Category: reason

For Trump, the Georgia Senate Runoff Is All About Him

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Ahead of today’s pair of crucial Senate runoff elections in Georgia, President Donald Trump ostensibly campaigned for the two Republican candidates, but instead used his time to air more grievances about the last election. Trump is convinced that he won Georgia in November’s presidential election, even though the official numbers say he lost by nearly 12,000 votes and despite the fact that Trump’s lawyers have been unable to find evidence of widespread voter fraud in the state. A day after The Washington Post published an audio recording of a phone call where Trump cajoled the state’s Republican secretary of state to “find” enough votes to flip the results, the president continued to push his discredited conspiracy theories at a Monday rally to reelect incumbent Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, the two GOP candidates who are on the ballot Tuesday.

“That was a rigged election. But we are still fighting it,” Trump told a crowd in Dalton, Georgia. He promised to return to the state next year to campaign against Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, another Republican whom Trump blames for his loss in November.

Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the presidential election has left Republicans in a bind. If Democrats win the two runoff elections on Tuesday, they will have a slim Senate majority (with incoming Vice President Kamala Harris as the tiebreaking vote). The latest polls show Democratic candidates Jon Ossoff, a former journalist and political activist, and Raphael Warnock, a pastor, with slim leads in their respective races. That means turnout will likely decide the outcome, and if Trump has proven anything since his entry into politics in 2015, it’s that he’s a turnout machine for the Republican base.

But the president’s behavior—and the fact that both Perdue and Loeffler have refused to reject a wild plot by some Republican senators to challenge the certification of the presidential election’s results—may have alienated enough mainstream Republicans to tip Tuesday’s races toward the Democrats. Alternatively, Trump’s repeated (and false) attacks on the legitimacy of elections in Georgia may encourage his supporters to stay home.

That inconsistency has been on full display in the president’s Twitter feed where he has alternated between condemning Georgia’s election process as fraudulent—even going so far as to say that Tuesday’s runoff elections are “illegal and invalid“—and encouraging his supporters to participate in them. It leaves the impression, once again, that Trump sees elections as legitimate only when the results favor him.

Regardless of what happens on Tuesday night, we can all breathe a welcome sigh of relief that the seemingly interminable 2020 election season is finally over. It began with a Democratic primary debate on June 26, 2019. At 7 p.m. today, 559 days later, the polls will close and it will finally come to an end.

FREE MINDS

Maximizing COVID-19 vaccinations means sometimes ignoring the government’s guidelines for who gets vaccinated first, especially when the alternative is throwing vaccine doses in the trash. More of the D.C. approach, please. And less of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s heavy-handed approach to vaccine distribution, which is likely to be a disaster.

FREE MARKETS

Americans moved from big metropolises to smaller cities and away from high-cost, high-tax states during 2020, according to annual migration data tracked by United Van Lines, a major moving company. Idaho was the state with the highest percentage (70 percent) of inbound moves last year, followed by South Carolina and Oregon—while New Jersey (70 percent) had the highest percentage of outbound moves, just narrowly ahead of New York, Illinois, Connecticut, and California.

QUICK HITS

  • The results of Tuesday’s runoff elections in Georgia will determine how ambitious President-elect Joe Biden’s first-term agenda will be.

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Malpractice Plaintiffs Ask to Project Family Members’ Images on Courtroom Screens During Opening Statements and Closing Statements

From Snyder v. Scranton Hospital Co., decided Thursday by Judge Terrence R. Nealon, Judge (Pa. Ct. Comm. Pl.)

