J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 298
September 25, 2018
Robert E. Litan and Ian Hathaway: Is America Encouraging ...
Robert E. Litan and Ian Hathaway: Is America Encouraging the Wrong Kind of Entrepreneurship?: "William Baumol... idea... that may help explain America���s productivity slump. Baumol���s writing raises the possibility that U.S. productivity is low because would-be entrepreneurs are focused on the wrong kind of work...
...In a 1990 paper, ���Entrepreneurship: Productive, Unproductive, and Destructive,�����Baumol argued that the level of entrepreneurial ambition in a country is essentially fixed over time, and that what determines a nation���s entrepreneurial output is the incentive structure that governs and directs entrepreneurial efforts between ���productive��� and ���unproductive��� endeavors.... Baumol was worried, however, by... entrepreneur[s]... ���unproductive���... who ... construct regulatory moats, secure public spending for their own benefit, or bend specific rules to their will, in the process stifling competition to create advantage for their firms...
#shouldread
Will McGrew directs us to David Leonhardt's rant against ...
Will McGrew directs us to David Leonhardt's rant against the mainstream media's addiction to gauging the overall health of the economy by statistical measures that are relevant only to the rich: Will McGrew: Weekend Reading: ���Earnings Inequality��� Edition: "Criticizing the relevance of the economic data the government makes available, David Leonhardt echoes an argument...
...frequently made by Equitable Growth Chief Economist Heather Boushey and computational social scientist Austin Clemens. In particular, Leonhardt notes that while stock values and GDP growth have increased in the past few years, the income and net worth of most families have remained stagnant. Similarly, while unemployment rates are down, a larger number of workers has stopped looking for jobs, thus exiting the labor force...
#shouldread
I have been a "China is unlikely to keep its model going ...
I have been a "China is unlikely to keep its model going for more than another five years���a decade tops" perma-bear since 1988. All I understand is that I do not understand the Chinese economy. I wish I did understand it: Arvind Subramanian and Josh Felman: R.I.P. Chinese Exceptionalism?: "Over the past few decades, China���s growth has appeared to violate certain fundamental laws of economics.... China���s debt keeps on rising.... For any normal country, the build-up of extensive surplus capacity would lead to sharp declines in investment and GDP growth. And that, in turn, would produce financial distress, followed by a crisis if the warning signs were ignored. But China has had a different experience...
...China���s economic exceptionalism is now being threatened by a perfect storm of existing stresses���namely, the domestic debt build-up���and new complications, including US trade barriers, the geopolitical pushback against China���s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and tightening monetary conditions, particularly in the United States. After the 2008 financial crisis, China shifted its economic model away from exports and toward internal sources of growth. But such a rebalancing requires ever more debt and investment, thus creating greater risks of collapse. As a result, the government has had to tread carefully, providing only moderate dollops of stimulus to the economy as needed. There is no how-to manual for managing this balancing act. Policy interventions that seem moderate in the moment could turn out to have been excessive. At some point, Stein���s Law will assert itself.... Xi would do well to remember not just Stein���s Law, but also R��diger Dornbusch���s Law, which holds that, ���The crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought.��� Sooner or later, Chinese exceptionalism will give way to the laws of economics. The world should prepare itself. The consequences could be severe���and unlike anything experienced in recent history...
#shouldread
Simon Wren-Lewis: Another Lesson of the GFC Unlearnt: The...
Simon Wren-Lewis: Another Lesson of the GFC Unlearnt: The Consensus Assignment Is Dead: "Martin writes: 'There was broadly shared understanding.... Fiscal and budgetary policy should be set to achieve microeconomic and distributive goals, and the desired share of the state in the economy; while monetary policy should take care of stabilising aggregate demand.'... This is what I call the Consensus Assignment...
