BECAUSE THEY’RE SMART:  Naomi Schaeffer Riley on “Why Powerful Men Now Hide Behind Open Doors.”

But this idea that it doesn’t look right for a male boss to be alone with a female employee sounds like it comes straight out of Victorian England. And it’s probably just an excuse.

More likely the congressmen, like the professors I’ve spoken to, don’t want to leave themselves open to claims of sexual harassment and the lawsuits that might result.

Feminists have managed to create an employment atmosphere where men walk around on pins and needles wondering when something they say might be taken out of context or when a woman might decide to ruin a man’s career with a false accusation.

Surely there are plenty of male bosses guilty of boorish behavior. But there are also plenty of women who believe that a sexist joke or even a compliment on one’s outfit is enough to create a “hostile work environment.”

And so rather than engaging in a “he-said, she-said” deposition, many bosses would rather make sure they have witnesses to every interaction.

She’s absolutely right.  When I worked on the Hill back in the late 80s/early 90s, I would spend hours alone, doors closed, with the male Congressmen for whom I worked, sometimes on weekends. I learned a tremendous amount during those hours, and I hate to think that young women these days cannot get the same one-on-one interaction with male bosses/professors because of concerns over sexual harassment claims. But I certainly understand the concern and if I were male, I would probably avoid one-on-one, closed door interaction with all female colleagues except for my most senior and trusted aides.  #waronwomen

I’M SHOCKED, SHOCKED I TELL YOU:  IRS hit by cyberattack, stealing more than $50 million and stealing more than 100,000 taxpayers’ information.  I’m sure the IRS will learn from this mistake, though, and it won’t happen again.  But of course they’ll need more money, to beef up security and all.

WHITE HOUSE SUPPORTS MORATORIUM ON GERMLINE CELL EDITING:  The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a statement supporting the voluntary industry moratorium on research involving gene-editing of germline cells (i.e., sperm and egg cells).  The fear is that such research could alter the genetic composition of humans for generations to come, whereas genetic modification of somatic cells (fully differentiated cells, such as heart cells, blood cells, etc.) only treats the individual affected, but does not alter that individual’s germline, and thus his/her propensity to pass along genetic conditions to future generations.

I LIKE THIS APPROACH TO THE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATES:  Stuart Rothenberg has a modest proposal, “How to Fix an Unfair Presidential Debate System.”  The Fox News and CNN approach to handling the large field of candidates is to limit debate participation to the “top 10” candidates, as evidenced by various polls.  But this does block out many good candidates out, particularly those without wide name recognition.

Rothenberg’s proposal?  “The obvious answer is to divide the field in half, randomly assigning individual hopefuls to one of the two debates. Of course, not everyone will like the group he or she is in, and the makeup of each group would determine the particular dynamic of that debate.”

Sounds fair to me.

THE LAW PROFESSSOR HAS BEEN SCHOOLED:  WSJ’s editorial about the Fifth Circuit’s refusal to reverse the preliminary injunction halting the President’s unilateral immigration legislation executive action:

America’s most powerful former law professor is getting a re-education in the Constitution, and on present course President Obama might flunk out. Witness Tuesday’s federal appeals-court rebuke of his 2014 immigration order, including language that suggests the Administration will also lose on the legal and policy merits. . . .

The Administration claims it is merely allowing immigration officers to apply routine “prosecutorial discretion” on a case by case basis not to deport illegals. But the court noted that if this were true “we would expect to find an explicit delegation of authority” to implement the Obama rule—“a program that makes 4.3 million otherwise removable aliens eligible for lawful presence, work authorization, and associated benefits—but no such provision exists.” (Our emphasis.)

In summary, said the court, “the United States has not made a strong showing that it is likely to succeed on the merits.” . . .

Mr. Obama could have avoided this mess if he had recalled his law classes on the separation of powers. That’s where he should have learned that the federal government can’t run roughshod over states and that the courts are an independent branch of government that can call out a President for breaking the law.

Yep–he would have failed my constitutional law class if he had tried to justify such sweeping authority to categorically rewrite existing law and confer benefits Congress never provided as “prosecutorial discretion.”  It’s almost as though the Fifth Circuit has been reading my House Judiciary testimony on the topic.

NEWS YOU CAN USE:  Caterpillars contort their bodies to look like bird poop. Apparently, it wards off hungry birds.

