Retired Judge Nancy Gertner and Joel Cohen raise the alarm about the potential shift in the 94  United States Attorneys offices across the country from independent entities to weapons of partisan retribution.

President-elect Trump recently threatened to lock up political foes, like Liz Cheney, as well as members of Congress who investigated his role in the Jan. 6 attack. “For what they did,” he said, “honestly, they should go to jail.”

On the campaign trail, Mr. Trump said repeatedly that he would encourage the Justice Department and the F.B.I. to go after his enemies. His picks for attorney general (Pam Bondi) and F.B.I. director (Kash Patel) have echoed these remarks. Mr. Patel even compiled an enemies list, which includes Christopher Wray and retired Gen. Mark Milley.

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The tradition continues. Merry Christmas, everyone.

Many young people have the mistaken understanding of olds that as their mental faculties diminish, they slide from wise, cogent beings into incoherent drooling dementos. As an old, and an old who has spent a good deal of time dealing with even older olds over the past few years, that’s not how it works. It creeps in, quietly at first, and then one day, you end up missing from Congress for six months and eating lime jello in a home for people with dementia, delightfully called a senior living center.

It’s one thing for a member of Congress to succumb to senility. After all, the ramifications aren’t necessarily different from those who entered Congress despite their inability to enjoy rational thought. It’s another for those who hold singularly important positions. One of the underdiscussed issues at the moment is who is the president? Continue reading →

Just the other day, I snarkily twitted:

Can somebody wake President Biden up and remind him that he still needs to commute the sentences of federal death row prisoners to life?

And I’ll be damned. someone did.

President Biden on Monday commuted the sentences of nearly all prisoners on federal death row, sparing the lives of 37 men just a month before Donald J. Trump will return to the Oval Office with a promise to restart federal executions.

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Rats, amirite? After decades of suffering rat infestations, New York City’s Department of Sanitation came up with a brilliant idea: Put garbage in sealed bins. You know, like they do in most other places. What could possibly go wrong?

Last week, Mahmoud Kasem opened a pair of rusted steel doors in the sidewalk in front of his business, the Al-Aqsa Bakery & Restaurant in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and descended into the mucky darkness of a small basement.

By squishing, stacking and cramming, Mr. Kasem can squeeze an almost infinite number of black plastic trash bags into this underground space. But bins — particularly the wheeled ones the city now requires restaurants and smaller apartment buildings to use — can’t be squished or stacked. His bakery generates enough trash to fill 12 bins three times a week. But Mr. Kasem has no place to put them all. Continue reading →

Happy Friday everyone! It’s time for the annual Friday Funny Christmas Letter, my musical holiday interlude for you all. Per usual, I’m accompanied by the incomparable Tom Lehrer. Could you please get us started, Tom?

Christmas time is here by golly, disapproval would be folly,
Deck the halls with hunks of holly, fill the cup and don’t say when!

I like celebrating holidays at their own times during the year and their own pace. In my house Christmas officially begins when Santa makes his Macy’s Parade appearance. After that we get to put up decorations and so on. Continue reading →

I have little sympathy for the murderer of United Healthcare CEO, Brian Thompson. It has nothing to do with my views about healthcare, but with my views about murder. But as despicable an act as it was, the subsequent “piling on” is deeply concerning and, in all likelihood, problematic as well. The feds just couldn’t keep their nose out of it? New York County district attorney Bragg had to up the ante with a first degree murder charge by making it about terrorism rather than a second degree charge for the murder itself?

Was it not sufficient that a murder be prosecuted in the usual jurisdiction under the usual charge? Continue reading →

I remember a kid in my grade school class who constantly got in trouble, disrupted class and failed to do his work. But he was actually quite smart. It made no sense to us at the time, why he was so scattered and incapable of focusing on the work at hand. Of course, we had no diagnoses at the time like ADHD or autism.

We had good students and bad students, and because they made teachers’ lives difficult, they were bad students. We all thought so because we didn’t know any better. I often wonder what became of him, whether he ever found help that enabled him to be the smart person he was without the troubled person he was known to be.

It wasn’t fair, but that’s what it was and nobody knew any differently back then. We know better today. At least we did. Continue reading →

No matter how many times it’s died, some people won’t let go of the Equal Rights Amendment. Having explained why it’s dead, and dead, and dead, before, even though I supported its adoption back in the good old days when there was still a possibility of ratification, there is no reason to explain it again. And yet, that didn’t stop the New York Times from including New York’s junior senator, Kirsten Gillibrand’s, disdain for democracy in its end of Biden’s presidency wish list.

Fortunately, Mr. Biden has the power to enshrine reproductive rights in the Constitution right now. He can direct the national archivist to certify and publish the Equal Rights Amendment. This would mean that the amendment has been officially ratified and that the archivist has declared it part of the Constitution.

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Given the controversial redefinitions of rape raised here over the past decade, the use of the word by George Stephanopoulos didn’t come anywhere near the fringes. Not that Trump cared.

Mr. Trump sued ABC and Mr. Stephanopoulos in March, after the anchor asked Representative Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina, who has spoken publicly about being raped as a teenager, why she had continued to support Mr. Trump after he was found “liable for rape” in a 2023 civil case in Manhattan.

In that case, a federal jury found Mr. Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll, but it did not find him liable for rape. Still, the judge who oversaw the proceeding later clarified that because of New York’s narrow legal definition of rape, the jury’s verdict did not mean that Ms. Carroll had “failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’” Continue reading →