Coyote Blog

I confess that historically, I have always had a bit of disdain for folks who say they are single issue voters.  "Really?" I would ask, "You are going to ignore everything else going on and only vote based on X?"  I thought it was a narrow-minded and shallow way to vote.

My apologies.  I may have become a single issue voter myself.  Here is why:

Two years ago, when the Republicans manage to elect Trump, I was sure I was going to vote straight-ticket Democrat in reaction.  I find Trump's entire style distasteful in the extreme.  And while I think there has been some good news on the regulatory front in various Departments under him, on his signature issues of immigration and trade I am 100% opposed to his goals and his approach.  And while I have always believed Trump is probably a social liberal himself, he has a lot of advisors and cabinet members who are pretty hard-core opposed to a variety of freedoms, from gay marriage to marijuana use.

But that was two years ago, before the Democrats decided that their future was in a hard left turn into Marxism.   I am not sure how a serious person can really entertain socialism  given its pathetic history, but it seems to be a product of several cardinal sins of the modern generation (e.g. ignorance of history, evaluating policy based on its intentions rather than its logical consequences, and categorizing all perceived problems as resulting from white male European hetereosexual priviledge).  At first I thought perhaps people were just using "democratic socialism" as a synonym for more redistributive taxes and greater welfare spending within an otherwise capitalist society.  But over time I see proposals like one in Congress with fully 100+ Democratic sponsors calling for banning health care companies of all sorts from making a profit.  This is straight-on socialism and ignorant in the extreme of any consequences beyond good intentions.  By the way, I actually don't think we will end up with socialism under the Democrats but a form of European-style corporatism.  This will mean that large companies like Google and Amazon with political influence will be ok, maybe even better.  But small companies like mine with no hope of political access will get hammered.

So here is my voting problem.  Republicans suck on many issues -- gay rights, drug law liberalization, immigration, trade -- that I am extremely passionate about (I briefly ran an Arizona initiative to legalize gay marriage) but that don't directly affect me.  Yes, they affect many of my friends -- I have friends with potential immigration issues, I have friends with businesses getting hammered by tariffs, I have friends who are gay and married, I have friends that smoke rope and would rather not go to jail for it -- but not me directly.  On the other hand, Democrats suck on most business regulatory issues, trying in the near term to turn the US into California and in the long-term into Venezuela.  These are issues that DO affect me directly and greatly as a business owner.   Already I have had to red line states such as California, Oregon, Illinois, New York, and Rhode Island where I formerly did business but backed out because the business climate was impossible.  If this spreads to more states, I will be wiped out.

All of this is being made worse as both parties have started to get worse in the areas where they were traditionally more sensible.  Republicans have abandoned whatever free market credentials they had by pursuing trade protectionism and increased restrictions on companies trying to hire foreign workers.  Democrats are in the process of turning against free speech and have started sticking their nose in the bedroom (for example, by shifting the discussion of sex work to "trafficking," Republicans have successfully gotten Democrats to turn against a number of sorts of sexual freedom).

For years I have voted against my personal interests in elections, because my interests did not seem as weighty as other issues in play.  Folks are being denied basic civil rights, so am I really going to vote for the folks enabling that just to avoid (admittedly costly and loony) California meal break laws to be applied in Arizona? Now, though, I am starting to rethink this position.  In part because threats to businesses like me are more existential, and part because I am exhausted spending time defending other people's rights who in turn actively work to take away mine.  For certain offices like sheriff, that don't affect my business, I will still be voting as I always have -- which person is least likely to harass the sh*t out of certain marginalized groups.  But for others, and particularly the national offices, I am thinking about voting a straight "it's all about me" ticket (I am reminded, ironically, of the old "Me, Al Franken" SNL news bit he used to do.)

By the way, you might ask, "Coyote, you are a libertarian, why not just vote for the Libertarian candidate."  Good question.  Well, it turns out that the Arizona state legislature changed the rules for third parties explicitly to get the libertarian party off the ballot and prevent libertarians from "taking" votes from Republicans.  Seriously, they were not even subtle about it.  Instead of having to get a certain percentage of libertarians to sign a petition to get on the ballot, libertarian candidates now have to get a certain percentage of all independents to sign a petitions to get on the ballot.  This is an very high bar and one that most libertarians could not clear this year (cynically, somehow the rules allowed green candidates to get on easier as Republicans want them on the ballot to "steal" votes from Democrats.)  This is the #1 reason I may not vote tomorrow at all -- I cannot vote for our Marxist Democratic candidate for Senator, but I refuse to be forced to vote for the Republican.  Ugh.

The other day, in writing about how I think Black Lives Matter has lost its way, I said that I supported their goal of increasing accountability of police forces but that goal was going to take a lot of hard, nuts-and-bolts legislative and policy steps that BLM seems uninterested in pursuing.  This article from Reuters (via link from Overlawyered) gives one an idea of some of the issues that exist:

The episode is a telling snapshot of the power police unions flex across the United States, using political might to cement contracts that often provide a shield of protection to officers accused of misdeeds and erect barriers to residents complaining of abuse.

From city to city, union contracts have become just as crucial in governing departments as police manuals and city charters. Yet those contracts are coming under scrutiny amid civil rights protests over alleged police abuses, including shootings of unarmed black subjects.

Reuters, examining the fine print of 82 police union contracts in large cities across the country, found a pattern of protections afforded the men and women in blue:

• A majority of the contracts call for departments to erase disciplinary records, some after just six months, making it difficult to fire officers with a history of abuses. In 18 cities, suspensions are erased in three years or less. In Anchorage, Alaska, suspensions, demotions and disciplinary transfers are removed after two years.

• Nearly half of the contracts allow officers accused of misconduct to access the entire investigative file – including witness statements, GPS readouts, photos, videos and notes from the internal investigation – before being interrogated.

