Activists are decrying the imposition of cash bail as a means of imprisoning people for poverty. They contend that cash bail is merely the way the wealthy buy their freedom while the poor languish in jail, turning bail into another rich person’s privilege. And the unwary are buying this simplistic argument, telling the stories of sad, poor innocent people held for lack of the ability to pay.

This narrative isn’t false, but it isn’t sufficient either. And there is no doubt that being held for the inability to bail out is one of the foremost wedges coercing the innocent to plead guilty. There is much, much, about bail that’s wrong and demands correction. But it is not the simple binary of rich and poor, and to argue otherwise is to argue  falsely, to call for an untenable system and to invite a bludgeon in response.

Many people think that “innocent until proven guilty” implies that everyone should be let loose on their own recognizance before trial. A moment’s thought reveals that this is idiotic. The white supremacist Dylann Roof killed nine people on June 17, 2015 at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. His image was captured on security cameras and he was arrested the next day. Roof’s trial, however, didn’t start until more than a year later, December 7, 2016, and he wasn’t convicted of anything until December 15, 2016. Should Roof have been released before trial because he was “innocent until proven guilty”? Of course not.

I stand second to none in demanding high standards before the state can deprive a person of their liberty but high standards do not demand binary divisions. Tradeoffs are everywhere and when the evidence against the accused is strong and the danger to the public is high, it’s not unreasonable to deprive the legally innocent of some liberty prior to trial. The tradeoffs are ugly, as they always are when trading off two sacred values, but the tradeoffs cannot be avoided.

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None of these were problems in 2008 or 2012, but they sure are now. The electoral college has to go. The First Amendment needs to be changed to prohibit hate speech. The Supreme Court needs term limits or, in the alternative, to be packed with the right sort of justices. And now we need two new states.

The biggest racial preferences in this country have nothing to do with college admissions or job offers. They have to do with political power. And they benefit white Americans, at the expense of black, Asian and Hispanic Americans.

There are many arguments, problems, that could follow this paragraph. Gerrymandering to deny predominantly black areas the ability to elect a representative of their choosing. Voter suppression to reduce the number of minority voters. Felon disenfranchisement, which coordinates with the disproportionate focus on minorities to deny them the right to vote. But that’s not what follows. Continue reading →

In a remarkable piece of investigative reporting, Radley Balko reveals the pointless, baseless, destructive raid that turned Roderick Talley’s life into misery.

“You don’t know what fear is until you wake up and your own front door is flying at you,” says Roderick Talley.

Talley may not have been a perfect guy, but he was a good guy, and so had no reason to  anticipate the explosion that would awaken him on August 10, 2017.

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When Harvard political scientist, Yascha Mounk, wrote about the results of the study at The Atlantic, I felt a brief moment of hope for the future.

According to the report, 25 percent of Americans are traditional or devoted conservatives, and their views are far outside the American mainstream. Some 8 percent of Americans are progressive activists, and their views are even less typical. By contrast, the two-thirds of Americans who don’t belong to either extreme constitute an “exhausted majority.” Their members “share a sense of fatigue with our polarized national conversation, a willingness to be flexible in their political viewpoints, and a lack of voice in the national conversation.”

Most members of the “exhausted majority,” and then some, dislike political correctness. Among the general population, a full 80 percent believe that “political correctness is a problem in our country.”

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The video is replete with issues, from the accused being a child, a black child, to the “survivor” bizarrely remembering her trauma backwards, where she claimed someone else claimed to be a cop when it came from her mouth. Reactions to the video are as varied as there are IQ scores. But there is one tiny slice of what happened that can’t be distinguished by age or race, the lie of traumatic memory or #BelieveTheWoman.

What happened to her was “sexual assault.” We know because she said so. While #BelieveTheWoman would preclude anyone from doubt that it happened, it also prevents all but the slave to facts from questioning her conclusory claim, that whatever actual conduct occurred, it was “sexual assault.” Not a grope. Not even “copped a feel,” but “sexual assault.” Continue reading →

The argument is that it’s sexist, if not downright misogynistic, to use the “nuts and sluts” argument, that a woman is batshit crazy, to oppress women. All the unduly passionate tell me so, and make it clear that one can never, but never, seize upon the tool employed for centuries to silence women. So what then does one call this?

Thanks for not raping us, all you ‘good men.’ But it’s not enough.

It started with “don’t be bad guys.” Then be good guys. Shed your toxic masculinity. But even that wasn’t good enough for Victoria Bissell Brown, who apparently decided to lose her shit on the pages of the Washington Post. Continue reading →

Why? What possible reason could there be for the Metropolitan Republican Club to have someone like Gavin McInnes speak? It’s not that they don’t have the right to invite him. They do. It’s not that he doesn’t have the right to speak. He does. But of all the people in the world to invite, why someone like Gavin McInnes?

…Gavin McInnes, who spoke at the club Friday evening and who is touted on its web page as the “Godfather of the Hipster Movement” who “has taken on and exposed the Deep State Socialists and stood up for Western Values.”

McInnes, a Canadian, is a co-founder of Vice Media and leads the far-right group “Proud Boys,” whose members have been involved in several physical conflicts with left-wing and anti-fascist protesters. The group, which insists it is not part of the so-called “alt-right,” is designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

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Since everybody is a cartoon character except you, because you are unique and special, it comes as no surprise that the outrage shown by Brett Kavanaugh can be reduced to a bumper sticker for convenient use on Instagram.

Variations on the phrase white male rage were everywhere. Some meant only to suggest that Kavanaugh could get away with shouting and crying in a way that an African American or a woman never could. While anger would be a more accurate word than rage, I have no objections to folks who raised that hypothesis; indeed, I am convinced by the evidence for gender inequities in responses to male and female anger.

Like Conor Friedersdorf, it seems patently obvious that the anger wouldn’t have played well had Kavanaugh not been a white male, although Clarence Thomas managed to pull it off during his confirmation hearing with his “high tech lynching” speech. But on the whole, it’s true that the same show of emotion is perceived differently for different races and genders because we superimpose our prejudice over their display and attribute it to acceptable, or unacceptable, traits and motives. Continue reading →

The distinction is remarkably subtle, and will likely be missed by many despite their best efforts to understand it. They may be able to parrot the words, but they just wont be able to wrap their heads around Harvard prof Jeannie Suk Gerson’s message: The trial is not about affirmative action, but whether Harvard discriminates against Asians. But does this distinction make a difference?

The question that remains for trial is whether Harvard has gone beyond what the Supreme Court has said are permissible ways to consider race in admissions—and, specifically, whether it has shown a special bias against Asian-American applicants.

Affirmative action can be best characterized as “merit plus” with the goal of achieving a more diverse student population in the belief that diversity of race, gender, nationality brings different perspectives to education, which is inherently beneficial for all. Some agree. I do. Others don’t. But that’s not the case on trial. Continue reading →

Can you blame UC Santa Barbara for trying its darndest to comply with the demands of the “Dear Colleague” letters, their “questions and answers,” the cries of anguish emanating from the Obama Department of Education, Office of Civil Rights, not to mention the unlawful threat of withholding federal funds should they not? Well, yes, you can.

Due process – two preeminent words that are the lifeblood of our Constitution. Not a precise term, but most everyone knows when it is present and when it is not. It is often most conspicuous by its absence. Its primary characteristic is fairness. It is self-evident that a trial, an adjudication, or a hearing that may adversely affect a person’s life must be conducted with fairness to all parties.

Here, a university held a hearing to determine whether a student violated its student code of conduct. Noticeably absent was even a semblance of due process. When the accused does not receive a fair hearing, neither does the accuser.

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