MY USA TODAY COLUMN IS ABOUT THE NEW LITTLE PINK HOUSE MOVIE: Can the government take your land? Yep, but the ‘Little Pink House’ was worth fighting for. Excellent film, and highly recommended. I was able to get an advance screener and shared it with my Con Law class, where we were doing Kelo last week.
Archive for 2018
April 16, 2018
I CONSULTED FOR THE WINNING SIDE IN QUILL, AND I STILL THINK IT’S RIGHT EVEN WITHOUT BEING PAID: South Dakota e-commerce sales tax fight reaches U.S. Supreme Court.
BLUE WAVE? WaPo: Dems’ midterm lead still slipping away.
As Kurt Schlichter writes, “Republicans, get it together. Defy our expectations. Get smart and fight.”
To be fair, those are rather yuuuge expectations to overcome.
ALLIES: US pastor faces terror charges in fraught trial in Turkey. “Turkey has used the pastor as a diplomatic pawn, hoping to trade him for a U.S.-based Muslim cleric Turkey blames for masterminding a failed military coup.”
Andrew Craig Brunson, a 50-year-old evangelical pastor from North Carolina, is facing up to 35 years in prison on charges of “committing crimes on behalf of terror groups without being a member” and “espionage.” The trial begins Monday in western Izmir province.
Brunson was arrested in December 2016 for alleged links to both an outlawed Kurdish insurgent group and the network of the U.S.-based Muslim cleric who Turkey blames for a masterminding a failed military coup that year. The cleric, Fethullah Gulen, denies the claim.
It wasn’t a failed coup — it’s a successful purge.
BECAUSE OUR SCHOOLS TODAY ARE POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS, NOT EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS: Why American Students Haven’t Gotten Better at Reading in 20 Years.
ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: ‘Help, Can I Get My Money Back from McCabe’s GoFundMe Campaign?’
There really is one born every minute.
SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST. “This aged well.”
(Classical reference in headline.)
ARE YOU AN ASPIRING LAW PROFESSOR? Then you may want to attend this workshop:
Each year, SEALS hosts a Prospective Law Teachers Workshop, which provides opportunities for aspiring law teachers to network and participate in mock interviews and mock job talks — prior to the actual teaching market. The Committee also schedules 1-on-1 sessions for candidates to receive faculty feedback on their CVs. This year’s Prospective Law Teacher’s Workshop will be held at The Fort Lauderdale Marriott Harbor Beach Resort & Spa in Fort Lauderdale, Florida on Monday, August 6, and Tuesday, August 7, 2018. There are also many excellent panels throughout the week that are targeted to newer law professors, which prospective law professors will also find helpful. See (link). If you are interested in participating in this year’s workshop, please send your CV and a brief statement of interest to professor Brad Areheart (Tennessee) at , who co-chairs the committee along with professor Leah Grinvald (Suffolk). Please also indicate when you are planning to go on the teaching market. Applications are due by May 15, 2018. Many of the past workshop participants have gone on to obtain tenure-track appointments and now teach at a wide variety of law schools, including Tulane, South Carolina, UNC, Cal Western, Boston College, Georgia, Alabama, Oklahoma, Boston U., Tulsa, Wisconsin, Michigan State, Maryland, Idaho, Colorado, Miami, Richmond, Louisville, and others.
Plus you can hang out at the beach with real law professors. Nowhere else in America can you find so many law profs in swimsuits in one place.
I’VE NOTICED THIS, TOO: Demand for Batteries Is Shrinking, Yet Prices Keep On Going and Going… Up.
Batteries on average cost 8.2% more than a year ago, while prices in the overall household-care segment rose only 1.8%, according to Nielsen. At a time when prices are stagnating on everything from toilet paper to diapers, such pricing power for a product that is increasingly obsolete has confounded shoppers.
“As far as the prices go, you don’t have a choice,” said Samuel Hurly, a contractor from Mount Vernon, N.Y., as he scanned a Home Depot display of AAA batteries to power flashlights he uses on the job. Batteries ordered online take too long to arrive, Mr. Hurly said, and he finds cheaper, private-label options lose power too quickly.
Battery prices were more likely to fluctuate a few years ago, when Duracell was owned by consumer-products giant Procter & Gamble Co. and Energizer was part of Edgewell Personal Care Co. Those companies were more focused on their bigger, more profitable razor businesses—Edgewell with Schick and P&G with Gillette. They would invest less in batteries, or slash prices to drive up volume, to compensate for weak sales in other units, said SunTrust analyst Bill Chappell.
Energizer Holdings Inc. spun off from Edgewell in 2015, and Duracell broke apart from P&G a year later when it was acquired by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc.
Both businesses have become more profit-focused since separating from their previous owners.
It’s been my experience that the no-name (or AmazonBasics) brands aren’t that much cheaper, and also don’t last as long. Still, the Energizer/Duracell duopoly looks ripe for disruption.
DECLAN MCCULLAGH: Silicon Valley’s Dangerous Political Blind Spots: Will the lack of ideological diversity doom big tech companies?