• Twenty cities, including San Antonio, allow officers accused of misconduct to forfeit sick leave or holiday and vacation time rather than serve suspensions.

• Eighteen cities require an officer’s written consent before the department publicly releases documents involving prior discipline or internal investigations.

• Contracts in 17 cities set time limits for citizens to file complaints about police officers – some as short as 30 days. Nine cities restrict anonymous complaints from being investigated.

Police and their supporters will say that Police have a particularly dangerous job and need such extra process protections.  In fact, while there are dangers, it is certainly not among the most dangerous jobs (trash collectors are twice as likely to die on the job than police).  I would argue that we give the police unique powers -- to use violence and to take away a persons liberty -- not possessed by any other citizens and thus we should expect more rather than fewer accountability provisions to go with these special powers.

I will say that I am not particularly optimistic about progress in this area.  The Right tends to fetishize police and are tend to oppose any restrictions on police.  The Left is the natural home for police reform, but most on the Left are loath to take on public employee unions, probably their strongest base of political power, and most of these changes (as seen above) require challenging the police unions.  Black Lives Matter brought a lot of focus to these issues, but they simply can't seem to get past disruption and into policy changes and legislation, and besides the group appears to have been hijacked by the Left to be a vehicle for generic protests of Progressive causes like climate change legislation.

My personal reaction was that Trump's speech was horrifying, a dystopian vision that bears no relationship to what is actually going on in this country (e.g. violent crime continues to fall, trade continues to make us wealthier, immigrants continue to make productive contributions, etc).  Peter Suderman has more in case you missed it.

But in Arnold Kling's 3-axis model of politics, the speech made perfect sense.   Trump has decided he is going to run hard on the civilization-barbarism axis.  The barbarians are at the gates, and his opponents are either too weak to deal with them or are actually in league with the barbarians.  He is the strong leader who will turn them back and make everyone safe again.  We're not going to trade with the barbarians, we are not going to treat with them, and we are not going to waste civil rights on them.  Ugh.  Trump is working hard to make me feel the victim, but I don't accept victim status.

I am not sure if this is marginally better or worse than what we are going to get at the Democratic Convention, where we will get four days of hearing that I personally am the bad guy and source of all misery in the world and the person that needs to be regulated harder and looted more furiously.   I almost prefer the Democratic approach, because at least evil is being done against me rather than in my name.

Because about 5 seconds after they are passed, government officials are scheming to use the laws against non-terrorists to protect themselves from criticism.

Twenty-four environmental activists have been placed under house arrest ahead of the Paris climate summit, using France’s state of emergency laws. Two of them slammed an attack on civil liberties in an interview with FRANCE 24....

The officers handed Amélie a restraining order informing her that she can no longer leave Rennes, is required to register three times a day at the local police station, and must stay at home between 8pm and 6am.

The order ends on December 12, the day the Paris climate summit draws to a close....

Citing the heightened terrorist threat, French authorities have issued a blanket ban on demonstrations – including all rallies planned to coincide with the climate summit, which Hollande is due to formally open on Monday.

This justification is about as lame as them come:

AFP news agency has had access to the restraining notices. It says they point to the “threat to public order” posed by radical campaigners, noting that security forces “must not be distracted from the task of combating the terrorist threat”.

Note that the police had absolutely no evidence that these folks were planning any violence, or even that they were planning any particular sort of protest.  This was a classic "round up the usual suspects" dragnet of anyone who had made a name for themselves protesting at green causes in the past.

Postscript:  Yes, I know that these protesters and I would have very little common ground on environmental issues.  So what?  There is nothing more important than supporting the civil rights of those with whom one disagrees.

And yes, I do have the sneaking suspicion that many of the very same people caught up in this dragnet would cheer if I and other skeptics were similarly rounded up for our speech by the government.  But that is exactly the point.  There are people who, if in power, would like to have me rounded up.  So it is important to stand firm against any precedent allowing the government to have these powers.  Else the only thing standing between me and jail is a single election.

Update:  Think that last bit is overly dramatic?  Think again.  I can guarantee you that you have some characteristic or belief that would cause someone in the world today, and probably many people, to want to put you up against the wall if they had the power to do so.  As proof, see:  all of history.

First, let me establish a few background facts.  Several years ago I headed an attempt to put a Constitutional amendment legalizing gay marriage on the ballot here in Arizona.  As far back as 2004 I had a gay couple running a campground, and faced a customer petition demanding we remove them because they promoted moral degeneracy by being gay (it's for the children!).  I told those customers to camp somewhere else, as we were not changing our staffing.  Since then I have probably hired more gay couples to run campgrounds than anyone else in the business.

So how could I possibly be opposed to this:

After a period of foreshadowing and rumor, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has now gone ahead and ruled that employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is forbidden under existing federal civil rights law, specifically the current ban on sex discrimination. Congress may have declined to pass the long-pending Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), but no matter; the commission can reach the same result on its own just by reinterpreting current law.

There are multiple problems with non-discrimination law as currently implemented and enforced in the US.  Larger companies, for example, struggle with disparate impact lawsuits from the EEOC, where statistical metrics that may have nothing to do with past discrimination are never-the-less used to justify discrimination penalties.

Smaller companies like mine tend to have a different problem.  It is an unfortunate fact of life that the employees who do the worst job and/or break the rules the most frequently tend to be the same ones with the least self-awareness.  As a result, no one wants to believe their termination is "fair", no matter how well documented or justified (I wrote yesterday that I have personally struggled with the same thing in my past employment).

Most folks grumble and walk away.  But what if one is in a "protected group" under discrimination law?  Now, not only is this person personally convinced that their firing was unfair, but there is a whole body of law geared to the assumption that their group may be treated unfairly.  There are also many lawyers and activists who will tell them that they were almost certainly treated unfairly.

