Misguided Iowan Doesn't Seem to Understand Judicial Activism

In an article about the politicizing of appointments to the Iowa State Judicial Nominating Commission, the Sioux City Journal interviews new commissioner Tammy Kobza, who just seems terribly confused about many things.

"I want my children and future grandchildren to enjoy the liberties, freedoms and safety that I enjoyed growing up," Ms. Kobza wrote in her application to the commission.  And how will her children and grandchildren enjoy liberty, by destroying "judicial activism."

By judicial activism, she means Varnum v. Brien, the case which legalized same-sex marriage in my home state.  Taking her at her word, this decision somehow means that giving freedom to homosexuals somehow endangers her own personal safety, but what's more confounding is that Ms. Kobza's definition of "liberty" is perversely wrapped in her own Christian faith.

She criticized "judicial activists" for being more than just secular but "'Anti-founder' is more like it."  "The founders of this country were very religious people. Very, very God-fearing people," Ms. Kobza stated in a later interview.

Let's forget the fact that this simply isn't true.  What's truly confounding about Ms. Kobza is that her notion of religiosity is exclusively Christian in its outlook.  Writing for the Iowa Eagle Forum, she insists "we are a nation where Shari'a law is acknowledged" even as America is exceptional because our law is based on the "rightness of Scripture and the truth of man's nature."

When she's not celebrating our freedom to be Christian, she's railing against a health system she doesn't seem to understand. ("There are few truly elderly or mentally or physically handicapped children around anymore.  Socialized medicine doesn't pay for their care.") Or lamenting the "false science of carbon emissions" and the rampant drug and alcohol abuse "that plagued Russia."

All of this from a woman who insists that everyone should understand the Constitution "and Iowa's Constitution," documents which craft a society in which Ms. Kobza is free from anyone who isn't just like her.

Facebook Predicts Job Performance?

The Wall Street Journal today reports on a study suggesting that Facebook profiles could be a reliable indicator of job performance:

[R]aters answered a series of personality-related questions, such as "Is this person dependable?" and "How emotionally stable is this person?" Six months later, the researchers matched the ratings against employee evaluations from each of the students' supervisors. They found a strong correlation between job performance and the Facebook scores for traits such as conscientiousness, agreeability and intellectual curiosity.

Evidently candidates have "a hard time 'faking' their personalities."  So I wonder what my currently barren Facebook profile reveals about me?

I have no profile picture, my Facebook alias is only barely my real name, and I've wiped away all my hobbies, jobs, and favorite quotations.

Maybe I have become weirdly inconsistent about my privacy, or as our intern tells me, I get too easily flustered by personal information.  "It's charming," she says. "Like Michael Cera."

Friday Links!

The best thing about working on President's Day, weekend metro fares . . . and posting Friday Links!

• From a friend, David Brooks catches . . . Linsanity (ugh) and makes no more sense than usual.
• Foster Friess caught a lot of flack for recommending aspirin-induced abstinence, but no one seemed to care about his assertion that all major religions and the African tribes are opposed to marriage equality.
• This timely Times' story about the Afghan-practice of Baad came one day after my good buddy made a passionate argument that there's just no fixing the Pashtun part of Afghanistan.  
• Mike Lachter writes for McSweeneys about how fixing the old folks' wifi can make a man a hero.  I think anyone under the age of thirty can relate to this by now.
• Texan federal district court judge eloquently calls Newt Gingrich a gas bag.

I'll do better next week.

Success and Failures

Last night, for better or worse, I spent my Valentine's Day playing trivia at a pub.  My contribution to the team involve, obviously, my wealth of nerdly knowledge, which shamefully let me down last night.

The question, worth a tasty nine points, asked which film featured a band known as Figrin D'an and the Modal Nodes.  The team quickly started throwing out Spinal Tap and a host of assorted teenage coming-of-age flicks, while I rubbed my chin.

"I really hope it's not the band from Return of the Jedi," I said.

It wasn't.  However, Figrin D'an and the Modal Nodes is the much more obvious band playing in the Mos Eisley cantina in Star Wars.  Knowledge fail on my part.

But hey, a pretty pedestrian piece I wrote on the Affordable Care Act's expansion of Medicaid got picked up by SCOTUSblog, so there's that.

