Your October surprise: “New York Times squares off against Bain Capital in federal court”:
U.S. District Court Judge Edward F. Harrington has given lawyers for Bain Capital three weeks to convince him that previously sealed documents in a long-running anti-trust lawsuit should remain out of the public eye.
A group of plaintiff shareholders filed suit in 2007, alleging that Bain and other major private equity firms had colluded to “rig bids” in order to drive down prices on companies under consideration for purchase.
For nearly five years, the parties filed most of their substantive pleadings under seal. But then The New York Times, represented by Robert A. Bertsche and Jeffrey J. Pyle, of Prince, Lobel, Tye, stepped in with a motion to intervene seeking to lift Harrington’s order.
Bain, co-founded by Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, and the other defendants countered that any presumption of public access is outweighed by their private interests in retaining confidentiality.
But in a Sept. 14 order, Harrington told the companies they had not persuaded him that unsealing the materials would be improper.
“While the Complaint appears to contain information related to relevant business interests, the Defendants have failed to explain how the particular information that they have redacted causes specific and severe harm,” Harrington writes. “The Defendants at this time have only supported their position with general assertions of harm, which are insufficient to overcome a presumption of public access.”
If the defendants fail to meet their burden, the Times could succeed in ensuring the materials come to light prior to Election Day on Nov. 6.
While Pyle would not discuss the presidential angle, the Boston lawyer told Lawyers Weekly that Harrington’s order properly recognizes the importance of the public’s right to access judicial documents.
“Judge Harrington’s order makes clear that Bain and the other defendants have a heavy burden,” Pyle says. “They have to show that the information they want to redact is so competitively sensitive and that the harm is so great that it outweighs the strong and steady presumption in favor of public access. It is our position that they can’t do that.”
David H. Rich of Todd & Weld in Boston, who dealt with a similar public access question before the 1st Circuit, says the great weight of federal authority has come out against the sealing of pleadings such as complaints.
The fact that a defendant could suffer embarrassment if allegations become public is hardly grounds to keep court filings off limits, he says.
Just so we’re clear, this is the same NYT who wouldn’t print the Mohammed cartoons, but who would print leaked national security documents. So let’s just note for the record that, as I’ve been saying for a while now, the clean-up and restoration of this country needs to begin with the reclamation of language, followed by a complete reconsideration of the mainstream press and its “access.”
But beyond all that — because naturally, we’ll be told in solemn and serious tones the importance of such unsealings, etc. (I guess if you can’t find divorce filings to unseal, you go after what you can find, right Barry?) — what the Romney camp needs to do in response is either mount a furious defense, or else prepare to have the records unsealed simultaneous to very public, very constant demands that the LA Times release the Khalidi tape (which could shed light into the “accidental” “organic” nature of the “Arab Spring”); that Obama release the academic records he’s paid big money to keep hidden from view (which could, as with Elizabeth Warren, shed light on how a pot-smoking dude named Barry turned into an Occidental/Columbia/Harvard student named “Barack”); and that the Romney campaign switch gears away from “Obama the nice, incompetent President” to “Obama the sleazy Chicago thug pol run by a cabal of New Leftists, communists, and transnational progressivists who really meant it when he said he wanted to ‘fundamentally transform’ the US into something resembling the crumbling welfare states all over Europe which are themselves run by an entrenched and permanent ruling elite — a complete antithesis to the ideas of our foundings.
Of course, this won’t happen, because I’m convinced many in the GOP establishment don’t much care if Romney wins. A Romney loss assures permanent government control over health care, and essentially completes the transformation of the country into one where the central government controls the lion’s share of all power. Which pleases the status quo, who recognize that, likely in 2016 — with a Chris Christie / Jeb Bush ticket that has them salivating — they can finish the job off while removing the nonsensical Marxist ideology that unnecessarily pollutes the technocratic state.
They will manage the Rockefeller Republican paradise of supreme central power — throwing in low taxes and pro-business policies, while horsetrading on liberties under the guise of “health” or “the environment” or “the children.”