So a fair percentage of people in protected groups whom we fire for cause will file complaints with the government or outright sue us for discrimination.  I will begin by saying that we have never lost a single one of these cases.   In one or two we paid someone a nominal amount just to save legal costs of pursuing the case to the bitter end, but none of these cases were even close.

This easy ability to sue, enabled by our current implementation of discrimination law, imposes a couple of costs on us.  First, each of these suits cost us about $20,000 to win (insurance companies are smart, they know exactly how this game works, and will not sell one an employment practices defense policy without at least a $25,000 deductible, particularly in California).  It takes a lot of effort for the government, even if neutral and not biased against employers as they are in California, to determine if the employee who was fired happened to be Eskimo or if the employee was fired because he was an Eskimo.  Unfortunately, the costs of this discovery are not symmetric.  It costs employees and their attorneys virtually nothing to take a shot at us with such discrimination cases, but costs us$20,000 each to defend and win (talk about Pyrrhic victories).  Which is why we sometimes will hand someone a few bucks even if their claim is absurd, just to avoid what turns out to be essentially legal blackmail.

Second, the threat of such suits and legal costs sometimes changes our behavior in ways that might be detrimental to our customers.  A natural response to this kind of threat is to be double careful in documenting issues with employees in protected groups, meaning their termination for cause is often delayed.  In a service business, almost anyone fired for cause has demonstrated characteristics that seriously hinder customer service, so drawing out the termination process also extends the negative impact on customers.

To make all this worse, many employees have discovered a legal dodge to enhance their post-employment lawsuits (I know that several advocacy groups in California recommend this tactic).  If the employee suspects he or she is about to be fired, they will, before getting fired, claim all sorts of past discrimination.  Now, when terminated, they can claim they where a whistle blower that that their termination was not for cause but really was retaliation against them for being a whistle-blower.

I remember one employee in California taking just this tactic, claiming discrimination just ahead of his termination, though he never presented any evidence beyond the vague claim.  We wasted weeks with an outside investigator checking into his claims, all while customer complaints about the employee continued to come in.  Eventually, we found nothing and fired him.  And got sued.  The case was so weak it was eventually dropped but it cost us -- you guessed it -- about $20,000 to defend.  Given that this was more than the entire amount this operation had made over five years, it was the straw that broke the camel's back and led to us walking about from that particular operation and over half of our other California business.

Conservatives say they are for free markets and free enterprise, but then I read stuff like this (have have added the bold):

Lynch supports Obama’s unconstitutional amnesty, believes illegal immigrants should have the same rights to employment as American citizens, opposes voter ID laws, advocates federal intrusion in local law enforcement under the guise of civil rights, supports the government taking private property on flimsy grounds, and offers no opposition to using drones against American citizens.

I agree with some of these concerns, but the one in bold is a real head scratcher.   What theory of free markets do Conservatives hold that accepts as valid the government licensing of labor?  On what possible grounds should a government bar me from hiring, say, a Russian immigrant to do my programming?  Or crazier still, why can I hire a Mexican in my Mexico office but can't have the same person working for me in my Phoenix office?

I have a theory about the Romans that is probably shared by nobody.  The Romans were strong and powerful and vital when they were creating a variety of citizenship types to accommodate multiple peoples who entered the empire in multiple ways.  In particular I think of civitas sine suffragio or citizenship without the vote.  But this was just one of many variations.   By the first century AD  (or CE per the modern academic trend), a lot of people of a lot of cultures and races and over a wide geography called themselves Romans.

By the end of the empire, the "reforms" of Diocletian and Constatine purged all flexibility from both governance and the economy (in sum, their laws amounted to the Directive 10-289 of the ancient world).  By the time the Empire started falling apart, they had lost all ability to integrate new peoples or innovate with citizenship models.  What was eventually called the Barbarian invasions began decades earlier as the attempted barbarian migrations.   The barbarians wanted to just settle peacefully.  And Rome desperately needed them -- their system was falling apart as their farms and countryside was depopulated from a combination of government policy and demographic collapses (e.g. plagues).  Rome desperately needed new people to settle their farms and form the new backbone of the army and the barbarians desperately wanted to settle and had a lot of military skill, but they couldn't make it work.

Last week, I wrote about how much liberal college sex vigilantism reminds me of the right-wing 1970's Death Wish vigilantism.  Here is Ezra Klein proving my point:

For that reason, the law is only worth the paper it’s written on if some of the critics’ fears come true. Critics worry that colleges will fill with cases in which campus boards convict young men (and, occasionally, young women) of sexual assault for genuinely ambiguous situations. Sadly, that’s necessary for the law’s success. It’s those cases—particularly the ones that feel genuinely unclear and maybe even unfair, the ones that become lore in frats and cautionary tales that fathers e-mail to their sons—that will convince men that they better Be Pretty Damn Sure.

Good God, I have had many differences with liberals on a variety of issues but I have always made common cause with them on civil rights and criminal justice issues.  I can't believe he wrote this.  What is the difference from what Klein writes and and having a 1960's southern sheriff argue that it is OK to hang a few black men because it has the benefit of making the rest of the African-American population more docile?   Last week I asked:

 It is the exact same kind of rules of criminal procedure that Dirty Harry and Paul Kersey would have applauded.  Unacknowledged is the inevitable growth of Type I errors (punishing the innocent) that are sure to result.  Do the proponents not understand this tradeoff?  Or, just like the archetypal southern sheriff believed vis a vis blacks, do women's groups assume that the convicted male "must be guilty of something".

I guess we have our answer.

Ken White at Popehat offers some useful insight to non-lawyers among us about compelled testimony (in the context of the Louis Lerner/IRS saga)

Some people have argued that Lois Lerner should be compelled to testify, either by court order or by grant of immunity. Lerner and her lawyers would love that, as it would make prosecuting her for any suspected wrongdoing incredibly difficult.

