"Liberty," said Learned Hand, "lies in the hearts of men and women. When it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it."

Learned Hand was quite right — if people don't support basic legal norms like freedom of expression and due process of law, no legal systems will be sufficient to enforce those norms. They will wither. But how is the appetite for liberty born in our hearts? Some choose to believe that it is an inherent aspiration of humanity. I don't think that history, ancient or recent, supports that. Rather, I think that liberty is a cultural value, carefully cultivated by example and education. Good American citizenship is characterized by fidelity to shared taught values, and a willingness to support them and teach them to others.

Like any value, liberty can also be suppressed. People — especially young people — can be taught to scorn it.

Right now, the Shawano School District is Wisconsin is teaching students to scorn free expression. The Shawano School District, through its leaders, is teaching bad American citizenship.

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Listen to me: no sensible and well-ordered society can recognize a right to be free from offense. It's unprincipled and mercurial, a celebration of the rule of subjective reaction over the rule of law. It's an open invitation to censorship-by-heckler's-veto. It chills satire, parody, sharp retorts, hard truths, and uncomfortable revelations. George Bernard Shaw says "all great truths begin as blasphemies" — so where is the room for exploration of truth in a society that lets every entitled group define its own blasphemies and demand that everyone avoid uttering them? Going to courts complaining of fee-fees is no basis for a system of government.

Why the mini-rant? It's because today, courtesy of Ophelia Benson, I learned of a loathsome example of the assertion that we all have the right not to be offended, and an illustration of how it can be used as a weapon of suppression. The Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society (ASHS) at University College London has a Facebook page, and on that page they posted a picture as part of an invitation to a party:

And you know what happened next:

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That was the title of an email I received an hour ago. OK, I added the exclamation point — the email was titled only "Felony Arrest."

Other criminal defense attorneys — indeed, perhaps most attorneys — know what comes next. Was it from a client, or potential client, alerting me to crisis requiring my assistance? No. No, it was not. It was an unsolicited email from a legal marketeer I had never heard of before — from a fairly well know referral service — who wanted me to "discuss a relationship" in which I would pay for access to his firm's list of potential clients. Here, with certain deliberate omissions and alterations, is how it went:

Ken,

I do not believe that our two firms have met.

I'd like to discuss a relationship regarding the rights to our criminal law matters in the San Diego area.

Take a look at some of our current pre-screened (for financial capability) client matters in that protected territory.

To access our database:

• go to our site, societyforcornholingunsuspectingchildren.com;

• click on attorney log-in;

• your user name is rube2012;

• your password, is sucker2012;

• all lower case

• note that the password and user name are different

• click on the "all" cases line near the top of the home page;

• expires on January 4

Of course, I do ask that you not yet contact any of the clients.

Let me know whether it looks like a potential fit.

Cordially,

Mr. Feculent Q. Pus-Crust
Society For Cornholing Unsuspecting Children
[Los Angeles address and numbers]

My new pal Feculent is right about one thing — our firms have not met. That's because my firm is a law firm, and his firm is lodged, like a partially absorbed suppository, in the legal referral industry.

A few notes:

1. As is common with solicitations form the legal referral industry, the email title is intended to deceive. They do they same thing when they call — they tell the receptionist "I'm calling with a referral of a case" or "I need to talk about a criminal case."

2. My firm does, in fact, do work throughout California. However, most of our work is in the greater Los Angeles area. Our San Diego work is a few percentage points of our practice. Trying to pitch San Diego strongly suggest that dear Feculent is working off of some sort of automated lead generator. [Note: Feculent writes an enraged email back stating that he writes each pitch by hand and does not use any automated lead generator.]

3. Note that the misleading headline and the lack of a prominent opt-out provision puts the email squarely in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act.

4. I cannot imagine doing business with someone who seeks to initiate a business relationship based on deception. Even if I thought that using a legal referral service is palatable (which I do not) or made business sense (which I do not), I would never in a million years turn to a firm like the S.F.C.U.S., which approached me with a deceitful heart and a dishonest pitch.

5. I didn't use the password to look at their "pre-screened (for financial capability)" client matters. But the mere existence of a list of such things being put on the internet and emailed to potential customers is bizarre. I assume — I hope — that the list doesn't disclose actual names. Even if it does not, what type of criminal case has (a) a client pre-screened for financial ability and (b) such a leisurely pace that it can be summarized on a web site and used for marketing purposes to attract potential lawyers to represent the client, as opposed to, I don't know, immediately connecting the criminal defendant with a lawyer to protect his or her rights?

I feel the way I do when I get body-part-enlargement spam and fortune-in-gold-in-Nigeria pitches: what sort of morons respond to this? Isn't the model, in some ways, inherently self-repudiating? Isn't any lawyer who would respond to such a pitch inherently unsuitable to represent any criminal defendant?

The Bloggess is simply hilarious. That's why I'm a fanboi.

But because she's simply hilarious, she gets huge traffic. And because she gets huge traffic, she gets huge amounts of blogspam — press release spam, let-us-advertise spam, etc. We get a little here, but nothing like that.

Part of what makes the Bloggess hilarious and awesome is that she has a lot of fun with them, as I've pointed out before.

But spammers and other forms of marketeers are, as a rule, an entitled bunch. They don't like it when people make fun of them.

That's how marketeers from a firm that is supposed to be in the business of media relations and marketing called the Bloggess a "fucking bitch" and told her, in effect, that she should be grateful to be spammed by them.

