It’s not as if the government came up with Raymond Dearie’s name as one of two potential special masters, and almost certainly the only one of the two with any potential whatsoever to be appointed special master. But whichever genius on Team Trump told the rest of the tap room at Mar-a-Lago that he was the perfect choice is going to be forced to spend the rest of his career as Bill Barr’s virtual assistant. Trump asked for Dearie, a very serious guy, and he got him. Uh oh.

The court-appointed “special master” reviewing documents the FBI seized during the Aug. 8 search has asked the former president to disclose details about any materials he claims to have declassified before calling them his property.

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Remember when tennis hustler Bobby Riggs got his butt kicked by Billy Jean King? It was a glorious moment for women, shutting up his sexist denigration of women athletes as being unable to complete with men. Of course, King was 29 and at her peak and 55-year-old Riggs, to the extent he ever had a peak playing tennis as opposed to shooting off his mouth, was well past his. But it was groovy to watch King win in straight sets.

What it wasn’t was a claim that sports segregation was based on a fallacy, that the purported biological differences between men and women was a myth. Not only would the notion have been ridiculous, but pointless. Women could be great at sports and still be women, and Riggs’ claim, that even a tired old man could beat the best woman athlete in a sport was empty macho bravado. Continue reading →

Were there black-skinned hobbits in the mind of Tolkein and translucent mermaids in the head of Hans Christian Andersen? Who cares?

Imagine a world where everyone on Earth has roughly the same skin color. How would it happen? I don’t know, imagine! Maybe COVID-45qanon affects skin color. Maybe God snaps her fingers and we all turn chartreuse. I picture a super popular K-Pop/HipHop documentary directed by Harry Styles that starts a worldwide trend of everyone marrying someone different looking and ten generations later we’re all looking like Mariah Carey, Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson, or Bruno Mars, only more so. Continue reading →

From the sanitary perspective, it’s a bizarre decision lacking both sound rationale or respect for precedent. The Fifth Circuit got it wrong.

Yesterday, the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld Texas’ law banning major social media websites from using most forms of content moderation. The decision is at odds with a recent Eleventh Circuit ruling striking down Florida’s similar law (written by prominent conservative Trump appointee Judge Kevin Newsom). In May, the Supreme Court signaled that at least five justices believe the law to be unconstitutional, when it overturned a previous Fifth Circuit ruling lifting a trial court injunction against implementation of the Texas law.  For reasons I summarized here, I agree with the Eleventh Circuit’s approach, and believe the Texas and Florida laws violate the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech. In this post, I argue that these laws also violate the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment.

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The underlying case was a travesty on level after level, as the pseudonymous “survivor” ended up with the credibility of a dead slug, having done pretty much everything humanly possible to demonstrate that the University of Maryland student fabricated claims of sexual assault against two male students. The two men were found not responsible, as it would be impolite to make a finding that the accuser was a  lying sack of shit.

But it didn’t end there, because this was Title IX and “believe the woman” doesn’t suffer the possibility that women lie, even after it’s conclusively proven that the woman lied. When the two co-presidents of the school’s “Preventing Sexual Assault” organization, which worked with and was given special access to and influence at the university’s Office for Civil Rights and Sexual Misconduct, persisted after John Doe was found not responsible in alerting clubs, sports teams and others that he was a “rapist,” Doe brought a complaint to the University of Maryland’s Title IX office. They ignored it, then dismissed. Doe then sued the university and the two PSA co-presidents. Continue reading →

“Cheap Heat” is a professional wrestling term used to describe a throwaway remark or action by a performer that requires little effort and is guaranteed to elicit a negative crowd reaction. Examples of this would be wiping one’s ass with a Josh Allen jersey in Buffalo or reminding the fine people of Jacksonville their football team’s never going to win a Super Bowl.

The use of cheap heat by conservative commentator Matt Walsh on his Daily Wire Plus show is especially galling, considering Matt’s schtick would fit right in if he were a heel wrestling manager back in the territories. I’m talking specifically today about a clip my mean-ass editor assaulted me with Wednesday night where Walsh took issue with Disney casting a young black girl in the lead of the live-action “Little Mermaid” remake. Continue reading →

The reply was short and sweet, “Lawyers aren’t supposed to represent clients they know are guilty.” I would have shrugged it as with most of the inanity seen on twitter, but for the fact that its author was Charlotte Allen, who, among other things, was a lawyer.

About Charlotte Allen

I’m an award-winning journalist who has published prolifically in the Weekly Standard, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Washington Times, Insight, City Journal, Washington Monthly, the New Republic, and the Atlantic. I’m the author of “The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus” (1998). I have a B.A. from Stanford, an M.A. from Harvard, a law degree from U.S.C., and a doctorate in medieval and Byzantine studies from the Catholic University of America.

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On the twitters, a lawyer said that his concern for due process caused him to be a liberal 30 years ago and a conservative today. These 19 Democrats in the Senate seem determined to prove him right when it comes to Title IX.

Changes to the School Grievance Process We appreciate that the proposed rule updates the requirements for schools’ grievance procedures addressing incidents of sexual violence to provide more flexibility for schools, allow processes that are not punitive and do not disincentive reporting, and include guardrails to ensure all students, including Continue reading →

That some will engage in dangerous or criminal conduct is pretty much a given if the opportunity presents itself, but not necessarily a reason to prohibit the lawful version of the conduct. In this instance, the conduct is ingesting marijuana, and the danger is driving high. Before you pooh-pooh it off, consider that if you or a loved one is in the car next to Tommy Chong on the highway, it could take on a more ominous concern.

Any form of driving while intoxicated is obviously a bad idea, but smoking a joint or taking an edible before getting behind the wheel can pose distinctive risks. That, experts say, is because of the particular ways that marijuana affects the brain, and the fact that there’s no standard dose for a federally criminalized drug.

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The initial charge was first degree murder, but it was subsequently reduced to involuntary manslaughter, for which Pieper Lewis was sentenced to five years of closely supervised probation and ordered to pay $150,000 restitution to the family of the deceased. So what’s the issue? The man Lewis stabbed to death when she was 15 had been raping her with regularity.

Lewis was 15 when she stabbed Brooks more than 30 times in a Des Moines apartment. Officials have said Lewis was a runaway who was seeking to escape an abusive life with her adopted mother and was sleeping in the hallways of a Des Moines apartment building when a 28-year-old man took her in before forcibly trafficking her to other men for sex. Continue reading →