Tag: hit&run

The Duke-UNC Chapel Hill Consortium for Middle East Studies (CMES) is fighting to retain a federal grant after the U.S. Department of Education accused the group of displaying a disqualifying bias against Christianity and Judaism. While the department’s decision is a potential affront to free speech and academic freedom, it’s also a great example of why the federal government shouldn’t dole out such grants to anyone.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos opened an investigation in July at the behest of Rep. George Holding (R–N.C.), who alleged that a recent consortium conference, titled “Conflict Over Gaza: People, Politics, and Possibilities,” was rife with anti-Israel and anti-Semitic sentiments. Holding wanted a CMES grant revoked.

In 2018, the Office of Postsecondary Education awarded CMES a four-year grant for $235,000 as part of a program meant to train U.S. students to become global leaders. Students who participated in the program told The Daily Tar Heel that they disagree with the accusations made by Holding and the Department of Education. Maggie Barkowitz, a Jewish graduate of UNC Chapel Hill who attended several events at the CMES, said that she never encountered any anti-Semitism. The focus on Islam made sense from her vantage point, as the university’s department is called the Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies⁠. She also noted that her classes weren’t biased against any particular religion.

In an August letter to the consortium, the Department of Education alleges that “most of the Duke-UNC CMES activities supported with Title VI funds are unauthorized.” Such funds should be spent only on preparing participants for roles in diplomacy, national security, international business, and education, and the Duke-UNC Chapel Hill Consortium offers “very little serious instruction preparing individuals to understand the geopolitical challenges to U.S. national security and economic needs but quite a considerable emphasis on advancing ideological priorities,” the department says. In short, CMES is too pro-Islam.

In a letter to Robert King, the Assistant Secretary of the Department of Education, the Duke-UNC CMES tried to dispel the notion that its activities disqualify it from federal assistance. “The Consortium deeply values its partnership with the Department of Education and has always been strongly committed to complying with the purposes and requirements of the Title VI program,” writes Terri Magnuson, UNC’s Vice Chancellor for Research.

Reactions have been predictably polarized. One such response came from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which argued against the Department of Education. “The federal government may fairly condition the award of funds on the satisfaction of certain criteria,” FIRE wrote in a statement, “but determining how best to satisfy grant terms that involve academic or pedagogical judgments, especially those which contain ambiguity, should remain the province of the academy.” Some of the requirements are too vague, they say, like assessing ideological “balance.”

The pro-speech group is not wrong. It is difficult to fairly measure fairness. Such judgments hinge on who is doing the judging. But if it is impossible to measure the wider social benefit of a concentrated subsidy, why are tax dollars paying for it?

We ask this question of all kinds of subsidies. Tax credits for Hollywood studios and professional sports teams are considered by economists to be a waste of money. Government subsidies for firearms manufacturers would likely offend half the country, and that’s before you take into consideration they’ve been secured by lawmakers who favor gun control! Pick a subsidy, take a poll, and you’ll find some group of people who find that subsidy offensive, useless, or otherwise objectionable.

Add our bloated national debt on top of that, and people have good reasons to question the merits of funding programs like the one run by Duke and UNC, two well-funded, untaxed, elite universities with endowments valued at $8 billion and $5 billion respectively.

Why not do away with these grants altogether? Let the market determine which programs are actually preparing the diplomats of tomorrow and encourage philanthropists to fund the programs that can’t quantify their value. This spares taxpayers the frustration of funding policies and programs they don’t like or understand and the people at CMES and other academic institutions the awful position of justifying their existence to culture-warring bureaucrats. Government, meanwhile, can and should stick to the provision of basic services.

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Here is the federal witness-tampering statute (18 USC 1512(b)):

Whoever knowingly uses intimidation, threatens, or corruptly persuades another person, or attempts to do so, … with intent to —

(1)influence, delay, or prevent the testimony of any person in an official proceeding; [or]

(2)cause or induce any person to—

(A)withhold testimony, or withhold a record, document, or other object, from an official proceeding … shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.

