When the Chief Judge of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals says the Fourth Amendment is dead, you have to pay attention.  Judge Alex Kozinski, together with his law clerk, Stephanie Grace, have written a Requiem for the Fourth.

When did the Fourth Amendment die, you ask?

Recently, but it’s been sick for a while.

So why haven’t you heard about it?

Because you’re the murderer. We all are. Our weapon of choice? Most recently, the smartphone, which, with our collective blessing, allows law enforcement to monitor our real-time geographic location.

It started with the supermarket loyalty programs. They seemed innocuous enough — you just scribble down your name, number and address in exchange for a plastic card and a discount on Oreos. The problem, at least constitutionally speaking, is that the Fourth Amendment protects only what we reasonably expect to keep private. One facet of this rule, known as the third party doctrine, is that we don’t have reasonable expectations of privacy in things we’ve already revealed to other people or the public.

There’s a sign as you drive down South Virginia Street that proclaims Reno, Nevada special.  No, the police don’t wear hot pants as in Reno 911, a huge disappointment.  There aren’t many people walking on the streets in this place plopped in the middle of nowhere. 

It appears that Reno consists primarily of two things: tired old casinos behind walls that look like they were once built to be flashy, but were left to decay after someone realized that no one was looking.  And there are pawn shops.

The casinos speak for themselves, no clocks to be seen, music blaring, the pretense of excitement surrounding a few people slumping over game tables or putting coins in slots as if there was a rule that they had to eventually come out.  Hope springs eternal. Odd don’t seem to compute to folks in casinos.

The pawn shops seemed interesting, now that I’ve become intimately familiar with the cool things that come into Nevada from watching Pawn Stars.  Apparently, Vegas must get all the really fascinating items, as the shops in Reno had drecht, inconsequential crap that would barely buy someone another roll of the dice.

The only other point of interest was notable atop the taxis, most of which advertised the Mustang Ranch and museum.  We like to go to museums as we travel the nation to fence on the North American Cup circuit, so my son wondered if we should take in this one as well.  I explained what the Mustang Ranch was and told him it was his choice. 

One point of sincere interest is the National Automobile Museum at Harrahs, which is well known as being one of the best car museums in the country.  We will certainly be able to spend some quality time there, and anticipate it to be the height of Reno culture.  Not bad, as culture goes.

One of the strangest tings about manifest destiny is that all the clocks are wrong.  When the body says it’s had enough sleep at 5:00 a.m. New York time, but the clock says it’s 2 in the morning, it’s hard to figure out what to do.  My solution is to finally read  Dan Solove’s ambitious new book, Nothing to Hide, which first debunks the arguments used to trick people into trading off freedom for security, and then goes on to offer Dan’s idea of how, in the internet/terrorist age, we should approach the protection of personal freedom.  A review will be coming soon.

I have no idea what would make Reno the “Biggest Little City,” or a city at all.  It bears none of the indicia of real life with real people living here doing the stuff real people do.  Unless real people sell off their trinkets to gamble and then salve their wounds at the Mustang Ranch.  But that’s not how the real people I know behave.  Then again, maybe I hang out with the wrong sort of people.

About this time every year, my son and I take off to some godforsaken part of the country where the United States Fencing Association has seen fit to hold the Summer National Championships.  This year it’s Reno, Nevada.

Over the next eight days, we will be hiding in a massively large, exceptionally loud, wholly undecorated, notably smelly, room where men and women will be fighting with swords of one type or another.  It smells like . . .  victory. 

Whether he wins, loses or otherwise, I am incredibly proud of my son. That he’s an A11 rated epee fencer is just frosting on the cake.  He works hard. He cares. He strives to achieve. He’s felt glory, but knows the agony of defeat.  He knows nothing worthwhile is accomplished without effort.

