Archive for February, 2007

Marcotte encore

John Edwards’ selection as his blogger-in-chief of Pandagon‘s Amanda Marcotte has mushroomed into what National Journal “Beltway Blogroll” terms “the first blog scandal of campaign 2008,” made more piquant by Marcotte’s quick move (documented in our Friday post) to delete her bizarrely abusive rantings about the Duke case once they began to attract attention. I should note that in our very active comments thread, Ted takes a different view than I do of the affair, and I explain in turn (in a comment kindly quoted by K.C. Johnson) why I think the episode does reflect poorly on Edwards’ campaign:

John Edwards’s life in the law and experience with the justice system is his major resume item dating back beyond the past few years, as well as the major reason this site has given his career extensive coverage. Moreover, the Duke case, which looks ever more like the Scottsboro Boys case of our era, has been convulsing his own state of North Carolina for month after month. Edwards’ dodging of the case — his apparently successful stifling of any urge to speak out at the plight of the falsely accused — might on its own stand as merely cowardly. Marcotte’s hiring, on the other hand, throws an even less attractive light on it, rather as if, in Scottsboro Boys days, an on-the-sidelines Southern senator took on as a major spokesperson someone who’d been yelling the Boys’ guilt from the rooftops in the most crudely prejudicial language.

On Marcotte’s quick removal of her Duke comments, Dale Franks at Q and O makes the legitimate point that there’s nothing intrinsically improper in bloggers’ going back to amend or delete past posts that they now realize are mistaken or which no longer reflect their evolving views. And Ted cautions, also quite fairly, against evaluating a blogger’s fitness for a real-world post by pointing to the most inflammatory of his or her thousands of past posts.

Part of what lends the Marcotte episode such a comic aspect, however, is the timing and nature of her post and later revision. Her vitriolic rant asserting the lacrosse players’ guilt was posted a mere two weeks ago, almost certainly at a point after (as the Atlanta airport reference indicates) she had already entered talks with the Edwards campaign and thus had reason to know that she might soon come under the heightened scrutiny accorded to an official spokesperson. These were not the impulsive utterances of a Net Newbie. Moreover, the temperate-sounding new “official stance” with which she replaced the scrubbed post is ludicrously different in both tone and content from the rant it replaced; at a quick reading, one might even take it for a defense of the lacrosse players. A closer examination of its dodgy language, however, reveals that she does not actually take anything back; there is no indication that she has reconsidered her view of Jan. 21 or sees it as being in need of actual correction.

As for whether Marcotte was just having a bad day and slipped into an abusiveness that is unrepresentative of her usual tone, even a cursory glance through her output at Pandagon makes clear that there is much more embarrassment for the Edwards campaign to come: a few examples are collected at LieStoppers (scroll to “Earlier Comments”), Michelle Malkin, and Creative Destruction.

Some further commentary: Common Sense Political Thought, Protein Wisdom, Mark Steyn @ NRO (“There are two Americas: one in which John Edwards gives bland speeches of soporific niceness, the other in which his campaign blogger unleashes foaming rants of stereotypically obsessive derangement.”), Patterico (& welcome Michelle Malkin readers).

Litigious Princetonians

One of my favorite pop-culture bloggers, fellow Chicago Law graduate Adam Bonin, spots a line in today’s New York Times Vows column

As their dating progressed, Ms. Wu researched Mr. Nobay online and learned that in 1998 he sued Princeton, unsuccessfully, for defamation after the university notified medical schools he had applied to that his applications contained misrepresentations and altered his academic record. (In court, he admitted misstatements but says he still believes some of what Princeton presented was inaccurate.)

—that obviously merited further investigation. Sure enough, AP reported in 1998:

The graduate, Rommel Nobay, had admitted he told numerous lies and half-truths in applying to Princeton and later to medical school. He claimed that he was part black and a National Merit Scholar and that a family of lepers had donated half their beggings to support his dream. … Nobay, 30, a computer science teacher from New Haven, admitted that he was not, in fact, a Merit Scholar and that a family of lepers had not helped send him to school. He also acknowledged that he doesn’t know whether he has any black blood.