Here’s what our president said yesterday, at an event for UN staffers and their families:

So the whistleblower came out and said nothing. Said: ‘A couple of people told me he had a conversation with Ukraine.’ We’re at war. These people are sick. They’re sick. And nobody’s called it out like I do. I don’t understand. People are afraid to call it out. They’re afraid to say that the press is crooked. We have a crooked press. We have a dishonest media. So now they’re devastated, but they’ll always find something. I’m sure there’ll be something they’ll find in this report that will suit their lie.

But basically that person never saw the report, never saw the call. Never saw the call. Heard something, and decided that he or she or whoever the hell it is — sort of like, almost, a spy. I want to know who’s the person that gave the whistleblower, who’s the person that gave the whistleblower the information, because that’s close to a spy. You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart? Right? With spies and treason, right?”

I believe that his reference to “what we used to do in the old days … with spies and treason” refers to execution, which is indeed what we used to do with (convicted) spies (see, e.g., Julius and Ethel Rosenberg), though I do not believe we have executed anyone for spying since then (hence, the reference to the “old days”).

This sure looks like a prima facie case of witness tampering to me.  There is an ongoing official proceeding; we know that the whistleblower him/herself is going to be called to testify, and one can certainly expect others who were present during the July 25th call, or who had notice of the July 25 call and who might, therefore, have “[given] the whistleblower the information,” will be called to testify. The President of the United States—our chief law enforcement officer—has called these people “close to spies” and made reference to the punishment to which spies were subjected “in the old days when we were smart,” and to “treason” (a federal crime that still carries the death penalty). The effect of these comments, surely, will be to make potential witnesses think twice about providing evidence against the president (and having their identities revealed to the public and to federal prosecutors who work for the President).

The hard questions, as always in a witness-tampering case, is: Did Trump act with the “intent” to “influence” or “prevent” the testimony of these individuals? Using the ordinary (and rebuttable) presumption that a person “intends” a consequence when (a) they foresee that it will happen as a result of their conduct and (b) desire it to happen,” I think he did—though of course without more evidence (including Trump’s testimony, under oath, about what he did or did not intend, and other actions that might suggest proper, or improper, motives) one cannot be certain of that conclusion.  [That’s why it’s just a prima facie case of witness tampering at this point].

I expect, given many of the comments on my earlier postings on the Ukraine matter, that some readers will, in the face of this, continue to hold to the position that Trump has done nothing wrong. Here’s my best guess as to the arguments they will raise—and if I’ve missed any, please do set me straight in the comments.

1. “It can’t be ‘witness tampering’ under the federal criminal code, because DOJ takes the position that the president can’t be charged with any (federal) crime.”

False. First of all, the current DOJ position is that the President cannot be charged with a federal crime while in office; if Trump were no longer the president, he could be criminally charged in connection with the Ukraine affair (or anything else).  More importantly, even though a president can’t be charged with a federal crime while in office (because, as head of the DOJ, he would in effect be acting as prosecutor and defendant in such an action), he can certainly commit a federal crime while in office.  That, of course, is the whole point of an impeachment proceeding; Presidents Nixon and Clinton were both charged with the crime of obstruction of justice, though the charge was contained not in a criminal indictment but in Articles of Impeachment.

2. It’s not “witness tampering,” because nobody’s been charged with anything at this point, and therefore there aren’t any witnesses who could have been “influence[d]” or “prevent[ed]” from testifying.

Wrong again. The statute refers to “testimony … in an official proceeding.”  An impeachment inquiry is an “official proceeding” (as is, I believe, any Congressional hearing).

3. “He was just joking—chill out! He wasn’t actually saying that the whistleblower should be executed!”

Well, that’s a harder one to deal with, I admit, especially because the President’s intent is an element of the crime.  I’m a little dubious, generally, about the “it’s a joke” defense, having heard it before, when Trump invited the Russians to hack Clinton’s server (which—coincidentally enough—began, according to various federal indictments and the Mueller Report, that very day).  And listening to the audiotape of his remarks, he certainly sounds like he’s not joking.  But again—it’s just a prima facie case we’ve got here; if Trump was joking, let him come forward, under oath, to say so.

