... it is now up to the Justice Department and the FBI to justify their actions to the American public. They must explain why a different standard appears to have been applied to Democrats such as Clinton and Berger than to Republicans such as Trump and many of his associates.
Yesterday I had occasion to look back at a bunch of old pictures from twenty years ago, trying to find a particular photo I remembered. I was struck by how much my life has followed the patterns I adopted in that period of adulthood. In my early twenties and teenage years I lived at home and went to school, and my father set the rhythm of our lives. By my mid-twenties, however, I had moved out and begun to explore things; I moved to Savannah in pursuit of a woman, married her, we went to grad school (her in fine arts, myself in history) and then moved to China and had adventures. After I returned, though, we settled down into a life that is recognizably similar to that which came afterwards.
This is true in spite of the fact that many major changes happened in the subsequent period. We had our son, I went to war (three times, once as a correspondent for the Long War Journal to the Special Operations Task Force - Philippines, and then twice to Iraq as a participant in the conflict). We moved many times, shifted from renting to owning a home, sold homes and moved twice more. I sought and obtained a doctorate in philosophy. I published books and many essays. My father died, I took up firefighting and wilderness rescue, I learned to ride a horse and rode almost every day for more than a year, I learned to ride motorcycles and still ride every day or nearly so.
Yet I see a clear picture of life in the pictures of me standing beside stacks of firewood, the pictures of me working on various trucks, and the pictures of me hiking or camping in the wilderness. Mostly the cold months have been heated with firewood, which is a rhythm of its own. We are a little behind this year due to a minor injury that kept me from starting for a couple of months. I prefer when wood is cut and split in the spring, cured through the summer and early autumn, and ready to warm you by Christmas. This year I am still splitting in August, though some of it has been split since May. For about a quarter of each year one is bucking wood some days and splitting on others. Today my now-adult son and I split some fine straight-grained red oak, and it will burn beautifully in the cold months.
The trucks always need work, too; it's always one thing or another. Today I intend to change the coil pack on my Jeep, which still has a cylinder that is firing improperly in spite of new plugs and plug wires. My Ford is having powertrain issues that are computer- and sensor-related. I can diagnose those with an OBD-II cord and my laptop, which is new. I've changed two tires in the last few weeks, oil and filters also.
And always there are the mountains, which with one exception our moves have kept us as close to as possible. Now we are right up among them. The air is clean and the people are fewer. Wild animals make better neighbors, both because they are less offensive and because you can always eat them if they ever do become a problem.
Heaven was so close Mark Tushnet could feel the years rolling off him.Tushnet was a 70-year-old Harvard Law professor in 2016, but he evinced the youthful zeal of a Harvard undergraduate when he published a manifesto that May encouraging his fellow progressives to start imagining the possibilities of a reinvigorated progressive jurisprudence that would be ushered in by Hillary Clinton. Adverse precedents “overruled at the first opportunity.” Judicial nominees in the mold of Thurgood Marshall. Defeated social conservatives treated like the losers in World War II. The days of “looking over [your] shoulders” in fear of the conservative bogeyman are over, he exhorted. The time for “abandoning defensive crouch liberal constitutionalism,” as he titled his blog post, had come.
The organization's research started with a control group of voters, and asked them whether they agreed or disagreed with this statement: "Overall, I trust the process for counting votes in our elections."Initially, 63% of voters said they did.But when another group of voters was asked the same question after reading a statement that included things like "political candidates can challenge election results. But our system requires proof and following the law" and "let's keep improving our elections and make them more fair, equal, and transparent" that number went up to 72% of voters.
As I was saying at D29's place yesterday, it's really striking that they have added the ANCAP flag to this list of 'militant violent extremists.' "[ANCAPs] believe in the Nonaggression Principle. It’s a core value of the movement. The only way they’re a threat of violence is if you are the aggressor."
Garland said that while the law provides an exception in order to prevent the death of a pregnant woman, "it includes no exception for cases in which the abortion is necessary to prevent serious jeopardy to the woman's health."