Plaintiffs’ motion … in this malpractice action … seeks leave of court to project plaintiffs’ children and grandchildren via the Zoom videoconferencing platform on monitors and screens in the courtroom during the opening statements and closing arguments “in order to introduce all of them to the jury,” to “allow [them] to observe opening and closing statements,” and to enable “the jury to see and understand that Plaintiffs’ family is close knit and supportive.” Defendants oppose that request on the grounds that it “serves no legitimate evidentiary purpose,” is “intended to inflame the jury from the outset of trial,” and will “divert the jury’s attention away from the facts and circumstances and instead engender improper sympathy.” …

[Under the COVID social distancing rules, t]he jury’s use of the gallery for seating deprives the public of its ability to attend trials in-person in Courtroom No. 1. To satisfy the constitutional requirements of public access to trials, special audio and video technology has been installed to transmit the proceedings into adjacent Courtroom No. 4 where they may be viewed on large mobile screens by socially distanced family members, friends, and members of the public…. [T]he jurors are advised during the opening instructions of the various measures taken to ensure their health and safety, including their socially-distanced location in the gallery which is customarily used by the parties’ family and friends, and members of the public. Jurors are also informed that those individuals are able to view the proceedings on screens located in Courtroom No. 4, and that the jurors should not draw any conclusions or inferences from the fact that those individuals are not present in Courtroom No. 1.

[Plaintiffs seek] court approval “to project Plaintiffs’ five children and several grandchildren on the video monitors and screens in the courtroom, via Zoom and without sound, during opening statements and closing statements.” Plaintiffs submit that they “intend to do this in lieu of having all of the family members in the first row of the gallery as Plaintiffs’ J counsel normally would in order to introduce all of them to the jury, and allow Plaintiffs’ family to observe opening and closing statements.”). They assert that “a large part of Plaintiffs’ damages is the effect of [the male plaintiff’s] inability to interact with his family members in the same fashion” due to his injury, and that their Zoom request will enable “the jury to see and understand that Plaintiffs’ family is close knit and supportive of their father and grandfather.”

Defendants counter that “Plaintiffs’ request will produce no admissible evidence and will instead and improperly engender juror sympathy for the Plaintiffs before the first piece of evidence is ever introduced.” They argue “that the virtual appearance of Plaintiffs’ family members during opening and closing statements is improperly meant to constitute part of Plaintiffs’ damages evidence,” and “that Plaintiffs improperly confuse a video projection of Plaintiffs’ family members during opening and closing statements for properly admissible evidence of Plaintiffs’ damages in this case.” Noting that “Plaintiffs are free to elicit testimony regarding the same during the trial itself,” defendants maintain “that Plaintiffs’ request serves no legitimate evidentiary purpose,” is “intended to inflame the jury from the outset of trial,” and will “divert the jury’s attention away from the facts and circumstances at issue.”

Based upon plaintiffs’ proffered reasons for seeking to display their family members “via Zoom during opening and closing statements,” their … request would create more problems than it would solve. If plaintiffs wish “to introduce” their family members to the jury, they may call them as witnesses at trial, or, if appropriate, seek to offer into evidence a day-in-the-life film featuring the male plaintiff’s “inability to interact with his family members in the same fashion as he did before his arm was rendered useless.” …

To the extent that plaintiffs seek to display their family members on the courtroom screens and monitors as proof that plaintiffs’ “family is close knit and supportive of their father and grandfather,” their requested ACT use would constitute improper opening statement and closing argument. Although the right to present an opening statement and closing argument in a civil case is part of the constitutional right to be represented by an attorney, the trial court is vested with the discretion “to regulate addresses by counsel to the jury.” Our Supreme Court has stated that “‘[t]he purpose of an opening statement is to apprise the jury how the case will develop, its background and what will be attempted to be proved; but it is not evidence.”‘ “A party is entitled to argue the evidence during closing arguments, including all logical inferences,” but “this latitude does not include discussion of facts not in evidence which are prejudicial to the opposing party.” …

While it is true that “[i]n appropriate cases, counsel is permitted to use visual aids during opening and closing statements to assist the jury in understanding the evidence,” the continuous display of plaintiffs’ family members on the screen and monitors in the courtroom would not be a proper use of demonstrative evidence under the circumstances. The constant image of plaintiffs’ family members, particularly younger grandchildren who may be more restless during extended opening statements and closing arguments, could serve as a distraction for the jurors and interfere with their ability to focus on the remarks and arguments by counsel….