4. “He couldn’t have intended to intimidate any potential witnesses, because he was speaking at a private event, and therefore had no reason to think that the targets of the supposed intimidation would ever hear about it.”

Again, this gets a “Maybe, but …” First off, this wasn’t really a “private” event like a family dinner or a confidential briefing by a few top aides; it was an event staged for hundreds of US employees (and their families), and it seems a bit disingenuous to suggest that Trump expected that his comments would not be made public or otherwise communicated to the officials in the White House and the Intelligence Community who were being accused of spying and treason. Furthermore, because we don’t know the identity of the individuals who were the target of Trump’s ire, and we don’t know (and perhaps Trump didn’t know) for certain that none of them were in the room.  UN Ambassador Kelly Craft, for instance, was in the room, and, as a senior official with international responsibilities, might have been the source of some of the leaked information.  So this is hardly like an offhand comment to a couple of friends over dinner; as unfortunate and intemperate as such comments might be, they wouldn’t, in that case, be directed specifically at the whistleblower or any of the whistleblower’s sources.  Here, it’s a little easier to presume—again, rebuttably—that Trump knew full well and intended that word of the threats would get to the “right” people.

As I said, perhaps some readers have other possible defenses they could proffer.  Please do—but I’d appreciate it if you could avoid discussion of the many irrelevant defenses that are simply variants of the “Fake News! Hillary’s email server! The Steele Dossier! What Biden did was worse!” etc. arguments.

 

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A former Dallas cop is fighting a murder charge in court this week. Last September, she shot and killed a neighbor in his own apartment after mistaking his home for her own and assuming he was an intruder. Even though she was the actual intruder, she is claiming she killed the man in self-defense.

The ex-cop, Amber Guyger, is battling one count of murder for killing Botham Jean. If convicted, she faces anywhere from five to 99 years in prison. She was initially charged only with manslaughter, but after further review of the evidence a grand jury later indicted her for murder. The trial began Monday and is expected to run about two weeks.

Jean had been sitting on his couch eating a bowl of vanilla ice cream when he heard Guyger enter his apartment. According to Guyger’s defense attorney, Robert Rogers, Jean was startled by the sudden intrusion, shouted “Hey! Hey!,” and rose from the couch. Guyger then drew her gun and fired two shots at Jean, piercing his heart and lungs. In the defense’s opening statement, Rogers argued that Guyger’s fatal mistake resulted from a culmination of exhaustion from working 40 hours in four days, knowledge of recent burglaries in the complex, and genuine confusion over whose apartment she was in.

Rogers claimed that Guyger attempted to de-escalate the situation by demanding that Jean show her his hands, and that this failed because Jean’s shouting drowned out her orders and made the officer “fear for her life.” Jean’s last words, according to a witness, were “Oh my God, why did you do that?”

Assistant District Attorney Jason Hermus noted that Guyger failed to follow her police training for what to do if she suspected someone of being a burglar. The correct response was to retreat, take cover, and call for backup, not open fire.

On Thursday, State District Judge Tammy Kemp blocked a portion of lead investigator David Armstrong’s testimony. Armstrong claimed that Guyger had acted reasonably and had not committed a crime in shooting Jean. Kemp ruled that this information only represents Armstrong’s opinion and is not admissible in court.

Bodycam footage of Jean’s final moments depicts Guyger, still clad in her police uniform, frantically repeating “I thought it was my apartment” as officers begin CPR on Jean. Guyger also stated that she thought she was in her apartment approximately 20 times in her initial 911 call.

In the same call, she said “I’m gonna lose my job,” prompting District Attorney Hermus to declare that Guyger appeared “as concerned or more concerned about how [the shooting was] going to concern her than this poor guy on the floor next to her.”

The defense’s motion for a directed verdict of not guilty for the murder charge has been denied. Jean’s family has also filed a civil suit against the City of Dallas.

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Here is another preview of the 11-hour video library from our new book, An Introduction to Constitutional Law: 100 Supreme Court Cases Everyone Should Know. This post will focus on cases from the Burger Court.