This is all happening, people. I know it’s hard to wrap your head around, but the miracle is that we’ve been able to stave such power lust off for so long. The Constitution has been our defense. But the incoherent linguistic and hermeneutic methods for “democratizing” interpretation and removing a text from the agency who produced it — all so we can pretend it lives somehow outside of human subjectivity — has reduced it to but a plaything for clever judges wishing to put a stamp on their “legacies.”
I hate to say it but it needs saying: we won’t have this country back, ever, the way it was. What we may have is a country very similar to the one our founders envisioned once enough people / states refuse to accept as legitimate the unconstitutional dictates of tyrants, in all branches of government, sold as “evolving” jurisprudence and legitimate constitutional legislation, when clearly on it’s face it is not.
Screw SCOTUS precedent. Screw stare decisis. The very idea that because someone somewhere made an awful decision, we can’t go back and rectify that — but must instead find ways around it, or else build on top of it — nullifies the Constitution and replaces it with ever-changing judicial oligarchies.
I didn’t sign up for that. And I know so because I live under the Declaration of Independence, not the “Legacy Doctrine of Hugo Black or John Roberts.”
Time for the TEA Party to get real.
outlaw.
(h/t RI Red)
Earlier today, I traded my Squid™ brand pitchfork for a new Cranky-Cudgel. Since the Squid™ brand pitchfork had been a gift from my father, I was feeling kind of glum.
Now, not so much.
As to the topic, maybe we’ll learn that Romney and the boys liked to hold drunken sex orgies in lieu of board meetings.
I agree, we will never have this country back completely. Too many laws have been passed that likely will never be untangled. Too many entitlements have been created. I think it’s possible to knock most of it back to something more manageable, but until individual states are ready to refuse to accept the will of DC, nothing will change, no matter who is in charge.
Speaking of that, Rush has been hitting on those members of the Republican/Conservative commentariat who told us in the spring that Romney was our only chance to beat Obama and are now pronouncing Romney’s candidacy dead as McCain’s.
So yeah, winning is nice, but being well thought of by your peers in D.C. NYC political and media corridors is essential.
Risk management isn’t just for financiers.
And that won’t happen until the system is obviously tits-up, and local self-preservation compels them to.
You can’t have enough hobnails in your cudgels these days.
In order to reclaim the language, we have to reclaim the culture.
Know who is the most monolithic group standing up for the constitution? The one hated in both parties? Social Conservatives.
You can’t be a social liberal and expect a free society, because a free society requires a people that are responsible, honorable, and industrious.
I hate to say it, but if anyone wants to be outlaw, you need to get your socon on and battle the culture that says all personal choices are equal, so consequences for those choices, for better or worse, should be born or enjoyed by all.
As a note, I feel the need to say social conservatives aren’t necessarily religious Christians, I think you just have to love the truth and hate what is false. Such is the core behind loving God and hating sin.
Well, if we have to choose between the uptight godbothers and the Constitution, we know which why that’s going to go. Don’t we?
What if it turns out that reclaiming your language entails discovering that embracing such language as “culture” or “values” is to embrace the progressive political schema? Ah, but no, that wouldn’t be helpful at all.
My line of CrankyCudgels™ has, so far, not included hobnails. I will be adding them as a factory option soon.
You have it backwards, Lee. Language — the building blocks for epistemology, what we come to conceive of as knowledge, and the mechanism for determining truths — is foremost. Culture can be manipulated through the usurpation of language.
Just as an example I’ve used before: the idea that way we “gaze” at the Other and are disallowed to judge him, lacking the requisite authenticity, comes from a post-colonial notion of language function popularized by Edward Said, who when he wasn’t being lionized in English and History Departments in the modern leftist academy was once photographed throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers. It is at heart tyrannical and driven by consensus — mob collectivism protected by the winning side of the individual ethnic / identity group narrative war.
