Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

Trump has not been happy with the Republican National Committee. He proposed a person close to him to be the chief operating officer of the organization. He proposed another man close to him, an election denier, to be a co-chair of the RNC. And he proposed his daughter-in-law to be another co-chair. I wondered why there were two co-chairs, and I learned that the rules of the RNC require one male and one female co-chair. Say, what? I expected conservatives to become vocal, not about Trump’s seeking to control what is supposed to be an independent organization, but about this two-gender requirement. (Of course, the conservatives believe there are only two genders, so I am not surprised that there are not more co-chairs.) This reeks of affirmative action. This is an example of wokeism. Surely the co-chair requirement should be abolished.

What Margot Asquith said about David Lloyd George still applies to some today: “He couldn’t see a belt without hitting below it.”

At this time of year, my local movie theater plays Oscar-Nominated Live Action Shorts and Oscar-Nominated Animated Shorts. I try to see these before the awards and make my own judgments about who should win. I recently saw the live action program. These movies are always well made with excellent production values. The credits seem just as long as for a full-length movie. I wonder each year who the audience is for these shorts. I am not aware that such shorts are shown commercially, or at least not enough to make back the amount of money that it must take to make them. Almost uniformly the five or so films are interesting, often with innovative stories. There is, however, one problem with the programs. I used to see movie shorts as a kid, sometimes in a theater as an interlude between the double feature. More often, I saw them on TV as local stations tried to find content to fill out their airtime. Often they were, or at least meant to be, humorous, such as instructional videos by Robert Benchley or The Fatal Glass of Beer featuring W.C. Fields. (Everyone should see The Fatal Glass at least several times in their life.) Humor, however, in the nominated live action shorts is in short supply. I guess to be nominated a film must be serious. The ones I just saw did feature one quirky film, but the others explored grief, tragedy, abortion restrictions, and teenage suicide. Each was remarkably good in writing, directing, and acting. Each was affecting — so much so, that I had troubled sleep the night after I went to the theater. I plan to see the animated shorts. However, to my surprise, some of them are also quite disturbing. One year before the final animated short was shown, a manager of the theater came out and said that all children should be taken out of the auditorium. The film was too disturbing for children. He was right. It had graphic nudity and graphic violence. I hope that is not the case this year.

I seldom believe in censorship, but sometimes a phrase that at initially seems fresh becomes so used that I want to have it banned. First on my list right now is “off ramp.” Second is “soft landing.”

“If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you. If you really make them think, they’ll hate you.” Don Marquis.

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

His ex-wife said a Republican seeking a senate seat had physically abused her and their son. Previously, he had left office when it was learned that he had taken pictures of his naked hairstylist without her consent. Am I being sexist if I think that it should disqualify any male from being elected to office if he has a hairstylist?

We have honored people by naming parks, craters, stars, mountains, prizes, streets, buildings, campuses, and more after them. Doctors, however, often have maladies named after them. Do they like that?

The Supreme Court justice was hospitalized for an infection. He stayed in the hospital longer than first predicted. We were told that he did not have Covid, but there was nothing said further about the nature of the infection. How many of us were hoping that it was related to an STD?

Nearly 90% of American students attend public secondary schools. Only three of the present nine Supreme Court justices did. None of the justices attended a public college, university, or law school.

The Final Four is alliterative. Did the NCAA phrasemongers also think Elite Eight and Sweet Sixteen were alliterations?

I have been trying but failing to understand who comprise “the elites” conservatives rail against. Are the Elite Eight in that group or do they comprise it?

I received a letter “signed” by Donald J. Trump urging me to become a member of the Republican National Committee. It did not offer me any membership benefits but urged a money contribution. The letter pointed out Biden’s less than stellar poll numbers and continued, “And my polls are at an all-time high.” I wondered about that and went to RealClearPolitics, which aggregates polls. It reported that Trump’s favorability number was 44.6 and his unfavorable rating was 50.8. They are a bit better than Biden’s, which were 42.5 and 52.0, but would you brag about polls that show the majority of the country views you with distaste?

The letter’s salutation from the RNC signed by Trump was “Dear Fellow Patriot.” And I have thought that “Trump, the patriot” was a very short joke.

