Glenna Goldis

mundane bigotry leads to awesome constitutional law issue

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 14:09:33 -0500

If Obama doesn’t fight against every American lesbian’s quest for health insurance, swing state voters will think this photo is real.

Karen Golinski works as a lawyer for the 9th Circuit. After HR told her she couldn’t add her wife to her insurance, Alex Kozinski—the circuit’s chief judge—cleared up the rule and ordered HR to process her form. It was just an internal administrative snafu, not a contested law suit, so HR had no problem executing Kozinski’s order. But then Barack Obama intercepted the lesbian insurance form, running it in for a touchdown!

Seriously. The Obama administration, acting through the Office of Personnel Management, forbade Blue Cross Blue Shield from insuring Golinski’s wife. Now Kozinski has ordered Obama to back off, framing the issue in terms of separation of powers, which is the judicial style of calling someone Hitler.

Obama’s coming off not only as mean but as stupid. Of all the lesbians in America, he picks on one who works as a lawyer and whose name rhymes with the judge deciding the case?

Anyway, I think I speak for all law school graduates when I say it is AWESOME to watch the judiciary and executive square off. Law v. Order isn’t on every day. Usually when the president shirks judges, he pretends he’s not, for example by getting John Yoo to write up a weaselly legal memo. And even when he’s obviously contradicting what a judge ordered, the judge doesn’t get to sass him right back. He has to wait for someone to sue about it, then the case makes its way up… This is different because Kozinski is operating as an administrator—a boss standing up for his employees—but because he’s also a judge he has the power to say what the law is.

Unfortunately for married lesbians, Kozinski’s only power is to say what the law is. The executive is the one who actually tells people what to do. If Obama is serious about keeping his anti-gay marriage record spotless (it seems like he is) then he can just scrounge up a technical reason why Kozinski doesn’t have authority here. Golinksi will then have to file a law suit, taking forever, wasting money, etc.

"In a properly functioning capitalist economy, rich people don’t ‘create jobs’ for..."

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 12:19:00 -0500

“

In a properly functioning capitalist economy, rich people don’t ‘create jobs’ for workers; workers, upon having jobs, create rich people. … [But in] ‘capitalism’ as it is actually practiced today, jobs really are a kind of charity, often superfluous to the amassing of multibillion dollar fortunes.

Today’s millionaires and billionaires make their money by creating contracts—and a lot of those are, at their core, tax dodges.

”

- Baltimore City Paper on why lowering taxes on the rich doesn’t lead to job growth anymore

(via futuremilk)

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 14:31:29 -0500

(via futuremilk)

in the future, all money, power, and good deeds will be traceable to Goldman Sachs

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 14:06:12 -0500

The Times editorial board solemnly shakes its head at the antics of Goldman Sachs today. “Goldman pledged $500 million over five years — crumbs from its table — to help 10,000 small businesses. It is hard to take seriously Goldman’s claim that the program was not motivated by its public relations problems.”

Goldman is a corporation, not a person. Expecting a corporation to show remorse is like expecting a person to delegate all her moral judgments to a Board of Directors. Corporations are supposed to make money, not judgments, and if they did then we’d live in a world where graphing calculators won American Idol and naps were illegal.

If the Times editorial board is angry with Goldman, they should actually try to shrink its power by arguing that:

corporations shouldn’t enjoy the same legal rights as people
there should be higher taxes on corporations, financial services, and rich people
investment banking has a lot in common with pedophilia
Congress should pass tighter regulation of securities and looser securities fraud statutes
Naomi Klein is the perfect antidote to Sarah Palin. Klein/Nader 2012!

if I were powerful, I'd censor all references to my so-called physical awkwardness and runny nose

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:35:00 -0500

This image has probably been photoshopped by Kennedy’s office.

Last week we learned that when Justice Kennedy speaks to prep schools, he requires the student reporters to get his approval on their stories before publishing them. Now we learn that he does the same thing to college kids. At GWU, he insisted that a reporter change a quote from “it’s” to the more patrician “it is.” That’s good. If the American public believed its judges elocuted casually, the legitimacy of the Court would be undermined.

With his narcissistic censor jobs Kennedy reminds me of those Disney actresses who race off to pose naked and make a sex tape on their 16th birthday. It’s legal and everything but also it makes the world a worse place. Hey famous people, kids look up to you! Express your true self—whether that be a skank or a duke—in some way that doesn’t insult the First Amendment.

