Forty-two years on

4 May 1970:

As they arrived at the top of the hill, twenty-eight of the more than seventy Guardsmen turned suddenly and fired their rifles and pistols. Many guardsmen fired into the air or the ground. However, a small portion fired directly into the crowd. Altogether between 61 and 67 shots were fired in a 13 second period. [ ... ] Four Kent State students died as a result of the firing by the Guard.

To understand who came looking for a riot, see who came dressed for a riot. When a protest situation gets out of control, you have to ask, every time, who did the escalating? Who brought in horses? Who is carrying pistols? Who is using billy clubs? Who is wearing military- and SWAT-style protective gear like helmets, body armor, body shields? Who arrived in a Blackwater armored vehicle? Who brought a panjandrum to a knife fight?

Honestly, I think the only reason we're not getting murders like this with Occupy events is that the actual National Guard is in Iraq and Afghanistan right now, instead of staying stateside to help evacuate cities during hurricanes and stuff.

GOP to women: You can pay your student loans, or you can have pap smears

The House will vote Friday to extend current rates on federally funded college loans for one year, Speaker John Boehner announced on Wednesday in what is seen as an attempt to blunt President Barack Obama's momentum on an issue popular with young voters.

Boehner said the extension will be paid for with funds from the Affordable Care Act, the Obama administration's signature health-care law. [...]

The Republican proposal [...] covers the $5.9 billion cost by dipping into a fund in the Affordable Care Act called The Prevention and Public Health Fund. According to health.gov, the fund is intended to promote wellness, prevent disease and protect against public health emergencies (CNN).

Specifically, the GOP proposal uses funds earmarked for cervical and breast cancer screenings to pay for extending the lowered rates. Got that, college-educated women? This is what the GOP thinks of you. They beg the question that money for the extension has to come out of the Affordable Care Act to begin with, as opposed to any other government program or billionaires' tax loophole. And then after deciding that the ACA is totally the best place out of the federal budget to seek funding, they zero in and go directly after what they call a "slush fund" for women's preventive healthcare.

My "portfolio" of law school loans includes one federally subsidized loan. Doubling the interest rate on that loan would increase my monthly payment by about $25, for an added $300 per year. At least the GOP's math is right: that's about the same cost as one pap smear and one mammogram.

Little old lady unable to get Pennsylvania poll-approved ID

And this year's mass disenfranchisement of Pennsylvanian women begins:

[A] 91-year-old grandmother [went] to a PennDot office, looking for a photo ID so she could keep her 70-year voting record intact.

Joyce Block of Doylestown Township is such a dedicated voter that [Doylestown Borough Council President Det] Ansinn took her from the hospital in a wheelchair to vote in 2010 because she couldn't get an absentee ballot.

She has an old voter registration card with her married name, but she has never had a driver's license.

Block had all the documents on the Department of State checklist - birth certificate and Social Security card, both with her maiden name; her marriage certificate; deed to her house; Peco bills; plus her IRS refund check.

That wasn't enough to satisfy PennDot, Ansinn said.

Her Hebrew marriage license was rejected because the PennDot worker couldn't read Hebrew.

And the deed and Peco bill were rejected because they had her married name, not her maiden name.

The state worker suggested she take legal action to switch the ownership of her home to her maiden name, which she hasn't used in 60 years. Then, maybe, she will be allowed to vote in the November election (Inky).

Emphasis added. Women in photo ID states, check your wallets! And make time now to obtain a poll-acceptable ID -- the process can take weeks, or even longer if your only option, as is evidently the case with Ms. Block, is to modify the deed to your home.

No, really: a huge number of women will be disenfranchised in November

Another 8 weeks, another job interview scheduled.

Add to my previous dataset the new statistic that this will be for a "J.D. preferred" job, not an actual attorney position. With an accordingly dismal salary expectation.

But back to photo ID requirements for voters. Current lawsuits challenging voter ID laws are attacking them via the 14th and 24th Amendments or as a Voting Rights Act problem. But you know what would be neat? Since one third of American women do not possess a piece of ID that meets the requirements of these photo ID laws (PDF), it would be really neat to see a disenfranchised woman or class of women bring a § 1983 action against one or more of the states enacting the voter ID laws, on the grounds that it deprives them of their 19th Amendment right to vote regardless of sex.

Barring a massive "get your female voting friends and family to the DMV" awareness-raising effort, in some states one third of the female electorate will be disenfranchised in November. That is an outrageously huge fraction, and it will be a huge number standing alone. I'm actually really surprised that no one is pursuing this issue as an unconstitutional sex discrimination problem. But what do I know? I'm just an unemployed lawyer.

Friday jukebox: Syd Straw

Seven schools in seven states and the only thing different is my locker combination.

