The Supreme Court denied cert in a particularly bad decision by the Sixth Circuit, granting qualified immunity to Cleveland cops who arrested, tackled and punched Shase Howse on the porch of his home.

One summer night in 2016, Howse was walking home from a convenience store. Along the way, Howse says an unidentified Cleveland Police officer approached and asked whether he had any weapons. Howse said no. The John Doe officer then patted him down and searched his pockets. After finding no contraband, the officer told Howse that he could leave.

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Rhode Island’s junior senator, Sheldon Whitehouse, was a United States Attorney and state attorney general, so it’s not unreasonable to assume he’s got a modest functional knowledge of separation of powers. That means he’s not doing stuff because he doesn’t know better, but because it’s deliberately designed to undermine our constitutional structure.

There was the golden oldie, the five-senator amicus brief to the Supreme Court in NYS Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. City of New York, where they “warned” the Court at the conclusion to do as they demanded or else. Continue reading →

That snarkiest of justices, John Roberts, called The Brethren “advice columnists” in his first and only solo dissent in Uzuegbunam v. Preczewski. The 8-1 opinion, written by Justice Clarence Thomas, held that a claim for nominal damages was sufficient to keep the case and controversy alive even after the defendant pulled the plug on the rules at issue.

 “Plaintiff used contentious religious language that, when directed to a crowd, has a tendency to incite hostility,” the college’s lawyers wrote.

But the college soon abandoned its defense of its speech code. Its revised policy, which allowed students to speak anywhere on campus, made the case moot, its lawyers argued in court.

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On the one hand, it’s ironic that the guy who was given the opportunity to beat back the Tara Reade accusations would deny that opportunity to male students, who are powerless in the face of their University Title IX Administrators’ cavalier callousness. There’s also the sexual harassment accusations against Andy Cuomo, but nobody likes him today anyway, so the hypocrisy of his defending himself can be dismissed. Hey, intellectual consistency is the hobgoblin of unwoke minds. If only nonsensical excuses could be monetized, the woke would be RICH!!!

But on the other other, this comes as no surprise. Biden said he would undo the minimal due process protections imposed by the DeVos Department of Education rules as a candidate, so his announcing his plan to do so as president is exactly what was expected. The order contains all the benign words expected in an Executive Order, to “go good things and stop bad things.” And that’s all Joe has to say about it for now. Continue reading →

Following the outrageous killing of Elijah McClain, protesters engaged in what was described as an “occupation-style protest” by sitting down and surrounding the Aurora, Colorado police station.

The July 3 protest in Aurora, Colorado, seemed, at least on the surface, like just another of the hundreds of racial justice protests that have swept the nation this year. Demonstrators sat outside a police station chanting and playing music. Although they said they wouldn’t leave until their demands were met, the protesters were cleared out by police around 4:30 a.m.

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University of Alabama lawprof Russell Gold opened the abstract to his new law review article with a very provocative assertion: Criminal procedure is systemically racist and classist. He sums up his argument succinctly:

This Article argues that comparing criminal procedure to civil procedure on a broad scale provides new and valuable insight into the systemic racism and classism woven into the fabric of U.S. law. Criminal defendants are disproportionately poor people of color, while civil defendants are often wealthy corporations whose executives are largely White; those wealthy civil defendants play an outsized role in developing civil procedure. One might expect to see greater procedural protections before criminal defendants are deprived of their liberty than for civil defendants before they are deprived of their money. But the reality cuts decidedly the other way.

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There has been a spike in random violent attacks against Asian people, and it’s a problem. It’s a problem because people are being harmed. It’s a problem because the fantasy propagated by social justice precludes even the LA Times from telling a factual story.

Last March, 34-year-old Bawi Cung was grocery shopping at a Sam’s Club in Midland, Texas, when a man grabbed a knife from a nearby rack.

Cung was slashed on his face, his 3-year-old was stabbed in the back, and his 6-year-old was stabbed in the face. Continue reading →

For years, I’ve used religious allusions when describing the various flavors of progressive ideology. Praying at the altar of woke. Adhering to the orthodoxy of the high priestesses. It may be secular, in that there’s no particular deity at stake, but it has otherwise had the attributes of a religion. Blind faith in an ideology and intolerance for non-believers. John McWhorter has been pounding on this point. Even Andrew Sullivan explains its “win” in religious terms.

Belief in something bigger, better, than ourselves has long been a staple of the human condition. Whether it’s Jesus, Buddha or Mohammed, people need something to believe in to make their existence meaningful. Is woke any different? Continue reading →

For most people, avoiding an avoidable confrontation with a police officer was the objective. Just as nobody got a happy feeling when they heard a siren and saw lights flashing  behind them, why put yourself in a position where things could go bad quickly and, well, right or wrong, nobody sought out the opportunity for a tune up by cop.

That hasn’t been the case for some lately.

“In these riots, you see people getting up in officers’ faces, yelling in their ears, doing everything they can to provoke a violent response,” Carroll said. “I’m not saying the officers do that, but there has to be a provision within that statute to allow officers to react to that. Because that does nothing but incite those around that vicinity and it furthers and escalates the riotous behavior.”

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Delvin White was a black man. He was also a cop, a school resource officer as cops in schools are euphemistically called. So is he black or blue, because that would seem to dictate what words he is permitted to use without losing his job.

Officer Delvin White was fired for “violations of policy that prohibit discriminatory conduct,” said a news release. He was an eight-year veteran of the department.

A disposition letter released by police about White’s actions said he used the racial slur while on the phone and directly to a person while he was arresting them Nov. 30.

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