...It was certainly the consensus among mainstream macroeconomists before the 1990s. But the experience of Japan���s lost decade where they also had interest rates stuck at the ELB began a process of rethinking. By the time the GFC came around many macroeconomists had realised that there was an Achilles Heel in the Consensus Assignment. Fiscal stabilisation was still required when interest rates hit their ELB. That is why we had fiscal stimulus in 2009. The importance of this cannot be overstated. The policy consensus in 2009 was that fiscal stimulus was required, because monetary policy was not enough. This consensus didn���t evaporate in 2010. What overrode it was mainly politics - what I call deficit deceit. There was also a bit of panic in some quarters caused by the Eurozone crisis. However a majority of academic macroeconomists continued to believe that further fiscal stimulus was required, and that majority got steadily larger as time went on....
#shouldread
On Kavanaugh, Alexandra Petri is on fire: Alexandra Petri...
On Kavanaugh, Alexandra Petri is on fire: Alexandra Petri: The Kavanaugh Accusations Are Horseplay, You Say?: "To comment, I have a horse (not that Kavanaugh was even at the party, of course, of course): 'To Whom It May Concern: I am a horse. I know horseplay. This, my friend, is not horseplay. Ask yourself: Was someone frolicking in a beautiful, verdant field? Was a mane billowing in the breeze? Did you feel a stirring of joy in your heart for the first time in months, like a crocus bursting from the winter soil? Was a long tail flapping freely in the breeze? Was it unbelievably majestic? Was Misty of Chincoteague there?...
Plus:
Some verbs for the Kavanaugh discussion, conjugated by gender : "She is drinking; she is drunk; she was drunk. She is 15; she was 15. She is putting herself in this position; she put herself in that position. She should know better; she should have known better...
[Every man should be worried if Kavanaugh goes down. At least, I'm worried]](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/o...): "You���re telling me I am supposed to encounter dozens, hundreds, thousands of women in my life, some drunk and some sober and some with really good legs and just ��� not assault any of them?...
#shouldread
Some Fairly-Recent Must- and Should-Reads...
Jerome H. Powell: Monetary Policy in a Changing Economy: "Analysts talk about... u* (pronounced "u star") is the natural rate of unemployment, r* ("r star") is the neutral real rate of interest, and ��* ("pi star") is the inflation objective. According to the conventional thinking, policymakers should navigate by these stars...
Josh Marshall: Whelan Nutbar Twitter Thread Preserved for Posterity: "We still have more questions than answers about Ed Whelan���s bizarre twitter thread that accused another Kavanaugh classmate of attacking Prof. Blasey Ford and roiled the already embattled nomination. So for those who didn���t see or would like to read through it again for clues to what happened, here���s the whole thing...
Michael R. Strain: The Economics and Emotions Behind Slow Wage Growth: "why does wage growth continue to be so tepid? As unemployment falls and the number of open jobs increases, businesses should have to increase pay in order to attract increasingly scarce available workers as well as retain the employees they have...
GDP has its place in our national public-sphere conversation because a new number is released roughly once a month���each quarter of the year has its own GDP number, and the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis releases "advance", "second", and "third" estimates for each quarter, and then there are benchmarking revisions. To attain an equal place in public-sphere consciousness, the distributional national accounts component would have to appear also once a month. And it is not clear to me how to do that: Equitable Growth: Measuring U.S. economic growth: "The measurement of GDP has fostered a national fixation on 'growing the pie' that ignores how growth is distributed...
Binyamin Applebaum: Economics as a Professional Vocation: "I am not sure there is a defensible case for the discipline of macroeconomics if they can���t at least agree on the ground rules for evaluating tax policy...
Pedro Nicolaci da Costa: Wage Growth Should Be Much Stronger by Now Given Low Jobless Rates: "There's a simple way to tell the US job market is not as strong as it appears.... 'The definition of full employment is low- and moderate-wage workers actually get raises," said Josh Bivens, director of research at the Economic Policy Institute. 'We are not at full employment yet'...
Sara Boboltz and Emily Peck: Yale Students To Prof Who Denies Coaching Kavanaugh Clerks: You're Lying: "Yale Law School professor Amy Chua strongly denied that she told students that Brett Kavanaugh, now a nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court,��liked his female law clerks to have a certain feminine appearance, in a statement emailed to the Yale Law community on Saturday...