Roe v. Wade (1973)

Frontiero v. Richardson (1973)

Buckley v. Valeo (1976)

Craig v. Boren (1976)

Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978)

Penn Central Transportation Co. v. New York (1978)

Cleburne v. Cleburne Living Center, Inc. (1985)

You can also download the E-Book or stream the videos.

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On the impeachment front… The anonymous whistleblower complaint about Donald Trump’s July call with Ukraine’s president (and subsequent alleged attempts to cover it up) was apparently lodged not long after a CIA officer raised the issue around the office.

“The officer first shared information about potential abuse of power and a White House cover-up with the C.I.A.’s top lawyer through an anonymous process,” The New York Times reported on Thursday night. “The lawyer shared the officer’s concerns with White House and Justice Department officials, following policy.”

Then, about two weeks later, the officer “decided to file a whistle-blower complaint to [inspector general for intelligence agencies Michael] Atkinson, a step that offers special legal protections, unlike going to a general counsel,” according to the Times.

Lawyers representing the person who filed the whistleblower complaint did not confirm that the CIA agent was their client, saying: “The whistle-blower has a right to anonymity.”

Executive Editor Dean Banquet defended the paper’s decision:

We decided to publish limited information about the whistle-blower—including the fact that he works for a nonpolitical agency and that his complaint is based on an intimate knowledge and understanding of the White House—because we wanted to provide information to readers that allows them to make their own judgments about whether or not he is credible. We also understand that the White House already knew he was a C.I.A. officer.

Meanwhile, Trump isn’t letting whistleblowers and the possibility of impeachment dim his capacity for cruel immigration policy. Yesterday the administration announced that it would lower the refugee cap from its current 30,000 down to 18,000.

“The coming year’s 18,000-person cap will be the lowest since the refugee resettlement program began in 1980, a major shift from the 110,000 refugee admissions former President Barack Obama proposed for fiscal year 2017,” Politico points out.

The announcement comes at the same time as new figures on dwindling immigration rates:

The net increase of immigrants in the American population dropped to about 200,000 people in 2018, a decline of more than 70 percent from the year before, according to William Frey, chief demographer at the Brookings Institution, who conducted the analysis.

“It’s remarkable,” said David Bier, an immigration expert at the Cato Institute, of the 2018 numbers. “This is something that really hasn’t happened since the Great Recession. This should be very concerning to the administration that its policies are scaring people away.”

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FREE MINDS

Chelsea Manning, Reality Winner Excitedly Hoping Nation’s Newfound Approval Of Whistleblowers Will Get Them Out Of Jail https://t.co/De1wwq0xEQ pic.twitter.com/jrXLoedY1N

— The Onion (@TheOnion) September 26, 2019

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FREE MARKETS

Young people are leaving big cities. “Large U.S. cities lost tens of thousands of millennial and younger Gen X residents last year, according to Census figures released Thursday that offer fresh signs of cooling urban growth,” The Wall Street Journal reports. According to the paper’s analysis of census figures:

Cities with more than a half million people collectively lost almost 27,000 residents age 25 to 39 in 2018….It was the fourth consecutive year that big cities saw this population of young adults shrink. New York, Chicago, Houston, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Washington and Portland, Ore., were among those that lost large numbers of residents in this age group.

The drop in young urban residents last year was smaller than in 2017, when big cities lost nearly 54,000 residents in this age group. But the sustained declines signal a sharp reversal from the beginning of the decade, when young adults flooded into cities and helped lead an urban revival.

The 2018 drop was driven by a fall in the number of urban residents between 35 and 39 years old. While the number of adults younger than that rose in big cities, those gains have tapered off in recent years.