Compelled testimony is radioactive. If a witness is compelled to testify, in any subsequent proceeding against them the government has a heavy burden to prove that no part of the prosecution is derived from the compelled testimony, which is treated as immunized. This is called theKastigar doctrine:

"Once a defendant demonstrates that he has testified, under a state grant of immunity, to matters related to the federal prosecution, the federal authorities have the burden of showing that their evidence is not tainted by establishing that they had an independent, legitimate source for the disputed evidence." 378 U.S. at 378 U. S. 79 n. 18. This burden of proof, which we reaffirm as appropriate, is not limited to a negation of taint; rather, it imposes on the prosecution the affirmative duty to prove that the evidence it proposes to use is derived from a legitimate source wholly independent of the compelled testimony.

If I read this right, if the House were to compel her to testify, they might as well grant her immunity and be done with it.

Further on in the post, Ken points out an issue that I have been wondering about myself -- Those who want Lerner to testify are concerned with government arbitrary abuse of power for political purposes.  Given that, how can these same folks have any doubt as to why Lerner might plead the Fifth in front of a hostile and partisan House committee

I've been seeing a lot of comments to the effect of "why should Lois Lerner take the Fifth if she has nothing to hide?" Ironically these comments often come from people who profess to oppose expansive government power, and from people who accept the proposition that Lerner was part of wrongdoing in the first place — in other words, that there was a government conspiracy to target people with the machinery of the IRS for holding unpopular political views. Such people do not seem to grasp how their predicate assumptions answer their own question.

You take the Fifth because the government can't be trusted. You take the Fifth because what the truth is, and what the government thinks the truth is, are two very different things. You take the Fifth because even if you didn't do anything wrong your statements can be used as building blocks indishonest, or malicious, or politically motivated prosecutions against you. You take the Fifth because if you answer questions truthfully the government may still decide you are lying and prosecute you for lying.

Pardon me: if you accept the proposition that the government targets organizations for IRS scrutiny because of their political views, and you still say things like "why take the Fifth if you have nothing to hide", then you're either an idiot or a dishonest partisan hack.

If you want to get bent out of shape about something, you are welcome to wonder why Lerner is being investigated, apparently, by the hyper-partisan civil rights division of Justice rather than the public integrity section.  That, combined with President Obama's pre-judging of the DOJ's conclusions, is more of a red flag than Lerner's taking the Fifth.

Remember, Martha Stewart did not go to jail for securities fraud of any sort.  She went to jail for statements she made during the government investigation.

San Francisco has put deep restrictions employers' ability to check the criminal records of people they hire.  Yesterday the Senate blocked the nomination of Debo Adegbile to run the Civil Rights division of the Justice Department.  Senators were concerned about his actions as defense attorney for a man convicted of murdering a Philadelphia police officer.  Honestly, I have no problem with defense attorneys going to extremes to defend their clients.  I was more concerned with his historic support for ideas like this one in San Francisco:

Private sector employers in the City of San Francisco will have to comply with new “ban the box” legislation restricting questions about applicants’ criminal records on applications for employment and during job interviews.

The Fair Chance Ordinance, No. 17-14, prohibits employers with at least 20 employees from inquiring about a job applicant’s criminal history on an employment application, including “checking the box” to indicate criminal convictions or other criminal justice system involvement. It also prohibits covered employers from asking about criminal history during an initial interview. The law applies not only to regular employees, but also those performing contracted or contingent work, or working through a temporary agency. The Ordinance becomes operative on August 13, 2014.

After the initial interview, the Ordinance prohibits the employer from asking the applicant about the following:

• arrests that did not result in conviction, unless charges remain pending;
• completion of a diversion program;
• sealed or juvenile offenses;
• offense s that are more than seven years old from the date of sentencing; and
• offenses that are not misdemeanors or felonies, such as infractions.

The employer must provide the applicant with a written notice before making any inquiry into the applicant’s criminal history and display a poster in the workplace developed by the City’s Office of Labor Standards Enforcement (OLSE).

The Ordinance also restricts an employer’s ability to consider criminal history disclosed by an applicant. The information may be used in the selection process only if it has “a direct and specific negative bearing on that person’s ability to perform the duties or responsibilities necessarily related to the employment position.”

This is just stupid.  First, I cannot tell you how many government forms (e.g. corporate registrations) require me to report my criminal background -- this is outright hypocrisy, holding private employers to  a different standard than public agencies.  If they really are consistent, truly believing that criminal background checks are discriminatory because they have disparate impact, then they should be pushing to remove them for things like gun ownership.  Anyone really believe they will do this?

The bigger issue for businesses is that we don't make these checks because we are jerks, we make them for real financial reasons.  Specifically, we are worried about the health and safety of our employees and customers.  And for those that think that business owners are all evil and wouldn't care about such things, then we certainly care about getting sued for the actions of our employees.  As a business owner I have been made, particularly in California, responsible for any dumbass thing my employees do.  I will get sued if these employees do something wrong.  And worse, can you just see the trial -- plaintiff's attorney is going to be in front of the jury and say things like "this employee has a long criminal record and defendant did not even check, he did not even care about my client's safety."

The American Studies Association has voted to initiate an academic boycott of Israel ostensibly to protest its denial of civil rights to Palestinians in the occupied territories.   Forgetting for a moment Israel's unique security concerns (what would the US do if Mexico routinely lobbed rockets and artillery shells into US border towns), the implication is that the Palestinians in Israels have it worse than any other group in the world, since this is the first and only such boycott the ASA has ever entered into.  Is it really worse to be a Palestinian in Israel than, say, a woman anywhere in the Arab world** or about anyone in North Korea?  Do academics in Cuba have more ability to write honestly than they do in Israel?  I doubt it.

The only statement the ASA makes on the subject that I can find is in their FAQ on the boycott

7) Does the boycott resolution unfairly single out Israel? After all there are many unjust states in the world.

