Archive for 2012

OH, I THINK THEY’RE BIGGER THAN THAT FIZZLE: McCain: White House Leaks Are Obama’s Valerie Plame Incident. The Plame “leak” after all, came from Richard Armitage, not the White House, and didn’t endanger any actual covert agents. Naturally, it got a lot more press.

LEGAL EDUCATION UPDATE: Job Market Gets Even Worse For Law Grads. “This leaves us with 33.75% of all 2011 ABA law school graduates in real legal jobs nine months after graduation. This is, in my view, a conservative estimate of the scope of the disaster that has overtaken America’s law school graduates.”

I recommend Brian Tamanaha’s book on this.

BARACK HUSSEIN KARDASHIAN: Mark Steyn: Our Celebrity President. “Last week, the republic’s citizen-president passed among his fellow Americans. Where? Cleveland? Dubuque? Presque Isle, Maine? No, Beverly Hills. These days, it’s pretty much always Beverly Hills or Manhattan, because that’s where the money is. That’s the Green Zone, and you losers are outside it. . . . This is all he does now. But hey, unlike those inbred monarchies with their dukes and marquesses and whatnot, at least he gets out among the masses. Why, in a typical week, you’ll find him at a fundraiser at George Clooney’s home in Los Angeles with Barbra Streisand and Salma Hayek. These are people who are in touch with the needs of ordinary Americans because they have played ordinary Americans in several of their movies. And then only four days later the president was in New York for a fundraiser hosted by Ricky Martin, the only man on the planet whose evolution on gayness took longer than Obama’s. It’s true that moneyed celebrities in, say, Pocatello or Tuscaloosa have not been able to tempt the president to hold a lavish fundraiser in Idaho or Alabama, but he does fly over them once in a while.”

POLITICS IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: Netroots Nation Under a Cloud. “If elections are won partly on the enthusiasm of a candidate’s base, Barack Obama is in trouble.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: University of Virginia President Makes Sudden Departure.

The statement added that with “no bright lights on the financial horizon,” the board members believe the university must “be able to prioritize and reallocate the resources we do have, and that our best avenue for increasing resources will be through passionate articulation of a vision and effective development efforts to support it. We also believe that higher education is on the brink of a transformation now that online delivery has been legitimized by some of the elite institutions.”

Read the whole thing.

Best missing-the-point comment: “Get ready for more attacks on women across the university.” It’s the War Against Women!

ROBERT SAMUELSON: DON’T EXPECT GERMANY TO SAVE EUROPE. “The dark truth may be that even a willing Germany can’t rescue Europe. . . . To Germans, other European countries must now adjust to new, if unpleasant, realities. Chief among these is that the economies of many European countries are no longer strong enough to support their welfare states. Economic growth is too low, populations are aging and demands on pension and health-care systems are too high.”