Remember Walt Tuvell? He was the commenter from a few years ago that I banned for various (good) reasons, and he subsequently sued me in Massachusetts for “defamation.” I won the frivolous suit and the subsequent appeal (representing myself) at the cost of quite a bit of money and time, but with a renewed appreciation for how much the civil justice system is willing to bend over backwards to allow pro se litigants to have their day in court even when the justification for that day (or many days) is fanciful.

Well, last week the esteemed law professor Eugene Volokh discovered the case, and wrote at The Volokh Conspiracy:

I just came across a case that seriously considers the issue of whether (here, falsely) accusing someone of being an academic is defamatory. From Justice Christopher Barry-Smith in Tuvell v. Marshall (Mass. Super. Ct. 2017), a libel lawsuit that stemmed from a commenter banning controversy at the Ethics Alarms blog:

“Tuvell takes particular issue with Marshall’s statements in the Initial Post that the author of the email was an “academic” and that the “American Left” (which includes academics) “have gone completely off the ethics rails since November 8, 2016.” Even if Tuvell had been identified as the author of the email, these statements could not serve as a basis for a defamation claim. The term “academic,” even when used in this context, cannot be properly viewed as a statement that “would tend to hold the plaintiff up to scorn, hatred, ridicule or contempt, in the minds of any considerable and respectable segment in the community” and is therefore not defamatory. Phelan, 443 Mass. at 56 (emphasis added)….”

Good to know!

The complaint about my mistaken (BOY was it mistaken!) description of Walt as “an academic” was,remarkably, among the more legitimate of his defamation claims.

1. Speaking of Professor Volokh, he noted that the SCOTUS justice intimidation Jen Psaki proclaimed as no big deal is, in fact, illegal.under 18 U.S.C. § 1507:

1. Whoever, with the intent of interfering with, obstructing, or impeding the administration of justice, or
2. with the intent of influencing any judge, juror, witness, or court officer, in the discharge of his duty,
3. pickets or parades in or near a building housing a court of the United States, or
4. in or near a building or residence occupied or used by such judge, juror, witness, or court officer, or
5. with such intent uses any sound-truck or similar device or resorts to any other demonstration in or near any such building or residence,
6. shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.

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That idiocy above is courtesy of Occupy Democrats, who are responsible for many of the dumbest memes on the web, and a longtime friend who may be sliding into dementia based on the fact that she posted that to Facebook approvingly. In addition to serving as an integrity test for the woke and their knee-jerk allies, the leaked draft opinion portending a reversal of Roe v. Wade has also been a boon in that it has largely exposed the logical and ethical deficits of the pro-abortion position. Its advocates can’t really argue intelligently on the merits, or if they can, they’re not. What does the supposedly clever statement above have to do with abortion? No one is regulating sex. That’s a straw man. (The last few days have been an orgy of straw men.) The reversal of Roe means that there is no Constitutional right to kill the results of your own conduct when you are careless, reckless or unlucky. Moreover, there never was one: the “right” found in Roe was made up out of whole cloth at the peak of the sexual revolution and as women’s rights were a mounting cultural feve. A mediocre SCOTUS justice (the otherwise forgettable Harry Blackmun) wrote an unpersuasive, bootstrapping opinion that virtually no lawyer nor legal scholar respected, except that some liked the result.

Now the demoralized Roe fans are reduced to threats, fantasies, insults and dire predictions based on the fallacious reasoning that since the Court (may have) overturned this single, especially bad and still destructive opinion after 50 years, no established SCOTUS precedent is safe. Since Roe, there have been more than 63 million American lives ended in the womb, most of which would be still lives today had their mothers not availed themselves of the “right” to snuff them out for varying reasons. That rather material distinction, as Justice Alito clearly explains, takes Roe out of the usual class of stare decisus cases.

Since we last visited the freakout… Continue reading →

Not for the first time, Senator Paul has demonstrated the integrity, guts and skill to not only expose a government villain but also to explicate some basic cultural values and truths in the process.

This time Paul’s oh-so-deserving target was Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, he of the deliberately porous Mexican border and the deceitful disrespect for enforcing the law, and the topic was the agency’s new and ominous “disinformation governance board.” The setting: a Senate hearing this week.