The boycott resolution responds to a request from the Palestinian people, including Palestinian academics and students, to act in solidarity. Because the U.S. contributes materially to the Israeli occupation, through significant financial and military aid - and, as such, is an important ally of the Israeli state - and because the occupation daily confiscates Palestinian land and devastates Palestinian lives, it is urgent to act now.

A couple of thoughts.  First, I am not sure why US material aid is relevant to choosing a boycott target.  I suppose the implication is that this boycott is aimed more at the US than at Israel itself.  But the question still stands as to why countries like Saudi Arabia, which receives a lot of US material aid as well, get a pass.  Second, the fact that Palestinian academics can seek international help tends to disprove that their situation is really the worst in the world.  I don't think the fact that the ASA is not hearing cries for help from liberal-minded academics in North Korea means that there is less of a problem in North Korea.  It means there is more of a problem.

I am not a student of anti-semitism, so I can't comment on how much it may explain this decision.  However, I think it is perfectly possible to explain the ASA's actions without resorting to anti-semitism as an explanation.  As background, remember that it is important for their social standing and prestige for liberal academics to take public positions to help the downtrodden in other countries.  This is fine -- not a bad incentive system to feel social pressure to speak out against injustice.  But the problem is that most sources of injustice are all either a) Leftish regimes the Left hesitates to criticize for ideological reasons or b) Islamic countries that the left hesitates to criticize because they have invested so much in calling conservatives Islamophobic.

So these leftish academics have a need to criticize, but feel constrained to only strongly criticizing center-right or right regimes.  The problem is that most of these are gone.  Allende, the Shah, Franco, South Africa -- all gone or changed.  All that's left is Israel (which is odd because it is actually fairly socialist but for some reason never treated as such by the Left).  So if we consider the universe of appropriate targets -- countries with civil rights and minority rights issues that are not leftish or socialist governments and not Islamic, then the ASA has been perfectly consistent, targeting every single country in that universe.

** To this day I am amazed how little heat the gender apartheid in the Arab world generates in the West in comparison to race apartheid in South Africa.  I am not an expert on either, but from what I have read I believe it is a true statement to say that blacks in apartheid South Africa had more freedom than women have today in Saudi Arabia.  Thoughts?

Update:  I twice emailed the ASA for a list of other countries or groups they have boycotted and twice got a blurb justifying why Israel was selected but with no direct answer to my question.  I guess I will take that as confirmation this is the first and only country they have ever targeted.  They did want to emphasize that the reason Israel was selected (I presume vs. other countries but they did not word it thus) had a lot to do with he fact that Israel was the number one recipient of US aid money (mostly military) and that it was this American connection given they represent American studies professors that made the difference.  Why Pakistan or Afghanistan, who treat their women far worse than Israel treats Palestinians, and which receive a lot of US aid, were not selected or considered or mentioned is not explained.  Basically, I would explain it thus:  "all the cool kids are doing it, and we determined that to remain among the cool kids we needed to do it too".  This is a prestige and signalling exercise, and it makes a lot more sense in that context, because then one can ask about the preferences of those to whom they are signalling, rather than try to figure out why Israel is somehow the worst human rights offender in the world.

By the way, by the ASA logic, it should be perfectly reasonable, even necessary, for European academic institutions to boycott US academic institutions because the US government gives aid to such a bad country like Israel.  This seems like it would be unfair to US academics who may even disagree with US policy, but no more unfair than to Israeli academics who are being punished for their government's policies.   I wonder how US academics would feel about being boycotted from European events and scholarship over US government policy?

The government just sent me a letter informing me that it is time, in the name of creating a race-blind society, to categorize all my employees by race, count them up, and report everyone's color to the government.

As an aside, I found this bit of privacy reassurance to employees to be pretty funny.  This is suggested language for an employer to use when asking, "um, by the way, can you tell me what race you are?"**

"The employer is subject to certain governmental recordkeeping and reporting requirements for the administration of civil rights laws and regulations. In order to comply with these laws, the employer invites employees to voluntarily self-identify their race or ethnicity. Submission of this information is voluntary and refusal to provide it will not subject you to any adverse treatment. The information obtained will be kept confidential and may only be used in accordance with the provisions of applicable laws, executive orders, and regulations, including those that require the information to be summarized and reported to the federal government for civil rights enforcement. When reported, data will not identify any specific individual."

So the private data you share will only be used if Congress writes a law, the President issues an executive order, or a bureaucrat writes a rule saying they can use it.  And this is comforting?  Our President claims the right to assassinate Americans by executive order, for God sakes, and this paragraph makes people feel better about categorizing themselves with the government in ways that, in the past, have been used by numerous governments in a variety of pogroms.

** I do not allow my supervisors to even ask.  We just do our best from our knowledge of all the employees.  My vision of the relationship I have with my employees does not include inquiring about their race (or religion, or sexual orientation) in an official capacity.  It also, does not encompass testing their bodily fluids, which is why I refuse to bid on management contracts that require drug testing of our employees.

I thought this was an interesting hypothesis, that the inability of coporations to use aptitude tests on potential hires (something that has been effectively killed by civil rights suits) has led to the increased reliance on college credentials as a screening mechanism.

I think there is an element of truth to this, but I suspect this would have happened anyway as the presure to cut costs caused companies to push their candidate evaluation and screening onto other institutions.  As I wrote a while back

There is some rationality in this approach [to hiring mainly from the Ivies] – it is not all mindless snobbism.   Take Princeton.  It screens something like 25,000 already exceptional applicants down to just 1500, and then further carefully monitors their performance through intensive contact over a four year period.  This is WAY more work and resources than a private firm could ever apply to the hiring process.  In effect, by limiting their hiring to just a few top schools, they are outsourcing a lot of their performance evaluation work to those schools.

