Category Archives: Fire This Time

Post-Confirmation: Our World Won’t End Right Now. (But you can see the clouds gathering.)

I don’t mean to diminish for a minute the magnitude of the institutional violence done to women this week, especially survivors of direct assault and abuse. Yet the list of legal catastrophes whose likelihood would climb with Kavanaugh’s ascension had already gotten long, and portends massive negative impact on many other segments of the population.

Further, there was an excellent, but now forgotten overview of this in the opening session of Kavanaugh hearings, presented by Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse.

I don’t know why Whitehouse isn’t better known. Maybe it’s Rhode Island’s mini-size (at barely 1200 square miles, it makes Vermont — 8 times as large– look huge; or maybe its due to the state’s mostly Democratic voting record.) Perhaps it’s because he is not running for president.

Whatever; Whitehouse was a prosecutor and state attorney general before he came to Washington. He knows how to make a case succinctly and trenchantly. And he made this detailed pre-rapist case against Kavanaugh in the first round of opening statements on September 4.

Kavanaugh Hearing, Day One: Sheldon Whitehouse Vs. the “Roberts Five”

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse: Tomorrow, we will hear a lot of “confirmation etiquette.” It’s a sham.
Kavanaugh knows the game. In the Bush White House, he coached judicial nominees to just tell Senators that they will adhere to statutory text, that they have no ideological agenda. Fairy tales.
At his hearing, Justice Roberts infamously said he’d just call “balls and strikes,” but the pattern – the 73-case pattern – of the Roberts Five qualifies him to have NASCAR-style corporate badges on his robes.
Alito said in his hearing what a “strong principle” stare decisis was, an important limitation on the Court. Then he told the Federalist Society stare decisis “means to leave things decided when it suits our purposes.”
Gorsuch delivered the key fifth vote in the precedent-busting, but also union-busting, Janus decision. He too had pledged in his hearing to “follow the law of judicial precedent,” assured us he was not a “philosopher king,” and promised to give equal concern to “every person, poor or rich, mighty or meek.”
How did that turn out? Great for the rich and mighty: Gorsuch is the single most corporate-friendly justice on a Court already full of them, ruling for big business interests in over 70 percent of cases, and in every single case where his vote was determinative.
The president early on assured evangelicals his Supreme Court picks would attack Roe v. Wade. Despite “confirmation etiquette” assurances about precedent, [Kavanaugh’s] own words make clear [he doesn’t] really believe Roe v. Wade is settled law.
We have seen this movie before. We know how it ends.

A Carolina Lynching, But No Carolina Justice: John Jeffress Remembrance Day, August 25, 1920

In the version of this report published in the Charlotte NC News, additional details were included:

Sheriff Story [sic] and his six assistants started with Jeffress to the courthouse one block away. Arriving at the spot where Ray was killed, a mob formed around the Officers and their prisoner. There was a sudden surge forward and in the twinkling of an eye, according to the sheriff, the prisoner had been taken from the officers and was placed in an automobile and rushed away. There was not a shot fired: not even a gun drawn during the minute scuffle between the mob and officers.

Sheriff Storey said tonight that resistance would have been folly as the mob was made up of between 25 and 50 determined men. There were at least 150 additional men nearby whose sympathies were with the- mob, he stated tonight. Answering a. direct question, Sheriff Story declared that he did not know anyone in the mob. The man who led the mob and took the prisoner away, the sheriff said, must have just moved into the county and was not known to him.

Dog Days True Tales: Vietnam & the Secret Life of Pizza

Still Boston-based, she was coming to Washington to work on a book. It was to be about abortion, now legal everywhere — or rather, the book was about the right-to-life movement, which was determined to make abortion illegal again.

She’d be there in a few days, and wanted to catch up. Which was great, but left me wondering. I was the Washington reporter of the two of us: Washington, the nation’s premier center of media, power and glamour. I wanted to show her something of that, but the truth was I was still a rookie there: I didn’t know any powerful people. I wasn’t invited to the parties the local glitterati kept throwing for the powerful and glamorous, plus some media hangers-on. So I’d have to find something else to show her, something offbeat. What could it be?

The Star, which was on its last legs when I saw the story about General Loan.
The Washington Star came to my rescue. It had recently run a story about area Vietnamese refugees, one of whom was a former general, who had come to America after his army (and ours) lost the war to their Communist enemies. He was, it said, now running a restaurant in northern Virginia called the Three Continents.

The man’s name seemed familiar. So I did some checking– and yes, it was General Ngoc Loan, the one from the world-famous front page execution photo. I got the exact address in the phone book, and drove past it to be sure I knew the way.