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QUICK HITS

• The next small but significant step in congressional criminal justice reform moves involves federal sentencing policy. The Prohibiting Punishment of Acquitted Conduct Act would “end the unjust practice of judges increasing sentences based on conduct for which a defendant has been acquitted by a jury,” says a press release from sponsoring Senators Dick Durbin (D–Ill.) and Chuck Grassley (R–Iowa).
• The president doesn’t understand the difference between an apostrophe and a hyphen, among other things:

To show you how dishonest the LameStream Media is, I used the word Liddle’, not Liddle, in discribing Corrupt Congressman Liddle’ Adam Schiff. Low ratings @CNN purposely took the hyphen out and said I spelled the word little wrong. A small but never ending situation with CNN!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 27, 2019

• The Senate voted to confirm Eugene Scalia as the new secretary of labor.
• Government shutdown averted.
• A Mississippi city is claiming undocumented immigrants don’t have a right not to be killed by police:

Sweet Moses. Last year, cops in Miss. went to the wrong address, then shot and killed an innocent man in his own home. His family sued. The city claims his family has no standing, because as an undocumented immigrant, **he had no constitutional rights.** https://t.co/Nk7XQz7IKp

— Radley Balko (@radleybalko) September 26, 2019

• Bitcoin is back in a chaos spiral downward.
• On the spectacular downfall of WeWork.
• A new measure in the large Australian state of New South Wales “overturned a 119-year-old law that made it a criminal offense to procure or administer an abortion.”
• Tech executives in a CNBC poll voted Facebook the technology giant “most likely to face punitive action as a result of the federal government’s antitrust review of Silicon Valley.”
• Uber’s redesign will “combine Uber’s ride-hailing and food delivery apps, boost new modes of transportation like scooters and add safety features.”
• Everybody’s canceled!

No, you idiots, you weren’t supposed to fire the reporter for his dumb old tweets, you were supposed to not have him write about other people’s dumb old tweets in the first place

You did the stupidest thing at every possible turn https://t.co/JiN1N5cr3r

— Logan Dobson (@LoganDobson) September 27, 2019

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Every time we walk past lumber racks in a home-improvement store my wife or daughters start giggling about all the “fine pieces of wood.”

It’s an inside joke that goes back to my first rental property in a small Mojave Desert town. I bought it “as is” in an online auction (although I saw it in person first), and remember the horrified look on the faces of my family when I took them to see it. Think of the term “uneasy silence.”

Half of the roof had blown off from vicious desert winds. The house had broken windows, broken everything, trash strewn everywhere. It looked like something out of the movie “Road Warrior,” given that it sat amid tumbleweeds, sand and cactus. Anyway, I lovingly fixed it up on a shoestring budget. When it was done, I popped for a pricey but fine piece of wood to create the mantelpiece. I was proud of it—and still get teased.

This is not the newspaper version of “Fixer Upper,” but a look at rent control. Gov. Gavin Newsom is likely to sign an anti-rent-gouging bill that caps annual rent increases at 5 percent plus inflation and limits the ability of landlords to evict tenants.

The debate has centered on the plight of tenants, who face soaring rents as California’s self-imposed housing crisis deepens. Opponents note that landlords will exit the market, builders will stop building apartments or turn rentals into condos, and owners will defer maintenance. Owners and renters will become adversaries as regulators and tenant boards turn a simple market transaction into an us-versus-them situation. Rent control obliterates housing markets wherever it is imposed.

Personal stories trump economic arguments, so today’s column offers my perspective as a small-time landlord. It’s a story other investors share, and sheds light on why government caps will make the housing situation worse. They’re not looking for sympathy, even when tenants mistreat the property, don’t pay their rent, or when unexpected things happen. In my case, a small earthquake cracked the toilet line and flooded my Mojave Desert house the day tenants were supposed to move in. It’s a business with costs, risks, and rewards.

But here’s a clue of what’s going to happen. I’ve rarely raised rent or charged late fees and am lackadaisical about rules. Now the state is going to tell me how much I can charge and make it tough to evict any bad tenants. Most landlords will now raise rents to the maximum allowable limits every year and strictly enforce the terms of the lease. Many will sell their houses to single-family owners, which will take them off the rental market.

