The Biden Trolley Experiment

Why I didn’t vote for Joe Biden (and Don’t Regret It)

Honestly, I was never going to vote for Joe Biden. The thought never crossed my mind. Out of all the candidates that the election season began with, Joe Biden was amongst the worst, enjoying the company of people like Pete Buttigieg, Michael Bloomberg and Tim Ryan. And I thought his lackluster performance in the primaries, his frequent gaffes and his complete lack of a coherent message would preclude Biden from consideration. Indeed, it is still a complete mystery how he managed to rise to the top of the ticket. Didn’t people notice that he could barely complete a sentence without sounding demented? Oh well, I’m sure it was a totally legitimate and transparent process that propelled him to frontrunner status. But I still wasn’t going to vote for him.

There are a truckload of reasons that Joe Biden was a terrible candidate: he has a history of lying and fabricating, and was even forced to withdraw his candidacy in a previous presidential campaign for being caught plagiarizing speeches and lying about his record. He voted for the Iraq War…

The Politics of Bernie Sanders

Democratic Socialist or Social Democrat?

If anyone is paying attention to American politics at this time, it would be difficult to miss the fact that we are in a presidential election year. Donald Trump, currently serving as the 45th President of the United States, is running for his second term against a winnowing field of…

Self-Care:

Why The Left Attacks the Left

In November, 2016, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. This event was viewed as a cataclysm of biblical proportions to people around the world, most notably by Americans who identify as rational human beings. In fact, absent the approximately 65 million voters who voted for Trump, virtually…

The Second Amendment

A White Privilege?

I actually wrote an article about this a few years ago, on a now-defunct website that I can no longer access. But I recently read about the police shooting of Terry Tillman in St. Louis in September, and it reminded me that this issue still persists in America. St. Louis…

A Father’s Day Retrospective

The date is June 16, 2019, and it is officially Father’s Day here in the United States. The first known Father’s Day celebration in America occurred in 1910, in Spokane, Washington, though it didn’t really catch on. In fact, there were numerous failed attempts to revive the holiday for several…

Habitual Inequality:

On Inequity Built Into Habitual Offender Laws

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I have noticed over the course of my legal career that criminal defendants with money (or who have supportive families with money), fare better than those who are poor. We see it play out in several distinct ways within the criminal justice system. It has been pointed out how poor…

To Plea, or Not to Plea

The Paradox of the Plea Bargain: Indispensable, Yet Treacherous

In the United States, every year tens of millions of people are charged with traffic offenses, misdemeanors and/or felonies. Approximately 95% of those cases resolve either through guilty pleas or other pre-trial devices. In other words, only about 5% of criminal cases actually go to trial. So prevalent is the…

Bernie Sanders Has Already Won

The Overton Window and the Populist Left

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Bernie Sanders was cheated in 2016. I don’t mean to suggest that I know he would have won the nomination if not for cheating, but there is no doubt that he was cheated. The DNC has practically admitted that it purposely shut Sanders out. Superdelegates — unelected party insiders —…

Predatory Policing

Why American Prisons Stay Filled

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It is no secret that America is the Incarceration Capital of the world. Not only does the U.S. have the highest percentage of prison inmates, we also have the highest absolute number of citizens behind bars. In fact, while the U.S. population makes up only 5% of the world’s population…

Desperate Times, Desperate Measures

Just Build the Stupid Wall

President Donald Trump has been promising his supporters that he was going to build a wall on our southern border since at least he announced his candidacy for president in 2015. It was arguably one of his most cheered proposals at his raucous rallies during the campaign. …