The outfit in question is called Brandlink Communications LLC. Their Twitter account describes them thusly:

BrandLink Communications. Builds brands with ROI strategies Leverages its relationships with media, influencers and talent to ensure a clients messag

The kids these days — they're in such a hurry.

Anyway, Brandlink sent the Bloggess an unsolicited PR pitch, hoping that somebody might blog about a Kardashian wearing panty hose, which they view as newsworthy. From the email:

“The Kardashian’s once again show they are right on trend, and this is on (sic) Mommy’s are all going to want to follow.”

Global illiteracy is also a trend that is widely followed, though I do not believe that it is a paying client of Brandlink Communications per se.

Anyway, the Bloggess sent her standard whimsical reply: a picture of Wil Wheaton collating paper. It means "thanks for the thing I didn't ask for; here's something you didn't ask for, albeit almost certainly a far cooler thing.

Some marketeers laugh this off, or engage in amusing banter with the Bloggess. Not this one. "Erica" of Branklink sent a snippy email threatening the Bloggess with the ULTIMATE MARKETEER SANCTION: they would stop sending the Bloggess things she didn't ask for and didn't want:

We’ll make note of this email in moving forward and remember if we have any advertising opportunities with any of our clients not to go through you.

How will the Bloggess know whether or not the Kardashians are wearing hose now?

But that wasn't all. "Jose" — would that be VP Media Director Jose Martinez? — sent a "reply all" calling the Bloggess a "fucking bitch." I haven't been to media relations school, but I'm pretty sure they don't recommend that. Perhaps the "reply all" was an accident — but it strikes me as just the sort of deliberate-accidental move you might make if you are a passive-aggressive douche who spams people about Kardashians for a living.

The Bloggess responded with an unusually serious email about how she fights PR spam. "Jose" replied. "Jose's" reply is why I am writing about this — not because of the "fucking bitch" reply-all, which could be Jose having a bad day. "Jose's" reply shows him swollen with typical marketeer/spammer entitlement, including the following:

I get it and I was out of line by saying that however you put way too much effort into your approach. A simple "I don't cover this, no thanks" or "Please remove" would suffice. To go out of your way to be snarky and rude is a little inappropriate. Again, I should've been less harsh – but I also feel like your email was rude and unprofessional as well. We will do a better job to research who we are pitching but maybe you should be flattered that you are even viewed relevant enough to be pitched at all instead of alienated PR firms and PR people – who are actually the livelihood of any journalists business.

Jose is freakishly entitled: he thinks people should be grateful to get his spam, and that people should, out of courtesy, simply politely decline or ask to be removed from the mailing list. Jose sees himself as participant in a polite conversation, not as the equivalent of a stranger deluging you with unwelcome, over-capitalized and oddly spelled screeds telling you how you can make your dick bigger. Jose is wrong. Jose is a classic loser in high-tech form: someone who makes his money sending insipid spam emails about uninteresting things done by vapid people to masses of people, 99.9% of whom don't care and the other .1% of which only care because they are stupid.

Jose's attitude is typical of his ilk. Remember when we made fun of SEO spammer Jamie Spottz, and he showed up in the commends to tell us we should be grateful like his other clients? Remember Spara Townson, the the marketeer who thinks that the comments to other people's blogs are fair game for her shitty little advertisements? Remember serial spammer Bradley Johnson, who inspired a different marketeer to show up and call us assholes for not just deleting comment spam meekly and moving on? Spammers and other marketeers are entitled. I suspect they feel so entitled because they secretly know what they do is so loathsome. They don't just feel entitled, under the First Amendment, to spam you — they feel entitled to be free of criticism and ridicule for doing it.

But they are not. People like this aren't entitled to such polite deference. They aren't entitled to the expectation that you will simply delete the email or unsubscribe, that you will refrain from telling them what you think of them if it amuses you. They are unwelcome intruders, annoying ten thousand people to get one sale. Fuck 'em. Keep up the good work, Bloggess.

Also, on a pure marketing level — if you were the manager for a celebrity, or an event, or a product brand, and were shopping for a public relations and marketing firm, wouldn't you want to know that this is what the people at Brandlink Communications think is good marketing?

Edited to add: On Twitter, Jose is saying that he was "defending" Wil Wheaton. That's his story. That's his crisis management. He gets paid to do that.

Edited again to add: Consider this post by a PR blogger to demonstrate that not all PR people support spamming — though from the comments to that post, you can see that other PR people still think that there's something wrong with calling spammers out. In a similar vein, consider Scott's encounters with PR entitlement syndrome here and here.

Also, Brandlink's Facebook page now says this:

Earlier in the evening I wrote an email to the Bloggess. She was the wronged party and it is up to her to decide if she wants to post the contents of my email. An apology was included, as were my thoughts on profanity and spamming. A mistake was made, but we will respect the privacy of those involved and deal with it, and the consequences, internally. I have chosen not to remove or block the posts. I do ask that you refrain from obscenities as it wasn't right today, and it isn't necessary now. I hope you will continue to follow us and that we will have the opportunity to earn the respect of those of you who were introduced to us through this situation. Sincerely, Carol Bell- Partner

That's somewhat better. Though "mistake was made" made me guffaw.

Fear not, America: in a world where so many wish you ill, the Transportation Security Administration is still vigilant against your greatest foe: Americans who have survived cancer.

