To promote the health and welfare of children

I don’t know if you’ll find this comforting or frightening, but I think it’s an interesting take by Andrew Koppelman:

It took decades for Congress to address the problem. When, at long last, federal legislation was passed, some people raised constitutional objections, but few took them seriously. The objections required the Supreme Court to adopt unheard-of constitutional theories, hamstringing well-established powers on the basis of hysterical fears about a tyrannical federal government. Even the law’s opponents were surprised when the Court took those objections very seriously. Some warned that the Court was overreaching, and that its intervention would seriously hurt large numbers of innocent people, but the Court thought it was more important to rein in Congress. You might assume I’m talking about health care reform. I’m not. I’m talking about child labor—and a 1918 decision by the Supreme Court that history has not looked kindly upon.

The parallels between the child labor issue and the health care issue are remarkable. In both cases, the legislation in question was the product of a decades-long struggle. And so in 1916, Congress, using its power to regulate interstate commerce, banned the interstate shipment of the products of child labor. When it defended the law in Court, the government explained that this was an interstate problem: “The shipment of child-made goods outside of one State directly induces similar employment of children in competing states.”

Both then and now, challengers to the statutes had to propose that the Supreme Court invent new constitutional rules in order to strike them down. At the time it considered the issue in 1918, there was nothing in the Supreme Court’s case law that suggested any limit on Congress’s authority over what crossed state lines. On the contrary, the Court had upheld bans on interstate transportation of lottery tickets, contaminated food and drugs, prostitutes, and alcoholic beverages.

That’s why the Supreme Court’s invalidation of the law in 1918 astounded even those who had most strenuously opposed enactment. The Court responded that unlike all the contraband that it had permitted Congress to block, the products of child labor “are of themselves harmless.” This meant a completely novel constitutional doctrine: The Court took unto itself the power to decide which harms Congress was permitted to consider when it regulated commerce.

The decision provoked a wave of national revulsion. Congress responded that same year with a second law, a tax on products of child labor. Here, Congress presumed it was surely acting within its rights. The Constitution gives Congress a nearly unlimited power of taxation. But the Court struck down this law, too, in Bailey v. Drexel Furniture Co., a decision that is unashamedly cited by opponents of the health care mandate (who need to beat back the claim that the mandate is a valid exercise of the taxing power).

Hammer v. Dagenhart was overruled in 1941. That year, in United States v. Darby, the Court upheld the Fair Labor Standards Act, which included restrictions on child labor. Bailey has never been formally overruled, but it has been neglected and regarded as a dead letter—until, that is, it proved useful in challenging the mandate.

The prevailing claim in Hammer was made by a father whose sons had been working sixty hours per week in a North Carolina factory. He claimed that the law violated his rights by depriving him of his children’s earnings. Several years later, Reuben Dagenhart, one of those boys, reflected on the constitutional rights that the Supreme Court had given him. “We got some automobile rides” from the wealthy businessmen’s committee that had financed the litigation. “They bought both of us a Coca-Cola. That’s what we got out of it.”

For all of those optimists who are saying overturning this law will lead to a better law, here’s a handy timeline of the struggle to end child labor you may want to consider. It begins in 1832 and ends in 1938.

h/t eemom, from the comments

▲

FaceOff

I wonder if Zuckerberg knew his social media site would become a platform for whiny wingnuts, he would do it all over again:

In today’s disappointing speech, the President made a series of claims that are simply false.

The President’s attacks began with an admission that his assumptions reflect White House spin, not our budget’s substance: “I want to go through what it would mean for our country if these cuts were to be spread out evenly.” Of course, the assumption that our budget makes these kinds of indiscriminate cuts is false. The House Budget Committee made dozens of specific assumptions to justify our numbers, and we made these assumptions public in the hundreds of pages of text we posted in plain view on the House Budget Committee’s website. It’s not a “secret plan” to “never tell us where the knife may fall” – it is a specific plan to cut waste, eliminate programs that don’t work, end crony politics, and carefully prioritize hardworking taxpayers’ money in precisely the way leaders of the President’s party have refused to do for over three years. In a related vein, does this new standard allow for analyses of the President’s budget to go through what it would mean for the country if the President’s $2 trillion tax increase were to be spread out evenly?

Instead of using numbers from the actual House-passed budget, the President’s claims relied on false assumptions created out of thin air by the White House.

The reason Ryan and Palin use facebook to spew their bullshit is that there is no accountability. They delete every comment that challenges them, and there are no reporters there to call them liars (like that would happen anyway- Remember when the Klondike cougar freaked out when asked which newspapers she reads? That’s as close as we get to grilling these guys).

