…and miss the more significant role of former Bloomberg health czar Thomas Frieden at the Centers for Disease Control. The Blaze covers my remarks yesterday at a Heritage panel discussion on food freedom.
More: At Independent Women’s Forum, Julie Gunlock thinks I’m letting the First Lady off the hook a bit too much.
On Aug. 27, during the reporter-vacation lull before Labor Day, the Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs finalized its controversial rules requiring federal contractors to adopt “benchmarks” of 7 percent disabled employees in their workforce, a higher percentage than apparently prevails in the workforce at large. [Earlier here, here, here, etc.] OFCCP director Patricia Shiu insists the initiative should not be described as quotas, since contractors falling short will not suffer automatic penalty. Instead, they’ll be thrown into a process of auditing and having their internal procedures put under review and having to demonstrate progress and that sort of thing. Nothing penalty-like about that! Also, if their willingness to go along with this process doesn’t please the federal overseers, they can eventually be debarred from any future contract work, a devastating economic sanction for many firms. Crucially, the feds are applying the regulation to firms’ entire workforce even if only a single division has federal contracts, so that if, say, a food company has one line of business that caters to the military, and nineteen others that do no federal contracting whatsoever, all twenty lines must adopt the quot… sorry, benchmarks. [Cleveland Plain Dealer, OFCCP, Government Executive, Federal News Radio]
I’ll be speaking at lunchtime Wednesday, Sept. 25 to the University of Michigan Law School’s Federalist Society chapter, on my book Schools for Misrule. Details here.
Whether or not the Drug War counts as an irresistible force, it seems to have run into an immovable object in the form of New York City teacher tenure [New York Law Journal]:
Termination was too harsh a penalty for a tenured teacher who created a spurt of news stories after he was found with bags of heroin when trying to enter Manhattan Supreme Court, where he was serving on jury duty….
“There is no evidence that the conduct with which petitioner was charged affects his performance as a teacher or that any publicity would impair his capacity to discharge his responsibilities as a teacher,” [Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Manuel] Mendez wrote in Matter of Esteban v. Department of Education of the City School District of the City of New York, 651904/13.
Roger Parloff makes the story clearer and more understandable than I’ve seen it anywhere else. [Fortune cover story]
“An Indiana lawyer has been suspended for 30 days for a comment about the immigration status of his divorce client’s spouse in a letter sent to opposing counsel and the judge in the case.” [ABA Journal]
Over Labor Day weekend, hundreds of teenagers held an illegal party in the upstate New York home of former NFL star Brian Holloway. They left a wide swath of photos on social media, and Holloway put up a website identifying more than 100 of the 300 partiers. “But rather than apologize to Holloway for their children’s behavior, some parents have contacted their lawyers to see what legal action they can take” against him. [New York Daily News; response from radio personalities Chuck and Kelly, WGY]
Some serve essentially as security guards for federal installations and lack much of an outside presence, but others — quite a few others, in fact — are capable of engaging in antics like SWAT-style environmental raids on rural settlements.
— against patent trolls. But Kevin O’Connor, CEO of a startup named FindTheBest, went ahead and did so [Joe Mullin, Ars Technica] Exploding and escalating-on-response demands, threats of criminal prosecution, demands for “sequestration” (removal from service) of his company’s computers to prevent evidence spoliation, and promises of burdensome discovery are all part of the story.