I don't know if these percentages are entirely correct - I would argue the education / skills component of my mechanical engineering degree was higher than 10%, but that may be just my personal bias - but the basic approach seems sound

Peter Thiel describes higher education as a "giant selection mechanism" and estimates that only 10% of the value of a college degree comes from actual learning, and 50% of the value comes from selection (getting into a selective university) and 40% comes from signalling (graduating from a selective college becomes known to employers).  If employers could use intelligence tests instead of college degrees as measures of aptitude, it might be a lot more efficient and more cost-effective than the current practice of using very expensive four-year college degrees that add very little in terms of educational value (at least according to Thiel).

Though it's a high bar given what has been going on recently, this is the most aggravating thing I have read this week, via Glen Reynolds:

Robert and Patricia Haynes live in Michigan with their two adult children, who have cerebral palsy. The state government provides the family with insurance through Medicaid, but also treats them as caregivers. For the SEIU, this makes them public employees and thus members of the union, which receives $30 out of the family's monthly Medicaid subsidy. The Michigan Quality Community Care Council (MQC3) deducts union dues on behalf of SEIU.

Michigan Department of Community Health Director Olga Dazzo explained the process in to her members of her staff.  "MQC3 basically runs the program for SEIU and passes the union dues from the state to the union," she wrote in an emailobtained by the Mackinac Center. Initiated in 2006 under then-Gov. Jennifer Granholm, D-Mich., the plan reportedly provides the SEIU with $6 million annually in union dues deducted from those Medicaid subsidies.

“We're not even home health care workers. We're just parents taking care of our kids,” Robert Haynes, a retired Detroit police officer, told the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. “Our daughter is 34 and our son is 30. They have cerebral palsy. They are basically like 6-month-olds in adult bodies. They need to be fed and they wear diapers. We could sure use that $30 a month that's being sent to the union.”

This is a microcosm of the typical liberal fail -- a group or agency does initial good work (private unions in the early 2oth century, civil rights groups in the 60's and 70's, the EPA in the early 70's) but refuse to go away and declare victory, instead morphing into self-sustaining parasites whose only concern is their own survival.

Yet more crap to keep up with as an employer

Today the NLRB released its final rule mandating all private sector employers subject to the National Labor Relations Act to post notices informing employees of their rights under the Act. The final rule is scheduled to be published in the Federal Register on August 30, 2011. Posting of the Employee Rights Notice becomes effective November 14, 2011. Failure to post will be an unfair labor practice....

Failure to post the Notice will constitute an unfair labor practice which may be filed with the NLRB by any person. Further, the failure to post the Notice will be deemed evidence of anti-union animus or motivation where employers are alleged to have interfered, restrained, or coerced or otherwise discriminated against employees to encourage or discourage union membership or activity.

We already spend a thousand bucks a year or so with printing companies that keep us supplied with updated signs for all of our locations.  At some point we are going to have to buy billboards to fit all the stuff we are required to post -- minimum wage notices, NLRB notices, civil rights policies, occupancy permits, sales tax licenses, liquor licenses, egg licenses, cigarette licences, fire inspections, health inspections. Soon I am sure we will have a couple of square feet of Obamacare notices.

Often we libertarians think of making common cause with liberals on social and civil rights issues while making common cause with conservatives on fiscal and regulatory issues.

But these are rules of thumb, as often those we think of as allies on a certain issue abandon us in favor of statism.  Certain conservatives do when they give up capitalism for corporatism.  And Ken at Popehat has a fabulous example of a situation -- protection of defendant's rights in a trial -- where expected liberal support does not materialize.   He discusses the case of an accused child pornography creator

In real life, the accused has the right to review the evidence against him. But how you feel about that scenario can help to determine whether you lean liberal orlibertarian — whether you are suspicious of state power in all instances, or whether you trust the state and look to its firm hand when it comes to hot-button issues, like OMG THINK OF THE CHILDREN!

We’ve been conditioned by the culture to expect that “liberal” and “supportive of due process and fundamental fairness to all people accused of crimes” go hand-in-hand. It’s a lie.

I think the same holds true in other circumstances, like rape trials.  Rights liberals would normally fight for, say, in the case of an accused black murderer in Mississippi were totally tossed aside for white college students accused of rape at Duke.

Allowing this kind of hell to exist has got to be one of the worst systematic civil rights violations that still exist in this country

The U.S. Department of Justice recently released its first-ever estimate of the number of inmates who are sexually abused in America each year. According to the department’s data, which are based on nationwide surveys of prison and jail inmates as well as young people in juvenile detention centers, at least 216,600 inmates were victimized in 2008 alone. Contrary to popular belief, most of the perpetrators were not other prisoners but staff members—corrections officials whose job it is to keep inmates safe. On average, each victim was abused between three and five times over the course of the year. The vast majority were too fearful of reprisals to seek help or file a formal complaint.

Just to calibrate, the total number of sexual assaults reported outside of prisons in the US is something like 190,000 a year.

Sexual violence is not an inevitable part of prison life. On the contrary, it is highly preventable. Corrections officials who are committed to running safe facilities train their staff thoroughly. They make sure that inmates who are especially vulnerable to abuse—such as small, mentally ill, and gay or transgender detainees—are not housed with likely perpetrators. And they hold those who commit sexual assaults accountable, even if they are colleagues.

But many corrections administrators are reluctant to make sexual abuse prevention a top priority, preferring to maintain the status quo rather than acknowledge the role their own employees play. Others are actually fighting reform efforts, claiming, in spite of the evidence, that sexual violence is rare.

This resistance is reflected in the slow implementation of the Prison Rape Elimination Act, which Congress unanimously passed in 2003. The law mandated binding national standards to help end sexual abuse in detention. But almost eight years later, the Justice Department has yet to promulgate final standards.

