Silly story in yesterday’s Washington Post, the gist of which is that the consolidation by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights of its six regional offices into four (in order to help get the Commission’s ruined finances in order) will leave many people without a way to complain when their civil rights are violated. In the first place, most people who want to contact the Commission would do so by phone or e-mail anyhow (there are, again, only six regional offices now), so what difference does it make that now they’ll be calling or e-mailing Chicago instead of Denver? More fundamentally, anyone with a real civil-rights complaint shouldn’t be wasting his or her time with the Commission anyhow, since it is not a law-enforcement agency (instead, it conducts research and writes studies). For legal violations, there are plenty of federal, state, and local officers to contact.