STOP ME BEFORE I SNOOP AGAIN: Obama to Call for Limits on Collection of U.S. Phone Data. “President Barack Obama plans to call for an end to the government’s mass collection of American phone data and restructure the program so the data is held outside the government, according to a senior administration official. The president will also require a judge’s order for government searches of this data, according to the official.” Hmm.
Archive for 2014
January 17, 2014
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Ph.D. Programs Have a Dirty Secret: Student Debt. If your Ph.D. program isn’t fully funded, think twice. Hell, think three or four times. And even if it is fully funded, remember that you’re also investing irreplaceable years of your life: “There were over 14 of us when we started and only 4 graduated. There are 3 more that have over 100K debt and are still in the program. They let some of the people ‘hang themselves with their own rope’ by not funding them and those people withered away. The older grad students were left to fend for themselves and also died on the vine.”
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THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Stark warning: Admiral concedes U.S. losing dominance to China.
JAMES TARANTO: Free Speech Quackery: The left defends corporations’ rights.
The First Amendment protects speech only against censorship or other adverse action by the government. The latter question refers obliquely to last month’s kerfuffle over “Duck Dynasty” star Phil Robertson, an incident that did not implicate the First Amendment. As to the former question, it’s a bit more complicated. Some people, after all, are employees of the government, and in a series of cases starting with Pickering v. Board of Education (1968), the Supreme Court has afforded them some protection against being fired over protected speech.
Swanson means mostly to make fun of the left’s favorite bogeyman, who defended Robertson; her headline is “Nearly Half of Americans Grasp the First Amendment About as Well as Sarah Palin Does.” Palin had written on Facebook: “Free speech is an endangered species. Those ‘intolerants’ hatin’ and taking on the Duck Dynasty patriarch for voicing his personal opinion are taking on all of us.” Here it seems to us the snark is unjustified: “Free speech” is not only a legal concept, and government is not the only entity capable of stifling free and open debate, even though it is the only entity enjoined against doing so by the U.S. Constitution.
One source of the popular confusion over the First Amendment’s scope may be the ubiquity of antidiscrimination laws. Our guess is that a large number of Americans would answer in the negative if asked whether the Constitution allows people to be fired (or otherwise treated adversely by a private-sector employer) on account of race. In fact, such discrimination is illegal–but pursuant to statutory law, not the Constitution. (One does, however, have a constitutional claim if the government is enforcing laws against racial discrimination in a racially discriminatory way.)
There are no federal laws against discrimination on the basis of political views or expression of protected speech. But as UCLA legal scholar Eugene Volokh noted in a 2012 article for the Texas Review of Law & Politics, “about half of Americans live in jurisdictions that protect some private employee speech or political activity from employer retaliation.” One man who does is Phil Robertson of Louisiana, where the state Supreme Court has held that “the actual firing of one employee for political activity constitutes for the remaining employees both a policy and a threat of similar firings” and is therefore forbidden under state law.
Read the whole thing. Plus: “Implicit in the claim that A&E was within its legal rights in suspending Robertson–which it was, in our view–is a recognition that corporations and not just individuals have the right to free speech. We remember when the left didn’t believe in the First Amendment.” Heh.
ED DRISCOLL INTERVIEWS HUGH HEWITT about his new book, The Happiest Life.
ROLL CALL: Reid, Schumer Encouraged by Boehner’s Immigration Push. “Key Senate Democrats on Thursday were pleased to hear that Speaker John A. Boehner, R-Ohio, continues to push for an immigration overhaul. After a news conference, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., praised the possibility of action in the House overhauling immigration laws, but he didn’t comment on the expectation that the House’s legislation would provide legal status for illegal immigrants but not have a pathway to citizenship.”
THE HILL: Gillespie Puts Virginia In Play For The GOP.
In deeply-divided Virginia, there’s rare bipartisan agreement — former Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie is the strongest candidate the GOP could field against Sen. Mark Warner (D).
Even Democrats admit Republicans accomplished a coup by landing Gillespie, a former top advisor to President George W. Bush and powerhouse lobbyist. But both parties concur the popular Warner will be hard to oust.
Gillespie’s betting that ObamaCare — and Obama in general — will be a drag on Mark Warner’s candidacy. It’s a reasonable bet.
MICKEY KAUS: Out Of Whack. “Wonkblog‘s Sarah Kliff notes that health insurers, when speaking to investors, are much more positive about their prospects under Obamacare than you might think reading the policy complaints of their allies on the Web. But some of what they’re saying seems, on closer inspection, to be less than a ringing endorsement.”
A SELF-REGULATED MILITIA, BEING NECESSARY . . . “If the government doesn’t back us, we must do what we can”: Mexican Citizens Create Private Forces to Fight Cartels. “In the face of kidnappings and extortion from cartels and a lack of reliable protection from the police and military, groups of Mexican citizens are taking matters (and weapons) into their own hands and protecting themselves. . . . Mexico has extremely strict private gun ownership laws, which is why part of the news coverage seems focused on ‘disarming’ the vigilantes. That the military is unable to even disarm its own law-abiding citizenry (other than the gun laws anyway), and that armed citizens appear to be a better choice to keep cartels at bay (they actually have a stake in the outcome) may indicate an important shift for Mexicans in fighting the violence in their country. The New York Times frets these vigilante leaders may have ties to other criminal gangs, but there’s little to indicate in either their story nor Fusion’s that they are victimizing these communities further or worse than what they had been living under.”