Another example I’ve frequently used is the inversion of meaning by switching the locus of that meaning from the person willing the language and message into being (using mostly conventional tools: plain language, inflection, intertextual or intratextual cues; autobiography; contemporary cultural mores, etc) to some motivated group willing to usurp that meaning.
Tolerance is now the antithesis of tolerance as we’ve long understood it here in this country, and yet it carries with it the same name and the same demands that we adhere to it. When in fact, by that maneuver, the demand remains the same even as we are now adhering to the opposite of tolerance, often under force of govt. coercion. Cf. Chick Fil A.
You lose “the culture” when you lose the means to distinguish between knowledge and the manufacturing of consent, between individual subjectivity as a debated assertion fought over in the marketplace of ideas that leads to a rational, rigorous defense of a position, and the willful, mob-like assertion of subjectivity that stands solely on the basis that enough motivated people simply insist it be so, and shun those who refuse to surrender to such a dangerous, sophistic, anti-foundationalist view of the world.
It begins with language. And had any of the major new players in the right blogosphere not been warned about my evil, they may have effectively employed me by now to go about at their various conferences and meetings and seminars teaching people why this is, how it works, and how we need to combat it.
But instead, we had butthurt people reaching out to big time bloggers, lying about my perniciousness, having me blackballed, and then working with a notorious hacker group to try to have me silenced.
I’m all for self-interest, don’t get me wrong. But I’m also all for leaving my kids in a free country.
Guess some people have different priorities.
I’ll
Hogue OverMolded grips would be a nice upgrade as well, Cranky.
This is all happening, people. I know it’s hard to wrap your head around, but the miracle is that we’ve been able to stave such power lust off for so long.
True dat. However, I bade farewell to the Republic a long time ago, and now it’s just a matter of watching the cookie crumble.
I sooooo hope that cut-off in midsentence was intended.
It begins with language.
Because all civil (read: non-pathological) society is based on the rule of law, and laws are made of language.
If the language is corrupted (by corrupting the common understanding of how language works), so then are the laws, and the only thing that can come from that is lawlessness.
Which, that works to the advantage of those who long to hear the beleaguered crowds cry out for an end to the madness. “Save us!” the Afghanis said to the Taliban. “Save us from the endless tribal warfare that broke out after the USSR withdrew!”
And the Taliban, disciplined as it was, was happy to oblige.
With apologies to Christopher Lasch, but he’s said it better than I:
Now, full disclosure: that quote, from Lasch’s introduction to the posthumously published The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1995) is Dowdified. That’s a compressed version of his summary of the conservative/traditional reaction to the rise of PoMo in the academy, a reaction that he partly agrees with, but mostly rejects:
Lasch goes on here to uphold Dewey and pragmatism as the way out of this intellectual divide, so unlike, say Himmelfarb, Lasch isn’t a friendly critic to fall back on. But I thought I’d through that up because it succinctly captures what Jeff is getting at in the post and his comment (and well, every third or fourth) blog post over the past ten years), and it shows that lagnuage is in fact important and something to take seriously, because he’s not the only one doing so.
The truth is the truth, you lose the “culture” when the society will accept a lie when the truth is hard.
Eve found it hard to resist the forbidden fruit, and so readily accepted the Devils lie. Language is the medium, but determining the truth is useless if rejected, through language, for a lie.
I’ll stick with my assertion that loving the truth is foremost, and the only defense for manipulation through the false use of language.
Anti-foundationalism is how you confuse things to the point where the lie seems truer than the truth.
There’s that great line Claude Rains has in Lawrence of Arabia where Rains say’s to O’Toole, “If I’ve told lies, you’ve told half-lies. And a man who tell lies, like me, merely hides the truth, where a man who tells half-lies doesn’t remember where he left it.”
That about sums it up.
Cultures seem ever more analogous to Cartesian homunculi, a macro for the micro (there’s no there, there), coming and going just as fast as anyone should choose to anatomize them or Leviathan them up.
Superior post in terms of the linguistics.