Why is it that some jokes are painful if told by the comedian but make me laugh when told by a ventriloquist’s dummy?

“A different taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.” George Eliot.

Even though the book review interview stated that the author had written many books and I have not, I felt as if I were the same as the writer when the interview reported that the novelist can’t read Proust anymore.

Proper perspective. After that incident that got a lot of attention at the Oscars, a Brooklyn news source had the headline, “Brooklyn Man Gets Slapped on National TV.”

Posted on by rjonakait

No Public Defenders Need Apply for the Supreme Court

          Joe Biden has nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson to be a Supreme Court Justice. And this is where we now are on judicial nominees: Republicans know they will oppose her nomination, so they are now looking for reasons to justify that opposition. Lucky for them she was a public defender because now they can vilify her as being lax on crime.

          Other Biden judicial nominees who were public defenders have been asked by Senators Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley, and Ted Cruz questions that boil down to, “How could you represent such scum?” Public defenders are not surprised by this question at social gatherings from people who do not fully grasp our legal system. On the other hand, Cotton, Hawley, and Cruz have degrees from some of the country’s finest law schools. The all clerked for federal judges, two of them for Supreme Court justices. You might expect them to understand American justice and recognize the importance of defense lawyers in that system, but their comments only reveal either their ignorance or their disingenuousness.

          The Senators, however, are selective in their disdain for lawyers who represent criminals or those accused of crimes. When I taught, some students would tell me that they could never represent organized crime. My response was, “I guess you are not going into corporate law then.” I was only being semi-flip. Although corporate crime has seldom been a high prosecutorial priority, many corporations have defended themselves in our criminal justice system. For example, to avoid criminal prosecution in 2015, General Motors paid a $900 million fine for hiding a fatal ignition switch defect responsible for 174 deaths. (How often has a public defender had a client linked to 174 deaths?) As a result of charges filed in 1996, Archer Daniels Midland pleaded guilty to criminal antitrust violations for fixing prices and paid a fine of $100 million. In 2013, Halliburton pleaded guilty to charges stemming from an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that killed eleven people. In 2021, United Airlines paid over $49 million to resolve criminal charges and civil claims on postal service contracts.

          You can play a little parlor game: Put into a search engine the name of a corporation and “criminal” or “felony” conviction and see how many hits you get. You can go further and put in the name of a major financial institution together with “fraud” and see what comes up. You might learn that investment firms paid over $20 billion to settle fraud claims from the sale of mortgage-backed securities in 2005 to 2007, behavior that might have been criminally prosecuted.

          In other words, if you know a corporate attorney, there is a good chance that you know somebody who works for, and presumably gets well paid by, a criminal. But there is little chance that you would hear those lawyers derided by Republican senators because of their clients.

          True conservatives who are concerned about checking governmental power and overreach should, of course, be thanking, not denigrating, public defenders. The government has the power to criminally investigate and punish people. Right wingers screech about this power only when other right wingers are caught up in our criminal justice system, but true conservatives should be concerned with the appropriateness of this authority all the time. Since defenders provide a check on governmental power and overreach, they should be celebrated by those who claim conservative credentials.

          I am not surprised when “conservatives” pandering for partisan gain do not uphold conservative principles, but I still found some recent comments by the Republican National Committee noteworthy. A news story reported that the RNC “in a background paper on her nomination for the high court referred to Judge Jackson’s ‘advocacy for these terrorists’ [imprisoned at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay] as ‘going beyond just giving them a competent defense.’” If an attorney for the government at Guantanamo were a judicial nominee, I doubt the RNC would label the lawyer an advocate for torture even though it has been established that detainees were tortured. More startling, however, is that conservatives are trying to vilify Jackson for going beyond competence in her job. They apparently don’t want people who do their jobs too well on the Supreme Court. Mediocrity is good enough.

          And while I assume the Senators Cruz, Cotton, and Hawley have proclaimed that they want Supreme Court justices who are “originalists,” these conservatives would appear to be ignorant of the importance placed on defense advocacy by the founders of the country. Our Constitution expressly rejected English law and guaranteed a right to counsel because of the important role defense attorneys had for preserving American freedom.

(continued March 23)