The house was in a quiet neighborhood and was well priced. Roy Thorne was in the market to buy, and real estate agent Eric Brown was in the business to show. And “elderly” neighbors  across the street were in the business of keeping their eyes out for burglars.

Someone was arrested a week earlier after breaking into the house, the statement said. The neighbor thought Mr. Brown’s car, a black Hyundai Genesis, looked like a black Mercedes-Benz sedan that had been parked in the driveway at the time of the previous arrest, according to a recording of the call provided by the police.

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It’s hard to comprehend why anyone who could get the vaccine would not. That may be because I’m a lawyer, and know only what I’ve read about its efficacy even though my family and I have made the decision to be fully vaccinated. It’s hard to explain why so many people in health care have chosen not to, although I’ve been told they have a far greater fear of unknown side effects than most. Some will chalk it up to right wing ideology, but that’s inaccurate and serves only to validate the intolerance of the left.

There are an array of reasons why people decide against getting vaccinated. There are the conspiracy theory nuts and there are people who have weighed the costs and benefits and chosen against it. And there are some for whom the practical barriers remain a reason, although like blaming MAGA nuts, it’s exaggerated as a universal excuse for the marginalized cohort just as Trumpkin lunacy is exaggerated to blame the wingnuts. Continue reading →

There are some exceptionally worthwhile lessons to be learned from participating in competitive sports. One, for example, is that there are winners and losers, and if you want to be the winner, you have to work harder than the next person. Another is that no matter how hard you work, you won’t always win. Take losing as gracefully as winning, as they’re both part of the deal. These are lessons that will serve a person well in their life as well as their sport.

But if you participate in a sport that isn’t destined to land you in a million dollar contract, then you compete for the joy of the sport. Some people thrive on the stress of top-level competition and some burn out from it. Some days you’re up for the challenge and some days you just don’t have it in you. Continue reading →

Senator Bill Proxmire used to give out the Golden Fleece Award for government pissing away money on absurdly expensive, completely pointless and massively failed projects. Whether he was right or wrong in any given award, what he accomplished was making public what Congress buried in long bills that purportedly served worthy purposes and how federal agencies used their putative mandates for purposes never imagined.

Biden came into office promising “bold and transformative” initiatives. They were a bit costly, upping Senator Everett Dirksen’s “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money,” into the trillions. But if you want to reimagine everything, it won’t come cheap. So how did that work out? Continue reading →

Are you expecting a visit from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, or any of the other members of “The Squad” in your immediate future? Does the thought of dealing with air-headed idiots make you squirm in your seat?

Fear not, dear reader. I have taken it upon myself to create a letter you too can share with the Squad member coming to your hometown letting them know you’re not happy with their presence. There’s a bit of material here, so feel free to copy and paste at your convenience!

Dear (insert Squad member here—use their title as well, let’s be courteous!): Continue reading →

Saying what FDR would have done is a lot like saying what would Jesus have done, both because nobody knows and because it can’t be proven false since neither FDR nor Jesus is around to say otherwise. But after four years of a rogue presidency where courts were denigrated for not serving their master, where law and the Constitution were routinely ignored, either out of basic ignorance or a more Nixonian arrogance, Biden’s White House counsel and the courts had no doubt that the CDC did not have the authority to issue an eviction moratorium.

In the face of an expired moratorium, a recessed Congress, Rep. Cori Bush embarrassing the administration by sleeping on the Capital steps and a formerly-respected Harvard law professor who spent the past four years disgracing himself with absurd legalish claims, but who now manufactured a nonsensical theory to distinguish a new moratorium from the clearly illegal one worthy of Rudy Giuliani’s and the Krakens, Biden and the White House shut their eyes tight and dove off the ledge. Continue reading →

As progressives continue to lament the likelihood that the Supreme Court will not serve their cause of reinventing the Constitution via lawfare to accomplish what they have proven unable to do because Congress is paralyzed and people in America don’t want to live in their woke Utopia, a new front has opened on the Great Awokening.

The 26th Amendment to the Constitution took effect 50 years ago this summer, extending the right to vote to all Americans age 18 and older. It was the fourth amendment in the span of a decade, three of which expanded voting rights — a burst of democratic reform nearly unequaled in the nation’s history. Continue reading →

When last surveyed, the results were pretty clear. Hispanics didn’t care to be called Latinx.

More recently, a new, gender-neutral, pan-ethnic label, Latinx, has emerged as an alternative that is used by some news and entertainment outlets, corporations, local governments and universities to describe the nation’s Hispanic population.

However, for the population it is meant to describe, only 23% of U.S. adults who self-identify as Hispanic or Latino have heard of the term Latinx, and just 3% say they use it to describe themselves, according to a nationally representative, bilingual survey of U.S. Hispanic adults conducted in December 2019 by Pew Research Center.

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After release of the report by outside counsel prepared under the auspices of New York Attorney General Letitia James, there was a near-universal call for Governor Andrew Cuomo to resign. From President Biden, irony aside, to the New York Times, irony aside, to people in his own office, irony aside, the report sealed the deal.

It was, to be sure, a serious and devastating report. Much of it was the usual empty “inappropriate” stuff, the normative rhetoric that Cuomo said things that people found unpleasant or creepy, at least after the fact. There were also some actual claims about touching breasts and buttocks, and some other touching that was just weird and creepy. Continue reading →

It was clear that the end of the pandemic eviction moratorium was going to produce our now normal toxic mix of mindless hysteria, as if it comes as a surprise that it would, eventually, end and tenants would have to pay up what they didn’t pay, whether because they couldn’t afford to pay or could get away with not paying, since the moratorium began.

Did renters think that once the moratorium was over, they would be forgiven the rental payments they didn't make during the pandemic?

— Scott Greenfield (@ScottGreenfield) August 1, 2021

With Congress away on vacation, except for thrice-evicted Rep. Cori Bush who has taken to sleeping on the steps of capital to get her name in the paper, the moratorium reached its sunset as the Supreme Court anticipated when it gave the case a pass until the end of July, despite the clear admonition that the CDC had no authority to issue such a mandate. Continue reading →