FOR THE UNFORGIVABLE CRIME OF BEING A REPUBLICAN, AND A TRUMP APPOINTEE. George Washington Law Faculty Tried But Failed (For Now) To Revoke Alum Bill Barr’s Honorary Degree. This effort does not say good things about the seriousness of the legal academy generally. If an “honorary” degree just means you’re a lefty in good standing, then it’s not much of an honor at all.
Archive for 2020
June 5, 2020
TODAY’S NON-SHOCKING STORY: Feds Say ‘Very Organized Coordination’ in Riots from ‘Professional Agitators’ Connected to Antifa.
JUSTICE: Appeals court throws open the door to anti-male bias lawsuits against universities. “The 3rd Circuit’s May 29 ruling has already been cited in at least one other similar lawsuit.”
BASKET OF DEPLORABLES, II: Biden claims ’10 to 15 percent’ of Americans are ‘just not very good people.’
LOOTERS ANGERED BY BEING LOOTED: Law Enforcement Seizes Masks Meant To Protect Anti-Racist Protesters From COVID-19.
WELL, GOOD: Federal Court Strikes Down Vote-By-Mail In Texas, Citing ‘Significant, Irreparable Harm.’ “In a 48-page ruling Thursday, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a decision by a District Court judge in San Antonio two weeks ago that would have allowed for expanded mail-in balloting during the pandemic.”
NEWS YOU CAN USE: The Gospel According to Peter Thiel. Wherever there’s a major shift in the American landscape, one can usually find Silicon Valley’s iconoclastic investor.
SEGREGATION NOW, SEGREGATION TOMORROW, SEGREGATION FOREVER! Students call for laxed grading for black students. University goes along with it.
UNEXPECTED EMPLOYMENT GAINS, MEGALITHIC MEDIA CRUSHED: Biggest Job Gain in History, Unemployment Drops as Lockdowns Lift
UNEXPECTEDLY! US shocks economists by adding 2.5 million jobs in May as unemployment declines to 13.3%.
Models based on past unemployment are unreliable. Today’s “unemployment” is as high as it is because the government is paying many people an above-market wage to be unemployed, and because government is keeping many businesses closed, not because of a fundamental breakdown.
HOT: The California legislature’s effort to repeal Proposition 209 continues apace. Despite my written testimony before the Assembly Appropriations Committee showing that, over time, Prop 209 has saved the state at least a BILLION DOLLARS in public contracting costs, the Appropriation Committee reported the bill out Wednesday afternnoon. (Testimony before that committee is limited to a bill’s fiscal impact.) The issue now goes to the full Assembly.
Also reported out was a bill to study slave reparations. (Note that California was never a slave state.)
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Who In the Heck Even Voted for Bill de Blasio? “When Mayor Moron was first elected almost everyone I know who is well-versed in New York City politics was convinced that he would be a one-term wonder. As he went about dismantling twenty years of progress in the city it seemed almost certain that he would be shown the door, Apparently, every one in New York was drunk in 2017, and de Blasio was given another shot at screwing everything up.”
Give de Blasio this much credit: He certainly didn’t waste the opportunity he was given.
COOL. THEN BLOCK THE ADS FROM FELLOW TRAVELERS AND FRONT ORGANIZATIONS: Facebook will block ads from state-controlled media outlets.
I FEEL LIKE AIDING VOTERS MIGHT BE AN EASIER SELL TO VOTERS THAN AIDING ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS: Trump’s virus payroll tax cut ‘crushes’ Pelosi plan to aid illegal immigrants.
BAY AREA PROTESTS UPDATES: SF mayor announces effort to redirect police funds to black community.
“Decades of disinvestment and racially disparate policies have disproportionately hurt our African-American community in SF,” Breed wrote on Twitter in announcing the joint effort with Supervisor Shamann Walton. “This week has highlighted the devastating impacts of police violence against African-Americans in this country.”
San Francisco’s last Republican mayor left office at the beginning of 1964.
CHINA IS ASSHOLE: Chinese Government Pushing All Lives Matter on Anniversary of Tiananmen
DOMINIC GREEN: Life’s a riot with Meghan Markle. “Why send in the troops when you can send in the clowns?”
It’s a vintage performance: the dress-down ponytail and Diana-like white shirt, the Diana-like rolling of the spontaneously moistened eyes, the Diana-like repetition of the clichés of the day as if she is thinking of them for the first time, the long pauses where she is overwhelmed, speechless but still profoundly moved by her own compassion in a sensitivity that could only be called Diana-like, or Diana-lite.
It is impossible not to be impressed by the conviction with which the millionaire wife of a ginger prince faces the pervasive hierarchies of white supremacy. Only a racist cop would refuse to take a knee, and perhaps a Sussex Royal tea towel, when hearing Meghan’s tremulous account of witnessing the Rodney King riots as an 11-year-old. The bit where she quaveringly recalls seeing ‘men in the back of a van, just holding guns and rifles’ must have been especially upsetting for her.
Click on over because this is a joy to read.
CORONAVIRUS? IS THAT STILL A THING? I THOUGHT MASS RALLIES WERE FINE NOW. Harvard Law School To Hold All Fall 2020 Classes Online Due To Coronavirus.
THEY’RE NOT COVERING THE RIOTERS, THEY’RE COVERING FOR THEM: Times News Article Minimizes Church Arson.
WHO IS BEHIND SYSTEMIC RACISM? THE DEMOCRATIC MACHINES: “Chauvin and the other three cops did what they did because they thought what they had been taught to think by decades of one-party rule in the city, that the fix was already in: if the pols keep their hands off the cops, the police union will deliver the votes.”