Mariana Flores, a sophomore at the University of California-San Diego, has a curious concept of not just tort liability but personal responsibility. She is suing UCSD for being hit by a car on the highway. However, she was taking part in a protest illegally blocking the highway at the time. She is suing the University of California Regents, the city and county of San Diego, the state of California, and the driver of the car.
I have previously written about my objections to Antifa and its anti-free speech values, including academics legitimizing efforts to violently curtail free speech on our campuses. Germany has banned an Antifa website as an extremist organization. That has not stopped Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., the deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee, from posing with the handbook of the Antifa movement and giving the group a proud shout out. As Democrats seek a new identity and purpose after the debacle with Hillary Clinton, this is a worrisome signal. The Democrats will hand over another election if they simply try to run on being anti-Trump and pro-Antifa.
Continue reading “DNC Deputy Chair Gives Shout Out To Antifa”
This may be the single most challenging defense that I have seen in years. Counsel for Edwin Greco Wylie-Biggs argued that the police had failed to prove that drugs seized in the state prison at Fayette, Pennsylvania belonged to Wylie-Biggs. The problem is that the drugs were found in his rectum.
Continue reading “Defendant Loses Appeal In Contesting Possession Of Drugs Found In His Rectum”
I have previously written about the reckless claims of commentators and congressmen for the impeachment or removal of President Donald Trump. Some based these calls on tweets posted by Trump, including comments on the NFL protests. When calls for impeachment began to wane, many turned to the 25th Amendment. Now, the former ethics lawyer to President George W. Bush Richard Painter has declared that Trump can be removed on the basis for removal under the 25th Amendment — a dangerous and unsupportable interpretation of the constitutional standard.
Continue reading “Bush Ethics Lawyer: Trump’s Nuclear Button Tweet Is Sufficient For Removal”
For free speech advocates, there was another chilling development last week in the expanding censorship of social media and the criminalization of speech in the West. The government is investigating Beatrix von Storch (the deputy leader of far-right party AfD) for a tweet posted on New Year’s Eve in which she accused police of appeasing “barbaric, gang-raping Muslim hordes of men.” The statement was barred on Twitter and Von Storch and others were barred on Twitter and Facebook. Once again, raising the free speech concerns is not an endorsement of such offensive posts. Rather, the Germans have taken their controversial speech regulations and have extended them to social media — forcing these companies to become active players in the censoring of political speech. People may have no objection (and even relish) the crackdown on the AfD but the implications for speech is far greater than these individuals.
The founders of Fusion GPS (which compiled the Trump dossier with money from Hillary Clinton and the DNC) has caused a stir with an op-ed in The New York Times calling for Congress to release transcripts of their testimony last summer. I favor such a release to give greater transparency on the facts underlying the allegations over both the Trump and Clinton campaigns. I have criticized both parties for managing the information and pushing investigations on one side while obstructing investigations on the other side. However, six words in the op-ed raise a far more interesting prospect: they say that there may have been an insider cooperating with the FBI during the campaign. That would be a highly significant development if the source was a true cooperative witness funneling information to the Bureau during the presidential campaign.Continue reading “Did the FBI Have A Source In The Trump Campaign?”
We have previously discussed the controversial writings of George Ciccariello-Maher, a former Drexel University professor who was pushed to resign after a national outcry. Ciccariello-Maher has blamed the Las Vegas massacre on “Trumpism” and declared that “All I want for Christmas is white genocide.” He has insisted that some of his prior tweets have been”satirical,” though he appears to court controversy on social media. He has now announced to have been hired as a visiting scholar by New York University’s Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics.
Continue reading “Drexel Professor Who Called For “White Genocide” Hired By New York University”
Below is my column in the Hill newspaper on New Year’s resolutions that would bring a welcomed change in Washington for President Donald Trump, the Congress, and the media. While I have little illusions over the chances of either such resolutions being made or kept, it is worth noting that all of the major players could do well with a modicum of self-reflection with the New Year.