After the Homeland Security Secretary ducked Paul’s question about whether the Steele Dossier included “Russian disinformation,” Son of Ron said,

“Here’s my question: The FBI concludes that the Steele dossier was full of Russian disinformation. CNN propagated this disinformation gladly for years and years. The difference, I guess, between your opinion and our opinion is that as despicable as it is that CNN propagated this disinformation, I wouldn’t shut them down, I wouldn’t lecture them, I wouldn’t put it on a government website that CNN is wrong for propagating disinformation. The problem you have is you’re not even willing to admit — I mean, we can’t even have an agreement on what the FBI said was disinformation.”

When Mayorkas huminahumina-ed that his board would not be responsible for policing disinformation in general, but only “when there is a connectivity between disinformation and threats to security of the homeland,” Paul said,

Well, the Russians might be considered that. You mentioned the Russians the other day when you tried to pivot away from this being about censorship. Let’s just say … you’ve discovered tomorrow Russian disinformation that is going to hurt our national security, and CNN is broadcasting it, what are you going to do? Here’s the problem: We can’t even agree what disinformation is!  You can’t even agree that it was disinformation that the Russians fed information to the Steele dossier. If you can’t agree to that, how are we ever going to come to an agreement on what is disinformation so you can police it on social media?”

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May 5 isn’t much of a date in ethics history, though it does mark one of the weirdest episodes of WWII. The Fu-Go balloon bomb was a weapon launched by Japan in late 1944 as a creative (and cheap) way to bomb U.S. cities. The hydrogen balloons carried antipersonnel incendiary devices, it was designed as a cheap weapon that the jet stream over the Pacific Ocean was supposed to deliver in the U.S. with deadly effect. It didn’t work as well as that other surprise bombing attack. Although 10% of the 9000 Fu-Gos launched were predicted to cause death and destruction, only one did. On May 5, 1945, a pregnant woman and five children were killed when they discovered a balloon bomb in a forest in Southern Oregon. Archie Mitchell, a pastor, and his pregnant wife Elsie drove up to Gearhart Mountain with five of their Sunday school students to have a picnic. Elsie and the children were looking for a good place to spread their blankets when they discovered a strange, large balloon lying on the ground. When they tugged at it, there were two explosions: the children were were killed immediately, and Elsie died while Archie tried to extinguish the fire on her clothing. Another student survived the initial blast, but died later.

Success!

One of the sites I use to track down these historical ethics markers is History.com, and in this instance, not for the first time, its bias pollutes its writing. Here’s the last paragraph:

The explosive balloon found at Lakeview was a product of one of only a handful of Japanese attacks against the continental United States, which were conducted early in the war by Japanese submarines and later by high-altitude balloons carrying explosives or incendiaries. In comparison, three years earlier, on April 18, 1942, the first squadron of U.S. bombers dropped bombs on the Japanese cities of Tokyo, Kobe, and Nagoyo, surprising the Japanese military command, who believed their home islands to be out of reach of Allied air attacks. When the war ended on August 14, 1945, some 160,000 tons of conventional explosives and two atomic bombs had been dropped on Japan by the United States. Approximately 500,000 Japanese civilians were killed as a result of these bombing attacks.

Or, as a further “comparison,” the Japanese army murdered an estimated 200,000 (or more) Chinese civilians and raped 20,000-80,000 during the Rape of Nanking.

1. Those clever Satanists! In the wake of the OTHER SCOTUS decision recently discussed here (but I can’t find the post right now), where Boston was told that it couldn’t ban a Christian flag from flying over City Hall when the city routinely allowed any organization to have its flag displayed, The Satanic Temple in Massachusetts is requesting that Boston fly its flag:

I see no way Boston can refuse, and the inevitable result will be that the city will stop flying any flags other than the nation’s and the state’s.

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Controversial comic Dave Chappelle was attacked on-stage last night by a member of the audience as he was performing for a Netflix comedy festival at the Hollywood Bowl. Isaiah Lee, 23,was carrying a replica handgun with a knife blade inside, authorities said. Lee was wrestled to the ground by security as well as comedian Jamie Foxx, then arrested for assault with a deadly weapon.

