"Calling the shooting a 'watershed event' in the national debate on gun control, Cerberus Capital, a New York-based firm that manages over $20 billion, said in a statement Tuesday it planned to sell off its investment in the Freedom Group. Freedom Group bills itself as a 'family' of more than a dozen firearm companies including Bushmaster Firearms." —Looks like a certain New York bunch of urban elitists are getting their man cards revoked.
It's been a while since we've played "Explaining Metropolitan Diary" (previously; and also; to be sure) but… well, here we are, with today's fourth item:
Dear Diary:
Recently, I made an interesting discovery. The eccentric middle-aged man who parades around my quiet Queens suburb sheathed in gowns of the most extravagantly tacky sort, while pushing his companion, a toylike pink and orange poodle (dressed to the nines of course) in an equally ostentatious stroller, is, in fact, a lawyer.
Emily Gifford
This item is enraging in at least four ways.
Did you know that House Republicans are paying a single lawyer as much as $1.5 million to defend America's "Defense of Marriage" Act? Your tax dollars at work! (There is, at least, a rationale for that: it is a law of America, and laws exist to be defended. But then lawyers argued against the 13th and 19th Amendments, too.) The lawyer is Paul D. Clement, and he represents everything else that is terrible, like Arizona's immigration law, and he also won the Florida case against the new requirement that all Americans have health insurance. (He's also the dude who claimed, to the Supreme Court's faces, that we didn't torture [...]
The Daily News notes that American Hero Steven Slater is being represented by a Legal Aid attorney? No offense to the wonderful, terrific American Heroes who work at the Legal Aid Society-and each of them is deserving of quadruple their salary and a sunroom in heaven-but you know they get a little busy with crazy case loads. That being said, it shouldn't be hard for him to cop a little plea on his class D felony charge and get some probation. (He's not the first maniac to pitch a fit in the county of Queens, after all.) But is Steven Slater our first celebu-criminal without a fancy Manhattan [...]
Law firm Fish & Richardson just deferred two-thirds of their incoming first-year associates. That's pretty bad! Though don't feel terrible for them. Half those kids are all getting paid $5000 a month for a year to not come to work. (The other half are only getting paid for six months.)
"Right now, only two of the six largest American publishers allow libraries to lend all of their e-books, and one of those two sells licenses that expire after twenty-six check-outs…. Publishers have tried charging libraries higher prices for e-books. They've tried introducing technologically unnecessary 'friction,' such as a ban on simultaneous loans of a title, or a requirement that library patrons come in person to the library to load their reading devices. The friction frustrates library patrons and enrages librarians, and even so, it hasn't been substantial enough to reassure the publishers who are abstaining from the library market altogether."
Let's play compare and contrast!
Mark Zuckerberg: "Recently, the US Federal Trade Commission established agreements with Google and Twitter that are helping to shape new privacy standards for our industry. Today, the FTC announced a similar agreement with Facebook."
The government: "The social networking service Facebook has agreed to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it deceived consumers by telling them they could keep their information on Facebook private, and then repeatedly allowing it to be shared and made public. The proposed settlement requires Facebook to take several steps to make sure it lives up to its promises in the future."
Helpful hint: Don't file-share child pornography on your laptop, law firm partners. Probably don't do it on any other computer/in any other profession either?
With the rise of the Wall Street Journal's New York section has come the realization that the WSJ and the New York Times are two silly, squabbling children. This schtick was fun and profitable when the Post and the Daily News did it-but that scheme isn't going to work in this case. The endless back and forth has already become sad: now their legal departments are bitching each other out over trademarked language in their competing promotions. Also, you know what's uncalled for, from a lawyer? "After an exhausting search of our records, we find no indication that you ever received permission to make use of our unique [...]
The most bizarre portion of New York magazine's story on lawyer-swindler (tautology! ok, sorry) Marc Dreier, about his son Spencer:
With his mother waiting outside, Spencer delivered his speech. "He said no one should be deserting his father because his father gave them so much," says someone who was there. "It was bizarre." The lawyers in the room were livid. One even started shouting: "I'm not going to listen to you! You have no place in here! This is a partnership meeting. You're not a partner!" Spencer even apparently came back to 499 Park Avenue the next day, trying to get in, when the guards stopped him. "He said, [...]
“Space tourists are usually high-income earners whose survivors can use high-powered lawyers—insurability for private space travel flights is a big issue at this time." —Space lawyer Doug Griffith talks to Fast Company's Neal Ungerleider about the growing field of space law.
If you haven't yet heard of him over the years, Stanislaw Burzynski operates a clinic in Houston where he runs pay-per-entry "clinical trials" for people with cancer for something called antineoplaston therapy. People spent thousands and thousands of dollars to enter these trials. And when the doctor is questioned in print about the efficacy of this treatment, a guy named Marc Stephens writes angry, harassing, legal-esque rants to the writer, as he did to this 17-year-old Welsh blogger and this writer at The Quackometer. It's funny, this Marc Stephens doesn't really act like a lawyer, because he does things like including Google Maps screenshots of the [...]
"One lawyer representing 33 men who agree to share media-deal profits equally is a recipe for disaster. Here's why: as the group does interviews, the individual personalities of the miners will flourish, and one member of the pack will emerge as the breakout star, like Beyoncé from Destiny's Child. The Chilean Beyoncé will receive offers that his fellow miners won't – a spot on Dancing With the Stars here, a cameo on A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila there – and he will grow increasingly bitter, as he is forced to split profits 32 ways."
The super-weird and super-invasive current strain of anti-single bias has popped up in a whole new Elena Kagan-centric way this past week. It was fine when people just thought she was a striving, careerist lesbian, because that's how lesbians are, but now that everyone actually understands she's straight, it is apparently repellent that she hasn't spawned. Because you know what's wrong with these sterile (emotionally, at least!), career-oriented, success-craving women who make it to the judiciary and the Supreme Court? They just never took time out to have babies. You know what babies give you? Well-roundedness! And I guess therefore the ability to issue Supreme Court decisions! If you have [...]