At any rate, Ezra does the heavy lifting, and guess what- Ryan is lying.

▲

Blame game

When my oldest son was in 4th grade, he had a teacher who spoke to the class exclusively in Words to Live By. I don’t know that she really did this. He said she did and we developed a sort of running joke about it, so he may have been exaggerating to amuse his mother. One of the things she said to her students (allegedly) when they were upset about one thing or another was “we don’t play the blame game here.”

In my experience, kids have a real basic sense of fairness and rough justice, in other words, they’re all about apportioning blame. They’re blamers. She effectively shut down 90% of what they natter on about with her ban on blaming. He’d complain: “They did do it (whatever “it” was). Why can’t we blame them?” Why indeed! Good question. Now of course I’d tell him “both sides do it, that’s why” but this was before that.

I read Angry Black Lady’s post on fear of losing health insurance and some of the comments and the whole thing made me really mad, so I’m ready to play the blame game.

Because I think libertarians aren’t hearing nearly enough condemnation for their central role in the radical turn Right at the Supreme Court, I think it’s time to point fingers in that direction:

When Congress passed legislation requiring nearly all Americans to obtain health insurance, Randy E. Barnett, a passionate libertarian who teaches law at Georgetown, argued that the bill was unconstitutional. Many of his colleagues, on both the left and the right, dismissed the idea as ridiculous — and still do.
Professor Barnett, who watched Monday from the spectator seats, was not the first to raise the constitutional critique of the health law, but more than any other legal academic, he is associated with it.
“He’s gotten an amazing amount of attention for an argument that he created out of whole cloth,” said one of his many critics, Douglas Laycock, a professor at the University of Virginia Law School. “Under existing case law this is a very easy case; this is obviously constitutional. I think he’s going to lose eight to one.”

If we’re apportioning blame (and we are! we will!) and 50 million people end up being denied the access to health insurance or Medicaid that was promised when this law passed Congress, I think libertarians and conservatives should share in responsibility for that situation.

I’m not that fond of slippery slope arguments, but libertarians live by them. Really, libertarianism is basically one big slippery slope argument, as far as I can tell. Slippery slopes can run both ways, so
I’d like to call particular attention to this rather alarming facet of Professor Bartlett’s “intellectual project”:

Professor Barnett’s work on the health care law fits into a much broader intellectual project, his defense of economic freedom. He has long argued that the Supreme Court went too far in upholding New Deal economic laws — a position that concerns his liberal critics.
Even a close friend and fellow Georgetown law professor, Lawrence B. Solum, says that Professor Barnett is aware of the “big divide between his views and the views of lots of other people,” and that his political philosophy is “much more radical” than his legal argument in the health care case. Professor Barnett, for his part, insists that if the health law is struck down, it will not “threaten the foundation of the New Deal.” But, he allowed, it would be “a huge symbolic victory for limited government.”

Yeah, well, Professor Barnett, you’re a big slippery-sloper, what with the broccoli and all, so I’m sure you’ll sympathize with “liberal concerns” on the Commerce Clause. No one predicted we’d be hearing an argument you created out of “whole cloth” coming out of the mouths of one of the justices, either, and we did. Your “fringe” idea out of “academia” may have just gone mainstream, so I wouldn’t be running around making broad assurances about the “foundation of the New Deal” if I were you.

▲

Wankers of the Decade

Atrios is looking back at ten years of blogging and holding a spring fundraiser while also listing the ten biggest wankers of the decade. The first entry (9th Runner-Up) is our very own McMegan.

▲

Migrant Child Labor: Why Nick Gillespie {Hearts} Bullying, Right Now

When it comes to a libertarian, always Follow the Money. Kathleen Geier uses her weekend stint at Washington Monthly’ Political Animal blog to pick the plutonium kernel out of Nick Gillespie’s shitty WSJ op-ed:

... I think the most awesome moment in the entire piece is when he actually comes out in favor of child labor. As In These Times has noted, “Advocates have for months been pressing the Labor Department to finalize a rule change that would help shield child farm workers from some of the most severe occupational hazards, such as handling pesticides and dangerous farm equipment, and would beef up protections for workers under age 16.” But Gillespie seems to believe that protecting kids from dangerous working conditions is for pussies: “What was once taken for granted—working the family farm, October tests with jack-o-lantern-themed questions, hunting your own Easter eggs—is being threatened by paternalism run amok.” Hey, if it was good enough for those Joad kids, it should be good enough for today’s spoiled brats! And while you’re at it, get offa my lawn!