UPDATE: From the comments: “Finally, a group in Mexico the Obama administration will not sell guns to.”
CHANGE: Democrats joining GOP efforts to alter troubled Obamacare.
For the second time in two weeks, House Democrats joined with Republicans to pass legislation that would require the Obama administration to report regularly to Congress on progress made implementing the new health care law.
In a 259-154 vote, the House passed the Exchange Information Disclosure Act, which would require the Health and Human Services Department to provide weekly reports to Congress on the sign-up data for the troubled healthcare.gov website.
While Democrats have generally dismissed the Republican attacks on Obamacare as politically motivated, 33 Democratic lawmakers broke with the party and voted for the bill that would increase scrutiny of the new law.
Last week, 67 Democrats joined the GOP to pass the Health Exchange Security and Transparency Act, which would require HHS to tell healthcare.gov users about any security breach involving personal identity theft or unlawful access within two days of discovery.
Seems reasonable.
January 16, 2014
FIRST THE PROFESSOR, NOW THIS: Dave Madden, Reuben Kincaid In ‘Partridge Family’ Dead At 82.
ROGER SIMON: The Oscars Have No ‘Lone Survivor.’ “As an Academy member, I had voted but did not see my number one selection for Best Picture — Lone Survivor — anywhere on the list of the nine nominees. I can’t say I was surprised. Lone Survivor is a patriotic film and patriotism isn’t high on the list of positive traits for Hollywood these days, except perhaps to that group of once-secret outliers known as the Friends of Abe. In fact, Lone Survivor, a big audience success, has raised the particular hackles of some of our more liberal (in the modern sense) critics.”
Why “Duck Dynasty”? It worked the first time, so we did it the second time. How did it work? It balanced things. Real(ish) people, in the country, who have a way of life that completely makes sense to them and know how to do a bunch of useful things, feel likeable to us and clearly enjoy each other, and continually get into jams in classic — I’m talking “I Love Lucy” — TV-sitcom style.
In “Girls,” you have fictional(ish) people, in the city, who are bewildered by the way they are living, can’t do anything useful, feel unlikeable to us and endlessly bother each other, and bumble about in low-narrative sequences that feel like an old-fashioned cinema verité — “Grey Gardens”? — documentary.
People you like vs. people you don’t.
R.I.P. RUSSELL JOHNSON, aka “The Professor.” “Born in rural northeastern Pennsylvania, Johnson graduated from a private boarding school for orphaned children before joining the Air Force, flying dozens of combat missions in World War II — including one that turned him into a real-life castaway in the Philippines in 1945. Johnson’s B-25 bomber was shot down by heavy flak; he broke both his ankles during the mission, and received the Purple Heart.”
IT DOESN’T GET ANY BETTER THAN THIS:
BADASS OF THE WEEK: Rick Rescorla. “Cyril Richard Rescorla was born in Cornwall, on the southwest tip of England, in 1939. A rugby star and high school shot put champion growing up, it soon became apparent that the whole book-learning thing really wasn’t as appealing to young Rick as a good old-fashioned ass-whipping was. So as soon as this adventure-hungry athlete turned 16 he quit school, joined the British military, and dedicated the majority of his life to pummeling the ever-loving cock-and-balls off of Communist douchebags wherever he could find them. . . . He was last seen on the tenth floor of the World Trade Center, headed up. Of the 2,700 people he had been charged with protecting, all but 6 survived the terrorist attack.”
PEOPLE ARE ASKING ABOUT THIS: Man severs spine during lifting competition. The story makes it sound like his spine just broke in half, but it seems as if what really happened is he dropped the weight and it fell on him. It’s a freak accident, but when you lift heavy weights there’s always a chance one will fall on you. I see people on Facebook blaming Crossfit, but as I say, it’s a freak accident. And it’s nice to see the Crossfit community rallying behind him.
Related: Mark Rippetoe on what he likes and doesn’t about Crossfit. “CrossFit is also about the concept of ‘community’ — the reinforcement of behavior through group participation and group approval. I understand this quite intimately, because I have met some of the best people I have ever known through CrossFit, the vast majority of whom are still friends even though I’m no longer associated with CrossFit formally. A better-than-average group of people that likes you and helps you be better is a very powerful motivator for improvement, and CrossFit: The Community provides this in abundance.”
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Wealthy Women Can Afford to Reject Marriage, but Poor Women Can’t. This is why social policies that make marriage unappealing to men disproportionately harm poor women.
I COULDN’T SEE GLENN BECK WHEN I DID THIS INTERVIEW. Which is just as well, as the hat would have been distracting.
THANK GOD, THE SCOURGE OF SEQUESTRATION HAS BEEN LIFTED FROM OUR PROSTRATE LAND: Congress passes $1 trillion spending deal.
FASTER, PLEASE: Could This Man Hold The Secret To Human Regeneration?
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