Currently, I’m under market rate with most rents because I rather keep good tenants than risk finding new ones. With rent control, landlords lose the ability to raise rents when they choose, so we need to be diligent to keep rents at their peak given that the previous year becomes the baseline. If we are lax on enforcing the lease, then it’s hard to suddenly declare that to be a “just cause” for eviction. Since the state will control our profits, we’ll need to maximize profits wherever we can.

I’ll probably turn management over to management companies, which are far less lenient when a tenant has a tough month or less likely to authorize what I did recently—insulate a house and install new ductwork to help a tenant get utility bills to an affordable spot.

This is a side business. It’s partly a labor of love. Most of my homes are historic properties in working-class communities. After I renovated an Art Deco mansion on a city park, neighbors hugged me because turning an eyesore into a professional office building helped upgrade the surrounding block. As an aside, a 2020 ballot initiative would remove Proposition 13’s property-tax limits from most commercial buildings, which could obliterate my earnings on that property. California gets you coming and going.

At what point does it make more sense to stick one’s money in a mutual fund? That fund doesn’t call you at 2 am when the toilet is overflowing. When small landlords leave the market that means fewer single-family homes for rent. It makes renters more dependent on big apartment companies, who can afford the staff to manage the regulatory hassles. It also means fewer opportunities for middle-class people to buy and rent out real estate, which remains a great path to wealth creation. Not everyone has a government pension, you know.

It’s about incentives. You get more of what you encourage and less of what you punish. California’s rent crisis is caused by insufficient supply, which is the result of a system that imposes a punishing level of regulation and fees on builders and developers—and now on landlords. It will mean fewer properties for rent and fewer landlords who proudly design the fireplace mantle.

This column was first published in the Orange County Register.

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Takashi Miike is possibly the last director—well, Rob Zombie and the sadly retired Uwe Boll might also spring to mind—whom you’d expect to find dabbling in true romance. It’s taken him a while to reach this breakthrough, but hey, he’s been busy. (As required by movie-reviewing law, I must here point out that, although he’s only 59 years old, Miike is credited with directing more than 100 films, many of them released theatrically, others made for the straight-to-video market or for TV.) Since his trademark is a species of fierce, sadistic violence that’s so over-the-top it’s often funny (well, to a certain kind of viewer), the appearance of a new Miike movie called First Love might incline fans to fear that he’s going soft on them.

But no. Or not really. This being a Miike film, the young canoodlers at the heart of the story are a boxer with a brain tumor (Masataka Kuboat) and a drug-addicted call girl (Sakurako Konishi). And the Tokyo that they flee through over the course of one long, frantic night is a place where severed heads come rolling out of doorways, a woman expends a lot of energy kicking a man to death (“You don’t get out of this by dying,” she screams at his lifeless body), and an angry yakuza carefully drives his van over an unconscious bad guy’s head (cue sound of melons being crushed).

One drawback of Miike’s madly prolific approach to filmmaking is that it sometimes leaves him scrambling for good scripts, which he isn’t always able to find, if he even bothers looking. (On the other hand, his 1999 needle-torture classic Audition is a picture not an awful lot like any other, and so is his spectacularly brutal 2001 gang flick, Ichi the Killer.) With First Love, the director has said that he wanted to get back to a classic yakuza crime film, and he’s certainly done that—the picture is filled with tough guys (and very tough women), scuzzy drug dealers and crooked cops, all doing pretty much what you’d expect. What makes the movie compelling is the tireless energy and choreographic clarity that Miike brings to his action sequences, of which there are, of course, many.

The story gets underway in a boxing ring, where Leo, a well-regarded up-and-comer, is losing a match for reasons he can’t understand. (Miiki renders his fight scenes with nimble camera strategies and very tight editing, and you can almost feel the sweat spraying your face with each punch.) After Leo gets the news that he has a possibly inoperable brain tumor, we move along to make the acquaintance of Monica, who’s turning tricks to pay off a debt owed by her abusive father to a yakuza bigwig. Monica is kept a virtual hostage by a drug dealer who has gotten her addicted to heroin, and she’s also mercilessly berated by the dealer’s unhinged girlfriend Julie (pop singer and TV star Becky, taking a step up in the biz).

