NORTHWESTERN LAW SCHOOL

Focus: Nearly two dozen students, staff and faculty told The Daily that Northwestern Law has been plagued by mismanagement, a toxic work environment and a lack of transparency since Dean Hari Osofsky joined more than two years ago.

Before Osofsky even arrived at Pritzker in 2021, the decanal search process lacked transparency, several faculty members told The Daily.

Now, more than two years later, sources tell The Daily their frustrations remain, despite several complaints lodged with University officials.

While several sources said their frustrations lie directly with the dean, they don’t anticipate that a change in leadership alone will remedy the situation at the law school. Instead, institutional change is needed, they said.

“A lot of the things I experienced could’ve been avoided not just with a different dean, but with some kind of protection for administrators,” one of the dean’s former assistants told The Daily.
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Story by Jacob Wendler. Illustration by Shveta Shah.
Read the full story at the link in bio.

SUPREME KLANSMEN

 

FOR ALL OF US DEPRESSED BY THE CORRUPT SUPREME COURT - WE EACH HAVE TO KEEP DOING WHAT WE CAN

 

JAIL THESE TRAITORS

 Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife, Ginni, texted Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, over two dozen times following the 2020 election, urging that Joe Biden’s victory be overturned. Justice Thomas didn’t even make that egregious conflict of interest known, let alone recuse himself, when multiple election-related emergency cases hit the Supreme Court. He won’t recuse now, either, even though what his wife was peddling gave rise to the six-count criminal indictment against Trump, which Justice Thomas is now positioned to help dismiss as a matter of constitutional fiat.

 

The 17 worst things Mitch McConnell did to destroy democracy

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Mitch McConnell announced Wednesday that he will be stepping down as Republican leader of the Senate in November. And, for the sake of the democracy he’s spent decades trying to destroy, that moment can’t come soon enough.

Here are just a few of his career lowlights.

1. He stole a Supreme Court seat from President Barack Obama. 

When Justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016, McConnell insisted that the seat would remain empty because it was an election year and, according to a rule he created, the seat could therefore not be filled.  

“The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice," he said. “Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new President.” He refused to even give Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, a hearing much less a vote.

But three years later, asked what he would do if the same situation arose in 2020 under President Donald Trump?

"Oh, we'd fill it," he said. And that’s just what he did.

2. He stole a Supreme Court seat from future President Joe Biden.

And he did this after changing his “no new Supreme Court justice in the last year of a president’s term” rule—to install the ultra-conservative Amy Coney Barrett on the court eight days before the 2020 election.

The night Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in the fall of 2020, according to McConnell’s former chief of staff, McConnell told Trump he would absolutely fill the vacancy just weeks out from the election, “and you’ve gotta nominate Amy Coney Barrett.”

3. He packed the federal judiciary for Trump with white men, many of them unqualified. 

While the Supreme Court seats may be the most visible part of McConnell’s stacking of the judiciary, his goal went further. As Frontline noted, that meant he wanted his legacy to be one of “filling the federal judiciary with conservative judges.”

4. He vowed to obstruct Obama. 

“The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” he told the National Journal in 2010.

5. He vowed to obstruct Biden. 

“One hundred percent of our focus is on stopping this new administration,” he said in 2021.

6. He made the debt ceiling a permanent hostage starting in 2011. 

McConnell may not have invented the government shutdown, but he made sure that shutdown threats were a regular part of American politics while shutting down efforts to fix the problem. "I think some of our members may have thought the default issue was a hostage you might take a chance at shooting,” McConnell said before a vote in 2011. “Most of us didn't think that. What we did learn is this—it's a hostage that's worth ransoming."  

7. He turned the filibuster into a weapon. 

McConnell used the filibuster “more than ever in history” during the Obama administration to try to deny Obama any legislative victories, just as he’d threatened to do. And he kept using it long after Obama left office, including to block a 9/11-style Jan. 6 committee. 