I think its completely fine the NYT is suing to get ahold of the sealed docs. P/E firms generally do collude and modern P/E, whatever the merits it once offered businesses–and they DID improve operational efficiency and strategy execution…back in ’80-’84–are little more than cash-flow hoovering asset-strippers.
I wish more news orgs. did that, in 20 different areas, like union contracts, city halls, medicare/hospitals payments, Department of Defense, public university admissions and administration (Oh man the stories they would tell about affirmative action, institutional leftism, legacy admits, cash flow waste), drug policy…you take the point.
You are, as usual, completely correct about the rank hypocrisy of it all. Pornographic, really: They’re acting like an aggressive news gathering organization only because of the political affiliation of a candidate for POTUS.
Sad, infuriating, nauseating–pick one, or all.
Perhaps the looming Romney defeat–my suspicion is he does mildly better than McCain did in ’08, perhaps by winning NC and 1/2 other Obama-controlled ’08 states–forces the reckoning you have been discussing. It is turning out that running as “Not-Obama” or “Cousin of Bush,” without a material platform of addressing pressing national issues, like Too Big Too Fail banks & Financial institution leverage, budget spending, tax reform etc., doesn’t really work. Maybe people at the GOP will realize that Reagan only worked because he was as far from Nixon, Ford and Rockefeller as he was from Jimmy Carter.
But likely not.
As you know full well, the Classic Liberal and Libertarian positions are minority views within the Conservative movement now. Republicans are as scared about life and the economy as Democrats and they want the firm embrace of their Uncle Sam. Doubt me? Watch the Home-builders–a very GOP-friendly group–rise up like Zombies when Mortgage Interest deductions are (sensibly) threatened. The threat is soon diminished when representatives see how many jobs are at risk; few ask how MI and housing policy came to control so much of the U.S. economy.
Losing more slowly is just losing. Bill Parcells, in his first year as New England’s head coach, told his (crappy) team one time that the constant ass-kickings would never end until all 45 men decided that it was time to end them. The Pats have been ok since then.
Our colleagues on the right have decided that playing hard and losing is ok for now, so lose we shall.
Truth IS the foundation. There is an objective truth, and rejecting that is like building a house without a plumb line. Or, to use Jesus’s analogy, a house built on sand.
Oh, that was directed at Ernst…
Tower of Babel, sdferr. Either the Bible’s or Oakeschott’s, as you prefer.
We’re attacking the problem from opposite ends and meeting in the middle Lee. Hopefully.
Groping around for a truth, some people landed on mathematics and mathematical objects. Yeah, that’ll work.
They decided it was okay to play hard? When did they decide this? About playing hard as opposed to scrimmaging hard, I mean.
Groping around for a truth, some people landed on mathematics and mathematical objects. Yeah, that’ll work.
The search for TRVTH, such as the philosopher or theologian engages in, might not produce solid, unchallengeable answers.
But simpler, everyday truth—such as whether Obama’s campaign disabled the verification on his internet credit-card acceptor, or whether Holder is corrupt, or whether 9/11 was a Zionist conspiracy—needs to be valued at the very least.
And it is not. As soon as you get into “fake but accurate” territory, all is lost, and Rigoberta Menchú is your uncle.
If she’s our uncle, that makes Barry Soetero our big brother, don’it?
Whatever Sdferr, when someone says “culture” (or even values!), they use it with some intent, and if you have problems finding the meaning from context and previous usage by the author, you can ask the author to clarify.
When I use the word, I’m referring to the common societal experience. That experience is indeed in constant flux, but there is a dominantly common (not universal) experience we here in the US share, and call the “culture”. Those in Saudi Arabia share a different common experience, and so live in a different culture.
You seem a little hostile, is that intended?
New York Times… New York Times…?
Never heard of ’em.
When someone says culture, did they derive their concept of that usage from thin air? Did they create the term, define the term, apply the term from out of nothing? Or did they — on the contrary — inherit the usage from the teachings of others? And where did the term come to those others who teach it? From yet others perhaps?
And where first? Where did the term originate? And to fill what need, to serve what purpose? Are these questions out of bounds? How? Why would they be, save perhaps to relieve us of troubles?
