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Peak Wingnut, October 14 2009

[ 0 ] October 15, 2009 | Paul Campos

Orly Taitz, the enterprising lawyer who has filed various lawsuits alleging that Barack Obama is constitutionally ineligible to be president of the United States, has achieved the perhaps unique legal distinction of so enraging a federal judge with her lunatic theories that she has been fined $20,000 for making frivolous legal arguments, without opposing counsul first moving for sanctions.

Readers who don’t want to wade through this mess may wish to peruse pages 16-18 of the judge’s ruling, dealing with the mysterious appearance of Attorney General Eric Holder in a Columbus Georgia coffee shop, and Microsoft’s tottering financial empire.

The last word

[ 0 ] October 14, 2009 | Paul Campos

He only raped one little girl.

Sometimes it’s hard to be a Redskin

[ 0 ] October 13, 2009 | Paul Campos

Joe Posnanski points out the rather amazing statistical quirk that Washington’s NFL franchise won’t play a team that will have won a game until the seventh week of the season (their opponents will have been a combined 0-14 up until then).

He also has some interesting thoughts on how strange it is that what’s by far the most offensive nickname for any major sports team in the USA belongs to the nation’s capital’s favorite franchise. (Of course when Washington’s NBA franchise changed their name from the unfortunate moniker “Bullets” they actually managed to come up with something worse. This would be difficult to achieve with “Redskins.”)

Also, Todd Collins, now in his second year of a three year nine million dollar extension, during which he has yet to take a snap in a game, is still teh awesome.

Four-month old engages in unhealthy lifestyle; denied health insurance

[ 0 ] October 12, 2009 | Paul Campos

Ask your doctor if cultural hysteria is right for you.

Couple of notes:

(1) “Obesity” among infants is currently defined by the CDC by taking what was the 95th percentile of height-weight among infants 30 years ago and treating anything above that as “obese.”

(2) This definition is based on no data regarding any correlation between infant weight and present or future health risk.

Why is dog fighting more morally repugnant than football?

[ 0 ] October 12, 2009 | Paul Campos

Malcom Gladwell asks a very good question.

I’m a huge college football fan and like my NFL fix too. This article is to put it mildly extremely disturbing.

I don’t know whether it’s a function of watching games in HDTV on a bigger screen or just getting older and less reckless, but even before reading this article I had been struck by the incredible violence of high level football, especially the NFL. The players are so huge and so fast and so strong that every play ends up featuring the equivalent of a bunch of moderate car crashes. I remember saying to somebody I was watching a game with the other day that I don’t understand how five guys aren’t getting seriously hurt on every play. Apparently they are.

Blame it on the 70s

[ 0 ] October 10, 2009 | Paul Campos

This NYT story argues that the American legal system and the culture in general have become far less lenient toward adults having sex with minors since the wild and crazy 1970s. While doing so it softpedals Roman Polanski’s crimes, waiting until the 13th graph to mention that the girl he raped testified the rape was forcible, and failing to mention at all that Polanski now faces prison time for fleeing from justice for 30 years, in addition to the crime to which he pleaded guilty.

Worse yet, it frames Polanski’s offenses by comparing them to the fictional romance in Woody Allen’s film Manhattan, which involved a consensual relationship between a nearly 18-year-old character and Allen’s middle aged alter ego. Whatever legal and moral objections might be raised to such a relationship (and they would be considerable if, for example, the Allen character was in a position of trust or authority in regard to the Mariel Hemingway character — I saw the film 30 years ago and don’t remember if this was the case), it nevertheless involves a radically different situation than that in Polanski’s real-life rape drama.

The story also contains this almost unbelievably fatuous quote from Polanski’s probation report:

Possibly not since Renaissance Italy has there been such a gathering of creative minds in one locale as there has been in Los Angeles County during the past half century. While enriching the community with their presence, they have brought with them the manners and mores of their native lands which in rare instances have been at variance with those of their adoptive land.

In this context it might be worth mentioning that the late 70s did feature high profile films such as Taxi Driver and Pretty Baby, in which 13 and 12 year old girl characters starred as glamorized and disturbingly sexualized siren/prostitutes (Indeed the sexualization of Brooke Shields in general was a creepy motif of the times). But life doesn’t get to imitate art without criminal consequences, even in Hollywood.