McConnell reportedly worked the phones to be sure the commission bill died, asking some Republican senators to join the filibuster as “a personal favor” to him despite the appeal from the mother of fallen Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick to support the commission. 

8. He voted to acquit Trump after the Jan. 6 insurrection. 

And, just like when he blocked the nomination of Garland to the Supreme Court, he blamed it on the timing. 

As The Washington Post described it, “We witnessed a historic confession of hypocrisy and deceit on Saturday when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) went to the floor after voting to acquit Donald Trump in the former president’s Senate impeachment trial.” That came after McConnell had given a speech calling Trump’s actions “a disgraceful, disgraceful dereliction of duty” and saying that  Trump was “practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day.”

But McConnell had an excuse: timing. He claimed it was too late to convict Trump. For McConnell, it’s always too late to do something. Unless it isn’t.

9. He built a career, and a big campaign nest egg, fighting gun safety regulations. 

That includes pulling down $1.3 million in donations from the NRA while blocking efforts to address mass shootings. No single individual may be completely responsible for America’s failure to address gun violence, including school shootings, but McConnell comes close.

10. He destroyed campaign finance reform and filibustered any effort to get money out of politics. 

He may have called money in politics “a cancer” at the start of his career, but once he was in the Senate, he devoted himself to protecting that cancer. And spreading it.

11. He blocked votes to save the Voting Rights Act. 

That included refusing to hold hearings on an amendment named in honor of the great congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis. McConnell claimed he was a supporter of the VRA at the beginning of his career, but as Senate leader, he weakened the act at every turn. This, along with his other moves to make it more difficult to vote, earned McConnell the nickname “the gravedigger of American democracy.”

12. He tried to kill Obamacare—and failed.

"This is clearly a disappointing moment," he said after the repeal attempt failed 51-49. "I regret that our efforts simply were not enough this time."

13. He blew off coal miners with black lung disease from his own state. 

That included giving a group of miners who drove from Kentucky to meet with him just two minutes of his time, but McConnell always found time to help mine owners prop up the dying industry.

He failed to support legislation that would reclaim mine land for economic development. He shied away from a bipartisan coalition in his state that is nurturing tech, medical, and even solar jobs. He led the Republican effort to cut taxes on the coal companies—taxes that would help struggling miners. And he has not pushed to shore up a badly underfunded miners’ pension fund.

14. He’s working with the Trump campaign right now to endorse Trump for another term. 

Sources involved in the negotiations give a weak explanation. “We’ve reached the part of the primary where the party is coming together,” one source told The Hill. “The absolute worst thing that can happen to this country is electing Joe Biden for four more years, and you can expect to coalesce around that point over the next nine months,” the source continued. So much for protecting our institutions from the guy who tried to “torch” them.

15. He named himself the “Grim Reaper.” 

He vowed to kill—literally kill—progressive legislation to address climate change and expand Medicare.

“Are we going to turn this into a socialist country? Don’t assume it cannot happen,” he said in 2019. “If I’m still the majority leader of the Senate, think of me as the Grim Reaper. None of that stuff is going to pass. None of it.”

16. He took this infamous picture in front of a Confederate flag.

He said the photo of him beaming in front of the racist flag was taken when he was a freshman senator, at a meeting of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. And no, he isn’t sorry.

"I don't regret going to speak to a group which at the time was not being considered, you know, a pariah in our society,” he said years later. “I, over the years, have probably been to plenty of groups and shaken hands with a whole lot of people who didn’t agree with me."

17. He tried to silence Sen. Elizabeth Warren. It backfired.

During a floor speech against the confirmation of Jeff Sessions as Trump’s attorney general in 2017, the Massachusetts senator read—or tried to read—a damning letter from Coretta Scott King, written in 1986, which blasted Sessions for “the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens” while serving as a United States attorney in Alabama.” 

McConnell didn’t like that and insisted Warren had violated a rule against demeaning a fellow senator. And he cut her off.