(Insulting the First Amendment is awesome when you do it on historical or sociolegal grounds, but egomania by itself doesn’t add to the collective wisdom.)

fact checking doesn't matter

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 07:44:00 -0500

Lately I keep hearing people throw around the term “fact check” in a smug way. Jon Stewart “fact checked” Sean Hannity; Justice Kennedy was within his rights to “fact check” a high school newspaper story. Apparently the term “fact checking” is a sacred cow—that’s why people are tempted to use it incorrectly, as in both those instances. They sound ridiculous to me, because I know fact checking doesn’t matter.

(Disclosure: I worked as a pro bono fact checker for four months and did not enjoy it.)

There are two types of people who influence policy in this country. The first group is experts. Experts get their info by reading academic articles and researching their own. They rely less on newspapers to form policy; when they do, they check up on the data themselves.

The second group of people who influences policy is idiots. Idiots write handwritten letters to their Senators and idiots boycott and protest. And idiots believe what they want to believe. No matter how many facts a fact checker checks, idiots will misunderstand all of them.

The remainder of the population, including you and me, has zero influence over policy. For us, newspapers are entertainment. A serious form of entertainment, certainly; more cerebral than playing pinball, graver than watching Glee. But still, entertainment. We feel more satisfied—more entertained—if we believe the newspapers we read are factual. But if they’re not perfectly factual, either we’ll never know, we’ll let it slide, or we’ll switch to another form of entertainment.

The New York Times could tell us that Goldman Sachs pays Osama bin Laden’s medical bills, unemployment just fell to 4% thanks to a benevolent Wal-Mart hiring drive, and Barack Obama had an abortion. It wouldn’t matter.

Glee is darker than American Psycho

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 06:42:00 -0500

Not earnest.

Slate reviews Glee today:

The show is eager to offend, and on the other hand, it flaunts good morals—hard work and collective struggle and all that. It has its earnestness and spits its sarcasm, too.

No. Hard work and collective struggle pay off for the characters within such an absurd context that you know in reality, the results would be the opposite (for example, in real life a tiny gay boy would not become a football hero by leading the offense in dance before a crucial play). It’s a 100% nihilistic show.

If you’re looking for an earnest story, read or watch something perverse. The darkest storytellers are often the most obsessed by morality and injustice—Bret Easton Ellis, Houellebecq, Celine. The bad behavior they depict is meant to represent our society’s real behavior taken to the extreme, in order to shock the audience into reflection, and the material disgustingness comes from the author’s moral disgust.

questions raised by Justice Kennedy's insistence on censoring Dalton's student newspaper article about his speech

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:53:00 -0500

Image control: keeps the justices looking good.

Under what ontology does changing quotations to “better reflect the meaning the justice had intended to convey” count as “fact checking”?

How come supreme court justices visit the Dalton School (NY) but not South Kingstown High School (RI)?

Was the newspaper’s faculty advisor, who said he “believed we could not publish anything without the approval of Justice Kennedy,” chosen for his post because he likes to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable?

“Editors at The Daltonian either would not comment for this article or did not respond to requests for an interview” because all teenage journalists in 2009 dream of becoming supreme court clerks?

Does Kennedy’s refusal to answer students’ questions signal agreement with Clarence Thomas’s theory that dialogue does not illuminate complex issues?

Why are America’s most verbal government officials so bad at explaining themselves?

Rhode Island shall make no law

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:12:09 -0500

RI’s republican governor vetoed 25 bills today. In so doing he:

prevented long term domestic partners from arranging each other’s funerals
protected school officials’ right to surveil students via GPS
blocked the formation of a Green Jobs Task Force
kept prisoners in jail who’d been acquitted of the probation violation that landed them there
defended his power to fill a vacated senate seat himself instead of putting it up for election
maintained the foreclosure process’s ease and swiftness

Meanwhile, New York’s democratic governor failed to persuade the democrat-controlled senate to vote on his signature issue, gay marriage. The virility gap between democrats and republicans yawns.