Geier spells it out, in another post:

Gillespie refers to the children who would be affected as “kids” “working the family farm.”...

Actually, as Chen reports, the children affected would overwhelmingly be desperately poor Latino immigrants working on big industrial farms owned by the major agribusiness concerns. Gillespie’s dishonest representation of this issue is a common ploy among conservatives, however. Whenever business regulations are debated, they are quite fond of painting heartwarming pictures of the affected parties, spinning sentimental tales about idyllic family farms and plucky small business owners. But in fact the entities being affected almost always tend to be gigantic,very rich, and very powerful corporations.

Last week, not coincidentally, was National Farmworkers’ Awareness Week. Per Michelle Chen, at In These Times:

The Child Labor Coalition, which advocates for the rights of exploited children around the world, documents a cornupcopia of abuses in the backyard of a global superpower:

*More children die in agriculture than in any other industry.

*According to the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), between 1995 and 2002, an estimated 907 youth died on American farms—that’s well over 100 preventable deaths of youth per year.

*In 2011, 12 of the 16 children under the age of 16 who suffered fatal occupational injuries worked in crop production, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

*When you include older children, more than half of all workers under age 18 who died from work-related injuries worked in crop production.

Advocates have for months been pressing the Labor Department to finalize a rule change that would help shield child farm workers from some of the most severe occupational hazards, such as handling pesticides and dangerous farm equipment, and would beef up protections for workers under age 16 (currently, children as young as 12 can legally work on farms, thanks to a loophole in federal labor law, and many younger ones have worked illegally, according to recent reports)...

But common decency has again been overshadowed by a well-oiled campaign by the agricultural industry lobby, which has pushed to block the rule changes by claiming that child labor reflects good old American values.

The “Preserving America’s Family Farms Act,” proposed by Rep. Tom Latham of Iowa, targets the pending reforms as a threat to a time-honored “tradition” of child farm labor. Evoking an imaginary pastoral ideal of the American homestead, the bill argues that the strengthening of child labor protections would “adversely impact the long standing tradition of youth working on farms to gain valuable skills and lessons on hard work, character, and leadership” and would hurt their opportunities to “gain experiential learning and hands-on skills.”

Supplemental reading, from the Atlantic: “Do Children Harvest Your Food?”

So, it’s not that Nick Gillespie, Fonzie of Freedom, is necessarily a sociopath who defends turning a blind eye when kids torture other kids, in the name of ‘traditional values’. Gillespie, devout Libertarian, is getting paid to defend child abuse by giant corporations, because keeping desperately poor teenagers in the fields instead of the classroom (hey, they’d only get bullied anyways!) is profitable. And asking a Libertarian to choose the welfare of a bunch of random children he’ll never have to meet over his fat foundation paycheck and cheap produce… well, that would be a violation of his religious freedom!

Tags: Fonzi of Freedom ▲

Bully For You, America

Reasonoid Nick Gillespie takes to the WSJ to let America know there’s no such thing as a bullying crisis in schools and neighborhoods as he rips into the new film “Bully”.

Now that schools are peanut-free, latex-free and soda-free, parents, administrators and teachers have got to worry about something. Since most kids now have access to cable TV, the Internet, unlimited talk and texting, college and a world of opportunities that was unimaginable even 20 years ago, it seems that adults have responded by becoming ever more overprotective and thin-skinned.

Kids might be fatter than they used to be, but by most standards they are safer and better-behaved than they were when I was growing up in the 1970s and ‘80s. Infant and adolescent mortality, accidents, sex and drug use—all are down from their levels of a few decades ago. Acceptance of homosexuality is up, especially among younger Americans. But given today’s rhetoric about bullying, you could be forgiven for thinking that kids today are not simply reading and watching grim, postapocalyptic fantasies like “The Hunger Games” but actually inhabiting such terrifying terrain, a world where “Lord of the Flies” meets “Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior,” presided over by Voldemort.

Stop whining.  Life is Darwinian.  Deal with it, you little ferrets.

When it comes to bullying numbers, long-term trends are less clear. The makers of “Bully” say that “over 13 million American kids will be bullied this year,” and estimates of the percentage of students who are bullied in a given year range from 20% to 70%. NCES changed the way it tabulated bullying incidents in 2005 and cautions against using earlier data. Its biennial reports find that 28% of students ages 12-18 reported being bullied in 2005; that percentage rose to 32% in 2007, before dropping back to 28% in 2009 (the most recent year for which data are available). Such numbers strongly suggest that there is no epidemic afoot (though one wonders if the new anti-bullying laws and media campaigns might lead to more reports going forward).

