Just for Fun Friday

"Reasons to Date Writers" as critiqued by a writer.

Also, for those of you less amused by writer's humor, the latest internet sensation:

Every Little Step with Mike Tyson & Wayne Brady from Mike Tyson

One of These Things Is Not Like the Others

So The Nation recently published its list of "The Fifty Most Influential Progressives of the Twentieth Century." Regardless of your political leanings, the list is certainly debatable. (I may write more on some of their selections later.) But one of the last paragraphs of the introduction to the list struck me as offensively off-base:

A few of the people on the list expressed views, at some point in their lives, that progressives consider objectionable, such as Margaret Sanger's endorsement of eugenics, Earl Warren's support for rounding up Japanese-Americans during World War II, Bayard Rustin's support for the Vietnam War and Jackie Robinson's attack on Paul Robeson. They made mistakes, which may be understandable in historical context, but which should be acknowledged as part of their lives and times.

Now, it must be mentioned that Jackie did testify before McCarthy's the House Un-American Activities Committee. That's a big deal. But here's some background on exactly went down:



More here.

What, pray tell, do you suppose would have happened if some uppity nigger baseball player told HUAC, by way of polite declination, to shove it's "invitation"? Yet somehow, this action--the reluctant testimony to separate the fight for racial equality from the looming specter of communism--is mentioned in the same sentence with support for a war that killed over a million soldiers and civilians, Margaret Sanger's enthusiastic genocidal attachment to Eugenics and throwing thousands of American citizens into detention camps for their ethnicity. (Without mentioning FDR's role in it, no less.)

This "attack" was mentioned again in Robinson's profile--as was Warren's culpability in the Japanese internment in his own--but Rustin's and Sanger's "mistakes" are stricken from their laudatory bios. Apparently, to Professor Dreier and The Nation's editors, an effectively coerced statement that illustrates differing civil rights approaches--while maintaining the shared contempt of the United States' criminal and unconstitutional discrimination policies--reflects as poorly on Jackie Robinson as the racist dedication of Margaret Sanger and authorizing the false imprisonment of over 100,000 innocent people.

Unbelievable.

Just for Fun Friday: Triumphant Return Edition

Hey all. Sorry about the hiatus. My busy time is over, so I'm starting up my research and writing again. This will probably make the blog a little more focused on criminal justice issues, but I hope to still keep it entertaining for the rest of you too.

Anyway, courtesy of  Julian's twitter feed, I give you a collection of animated gifs and music mashups. The audio isn't safe for work, unless melodic F-bombs are cool at your job. Most of the video is safe, though you will see a canine sexually assault a plush toy. You've been warned.

Hopefully I'll have some decent content up next week. Til then, enjoy.


Cache Rules Everything Around Me from Evan Roth on Vimeo.

Stare Decisis: Latin for "Because We Said So"

I was writing another post about "situational constitutionalism" and one of the links I was going to use was Justice Scalia's scathing dissent* from the 1992 abortion case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey. I found myself no longer wanting to write the post because Scalia does such a marvelous job deconstructing the plurality's incoherent stare decisis argument that Casey upholds the constitutionality of Roe while it simultaneously guts everything substantive in the opinion. Re-reading it brought back memories of Con Law back at IU--and of a Scalia I admired so much more than I do now.

That said, I have three things to mention before linking to the opinion:

First, I am personally "pro-choice" and legal abortion is my policy preference, for a number of reasons. There is nothing inconsistent with Scalia's dissent and holding these positions because I don't believe abortion access should be a federal matter, for reasons Scalia explains better than I could.

Second, part of the inspiration for this post still requires mentioning, especially in the context of policy assertions divorced from reality: referring to abortion clinics as "reproductive centers" is enough to make Orwell proud. There is no doubt that Ms. Lithwick is not the first person to have used this insultingly absurd misnomer, but I read it and nearly suffered ocular strain from the eyeroll it induced.

