Category Archives: Law

Business, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

MGM Resorts

28 Comments

The first lawsuit has been filed against them for the Vegas shooting. There will be more, and they’ll have to settle. Three days of “Do Not Disturb” and no attention paid to all that luggage going in and none coming out does appear to me to be negligent. Particularly since it seems to have been a comped room. I think the real lesson here isn’t about gun control, but better security in high locations near entertainment and event venues.

[Friday-afternoon update]

Karl Denninger is unhappy and unimpressed with the Vegas authorities. To put it mildly.

Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Bump Stocks

89 Comments

They’re not worth banning, but no one really cares about them that much:

Bump stocks, says Mr. Valone, “are an amusement, because they don’t under normal circumstances turn an AR-15 or another rifle into a killing machine, because you can’t hit anything with it. Only when you are presented 400 yards away with a field of uninterrupted humanity would something like that even be effective.”

Hard cases make for bad law.

Business, Law, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Space Regulation

18 Comments

Glenn Reynolds has put together a short video.

A couple points: The FAA has only been regulating space since the mid-90s; prior to that it was done by a separate office that reported directly to the Secretary of Transportation. I recommended in my book that the office be taken out of the FAA and restored to its original place in DoT. Others (including NASA administrator nominee Jim Bridenstine, who told me in February that he read the book) have recommended this as well, as has the commercial industry, but they’re (unsurprisingly) getting pushback from the FAA. Over a year ago, I had an op-ed in The New Atlantis in which I said that the FAA should keep its head on the clouds, and hands off space.

If Elon really does build BFR, and wants to use it for point to point, it’s going to raise some very interesting regulatory issues. Under the current law, because it’s suborbital, it will be regulated by the Office of Commercial Space Transportation, not the aviation portion of the FAA. There will be no certification of the vehicles; they will operate under a standard launch license, and the spaceflight participants (aka “passengers”) will fly in an informed-consent regime, without the same expections of safety they’d have with an airliner. We’ll see how long some in Congress will find that acceptable.

Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

The Vegas Massacre

37 Comments

Yes, based at least on initial reports, it does appear to be very, very strange.

[Update later afternoon]

The Vegas shooting and the attack of the carrion crows.

Every.Single.Time.

[Tuesday-morning update]

Mass shootings are a bad way to understand gun violence.

And Nick Gillespie says that this is the time to defend the Second Amendment and less-strict gun control. Because gun control is not, and has never been, the solution.

I have a crazy idea that if you’re going to propose a policy or law in response to a tragic event, you should have to explain how it would have actually prevented that event. Everything this guy did and used was already illegal, as far as I can tell.

History, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Left

5 Comments

…is sitting on the biggest crime ever committed by a sitting president.

As many have pointed out, this is the Democrats’ Watergate, where the president actually committed the crimes of surveillance and siccing the IRS on his political enemies (unlike Nixon, who simply attempted to). Beyond that, one of the reasons why Lynch refused to let Clinton be prosecuted is that it would have almost certainly implicated Obama as well.

[Late-morning update]

Unmasking, yet another abuse of power. It may not have been illegal per se, but it was certainly that.

History, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Maxine Waters

11 Comments

Impeachment is whatever Congress says it is.

Well, pretty much, yeah. This isn’t right, though:

“Bill Clinton got impeached because he lied,” Waters declared. “Here you have a president who I can tell you and guarantee you is in collusion with the Russians, to undermine our democracy. Here you have a president who has obstructed justice, and here you have a president that lies every day.”

…Unless Trump can be accused of “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors,” he cannot be impeached.

While Waters claimed Clinton was impeached for “lying,” he was actually impeached for perjury — lying under oath.

Actually, he was impeached for multiple counts of obstruction of justice, including not just perjury, but suborning perjury from others via bribes and physical threats to a woman’s family, for the purpose of preventing someone he’d sexually harassed from getting a fair trial.

Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

The Lying Obama Administration

5 Comments

Yes, it looks like they did spy on Trump, just like they did with Sheryl Atkisson.

[Update a few minutes later]

What we still don’t know about the Obama administration’s unmasking. I think it’s unlikely that it will turn out to be innocuous. I agree with Rush Limbaugh that this (combined with the IRS abuse) is much worse than Watergate.

[Update a few more minutes later]

Samantha Power sought to unmask Americans on an almost-daily basis. And hey, remember when Clapper (you know, the guy who lied about spying on other Americans) categorically denied wiretapping the Trump campaign?

[Update a couple minutes later]

Congress needs to learn more about how the FBI interfered with the 2016 campaign. This, not what the Russians did, is the real scandal.

[Saturday-morning update]

This is Obama’s Watergate, in which he (so far) got away with what Nixon could only dream of doing.

And the FBI is still stonewalling:

I can’t imagine why Speaker Ryan wouldn’t want to get to the bottom of the apparent misuse of the FBI by Barack Obama and his corrupt Department of Justice. But this is what I really don’t understand: the FBI is part of DOJ, which is run–in theory, at least–by the Attorney General. Why doesn’t Attorney General Jeff Sessions simply order the FBI to comply with the House Intelligence Committee’s subpoena, promptly?

If we had real journalists, instead of Democrat operatives with bylines in the WH press corps, they’d be asking Sarah Huckabee Sanders that question every day.