THE RISE OF EXECUTIVE FEDERALISM:  Michael Greve has an excellent piece at Real Clear Policy on what he terms the rise of “executive federalism“:

“Cooperative” federalism is supposed to come from Congress and federal statutes. However, practically nothing comes from Congress these days. The legislature is notoriously divided. It lacks the financial resources to rope recalcitrant states in new federalism bargains (witness the ACA), and it cannot even revisit the bargains embedded in old statutes (such as education programs or the Clean Air Act). Thus, to make federal programs “work” under current conditions, agencies rewrite statutes, issue expansive waivers, and negotiate deals with individual states on a one-off basis. That is how the ACA is being “administered.” That is how Secretary of Health and Human Services Sylvia Burwell is trying to expand Medicaid. That is how No Child Left Behind is run. And that is how Environmental Protection Agency is trying to impose its Clean Power Plan: “stakeholder meetings” and assurances of regulatory forbearance for cooperating states; unveiled threats against holdout states. This brand of federalism knows neither statutory compliance nor even administrative regularity. It is executive federalism.

. . . .  Further along that path lies the fate of Argentina, which practices an advanced form of executive federalism: corrupt, ruinous, unstable.

Exactly.  “Cooperative” federalism is just a ruse–often little more than federal bribery for States to relinquish their reserved powers under the Tenth Amendment.  And while Congress could, in theory, “fix” many of the problems by writing clearer statutes, there are multiple reasons why this may not always be politically possible, and courts are left to reign in the most egregious ultra vires executive overreach.  There is much to be developed here, both politically and via litigation, to stop the erosion of federalism.

CORPORATE CRONYISM PERSONIFIED:  Hillary Clinton’s support of the Ex-Im Bank is more evidence of her inextricable involvement with corporate welfare sleaze.

THOMAS SOWELL:  How to open the mind of a college graduate.  Good practical advice for trying to help young people move out of the liberal/progressive cocoon and into the real world.

TYPICAL SOCIALIST GRAFT:  A story over at the Daily Caller asks, Did Bernie Sanders’ wife commit fraud?

PATRIOT ACT “METADATA” PHONE COLLECTION EXPIRES JUNE 1:  The collection of cell phone “metadata”–the time/duration of calls, plus the numbers dialed (but not the content of the conversations) has been justified under section 215 of the Patriot Act, which automatically expires June 1, Unless and until Congress can agree on some legislative alterations.  President Obama is urging the Senate to reconvene from its Memorial Day recess to take up the issue again.

Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) staged at 10-hour filibuster over section 215 and on Saturday the Senate refused to approve a temporary extension of the program.  Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has said he will reconvene the Senate on Sunday, May 31, for a last ditch effort at reauthorization.

IMMIGRATION INJUNCTION ALLOWED TO STAND:  The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has refused (by a 2-1 vote) to stay a preliminary injunction granted by a federal trial judge that halted the Obama Administration’s implementation of its unilateral legislation executive order granting deportation amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants.  In declining to remove the injunction, the Fifth Circuit said:

Because the government is unlikely to succeed on the merits of its appeal of the injunction, we deny the motion for stay.

Translated from legalese: The Obama Administration’s unilateral legislation executive action is probably illegal, so the trial judge was correct in stopping it from going into effect.  This is very good news for the rule of law.

ILLEGAL ALIENS AND ONE PERSON, ONE VOTE:  The Supreme Court has granted review to hear a case, Evenwel v. Abbott, brought by a group of Texas voters who challenge the apportionment of legislative districts using total population counts, rather than the total number of eligible voters.  Plaintiffs assert that voters living in districts with small numbers of illegal aliens have their votes diluted compared to voters living in districts with large numbers of illegal alines, thus violating the Equal Protection Clause and its “one person, one vote” principle.

SOUNDS LIKE SOMETHING A GIRLY MAN WOULD SAY:  Why Men Shouldn’t Lift Weights.

I wondered why us guys were so conditioned to want huge muscles, even with our high school “glory days” behind us. Now, I understand that it’s more important to have a quality workout resulting in sustained energy and fitness, rather than one that focuses on repetitions and achievement-based results that diminish quickly over time.

Plus, it makes them into strong alpha males and that’s bad.

