If the last two years taught us anything, it’s that just when you think life can’t get any weirder, life will stare you straight in the eye and say “Hold my silly-string flavored beer.”

Last week I made a bunch of bad jokes about an incident where a Washington Post reporter got suspended without pay for retweeting a joke. Then this week I find out Vince McMahon, the 76-year-old billionaire at the helm of professional wrestling giant WWE, is stepping down from his roles as Chairman of the Board and CEO due to an alleged $3 million hush money payout made to a former paralegal. Continue reading →

As expected, the 50th Anniversary of Title IX wasn’t merely a day to remember when women got to play sports and men’s teams were eliminated because there weren’t enough women interested to align the numbers. It was the day Joe Biden’s renominated head of the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights would have her last hurrah. As expected, Catherine Lhamon introduced her new rules designed to undo the regulations instituted by Betsy DeVos to provide minimal due process to the nightmare of campus sex inquisitions.

You see, Lhamon has dedicated her public service to the nightmare of campus sex inquisitions. Continue reading →

There’s no lack of discussion of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, but that’s about what activists have turned Title IX into, not what it was or was meant to be. Now that it’s reached its 50th birthday, there’s some discussion of how it worked out.

But in some ways, Title IX was a Pyrrhic victory. For all its successes, the groundbreaking legislation has failed to allow girls and women to excel on terms independent of boys and men. Like so much in our culture, sports are still based on a male model — a man’s body, a man’s interests. Current models of success in mainstream sport leave women competing on standards that exclude us, where in most cases we are not set up to thrive. Continue reading →

Given the makeup of the 6-3 decision, with the usual suspects on their expected sides, there was almost no chance that the analysis of Carson v. Makin wasn’t going to be spun into an existential crisis preceding the end of the world as we know it.

The Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority effectively declared on Tuesday that the separation of church and state—a principle enshrined in the Constitution—is, itself, unconstitutional.

“Effectively” is doing far too much work there. The decision did nothing of the sort. Continue reading →

I still remember the surprise when I read a post by David French promoting Red Flag Laws as the solution to gun violence.

A so-called “red flag” law fills the gaps in criminal law and the laws governing mental-health adjudications by granting standing to a defined, limited universe of people to seek temporary seizure orders — called gun-violence-restraining orders — for a gun if they can present admissible evidence that the gun’s owner is exhibiting threatening behavior.

Properly drafted, these laws can save lives while also protecting individual liberty. Improperly drafted, they grant the state an overly broad tool that can be systematically abused to deprive disfavored citizens of a fundamental constitutional right.

Continue reading →

Did the January 6 Committee’s public hearings do the trick? According to an ABC/Ipsos poll, it would appear to be the case, as almost 60% of those polled believe Trump committed crimes.

In the poll, which was conducted by Ipsos in partnership with ABC News using Ipsos’ KnowledgePanel, 58% of Americans think Trump should be charged with a crime for his role in the riot. That’s up slightly from late April, before the hearings began, when an ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 52% of Americans thought the former president should be charged.

Continue reading →

When Martin Luther King Day was made a federal holiday in 1983, it was quite the controversy. When Juneteenth was made a federal holiday, there was almost no discussion. Whether that’s a sign of the change in American attitude toward recognition of slavery and the historic discrimination against black people or something else is unclear, but the lack of discussion raises a question. How do we celebrate Juneteenth?

It marks the day in 1865 — June 19 — when some of the last enslaved people in the United States, in Texas, learned that they had been freed, roughly two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued. Continue reading →

When the mob descended upon someone for making what someone deemed an incorrect utterance, the target had choices. One was to shrug and let the chips fall where they may. One was to defend against the vicissitudes of the mob attempt to dictate correctness to others by fiat. And one was to apologize and repent, often performing an act of contrition to demonstrate the sincerity of obsequiousness to the aggrieved and offended.

If you will recall, Dave Weigel, of the joking Weigels, attempted the third option, immediately deleting his retwit of the putatively offensive joke and apologizing for the error of his ways. Rather than end the torment, it emboldened Felicia Sonmez and others who tasted blood to pound harder.

Lizzo, on the other hand, pulled it off. Continue reading →

If you’ve had better things to do over the last week or two than follow what reporters are doing on Twitter, congratulate yourself for minimizing your exposure to the shitstorm we’re going to discuss today.

David Weigel is a reporter for the Washington Post. I’m not really familiar with Dave’s work, but I do know in the last couple of weeks he retweeted a bad joke.

The joke, in case you were wondering, was something told by a YouTuber named Cam Harless, who apparently twitted “Every girl is bi. You just have to figure out if it’s polar or sexual.” Continue reading →

The demise of the jury trial has been a frequent subject of inquiry from within the profession to academics and think tanks. The most common solution is to ban plea bargaining, thus forcing defendants to go to trial and, hopefully, constraining prosecutors from charging as many defendants as they do now because of the physical and logistical limitations of trying cases, a highly speculative and dubious outcome.

This solution is, as I’ve argued here* and at Cato Institute, simplistic and foolish, ignoring the complex reasons why pleas have overwhelmed trials and putting every defendant to go to trial, despite having no defense, and being at risk of being sentenced to life plus cancer with no safety valve or alternative. Continue reading →