As much as I abhor Trump for being a vulgar, amoral, lying ignoramus, neither one more voice saying it nor one more person harping on his every word, every move, every act, is going to change anything. Trump lied? Oh no, it’s another Tuesday at 10 a.m. So what? Who expected otherwise? And so if it goes without saying, don’t say it. There’s no reason.

It’s also bad tactics, despite the Trump-hating obsession so many carry, to exhaust any utility to challenging the president. People are so inured to attacks that they mean nothing, and nothing he says or does has much of an impact. One lie is an outrage. A million is a statistic. Things that would have toppled any administration before just roll off his back, both because he does such wildly inappropriate stuff so regularly and there is so much screeching that it’s just background noise at this point. No outrage lasts longer than a few hours, tops, before the next comes along and captures the moment. Continue reading →

The contrast is jarring. Videos were everywhere showing Kyle Rittenhouse shooting his rifle. Yet, there was a killing in Portland, a bullet to the chest that left one man dead, and the only piece of information about it is the hat.

The man who was shot and killed was wearing a hat with the insignia of Patriot Prayer, a far-right group based in Portland that has clashed with protesters in the past.

There may be video, but it’s not offered, no link, no embedded video. And apparently it doesn’t really do much to illuminate what happened. Continue reading →

National media’s attention focused on Tennessee about a week ago when Governor Bill Lee signed into law a bill potentially stripping protesters of their ability to vote. At least that was the attention-grabbing narrative during an election season rife with incessant screeching about voter suppression. The context of SB 8005 adds no shine to the law and blunts that narrative’s credibility.

As interest and energy waned in Seattle’s “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone,” talk of establishing a similar community in Nashville started briefly on social media. Governor Lee wasn’t keen on a similar “summer of love” in Music City, warning protesters Nashville would never allow a Volunteer State version of CHAZ. Continue reading →

The looting and rioting was the outgrowth of the news that police had killed yet another man, except the man was a killer himself, and then killed himself as the police were about to arrest him. It doesn’t take much to light a tinder box, especially one where you get free stuff. Well, free for looters. Whoever had it before had to pay for it, but if you make up stuff about how people you don’t know are undeserving or evil, it all becomes magically fine.

Then the Minneapolis police came and someone in the crowd decided to engage in mostly peaceful protest. Continue reading →

This week I’m telling you my all-time favorite “crazy but true” story. It’s about the time “The Tennessee Stud,” Ron Fuller, wrestled in the Bahamas.* I first heard Ron tell it a couple of years ago and this unbelievable yarn still tickles me to this day. My problem is any written version of this won’t nearly do it as much justice as if you heard it from the man himself. Check the link at the bottom of the post to remedy that.

“Dynasty” is an excellent term to describe the Fuller/Welch family’s impact on the wrestling world. Their influence spans 90 years across four generations. Countless grapplers learned the business from the family.** Ron’s grandfather, Roy Welch,*** was a master promoter with a knack for turning a dying town into a cash cow for the wrestling business.**** Continue reading →

Ed. Note: Greg Prickett is a former police officer and supervisor who went to law school, hung out a shingle, and now practices criminal defense and family law in Fort Worth, Texas. While he was a police officer, he was a police firearms instructor, and routinely taught armed tactics to other officers.

There is further information relevant to the situation in Kenosha on more than one front. This deals with both the situation with Jacob Blake and the situation with Kyle Rittenhouse. I imagine that both sides are not going to like what I have to say, not that this will stop me from saying it. Continue reading →

It’s been obvious for a long time, though denied with a vehemence that only the unduly passionate could love: Identity trumps facts, law and reality. Orin Kerr summed it up.

These days, if it's announced that X assaulted Y, a lot of people can't decide whether that's good or bad until they know the politics of X, Y, and the reporter who wrote the announcement.

That's not good.

— Orin Kerr (@OrinKerr) August 28, 2020

Simultaneously the excuses and condemnations fly, ranging from the inane to the outright lies, all to achieve the only possible outcome: as to the shooting of Jacob Blake, that this was a clear example of racist police attempting to murder a black man, and as to Kyle Rittenhouse, that he was a white-supremacist vigilante out to murder protesters. Continue reading →

At Reason, Zuri Davis runs through the failures, bit by bit, of how Tennessee cops searching for a 16-year-old suspected of breaking into cars managed to not merely end up pointing guns at a naked woman in her own home after breaking down her door because she didn’t open it within 30 seconds, but it ended up being the wrong house.

Several minutes later, the officers told Hines they had the wrong home.

How is that possible? Continue reading →

The rape and murder happened in 1983. At the time, people thought we were a fairly advanced society. Horses had long since given way to cars. We had science. The law had gone through the Warren Court and come out better on the other side, protecting the rights of defendants in what today might be considered some social justice fashion. So a conviction for a rape and murder in 1985 had to be pretty reliable, because we were a caring, smart, advanced nation trying to do the right thing.

Yet, the conviction of then-18, now-55, year-old Robert DuBoise, by a unanimous jury beyond a reasonable doubt, got everything wrong. Every single thing wrong. Continue reading →

Ed. Note: Greg Prickett is a former police officer and supervisor who went to law school, hung out a shingle, and now practices criminal defense and family law in Fort Worth, Texas. While he was a police officer, he was a police firearms instructor, and routinely taught armed tactics to other officers.

In 1862, in Minnesota on the Lower Sioux Indian Reservation, the Santee Dakota Indians were starving to death. They had agreed to cede land to the United States and move onto the reservation, and the government agreed to provide for their needs, including food.[1]

In 2020, blacks had suffered for years with young blacks being killed by police officers, culminating in the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, without officers being held accountable for misconduct.[2] In both cases, the affected population did what people do when they have taken all that they can take and have no other readily available options—they reacted with violence.[3] Continue reading →