May 2012
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Modeling Police Accountability
Recently, I wrote an article (which will hopefully be published) criticizing Scalia’s 2006 majority opinion in Hudson v. Michigan. In that opinion, Scalia and his fellow concurring justices on the Supreme Court held that the Exclusionary Rule did not apply to violations of the knock-and-announce rule. Scalia believed that it was not necessary to exclude evidence obtained in violation of...
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“After interviewing more than 20 tribal leaders, victims’ relatives, human rights...”
– Medea Benjamin
h/t anticapitalist
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“These [Distracted Driving] laws give police officers yet another pretext to...”
– Peter Johnson, General Partner of the Johnson & Johnson law firm in Walnut Creek, California. Johnson’s firm has filed a lawsuit challenging California’s “Distracted Driving” law. 68,000 California drivers were issued citations for Distracted Driving last month alone.
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Are Men's Bodies Repulsive?
Apropos of this recent post about Male objectification, I happened upon Hugo Schwyzer’s March 2011 article at the Good Men Project reflecting on male body image issues:
In sixth grade, the same year that puberty hit me with irrevocable force, I had an art teacher, Mr. Blake…[who said] that great artists all acknowledged that the female form was more beautiful than the male…
In...
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“[I]n The Worst of Times, a collection of interviews with women, cops, coroners,...”
– Eleanor Cooney, “The Way It Was.”
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4 Year-Old Sings "Ain't No Homos Gonna Make It To...
From Joe My God:
It’s apparently an actual song and not only did they teach it to a four year-old, they proudly brought him up to the pulpit to perform it, generating whoops and a standing ovation from the congregation.
A Sullivan reader writes:
The church is in Greensburg, Indiana, where Billy Lucas was bullied to death for being perceived to be gay in September 2010. It was...
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“This program rests on the personal legitimacy of the president, and that’s not...”
– Michael Hayden, CIA Director under Bush II, discussing the White House assassination list.
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“I’m an Iraq war veteran, though I very rarely tell people that. Partly...”
– Sullivan Reader, discussing Memorial Day. More like it here.
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Hero Talk
Over Memorial Day weekend, we were treated to a familiar round of what might be termed “Hero Talk” (which is not to be confused with R. Kelly’s “Real Talk:” arguably his most exquisite piece of performance art since Trapped in the Closet Pt. 1).
Unlike Real Talk, however, “Hero Talk” most often centers around men and women in the armed forces. These...
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Obama And The Drug War
Sullivan spots a discussion about Obama’s stance on drug prohibition. David Frum tweets to defend the President’s prohibition stance:
Not hypocritical to experiment w drugs in early life, recoil, and as a mature adult favor prohibition.
Balko fires back:
@davidfrum It’s flat out immoral to enforce policies that ruin the lives of young people who make the same choices about...
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“Two female soldiers filed a lawsuit yesterday charging that the military’s ban...”
– Female Soldiers Sue to Challenge Ban, Ms. Magazine
h/t Turley
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“Science is used to show that someone is in fact guilty when the reality of the...”
– Tempe Criminal Defense Blog
h/t Simple Justice
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“There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of...”
– Sir Joshua Reynolds.
via Simple Justice
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“The Afghan jihad was the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA. In...”
– Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism (via maozedongisnotcool)
h/t logicallypositive
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What Recession?
Cord Jefferson discusses an alarming upward trend in people robbing banks in order to keep their heads above water:
In Mississippi this week, a man walked into a bank and handed a teller a note demanding money, according to broadcast news reporter Brittany Weiss. The man got away with a paltry $1,600 before proceeding to run errands around town to pay his bills and write checks to people to whom...
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The Rise And Fall Of The Fourth Amendment: A Case...
Imagine, if you will, that you are David Holland. You live in New York City. It’s 1:40 a.m. You’re walking down East 129th Street in Manhattan. You’re in a poor part of town, near a housing project. It’s late at night. All of a sudden, you see four police officers turn the corner up ahead and start walking towards you.
What do you do?
David decided to turn around...
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Many hospitals, doctors offer cash discount for... →
logicallypositive:
latimes:
The lowest price is usually available only if patients don’t use their health insurance. In one case, blood tests that cost an insured patient $415 would have been $95 in cash.
