter which is mostly owned by Trump, has decided that if others are going to monetize inside knowledge, why shouldn’t Trump. After all, is he not the mother lode of inside information, prime for market manipulation even by a twit with ALL CAPS and misspellings by such matters as the on again, off again, war-not-war? Sure, the United States is burning through billions, but why should that mean the president can’t enjoy a few bucks off the grift? Continue reading →

To hear Todd Blanche talk about it, he’s just a foot soldier in Trump’s army, doing as Trump commands. The problem is that ICE and CBP agents, like the FBI and ultimately the DoJ, are also Trump’s minions, subject to executive policies and goals, foremost of which is the removal of as many non-citizens, plus a few who are citizens, as possible by any means possible. And if a few people, regardless of citizenship, get killed by ICE along the way, so what? You can’t make a deportation omelet without breaking a few eggs.

So it should come as no surprise that the FBI made it official by putting into writing that it will no longer investigate killings by their fellow minions, ICE agents, regardless of whether they’re righteous shoots or plain old murder. Continue reading →

The reviews came in. Trump proclaimed his big speech to be a huge hit, “Great reviews on speech last night. Big audience.” Fox News made no mention of the speech whatsoever during its three hours of broadcasting the following morning, after announcing immediately after the speech that they were unable to independently verify the truthfulness of anything Trump said. Pretty much everyone else was far less kind, ranging from debunking the lies to calling it typical Trump delusional unproven garbage.

But what really angered Trump was that no network carried the speech in its entirety, and two networks, ABC and NBC, didn’t carry it at all. How dare they not broadcast the president’s very important speech. When Trump talks, it’s their duty to air it, or else. Continue reading →