Continue reading “The New Year’s Resolutions For President Trump, Congress, and The Media”
Sherwin Shayegan, 34, may be one of the truly creepiest individuals to make it on a police blotter, if New Jersey prosecutors are correct. Shayegan gave a 14-year-old boy a spontaneous massage at the Newark International Airport last Friday as he sat near a luggage carousel. He then gave the boy a note with a $10 bill. It turns out that Shayegan has a long, bizarre, and deeply disturbing history.
Pudit Kittithradilok, 34, was found guilty to running a Ponzi scheme based on investors artificially high financial returns. A defendant would normally be delighted by a fifty percent reduction in his sentence, but Kittithradilok was sentenced to more than 13,000 years in prison. His reduction left him with a hefty remainder of 6,637 years and six months. Even with regular workouts in the prison yard, it would seem difficult to serve that time.
Happy New Year to all of our blog community from around the world. As I mentioned yesterday, I get to celebrate both New Years and my anniversary on the 31st. Leslie and I eloped in Alexandria Virginia on New Year’s Eve in 1997 — making this our 20th anniversary. (We disagree on the number for celebrating since I count the 8 years that we dated — making this our 28th). I make our traditional soup on New Year’s: The Bowl of The Wife of Kit Carson Soup. It is a hot Turkey soup that my father Jack Turley would make every New Year and was believed to be a cure for any hangover.
As has been our tradition on this blog, with the start of 2018, I thought I would wanted to share our annual “State of The Blog” statistics.
Below is my column in The Hill newspaper on the status of the Russian investigation and a look back at the various crimes alleged over the year. A brief search of mainstream media found roughly 5000 stories referring to “bombshell” developments. However, the status has changed little over the year. That could, of course, change. We do not know what Special Counsel Robert Mueller had in terms of new evidence. That did not stop many from declaring conclusive evidence supporting charges over the year despite the paucity of evidence. While we have had four indictments or pleas, but the charges are been notably removed from the core purpose of the Russian collusion investigation. The point of the column is not that new charges are unlikely but that there is little public evidence supporting such charges at the end of 2017. CNN reported yet another “bombshell” discovery this week: George Papadopoulos told an Australian diplomat that Russia had “political dirt” on Hillary Clinton in May of last year. However, there has to be more than knowledge of such hacking (or even a desire to use the results of hacking) to support even a collateral criminal charge. We could certainly reach that point in 2018 but the evidence remains sketchy on specific criminal acts tied to Trump or his closest aides related to Russia.
Here is the column:
Continue reading “A Year Later, An Investigation In Search Of A Crime”
Tonight we will ring in 2018 at home in McLean, Virginia with my in-laws from North Carolina. New Year’s eve is also my wedding anniversary. Twenty years ago, Leslie and I decided to walk across the street in Old Town Alexandria and get married. Since we dated for eight years, I count the anniversary as our 28th while Leslie insists on counting this year as our 20th anniversary. We will toast our anniversary and the New Year (as we did 20 years ago) with a bottle of Schramsburg Cremant.
Ever wonder who is behind those email messages from Nigerian princes promising millions if you could just send some money to help him release his fortune? Well, meet Michale Neu, allegedly a 67-year-old “Nigerian Prince” from Slidell, Louisiana. Neu was arrested and charged with 269 counts of wire fraud and money laundering by the Slidell Police Department’s Financial Crimes Division after a long investigation into an Internet scam.
Danny Kay, 26, will greet the New Year as a free man after being convicted of a rape that was based on altered evidence submitted by the alleged victim. His freedom is due not to police work but the work of his sister in law Sarah Maddison. Maddison decided to take a minute and look at the Facebook messages sent between Kay and the unnamed woman who accused him of rape. What she found was that the police used messages that were misleadingly edited by the woman and that the real messages directly contradicted her claims. The police revealed an utter incompetence in the investigation and the prosecutors have expressed no intent in looking at possible charges against the woman who is accused of changing the meaning of the messages from exculpatory to incriminating. This follows an equally shocking reversal where the police were found to have withheld 40,000 messages from the defense in another rape case.