Will nitwits rule us all?

I moved to Minnesota during an election year. I was not particularly thrilled about the results of that particular election on either a nationwide or statewide level. Most of the candidates that I liked lost that year. But since I had not done much work on any candidates' election, I figured that I should not complain about the results given that I had not put any effort for my folks to win.

Good press for a good friend.

I have a big post coming but in the meantime, please take a look at this post at Minnesota Litigator. It discusses a big win for a good friend of Mr. Torvik's and mine, Martin Fallon.  It's nice to see one great person/lawyer (i.e., Seth Leventhal grand poobah of Minnesota Litigator) write about another great person/lawyer.

Wait. . . What?

I really want to share my thoughts on the whole United Airlines passenger removal fiasco, and I have a post about human resources that I think will be better than the subject matter implies (a low bar, but a bar nevertheless). But I am pretty busy at work so those will have to wait because I learned something today that captures the attention in a way that those future posts may not.

Ted Cruz will never be President of the United States of America

Astute Reader(s)™ of this blog undoubtedly noticed that we went over a year without posting anything. One of my regrets about that period is that I had a draft post about how Ted Cruz will never be elected President of the United States.  There are many reasons for why Senator Cruz will never be elected, I will address two.

The Supreme Court and abortion: how has the plan to overturn Roe been working so far?

For reasons that I prefer not to ponder (cough-age-cough), I am not very well informed about popular culture.  For example, I do not know which political commentators are popular and which are not. Prior to Monday, I had never heard of Tomi Lahren. In fact, I had never heard of the "digital network" TheBlaze, where Ms. Lahren apparently hosts a nightly show in which she acts as a "liberal agitator."

Bracket, rankings, and money oh my!

So the NCAA 2017 Division One Men's Basketball Tournament began this week. As computer-based workers stop doing their jobs and start watching basketball, it seems like a good time to look at another famous ranking that came out this month. I refer to the US News and World Report's annual ranking of Best Law Schools.  

The Supreme Court giveth but do they also take away?

As 2016 comes to an end and the presidency of Donald J. Trump about to begin, a lot of liberals I know are very worried about what the Supreme Court will do once President Trump appoints a successor to the late Justice Antonin Scalia. They should not be too worried.

Why not? First, the two obvious choices for next Supreme Court justice are both awesome. Appointing either of us to the Supreme Court will rectify the eight-year injustice that we like to call President Obama’s inexplicable failure to name us to the federal bench.

As I was saying...

So we have been running this series on people who will never be President.  For the most part, we have been spot on.  But this post will need to get walked back at some point.  I can't speak for Mr. Torvik but I promise to share some thoughts on the election before the end of the week.

Update:  Given that it is now December 23, I clearly broke my promise.  My thoughts on the election will remain in the vault.

One (or two, depending on how you count) moment of sanity does not change the fact that judicial elections are a bad idea.

I strongly believe that electing judges is a very bad idea. See e.g., here and here. Over at Slate, Robert J. Smith has an article about how two justices on the Kansas Supreme Court survived an attempt by death penalty proponents (including the Sam Brownback the Governor of Kansas and a dark money group called Kansans for Justice) angered by the Kansas Supreme Court's overturning of the death sentences of two men who committed a series of grisly crimes in Wichita, Kansas. Mr. Smith's main point in his article is that the election results show that people in Kansas do not fully support the death penalty.  But if one look at the election results, one sees that the justices barely won and the vote was much closer than typical Kansas Supreme Court retention elections. 

48 years ago today (most likely)

Moderately reliable sources on the Internet, i.e. Wikipedia, say that on this date in 1967, Thurgood Marshall was sworn in as a Supreme Court Justice. He was, of course, the first African-American appointed to the Supreme Court. His appointment, like the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, The Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, the Fair Housing Act, and the creation of Medicaid and Medicare, is one of the reasons we should he happy that Lyndon Johnson was President.  But I digress.