Fuurther enlivening the story is a treacherous yakuza youth called Kase (Shôta Sometani) who’s scheming with a corrupt police detective (Nao Ohmori, a veteran of Ichi the Killer) to hijack a big drug shipment and blame it on the Chinese mob. Also on hand, at first as a subject of nervous discussion and later as a fearsome presence, is a hitman called One-Armed Wang (a name I take to be a shout-out to the 1967 martial arts movie of that title), who has been able to continue pursuing his chosen profession, despite his handicap, by acquiring a pump-action shotgun. (If only the actor who plays him could acquire a name in the movie’s English-language credits.)

First Love isn’t great Miike, but it’s fun, despite the fact that—spoiler—love conquers all (or at least a lot) in the end. Fans should find quite a bit to like—there’s a quick, funny bit, for example, in which a gunman has his shooting arm hacked off with a sword and then finds it hard to pry his pistol back out of his former fingers.)

Miike remains a meticulous action filmmaker; if only he hadn’t always been in such a hurry. And now he faces a serious challenge in the ultra-violence department: the John Wick movies. These are also deliriously brutal (although not as sadistically twisted as some of Miiki’s films), but they’re also set in a world with a rich pulp mythology unlike anything Miike has come up with (as far as I’m aware). Our man might want to give this some thought, maybe take a year off.

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Earlier this month, an article on Bloomberg Law surfaced purportedly anti-semitic facebook postings by Leif Olson. Of course, the postings were in no way anti-semitic, and indeed were mocking anti-semites. The report was false and misleading. Since publication, Bloomberg Law has refused to retract the article. Instead, it has issued several revisions and modifications that make the story incomprehensible. I can only hope that the purported reporter, Ben Penn, is being investigated, and will face discipline. (He has not tweeted since the original story was published).

My goal here is not to further excoriate Bloomberg’s indefensible publication. Rather, I will focus on an element of Penn’s story that has not gotten much attention. He wrote:

“A review of a decade of Olson’s Facebook posts shows that he usually promotes his Christian faith and conservative views.”

This statement is stunning. A reporter spent countless hours scrolling through ten years of Facebook posts. How much time did this task take? Do journalism schools now offer classes in timeline scrolling? Hashtag analysis? Sarcasm detection? Deleted tweet recovery?

Penn did not perform this grueling search as part of a general profile of Leif. Rather, Penn had a specific goal in mind: search and destroy. He was looking for something– anything–that could be deemed offensive. (Penn utterly failed on that front). I would surmise that Penn also performed a similar search-and-destroy mission for other Trump Administration officials. That he didn’t write about them suggests he didn’t find anything to use. The best he could find were Leif’s non-anti-semitic posts.

There is another reason why Penn’s statement was stunning. Journalists routinely complain about being forced to produce vast amounts of content under tight deadlines. Reporter often call me and request a quote instantly, because they are facing a deadline–whether or not I’ve had time to consider the issue! I get it. Social media has transformed the news landscape. The first to publish gets the glory.

Given these constraints, why would a reporter spend countless hours aimlessly scrolling through Facebook posts with the sole purpose of surfacing offensive tweets? There are so many other useful tasks a reporter can perform. Moreover, why would any competent editor at Bloomberg approve of such a task? Note to Bloomberg: this failure belongs also to your editorial team–they should face discipline as well as Penn.

Recently the Des Moines Register faced a similar situation. The Washington Post offered this summary:

The case revolved around Carson King, a 24-year-old casino security guard who gained unexpected fame after he appeared in the background of ESPN’s “College GameDay” on Sept. 14 holding a sign requesting donations for his “Busch Light Supply.” When strangers quickly sent him more than $600 on Venmo, he decided instead to donate the money to a local children’s hospital. Soon, Anheuser-Busch and Venmo announced matching donations as his fundraising topped $1 million.

That’s when the Register began working on a profile, and Calvin learned of two racist tweets King had sent when he was 16 years old. Before the newspaper could publish its profile, though, King held a news conference Tuesday evening apologizing for the racist jokes and revealing that Anheuser-Busch had cut ties with him. King said Calvin had brought the tweets to his attention, though he said he didn’t blame the newspaper.

