Caps and gowns are back in storage, now that graduation season is nigh. And by the time the next graduation season rolls around, there will be a new regime in power. Ah, the lame duck term of a presidential administration offers so little, and yet so much. Much as its gestures may be empty, since no one cares what the outgoing people have to say, it’s also freeing, as it allows them to say whatever they please without fear of consequences.

So the Obama administration makes its announcement:

Obama, Biden Will No Longer Visit Universities That Don’t Address Sexual Assault

Did anyone invite them? If they came, would anyone care? If they don’t, will anyone notice? What difference does it make, because they have a cause.

Less than a month after Vice President Joe Biden penned an emotional letter to the woman sexually assaulted by Brock Turner, the White House has announced sweeping new rules for future visits to colleges campuses.

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There is nothing wrong, nothing at all, with the Ford Foundation using its resources to help underprivileged students by giving internships to a select group of students. It’s Edsel Ford’s money (more or less), and its stewards can use it to promote whatever they want.

At the Ford Foundation, we take seriously the responsibility to ensure our paid internships help dismantle privilege. In addition to screening for strong academic performance and an interest in social justice issues, our managers require that interns be recipients of needs-based financial aid. In this way, we offer sought-after positions to young people who otherwise might not have the chance to pursue them.

President of the Ford Foundation, Darren Walker, explains at length the benefits of a sexy internship on a student’s future, as if nobody knows.

The stakes of America’s broken internship system are high. As report after report reminds us, this generation of students faces significantly worse job prospects than its predecessors. Without the short-term opportunities to help them learn, grow, connect with mentors and begin climbing the earnings curve, many promising young people with limited means are denied the chance to rise as high as their talent will take them.

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Maybe she doesn’t come with the justification that she descended from human beings brought to the United States as chattel, against their will, with a good chance of dying along the way, and a certainty of living out the rest of their lives as slaves.  So what? Margaret Lam is a little girl* who discovered how to use her vagina as a weapon and the rest of her anatomy as an excuse.

Maggie Lam writes about reclaiming the Asian-American narrative surrounding the immigrant experience.

And she does this how?

In one column, Ms. Lam accuses her room-mate, “Becky,” of exhibiting the symptoms of white privilege as she and Becky debate whether their dorm, which is transitioning to a “People of Color House,” should be allowed to exclude white residents. Continue reading →

The background was somewhat typical of an upstate New York Supreme Court justice.  District Attorney’s office, where he rose to some prominence as head of a bureau. Private practice in a small firm, where he handled what passes in the boondocks as high profile cases. John Michalek seemed destined for a decent career as a judge to cap off his decent career as a lawyer.

In 1985, after serving four years as chief of the Justice Courts Bureau, Michalek left the DA’s office and established a Hamburg law firm with two partners, Daniel J. Henry* and Robert M. Vallarini, who later would win election as an Erie County legislator. Michalek handled some criminal defense work with the law firm, and his most famous – or infamous – client was the late Richard W. Matt.

For the most part, he was well regarded as a fair, if conservative judge.

“I practiced before him on several different lawsuits, and I thought he was fair and very careful,” said Cosgrove, Michalek’s former boss. “As far as I am concerned, his past and present reputations are marvelous. I don’t know of anything contrary to that. I’d have to understand every part of what happened before I made any judgments on him.”

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Civics 101 teaches that we have a tri-partite government, one branch being the legislative.  Among the many things that really suck about this arrangement is that there will be people elected to the legislative branch who are very sad because, after all that effort to raise money, kiss babies, pretend to care about their constituents, they have no power to accomplish anything.  These are the people who are in the minority.

What to do when you are impotent?  Former speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, has come up with a plan.

San Francisco – House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi today released the following statement on a bicameral amicus brief of 105 Members of Congress and 23 Senators in the case of Christiansen v. Omnicom Group urging the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit to hold that discrimination based on a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity constitutes sex discrimination in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act:

“Today, more than 100 Members of the House and Senate called on a federal appellate court to recognize that the protections of the Civil Rights Act must include people facing discrimination because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.  Such an approach has been adopted by the expert federal agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, combatting discrimination in the workplace. Continue reading →

There are a lot of people on the internet. Some prefer chocolate. Others, vanilla. The chocolate people are wrong. Amirite?  No, of course not. People can prefer any flavor they want, and no one has to either explain or justify why they prefer one to the other. Indeed, there is no explanation. They prefer what they prefer. There’s no explanation for such things.

Yet, if someone was to write that they preferred vanilla, there will inevitably be someone who can’t resist the impulse to respond, “I disagree. Vanilla is a terrible flavor. Chocolate is much better and you’re wrong and a moron.” What would make someone respond this way can be explained as narcissism, stupidity, the inexplicable and irresistible impulse to spew whatever bit of inanity that pops into one’s head out loud.

