SHOULD ASPIRING LAW PROFESSORS participate in this year’s AALS “meat market?” I’d say yes. My prediction is that this year will be bad, but next year will be worse. But that’s just my guess.

ERIC SCHEIE: “Times have changed. It now seems that supporting the war, not believing 9/11 was an inside job, and opposing the belief that Bush is a Nazi are no longer conservative positions. Even foot dragging on Gitmo has become suspiciously liberal.”

LOTS OF MARKDOWNS on science fiction DVDs.

THE WA$HINGTON PO$T SCANDAL has other publications issuing clarifications.

THE HILL: Centrists Threaten Obama’s Agenda.

A “MEASURED” RESPONSE TO DON’T-ASK-DON’T-TELL: “Is that enough hope and change for you — in these very challenging times?“

HONDURAS:

Bizarrely, President Obama has sided with the OAS and the scofflaw ex-president. A Bloomberg report from last week quotes a Honduran Supreme Court justice, Rosalinda Cruz, explaining the situation:

“The only thing the armed forces did was carry out an arrest order,” Cruz, 55, said in a telephone interview from the capital, Tegucigalpa. “There’s no doubt he was preparing his own coup by conspiring to shut down the congress and courts.”

Why won’t Obama listen? Does he have something against wise Latina women?

Heh.

JOE QUEENAN: “To the affluent, books are ornaments. To the poor, books are siege weapons.” I wonder, though, if the father’s bad attitude didn’t stem, in some small part, from having his new wife say she didn’t love him on their wedding night. I’m not sure I’d call that “moxie,” exactly.

LAW AND THE PEOPLE: Reader Dennis Dezendorf writes:

I read your blog every day, as do thousands of other people. Thanks for your thought snd the effort you put into it.

I was reading your post about Law School 4.0 and was intrigued by the idea that there is discussion in some circles about the way that attorneys are trained. I think the discussion is long overdue.

I’ve been a cop for thirty years and have spent a tremendous amount of time in court. I’ve known great lawyers and lousy ones and I toyed at one time with the idea of going to law school. It was impossible for a number of reasons, but the main barriers to entry are:

Accessibility. I live in Louisiana and going to law school means moving to Baton Rouge or New Orleans. There aren’t any law schools in central or north Louisiana.

Cost. Law school is expensive, though not exorbitantly more expensive than graduate school. However, when I was researcing law schools (and th is may have changed in the past decade), law school required the student to be unemployed for at least the first year. Families require sustenance and going to law school full-time demands sacrifies from the family that might not be overcome for a long time.

I went to graduate school at nights. My family was young and I was able to juggle a fairly rigorous academic load while taking care of my obligations. My family was aware that Daddy was studying, but they didn’t suffer. Any reasonably intelligent person can enroll in graduate programs in business, the clergy, education, or any number of other disciplines and attain their education on a night-school basis.

Of course, if the mission of a law school is to maintain the income and status of the faculty, you need do nothing.

Thanks again for all your writings.

Well, as the pressure mounts to end night law programs, it sounds like the public-service ideal is fading. In fact, there’s a good argument that changes in the educational system in general tend to favor the children of those who are already high up on the occupational ladder. This somehow made me think of Ross Douthat’s column on Race, Class, Gender, and Sarah Palin:

If Palin were exactly what her critics believe she is — the distillation of every right-wing pathology, from anti-intellectualism to apocalyptic Christianity — then she wouldn’t be a terribly interesting figure. But this caricature has always missed the point of the Alaska governor’s appeal — one that extends well outside the Republican Party’s shrinking base.

In a recent Pew poll, 44 percent of Americans regarded Palin unfavorably. But slightly more had a favorable impression of her. That number included 46 percent of independents, and 48 percent of Americans without a college education.

That last statistic is a crucial one. Palin’s popularity has as much to do with class as it does with ideology. In this sense, she really is the perfect foil for Barack Obama. Our president represents the meritocratic ideal — that anyone, from any background, can grow up to attend Columbia and Harvard Law School and become a great American success story. But Sarah Palin represents the democratic ideal — that anyone can grow up to be a great success story without graduating from Columbia and Harvard. . . .

