What do you know - occasionally our congressional representatives are good for something.

It’s time to replace the Bar Association with an oversight agency that protects the public interest. When people have a complaint about the conduct of a particular lawyer or the legal system in general, the first thing they usually do is fire a complaint with the bar association. However, all they usually find there is interminable delays and reluctance to discipline one of their own. On top of putting victims of lawyer misconduct through additional bureaucratic hassle for nothing, the lawyers are given the identifying information that allows them to retaliate.

Now the Bar Association in Ohio is out to make an example of (and extort lawyer fees from) a family that acted on behalf of their own their own child. It’s time for the public to rise and say that this is the last straw. No one should be obliged to pay to enforce their rights under the law. People who can afford a lawyer obviously already have an unfair advantage: but people who can’t afford tens of thousands of dollars shouldn’t therefore be denied protection of their rights. People who have no way of protecting their rights might as well not be citizens of this country.

A friend of mine who is familiar with the legal landscape in Ohio recommended that anyone with an lawyer complaint there should contact the Clerk of the Ohio State Supreme Court and file a complaint against the lawyer with the Disciplinary Committee. The Disciplinary Committee of the Court governs the licensure of the attorneys in Ohio. I’m not sure if other states have similar mechanisms. I do know California has a general problem with oversight, ranging from deteriorating juvenile services to failure to curb judicial misconduct.

It has become a cliche to say the legal system is broken, but perhaps recent events will demonstrate that a major factor in the problem is that in the U.S. we’ve left oversight to the members of the club. A truly independent agency needs to be created to alleviate this problem.

This is the domestic terrorism we need to be worrying about. Perhaps part of the $545 million Homeland Security budget should be dedicated to developing a color-coded alert system to protect people from their domestic partners.

There’s a terrific news aggregator for domestic violence issues here. For LGBT-specific issues, get started here.

One of the tricky things about the U.S. legal system is that people have to arrange their grievances to fit the existing law. The woman who won a $500,000 judgment against the company that spanked employees deserves every penny. However, it should give us all pause for thought that the lawsuit had to be constructed around sexual harassment. Are we really missing the legal foundations to defend workers against deliberate humiliation by superiors? Why wasn’t this a class action suit?

If even half of this is true, I hope the plaintiff wins a definitive, precedent-setting verdict.

Unfortunately, this case will probably add to the widespread perception that women exercise their power in petty, bullying ways.

Since media structures theorist Jon Garfunkel has been in town, I decided to take a look at how the concept of rankism is being applied to the blogosphere. There’s some impressive brainpower at work. Rankism is coming up in relation to link hierarchies (also here), tag clouds, the attention economy, P2P, social media, metrics, wikis, network theory, paramedia, and online activism.

Since the Internet is an evolving structure, there are abundant opportunities to identify and hopefully stem rankism. It’s good to see that the conversation is indeed happening.

As the media grapples with how to present CIA-whistleblower Mary McCarthy, I can’t help but group her in the pantheon of whistleblowing women enshrined by Time Magazine in 2002. The gist was that women are more likely to be marginalized by rankism, so taking an ethical stand is their route to dignity.

Even though McCarthy is in an unusually good position as whistleblowing goes (visible to an interested public, able to afford an attorney and invoke whistleblower protections), she will surely pay the price that society exacts on those who make a stand. Rush Limbaugh has already been spamming Google News in an attempt to remake public opinion in the Bush administration’s favor and isolate the troublemaker. Even more disturbing, prominent bloggers have been taking potshots.

In the end, the truth about any dust up is always complex. The media does the public a disservice when they construct cardboard heroes or villains. This is not only a cheap tactic to whip up emotions and increase circulation, the decision to spoonfeed people “what they want to hear” shows a profound disrespect for their intelligence and willingness to engage with difficult, multi-threaded events. Bloggers sometimes do a good job of balancing out media agendas, but in this case it looks like they want to get on the smear bandwagon. My heart goes out to McCarthy. Whether she’s a whistleblower or not, whether she gains public character approval or not, it’s clear that she’s now at the mercy of the media. I hope everyone remembers that if she was already shafted in the workplace, it would double the injustice for press and the public to pile on her now. Let’s all take a step back and see how the facts unfold.

I just discovered that a documentary called Dignity of the Nobodies is making the rounds on the indy film circuit. The director Fernando Solanas has a distinguished history in covering human rights issues in Latin America. Dignity of the Nobodies explores the lives of the people who have been struggling to survive in the Argentina slums, in the wake of a national economic disaster. It also attempts to instill the nobodies with the dignity of telling their own story. This quote from a protester says it all: “work is dignity … they are destroying all dignity.”

As I checked into the Nobodies Movement, I found that they had been spawning groups on a variety of social networking sites:

1. A growing Frappr Network.

2. A Google Group of Nobodies.

3. A Nobodies Wiki.

4. A Squidoo Lens on nobodyness.

This is some exciting follow-up for the International Association of Nobodies. I spent half the morning signing up for things.

Ps. I’ve added a link to the Nobodies Movement to The Nobody Manifesto.

A study sponsored by the United Nations shows that domestic abuse has been normalized in Syria. It’s not hard to imagine why Syrian women would hesitate to protest a beating when a sideways look from their neighbors can get them killed.