Wigner has many friends, and they can disagree: Lidia del Rio: Journal club: Frauchiger-Renner no-go theorem for single-world interpretations of quantum theory: "In this talk I will go over the recent paper by Daniela Frauchiger and Renato Renner, "Single-world interpretations of quantum theory cannot be self-consistent" (arXiv:1604.07422)...
Rob Johnson and George Soros: A Better Bailout Was Possible: "A critical opportunity was missed when the burden of post-crisis adjustment was tilted heavily in favor of creditors relative to debtors.... When President Barack Obama���s administration arrived, one of us (Soros) repeatedly appealed to Summers... [for] equity injection into fragile financial institutions and... writ[ing] down mortgages to a realistic market value.... Summers objected that ... such a policy reeked of socialism and America is not a socialist country...
Duncan Black: Who Talks Like This: "I have some opinions about elite law-and The Law as a "scholarly" endeavor-which I might share sometime after a few lines of coke (joke), but something which drives me nuts is how they all talk about each other in terms of 'giant intellects' and 'intellectual prowess' and 'my friend, the jurist, has always impressed me with his deep intellect'...
Paul Krugman: The Careerism and De Facto Soft Corruption of the Center_: "given Kavanaugh's record (sexual assault aside) and the Whelan stunt it's now clear that the right-wing judicial establishment is full of charlatans and cranks.... What's different is how respectfully the judicial crazies have been treated by the non-right-wing legal establishment...
Women of Yale: Open Letter from Women of Yale in Support of Deborah Ramirez: "We stand behind Deborah Ramirez, Yale ���87, and with Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. These two women have come forward with grave allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, a Yale graduate...
Statement from James Roche: "I was Brett Kavanaugh's roommate at Yale University in the Fall of 1983. We shared a two-bedroom unit in the basement of Lawrence Hall on the Old Campus. Despite conditions, Brett and I did not socialize beyond the first few days of freshman year. We talked at night as freshman roommates do and I would see him as he returned from nights out friends. It is from this experience that I concluded that although Brett was normally reserved, he was a notably heavy drinker, even by the standards of the time...
Brett Kavanaugh: A Multiple Train Wreck in Many Dimensions: Monday Smackdown
Yale Students To Prof Who Denies Coaching Kavanaugh Clerks: You're Lying | HuffPost
Why Would Anybody Sane Ever, Ever Choose Brett Kavanaugh Over Amy Barrett?
Some Fairly-Recent Links:
Peter Norvig: A Concrete Introduction to Probability (using Python)
James Gorman: Parrots Think They���re So Smart. Now They���re Bartering Tokens for Food
Paul Moses: Tackling the Wrong Problem : "Pope Benedict XVI���s Removal of Bishop William Morris...
Weekend Reading: John Maynard Keynes on the "Euthanasia of the Rentier"
Rachel Feintzig: Tax Change Helps Executives Afford Pricier Planes : "The recent changes to the tax code are giving business executives a new perk: the opportunity to deduct the entirety of a corporate-jet purchase.... The price of a new or used airplane purchased by a company can be a 100% write-off against its earnings. That is a major change...
Robert Farley: The Queen Elizabeth Class Battleships Were Among the Best Ever Built. What If They Never Happened?
Erik Bergl��f: The Evolution of Globalization : "Around the turn of the century, critics of trade and capital-market liberalization had good reason to worry that emerging and developing economies would fall further behind the developing world. But the opposite happened, and now the world must worry about the trajectory of advanced economies and the fraying of multilateral arrangements...
Adair Turner: Japan���s Successful Economic Model by Adair Turner : "Japan���s GDP growth lags most other developed economies, and will likely continue to do so as the population slowly declines. But what matters for human welfare is GDP per capita, and on this front, the country excels...
Very, very, very, very smart: Brad Setser: Three Sudden Stops and a Surge : "Fundamentally, the crisis was a crisis of confidence in the health of the balance sheets of the great financial houses of the United States and Europe.... The line between banks and shadow banks was thin, it turned out...