The questions are not out of bounds, but to be embarrassingly honest, I don’t know the answer to those questions for most of not all of the words I use. I’m just trying to communicate.
If by “troubles” you mean pedantry, then yes.
It could be dismissed easily as mere pedantry Lee.
But what if, as per the initial question, it turns out to amount to an embrace of the very thing you seek to avoid? As an analog, for instance, since Abd al-Malik chooses to build the Dome of the Rock on top of the most holy site in Judaism, and to protect that site thereby (“protect”, see? Not eclipse or subjugate, surely, for that wouldn’t be pious!), why don’t the Jews embrace Islam as their own?
Well, it’s not like the Jews were using the site at the time.
He said with grim irony.
“Yeah, I know what it is, but I’m using it.”
Values is one of those weasel words that weasels use to first relativize and then suborn truth, lee, before they finally subjugate it.
As in preferring snails to oysters is a matter of taste and not morality, or so it was posited in one of the creepiest seduction scenes ever put on film.
I’m advocating for the Jews to raze the Dome and rebuild Salomon’s Temple.
The Israelis will have a culture, however it looks, either way.
And the barbarian savages will be only more so.
Slumlord Valerie Jarrett: Preparing for the Next Millenium.
The next millenium, people. This gang is nothing if not self-regarding.
If someone refers to “family values”, I know what they mean. I see nothing weasely in the use.
It’s ‘cuz of the fucked up foundation their culture is built on.
Heather has Two Mommies Lee.
“Ev’ry chil’ a wanted chil'” Lee.
We valuate family values differently (I should really say “they valuate differently from us” I suppose) in order to obscure the underlying moral premises. In this case the best interests of children.
Meet the new Thousand Year Reich, sdferr.
Of course you know the rest of the line.
Fouad Ajami, WSJ:Muslim Rage and the Obama Retreat:
His embrace — their culture. Without knowing it, he had broken.
Because a word can be ambiguous, and easily abused, doesn’t mean the word should be banned from learned company.
Obviously the phrase could come up just as easily on the Soprano’s as the 700 Club, but should we throw out “family” as well as “values”?
No one is suggesting the word be banned from learned company (and what company would be learned? We’re the ignorant knuckledraggers, remember? merely attempting to reclaim our language — in part by trying to discover where parts of it originate and what sort of baggage comes along with them).
The embracing was the lie, not that there is something malignant about referring to that culture.
If he really embraced their culture, he would pray seven times a day, get a grip on Michele, and wear a turban.
I’m not saying the word should be banned, but I am saying that we should be aware of what it connotes as well as what it denotes. We are all Nietzscheans now —closed minded ones at that. And that’s largely by the popularization of Weber’s popularization of Nietzsche.
And I’m sorry, I can’t unpack that. All I can do is refer you to the book.
I had thought the pretense that he understood the culture was the error, or even lie, if he knew better (which I suspect would never have occurred to him).
That’s part of the trouble with culture. People think they’ve got a hold on something particular when they make claims to such understanding. After all, that was in part the point to the invention of the concept in the first place: to give scientific political thinkers something to take a hold on when they wax theoretical on things they can’t possibly comprehend.
I’m going to go watch Battlestar Galactica now. I think I’ll pretend Lew Ayers is playing Karl Rove and that the Battlestar Atlantia is full of sensible, pragmatic Republicans.
Actually it was the anthropologists who stuck us with the current usage, sdferr.
I see it as more a description of a particular circumstance being discussed/investigated. Culture is merely the social phenomenon that occurs within a closed set of people. The set doesn’t even have to be based on nationality, region, or ethnicity. Say a “culture of corruption” and I know the reference is to a particular set of people. Say the American culture, and of course there are many, many subsets of the culture, obviously a New York lawyer lives a much different lifestyle than a Arizona rancher, or a Detroit drug pusher, but still, all three could end up in a bar together watching football and staring at their iphones…
Cultural Anthropologists, yet.