I think there is both a genuine concern here and also a politically motivated move. On the one hand, there are reports that doctors are delaying carrying out an abortion up until the point that a woman's life is obviously and incontestably endangered even though it is obvious much earlier that this point is going to be reached. There is no reason to delay what is ultimately going to be necessary, making the woman run risks and suffer just to provide a blanket to protect doctors in court. Some women may risk dying or suffering irreparable harm over that, and it's not ultimately going to save the life of the child. It's pointless and either cruel or cowardly to push suffering onto the woman in order to protect the doctor's career.
On the other hand, creating a broad exception will end up excusing a number of cases that are fringe or vague cases. This is clearly part of the intent, given that the real desire is to have abortion legal (and paid for by taxpayers) in all cases whatsoever. This is on the same principle Richard the Lionheart cited in assigning Friar Tuck his bucks:
“I understand thee,” said the King, “and the Holy Clerk shall have a grant of vert and venison in my woods of Warncliffe. Mark, however, I will but assign thee three bucks every season; but if that do not prove an apology for thy slaying thirty, I am no Christian knight nor true king.”
Even so, I'm inclined to view this as an acceptable solution. Even if they manage the tenfold increase of 'medically necessary' abortions that the King expected from the Friar and his bucks, genuinely necessary cases are estimated at two percent. (This figure is hotly contested by activists on both sides, in and out of 'expert' NGOs; but it is somewhere between less than one percent and maybe three percent.) If you get to twenty percent, that still is a vast improvement over where we were before Dobbs, as the remaining eighty percent will be capable of being regulated according to democratically-enacted law.
Meanwhile an anti-abortion referendum in Kansas of all places went down in flames yesterday. Returning the issue to democracy means accepting democratic results, and abortion is always very popular once people have had it for a while -- even Ireland is not likely to go back to banning it. It's just so convenient to be able to make a daunting 20-year challenge, which entails heavy responsibility and permanent physical changes to your own body, go away like it never existed. There's no guarantee of success without a lot of moral work to convince people to accept the arguments against the practice. You can't skip the philosophy and go straight to force: that's now how democracy works.
Not just the Secret Service, now the Department of Defense appears to have wiped phone and text records of those responsible for deploying the National Guard on January 6th. Why the Guard was not deployed is a major question we've been asking here since before January 6th, and certainly since then -- it was obvious that there was a significant potential for disorder given the nearby mass rally to protest the very thing going on inside Congress right then. Finding out why the Capitol was left unprotected is going to be harder given this apparently intentional destruction of the relevant public records.
Japan is having a strange problem with its monkeys. For some reason this kind of thing doesn't happen in the USA; I assume the reason is related to the fact that they've had to hire specialists with tranquilizer guns to address the matter. This is the sort of job Americans would handle themselves.
Quilette has an article on the challenges facing public education.
This past May, my community sought to fill four open school board seats.... It quickly became apparent that nearly all of the candidate platforms fit neatly into one of two distorted worldviews: either that of the MSNBC viewer or the Fox News viewer.... each platform simply revealed how little was understood about the real challenges facing public education and youth culture more broadly.
Last week we had a runoff election for the school board locally which mirrored this concern exactly. These are officially nonpartisan positions. Nevertheless, one candidate ran on rainbows and talk of 'equity' and 'school safety,' and she was backed by the local Democratic Party. The other one said nothing much about education, but a lot about Jesus. She was backed by the Republicans.
Rainbow lady won, but because she's the incumbent that means nothing will change. Recent graduates I know personally can't do math and lack basic English skills such as knowing the difference between "your" and "you're." The institution is an embarrassing failure.
The Quilette piece suggests the problem is one of mental health among the youth. Maybe that's part of it; but part of it is the need to burn this institution of American public education to the ground, so that something more fertile can be grown upon its ashes.
Andrew Morgan at the Federalist writes:
The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee the presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. It has been enacted by 15 state legislatures plus Washington, D.C., and passed in 41 legislative chambers in 24 states. For the proposal to become the law of the land, enough states totaling at least 270 electoral votes would be required to enact the law, and states would then commit their electoral votes to the candidate with the most popular votes nationally, regardless of which candidate won at the state level.