Martin Sandbu: Salzburg Changes Nothing : "[May] far from giving up on Chequers, will be prepared to make further concessions on the specifics to gain agreement from the EU27 on the plan���s basic principle.... Britain... will have to sign up to a permanent customs union with the EU in all but name, and accept the full force of European jurisdiction in everything to do with production and trade.... It would be a good deal for the EU for its regulatory authority to be accepted by such a big third country...
Tim Duy: Fed Interest-Rate Debate Misses the Bigger Picture : "It���s better to let economic conditions dictate when to pause the monetary tightening process...
Olla Cocina : "Downtown San Jose Mexican Restaurant in the historic San Pedro Square...
Benjamin Wittes: Brett Kavanaugh Bears the Burden of Proof : "The question isn���t whether he can win confirmation���it���s whether he can defend against the charge he faces in a manner that is both persuasive and honorable...
Wall of Shame:
Morgan Gstalter: McConnell: Midterms could be 'a Category 3, 4 or 5' storm for GOP: "'We know the wind is going to be in our face. We don���t know whether it���s going to be a Category 3, 4 or 5'...
Matthew Yglesias: "The highbrow intellectual leaders of the modern conservative movement explicitly conceptualized it as a white nationalist undertaking. Trump is true to this legacy and his intra-movement critics are the innovators...
Eight years of Governor Sam Brownback has seen Kansas lose 8% of its jobs relative to the national average. Now Kansas is Ground Zero for Trump's trade war. Joshua Green: Chinese Sorghum Tariffs Will Hit Hard in Trump-friendly Kansas: "Trump���s Trade War Hits Another Red State: What���s the matter with Kansas? It���ll be hardest hit by new Chinese tariffs...
Will Wilkinson: The DACA and immigration debates are about whether Latinos are ���real Americans���: "Challenging the idea that Latino Americans can be truly American undercuts the very idea of America...
Just when you think the mainstream media could not sink any lower into misogyny and stupidity, it's the Atlantic Monthly!: Scott Lemieux: Are you provoked yet?: "Both James Bennet and Fred Hiatt have been asked to hold David Bradley���s beer...
Ezra Klein: @ezraklein on Twitter: "I don���t know what the [New York] Times should���ve done with Thrush. But I watched the efforts to plant oppo and smear @lkmcgann in the aftermath of her reporting. Anyone who thinks coming forward with these experiences is easy, even now, is wrong. I am beyond proud to be her colleague..."
Yes, this is as bad a violation of academic standards as it looks: Henry Farrell: The public choice of public choice: "Now this... 'financial ties to the Charles Koch Foundation... [but] George Mason University has cited its academic independence.
The Brexiters never had a plan for what they would do if they won the referendum. And they still do not have a plan. I do not see a road other than "transitional" arrangements that keep things as they are without the UK having any voice in Brussels���"transitional" arrangements that will keep getting indefinitely extended: Robert Hutton: Stuck In the Middle: These Are Theresa May's Four Brexit Options: "Her inner Brexit Cabinet has rejected her proposed customs relationship with the European Union...
Gabrielle Coppola: Trump���s TPP Pullout May Have Cost Missouri Its Harley Factory: "Harley-Davidson Inc.���s chief executive officer said he may have kept a plant open in Missouri if the U.S. had stayed in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the free-trade agreement that President Donald Trump withdrew from last year...
WTF happened to Brendan Nyhan? The braineater has eaten his brain: Josh Marshall: "There are several problems with this logic.: The first is that you are applying jury trial standards to what are political questions. You are also applying statutory standards where they do not exist. As a factual matter the obstruction question is not in doubt...
Shame on the Editors of Vanity Fair!: Highlighted/Hoisted from Two Years Ago
September 24, 2018
Statement from James Roche: "I was Brett Kavanaugh's room...
Statement from James Roche: "I was Brett Kavanaugh's roommate at Yale University in the Fall of 1983. We shared a two-bedroom unit in the basement of Lawrence Hall on the Old Campus. Despite conditions, Brett and I did not socialize beyond the first few days of freshman year. We talked at night as freshman roommates do and I would see him as he returned from nights out friends. It is from this experience that I concluded that although Brett was normally reserved, he was a notably heavy drinker, even by the standards of the time...
