Building on his work over more than a decade, Radley Balko asked 20 Questions of the candidates seeking the 2020 Democratic nomination for president. Put aside whatever quibbles you have about the framing of the questions, as he’s tried to be as neutral as possible in how they’re framed in order to ask a question that would get a meaningful response. And he’s done a fine job of it.

But his 19th question raises an issue that was a hot topic here a decade ago, as I took the position that Sonia Sotomayor was an excellent choice for the Supreme Court. While she checked the boxes for female and Hispanic, which was a big issue at the time, neither of those factors commended her nomination. There was no doubt an Hispanic woman could be a justice, but being an Hispanic woman wasn’t enough. Not by a mile. My support was based on her legal experience. Continue reading →

Who cooks? Cleans? Does the laundry? Cares for the sick child? Women are pissed that it’s assumed they will do it all. Not those women who are married to shitlords, but women who thought their spouses were allies, the “good” husbands.

The optimistic tale of the modern, involved dad has been greatly exaggerated. The amount of child care men performed rose throughout the 1980s and ’90s, but then began to level off without ever reaching parity. Mothers still shoulder 65 percent of child-care work. In academic journals, family researchers caution that the “culture of fatherhood” has changed more than fathers’ actual behavior.

Fathers still shoulder 95% of the lawn mowing and spider killing, but spiders are yucky. Continue reading →

Much like cops, who believe they have a magical ability to tell when someone is lying, prosecutors similarly believe they possess that skill.

The prosecutor, Stacey Tenney, later told me that she knew Michelle was lying. Of course she was lying.

People often wonder why, after DNA proves a defendant innocent, prosecutors maintain their certainty of guilt, often using it to justify their hiding the Brady or fighting to the end to prevent the DNA from being tested after a conviction. It’s because they’re magic. They know. They’re not going to let that filthy scum get off just because of . . . evidence. He’s guilty. They just know it.

The New York Times brings that same delusion to domestic abuse, with its headline writer asking perhaps the dumbest possible question. Continue reading →

The battle arose from one of the most unfortunate but pervasive problems in family law. A couple with kids divorces, and decisions are made at the time about who gets physical custody and decision-making authority over the children of the union. Often, it’s by agreement between the parents. Sometimes, the bitterness requires a judge to intervene.

Unsurprisingly, the mother almost always gets the kids, even if the father cares deeply, is fully prepared to be the nurturing parent  and is the better choice. You have to really suck as a mother not to prevail, claims of equality and mental labor notwithstanding.

But then, the ordinary expectation is that the decision-making parents will deal with the unpleasant choices of bed time, schooling, religious training and whether to coerce their child to eat peas. When the decision involves something more dramatic, does the agreement reached between spouses, or imposed by judicial fiat, still suffice? Continue reading →

When I was a kid, the television told me that if I wore Keds, I would run faster, jump higher. Did they work? I wouldn’t know, as my mother bought my sneakers from the big bin at the supermarket. But a little more than a decade later, Adidas was selling sneakers with three stripes for a lot more than PF Flyers and people were buying.

They stopped calling them sneakers and started calling them athletic shoes. Soon, there were different types for specific sports, and everybody knew that you should run in running shoes and play hoops in basketball shoes. Did the kids wearing the expensive sneakers athletic shoes play better? Maybe, but if so, it wasn’t because of the shoes. They just played better.

Castor Semenya runs faster. No doubt she’s got some sweet shoes, but even if she wore Keds, she would run faster. Isn’t that the point of being a middle distance runner, to run faster? Continue reading →

The analogy Keith Kaplan made to me was a good one. Can you imagine some biglaw firm coming in as amicus on behalf of the government in a criminal prosecution? It seems ridiculous, but then, it occurred to me that it’s not as outlandish as it would appear at first blush. What, for example, if the government cut a sweetheart deal with a billionaire? Or maybe some judge approved a plea deal to let a statutory rapist off with probation? As Judy Tenuta used to say, “it could happen.”

My hope and expectation is that the Texas Tornado, Mark Bennett, will get down in the weeds to parse the substance of the argument made by the Duke Law School First Amendment Clinic in its amicus brief arguing against the challenge by criminal defendant, John Rivello, for sending an “animated strobe gif” to “known epileptic” Kurt Eichenwald. The particulars of the case are one thing; the fact that Duke’s First Amendment Clinic proffers its mission to be to limit the First Amendment to speech that law students deem worthy goes well beyond the particulars of this case. Continue reading →

Like other platforms, Tumblr is not one where I can be found, so I come at this from a distance. Others, apparently, were users and found certain content unsavory, which was pretty much Tumblr’s reason to exist.

Though Tumblr was born alongside most other modern social networks, it’s long been associated with a certain countercultural deviance. Founder David Karp launched it in 2007 when he was just 20, and his much-vaunted hoodie-wearing ethos helped give the site a permanently youthful attitude — even an air of “millennial narcissism.”

Tumblr’s younger, digital-savvy denizens made Tumblr into a center of internet culture, churning out memes and cultivating subcultures from fandoms to study bloggers to digital art collectives. But despite all this, the site has long been plagued by an unfairly dismissive cultural reputation that reduces the entire vibrant platform to a vast repository of porn, and not much else.

Does that mean Tumblr turned into a porn site, or was porn inherent in the deviant “digital-savvy denizens” culture? No matter. Continue reading →

A controversy arose from a twit by Peter Boghossian of Sokal Squared fame.

I’m at a softball game. It’s interesting to hear parents tell their kids “good job” after they struck out (some when they didn’t even swing and just looked at the ball whiz by). I wonder how this form of illusionary self-esteem has collectively influenced the generations.

A relatively innocuous question to ponder, given that unwarranted self-esteem, combined with pervasive narcissism, anxiety and depression, are acknowledged to be very serious problems. It wasn’t a stinging rebuke, as “good job” wasn’t exactly a standing ovation for failure. And it was just a softball game. Had it been “good try,” rather than “good job” for striking out looking, perhaps it would have been less dissonant. But wasn’t it a fair enough observation? Continue reading →

Going into the special counsel investigation, it was surreal how former director of the FBI, Bob Mueller, shed all baggage and became that mythical figure in Washington, the Honest Broker. Everyone agreed, Bob Mueller was to be trusted. Bob Mueller was the man who would tell America the truth. And so, we waited.

Two years later, the Report came out, and within days, the attorney general issued what the regulations required him to issue, a summary of the report’s conclusions. But Bill Barr’s summary lacked the trustworthiness of Bob Mueller’s report, because Barr was the president’s “hand-selected man,” as if any president ever nominated an attorney general who wasn’t “hand-selected.” Was the summary legit? If not, why didn’t Mueller say something?

Then came the redacted report, which raised a wealth of questions that sowed confusion as to whether the conduct of the president obstructed justice. There were ten points of conduct suggesting obstruction, yet no conclusion of obstruction. There was, explicitly, no exoneration, but no explicit condemnation either. What did it mean? Why didn’t Bob Mueller just say something? Continue reading →

Twice in the past few days, the Grey Lady has been “forced” to apologize for publishing political cartoons that have been deemed anti-Semitic, or as otherwise framed, contain anti-Semitic tropes. Do they offend? That’s up to the viewer.

First was their required Trump smack.

Whether this political cartoon is anti-Semitic, or perpetuates anti-Semitic tropes reminiscent of those used in furtherance of the Holocaust, is not the issue for the New York Times. They admit fault for having published them, which raises their curious apology. Continue reading →