COURTS DON’T FIX “MISTAKES,” LEGISLATURES DO:  A New York Times piece designed to influence the Supreme Court in the Obamacare subsidy case, King v. Burwell, “Four Words That Imperil Health Care Law Were All a Mistake, Writers Now Say.”  How convenient–a self-serving, ex post confession by some Democrats that they didn’t read the bill, and now really, really, really hope the Supreme Court will “fix” their mistake.

A VELVET FIST DICTATORSHIP:  Do they not see the irony? The New York Times published an oped over the weekend titled, “The New Dictators Rule by Velvet Fist,” penned by a couple of professors.  Their thesis:

[A] new brand of authoritarian government has evolved that is better adapted to an era of global media, economic interdependence and information technology. The “soft” dictators concentrate power, stifling opposition and eliminating checks and balances, while using hardly any violence.

Um, yeah.  Sound familiar?  Eliminating checks and balances? Anyone?  To make matters worse, the authors further elaborate on the characteristics of such “soft” dictatorships:

The new autocrats often get to power through reasonably fair elections. Mr. Chávez, for instance, won in 1998 in what international observers called one of the most transparent votes in Venezuela’s history.

Soaring approval ratings are a more cost-effective path to dominance than terror. Mr. Erdogan exploited his popularity to amend the Constitution by referendum and to pack Turkey’s Constitutional Court.

The new autocrats use propaganda, censorship and other information-based tricks to inflate their ratings and to convince citizens of their superiority over available alternatives. . . .

When their economies do well, such leaders co-opt potential critics with material rewards. In harder times, they use censorship. The new autocrats bribe media owners with advertising contracts, threaten libel suits, and encourage pro-regime investors to purchase critical publications.

They dominate the Internet by blocking access to independent websites, hiring “trolls” to flood comments pages with pro-regime spam, and paying hackers to vandalize opposition online media sites.

I could hardy contain my laughter whilst reading this.  Hmmmm… let’s see:  propaganda? Check. Censorship? Check. Co-opting potential critics with material rewards? Check. Control over media through various civil or criminal means?  Check.  As for hiring trolls to flood comments and vandalizing opposition media sites, that can all be accomplished through private groups, without the need for government fingerprints.

But hey, I’m sure that could never happen here.

THE HACKERS KNOW, BUT WE DON’T:   A screenshot from a Romanian hacker confirms that two emails sent to Hillary Clinton from Sidney Blumenthal regarding intelligence reports on Libya are “missing.”  Hmmmm… I wonder what happened to them? Nothing to see here–move along.

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT’S SLOW DEATH: George Will’s latest column explains his own opposition to the death penalty.  He elaborates:

The conservative case against capital punishment, which 32 states have, is threefold. First, the power to inflict death cloaks government with a majesty and pretense of infallibility discordant with conservatism. Second, when capital punishment is inflicted, it cannot later be corrected because of new evidence, so a capital punishment regime must be administered with extraordinary competence. It is, however, a government program. Since 1973, more than 140 people sentenced to death have been acquitted of their crimes (sometimes by DNA evidence), had the charges against them dismissed by prosecutors, or been pardoned based on evidence of innocence. For an unsparing immersion in the workings of the governmental machinery of death, read “Just Mercy” by Bryan Stevenson, executive director and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative.

Third, administration of death sentences is so sporadic and protracted that their power to deter is attenuated. And expensive, because labyrinthine, legal protocols with which the judiciary has enveloped capital punishment are here to stay. Granted, capital punishment could deter: If overdue library books were punishable by death, none would be overdue. But many crimes for which death is reserved, including Tsarnaev’s crime of ideological premeditation, are especially difficult to deter.

While I normally agree with Will on most issues, I must disagree on this one.  The conservative case supporting capital punishment has nothing to do with the “majesty” or “infallibility” or even “competence” of government (God forfend).  Conceding that mistakes both can and will, inevitably, be made, Will wants to know how can one support the death penalty?  This is an important question, but one for which there is a response that is too often overlooked.  The best articulation of the answer comes from Clatstop County, Oregon District Attorney Joshua Marquis [full disclosure:  Josh is my brother-in-law], an elected Democrat D.A. who is one of the most prominent supporters of the death penalty:

[Often cited by death penalty opponents is a] study by Professor Samuel Gross that came out of a Northwestern Law School symposium and subsequent issue of their Journal of Criminal Law. I used Gross’ own numbers to estimate the incidence of real-life exonerations, as opposed to those in TV shows or movies. Gross cited about 390 cases from 1989 to 2003 where he and his team believed serious felony sentences were unfairly handed down against innocent defendants. . . . Gross posits there must be many more exonerations than he identified because he asserts . . . that in many cases DNA or a recantation by a key witness does not exist. So I rounded Gross’s number up to 400 and multiplied it by ten, yielding 4,000 exonerations—far more than I believe exist for the time period. I divided the 4,000 by 15 million, the number of felonies committed during the same period, yielding a “rightful” conviction rate of 99.93%. My article in the New York Times drew howls of protest, many attacking my math, pointing out that my base statistic of 15 million was all felonies.

