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"That's well beyond the point where the character of a college shifts, and may make a school less appealing to some of the highly qualified students it seeks to attract.
"Colleges will then be unable to attract the female students they want most - or so they fear," wrote Gail Heriot, a professor of law at the University of San Diego and a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
Alerted by media reports that some admissions officers may be accepting less-qualified male students over female applicants, the Civil Rights Commission is investigating whether women are being discriminated against in college admissions.
"Everybody should feel very uncomfortable by the notion that it is more difficult for a woman to get into a college than a man," Heriot said in an interview."
Nobody likes unpleasant surprises, but when Allison Brooke Eastman's fiancé found out four months ago just how high her student loan debt was, he had a particularly strong reaction: he broke off the engagement within three days. Ms. Eastman said she had told him early on in their relationship that she had over $100,000 of debt. But, she said, even she didn't know what the true balance was; like a car buyer who focuses on only the monthly payment, she wrote 12 checks a year for about $1,100 each, the minimum possible. She didn't focus on the bottom line, she said, because it was so profoundly depressing.
But as the couple got closer to their wedding day, she took out all the paperwork and it became clear that her total debt was actually about $170,000. "He accused me of lying," said Ms. Eastman, 31, a San Francisco X-ray technician and part-time photographer who had run up much of the balance studying for a bachelor's degree in photography. "But if I was lying, I was lying to myself, not to him. I didn't really want to know the full amount."
Plotting ex-wife gets 7-14 years in jail
By JAMES A. KIMBLE
Union Leader Correspondent
Friday, Aug. 20, 2010
BRENTWOOD - Kristin Ruggiero will spend 7 to 14 years in state prison for what police say was part of a years-long ploy to use the criminal justice system against her ex-husband, who was thrown in jail and nearly lost his career during a bitter divorce.
Judge Kenneth McHugh said Ruggiero's attempt to set up her ex-husband and use the legal system as a weapon was unlike any other case he has seen.
"There's a lot of people, usually women, who have been subjected to abuse by their significant others," McHugh said, during Ruggiero's sentencing yesterday. "As a result of her actions, their cases, their safety, their security has been damaged. The web for this is much greater than what has just happened to Mr. Ruggiero."
A jury found that Kristin Ruggiero registered a disposable cell phone under her ex-husband's name and sent herself a dozen threatening and suicidal text messages. She then reported to East Kingston police in May 2008 that her ex-husband had violated bail conditions tied to a criminal threatening case, which police learned was also fabricated by the 34-year-old mother.
By portraying herself as a victim, she duped local police and portrayed her ex-husband, Jeffrey Ruggiero, as a violent monster while the couple was going through a contentious divorce in family court, according to prosecutors.
The couple battled over finances and their 7-year-old daughter.
While Jeffrey Ruggiero was being investigated, his ex-wife called him at all hours and taunted him over the phone, according to court testimony.
"She mocked him. She laughed at him. (She said) 'I took all your money, I took your daughter and now I am going to take your career'," Assistant County Attorney Jerome Blanchard said in court yesterday.
Video: Click below to view some of Judge Kenneth McHugh's comments during sentencing.
He said Ruggiero's folly came because claims in criminal court had to be backed up -- unlike in family court where she made repeated claims about ex-husband's behavior.
"Unfortunately for her, we're not in family court anymore," Blanchard said.
Blanchard argued that Ruggiero continued to try to manipulate the justice system, even after her conviction in May from her jail cell.
In a series of recorded phone calls from the jail played in court, Ruggiero asked her mother to get a letter from a doctor, which would claim that Ruggiero suffered a form of psychosis stemming from addiction to Adderall and alcohol.
"I'm going to pull the mental health card, you know what I mean?" Ruggiero says during the call, which was played in court. "It has to be outpatient in the United States and I can live at home."
But yesterday, Ruggiero sobbed to McHugh. She apologized for comments she made about the judge and his heart bypass surgery during another phone call.
"Dad, guess what? Judge McHugh had a quadruple bypass!" Ruggiero said during the phone call, only a small portion of which was played in court.