Bonin notes an early 1990s suit by Princeton student Bruce L. Miller, who received $5.7 million after getting himself drunk and losing three limbs in a climb-a-train-plus-touch-high-voltage-wires-electrocution accident. (Regular Overlawyered readers know that this sort of suit doesn’t require a Princeton education.) But Bonin forgets to mention the drink-and-fall-off-the-Princeton-bell-tower lawsuit.

Infant mortality statistics

As I’ve noted other times on Overlawyered, United States infant mortality statistics are artificially high relative to other nations, because of the way they are tabulated. In the US, heroic efforts are taken to save the lives of premature infants; when those efforts fail, the infant mortality statistic goes up; other nations with rationed single-payer health care consider the same child “stillborn” and do not register the death in the infant mortality statistics.

Amber Taylor points out that I may have missed part of the story, and a part that I should be especially sensitive to: the effect of legal rules creating financial incentives to count stillborns as infant deaths. (& Apr. 8: response to the latter point from Linda Gorman of the Independence Institute).

More Super Bowl litigation threat coverage

More newspapers are covering the story raised by our January 31 post about the NFL forbidding Super Bowl parties and promotions. Notwithstanding the NFL threats, my heavily-blogger-attended annual Super Bowl party is still going forward, complete with the title “Super Bowl” on the Evite. (Stephanie Simon, “No sanctuary for Super Bowl flock”, LA Times, Feb. 3 (churches); Liz Benston, “Casinos not best seat in house for big game”, Las Vegas Sun, Feb. 2 (casinos)). (OT personal note: the latter story quotes my friend “Steve Fezzik”, who I knew when he was just an actuary with a real name, and who almost convinced me to leave the law in 2001 to team up with him as a professional gambler.)

Blame the messenger: Overstock’s $3.5 billion suit

With EPS of negative $3.14, Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne is regularly named as one of the worst CEO’s; as MarketWatch’s Herb Greenberg writes, “Byrne has done an atrocious job, proving himself inept at running a public company. And while his idea for Overstock is intriguing, his execution has been a failure, especially relative to what he led shareholders to expect. Worse, he has spent shareholder time and money using innuendo and lies to create a conspiracy theory that includes journalists (including yours truly), regulators, politicians and others as his company’s performance plummeted.” Overstock, apparently unable to make money through its business plan, has a new business plan: sue investment banks for $3.5 billion in California state court, blaming them for the 77% decline in stock price. The suit alleges shenanigans on controversial practices of naked short selling, but the economic theory of price manipulation and damages is simply bogus: if the perpetually-money-losing Overstock were really worth billions more, investors would have every incentive to squeeze the short-sellers, who don’t have the market power to manipulate the price. Forbes writes a sympathetic and unskeptical account of the lawsuit.

Disclosure: I lost an embarrassing amount of money investing in Overstock in 2006 by failing to sell it immediately when Byrne started blaming the company’s problems on short-sellers.

Meet John Edwards’s new blogger-in-chief

Well after the revelation of the undisclosed DNA results, the ATM, taxi and dorm alibis, the umpteen times the stripper has changed her story, Amanda Marcotte still is willing to blast the Duke Lacrosse Three as guilty, guilty, guilty; and what do you know, the John-Edwards-for-President campaign has just saluted Marcotte’s acuity by naming her its blogger-in-chief (Pandagon, Jan. 21, foul language galore; Edwards blog, Jan. 30; Blogger News Network, Jan. 30, via Taranto; LieStoppers, Feb. 1). It’s enough to distract attention from all the comic joshing over the Friend of the Downtrodden’s gigantic new residence, or “Suing-’em Palace” as Mark Steyn calls it (NRO “The Corner”, Jan. 30; Dean Barnett, Jan. 30).