Judge: Firing for Lactation Not Sex Discrimination

From EEOC v. Houston Funding, comes this gem only a white male Texan could concoct:

Even if the company's claim that she was fired for abandonment is meant to hide the real reason - she wanted to pump breast-milk - lactation is not pregnancy, childbirth, or a related medical condition. She gave birth on December 11, 2009. After that day, she was no longer pregnant and her pregnancy-related conditions ended. Firing someone because of lactation or breast-pumping is not sex discrimination.

As the AP reports, there's obviously a gap in the law, but as my non-lawyer friend so wisely put it, "since when do dudes lactate?"  Perhaps in Judge Hughes world, they do.

Coming off a week where the Komen Foundation decided abortions were more danger than breast cancer and every white male in the country got upset that the Affordable Care Act might require contraception coverage for women, it totally makes sense to suggest that lactation isn't a "pregnancy-related condition."

Friday Links!

Angry week here for the overdressed:

• More on the contraception coverage brouhaha: Linda Greenhouse wonders whose conscience we should worry about (and a commentator amusingly brings Sharia law into the equation) and some religious guys exalt the Catholic Church for its stance on birth control--for the good of all humanity!
• An oldie: Sherry Colb discusses the legal implications of "accidental" pregnancies.  
• Funny or Die explores the hidden meaning behind the most often used Facebook status updates.
• A Utah artist goes from painting landscapes to weirdly revisionist political statements.
• Cord Jefferson writes about Jeremy Lin's big night for the Knicks and gets to talk about the pervasiveness of racism in professional sports.
• An interactive map at The Economist shows just how big the American economy really is.
• Southerners don't like mixing "religion and politics" on Sundays, particularly when minorities are involved, but they do enjoy renaming the Gulf of Mexico just because.
• And surprise, surprise, people tend to talk politics only with those they agree with.  And Republicans out there?  Leave a comment!  Pretty puh-lease!

Typical White Male on Catholic Birth Control Coverage Brouhaha

For a midwestern white male, nothing tends to get me riled up more than the astonishing arrogance of other white men.  For example, the White House's decision to mandate religious institutions provide contraception under the Affordable Care Act, and more specifically, how every white Catholic male has come out suggesting this decision is something of an outrage.

Take my friend, a white male Catholic from flyover country:

::i don't understand what the issue is over the BC coverage
::if you want BC coverage, don't work for catholic institution

My friend, unwilling to define whether a multicultural university or hospital is a proper Catholic institution, maintains that doctors, nurses, teachers, and janitors can "just quit if BC is an issue."
::no one is holding a gun to the nurse's head
Since my friend thinks of birth control as yet another in the recent cascade of "women's issues," I asked if he'd ever chipped in to help his girlfriends pay for their birth control:

::i don't have a GF

But when you do a girlfriend, do you offer to split things 50/50?

::thats fair

Of course, that's not much of an answer.

What's so disturbing about this debate is that it warps any proper meaning of our First Amendment Freedom of Religion.  As Joan Walsh pointed out, what if a religious organization disapproves of child labor laws?  Again, my friend deflects rather than confronts what his position produces:

::its not part of the core beliefs
::your example is absurd

But is it absurd?  A better example might be if the Taliban, or any Wahhabi sect, set up a hospital in rural America on the condition that no women could work there.  It's a core belief of that faith that women do not work, but my friend's response:

::the taliban aren't a church

If the First Amendment means anything at all, it's that the Taliban can be a religion.  It permits all manner of bizarre faiths to be treated as religions, equal in dignity to any mainline Protestant.

The absurdity is that the average white American male sees the provision of birth control as both no big deal and, simultaneously, a "core belief" of some male-dominated religious constituency.  Of course, both beliefs are tragically arrogant and also pretty stupid.

In Support of Negative Facebook Status Updates

Before I stopped issuing status updates on my Facebook account, I unsurprisingly took a good deal of pleasure out of a concocting the most negative, cynical self-serving updates my brain could develop.  A number of my friends similarly found perverse pleasure in just how gloomy I could go.

Turns out, most people on Facebook don't much like this.  According to a new study out of the University of Waterloo:

Less secure students tended to post negative updates, while self-assured ones tended to gush. . . . Undergraduate volunteers read the batches of updates and rated how much they liked the strangers who wrote them. It turns out that, on Facebook, impatience for whining trounces sympathy: Raters said they liked students posting negative updates less.

So it turns out, I am perhaps both insecure and disliked by the larger social community.