...and that he became aggressive and belligerent when he was very drunk. I did not observe the specific incident in question, but I do remember Brett frequently drinking excessively and becoming incoherently drunk.
I became close friends with Debbie Ramirez shortly after we both arrived at Yale. She stood out as being exceptionally honest, with a trusting manner. As we got to know one another, I discovered that Debbie was very worried about fitting in. She felt that everyone at Yale was very rich, very smart and very sophisticated and that as a Puerto Rican woman from a less privileged background she was an outsider. Her response was to try hard to make friends and get along.
Based on my time with Debbie, I believe her to be unusually honest and straightforward and I cannot imagine her making this up.
Based on my time with Brett, I believe that he and his social circle were capable of the actions that Debbie described.
I do not consider myself to be a political person and I have no political agenda. I have shared thisninformation with a small number of reporters who reached out to me directly because Debbie has a right to be heard and I believe her.
I have been asked for more detail and additional stories, but this is all that I am
comfortable with sharing. If I could contribute more first-hand information, I would, but I will not be granting any more interviews or answering any more questions at this time.
#shouldread
Brett Kavanaugh: A Multiple Train Wreck in Many Dimensions: Monday Smackdown
I confess that I have been procrastinating on various things. Why? Because I have been unable to tear my eyes away from the multiple train crash that is the confirmation process... the career... the life of Brett Kavanaugh. My view of this is a third- or fourth-hand view. It is the view of Georgetown Prep from Sidwell Friends. And it may well be wrong. But I think that it is right. So, with that warning, here goes:
The first... oddity... is Brett Kavanaugh���s reaction to Christine Blasey Ford. It really ought to have been something like this:
I cannot say that I have a good memory of this, and I am not certain I am remembering the incident that was clearly very traumatic for her. I was drunk. I think she was drunk. From my perspective, we were roughhousing, and I was hoping she would let me see her tits. When it became clear she clearly was scared, Mark and I backed off.
I was in an unhealthy liberal culture in my high school and college years. When I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible. I hope I have learned to be a better person since then. I am now trying hard to be my best possible self.
I was too much of a dork and a dick back then to call her up the following day to apologize. And I have not been my best self in shirking my duty to apologize to her, to repent, to atone. It maybe too late now��� better late than never Is not always true. But if better late than never is true in this case, I would like to say: I do regret my actions at what I believe was that incident and at other incidents where I was young and irresponsible. But I am not a rapist. I do not like to force myself I���m scared, struggling women.
That would���ve been the same thing to do. The non-psychopathic thing to do. The normal thing to do. The Manly thing to do.
But Brett Kavanaugh and company did not do that. Why not?
I think the balance of the probabilities has to be that he was, more likely than not, poisoned by his upbringing, and perhaps especially by his upbringing in the right wing of the Catholic Church of Pope Paul VI and John Paul II���their moral imbecility in the age of artifical birth control is truly wondrous.
I think it is more likely than not that he did and perhaps does have a particular kink: enjoying destroying female agency, through intoxication and a little light restraint, perhaps especially when women find themselves of multiple minds, with hopes, fears, regrets, and anticipation. Perhaps especially when there are no hopes and anticipations but only fears and regrets.
Thus, if that is who Brett Kavanaugh really was and is, there is an awful lot out there���not just Christine Blasey Ford, and Deborah Ramirez out there trying to make an example of Christine Blessey forward and frighten the others into silence has been a deliberate part of his confirmation strategy since the possibility of his nomination was first mooted.
Why didn't this get steamrolled out of him at Yale? My memory of Harvard-Radcliffe half a decade before is that frat boys and misogynist frat-boy culture wer in retreat: Wellesley women were finding themselves and their careers, and Radcliffe women believed that they could demand that Harvard boys toe the line. Harvard-Radcliffe had or at least seemed to have things largely under control���Finals Clubs marginalized, alcohol served sedately as wine and beer at Masters' Receptions and House parties, some heavy drinking in dorms, most men who weren't too shy trying to figure out how to be properly feminist so that the object of their affections' roommates would not tell her that they were pig.