The most common bullying behaviors reported include being “made fun of, called names, or insulted” (reported by about 19% of victims in 2009) and being made the “subject of rumors” (16%). Nine percent of victims reported being “pushed, shoved, tripped, or spit on,” and 6% reported being “threatened with harm.” Though it may not be surprising that bullying mostly happens during the school day, it is stunning to learn that the most common locations for bullying are inside classrooms, in hallways and stairwells, and on playgrounds—areas ostensibly patrolled by teachers and administrators.

Everything’s fine.  You know, except for the kids driven to suicide for being gay or fat or different or getting shot for walking down the street with an iced tea and a bag of candy, that is.  Jesus launch the helicarrier.  It’s funny how these guys believe in the free market so much until it comes to the flash mobs actually getting called on ruining a kid’s life, but I guess that’s just culling the weak, right?

▲

Symptoms Of A Syndrome

On a day where President Obama spoke about Trayvon Martin’s murder and said the following:

“All of us have to do some soul searching to figure out how does something like this happen,” President Obama said Friday morning following a White House Rose Garden ceremony when asked about the 17-year-old’s death.

The president called the shooting a “tragedy” and says “every aspect” of the case should be investigated. Obama gave his condolences to the slain teenager’s parents and said if he had a son, “he’d look like Trayvon.”

We have this going on at a Rick Santorum event...

At a shooting range in Louisiana on Friday, an onlooker encouraged Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum to pretend the target he was firing at was President Barack Obama.

“Santorum is shooting a 1911 Colt,” Politico’s Juana Summers tweeted from the sheriff’s office shooting range in West Monroe. “Range master says ‘Well, it’s not your first rodeo.’ Someone here says ‘pretend its Obama.’”

...and this out of the mouth of Newt Gingrich....

In a radio interview on Thursday, Newt Gingrich returned to one of his favorite recent themes, what he calls the “elite media” and their conspiracy to aid and abet the Obama administration.

In an article at Huffington Post, the former Speaker of the House is quoted as saying to Sandy Rios of the American Family Association that the “elite media” are “in the tank for Obama” and will do everything they can to see him re-elected.

“It is just astonishing to me how pro-Obama they are,” he said, “Do you think you are going to see two pages on Obama’s Muslim friends? Or two pages on the degree to which Obama is consistently apologizing to Islam while attacking the Catholic church?”

...and I just shake my head.  I’m a black male who has survived to the ripe old age of 36 and is not incarcerated.  I’m an exception in this country, it seems.  I live in one of the 24 states that has a law that solely exists to justify the use of deadly force as the ultimate sanction against someone who is merely perceived to be a threat, without evidence, due process, or the right to face your accuser (because hey, you’re effing dead.)  The legislative need to create laws like this is a symptom of a much more awful syndrome, and in every case these laws were passed by “pro-life” Republicans led by the gun lobbyists.

These laws are designed to allow vigilantism, period.  It’s the worst impulse of the whole Glibertarian/Paulite/Somali Pirate anarcho-justice codified into “I get to decide who lives and who dies, and I reserve the right to exercise that impulse at any point.”  We’re all castles stomping around killing each other, and may the best, most heavily armed castle win.  And as far as Republicans are concerned, well that impulse extends to “We’ve decided that having a black President violates our right not to have one, so we’re going to do something about it from the ground up.”

Trayvon Martin’s awful, pointless murder is just a symptom of a much uglier sickness.

[UPDATE]  Newt doubles down.

“What the president said, in a sense, is disgraceful,” Gingrich said on the Hannity Radio show. “It’s not a question of who that young man looked like. Any young American of any ethnic background should be safe, period. We should all be horrified no matter what the ethnic background.

“Is the president suggesting that if it had been a white who had been shot, that would be OK because it didn’t look like him. That’s just nonsense dividing this country up. It is a tragedy this young man was shot. It would have been a tragedy if he had been Puerto Rican or Cuban or if he had been white or if he had been Asian American of if he’d been a Native American. At some point, we ought to talk about being Americans. When things go wrong to an American, it is sad for all Americans. Trying to turn it into a racial issue is fundamentally wrong. I really find it appalling.”

Effing. Perfect.

▲

Monkey See, Monkey Douchebags

It just never stops with these religious fanatics:

“The Senate approved a bill Monday evening that deals with teaching of evolution and other scientific theories,” the Knoxville News-Sentinel (March 19, 2012) reported, adding, “Critics call it a ‘monkey bill’ that promotes creationism in classrooms.” The bill in question is Senate Bill 893, which, if enacted, would encourage teachers to present the “scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses” of “controversial” topics such as “biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.”