During this time, my interest in writing wanes, with other things taking precedence.  As much as I enjoy writing, there are things more important and they come first.  More than that, my head isn’t as much into law as it is touches, lunges, parries and ripostes (and the occasional fleche), or the sort done with cold, hard, maraging steel. 

For those of you looking for an opportunity to beat me to death because of how much you despise what I write (or just don’t like me), this would be a wonderful opportunity to take me to task without fear of response.  For those who just think I write too damn much, this would be a chance to catch up.  And for those who don’t care much either way, you aren’t reading this, so it doesn’t matter.

In the interim, I expect to do some posting along the way, but I won’t be following things nearly as closely as I normally do.  Comment moderation will be slow in coming.  So cut me a break and wish my son luck.

Did I mention how proud I am of my son? 

And we’re off to Reno.  Later.

The Supreme Court’s decision in  Turner v. Rogers has launched thousands of words on the lawprof blogs, trying to spin the case into a face off between men and women, wealth and poverty, pro se and representation, all too boring and pointless to make anyone care.  But seeing a post by Norm Reimer on  Concurring Opinions shook me out of complacency.

Many will recognize Norm’s name as the Executive Director of the NACDL, but I remember Norm as the guy down the hall when I first started practicing.  With partner Frank Gould, Norm was a pretty cool lawyer.  As a snot-nosed baby lawyer, I sometimes wandered down the hallway of the 16th floor to ask him a question. He was always happy to help.

Unlike the lawprofs, Norm’s post goes to the heart of the problem in Turner, one that is dismissed by the scholars but can’t be ignored by a trench lawyer. 

From the criminal defense practitioner’s standpoint, the Court’s decision betrays naïve simplicity and a breathtaking disconnect from the real world.   The first of the three reasons cited against the Due Process Clause requiring the State to provide indigents with counsel in civil support contempt proceedings is that the critical issue is likely to be the defendant’s ability to pay.   The Court blithely notes that the question of a defendant’s indigence “is sufficiently straightforward.”  Slip Op. 13. Nothing could be further from reality.

Only in the sanitized world of appellate courts can the hardest issue be dismissed with a wave of the hand. Indigency permeates the problem, whether as the ability to pay support or the ability to pay for a lawyer to defend.  It’s like the millionaire criminal defendant, stripped of use of his assets by forfeiture proceedings, who is subsequently convicted, his criminality justifying his having been deprived of the ability to pay for his defense.  At the back end of the sausage making, it all seems so simple.

Norm notes that whenever, in the opinion, the majority is about to crash into the wall that would require them to reach the only rational conclusion possible, that any person whose liberty interest, a benign phrase that means they’re going to jail, regardless of whether it’s dolled up by calling it civil rather than criminal, the Supremes pull out the 1973 decision of Gagnon v. Scarpelli, which holds that defendants aren’t entitled to counsel in probation revocation hearings.  Precedent, you know.

Gagnon was wrong, and repeating it as precedent applied to another jailing doesn’t make it less wrong.

Turner may implicate a wide variety of scholarly issues, but who cares.  What matters most about the decision, like Gagnon, is that a person goes to jail without having a lawyer to defend him because he’s indigent.  And his failure to prove indigence, because he has no one to tell him anything is proved in court, doesn’t mean that he’s not indigent or that it’s straightforward.  The need for counsel is because of the need to defend; the failure of the defense isn’t proven because the unrepresented defendant doesn’t know how to do so.

And calling the jailing of a person “civil” doesn’t mean they put curtains on the cell windows.  Jailing is jailing, and putting lipstick on its doesn’t make it more civil than criminal, an artificial distinction used to deprive the guy going to jail of the ability to defend himself.

So pontificate all you want about the fascinating collateral issues that will keep scholarly folks busy and launch a thousand law review articles.  Guys like Norm (and even me) see a very different point in Turner, that no person should be sentence to jail without a lawyer to defend him.  And that being too poor to afford counsel is a damn poor reason to jail someone.

