The “Little Flower,” Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, was faced with a newspaper delivery strike that lasted 17 days. He didn’t call the national guard, but took to the radio.

On July 1, La Guardia was scheduled for his regular Sunday broadcast of Talk to the People, a weekly radio show he held on WNYC. At one point in the show, he encouraged his listeners to gather their children around the radio, and commenced to reading that day’s “Dick Tracy” comic from the Sunday Daily News. With obvious relish, the mayor described the action in the panels, impersonated the voices of various characters, and reminded listeners of the plot that had led up to that moment. At the end of each strip, he would explicate the moral of that week’s adventure to his young listeners.

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When my kids hit a bump in the road, I would do my fatherly duty of giving them a pep talk. They would respond that I had no future as an inspirational speaker, which was their way of telling me that they got the message and had moved on to the joke-telling stage. The “trauma” was past, at least for the moment. What I never did was give them a dollar and a dream. Apparently, I handled it all wrong.

During the last month of school, when I was at my wit’s end, the principal called me in to discuss my kids’ excessive tardiness, and I knew something had to change. Fortunately, she was understanding, and I left the meeting with the beginning of an idea. By the first day of school this year, I had completely transformed our lives — the mornings and the evenings.

I accomplished this by paying my kids to perform basic life tasks. In behavioral psychology, this is called positive reinforcement. And it works.

In fairness, the writer and her children had issues. Continue reading →

Years ago, I called my parents for my weekly check-in, but they were out and I got their answering machine instead. Not their voicemail. Their answering machine. The recorded message was from my father, who explained in his official voice that they weren’t home and would “return your call at my earliest convenience.”

When he called me back, I made a point of noting his message. “That’s rude, pop,” I explained. “At your convenience is like telling callers you’ll return their call if and when you have absolutely nothing better in the world to do and will, finally, deign to respond.” He didn’t mean it, and hadn’t thought about it. When I pointed it out to him, he realized it was the wrong message and changed it to “as soon as possible.” It was still in his official voice, but at least it wasn’t rude.

KJ Dell’Antonia writes about “parenthood,” which is one of those curious topics to write about since pretty much anybody can be a parent, and there’s no objective basis to heed one parent’s ideas of good parenting from another’s. Continue reading →

It’s hardly controversial for a woman to respond to a man’s disagreement with an assertion that he’s mansplaining, sexist or literally Hitler. But in the victim hierarchy, the social justice rules by which someone is allowed to “punch up” but not down, it’s hard to know where the oppressed win over the marginalized. Just when you think you’re entitled to express your opinion on a highly controversial subject, you get spanked for not being of the correct identity.

Cathy Young found this out the hard way when she wrote about that great humanitarian, Angela Davis. Maybe you love Davis. Maybe not. You’re allowed either way, because this is America and everyone is entitled to be wrong. But the problem wasn’t that Cathy Young was wrong about Davis, that she wasn’t pals with murderous communist dictators and a faming anti-semite, but that Cathy Young was, well, here’s the reaction she received.

Yes @CathyYoung63 is a white woman and yes she wrote this! pic.twitter.com/fsFiZ1IKOz

— Black Intifada (@IntifadaBlack) January 10, 2019

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Yesterday, KC Johnson twitted of the 128th loss in federal court by a college sued for its handling of campus sex policing in Doe v. Coastal Carolina University. That’s a lot of losses, not that there haven’t been some wins, but the trend has been clear: courts are acknowledging that these proceedings are not only deeply flawed procedurally, but that they reflect anti-male bias.

Therein lies the nasty detail behind an accused prevailing in a subsequent suit under Title IX against the college. That the adjudication was a sham, procedurally deficient, has become less of a stumbling block, as courts have recognized that the stakes are huge and the denial of minimal due process is flagrant. But that’s not enough to make it past a motion to dismiss.

A plaintiff claiming erroneous outcome must allege: (1) “particular facts sufficient to cast some articulable doubt on the accuracy of the outcome of the disciplinary proceeding” and (2) “a particularized . . . causal connection between the flawed outcome and gender bias.”