Women will be disenfranchised this November

Have been keeping myself busy with non-paying work, a couple of trips up and down the Northeast Corridor, and academic politics. My most recent stabs at employment in a venue where someone else would cut my paychecks have gotten nowhere. I've been advised by a very interested party to simply take the J.D. off my resumé. However, as the advice did not include any correlating advice as to what to do with the 3 school years and 2+ underemployed years that would then go "missing" off the resumé, I've so far declined to follow it.

In the meantime, we appear to have a definite GOP nominee for president. Bizarrely, some polls are putting him at a dead heat against President Obama. Did the poll-takers not speak to any women at all?

Speaking of which, women voters in photo-ID states need to beware, and they need to beware fast. Fully one third of American women over 18 do not possess a valid photo ID, one that the pollworkers will accept, reflecting their legal name (3-page PDF), mostly for marriage or divorce reasons. Pennsylvania just enacted a voter ID law that will permit ID-less voters at the primary election next week, but will disenfranchise people without photo ID in November. The process can take weeks because of documentation requirements, and the rule in November will be strict.

This is going to be huge. You think the ACORN debacle was stupid? Do you want to take a stab at what the 2-digit percentage will be of women across the country who won't be allowed to vote for president in November?

-tap tap-

Is this thing on?

Komen link round-up; local protest later today

Richer, smarter, and funnier minds than mine have explained why it's stupid for Susan G. Komen for the Cure to politicize women's healthcare by ending grants to Planned Parenthood that provide breast screenings to underserved American women. In short, cancer prevention activities make up some 16% of the patient care Planned Parenthood delivers, compared to 3% for abortion services. Math from figures in a Bloomberg Businessweek article indicates to me that Planned Parenthood used Komen grant money to provide about 172,000 breast exams in the past 5 years ("Komen grants paid for about 4.3 percent of the 4 million breast exams and 9 percent of the 70,000 mammogram referrals provided at Planned Parenthood clinics in the past five years, Planned Parenthood said"). That's not a whole lot of exams -- 34,000 per year -- and it was probably not even 172,000 individual women. But it's 172,000 exams that wouldn't have taken place without the grants, and it's 172,000 encounters with women who got some education on breast cancer prevention and detection.

Komen says they're "dedicated to the fight against breast cancer in the world." They need to add the qualifier, unless the service reaches you through Planned Parenthood.

EDIT: Word on the street is that there is a fundraiser for the Philadelphia Komen affiliate today at the Cescaphé Ballroom, 932 North 2nd Street, and that activists will gather at 5:30 p.m. to urge the affiliate to join those in Denver and Connecticut in telling the national organization that it sucks to politicize women's public health.

Contract with America evolves: contract on whistleblowers

Newt Gingrich says his best-case scenario is that next January he'll walk from the inauguration ceremony to the Oval Office and sign the repeal of Sarbanes-Oxley (MSNBC video, skip to 9:05).

Dude's candidacy gets hilariouser and hilariouser.

Stats on looking for work

My job application-to-interview ratio seems to be about 6:1. I'm on track to apply for 72 jobs this year and interview for 6.

By "apply" I mean carefully select positions that interest me, that I appear qualified for, that I reasonably believe I have a good chance of getting, and that I make a good-faith effort to tweak my resume and compose a solid cover letter for. I don't mean shotgunning: shotgunning my resume out to all the lawyering positions I see on craigslist takes away time from my law practice. Which has at least been paying my office rent for a few months now.

Stats from this week's job interview: There were 3 interviewees (including myself), and it'll be about 4 weeks before they make their hiring decision.

Who is Jessica Buchanan?

Who is Jessica Buchanan, and what about her caused the President to give the go-ahead for a Super Special Black Ops Navy Seals operation to kill nearly a dozen militant pirates to get her out of Somalia yesterday, just before the State of the Union address?

Maybe she's this Jessica Buchanan.

EDIT: Or maybe not. Later news reports say that she's local, a student at Valley Forge Christian College (CNN). I'd guessed the Buchanan in the LinkedIn profile based on age and work in the Middle East.

Excitotoxins!

"Excitotoxins"? This is my word of the day. My made-up word of the day:

Don't you have to cook grains in order to get their nutritional benefit?

This question presupposes that grains such as rice, wheat, barley, and oats are helpful to the body's nutrition. Actually, they are not. The fact that they must be cooked to be edible is the first clue that something is wrong with them. They are bland to the taste and are virtually inedible without salt, spices, and condiments, the deadly "excitotoxins". Grains are acid forming in a body that needs to be slightly alkaline. Many people have substituted cooked grains in place of meat in their diet, and as a consequence, have shown a marked reduction in cardiovascular disease. However, because cooked grains create a condition known as acid toxemia, these same people will instead, suffer from a higher risk of arthritis and cancer. Cooked grains also contain opioids (which are addictive), cause daily mood swings, and contribute significantly to obesity.

