Most lawsuits for defamation turn out to be SLAPP suits, strategic lawsuits against public participation, whose purpose isn’t to win but to silence by exacting a cost to litigate and defend. Some, even some who should know better, leaped to this assumption, as there have been a rash of frivolous suits (think Devin Nunes versus his cow) of late, and the president threatens them with regularity.

This is no SLAPP suit. The defendants are Netflix, Ava DuVernay and Attica Locke, and Netflix has done very well with the serial When They See Us. Time is long past to try to prevent people from seeing “the truth,” as it’s already been seen by millions. Netflix won’t be scared off by the cost of defense, as they’ve made many millions of dollars off the show and can well afford to litigate any damn thing they want. Continue reading →

Mitt Romney’s proposal to send every American adult a check for $1,000 opened a discussion of ways to address the economic dislocation that will permeate the nation. Of course, if you can’t work, lose your job, have a small business that’s shuttered, will a check for $1000 do the trick?

The shift came four days after an internal report from the Department of Health and Human Services — not yet shared with the public — concluded that the “pandemic will last 18 months or longer and could include multiple waves of illness.”

To self-isolate for a couple weeks is one thing. If this goes on for 18 months, is it even conceivable? This isn’t to say it will happen, but it’s not beyond the pale. During whatever period it is, people will not only need medical care, and maybe burial, but will need to eat, among other things. Continue reading →

Before sides were picked and bizarre and disgusting accusations leveled, a new Woody Allen movie was an event. They were a big deal, and his movies became cultural touchstones. Even the opening sequence to Manhattan, scenes aligning with Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, was magical. Or the iconic scene on the movie line in Annie Hall, where Marshall McLuhan appears to shut up the smug Columbia professor. Classic, but only one of hundreds.

Then it all crashed.

As readers surely know, that happened after Farrow found out about his relationship with her (but not his) adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn, now his wife, who was then 21. Farrow subsequently accused Allen of sexually molesting their adopted daughter Dylan Farrow, who was then 7, during a 1992 visit to her Connecticut country house. Continue reading →

Already this morning, I’ve written three posts and, after due deliberation, decided not to post any of them. The first was about how the past excesses of criminal reform activists have made their calls for releasing prisoners to avoid COVID-19 from ripping through prisons ring hollow at a time when people care more for mom and dad than convicted felons.

The second was about the economic illiteracy of millennials who somehow connect COVID-19 with proof that capitalism is the disease and Bernie is the cure, and passionately expressing it on the corporation named Twitter on their China-made AAPL iPhones.

The third was about Mitt Romney’s idea of giving $1000 to every American adult to tide them through this economic dislocation. Continue reading →

No matter how healthy he is, or at least appears to be, the fact remains that Joe Biden, like Bernie and Trump, is old. Old people, well, don’t always remain alive in the natural scheme of things. At age 77, there is a very real possibility that Biden, if nominated and if elected, might not survive his term of office. Remember, William Henry Harrison, the oldest president for a very long time, only lasted one month before he kicked the bucket, and he was a mere kid at 68,

This being the case, Biden’s choice of running mate as vice president is very important. So what’s the plan?

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My daughter got the email around 11:00 am yesterday. Don’t show up on Monday as school will be closed. The plan had been to show up Monday and Tuesday, which had already been designated as “professional development” days to prepare for the likelihood of school closings. The idea, last week, was that schools needed to figure out how they were going to deal with closing, whether they could teach remotely and how to accomplish it. For public school students, the issues are very different than college or graduate school. Think first graders.

But then, a decision was made, and that was that.

“I understand the gravity of this action and what it means for every community in our county, as well as for the families and caretakers of our students, especially health care workers with kids in school,” Nassau County Executive Laura Curran said.
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Where some see pain, others see opportunity. Matt and Noah Colvin saw the latter and acted upon it.

On March 1, the day after the first coronavirus death in the United States was announced, brothers Matt and Noah Colvin set out in a silver S.U.V. to pick up some hand sanitizer. Driving around Chattanooga, Tenn., they hit a Dollar Tree, then a Walmart, a Staples and a Home Depot. At each store, they cleaned out the shelves.

Matt Colvin stayed home near Chattanooga, preparing for pallets of even more wipes and sanitizer he had ordered, and starting to list them on Amazon. Mr. Colvin said he had posted 300 bottles of hand sanitizer and immediately sold them all for between $8 and $70 each, multiples higher than what he had bought them for. To him, “it was crazy money.” To many others, it was profiteering from a pandemic.

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Despite having watched Outbreak and Contagion, I remain no expert in epidemiology, and so I leave it to more knowledgeable people to make predictions about what COVID-19 will bring to our life and how we should address it. My general view is to hope for the best but prepare for the worst, but that’s unhelpful platitudinous nonsense when there are hard choices to be made. Some counsel panic while others argue denial. Neither helps.

Should things deteriorate as some anticipate, there will be hard choices to be made. This isn’t a new concept. When Obamacare was on the docket in the halcyon days of 2009, its opponents created the phrase “death panels*” to manipulate people’s fears, that people’s lives would be left in the hands of bureaucrats to decide if their lives were “worthy of saving.” Much as the phrase was intended as a rhetorical device to create fear, it wasn’t entirely wrong. The allocation of scarce resources will always require decisions to be made to provide, or withhold, the resource. Continue reading →

Ever watch a panel discussion where the range of views runs from bad to worse, a fast death to brutal slow death, as if it reflected the full gamut of thought on a subject, as long as you prefer your gamuts to invariably lead to the only possible acceptable outcome?

What if that was the case on New York’s oddly-named highest court, the Court of Appeals? Appellate Squawk is not amused.

Apropos of #MeToo, the Court of Appeals has finally eliminated all that silly frou-fra about proof and decided that in SORA hearings, accusations alone are clear and convincing evidence. According to the majority, if it’s on a piece of paper from a law enforcement agency, that’s good enough. Continue reading →

What happened in a bar between a couple drunken people ordinarily doesn’t make the front page. But then, it doesn’t ordinarily involve a lawyer and a former Manhattan Assistant District Attorney either. Eli Cherkasky was both, and was convicted after a non-jury trial for his actions.

Eli Karl Cherkasky was convicted in 2015 of “criminal obstruction of breathing or blood circulation and assault in the third degree and harassment in the second degree,” the court recounted. He had been “drinking heavily for many hours” when he got into a verbal altercation with a woman that ended up getting physical, it said.

According to Cherkasky, the woman hit him in the eye with her arm [which was sufficiently severe to cause him a black eye] and then threw a beer at him. Continue reading →