Further thoughts from Anne Applebaum: The slut was asking for it

[ 0 ] September 30, 2009 | Paul Campos

Incredibly, Applebaum’s followup to her original contribution on the Polanski rape is even more clueless and offensive than the original:

Of course, there were some very legitimate disagreements, including two excellent ones from my colleagues Gene Robinson and Richard Cohen, and I take some of their points. But to them, and to all who imagine that the original incident at the heart of this story was a straightforward and simple criminal case, I recommend reading the transcript of the victim’s testimony (here in two parts) — including her descriptions of the telephone conversation she had with her mother from Polanski’s house, asking permission to be photographed in Jack Nicholson’s jacuzzi –and not just the salacious bits.

Here’s the relevant part of the transcript:

Q. What happened out there after he indicated he wished to take pictures of you in the jacuzzi?

A. We went inside and called my mother.

Q. When you say “we called,” did you call or did Mr. Polanski call?

A. He told me to and I talked and then he talked and then I talked again.

Q. What did you tell your mother?

A. She goes, “Are you all right?

I went, “Uh-huh.”

And she says, “Do you want me to come pick you up?”

And I went, “No.”

And he said that we’d be home kind of late because it had already gotten dark out.

Q. When you said “he said,” did he tell you or did you hear him tell your mother on the phone?

A. He told my mother.

Q, Did he tell your mother any other things?

A. Not that I was listening to.

Q. After talking to your mother on the telephone, what happened?

A. We went out and I got in the jacuzzi.

Applebaum can’t even read 20 lines of a trial transcript accurately (the victim never asked her mother for permission to be photographed in the jacuzzi). But that idiocy pales to insignificance in comparison to the moral blindness involved in suggesting, as Applebaum clearly does, that if the 13-year-old victime had in fact asked her mother’s permission to be photographed in a jacuzzi by a 44-year-old man that would somehow transform the man’s subsequent drugging and raping of the girl into something other than a “simple and straightforward criminal case.”

Applebaum’s first post on this subject might have been ever so slightly excused by the possibility that she simply hadn’t thought through exactly what she was defending. This has no such excuse.

Au revoir, les enfants

[ 0 ] September 30, 2009 | Paul Campos

This reads like a wingnut parody of degenerate France and degenerate Hollywood engaging in an orgy of amoral pomposity. (As a lawyer I confess ignorance regarding the principle of immunity from legal process for film festival attendees).

I can only hope that most of the signatories to this kind of thing aren’t actually familiar with the facts of the case. Of course that sort of selective blindness is a huge problem of its own.

As djw notes in a thread below, the worst part of minimizing Polanski’s crimes is that almost all the arguments used to do so are classic rape culture tropes. (Consider the central claim of this petition, which is that Polanski was arrested on a “morals” charge, as if it were obvious that it’s perfectly possible for a 44-year-old man to have genuinely consensual sex with a 13-year-old girl, let alone one he had first drugged up, and who has always insisted that she was forcibly raped).

Depressing.

Crime and punishment

[ 0 ] September 29, 2009 | Paul Campos

Several commentators in the Polanski thread are apparently taking the view that if a particular exercise of criminal punishment is unlikely to deter crime or rehabilitate the offender, then punishing the offender is pointless at best if not actually barbaric.

Leaving aside the question of whether or not punishing Polanski would deter anyone from committing rape in general or child rape in particular, I find it odd that some people so easily dismiss the idea that Polanski should be punished because he deserves to be punished. One doesn’t have to be a strict Kantian to accept the idea that a person who commits a henious crime should be punished irrespective of whether the punishment specifically deters the offender, or generally deters others from committing similar acts.

For example, I imagine hardly anyone would accept the idea that if Polanski had murdered his victim it would be wrong to punish him unless one could show the punishment was likely to deter murder.

All of which is to say that arguments about how there’s no “point” in punishing Polanski now are only plausible to the extent that it’s accepted that what Polanski did wasn’t a particularly serious crime.

Joe Paterno and the Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism

[ 0 ] September 23, 2009 | Paul Campos


Penn State University’s titular head football coach, Joe Paterno, is old. Really, really old. How old? Well Chalmers (“Bump”) Elliott was Michigan’s football coach for ten years, before retiring from the profession 41 years ago this fall. He then went on to be Iowa’s athletic director for 20 years, before retiring from that position 19 years ago. Elliott is a year older than Paterno.

