David Roland

The funny thing is that German involvement in Huntsville did create a unique southern American and German blend of engineering excellence As Charles Murray records in Apollo: “What made this Germanic conservatism and precision remarkable was that by the late 1950s most of the people from Huntsville who were behaving this way weren't Germans at all, but the Americans who had been hired to work with them. Most of them were men from the small towns of the deep South, graduates of nearby engineering schools like Auburn and the University of Mississippi and Georgia Tech. The result was a combination of Germans like Eberhard Rees or Karl Heimburg or Walter Haeussermann—distinguished and courtly, talking about "ze vay ve do sings," very models of the rocket scientist—and Americans like Alexander A. McCool of Vicksburg, Mississippi...”

This is a huge victory for transparency over police records. Great work by @stltoday and @dave_roland in fighting for this ruling against @SLMPD, which has for years misapplied an appeals court ruling to presumptively close public records. stltoday.com/news/local/cri… via @stltoday

Anakins fall is still relevant. But the Jedi and Sith are basically Gods. Average people still had to live in this fascist nightmare. And Andor shows how they responded. Andor is brilliant Star Wars.

I think they should turn the cameras on so the People of Missouri can see what our elected state senators are doing, just like most everyone living in states other than Missouri can do.

@RepMichaelDavis @CoMissourian @AGCHanaway So what is the duty? On page 15 of the opinion the Missouri Supreme Court literally said it's not possible to know whether HB 1 is in effect. How can *anyone* know what a county clerk's duty is until the Secretary of State determines the status of the referendum petitions?

@CoMissourian Willful neglect of official duties is cause for quo warranto. #moleg @AGCHanaway

Boone County clerk refuses to update voter rolls amid uncertainty over Missouri map columbiamissourian.com/news/local/boo…

Today, 1928.

@chuckhatfield And the Secretary of State's choice not to say whether the referendum is certified is the *reason* it is impossible to say whether HB 1 has gone into effect. If the Secretary wants this issue definitively resolved, well... the ball is literally in his court.

For those in the back, “it is impossible to say” whether HB1 is currently in effect. Saying it IS is legally incorrect.

@chuckhatfield So although Mo. Const. says a law referred to the people can ONLY become effective if they approve it, the law is effective as long as the SoS delays referring it to the people. Thus, the legislature can manufacturer an end-run around a constitutional restriction they don't like.

In the SCOMO Maggard case today the Mo Supreme Court said they cannot decide now whether the legislature’s Congressional maps are in effect. Once SOS does his job, we can get on to that decision. But SCOMO didn’t decide today. Here’s the money quote.

251 years ago this week, a 6'2" Vermont moonshiner with no military experience and no authorization from anyone captured the most strategically important fort in North America at dawn, and accidentally won the Revolutionary War before it had really started. It's May 1775. Lexington and Concord happened three weeks ago. The colonies have muskets but almost no cannon. The British, sitting in Boston, have plenty. Everyone knows that without artillery, the rebellion is over by autumn. Everyone also knows where to get artillery: Fort Ticonderoga. A stone star-fort on Lake Champlain, bristling with roughly 80 heavy guns. The British call it "the Gibraltar of America." It's the bottleneck of the entire continent. Whoever holds it controls the invasion route between Canada and New York. ​What the rebels don't know, but Ethan Allen has heard, is that "the Gibraltar of America" is, by 1775, mostly held together by moss. The walls are crumbling. The garrison is 48 men, many of them invalids and pensioners. The commander hasn't even been told a war started. Allen is not a soldier. He's a frontier land speculator who runs an armed militia called the Green Mountain Boys, originally formed not to fight the British, but to beat up New York surveyors trying to seize Vermont farms. New York has literally put a bounty on his head. He decides to go take the fort anyway. Halfway there, a man named Benedict Arnold shows up on horseback with a Massachusetts colonel's commission, waving paperwork, demanding command of the expedition. The Green Mountain Boys threaten to go home if Arnold is in charge. Allen and Arnold agree to "joint command," which mostly means walking next to each other in furious silence. They reach the lake at midnight. Problem: they have 200 men and exactly two leaky boats. By 3 AM only 83 have made it across. Dawn is coming. Allen decides to attack with what he has, meaning roughly 1 American for every half-cannon inside the fort. ​A lone British sentry sees them coming through the wicket gate, levels his musket at Allen's chest, and pulls the trigger. The musket misfires. He runs. The Americans pour in. Total resistance to the capture of British North America's most important inland fortress: one wet flintlock. Allen pounds on the officers' quarters with the flat of his sword. Lt. Jocelyn Feltham stumbles out half-dressed, asking by what authority Allen is there. Allen, by his own later account, roars: "In the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress!" (Other witnesses remembered the wording as substantially more profane. The Continental Congress, for its part, had no idea any of this was happening.) Captain Delaplace, the actual commander, emerges still buttoning his trousers and surrenders the fort, its 78 cannons, its garrison, and roughly 30,000 musket flints without a shot fired by either side. Casualties: zero. Time elapsed: about ten minutes. But here's the part that actually changed history. Those cannons sat at Ticonderoga for six months until a 25-year-old, 280-pound Boston bookseller named Henry Knox, who had learned artillery from books in his own shop, volunteered to go get them. In the dead of winter, Knox and his men dragged 59 cannons weighing 60 tons across 300 miles of frozen rivers, the Berkshires, and unbroken snow, on 42 ox-drawn sleds. One gun fell through the ice of the Hudson. They fished it out and kept going. It took 56 days. On the night of March 4, 1776, those cannons were hauled silently up Dorchester Heights overlooking Boston Harbor. The British woke up on March 5 to find every ship in the harbor and every redcoat in the city under the muzzles of guns that, six months earlier, had belonged to them. Eleven days later, the British evacuated Boston. They would never hold it again. An unauthorized raid by 83 backwoodsmen, led by a wanted man and a future traitor, against a fort defended by a captain in his pajamas, became the artillery that drove the British army out of the largest city in the American colonies. Easiest W in American history. Possibly the most consequential ten minutes of the 18th century.