McHugh told prosecutors to skip over that call, saying it wasn't necessary for the sentencing hearing.
McHugh said it's likely that Ruggiero cannot be rehabilitated. He told Ruggiero he found her apology yesterday disingenuous.
Defense lawyer Chuck Keefe argued that his client was a caring mother whose judgment may have been affected because she suffered from drug and alcohol dependency.
"I want to say here what the state offers is a sentence of extermination," Keefe said, while proposing a 12-month jail sentence for Ruggiero.
Before her arrest in September 2008, Ruggiero nearly had the criminal justice and family court system fooled, according to prosecutors. A district court judge convicted Jeffrey Ruggiero of misdemeanor criminal threatening and related charges, but refused to jail him before sentencing.
That allowed Jeffrey Ruggiero to remain free on bail and return to his job as a petty officer in the U.S. Coast Guard.
It enraged Kristin Ruggiero so much that she came up with the scheme about receiving a series of threatening and suicidal text messages. Ruggiero was sentenced on 12 counts of falsifying physical evidence, which each carry a potential 3 1/2 to 7-year prison term.
The case that McHugh repeatedly described as "bizarre" yesterday may not be over.
Prosecutors revealed during Ruggiero's sentencing hearing that a new criminal investigation related to her is under way.
Ruggiero was also ordered to pay $19,000 in restitution to the East Kingston police department, which conducted the investigation.
Like many other families, Tara and Charles Dai found their world quaking from the recession. Eighteen months ago, Charles, a computer consultant, was laid off. With the job market so contracted, they decided he'd stay home and care for the children, ages 4 and 7.
"Now he's Mr. Mom and I'm the primary breadwinner," says Tara, 39, a health care consultant in Flemington, N.J., and developer of Stork Tunes, a CD for moms-to-be.
The shift wasn't easy for either of them. "I felt pressure at first and took on more hours," she says. "He was caught up in the I'm-only-useful-if-I'm-making-money thing. He had trouble understanding that making dinner, handling family finances and taking care of the kids is helpful."
Today, says the Shriver Report, a 2009 study by Maria Shriver and the Center for American Progress, only one of five families with children at home have dads who work and moms who stay home. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 25.9% of wives in 2007 were earning more than their husbands in households where both spouses work. That's up from 17.8% two decades ago. Since December 2007, men have accounted for three-quarters of all job losses.
When earning more money shifts the status quo at home, learning new ways to cope with the money/gender gap can help.
Later in the movie, Marty comes up with a plan to get George with Lorraine, a plan which involves Marty being not so nice to a nice girl (his mom), and he tells George to rescue her. George points out that that is not a very nice thing for Marty to do, but he assures George that's it's totally cool cuz it's pretend and stuff. Hear that everyone? Sexual assault is okay if you're only pretending to assault the woman to act as wingman to your buddy (or father!), but it's gotta be believable, so scare the shit out of her. Ugh. I can't believe I just wrote that.
Anyway, the plan goes wrong. Turns out Lorraine is totally hot for Marty, but quickly changes her mind when she finds kissing him feels like kissing her brother. Biff interrupts, and in an act of revenge against Marty for a sweet skateboard escape attempt that earlier trashed Biff's car, Biff hands Marty over to his thugs, and jumps in the car with Lorraine, presumably to "have his way" with her. Yeah, it's called rape, but it's not really treated as such in the movie. It does, however, mean that George can really prove himself a man because Lorraine is really being sexually assaulted by Biff (and not just pretend sexually assaulted by Marty). Long-ish uncomfortable scene short: George rescues Lorraine. Seriously, this scene was really uncomfortable to watch. I mean, after all the other assaults that Lorraine endures, it's made even more disgusting by the fact that I'm made to think "omg will no one save her?" That's what these assaults are all building up to, right? George has a chance to protect her, and eventually does before it can escalate anymore. But it's just a prop to motivate George, which falls into that cliche of women dying / being assaulted / or being in any other form of danger to cause a man to act (I think one of the best examples of this is Wolverine in the X-Men movies, since the women are basically required to die twice to get Wolverine to do stuff).