But, I am told, then the drinking age went up. And Finals Clubs came back. And seniors began getting frantic phone calls from the younger sisters of high school friends, saying: "They've looked my roommate in the basement of �����, and they say they won't let her out until she gives them all blowjobs..."
Not sure I am right about all this. Certainly not sure beyond a reasonable doubt. Certainly not sure even by clear and convincing evidence. But I do believe it is more likely than not. It was certainly how Georgetown Prep looked from Sidwell Friends at the time. And it is certainly how Georgetown Prep through the lens of its yearbook and "no means yes, yes means anal" Yale ������ look today.
Then, of course, there are the finances. Where did the down payment for his house come from? Who paid off the roughly hundred thousand dollars in credit card debt? Where did the hundred thousand dollars for the country club initiation fee come from? Financial disclosure forms are designed by Congress to allow for low-level bribery, or perhaps it would be better to collect favor exchange (you make sure my business does not get ground finally in the mills of government, I put you onto some really good investments), well putting curbs on truly mind-boggling corruption. As I see it, there are three places where at the cash that filled the holes in Kavanaugh���s finances could���ve come from cold
From family, in which case is almost surely a gift tax sheet.
From giving a highly overpaid speeches to groups of Federalist Society were these and donors, in the strange way judges appear to be allowed to do.
From parenthesis two), but somehow he forgot to give the speeches and just took the money.
(2) is unseemly, but more-or-less par for that particular social group's course in this particular ideological-partisan judicial environment. (1) is criminal, but the IRS is very unlikely to prosecute in May will waive many penalties if you come forward voluntarily to disclose and amend your return. (3) is simply corrupt. That Cavanagh is unwilling to disclose how the holes in his finances have been closed strongly suggests to me that it is (3).
Somewhat connected with finances... There are multiple ways of being an acceptable relationship partner. You can be a good listener and a soulful lover, making her feel highly valued and good about herself. You can be a Brooklyn hipster, actively sharing the childcare, and child management, and household maintenance load. Or you can be filthy rich, bringing enormouis financial resources to the household for your partner to utilize as social power. Here Kavanaugh's problem is that he has worked for the the government and is not rich by Silicon Valley, American finance, of even Big Law standards. Does that matter? Yes, because wealth as social power is a relative status thing.
This complex of issues may have a considerable amount to do with a general sense I get of right wing upper middle-class and lower upper class psychological grievance. Their incomes today vastly exceed those of the proletariat by a margin that those who remember America of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s cannot find anything other than mind-boggling. Yet, as I like to put it, their predecessors in the 1960s could believe they could look George Romney in the eye, but they look at Mitt Romney and the other plutocrats and feel very very very small indeed. The decline of patriarchy and their failure to become plutocrats themselves has, they think, cheated them. Kavanaugh wants to run with the big dogs. He wants to be the kind of person who can trivially spend six figures on a Country Club initiation fee. Hence he cannot afford to have judicial principles.
I will pass over Kavanaugh���s judicial practice, safe to say that he is the most perfect example I have found so far of conservative legal theory: in Frank Wilhoit's words: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. Kavanaugh is extreme here, but not unusual except perhaps that he is one of those who believes that above all the law protects but does not bind Republican presidents, even���or perhaps especially?���those named Trump.
This bears on why Kavanaugh is still in the ring���and why Republicans are still backing him, and have been backing him for months knowing that sexual assaults he cannot now remember because he black-out drunk are out there. As I said before: Why would anybody sane ever, ever choose Brett Kavanaugh over Amy Barrett as the swing vote to eviscerate Roe versus Wade? People have advanced three reasons:
They just do not think girls are serious���other things being equal (or, indeed, not equal), choose the man.
Amy Barrett has faith and principles: they do not know what the key issues will be 20 years from now, and they are scared to appoint somebody who may turn out to be like Justices Kennedy and Souter, actually have principles and faith, and so go off the reservation.
Amy Barrett does not believe that the president is above the law���princeps legibus solutus est is not one of her judicial principles.
Things are definitely not equal. There are lots of reasons to fear Brett Kavanaugh does not have a judicial temperament in addition to the fact that he is now lying about sexual assault of a 15-year-old 35 years ago...
