For the most part, New York Times readers hate never-Trump conservative columnist Bret Stephens because they refuse to believe that their ideology might be wrong. But before the outcome of yesterday’s election was known, he wrote an op-ed about humility for both candidates. Buried in there was a reminder about the man we’ve somehow forgotten who, as it happens, is still president and will be for the next two and a half months.

What happens to presidents who think they have mandates when they don’t? Look at Joe Biden, who promised Americans he’d be a transitional president and then decided to take a run at being the second coming of Franklin Roosevelt. He hasn’t had a positive approval rating since September 2021.

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Not that we’ll have an answer this evening, or perhaps this week, but today is election day. Like its predecessors, we’re told this is the most important election in American history. Ultimately, someone will win and someone will not. Some of you will pretend otherwise, but you will be lying to yourselves. At this point, the polls inform us that the race is a toss-up and either candidate can win.

If you support Kamala Harris and she loses, why?

If you support Donald Trump and he loses, why? Continue reading →

The dreaded Federalist Society at Pace Law School decided to have a panel on New York’s Proposition 1. The program was packed and its moderators were thrilled at the prospect of holding such a popular event.

When Houston Porter, a 28-year-old law student at Pace University, first walked into the college auditorium last month, he was surprised to see a packed house for the “Saving Women’s Sports” panel he was co-moderating.

“Our events normally don’t get that kind of turnout,” says Porter, a member of the Federalist Society, a conservative group that sponsored the panel at Pace’s law school in White Plains, New York. “So it was exciting.”

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The original opinion, by Judge Jane Stranch, joined by Judge Stephanie Davis, with Judge Alice Batchelder dissenting, has now been vacated and will be reheard, en banc. At Volokh Conspiracy, Eugene revisits the initial ruling which, I contend, reflects an excellent example of the logical fallacy of “begging the question.”

The problem is that the rationale of the majority in the original opinion cannot reach a conclusion without deciding the merit of the underlying question as to the efficacy of gender identity. This is not to say which way the court should come out on the question, or what the right or wrong decision may be, but that skipping over the issue and assuming its legitimacy, as recognized in the Batchelder dissent, undermines the majority’s rationale. Continue reading →

Ed. Note: This is a reprise of a classic post about Mud Lick’s top cop, Sheriff Roy Templeton, following Chris Seaton’s unfortunate kiln accident which prevented him from writing a new post as well as wearing the Halloween orange and black panda costume purchased from Kmart with the bespoke codpiece.

Happy Halloween—ahh shit, that was yesterday wasn’t it? Well enjoy this spooky tale a day late-CLS

Mx. Roberta Finklestein (pronouns they/them, MA in Gender Studies, Oberlin 2010) was perplexed. For the life of them they couldn’t figure out why they’d been pulled over that day by a nice but rather imposing Latinx gentleman working for the Sheriff’s Department, cited, and told to appear at the station for questioning. Continue reading →

Remember reading Google’s terms of service? Neither does anyone else, because nobody does. We all click on the “yes” link that we’ve read and agreed to it because otherwise we can’t do whatever it is we were trying do when the TOS link popped up, and it’s not as if reading it opened up the possibility of engaging in negotiation with Google about what was fine and what was not so fine. It was take it or leave it, and leave it meant we didn’t get to use gmail, or whatever feature brought us there.

In legal parlance, one might characterize it as a “contract of adhesion.” Courts, on the other hand, treated it as if it was a legitimate contract, one that people entered into knowingly and willingly. After all, you clicked “yes,” didn’t you? Continue reading →

The event at the Statler was a job fair for ILRies in human resources. For those unfamiliar with Cornell University, the Statler is the home of the hotel school, and ILR stands for Industrial and Labor Relations,* another of Cornell’s colleges. The event, like so many campus events, evoked the outrage of the unduly passionate, who decided it was their duty to disrupt it and prevent it from happening.

Despite whatever one thinks of the intelligence of students at an Ivy League university, the students involved fell short of cognizance when a question was posed to Michael Kotlikoff, interim president and former provost of Cornell University. Continue reading →

There’s a television commercial running in New York about Mondaire Jones, a candidate for Congress, having called for defunding the police. Then came a television commercial wherein Jones replies that he said this when he was young and dumb. Another television commercial  was then broadcast saying that “young” was four years ago as he ran for Congress.

When it was said, it was the position of the progressive orthodoxy, and Jones chose to be an orthodox progressive. Was he really “young and dumb” back then? Perhaps, but then, is it really an excuse that he lacked the intelligence to realize it was a monumentally dumb idea or lacked the guts to reject the orthodoxy? Either way, he took a position that, today, would make him unelectable. What was he thinking back then? He wasn’t. And that’s true of a great many people who embraced the crazy when it was cool to be crazy and now need to wheedle their way out of their idiotic past positions. Continue reading →

Ed. Note: The idea for today’s post came from biochemistry prof Chris Halkides, who raised questions about whether teens are “amusing” themselves to death, or whether the First Amendment protects the right to engage with AI, regardless of outcome.

Fourteen-year-old Sewell Setzer III, a ninth-grader from Orlando, Florida, took his own life. Regardless of anything else, this is a tragedy, and as with most tragedies, people want to deal with the cause and prevent other teens and their families from suffering the same tragedy. But who’s to blame? Continue reading →

As I said when Biden withdrew and Kamala Harris was unceremoniously anointed as the Democratic Party candidate for president, I was open to being persuaded to support her. I watched her, listened to her, considered what she had to say. I continued to watch and listen, hoping that she would present herself in such a way as to give me a reason to vote for her. This continued up to the last Town Hall with Anderson Cooper on CNN.

Harris failed to persuade me to support her. Indeed, I found her canned, non-responses to the most obvious and easiest questions posed, disturbing. I have no idea whether she will support Israel given here inherently conflicted attempt to play both sides. I have no clue whether she will be the progressive she claimed to be in 2019 and for which her facile switcheroo “I’ve learned better” explanation doesn’t cut it for me. Will she be a moderate liberal or a woke progressive? To the extent she provides “hints,” she sometimes suggests the former, other times the latter. What she won’t do, and has studiously avoided doing, is giving a clear, firm answer. Continue reading →