Everyone will see what they want to see in President Obama’s Q&A; with the House Republican conference today-Democrats will be emboldened by the President’s sometimes aggressive tone, Republicans will praise the sharp questions from their members, C-SPAN will be thrilled that people are paying attention to C-SPAN, etc.-but I think this was the part I enjoyed most.

“I mean, we’ve got to be careful about what we say about each other sometimes because it boxes us in in ways that makes it difficult for us to work together because our constituents start believing us. They don’t know sometimes this is just politics, what you guys, you know, or folks on my side do sometimes. So just a tone of civility instead of slash-and-burn would be helpful.

The problem we have sometimes is a media that responds only to slash- and-burn-style politics. You don’t get a lot of credit if I say, ‘You know, I think Paul Ryan’s a pretty sincere guy and has a beautiful family.’ Nobody’s going to run that in the newspapers, right?

(LAUGHTER)

And by the way, in case he’s going to get a Republican challenge, I didn’t mean it.

(LAUGHTER)

I don’t want to — don’t want to hurt you, man.

(LAUGHTER)”

I don’t know, it made me smile, at least. (I also liked the part where he kept calling Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) “Jim.”) Anyway, if you’d like to watch the whole thing, C-SPAN has it. There’s also a transcript here.

The Somali pirates are, apparently, going to send large donations to Haiti. For reference, their estimated income for last year was $60 million.

Three weeks ago, a bear entered the town of Przemysl, Poland, and approached a local school. She was tranquilized by local authorities, who returned her into the forest on the theory that, hey, she certainly wouldn’t do that again. Naturally, she did, heading to the nearby town of Chorzow. Guess what? “[T]his time, efforts to tranquilize her proved decidedly unsuccessful. Despite apparently succumbing to a first injection, the bear suddenly awoke when authorities approached. A chase ensued, with a second ranger having to come to the aid of his companion.” Everyone survived, the bear is headed to a zoo, and the rest of us get a photogallery out of it. Everybody wins!

IMPORTANT ALERT. Famous upcoming 3:33 p.m. Erykah Badu leak, as promised by her Twitter, is merely a single bonus track. (We’ll happily take it, of course.)

In a fine example of what Ann Powers defined as “violator art” in a 1999 Village Voice article-one which is now being taught as a four-credit humanities course at Mt. Holyoke!-50 Cent’s G-Unit henchman Tony Yayo has been making some great, awful rap music lately.

A couple weeks ago, he leaked a song called “Obama” that will appear on a new mixtape, Gun Powder Guru. “Obama,” Yayo says in rhyme, is a new brand of heroin he’s selling. (“Dope bags stamped ‘Obama,” as he puts it, to go with “Sammy Sosa” cocaine, and “Lady Gaga” ecstasy pills. This is the best celebrity drug nomenclature since U.G.K. labeled marijuana “Bobby” and coke “Whitney” on 2007’s “The Game Belongs To Me.”)

Now, even better, is “Bullets Whistle,” which makes murder sound sexier than one would maybe hope murder could sound. The beat, with that cold worm synth reminiscent of vintage Dr. Dre.

And the video. Jesus Christ! Tony Yayo sure likes guns. And grenades, apparently, one of which he swings around on his finger before pretending it’s a basketball and miming a fadeaway-jumper. If there was ever a time to warn kids not to try this at home. What can you say about this? It’s terrible. It’s terrific.

Video mash-ups aren’t usually my thing, but this “Sopranos”/Wild Things overlay somehow does the trick. [Via]

Science is PISSED: “You just cannot believe what you read in British newspapers. I’d further call on my academic colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic never to speak to British reporters. You have absolutely no control over what they say about you and your scientific research.” [Via]

by Ian Retford

For 2000 or so years, conventional medical wisdom/quack science held that various bodily substances, known collectively as the four humours, governed a person’s physical and emotional disposition. I have my own four humours theory, which is basically that the only things people really find funny are cursing, typos, pratfalls and old people. (This means, for a lawyer, that your day job is about as amusing as a Chris Buckley piece.)

But, oh, the exceptions! In 2008, for example, Fox was fined by the FCC for failing to bleep various expletives uttered at the now-defunct Billboard Awards. (One “fuck” by Cher at the 2002 awards, one “fucking” and one “shit” by Nicole Richie at the 2003 awards.) The FCC contested the appropriateness of the fines, and during oral argument at the Supreme Court, then-88-year-old Justice Stevens had a question that he thought cut to the heart of the matter.

“JUSTICE STEVENS: Could I ask one question that just occurred to me? Do you think the use of the word dung, D-U-N-G, would be indecent?”

That was amusing. But “dung” is usually about as wild as judges get. (In the Supreme Court’s opinion upholding the fines, “fuck” and “shit” were rendered as “f***” and “s***”.)

