Really?

Posted on October 23, 2018 by Michael Froomkin

My feed had the headline “VA official proudly displays KKK Grand Wizard portrait in his D.C. office” and quoted the official as saying about the portrait that, ‘I thought it was very nice’. Uh-huh. No one is that dumb, right?

I mean, I can sort of believe that a person might not know that Nathan Bedford Forrest was the founder of the Klan until someone pointed that out, but even so, how dumb do you have to be to hang a lighted portrait of a Confederate General in your federal government office? When nine out of 14 of your senior staff are Black? And then refuse to take it down when they point out the problem? Not credible.

And am I really supposed to believe that the VA has an “Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization”? Surely that belongs in the SBA, not the VA, right?

Well, shows you what I know. The article was from Boingboing, not the Onion. The Washington Post confirms the story and adds more damning details. And the VA does have an  “Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization”.  And someone with a decent supervisory civil service (not a Trump political appointee) job is really that dumb.

Posted in Onion/Not-Onion | Leave a comment

Twitter Follower Audit

Posted on October 22, 2018 by Michael Froomkin

SparkToro analyzes a random sample of 2,000 of your Twitter followers and tries to estimate how many are fake.  I did OK (love the spike at 9 out of 10), and given the methodology I think the 12% fake number is probably a slight over-estimate..

Posted in Internet | Leave a comment

If You Read One Thing Today

Posted on October 21, 2018 by Michael Froomkin

…make it Getting Out (the print title; online it’s the much wordier, “Could an Ex-Convict Become an Attorney? I Intended to Find Out”) by poet, father, Yale Law grad (and ex-con), Reginald Dwayne Betts.

Posted in Law: Practice, Readings | Leave a comment

Clarity

Posted on October 20, 2018 by Michael Froomkin

Really the Kevin Drum post, Saudis: Khashoggi Committed Suicide By Cop, Sort Of is so much easier to follow than the NYT version. Drum summarizes it like this:

The Saudis now say that they intended to negotiate a return to Saudi Arabia with Khashoggi, so they sent a 15-man team to meet him at the consulate. Fifteen men! Unfortunately, a fistfight broke out during the negotiations and one of the negotiators accidentally killed Khashoggi.

It seems odd that a 60-year-old man would pick a fight with 15 guys, doesn’t it? But that’s what happened. At that point, the Saudi team apparently went rogue and decided they had to cover up what happened. Luckily, they had come equipped with a bone saw and a forensic pathologist, so they were able to dismember the body and dispose of it. However, everyone on this rogue team has been arrested now, so the case is closed.

I’m pretty sure that a six-year-old could come up with a better story if he had two weeks to work on it.

Contrast the NYT:

Posted in Politics: International | Leave a comment

Student Debt Growing Quickly

Posted on October 19, 2018 by Michael Froomkin

I never used to worry about the morality of teaching in a private law school. But as the debt burden grew on students, I began to worry, and charts like this one from Naked Capitalism make me worry even more.

Unfortunately, many public law schools now charge comparable tuition (but some still don’t).

In any case, student debt of this magnitude is not sustainable, and even if it were the drag on people’s futures and life choices seems excessive. I think the first part of the answer is to bring down the cost of public college: we should return to the era, not so long ago, where you could pretty much finance your college education from a summer job.

Law school prices may still be too high even in that scenario, but at least the overall consequences for students wouldn’t be as bad.

What we do with the debt overhang, meanwhile, is a wicked problem. To simply forgive the debt would be a windfall for the debtors. As a taxpayer, I could live with that; the problem that bugs me is that it seems so unfair to the people who didn’t borrow or who paid down their debt, and those who made sacrifices to finance education or chose less-expensive and perhaps lesser alternatives…or who chose to forgo education entirely.

Posted in Econ & Money, Law School | 3 Comments

A Very Illuminating Chart

Posted on October 18, 2018 by Michael Froomkin

I knew there was a big difference, but not this big:

It’s even more striking when you consider that historically the FBI and other federal law enforcement bodies were strongly Republican. And in my lifetime, the GOP has made much more noise about ‘law and order’ too.

And of course we can reasonably expect the Trump number to balloon…

Posted in Politics: The Party of Sleaze | 3 Comments