Take California for example, where the prison guard union is among the most powerful in the country.  Given how far in the tank legislators in that state are for their public unions, it is hugely unlikely this will get addressed any time soon

I don't write about the Middle East much because its a big muddle that requires a lot more knowledge than I have to comment on seriously.

I will say this about Israel, though:  I too would love to see better civil rights performance at times (just as I would like to see better performance from our own damn country) but it's interesting to hypothesize what the US would do in similar circumstances.  After watching our post-9/11 Constitutional rollback, I wonder what other extreme steps we would be taking if, say, Mexican rockets routinely landed in San Diego or Nogales or El Paso.  One does not have to go too far out on a limb to call the Israeli response "restrained," at least in comparison to what the US would do in parallel circumstances.  Not to mention our reaction if a major foreign leader came to our country and urged us to give back the Gadsden Purchase as a solution.

The Civil Rights movement can officially declare victory, if this is the kind of racism being faced by African Americans today.  Seriously, if the harms are really this trivial, let's move on to other issues.  If there is still meaningful racism out there, let's stop clogging the courts and wasting our time with this kind of trivial BS and work the real issues.

Postscript:  It could be that I am just not hip to modern lingo.  I suppose that the words "please turn off your cell phones during the movie" is actually a well known code phrase meaning "back to slavery all of you" and I am just not aware.  If I am missing something, please let me know so I too can feel appropriately victimized next time I go see a movie.

One aspect of the TSA debate I find hilarious as a libertarian is that we get to see yet another example of partisans switching sides on an issues based on whose team is in the White House.  Since when have Republicans had this deeply held concern about liberty and privacy vs. security against terrorism.  And now leftie Kevin Drum steps up to say that all the extract screening makes sense (to my college roommate Brink Lindsey:  Sorry, but the whole liberaltarian thing is a myth.  When in power, they seem to act just as authoritarian on social and civil rights issues as Conservatives).

Anyway, Drum is certainly not full-bore backing the TSA, but he does write

I hate the TSA screening process. Everyone hates the TSA screening process. You'd be crazy not to. It's intrusive, annoying, and time-wasting. It treats us all like common criminals even though most of us are just ordinary schlubs trying to get on a plane and go somewhere.

But guess what? The fact that you personally are annoyed "” you! an educated white-collar professional! "” doesn't mean that the process is idiotic. I've heard it called "security theater" so many times I'd be rich if I had a nickel for each time it popped up in my browser, but although the anti-TSA rants are often cathartic and amusing, they've never made much sense to me. All the crap that TSA goes through actually seems pretty clearly directed at improving the security of air travel.

The point is not, as implied by Drum, that current TSA screening isn't protection against certain types of threats. Let's be generous and assume that the TSA's screening, generally concocted in a barn-door approach after someone tries a particular approach, is effective at catching the threats it is designed to catch.

The point is that nearly anyone with a room temperature IQ can think of 20 ways to attack an airplane that is not covered by the screening. If there are, say, a hundred imaginable threats, how much privacy do you want to give up to protect yourself from 35 of them?

For example, you know what is in the cargo hold below your seat? The US Mail. You know how much screening is performed on the US Mail? Zero. How hard would it be to wire up a package with a bomb and an altimeter, or perhaps just a noise sensor, and send it off airmail.  They screen the crap out of your bags and body and then throw them on the plane right next to a bunch of anonymous, unscrutinized cargo.  And that is just one example.

Patrick at Popehat observes how a media outlet probably missed the fact that they were hearing sarcasm.  But there is a very good explanation of why sarcasm does not work on the web.  Think of a couple of sarcastic comments, like "Boy that Joe Arpaio is sure a friend of civil rights" or "wow, that Cynthia McKinney is one sharp legislator."  The problem is that on the web, there are likely any number of people arguing, quite seriously, that Arpaio is the greatest friend the Constitution ever had or that McKinney is a bastion of well-reasoned, sober deliberation.  We are getting to the day that without regularly reading an author on the web, it is virtually impossible to be sure a given remark is sarcasm.  I mean, if I didn't know where he stood politically, I would have initially pegged Kevin Drum's assertion that Tip O'Neil cut a deal to have poor people pay the taxes of rich people as some sort of clever joke.

Read this story, and then imagine if the facts had been reversed:

"A sports conference that always scheduled weekday basketball doubleheaders in which women's teams played the first game -- letting the men play in the later time slot -- has altered the practice, after an anonymous sex discrimination complaint charged that this made the women's games appear to be a "warm-up" act for the men's games.

Now, hoping to avoid possible gender equity suits, other athletic conferences are considering similar scheduling changes.  Last month, the Great Lakes Intercollegiate Athletics Conference announced that it would alternate from season to season the order in which men's and women's teams would play in doubleheaders. The men will play first this season, and the women will play first next season.

Dell Robinson, the conference commissioner, said the decision was made after the league received an inquiry in March from the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights. An anonymous complaint filed with the agency argued that the negative connotation conveyed by always having women's teams play first in these doubleheaders was detrimental to women's athletics."

So let's imagine a alternate world where women's basketball games had always traditionally been played in the second game of the double-header, after men's games.  Does anyone believe that the civil rights folks wouldn't have filed a complaint saying

Having women's games always played after men's games makes them appear to be an after-thought to the main contest, positioning the game later in the prime social hours where potential student fans will be more likely to leave early and head to the bar instead of staying to watch.  The negative connotation conveyed by always having women't teams play last in these doubleheaders is detrimental to women's athletics.

See, its easy to be a race/gender advocate.

The title is from a quote by Representative Peter King, lamenting that the Feds might actually have the gall to Mirandize an American citizen who has been arrested.

Miranda warnings are not actually required per se, but statements by un-Mirandized suspects will generally be tossed out of court.  So I think the whole Miranda thing is overblown, but Representative King's words tend to summarize for me the slippery slope of civil rights exceptions.  Someday, you too may be the "but still."

