Taking a Knee
If you’ve been hoping I could make sense of the passing scene, lo these many weeks, your long wait is over. At last, events have crystallized and I can now take on the most important issue confronting the nation (as President Nixon, Watergate raging, famously said to his Cabinet about inflation three days before he resigned) — namely, taking a knee while the national anthem swells through football stadiums across the country. [more]
My Slant on Matal v. Tam: Welcome to My T-Word X-Word G-Word O-Word Z-Word Co., Inc., or Death to the Happy-Talk Clause
It’s old news now, having happened about 30 hours ago as I write, but my long absence from the blog this spring shows that this first day of summer I’m moving at superluminal speed. I do so to bring you important news about the legal status of raw offensiveness: [more]
The Winter of Our Disconnect
My Trump Timeout has timed out. It’s high time to get on with things. A few of my more daring friends are way ahead of me, and one or two never tuned out. They’ve actually been reading the papers every day. The president, they tell me, has reassured us all: things couldn’t be better. (The only person I know who admits to voting for The Donald says that things are at least all right.) But just because I’m in the dark—I don’t know anything, I swear, about the attorney general’s lying under oath, or Congress’s failure to repeal the Affordable Health Care Act immediately, or the EPA’s plan to renounce its mission, or the president’s press secretary’s amiable ignorance (he couldn’t be lying, could he? they don’t do that sort of thing)—doesn’t mean I don’t know what’s going on elsewhere. [more]
The year of living offensively
Offensiveness won. Or lost. It’s really the same thing: it just depends on how you come at it.
For more than a year, the press has treated Americans to a tsunami of stories about offensiveness. Though many of the stories were one-offs, they centered around two motifs: the hothouse atmosphere on college campuses, and the abhorrent rhetoric of Donald Trump, now the President-elect of the United States. [more]