Cut to its core, that’s the failure of Turner, as no safeguards (whatever that is supposed to mean) are real when a person is thrust into the legal system, facing jail and left to dangle without a lawyer because he’s poor.  That’s the problem that the Supremes needed to fix, and they didn’t.

The bad news is that the Supreme Court held that children are now subject to the death penalty.  The good news is that it’s only virtual.  The bad news is that they’re still children, which is what makes the decision in Brown (having replaced Schwarzenegger) v. Entertainment Merchants Association.

Never having had my hands on the joystick of Mortal Kombat, the extent of horrific violence that enraptures young minds is beyond my knowledge.  But my personal expert in such matters tells me it’s no big deal.  From my gut, it seems reasonable that allowing impressionable minds to grow desensitized to violence can’t be good. 

But my gut is a lousy measure of anything, particularly an entire category to speech.  There are a number of niches of expression that don’t sit well with me, so I don’t watch or listen to them.  That doesn’t mean that you can’t, or shouldn’t. To each his own.

Kids, however, aren’t just short grown ups, but developing minds and hearts. That’s why parents can screw them up so easily, and why they shouldn’t be treated like adults in the legal system when the do something bone-headed.  Children do childish things.  We measure their conduct as children, recognizing that they make mistakes, sometimes mistakes that cause others significant harm, in the process of maturing.

And therein lies the problem with the 7-2 decision.  As a strong free speech advocate, disinclined to agree that the government should wipe away entire categories of communication that are otherwise permissible because some legislators’ nose tells them they smell bad is the sort of destructive overbreadth that emasculates the First Amendment.

Yet I frequently argue that the law must treat children differently than adults.  Kids must not be subject to the death penalty, or life without possibility of parole. Kids should not be tried and punished as grownups.  I’ve railed against the manufactured claim that kids turn into a marauding pack violent predators, as in wilding.  And I agree that the sexual molestation of children by adults is one of the sickest, most horrific crimes around, deserving of a special place in Hell.

Squaring up these conflicts isn’t any easier than raising children.  How can I strongly contend that the police should not be permitted to interrogate children without their parents knowledge and presence (and hopefully the presence of mind to refuse to allow questioning and have a lawyer close at hand), and yet attribute sufficient sophistication to children to allow them unfettered access to violent communication?

The issue came to mind when reading this commentary by Ken at Popehat :

Take Justice Thomas’ dissent. Thomas appeals to the original intent of the Framers to resolve the dispute, saying that California’s law passes muster because the men who drafted the Bill of Rights never intended for the First Amendment to apply to an entire category of speech: talking to other people’s kids:

In my view, the “practices and beliefs held by the Founders” reveal another category of excluded speech: speech to minor children bypassing their parents.

This rather breathtaking conclusion demonstrates that the “conservative” and “liberal” political labels are often a poor fit for constitutional analysis.

That this was within the “Founders'” beliefs is another facile effort to blame the dead guys.  But then, the notion that children deserve special protection from police who would bypass parents is one that I’ve long advocated.  Children are impressionable and easily manipulated.  It’s not that adults aren’t, but they can’t use the excuse that they’re just kids.  So can we have categorical protections, on the one hand, but not categorical limitations on the other? Do we bypass parents or not?

It may well be that playing violent video games doesn’t do any of the things that the California Lege thinks it does.  It may be that the vast majority of 12-year-olds know that it’s just a game, and that in real life, we don’t torture, rape, kill others.  Perhaps a few children who are already at risk for bad ideas will come away troubled, but that is neither a reason to categorically deny an entire class of communication to an entire group of people.  There will always be a few for whom things work out badly, differently, and they aren’t the measure for the rest of society.  Even a society of children.

This schism in our vision of children troubles me, as there doesn’t seem to be a good basis to distinguish why they deserve special consideration, recognizing that they lack the sensibilities that come with maturity, while freeing them from the constraints that their immaturity seems to demand.

