A SUGGESTION FROM MICKEY KAUS:

Shouldn’t Republicans hold hearings on the general threat of Putin-like corporatism—i.e., an insidious alliance between big government and favored corporate and labor interests? a) They could call GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt to testify and embarrass him about the myriad ways in which his slightly creepy role as CEO and presidential adviser might allow him to benefit his company and squash competitors; b) They could grill the various regulators who might be tempted to favor the auto manufacturers that the government bailed out (and which, in GM’s case, it still owns about a third of). Maybe some GM competitors would even be brave enough to testify. (Exhibit No. 23: Will GM and Chrysler claim all the remaining billions of “green” retooling loan money from Obama’s Department of Energy? Entrepreneurial startups need not apply?) c) They could question whether these bureaucrats and others are also doing favors for other Obama constituencies, like labor unions, or Google; d) They’d appear transpartisan–this is an issue where left and right populists unite. Do they love corporate-government alliances at Daily Kos? It’s also one of the legitimate worries at the heart of TeaPartyism. e) Hearings might help.

More at the link.

THE NEW YORK TIMES, SNOBBERY, and becoming Mark The Great. But that sort of behavior can lead to dangerous places.

HEY, MAYBE THAT WHOLE DUMPING-WESTERN-CIV THING wasn’t such a good idea. “While humanists were busy arguing amongst themselves, American college students and their families were turning in ever-increasing numbers away from the humanities and toward seemingly more pragmatic, more vocational concerns. And who can really blame them? . . . In the 1980s the humanities still constituted the core of most major universities; by now, at most universities, even major ones, the humanities are relatively marginal, far surpassed, in institutional strength, by business, medical, and law schools.”

UPDATE: From the comments:

This is a very refreshing and revealing article.

Looking on from outside the humanities for the past four decades, faculty members in other disciplines have been deeply troubled by what we perceive to be the substitution of ideology for scholarship in the humanities. The clear hostility towards Western culture looks like cultural suicide and it seemed to have a life of its own independent of the reality that that culture lifted billions of people out of abject poverty over the past two centuries.

Anyone with enough curiosity to plot the relationship between life expectancy and per capita real income by country from 1800 to date would be stunned by the progress in all countries that promoted Western style economies as compared to those that did not. Yet, humanities faculty members treat Western culture as if it is the incarnate evil. More curious still, humanities faculty members can find little fault with other cultures that suppress democracy, brutalize minorities, and abuse women!

The forgoing outside perspective is shared by the general public; hence, it is no surprise that enrollment in the humanities has declined and that public financial support has been withdrawn.

Stay tuned, as I think the deflating higher education bubble will prompt a lot more re-examination.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Mike Drout emails: “If the scholarship you most value and reward is that which is intended to shock the bourgeoisie, don’t be shocked when the bourgeoisie decides that they don’t feel like paying for it.”

MORE: Prof. Stephen Clark emails:

Regarding your reader’s comment in response to your post on dumping Western Civ, I highly recommend the short but very interesting narrative by Robert Fogel found in this book “The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100: Europe, America, and the Third World.”

He doesn’t dwell on culture per se; you can draw your conclusions on that from the relative importance Fogel places on the development technologies related to agriculture and health and the resulting synergies with human physiological development and relative health in those parts of the world where markets in these technologies flourished. Though written in 2004, his comments and recommendations on government health care policy are very relevant to today.

Yes, that’s a very important book, and one I highly recommend. And the point, of course, is entirely true.

MORE: Reader Jason Whitworth writes: “For those of us that were in school in the late 80’s/early 90’s and never had a Western Civ course, can you or your readers recommend one?”

IN THE MAIL: Where Does the Money Go? Rev Ed: Your Guided Tour to the Federal Budget Crisis.

PJTV: Rep. Allen West responds to President Obama’s SOTU address.

WHY THEY’D RATHER TALK ABOUT SARAH PALIN (CONT’D): Initial jobless claims jump 51,000.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Will Charter Schools Cure America’s Blues? “As the blue social model gradually falls apart and American society casts restlessly about for something to replace it, charter schools may be on the cutting edge of the social transformation about to take place.”

CHRIS CHRISTIE EXPLAINS THINGS: “Here’s the difference. You’re getting a paycheck. And there are 9% of the people in the state of NJ who are not.”

