FREE SPEECH? NOT IF WE DON’T LIKE WHAT YOU HAVE TO SAY:

Meanwhile, the Ms. Foundation for Women, in cooperation with an outfit called the Service Women’s Action Network, has started an online petition “calling for the disciplining of” your humble columnist, whom they graciously describe as “prominent.” They find no fault with our account of the facts; they complain only of our “framing the campaign as a ‘war on men’ ” and of a few phrases they find neuralgic.

That is to say, they want a journalist to be punished for committing journalism–for accurately reporting the news and expressing an opinion contrary to feminist orthodoxy. It is a lovely example of the totalitarian mindset that is the core of contemporary feminism.

Indeed.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD ON the Republicans’ new interest in prison reform.

The American prison system as it has operated in recent decades is a serious and ugly unresolved problem that by some measures is becoming untenable. According to famed legal scholar Bill Stuntz, we’re perhaps the most penal country in history, imprisoning a larger percentage of our population even than the Soviet Union under Stalin. Our system is expensive, discriminatory, often cruel, and profoundly socially disruptive. Though the rate of incarceration of blacks has declined recently, it is still disproportionate to the size of the overall black population, and because of this and the poor employment prospects for convicted felons, black communities have been decimated.

If this reform push by the GOP is serious, it’s good news for two reasons. First, it will generate significant momentum towards reducing the iniquities of our current system. The policies that are being pursued by different states are too various to take a position on as a whole: some are likely sensible, others not. In general, we prefer reforms that focus on less draconian sentences for drug use and policies that seek to penalize lawbreakers without necessarily sticking them in prison.

Second, it’s a sign that the GOP is still evolving in productive ways. After the last election, many triumphant Democrats suggested that the Republican Party was in utter shambles and might never fix itself. More and more, it seems these assessments were premature. In areas from health care to prison reform, the Right has clearly been doing some soul searching.

Not only do we need prison reform, we need criminal law reform. There should be far fewer crimes, and prosecutors should be under more scrutiny.

BEN BARTON: A Glass Half Full Look at the Changes in the American Legal Market.

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F.I.R.E.: OCR Descends into Self-Parody in Front of Incredulous College Lawyers. “This casual dismissal of administrative law is frightening to hear from the federal government, however ‘good-humored’ it may be. . . . The audacity of an OCR attorney telling a roomful of college and university attorneys that legal standards don’t matter is breathtaking. . . . OCR is also ignoring the Supreme Court’s decision in Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education, 526 U.S. 629 (1999), which said that student-on-student harassment in the educational context is conduct that is targeted, discriminatory, and ‘so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively bars the victim’s access to an educational opportunity or benefit.’ Severity, pervasiveness, and objective offensiveness might not matter to OCR bureaucrats, but it does to the Supreme Court.”

UPDATE: One of my former law students was at that meeting and writes:

I attended that session, as well as the follow up session on sexual misconduct yesterday. This is my second NACUA conference and the first session when the entire room broke into applause in response to the notice and comment question. “Incredulous” is a mild way to describe the lawyers in that room, including me. “A blueprint, not THE blueprint?” Give me a break!

Indeed. Universities need to push back on this.

ADAM WINKLER: Obama’s Terrible, Awful, Horrible Year at the Supreme Court. “While the country waits (and waits and waits) for the Supreme Court to announce its decisions in what court watchers are calling the Big Four—the two gay-marriage cases, the affirmative-action case, and the Voting Rights Act case—one thing has already become clear by the court’s decisions: the Obama administration has had a lousy year in the high court. While the administration has certainly won some cases, more often than not the court has rejected the administration’s arguments. On Thursday, for example, the court announced three decisions, rejecting the Obama administration’s arguments in each one. . . . In part the Obama administration’s poor track record at the high court—last year, it also lost an unusually high number of cases, although that was obscured by its victory in the Obamacare case—is attributable to the hostility some of the justices have for Obama. Yet the administration shoulders some of the blame too, as evidenced by a number of unanimous decisions in which even the court’s liberal justices rejected the government’s arguments, which often go against precedent or assert nearly unlimited federal power.”

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE, TROOPS IN JORDAN EDITION: Letter from the President — Regarding the War Powers Resolution.

GEORGE WILL: Obama Hits A Wall In Berlin.

The question of whether Barack Obama’s second term will be a failure was answered in the affirmative before his Berlin debacle, which has recast the question, which now is: Will this term be silly, even scary in its detachment from reality?

Before Berlin, Obama set his steep downward trajectory by squandering the most precious post-election months on gun-control futilities and by a subsequent storm of scandals that have made his unvarying project — ever bigger, more expansive, more intrusive and more coercive government — more repulsive. Then came Wednesday’s pratfall in Berlin. . . . Obama’s vanity is a wonder of the world that never loses its power to astonish, but really: Is everyone in his orbit too lost in raptures of admiration to warn him against delivering a speech soggy with banalities and bromides in a city that remembers John Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” and Ronald Reagan’s “Tear down this wall”?