Remember that entry I wrote about health care costs being a result of a disruption of the price mechanism viz. government-promotion of insurance companies? Yeah, this is my point.
LTMC:...
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“Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and...”
– Audre Lorde
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Double Jeopardy Bonus Round (Capital Murder...
This week, the Supreme Court decided in a 6-3 decision, Blueford v. Arkansas, that if you are charged with multiple crimes, and a unanimous jury finds you not guilty of one charge, but fails to reach a verdict on others (resulting in a mistrial), you may be retried on all charges, period. Including the one that you were unanimously found not guilty of by the original jury. You know, the one who...
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Race, Crime, And Statistics (Long Post)
A reader asks:
In your recent posts regarding the racial disparity in conviction rates, you dismiss using conviction statistics as a proxy for knowing who is committing crime. However, you haven’t made the counter-argument — you simply assume that all races commit crimes at the same rates, and show how a racial bias could produce unequal conviction rates, but that’s begging the...
Lost In Translation
lexi-trek replied to your photo: Still the best movie of all time. Dissenters are…
Which movie is this? I wanna know!
Lost In Translation, by Sofia Coppola, 2003, starring a 19-year old Scarlet Johansson as Charlotte, and Bill Murray as Bob Harris.
Also known as the Form of the Good manifest in Cinema, by unanimous consent of all Greek philosophers everywhere and at all times.
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Why Criminal Defense Lawyers Get Pissed Off
Ken at Popehat provides a textbook example of why many of us in the criminal defense racket think the warrant process is a joke (disclosure: I am still a law student, not a practicing attorney):
Witness tells Cop that she saw a photo of guns in Defendant’s house a year ago, and thinks she saw guns there at one point more than a year ago.
Cop tells judge, in warrant application, that...
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Male Objectification (Pro & Con?)
One of Sullivan’s readers is sympathetic to D’Angelo’s frustrations about being made a male sexual object:
I was a ballet dancer most of my twenties and thirties and I remember how I would grind my teeth when all my years of work and dedication would be reduced to a discussion about the “dancer ass.” Or seeing the ballerinas flinch when guys would leer and ponder...
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“Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of...”
– Audre Lorde, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House, 1984.
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How To Look Like An Idiot By Using Conviction...
From a 2008 post at Simple Justice, Scott Greenfield takes a commenter to task for defending Paul Cassell’s absurd claim that Blacks are disproportionately imprisoned because Blacks simply commit more crimes than Whites. The commenter references FBI UCR statistics:
…Access the FBI uniform crime reporting program on their website. You can wade thru the stats or cut to the chase and...
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School Nurse Reportedly Refuses To Allow Student... →
Money quote:
The school dean found the inhaler in its original packaging with the student’s name and directions for its use. He seized the inhaler because of the absence of a form. When the boy began to have trouble breathing the mother was called to come into school. It is not clear why, if they could reach the mother, they could not get telephonic approval. More importantly, with the boy...
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This Is Your War On Drugs: Civil Asset Forfeiture...
Turley reports on Tennessee’s new “Policing for Profit” program:
A professional insurance adjuster, George Reby, was traveling through the state from New Jersey when he was stopped and asked by Officer Larry Bates if he had large amounts of cash. He said that he did — $22,000. The officer demanded the money and said that he was confiscating the money on suspicion of drug...
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LimeWire Sued For More Money Than Exists In the... →
antigovernmentextremist:
Not The Onion:
It’s no secret that LimeWire was once a hotbed of peer-to-peer music piracy, but the RIAA has now attempted to sue it for $72 trillion - more money than exists in the world today.
LimeWire was shut down in October 2010, but litigation continues from music bodies around the world, including Merlin which represents independent labels.
LTMC: Rob Reid...
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Another Conservative Apostate
Michael Fumento, who worked for the Reagan administrations and has written for Wall Street Journal, National Review, Weekly Standard, and Forbes, no longer wishes to associate himself with the modern Conservative Movement. He views the contemporary American Right as caught up in “Mass Hysteria,” which he says is completely antithetical to traditional Conservatism:
Civility and...
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"Your Father Never Fucked Me For 20 Years And I...