While I've given up updating my Facebook account in any meaningful way, I haven't quite cut the cord, still regularly perusing my two hundred some "friends'" updates on life.  The kicker is that I found all the gushing (OMG!  I love my friends/hubby/dog!) to be obnoxious and meaningless.  It's the complaints, the substantive complaints, which provide insight into my "friends" and are generally worth reading.

Studies like this suggest I honestly have no comprehension for what people get out of Facebook, and social media.  Clearly, some element of an internet-wide popularity contest still exists, but if all anyone wants is short-form vapid gushing about how wonderful the whole network is, what's the damn point?

More on Introversion

After uncovering last week's gem, Slate's Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow discusses the notion that women are better off living solo than men:

Although far more elderly women lived alone in the city than elderly men, many more of those who died alone in the searing temperatures were male, presumably because they had no one to check in on them. Of the unclaimed bodies at the morgue, about 80 percent were men.
Among the bleakest portraits in the book are of elderly male “shut-ins.” 

“We spent years combing New York City in search of shut-ins and socially withdrawn seniors who would speak openly about their situation,” Klinenberg writes, “and although each of the men we found had his own individual story, together they had much in common: a spouse lost to death or divorce; weak ties to children and other family, or no children at all; a small or nonexistent friendship network; physical or mental illness; a repellent personality.” Apparently they found no such women.

One of my more morose mantras in college was that I was destined to die alone.  Once someone confirms that I do, in fact, have a "repellent personality," I think I'm headed straight for a scenario where I'm a male "shut-in."

What the Komen debacle says about social conservatives and abortion

This week's drama surrounding Komen for the Cure's decision to cease providing funding to Planned Parenthood for breast exams made for interesting political theater, but it also demonstrates once again how  anti-abortion activists are so single-mindedly opposed to abortion rights that there's very little common ground to be had with the rest of us.

As is popular these days, I got into a Facebook status debate about Komen--but it quickly devolved into accusations that Planned Parenthood practiced eugenics.  In other words, civility went out the window.  For the sake of posterity, here's the discussion:

THEM: I've covered this ground before. Why does money go to PP? Abortion. Even if abortion were .0001% of their services, the fact remains that it is a flagbearer for a liberal cause celebre. It gets Congressional funding for non-abortion services BECAUSE OF its abortion services.

It's a brilliant scheme.

ME: Even if PP fundraises off abortion, the fact remains that it also provides plenty of other needed services. If Komen's desire is to go after the abortionists, fine, but they're doing that to the detriment of women's health generally. Killing PP may go a long way to abolishing abortion from the land, but I think most women like PP because of everything else it does.

This discussion was prompted by a question about why Komen bowed to political pressure, from both initially the Right and then the Left, yet not five messages in, abortion takes center stage.

Like so many, abortion rights is an issue that's quick to get me riled up.  Oddly, while I support women's right to do what they will with their bodies, my disdain for anti-abortionists is based largely in their religious fanaticism for their cause.  Every point of discussion is couched in a sense of moral superiority, as this Facebook debate sharply reveals:

THEM: I agree. If, for example, 99% of the time and money of a group is spent on breast cancer research, and 1% of time and money is spent on raping black women, on balance the group is a force for good.

...ah see, yes, Planned Parenthood's provision of legal abortion services is akin to raping women.

THEM: Well, that makes the Nazis in Germany a force for good, as well as the KKK. If we're talking shades of gray, sure....  

...and the Nazis! As anyone knows, once you invoke the Nazis, there's just no coming back from that.

ME: This is why arguing with you is so fruitless. You use a policy debate about Komen to suggest Planned Parenthood is analogous to Nazi Germany. That's truly astounding.
THEM: I'm actually serious. And they are analogous. They both did overwhelming good and one little bad thing.
The argument is that 99% good inoculates an org against 1% bad. Or 56% good inoculates against 44% bad.

At this point in the "discussion," it was obvious my opponent was going to pull the ol'incalculable value of human life thing that anti-abortionists invoke when they want to suggest that every single fetus has the potential to cure cancer:

How much is a life worth in 1945? We can monetize those lives, and find the utility of each dead Jew to the Germans. In all, the Third Reich was probably a net positive.

Likewise the death of one child and the political donations it brings to PP and the breast cancer screenings can also be calculated.

My opponent enjoys flaunting his philosophical smarts, but this Holocaust invocation is used entirely too often by anti-abortionists.  From my point of view, its absurd to suggest the right to abortion in America is in anyway a "holocaust" in the sense of what the Nazis did to an entire people.