Ouch.

CHANGE: As Prisons Squeeze Budgets, GOP Rethinks Crime Focus.

REX MURPHY: The Ordinary President. “Simply stated, the remarkable charisma of Barack Obama has fled. Fled, mainly because it was in large measure artificial from the beginning, embedded in external circumstances and fuelled in large measure by the media hyperdrive that attended his campaign.”

RICH HAILEY: Ms’ing the Mark; Heidi Yewman Fails Her Own Test.

TECHDIRT: Obama Administration Has Declared War On Whistleblowers, Describes Leaks As ‘Aiding The Enemy.’

Flashback: 2009: Obama: Transparency Will Be Touchstone. “For a long time, there’s been too much secrecy in this city.”

EUGENE VOLOKH: When May the Government Require Groups to Endorse Certain Views in Order to Get Government Benefits?

SHOCKER: Trail of Benghazi security lapses leads to State Department senior leadership, records show.

ALEX TABARROK: No One Is Innocent.

Faced with the evidence of an non-intentional crime, most prosecutors, of course, would use their discretion and not threaten imprisonment. Evidence and discretion, however, are precisely the point. Today, no one is innocent and thus our freedom is maintained only by the high cost of evidence and the prosecutor’s discretion.

One of the responses to the revelations about the mass spying on Americans by the NSA and other agencies is “I have nothing to hide. What me worry?” I tweeted in response “If you have nothing to hide, you live a boring life.” More fundamentally, the NSA spying machine has reduced the cost of evidence so that today our freedom–or our independence–is to a large extent at the discretion of those in control of the panopticon.

Indeed. Welcome to Ham Sandwich Nation.

MARK STEYN: Obama’s Melting Wings.

I suppose it might have been worse. When Angela Merkel proposed a toast to a strong West, he could have assumed that was the name of Kim and Kanye’s new baby. At any rate, President Obama’s mishap had faint echoes of a famous social faux pas during the Second World War. Irving Berlin, the celebrated composer of “White Christmas,” was invited to lunch at 10 Downing Street and was surprised to find that Churchill, instead of asking what’s that Bing Crosby really like, badgered him with complex moral and strategic questions and requests for estimates of U.S. war production. It turned out the prime minister had confused Irving Berlin with the philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin, then under secondment to the British embassy in Washington, and thought it was the latter he’d invited to Number Ten. In the Obama era, any confusion is the other way around.

Read the whole thing, of course.

THIS IS TURNING OUT TO BE A BAD YEAR FOR ANTI-CONSPIRACY-THEORISTS: Police infiltrator co-wrote Greenpeace flyer that sparked major McDonalds libel suit. “In a plot twist that would seem ridiculous in a Hollywood movie, a new book has revealed that an undercover London cop helped write an anti-McDonalds leaflet for a Greenpeace group that sparked the longest-running libel case in British legal history.”

A PACK, NOT A HERD: Out: Neighborhood Watches. In: “Glock Blocks.”

CHANGE: Dem Negotiator Laments House GOP Putting Down Its ‘Harmonious Hymnal’ on Immigration.

FLASHBACK: Documents show media plotting to kill stories about Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

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BUILDING A BETTER clinical trial system.

TWEET OF THE DAY: “In the new world of the NSA, the only secret left is Barack Obama’s college grades.”

BURN THE WITCH! “Swarm Cyber-Shaming” In The SFWA. “Given the prevalence of academic jargon from Cultural Studies or other Studies departments in their comments, I imagine a goodly number of the criticizers on the SWFA discussion boards and the broader Internet are either university instructors or possessors of an advanced degree from one of those programs. For many individuals under the age of forty who have been through the university system, mau-mauing may seem normative, or at least unremarkable. . . . The virtually thoughtless piling on is perhaps the most appalling. So many of the criticizers whose comments I have come across admit they haven’t even read the columns in question. Once the ball of shunning and shaming got rolling, hundreds of onlookers, alerted by social media, jumped on the bandwagon, attracted by the enticing glow of participating in shared moral outrage.” It’s a high-tech lynching.

If this account arouses your sympathies, why not buy a book from Mike Resnick and/or Barry Malzberg? And I suspect that the real “radioactive aura” is more likely to attach to the SFWA and the journals in question.

BUT IT DIDN’T BUY HER IMMUNITY: Alleged racist Paula Deen gave lots of help to Barack Obama. “Paula Deen is a horrible racist who has never had a progressive thought in her life because who would ever use that term to refer to a minority in this day and age? Why, she must be one of those Republican, church-going, hatred-supporting vote suppressors we’re always hearing about! Which would probably be accurate if she didn’t happen to be close personal friends with the Obamas. . . . I have a feeling someone in the White House is checking Open Secrets right about now to figure out which campaign checks they need to send back.”