Among those expressing opposition to the bill are the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee, the American Institute for Biological Sciences, the Knoxville News Sentinel, the Nashville Tennessean, the National Association of Geoscience Teachers, the National Earth Science Teachers Association, and the Tennessee Science Teachers Association, whose president Becky Ashe described (PDF) the legislation as “unnecessary, anti-scientific, and very likely unconstitutional.”

In favor of the bill is every bible humping semi-literate god-bothering douchebag in the Tennessee Senate. I can’t wait to see how Mr. Robot Sex “Heh Indeedy” contorts himself to make this seem appropriate.

▲

“That’s reasonable doubt”

Guess who?

But could there be a scenario where he–wildly inappropriately–followed this guy, and brandished his gun, and then much to his surprise, the teenager tried to wrestle the gun away, and in the ensuing struggle, he got shot?

Does that seem the most likely explanation to me? No. Could I rule it out? Also no. And that’s reasonable doubt.

McArdle is saying that prosecutors are right not to bring charges against George Zimmerman, not because the “Stand Your Ground” law is written so bizarrely that it might make prosecution difficult, not because there is evidence that Zimmerman fired accidentally, but because she can imagine a scenario in which Zimmerman might have accidentally shot Martin.

▲

The Talented Mr. Ryan

I liked it better when our liars and sociopaths were content with just robbing, screwing, and killing a few people:

Here’s the basic outline of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s 2013 budget in one sentence: Ryan’s budget funds trillions of dollars in tax cuts, defense spending and deficit reduction by cutting deeply into health-care programs and income supports for the poor.

It’s a Randian wet dream:

Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin chairs the House Budget Committee and is also a follower of the philosophy of Ayn Rand. As he put it, ” I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand” which is why he requires staffers to read Atlas Shrugged. Normally we don’t think of Republican members of congress as super-concerned with the poor, and we especially don’t think of Republican members of congress who are also committed Randians to be super-concerned with the poor. And, indeed, Ryan’s priorities as revealed in both last year’s version of his budget proposal and this year’s new one are to keep taxes low and military spending high. Obviously to do that you need to ax programs aimed at benefitting poor people.

***

But please God almighty can we avoid referring to this as a measure that “strengthens the safety net” by empowering states to “tailor assistance to their specific populations”? Ryan doesn’t like taxing the wealthy to give resources to the poor and disabled, so he proposes to give fewer resources to the poor and disabled.

Here’s another rundown of the Ryan “plan”:

* Ryan proposes major tax reform, with lower corporate and personal rates balanced out by repealing various tax deductions. The problem? Just like last year, he doesn’t tell anyone which deductions he’s going to eliminate. That’s not a budget proposal. That’s an aspiration. It’s very, very, easy to say you want tax reform. It’s very, very, difficult to do.

His budget would cut tax rates on all federal income taxpayers, especially the wealthy, and the danger is that he would pass the rate reductions without offsetting them by repealing deductions. All this means is a huge tax cut (mostly for the rich) and enormous deficits.

• Ryan is selling the fact that he’s reduced the number of tax brackets as “simplification.” But, as Matt Yglesias says, one has nothing to do with the other. Simplification comes from removing deductions, credits, and loopholes, which amounts to taking money away from people. That’s why it’s hard!

• The cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, and other health care programs — including repealing health care reform — are the bulk of the “savings” in Ryan’s budget. Without some sort of mechanism to control medical costs, all these cuts do is shift the burden from the government to individuals.

• The real tell in Ryan’s budget is that in the long run, he projects that all discretionary spending (and automatic spending outside of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security) be reduced to 3.75 percent of GDP by 2050. Why does that matter? Because that category includes military spending, which as CBO reminds us has never dropped below 3 percent* of GDP since World War II. Since Ryan doesn’t want to cut the military, that would leave less than one percent of GDP — to fund the entire rest of the government.

Paul Ryan wants to cut taxes for the rich, jack up defense spending so we can fight more unnecessary wars, and then throw the poor, the elderly, and those in need of healthcare out into the street. It’s just that simple- no matter what he says, those are his clear priorities. It’s right there in his plan. He’s a sociopath, and what’s worse, he won’t be standing over the corpse of Medicare crying as he finishes strangling it. He’s giddy to throw everyone overboard.