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Mr. Mayor Makes a Much-Deserved Mockery of Urban Politics

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  • Mr. Mayor. NBC. Thursday, January 7, 7 p.m.
  • Call Me Kat. Fox. Thursday, January 7, 7 p.m.

Recycling may be garbage when it comes to your kitchen. But your television may be another matter. NBC’s Mr. Mayor, which reworks 30 Rock as a cluster bomb directed against politics instead of TV itself, is gourmet recycling. Then again, there’s Fox’s Call Me Kat, which transforms the nerd-comedy masterpiece The Big Bang Theory into—well, garbage.

30 Rock was one of the most brutally funny sitcoms in all TV history, not just biting but swallowing whole the television hand that fed it. (Some of the shows its fictional TV network aired, like Bitch Hunter and MILF Island, probably came thiiiiiiiiiis close to making the actual NBC schedule.) Written and starring Saturday Night Live alum Tina Fey, there hasn’t been anything quite like 30 Rock since it left the air in 2013.

Not at all coincidentally, that’s precisely the length of Mr. Mayor‘s prolonged and painful gestation. Created by Fey and her SNL and 30 Rock writing partner Robert Carlock (among many others, he authored the SNL Schweddy Balls sketches) It was originally planned as a spinoff of 30 Rock, with network boss Alec Baldwin deciding to run for mayor of New York. Baldwin dropped out; Ted Danson said he would take the role, but only if the show moved to Los Angeles. Production finally began, only to fall victim to the coronavirus—twice.

So, it’s a minor miracle that Mr. Mayor made it to the air, and you should be appropriately thankful. The two episodes I saw were utterly pee-your-pants hilarious, mercilessly lashing out in all political directions. Danson plays Neil Bremer, a retired billboard zillionaire swept into office after the previous mayor, crushed by 2020, retired without warning. (Final blow: Murder hornets showed up in Los Angeles and turned out to be miniaturized North Korean fighter jets.) Though he didn’t tell voters, Bremer had no real political agenda; he only wanted to impress his teenaged daughter, who thought of him—not inaccurately—only as a doddering old unemployed techno-blockhead who has trouble figuring out how to turn his TV off and on.

Now that he’s mayor, though, Bremer’s awesome lack of political instinct is killing him. He tries to ban plastic drinking straws (an idea he stole from his acerbic lefty daughter, who’s running for president of her sophomore class, though he doesn’t include her ringing slogan: “Drinking through straws is a phallic lie!”) yet has no comeback when L.A.’s nutball progressives accuse him of genocide against quadriplegics who will die without bendy straws. He gets wrecked on the merchandise as he presides over a ceremony honoring the opening of the city’s 10,000th marijuana dispensary. His policy initiatives (“I’m very open to the idea of an all-robot police force”) are even more clueless than most—well, many—of those you near coming out of real-life Washington.

Picking on the idiocy of politicians, though nearly always amusing, is an ancient Hollywood trope that probably couldn’t support a TV series for long. Mr. Mayor goes much further, attacking the very process of politics. Bremer’s aides are as lunkheaded as he is—they try to order him a police escort to a political event and wind up with strippers—and his progressive opponents are clearly even more so: Their leader, played by Holly Hunter, is demanding the demolition of statues of Big Boy on the grounds that “it whitewashes the labor force and gives me sexual nightmares.” The entire city hall is a nest of avaricious vipers, each of them demanding a political payoff even for a roll of Scotch tape from the supply closet. Even the journalists get scathing treatment. When Bremer announces his ban on straws, a reporter—I’m looking at you, Jim Acosta—self-righteously demands, “How will people do cocaine?”

The characters are all well-drawn and hysterical, but they are by no means the whole show. Like 30 Rock, the air on Mr. Mayor crackles with hilarity. Every throwaway line is subversively funny. Even the diseases are funny, apologies in advance to the many victims of “erotic dementia” and “podiatric claustrophobia” among my readers.