Justice Scalia thinks you can't handle the truth

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 13:54:00 -0500

Scalia holds a coherent judicial philosophy which depends on both historical knowledge and rhetoric skills. But a lot of Americans see him as a mere politician, railing against gay marriage and abortion while paying lip service to racial equality. Why do they insist on caricaturing him? It’s not because they’re unsophisticated. It’s because Scalia’s judicial philosophy—the one thing that makes him better than Sarah Palin—obviously forces him to oppose Brown v. Board, but he refuses to admit it.

Since Scalia won’t explain himself, I will explain him.

Scalia thinks that rule of law is more important than integrated schools. That’s okay; every serious judge in America probably believes that rule of law is more important than integrated schools. If it weren’t for rule of law—the fact that courts help people after they’ve been treated unfairly—the only people with any power at all would be cops, drug kingpins, and Jared Kushner. Rule of thugs.

For most judges, rule of law and integrated schools don’t conflict because standing up for minorities seems to them like the opposite of thug rule. But this approach doesn’t strike Scalia as lawful at all. He thinks that when judges allow affirmative action and strike down unequal marriage laws they over-enfranchise minorities. Favoring certain people = rule of thugs. Super-powered courts are just as bad as powerless courts. Except in Scalia’s vision of lawlessness, educated black people, Ellen Degeneres, and Portia de Rossi rule the streets.

In order to resist favoring minorities, Scalia judges equality cases according to how he thinks the 19th century framers of the Equal Protection clause would want him to. Historians have shown that the framers did not intend to integrate public schools. So if Scalia is serious about his philosophy—and he’d better be, because it’s the only thing that morally justifies the dozens of anti-minority opinions he’s written—then that means he should believe Brown v. Board was wrongly decided.

Presumably Scalia won’t admit that because he thinks he’ll sound like a bigot. But everyone already knows he’s a bigot. Now he sounds stupid, too.

sugar and spice and everything nice

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 21:46:44 -0400

Barack Obama is a macho man. Before Michelle Obama accepted a job in the Chicago mayor’s office, Barack insisted on meeting her new boss. ”My fiance wants to know who is going to be looking out for me and making sure that I thrive,” Michelle said. On the campaign trail he called a reporter “sweetie” in the course of blowing her off.

(Where did Obama even pick up the term “sweetie”? He’s not 90 years old or a cab driver.)

This weekend the NY Times reported that Obama unwinds by playing sports with his advisors and members of congress—but never with female ones. He’s played 23 rounds of golf with men since taking office and he’s never played with a woman. His White House is “rife with fist-bumping young men who call each other ‘dude[.]’” When asked about the issue, Obama called the whole thing “bunk.”

Putting all that together, might one worry about Obama overlooking ideas that come from women? Only if one is a Feminazi. All over the internet this week, women have reacted to Obama’s biases against them by boasting nonchalance. Here is a representative argument in the Washington Post:

Basketball is a contact sport. Wouldn’t we find a presidential body brush with a congresswoman at least equally problematic? How about the likelihood that few women in the White House or Congress could play well enough to make it fun for the president? Or should we have Obama play down for the girls?

If Obama enjoys competing only against the best basketball players in the world, he should fly in the Carolina tar heels. If his favorite part of the game is mutual unrestrained shoving, he should fly in the Patriots’ defensive line. If men and women elbowing each other is sexual, then I should keep my love of subways to myself. How embarrassing!

Does anyone, male or female, actually do their best to clobber the president of the United States? …Maybe they shouldn’t?

Obama plays basketball against male colleagues because he likes to hang out with male colleagues. Argue about whether that’s weird, but don’t argue that playing sports with women sucks. That’s like saying arguments are only interesting if you have them with lawyers.

The pro-macho argument devolves:

Honest women will have to admit that they helped Obama become president not only because of the policies he promised but also because they rather fancied him. That famed jocularity he shares with men more than women may be cause for criticism in the Halls of Harrumph, but it’s called nectar in the jungle.

… Opinion websites need to hire more lesbians.

"And maybe one reason [Obama’s] not as comfortable and intimate with his women staffers is his..."

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:18:00 -0400

“And maybe one reason [Obama’s] not as comfortable and intimate with his women staffers is his incredibly strong relationship with Michelle.”

- Emily Bazelon, inferring a rich romantic life from anti social behavior

"For most of us, hiring someone is essentially a romantic process, in which the job interview..."

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 20:25:13 -0400

“For most of us, hiring someone is essentially a romantic process, in which the job interview functions as a desexualized version of a date. We are looking for someone with whom we have a certain chemistry, even if the coupling that results ends in tears and the pursuer and the pursued turn out to have nothing in common. We want the unlimited promise of a love affair.”