I’m glad I wasn’t the only one who had Bloom pop into mind today.
By the way, it’s very unlikely that you’ll catch me sitting in a pub drinking warm beer and watching soccer.
Talk about a culture of corruption…
Is it possibly the case that the anthropologists take their warrant from the novel transformation of the academy under the guidance of the positivist/progressives Ernst? That during that transformative, enlightened age all manner of novel creations reigning over the realm of politics burst forth into bloom? (Had to work him in somehow).
From a previous “cultural” discussion a couple of comments, wordy though they are.
My guess, sdferr, is that the adoption of culture by the anthropologists precedes the takeover of the academy, or is at most coterminous with it. And the positivist/progressives weren’t the problem per se. It’s those who came after them, Bloom’s “German connection,” so to speak.
If we take Bloom’s fingering Kant for the main culprit as a credible beginning to culture posited, we’d only have then to see whether Condorcet, St. Simon and his offspring were mere contemporaries, preceded or postceded Kant’s gifting creation in solution of his Rousseauvian problem.
Looks as though the latter is the case at first glance.
Yet the elaboration of the enlightenment program in the re-articulation of the sciences and universities was surely an immense collaboration, requiring the efforts of many men of genius, and decades of effort to accomplish. Perhaps it suffices to place the co-mingling of effort in the one boat. But was the boat political? Sure looks it to me.
I’ll be damned, Soriano gave up a game tying solo home run in the top of the ninth. Sic ’em, A’s.
Sorry for being in and out, (as is my want). You might want to track down a copy of Jacques Barzun’s 1984 essay “Scholarship High and Dry” which was published in the Atlantic before being republished in Barzun’s collection The Culture We Deserve (1989). I need to track down a copy of Bloom’s collected essays (I forget the title), and then we can ring all this out —assuming our brain cells haven’t been dessicated in the reading, of course.
Barzun’s point is that anthropologists (mis)appropriated culture because the sociologists already had a claim on society and, like all good academic turf warriors should be, they didn’t want anyone getting the idea that they were a subsidiary discipline. (Oh the stories I could tell about turf fights between History and Political Science at the university where I earned my B.A.)
After we ring it out, maybe we can wring it out too. (Jesus, I either need to give up liquor, or learn how to properly use the preview. And I ain’t giving up liquor, —not while Teh Wan is in office!
The question(s) we have to contend with (on political grounds) run straight to the center of our epistemology, I think, which is — again I guess — why we should care about this stuff. As opposed to taking the easier way out, to dismiss it as mere pedantry or insignificant inter-disciplinary squabbles. But the more carefully we examine the background, the more difficult the diaeresis becomes. The closer we draw to the most basic phenomena of human life and choice in life, the less certain our grasp, or comfort in our grasp.
Only look what Chicago chooses. (h/t Insty)
Hutchins rolls in his sarcophagus.
Allan Bloom, “Giants and Dwarfs”, perhaps?
That’s what I was trying to think of. Thanks Geoff.
sdferr we’re in complete agreement about the need to think about this stuff seriously.
Outlaw? Hell, time for radical insurrectionists.
And I’m not talking about OWS.
Keep in mind, they’ve already decided that the only path for Constitutionalists to go is for them to attempt to seize local government hoping that if enough local gov’t is seized the inroads of the larger gov’t will be blunted.
They intend to meet those attempts with over whelming force regardless of civilian collateral damage.
Individuals will have to take it upon themselves the burden of effecting radical violent “adjustments” to the power structure. Without assistance in the beginning.
Gray power.
No, it’s still Outlaw time. We still want to fix the system from within; as long as there’s a reasonable chance, and the system is still fixable (IE, it’s possible to chop it back down to constitutional limits and intents).
Don’t be too eager for insurrection, you’ll know when it’s time…
I’ll promise to avoid using the word culture here, and be more precise.
Frankly, I use it as a shorthand word anyway, to refer to the conception of shared experience within a defined group. I never gave possible baggage a thought.
Ain’t no big thing to me…