The states that have enacted the compact represent 195 electoral votes: Delaware, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Vermont, Colorado, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, Illinois, California, New York, and the District of Columbia. States with passage in one chamber include Arkansas, Arizona, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Nevada, Oklahoma, and Virginia. Successful passage in all of these states represents 283 electoral votes, enough to change the law and make our presidential election decided via popular vote rather than the Electoral College.
Some of you might be interested in this book. To quote from a review by Christopher S. Grenda in the Journal of American History (volume 107 issue 1):
In The Pursuit of Happiness in the Founding Era, Carli N. Conklin seeks to disclose the original meaning of the phrase "the pursuit of happiness" in the Declaration of Independence. She maintains that the phrase was neither a synonym for private property or public spiritedness nor a foreshadowing of latter-day notions of personal fulfillment. Rather, Conklin argues that the authors and editors of the Declaration of Independence—Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin—as well as those who debated and approved the document in the Continental Congress understood the "pursuit of happiness" to mean the pursuit of virtue, the striving to live according to natural law.
Today it was announced that the American government is apparently offering to trade a major arms dealer for a women's basketball player who smuggled dope into Russia. She's important, you see, because she's a women's basketball player and they are important symbols in the war against America. They are not important because they play basketball. Nobody cares about women's basketball: even the feminists won't make time to actually watch it, as Bill Burr points out (strong language warning, but it's worth it).
As the Washington Post points out, however, she's not the first or only American to fall prey to Russia's strict laws on marijuana. If you're an important symbol to the left, we'll move heaven and earth for you and trade away dire felons to secure your freedom to come home and lecture us about how awful we are. If you're a nobody, well, you're a nobody.
UPDATE: Heh. Apparently this basketball player's "fight for freedom" -- which entails begging Biden to move heaven and earth for her specifically even though she has confessed to being guilty -- is now the cover story of TIME Magazine.
An American ally was killed today. She was a famous Kurdish commander who saved American lives in the war on ISIS (one of the relatively few in the 'W' column lately).
Her killer? An American ally -- indeed a NATO member-- the Turkish government.
Buried deep in this article about Scotland's oldest distillery is the fact that there are serious attacks on the use of peat in the making of whisky.
Glenturret is now introducing up to 14 new whiskies every year. But as for the peat? That may be on its way out as whisky producers increasingly come under the hyper-critical lens of sustainability. The use of peat as a natural marshland resource is coming under fire, Laurie says, even for a relatively minimal peat-user like Glenturret. So the pressure is on to find some kind of sustainable peat replacement.
“Though you know what will happen — you can bet that that will only drive up demand for the last of the real peat-based stock,” he adds. “That’s the thing about whiskey, people want the real deal.”
Originally the model included over 30 different factors, like poverty, income inequality, how diverse religiously or ethnically a country was. But only two factors came out again and again as highly predictive. And it wasn’t what people were expecting, even on the task force. We were surprised. The first was this variable called anocracy.
...what scholars found was that this anocracy variable was really predictive of a risk for civil war. That full democracies almost never have civil wars. Full autocracies rarely have civil wars. All of the instability and violence is happening in this middle zone.
...the second factor was whether populations in these partial democracies began to organize politically, not around ideology — so, not based on whether you’re a communist or not a communist, or you’re a liberal or a conservative — but where the parties themselves were based almost exclusively around identity: ethnic, religious or racial identity.
[W]atching what happened to the Republican Party really was the bigger surprise — that, wow, they’re doubling down on this almost white supremacist strategy. That’s a losing strategy in a democracy. So why would they do that? Okay, it’s worked for them since the ’60s and ’70s, but you can’t turn back demographics. And then I was like, Oh my gosh. The only way this is a winning strategy is if you begin to weaken the institutions; this is the pattern we see in other countries.
Here in the United States, because we had a series of long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria, and now that we’ve withdrawn from them, we’ve had more than 20 years of returning soldiers with experience. And so this creates a ready-made subset of the population that you can recruit from....
