Philip Rosmarin

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

I never thought I’d be drawing positive attention to someone who used to work for the Internal Revenue Service, or to a blog they write whose title features a word I can’t find in any of the dictionaries I’ve ever used.

But Jaydra Perfetti, an Oregon certified fraud examiner and private investigator who writes On Humaning, deserves it.

I’m a little late to the party. She wrote to me last August to let me know she too writes about human rights and criminal defense, and other topics related to the human experience.

She started publishing these essays not even two and a half months into the Covid-19 pandemic, and declared it an opportunity to show that we can solve what seem like insurmountable issues. Just as we had “majorly” shifted in just a couple of months the way we live our lives and conduct our business to confront Covid, she wrote, so too can we shift to make differences in climate change, and in our economic, justice, and political systems. She called that time, so early in the fight, “the perfect time to reimagine our world.”

Her latest essay, published today, commemorates the fifty-second week of the second year of Covid. Yet she’s still hopeful, and wanting to keep a light shining on what we’ve seen these two years.

Perfetti says her effort is about working to make the world a better place.

If you take a look at some of what she’s written, here, I think you’ll find she’s definitely helping us get there.

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

The Supreme Court, the highest court in the United States, has fewer admirers than my hometown municipal court. Lowest approval rating in the history of the nation.

Is it any surprise? Two of the justices are men who should never be allowed around women. One of the women they shouldn’t be allowed around literally signed a pledge fifteen years ago “to put an end to the barbaric legacy of Roe v. Wade,” the barbaric legacy that permitted women some measure of control over their bodies which probably at least four of her male colleagues would prefer to see remanded back to men.

The whole process of choosing who is to sit on the Supreme Court for the rest of their life is dragged through the dung of political dogfight, free of even a pretense of picking the best and brightest. Free too, of fidelity to the country’s own Constitution.

Article II, Section 2 of that document requires the President to appoint these judges, “by and with the advice and consent of the Senate.” Both branches of government are commanded to do their duty to the third. Senate leadership refused to do that Constitutional duty when conservative Justice Antonin Scalia didn’t quite make it to Valentine’s Day in 2016. Too close (almost nine months) to the next Presidential election, they said. (Oddly, the next time a Justice died in office — liberal Ruth Bader Ginsburg in September 2020 — the same Senate leadership said less than two months before a Presidential election was just fine. So even though Joe Biden slid to election on the Presidential slimetrails of his predecessor, he didn’t get to slide in with a Supreme Court nominee like the other guy did.)

The Executive branch had shrugged its own Constitutional shoulders with a stupid bet that it wouldn’t matter because the great masses of the American people would never vote for a moron. The Merrick Garland nomination died partly because the Democrats forgot about H.L. Mencken.

And that’s how we got to the Supreme Court that pollsters ask how we like them today.

So yeah: is it any surprise?

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

10. The then-President commands his troops, um, supporters, to march on the Capitol and demand that Congress give him back the Presidency. “And I’ll be there with you!” he courageously promises but is thwarted when the White House doctor reminds him that a walk of more than fifty steps might easily trigger the bone spurs of even the most courageous obese hero.

9. Representative Lauren Boebert smuggles her Glock into House Chamber, says it’s necessary to restore order in case legitimate elector slate shows up.

8. White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows advises his boss it would be better not to giggle the next time he sees a Capitol policeman nearly beaten to death.

7. “Excuse me,” one of the normal tourists politely asks a cop, “but would you mind removing your eye from the tip of my thumb?”

6. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene says she has ultimate proof Joe Biden lost the election, producing affidavit personally sworn by Q.

5. Senator Josh Hawley offers slightly less convincing proof; says he heard it from the guy in the Viking hat.

4. Congressman Jim Jordan, whilst eyeing an attractive young wrestler, says he too’s not convinced Biden is the winner, but what about that boy there?

3. Senator Ted Cruz holds emergency press conference in front of yet another porno parlor, affirming the defeat, at the same time admitting his father really did kill JFK and his wife really wasn’t nearly as pretty as Melania.

2. President-elect Biden warns of “severe consequences” if protestors invade the Capitol, if not in this life, then in the next, maybe.

And the Number One Top Ten Bit of Legitimate Political Discourse at the Jan. 6 Attack on the Capitol:

“Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence!”

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

The pigskin artists formerly known as the Washington Redskins finally changed their name today.

Redskins, Merriam-Webster tells us, was first used as an insulting and contemptuous term for American Indians, around 1769.

It was insulting and contemptuous in 1769, a half-dozen years the other side of the French and Indian War. It was insulting and contemptuous in 1933, when the team was first established in Boston. It was insulting and contemptuous all the way through till they reluctantly retired the name in 2020.

So used to the insulting and contemptuous nickname was management that it took two years to come up with a name that was neither. What they came up with was, the Commanders. No racial or gender slur there — probably: a lot of male army commanders in U.S. history made it their mission to slaughter almost as many Indians as they met.

First runner-up was an affectionate nod to the local members of Congress — who unfailingly use football metaphors at their press conferences — but owners felt the Washington Chickens might seem insulting and contemptuous of actual chickens.

Other close contenders were Armada (nobody could remember what that was), Presidents (who really likes presidents unless they’re on currency), Red Hogs (well, they’re red, and they’re hogs), and Defenders (too soon after Jan. 6).

However lame the name, it ends a hurtful and indefensible legacy too many nevertheless defended too long, if maybe not in rancor but only ignorance of the harm done. But to paraphrase Oliver Wendell Holmes, five generations of imbeciles are enough.

Team President Jason Wright said the team’s fans thought the new name should reflect concepts like resilience, grit, tradition, and family.

You know, the values deeply manifested by the first people who called this part of the world, home.

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

I was stopped by a policeman the other day, the same policeman who might have stopped my father-in-law once on a road in Howard County back in the day when Bobby still felt the need for speed he’d acquired as an Air Force Sabrejet pilot.

This cop, name of Clarke Ahlers, stopped me, not with his flashing lights, but with a letter kindly telling me about a terrific criminal justice podcast he hosts with a blue buddy of his, name of Serge Antonin. Both are blue by former profession (Clarke’s now a criminal defense lawyer; Serge, an ex-Baltimore cop, a security specialist), and white and black, respectively, by pigmentation. I mention race, because their podcast mentions it. It’s called “Black and White and Thin Blue Lines.”

The men say their podcast is inspired by the person we celebrate today, and every Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and start each one with perhaps less-remembered words King spoke in his “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963.

In that speech King characterized the founding documents of the United States as a promissory note to every American, black as well as white, guaranteeing the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

He said America had defaulted on that note, instead giving its black citizens a bad check returned by the Bank of Justice stamped “insufficient funds.”

Every podcast begins with the words King said next.

But we refuse to believe that the Bank of Justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so we’ve come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

There are twenty-five podcasts already in the podcasters’ vault, recorded over the past ten months. They first flashed their lights on the jury selection process in the trial of Derek Chauvin, the police officer convicted of the murder of George Floyd. Other episodes examine the impact of police body cams; whether police have the right to order you out of your car during a routine traffic stop; rapid response to active shooters (like the one not quite a year ago in my hometown); and their thoughts on the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, a boy who thought it would be cool to carry a man’s gun to a racial justice protest, lost control, and used it to kill two men and wound another.

No episode is more than an hour, and many are closer to the thirty-minute mark: good lunchtime listening.

You can find them here.