Okay, so let’s refine the numbers down to just willful homicide and forcible rape. This is narrower than Gross’s sample and amounts to about 1.5 million. Move the decimal one point and you have a “rightful” conviction rate of 99.72%. Small consolation if you are in that .28 of one percent.

The wrongful conviction rate should be lower and prosecutors can do more than anyone in the criminal justice system to make sure that happens by being very discriminating in bringing capital cases. Pharmacists and doctors separately kill 10,000 Americans—by accident—every year, but we don’t ban prescriptions or elective surgery. We try to find out what went wrong and fix it.

Garrett and his fellow opponents of the death penalty—and then true life, and then mandatory sentencing of any sort—claim they really just want to fix the problem. But, as Justice Antonin Scalia acidly pointed out in his concurrence in Kansas v. Marsh, they aren’t interested in fixing the system, but in tearing it down. I have no doubt their beliefs are sincere and deeply held, but if we are to debate such an emotional issue we should do so with context, not ignoring the stories that don’t make the front page or are relegated to the newspaper’s “airplane pages” (B-2, C-5, etc).

States are doing all kinds of things to prevent the errors  . . . better trained and paid public defenders and prosecutors, and a true national DNA bank . . . .

I can understand how libertarians generally don’t trust the government to get things right and accordingly might be even more leery of the government killing someone. Professor Cass Sunstein proposed in “Is Capital Punishment Morally Required: The Relevance of Life-Life Tradeoffs” that if the series of nonideological studies done in the last decade are right, then having a death penalty spares between 10 and 24 innocent victims of murder. How can we abandon indisputably innocent men, women, and children to homicide?

So there is a very small “wrongful” conviction rate, (less than one-half percent) and it seems to be getting smaller and smaller due to advances in DNA and other scientific evidence, as well as a bigger, well-heeled and experienced capital crimes defense bar.  And capital punishment does have a deterrent effect— a point even Will seems to concede, albeit reluctantly.  This deterrence saves innocent lives, and overall, more innocent lives are saved than lost due to the death penalty.  And IMHO, there is an added societal bonus:  Capital punishment serves the important societal objective of good, old fashioned retribution–the recognition that crime, particularly violent crimes capable of triggering the consideration of capital punishment, are inherently harmful to the very fabric of society.  Retribution is a justification for punishment that liberals/progressives have long since forgotten/abandoned, but conservatives and libertarians should not.  (The issue of over-criminalization is a separate issue, but I will assume no one thinks punishment for murder is an example of over-criminalization).

I am content to let the people of each state decide whether the “costs” associated with the death penalty outweigh the “benefits” society derives. Each state should be perfectly free to decide whether it wishes to continue its death penalty as a matter of state law.  But as for the continuing attempts of death penalty opponents to try to “constitutionalize” their opposition, that is another question.

As a constitutional matter, capital punishment was clearly contemplated by the Framers, as the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments state that government may not deprive individuals of “life, liberty or property” without due process of law, the necessary implication of which is that “life” may be deprived by state and federal governments, provided “due process” is provided.  And the Supreme Court itself has stated, most recently in Gregg v. Georgia, that the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments does not demand abolition of the death penalty for those who are mentally competent and adults.

If the death penalty is indeed going to die a slow death, it should come from a thoughtful, democratic debate within each State, not through litigation aimed at getting unelected federal judges to impose a “one size fits all” constitutional “solution” on this controversial topic.

DAMN THE TORPEDOES?:  An oped in the WSJ today by former Navy Secretary John Lehman excoriates President Obama’s decision to nominate Admiral John Richardson to the post of chief of naval operations, thus moving him out of his current position as director of the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program (NNPP):

Working with the bipartisan leadership of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, the Senate and House Armed Services Committees and the secretary of energy, we constructed  . . . a position having executive power to prevent meddling from the layers of bureaucracy that were creating chaos in most defense programs. Importantly, we gave the new incumbent [director of NNPP] complete control of the selection and training of personnel. To ensure that such a powerful executive stayed long enough to execute programs and ensure accountability, a nonrenewable term of eight years was established.