What we’re heading toward is an insurgency, which is a form of a civil war. That is the 21st-century version of a civil war, especially in countries with powerful governments and powerful militaries, which is what the United States is.... They use unconventional tactics. They target infrastructure. They target civilians. They use domestic terror and guerrilla warfare. Hit-and-run raids and bombs. We’ve already seen this in other countries with powerful militaries, right? The IRA took on the British government. Hamas has taken on the Israeli government. These are two of the most powerful militaries in the world. And they fought for decades. And in the case of Hamas I think we could see a third intifada. And they pursue a similar strategy.Here it’s called leaderless resistance.... Do not engage the U.S. military. You know, avoid it at all costs. Go directly to targets around the country that are difficult to defend and disperse yourselves so it’s hard for the government to identify you and infiltrate you and eliminate you entirely.
Not exactly new advice -- prison in the Deep South has been a good thing to avoid since at least the 19th century, and was the subject matter of many dramas including Cool Hand Luke. It sounds like it's still pretty miserable, though.
"In one instance, prison staff had to borrow a razor blade from a prisoner to cut the ligature suspending a prisoner who had hung himself in his cell," [Sen. Jon] Ossoff said, referring to the BOP's documents....
...a crumbling physical structure infested by mold and rats. Regular sewage back-ups often left standing pools of human foot waste a foot deep....
... unmanaged flow of drugs that persisted for years contributed to a rash of suicides.... "so many rats" in the inmate dining hall and other areas that staffers often left the doors open to allow cats in to catch the rodents....
Repeatedly pressed about his lack of knowledge of the conditions in Atlanta, [Bureau of Prisons Director Michael] Carvajal said the agency appeared to be "stuck" in information silos.
"This is clearly a diseased bureaucracy," Ossoff said.
After the hearing Carvajal fled to a freight elevator to avoid reporters, who crowded in after him to ask questions anyway. So, he likewise fled the elevator and ran down the stairs.
I had not realized the Bureau was quite that old. And indeed it turns out they aren't: they were founded in 1935 under J. Edgar Hoover as I had thought, not in 1908 as their tweet claims; although there was an earlier Bureau of Investigation that was rolled together with the Bureau of Prohibition in 1933, which then became the root stock of the present bureau.
They're in the news today for the usual reason -- corruption -- but only of course in certain parts of the news media.
The FBI and Justice Department have been accused by “highly credible whistleblowers” of burying “verified and verifiable” dirt on President Biden’s troubled son Hunter by incorrectly dismissing the intelligence as “disinformation,” according to Sen. Chuck Grassley.
The ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee made the explosive claims Monday in an official Senate letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland.
He insisted the allegations were so serious, they would prove — if confirmed — that both offices were “institutionally corrupted to their very core.”
You can read the Senator's letter at the link.
A federal judge said Monday that there “have to be consequences” for the Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 and raised concerns that members of the mob were getting off light.... “There have to be consequences for participating in an attempted violent overthrow of the government beyond sitting at home,” Chutkan said Monday. “The country is watching to see what the consequences are for something that has not ever happened in the history of this country before,” Chutkan said. While Mazzocco was far less culpable of many others who participated in the riot, he was proud of what he did, Chutkan said.“That mob was trying to overthrow the government,” Chutkan said, and “showed their contempt for the rule of law.” She rejected comparisons between the protests of the summer of 2020 in support of civil rights and the attack on the Capitol, which she said was “no mere protest.”
She again today handed down a sentence in excess of the government's request, this time over five years in length. It ties the longest sentence yet issued for the riot, which she insists on seeing as an 'attempt to overthrow the government' -- a charge not actually alleged by the prosecution, but for which she is issuing sentences as if it had been charged and proven.
But sure, this is about the "rule of law." The law, that is, as defined and practiced by them.
The trial balloon of changing the definition of 'recession' didn't fly, so today the NYT is instead claiming that the recession will be global -- and thus beyond the control of the leader of any one country. Today's morning newsletter began with a note that inflation is worse in the Eurozone than in the US. It helpfully pointed out that this means that it can't be Biden's fault, noting that the causes of the inflation differ there: it's more about the war in Russia and Ukraine, and less about massive deficit spending by a profligate government.