Via Letters to my Country and Amy Alkon (who, you might recall, had her own recent run-in with the TSA), I encountered this rage-inducing story by Lori Dorn:

Yesterday I went through the imaging scanner at JFK Terminal 4 for my Virgin America flight to San Francisco. Evidently they found something, because after the scan, I was asked to step aside to have my breast area examined. I explained to the agent that I was a breast cancer patient and had a bilateral mastectomy in April and had tissue expanders put in to make way for reconstruction at a later date.

I told her that I was not comfortable with having my breasts touched and that I had a card in my wallet that explains the type of expanders, serial numbers and my doctor’s information (pictured) and asked to retrieve it. This request was denied. Instead, she called over a female supervisor who told me the exam had to take place. I was again told that I could not retrieve the card and needed to submit to a physical exam in order to be cleared. She then said, “And if we don’t clear you, you don’t fly” loud enough for other passengers to hear. And they did. And they stared at the bald woman being yelled at by a TSA Supervisor.

I'm sure the TSA will explain why it was necessary to grope a cancer patient in public, just as soon as their official blogger finishes bragging about how the TSA's explosive detection technology helps them interdict smuggled fish.

This is, by far, not the first time we've heard that the TSA acts in an inhuman fashion to people with illnesses and disabilities. We've seen wanton treatment of people with urostomy and colostomy bags, the sick torment of the mentally disabled, and the demands that cancer survivors remove prosthetic breasts. Throughout, for the most part, the media remains the TSA's compliant fluffers. So, though what happened to Lori Dorn is sick and infuriating, it is not new.

One of the questions I've been asking here is why do we let this happen? But there's another apt question: these TSA agents are human beings, of a sort, so why do they act this way? Is there something about recruiting on pizza boxes that attracts a statistically unlikely cluster of sociopaths?

I think the answer is an old one and a simple one, congruent with one of the main themes seen on this blog: power corrupts. If you confer upon a man or woman the power to inflict tyrannies and indignities upon his or her fellow citizens, he or she will slowly grow to hate those fellow citizens, feel justified in mistreating them, and increasingly inflict the indignities with aggression and contempt.

Stanford University has offered two very apt studies, one old and one new. First, there's Philip Zimbardo's chilling and classic prison experiment, which illustrated how ordinary college students — people who on a more typical day would be thinking about weed and sex and avoiding work, people who were probably more countercultural than authoritarian — were transformed by being given even temporary power over others as mock prison guards. And now, more recently, a joint study by Stanford, USC, and Northwestern shows how petty power corrupts:

In a new study, researchers at USC, Stanford Graduate School of Business, and the Kellogg School of Management have found that individuals in roles that possess power but lack status have a tendency to engage in activities that demean others. According to the study, "The Destructive Nature of Power Without Status," the combination of some authority and little perceived status can be a toxic combination.

The research, forthcoming in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, is "based on the notions that (a) low status is threatening and aversive, and (b) power frees people to act on their internal states and feelings."

(Thanks to Greg Lukianoff for the pointer to that study.)

This study could have been written explicitly about the TSA. TSA agents are poorly paid, work in nasty conditions, and have little status. Yet they have, within their petty fiefdoms, tremendous power to humiliate and demean. And God, do they ever use it.

The fact that this is a recognized psychological phenomenon explains, but does not excuse, any more than it excuses police abuse and bureaucratic indifference. Nor does it excuse the leaders of the TSA and the Department of Homeland security, who have decreed a feckless facade of security theater that is calculated to lead to this result, all in the name of promoting unquestioning compliance.

What are you going to do? Are you going to retell these stories on social media and forums and blogs? Are you going to make it clear, when asked, that you don't accept the security state's excuses at face value? Are you going to write your representatives?

Are you going to stand up? Or is it really no big deal that a petty authority groped and humiliated a cancer survivor in public, purportedly for your safety?

Blogger JJ seems to think so. [Edited to add: JJ has now sent the original post down the memory-hole and posted a much shorter and less emo post. Fortunately I have some quotes below]

See, though JJ assures us that he is not a "law-suit [sic] kind of guy", he believes he has a strong case against overpriced-coffee-and-muffin-behemoth-and-hipster-hangout Starbucks:

Do I want to file a law-suit against the company for discrimination and emotional distress? Absolutely not, although I know I would have a case for that.

My God, my God. What did Starbucks do? Did they refuse to serve him because of his race? Did they scream obscenities at him because of his religion, thus humiliating him? Did they disclose his ludicrously convoluted coffee order to the world for everybody's amusement?

Nope. They asked him to order more product, or move on, after he sat and worked for three hours. [Edit: again, note that he has now changed the post.]

This morning, like yesterday morning and many other mornings, I woke up and felt that need to be around people. I arrived at Starbucks at approximately 9:30 am. Like many other mornings, I stood in line, ordered my toasted bagel with cream cheese along with a grande, bold coffee in a venti cup. My total came in at just under $5. After I received my order in a very timely manner, I found an open seat, began eating and continued my work from earlier that morning. After playing a bit of musical chairs, I finally ended up on a cushioned bench near an electrical outlet. As always, I was minding my business and being productive. At about 12:00 pm (less than 3 hours after my arrival), a man in a button down approached me and politely asked, “What brings you into Starbucks today?”. I glanced up from the work I was doing and replied, “Just here to get some work done”. Here is where the story takes a sharp left. I was expecting his next sentence to be something along the lines of ”How has your experience been in our store today?” or “Would you mind filling out a feedback form?”. My prediction was off…WAY off. He stated, “Okay well we like to reserve our seating for those who are enjoying our beverages”. Go ahead and let that simmer. Being completely caught off-guard, I looked at the store employee who was cowering behind him and I said, “I had breakfast and coffee this morning”. He reiterated, “Yes, but we would like to reserve our seating for those who are enjoying one of our beverages. Would you like another beverage?”. I replied, “No, I’m not quite ready for another one yet”. He, again, repeated his previous 2 statements. At this point, he’s literally standing over me waiting for me to either say “Okay I would like something else” or “No thanks, I’ll leave”

Read the whole thing, to get more flavor.

