From an article in the Sunday New York Times magazine about James Comey’s private crusade to “end” the Trump presidency:

Rod J. Rosenstein, the former deputy attorney general whose 2017 memo about Mr. Comey was cited to rationalize the firing of the F.B.I. director that May, has been particularly cutting. At a speech last spring, Mr. Rosenstein taunted the former director for “selling books and earning speaking fees while speculating about the strength of my character and the fate of my immortal soul.”

“I kid you not,” Mr. Rosenstein said. “And that is disappointing. Speculating about souls is not a job for police and prosecutors.”

I guess I’m disappointed that Rod Rosenstein seems never to have heard of mens rea, forensic psychology, or Cicero.  The FBI famously has a Behavioral Analysis Unit. What is it that Rod Rosenstein thinks they do there?

From “Shoot Migrants’ Legs, Build Alligator Moats: Behind Trump’s Ideas for Border,” New York Times, October 2:

Privately, the president had often talked about fortifying a border wall with a water-filled trench, stocked with snakes or alligators, prompting aides to seek a cost estimate. He wanted the wall electrified, with spikes on top that could pierce human flesh. After publicly suggesting that soldiers shoot migrants if they threw rocks, the president backed off when his staff told him that was illegal. But later in a meeting, aides recalled, he suggested that they shoot migrants in the legs to slow them down. That’s not allowed either, they told him.

To adopt a Randian rhetorical trope: he got it from Israel, who got it from East Germany.

I’m not normally a fan of either Ross Douthat or Sarah Chayes, but both of them have articles on the Ukraine-Biden-Trump crisis that strike me as simultaneously out-of-the-mainstream and completely on-target. Douthat’s “The Corruption Before Trump” is in today’s New York Times; Chayes’s “Hunter Biden’s Perfectly Legal, Socially Acceptable Corruption” is in The Atlantic from a few days ago.

Both make the same point, a point that coheres with the point I tried to make about the Ukraine scandal in my last post on it: even if you think that Trump’s behavior on the Ukraine phone call is reprehensible and impeachment-worthy, it’s just the most egregious instance of a widespread set of practices. There’s no point in attacking Trump in particular but leaving the practices themselves unscrutinized. Frankly, there’s no point in attacking the practices and leaving the ideological motivation for them unscrutinized, either. Chayes is better than Douthat on the corrupt nature of the practices; Douthat is better than Chayes on the issue of the ideological motivations for the practices. But read both together, and you get the right overall picture.  Continue reading →

This story in The New York Times strikes me as involving a journalistic blind spot of a characteristically left-liberal sort. It’s presented as a landlord-tenant dispute with an immigration enforcement twist, but there’s more to it than that. The “more to it” is right there in the story, but treated as an afterthought, not quite a case of “burying the lede,” but definitely a failure to explain what happened. Continue reading →

I’m curious what readers think about this case. (It’s back in the news because the judge recently recused himself from the case.) It describes a judicial hearing in a New Jersey courtroom involving proceedings against an accused sex offender. Apparently, the alleged victim (a minor) and his mother traveled to New Jersey from out of state to attend the hearing, disrupting it out of frustration at the fact that the case wouldn’t be settled that day, as they’d expected. The delay arose because the defendant refused a plea deal and demanded a trial; the trial date was set months in the future, rendering the mother-and-son’s present trip pointless.

The mother explained, “We’ve been dealing with this for four and a half years, your honor. Four and a half years. And it’s been constant delays and pushbacks.”

There’s audio in the first link above. In it, the judge tells the mother, rather brusquely, to keep her mouth shut and sit down. He’s kind of an asshole about it, but I guess his point was that she was being one. This may be a regional thing. Continue reading →