Anyway, PSU under Paterno was for decades a remarkably consistent program. They finished fifth in the nation in overall winning percentage (out of 121 D-I programs) in the 1970s, seventh in the 1980s, and sixth in the 1990s. Then age suddenly seemed to ambush Paterno, and the team more or less collapsed. In the first five years of this decade PSU fell to 72nd in overall winning percentage. Paterno’s behavior on the sidelines and at press conferences started going from charmingly eccentric elder statesman to disturbingly crazy old coot.

After racking up a several-year won-loss record that would have gotten any other coach at a historically elite program fired, Paterno hung on, cashing in a mountain of institutional chips, and leaving observers to wonder how long it would be before his career ended in some Woody Hayes-like incident (Hayes, the legendary Ohio State coach, was fired in 1978 after punching an opposing player on the sidelines at the end of a game).

Then something unexpected happened. Penn State got things turned around. In the four and a third seasons since 2005, PSU is more or less back to where they were before the decline and fall of the Paterno empire. Their 43-11 record is 8th best in Division I over that span. What happened?

Apparently, Penn State’s assistant coaches somehow managed to wrest all actual decision making power from their putative boss. Long time defensive coordinator and heir apparent Tom Bradley is now all but openly acknowledged by everyone but JoePa himself to be PSU’s real head coach. Now during games Paterno sits in a booth high above Beaver Stadium, a quite possibly unplugged headset straddling his still remarkably dark hair, a video monitor before him, which for all anyone knows may be playing highlights of the 1983 Sugar Bowl in a continuous loop.

Perhaps some sociologist or political scientist with an interest in institutional theory (and college football) will one day study this bloodless coup with the analytic rigor it deserves.

Update: I thought it was fairly obvious this post was somewhat tongue in cheek (I don’t actually believe JoePa was watching the 1983 Sugar Bowl on his monitor during games). Still it would be interesting to try to figure out the processes by which guys like Paterno and Bowden cede much or all of their previous decision making authority, while still holding on to their jobs. (It’s clear both of them have, although the extent of their semi-retirements isn’t.)

Obstruction of justice

[ 0 ] September 21, 2009 | Paul Campos

It’s always difficult to figure out what’s going on from news reports regarding a criminal investigation, but this story raises a lot of questions.

First, why isn’t Zazi being charged under one of several very broadly-worded federal anti-terrorism statutes? If, as the FBI asserts, Zazi admitted attending courses “at an al-Qaeda training facility in the FATA (tribal) region of Pakistan” and that “he received instruction from al-Qaeda operatives on subjects such as weapons and explosives,” those are very serious crimes — far more serious than giving false statements to investigators.

Second, the crime with which Zazi, his father, and the NYC informant have been charged with is essentially a form of obstruction of justice. But the federal statute that supposedly criminalizes this conduct is a textbook example of a law that’s subject to abuse by overzealous prosecutors. Obstruction of justice at its core involves acts like witness tampering, intimidation, and the like. But a catch-all provision in the statute allows making false statements to an investigator to be treated as a free-standing crime.

Note that when they agreed to submit to questioning none of these people were under oath, or had been charged with anything. The “crime” they have supposedly committed is that of giving inaccurate statements to investigators. Meanwhile the investigators are free to lie with impunity to the people they interview.

Third, this kind of case appears to illustrate how easily civil libertarian and due process concerns can get tossed out the window when the magic word “terrorism” is invoked. From what’s been reported there appears to be no solid evidence of an actual plot of any sort, or the existence of real weapons, or indeed anything beyond some suspicious movements and conversations. This probably explains why the suspects haven’t been charged with any crime other than that of failing to cooperate appropriately with their interrogators. (Note too the absurdly transparent pretext that Zazi’s rental car was stopped by the NYPD as part of a “random drug stop.”).

Now of course it’s always possible that Zazi is part of an actual Al Qaeda cell of some sort, as opposed to say a clownish amateur who hasn’t done enough to be charged with a real crime. But then he ought to be charged with one.

The best health care system in the world is unlikely to succeed in killing you if your sister is a good enough lawyer

[ 1 ] September 18, 2009 | Paul Campos

That’s the basic moral of this story.

I did a town hall-style health care debate last night in Denver with Hugh Hewitt, before an audience of 973 people, 964 of whom were shall we say predisposed to favor Hewitt’s views on the matter over mine. One of the questions from the audience was about the linked controversy, which was proffered as evidence that Obama is telling lies to get “his” proposal enacted. Hewitt’s main argument against the present proposals is that they don’t do enough to lower medical malpractice costs, when ironically stories like this are if anything arguments for universal access to good legal advice.

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