I’m terrified to even check Sullivan’s views on this- has he started in with his “it’s a serious plan” bullshit again?

▲

Weird What Upsets Them

The Reason magazine staff is very, very upset that Dharun Ravi was convicted:

I hope future generations will find the preceding paragraph as baffling as I do. In what the Newark Star-Ledger calls a “high profile case that sparked awareness of cyber-bullying and harassment of gay teenagers,” Ravi cammed roommate Clementi canoodling with another man, then tweeted about it. Shortly thereafter Clementi jumped off the George Washington Bridge.

Jacob Sullum on the Clementi/Ravi case: Lack of evidence that Ravi’s snooping led to any shaming, outing, or any other public response. Why giving a person 10 years for having expressed unpopular ideas is not different from old-school thought-crime prosecution. How deleting an embarrassing tweet can get you time for “hindering apprehension.”

Here’s what actually happened, from the story Reason linked to:

Ferreira said the jurors were not in conflict with each other during deliberations.

“I’m actually satisfied with the verdict. It was very hard, very difficult. Nothing means we would be personally biased toward the defendant. You have to look at all the facts and the evidence. That’s why you have 24 counts guilty and 11 not guilty. Witness statements and the evidence were not there to prove those,” he said. “This was very difficult, but it was a really good experience. You feel like justice has been served.”

Prosecutors presented more than 20 witnesses over 12 days of testimony, including students who lived in Ravi and Clementi’s dormitory, Davidson Hall, law enforcement officials, Rutgers residence life staff and computer experts.

Clementi, a shy violinist from Ridgewood, and Ravi, a tech-savvy computer geek from Plainsboro, were seemingly ill-matched from the start. The two roommates were worried about living together from nearly the moment they learned each other’s names, according to documents filed in court.

When Clementi asked to use their room on Sept. 19, 2010, Ravi went to the room of a friend, Molly Wei, and turned on his webcam from her laptop. Witnesses for the state testified that Ravi built an ”automatic accept” feature on his webcam to access it from elsewhere.

Wei and Ravi saw Clementi and M.B. kissing for a few seconds, and Ravi tweeted to his followers that he saw his “roommate making out with a dude.”

Two days later, when Clementi asked for the room again, Ravi set up the webcam and double-checked that it was angled at Clementi’s bed, according to two students who testified. He also dared his Twitter followers to chat him during the hours Clementi had asked for their room.

One witness testified that Ravi was “uncomfortable” having a gay roommate. Another read a text message in which Ravi explained his computer would “keep the gays away.”

But on cross-examination, about a half dozen friends and dorm neighbors of Ravi’s told Steve Altman, his lawyer, that Ravi never said anything malicious or derogatory about his gay roommate or about gay people in general.

After the prosecution rested last Thursday, the defense called seven witnesses in quick succession, all friends and co-workers of Ravi’s father who said they had never heard him say anything negative about gay people, though they had never actually discussed the topic with him.

Throughout the trial, Altman maintained that Ravi only looked at the webcam to see what was going on in his room because he was put off by M.B.’s scruffy appearance. Ravi told police in a statement that M.B. didn’t acknowledge him, appeared much older than a college student, and he got a “bad vibe” from him.

On the evidence charges, prosecutors said Ravi deleted dozens of relevant text messages and tweets, and tried to influence what Wei told police.

Clementi, who leaped to his death from the George Washington Bridge, came after a series of suicides of other young teenagers around the country who were bullied because they were gay or perceived to be gay.

So while the Reason staff looks at what happened and decided that 2 + 2 = flibberdygidget, the defendant knew precisely what happened, which is why after he intentionally set the camera up, live-tweeted it to all his friends to humiliate Clementi, and then learned his roommate had leaped to his death in shame, he systematically went about erasing the evidence and attempted to coerce one of the material witnesses. He made the connection between this kid’s suicide and what he had done, and so did the jury.

But even that is besides the point, because guess what, Reason- he wasn’t even charged with the kid’s death:

Mr. Ravi, 20, was not charged in Mr. Clementi’s death. He faced 15 counts of invasion of privacy, bias intimidation, tampering with evidence and a witness, and hindering apprehension. The jury found that he did not intend to intimidate Mr. Clementi the first night he turned on the webcam to watch. But the jury concluded that Mr. Clementi had reason to believe he had been targeted because he was gay, and in one charge, the jury found that Mr. Ravi had known Mr. Clementi would feel intimidated by his actions.

