Cathy Young checks out a much-told anecdote of misogyny, and finds that there isn’t much there. [Minding the Campus]
Archive for May, 2013
IRS scandal, cont’d: “It was pretty much a proctology exam through your earlobe”
- As Ezra Klein says IRS furor has nowhere to go, more and more keeps tumbling out [Althouse, Examiner, flashback, Chronicle of Philanthropy, MSNBC video, WaPo, WSJ (“Higher-Ups Knew of IRS Case”), Kim Strassel/WSJ]
- Background: partisans on both sides have taken shifting positions of convenience on whether nonprofit political advocacy is abuse of the tax laws or free speech worthy of protection [Dave Weigel] Now if only the IRS would stop behaving like one of the partisans [Scott Walter, NY Post] Ideas for reform [Conor Friedersdorf]
- “A note on 501 (c)4 corporations” [Coyote] Paul Caron/TaxProf latest daily link roundup;
- Apologia for Service’s misconduct does no credit to New Republic or Noam Scheiber [Nick Gillespie]
- Echoing my post of yesterday, Jonathan Adler at Volokh Conspiracy seeks to distinguish between political affiliations of IRS personnel that have some arguable relevance to the scandal, and those that really seem like stretching;
- If you missed it: Cato video, “The I.R.S. Abusing Americans is Nothing New.”
“Portland sued for workplace fragrance use”
Two years ago the city of Portland, Ore. became the first to adopt a voluntary policy against fragrance use in city offices. (A similar Detroit measure had been taken in response to a lawsuit.) Now Julee Reynolds, a city worker who says she suffers from multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS), has sued Portland for allegedly not doing enough to enforce the policy. [KOIN; earlier here, here, etc.]
15,989 views yesterday on Overlawyered
One of our best traffic days ever, fueled by an Andrew Sullivan link to our post correcting an overzealous effort to connect the dots in the IRS scandal.
Regulating across national lines
New SEC chairman Mary Jo White shows better sense about it than some newspaper editorialists that could be named [Louise Bennetts, Cato]
“Law Student Sues Law School For Implying He’s Litigious”
“Watch what you say about lawyers” is an old theme around here, but in light of developments at Wake Forest it might need to be extended to law students as well. [Above the Law, more]
Labor and employment roundup
- Gov. Christie vetoes bill enabling workers and job applicants to sue employers who asked about Facebook use [NJLRA, Star-Ledger, more]
- “Shockingly a British pub might want to hire British employees,” NYC Human Rights Commission sees things differently [Amy Alkon]
- Anticlimax: despite fears, NLRB won’t ban at-will disclaimers in employee handbooks [Jon Hyman]
- “Equally injurious to the children of the laboring classes is their utilization by their parents in theatrical and operatic shows” [Kyle Graham]
- Senate confirms plaintiffs’ class action attorney as newest appointee to EEOC [Stoel Rives]
- Public accounting: “Two advances for pension transparency” [Josh Barro]
- At least there’s one category of young worker for whom job prospects remain bright, namely kids of Andrew Cuomo’s friends [David Boaz]
The Daily Caller fires a blank at Lois Lerner
The IRS scandal is a genuine scandal, for sure; efforts to portray it as merely a “scandal” within quotation marks, as by the L.A. Times’s Michael Hiltzik, are well answered by Megan McArdle, Patterico, Ed Krayewski, and (implicitly in advance) by this Josh Barro column exploding the notion that 501(c)4 status was somehow intended only for volunteer fire departments and the like and not for politically engaged citizen groups.
Once the scandal momentum gets going, however, people start in on all sorts of efforts to connect dots that may not have any necessary connection or even qualify as dots at all. Example: at the Daily Caller this morning, reporter Patrick Howley is out with a story headlined, “Embattled IRS official Lois Lerner’s husband’s law firm has strong Obama connections.”
Curious, I read on to see which law firm with strong Obama connections Lerner’s husband, an attorney named Michael Miles, is a member of. It turned out to be Sutherland, Asbill & Brennan, a pillar of the Atlanta legal establishment known for its strong tax practice.