JJ thinks that he has been discriminated against, in a way that gives him a cause of action against Starbucks. It's not clear what JJ means by "discrimination", which normally requires an invidious distinction — JJ implies, without saying, that Starbucks might have it out for laptop users. So far as I know, pertinent discrimination laws do not identify laptop-users as a traditionally despised class. JJ also thinks that Starbucks has inflicted emotional harm against him in a way that gives him a cause of action against Starbucks — even if this man-child with his lap-top is not in favor of law-suits and therefore will not file one at the court-house. JJ may or may not know that the tort of infliction of emotional distress generally requires extreme and outrageous conduct beyond the bounds of decent society, though somehow I suspect if he knows that it would not be a deterrent. JJ thinks that Starbucks has an obligation to let people buy $5 worth of product and then use their space as an office or hangout for more than three hours, and an obligation not to embarrass anyone who takes advantage of this obligation.

JJ deserves congratulations for not filing suit. People who have profoundly disordered senses of entitlement often do. JJ is taking the approach that Americans ought to take — writing about his discontents and, one hopes, voting with his feet and going to some other coffee shop that will cheerfully serve as a substitute for his mother's basement.

But in JJ's yawp is the seed of everything that is weak and soft and pampered and needy about us — the feeling that everyone else ought to be in the business of coddling us.

JJ might not sue Starbucks. But as he wanders through life with this set of expectations, chances seem high that he will sue somebody, sometime, for not indulging him. If he files pro se, I hope that he somehow comes up with a better grasp of the law than he has right now. If not, maybe we can recommend a lawyer.

Via.

By the way, if this is performance art or satire by JJ, then bra-fucking-vo.

A person I have mentioned in this "Anatomy of a Scam" series claims that her family is being harassed as a result of it. She claims increased car traffic near her house, and believes that this traffic represents harassment. She reports harassing phone calls, including someone posing as a police officer, whose number came back to a computer shop in Laguna.

Frankly, I'm not inclined to believe anything this person says without hard proof, in light of what I've seen in the course of the investigation. I specifically doubt this claim.

But if it happened, such harassment is absolutely unacceptable to me. I said that already, and I meant it. If you make harassing calls or drive-bys or any other form of harassing contact, you are part of the problem. You are my foe, and a foe of the detection, investigation, and exposure of fraud. Don't do it. The proper remedy for fraud like that exposed in this series is reports to the authorities, and publicity designed to expose and deter it.

I will cooperate with any law enforcement inquiries into any actual harassment. I am not legally obligated to do so, or even to post this notice. But I will. Ask yourself: based on this series, what is Ken likely to do to me if I use the information in his posts to behave badly?

I'm asking this person for the number of the computer store that was allegedly the source of the harassing call. If I get it, I will investigate accordingly. Both telephone harassment and posing as law enforcement are crimes in California. Conduct yourselves accordingly.

As we've discussed many times before, our friends in Canada have a government with very strong opinions about what opinions are "acceptable" — meaning what opinions may be uttered without prosecution, fines, cease-and-desist orders, and reeducation. It's not to American tastes to create vast bureaucracies with the power to regulate and punish speech based on vague guidelines, but Canada is a sovereign nation, and can do what it wants.

Pity poor Professor Cameron Johnston at York University. He was just trying to make this fundamentally Canadian concept clear to the students in the class he was teaching by giving examples of unacceptable opinions. Really, reminding them that some opinions are unacceptable was, in the Canadian context, an act of great patriotism, akin to starting an American lecture with the Pledge of Allegiance and possibly a barbecue. In the course of being so very Canadian, Prof. Johnston mentioned that the sentiment "all Jews should be sterilized" was "unacceptable."

Regrettably, Professor Johnston doesn't get it.

See, it doesn't matter that he uttered the words in a context — the context of identifying the sort of opinions that are unacceptable to Canada. He still uttered them.

By uttering the words, Prof. Johnston committed speechcrime. That's a strict liability crime; intent is irrelevant. Moreover, in thinking that he could utter a series of offensive words by putting them into a specific disapproving and pedagogical context, Prof. Johnston committed a hate crime against the Moron-Canadian community, which is too stupid to grasp context, and the Entitled-Canadian community, which believes that it is un-Canadian to require them to pay close enough attention to follow context. Prof. Johnston knew or should have known that his class of 450 people would include members of the Moron-Canadian and Entitled-Canadian community.

And indeed it did — in the form of Sarah Grunfeld, a member of the Moron-Insipid-Entitled-Canadian community. Sarah Grunfeld was outraged to hear, sort of, that her professor thought that all Jews should be sterilized, and started quite a stir, complaining to York University officials and various community members. Tumult and inquisition ensued. The Canadian media acted in an appallingly un-Canadian manner, focusing on the so-called "context" of Professor Johnson's words and the utterly irrelevant detail that he was Jewish. Grunfeld, raised by her actions into a position of leadership in the Entitled-, Insipid-, and Moron-Canadian communities, did her best to set them back on the path of right thinking:

Grunfeld said Tuesday she may have misunderstood the context and intent of Johnston’s remarks, but that fact is insignificant.