That successful effort was put into an executive order by President Reagan that has worked effectively for 34 years. . . . [The NNPP has] been protected from the 970,000 Pentagon bureaucrats whose paralyzing bloat has made a hash of most Army, Navy and Air Force weapon programs. The reason for Navy nuclear success is because there has always been one strong experienced person in charge and accountable, standing like a stone wall against the bureaucratic onslaught.

But by far the most important benefit from this unique arrangement is the fact that there hasn’t been a single nuclear accident in the seven decades that the U.S. Navy has operated hundreds of nuclear submarines, carriers and surface combatants.

President Obama’s nomination of a current director of the Navy’s nuclear program to be the next chief of Naval Operations puts this unique record at risk. If Adm. Richardson leaves the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program, which he has headed for less than two years, all that was accomplished by the executive order will be swept aside. The job will become one more rung up the career ladder, a perch for ambitious admirals to use to interact with and please the politicians who have the power to elevate them to more glamorous positions.

Worst of all, if the job is seen as a steppingstone, a fraying of the zero-defects culture may begin and the possibility of a nuclear accident within the U.S. Navy may increase.

Yikes.

DAMNED EITHER WAY:  Investor’s Business Daily:  Marco Rubio Buys a Refrigerator.  So apparently, to be acceptable to the liberal/progressive mainstream media, politicians cannot be too rich (just ask Mitt Romney), or too middle class, as Marco Rubio appears to be.  But there’s always the Clinton Exception, in which wealth is disregarded by mainstream media because it’s, you know, the product of good deeds, such as “helping” Haiti, battling global warming climate change, assisting individuals with AIDS, and so on.

BECAUSE WE JUST DON’T UNDERSTAND HER SENSE OF HUMOR:  Remember the Goldsmiths, University of London “diversity” officer, Bahar Mustafa, who held a meeting and requested white men not to attend?  I wrote about the incident here and here.  Now, a writer at Slate, Amanda Hess, attempts to excuse Ms. Mustafa’s reprehensible behavior as “ironic misandry“:

Mustafa is not the first to have her reputation raked across the Web on account of some lousy tweets. But she may be the first to crumble over a case of ironic misandry, a tongue-in-cheek form of discourse favored by the young feminist Internet natives. You may have spied them on Twitter or Tumblr, working on their “KILL ALL MEN” cross-stitch or sipping from a mug labeled “MALE TEARS.” Ironic misandrists say they’re poking fun at long-standing stereotypes about militant feminist man-haters. That seems to fit Mustafa’s tweets. In a statement to Goldsmiths students, she owned up to using the hashtags, calling them “in-jokes” between herself and other members of “the queer feminist community.” If some people failed to get the joke, well, that was kind of the point.

Oh, I get it now–ha ha!  That is soooooooo funny– calling to “kill all men” and reveling in “male tears”!  I assume, then, it’s equally okay for a university official to engage in “ironic misogyny” and joke about killing all women and reveling in their tears?  Ha ha, that would be soooooo funny, too!  I mean, after all, it would be an “inside” joke among male rights proponents, right?  And if some people–such as, for example, women–failed to “get the joke,” then that would be “kind of the point.”

And while we’re at it, how about that ever-funny “ironic racism,” where people talk about killing white “crackkkas” and other side-splitting comments, as a recent Valdosta State student did? After all, it’s just an “inside joke” about white oppression, right?

LMAO!  I’m glad to know these radical lefties have such a robust sense of humor– I was worried about them taking themselves too seriously for awhile.

THEY SAID IF I VOTED FOR MITT ROMNEY, I’D BE VOTING FOR INCREASED RACIAL TENSION, AND THEY WERE RIGHT!: Valdosta State Student Who Stomped on US Flag Wants to Kill All White People:

Eric Sheppard, the Valdosta State University student who was confronted last month by an Air Force veteran after he stomped on the American flag, has issued a violent 4,700-word anti-white rant in which he threatened to “annihilate those who come after me.”

