To its credit, the New York Times published Ben Smith’s dive into the firing of Donald McNeil, its “singular” journalistic importance and journalistic self-importance, and many of the fun details surrounding the Times’ new revenue stream of ridiculously expensive résumé road trips for entitled 17-year-old prep school darlings who will be deeply sensitive about the plight of the oppressed throughout their four years of Ivy undergrad and however many years of grad school are suffered before getting a gig at daddy’s investment bank.

The story is replete with interesting views about the New York Times’ confused identity and purpose, which is part navel gazing and part desperate plea for relevance. Continue reading →

Ed. Note: Greg Prickett is a former police officer and supervisor who went to law school, hung out a shingle, and now practices criminal defense and family law in Fort Worth, Texas. While he was a police officer, he was a police firearms instructor, and routinely taught armed tactics to other officers.

This post is based off of a series of tweets that I made in response to a comment about the impeachment trial. That comment stated that Trump did not incite the insurrection at the Capitol, at least not under the standards alleged. My response followed: Continue reading →

The trial is done and the verdict is in. Trump was not convicted, despite more members of his party having voted guilty than in any previous presidential impeachment, it fell short of the two-thirds required by the Constitution. It was unsurprising, yet disappointing. I realize that some (here) still believe that the election was stolen and the Trump Insurrection of ’21 was well-intended patriots defending their nation. That, too, is over. Trump lost the election, and this is no longer a tolerable discussion.

It’s unclear whether a switch in time would have made enough of a difference to change the outcome, but had Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told his caucus he would vote to convict, it likely would have swayed, or freed more likely, others to do the same. He did not, but his rationale wasn’t that Trump was not guilty for “provoking” the storming and ransacking of the Capitol, but that the Senate could not convict a president who was no longer in office. Continue reading →

My Great Uncle Dave was kind enough to move my admission into the bar of the United States Supreme Court. Uncle Dave was my idea of a lawyer as I was growing up. He was the kind of guy who would wear a three-piece suit to mow the lawn, because he believed he was a lawyer all the time, not just when he was in court or sitting in his corner office at Broad Street in Newark.

Uncle Dave “hired” me to “clerk” for him while I was still in college so I could see what lawyers did, who lawyers were. I wasn’t really a clerk, but the kid who fetched coffee for the lawyers in his office, sat in the library (that was a place where he kept all the law books) and looked up things for him and, mostly, listened to him as he explained why he did what he did. Continue reading →

Since I don’t have Disney +, I’ve never seen the Mandalorian, have no feelings about Baby Yoda and didn’t know who Gina Carano was until I learned she was canceled.

“Gina Carano is not currently employed by Lucasfilm and there are no plans for her to be in the future,” a Lucasfilm spokesperson said in a statement, per The Hollywood Reporter. “Nevertheless, her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.”

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It should come as no surprise, given that the Southern Poverty Law Center has long since slid beyond its original mission, much as it ousted its founder, Morris Dees, who got old and didn’t change with the times. But it’s still quite jarring to learn that the SPLC has decided that it’s not even going to pretend to be a resource on hate groups, but only the “bad” hate groups.

In pursuit of a more accurate and more just hate map, the Intelligence Project (IP) has committed to collapsing the Black Separatist listing. We will still monitor these groups, but we will be transferring them to hate ideologies, including antisemitism, that better describe the harm their rhetoric inflicts.

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How is it possible that a mayor can’t fire a bad cop in Wisconsin? No, this time it isn’t about the police union, which can’t actually stop a cop from being fired per se, but can take the case to binding arbitration where the cop can be reinstated with back pay for not being significantly worse than the cops who haven’t been fired for being as bad.

This time, it’s because a very progressive idea came to fruition. It was meant to deal with one problem, which it did very well. It created another problem, but our concern now wasn’t the same as their concern then. Something had to be done and it was. Continue reading →

Watching cable after the end of the day’s impeachment proceedings, I flipped through the cable channels to see what was being said. Between CNN and MSNBC, it was a competition for who could gush more about horror, the former with Jake Tapper pacifying old man Wolf and the latter with Joy Reid silently bobbing her head in the most insightful way she could.

So I turned to Fox News and was shocked to learn that nobody told them there was an impeachment going on. At least, no one mentioned it, as they were doing a critical piece on how liberals were engaged in a conspiracy to spread foot fungus. That wasn’t really what they were doing, but it was something of similar ilk, and there was no mention, none, of the impeachment trial, as if it wasn’t happening. It was classic Fox, existing in a separate reality. Continue reading →

Whenever someone is presented as an “expert,” an unpleasant odor permeates the room. It’s not that there aren’t experts in fields that involve expertise, but those fields rarely include such subjective issues as the value of the First Amendment. It’s not that there aren’t scholars, familiar with all the case law and able to list every circuit court decision mentioning Brandenburg from memory, but that has nothing to do with putting them on a higher moral plane when it comes to what to make of speech.

So when the interview presented Suzanne Nossel, chief executive of PEN America, as an “expert,” I started to worry. For one thing, PEN America hasn’t always demonstrated consistency in its approach to free speech, and Nossel, in particular, hasn’t shied away from wallowing in the gutter when it suited her purpose. Yet, here she was, being interviews, as an “expert” on Free Speech. Continue reading →

The general consensus is that the House Managers did a very effective job of arguing their position on Day 1 of Impeachment 2, where the Senate unsurprisingly voted that it was constitutional to proceed with the impeachment trial. The only surprise was that there was one more Republican vote to proceed than anticipated.

Similarly, the general consensus is that Trump’z last minute replacement defense team, consisting of Bruce Castor and David Schoen were awful, the former rambling and pointless, the latter angry and flagrant. There was nothing new said, provided Castor’s “admission” that Trump lost the election despite Trump pretending otherwise. This wasn’t exactly an epiphany to anyone but Trump, who reportedly was not pleased with his representation. Continue reading →