I take the shift from 'this is transient' to 'this is global' to mean that rough weather is definitely coming, and expected to stay a while.
Two-thirds of Republicans and independents say the government is “corrupt and rigged against everyday people like me,” according to the poll, compared to 51 percent of liberal voters.Twenty-eight percent of all voters, including 37 percent of gun owners, agreed “it may be necessary at some point soon for citizens to take up arms against the government,” a view held by around 35 percent of Republicans and around 35 percent of Independents. One in five Democrats concurred.
The Davis poll asked mostly if people thought other people might start a war; this one asked if you thought it might be necessary to fight one. They only got about half as many 'yes' answers, but those are answers to a much more pointed question.
It's bad news, too, when a majority of the group in power thinks the system is corrupt and rigged against them. It is, of course, which is why the number is so high; but that represents a dangerously high degree of self-awareness against partisan interest.
The Secret Service says it “lost” critical communications from January 5 and 6, 2021, supposedly as a part of a routine process.Does that explanation not quite sound believable? It shouldn’t. Because, really, how could the Secret Service, a law enforcement agency well versed in the practice of preserving documents and corroborating stories, just accidentally destroy communications from one of the most momentous days in its history—especially after the agency was asked to preserve exactly those types of documents?
Oddly neither of these reports may turn out to be very important, though they come from unimpeachable sources: the man himself, and the White House. The latter report is allegedly of a 'very mild' illness, which seems to be ordinary for the newer variant even in elderly men like himself, and the former one is probably just another sign of his mental decline rather than an actual cancer.
...voters support an Article V Convention to propose constitutional amendments that address four specific issues:
- Term limits for Congress
- Term limits for unelected federal officials
- Federal spending restraints
- Constraining the federal government to its constitutionally mandated authority
...While SCOTUS slowly and methodically curtails the powers of the administrative states, Meckler believes a Convention of States will act more like a sledgehammer to the foundations of the bureaucratic regime. “All we have to do is reinforce the non-delegation doctrine. Nope, sorry. There is no EPA anymore. Department of Education, gone. No Department of Energy. No Health and Humans Services. Those departments are fundamentally unconstitutional,” he asserted. ” We need to take that position as soon as possible.”
At that point, the several states could partner up into new (smaller) unions if they wished, as perhaps the Northeast would want to do. States could also hold similar conventions at home and dissolve if they feel like they're internally divided along geographic lines: North Carolina could dissolve east/west, with Western NC joining Tennessee to create a much more natural political union.Then everything would be easier, almost: legislation and budgets could get passed, because people would agree on basic values. The continent would become somewhat more like Europe; we'd probably want to negotiate a free trade area and freedom of travel. We might break up the Army, but agree to jointly fund the Navy to keep the sea lanes open. That could be based on existing joint command structures like Supreme Allied Command -- Europe.
The reason is that blue McDonald’s is kosher, and there’s some law against mixing meat and milk in the stomach in the Jewish tradition. I didn’t go — not to either species of McDonald’s, preferring to eat the local cuisine. I wonder if they’d serve you a milkshake as long as you didn’t also order a burger.
The survey out of UC Davis is interesting, but note up front the funding statement:
This work was supported by grants from the Joyce Foundation, the California Wellness Foundation, and the Heising-Simons Foundation, and by the California Firearm Violence Research Center and UC Davis Violence Prevention Research Program.
Two-thirds of respondents (67.2%, 95% CI 66.1%, 68.4%) perceived “a serious threat to our democracy,” but more than 40% agreed that “having a strong leader for America is more important than having a democracy” and that “in America, native-born white people are being replaced by immigrants.” Half (50.1%) agreed that “in the next few years, there will be civil war in the United States.”
12.2% were willing to commit political violence themselves “to threaten or intimidate a person,” 10.4% “to injure a person,” and 7.1% “to kill a person.” Among all respondents, 18.5% thought it at least somewhat likely that within the next few years, in a situation where they believed political violence was justified, “I will be armed with a gun”; 4.0% thought it at least somewhat likely that “I will shoot someone with a gun.”