Sheppard is wanted by police after they found a gun in his backpack days after the flag-stomping demonstration. In his lengthy letter, submitted to The Valdosta Daily Times this week, Sheppard said he will not surrender and will use violence if necessary. . . .

Quoting former Nation of Islam leader and New Black Panther Party chairman, Kallid Abdul Muhammad, Sheppard wrote of whites, “we give them 24 hours to get out of town by sundown.”

“I say, if they don’t get out of town, we kill the white men, we kill the white women, we kill the white children, we kill the white babies, we kill the blind whites, we kill the crippled whites, we kill the crazy whites, we kill the faggots, we kill the lesbians, I say god dammit we kill ’em all,” Sheppard continued.

“If they are white kill ‘em all.” . . .

According to The Daily Times, Brian Childress, the Valdosta chief of police, believes that Sheppard’s video is a publicity stunt. Nevertheless, he contacted federal authorities about the threats.

Oh, good — I feel better now — the federal authorities have been alerted.  I’m sure they’re on it, you know, since they’ve been so steadfast in prosecuting lawless acts of intimidation by Black Panthers and so even-handed in their application of civil rights laws to all races and religions.

BECAUSE IF WE AREN’T GOOD AT IT, WE SHOULD BAN IT FOR EVERYONE!: That’s the “solution” to the “problem” of the gender gap in pay, according to this silly Washington Post oped by a business school professor.  The author asserts:

When it comes to playing hardball, women are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Training them to be tough negotiators won’t overcome the cultural rules rigged against them in the workplace. And it’s galling to think that women might need to employ a “Mad Men”-era strategy of flirtation to get a fair shake. Given that salary negotiations ignite the gender pay gap at the starting gate,a gap fueled by small gender biases over time, negotiation-free workplaces are women’s best option for getting the salaries they deserve.

Maybe so, but favoring women (or protecting them, which is the implication of this oped) isn’t the answer.  There’s a little thing called “liberty,” you see, and it’s really an empowering thing–even for women.  In fact, it’s central to the entire field of contract law, which presupposes that competent adults are, well, competent, to negotiate in their own best interests.  I hardly think the answer is assuming that women are incompetent at negotiating, ergo we should stop salary negotiations altogether.  How insulting, and how horrific for individual liberty. These liberals/progressives really should take a long, hard look at the prejudicial assumptions underlying their inane “solutions” to “problems.”

Talk about a #waronwomen.

BECAUSE #TOLERANCE!:  Charles C.W. Cooke on the Intolerant Jeweler Who Harbored an Impure Opinion on Same-Sex Marriage. Oh, the irony is deep on this one.  A Canadian jeweler who opposed same-sex marriage nonetheless makes wedding bands for a lesbian couple.  The lesbian couple then demanded their money back, claiming the jeweler’s thoughts tainted their rings.

Geez, either you do or you don’t want service.  You cannot, however, demand agreement, even in Canada.

I USED TO LOVE MY ‘BERRY:  The Inside Story of How the iPhone Crippled BlackBerry.

If the iPhone gained traction, RIM’s senior executives believed, it would be with consumers who cared more about YouTube and other Internet escapes than efficiency and security. RIM’s core business customers valued BlackBerry’s secure and efficient communication systems. Offering mobile access to broader Internet content, says Mr. Conlee, “was not a space where we parked our business.”

The iPhone’s popularity with consumers was illogical to rivals such as RIM, Nokia Corp. and Motorola Inc. The phone’s battery lasted less than eight hours, it operated on an older, slower second-generation network, and, as Mr. Lazaridis predicted, music, video and other downloads strained AT&T’s network. RIM now faced an adversary it didn’t understand.

“By all rights the product should have failed, but it did not,” said David Yach, RIM’s chief technology officer. To Mr. Yach and other senior RIM executives, Apple changed the competitive landscape by shifting the raison d’être of smartphones from something that was functional to a product that was beautiful.

“I learned that beauty matters….RIM was caught incredulous that people wanted to buy this thing,” Mr. Yach says.

For me, moving to the iPhone wasn’t about aesthetics at all.  I loved my ‘Berry’s actual keyboard and its battery, which lasted a full 24 hours. Heck, I even loved my old trackball. But every time I wanted to quickly look something up on the internet, I felt like I was swimming in molasses, it was so freaking slow. So I converted to iPhone, and I’ve never looked back, because BlackBerry has never been able to offer fast, seamless internet access.