In her very first New York Times column, Michelle Goldberg digs deep into her Slate-level thoughts to come up with a way to circumvent the electoral college and save the Union (from the apocalypse).

Since Donald Trump’s cataclysmic election, the unthinkable has become ordinary. We’ve grown used to naked profiteering off the presidency, an administration that calls for the firing of private citizens for political dissent and nuclear diplomacy conducted via Twitter taunts. Here, in my debut as a New York Times columnist, I want to discuss a structural problem that both underlies and transcends our current political nightmare: We have entered a period of minority rule.

I don’t just mean the fact that Trump became president despite his decisive loss in the popular vote, though that shouldn’t be forgotten. Worse, the majority of voters who disapprove of Trump have little power to force Congress to curb him.

On the one hand, Goldberg may be misreading the way in which elections happen in America. If presidents were elected by popular vote, the dynamic across the nation would change. People who might have voted but stayed home because they figured they were in the minority in their state, and their vote wouldn’t have mattered anyway, might have voted. Continue reading →

Judge Denise Cote sentenced former United States Representative and New York City mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner to 21 months in prison. The government asked for a sentence between 21 and 27 months*. The defense sought probation.

Cote, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, seemed to struggle with the decision she was about to make. One the one hand, she acknowledged she was dealing with a defendant who is unwell: “He has a disease that involved sexual compulsivity. Some call it a sex addiction,” she said, as she credited the treatment he’d been receiving, which she considered “effective.” For a moment, it seemed as though she was leaning toward probation — especially when she suggested that Weiner could “make an enormous contribution to society” and provide a “true public service” if he somehow became an advocate for people suffering from his same disease.

But on the other hand, she recognized Weiner committed “a serious crime that deserves serious punishment.” And that the “strong compulsion” that had already led to two very public downfalls had reared its head once again. Treatment and probation alone may not suffice to cure him this time around. Something more was needed.

Much is wrapped up in Weiner’s crime, his downfall, those whose lives were implicated as a result, and his sentence. His inability to control his behavior was manifest; he refused to stop engaging in his “dalliances.” It’s not as if the price wasn’t enormous, for him, his former wife and, possibly, others. Not that any of this seemed to make any difference to Carlos Danger. Continue reading →

The reporter was Davis Winborne, a Mizzou photojournalism student. The lesson he was about to learn covering the demonstrations following the Jason Stockley acquittal for the 2011 killing of Anthony Lamar Smith couldn’t be taught in any classroom.

The SWAT truck stopped, and heavily armored officers carrying assault rifles poured out, screaming at us. Thinking that they would likely ignore the journalists and go after the demonstrators, we stopped and put our hands and cameras in the air. Most of the demonstrators were wearing black, their faces covered with bandanas, and some had weapons. The journalists, on the other hand, were dressed the way we often are — in button-down shirts, with press credentials and cameras plain to see. The difference was obvious.

The peaceful demonstrators of the day had turned into violent protesters of the night, “using broken cement planters to destroy windows, cars and storefronts.” Certainly the windows. cars and storefronts were at fault for the Stockley acquittal and deserved to be broken. And why was Winborn there?

It is important that journalists be allowed to do their job. It is our responsibility to bear witness to newsworthy events. When police ignore the people who are smashing windows and destroying property in order to focus on handcuffing and berating journalists, it impedes our ability to show the world what is happening.

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Among the great many issues that are “literally horrifying” about the changes to Title IX campus sex tribunal guidance, one of the most unseemly is that the accused may be given the right to cross-examine the accuser. Confrontation. It’s exhausting.

DeVos has said that the former Title IX guidance unfairly denied rights to students who are accused of sexual assault, a claim activists strongly deny. “The Obama-era guidelines reflect bipartisan consensus that campus investigations into sexual assault had to be prompt, equitable, and fair to both sides,” Singh said. “There’s a conservative media narrative that the Obama guidelines required campuses to be procedurally unfair to accused students, but nothing could be further from the truth.” (Emphasis added.)

Nothing? That might be a bit hyperbolic, but if Sejal Singh, a policy coordinator with the advocacy group Know Your IX says so, shouldn’t we just believe? And as Skadden Fellow(?), Alexandra Brodsky, went on a twitter tear over the prospect of “survivors” being forced to subject themselves to “direct cross” by their “assailant.”

That means that a survivor could be directly questioned by her assailant. Not through an intermediary or representative. Directly. Continue reading →

There’s a new columnist at the New York Times. The Jewish name begins with a “G.” The “G” is a color. It ends with a typical Jewish name suffix. Is it…is it…Goldberg? Yes, it’s Michelle Goldberg. My mother’s maiden name was Goldberg. What are the chances? Slim. It’s a very common name, but getting the opportunity to write as a columnist on the Times’ soapbox is uncommon.

Gail Collins does a question and answer column to introduce Goldberg, which isn’t the sort of thing normally done or, to be frank, necessary. If someone hasn’t sufficiently established their bona fides to stand on their soapbox, why would they get the nod? And it’s not as if Goldberg hasn’t done her share of writing. Heck, her name has even appeared in the august pages of SJ. But what niche will she fill at the Times?