I spent some of my sparse nondriving hours during our cross-country trip reading Matthew Crawford’s “Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road.”...
In this case Crawford is out to defend what he calls “homo moto,” the human being who moves purposively through the world rather than being simply carried through it, who uses a “car or a motorcycle as a kind of prosthetic that amplifies our embodied capacities,” who gains freedom, familiarity and mastery by navigating swiftly through a complex landscape.
I might have picked a different name for this phenomenon, though now that you mention it the phrase is evocative...
There's actually a good point buried towards the end of the review.
If the bloc’s 27 member countries agree to adopt the plan and the new legislation that goes with it, it would solidify the sense that Europe’s economy is on war footing because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
As mentioned I get the NYT's morning newsletter. Today's is a true classic. It is a meditation on 'why the anti-democracy movement' is going on. The obvious problem is that there isn't, in fact, an anti-democracy movement in the United States. But let's not let that bother us!
“What is striking about the movement around the supposed theft of the 2020 election,” Charles writes, “is how much of it — the ideas, and rhetoric, and even the people involved in it — predated Trump’s presidency, and in some cases even his candidacy.”
Indeed, except the newsletter never mentions the name "Stacey Abrams" even once, nor the controversy she engendered about whether the election in Georgia was stolen by then-Secretary of State now-Governor Brian Kemp. As a consequence, they make two key errors that lead the whole piece into paranoid musings about anti-democratic fascists endangering America.
1) That suspicion of elections is per se an anti-democratic expression, and,
2) That it is only the right wing that does it.
Because of these errors, they never get around to asking whether there might be something about the nature of our elections that might be causing people not to trust the results. Abrams had a pretty good case that the Georgia election was extremely suspect: I know, I voted in it and wrote about it at the time. The voting machines did not produce printed receipts that might be used for an audit. Ballots were a plastic card with a magnetic strip on the back, which allegedly recorded your votes but had no visible signs of having done so -- and which were immediately wiped and re-used all day after they were swiped in the 'counting' machine.
The process was thus completely opaque and impossible to audit, but no worries: one of the candidates for the office being voted on was in complete charge of the election, and swore that he would oversee any recount efforts as well.
That doesn't mean Abrams won, of course. It does mean that suspicion of the election being dishonest was extremely well-grounded. If this is a terrifying prospect, there are easy things we could do to ensure that elections were more trustworthy. Having a print-out ballot so you can see that your votes were correctly recorded, and which can be compared against electronic returns in an audit is a good start. Voter IDs are a good start. Real IDs are connected to proof of citizenship centrally maintained, so that voting officials can check the ID both against your face and signature in person, and then verify that your birth certificate or passport is on file.
On the left people worry that these are voter-suppression efforts (and occasionally on the right as well), but there is no need that should be true. We could embark upon a campaign to make sure that all eligible voters have proper IDs and their proofs recorded in the system. We could establish -- pre-election -- independent bipartisan bodies tasked with auditing the returns. We could do the sorts of things we would do, in a system that was designed to be carefully audited to prevent abuse.
If we did those things, a lot of this would evaporate.
Finally, 'anti-democracy' is arguably a bipartisan impulse (if not on either side a movement). Democrats are working very hard right now to try to prevent democracy from informing abortion laws, leveraging courts, bureaucracies, and executive orders to derail efforts by actual democratically-elected legislatures. The Republicans do, certainly, benefit from the Senate and the Electoral College to some degree, but until this very year Democrats benefitted from the Supreme Court being willing to strip the democratic branches (and direct democratic votes, as in the case of California Propositions passed by referenda) of the power to rule on major questions. There's no anti-democracy movement, but there is a real impulse on both sides to try to set one's preferences beyond question.