There is no argument that the outcome of Brown v. EMA is proper.  Videogames, along with books, movies, songs, the ideas, are part of our cultural expression.  Parents can make the decision whether their children should play them, but it’s not for government to shield our kids from ideas it deems inappropriate.  It’s also not for government to take advantage of our children when it serves its purposes.

How can we justify these conflicting positions?

Apparently, Michael Doudna, a criminal defense lawyer in California, heard that there was magic happening on the internet, and he wanted his piece.  All a lawyer needed was a dollar and a dream to hop on the internet train to wealth and success.  He was 52 years old and a lawyer since 1985.  He was no dumb kid scrambling to pretend he was a lawyer, but if there was business flocking to internet lawyers, he wanted some.

Michael Doudna ended up getting less, and more, than he bargained for. 

He hired an internet marketing named  Kenney and Associates in March, 2011, run by a woman named Harmony Kenney.  Whether there were any associates is unknown, but who cared, as long as they can get him on that runaway train filled with clients, the internet.  So Kenney nailed down a wordpress blog at DoudnaLaw. 

The blog went live on the internet in March 2011, at the internet address (URL) “doudnalaw.wordpress.com.” The blog contained information about the firm, including the types of cases Mr. Doudna handled (i.e, criminal defense and bankruptcies), and his contact information, namely his office address, telephone and fax numbers, email address, and URLs.

A “Criminal Law News” section was included in the blog. In order to provide interesting content for that section, I reviewed articles that were publically available online, such as those published by the ABA Journal (Online) of the American Bar Association.

By mid-April, 2011, I had not received any new business as result of the blog. I was, however, incurring fees by KA for maintaining the blog. Therefore, on or about April 14, 2011 I cancelled the KA’s services referable to the blog.

Nothing. Nada. Zip, zero, zilch. Certainly the posts were interesting, as they were merely rehashes of the ABA Journal, the motherload of whitebread fascination.  The blog contained all the salient information, so it’s not like the waiting throngs of clients didn’t know where to find Michael Doudna.  And yet, not a single new case came across the interwebz.

In fairness, it would appear that the blog was live for a grand total of six weeks at most by the time he decided to pull the plug.  While the whispers in the courthouse hallway said that he should be able to buy a new Mercedes by then, six weeks really isn’t a very long time to establish a blog.  He expected to see something, anything, come from the internet magic, and yet the phone didn’t ring at all. Not even once.

The problem was that the silence of the phone was exacerbated by the appearance of the bills for the services rendered.  No money coming in, but definitely money going out.  This is where the cheerleaders’ talk of the incalculability of an ROI for blogging hits a lawyer square in the face, as the warm and fuzzy feeling he gets from the vast array of benefits of blogging, none of which translate into a monetary value, doesn’t make the marketer’s bill any easier to pay.

And so Michael Doudna, having given it the best six weeks of his life, pulled the plug.

Heck, it was worth a try, right?  So he’s out a few bucks, but at least the internet train didn’t leave the station without him.  He rode it and learned it went nowhere, but there will be no shame when the guys chat over beers about how you have to give it the old law school try.

But this really isn’t a story about how California criminal defense lawyer Michael Doudna got sucked into blogging, or internet marketing, and threw some money into the toilet and flushed.  It’s not about the failure of the internet to be that magic bullet all the cheerleaders yell about.  It’s not about the lack of ROI in blogging,  It’s not about how marketers sell snake oil, or how marketing isn’t the answer.

Harmony Kenney’s internet marketing business folded right after Doudna pulled the plug.  But this isn’t a post about how internet marketers may sell themselves as winners, as the magicians who make the magic of the internet happen.  Whether Kenney and Associates had any other customers isn’t known, but losing Doudna certainly didn’t help Harmony.  But this post isn’t about Harmony.

It seems that Harmony Kenney, when glomming on the ABA Journal’s content to make Michael Doudna’s blog as interesting as possible, happened on a story on April 4, 2011.