“She was warned,” McConnell said. “She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”

The joke’s on McConnell, though, because his tsk-tsking of Warren became a meme. And a hashtag. And a tattoo. And a fundraiser. And a rallying cry. 

So long, Mitch. And good riddance. 

PIECE OF SHIT

 

HYPOCRITE AND SCUMBAG MCCONNELL

 

FRONT-RUNNING RAPIST

 

THE PARTY OF NO

 

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN BY HOWARD TULLMAN

 

Nothing Beats Being There

You can argue all you want about the productivity of hybrid vs. remote vs. on site. But if you really want to build a culture, deepen your company's values and transfer them to new arrivals, then working together in one place is still the best way to do it. 

 

EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS@HOWARDTULLMAN1

FEB 27, 2024

I've had dozens of opposing conversations with business owners and managers on one side, and entrepreneurs on the other, about the perks and perils of trying to build and grow a business when a significant portion of the workforce is remote. It's even more challenging when some of those remote team members have never met most of their co-workers or upper management, either personally or online. As obvious as some concerns would seem to be, there's an amazingly wide divergence of opinion on how to address the "new normal," which breaks down along fairly old and familiar lines.

Not surprisingly, the more senior executives in the larger and better-established firms think it's no big deal to operate as they always have, in spite of the clear logistical and communication changes in the new hybrid world. Keep in mind that most of these people are quite removed from the day-to-day communication channels of their businesses, and many are rarely using any form of digital connection tools. These aren't Slackers or Teams people. And they're also sadly stuck in the ivory towers rather than spending any time in the trenches. They think their company's culture is built of concrete, locked down, easily understood, and permanent.

Unfortunately, time has a way of turning anyone's assets into dust.

Let's say that old schoolers can ignore the obvious fact that - just like brands  - successful company cultures need to change, expand and be reinvigorated periodically. And if these older folk also ignore the issue of new and uninitiated employees flowing into the business, there's even a more fundamental misunderstanding of how culture, values, and vision are transmitted and shared across their companies. In practice, as opposed to theory, it's rarely done in mission statements, memos, or meetings. The guy in the bowels of the business may know more about what's really going on than the folks in the main office.

At the other end of the spectrum, I'd estimate that nearly all of the experienced entrepreneurs and new business builders (regardless of age) that I know understand that creating, communicating, and controlling the culture of a startup can't be accomplished if the players aren't regularly and physically in one place. This isn't just about proximity or serendipity; it's about understanding how much of the culture's content and the value structure of a business moves by osmosis, watercooler conversations, observed actions, and, maybe most importantly, war stories - at least some of which are true.  

All of that helps to compose the emotional and visceral meat of the company's culture. These aren't things that others can easily explain to you or that you can learn from a manual or a lecture. Anyone who's built a business from scratch, anyone who's been in the crucible of confusion, concern, and conflict that's the heart of a startup, and anyone who understands the real value and meaning of camaraderie and shared pain will tell you that you had to be there - and be an active part of the process - in order to get it.

Every great business has its foundational stories, its formative myths, and apocryphal adventures. But, in the new, widely distributed operating environments, very little thought or attention is being paid to making sure that we are building new channels to share and reinforce the transmission of all of this informal, but crucial, wisdom, attitude, and experience. There's no Zoom or Teams equivalent for the most important one-on-one chats that take place before and after any meeting or call, but these are the most critical discussions of all.

So, the critical question concerns what smart companies can do-- even assuming that they can assemble all of the concerned parties in one place on a regular basis-- to make sure that the right messages, examples, and directions are front and center and consistently communicated to everyone. I appreciate that these suggestions are better suited to smaller firms and startups rather than larger firms, but if you have more than a couple of dozen employees, I'd suggest applying the same ideas to divisions, teams, select skill sets, or other more-manageably sized groups.