Here are lessons of the Sarah Palin experience, for any aspiring politician who shares her background and her sex. Your children will go through the tabloid wringer. Your religion will be mocked and misrepresented. Your political record will be distorted, to better parody your family and your faith. (And no, gentle reader, Palin did not insist on abstinence-only sex education, slash funds for special-needs children or inject creationism into public schools.)

Male commentators will attack you for parading your children. Female commentators will attack you for not staying home with them. You’ll be sneered at for how you talk and how many colleges you attended. You’ll endure gibes about your “slutty” looks and your “white trash concupiscence,” while a prominent female academic declares that your “greatest hypocrisy” is the “pretense” that you’re a woman. And eight months after the election, the professionals who pressed you into the service of a gimmicky, dreary, idea-free campaign will still be blaming you for their defeat.

All of this had something to do with ordinary partisan politics. But it had everything to do with Palin’s gender and her social class.

Sarah Palin is beloved by millions because her rise suggested, however temporarily, that the old American aphorism about how anyone can grow up to be president might actually be true.

But her unhappy sojourn on the national stage has had a different moral: Don’t even think about it.

What Joel Kotkin calls “the Gentry Faction” has taken over the Democrats completely. Wherever they dominate, you see a lot of talk about equality — and a lot of effort at maintaining inequality and keeping the proles in their place. There are plenty of Gentry in the Republican party, too. But I wouldn’t be surprised to see a populist backlash arise, on either the left, or the right, or both, or somewhere in between.

CHINA’S TARGETS for nuclear and wind energy. I’ll be surprised if they hit the wind target.

WHAT EVERY GUITARIST NEEDS: The Gristleizer! Okay, maybe not every guitarist. . . .

ROBERT MCNAMARA has died.

DRAIN THE SWAMP: Federal I.G.s Object To Attack on Independence. “The bill to surrender the IGs to the White House is a dereliction of duty by Congress. It threatens to remove accountability in the system just as the executive branch attempts to take unprecedented control over the federal bureaucracy.”

NPR: Top 10 Reasons Why The BMI Is Bogus.

ROGER SIMON: Obama administration backs Zelaya as PJTV heads for Honduras.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Did the Toppling of Saddam Hussein Lead to Recent Events in Iran? Given the connections between Iraq and Iran, it’s not as unlikely as it sounds.

UH OH: US lurching towards ‘debt explosion’ with long-term interest rates on course to double. I hope not, but it does seem plausible.

KEVIN HASSETT: California’s Nightmare Will Kill Obamanomics. I wish I believed that. California is a nightmare, but politicos seem quite eager to follow in its path. It’s a bust-out!

JAMES TARANTO: Why Palin’s Bailin’.

YEP, IT’S THE 21ST CENTURY NOW: A 1-Terabyte hard drive for under 100 bucks. I remember when a 10 megabyte HardCard was expensive . . .

UPDATE: Reader Stephen Walsh writes:

I began a career in information technology (called MIS then) in 1980. Here is the sort of disk drive that was attached to the system I first worked on.

This thing was the size of a large clothes washer. It was connected to the computer by a ribbon cable. The thing used to shake like a
washing machine in times of heavy disk usage. One time when a service tech neglected to secure the leveling feet the drive walked its way,
due to the shaking, so far away from the computer that the connecting cable disconnected (it wasn’t properly secured either).

Fun stories to tell the kids, but I don’t miss those days!

Me neither. Heck, it wasn’t very long ago that I was marveling over the first 1 TB consumer drive, and now they’ve gotten dirt-cheap.

A LOOK AT water on Mars.

A.C. KLEINHEIDER: An Adolescent View of Love is Not “Hot.”

WANT TO GET RID OF STUFF? Apparently you can trade it at Tradingo.com. I haven’t used ’em, but it’s a Knoxville outfit set up by a guy I used to be in a band with. More info here. (Bumped).

CONTROLLING medical nanorobots.

LEGAL UPROAR: Warring Judges Create Chaos in the Caymans.