The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has spoken. The Court of Public Opinion has too, and it has not been as kind or principled. It’s understandable that even those who accept that the law may compel reversal refuse to accept the premise that Cosby is legally restored to the position he held before he was charged, prosecuted, convicted, sentenced and then reversed and dismissed.

It’s a lot to process, but more importantly, there are tropes to embrace to justify the belief that while he may be legally free, his guilt remains a fact and the right to hold him culpable remains an entitlement. But as with so many aspects of the Cosby case, it presents hard issues that give rise to troubling beliefs. Continue reading →

If the “Back the Blue” sign was stolen from someone else, the act of a 19-year-old unnamed woman destroying it could be a crime, and most likely is. It could have been abandoned. She could have made the sign herself, though it appeared to be a sign made by the local sheriff, so that she could perform the act of destroying it. Or someone put the sign up and she found its message so offensive that she seized it, stomped on it and crumpled it up for the illegal purpose of destroying someone else’s property.

It’s not a big crime, but it’s still a crime, a B misdemeanor in Utah. But it’s the enhancement with which she was charged that makes this otherwise petty wrong worthy of note. Continue reading →

The Battle of New York is raging again, although General Howe isn’t involved this time. Instead, it’s between the people fighting against the catastrophizing of crime and a hillbilly with a Yale law degree.

Serious question: I have to go to New York soon and I'm trying to figure out where to stay. I have heard it's disgusting and violent there. But is it like Walking Dead Season 1 or Season 4?

— J.D. Vance (@JDVance1) July 11, 2021

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Fencing doesn’t get much face time, even though there’s an allure to it from the outside because of its romantic, swashbuckling image. But actual competitive fencing requires an extremely good eye and a deep understanding of the sport. It happens at lightning speed, and requires a mental focus that few possess.

So a story about fencing in GQ in anticipation of the Olympics is kind of a big deal. Except the writer demonstrates no grasp of fencing, not that he lets his woeful ignorance of the sport influence his arrogance. But far worse is that he found the hook for his fencing story in one of the epees who will represented the United States at the Olympics, Curtis McDowald. Continue reading →

It was one of those “what do you think” calls from a friend, that was really a “here’s what I think and you should too” calls. He acknowledged that Trump’s lawsuit must be bonkers because all the lawyers say so, but wasn’t he “right, really”? Wasn’t it really true that but for Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, there would be no Twitter, no Facebook, no social media where most of the people can be found, and so becomes the de facto town square in a virtual town?

The discussion didn’t center on whether private corporations had a First Amendment right to speak as they chose, or not, or allow speech as they saw fit. Whether for good reason or no reason, they could shrug and trash any utterance, as they explained in their terms of service. Unfair? Arbitrary? Capricious? Where is the respect of principles of free speech, of diverse thought, of tolerance? A fair enough question, given how ham-handedly decisions appear to be made and the inability to argue your case with a sentient human being. Continue reading →

Right wing provocateur Andrew Breitbart once said “Politics flows downstream from culture.”

Sun-Tzu said in “The Art of War,” “If you know the enemy and you know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.”

With these sayings in mind and a dash of masochism in my heart, I started reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’ run* on “Captain America,” a seminal Marvel title I was sure he’d fuck up on some level. Continue reading →

A black ex-cop*, Eric Adams, won the Dem nomination for mayor of New York City, which apparently isn’t a big enough deal since New York City already had a black mayor, David Dinkins, and so he gets no victim points. But to get there, he won over the New York Times’ choice, Kathryn Garcia, and the AOC choice, Maya Wiley. Both are . . . women.

It was a constant refrain for the two leading female candidates running for mayor of New York City: The city has had 109 mayors, and all of them were men. It was finally time for a woman. Continue reading →

Some words have no purpose other than to be pejorative. The obvious example is the “N-word,” but there are plenty of others to cover Italians, Irish, Jews, Asians, Hispanics, and even French. In WWII, the Germans were called “krauts” and the Japanese were called “nips.” But these are slurs, created as slurs and for the purpose of slurring. They are meant to insult and dehumanize, even if they’re later adopted to seize the sting and turn it around, as did our forefathers with Yankee Doodle Dandy.

But “alien”? It’s a word with a longstanding legal definition and used regularly in statutes. It was sullied by use in the phrase “illegal alien,” for which there is no legal definition or legal usage, and is a misleading phrase in any event. This became the pejorative phrase. And because alien was so often used in this phrase, the stink of the first word rubbed off on the second. Continue reading →

Trump sued and lawyers laughed. The suit claims that social media giants violated the First Amendment by silencing the “Forty-Fifth president of the United States,” which we know because he included it in the caption. On the one hand, nobody does that. On the other, the claim is impossible because Facebook isn’t the government, and only the government can violate the First Amendment.

Legally, it’s worse than goofy, which explains why Dersh calls it the “most important First Amendment case of the 21st century.” This is worse than frivolous: for it to rise to the level of specious would require a complete reversal of American constitutional jurisprudence. But then, as legally absurd as the suit is, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost makes a pitch for a paradigm shift nonetheless. Continue reading →

The laws are bad. I’ve said it. Others have said it. Laws are not up to the job of addressing the myriad issues and problems. But the problem not only isn’t going away, no matter how passionate Judd Legum’s denials.

This is no small matter, given that many progressives have rested their entire defense of CRT on the idea that it’s a very narrowly defined aspect of elite law school training. Judd Legum, formerly of [the now defunct] ThinkProgress, has said the notion that CRT is taught in K-12 schools is a lie. During an extended and furiously unproductive debate on the subject, MSNBC’s Joy Reid accused Manhattan Institute scholar Christopher Rufo—the leading anti-CRT activist—of “making up your own thing, labeling it something that already existed as a name, slapped that brand name on it, and turned it into a successful political strategy.”

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