Chappelle is considered a political correctness villain because of his jokes about transexuals as well as other segments of the LGTBQ collective. The obvious reaction would be to blame his attack on Will Smith’s Academy Awards broadcast assault on Chris Rock for making a joke Smith (or his wife) didn’t find amusing. (Indeed Rock, who was also on last night’s program with Chappelle, reportedly quipped, “Was that Will Smith?”).

After that unprecedented episode at the Oscars, many comedians expressed concern that Smith had placed a virtual target on their backs. (The Oscars didn’t help by allowing Smith to go back to his seat and later collect a statuette as the audience stood and cheered.)

However, the cultural permission to resort to violence and intimidation as a response to to words, opinions and even jokes that seem to counter what those with superior sensibilities and values (or so they assume) want to hear arrived well before “the Slap.” It was given when the Left’s antifa began advocating “punching Nazis,” leftist students on campuses threatened violence to goad universities into shutting down (and up) conservative speakers, and Rep. Maxine Waters, among others, encouraged opponents of the Trump administration to harass conservatives and members of his administration when they and their families appeared in public.

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Comic Dave Smith reveals a great truth: Integrity is the irreplaceable ingredient of trust. Somehow the Democrats and progressives have completely abandoned integrity for opportunism and expediency.

1. See? The Washington Post still has it’s uses!  Virtually every article about yesterday’s leak of the Alito draft of a potential SCOTUS ruling reversing Roe v, Wade (including mine last night) states that no previous Supreme Court decision had leaked to the press before it was released. Experts who the public has good reason to trust also have made the same claim: Neal Katyal, for example, the former acting solicitor general, tweeted that this was “the first major leak from the Supreme Court ever.” He called it the equivalent of the Pentagon Papers. It turns out that a previous SCOTUS landmark decision was leaked. Interestingly, as the Washington Post revealed, it was…Roe v. Wade!

From The original Roe v. Wade decision also was leaked to the press:

The Supreme Court clerk who leaked the story, Larry Hammond… clerked for Justice Lewis Powell. …Hammond confided in an acquaintance he knew from the University of Texas School of Law that the Roe ruling was forthcoming. The acquaintance, a Time staff reporter named David Beckwith, was given the information “on background” and was supposed to write about it only once the opinion came down from the court. A slight delay in the ruling, however, resulted in an article that appeared in the issue of the magazine that hit newsstands a few hours before the opinion was read on Jan. 22, 1973…

Chief Justice Warren Burger was livid….There are obvious and profound consequences if litigants and the public are tipped off to the result in a case before it has been formally announced and adopted. Burger sent a frantic “eyes only” letter to all the justices demanding that the leaker be identified and punished. Burger even threatened to subject law clerks to lie-detector tests if no one was forthcoming. Hammond [told Powell]…what happened and offer[ed] his resignation. Powell would not hear of it and called Burger to tell him that Hammond had been double-crossed.

…Burger showed mercy to Hammond and gracefully accepted his apology… Hammond survived as Powell’s clerk and even served an additional term for the justice before leaving the court to join the Watergate Special Prosecution Force. The story of Hammond’s close call became legend to other clerks on the court at the time and has been passed down as a cautionary tale over time.

“We do not pretend to know how our political system or society will respond to today’s decision overruling Roe and Casey. And even if we could foresee what will happen, we would have no authority to let that knowledge influence our decision. We can only do our job, which is to interpret the law, apply longstanding principles of stare decisis, and decide this case accordingly.’

Justice Samuel Alito, in his tour de force majority opinion draft declaring that Roe v. Wade is  no more.

The next sentence: “We therefore hold that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion. Roe and Casey must be overruled, and the authority to regulate abortion must be returned to the people and their elected representatives.”

That unequivocal statement by Alito makes it very clear that the Supreme Court majority, whether it be five or, if Roberts doesn’t chicken out, six, fully understands that the pro-abortion forces will go ballistic when and if Roe is reversed. This means that the leak isn’t going to put any more pressure on the Justices than they expected.

Law professor Josh Blackmon [not “Jon,” as I mistyped originally], a libertarian, read the opinion draft and this was his verdict: Continue reading →