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Courtesy of Matt Latimer

By POLITICO STAFF

12/30/2019 07:42 AM EST

How/where are you celebrating your birthday and with whom? With my wife, Anna, our three children, and unquestionably the best in-laws in the world, David and Robin Sproul. We will be here in town. Nachos will be involved.

How did you get your start in your career? Right out of Columbia Journalism School, I got a job in D.C. working for a Republican senator from my home state of Michigan -- in fact, the only Republican senator from Michigan in my lifetime -- Spence Abraham. One of my coworkers was Ann Coulter, who was just starting out on the pundit circuit. She was, well, herself even back then, but I will say she was one of the only senior staff members who spent any time talking to the rest of us grunts. My goal was eventually to become a presidential speechwriter -- a goal I did eventually achieve thanks to George W. Bush. I wrote a whole book about it in fact, though I was harder on him and others in some respects than I might have been looking back at it now.

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Whats an interesting book/article youre reading now or youve recently finished? And why? Well, the last book I read cover to cover was Tim Albertas American Carnage, which explains better than any book Ive read where we are as a country today. But since that might seem a little self-serving (as his literary agent), the book Im reading solely for pleasure is The Black Count, the story that inspires my favorite book, The Count of Monte Cristo. Im a big believer in both justice and revenge. Not in that order.

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BIRTHDAY OF THE DAY: Matt Latimer, partner at Javelin - Politico

I saw the No Safe Spaces movie. In this conservative documentary about the importance of free speech, talk-show host Dennis Prager and lad-mag TV star and podcaster Adam Carolla spend a lot of time walking in slow-motion toward the camera and sucking on cigars. They make a persuasive case that todays college students are fairly intolerant of non-woke opinions. They provide an intermittently amusing and also chilling reminder that the First Amendment rests on somewhat precarious footing and that our civics education has gone to hell. But Im not entirely persuaded that America is in as much danger as No Safe Spaces claims.

NO SAFE SPACES (3/5 stars)Directed by: Justin FolkRunning time:100 min

No Safe Spaces is at its best when it presents actual evidence of its thesis that kids today dont respect the First Amendment. Theres some frightening footage of an anti-Ben Shapiro protest at UC Berkeley and of a Toronto college teaching assistants railroading at the hands of a moronic super-woke academic committee. Most effectively and prominently, it features a long and effective retelling of the Bret Weinstein saga.

For those of you who observe online flame wars as a hobby, youll already know that Weinstein was a liberal lecturer at Evergreen State College in rural Washington. Evergreen has a tradition of a day, based on the ideas of a radical Harlem Renaissance playwright, where black students disappear so white people can specifically feel how much they contribute to society. A couple of years ago, the black students informed the white students that the black people would remain on campus and it was the duty of thewhitestudents to disappear. Weinstein rightly declared this an illiberal tendency. Students protested him and forced other students to denounce him, Gang Of Four-style. And then the college fired him. They deserved to pay ten times the $500,000 settlement that Weinstein eventually received.

Your tolerance of No Safe Spaces may vary upon whether or not you think this is an isolated case, or a harbinger of a left-wing Big Brother future. Prager and Carolla think it might be the end of freedom. Im not so sure. Woke culture is mostly ridiculous, and violent protests against righty gadflys like MiloYiannopoulos and Ann Coulter are completely ridiculous. But its not like people areactuallybeing canceled because of their ideas, expect for maybe Milo, but one could safely argue that he cancelled himself by being a huge jerky weirdo. In the end, Ann Coulter still gets to appear on TV, as does pretty much everyone else. No Safe Spaces also prominently features the voices of Van Jones and Bill Maher, hardly fascist sympathizers, reflecting the movies central thesis that speech should be free. Not everyone agrees, but enough people do.

No Safe Spaces weakens its case with lame cartoons interspersed thoughout, including a bad Schoolhouse Rock parody where Antifa riddles the First Amendment with bullets, and a superhero cartoon called Social Justice Warriors thats about a thousandth as funny as the Robert Smigel and Adam McKay-written X-Presidents cartoons to which its indebted. Meanwhile, the rich get richer.Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson, two of the major victims of this movement according to our documentary hosts, make a lot of money and have careers that many politically-correct pundits would envy. Peterson gets a custom-tour of Carollas personal garage, where they gawk at vintage sportscars. The movie ends with Prager conducting the L.A. Symphony Orchestra and Carolla driving fast around a racetrack. These dudes are not gulag-bound anytime soon.

