[guest post by Dana]

Students from a number of law schools have walked out of class to protest the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court. The walkout began yesterday, and is scheduled to go through Friday. From the Strike Against Kavanaugh Organizing Committee’s open letter:

We are in the middle of a national emergency. Brett Kavanaugh has been confirmed to the Supreme Court. We cannot accept a system that empowers a man who repeatedly lied under oath and a judiciary review process that only performs a sham of an investigation into his misconduct. We do not recognize Kavanaugh as a legitimate member of the United States Supreme Court.

…

This week, law students will be striking across the country beginning at 2:15 PM EST on Wednesday 10/10/18 and lasting through Friday 10/12/18. We demand that anyone seeking to be elected to Congress in November commits to impeaching Kavanaugh to protect any semblance of rule of law and the people of our communities. While this strike primarily is being organized on law school campuses, we encourage students at every level to participate and invite non-student workers, lawyers, and other members of the public to organize their communities to walk out on Wednesday and strike with us.

While the students are obviously free to walk out of class and raise their voices in protest – God bless America – other students are pointing out the obvious:

Some students… questioned the strategy because Kavanaugh had already been confirmed.

According to students involved in planning the walkout, the goal of the protest is two-fold: to see Kavanaugh impeached, and to defend reproductive rights because Kavanaugh is going to kill women.

The strike aims to push politicians and political candidates to support Kavanaugh’s impeachment on the grounds of alleged perjury, and to defend reproductive rights as members of the U.S. Congress, said Nikta Daijavad, a second-year student at New York University’s School of Law and a leader of NYU Law Women, which endorsed the strike.

Whether impeachment happens in the new Congress or a future one, “we’re not going to stop thinking that Brett Kavanaugh should be impeached for perjury,” [Justine] Medina [co-chair of Brooklyn Law School’s National Lawyers Guild] said.

While Medina and her peers may have a goal of seeing Kavanaugh impeached for perjury, one questions the likelihood of that actually happening:

“Perjury is pretty narrow. A statement that is misleading, that is evasive, that doesn’t answer the question is not perjury. It’s only perjury when you deliberately, knowingly and directly lie. So a lot of the things that people are upset about in Kavanaugh’s testimony, I think are better characterized as evasive or combative or misleading.”

For more on the question of perjury, see Beldar’s comment here.

No doubt these young protesters are fueled by a smug sense of self-righteous anger at the seeming unfairness of it all, yet a few years down the line, they may be faced with an unfortunate consequence of their actions.

(Cross-posted at The Jury Talks Back.)

–Dana

[guest post by JVW]

I saw an interesting little tidbit over at the good ol’ Dog Trainer from a story that was actually published last week:

The president of the board of administration of CalPERS, the state’s largest public employee pension fund, lost her bid for reelection to a Corona police officer, the agency announced Thursday after tallying votes from members cast over the last two months.

Priya Mathur, who has served on the board of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System since 2003, will be replaced by Jason Perez, a police sergeant who serves as president of the Corona Police Officers Assn. Mathur was selected in January as president of the CalPERS board, and her defeat marks the second shake-up of the pension fund’s leadership in less than a year.

Perez focused his campaign squarely on Mathur’s record representing public agency workers and on what he argues is a record by the pension fund of being overly focused on the political implications of its investments.

“In the past, it’s been used more as a political action committee than a retirement fund,” Perez said in an interview Thursday. “I think the public agency [employees] are just sick of the shenanigans.”

CalPERS for some time has been run as yet another adjunct of left-wing Democrat policy, using its huge investment powers (valued at almost $357 billion) to reward allies while shunning those who are not riding in first class aboard the social justice train. In past years the organization’s board — which consists of six members elected by CalPERS members, four ex officio members drawn from the fetid state bureaucracy, and three members appointed by the governor (two) and legislative leaders (one) — has decided to meddle in corporate governance and foreign policy, which is certainly their prerogative. But when given a foot, progressives demand a yard, and it was only a matter of time before the wokedy-wokest activists started pushing for a ban on investments in fossil fuels and other bugaboos of the activist left, most notably guns.

And that’s what pressed Sgt. Perez to run and cast out Ms. Mathur. According to the Dog Trainer:

Perez focused his campaign squarely on Mathur’s record representing public agency workers and on what he argues is a record by the pension fund of being overly focused on the political implications of its investments.

“In the past, it’s been used more as a political action committee than a retirement fund,” Perez said in an interview Thursday. “I think the public agency [employees] are just sick of the shenanigans.”

As such, Perez could bring a decidedly different approach to the pension governance board. In March, he lashed out at state Treasurer John Chiang, who sits on the CalPERS board, during a debate over whether the fund should embrace Chiang’s request to divest from certain gun retailers.

“This is nothing more than a political ploy,” Perez said during public comment. “It has nothing to do with CalPERS and its fiduciary responsibility to invest, to maximize returns.”

The board ultimately declined to accept Chiang’s proposal.

In a state like California where virtue signaling is as ubiquitous as air kisses and bro-hugs, this is pretty significant. A public board that skews heavily to the left has decided that they aren’t willing to endanger their own financial well-being in order to placate the capricious political posturing of the haut monde of the Golden State. Score one, but only one, for sensibility. It’s nice to win one every once in a while here in the Avocado Republic.

– JVW

The insanity of the radical left continues:

A truck bearing pro-Trump stickers was torched after the owner left the vehicle at a bar parking lot in Vancouver, Wash., overnight.

Johnny MacKay told KOIN News the incident occurred late Monday night, after he opted to take an Uber home after having a few drinks, leaving his Nissan Titan pickup in the Garage Bar and Grille’s parking lot.

During the night, Randy Sanchagrin, who lives near the bar, told the local station he heard an explosion. He then exited the house and began filming what turned out to be MacKay’s truck being engulfed by flames.

“By the time I ran back to the street it was so bad there was no getting close to it,” Sanchagrin told the local outlet.

Photos of MacKay’s pickup showed two bumper stickers reading “TRUMP 2020” and “TRUMP: KEEP AMERICA GREAT! 2020.”

MacKay told the station he thinks his stickers made him a target.

Oh, and in case you thought it was an unrelated coincidence that the truck had Trump stickers on it:

He said when he arrived at the bar the next morning to pick up his truck, he also found Trump’s name spray-painted on the vehicle.

It’s not an unrelated coincidence.

Truck with 'Trump 2020' stickers torched in bar parking lot https://t.co/4uRkA1Lnfe pic.twitter.com/FB2v25RPcu

— The Hill (@thehill) October 10, 2018

When they go low, we kick them. But we don’t do anything inappropriate of course.

No word yet on whether Brooke Baldwin or Don Lemon think this was “arson” as opposed to peaceful protest.

[Cross-posted at The Jury Talks Back.]