I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
“By ratings standards,” the Murdochs say today of the King of Cable News who liked to masturbate to the sound of sexual harrassment (his own), “Bill O’Reilly is one of the most accomplished TV personalities in the history of cable news.”
No word on how he ranked by social standards. None at all.
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
Missouri is the Show Me state. So when a woman there became a victim of repeated and violent domestic abuse, Missouri showed her…the door. She was kicked out of her home, kicked out of her city, and ordered not to come back for six months.
That’s the law in Maplewood: tell the cops your boyfriend beat you up, stabbed you, or shot you more than twice in six months, and he may or may not go to jail, but you will definitely be on the streets.
Worse, that’s the law (or there are laws similar to that) in communities across the United States. They’re called nuisance abatement ordinances, and are intended to allow cities to declare any number of conditions, from trash violations to repeated violations of the criminal law (such as assault), a public nuisance that can then be legally rectified.
Until ten years ago, that was the law in my own community, Boulder, Colorado. In 2007 the nuisance abatement ordinance was changed to make an exception for victims of crime, such as domestic violence.
The American Civil Liberties Union has a project to go after other communities like Maplewood where that exception has not been written into the law. One by one, they’re filing lawsuits, and one by one, cities are settling and changing the law.
Its latest lawsuit is in Maplewood. That one will likely settle, too. It will settle a few thousand dollars on the woman whose loved one left her scarred with stab wounds, whose community left her scarred with the gut fear of ever calling the police and rendered homeless again.
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
There is no fool like an April fool, and I went to see one today. I don’t mean Hal Holbrook, the magnificent ninety-two-year-old actor who for the past sixty-three years has made his living channeling my multiply-great uncle Sam Clemens, whom many people recall as Mark Twain.
Mr. Holbrook performed “Mark Twain Tonight” in Denver. Tickets to his performance were a gift from my children, who thought their old dad, and significantly younger mom, ought to at last see this inspiring portrayal of the distant relative (grandmama was a Clemens) he’d bragged on all their growing years.
Mark Twain talked and wrote a lot about politicians, so it wasn’t surprising that Hal Holbrook would speak to his Denver audience about politicians, and he did. He talked about the President of the United States.
“No high-minded man, no man of right feeling, can contemplate the lumbering and slovenly lying of the present day without grieving to see a noble art so prostituted,” he lamented.
Piling on, he said, “I think the President is clearly insane in several ways, and insanest upon war and its supreme glories. I think he longs for a big war wherein he can spectacularly perform as chief general and chief admiral, and go down in history as the only monarch of modern times that has served both offices at the same time.”
Well, this was just too much to bear for one Trump voter in the audience, who interrupted the performance to shout from his seat, “Where’s Mark Twain?”
In the age of Trump, heckling of the old, the lame, and the less-than-seven-on-a-scale-to-ten is enjoying a big comeback. But to answer that boor’s question, Mark Twain was right there in front of his eyes. What that April fool didn’t understand, because stupidity is the close companion of boorishness, is that Hal Holbrook was reciting the words of Mark Twain, who had the great good fortune never to meet the forty-fifth President, but had met the twenty-sixth: Teddy Roosevelt.
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
Where I practice law, until 2012 it was a felony to commit the kind of libel Donald Trump committed when he falsely accused Barack Obama of wiretapping the billionaire liar.
The idea that the former President would even want to do such a thing to the now current-President kind of tickles the silly-meter.
How, for starters, could anyone begin to evaluate the credibility of the “intelligence” gleaned there, if that’s using the right word for anything that goes on in Trump Tower.
What Trump says under the influence of Kentucky Fried Chicken is about as valuable as what most people might say under the influence of torture — though I may have just recollected the same thing twice.
The New York Times put a meter on the man last September and found he lied on average about thirty-one times a week. And that’s just the whoppers he told in public.
Every President has lied. I don’t believe that story about the cherry tree for one damn second. But this is the first President who is supporting a whole cottage industry of people gamely trying to keep up with the count of the lies he tells. And, like the man himself would say of the New York Times, failing.
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
President Donald Trump has every Constitutional right to nominate whomever he likes to the Supreme Court. So did President Barack Obama.
In both instances, the Senate of the United States had every Constitutional obligation to advise and consent to or veto those nominations.
The Senate unconstitutionally refused to do its duty in the case of Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland. The executive branch of our government — perhaps from hubris, or a failure of imagination to see that, disgusted with politics, the American people would take short-sighted revenge and elevate a television buffoon to the Presidency — declined to sue the legislative branch for that dereliction.
Now the high court chickens come home to roost in yet another revolting display of the bipartisan hypocrisy we’re wholly accustomed to see ooze all over these D.C. barbecues.
Neil Gorsuch is eminently qualified to be a Supreme Court Justice of the United States.
He’s just not the Justice to replace Antonin Scalia that, had the Senate any actual respect for the Constitution, the American people deserved. Maybe next time, but not this time.