Bail has become a controversial subject, much like weather. Everybody talks about it but few do anything. Google has decided that the woke thing to do is ban bail bond ads from its service, as bondsmen have been vilified as profiteers in the contoversy. And former Department of Justice icons of wokeness think that’s groovy.

No one should be incarcerated simply because they can’t afford not to be. I applaud @Google for taking the unprecedented step today of banning ads for bail bonds from its platforms. https://t.co/jrzOsh8Icg pic.twitter.com/3LijJA5u3X

— Vanita Gupta (@vanitaguptaCR) May 7, 2018

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Hey, if you’re going to believe anything anyone says when it tugs on your heartstrings, why not the cops? After all, who doesn’t love the cute, adorable drug-sniffing dogs?

The training director of a police K-9 academy in Illinois claims that if the state legalizes recreational marijuana, it will likely have to euthanize “a number” of its pot-sniffing dogs, The Pantagraph reports.

There are approximately 275 trained narcotic K-9s in Illinois, with each costing the department thousands of dollars. Replacing the dogs would cost millions, and Chad Larner, the director of Maron County’s K-9 Training Academy, said “retraining” the dogs would be “extreme abuse.”

Not just abuse, which would be horrifying and exhausting, but “extreme abuse.” Would you want a dog to suffer extreme abuse? What kind of a human being are you? Continue reading →

Is your work about performing your job, or is half your time, maybe more, about filling out the paperwork that administrators require of you? Or dealing with the concerns of support staff, for whom you are now their support staff? Has real work become secondary?

For a number of years now, I have been conducting research on forms of employment seen as utterly pointless by those who perform them. The proportion of these jobs is startlingly high. Surveys in Britain and Holland reveal that 37 to 40 percent of all workers there are convinced that their jobs make no meaningful contribution to the world. And there seems every reason to believe that numbers in other wealthy countries are much the same. There would appear to be whole industries — telemarketing, corporate law, financial or management consulting, lobbying — in which almost everyone involved finds the enterprise a waste of time, and believes that if their jobs disappeared it would either make no difference or make the world a better place.

Kinda makes me proud not to practice corporate law.  Continue reading →

New York’s now-ex-Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman fell from grace in the course of half a news cycle. He denies wrongdoing, but that’s no longer relevant.

Until Monday evening New York’s Attorney General Eric Schneiderman was a public champion of the #MeToo movement. Now he appears to be the latest sickening example of the scale and insidiousness of the cruelty that movement is confronting. He resigned late Monday after The New Yorker magazine published an article in which four women accused him of abusing them physically and emotionally.

Ronan Farrow ruled. Can there be any doubt after judgment has been handed down?  Continue reading →

Ed Mullins has a way with words. A really bad way with words.

You are all a disgrace. You sit on your ass and target the NYPD all while growing up on the nipple of what’s easy. You have no clue what a NYPD officer does yet target us and disparage our integrity. One day you will dial 911 when evil is at your door and thank god for the NYPD. https://t.co/8I00FD7hny

— SBA (@SBANYPD) May 5, 2018

Mullins is the president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, the second-string bargaining unit in the NYPD. And it’s his job to say whatever he must to defend the honor of his union members or get ousted and be required to work for a living. Continue reading →

Nice business you have there. It would be a shame if anything happened to it. Whether the threat comes from the mob or the governor, it’s not a threat one takes lightly in New York. This time, Gov. Andrew Cuomo has ordered it be used against the National Rifle Association.

“I am directing the Department of Financial Services to urge insurers and bankers statewide to determine whether any relationship they may have with the NRA or similar organizations sends the wrong message to their clients and their communities who often look to them for guidance and support,” the governor wrote in a statement.

Whether anyone looks to bankers and insurers for “guidance and support” is a question few consider, probably because no one has ever done so, but what other words could Andy use to explain why he was using his authority over regulatory agencies to deny basic availability of private services to an organization that supported a cause he didn’t? He has to say something, and “because they’re awful and we need to destroy them” sounds a little negative. Nobody likes a governor who is negative. Continue reading →

The Connecticut Supreme Court reversed Michael Skakel’s murder conviction. Years ago, this would have been huge, but memories fade. The murder occurred in 1975. Skakel was convicted in 2002. His conviction was vacated in 2013, and reinstated in 2016. Now it’s been reversed again and remanded for a new trial. The basis was ineffective assistance of counsel.

Almost no one gets a reversal based on Strickland, as the test is essentially impossible to meet. Skakel did.

Mickey Sherman is a handsome guy with one of the most magnificent smiles ever. For a while, his smiling face was everywhere. He was a media darling, available on a moment’s notice for every cable new show. He knew which green rooms had the good food and which served tap water. He was, for a brief and shining moment, the media’s “It” lawyer. Heady times to be Mickey Sherman. Continue reading →

Trump says they’re all rapists. Some people in Arizona applauded Crazy Joe’s roundups of everybody with an accent, darkish skin or a vowel on the end of their name. But yesterday, on the fifth, people held parties, drank Coronas with a wedge of lime, ate guac without peas and maybe wore a sombrero.

Most of the festivities surrounding #CincodeMayo in the US are textbook examples of cultural appropriation, relegating the history and culture of Mexican people to novelty items. Mexican culture cannot be reduced to tacos, oversized sombreros and piñatas. https://t.co/kffsaJWPUJ

— Southern Poverty Law Center (@splcenter) May 5, 2018

It’s absurd enough that a once-honorable group has allowed itself to become a parody in search of a mission, but what could be gained by shifting from condemning lynchings and unmasking the Klan to scolding party-goers for enjoying a taco? Continue reading →

The first thrust was to include more writers of color, but once Reedies Against Racism tasted blood, they went for it all. And they got it.

Reedies Against Racism, a student group at Reed College, is demanding that the school’s Humanities 110 course remove all European texts and replace them with non-European reading materials as “reparations for Humanities 110’s history of erasing the histories of people of color, especially black people.”

Those classics that every moderately well-educated person reads in college? Racist. All white men, Europeans. And they even came up with a cool name for it. Continue reading →

Following news of Eastern District of Virginia Judge T.S. Ellis’ putting some pointed questions to Michael Dreeban, the prosecutor from Bob Mueller’s Special Counsel office prosecuting former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, a segment of the internet exploded in outrage at his disrespectful lack of civility.

“I don’t see what relation this indictment has with anything the special counsel is authorized to investigate,” he said, according to a transcript of the hourlong hearing on a defense motion to dismiss the charges. He added, “What we don’t want in this country is we don’t want anyone with unfettered power.”

Of course, this was a judge appointed by Reagan, so he must have been biased, as is assumed these days of all judges by dint of their patrons. That made his more explicit question all the more uncivil. Continue reading →