Andrew Sullivan relates stories from readers who have endured the unique and nuanced pain of discovering that a spouse was gay after hiding it from them for years. It is so difficult to paraphrase these stories because they are inevitably so complicated and sad, and every detail matters. One woman sums up her experience:
I knew he would never pull the plug on our marriage, so fierce is his...
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“Whether American agents or contractors pulled the trigger that killed two...”
– Mike Riggs
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mindbabies asked: A woman on FB who poses in provocative clothing at car events posted a photo of a younger woman (not sure what age, 17-19?) posing in front of a mirror dressed in similarly revealing clothing and harshly criticized her. When someone else pointed out that she basically does the same thing, I chimed and pointed out that she is a grown woman, capable of making her own choices.I can't help but...
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Feminism And Fashion Policing
I recently had a conversation with a friend of mine, which followed from a post she made discussing a woman she saw while out in public: the woman in question was wearing a pair of low-cut jeans with a very visible thong showing. My friend was frustrated, because she felt that when women objectify themselves by wearing revealing clothing, it makes it more difficult for her to be taken seriously...
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“[Tom Bridegroom] [yes, that’s his actual name!] had been with his partner,...”
– Michael Fleck
Until this country gets its act together, LGBT couples need to watch out for this. If you live in a state that does not give you the legal protection of a civil union or legal marriage, you need to make independent arrangement to have the disposition of your property settled via will...
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“A lot of effort has been invested since 2009 to create a narrative of white...”
– David Frum
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“Strauss was at best a mediocre scholar whose thought expressed a confused...”
– Kenneth B. McIntyre
Ice burn.
h/t Sullivan
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“Years later, at a junior tennis tournament, I found myself sharing a hotel room...”
– Randall Kennedy, Nigger: the Strange Career of a Troublesome Word
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Right of Return For Israeli Americans, But Not...
Randa Jarrar was prevented by Israeli authorities from visiting her sister in Ramallah because she has a Palestinian ID attached to her name:
I had deleted anything on my website critical of Israel, which amounted to about 160 posts. I had deleted the section in my Wikipedia entry that said that I was a Palestinian writer. It had been unsettling, deleting my Palestinianness in order to go back...
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“The historically acceptable conditions under which a president can unilaterally...”
– Senator Jim Webb, discussing legislation that would require Congressional consent for the President to commit military forces overseas unless one of the “historically acceptable conditions” for unilateral action, as outlined above, are present.
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“It’s just not right, ya know? I mean… uh… a lot of people think that every guy...”
– Anonymous Chicago Police Officer, refusing to arrest non-violent protesters at the NATO summit.
h/t occupyla / liberalchristian
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TXU is First to Offer Free Night-Time Electricity... →
TXU Energy in Texas is offering the first free energy rates in the nation, between 10 PM and 6 AM. Its daytime rates are 11 cents.
Wind power tends to be greatest in the wee hours. Texas wind power sometimes has to be curtailed or wasted because there’s no one to use it at night. The more wind power on the grid the more this happens, as it already has in Texas, and in the Pacific Northwest.
...
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“[P]rejudice is a kind of cartel that works best when there is no real dissent....”
– Ta-Nehisi Coates
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More Scenes From The War On Women
A lot of folks of Conservative disposition, and perhaps pro-life people more generally, take exception to the idea that the recent nation-wide expansion of policies which restrict the reproductive choices of women amount to a “War on Women.” They feel that it’s an overwrought appeal to emotion that cannot be fairly quantified, and obscures legitimate moral choices in the...
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“[L]eave America, if she has taxable matter in her, to tax herself. I am not here...”
– Edmund Burke, Speech on American Taxation, English Parliament, April 19, 1774.
I like how Burke delivers this speech without a hint of irony, given the fact that he’s surely aware of the fact that actual slavery of African nationals and their descendants was going on in America while he was...
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Gay Marriage And Moral Seriousness
Ari Kohen recently posted a video of Ann Althouse discussing Gay marriage with Glenn Loury. Ari summarizes the video thusly:
Both Glenn Loury and Ann Althouse have gay sons. And, in this clip, both of them argue that we shouldn’t consider opposition to same-sex marriage to be akin to bigotry. Loury goes a few steps farther, in fact, and claims that a charge of bigotry really amounts to...