Alaric DeArment

Facing consequences for the Ukraine war might do Russians some good.

If this were the 70s, they’d be calling Anita Bryant a gay icon.

The war hasn’t been good for Russia’s Western apologists.

Russia offers imperialism even the CCP can love.

Putin showed his true self. So did Carlson and Trump.

Their contempt for Ukraine shows.

She and Manchin are hastening democracy’s demise.

Glenn Greenwald and Jimmy Dore are not antivaxxers. They're worse.

Americans should be careful what they wish for.

Now will people like Glenn Greenwald stop going on his show?

Tucker Carlson’s fascism is now beyond deniability.

Where the GOP once turned against Nixon for comparatively minor crimes, it now mostly cheers Trump or looks the other way as he leads the party and the country down the path of autocracy.

Our failure to contain COVID-19 exposes American exceptionalism as untenable. It’s also an opportunity for us to become a better country instead of deluding ourselves that we’re the greatest. 

Current Affairs’ Nathan Robinson, podcaster Katie Halper, and other activist journalists screwed up because they approached the story as litigators, rather than simply as journalists.

The former Quillette writer represents a new kind of perfidious pseudo-journalist born of the social media age who was granted a professional respectability he didn’t deserve. But there will be others like him, and journalists need to be more vigilant.

* Nancy Gertner and Laurence Tribe take Alan Dershowitz to task for his unorthodox analysis of the sentencing proceedings of General Michael Flynn. [Boston Globe]

* In this elegant essay, Jane Chong uses two notable new books — To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment, by Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz, and the updated edition of Charles Black’s classic, Impeachment: A Handbook, with a new preface and additional chapters by by Philip Bobbitt (affiliate links) — as the jumping-off point for reflections on impeachment, law, and politics. [Los Angeles Review of Books]

* Judges often struggle when it comes to sentencing — and that’s as it should be, according to veteran defense lawyer and former prosecutor Joel Cohen. [New York Law Journal]

* Yes, more of President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees have been rated “not qualified” by the American Bar Association compared to the nominees of his four most-recent predecessors — but as Patrick Gregory explains, there are some reasons for this (most notably, the Trump Administration’s decision to stop giving the ABA a sneak peek at nominees, which allowed past administrations to simply pull nominees the ABA deemed unqualified). [Big Law Business]

* Jonathan Adler has many problems with the recent ruling by Judge Reed O’Connor (N.D. Tex.) on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act — including the fact that Judge O’Connor ruled in the first place. [Volokh Conspiracy / Reason]

* Former public defender Stephen Cooper flags an issue that many reporters probably haven’t thought much about: “When Will Journalism Grapple With the Ethics of Interviewing Mentally Ill Arrestees?” [CounterPunch]

* As 2018 draws to a close, the U.S. Chamber offers up its annual list of the year’s Top 10 Most Ridiculous Lawsuits.
[Faces of Lawsuit Abuse]

* Looking ahead to 2019, the new year could ring in new legislation that could help lower drug prices by facilitating the timely entry of generics into the market, as Alaric DeArment reports. [MedCity News]