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 →

Columbia English prof John McWhorter took on a big, and difficult, subject. He did so because he sees the problems and can’t be so easily dismissed.

A white version of this would be blithely dismissed as racist.

But he can, and will, still be dismissed. It just takes one more step when it comes from a black man by imputing a more personally denigrating claim.

I will be dismissed instead as self-hating by a certain crowd.

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A core part of the argument that there is no such thing as “cancel culture” is that it’s just culture, just the normal enforcement of “social norms” as society has always done, but now with a new name. Not only do I find that argument false, as the back-end consequences are very different, but the claim that it’s merely about “social norms” to be nonsense.

Your notions of political correctness do not constitute "social norms."

Society organically creates social norms over time, not angry mobs on twitter looking for reasons to be offended.

— Scott Greenfield (@ScottGreenfield) February 2, 2021

Unsurprisingly, this was not a popular notion to those inflicting political correctness on others. My pal, Ken, was unimpressed. Continue reading →

Former lawprof and author of The New Jim Crowe, Michelle Alexander, opens with the mandatory anecdote.

The first week on the job, one of my white co-workers, a middle-aged woman from rural Oregon, pulled me aside after she watched a group of rowdy white men, who had been rude and condescending to me throughout their meal, walk out the door without leaving a tip. “From now on, dear,” she said, “I’ll take the rednecks. Just pass ’em on to me.” This became a kind of joke between us — a wink and a nod before we switched tables — except it wasn’t funny. The risk that my race, not the quality of my work, would determine how much I was paid for my services was ever-present.

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The rotisserie chicken at Costco is legend. For $5, you get a delicious bird. To eat, I mean. Not to give to the kids as a beloved pet. Not to cuddle. Not to take on long walks in the park. To eat. We eat the chickens. And they are delicious. Want to know about their life before they get put on a spit?

But an animal rights group called Mercy for Animals recently sent an investigator under cover to work on a farm in Nebraska that produces millions of these chickens for Costco, and customers might lose their appetite if they saw inside a chicken barn.

“It’s dimly lit, with chicken poop all over,” said the worker, who also secretly shot video there. “It’s like a hot humid cloud of ammonia and poop mixed together.”

Continue reading →

Today’s an interesting day for your humble humorist. It’s the Big Game, and for a second year my team, the New England Patriots, isn’t playing.

This year my team didn’t even make the playoffs. Hell, the Pats didn’t even have a winning record this year. We kind of sucked.

So who do I want to see win today? What I want to happen and what I think will happen are two entirely different outcomes. I’d love nothing more than to see Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs make today the last stop on the Tom Brady Retirement Tour. Continue reading →

There are many lessons worth remembering from World War II, though it’s unclear whether they will be remembered or they will be remembered for the right reasons. Some of those lessons are about how a nation spiraled into hatred and the nadir of immorality. Others are about how a world, after beating that warmongering nation, allowed it to take a path back into society.

As a boomer whose father fought the Nazis in the Ardennes Forest and freed a concentration camp, and as a Jew, this is not an emotionless subject for me. I was raised to Never Forget, and I can’t and won’t. When I went to Germany in the summer of ’79, I looked at every old man and wondered what he did in the war. But I couldn’t hate Germany or Germans. I chose to let it go. Continue reading →

Not that it’s surprising, per se, that President Biden has chosen not to ask the ABA to rate his judicial nominees. After all, it’s barely a shell of its former legacy self, having lost most of its members and carrying no sway in the legal profession. But that wasn’t the reason Biden decided not to have his judicial nominees vetted. The contention is that the ABA is just too conservative to be fair to his “diverse” appointees.

Paige Herwig, who focuses on judicial nominations for the White House Counsel’s Office, said in an interview that the administration valued the bar group’s input before senators vote. But, she said, the White House also believes it will have a freer hand to consider a wide range of nominees if the group does not wield prenomination veto power. Continue reading →