And apologies to literally everybody for my mention of Call Me Kat, in which Mayim Bialik plays a relentlessy unfunny version of the sexually frustrated nerd Amy, her character on The Big Bang Theory. Bialik and Jim Parsons, the uber-nerd Sheldon of Big Bang, are both producers of Kat, but they don’t seem to have picked up many tips from their former employer.

Kat, unfulfilled by her life as a mathematician, decides to leave academia and open one of those trendy cat cafes, which allows her more time to come up with slogans like “It’s purrrr-fect!” (if reading that once here makes you want to murder somebody, you’ll be a legendary serial killer by the end of the first episode of Kat), brood about her perpetual lack of a boyfriend, mug a lot, and perform pratfalls.  As for laughs, well, at UCLA, Bialik wrote a thesis for a doctorate in neuroscience called “Hypothalamic regulation in releation to maladaptive, obsessive -compulsive and satiety behaviors in Prader-Willi syndrome.” You’ll find more of them in there.

 

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Malpractice Plaintiffs Ask to Project Family Members’ Images on Courtroom Screens During Opening Statements and Closing Statements

From Snyder v. Scranton Hospital Co., decided Thursday by Judge Terrence R. Nealon, Judge (Pa. Ct. Comm. Pl.)

Plaintiffs’ motion … in this malpractice action … seeks leave of court to project plaintiffs’ children and grandchildren via the Zoom videoconferencing platform on monitors and screens in the courtroom during the opening statements and closing arguments “in order to introduce all of them to the jury,” to “allow [them] to observe opening and closing statements,” and to enable “the jury to see and understand that Plaintiffs’ family is close knit and supportive.” Defendants oppose that request on the grounds that it “serves no legitimate evidentiary purpose,” is “intended to inflame the jury from the outset of trial,” and will “divert the jury’s attention away from the facts and circumstances and instead engender improper sympathy.” …

[Under the COVID social distancing rules, t]he jury’s use of the gallery for seating deprives the public of its ability to attend trials in-person in Courtroom No. 1. To satisfy the constitutional requirements of public access to trials, special audio and video technology has been installed to transmit the proceedings into adjacent Courtroom No. 4 where they may be viewed on large mobile screens by socially distanced family members, friends, and members of the public…. [T]he jurors are advised during the opening instructions of the various measures taken to ensure their health and safety, including their socially-distanced location in the gallery which is customarily used by the parties’ family and friends, and members of the public. Jurors are also informed that those individuals are able to view the proceedings on screens located in Courtroom No. 4, and that the jurors should not draw any conclusions or inferences from the fact that those individuals are not present in Courtroom No. 1.

[Plaintiffs seek] court approval “to project Plaintiffs’ five children and several grandchildren on the video monitors and screens in the courtroom, via Zoom and without sound, during opening statements and closing statements.” Plaintiffs submit that they “intend to do this in lieu of having all of the family members in the first row of the gallery as Plaintiffs’ J counsel normally would in order to introduce all of them to the jury, and allow Plaintiffs’ family to observe opening and closing statements.”). They assert that “a large part of Plaintiffs’ damages is the effect of [the male plaintiff’s] inability to interact with his family members in the same fashion” due to his injury, and that their Zoom request will enable “the jury to see and understand that Plaintiffs’ family is close knit and supportive of their father and grandfather.”

Defendants counter that “Plaintiffs’ request will produce no admissible evidence and will instead and improperly engender juror sympathy for the Plaintiffs before the first piece of evidence is ever introduced.” They argue “that the virtual appearance of Plaintiffs’ family members during opening and closing statements is improperly meant to constitute part of Plaintiffs’ damages evidence,” and “that Plaintiffs improperly confuse a video projection of Plaintiffs’ family members during opening and closing statements for properly admissible evidence of Plaintiffs’ damages in this case.” Noting that “Plaintiffs are free to elicit testimony regarding the same during the trial itself,” defendants maintain “that Plaintiffs’ request serves no legitimate evidentiary purpose,” is “intended to inflame the jury from the outset of trial,” and will “divert the jury’s attention away from the facts and circumstances at issue.”

