Somebody wrote something and somebody thought it was crap. This isn’t breaking news. When the blawgosphere was in its early days, and cheerleaders were extolling its virtues as the new normal where everybody could show the world their brilliance, I had a cute sound bite: Anybody can blawg. Everybody cannot.

Put something up on the screen and see what happens. Some people are going to find out that nobody wants to read it. Maybe because they’re boring. Maybe because they suck at writing. Maybe because they have nothing to say. The possibilities are endless.

But some people are going to attract some attention, though not the attention they want. Somebody is going to call your baby ugly. Somebody is going to say you’re wrong, your writing is idiotic, you, dear writer, are a moron. Yesterday, I was informed that a lot of people think I’m a “major league twat.”

Here’s the sad news. Not everybody is going to love you. Not everybody will think you’re as brilliant as you think you are. Me either. As regular readers here know, I’m told all the time how wrong I am. BFD. Continue reading →

In a series of twits, Suzanne Maloney of the Brookings Institute, a liberal-leaning think tank, and a former executive of ExxonMobil, did the unthinkable. She explained why the leaked news that Trump would name Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State wasn’t so terrible.

The knives had already come out to slice and dice the choice, with superficial assumptions, the sort of routine quasi-informative arguments that are deeply persuasive to people who prefer not to know too much, think too hard, and appreciate any reason to persist in hating whomever they hate.

Maloney’s twits were dangerous, heresy. They suggested that Trump’s choice may not be a poor one at all, that Tillerson might be a reasonable pick. It wasn’t so much that her twits were a conclusive vindication of the choice, but that they forced one to think beyond seeking excuses to hate everything Trump is doing. If you believe with certainty that Trump is “literally Hitler,” then the last thing you want to hear is that he may not be as terrible, or at least that every decision he makes, everything he does, isn’t absolutely horrifying.

No one can force anyone to think. No one can force anyone to believe what they don’t want to believe. And the same elites who were so certain that Trump could never be elected have chosen not to believe Trump. Continue reading →

Stew 1: 27C is feeling a bit hungry.

Stew 2: Oh my, I will rush over there with a delightful raspberry scone immediately.

Fantasy? Not if British Airways gets its way.

British Airways is looking to automate its service by getting passengers to swallow a pill that will communicate your needs to their crew.

British Airways is investigating getting passengers to swallow ‘digital pills’ that will tell flight staff if they are feeling comfortable.

The ‘ingestible sensors’ will be able to beam wirelessly health information from inside a customer’s body – and be used to help ensure travellers suffer minimal jet-lag.

The information could be used to indicate if a passenger is awake, asleep, hungry, nervous, hot, cold or uncomfortable.

Seriously? Apparently so. Continue reading →

The peculiar belief of college administrators that their special authority exempts their campus from the laws that apply to the unwashed is bad enough. But what of the mere professor who believes that, of all places in the nation, his classroom is sacred?  A University of Illinois-Urbana prof learned otherwise.

Erik McDuffie, professor of history and African-American studies at the University of Illinois.

A hunt for a stolen cellphone at the University of Illinois has triggered a debate about when campus police can enter a classroom.

Triggered? The question of how a college chooses to deploy its campus police may well be a subject of debate, but the question is not whether they “can” enter a classroom. There is no debate: any damn time they please. Whether they should may well be a different question.

But then, why would this be an issue? Continue reading →

The parting gift of the Obama Department of Housing and Urban Development to residents of public housing is air. Not exactly clean air, but air free of cigarette smoke. Those who find smoking repugnant will applaud, noting that no one should be forced to smell the acrid odor of another person’s foul and cancerous habit. That smoking is dangerous is beyond question, though the effects of second hand smoke may be over-hyped, even if for good intentions.

But has the regulation of smoking now come to a place too close to home? For residents of public housing, the existence of which is a recognition that even those who can’t afford a brownstone on Sutton Place ought to have a roof over their heads, the nannies who know what’s best for them are now in their home to dictate acceptable conduct within their own home.

The New York Times Room for Debate, in one of the most New York-ish, not to mention Times-ish, debates ever, questions whether banning conduct within a person’s home is “heavy handed.” It was a two-person debate, both of whom began with serious Gertruding. Bronx NYC councilman Ritchie Torres supports the move. Continue reading →

There was an open question when Tyler Kingkade left his position as Huff Po’s staunchest neo-feminist ally to go to Buzzfeed whether he would persist in being the go-to apologist for sad tears and big lies. That question has now been answered. You go, girl.