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When the Department of Education issued its “Dear Colleague” letters during the Obama administration, there was no push for comments in support of the constitutional rights of the accused. That’s because nobody asked. In the hands of Russlynn Ali and Catherine Lhamon, the rules were whatever they decided they were.

Your comments didn’t matter. They were going to do whatever they wanted to do, and what they wanted to do was create a system that assured that any woman who complained would prevail and any man who was accused would lose. “Survivors” became the twisted characterization, so we would all feel their pain and suffering.

Now that the Department of Education has chosen to employ the Administrative Procedures Act, or what lawyers refer to as law, the window for comments before the regulations are final has given rise to a last-ditch effort. And the push is on before the window slams shut. Continue reading →

Scandal-plagued and bankrupt is no way to go through life, but it’s apparently not enough to compel a sober view of why the American Bar Association has become irrelevant to the legal profession. So naturally, the ABA doubled down on its Model Rule 8.4(g) bet in a remarkably tone-deaf post by its “ethics counsel,” Dennis Rendleman.

The Crusade against Model Rule 8.4(g)

That it would begin by calling it a “crusade” sets the tone. Apparently, the oppressed ABA has been victimized by crusaders. Lawyers and judges, the big machers of the bar, have been mislead, deceived, snookered, by these crusaders who have made it their zealous duty to undermine the ABA’s good works for social justice.  Continue reading →

Whether you’re otherwise on board with the Cato Institute or the Institute for Justice, there’s one thing they do that should warm your cockles: they take the government to task when it overreaches. In a suit filed by IJ for its client, Cato, they reveal an astounding abuse by no more beloved an agency than the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Normally this is the point where we’d tell you who this person is and why the SEC went after him. But we cannot. As part of the agreement he reached to settle the matter, the plaintiff in the Cato suit had to accept a gag order that prevents him from discussing or criticizing the case. Even though the settlement does not require him to admit guilt, he is nevertheless forbidden from saying anything that would indicate that he thinks the “complaint is without factual basis.”

Because this gag order prevents him from talking about the case, it also prevents the Cato Institute from publishing his book. Cato and the Institute for Justice are thus not revealing the man’s identity because doing so would also reveal that he disagrees with, and is critical of, his settlement with the SEC. If he violates the gag order, SEC prosecutors could try to vacate the settlement and punish him more harshly.

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The name is “The Argument,” reminiscent of the old New York Times “Room for Debate,” which died a mysterious death when the Times decided there was no longer anything to debate. And if the name wasn’t enticing enough, the particular headline certainly caught my eye, “Why Do Powerful Women Make America Panic?” So I went to take a look.

There was nothing to look at. There were, apparently, three participants in the argument, Ross Douthat, David Leonhardt and Michelle Goldberg. The former two, the men, are occasionally interesting, and occasionally thoughtful. Goldberg, the not-a-man participant, is fascinating in the same way as if an intellectual train crashed with a truck carrying a load of manure. It’s not that she’s a woman. Many women offer interesting and illuminating ideas. It’s that she’s vacuous. The most interesting thing about Goldberg is that the Times gives her real estate despite her puddle-deep feelings.

With this provocative headline, I went for it. And . . . it was a podcast. It ran 36 minutes and 51 seconds. If I was to listen to it, that would mean I dedicated 36 plus of my life to it. This I was unwilling to do. Continue reading →

Denying certiorari is the Supreme Court’s favorite past time. Sure, they get tons of petitions for a grant. Sure, everybody who loses wants that last bite of the apple to try to win, to get that wrong righted. No, the Supremes can’t take every case. But, well, they could take more than they do. A lot more.

But one thing that has become more common is opinions on denials of cert. In Hester v. United States (beginning at page 41 of the Order List), there is not only a dissent by Justice Gorsuch, joined by Justice Sotomayor, but a concurrence with the denial by Justice Alito. It’s oddly like a whole decision without any decision at all. One wonders that if the conflict so moved these three justices to write, why did the other six refuse to hear the case?

In the dissent, Justice Gorsuch surprised many who were firm in their ignorant certainty based upon the war of misinformation following his nomination and confirmation by expressing views that, for the second time, brought the empathetic Latina on board. The first time was viewed as an outlier, since woke pundits were certain Gorsuch was otherwise horrible. But a second “partnership”? Continue reading →