Oh, but after George proves his manliness by saving Lorraine's virtue, George gets another chance to really hang on to that manliness because (guess what!) Lorraine is assaulted AGAIN. Some random dude on the dance floor shoves George out of the way and has his hands on Lorraine even though she, again, says no, and even tries to get away. At this point I believe I was throwing things. Apparently the character of Lorraine exists solely for the purpose of being sexually assaulted. I mean, she like goes around doing Lorraine things, and gets assaulted. And it's okay, because eventually some upstanding man will defend her. Maybe. And even when she's sitting with friends, her friends just carry on like nothing is happening. Can I get some damn female solidarity please??
Oh yeah, George eventually reclaims Lorraine for a second time. Marty still exists. Hooray.
Docket No. 17122-07X. Filed July 7, 2010.
P, a nonprofit corporation founded by S, provides S's
sperm free of charge to women seeking to become pregnant
through artificial insemination or in vitro fertilization.
S and his father, F, are P's board members and officers. S
and F ultimately determine to whom P will distribute sperm.
P, seeking tax exemption as a private operating foundation
pursuant to sec. 501(c)(3), I.R.C., contends that it
operates exclusively for the charitable purpose of promoting
health.
1. Held: P's activities do not promote health for the
benefit of the community.
2. Held, further, pursuant to sec. 501(c)(3), I.R.C.,
P is not operated exclusively for exempt purposes and
therefore does not qualify for tax exemption.
Illinois is attempting to force a Frankfort man to pay child support for a son who allegedly was kidnapped by his mother 10 years ago and taken to Poland.
A Polish court says the father, Gerardo Serrano, owes back child support.
But Serrano has Cook County court orders that say the boy was "unlawfully removed" by the mother to Poland, Serrano should have full custody of his son, and, as the custodial parent, he does not owe child support.
And Joanna Serrano owes Serrano money, according to a Cook County court order. The amount, $11,000, is roughly equal to what Serrano is said to owe the Polish government, which has been paying the mom the child support and is now attempting to collect from Serrano.
Matt Arnoux, one of Serrano's lawyers, was critical of state officials for attempting to enforce a Polish court's ruling over a Cook County court's ruling.
"They're following a foreign order when they really shouldn't," he said.
"I don't know anybody else in Mr. Serrano's predicament," Arnoux added.
Serrano said his bank account has been frozen by the state and that one quarter of a federal payment he gets from the death of his first wife in a car accident has been garnished. Both actions were taken without a hearing for Serrano to state his case.
In a letter to the state's Department of Healthcare and Family Services, Erin Masters, another one of Serrano's lawyers, chastised the department for allowing Serrano's bank account to be frozen without a hearing. An administrative hearing is scheduled for Aug. 4.
All the Single Ladies
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: May 18, 2010
When does a woman go from being single to unmarried?
As my friend Carol Lee, a Politico reporter, observes: "It seems like a cruel distinction and terrifying crossover."
Single carries a connotation of eligibility and possibility, while unmarried has that dreaded over-the-hill, out-of-luck, you-are-finished, no-chance implication. An aroma of mothballs and perpetual aunt.
Men, generally more favored by nature as they age, can be single at all ages. But often, for women, once you're 40 or 50, or simply beyond childbearing age, you're no longer single. You're unmarried -- meaning it isn't your choice to be alone. There are post-50 exceptions. Consider celebrity examples: Samantha in "Sex and the City," Dana Delany, Susan Sarandon and Madonna are seen as sexily single.
But if you have a bit of a weight problem, a bad haircut, a schlumpy wardrobe, the assumption is that you're undesirable, unwanted -- and unmarried.
White House officials were so eager to squash any speculation that Elena Kagan was gay that they have ended up in a pre-feminist fugue, going with sad unmarried rather than fun single, spinning that she's a spinster.
You'd think that they could come up with a more inspiring narrative than old maid for a woman who may become the youngest Supreme Court justice on the bench.