Sutherland, Asbill & Brennan is a so-called BigLaw firm. Per the American Lawyer’s profile, it has 387 lawyers and represents all sorts of clients, with an emphasis on corporate work across a wide range of industries.
So what’s the evidence that Sutherland has “strong Obama connections” or is tight with White House Democrats? Here it is: according to Howley, the firm:
hosted a voter registration organizing event for the 2012 Obama re-election campaign, praised President Obama’s policy work, and had one of its partners appointed by Obama to a key ambassadorship.
Really? In a 387-lawyer BigLaw firm, those are the strongest Obama links Howley was able to come up with? As with virtually all BigLaw firms, Sutherland has attorneys active in both parties who host events favorable to one side or the other. It took me only a minute or two on search engines to confirm that Sutherland lawyers and alumni are quite successful in landing prominent appointments under Republicans. Here’s a 14-year Sutherland alum (though he’d moved on to other employers in the interim) who served as National Executive Director of Lawyers for Bush-Cheney in 2000 and went on to a distinguished career as ambassador appointed by that administration. Here’s a Sutherland attorney (“top lawyer at the Pentagon for six years”) nominated by President George W. Bush to the Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.
Of course, some BigLaw firms do have a distinct coloration that falls toward one side of the political spectrum while tolerating the occasional maverick from the other. Is this true of Sutherland? I consulted the Open Secrets database and found that in the last election cycle the firm’s lawyers donated $41,700 to Mitt Romney and $35,413 to Barack Obama. In Congressional races, the firm’s lawyers donated $38,040 to Republican candidates and $25,350 to Democrats. The biggest recipient by far in the Congressional races? Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who got $16,250 from Sutherland lawyers. Overall, these figures would rank Sutherland as not a particularly heavy hitter among law firms in federal donations. Twenty other law firms’ attorneys gave upwards of $1.2 million in the last election cycle, mostly leaning much more toward the Democratic side than did the donations from Sutherland’s attorneys.
I suppose “Embattled IRS official Lois Lerner’s husband’s law firm has strong Ted Cruz connections” would have made for too confusing a headline on a Daily Caller lead story.
“No Benefit Seen in Sharp Limits on Salt in Diet”
“In a report that undercuts years of public health warnings, a prestigious group convened by the government says there is no good reason based on health outcomes for many Americans to drive their sodium consumption down to the very low levels recommended in national dietary guidelines.” [Gina Kolata, New York Times, on Institute of Medicine report; CBS News; Philadelphia Inquirer]
Schools roundup
- More commentators weigh in on the truly horrible new federal campus speech and discipline code [Harvey Silverglate /Juliana DeVries, Minding the Campus; Wendy Kaminer, The Atlantic; Will Creeley, HuffPo; Scott Greenfield; Reason TV; my two cents] More: Greg Lukianoff, WSJ.
- Feds: states must impose extensive disability-rights regime — including obligations to accept students with difficult accommodation needs — on private/religious schools participating in voucher programs [Bagenstos, Disability Law; Ramesh Ponnuru (noting that loading new regulatory burdens onto private and religious schools may not be displeasing to school choice opponents in the administration)] NYC’s famous selective/performance schools obliged to take special ed kids who can’t meet standard entrance or audition requirements [Inside Schools]
- Volunteer-led school band survives shutdown attempt by Oregon teachers’ union [Katherine Mangu-Ward]
- AFT: donate to groups that oppose our aims, and we’ll see that you pay [Jason Bedrick, Cato]
- Chicago: “Teachers union plans to file civil rights suits to stop school closings” [Chicago Tribune]
- Newly passed Minnesota “anti-bullying” law will expand state control over local schools [Pioneer Press] Court proceedings over alleged taunting and insults proliferate under New Jersey’s law [Star-Ledger via Reason]
- “Graduates, your ambition is the problem” [Roger Pilon on the president’s Ohio State commencement address]