Was the Register on a search-and-destroy mission, like Ben Penn was at Bloomberg? No. The paper explains that it was trying to write a balanced profile of Calvin that unexpectedly turned up a few inappropriate tweets:

Some of you wonder why journalists think it’s necessary to look into someone’s past. It’s essential because readers depend on us to tell a complete story.

In this case, our initial stories drew so much interest that we decided to write a profile of King, to help readers understand the young man behind the handmade sign and the outpouring of donations to the children’s hospital. The Register had no intention to disparage or otherwise cast a negative light on King.

In doing backgrounding for such a story, reporters talk to family, friends, colleagues or professors. We check court and arrest records as well as other pertinent public records, including social media activity. The process helps us to understand the whole person.

This explanation seems reasonable. Calvin was thrust into the spotlight, and the local paper decided to figure out who he was. This task stands in stark contrast with Ben Penn’s facebook crusade: his sole purpose was find bad stuff on Leif. Bloomberg would never have run a story if Olson’s social media was clean.

The Register also explains why it decided to write about the old tweets, once they were discovered:

Once we have obtained information in background checks, how do we decide what to publish?

It weighed heavily on our minds that the racist jokes King tweeted, which we never published, were disturbing and highly inappropriate. On the other hand, we also weighed heavily that the tweets were posted more than seven years ago, when King was 16, and he was highly remorseful.

We ultimately decided to include a few paragraphs at the bottom of the story. As

This analysis is incomplete. On the one hand, the tweets were inappropriate. On the other hand, the tweets were posted when King was 16–not even old enough to form a legal contract! Why, then did the paper opt for disclosure? The editor does not say.

Regrettably, the norm today is predictable: whenever anyone is thrust into the spotlight, for even the most insignificant reasons, an army of social media spelunkers climb through every crevice of the insta-celebrity’s timeline to find something–anything–to embarrass him. Conservatives do it to liberals. And liberals do it to conservatives. This circular firing squad needs to end–eventually, everyone can be cancelled. He that is without without social media sin among you, cast the first tweet.

What, then is the relevance of old, offensive tweets? To be sure, these posts shed some light into a person’s views at an early juncture of his life. But I am generally skeptical they provide much insight into how they currently approach the world–especially when the postings are old, and were published before a person’s professional career began.

How should our society weigh these old postings? I do not propose some sort of statute of limitations, in which past writings are off-limits. Rather, I suggest a different test: when a person’s established body of work is entirely inconsistent with, and indeed in tension with earlier postings, such nascent musings should be entitled to less weight. Under the opposite rule, everyone will be forever tainted by their worst moments. Our society should afford those aspiring for higher status the opportunity to grow, reflect, and recant.

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“I was interested in how people improvised the structures of a society when there was no law to guide them.” That’s how David Milch, creator of the HBO drama Deadwood, described the project to The New Yorker in 2005. Fourteen years later, his story has finally come to completion with a feature film.

In its original three seasons, the prestige Western tracked a frontier camp’s progress, under the watchful eye of Sheriff Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant) and the bad influence of brothel owner Al Swearengen (Ian McShane), from muddy outpost to bustling village. The 2019 finale, Deadwood: The Movie, drops back in on the characters a decade after viewers left them following the show’s untimely cancelation.

In the duration, much has changed. Railroads have come to South Dakota. So has statehood and, even as we watch, telephony. Chaos gives way to spontaneous order but also to formal governance.

Fans of the series can rest easy, however. A (slightly) more civilized backdrop does nothing to dampen the interpersonal fireworks, and we get the same stellar acting and crackling dialog that garnered so many accolades in Deadwood‘s first run.

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For a number of years, students at the Little Ones Learning Center preschool in Forest Park, Georgia, have grown vegetables. Last year, the school set up a bimonthly farm stand, selling vegetables grown at the school as well as from nearby farms. But this year, city officials shut it down because the school is in a residential neighborhood not zoned for food stands.

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