As the joke goes, [citation needed]. Christ, why can't I look up some information about growing bean sprouts at home without being associated with looney-tunes raw foodists? (I recently started up again, after having quit since renouncing my former life as a hippie. All the internet research I can find indicates that the beans I'm sprouting are so old that they shouldn't be sprouting. But three dinner guests and my ravenous daughter found differently this weekend.)

Further on in the FAQ:

Too much fat will thicken the blood

Oh, man, that line brings just one thing to mind:

Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murd'ring ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature's mischief! Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry "Hold, hold!"

Crazy-making

I think it bears repeating that being un- or under-employed is incredibly stressful. I have a great undocumented, unofficial safety net of friends, family, and a partner who buys my groceries; but that's all it is, a safety net. I'm not building reserves. And I've had to accumulate debt on my credit card again because last month I had an only somewhat expected, but totally uninsured loss at my home.

A news item the other day mentioned that women are more likely than men to experience mental illness (MSNBC). How is this report surprising? When you jump through the right hoops, you do all you're supposed to do -- I put myself through law school so that I could double or triple my administrative professional's salary and show my daughter a better life -- and you get jack for it. What kind of jack? I serve on a volunteer committee with a guy who graduated below me in my law school class, who can't figure out how to calendar meetings on the iPad his Biglaw job gave him and who can't meet a deadline to save his life, and yet I'm the one who knows that, right now, I have $68.17 in the bank. This guy takes home six figures a year from his office; in my office, I get asked for free advice on how to legally force a grant-making foundation to give money to an organization that hasn't even applied for its determination letter yet.

I applied for dozens of jobs in 2011, landed a half-dozen interviews, and made less money in the past two years than a relative of mine spent in six weeks to finish their basement.

My friend Bee Lavender on American poverty and the lack of will on the part of political leadership to address it:

[E]normous numbers of people are forced into bankruptcy because of the egregious and parasitic [health] insurance industry. Others are trapped in jobs and relationships that restrict their aspirations, usefulness, and profitability, because they need the insurance. Health care reform hasn't happened in a fashion useful to me, and I very much doubt that it will in my lifetime. Not for lack of need, or care, but because the political will does not exist.

But instead of talking about the reality of poverty, and what it means to be poor, we get to hear presidential candidates shit talk our brothers and sisters, wives, husbands, children.

They say we're poor because we're lazy. I say I've never met a lazy poor person, though I have met quite a few rich people who lie and cheat and steal.

The esteemed Republican presidential candidate does not seem to grasp some basic concepts about life, work, or economics. Repealing child labor laws would certainly not have helped me as a child (my absenteeism being the result of cancer, not a bad attitude). My parents were already forced by necessity to take any job on offer, no matter how demeaning or low paid.

My dad is a janitor; Gingrich says we should fire janitors and make kids do the job. I would like to ask him what my father is meant to do? He is sixty-two years old, and has the best job he can find. If he loses it, there is no alternative career path.

This is crazy-making. In the face of ad-hominem attacks from politicians who blame the poor for their condition, and yell "look, Elvis!" to successfully draw the media's attention away from government policies that allow incomprehensibly high corporate profits to go untaxed while social services, public education, and the nation's infrastructure crumble, it's enough to make an un- or under-employed person crazy.

Of course Gingrich's daughters are defending him

The CNN blog headline reads, "Gingrich's daughters defend him ahead of ABC interview with ex-wife." I was going to make a comment along the lines of, well, of course they're defending him. It's perfectly reasonable for a man's children to stick up for him. Parents generally treat their offspring very different from the way they treat a spouse, and no child shares the perspective, knowledge, and experience of a spouse when a marital relationship goes kablooey. So I was going to say, you know, I imagine my daughter would defend her dad ahead of a television interview with me, just as Gingrich's daughters are defending him as against one of his ex-wives; but that statement would seem to equate my ex-husband with Newt Gingrich. And no matter how smelly the dirty laundry is between me and my ex-husband, I would never dream of equating or even comparing him to Newt Gingrich. After all, my ex-husband never asked me to open up our marriage, or cheated on me with someone 23 years younger than he is (as far as I know), or discussed divorce proceedings with me while I was in the hospital, or brought legislation destroying the welfare state to the sitting Democratic President for his signature.

When abortions are illegal, women still get abortions

. . . and they get more of them. A study, published in The Lancet, covered the years 1995 to 2008 found:

Abortion rates were lowest in Western Europe -- 12 per 1,000 -- and highest in Eastern Europe -- 43 per 1,000. The rate in North America was 19 per 1,000. Sedgh said she and colleagues found a link between higher abortion rates and regions with more restrictive legislation, such as in Latin America and Africa. They also found that 95 to 97 percent of abortions in those regions were unsafe[, defined as] any procedure done by people lacking needed skills or in places that don't meet minimal medical standards.