Update: Marcotte has now (1 p.m. Friday) yanked down her original post of Jan. 21, and appears also to have deleted several comments, but GoogleCache still has it for the moment. Here is its text, in the spirit of Fair-Use-ery:

Naturally, my flight out of Atlanta has been delayed. Let’s hope it takes off when they say it will so I don’t miss my connecting flight home.

In the meantime, I’ve been sort of casually listening to CNN blaring throughout the waiting area and good f**king god is that channel pure evil. For awhile, I had to listen to how the poor dear lacrosse players at Duke are being persecuted just because they held someone down and f**ked her against her will—not rape, of course, because the charges have been thrown out. Can’t a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it? So unfair.

111 Responses to “Stuck at the airport again…..”

Further update (1:20 p.m. Friday): Here are two comments that Marcotte appears to have deleted from the original thread. The “In her part of the country” comment had already drawn criticism from readers on the LieStoppers site:

Amanda Marcotte Jan 21st, 2007 at 12:54 pm

Yes, how dare a rape victim act confused and bewildered like she was raped or something.

# Amanda Marcotte Jan 21st, 2007 at 2:03 pm

Natalia, do you know the details of the case? If so, why do you think a women enthusiastically jumped into a sexual situation with men making slavery jokes at her? Furthermore, what is your theory on why she supposedly looooooved having sex with guys holding her facedown on the bathroom floor? There’s no “if” they behaved in a disrespectful manner. We have conclusive evidence that happened.

This is about race and class and gender in every way, and there’s basically no way this woman was going to see justice. In her part of the country, both women and black people are seen as subhuman objects to be used and abused by white men.

Plus: I see that K.C. Johnson (“Durham in Wonderland“) is on the case in typically thorough and powerful fashion. Marcotte also provides this further comment reacting to her critics (“if I see the words ‘Duke’ or ‘lacrosse’ in an email that has the whiff of accusatory tone, I’m deleting it and simply not going to reply to it”).

And again (11:30 p.m. Friday): In a further post, K.C. Johnson cites chapter and verse about how Marcotte’s hiring won much praise for the Edwards folks as a shrewd way of reaching out to progressive netroots forces. More discussion: TalkLeft forums, Betsy Newmark, Jeff Taylor at Reason “Hit and Run” (R-rated), Outside the Beltway, Patrick Ruffini, South of Heaven, Little Miss Attila, Brainster; & welcome Glenn Reynolds, Kevin O’Keefe and Michelle Malkin readers.

Further updates: see Feb. 4, Feb. 7, Feb. 8, Feb. 12 (Marcotte quits Edwards post), Feb. 16.

Overzealous Trademark Enforcement Files: National Pork Board

A breastfeeding activist promotes, inter alia, t-shirts with the slogan “The other white milk.” This has the National Pork Board, with its slogan “The other white meat,” up in arms, and a Faegre & Benson attorney issued a ceast-and-desist letter. The shirt wasn’t a big seller (and CafePress quickly acceded to the threat), so it’s really not about the money, but Jennifer Laycock isn’t happy about the bullying (h/t W.C.).

Notable quote

“We cannot permit federal lawsuits to be transformed into amorphous vehicles for the rectification of all alleged wrongs” — a three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit (Chief Judge James Edmondson and Judges James Hill and Phyllis Kravitch), refusing to declare Alabama’s property tax system an unconstitutional cause of racial segregation in its institutions of higher education. (Tom Gordon, “Appeals court says tax system doesn’t segregate”, Birmingham News, Feb. 1; “Ruling backs state in higher-ed case”, AP/Montgomery Advertiser, Feb. 2).

“Plaintiff strikes out in lawsuit over Angels bag giveaway”

“A judge tossed out a sex and age discrimination lawsuit Thursday against Angels baseball that claimed thousands of men and juveniles were wronged during a promotional giveaway at a Mother’s Day game. The gift – a red nylon tote bag – was offered free only to women age 18 and older.” (Erik Ortiz, Orange County Register, Feb. 2; Lex Icon, Feb. 1). For more on the action by attorney Alfred Rava and his client Michael Cohn, see May 11, May 23, and Aug. 19, 2006.