So at the start of this summer’s program, this teacher was supposed to have 11 students in his class. But on the first day only two students showed up and on day two he was down to one student. By week’s end, a few parents had withdrawn their kids but most simply did nothing.The teacher found there were five kids on a wait list whose parents wanted to see them get extra help but when he asked about getting them in to fill the empty seats. He was immediately shot down because the district will not drop any student from a class even if they never show up. They won’t even contact the parent to ask if they plan to send their child because this is part of their “racial justice overhaul.”Now, when I say the district is “not allowed” to do so, I don’t mean they’re forbidden by some state law or local ordinance. Rather, the district actively embraced this policy as part of their larger equity and racial justice overhaul, and even bragged about doing so in public-facing materials. Their explicit position is that requiring attendance for any district program unfairly victimizes children of color, as does factoring in attendance to any student’s grades during the regular school year. The administrator I spoke to seemed baffled that I would even ask. “I’ll let you know if any parents pull their kids out,” he told me, “but otherwise, your class is technically full.”,,,
I once attended another meeting – lots of meetings when you’re a teacher! – where we were working to approve a new weekly schedule for students. When I said I was concerned that it would require leaving some sections of the curriculum untaught, a colleague said that might actually be a good thing, because most of our students are white and their test scores dropping slightly would help shrink the racial achievement gap in our state....
He concludes that the left has accidentally stumbled into a set of beliefs so crazy that to describe them accurately sounds like something made up, only they aren’t made up.
"The real hero of the day is the citizen that was lawfully carrying a firearm in that food court and was able to stop that shooter almost as soon as he began," [Police Chief Jim] Ison told reporters during a press conference on Sunday night.
Well done.
In a pretrial hearing last week, the judge overseeing Bannon's case, Carl Nichols, entered a series of rulings that will significantly limit the lines of defense Bannon's attorneys will be able to present to the jury.Nichols said Bannon won't be able to claim he defied the subpoena because Trump asserted executive privilege over his testimony, nor can Bannon claim he relied on the advice of his lawyer, or that he was "tricked" into believing he could ignore the subpoena due to internal DOJ opinions from previous administrations about executive branch officials' immunity from complying with congressional subpoenas.Nichols also rejected Bannon's defense that prosecutors would need to show that he knew his conduct was unlawful, saying that prosecutors only need to prove that Bannon acted "deliberately" and "intentionally" to defy the Jan. 6 panel.Bannon's attorney, David Schoen, questioned the judge's rulings, asking the judge at one point, "What's the point in going to trial here if there are no defenses?"
It shouldn't take long to get through the need to hold a trial with no defenses, so we can get on to the punishment part that is the point of the exercise. Obama officials defied Congress with impunity, but special rules as always apply.
Isn’t it irritating when your ancestral manuscript collection gets in the way of your ping-pong tournament? That was Colonel Butler-Bowden’s predicament in the early 1930s. He was so peeved by the heap of rubbishy papers cluttering up his games cupboard that he declared his intention to burn the lot. Luckily, his ping-pong companion that day happened to be a curator at the V&A, so the colonel was dissuaded from book- burning and his manuscripts were shipped instead to the museum’s London archives.Among the collection was the unique edition of the Book of Margery Kempe, often described as the first autobiography in English, a sensational account of a woman’s mystical visions, travels and tribulations. For centuries, while her book hibernated in the Butler-Bowden estate, Kempe was completely unknown.
It would have been a great tragedy if that book had been burned. One wonders how many works of great interest have been, over the years, for idle reasons or impassioned ones like Henry VIII's desire to weaken the Catholic Church by destroying its libraries.
Exit question: Would a federal assault weapons ban even be constitutional in light of the recent SCOTUS decision in Gruen? AR-15s are very much “in common use,” a key factor in the Court’s reasoning, and nearly all of them are used for “lawful purposes.” (Much more so than handguns are.) So how could Congress lawfully ban them presuming they had the votes to do so?
The Cicilline bill – which currently has 211 Democratic co-sponsors and no Republicans – would make it illegal for anyone to “import, sell, manufacture, or transfer” semi-automatic rifles that have certain “military features.” These features include a “detachable magazine” or “a fixed magazine with the capacity to accept more than 10 rounds.” Semi-automatic pistols and shotguns with similar features would also be covered.
