Saturday, April 11, 2020

In Which I Lament the Lack of Nina Totenberg on my Radio


I should be paying attention to Easter, as I have done in the past.  For personal reasons, I'm not (nothing deep or hidden there; but I'm an old man now, or at least that's a convenient excuse; and I have other fish to fry.  Make whatever Emmaus revelation you will of that.)  So I'm still focussing on politics, when the weekend should be devoted to more devotional matters.  For that I direct you to Thought Criminal, who is doing a fine job saying what I would say this year, and posting better music than I ever do.

I post this tweet because the editorial it links to is a good legal analysis of the Wisconsin electoral mess everyone was screaming about; mostly, as usual, screaming at the wrong villain.  The courts, as the editorial points out, were upholding the law, and a damned good thing, too.  To often these days we think the courts should rule as we would (one reason I noted Lee Yeakel's opinion on suspending abortion clinics in Texas during the pandemic.  Lee is acting on the law, not his personal opinions.), rather than being arbiters of the law.  The problem in Wisconsin, as the editorial points out, was with the Wisconsin Republican Legislature.  Indeed, the Governor was being dictatorial, something Raw Story and Alternet and everyone else on the "left" screams Trump is going to do for sure absolutely any day now under cover of darkness and his increible ineptitude (maybe the saving grace of the Republic is that Trump couldn't organize a two-car funeral procession, much less a palace coup).

Anyway, it always helps to know what the legal issues are and not to rely on news reports because even well-meaning journalists are largely just passing on gossip and coming up with Pulitzer level excuses to justify it.  I've found this is nowhere more true than in most legal reporting (I MISS Nina Totenberg!).

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