Good luck finding a job, Trina Thompson
Especially with the history of suing your former associations like this.
I am not sure where she got the idea that the college was obliged to provide her with a job. The tuition she paid was in exchange for classes. If she found classes useful when she took them, then the college fulfilled their obligation. If she didn't find them useful, well, maybe she should've dropped out or changed majors (as far as I know, no classes at any college is offered "satisfaction guaranteed").
This story is an amalgam of two different cancers of American society which could eventually kill us: litigiousness and death of individualism. Would it have occurred to anybody, say, 50 years ago, to sue McDonalds because eating their food made you fat (supposedly) or to sue colleges because you didn't develop useful marketable skills while you were there? The frivolousness and absurdity in these cases test the limits of our sense of fairness. The plaintiffs suffered no meaningful injustice at the hand of the defendants, and the defendant doesn't deserve any of this: definitely not a judgment against them, and perhaps not even the cost of defending themselves.
Perhaps this litigiousness is, in part, related to the death of individualism. Someone who understands her role as an individual in a society would understand what her duties are and when she failed to achieve it—with no one else to blame. She would have understood that she had a choice in where to eat, and therefore getting fat was her fault, not McDonald's. She would have understood that she had a choice in majors, classes, and experiences (internship, research, etc.) she could have while in college, so she wouldn't have been so quick to blame the college for non-employment: after all, assuming she started looking in the spring semester for a job, she hasn't looked for 1 year yet!
Something has to be done about these two phenomena. Maybe it will take the form of tort reform, and maybe it will take an education campaign. I don't know exactly what it'll take (because whatever it is, it has to be Constitutional; it can't be a tyrannical president or federal government telling what people can and can't do), but if we don't do something about these ... signs of decay, one day, they will be the cause of our downfall.
(Frivolous) Ethics investigations against Gov. Palin cost state $296,000
Ethics complaints against Gov. Sarah Palin and top members of her administration have cost the state personnel board nearly $300,000 over the past year, almost two-thirds of which appear to be from the Troopergate investigation of the governor.
That's according to new figures released by the personnel board, which described them as "independent counsel expenditures." The board hires private lawyers to investigate the complaints. The expenditures were released after the personnel board expressed frustration at the costs of the complaints.
This must be very frustrating. It's like every pedestrian walking in the street could walk in and ask you for $100 (or make you do something that will cost you $100). Sure, governments don't have rights that a natural person does (like right not to be robbed of property), but given that it is a servant of such natural persons, it seems reasonable that we should prevent random passers-by from robbing from the government—since that does translate to, via indirect means, robbing from natural persons with fundamental rights.
Couldn't they simply make the complainer pay for the investigation (and make the potential cost clear upfront) if the investigation reveals that the complaint had no basis, say, on some standard less strict than something that would result in Gov. Palin getting into real trouble, but more strict than "you said this so now we have to investigate this even though you can offer no concrete proof"? I mean, even insurance companies don't pay for ambulances if, after the fact, it is revealed that there was no real medical need for the ambulance (again, the government doesn't have rights that many private companies do, but I think here it deserves this particular protection).
It seems that should stop the complaints, the way no one is, say, actually bringing a civil lawsuit against Gov. Palin since in that case they would have to pay for their own attorney and they themselves know they have no chance in hell of winning (after all, all these complaints are really for personally bankrupting the governor, which the legal defense fund hopefully will successfully defend her against).