Shots in the Dark

Buddy Fletcher’s wife, Ellen Pao, is suing her venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, charging sexual harassment.

This from the NYT:

In the suit, filed May 10 in California Superior Court in San Francisco, the partner, Ellen Pao, contends that beginning in 2006 she was sexually harassed by Ajit Nazre, an investment partner who left the firm last year. When she complained to senior partners and others at the firm, the suit says, they retaliated against her, limiting her career advancement and income.

It is hard not to be skeptical of this given that Pao is married to a man who has made a dubious habit of suing (and being sued) on similar grounds.

The Times mentions this, albeit in a somewhat misleading way:

Ms. Pao, a graduate of Princeton University, Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School, is married to Alphonse Fletcher Jr., a prominent Wall Street investor who has filed discrimination suits in the past. In 1991, he sued his then-employer, Kidder, Peabody & Company, saying it was severely underpaying him because he was black. An arbitration panel awarded him $1.3 million in that suit. Last year he filed a racial discrimination suit against the Dakota, the well-known Manhattan apartment building, after its co-op board denied his request to buy an apartment next to his to accommodate Ms. Pao and their then-2-year-old daughter.

Why is this misleading? Well, first, Fletcher wanted to buy the apartment so that he could combine it with his current one and flip the new, larger unit, presumably because he needed cash; he wasn’t buying it for his wife and child, because they were living in San Francisco at the time with no plans to return to New York.

Second, and more important, while Fletcher did indeed win $1.3 million from an arbitration panel in the Kidder matter, that money was essentially back pay that had been disputed; the panel denied his allegations of racial discrimination, for which Fletcher wanted in the neighborhood of $30 million. The Times’ language suggests that the $1.3 million was in response to Fletcher’s claims.

“Rodriguez and Teixeira have just five homers apiece, although both singled in Tuesday’s 3-2 victory over Kansas City.”

—from an NYT article about the declining hitting power of the Yankees’ third and first basemen.

“The football team has been terribly hurt by this.”

—Pat Williams, a former Montana congressman and member of the University of Montana’s board of regents, on allegations that members of the football team had committed numerous acts of rape, including gang rape, over the past three years. (NYT)

According to a Washington Post-ABC News poll, opposition to gay marriage has fallen to 39% of the American public, while support for it is at 53 percent. And the gap is only going to widen…

The group that’s holding out the most? African-Americans. Which is understandable, because they’ve never been victims of discrimination, so they don’t know what it’s like….

…but also malevolent.

Now it tracks you online.

Felix Salmon continues the hatin’ on the Harvard-educated, tax-dodging greedhead.

“Love is at the heart of every Virginia vacation.”

—Virginia’s new tourism slogan—something I know because they keep sending me press releases—building on its long-time motto, “Virginia is for lovers.” (Just not gay ones or ones who need an abortion while visiting.)

Yesterday morning I took one step into the subway on my way to work when an African-American policewoman politely asked me if some cops could search my bag. This is a post-9/11 thing: You’re allowed to say no, but if you do, you can’t get on the subway.

In the decade since 9/11, not once has anyone asked to search my bag. I’d like to think it’s because of my honest face, but probably it’s because I’m white, and the vast majority of New York stop-and-frisks (thanks, Mayor Bloomberg) are inflicted upon black people.

Stop-and-frisks, if you don’t know, are also a post-9/11 phenomenon, and they are exactly what they sound like: For no reason that they have to provide, New York cops just stop and search you. It’s a staggering violation of civil rights, and it’s almost entirely directed against minorities. In the first three months of 2012, New York City cops stop-and-frisked people 200, 000 times. That is astonishing–200, 000 illegal searches. Almost all of them involved blacks and Latinos.

Funnily enough, this morning the Times reports that a federal judge has widened a class action lawsuit against the New York Police Department. According to the Times, “she was disturbed by the city’s ‘deeply troubling apathy towards New Yorkers’ most fundamental constitutional rights.’”

She’s not the only one. The New York City Police has grown out of control in the past decade, with its cops raping and stealing while searching anyone whose look they don’t particularly like.

So I guess yesterday they were trying to make amends—searching a white man instead of the usual darker-skinned ones. (And I didn’t even get the frisk that is part of the stop and frisk; they just searched my bag.) So violating civil rights is okay as long as you don’t target minorities?

I guess New York cops think they’ll make it up on the volume…

“Right now the Obama administration is involved in some very ugly killing of innocent people,” West tells the Huffington Post…