“The words, ‘Jews should be sterilized’ still came out of his mouth, so regardless of the context I still think that’s pretty serious.”

Grunfeld also expressed skepticism that Johnston was in fact Jewish.

Asked directly by a reporter whether she believes Johnston is lying, she was unclear.

“Whether he is or is not, no one will know,” she said. “. . . Maybe he thought because he is Jewish he can talk smack about other Jews.”

Grunfeld demonstrates that with proper accommodation, Moron-Canadian students are able to learn the most important lessons that modern universities offer, such as the lesson that there is no objective reality. Is the person-object-construct we call "Professor Johnston" Jewish? What a childish question, reflecting a retrograde, linear belief system. Whatever "Professor Johnson" or other social constructs like "The Center for Israel and Jewish Affairs" might say, whether the "Johnston" person-object is "Jewish" depends on the shifting perceptions of people like Grunfeld and on advanced scholarship by deep thinkers.

Shockingly, some Jews in Canada are contributing to the continuing wordcrime, failing to cherish Canadian values:

In response, Sheldon Goodman, the GTA Co-Chair of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs issued the following statement:

“Upon hearing of this incident, we immediately contacted York University as well as Professor Johnston directly. While York is currently looking into the matter, it appears that a very unfortunate misunderstanding has taken place. We believe Professor Johnston’s use of an abhorrent statement was intended to demonstrate that some opinions are simply not legitimate. This point was, without ill intentions, taken out of context and circulated in the Jewish community.

“Professor Johnston, himself a member of the Jewish community, may regret his wording but should not see his reputation tarnished. This event is an appropriate reminder that great caution must be exercised before concluding a statement or action is anti-Semitic.”

Sheldon "Goodman" doesn't get it. He's focused on "context." He's using "logic" and "inquiry." He might as well come right out and label Sarah Grunfeld and all the members of her dull-witted inattentive community as second-class citizens. Fortunately there are other Jewish-Canadians who are better assimilated into Canadian values. B'nai Brith of Canada, which has a record of supporting Canadian values about speech, is fully supporting the Moron-Canadian community by running Sarah Grunfeld's statement in full. In that statement, she speaks out bravely against all the bigots who wrongfully demanded her to absorb hate-concepts like context, comprehension, and caution:

I stand by my initial concern brought to the University’s attention immediately after the incident that when Professor Cameron Johnston made the abhorrent statement in his class that all Jews should be sterilized, he failed to qualify the statement clearly as an unacceptable opinion held by others. His delivery of this statement, made in a class of 450 impressionable students, was offensive to me and to others in the room.

I have since been grossly misquoted and ridiculed by the media, and attempts have been made to assign blame to me with the false claim that I simply “misheard” or “half heard” what was said. Meanwhile, the professor has not been called to account in any way for his “miscommunication”.

But Sarah's not done. Showing great insight far beyond her years and apparent natural abilities, she identifies what the real crime is here: that people — people like her — will be deterred from making careless, stupid accusations of racism if those accusations are actually subjected to scrutiny, and if the accusers are burdened with hateful responsibility for paying attention to what's going on around them:

It has been a very painful experience for me to see how the university has closed ranks and reneged on its assurances to me. I understand that there may have been a miscommunication, but any miscommunication was on the part of the professor, not me. The media has been complicit in allowing a false interpretation of my actions to be circulated widely, which can only have a chilling effect on the ability of students to have any kind of a voice on campus.

Well said. There ought to be a government inquiry — perhaps by Jennifer Lynch — into whether universities and the media are chilling stupid people from being stupid.

Meanwhile, if Sarah Grunfeld feels that Canada is a cold and barren place that refuses to celebrate her differences, she should consider coming here to America. Sure, we don't have Human Rights Councils like Canada. But there are signs that our universities and their administrators are coming around to Sarah's way of "thinking," and doing what they can to protect the moron community. At Brandeis University, Professor Donald Hindley uttered the word "wetback" in the course of criticizing people who use it; the 50-year teaching veteran was found guilty of racial harassment and forced to admit an ideology-monitor to his class. At Widener University School of Law, administrators are defying a hearing panel that cleared professor Lawrence Connell, and insisting that he be punished for using the term "black folks" in class and using the name of an administrator in an exam hypothetical.

And surely I need not offer you links to establish that modern America is, in fact, very welcoming to morons.

Come on down, Sarah. You've got lots of friends here.

Alyssa Rosenberg writes for Think Progress and The Atlantic. Today she was mad. Why? Because Brooke Shields is going to be in a movie about a famous abuse of eminent domain.

That abuse was at the heart of the case Kelo v. New London, in which SCOTUS famously and disgustingly ruled that the state can take your property and give it to another private party if it can come up with some theory about how that transfer will benefit the public. In New London, the issue is whether the city could force homeowners to sell their homes and turn land over to private developers in order to remove "blight" and promote "development." That concept made SCOTUS positively giddy:

Those who govern the City were not confronted with the need to remove blight in the Fort Trumbull area, but their determination that the area was sufficiently distressed to justify a program of economic rejuvenation is entitled to our deference. The City has carefully formulated an economic development plan that it believes will provide appreciable benefits to the community, including–but by no means limited to–new jobs and increased tax revenue. As with other exercises in urban planning and development, the City is endeavoring to coordinate a variety of commercial, residential, and recreational uses of land, with the hope that they will form a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Well, back in 2009 I wrote about how that turned out by quoting a WSJ story:

Now, four years after that decision gave Susette Kelo’s land to private developers for a project including a hotel and offices intended to enhance Pfizer Inc.’s nearby corporate facility, the pharmaceutical giant has announced it will close its research and development headquarters in New London, Connecticut.