Based upon plaintiffs’ proffered reasons for seeking to display their family members “via Zoom during opening and closing statements,” their … request would create more problems than it would solve. If plaintiffs wish “to introduce” their family members to the jury, they may call them as witnesses at trial, or, if appropriate, seek to offer into evidence a day-in-the-life film featuring the male plaintiff’s “inability to interact with his family members in the same fashion as he did before his arm was rendered useless.” …

To the extent that plaintiffs seek to display their family members on the courtroom screens and monitors as proof that plaintiffs’ “family is close knit and supportive of their father and grandfather,” their requested ACT use would constitute improper opening statement and closing argument. Although the right to present an opening statement and closing argument in a civil case is part of the constitutional right to be represented by an attorney, the trial court is vested with the discretion “to regulate addresses by counsel to the jury.” Our Supreme Court has stated that “‘[t]he purpose of an opening statement is to apprise the jury how the case will develop, its background and what will be attempted to be proved; but it is not evidence.”‘ “A party is entitled to argue the evidence during closing arguments, including all logical inferences,” but “this latitude does not include discussion of facts not in evidence which are prejudicial to the opposing party.” …

While it is true that “[i]n appropriate cases, counsel is permitted to use visual aids during opening and closing statements to assist the jury in understanding the evidence,” the continuous display of plaintiffs’ family members on the screen and monitors in the courtroom would not be a proper use of demonstrative evidence under the circumstances. The constant image of plaintiffs’ family members, particularly younger grandchildren who may be more restless during extended opening statements and closing arguments, could serve as a distraction for the jurors and interfere with their ability to focus on the remarks and arguments by counsel….

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Mr. Mayor Makes a Much-Deserved Mockery of Urban Politics

mrmayor_1161x652_1161x653
  • Mr. Mayor. NBC. Thursday, January 7, 7 p.m.
  • Call Me Kat. Fox. Thursday, January 7, 7 p.m.

Recycling may be garbage when it comes to your kitchen. But your television may be another matter. NBC’s Mr. Mayor, which reworks 30 Rock as a cluster bomb directed against politics instead of TV itself, is gourmet recycling. Then again, there’s Fox’s Call Me Kat, which transforms the nerd-comedy masterpiece The Big Bang Theory into—well, garbage.

30 Rock was one of the most brutally funny sitcoms in all TV history, not just biting but swallowing whole the television hand that fed it. (Some of the shows its fictional TV network aired, like Bitch Hunter and MILF Island, probably came thiiiiiiiiiis close to making the actual NBC schedule.) Written and starring Saturday Night Live alum Tina Fey, there hasn’t been anything quite like 30 Rock since it left the air in 2013.

Not at all coincidentally, that’s precisely the length of Mr. Mayor‘s prolonged and painful gestation. Created by Fey and her SNL and 30 Rock writing partner Robert Carlock (among many others, he authored the SNL Schweddy Balls sketches) It was originally planned as a spinoff of 30 Rock, with network boss Alec Baldwin deciding to run for mayor of New York. Baldwin dropped out; Ted Danson said he would take the role, but only if the show moved to Los Angeles. Production finally began, only to fall victim to the coronavirus—twice.

So, it’s a minor miracle that Mr. Mayor made it to the air, and you should be appropriately thankful. The two episodes I saw were utterly pee-your-pants hilarious, mercilessly lashing out in all political directions. Danson plays Neil Bremer, a retired billboard zillionaire swept into office after the previous mayor, crushed by 2020, retired without warning. (Final blow: Murder hornets showed up in Los Angeles and turned out to be miniaturized North Korean fighter jets.) Though he didn’t tell voters, Bremer had no real political agenda; he only wanted to impress his teenaged daughter, who thought of him—not inaccurately—only as a doddering old unemployed techno-blockhead who has trouble figuring out how to turn his TV off and on.