When it comes to software, Silicon Valley understands the threat of monocultures. If 100 percent of computers run the same code and malware authors discover an exploit, 100 percent of computers will be vulnerable to the same attack. Fortunately, the way to reduce such risks is straightforward: Increase diversity.
Alas, this insight seems limited to software. Technology executives have yet to fully recognize the risks posed by the potent political monocultures forming inside their own companies.
We’ve reached the point where many tech employees in the San Francisco Bay Area who happen to be libertarian or conservative feel compelled to keep their views secret. Others, open about their opinions, report that they’ve suffered career setbacks for being insufficiently progressive, even as their outspoken left-of-center colleagues who spent 2016 sporting “I’m With Her” hats have not.
Even some self-identified liberals are dismayed at what they view as a toxic monoculture. Tim Ferriss, a startup advisor and investor, moved to Austin after living for 17 years in San Francisco. “Silicon Valley also has an insidious infection that is spreading—a peculiar form of McCarthyism masquerading as liberal open-mindedness,” he posted on Reddit in November. “I’m as socially liberal as you get, and I find it nauseating.”
This climate is unhealthy for employers as well. Companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Apple are increasingly likely to miss opportunities to develop products that can appeal to the half of the nation that cares little for left-of-center politics.
That’s created market opportunities for substitute services, from Gab.ai (a Twitter alternative) to Brave (a web browser), from InfoGalactic (akin to Wikipedia) to Voat.co (a chat board site much like Reddit)—each of which advertises itself as committed to protecting free speech, privacy, and a diversity of viewpoints. D.tube, a decentralized video sharing site, boasts that, unlike YouTube, it is “not able to censor videos” due to built-in technological constraints.
What if the Internet interprets Silicon Valley as damage and routes around it?
ART BELL, AN A.M. RADIO ORIGINAL, RIP. At the American Spectator, Daniel J. Flynn writes:
Broadcasting in the wake of Waco and the Oklahoma City Bombing and contemporaneously with The X-Files, conspiracy theories found a massive audience. But even more than broadcasting in that time in history, broadcasting during a specific time of night — which witnesses our imaginations turn on when the lights turn off — catalyzed his popularity. It helped that evangelists and paid programming provided the competition. But the presentation and content of the show, rather than its weak-sauce rivals, attracted listeners in the darkness when all seemed possible.
Over the weekend, James Lileks tweeted, “Coast to Coast came on after my show finished on KSTP. Some nights I’d hang around the station, talk w/ my producer, listen to Art,” adding, “Thing is, we look back at Art Bell — chupacabras, FEMA conspiracies, Mars ruins coverups, solar kill shots, THE QUICKENING — and think “Good times.” But it was pure Y2K anxiety.”
Conspiracy theories aren’t my cup of flavored dihydrogen monoxide, but as Flynn writes, the Nevada desert-based Bell had a huge following. RIP.
(Via Kathy Shaidle.)
HMM: Governor Brown’s Move To Hike California’s Gas Taxes Could Doom Dems As Elections Approach.
Republican Reps. Kevin McCarthy and Mimi Walters of California are using a very unpopular gas tax increase to generate excitement among GOP votes. Both Republicans want to put a measure on the ballot that repeals the increase. They believe the campaign could increase voter turnout and staunch a blue wave in the state.
“We pay one of the highest gasoline taxes in the nation,” Walters told reporters Saturday, according to The Hill. “By the time you get to 2021, we’re going to be paying $2 a gallon for gasoline just in taxes, and we can’t do that for working families who have to travel for their job.”
Recent polls show McCarthy and Walters’ gamble has a chance to pay off.
Plus:
The law, passed April 6, imposes a 12 cents per gallon (cpg) hike on citizens and raises the tax on diesel fuel by 20 cpg. It also implements an additional charge to annual vehicle license fees ranging from $25 to $175 depending on the car’s value.
California is one of the most heavily taxed states in the nation, but you wouldn’t know it from even a cursory glance at the state’s infrastructure.
ASKING THE BURNING QUESTIONS: “Can pot make you a better parent?…An Oregon mother posted a photo last year of herself breastfeeding her baby while she took a bong hit.”
LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Venezuela’s imploding economy sparks refugee crisis.
Many wore threadbare clothes. Their sunken cheeks and wiry limbs suggested this was the first decent meal they had eaten in days. Children were barefoot. One man hobbled in on crutches, his right leg amputated below the knee. Another pushed an elderly woman in a wheelchair.
These are the weary, often desperate victims of the worst migration crisis in recent Latin American history. Some had arrived from Venezuela that morning, escaping food shortages, hyperinflation, a collapsing economy, disease and violence. Others had been in Colombia for days or weeks, looking for work, scavenging for food, sleeping in the streets and avoiding deportation.
While the eyes of the world have been on the Syrian refugee crisis and the exodus of Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar, Venezuela’s humanitarian disaster has gone relatively unnoticed.
Sad, but it hasn’t gone unnoticed — or unpredicted — around here.
FIRST-WORLD PROBLEMS: When will *certain* tampon users stop shaming people who use pads?
UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES: Oxycontin Tweak Helped Turn Addicts to Heroin.