***

The prosecution had pointed out that Mr. Clementi had checked Mr. Ravi’s Twitter feed — where Mr. Ravi told others he had seen his roommate “kissing a dude” — 38 times in the days after the first webcam viewing. Records showed that Mr. Clementi had gone online to request a room change, and a resident assistant testified that Mr. Clementi had complained to him.

***

Mr. Ravi’s lawyers argued that he was “a kid” with little experience of homosexuality who had stumbled into a situation that scared him. M.B., who was 30 at the time, had made him nervous, the lawyers argued, so he set up his webcam to keep an eye on his belongings. Mr. Ravi, they argued, was being sarcastic when he had sent messages daring friends to connect to his webcam, or declaring that he was having a “viewing party.”

But prosecutors argued that his frequent messages mentioning Mr. Clementi’s sexuality proved that Mr. Ravi was upset about having a gay roommate from the minute he discovered it through a computer search several weeks before they arrived at Rutgers in fall 2010.

The kid knew what he was doing, the jury understood what he was doing, and you and I all understand that Ravi knew exactly what he was doing. This is no miscarriage of justice, this is the clear application of existing law to a criminal act of bullying, evidence tampering, and attempted witness coercion. He didn’t, as Sullum remarked, simply delete an “embarrassing tweet.” This is no threat to free speech. This is no prosecution for “what someone is thinking.” Free speech advocates have nothing to fear from this prosecution whatsoever. Here is the relevant law for hindering apprehension:

A person commits an offense if, with purpose to hinder the detection, apprehension, investigation, prosecution, conviction or punishment of another for [an offense] OR [a violation of Title 39 of the New Jersey Statutes] OR [a violation of Chapter 33A of Title 17 of the Revised Statutes] (he/she) [refer to appropriate portion of N.J.S.A. 2C:29-3a(1) thru (7)].

While Reason may put quotes o’ sarcasm around hindering apprehension, it is an existing law designed to prosecute those who are attempting to cover up an offense.

And he wasn’t, as Sullum states, simply expressing unpopular ideas. He didn’t say “I hate homos! Being gay is wrong.” Or even something worse, like “All fags should die.” No, he was not expressing ideas popular or unpopular. Instead, what he was doing was systematically shaming and bullying Clementi, offering others a forum to watch him be intimate with a partner, taunting him on twitter for everyone to see, including tweeting about it 38 times or more (I misread- Clementi checked Ravi’s feed 38 times). No, he was not expressing an unpopular opinion, he was targeting Clementi and doing so viciously.

Did Ravi want Clementi to kill himself? I have no way of knowing, and neither does anyone else.

Which is precisely why he was never charged for that.

▲

A Ron Paul Conspiracy Theory

Usually Paulist conspiracy theorists are inside the tent pissing out, but Mark Ames gives Paul a golden shower in his new piece in The Exiled (via). The elements of his case are that Ron Paul’s SuperPAC is headquartered in Salt Lake City, one of the founders is Jon Huntman Sr’s business partner, and the main contributor to that PAC runs a major defense contractor and supports a lot of candidates who are anathema to Paul’s principles. I don’t know if he’s right that there’s some Mormon collusion involved in Paul’s SuperPAC, but he’s right about this:

That might raise some potentially disturbing possibilities to a journalist or editor still interested in chasing down disturbing details and stories. Which probably explains why the media hacks aren’t interested in pursuing this possible angle, even though it’s staring them in the face. Instead, they’re trotting out a catalogue of fatuous “explanations” for the love-fest between Dr. Paul and Mitt Romney—explanations which have almost nothing to do with money and sleaze in politics, and everything to do with how Tiger Beat magazine might approach this election campaign.

Ron Paul isn’t giving Mitt Romney a pass in the debates because Ann Romney and Carol Paul are friends (as the Times would have us believe). He might be doing it in hopes of cleaving off Santorum and Gingrich to make it a two man race, but I don’t buy that, simply because both of those guys have done well enough in the race that they’re staying around no matter how many times Paul calls them “fake”. Being a paid stalking horse sounds a lot more plausible to me.

▲

The Action Is Affirmative

It was so worth watching the last half-hour of the MHP show this morning for this discussion on affirmative action, and especially for Elon James White taking Reasonoid emperor Matt Welch’s lunch money, buying a milkshake with it, then then drinking it all up in front of him.

Elon also had a nice exchange with Nona Willis Aronowitz from GOOD Magazine on this too, and he was having none of the Glibertarian nonsense at. All.

I’m loving this show more and more.

Open thread, also too.

▲

How’s That Austerity Thing Working For You?