GEORGE LEEF: Law schools are reluctant to grapple with the oversupply problem. I blame the whole thing on L.A. Law. No, really.

Television and the movies have glamorized the life of lawyers. While most young people who are contemplating law school probably realize that the high-powered attorney who gets out of his Ferrari in his $3,000 suit and marches into the courtroom to win his case is just a stereotype, that image is hard to shake.

Okay, not really. But kinda . . . .

BORNE OUT: Nabokov’s butterfly migration theory.

IMPORTANT NEWS: The State of the Onion Is Strong.

Plus, when did Brussels Sprouts get so cool? When people started wrapping them in bacon. Duh.

L.A. TIMES: Was that plagiarism in Obama’s State of the Union? Maybe Joe Biden helped. . . .

More here. “Had the president submitted the text of his second State of the Union Address in the form of a college term paper, he would have been sent forthwith to the nearest academic dean. Once again, our public affairs are such that we have one standard for presidents and another for undergraduates.”

Given the vapid quality of the speech, I think the same defense offered for Joe Biden — “at worst, Biden purloined piffle” — applies to this case, too.

Meanwhile, this chapter from The Appearance of Impropriety: How the Ethics Wars Have Undermined American Government, Business, and Society — a book that’s always timely, alas — has more on plagiarism, political and otherwise.

AN INTERVIEW with Gary Taubes, author of Why We Get Fat: And What To Do About It.

MICKEY KAUS: “You know that expensive ‘virtual’ border fence the Obama administration recently cancelled? It actually worked, acording to Janice Kephart of the Center for Immigration Studies. There were big problems with the prototype, but they fixed them. No wonder it got cancelled! … I had always assumed the ‘virtual fence’ was a fancy-sounding Bush administration scam to let the government weasel out of building a real, nonvirtual fence (of the sort that works well enough in California, which is why illegal immigrants and smugglers now cross in Arizona). But maybe both sorts of fences can work.”

TRANSPARENCY: Chaffetz Calls For FOIA to Apply To Fannie and Freddie. “The move comes after Rep. Randy Neugebauer, R-Texas, discovered that taxpayers were actually paying for the millions of dollars of legal fees of former Fannie and Freddie executives charged with crimes associated with their work.”

OTHER STATES HAVE STATE FLOWERS, OR BIRDS. Utah could be the first state to have a State Gun.

RACISM IN HOLLYWOOD: “No people of color have been nominated for Oscars.”

OBAMACARE UPDATE: HHS grants 500 new healthcare waivers. “A week after Republicans announced plans to investigate waivers granted to organizations for healthcare reform provisions, President Obama’s health department made public new waivers for more than more than 500 groups.”

JUDGE RICHARD POSNER: Not such a fan of the Bluebook.

WHY THEY’D RATHER TALK ABOUT SARAH PALIN (CONT’D): New-home sales in 2010 fall to lowest in 47 years.

HEALTH ADVICE FROM AN EXPERT: “Go on, have a glass of wine with dinner. What is wine, anyway? Pure grapes. A glass of wine is much better for you than a Coke.”

SMART DIPLOMACY:

“My Motherland” is still famous in China; indeed, it is well-known to practically every Chinese adult to this very day. Unfortunately, this political anthem and its significance were evidently unknown to the many members of the administration’s China team—the secretary and deputy secretary of State, the assistant secretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific, and the National Security Council’s top two Asia experts—who were on hand at the state dinner and heard this serenade. Clueless about the nature of the insult, they did not know to warn the president that he would embarrass himself and his country by not only sitting through the song, but by congratulating Lang Lang for it afterward.

They told me if I voted . . . oh, hell, this is too easy.

PRIORITIES: Rep. Kucinich sues over olive pit in sandwich. “Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio is suing a congressional cafeteria for dental damage he says he suffered after biting into an olive pit in a sandwich wrap he bought there.”

And reader David Schlosser emails: “There’s a tort reform joke in here somewhere.”

HMM: Border authorities arrest controversial Muslim cleric east of San Diego. “U.S. border authorities have arrested a controversial Muslim cleric who was deported from Canada to Tunisia three years ago and was caught earlier this month trying to sneak into California inside the trunk of a BMW, according to court documents. . . . Jaziri backed Sharia law for Canadian Muslims and led protests over the publication of the prophet Muhammad cartoons in a Danish newspaper in 2006.”

CAROLINE GLICK on blood libels.