In the initial accounts about Kagan, she seemed to have an appealing swagger, posing as a judge for her yearbook, bragging about what a "famously excellent teacher" she was, bantering with the Supreme Court justices as solicitor general, smoking cigars, drinking beer and playing poker. And she had an endearingly ditzy streak: One friend told how she would get so consumed with work, she sometimes parked her car and left it running all night.
But there were also the whispers -- is she or isn't she? -- and the guys in the White House got all defensive, protesting too much that she isn't. If roughly one out of nine Americans is gay, why shouldn't one out of nine Supreme Court justices be? After all, President Obama has quoted Oliver Wendell Holmes as saying that "it is experience that can give a person a common touch and a sense of compassion; an understanding of how the world works and how ordinary people live."
Kagan has told a friend in the West Wing that she is not gay, just lonely. Even so, that doesn't mean her sherpas in the White House, in their frantic drive to dismiss the gay rumors, should be spinning a narrative around that most hoary of stereotypes: a smart, ambitious woman who threw herself into her work, couldn't find a guy, threw up her hands, and threw herself further into her work -- and in the process went from single to unmarried.
It's inexplicable, given that this should be Kagan's hour of triumph as potentially only the fourth woman ever to serve on the highest court.
And it's a pathetic contrast to another big news story in Washington -- the resignation of Representative Mark Souder, Republican of Indiana, a goober who preaches sex-abstinence and couldn't abstain from sex.
The conservative Christian lawmaker is both morally and physically repellent. But he effortlessly benefits from Henry Kissinger's dictum about power being an aphrodisiac. He had an affair with a younger babe who worked for his district office -- "part time," he ludicrously stressed. They had assignations in state parks and boat launches, and in a particularly delicious bit of hypocrisy, the pretty mistress even interviewed him on a promotional video about the importance of abstinence.
Another case of a family-values politician thinking he knows what's good for everybody else but exempting himself.
For some reason, Kagan's depressing narrative is even more depressing because it's cast in the past tense, as if, at 50, Kagan has resigned herself to a cloistered, asexual existence ruling in cases that touch on the private lives of all Americans.
It's a disturbing echo of those Harvard Business School students who said on "60 Minutes" a few years ago that they had hid the fact that they went to Harvard from guys they met because it was the kiss of death with men who were threatened by more successful women. "The H-bomb," they called it.
Why is there this underlying assumption that Kagan has missed the boat? Why couldn't she be eager to come to Washington to check out the Obama-era geek-chic bachelors, maybe get set up on a date by Michelle Obama, maybe host some single ladies fiestas with Sonia Sotomayor, maybe even sign up for JDate with a new and improved job status?
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on May 19, 2010, on page A27 of the New York edition.
By JOCELYN NOVECK, AP National Writer Jocelyn Noveck, Ap National Writer - Fri May 7, 7:17 pm ET
NEW YORK - They've called it the "Mancession" -- a recession that's affected men disproportionately, because of its brutal impact on male-dominated sectors like construction and manufacturing.
But that term rings hollow to women like Sara Wade, an Illinois schoolteacher who became the sole supporter of two school-aged children -- possibly for good, she fears -- when her ex-husband, a carpenter and contractor, stopped paying child support 15 months ago.
Or to Martha Gonzalez, a divorced mother of three in Texas who had to take a second, part-time job when her work in real estate became scarcer. She lost her benefits, too, and for the first time in her adult working life, has no health insurance.
Or to Angela Grice, single mom of a 3-year-old son, who cobbles together two low-paying, part-time jobs while she tries to get an accounting degree that will lead to some stability for her and her son.
Concerned about women like these, a congressional committee has issued a report, timed for Mother's Day, outlining the adverse impact the recession has had on working women -- especially on mothers, and particularly single moms. A copy was provided to The Associated Press ahead of its Monday release.
Strikingly, the report, by the Joint Economic Committee, finds that whereas during the bulk of the recession job losses were overwhelmingly male, as the economy edged toward recovery, the trend began reversing.