The researchers' conclusion: "It is precisely where abortion is illegal that it must become safer," and providing education and birth control universally will go a long, long way.

The full text of the study is available free with registration at The Lancet's website.

Gruesome, public Center City suicide mostly unreported

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Who signed it?

Looking at the credentials I've hung on my wall -- B.A. diploma, J.D. diploma, certificate admitting me to the bar of Pennsylvania -- I see that every last signature on them is that of an older white man. My other credentials, too; everything going back to my high-school diploma and all the academic awards between is signed by only older white men. It makes me feel that I've earned my credentials not because of those signatures but in spite of them.

Doesn't help that, last night, after I dispensed about $300 worth of legal advice and business counseling to a non-profit organization, an older white man took me aside and gave me spontaneous, unsolicited advice on how to drum up business.

Anyway, as to the anti-SOPA website blackouts -- you know President Obama said two days ago that he won't sign the SOPA bill, right?

Neighbors to 26th District: help! 26th District to neighbors: help yourselves!

Captain Mike Cram, Philly P.D. 26th District, showed up late to speak to a town meeting in Port Richmond last week. When residents expressed their concerns that 26th District officers are slacking at addressing both violent crime and nuisance problems in Greater Port Fishington, Cram and A.J. Thompson of the District Attorney's office told them to forget the police and simply engage in self-help. They

suggested neighbors round up 50 or 150 friends to sit out at Conrail or outside known drug houses "to get it into people's heads that somebody's watching." Cram said a shortage of manpower means neighbors must take things into their own hands.

Wild. I'm not sure how the 26th District and the District Attorney's office expects residents to fix blight, end illegal house parties, and eliminate murderous armed robbery by "watching," but evidently that's the solution they're offering.

But for what it's worth, for the past several weeks Leo M. Mulvihill, Jr., the lawyer who lives and works in Fishtown quoted in City Paper's story there, has been doing just that. He's tweeted with @PhillyPolice name-checks when he sees cops driving while talking on cell phones, and regularly posts photos of cops napping in their patrol cars or just generally disrespecting the neighborhood. Here's hoping the cops in the 26th District don't start giving him a hard time for documenting them.

Rita's Water Ice sold to private equity firm again: what it means

Quietly reported yesterday, though not announced on either company's website, a private equity company called Falconhead Capital, LLC, has bought Rita's Water Ice. Rita's had been owned by a private equity group since 2005. So though this was merely paperwork (and the exchange of an undisclosed but likely eight-figure amount of money) it's still a good opportunity to talk about what it means when a business changes from operating as an independent company to being owned by a private equity firm.

It means the business is no longer a company of its own, but is merely an asset in the equity firm's diverse portfolio of brands. And as soon as it starts underperforming, the firm's portfolio managers will treat it as any asset that produces income for members of of the firm, not as a company employing and serving people: the asset will be sold off or terminated. The business will enter into bankruptcy or will wind down; workers will be laid off, shops will be closed, and money that would have moved around the local community from customers to workers and managers, and from employees to the places where they spend their paychecks, will no longer move around.

Companies are managed for their stakeholders. In our capitalist system and under our state and federal laws, it's the legal and ethical duty of the company's directors to do what they have to for the stakeholders. When any company's income is down, the company has to respond for the benefit of its stakeholders. The stakeholders of a private equity company are the investors in the company's portfolio. The stakeholders of an independent company are employees, customers, management, and stockholders. So compare. When a company is just a company, when it underperforms the directors choose from options like shaking up management, cutting some jobs, closing a few storefronts, or choosing some strategic planning option, like enduring a few quarters of decreased income while anticipating increased future income through investment in their plant, on the assumption that in the long run it's best to keep the company itself a going concern. But when a company is a line item in a portfolio of assets, when it underperforms it gets taken out of the portfolio. That's the only legal and ethical option, once a company has been sold, as Rita's has, and is nothing but an asset of a private equity firm.

It's what happened to Harry & David, the mail-order fruit gift box people. And there's a good possibility that sooner or later it'll happen to Rita's, too.

The end result of selling a business to a private equity firm so that it's just one brand out of many is uncertainty -- among the business's employees and local suppliers who lose their income. In the local communities that see an eventual loss of the money that the business had kept moving around. And among the customers who are disadvantaged economically with a lack of competition and with quality of life issues that enter in when the only choices at the strip mall are remotely-owned mega-chain restaurants and stores.

Daycare is awful

Daycares are horrible things.

I imagine I am projecting my own abandonment issues.

And I recognize my luck and privilege that my household was financially able to opt out of the American welfare-to-work system that President Clinton signed into law.