But the vanilla/chocolate “debate” has no substance. One is not inherently righter than the other. It’s merely a personal preference. When the beef is about “tone,” it is similarly substanceless, but usually seizes upon personal preference to ignore substance. And yet, the self-appointed tone police are always on the job.

In a remarkable post at Fault Lines, Josh Kendrick explained Judge Persky’s sentence of Brock Turner versus Raul Ramirez. The issues involved were highly contentious, replete with misinformation and misunderstanding of information, overwhelmed by emotion that blinded some to the substance.  Josh tackled the pervasive stupid head on: Continue reading →

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act has been a perpetual threat since its passage. This shouldn’t surprise anyone, since it was enacted in 1986, when nobody outside of some serious geeks had any real idea of how computers would be ten, twenty, thirty years later. It was a lot easier to pass a law about computers back then, because there wasn’t a great deal of public concern. We didn’t have them. We didn’t use them. They were barely a twinkle in our eye, and regulating their use posed no threat to our ability to play Angry Birds or take selfies.

One of the remnants of this more innocent age is that the CFAA, if interpreted by a federal prosecutor with a really sad story, would criminalize accessing a website in violation of the site’s terms of service. The notion is absurd, since the terms of service could prohibit anything the website owner wants it to prohibit. My TOS is that no assholes are allowed. You’re committing a felony right now if the CFAA’s “unauthorized access” provision criminalizes violation of terms of service.

Bear in mind, back then only corporations and educational institutions were regular computer users. They could type “gopher” after the C prompt and go online, because there was no world wide web then. Remember the old days when you had to include “www.” before every URL or you wouldn’t get anywhere? Then you might be asked for your five letter password, sometimes “muffy,” chosen because of an adored kitty. With enough effort, a hacker might discover your secret key and do mischief. That had to be stopped, and so the CFAA was crafted. Continue reading →

Never has an agency of the United States government done so little, and so much, to deserve the disgust of the citizenry, as the Transportation Safety Administration. The latest incident on the radar, the beating and arrest of poor 18-year-old Hannah Cohen, is a travesty.  She, like so many of us, went through their machines and a light went off.

“They wanted to do further scanning, (but) she was reluctant — she didn’t understand what they were about to do,” said her mother, Shirley Cohen.

Cohen said she tried to tell agents with the Transportation Security Administration that her 19-year-old daughter is partially deaf, blind in one eye, paralyzed and easily confused — but she said police kept her away from the security agents.

The confused and terrified young woman tried to run away, her mother said, and agents violently took her to the ground.

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I know!  All those editorials and op-eds about prosecutorial misconduct, the need for reform, the decades of innocent people in prison, right out the window. The New York Times just found religion, and it’s the religion of trusting prosecutors.

In dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas complained that the majority was treating the Second Amendment right to own a gun “cavalierly.” He warned that the “reckless” standard was so easy to meet that even accidental conduct could lead to a lifetime ban on gun rights. But prosecutors are not going after accidents. (Emphasis added.)

Whew. Why didn’t anybody tell me that we had solved the pervasive, systemic problems with the criminal justice system that caused the Times to spill a million words? Of course, this great news doesn’t arise from just any concern, but one that the Times finds particularly “deadly,” the “mix of guns and domestic violence.”

Congress saw clearly that domestic violence and guns were a deadly mix, and passed, with overwhelming bipartisan support, the Lautenberg Amendment, which barred people convicted of misdemeanor domestic abuse from buying or owning a gun or ammunition. (Those convicted of felony domestic abuse were already subject to a gun ban under federal law.) As one senator said during debate over the bill, all too often “the only difference between a battered woman and a dead woman is the presence of a gun.”

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It’s not the tail wagging the dog. It’s a hair on the tail wagging the dog, but all the virtue signallers are kvelling over what good people they are.  First, it was college campuses, where every new fashion trend in hem length is born. Then, the New York City Council, fearful that some other city would beat them to the punch.  Now, Washington, D.C. has jumped on the bandwagon.

Employers and employees in Washington D.C. are legally prohibited from referring to a transgender employee or coworker by the “wrong” pronouns or asking “personal questions” about their gender identity, according to the city’s Office of Human Rights (OHR).

OHR published a best practices guide for “valuing transgender applicants and employees” earlier this month with a list of “behaviors by supervisors or coworkers [that] may be considered unlawful harassment or a hostile work environment.”

It’s not that you necessarily get to reinvent the workplace to suit your personal sense of dignity, but that’s only if you’re not transgender (or any other protected classification of employee). Your boss can tell you how to perform your job, because that’s her job. But when it comes to favored classes, she must do as the law commands. And that means the law dictates the words she’s required to utter. Continue reading →