@CaseyMattox_ "I won't go to church, and I won't go to school. That stuff is for sissies - but BUNNIES ARE COOL!"

The bunny. The bunny... iykyk.

The president is a constitutional arsonist and the GOP is happy to stand aside at best, or pour on the gas at worst. We desperately need a pro democracy and pro rule of law party. Alas, the Democrats refuse to be that party, wanting only their turn. We're in a bad place.

So now that everyone has seen the disappointment of attempts to squeeze out a bit more federal power and the risk that it might be used against you... can we all agree we should give federalism a shot and limit the federal government to just its specifically enumerated powers?

New Cert Petition: Can You Be Forced To Be A Farmer Under The Police Power? inversecondemnation.com/2026/05/new-ce… @pacificlegal @jeremytalcott

The timeline of Dan Bongino: 1. Start a grifting podcast threatening to expose people. 2. Join the FBI where you could make it a reality if there were actually people to expose. 3. Expose zero people. 4. Quit the FBI. 5. Go back to podcasting and threatening to expose people. The fate of democracy rests on the shoulders of the people who continue to fall for these snake oil salesmen. Please stop.

Did you guys know that Big Spoon self-studied his way to being a lawyer and when met with a government requirement for non-graduates to apprentice for 5 years rather than only 3 for college men, he just did it anyway at 3. Openly challenging the courts on it, he won, and the law was repealed in 1836. He viewed licensing laws as naked class legislation—“no one has yet ever dared advocate, in direct terms, so monstrous a principle as that the rich ought to be protected by law from the competition of the poor.”

As Trump has demonstrated in three elections, nothing he says matters unless Democrats nominate candidates people prefer to vote for. The midterms are different, but Trump and Trumpism being a disaster isn't enough if the Dems are seen as still worse by swing voters.

Let's make a film version of 1984, in which a mentally ill man falls in love with a violent political radical, but thankfully receives the care he needs in a state facility and comes to realize how much he truly loves his big brother.

@janecoaston @TPCarney I want my transportation to be inexpensive, convenient, comfortable, and safe. Where Waymo is available, it usually ticks more boxes than any other option.

@TPCarney as an unabashed fan of Waymos I am not attempting to avoid interacting with people, I am attempting to avoid being driven by a person who might be mildly insane

Emily is pointing out a real problem in our culture, with a lot of roots. The COVID lockdowns exacerbated it. A cult of autonomy is also at the root.

@repckelly @tylermartinez Also, after the Court of Appeals ruled against us the Missouri Supreme Court ruled unanimously in support of our position.

@repckelly @tylermartinez Context.

The ultimate Lawyer Burn is "The other side argues X. Not so." But you only get one "not so" per briefing. Use it wisely. #appellatetwitter #appellatex