The case of Ingrid Reeves of Birmingham, Alabama is a notable departure from typical judicial decorum. Reeves, who may or may not bear a striking resemblance to the Kathy Bates character from Primary Colors, had a series of jobs where she was more or less the only lady around: a post on a container ship, a stint in the Merchant Marines and finally a job on the logistics floor at a shipping company, C.H. Robinson, where she was one of only two female employees. Like most environs that skew heavily male-e.g., locker rooms, trading floors, the island from Lord of the Flies, libertarian rallies-the C.H. Robinson office was a mix of foul language, puerile jokes, homoerotic towel-snapping and unrepentant misogyny.

It’s this last part that rubs Reeves the wrong way. Although she was apparently cool with the run-of-the-mill swearing by C.H. Robinson employees (sample: “Jesus fucking Christ,” “fucking asshole,” “fucking jerk,” and “fucking idiot”), she was, oddly enough, more troubled by the gender-specific insults that were flung around routinely (sample: “bitch,” “fucking bitch,” “fucking whores,” “crack whore,” and “cunt.”).

She was also bothered by some of the insults leveled at her only female coworker (for example, “She may be a bitch, but she can read”).

And: “Indeed, Reeves’s supervisor, branch manager David Mitchell, often referred to his female colleagues by the term ‘bitch.’ Among other examples offered, he ordered Reeves to speak with ‘that stupid bitch on line 4,’ and described a former female colleague, Jackie Burt, as a ‘lazy, good-for-nothing bitch.’”

After one of her colleagues displayed porn on his computer, Reeves decided that she’d had enough and complained to her branch manager. Five times. When that proved fruitless, she asked to speak with a few C.H. Robinson executives, who declined Reeves’s offer to discuss “sexually offensive language and conversation in the office.”

This being America, Reeves quit, and sued. She claimed that C.H. Robinson violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of, among other things, race and sex (but not, FYI, sexual orientation). The trial court, unpersuaded, held that Reeves had no claim because the offensive conduct was directed at other women and not specifically at Reeves.

A sweeping (and profanity-laced!) opinion [PDF] of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated Reeves’s suit. In what should already make any list of the top judicial pronouncements of 2010, the court found it immaterial that Reeves herself was not the target of her coworkers’ offensive barrage:

It is enough to hear co-workers on a daily basis refer to female colleagues as “bitches,” “whores” and “cunts” . . . . The harasser need not close the circle with reference to the plaintiff specifically: ‘and you are a bitch, too.’

The Court likewise dismissed C. H. Robinson’s charming argument that no discrimination took place because everyone, male and female alike, was called “bitch” at the Birmingham office: “[T]he terms ‘bitch’ and ‘whore’ have gender-specific meanings… Calling a man a ‘bitch’ belittles him precisely because it belittles women.”

Most immediately striking about the opinion is its unflinching and utterly logical examination of the ways in which, depending on context, profanity might or might not carry a sexually derogatory connotation. Check out footnote 4, on permissible and impermissible uses of “fucking.”

It is, needless to say, titillating to hear a dead-serious exegesis on curse words from the Geritol set. But it’s also useful. Coworkers are frequently nasty, brutish and short, and it is crucial to employment discrimination claims that courts have some heuristic for distinguishing between the acceptably boorish and the unacceptable biased.

Even more remarkable than the opinion itself is its provenance. The Eleventh Circuit is one of the most conservative federal appeals courts in the country, and yet all 11 of the judges who heard the appeal-7 of whom were appointed by Republican presidents-agreed on the outcome. This might make you suspicious. Is the opinion grounded in some kind of misguided, sexist chivalry, a notion of women as delicate hothouse flowers? The references to Reeves’s rough-and-tumble employment history and her own penchant for “generic swear words” suggests otherwise. The message of the opinion seems to be not that Reeves couldn’t handle the diarrhetic sexism of her coworkers, but only that she shouldn’t have had to.

Previously: Inconsistent Pleadings: ACLU v. Grayson County, or, America’s Heritage

Ian Retford is the pseudonym of a lawyer in New York City.

There’s already a Shake Shack iPhone app that lets you look at the burger joint’s line via live camera, so you know before you go over there just how much bitching on Twitter you will do while waiting for a sorta decent burger in Madison Square Park. Now there is an app, we have been notified, called Shakedown (that is an iTunes store link! This is their website) that will sync with FourSquare (the fun/ridiculous/scary app that tells your “friends” where “you are”) so as to ID your friends already in line so that you can therefore jump in and butt ahead of plebes who are not your “friends”? (Or, I suppose, to be ID’d so people can line-jump forward to stand with you and make awkward talk about your mutual “friends.”) And will also let you report line length? This is so extraordinarily niche and wonderful and silly that I can hardly stand it. It’s basically like someone created an app for a slightly alternate version of me (when I am back on eating burgers again and forget that they are made of hooves and feces, sorry-and also when I actually have friends). I’m concerned about where all of this is going but/and also I really hate waiting in lines.

I kind of feel like the last really great movie Oliver Stone had a hand in was Salvador, and the odds are that I’m not going to see Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps, but I have to give it to him: This is a pretty kickass trailer. Or at least the parts without Shia LaBoeuf in it.