Supreme influence

So, Samuel Alito has broken a tie, and the U.S. Supreme Court has decided that the death penalty in Kansas stays. (story) And this was a unique case, since Kansas has a bizarre stipulation that a jury should choose death when the evidence for and against death is equal. Yes, they should choose death NOT just if death wins out in a pro-con argument, but as long as there's no inclination to choose one over the other. The challenge to the Kansas death penalty on the grounds that it was cruel and unusual punishment was shot down by Alito alone, and this will be the final decision. In case people thought liberals, such as myself, were overreacting when they worried about both Alito and John Roberts being named to the court...THIS is just part of the proof that we were justified to worry, that the court would swing in a new direction with the addition of two conservatives. And I'm sure there's much more to come. For who knows how many years.

Because that's the real issue here. The Kansas decision is just the very beginning. It is one indicator of the way things are going to be now. Alito's conservative influence was all that was needed for things to play out the way they did. This was a 5-4 decision. It's not only the liberals that have worried about the new Court since the appointments that should take serious notice of these developments. The important question now becomes whether this kind of close decision, with a narrow conservative win, will play out over and over again...and what very influential decisions might it affect?

All I know is that I, in my typical pessimistic way, am dreading the day that this court overturns Roe v. Wade. Because it might not just be hype. Who knows....though the chances of it still seem iffy to me, it might just happen one of these days. These are the kinds of things that America will need to question under the newly conservative Supreme Court. And I'm not looking forward to it.

It all makes me keenly aware of the process of appointing new Supreme Court justices. It seems to me that this process is rather flawed. The influence of the Court can definitely not be underemphasized. The Supreme Court is, without doubt, the most powerful entity that the country has. It has the final say over any issue...it can essentially overrule all branches of government. And I think this type of power is indeed necessary; after all, this power was needed to put a stop to the 2000 Presidential election fiasco. However, when the Court has this much power, it would seem that there should be some sort of fairer way to appoint new justices than having the Presidential administration choose nominees.

It's true that Congress must approve the President's nomination, and it's even true that one of George W.'s nominees was shot down immediately, when even Congressional Republicans doubted the legitimacy of the pick. But the fact remains that the President, and his administration, is in charge of selecting the nominees for a seat that someone may hold for many decades. A President, and his deeply partisan administration, which will serve for eight years at the most, can have a large influence on some of the most important decisions in the country for countless years after his Presidency is long over. This does not seem to be the best idea to me.

George W. was incredibly lucky to be able to appoint not just one, but two new Supreme Court justices during his Presidency (and all within the matter of a few months.) This is an unlikely occasion, and unfortunately for this country, it occurred during the Bush administration. Though Congress (currently a Republican-dominated Congress, I might add) needed to accept W.'s nominations, Bush was able to get two very conservative picks through onto the Supreme Court. And now, who knows what the lasting implications of this will really be.

It makes me shudder to think of what W.'s true legacy might be in the end. A second Vietnam war, yes. An astonishing trampling of the Bill of Rights, sure. But the power to extend his conservative views through the new Court he created, a Court which could now swing conservative for a terribly long amount of time? A Court which, ulitmately, has power over every other institution in the country? The reality of this is, hopefully, enough to make anyone objectively wonder whether ANY administration should really have that much power. But I won't hold my breath.

What would an internet search say about you?

The following is a New York Times story about how employers are increasingly finding out more about job applicants by going to social networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace. I think this is terrible...everyone, especially every college student, will have fun outside of work. I think the fact that college students will party and maybe get drunk from time to time is hardly news. It doesn't make someone less qualified for a job. It seems that pretty much all college-aged kids have profiles on FB and/or MySpace, and a lot of these profiles have things that are not meant to be seen by people other than friends and fellow students. And there's nothing wrong with that. I mean, imagine if this same screening process technically could have been used for everyone that is already working at one of these companies. How many people wouldn't have been accepted?

What people do for fun and their professional attitude are generally two different things. I'm not going to claim it's some kind of invasion of privacy, because the users of these sites (including myself) are voluntarily putting it out there on the internet. But it hardly seems like something companies should be wasting their time on. Is it such an incredible thing that the way people present themselves to their friends might not completely be in line with how they present themselves to authority figures?

The problem, though, is that there's probably not much any of us can do about this. We can complain about it, but it appears as though it is becoming more and more of a reality. So I guess when I (finally) get to the point where I'm leaving school and seriously trying to find a career, I may need to temporarily tone down my MySpace and Facebook pages. Not that they're crazy or anything, but apparently all of us should be worried. And I'll also have to make sure there's nothing a Google search on my name will find that I might not want employers to see. Even though this is, I'm sure, completely legal, it does feel like an invasion to me, honestly, because it's putting a person up to some pretty ridiculous standards. But it looks like it's happening, and we all have to be ready for it.
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For Some, Online Persona Undermines a Résumé
By ALAN FINDER
Published: June 11, 2006
New York Times

When a small consulting company in Chicago was looking to hire a summer intern this month, the company's president went online to check on a promising candidate who had just graduated from the University of Illinois.

At Facebook, a popular social networking site, the executive found the candidate's Web page with this description of his interests: "smokin' blunts" (cigars hollowed out and stuffed with marijuana), shooting people and obsessive sex, all described in vivid slang.

It did not matter that the student was clearly posturing. He was done.

"A lot of it makes me think, what kind of judgment does this person have?" said the company's president, Brad Karsh. "Why are you allowing this to be viewed publicly, effectively, or semipublicly?"

Many companies that recruit on college campuses have been using search engines like Google and Yahoo to conduct background checks on seniors looking for their first job. But now, college career counselors and other experts say, some recruiters are looking up applicants on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Xanga and Friendster, where college students often post risqué or teasing photographs and provocative comments about drinking, recreational drug use and sexual exploits in what some mistakenly believe is relative privacy.