The aftermath of Kelo is the latest example of the futility of using eminent domain as corporate welfare. While Ms. Kelo and her neighbors lost their homes, the city and the state spent some $78 million to bulldoze private property for high-end condos and other “desirable” elements. Instead, the wrecked and condemned neighborhood still stands vacant, without any of the touted tax benefits or job creation.

But in all fairness, I have to point out that there has been an important update since 2009, when I suggested that the city and the state had wasted $78 million and forced citizens out of their homes to facilitate a phantom development and had not produced any jobs or anything of value. The condemned land has recently started providing value and jobs. I apologize for suggesting that it never would. Specifically, the condemned land is producing jobs and value in the Post-Hurricaine-Vegetation-And-Debris-Disposal-Industry.

Now, we learn from the local newspaper, The Day, that following the hurricane Irene, the city has designated the Fort Trumbull redevelopment site as a place to dump vegetation debris. For a video of locals dumping that stuff on the site, click here.

Anyway, that's the subject of Brooke Shields' new movie, apparently. The prospect of such a movie on the Lifetime Channel irritated Alyssa Rosenberg, who said the movie would be "anti-eminent-domain" and described it thusly:

I’d had the vague sense that Brooke Shields’ career wasn’t in the best place (as Entourage tells me, if she’s involved in a project with Johnny Drama, that’s not a good sign), but I’m sort of depressed, both because of what it means for her talent and what it means for her politics, that she’s starring in an anti-eminent domain movie on Lifetime about the Kelo case. Speaking out about postpartum depression and the idea that seeking treatment for it isn’t shameful is really useful and important. Sparking fears that the government’s going to take your property is a lot less useful.

Challenged on this, she tried to clarify that sure, there are occasional abuses, but that's only because corporations SUCK:

Apparently, this post has given people the impression that I think the Kelo ruling was good. I don’t think it’s good that corporations can manipulate eminent domain for their own benefit. But I don’t think a Lifetime movie is going to differentiate between Kelo and eminent domain as it ought to function. Instead, I think it is likely to take a conservative, totally anti-eminent domain tack that will not further the conversation. I should have made the connection between those two points stronger.

Hence, Alysse Rosenberg's reaction to an impending movie about a grotesque injustice and abuse of government power is to be angry because it might imply conclusions that do not suit her ideological biases. This is roughly the equivalent of Ann Coulter getting in a snit that someone is making a movie about Cameron Todd Willingham because it will just be a way for liberals to make the death penalty look bad.

E.D. Kain reacts by asking, not unreasonably, why aren't progressives upset by Kelo in particular and eminent domain abuse in general?

Progressives should be deeply bothered by a case like this, and should celebrate the fact that at least a television movie is being made about Kelo. Government should not be in the business of cronyism and theft, and liberals should be up in arms when government enriches private corporations at the expense of ordinary citizens.

And I should be 175 pounds with abs of steel and all my hair. But blogger's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for? The truth is that too often we react based not on the merits of a particular story or case, but based on the political and cultural baggage the case carries. That's how a crowd can cheer 234 executions in Texas even when there are Cameron Todd Willinghams. That's how Rosenberg can get upset that someone is telling Kelo's story even though it's so clear that Kelo was wronged.

If we discovered that PeopleEnergyCom had used money and influence to convince elected officials to detain citizens so PeopleEnergyCom could use them as human batteries to provide cheap power, progressives like Rosenberg would be saying "corporations are so awful!," and Rosenberg's conservative equivalents would be saying "government is so awful!" [Libertarians would be saying "PeopleEnergyCom should only be able to do that if they negotiate arms-length revocable contracts at market rate with their human batteries!"]

Americans affected by reading yesterday's Associated Press story "Texas Wildfire Victims Wondering Where Perry Is" woke up today to bewilderment, as the story had been replaced with this squib, "BC-US–Perry-Wildfires-Story". The original story, which Americans all over the nation are reprinting in its entirety for the sake of posterity, read as follows:

Texas wildfire victims wondering where Perry is

BASTROP, Texas (AP) — Residents affected by a devastating Central Texas wildfire are growing impatient with state officials and questioning why Gov. Rick Perry hasn't spent more time there.

Some residents yelled at Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst when he visited the command center in Bastrop County Friday, asking where Perry is and why they haven't had any housing help.

Wildfires have destroyed nearly 1,400 homes about 25 miles from Austin.

Perry, running for the Republican nomination for president, interrupted his campaign and returned to Texas for two days before heading to California for a debate Wednesday. He is now fundraising in California.

Perry's office said "everything that needs to be done to respond to these fires is being done."

Dewhurst said the White House hasn't yet replied to a request for federal aid.

Yet this morning, the story read simply:

STORY REMOVED: BC-US–Perry-Wildfires story

BASTROP, Texas — The Associated Press has withdrawn its story about Texas residents questioning why Gov. Rick Perry has not spent more time in areas affected by wildfires. The single person who asked about Perry's involvement was not an area resident.