On or about April 8, 2011, I drafted a synopsis of the ABA Journal article and posted it to Mr. Doudna ‘s blog, under the title: “D.C. ‘s Lawyer’s Inexperience Obvious; Judge Declares Mistrial” .

On May 18, 2011, Michael Doudna learned that he had been named as a defendant in Rakofsky v. Internet.  It seems like the magic bullet hit Doudna right between the eyes.  And that’s what this post is all about.

It makes enormous sense.  That it started with airports was obvious, as planes became missiles in the hands of terrorists.  But planes were also enclosed vessels where a group of people were trapped, making them a perfect target in themselves. 

We have to protect ourselves from these terrorists, because everything changed after 9/11.  This rationale is right up there with do it for the children.  It resonates.  It plays in Peoria.  It may not be sufficient for the handful of people on the internet who read blawgs by criminal defense lawyers, libertarians or the Tin Foil Hat Society, but it remains the mantra of many regular folk who would prefer not to be an uninvited guest to someone else’s martyrdom party.

And the TSA knows it.  Via Mother Jones :

Think you could avoid the TSA’s body scanners and pat-downs by taking Amtrak? Think again. Even your daily commute isn’t safe from TSA screenings. And because the TSA is working with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol, you may have your immigration status examined along with your “junk“.

As part of the TSA’s request for FY 2012 funding, TSA Administrator John Pistole told Congress last week that the TSA conducts 8,000 unannounced security screenings every year. These screenings, conducted with local law enforcement agencies as well as immigration, can be as simple as checking out cargo at a busy seaport. But more and more, they seem to involve giving airport-style pat-downs and screenings of unsuspecting passengers at bus terminals, ferries, and even subways.

Planes, trains and automobiles.

According to at least one news report out of Brownsville, Texas, TSA/VIPR has already conducted unannounced inspections of private passenger cars and trucks.

Once the barrier is broken and we step onto the slippery slope, the conceptual ledge is hard to find.  The next, and fairly obvious step, is the right authority to frisk people walking down the street.  We’ve long had frisks conducted at the entries to sporting arenas, another place where a large mass of people congregate and can be blown to bits by a suicide bomber.  Why would walking into a mall, or a store, or movie theater be less of a risk.  And you certainly don’t want to be blown up watching the final Harry Potter movies, do you?

Even if we return to the original rationale for airport screenings, that planes can be used a missiles, we find little comfort.  Cars can also be used as a delivery system.  Car bombings have long been a staple of attacks in the mideast.  So too are suicide bombers, wrapping themselves in explosives to deliver death.  There’s really no end to the possibilities.

Had the government decided to seize the authority to frisk grandma for walking down the street a decade ago, Americans wouldn’t have taken it too well.  Perhaps they would embrace it as feelings were raw, but it would have  touched too many people who knew that they posed no threat.  There was a significant potential for backlash, ruining a good thing by rushing it through before we were ready.

But ten years have gone by, and the government has seen Americans accept their intrusions.  We may not like it, but we haven’t refused it in sufficient numbers, or rejected it as a people.  We’ve become resigned to the fact that hands grope us, machines see through our clothing and the few who gripe are given “special treatment.”

My pal  Mark Bennett refuses to travel by plane anymore.  But what will he do when he can no longer drive his Porsche, or even walk down the street holding his children’s hands, without being subject to a pat down on demand?  Mark saw it coming.

In the past, I’ve advocated a variation on Nancy Reagan’s message, “just say no.”  Sure, it’s a risky proposition, since each of us alone, saying no, becomes an enemy of the state and an annoyance to the people behind us on line who just want to get on the plane and go to DisneyLand.  For many, whatever mischief happens at the hands of the TSA is well deserved.  You could just do what they ask and be done with it.  True, acquiescence is the easier route.  It always is, especially when facing people who have been given the authority to make your life miserable and, well, enjoy doing so.

But the path of least resistance leads to the road to perdition.