“We attribute the recent quadrupling of heroin death rates to the August 2010 reformulation of an oft-abused prescription opioid, OxyContin,” continues the report, authored by William Evans and Ethan Lieber, both from the University of Notre Dame, and Patrick Power from Boston University.
Deaths from heroin jumped to more than 15,000 in 2016, up from around 3,000 in 2010, according to the KFF data. And the fatalities from semisynthetic opioids stayed relatively flat for a few years and then grew, but much more slowly than previously.
Read the whole thing.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: US Tanks In Europe Get Invisible Futuristic Missile Shield To Counter Russian Threat.
I’m still waiting for the hover tanks I was promised back in high school.
WHAT RESPONSIBILITY DO HONDURANS HAVE FOR THEIR OWN PLIGHT? Now that is an uncomfortable question posed by the former chief of the national security division within the Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. In other words, it’s not a question posed by some guy in his pajamas sitting in his living room (10 bonus points if you know the origin of that image!) blogging.
RED ON RED: GOP launches secret group to attack West Virginia coal baron.
The Republican establishment has launched an emergency intervention in the West Virginia Senate primary aimed at stopping recently imprisoned coal baron Don Blankenship from winning the party’s nomination.
Late last week, a newly formed super PAC generically dubbed the “Mountain Families PAC” began airing TV ads targeting Blankenship, who spent one year behind bars following a deadly 2010 explosion at his Upper Big Branch Mine. The national party isn’t promoting its role in the group, but its fingerprints are all over it.
The 30-second commercials, which the group is spending nearly $700,000 to air, accuse Blankenship’s company of contaminating drinking water by pumping “toxic coal slurry,” even as the multimillionaire installed a piping system that pumped clean water to his mansion.
“Isn’t there enough toxic sludge in Washington?” the narrator intones.
If you want more Joe Manchin, I’m pretty sure nominating Blankenship is how you get more Manchin.
DON’T FLY SUN COUNTRY: Sun Country Airlines Strands Hundreds of Passengers in Mexico.
Gary Leff: “The airline acknowledged that no one was staffing the airline’s counters and that phone lines were just disconnecting callers because of volume. And they say they hope providing a refund for the cancelled flight ‘will more than compensate for the cost of making alternative arrangements home.’… However they should have chartered a plane. Or they should have covered the cost of each passenger’s tickets home on another carrier. Without interline agreements that means they’d be paying retail. The airline took money and agreed to provide transportation, not strand passengers.”
CUNY LAW SCHOOL NEEDS TO FIRE ITS DEAN: Inside Higher Ed reports that there will be no sanctions, nor even an investigation, of the students who disrupted Josh Blackman’s talk:
Via email on Sunday, Mary Lu Bilek, dean of the law school, said that the protest was reasonable because the disruptions ended relatively early in the time frame of the appearance.
“For the first eight minutes of the 70-minute event, the protesting students voiced their disagreements. The speaker engaged with them. The protesting students then filed out of the room, and the event proceeded to its conclusion without incident,” Bilek said.
“This non-violent, limited protest was a reasonable exercise of protected free speech, and it did not violate any university policy,” she added. “CUNY Law students are encouraged to develop their own perspectives on the law in order to be prepared to confront our most difficult legal and social issues as lawyers promoting the values of fairness, justice, and equality.”
Some free-speech provocateurs should consider disrupting the first eight minutes of each of CUNY law school’s classes this week, including by forcing the professor to run a gauntlet of protesters threatening to block entry into their classrooms. After all, we now know that the law school’s official position is that eight minutes of disruption is “a reasonable exercise of free speech.” Meanwhile, Dean Bilek should be fired, and the Department of Education should investigate whether CUNY, a public institution, is violating the First Amendment rights of its guest speakers and students by giving disrupting students carte blanche, at least for eight minutes. The joke is that Dean Bilek is an ABA site visit team member, helping determine whether other law schools should get or keep the necessary accreditation, something she clearly is not competent to do.
Note that I’m not advocating any particular punishment of the students. But surely it can’t be consistent with free speech and university policy to disrupt a speaker. Indeed, that was the law school’s position before the talk. As IHE reports: “The law school sent a campuswide email stating that Blackman had a right to speak, and that protests were welcome, but not if they disrupted his appearance. At the beginning of his lecture, a law school official came to the event, repeated that message and then left.”
UPDATE: Let’s take a look at page 85 of the law school’s student handbook: “II. Rules of the university (1-11) and law school (12). 1. A member of the academic community shall not intentionally obstruct and/or forcibly prevent others from the exercise of their rights. Nor shall she/he interfere with the institution’s educational process or facilities, or the rights
of those who wish to avail themselves of any of the institution’s instructional, personal, administrative, recreational, and community services.” Also this: “5. Each member of the academic community or an invited guest has the right to advocate his position without having to fear abuse—physical, verbal, or otherwise from others supporting conflicting points of view.” The disruption didn’t violate any university policy, Dean Bilek? Have your read the student handbook?
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: University fired a conservative professor for blogging. Now it’s denouncing him in Google ads.