College students punished for sexual assault would have their transcripts reflect their disciplinary history under a new bill proposed Thursday by Rep. Jackie Speier, a Democrat from California.

The Safe Transfer Act would require information about sexual assault charges to stay on a student’s transcript for five years after their disciplinary case settles. Colleges would also be required to disclose case results to officials at any other postsecondary institution that the accused student tried to attend. If a student was cleared, the case would be not added to their transcript.

The Scarlet Letter, that was once a joke in order to excuse the kangaroo college courts that didn’t need to be fair, to be competent, to provide due process because they didn’t really do anything according to pundits like Kingkade, is back. This time, a member of Congress wants to make it federal law so no neo-rapist gets away with it. Kingkade dutifully sells his wares, shilling for Jackie Speier, the Democratic representative of the 14th Congressional District of California, and the one in four women who will cry rape in college. Continue reading →

Today is my old friend, Carolyn Elefant’s, fourteenth anniversary of her blog, My Shingle. Carolyn started as the voice of solo lawyers in the blawgosphere, unattached to a practice area or substantive law, but advocating for solo lawyers as legitimate professionals rather than inferior “bumbling and harried rubber-soled creature[s] with a cheap briefcase bursting at the seams.”

Certainly I can’t deny that lots of great things have come out of blogging. Blogging has spawned wonderful, genuine friendships with other lawyers all over the country and given me a megaphone to voice my crazy views on the practice of law and our changing profession to a far broader audience than I could have ever accessed through the traditional legal trade press.

But then, fourteen years later little has really changed. Carolyn write sporadically these days, and even her anniversary post is caught up in the fake news fever of the moment, which too shall pass.  Continue reading →

At Turley’s blog, he writes of Israeli Interior Minister, Aryeh Dery’s, decision not to allow entry to an advocate of the BDS movement.

For the first time, Israel has denied entry to a prominent traveler due to her part advocacy of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. African theologian and academic Isabel Phiri is an assistant general secretary with the World Council of Churches in Geneva. She was refused a visa at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Monday afternoon. 

Who?

Phiri was a professor of African theology, and head of the school of religion, philosophy and classics at the University of KwaZulu Natal in South Africa. The WCC represents churches, denominations and church fellowships in more than 110 countries with more than 500 million Christians. That includes a wide array of Anglican, Baptist, Lutheran, Methodist and Reformed churches, as well as many United and independent churches. The ministry noted the WCC engaged in pro-Palestinian activities, including observers to Palestinian areas.

Continue reading →

This was a surprise. Linda Greenhouse, despite her many years of writing about law and courts, her position as a lecturer at Yale Law School following her retirement as legal pundit at the New York Times, apparently had an epiphany. The person elected president not only gets to nominate justices of the Supreme Court, but lower court federal judges as well.

As is mandated by the current journalistic regime, she opens with an anecdote to set the appropriate emotional tone:

In a recent issue of Judicature, an academic journal for judges published by Duke University Law School, Timothy J. Corrigan, a federal district judge in Florida, reflected on “the most multifaceted, emotional, and challenging task a judge performs ” — sentencing convicted criminal defendants. Judge Corrigan wrote about the broad discretion that district judges exercise, describing experiences from his 14 years on the bench that were both heart-rending (tear-stained letters from young children begging mercy for their parents) and hair-raising (an assassination attempt). The article’s title, across the journal’s front cover, said it all: “Who Appointed Me God?”

Ironically, Judge Corrigan, sensitive soul that he was, was appointed by George W. Bush, the president most reviled by progressives ever until the next Republican president. The president who gave us Sam Alito. Is Shrub suddenly looking good, or is there some other point to be made here? Continue reading →

The president of the American Bar Association, Linda Klein, whose slogan was “Defending Liberty, Pursuing Justice,” has announced its demise.

The ABA hasn’t aged well. It’s been taken over by the fragile, the intellectually weak, the dishonest, who have subverted the organization to their fantasy of social justice at the expense of the Constitution.  And now. under the “leadership” of Klein, it has publicly announced that it will fight against the First Amendment to the Constitution, the defense of free speech, and has forsaken any claim to defend liberty or support the rule of law. Continue reading →