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From People v. Blake, a California Court of Appeal case decided yesterday: After a nine-day crime spree a jury convicted appellant, Tom Blake, of ten counts of robbery, one count of attempted robbery, one count of carjacking, one count of burglary, one count of petty theft with a prior and one count of vehicle theft. […]

I posted on this a couple of days ago; here’s more, from an AP story, thanks to reader Philip Gallagher: Virginia Ormanian burned through most of her retirement savings playing slot machines in Detroit casinos last year — something she should not have been allowed to do. The 49-year-old gambling addict had voluntarily banned herself […]

More on the Claremont hate-crime-or-was-it? David Bernstein blogged about this last month — Kerri Dunn, a Claremont professor who reported being the target of anti-Semitic vandalism, is now being accused of staging the whole incident — so I thought I’d pass along an update, from the L.A. Times: [Dunn] went on to receive a law […]

Gary Leff writes, apropos my post yesterday: Eugene’s counterexample [of military flyers going to work for the airlines] is better than he realizes, because in fact military charter work is very common. American Trans Air alone did over $200 million in military charter business in 2003. Forbes attributes an increase in military charter work as […]

What did Sen. Kennedy mean when he said Iraq is “Bush’s Vietnam”? Various people have suggested that he meant that Iraq will go as badly for the U.S. as Vietnam did. InstaPundit writes that a blog named “USEFUL FOOLS says that Ted Kennedy is trying for a Tet rerun, with help from the media and […]

“The visual environment for the young, in short, has become confused, fragmented, and unstable. Students now understand moving but not still images. The long, dreamy, contemplative takes of classic Hollywood studio movies or postwar European art films are long gone. Today’s rapid-fire editing descends from Jean-Luc Godard, with his hand-held camera, and more directly from […]

Is it right to say, as the post says that Tyler links to below, that the “nationalize health care” view is silly on its face because we already have a 65-70% (estimated) public health care system? Trent writes: How do we define and measure the types of health care systems?I think this is the easy […]

The Associaton for Public Interest Law at George Mason Law School is holding its annual fundraising auction tomorrow night, starting at 8:00 p.m., at the Ballston Hilton in Arlington. Among other items that will be auctioned off are three Justice Stevens bobblehead dolls, courtesy of the Green Bag, which is published at GMU. These dolls […]

“So When Are We Going To Get That Free-Market Health Care Everyone’s Complaining About?” Read this post, all our lives are at stake. Here is the clincher: “If I had to make a wild guess, our health care system will be paid for by explicit or implicit public funds at a rate of 65-70%. My […]

Mark Kleiman writes, as part of his pragmatic argument against the government’s hiring contract security services: The private firms pay better than the regular military, and are using the money they get from public contracts to bid away experienced soldiers, leaving the Army short of skilled bodies. Why should we compete with ourselves in that […]

Mark Kleiman responds to my question about what’s wrong with mercenaries — contract private security people who provide security at U.S.-run Iraqi installations. Phil Carter has more and yet more. Mark’s and Phil’s posts, though stress that there’s nothing inherently immoral about the mercenaries themselves, but that using them is a bad idea that might […]

Brian Morris, who clerked for Chief Justice Rehnquist the year I was clerking, is running for the Montana Supreme Court. If you’re a Montanan, you should definitely vote for him — he’s a very smart and highly qualified guy, and I’m sure would do an excellent job. There’ll be a debate involving the five candidates […]

has now graduated from high school to university, the San Francisco Chronicle reports: The quiet freshman from Seattle who sat in the back row had submitted a disturbing short story, a fictitious first-person account of a young serial killer. The story was so rife with gruesome details about sexual torture, dismemberment and bloodlust that the […]

Patterico’s Pontifications disapproves of them, and gives some pretty good reasons, including some important legal points in this post: Multiple separate violent crimes count as only one strike if tried in a single trial. Under this rule, serial murderers and rapists would get only one strike conviction for their multiple violent crimes. For example, Richard […]

The Arizona Daily Star reports: Some Tucson casino gamblers who don’t know when to quit are trying a new tactic: banning themselves from all casinos in Arizona. A year-old state law allows people to ask casinos to help prevent them from gambling. Violating a “self-exclusion” contract means casinos refuse to pay winnings, kick out banned […]