And I will note the unseemly posturing of the legal establishment: Neal Katyal says:
Regardless of where one stands on the Kavanaugh nomination... with his former clerks, his mentoring and guidance is a model for all of us in the legal profession...
at the same time as the Guardian reports on Amy "Don't Wear a Suit to Your Kavanaugh Clerkship Interview" Chua:
[Amy] Chua invited a group of students that she mentored to a bar last year to catch up and discuss their plans for clerkships.... Chua... told the students she had known about allegedly abusive and harassing behavior by another judge, Alex Kozinski, who was head of the ninth circuit and was forced to retire from the bench last year after more than a dozen women accused him of harassment. The conversation then turned to Kozinski���s protege and good friend Kavanaugh.... Chua allegedly told the students that it was ���no accident��� that Kavanaugh���s female clerks ���looked like models���. Student reacted with surprise, and quickly pointed out that Chua���s own daughter was due to clerk for Kavanaugh. A source said that Chua quickly responded, saying that her own daughter would not put up with any inappropriate behaviour.
And:
Yale provided Kavanaugh with many of the judge���s clerks over the years, and Chua played an outsized role in vetting the clerks who worked for him. But the process made some students deeply uncomfortable.... Sources who spoke to the Guardian about their experiences with Chua and Rubenfeld would only speak under the condition of anonymity because they feared retribution and damage to their future careers.... Chua advised the... student... that she ought to dress in an ���outgoing��� way for her interview with Kavanaugh, and... should send Chua pictures of herself in different outfits.... Questions about why the couple believed it was important to emphasize the students��� physical appearance when discussing jobs with Kavanaugh. The couple were not known to do that in connection with other judges, sources said:
It is possible that they were making observations but not following edicts.... I have no reason to believe he was saying, ���Send me the pretty ones���, but rather that he was reporting back and saying, ���I really like so and so,��� and the way he described them led them to form certain conclusions...
how respectfully the judicial crazies have been treated by the non-right-wing legal establishment.... The way law professors rushed to endorse Kavanaugh���who got his career start pursuing conspiracy theories.... What seems to explain the difference is incentives. Judges are political appointees; so a lawyer may find himself or herself facing a Federalist Society judge, creating an incentive to treat these people respectfully...
It's not cases. It's clerkships. Law professors don't practice. They do place students.
As I said: a multiple train wreck of a confirmation process, of a career, of a life.
2081 words
Women of Yale: Open Letter from Women of Yale in Support ...
Women of Yale: Open Letter from Women of Yale in Support of Deborah Ramirez: "We stand behind Deborah Ramirez, Yale ���87, and with Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. These two women have come forward with grave allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, a Yale graduate...
...We are coming forward as women of Yale because we have a shared experience of the environment that shaped not only Judge Kavanaugh���s life and career, but our own. We are committed to supporting all women who have faced sexual assault, not only at Yale, but across the country.
Ramirez has made allegations against Judge Kavanaugh about an incident that took place when both were students at Yale. We commend her courage in coming forward. We ask that she be afforded respect and security to protect her privacy, quality of life, and emotional stability.
We demand that her allegations be thoroughly investigated and that she be treated with fairness, and given an opportunity to tell her story. We also demand that the Senate Judiciary Committee delay any vote on Judge Kavanaugh���s nomination to the United States Supreme Court until all allegations against him have been investigated, all witnesses have testified under oath, and his nomination has been thoroughly vetted...
#shouldread
Monday Smackdown: Things from His Georgetown Prep Yearbook Brett Kavanaugh Should Be Asked About This Week...
c
"Find them, French them, Feel them, Finger them, F-ck them, Forget them...:
FFFFFFourth of July
Summer of 100 Kegs
What Happens at Georgetown Prep, Stays at Georgetown Prep
Devil's Triangle
Bowling Alley Assault
Rehobeth Beach Police Fan Club
Boofing
Beach Week Ralph Club
100 Keg Club
One does wonder just what the frack the Jesuits running Georgetown Prep thought they were doing...
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