Could it be possible that the Louisiana Supreme Court was that desperate to avoid holding invocation of the right to counsel that it burned Warren Demesme over a comma?

“If y’all, this is how I feel, if y’all think I did it, I know that I didn’t do it so why don’t you just give me a lawyer dog cause this is not what’s up.”

That was Warren Demesme talking to the police after he voluntarily agreed to be interviewed over accusations he sexually assaulted a minor. In an opinion concurring with the Louisiana Supreme Court’s decision to deny the man a writ of certiorari, Justice Scott Chricton insists that Demesme only “ambiguously referenced a lawyer.”

Well yes, it could. But it didn’t. The “lawyer dog” cuteness comes not from the 6-1 majority opinion, but Judge Scott Cricton’s concurrence. Continue reading →

After the die-in, they hung a sign around the neck of the statue of the Great Emancipator.

During a 2016 Columbus Day protest conducted by Wunk Sheek, a Native American student organization, activists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus hosted a “die-in” at Bascom Hall, near a statue of President Abraham Lincoln.

According to The Daily Cardinal, a campus newspaper, the protest ended with the group hanging a sign on the Lincoln monument that said “#DecolonizeOurCampus.”

What made Lincoln a target of decolonization?

“Everyone thinks of Lincoln as the great, you know, freer of slaves, but let’s be real: He owned slaves, and as natives, we want people to know that he ordered the execution of native men,” said one of the protesters.

“Just to have him here at the top of Bascom is just really belittling.”

Continue reading →

Yawn.

The charges against Mr. Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, and Mr. Gates, a business associate of Mr. Manafort, were not immediately clear but represent a significant escalation in a special counsel investigation that has cast a shadow over the president’s first year in office.

Sorry, Matt Apuzzo, but I don’t think “significant escalation” means what you think it does.

That brutal purveyor of unpleasant reality, Scientific American, is at it again.

In a 1946 essay in the London Tribune entitled “In Front of Your Nose,” George Orwell noted that “we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”

Notably, this quote can be used to challenge anyone, any side, any set of beliefs, and often is. Nobody owns Orwell. It’s a truism that will be seized upon to dispute whatever the other side says, because they’re twisting facts to show they’re right, when we all know it’s false.

But ultimately, Orwell notes, beliefs “bump up” against “solid reality, usually on a battlefield.” The battlefield today is college campuses. Continue reading →

The Naxos were back, another march in the hope that the media would remember that they exist and use them as a foil. After all, if a Naxo walks down the street and nobody gives a damn, do they make a sound?

White supremacists, neo-Nazis and fascists descended on a Middle Tennessee town Saturday for a “White Lives Matter” rally, striking fear into communities desperate to avoid the kind of violence that visited Charlottesville, Virginia, nearly three months ago.

But it was met with a heavy police presence and resistance from counterprotesters. A second rally planned for the afternoon in the larger college town of Murfreesboro was abruptly canceled by organizers.

When the tiki-torch bearers made headlines across the nation in Charlottesville, it galvanized the forces of truth and justice, determined to change everything because Citronellanacht was happening. Then it all kinda faded, whether because of the eight-second attention span or because it was so utterly insignificant that moderately intelligent people realized it was just a handful of flaming nutjobs seeking notoriety to justify their existence. Continue reading →

That the Daily Kos’ Laura Clawson couldn’t help but lay it on as thick as possible, just in case its slightly progressive readership was too high to realize the brutally obvious, doesn’t change the fact that it happened, and was caught on body cam.

Kelsey Pierce was riding her bike to work. Someone called the cops complaining that a woman on a bike wearing a black shirt was looking at driveways. Could she be casing houses for a burglary? It’s possible. That Oklahoma City police officer James Herlihy had a reasonable and articulable suspicion to inquire, based upon the call, doesn’t appear to be in dispute. Nor, whether you like it or not, was he wrong to demand identification or to run a warrant check.

But after being handed ID (at 1:15), Herlihy then cuffed her and put her in the cruiser. Pierce complained of her treatment, there being no basis for her seizure. Continue reading →

The New York Times asks whether the Harvey Weinstein revelations will finally, finally, make men stop sexually harassing women. Finally.

Has America at last reached a turning point on sexual harassment? Watching the events of the past three weeks, one can hope.

In the wake of Harvey Weinstein’s sudden and overdue expulsion from Hollywood for his serial predation, hundreds of long-silent women are calling out powerful, influential men at a remarkable clip and accusing them of sexual misconduct: Roy Price, the head of Amazon Studios; the film director James Toback; the literary critic Leon Wieseltier; the restaurateur and celebrity chef John Besh; and the political commentator Mark Halperin, to name just a few.

Are you Weinstein? Besh? Halperin? Probably not. You’re probably not rich, famous, powerful. Women probably aren’t drawn to you by your fame, or the things you can do to further their careers. You’re probably not even a bawdy 93-year-old. Continue reading →

Jordan Furlong is a smart guy, even though he occasionally dabbles in Millennial pandering at the Puddle. So is he just trolling now?

Let’s start with a reality check. It’s kind of silly to talk about “the millennial generation” as if it’s some monolithic hive mind. If you’re setting out to describe the attributes of a demographic wave several hundred million people wide, then you’re going to over-generalize to the point of absurdity. So the first thing I want to acknowledge is that there are myriad exceptions to the broad strokes painted below.

It’s “silly,” so he’s going to do it anyway. Thanks, Gertrude.

The fundamental problem is that baby boomer lawyers (and to a lesser extent, gen-x lawyers like myself) keep trying to interpret the behavior of millennials through the lens of their own cultural assumptions and practices.

Continue reading →

Long before the methods shifted from sad tears to protest signs and disruption, I called for professors to take back the classroom. They didn’t. They didn’t want to because they feared their students’ condemnation. They didn’t want to because they shared their students’ activist beliefs. They didn’t want to because they embraced the soft pedagogy of appeasement and acquiescence.

Now, they’ve completely lost control.

At Reed College in Oregon, where I work, a group of students began protesting the required first-year humanities course a year ago. Three times a week, students sat in the lecture space holding signs — many too obscene to be printed here — condemning the course and its faculty as white supremacists, as anti-black, as not open to dialogue and criticism, on the grounds that we continue to teach, among many other things, Aristotle and Plato.

The writer is no white supremacist.  Continue reading →

Did this fail to make the radar because no one died (or was actually injured), or because it wasn’t conduct worthy of making the radar?

It doesn’t appear that anybody died, so you probably haven’t seen this. But yesterday a man allegedly drove into a crowd of protestors… kind of like the Alt-Right has been suggesting people do for years. Kind of like one person actually did in the attack that killed Heather Heyer.

Connecting unrelated events because of one common attribute creates a sense of parity, that they are the same thing. But “a sense” isn’t the same as a fact. And the facts simply don’t bear out the initial contention, that a man drove into a crowd of protesters. A KTLA reporter described it as a “vehicle slamming into crowds of protesters,” with the on-screen caption saying “car plows into protesters.” Continue reading →