Cellphones were always deemed contraband in jails and prisons. Initially, there were two obvious and one less-than-obvious reason for this. Cellphones allowed prisoners to communicate freely with the outside world, enabling them to engage in all manner of nefarious conduct. Requiring prisoners to talk on prison phones, the ones with the huge signs overhear that state “ALL CALLS ARE RECORDED,” still manages to provide prosecutors with confessions galore, because reasons.

And then there’s the profit sharing incentive from the economic rape of a captive audience by businesses like Securus, which simultaneously take the burden off of prisons from managing telephone logistics while charging prisoners’ families obscene rates because they can. Continue reading →

I can still remember typing out my college application essay on the Smith Corona typewriter I inherited from my older sister. When it was done, I asked my parents to read it. They demurred, telling me to ask my sister instead. After all, she went to college so she must know about such things. And that, pretty much, was that. If there was a cottage industry of college admissions counselors to get one into college, nobody told me about it.

By the time my kids went to college, everything had changed. There was a proliferation of courses and counselors to game the system. There were courses to teach students how to take the PSATs, SATs, ACTs, and any other T one could imagine. There were advisors who were experienced in college admissions and told students what to write about, what to write, how to write it and then tweaked the twenty drafts at an hourly rate. Continue reading →

What’s a doc to do?

The Texas doctor had six hours. Now that a vial of Covid-19 vaccine had been opened on this late December night, he had to find 10 eligible people for its remaining doses before the precious medicine expired. In six hours.

Scrambling, the doctor made house calls and directed people to his home outside Houston. Some were acquaintances; others, strangers. A bed-bound nonagenarian. A woman in her 80s with dementia. A mother with a child who uses a ventilator.

After midnight, and with just minutes before the vaccine became unusable, the doctor, Hasan Gokal, gave the last dose to his wife, who has a pulmonary disease that leaves her short of breath.

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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 →