Daily Archive: February 17, 2016

Then, in the 1960s, slam dunks started to take off. They were a captivating shot that reinforced the role of the so-called “big man” on the courts. There was a political dimension to all...

As Britain waits to find out which way Boris Johnson will jump in the EU referendum, my mind turns to the way things used to be in what we historians call the olden days....

The point I’m trying to make here is not that the Senate should do this or that, but that whatever it does, replacing Scalia in the current polarized atmosphere is going to tear our...

“Since Mayor de Blasio took office in New York, the number of recorded street stops has continued to decline, to about 24,000 last year from 45,787 in 2014, according to Mr. Zimroth’s letter. Those tallies represent a small fraction of the stop-and-frisk activity logged during the administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, a political independent, when recorded stops reached a height of 685,000 in 2011, and fell to about 192,000 in 2013, which was Mr. Bloomberg’s last year in office.

Even with recorded stops receding, broad swaths of officers are yet unable to articulate a rationale for the ones they carry out, or for the frisks that often follow, Mr. Zimroth’s report said. The report — citing a departmental audit of nearly 600 stop reports that officers filled out over 90 days last summer, as part of a pilot program — said documentation for the stops, and frisks, was lacking in nearly 30 percent of cases. Similar findings were included in a broader internal audit of officers’ stop reports and logbook entries for encounters in November and December.

More striking is that sergeants given the task of reviewing stop-report forms in many cases failed to note the officers’ deficiencies, or take steps to correct them, the report said, citing the internal audit of the pilot program.”

From: New York Police Still Struggle to Follow Street-Stop Rules, Report Finds – The New York Times

The U.S. Senate has confirmed only five Supreme Court justices during presidential election years since 1912 – and the last time it happened current Vice President Joe Biden defended the Senate’s constitutional right to act as “a forceful constitutional counterweight” to the president’s nominee.

“The president exercises better judgment when he considers the prevailing views of the Senate, and the American people, before making a nomination,” Biden, D-Del., said during the confirmation hearings of current Justice Anthony Kennedy. He added that “if the president does consider the views of the Senate and the people in making the nomination, the Senate may not need to act as such a forceful constitutional counterweight.”

From: Joe Biden in 1987: President Should Weigh the Senate’s ‘Prevailing Views’ about High Court — Medium