About that 6-year-old boy accused of "sexual harassment" for kissing his schoolmate's hand.

I heard Rush Limbaugh talking about this yesterday, and I see this morning that Glenn Reynolds — calling the boy "the littlest casualty in the war on men"  — is linking to James Taranto — who's blaming Obama (because of a requirement that schools protect students from sexual harassment).

I agree that someone that young should not be labeled with an offense that contains the word "sexual." (The school district, barraged with criticism, has relabeled his offense "misconduct.") And I would locate the issue of suspending him within the larger problem of the "zero tolerance" approach.

But I do think that the school is right to forbid kissing. The boy's mother, who naturally wants to defend her child, tells us that the children were "boyfriend and girlfriend" and that the girl "was fine with it." That may make the misbehavior less severe, but it does not take it out of the range of what a school should forbid.

By the boy's report, it happened "during class, yeah": "We were doing reading group and I leaned over and kissed her on the hand." That isn't acceptable in-class behavior! The school should forbid that. I don't understand saying it's fine for boys and girls who like each other to freely express that affection with hand kissing during class. How about a little support for the school teachers who expect discipline during their lessons? You're not allowed to whisper back and forth or pass notes either. This is basic classroom respect. Have we all forgotten?

"Jodie Gummow, a 'senior fellow' at Alternet.org, takes a feminist cheap shot at America."

"The World Economic Forum released its annual Global Gender Gap Report for 2013 measuring gender disparity between men and women around the world . . . and disappointingly the United States didn't even make it in the top 20!"

"Reich is a proven fabulist... But we're interested in the supposed moral of the parable of Reich's Disgusted Imaginary Friend..."

Writes James Taranto, after Robert Reich claims to have an "old friend who has been active in politics for more than 30 years" who says he's "giving up," because he "can't stomach what's going on in Washington anymore."

Disgusted Imaginary Friend has "better things to do with my life."

What are your imaginary friends — human and mollusk — saying about the mess in Washington?

"Obama's strategic languidness has put lawmakers in a position such that many of them will be unable to vote either 'yes' or 'no' in good conscience."

"And with his failure to develop even a political strategy for approaching Congress on this matter, he has managed the dubious achievement of leading the U.S. into a foreign-policy quagmire without firing a shot."

ADDED: When we look back at Barack Obama, what will we say? I think it will have to do with the way we wanted to believe that the old parental "use words" admonition was the best advice and we conned ourselves into seeing him as the embodiment of that fantasy, and he tried to be our dream.

But the world isn't that pretty, and the dream doesn't make much sense unless enough people to play along. Giving him the Nobel Peace Prize in advance was part of the shared dream: Come on, everyone into the delusion.

But the "use words" approach gave way to using bombs, which were supposed to be enough like words that we wouldn't wake from the dream. Bombs express our disapproval of the worse things done on the ground, the ground which our "boots" never touch.

James Taranto considers my warnings against counter-Trayvonism.

In his Best of the Web column today. Excerpt:

We are... dubious of Althouse's assertion that counter-Trayvonism plays into the hands of the left....

Saul Alinsky's fourth rule was: "Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules." The counter-Trayvonists may ultimately be wrongheaded, but if they can provoke as conventional a liberal as Josh Marshall into disparaging "the racial victimization bus" — a colorblind sentiment if ever there was one — then perhaps they serve a dialetical purpose.

"Excommunicated from the clown community."

"'Excommunicated' is our word, but there really is a 'clown community,'" writes James Taranto, who's apparently a community unto himself, judging by his use of the first person plural.

Judy Quest, author of a CNN.com op-ed titled "A Real Clown Wouldn't Mock Obama"... informs us of the existence of "international clown organizations," a "strict code of ethics" governing "the craft" of clowning, and "clown journals," for which Quest, who's been a clown for 32 years, "writes regularly."

But does the Clown Code of Ethics forbid dressing up as a particular President of the United States and appearing to have your life threatened? Taranto says:

[N]one of the Clown Commandments forbid political humor, so that it would appear to be permissible to pantomime truth to power. 

Yes, but do clown ethics forbid making comedy out of a physical threat to the President? What truth is spoken by saying Wouldn't it be funny if the President's life were in danger?

