An update, mainly for out-of-area folks vaguely worried about the news of fires in Southern California. My immediate area is not threatened by the Station Fire. However, yesterday and today everyone here in northern Los Angeles County has been treated… Continue Reading
LeVar Burton may be most famous for playing Geordi LaForge on Star Trek, he may have made his mark playing Kunta Kinte in Roots, but he did his best work inspiring children to read books on Reading Rainbow, which after… Continue Reading
Many of you Readers will have already come across the sensational story of a woman escaping from an eighteen-year captivity in an East Bay Area exurb. She was kidnapped by a stranger near her home in South Lake Tahoe in… Continue Reading
In part of my continuing theme of “dial the rhetoric down from eleven,” let me turn your attention to a phenomenon of truly astonishing disrepute: the fabricated hate crime. Here’s how I suspect the thinking behind such an activity goes,… Continue Reading
Now, I think there’s no problem with a law that requires you to register your guns. And Plaxico Burress owned a gun that he had not registered. And it went off when he carried it into a club in New… Continue Reading
I don’t know why people find Ted Olson’s advocacy against Proposition 8 to be so surprising. He got to being opposed to Prop. 8 the same way a lot of people did — by realizing that restricting marriage to opposite-sex… Continue Reading
I had Republican friends who worried that after the 2008 elections, the Democrats would embed themselves to become a permanent majority. I was calm, however; confident in my belief that it would not be long before the Democrats overreached and… Continue Reading
I know that the Supreme Court has narrowly upheld certain kinds of hate crimes laws. I think those laws, and those decisions, are ultimately contrary to the First Amendment — which is to say I think the Supremes blew the… Continue Reading
I’ve just finished reading Jeffrey Toobin’s book The Nine. In it, he paints a series of pictures — moments in time in the institutional history of the Supreme Court, shifting focus between the political dimensions of the Court’s work and… Continue Reading
A local TV reporter in Cleveland wanted to get coverage of an interesting local story. Only by the time the news van got there, the opportunity was gone. But no worries – the reporter and cameraman team found a solution.… Continue Reading