When viewed by corporate recruiters or admissions officials at graduate and professional schools, such pages can make students look immature and unprofessional, at best.

"It's a growing phenomenon," said Michael Sciola, director of the career resource center at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. "There are lots of employers that Google. Now they've taken the next step."

At New York University, recruiters from about 30 companies told career counselors that they were looking at the sites, said Trudy G. Steinfeld, executive director of the center for career development.

"The term they've used over and over is red flags," Ms. Steinfeld said. "Is there something about their lifestyle that we might find questionable or that we might find goes against the core values of our corporation?"

Facebook and MySpace are only two years old, but have attracted millions of avid young participants, who mingle online by sharing biographical and other information, often intended to show how funny, cool and even outrageous they are.

On MySpace and similar sites, personal pages are generally available to anyone who registers, with few restrictions on who can register. Facebook, though, has separate requirements for different categories of users; college students must have a college e-mail address to register. Personal pages on Facebook are restricted to friends and others on the user's campus, leading many students to assume that they are relatively private.

But companies can gain access to the information in several ways. Employees who are recent graduates often retain their college e-mail addresses, which enables them to see pages. Sometimes, too, companies ask college students working as interns to perform online background checks, said Patricia Rose, the director of career services at the University of Pennsylvania.

Concerns have already been raised about these and other Internet sites, from their potential misuse by stalkers to students exposing their own misbehavior, for example by posting photographs of hazing by college sports teams. Add to the list of unintended consequences the new hurdles for the job search.

Ana Homayoun runs Green Ivy Educational Consulting, a small firm that tutors and teaches organizational skills to high school students in the San Francisco area. Ms. Homayoun visited Duke University this spring for an alumni weekend and while there planned to interview a promising job applicant.

Curious about the candidate, Ms. Homayoun went to her page on Facebook. She found explicit photographs and commentary about the student's sexual escapades, drinking and pot smoking, including testimonials from friends. Among the pictures were shots of the young woman passed out after drinking.

"I was just shocked by the amount of stuff that she was willing to publicly display," Ms. Homayoun said. "When I saw that, I thought, 'O.K., so much for that.' "

Ms. Rose said a recruiter had told her he rejected an applicant after searching the name of the student, a chemical engineering major, on Google. Among the things the recruiter found, she said, was this remark: "I like to blow things up."

Occasionally students find evidence online that might explain why a job search is foundering. Tien Nguyen, a senior at the University of California, Los Angeles, signed up for interviews on campus with corporate recruiters, beginning last fall, but he was seldom invited.

A friend suggested in February that Mr. Nguyen research himself on Google. He found a link to a satirical essay, entitled "Lying Your Way to the Top," that he had published last summer on a Web site for college students. He asked that the essay be removed. Soon, he began to be invited to job interviews and has now received several offers.

"I never really considered that employers would do something like that," he said. "I thought they would just look at your résumé and grades."

Jennifer Floren is chief executive of Experience Inc., which provides online information about jobs and employers to students at 3,800 universities.

"This is really the first time that we've seen that stage of life captured in a kind of time capsule and in a public way," Ms. Floren said. "It has its place, but it's moving from a fraternity or sorority living room. It's now in a public arena, so it's a completely different ballgame."

Ms. Rose of the University of Pennsylvania said, "Students go on them a lot and, unfortunately, now employers go there."

Some companies, including Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Ernst & Young and Osram Sylvania, said they did not use the Internet to check on college job applicants.

"I'd rather not see that part of them," said Maureen Crawford Hentz, manager of talent acquisition at Osram Sylvania. "I don't think it's related to their bona fide occupational qualifications."

More than a half-dozen major corporations, including Morgan Stanley, Dell, Pfizer, L'Oréal and Goldman Sachs, turned down or did not respond to requests for interviews.

But other companies, particularly those involved in the digital world like Microsoft and Métier, a small software company in Washington, D.C., said researching students through social networking sites was now fairly typical.

"It's becoming very much a common tool," said Warren Ashton, group marketing manager at Microsoft. "For the first time ever, you suddenly have very public information about almost any candidate who is coming through the process."

At Microsoft, he said, recruiters are given broad latitude over how to work, and there is no formal policy about using the Internet to research applicants. "There are certain recruiters and certain companies that are probably more in tune with the new technologies than others are," Mr. Ashton said.

Microsoft and Osram Sylvania have also begun to use social networking sites in a different way, participating openly in online communities to get out their company's messages and to identify talented job candidates.

Students may not know when they have been passed up for an interview or a job offer because of something a recruiter saw on the Internet. But more than a dozen college career counselors said recruiters had been telling them since last fall about incidents in which students' online writing or photographs raised serious questions about their judgment, eliminating them as job candidates.

Some college career executives are skeptical that many employers routinely check applicants online. "My observation is that it's more fiction than fact," said Tom Devlin, director of the career center at the University of California, Berkeley.

At a conference in late May, Mr. Devlin said, he asked 40 employers if they researched students online and every one said no.

Many career counselors have been urging students to review their pages on Facebook and other sites with fresh eyes, removing photographs or text that might be inappropriate to show to their grandmother or potential employers. Counselors are also encouraging students to apply settings on Facebook that can significantly limit access to their pages.

Melanie Deitch, director of marketing at Facebook, agreed, saying students should take advantage of the site's privacy settings and should be smart about what they post.

But it is not clear whether many students are following the advice. "I think students have the view that Facebook is their space and that the adult world doesn't know about it," said Mark W. Smith, assistant vice chancellor and director of the career center at Washington University in St. Louis. "But the adult world is starting to come in."