For the screening, my safe space was a comfortable recliner in a fancy walking-mall multiplex in the southwestern suburbs of Austin, Texas. At the time, this film was, apparently, the number-one doc grosser in the country, despite only playing on 300 screens. There were six people in the audience midday pre-Christmas, four of whom applauded at the opening credits, so I assume they know someone who worked on the picture. In any case, thats about what you expect for a movie whose projected audience is people who legitimately believe that the progressive left is about to set the world aflame. Millions of those people exist, but they tend to watch such material on Twitter, and Twitter is about as unsafe as spaces get. Maybe thats why theyre so worried.

This concludes my review of the No Safe Spaces movie.

Go here to read the rest:
No Safe Spaces Movie Review - Book and Film Globe

Twitter: You use it to scream into a void at work, make enemies, or get fired, and in return, nothing good happens and using it only makes you sad. It's cigarettes for your brain. Sometimes you find a good joke on the site, sometimes you network online and make new friends, and almost all of the time, those instances are drowned out by the nonstop caterwauling of online Nazis, boomer idiots, and the president of the United States.

Miami is a particularly insane place to be online, because the city attracts narcissists, and 85 to 90 percent of being a Miamian in the 2010s revolved around Posting About Where You Were and Why It Was Important and Exclusive. Florida is a largely crazy place to live, and living inside the brains of Floridians online each and every day is even crazier. So, inspired by this BuzzFeed list of the decade's most brain-melting political tweets, here's a rundown of the best and worst that Miami Twitter offered this past decade.

Bleakest corporate tweet: UPS thanking Miami-area cops for possibly shooting a UPS driver to death.

UPS has been roasted incessantly since the December 6 shooting in which a team of 18 Miami-area cops fired their guns into rush-hour traffic after alleged robbers highjacked a UPS truck and took its driver, Frank Ordonez, hostage. Ordonez, the two robbers, and an innocent bystander died. In a since-deleted tweet, UPS thanked the cops for their service.

Worst Javier Ortiz moment: Miami's police union president saying 12-year-old Tamir Rice deserved to be murdered by cops.

Choosing a single Javier Ortiz Twitter moment is like eating only one Pringles chip from the can, except the chips in this instance are racist statements from a powerful cop and the canister holding them is bottomless. But the worst among the bunch is clear: Before Ortiz was forced from his position heading the Miami Fraternal Order of Police, he tweeted that Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old child holding a toy gun, deserved to be shot dead by Cleveland cops.

"Act like a thug and you'll be treated like one," he wrote online in 2015 after Rice was killed. We refuse to let him forget it.

Best way to get fired online: The time a radio host got canned for offering $1,000 to permanently injure Devonta Freeman.

Former Miami Hurricanes defensive tackle Dan Sileo was fired from his job on WQAM in 2013 after offering $1,000 to anyone who injured then-Florida State Seminole Devonta Freeman.This incident made the list less because of what happenedand more because Sileo had a subsequent meltdown and perfectly encapsulated the misspelled, bizarrely capitalized, and bone-chilling way male boomers get angry online in modern society.Sileo went from offering money to hurt people to claiming he was in hiding and had to hire armed guards because of the backlash. Few sentences are as perfect as "I have hired a PRIVATE COP and He is ARMED..THANK U..GO CANES." Sileo wins bonus points for threading his tweets out of order. Perfect boomer mindset.

Best hoax: Chad "Ochocinco" Johnson possibly making up a story about pigeon husbandry.

Miami native and former NFL star Chad Johnson could get his own list for all the crazy things he has done online, but the strangest was claiming in 2010 that he found a pigeon and watched that pigeon lay eggs. Some intrepid internet sleuths, however, discovered he was just using pigeon photos from the first page of Google Images.

Worst use of police time:Miami Beach cops arresting a dude for a parody Twitter account.

Miami Beach cops arrested Ernesto Orsetti in 2018 after he allegedly made an account that purported to be run by MBPD spokesperson Ernesto Rodriguez. That arrest seemed unnecessary on its face and could have had some serious repercussions for First Amendment rights. But prosecutors dropped the charges after noting Orsetti had written that retweets "are just RTs" in his bio, so don't let anyone tell you that phrase is meaningless.

Weirdest fight: Former Miami Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen's Twitter feuds with Karl Lagerfeld and Mariah Carey.

As former New Timescolumnist Kyle Munzenrieder wrote in 2016:

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Republican from Miami, is like the Azealia Banks of Congress. She always seems to find herself feuding with some celebrity or another. Beyonc, Mariah Carey, and Jennifer Lopez have all found themselves on the other end of a critical Twitter lashing from Ros-Lehtinen.

However, the congresswoman has good reasons for her beefs. Ros-Lehtinen usually reserves her ire for stars she believes are propping up dictators throughout the globe while ignoring human rights.

In fact, the member (and former chair) of the powerful House Committee on Foreign Relations has taken it upon herself to become Washington's top voice calling out Hollywood stars who dabble with dictators.