Gail: Well, you’ve picked quite a moment. What’s your take on Donald Trump? I don’t mean “Are you happy he’s president?” How do you see your role as a columnist — articulating a national cry of pain? Re-evaluating him on the basis of what happens each week?

The only unacceptable answer is “Crawling under the bed and assuming a fetal position.” It won’t fill 850 words — trust me, I know.

Michelle: Remember a few weeks before the election, when Hillary Clinton said, “I’m the last thing standing between you and the apocalypse?” I think she was basically right. Part of the job of a columnist, as I see it, is to bear witness to a nearly inconceivable civic disaster, and part of it is to grope toward an understanding of how it happened and how to move forward.

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Remember the good old days when the purpose of higher education was higher education? Good times.

The class is called symplectic geometry, a high-level course in mathematics that provides elite graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley, a better understanding of, among other things, planetary motion.

This seems as good a time as any for a Maria Muldaur song,* right? But what does that have to do with free speech and tuition refunds? It’s taught by a prof who feels strongly that it’s wrong for Berkeley to host speakers who are wrong.

But whether symplectic geometry will meet for its scheduled session on Tuesday is still up in the air because the professor, Katrin Wehrheim, is one of dozens of faculty members who announced they would boycott classes ahead of appearances by right-wing speakers this week.

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I confess, I am not very politically correct. It’s not that I choose to be provocative for the sake of shocking those who are, but I find it intellectually barren and socially untenable. Knowing full well that there is nothing I can do to avoid evoking the ire of the woke, I don’t try. But like many others, this means that random SJWs feel compelled to thrust themselves into my sphere to inform me I’m horrible and irredeemable.

Big deal. Usually, I ignore them. Being goaded into a discussion of social justice with the unduly passionate is a thankless endeavor. More to the point, it’s boring. But I indulged a silly girl yesterday.

Who is this person? Beats me. Not a  follower. Not a person with whom I’ve interacted. Just some random nutjob on the twitters. But what does she mean by “so telling”? And why does a random woman feel empowered to make such a statement? Having a few minutes, I decided to play. It ultimately came to this twit: Continue reading →

Howard Wasserman channels Alexis de Tocqueville at PrawfsBlawg in taking the ever-breathless Dahlia Lithwick to task.

Dahlia Lithwick wrote about the litigation of the Joe Arpaio pardon, with the district judge hearing from numerous amici about the constitutional validity and effect of the pardon. The article ends by quoting one amicus, Ian Bassin of Project Democracy: “Thankfully, in America it’s the courts who get the last say on what the Constitution allows.”

As I have been arguing again and again in defense of judicial departmentalism, this is not  true as a normative matter, at least not in the absolute sense in which it is presented here, as simply the way it works in America.

The new name for this is lawfare, challenging every decision with which one disagrees in court in the hope that a judge, some judge, any judge, will disagree and use his fiat to supersede the decisions of Congress or the Executive. While the basic notion of judicial review, established by no less dubious a character than John Marshall in Marbury v. Madison, is accepted despite its having been created by judicial fiat, Marshall pulled it off, despite President Jackson’s snippy retort, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.” Continue reading →

The news was big, huge, that the Department of Education under dreaded Betsy DeVos changed everything. The “Dear Colleague” letters of 2011 and 2014, together with the Q&A, that mandated a campus sex investigation and adjudication scheme designed to assure vindication of the accuser* were rescinded. Interim guidelines were issued pending invocation of notice and comment as required by the Administrative Procedures Act and a new Q&A was issued to explain the application of the changes.

So problem solved? Not quite. Certainly not yet. And potentially not at all.

Others will run through the changes, highlighting portions they believe to be most significant, whether accurately or falsely. There will be lies, born of the belief that the cause is so critical that anything that achieves the end is justified. Believers will believe. But the changes don’t change very much. They release colleges from the mandate of what they must address and how they must address it. They do not, however, require change for the most part.

For example, no longer will colleges be required to use the standard of proof mandated by the DoE:

The findings of fact and conclusions should be reached by applying either a preponderance of the evidence standard or a clear and convincing evidence standard.

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We need reporters. Without them, we’re blind as to what’s happening in the world writ large. Or not writ at all, which is the problem. But with dead-tree media dying (if not dead and now searching the nation in search of brains that taste like, well, I defer to Slate on this one) and online media replete with minimum-wage earners explaining a world they can’t begin to grasp, where will the next generation of journalists come from?

Google’s got you covered.

Many local newsrooms have been cut to the bone so often that there’s hardly any bone left. But starting early next year, some may get the chance to rebuild, at least by one.

On Monday, a new project was announced at the Google News Lab Summit that aims to place 1,000 journalists in local newsrooms in the next five years. Report For America takes ideas from several existing organizations, including the Peace Corps, Americorps, Teach for America and public media.

The problem, of course, isn’t that J-Schools aren’t churning out grads with the passion to crank out news stories, but that newsrooms eventually have to pay them because they get hungry. Every friggin’ day. Continue reading →