On top of Mr. King's statement and our local Sheriff's continuing proclivity to walk into businesses and zip-tie everyone with brown skin until they can produce birth certifications  (yes, he did it again last month and again the other day) comes Joe Lieberman's new bit of law and order paranoia.  Apparently, after watching a 24-hour festival of 1970's Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson crime dramas, Lieberman proposed:

Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Scott Brown (R-MA), joined on the House side by Reps. Jason Altmire (D-PA) and Charlie Dent (R-PA), today introduced a little publicity stunt in legislative form called the Terrorist Expatriation Act, making good on Lieberman's pledge to find a way to strip the citizenship of Americans"”whether naturalized or native born"”who are suspected of aiding terrorist groups. It does so by amending the Immigration and Nationality Act, which lays out the various conditions under which a person may renounce or be deprived of citizenship....

Finally, note that the bill's definition of "material support" for terrorist groups explicitly invokes the criminal statute covering such actions.  Which is to say, revocation of citizenship under the new bill is triggered by committing a particular federal crime. Except that the Immigration and Nationality Act only requires that one of the predicates for revocation be established by a "preponderance of the evidence." So in effect, the bill takes what is already a crime and says: Proof of guilt "beyond a reasonable doubt" is no longer a prerequisite for the imposition of punishment for this crime.

"Preponderance of the evidence" is the same standard under which McDonald's lost several million dollars because its coffee was too hot.

Conor Friedersdorf at Andrew Sullivan's blog has a number of comments from Arizona readers about why, despite all his nuttiness and outright hostility to civil rights, Joe Arpaio just keeps on getting elected here in Phoenix.

One sample:

...Arpaio is media-savvy, and picks his enemies well.  By this I don't mean his foes in county government or in the media, I mean the groups on whom he concentrates the resources of his office.  Last night, as every year about this time, all of the TV stations showed footage from this year's deadbeat dad roundup, along with the smirking Sheriff talking about how terrible it was that kids were going to have a lousy Xmas because these deadbeat dads hadn't been paying child support.  He also goes after animal cruelty cases with a vengeance.  I think he has a finely-tuned sense of which "others' are particularly viewed with scorn by his target supporters, and goes after them with a vengeance.  There is no doubt that many Maricopa county residents feel safer as a result of his policies, but also equally that his policies are never designed to impact negatively those supporters who see themselves as law-abiding (and hence won't ever be in jail), are white (and hence will never be racially profiled), and don't fit into any of the other classes that he has singled out for opprobrium.

On a side topic, one commenter does take this out of context:

But let's not forget we're in a state that effectively voted by referendum NOT to honor Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the 90's

The issue as I remember it was not of honoring Martin Luther King Jr. but of adding another paid holiday for state workers.  As I recall, Republicans readily agreed to a state holiday for MLK as long as government workers gave up one somewhere else on the calendar, so it wasn't about MLK per se but about whether government employees should be allowed an extra paid day off.

A blog that specializes in criticizing the Phoenix police argues that Judge Gary Donahoe, recent target of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, has a bad record of aiding and abetting overly-easy search warrants.  I am willing to believe that -- I think about every judge in the nation is too close to police and prosecutors on search warrant issues.  But I don't think this is why Sheriff Joe is after him.  Sheriff Joe likes to make the wrong-address no-knock raid as much as anyone, and protection of civil rights has never been in Arpaio's top 100 or so concerns.  So Danahoe may have issues, but I Sheriff Joe's charges against him are likely pure power play.

I remember the fuss a number of years ago that a disproportionate number of heavily polluting industrial plants were in poorer neighborhoods.  I suppose it is no surprise that companies look to site plants where there are large labor forces and cheap land, which probably means that they are not going to buy of large swaths of Grosse Pointe for their new auto plant.  But there also seemed to be some chicken and egg here - residential land around industrial tracts probably attract residents who can't afford to live somewhere else.

Anyway, I had never realized just how destructive public policy had become in response to this "problem," nor how much our current climate czar had to do with it:

Case in point is "Climate Czar" Carol Browner, former EPA chief under Bill Clinton and ghostwriter of Al Gore's apocalyptic book Earth in the Balance. In the late 1990s, Browner championed the effort to apply Title VII U.S. civil rights law to plant permitting, arguing that locating industrial facilities in majority black cities "disproportionately impacted" minorities and was there "environmental racism."The policy provoked outrage among those black elected officials across the country who believe it's a good thing to have jobs available in minority areas.

Some of those officials were in Michigan, where Browner's green allies tried to use EPA rules to shut down electric power facilities and auto plants. At the time, Browner had already bagged the pelts of two major facilities in Louisiana -- a plastics plant and nuclear fuel facility -- that would have brought hundreds of jobs to minorities.

As can be expected, African-American politicians who were told it was racist to locate jobs in their communities were not amused:

Horrified by this threat to jobs within poor communities, Detroit mayor Dennis Archer led the primarily Democratic U.S. Conference of Mayors to scrap "green redlining" -- so called because the EPA actually drew circles around plants located in minority areas that would encourage lawsuits. The mayors were joined by a rainbow coalition of groups from the National Association of Black County Officials to Republican pols like L.A.'s Richard Riordan and Michigan Rep. Joe Knollenberg.

Addressing the Black Chamber of Commerce's annual meeting, then-U.S. Chamber president Thomas Donahue said: "I'm trying to think of a policy that would be more effective in driving away entrepreneurs and jobs from economically disadvantaged areas -- and I can't do it."

Apparently, the whole to-do was BS anyway

Mastio's News investigation further uncovered that Browner's EPA had suppressed documents finding that there was not a corporate conspiracy to locate polluting industries in black areas (in fact, they are mostly in white areas), and the bipartisan outrage eventually led to a Congressional vote blocking the EPA rule.