That habit led Ros-Lehtinen to yell at then-Chanel head honcho Karl Lagerfeld for going to Cuba, former NBA great Dennis Rodman for traveling to North Korea, and even Beyonc for her 2016 trip to Havana. Did you know Mariah Carey took a bunch of money from former Angolan dictatorJos Eduardo dos Santos? Ros-Lehtinen sure remembers.

Best political tweet: Marco Rubio promising in writing he would not run for reelection.

Staring at this tweet approximates the feeling of staring directly at the sun. Kudos to the senator for having the guts to leave the post online.

Worst trend:#FloridaMan

Look, New Times(and even this reporter) is also guilty of leaning into the Florida Man aesthetic for cheap laughs in the social media era. But there's nothing funny about Florida Man stories they make for quick, viral hits on Twitter, but they ruin the lives of people who overwhelmingly have drug problems or mental-health issues. Think twice before you retweet those posts, folks. If you can't understand why, download this Chrome plug-in from the podcast Citations Needed that replaces the term "Florida Man" with the phrase "Man likely suffering from mental illness or drug addiction."

Best Twitter moment of the decade: The day all of conservative media screamed at a Miami Cheesecake Factory.

This incident didn't get much media play when it happened. But it might be the single funniest thing to ever happen in Miami politics, and it deserves to be immortalized as a shining example of how politics and social media broke everyone's brains in the post-Trump era. In May 2018, Eugenior Joseph claimed he was threatened by staff at the Dadeland Mall Cheesecake Factory for wearing a Make America Great Again hat. Joseph claimed staff gathered around his table and "smacked their knuckles" around him. So he called the cops. And the cops determined nothing happened.This did not stop Fox News from putting Joseph on the air to discuss the so-called incident while he proudly wore his MAGA hat. Pundits such as Ben Shapiro and white-supremacist bog-witch Ann Coulter came to Joseph's defense online and acted as if he had somehow been the victim of a hate crime for an incident that might not have even happened. Amateur conservative YouTubers briefly began appearing at Cheesecake Factory locations and screaming about Donald Trump. (Really.) And the Cheesecake Factory apologized online. Two days later, the company said it had fired two employees. But it also seemed to suggest Joseph was lying about portions of what had happened.

The incident reveals Americans have two paths in life: You can become a Eugenior Joseph and perform on camera for the TV propaganda machine, or you can sit behind a desk while waiting for 5 o'clock and trying to drink away the pain of writing branded tweets for a cheesecake chain. Here's to 2020.

Jerry Iannelli is a staff writer for Miami New Times. He graduated with honors from Temple University. He then earned a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University. He moved to South Florida in 2015.

The rest is here:
The Worst Miami Tweets of the 2010s Decade - Miami New Times

Here is news you probably cant use: a new Texas Law Review analysis by University of Chicago law professor William Baude concludesthat Justice Hugo Black, who served on the Supreme Court from 1937 to 1971, was unconstitutionally appointed.

The relevant text is the Constitutions Article I, Section 6, which says No Senator or Representative shall, during the Time for which he was elected, be appointed to any civil Office under the Authority of the United States which shall have been created, or the Emoluments whereof shall have been increased during such time.

At the time of his appointment Black was serving as a senator from Alabamaas part of a Congress that had enacted new retirement benefits for Justices, and while his backers argued that the clause did not apply to bar his nomination, Baude concludes that it probably did. One litigant before the high court challenged Blacks right to serve, but the Court chose to sidestep the merits of that claim by ruling against its standing, and the controversydied.

All of this might seem purely academic. At this remove there would be no way to unscramble the legal omelet as to Blacks jurisprudential contributions, even were there a will. (Despite an unpromising start, the Alabaman eventually showed a libertarian streak on many Bill of Rights issues.)

But the issue is not quite so remote as that, because more than a few contemporary commentators have flirted in some cases more than flirted with claims that the makeup of the present Supreme Court is illegitimate.

After the Senate leadership refused to hold hearings on the Supreme Court nomination of Merrick Garland, the editorial board of the New York Times repeatedly declared the seat of the late Justice Scalia to have been stolen, and then-Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) said of eventual nominee Neil Gorsuch that hes not there properly.

The confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the seat vacated by Justice Anthony Kennedy brought renewed attack, with former Attorney General Eric Holder declaring that the legitimacy of the Supreme Court can justifiably be questioned and other high-profile figures taking a similar line.

Law professor Erwin Chemerinsky raised the ante with this remarkable assertion in The American Prospect: each of the five conservative justices Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh or someone like him (emphasis added) came on to the Court in a manner that lacks legitimacy. Perhaps at some point it will lead to open defiance of the Court.