After another commentator pipes in with the retort that it might have been a good thing had Adolf Hitler been aborted, the discussion breaks down into more completely irrelevant attacks on Planned Parenthood:

Planned Parenthood was founded by Sanger, a proponent of the eugenics movement. Even though she was against gas chambers, she shared a common mindset with the Nazis...a literally expressed desire to eliminate the "unfit" from society...through birth control, abortion, sterilization, and forcibly excluding certain immigrant groups

My only flippant response is to wonder if anyone remembers the sainted Founding Fathers of America owned slaves, but if one side to this debate is seriously going to suggest teenagers seeking birth control are somehow still proponents of a radical eugenics movement, there's just no common ground to be had.  

On Introversion

Every introvert needs to read this old piece by Jonathan Rauch, because he not only speaks to the plight of the introvert but gets at what makes social butterflies so utterly annoying to people like me:

Extroverts have little or no grasp of introversion. They assume that company, especially their own, is always welcome. They cannot imagine why someone would need to be alone; indeed, they often take umbrage at the suggestion. . . . We tend to think before talking, whereas extroverts tend to think by talking, which is why their meetings never last less than six hours.

That, in a nutshell, explains most of my difficulties with people over the past decade.  Thank you, Mr. Rauch, for making me realize I am not alone.

Friday Links!

When I think about all the time I waste things I see on the internet, I really can't imagine what life was like for young urban professionals twenty years ago.  More work must have been accomplished, right?  What else was there to do!?!

• Google thinks I am a 55-64 year old dude.  Google is wrong.  Technology fail!
• Judge Kopf's replacement was named to the District Court of Nebraska this week.  Judge Kopf wrote the best Top Ten beatdown of Supreme Court jurisprudence I have ever seen.  
• Would it surprise anyone that in the South, a man named Bubba got pardoned after he raped a girl?  
• A discussion about the relative merits of photo sharing services on Google+ directed me to 500px.com--and this amazing forest photo. 
• Lisa Foiles thinks dialog like "If I sacrifice myself, surely father will show his love for me! Surely…" make Odin Sphere into a literary masterpiece of a video game.  I am less than convinced. 
• Chris Mooney concludes that the conservative ideas really only make "horse sense."
• Now the Department of Justice wants attorneys to work for them for free.  Like the State of the Union, our justice system is also "strong." 
• Anatoly Liberman discusses the origins of the C-word.  It's German!
• Followers of libertarian Ron Paul intend on starting a commune in the middle of the Texas desert.  No irony intended. 
• Our big bad Congress passed a whole 80 laws last year.  
• Adam Gopnik at The New Yorker writes about the "caging of America." Meanwhile, I decided to write a bit about solitary confinement abuse in our prison system.

State of the Union Exhaustion

A friend wondered where my State of the Union "rant" was.  My response, reiterating my disappointment with the President's speech last year:  what can I really say?

In terms of pure rhetoric, the President was a bit more uplifting, a bit more inspiring than last year.  As Republicans were quick to point out, much of the rhetoric was retooling of prior lofty words, but president's often repeat the same message, year after year and decade after decade.

But not a minute into his address, the President assured Americans that our "victory" in Iraq "has made the United States safer and more respected around the world."  ::pause for applause::  By the time the President suggested that the Taliban's momentum had been broken, I was already guffawing in my seat.

By the midpoint of his speech, rather than mention the labor movement, the President took the not particularly dignified step of begging corporate leaders to bring jobs back to the United States:

Tonight, my message to business leaders is simple:  Ask yourselves what you can do to bring jobs back to your country, and your country will do everything we can to help you succeed.

Then the President seemed to suggest he was a Republican:

I’m a Democrat.  But I believe what Republican Abraham Lincoln believed:  That government should do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves, and no more.  (Applause.)  That’s why my education reform offers more competition, and more control for schools and states.  That’s why we’re getting rid of regulations that don’t work.  That’s why our health care law relies on a reformed private market, not a government program. 

I understand the State of Union is a statesman's address, designed to appeal to all audiences, all parties.  It's supposed to make Americans feel better about themselves.  As NBC's Chuck Todd opined after the speech, in an election year, candidates who make Americans feel positive tend to win.  That's all well and good, but in an era when everyone, everyone, is just disgusted with Washington, it would have behooved the President to do more to explain how to fix America's "deficit of trust" with government than explain why he's a Democrat in the Abraham Lincoln mold.