Also missing was the name of the Associated Press reporter who wrote the story.  People all over the nation wondered what happened to the name.  Was it deliberately removed? Or was it edited? Was the story written by Scott Lindlaw, or Tom Hayes?, mused puzzled Americans from coast to coast.

Update: In fact it appears that only one person, rather than "puzzled Americans American from coast to coast" is wondering who wrote the withdrawn Associated Press story. Also, we have learned that only one person woke up today in bewilderment that the story was missing.  That person later clarified that he woke up bewildered because a local woodpecker was making noise against a tree in the yard, rather than for reasons having to do with the missing Associated Press story.

However, Popehat stands by this article, because the one person cited above is in fact an American.  Moreover, we feel that his behavior is indicative of a growing trend among Americans who worry about the accuracy of stories from the Associated Press.

Finally, Popehat now acknowledges that much of the reporting for this story was originally performed by the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto.

Back when my mom was sick, we had a deeply uncomfortable conversation about whether I could find marijuana for her. It was deeply uncomfortable because (1) it showed me that my very traditional and straight-laced mom, a very anti-drug junior high school principal, was very ill and in a lot of discomfort from chemotherapy, and (2) we both knew that, as the world's biggest dork, my access to marijuana was roughly comparable to my access to the nation's nuclear launch codes or to Angelina Jolie's bra strap. She passed before the topic came up again.

Medical marijuana had been legal in California for two years then; now it's been fifteen years. Yet anyone looking for medical marijuana still has to wrangle with both lawless local drug warriors and hostile federal law enforcement. Even in California, even fifteen years after Proposition 215, even in a nominally federal system, anyone looking to obtain (and, especially, to provide) medical marijuana is rolling the dice with their freedom and future.

The Obama Administration could be saying smart things about this, making an effort to change the national conversation and move it incrementally towards a sane policy. Instead, President Obama thinks that decriminalization is an issue worthy of snickers. And his Drug Czar, Gil Kerlikowske, is doubling down the stupid by arguing that even acknowledging the existence of medical marijuana will encourage our kids to toke up.

"People keep calling it medicine," he said at a press conference today, "and that's the wrong message for young people to hear."

It's not enough to the drug warriors to prosecute medical marijuana providers. Now they want to widen the pointless, ineffectual, and long-since lost War on Drugs into a War on Language as well. They might have better luck with that particular skirmish — bureaucrats are good with linguistic slap-fights.

Through the link, over at Reason, Jacob Sullum demolishes Kerlikowske's bad logic and junk statistics. Check it out.

It's time to name and shame some scummy attorney comment spammers: that subset of the legal profession that either (a) thinks that comment spam is an appropriate way to market legal services, or (b) thinks that it isn't necessary to supervise marketeers. Both sentiments are wrong. A lawyer who thinks that leaving unwanted, irrelevant advertising on strangers' blogs reflects well on him is a jackass with poor judgment, and it's dangerous to hire a lawyer with poor judgment. A lawyer who thinks that she need not supervise how she is marketed by marketeers soon discovers that when you outsource your marketing, you outsource your ethics and your reputation.

This week's contestants:

1. The wig-wearers of Havillands & Co. Solicitors. They are the English kind of solicitors, not the prostitute kind, despite their having spammed us with six bloody pages of linkspam. What's their approach to the law:

Irrespective of the type of case and the stress involved, we go all the way if we are confident justice needs to be done.

How . . . very comforting.

2. "KEL Attorneys", the lawyers of Kaufman, Englett and Lynd, PLLC, who have deluged us with dozens and dozens of spam comments. In an effort at innovation, KEL Attorneys link their spam to pages about them or mentioning them rather than directly to their website. If your web site was as overpoweringly dull and generic as theirs, you might prefer to link to various yahoo! pages as well.

3. Mitchell & Mitchell, a Tennessee firm specializing in auto accidents and divorce, which is particularly useful if you run over your spouse in your car and he or she just stop giving you shit about it:

Mitchell & Mitchell provides high quality legal services to individuals, families, and businesses while specializing in divorce and auto accidents.

The implication is that when they work on anything else, they are strictly ass.

4. McAfee Law Offices, a California bankruptcy firm. Spammers are ethically bankrupt, so that fits.

5. Matorell Law, the firm of Frederick J. Matorell, who does not know the difference between a blog and a clumsy, butt-ugly SEO optimization page.

6. Hargrove & Associates, a personal injury firm, the chief selling point of which appears to be that its lawyers will drive to see you. Just say "outcall" and save some space, guys.

All of these firms, either through deliberate fuckwittery or abject failure to supervise marketeers, has sent us unwanted and unwelcome comment spam. Shame on them.

My typical offer stands: I will remove any name if the spammer (1) sincerely apologizes for his or her own spamming, if it was deliberate, or (2) publicly throws his or her marketeer under the bus.

One bright warm Spring in the mid-seventies I had a lemonade stand on the sidewalk outside my house, less than a mile from where I live now. You need a hook in the lemonade game, and I had one — I offered free pollywogs from the pond out back, thoughtfully provided in the same cups in which I sold the lemonade. Doesn't everyone like pollywogs?

You see why I am a lawyer and not a businessman.

No one bothered me back then — least of all customers. I'm not sure I could get away with it now, thirty-five years later. There's a war on, you know — a war on lemonade.