Other commentators were happy to take up the exciting theme that future Court opinions written by, or decided by the votes of, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and perhaps other Justices might meet with open defiance or resistance from a future Democratic president, from state officials, or from people marching in the streets.

What can the Supreme Court do? Send its tiny police force to storm the White House? wrote Mark Joseph Stern at Slate. Libertarian-minded law professor Ilya Somin, who does not welcome the efforts to de-legitimize the Court or promote defiance of its rulings, nonetheless found them worth taking seriously enough to analyze at length last year.

Baudes research may provide a bit of reassurance in this respect. The challenge to the legitimacy of Blacks seat fizzled in part because it gained little headway with the public, but much more because the Courts other Justices welcomed Black aboard.

Most of the scenarios in which triumphant Democrats in 2021 or 2022 defy Supreme Court rulings are difficult to reconcile with the reality that the Courts liberal Justices have, to all appearances, been entirely content to regard Gorsuch and Kavanaugh as legitimate colleagues, and would, themselves, neither counsel nor welcome defiance of Court rulings. As I wrote last year, "the federal courts are not as polarized and tribal as much of the higher political class and punditry at nomination time."

Baude puts it this way at the conclusion of his article: the real source of constitutional settlement in our system is not always judicial decision, but sometimes sheer practice.

Read the original here:
Disputed Appointments and the Supreme Court's Legitimacy, in 1937 and Today - Cato Institute

Now, operatives in both parties are readying for an unprecedented fight in 2020 to elect those who will be the mapmakers in state legislative races across the country.

Former Attorney General Eric Holder and his group, the National Democratic Redistricting Commission, are leading the battle for Democrats. The group and its affiliates recently announced they had raised $52 million since 2017. They're targeting state legislative races in a dozen states, with more than half below the Mason-Dixon line.

"I'm bound and determined to make sure that candidates, activists and voters understand the stakes of the redistricting battle and the long-term consequences for our democracy," Holder said in a statement.

On the other side, the Republican State Leadership Committee is readying a defensive operation known as Right Lines 2020 to try and maintain the GOP's successes in 2010, sending out former House Speakers Paul Ryan, John Boehner and Newt Gingrich to raise money and keep the party focused on redistricting.

The Republicans are targeting races in 14 states, with six in the South. They declined to put a dollar number on the effort, but have said they are "planning multimillion-dollar investments in key states."

"We can't just assume that the success we've enjoyed in the states is going to be there," RSLC President Austin Chambers said, adding that he is concerned Republicans are more focused on re-electing President Donald Trump than the fight for statehouses that's so crucial to redistricting. "We're going to have to fight like hell to keep it this is as serious as a heart attack."

While each state's process is different, there are three key Southern battlegrounds next year, experts and party officials said:

Legislatures in other Southern states, including Georgia and Louisiana, also are in play.

Virginia poses a key test for national Democrats, who like Holder typically say they want fair not gerrymandered districts. Democrats have control in the state Legislature and the governor's mansion. If they wanted to gerrymander next year, they'll likely have the power.

"When Democrats are out of power, they say all the right things about gerrymandering," Li said. "But Virginia is a state with a lot of congressional districts and whether Democrats walk the walk when they have power Virginia's going to be a big test of that. Its a big test for Eric Holder."

John Bisognano, executive director of Holder's redistricting group, said Holder has spoken out against Democrats seeking to rig the system and the former AG also has expressed support for nonpartisan redistricting, a concept that's grown in popularity as states seek to opt out of the gerrymandering wars.

In the last decade, Colorado, Michigan, Missouri, New York, Ohio and Utah implemented changes to their congressional redistricting processes, with some states authorizing bipartisan commissions with the work in an effort to reduce the role of state lawmakers. For example, Missouri will ask a nonpartisan demographer to draw district lines, subject to approval by a commission made up of both Republicans and Democrats.

Still, not all commissions are created equally. In Ohio, voters passed a referendum last year requiring bipartisan support for redistricting plans in an attempt to prevent one party from forcing their House maps on the other. If the parties can't reach agreement, a bipartisan commission would draw the districts, but both Democrats and Republicans are angling for power on that commission and partisans can still push through four-year maps without minority party support.

"We supported an independent commission well, we supported a commission," Bisognano said. "It's a commission of politicians."

Given that, both parties say the Ohio Statehouse is a top target in 2020.

CORRECTION (Dec. 29, 2019, 11:24 a.m. ET): A previous version of this article misstated the number of seats Democrats in North Carolina need to gain to take control of the legislature. It is at least four in the state Senate and six in the House; not eight in the Senate and 11 in the House.

Jane C. Timm is a political reporter for NBC News, fact checking elections and covering voting rights.

Link:
Gerrymandering is alive and well. The coming battle will be bigger than ever. - NBC News