I’m no anarchist.  I’m hardly militant and definitely not a violent person.  The answer isn’t revolution, even though some who pay a great deal of attention to such matters grow to believe that there’s no other way.  Small exercises of conscience by regular people, grandmas and parents of young children, men of good standing in the community, simply informing the nice people in uniform that they do not believe they want to be touched without cause, and prepared to quietly and peacefully accept some consequences for their choices, will make a point. 

As Pastor Martin Niemöller  eloquently reminded us, we will all eventually be touched if we turn away and pretend this isn’t our problem.  At least not this time.  They’ll catch up with us, and those who argue that we should just go along with the government and not make waves may feel differently when it’s their turn to be stopped in the street for a quick grope.

First it was the airports.  Today, it’s cars in Brownsville, Texas.  See any trend?

In a very timely post, marketing philosopher  Seth Godin writes:

There are plenty of ways to rationalize false marketing claims (hey, at least they’ll use something…) but it’s pretty clear that marketers have done little to educate the public about what’s going on (did you know that 95% of the radiation that hits us is cancer-causing and skin-aging UVA, the kind that SPF has no relevance to?)

New regulations were recently announced, though it’s not surprising that many think the regs were watered down as a result of lobbying.

It turns out that in the US, sunscreens have been extraordinarily over-hyped, with variations being called ‘waterproof, ‘full spectrum’ and ‘effective’ without being any of these. You need to use a lot more, and a lot more often, than the labels currently indicate. Marketers would prefer a magic bullet, as it’s easier to sell, but sunscreen doesn’t work that way. It’s not easy to make an effective sunscreen, and so competitors with lesser products have hyped them with false or irrelevant claims. (SPF 120 anyone?)

So it’s not that sunscreens are worthless or useless, but just not what they’re marketed to be.  We use them in the vain belief that we’re doing the right thing, trying not to be one of the more than 80,000 who have died of skin cancer in the past decade. 

Ethics and integrity have been on my mind quite a bit lately, not so much because they are one of my scholarly concerns but because  I’m being told with  painful  regularity by  young lawyers that they can no longer afford the luxury of ethics, that the old niceties of a once proud profession no longer applies to their new paradigm.

If Maslow’s  Hierarchy of Needs focused solely on young lawyers, I imagine it would look something like this:

Level 1: Food, shelter, Cheetos
Level 2: Student loan repayment
Level 3: Booze, drugs, video games
Level 4: BMW
Level 5: Ethics

Forget self-actualization, as few new lawyers reach the point where they can manage a decent set of wheels.  This makes them sad, feeling as if the covenant has been broken.  They were promised that if they worked hard, made it through college and law school, there would be a good life waiting for them on the other side.  Well, they kept their part of the deal, and found out the pot of gold is empty.  And so they cry.

There are people like me, “fairy-tale ogres who drink only the tears of young children,”   Not only do I offer them no comfort, but no easy solution.  They want easy answers, and  they demand that I give them easy answers now.  They get angry with me when the answers don’t fit their paradigm.

And then there are people who want to make money off the tears of young children.  They tell them what they want to hear, stroke them and comfort them, and for a small fee, will provide the solutions that fit their paradigm.  They tell them the world is changing, and they are can be part of the new wave of success.  There will be a never ending supply of Cheetos in their future, if only they ride the wave.

The nature of ethics and integrity have become so watered down that even lawyers who believe themselves sufficiently ethical to pontificate on the subject see it merely as a matter of violating the Rakofsky Standard, where its so flagrant as to be unescapable.  Routine, banal puffery and deception have become so ingrained in the legal marketing ethos as to make no ripple.

And yet we feel emboldened to criticize police and judges for their faults and failures, their misconduct and impropriety, for their stupidity and error.  Who are we to challenge them while embracing lies about ourselves?  