First, find the passionate promoters in your company and make sure they're on the program. You want them as advocates, examples, and leaders. Keep in mind that these people aren't ever going to be limited to just managers and executives. It's important to have friends in low places as well. The good news is that, if you find the right ones, they really can't help themselves because it's in their nature to be chatty, excited cheerleaders for the company.

Second, bite the bullet and commit to a four-day work week. I'd just forget Fridays or maybe call it the Friday for Family plan. It's a good compromise and the only realistic way to get the right people in the right place at the right times. Make it clear that this is the way the business is going to operate going forward and that neither you nor anyone else is going to be the sheriff, the attendance taker, or anyone's babysitter. Everyone's an adult and no one's required to work at your company. Fire the whiners.

Third, make meals matter by shutting down for an hour at noon on Monday and Thursday and using those times for the team to come together to talk about the week ahead and the week just past. No phones, no interruptions, no excused absences and a real commitment to conversation and storytelling. The best and the worst of what's gone on and what's coming down the pipe. The execs should sit and mainly listen. It's amazing how much they'll learn. If anyone needs to cover the phones, have that be done by team members who never get to talk to callers or customers directly. It will be an eye-opening and learning experience for them for sure.

Finally, make some memories for the team by spending some time in the service of others. Those foregone Fridays can be put to important use by volunteering, helping with community projects for local schools and charities. Over decades of doing this, I've never found a more effective way to bring a team together than by doing some giving back as a group. It's absolutely one of the best ways for your team members to informally learn a great deal more about their peers and the kind of people they're working with. And it shows how the company can make a valuable difference and an important contribution outside of its day-to-day activities.

JUSTICE EILEEN O'NEILL BURKE

 

HE LIES>>>>

 

LADY LINDSEY IS A PIECE OF SHIT AND A TRAITOR

 

ONE OF MANY SENATE MORONS WHO TOLD US TRUMP WOULD CHANGE - WHAT A FOOL SUSAN COLLINS IS

 

THROW THE CROOKED TRAITOR IN JAIL NOW

 

What is an old fashioned anti-abortion fundamentalist Christian to do?

 

IT’S HARD TO BELIEVE WHAT SHAMELESS PIGS AND LIARS EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THESE REPUBLICAN HYPOCRITES ARE.

 

What is an old fashioned anti-abortion fundamentalist Christian to do?

The days that Republicans could say they were pro-life and forget about the details are over.

LUCIAN K. TRUSCOTT IV FEB 24

 

The Life at Conception Act is the legal jewel in the anti-abortion crown, a federal law that would recognize a fertilized egg – Alabama’s so-called extrauterine child – as a human being with all the rights and protections provided to the rest of us under the 14^th Amendment.  The Life at Conception Act, which has no exceptions for IVF or any other fertility treatments, would amount to an automatic nationwide ban on abortions with no exceptions for rape, incest, or the health of the mother.

 

The law would override state laws permitting abortion.  In states with limits on abortion, such as a ban after six or 15 weeks, the law would cancel those time limits as well.

It’s an extreme anti-abortion law that would take the end of Roe v. Wade to the next level, completely taking away a woman’s right to control her own reproductive life in every state in the Union. 

 

For 125 House Republicans who have co-sponsored the Life at Conception Act, and the 19 Senators who signed onto an identical bill in the last Congress, the act was a no-brainer.  If you were a Republican and you called yourself pro-life, you were for the Life at Conception Act, no questions asked.

Until now.

This week the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision declaring every fertilized egg a person immediately called into question the status of all the fertilized eggs at fertility clinics in the state and caused the closing of several, among them, the state’s most prominent.  The Alabama decision flipped the anti-abortion script.  The question became, “do you support in vitro fertilization?”, and Republican hands started popping up all over.  Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, an avowed Christian Nationalist who made his sponsorship of the Life at Conception Act a signature part of his agenda which includes support for the establishment of a national religion – Christianity, natch – raised his hand along with all the other Republicans who have found “Reverse” on their gear shifts. 