"As job losses slowed in the final months of 2009, women continued to lose jobs as men found employment," says the report, based on the committee's analysis of data from the Bureau of labor Statistics, including unpublished data. Specifically, from October 2009 to March 2010, women lost 22,000 jobs while men gained 260,000, it says. It adds: "April's strong employment growth showed women gained 86,000 jobs last month, far fewer than the 204,000 jobs gained by men."
Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., chair of the committee, noted that the findings were especially dire for single mothers -- their unemployment rate went from 8 percent to 13.6 percent between 2007 and 2009.
"Women are losing more jobs, yet families are more dependent on their earnings," she said in a telephone interview.
In all, one-third of jobs lost during the Great Recession belonged to women, Maloney notes. That's striking, she says, because in earlier recessions the percentage was much lower; women accounted for 15 percent of job losses in the 2001 recession, for example.
But even women who've been able to hold onto their jobs have found the economic sands shifting beneath them in ways they never anticipated.
Wade, the Illinois schoolteacher, counts herself among the luckier ones. An 8th-grade English teacher in Skokie for 16 years, she's fortunate to have tenure and seniority. (She thanks her lucky stars she didn't take an extended break from her career earlier on, as she once contemplated.)
Her husband, whom she divorced in 2004, is a carpenter and contractor, "just the kind of job they mean when the call it a 'Mancession,'" she says. But the term seems meaningless because the impact of his job troubles has put her in a risky position she never imagined: the sole source of economic support for their 8-year-old boy and 10-year-old girl.
Wade has had no child support since January of 2009, and bought a new home with the help of her family.
"I can't imagine what I'd be living in if they hadn't helped me out," she says. She's also worried about a potential pay freeze at her school. "It's scary," she says. "I'm the sole provider and I could be stuck here at this level." She reluctantly assumes she'll have to support her kids through college on her own.
There are many like Wade, and they're in a precarious position, says her district's congresswoman, Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill. "If a person like her loses her job, she is in deep trouble," says Schakowsky, chairwoman of the Congressional Caucus for Women's Issues, who also spoke to the AP about the report. "The house will probably follow."
In earlier times, women served as a buffer during recessions; If the husband lost his job, the wife could serve as a backup provider. The frightening thing for women who are the sole breadwinners is that there's no backup plan, says fellow Women's Caucus member Gwen Moore, D-Wis.
"We have no safety net for these women," says Moore. "Eight million women are the sole breadwinners in their family, and public policy needs to be a little more empathetic to this. Because when a woman loses her job, the whole family falls off a huge cliff."
Another problem for working women is what the report terms the "part-time penalty," meaning those in part-time work often earn far less per hour than their full-time counterparts in the same occupation.
In 2009, 3.3 million women worked part time for economic reasons, the report says, meaning that they didn't choose it: Either they couldn't find full-time work, or their hours had been cut from full-time.
Part-time means less money, of course. But it also means other things: More expensive child care per hour (it can be hard to find part-time child care), less seniority at work and fewer benefits, if any.
That's what Gonzalez, the Brownsville, Texas woman, has learned. Happily working full-time in real estate sales and leasing, with a salary and benefits, she was forced to switch to contract work when her company made cutbacks. She took on a second job, working afternoons and early evenings as a receptionist. She hauled her ex-husband into court to get him to pay back child support.
"I'm making it," she says, but she currently has no health insurance -- at 57, it's something she hasn't experienced before. Asked what she would do if something catastrophic happened, she replies: "I don't want to think about that."
At only 20, Grice, the single mother in Milwaukee, is just trying to begin her career. As she pursues an accounting degree, she cobbles together two part-time jobs, one in a hair salon and another at a call center.
It's a teetering house of cards. If her son is sick, she loses wages, and may have to choose between paying the rent or paying the phone bill. "My income feels temporary, and the bills feel permanent," she says.
Before the recession, Grice could count on her father for support. But he lost his job at a factory in June, and her parents moved to Texas, meaning she could no longer live with them.
Is it a man's recession? Grice doesn't think so. "A lot of women out there don't have help from men in taking care of their kids," she says. "This is a mother's recession, too."