A 21-year-old woman used meth while she was pregnant. That this was a monumentally bad thing to do isn’t the question. There’s no really good time to use meth, and people who use meth tend to make monumentally bad choices, a minor detail often ignored by those who want to legalize drugs. But using meth while pregnant is worse than just being your everyday meth user. Does that make it manslaughter?

Brittney Poolaw, 21, was sentenced to four years in prison after the jury returned a guilty verdict earlier this month, according to ABC affiliate KSWO. An autopsy on Poolaw’s unborn child revealed it had died at 17 weeks.

Prosecutors alleged that Poolaw caused her child to be stillborn due to intravenous methamphetamine use.

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There you were, wearing your tightest Jordache jeans and a flammable Huckapoo shirt, and still you were on line praying the doorman would open the velvet ropes like he did as Halston walked past the bridge and tunnel crowd without breaking step. It was the age of disco and Studio 54 was queen, filled with the beautiful and famous, and not you.

And that was why you tried so very hard to get in. That was why you wanted to get in. Because it was a club that wouldn’t have you. Continue reading →

Its Virginia local proudly announced that it filed an amicus brief in a case involving teachers in Loudoun County.

The ACLU of Virginia filed an amicus brief in the Loudoun County Circuit Court on behalf of ACLU Virginia, ACLU, Equality Virginia, Equality Loudoun, Side By Side, and He She Ze and We. The brief, filed on October 13, 2021, is in opposition to an emergency petition and preliminary injunction request filed by the Alliance Defending Freedom on behalf Mr. Cross and his fellow plaintiffs.

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Assuming we can get past the cognitive dissonance of how the same government that’s so massively incompetent, if not venal, in the performance of functions you don’t like will miraculously perform sufficiently, if not spectacularly, when it comes to the execution of Biden’s “Build Back Better” reconciliation bill, the contents of which remain largely a mystery because, as Bernie Sanders contends, the media has done a crappy job of selling to the public as the bros expected it to do, the next question is “why?”

Some proponents of President Biden’s plans are inclined to grant Mr. Manchin’s point and then argue for programs like the child benefit on the grounds that it is a worthy kind of charity. Continue reading →

Protests in Portland caused substantial property damage and Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead. But this time, the Portland police stood down.

A crowd of 100 people wreaked havoc in downtown Portland, Oregon, this week – smashing storefront windows, lighting dumpsters on fire and causing at least $500,000 in damage – but police officers didn’t stop them.

Portland Police Bureau officials say that’s because of legislation passed by Oregon lawmakers this year, which restricts the tools they can use to confront people vandalizing buildings and causing mayhem. Continue reading →

Cathy Young wrote a great post at Arc Digital about the Othello outrage at the University of Michigan. John McWhorter followed it up with a post of his own at the New York Times. Both took the complaint of the students outraged by Sir Laurence Olivier in blackface seriously, and put in a good deal of effort to explain why it should not have generated the outrage it did.

When I wrote about the “incident,” I took a somewhat different tack. It wasn’t real. It was a manufactured outrage, a non-event that students who are finely attuned to reasons to see outrage saw outrage and acted upon it. Continue reading →

Did you know the Secretary of Transportation, Pete B-something, took family leave after he and his husband adopted twins? Tucker Carlson made a breastfeeding joke, because he’s an ass putting on a show for dopes, but then it’s not as if being a cabinet secretary, especially when container ships are stacked on one side while tractor trailers are parked on the other, might be a national supply chain issue.

And Buttigieg says he learned to appreciate the value of parental leave. Continue reading →

I signed my son up for karate this week. He’s finally into sports, and one that won’t (theoretically) give him a concussion or turn him into a toxic-masculinity-fueled youthful super-predator. Theoretically.

He deserves it. I’m proud to say attempt #2 at child rearing produced a selfless young man with incredible heart and a level of polite manners that would turn a society debutante’s head. Karate was the one thing yours truly could get behind that he really seemed to enjoy.

So I guess I’m a karate dad now. Continue reading →

The Presidential Commission on SCOTUS issued its “discussion materials,” more than 200 pages of incredibly exciting academically moderated words that largely ended up where pretty much everyone expected, whether because the commission was crafted for the purpose of going nowhere fast or because there was never any other serious option given that the cries for radical change to undo the putative conservative theft of the Court were childish and just as partisan, if not more, than Mitch McConnell’s refusing to give Merrick Garland a hearing.

And the people who expected otherwise are pissed. Continue reading →

Not that I was familiar with the organization before, and based on its board of advisers, it will no doubt be the target of the usual critics for whom people who are not progressive range from evil scum of the earth to black “centrist” race traitors, but this dissection and response to the open letter to President Biden from the National School Boards Association is pretty impressive. The organization is FAIR, Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism.

Its mission statement is unabashedly liberal, not in the sense of people calling progressives liberal but in the liberal ideals of civil rights, freedom and tolerance. You know, what liberal meant when conservatives tried to turn it into a dirty word back in the good old days. Continue reading →