On Thursday, Johnson was still pushing for co-mingling of Biblical principles in our system of secular laws and supporting overturning laws legalizing homosexual acts and same-sex marriage.  If asked he thought frozen embryos were children as the Life at Conception Act says they are, he would have high-fived you.  But by Friday evening, Johnson was fulsomely praising the very thing Alabama had just banned.  “I believe the life of every single child has inestimable dignity and value,” Johnson squeaked.  “That is why I support I.V.F. treatment, which has been a blessing for many moms and dads who have struggled with fertility.”

You will note that Mike limited his support of IVF to “moms and dads.”  Gay and lesbian couples who want children using IVF?  Not so much.

The days that Republicans could say they were pro-life and forget about the details are over.  It turns out that being anti-abortion wasn’t about the fetus as much as it was about the votes. Today, the anti-abortion movement is all about trying to find a way through the minefield the issue has become for them.  Laws about abortion in red states have turned into a pick-your-timeframe smorgasbord. 

Republicans who used to say they are pro-life are all of a sudden for abortion but with caveats.  Take Donald Trump, who this week was exposed trying to carve out a new position for himself that split the difference and as he put it, “make everyone happy.”  Trump is all for aborting fetuses up to 16 weeks of pregnancy.  Then he’s against abortion.  In Florida, they’re pro-abortion up to 15 weeks, but only for the time being, while a new law works its way through the courts making abortion illegal after six weeks.  Some red states, like Arkansas and Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana, have banned abortion completely, without exceptions for rape or incest.  Other states have limits.  In Arizona, abortion is legal up to 15 weeks; in Georgia, it’s legal up to six weeks; in Nebraska it's legal up to 12 weeks; in Ohio, aborting a fetus is legal up to 22 weeks, but after that it’s illegal with no exceptions for rape or incest; same with Wisconsin, where abortion is legal up to 22 weeks, and after that, it’s illegal except to save the life of the mother, but not for reasons of rape or incest.

Do you see what’s going on here?  Republicans are against abortion except when they’re not.  When the vote wind is being blown by suburban woman, some Republicans find a way to legalize abortion up to some arbitrary number of weeks.  Republicans appear to be out there like fishermen, casting their lines for votes:  Hey, I got a bite at 12 weeks!  The Republican down the river hooks his votes at 15 weeks! 

They’re all looking for a sweet spot with the abortion issue, and where they land depends, as ever, on what state we’re in.  Trump seems to be betting he can con women by making abortion legal up to 16 weeks, a new number Trump pulled out of the air.  But give him some time, and he’ll find another number, once he’s stuck his finger in the air and checked which way the votes are blowing.

Whatever they pick – and by “they,” I mean Republican state legislators and governors and candidates like Trump – at the tick of the clock past midnight on the last day of that arbitrary number, the fetus magically becomes a child and you can’t abort it, because…well, because Republicans say so, that’s why.

It's going to be fun watching Republicans running for the exits from the Life at Conception Act, because last week Alabama started a fire and anyone clinging to it is going to get burned.  You’d like to think, wouldn’t you, that somehow Republicans are coming to their senses on the issue of reproductive rights, but that is not what’s happening.  Instead, they’ve got their metal detectors out and they’re waving them across the ground in front of them trying to find their way through the minefield they’ve created for themselves.

Yesterday, Republicans thought they could moderate their anti-abortion position by giving an inch on exceptions for rape or incest.  Today, it’s IVF.  But the truth is, they don’t believe anything they say about when life begins, or when a fetus becomes a child, or when a legal abortion should suddenly become illegal.  Despite the best efforts of Republicans like Mike Johnson to yap about abortion out of one side of their mouths and Jesus out of the other, abortion isn’t about morality, it’s about votes. 

Watch these shapeshifters. IVF bit them in the ass, and they don’t want to get bitten again.  We’re going to need X-ray vision to find our way through the fog of Republican obfuscation and quick-change reversals and outright red-in-the-face lies ahead of us.