Over at The Inductive, Christopher Carr's kid had a hook too — fruit punch and green tea. Maybe that's what attracted the attention of the Massachusetts State Police, who made his twelve-year-old stepson shut the stand on his streetcorner down. Carr also discovered that the Staties have the staff to go about shutting down kids' lemonade stands, but not the staff to answer phone calls from citizens about it. Funny, that.

Now an again it might be reasonable to hold a kid's lemonade stand to the same standard as an adult business enterprise — like when a kid sets up the stand at a commercial venue like a fair to compete with grown-ups. But when cops go about shutting down juveniles' lemonade stands because the law technically permits them to do so, we see the danger in broad, discretionary laws. Regulators tell us that the state can be trusted with broad authority because they will exercise good judgment and discretion. Really? What indication do we have of that?

Years ago, Coyote Blog did a great taxonomy of all the folks who want to run our lives for various reasons. It remains instructive, and it reminds us of why cops and bureaucrats defend shutting down lemonade stands — because the government has our best interests at heart, and knows better, and if the state lets the little things skate, next people will be questioning it on the big things. Might I catch some awful creeping crud from a kid's lemonade stand after the kid used standing pondwater with pollywogs to make the lemonade? Possibly. And God forbid that citizens start to think that maybe I can assess that risk myself, act accordingly, and accept the results.

It's simple!

1. Be a syndicated columnist affiliated with a project called "Restoring Civility."

2. Write columns calling people "economic terrorists" and comparing them to "al-Qaida bombers" because you disapprove of what they say and how they vote in Congress.

3. When this incongruity is mentioned, issue a snippy and defensive blog post asserting that (1) they ARE terrorists, sort of, and (2) anyway, "incivility" doesn't mean calling people terrorists, it means "not letting other people speak their piece . . . . [i]t’s not about offering strong opinions. If someone’s opinion is fact-based, then it is permissible in civil discourse."

4. When people dissent in the comments to your blog post, delete the comments and close comments on the post, notwithstanding that you just said civility is letting other people speak their piece.

Froma, Froma, Froma.

Here's the thing, Froma. We all have a bug up our assess about some subject or other. We're all susceptible to accusations of hypocrisy sooner or later. When confronted with such an instance, we have three choices. One is to say "yes, you're right." Another is to go down fighting — to say "why, it's because FUCK YOU!" The third — the one you chose — is to engage in a desperate and pathetic effort to reconcile the irreconcilable things we've said on different occasions. The first option makes us sound principled, the second option makes us sound human, and the third makes us a subject of widespread justifiable ridicule.

Froma, I'm going to be civil with you. On your terms, that is. Feel free to come here and say your piece about this, Froma, but I think the facts show you are a shallow, unserious, self-aggrandizing twit.

The censorious ettin has two heads.* One head is the state and its minions — thugs willing to abuse their power to censor under the color of law. But we'd be remiss to forget the other head. It is us — or, at least, those among us who run butthurt to the state, sniveling, when we encounter expression we don't like.

Dateline: Tennessee — already a place with a few issues with free speech. The FIRE's Torch blog alerts us to the story of Democratic State Representative Joe Armstrong, who became upset that the student bookstore at University of Tennessee-Knoxville was selling defamatory candy. How can candy be defamatory, you might ask, possibly throwing a few swears in there for effect? Well, apparently it can be if it looks like this:

Armstrong — who may or may not be on some Tennessee legislative committee devoted to regulating defamatory food products and novelty items — found these mints defamatory, and persuaded the bookstore (which had carried similar mints lampooning President Bush for years without incident) to remove them from the shelves.

"When you operate on state and federal dollars, you ought to be sensitive to those type of politically specific products," Armstrong said. "If it was a private entity or corporation or store, (that's different), but this is a state university. We certainly don't want in any way to put the university in a bad light by having those political (products), particularly aimed at defaming the president."

I realize that it is out of fashion for legislators sworn to uphold the constitution to have a passing familiarity with it, just as it is outre for lawmakers to grasp laws. But implying that President Obama is a "disappointment" cannot possibly be defamatory, because it is an expression of inherently subjective opinion, not a statement of fact susceptible to accusations of truth or falsity. Only an idjit, or someone unconcerned with the actual meaning of words, would say otherwise. Rep. Armstrong no doubt meant that the mints were defamatory in the sense that he personally disagreed with their message, which is the way that censorious twats generally use the word.

Now, any citizen — legislator or not — can try to convince any bookstore not to carry a book or a tin of mints. That itself is not censorship. But how do you suppose the manager of the bookstore felt when a state legislator — someone with substantial power over the university's funding and fate — came to demand that something be removed from the store? Do you suppose that felt voluntary to the manager? Do you suppose that Armstrong meant for it to feel voluntary?

Armstrong is the censor in this story — the first head of the ettin — wielding not overt laws but a nice-store-shame-if-something-happened-to-it power. It's the other head of the ettin I want to point out to you:

Armstrong said he got a call from a student who was bothered by the depiction of the president, and the legislator followed up Tuesday with a visit to the bookstore in the basement of the University Center. There, he purchased a box of the $2.99 mints and had a conversation with director David Kent, who ultimately removed product from the shelves. About 30 tins were removed.

That's right. Somewhere at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, there is a student who went to the bookstore, saw a tin of mints that was mildly critical of the President, and was so upset that he or she called a state representative to complain.

These people walk among us.

*Yes, I just combined a D&D reference with a Song of Ice and Fire reference. I'm in a geeky mood. Deal with it, bitches.