Regular readers are no doubt bored to tears with my writing about these subjects.  Where’s the next outrageous story about a police beating or a judge throwing innocent people in prison?  Why can’t we focus on one great villain, making him responsible for all the evil in the system and castigating him at every turn?  It’s not that simple. 

Lawyers are as much a part of a troubled system as everyone else, and we continue to foul the system as they do.  And far too many lack the understanding that we’re even doing this, somehow wrapping themselves in the sanctity of necessity, but we need to earn a living, while denigrating all the other players for their failings.  All of our houses need to be in order before there will be any hope of improving the system.

And so mother’s rub sunscreen with an SPF of 120 on their beloved babies in the hope of saving them from the harmful effects of the sun.  And defendants retain lawyers in the hope of saving them from the harmful effects of the system.  And we’re find with calling bullshit on fraudulent sunscreen marketing claims, but reject the idea that lawyers, a profession whose very existence depends on our will to put clients ahead of self interest, should be subject to the same scrutiny.

Maybe one young lawyer will get the idea.  Maybe one older lawyer will join this curmudgeon to push ethics higher on the lawyer hierarchy of needs.  Maybe one client will be saved.  This is what lawyers do.  An angry commenter asked whether I really thought I was ‘god’s gift to ethics.”  I responded that lawyers should all be “god’s gift to ethics.”  No sunscreen will shield of from our ethical failings.

Venkat Balasubramani wondered whether we were twins separated at birth when he sent me a link to the Washington Post’s Gene Weingarten’s column.  While the resemblance is uncanny, there is no familial ties.  That said, he could be my brother.

Dear Leslie:

I am honored that you have chosen me as the subject of your journalism school graduate thesis. At the behest of your instructor, you e-mailed me to ask how I’ve “built my personal brand over the years.” I’m answering with this column.

The best way to build a brand is to take a three-foot length of malleable iron and get one end red-hot. Then, apply it vigorously to the buttocks of the instructor who gave you this question. You want a nice, meaty sizzle.

Heh. The old smack ’em with literalism. Nice start.

These are financially troubled times for our profession, Leslie — times that test our character — and it is disheartening to learn that journalism schools are responding to this challenge by urging their students to market themselves like Cheez Doodles.

This is a place where Weingarten and I part ways.  My references are  always to Cheetos rather than Cheez Doodles.  It’s not that I take issue with Cheez Doodles, but I prefer to use one word rather than two.  Weingarten tends to be a bit long winded on his cheesey snack foods.

We are slowly redefining our craft so it is no longer a calling but a commodity. From this execrable marketing trend arises the term you ask me about: “branding.”

Let’s step back a minute, Leslie, and let that expression marinate in its own fetid sauce. Let us contemplate its meaning and the devastating weight of its implications.

But he’s talking about journalism, not law.  OMG, you mean the Slackoisie have expanded their reach into other fields of endeavor!?!  Ruh roh.  Aside to Gene: “fetid sauce,: nice.

When I was a hungry young reporter in the 1970s, I thought of myself as a superman, an invincible crusader for truth and justice — even though, looking back at old pictures, I now see that I resembled an emaciated weasel in unattractive clothing. My goals, however, were unambiguous, and heroic: 1) Get great stories that improve the world. 2) Get famous. 3) Get doe-eyed young women to lean in close and whisper, “Take me.”

Note the order. First came the work.

Whoa.  Doe-eyed young women, lean in closer, whisper “take me?”  I hope this is a journalism thing, and it’s not that I missed that step.

Now, the first goal seems to be self-promotion — the fame part, the “brand.” That’s because we know that, in this frenetic fight for eyeballs at all costs, the attribute that is most rewarded is screeching ubiquity, not talent. It is why Snooki — who is quite possibly literally a moron — has a best-selling book. It is why the media superstars of today are no longer people such as Bob Woodward, who break big stories, but people like Bill O’Reilly, who yell about them.

I see we have a new applicant for the curmudgeon’s club.  And a damn fine application it is.