- Malcolm Gladwell, explaining why I’m unemployed

from Gothamist

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 18:48:00 -0400

from Gothamist

the recession will go away if all Americans start their own businesses

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 02:14:00 -0400

Some people decorate their houses creatively; some people make money creatively; some people aren’t creative at all. NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman thinks that in our exciting new economy, only those in the second camp will be able to eat—and he seems to be cool with this. Sure, not all of us are superstar hustlers, but that’s just because we have bad educations. If public schools start teaching “entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity” then wealth disparity will melt.

What inspired Friedman to blame poverty on uncreativeness?

“A Washington lawyer friend recently told me about layoffs at his firm. I asked him who was getting axed. He said it was interesting: lawyers who were used to just showing up and having work handed to them were the first to go because with the bursting of the credit bubble, that flow of work just isn’t there. But those who have the ability to imagine new services, new opportunities and new ways to recruit work were being retained.”

Another interesting factoid about laid off lawyers: lots of them are recent graduates who would’ve been laid off plus punched in the face if they’d told a partner that they wanted to change how he practiced law.

I guess the Friedmanian solution is to start our own firm. Clients will love us because we’re cheap, we tweet, and our memory of Introduction to American Legal History is way sharper than those old experienced guys’.

Or here’s a less dangerous idea: since America is wealthy but there’s not a lot of work to go around, we should distribute the wealth according to some other metric besides work. Niceness, maybe, or funniness. And we should give everyone a few sandwiches per day just for being themselves.

UPDATE: here’s an anti-Friedman rant from a lawyer who survived layoffs at her firm. She refuses “to fall into the trap of blaming all the people who had to lose their jobs to justify my own privileged position[.]”

New York keeps arresting guys for hitting on guys

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 14:17:00 -0400

New York keeps arresting guys for hitting on guys:

I wish they’d arrest guys for hitting on me!

Tom Brady should be in charge of the war in Afghanistan

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 02:58:45 -0400

Tom Brady should be in charge of the war in Afghanistan

doom and food

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 18:22:00 -0400

The New York Times Magazine is supposed to be a sanctuary of abstraction. But Michael Pollan keeps invading it, trying to make me anxious about the most basic part of my day besides blogs: food. Last time he accused feminists of “trampling” over cooking. This time he’s laying down rules for eating. Rules?! Don’t worry, they’re packaged cutely.

“Every trip to the supermarket these days requires us to navigate what has become a truly treacherous food landscape,” he begins. Later he uses the phrase: “minefields of the modern-food marketplace.”

That’s dark. It makes you reconsider Pollan’s adorable slogan, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Guess the subtext is, “Be afraid. Be very afraid. You’re fat.”

So don’t read him! Follow my “modern-food marketplace” rules instead:

If you live near a Trader Joe’s then buy trail mix, string cheese, garlic bread, and the TJ version of oreos.
If you live only near bodegas then buy rolls, brie, and mint milanos.

Photo

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 14:01:51 -0400

an embarrassment to the Unemployed community

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 06:39:00 -0400

A Times op-ed bears the subheading: “When unemployed, time should not be idly spent.” The author describes the joy and resume-building utility of performing slave labor and concludes, “my time is valuable, really valuable, even if it’s not measured in paychecks.”

The author is not only a doosh but a liar. You can tell because she seems to have graduated less than a decade ago yet she says “I worked my way through college […].” Ha! Nobody in my generation “worked her way through college.” On top of cost of living, tuition’s way too high. Charity and loans paid our way through college. Jobs were for building up a savings account to finance the first few months of post-graduate unemployment. Also for nourishing an American Apparel addiction.

This woman admits her biggest accomplishments are an MFA and peace corps experience but then she claims: “I am not unemployable.” First of all, apparently she is. Second, some of us fluff-inclined unemployeds actually try not to seem like assholes. We trudged through real degree programs and worked uncool jobs we hated, and we still fake a sense of humor about our unemployability. As educated as the author is, she has a lot to learn about endearing herself.

I want to start an Unemployed People Union which forbids its members from embarrassing us in the New York Times. Not sure how I’ll entice them to join, though. Grant everyone the title of Vice President so they can put it on their resumes?