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 →

I was fairly certain that after the jury hung on the top count of Manslaughter 2, and Justice Max Wiley agreed to dismiss the count with prejudice at the prosecution’s request, Daniel Penny was looking at a conviction on the lesser account of criminally negligent homicide as a compromise verdict. After all, there was at least one, if not more, jurors ready to convict on the top count, and jurors get tired after a while and tend to accommodate the strongly held positions of their fellow jurors so they can reach a verdict and go home.

I was wrong. The jury acquitted and courtroom burst into chaos. Continue reading →

Dr. SJ informs me that we, meaning she, needs a little warm weather break, so we’re off to a Caribbean cruise. See you back here in about a week or so. Maybe. Have fun and be kind to each other.

Is there any doubt that the targeted assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was wrong and tragic? It’s almost inconceivable that a cold-blooded murder, caught on video for all to see, would be anything but. And yet, the very online left fringe sees the murderer as a hero and the murder as an act of bravery against an evil billion dollar business that makes its money by denying health care to those who need and deserve it, causing the deaths of many.

“How could people be so mad at a guy that runs the biggest insurance corporation that makes billions of dollars by denying claims for basic healthcare at the highest rate of any company?” Yea is a real head scratcher

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Some would suggest it’s pretty foolish to publish an “enemies list” of those you would target for prosecution if you had the power to do so. Others would call it far worse. So, naturally, that’s what Kash Patel did, because that’s what Kash Patel is.

Was hard for me to find the list of people Kash Patel included in his book “Government Gangsters” as Deep State officials who need to be targeted so here it is in one place. pic.twitter.com/j9I7FWNzoZ

— Tim Miller (@Timodc) December 2, 2024

And that’s just the start of it, Patel having already expressed his desire to target journalists who said mean things about his beloved. Continue reading →

Oral argument will be had today in United States v. Skrmetti, challenging the Tennessee law prohibiting medical intervention for minors for gender dysphoria, pitting the Equal Protection Clause for sex discrimination against the unsettled medical nature of hormonal to surgical interventions for children.

The Tennessee law prohibits medical providers from prescribing puberty-delaying medication, offering hormone therapy or performing surgery to treat the psychological distress caused by incongruence between experienced gender and that assigned at birth. But the law allows those same treatments for other purposes.

The primary question for the justices is not whether Tennessee’s ban is wise or consistent with the views of medical experts. It is, instead, whether the law makes distinctions based on sex. If it does, a demanding form of judicial review — “heightened scrutiny” — kicks in. If it does not, the Tennessee law will almost certainly survive.

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Sure. it’s all the rage at the moment, but Joe Biden’s pardon of his son is hardly a novel concept, either as to pardoning a family member (think Charles Kushner) or issuing a pardon on the way out the door. But it still emits an unpleasant odor, both because the president asserted that he would not do so, undermining whatever integrity he had left, and that there is no accountability for the exploit of a power possessed solely by the president.

Presidents have the constitutional “Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” There’s nothing Congress can do about that.

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When Donald Trump pardoned Crazy Joe Arpaio, there was a smattering of criticism that lasted minutes, maybe an hour or two, before he did something else that caught the media’s attention. Joe Biden is unlikely to be so lucky when it comes to his issuance of a pardon to his son, Hunter, after the many disavowals that he would do so. Is the problem that he pardoned Hunter, that he flip-flopped, maybe lied, about not pardoning Hunter, or both?

He said he made the decision because the charges against Hunter were politically motivated and designed to hurt him politically. Continue reading →

It started as a Joan Rivers’ shtick on Fashion Police, but it’s now the basis for a lawsuit in the Western District of Texas between “influencer” Sydney Nicole Gifford and “content creator” Alyssa Sheil.

In the lawsuit filed in April, Gifford — who has over 790,000 followers across Instagram and TikTok — claimed “at least” 30 photo posts across Sheil’s platforms featured “identical styling, tone, camera angle and/or text” to her images.

Gifford also claimed that Sheil — who has 380,000 social media followers — posted “nearly identical videos” to her content.

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