If you've wondered why I hadn't previously blogged about the rodeo clown, these questions reflect my reasons for avoiding what might seem like such a tempting story. I favor free speech, and I'm sorry this guy lost his job. He shouldn't have received so much attention, which is why I'd refrained from giving him more. But an employer is justified controlling the speech of employees. The speech expressed by the rodeo is the speech of the business that is the rodeo. It's not the individual speech of any particular performer. But I suspect the guy got scapegoated. Did the employer approve of this kind of performance before the nation's spotlight fell on this one clown?

Questions, questions.

I was amused to find myself amongst the miscellaneous items at the end of "The Best of the Web" today. That stuff at the end is definitely not the best of the web. It's more of a grab bag of things that can be made funny by putting it under a funny heading.

Questions Nobody Is Asking

" 'Why Don't You Ask Me Next Time Before Writing That I'm Either Malicious or Dumb?'" --headline, Althouse.blogspot.com, Aug. 14

"Why Is Samantha Power Speaking to Invisible Children?"--headline, NationalInterest.org, Aug. 14

Answers to Questions Nobody Is Asking

"Michelle Obama: 'No,' I Will Never Run for President"--headline, WeeklyStandard.com, Aug. 15

When is it a rape-threat hoax and when is it a sock-puppeting moby?

I've been thinking about the Meg Lanker-Simons incident. Here's James Taranto asking: "Why are phony 'hate crimes' so common, especially on college campuses?" He also looks into the First Amendment doctrine of "true threats." Obviously, it's not a "true threat" when the threat is actually written by the person targeted in the threat, but the police cited Lanker-Simons for statements she made to them, not for the original statement put up on the University of Wyoming "Crushes" page on Facebook. I can't tell from the articles I've read whether Lanker-Simons was the one who reported the Facebook post to the police, but the police did an investigation and had a warrant to search her computer, where they found evidence that she'd made the statement.

Sarah Zacharias, Wyoming state director for UniteWomen.org, said she and Lanker-Simons are friends. Zacharias spoke Monday during a campus demonstration against UW Crushes.  Zacharias said she was with Lanker-Simons when she found the post on UW Crushes.

“If the police are going to give her handcuffs for this, they need to give her an Oscar as well for her acting skills because I saw a woman devastated,” she said. Zacharias said she’d stake her own reputation on Lanker-Simons being innocent of creating the controversial post.

Did Zacharias report it to the police? Did the police initiate the investigation because of the demonstration? How awful to have the police seize your computer! It was the decision to leverage the Facebook posting into a demonstration — stirring up fear and outrage — that turned this thing into a hoax (and brought the apparently unforeseen horrible consequence of the police going through her computer). Thinking about the potential for the police to search your computer should make victims of true threats worry about calling the police, but it should also be a powerful deterrent to doing a fake threat.

But let's consider the Facebook posting alone:

“I want to hatef--- Meg Lanker- so hard. That chick that runs her liberal mouth all the time and doesn’t care who knows it. I think its hot and it makes me angry. One night with me and shes gonna be a good Republican b----.”

It's really not in threat form. It expresses a desire, not an intent to do something. And, let's be clear: "hatefuck" does not mean rape. It means: "To have sex, especially in a rough manner, with someone who one finds physically attractive but personally loathsome." So — assuming that Lanker really did write the post — we're seeing the work of a sockpuppet + moby. She was a sockpuppet to the extent that she was complimenting herself, proclaiming herself extremely seductive. She was a moby to the extent that she pretended to be one of her own antagonists and made that fake entity speak in a way that would bring her antagonists into disrepute.

Sockpuppets and mobys are ordinary characters all over the internet. As I said in my earlier post about Lanker-Simons: "People need better bullshit detectors!" The elements of sockpuppetry and mobyism are all over that Facebook posting. "Crush" pages for various institutions — like the University of Wyoming, in this case — invite statements about crushes on various students and make these statements anonymous. Of course, students are tempted to post about themselves, advertising how attractive they are. And of course, they are tempted to weave in their political opinions. The Lanker-Simons posting is exactly what you ought to expect. Sharpen up, everyone.

But what are the school authorities supposed to do? If they slough off these postings as the usual internet flimflam, they'll be denounced for minimizing violence against women. There lies the real problem: There's pressure against sharpening up.

Remember when feminism was about consciousness-raising?

"With characteristic contrarianness, blogress Ann Althouse speculates... It's a clever theory..."