But whatever, everyone likes us: "[O]pinions of America are higher than they’ve been in years. . . . America remains the one indispensable nation in world affairs."  Yes, the indispensable nation with a broken economy, impoverished citizenry, and a token victory in the Arab desert.  What more can one really say?

SCOTUS gives Sullivan & Cromwell the stink eye

Cartoon Peril at DailyKos has a great run-down of the Supreme Court's displeasure with Big Law member Sullivan & Cromwell's representation of an Alabama man on death row.  But a link to an old post reveals some particular insight into the machinations that go on in Big Law:

Lawyers at S&C handle pro bono cases on an individual basis. Accordingly, the lawyers who first appeared in this case, and all lawyers who have participated thereafter, have done so on an individual basis, and have attempted not to use the firm name on correspondence or court papers.

So says Sullivan partner Marc De Leeuw.

Sullivan & Cromwell considers pro bono work an important commitment of every lawyer, as well as a tool by which lawyers can supplement and bolster their skills. . . . S&C’s work included both individual pro bono initiatives and ongoing, long-term “signature projects.” The breadth of pro bono matters handled and the results achieved are representative of our lawyers’ depth of expertise across a range of practice areas

So says Sullivan's website.

Lawyers are great with technicalities, particularly, as here, in matters of life and death.

Friday Links!

It's been ages (or rather 49 days) since I last gathered all my favorite weekly links together into a post no one reads.  It's a new year, and well past time to get back in the habit:

• AmericaBlog has a great post dissecting a great Slate piece by Sonja West about why progressives just don't fight hard enough for judges, concluding "[w]hen the Right builds a media outlet to get its message out (Fox News, say), it allows that outlet to operate at a loss for as long as it takes. Why? Because the Right is on a mission. When the Left builds a media outlet (Air America, say), it forces that outlet to turn a profit or go under. Why? Because the Left is out to lunch." 
• Coming up on two years since Citizens United, the Sierra Club's Carl Pope explains what the decision did: "If our previous campaign financing system was, effectively, an oligarchy of the 1%, the new one is an oligarchy of the .01% -- the people who really control American politics today are the fewer than 10,000 people able to control closely held corporate assets."
• Oh, Persians and their toys . . . 
• The Atlantic explains the purpose of the SOPA blackout, while Gawker's Stephen Totilo spews a bunch of principled bull.   He's anti-SOPA, but, dammit, doing a blackout will hurt his page views!
• Until women no longer want babies, I don't think they'll do very well in Big Law.  (Ladies, don't hit me!)
• I don't know who Lana Del Ray is, but I have friends who are music bloggers and, yes, they are pretentious snobs.  NPR reports.
• An NYU Law grad details the 140 things his law degree was no good for.  NYU ought to put this on their front page!
• My roommate's girlfriend reports on a Miami banker who gave everything up to start a Cuban ice cream shop.  
• According to The Atlantic's Jordan Weissmann, the 6.7 million unemployed youth in this country could be a fiscal time bomb.  
• Mad Men is almost here, and in the process, the show offends a bunch of New Yorkers because of 9/11, of course. 
• Mitt Romney doesn't like dogs; he really doesn't like dogs that defecate on the roof of his car.
• According to Justice Scalia, Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech unless "some modesty" is required. 
• The RIAA, the people that sued a dead grandmother, believe online piracy threatens national security.  
• Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) believes the filibuster is necessary in order to "focus on filling judicial vacancies in areas of the country that have the greatest needs, especially when courts across the country have seen their budgets cut.  For this reason, I voted against Caitlin Halligan to the D.C. Circuit."
• Am I the last person to have heard of Garret the Copyright-Crusading Ferret?  
• Boumediene details his own personal GITMO nightmare in The New York Times.  
• This is totally a good way to ensure the United States upholds the rule of law:   

One need imply neither bad faith nor lack of incentive nor ineptitude on the part of government officers to conclude that [REDACTION] compiled in the field by [REDACTION] in a [REDACTION] near an [REDACTION] that contain multiple layers of hearsay, depend on translators of unknown quality, and include cautionary disclaimers that [REDACTION] are prone to significant errors; or at a minimum, that such reports are insufficiently regular, reliable, transparent, or accessible to warrant an automatic presumption of regularity.