Third, I wish the Scalia who wrote this opinion was present in the McDonald decision. Instead, we got a conservative hiding behind insults to the legal academy to capitulate sell-out to substantive due process; proof in a black robe that the Right, just as easily as the Left, can lack the intellectual honesty to be constitutionally consistent.

Unfortuately, I couldn't find a PDF of the slip opinion that isn't behind a pay wall, so HTML will have to do.


*Technically, it's a concurrence in part and a dissent in part, but the text makes pretty clear that Nino isn't being very agreeable.

Mood Music Monday

If livin' was actually easy, it wouldn't be almost 11PM before I posted my Mood Music Monday--but it just came on my iTunes and it's a great song. The embedded video could have used a spell check, but spelling isn't really the point, now is it? Enjoy--I hope to post something substantive soon.

The Systemic Unfairness of the Criminal Justice System

A rich man railroaded by an unconstitutional law reflects on his 28 months in federal prison:

It had been an interesting experience, from which I developed a much greater practical knowledge than I had ever had before of those who had drawn a short straw from the system; of the realities of street level American race relations; of the pathology of incorrigible criminals; and of the wasted opportunities for the reintegration of many of these people into society. I saw at close range the failure of the U.S. War on Drugs, with absurd sentences, (including 20 years for marijuana offences, although 42% of Americans have used marijuana and it is the greatest cash crop in California.) A trillion dollars have been spent, a million easily replaceable small fry are in prison, and the targeted substances are more available and of better quality than ever, while producing countries such as Colombia and Mexico are in a state of civil war.

I had seen at close range the injustice of sentences one hundred times more severe for crack cocaine than for powder cocaine, a straight act of discrimination against African-Americans, that even the first black president and attorney general have only ameliorated with tepid support for a measure, still being debated, to reduce the disparity of sentence from 100 to one to 18 to one.

And I had heard the vehement allegations of many fellow residents of the fraudulence of the public defender system, where court-appointed lawyers, it is universally and plausibly alleged, are more often than not stooges of the prosecutors. They are paid for the number of clients they represent rather than for their level of success, and they do usually plead their clients to prison. They provide a thin veneer for the fable of the poor citizen’s day in court to receive impartial justice through due process.

And I had the opportunity to see why the United States has six to twelve times as many incarcerated people as other prosperous democracies, (Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom), how the prison industry grew, and successfully sought more prisoners, longer sentences, and maximal possibilities of probation violations and a swift return to custody.

Before I got into the maw of the U.S. legal system, I did not realize the country has 47 million people with a criminal record, (most for relatively trivial offenses,) or that prosecutors won more than 90% of their cases. There, at Coleman, I had seen the courage of self-help, the pathos of broken men, the drawn faces of the hopeless, the glazed expression of the heavily medicated, (90% of Americans judged to require confinement for psychiatric reasons are in the prison system), and the nonchalance of those who find prison a comfortable welfare system compared to the skid row that was their former milieu. America’s 2.4 million prisoners, and millions more awaiting trial or on supervised release, are an ostracized, voiceless legion of the walking dead; they are no one’s constituency.

The whole thing, very much worth the read, here.

UPDATE: I should mention that I don't endorse everything Mr. Black says in the piece and I think he is guilty of over-generalization, especially painting public defenders as "in league" with the prosecutors. I think the PD system needs serious adjustment, as does the plea bargaining process. I stand by my encouragement to read it, but not without a critical eye. -JPB

It seems Texas education wasn't working that well before... you shouldn't judge Congresspeople by their alma maters

I present Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX), national embarrassment:



Someone get this idiot a map and a history book please.

UPDATE: It was brought to my attention that Rep. Jackson-Lee went to Yale, and in confirming this it turns out she's also a grad of UVA Law...and Jamaica High School in Queens, NY. So, apparently, she's a carpetbagging Yankee and not a product of Texas's school system. Apologies to the Lone Star State for the mix-up.