Now that he’s mayor, though, Bremer’s awesome lack of political instinct is killing him. He tries to ban plastic drinking straws (an idea he stole from his acerbic lefty daughter, who’s running for president of her sophomore class, though he doesn’t include her ringing slogan: “Drinking through straws is a phallic lie!”) yet has no comeback when L.A.’s nutball progressives accuse him of genocide against quadriplegics who will die without bendy straws. He gets wrecked on the merchandise as he presides over a ceremony honoring the opening of the city’s 10,000th marijuana dispensary. His policy initiatives (“I’m very open to the idea of an all-robot police force”) are even more clueless than most—well, many—of those you near coming out of real-life Washington.

Picking on the idiocy of politicians, though nearly always amusing, is an ancient Hollywood trope that probably couldn’t support a TV series for long. Mr. Mayor goes much further, attacking the very process of politics. Bremer’s aides are as lunkheaded as he is—they try to order him a police escort to a political event and wind up with strippers—and his progressive opponents are clearly even more so: Their leader, played by Holly Hunter, is demanding the demolition of statues of Big Boy on the grounds that “it whitewashes the labor force and gives me sexual nightmares.” The entire city hall is a nest of avaricious vipers, each of them demanding a political payoff even for a roll of Scotch tape from the supply closet. Even the journalists get scathing treatment. When Bremer announces his ban on straws, a reporter—I’m looking at you, Jim Acosta—self-righteously demands, “How will people do cocaine?”

The characters are all well-drawn and hysterical, but they are by no means the whole show. Like 30 Rock, the air on Mr. Mayor crackles with hilarity. Every throwaway line is subversively funny. Even the diseases are funny, apologies in advance to the many victims of “erotic dementia” and “podiatric claustrophobia” among my readers.

And apologies to literally everybody for my mention of Call Me Kat, in which Mayim Bialik plays a relentlessy unfunny version of the sexually frustrated nerd Amy, her character on The Big Bang Theory. Bialik and Jim Parsons, the uber-nerd Sheldon of Big Bang, are both producers of Kat, but they don’t seem to have picked up many tips from their former employer.

Kat, unfulfilled by her life as a mathematician, decides to leave academia and open one of those trendy cat cafes, which allows her more time to come up with slogans like “It’s purrrr-fect!” (if reading that once here makes you want to murder somebody, you’ll be a legendary serial killer by the end of the first episode of Kat), brood about her perpetual lack of a boyfriend, mug a lot, and perform pratfalls.  As for laughs, well, at UCLA, Bialik wrote a thesis for a doctorate in neuroscience called “Hypothalamic regulation in releation to maladaptive, obsessive -compulsive and satiety behaviors in Prader-Willi syndrome.” You’ll find more of them in there.

 

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How I Lost an Election to Sen. Hawley and Did Not Contest

I have an op-ed in USA Today about how I lost the Yale Law School Federalist Society presidential election in 2005 to Sen. Joshua Hawley, who is currently trying to overturn President-elect Biden’s rightful win over Donald Trump. Despite the inelegant way in which Sen. Hawley won against me, I did not contest his victory at any point. His own unwillingness to show grace in defeat risks inciting violence and imperiling our democratic system.

I recommend reading my Twitter thread here, which provides more detail. For those who can’t access Twitter, the direct link to the op-ed is here.

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How I Lost an Election to Sen. Hawley and Did Not Contest

I have an op-ed in USA Today about how I lost the Yale Law School Federalist Society presidential election in 2005 to Sen. Joshua Hawley, who is currently trying to overturn President-elect Biden’s rightful win over Donald Trump. Despite the inelegant way in which Sen. Hawley won against me, I did not contest his victory at any point. His own unwillingness to show grace in defeat risks inciting violence and imperiling our democratic system.

I recommend reading my Twitter thread here, which provides more detail. For those who can’t access Twitter, the direct link to the op-ed is here.

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