Says James Taranto, "but not a realistic plan. There's no doubt that die-hard Democrats will respond in the way Althouse imagines they are expected to.... The Althouse theory raises another question: If Obama succeeded in electing a Democratic Congress next year, what would he do with it?..."

"No one would be in trouble over this scandal if only David Corn had the news judgment to recognize a nonstory."

Says James Taranto. The distinction between this bland chat about things Ashley Judd wrote in her memoir is nothing like the explosive conversation in Bartnicki v. Vopper, the Supreme Court case that said "a stranger's illegal conduct does not suffice to remove the First Amendment shield from speech about a matter of public concern."

[M]embers of the Pennsylvania State Education Association discussed violently retaliating against school board members who were their adversaries in collective-bargaining negotiations. A quote from the tape: "If they're not gonna move for three percent, we're gonna have to go to their, their homes.... To blow off their front porches, we'll have to do some work on some of those guys...."

In Bartnicki, Justice Stevens (joined by Justices O'Connor, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer) says there's "a conflict between interests of the highest order — on the one hand, the interest in the full and free dissemination of information concerning public issues, and, on the other hand, the interest in individual privacy and, more specifically, in fostering private speech." But: "The normal method of deterring unlawful conduct is to impose an appropriate punishment on the person who engages in it." And: "It would be quite remarkable to hold that speech by a law-abiding possessor of information can be suppressed in order to deter conduct by a non-law-abiding third party." 

The majority acknowledges the interest in privacy, but says it doesn't extend to matters of "public or general interest." Taranto opines that it's not so clear-cut that the McConnell campaign's brainstorming about attacking Judd is really a matter of "public interest" since it wasn't as interesting as the "blow off their front porches" bombshell in Bartnicki. Taranto points to the concurring opinion by Breyer (joined by O'Connor). That says:

[T]he Court does not create a "public interest" exception that swallows up the statutes' privacy-protecting general rule. Rather, it finds constitutional protection for publication of intercepted information of a special kind. Here, the speakers' legitimate privacy expectations are unusually low, and the public interest in defeating those expectations is unusually high...

So Breyer claims to see a balancing test in the majority's opinion (which he joins). He also wants it to be possible for "legislatures to respond flexibly to the challenges future technology may pose to the individual's interest in basic personal privacy." Meanwhile, in the dissenting opinion, Chief Justice Rehnquest (joined by Justices Scalia and Thomas) frets about advancing technology and "the right to be free from surreptitious eavesdropping" (which, they say, isn't going to be deterred if it's possible to "anonymously launder the interception through a third party and thereby avoid detection").

It's 12 years later, and technology has advanced much further, and after this Corn incident, every campaign should expect any and all private sessions to hit the internet. Maybe Taranto thinks you can piece together a limit on Bartnicki from the Breyer 2 and the Rehnquist 3, but I wouldn't count on it. Journalists are likely to take risks. Once there's audio, some journalist will always be the Corn.

And what difference does it make now? The real advancement in technology is that the audio can be dumped directly onto the internet. Today's eavesdroppers don't need a journalist to grant him a platform. So what is gained by penalizing the Corns of this world? I'd say we're better off getting some kind of journalistic filter, even if that filter is politically biased. There are biases all the way around in journalism. Even if we're not better off, we gain nothing worth intimidating journalists about. This material is breaking loose, one way or another.

"If he's good enough to marry, he'll still be around when you're ready to make that leap."

Amanda Marcotte, quoted by James Taranto, who says:

Let's translate that from feminist-speak to English: If the romance fails, his inadequacy as a man is entirely to blame; you have no responsibility for making it work.

If you follow that advice, you're likely to end up alone. Marcotte seems to imagine it will be a consolation that you'll be resentful too.

Let me translate that back into feminism (this will be like "recursive translation"): You're free to absorb the risk that the right man at the wrong time will be in the wrong place when it's the right time.

ADDED: My translation reminds me of the analog of pregnancy and abortion as seen by feminism: You're free to end a healthy pregnancy that comes at the wrong time, but you take the risk that there will be no healthy pregnancy when it's the right time.

You're entitled to your freedom, but freedom can only be exercised in the real world with all its limitations — including nature and, in a free society, the freedom of other people.

"Blogress Ann Althouse, a driven woman who is no longer young, gets to the heart of the matter..."

Says James Taranto.