Live from the APSA: Lame Protesters!

Sure enough, more than 20 protesters turned up at my panel late yesterday afternoon about checks on abuses of executive power that also featured John Yoo. Their protest consisted of standing up when John took the podium and turning their back. The signs said “Stand up against torture.” We had thought of asking John to autograph any that were left behind, and selling them on eBay.

I ran my new GoPro camera to capture some of the fun and games. The sound is a bit weak, but you can make out the highlights, I think. The Claremont Institute did a clever thing: they had John speak last on the panel, so that the lefties who turned up had to listen to the three speakers before John. Perhaps they learned something. Certainly they didn’t know the torture they had left themselves in for. There were some complaints from the audience that the protesters were blocking their view of the panel, but John, as you’ll see, handled the whole thing with his usual avuncularity that no doubt enraged the left even more.

It was a silent protest for the most part. But then, as John was almost finished with his talk, the interruption occurred. You’ll see about halfway through a large person interpose himself between the yelling protester approaching the stage: that’s Mark Hemingway of the Weekly Standard. I wouldn’t want to mess with him either.

P.S. It was 104 here in San Francisco yesterday, and the state broke electricity demand records. I checked the power grid, and sure enough, there was almost no electricity coming from our wind power facilities, because when you have a high pressure heat dome like this the wind stops blowing. Solar power did great during the middle of the day, but once the sun started to go down, solar output crashed quickly to zero, and output from natural gas plants (many of which ran all day in “spinning reserve” mode even if they weren’t plugging into the grid) and out-of-state power purchases soared. And California wants to go 100 percent “renewable” some day?

Maybe there ought to be a protest about this stupidity.

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