Just to remember how bad Republican notions that we should cut spending in the midst of a recession, this latest from the Eurozone:

The euro zone economy shrank slightly less than expected in the last three months of 2011, but five countries including Italy fell into recession as the sovereign debt crisis discouraged consumers from spending and businesses from investing. sovereign debt crisisdiscouraged consumers from spending and businesses from investing.

Growth in the 17 countries that make up the euro zone fell 0.3 percent, Eurostat, the European statistics agency said [PDF] Wednesday. But the pain was most acute among smaller countries and in southern Europe — ground zero of the debt crisis.

...“It could have been worse,” Martin van Vliet, an economist at ING Bank, said in a note to clients. The figures “clearly indicate that ‘core’ euro zone economies generally were less affected by the escalating debt crisis than peripheral economies, which seems to make sense given that the financial turmoil and austerity efforts are concentrated in the latter part of the region.” (Emphasis added.)

In case you were wondering whether even hobbled stimulus efforts matter, here’s the context with which Eurostat framed its update:

▲

Oh, By The Way…

Which one’s Pink?

Which is another way of saying that I neither should nor have anything more to say about Komenfreude, except…

McMegan, as is her wont, has hit bottom and continued to dig—with a second post complaining that all the pro-choice meanies missed her point that funding health care services means that one is funding abortions (yup—neither logic nor the concept of designated donations seem to be in McArdle’s wheelhouse).  She goes on to educate her readers about the strange fact that overhead pays for actual expenses—which, astonishingly, many of us actually know.  She makes no effort to address the claims of those who argue that the Komen Foundation’s overhead is incommensurate with its actual services.  That would have required actual effort (and a calculator!).

She here ignores what more seasoned or cynical reporters would take to the bank:  more people make a living off the disease than die of it.

McArdle’s claim rests on the fact that overhead at Komen runs about 10% of its annual expenses of roughly 400,000,000, with fundraising adding another roughly 10%—which in fact doesn’t sound too bad.  But even a cursory look at the most easily accessed numbers suggests that a more curious writer would have had some questions about Komen’s books.

For example:  according to the foundation’s 2010 annual report, money spent on adminstrative overhead exceeded that for treatment.

It almost matched what was spent for screening, and even (now politicized) research expenditures accounted for less than 20% of whole pie.

By far the largest line item service paid for by Komen is that for education, which accounts for about $140 million, or 35% of the operation’s budget.  Now donors might want to know that cash offered up “for the cure” was by and large being spent on efforts that have nothing to do with either individual patient care or the science of breast cancer, but “education,” taken all in all is certainly an important element in an approach to any progressive disease—and  the difference in outcomes for breast cancers discovered when they are local compared to later stages is formidable.

But even these numbers are a little squirrely.  This post details a breakdown in which 37% of that budget goes for the actual delivery of “education.” 63% goes for everything else, from developing materials to postage—and professional fees and occupancy and so on.  That is – there is a fair amount of overhead hidden within this education line item, and obscured from the top line budget.  Again, a cynical or, perhaps better, a competent reporter would ponder the outsize proportion of money Komen chooses to spend on education, as opposed to activities that more directly connect to patient outcomes and the future of cancer medicine.  Given how easy it is to slosh cash around consultant fees and production contracts, if I were looking for ways a charity might turn itself into a piggy bank, this is the kind of thing I’d be looking for.*

McArdle didn’t, which is of course, no surprise to anyone here.  The only good news is that her trademark “I’m agin’ whatever the reality based community is for” act really does seem to be wearing thin; perhaps it’s just inattention on my part, but she seems to be having much more difficulty breaking out of the echo chamber she’s created over there than in the past.  Once a Villager, always one, I guess—but there are high tables and low, and I’m thinking that McArdle looks more and more like she will remain well downhill of the (pink Himalayan salt) as her combination of sloth and mean-girl reflex continues to lose its lustre.

But all that is preamble to the real point of this post, which is that all of the Komen reporting, and especially the discussion of Nancy Brinkley’s truly impressive annual salary, reminded me of the late great documentary Marjoe, and especially this clip.  (The action really gets on target at about 2:52.)

There is nothing new under the sun.

*The usual disclaimer:  I haven’t done what I’m suggesting McArdle should have.  I’m not a forensic accountant, and I didn’t write a story in which I try to argue that Komen’s overhead numbers are kosher.   Nor am I claming here that they are not, just that if I were an editor  I’d have a lot of questions to ask any reporter that came to me with the kind of unsourced and unsupported tripe we confront here.

Image:  Jan Steen, The Doctor and his Patient,  before 1679.

 

 

▲