Category Archives: Uncategorized

But For Video: Intercept’s “Wide Angle” Smear

Remember the video of Antifa in Portland smashing the windows of the Democratic Party office? Well, it definitely happened, but you shouldn’t believe it happened because it was captured by video taken by the right wing #Riot Squad. It wasn’t fake video. It was absolutely real video. But it was bad video and the Intercept can prove it.

On the air, Ingraham attributed the destruction to “antifa thugs,” using the right-wing shorthand that lumps everyone with left-of-center politics into one undifferentiated mass. Rosas, who was standing in front of a Circle-A — a symbol for anarchism, not anti-fascism — that had been spray-painted beside the ruined front door of the Democratic Party office, made no effort to correct her. Continue reading →

Short Take: Fulton County District Attorney Tested

Robert Long murdered eight people in Atlanta, six of whom were Asian women. If convicted, he will not be breathing free air ever again. But that wasn’t good enough for Fani Willis, District Attorney of Fulton County who ran for office as a progressive prosecutor against the death penalty.

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The Word: Punch

Among the great many flagrant failings of the woke is violence. It was once about punching Nazis, but has metastasized since into justified violence against anyone who doesn’t share their religion. But it’s unfair to chalk up the provocation faced by 27-year-old Corey Pujols, the manager of a Dunkin’ (formerly Donuts) when a 77-year-old angry customer pushed his button. Twice.

A Dunkin’ employee faces a manslaughter charge after punching a customer who then fell, hit his head and later died, police say.

The single punch that led to the arrest of 27-year-old Corey Pujols was thrown May 4 at the Dunkin’ store in the Marathon gas station at 410 S 50th St., just south of the Lee Roy Selmon Expressway, according to an arrest report. Pujols told police the man called him a racial slur.

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Short Take: H.R. 1 and The Secret Game of Jurisdiction

Gaming venue is a time-honored endeavor for lawyers. Who doesn’t try to find the most amenable court possible to pursue their claim? Of course, courts don’t always play along, sending you back to where you should have been in the first place, if not dismissing your case as a reminder that games have losers. And now Congress wants in on the action.

Court picking is when Congress uses its authority over federal-court jurisdiction to stuff politically sensitive cases from throughout the country into one court that leans its way, to be buried there for as long as possible. Court-picking’s evil genius is its stealth. Americans would notice four new justices, but not changes to technocratic statutes that excite only civil-procedure professors. Despite featuring in Congress’s most radioactive bill—the so-called For the People Act, or H.R.1, which would transform elections and limit Americans’ rights to speak about them—court-picking has escaped notice.

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A Good Stop, Twisted

Did you hear about the horrible racist stop of Juanisha Brooks? It was just a routine traffic stop in Virginia, with no one hurt, not even prosecuted, but still it made the New York Times because it proved systemic racism and people must know what happened.

Two troopers stopped Ms. Brooks, 34, around 2:21 a.m. after following her car past roughly two or three exits on the Capitol Beltway. According to a police report, her taillights were not turned on, she had twice followed “too close” to surrounding vehicles and she had failed to signal when changing lanes.

During the stop, Ms. Brooks said in an interview on Tuesday, the trooper who approached her did not tell her why she was being pulled over even though she asked repeatedly.

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Tuesday Talk*: Voir Dire Behind The Mask

In the early days of the pandemic, the conflicts quickly emerged. People were arrested but not arraigned because there were no judges sitting on benches to do so. They were detained but not indicted because there were no grand juries to hear the case. They remained in jail awaiting trial but not tried, because the courts were shut down and there were no juries. Bit by bit, adjustments were made, from conducting trials over Zoom to masked and socially distanced jurors.

On the one hand, having a defendant sit in jail because the system shut down was a disaster, particularly when the length of time awaiting the system to ramp up sufficiently to at least address the poor guy’s incarceration could easily exceed any punishment that might follow. On the other hand, the adjustments made were, to be blunt, inadequate. Zoom trials? Masked  witnesses and jurors? Was this good enough to satisfy due process? After all, we might be in the midst of a pandemic, but did that mean constitutional protections for defendants were suspended while the wheels of the system continued to grind? Continue reading →

No Safe Choices For Birthing Persons

When I saw the title of Elizabeth Bruenig’s op-ed, I skipped over it. My child-having and rearing days are long behind me, and while the love-hate relationship between Millennial parents and  their children over who gets to be the center of attention may fascinate them, it doesn’t do much for me. But that was a mistake on my part, because I read the headline through Boomer eyes, not realizing that there is nothing so banal, not even the decision to have children, that can’t be twisted into a culture war battle.

Millennial women in the United States are waiting longer than any generation in recorded history to have children, a trend that’s raised the rate of births among 30-somethings to a 50-year high. They didn’t start the trend, but they’ve taken it to new heights. “While slightly more than half (53 percent) of women in their early 40s in 1994 had become mothers by age 24,” one 2018 data analysis published by the Pew Research Center observed, “this share was 39 percent among those who were in this age group in 2014.” Yesterday’s geriatric is today’s “Juno.”

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The Health Care Aide Conundrum

Medical science can keep us alive well beyond our expiration date. That was what my father told me when he was in his 90s, a message I understood. He was alive, as long as breathing was all one wanted from life, but he struggled to walk, to remember names, to manage his personal hygiene. The problem was that he knew he was failing, his life pretty much sucked, but there he was, waking up every morning anyway. He wasn’t about to do anything to change the status quo, but when it came, he was ready and it was fine with him. He remembered what it was like to be able to enjoy life.

As the population ages, and it is indeed aging thanks to medical science’s ability to keep blood pumping if no other part of our anatomy, the need for care becomes increasingly problematic. First, caring for the elderly isn’t exactly a fun job, even if they can be cute at times. Their needs are constant. Senile dementia isn’t as adorable as they make it look in the movies. They can be downright unpleasant and demanding, often quite offensive without being entirely responsible for what they say and do. Who wants a job like that? Continue reading →