MICKEY KAUS: BEWARE THE WILBERFORCE TRAP. “Could the Wilberforce Fix be another way to trigger a Senate-House conference — a conference where amnesty-supporter Harry Reid and amnesty supporter John Boehner would predictably stack with … amnesty supporters? There are plenty of reasons to be suspicious.”
Archive for 2014
July 17, 2014
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: CNN: Go To Law School, Rack Up Debt, Make $62,000. Well, if you’re lucky.
JEFF JACOBY: The way to alter the Constitution is by amendment, not interpretation.
To say that the Constitution isn’t easy to amend is an understatement. More than 10,000 amendments have been proposed by members of Congress over the last two-and-a-quarter centuries. Just 27 of them were eventually ratified. But to say that the Constitution is impossible to amend is obviously an overstatement. It can be done, but only with time, persistence, and public support that is both wide and deep. The process was designed to be difficult. For all the talk about a “living Constitution,” it is the nation’s legal bedrock; it isn’t supposed to change except under extraordinary circumstances, and only after following the deliberately convoluted, hurdle-filled course set out in Article V.
Judicial review gives us a way to adapt constitutional writ to modern applications. “For the most part, we the people have generally regarded that as legitimate,” says Samford University law professor Brannon Denning, “even as we disagree about specific decisions.” But a fundamental altering of the Constitution’s meaning — a tectonic shift in the bedrock — should come not from judges but from the people, through the affirmative democratic act of amending the Framers’ text.
For most of our history, this was taken for granted. Americans committed to achieving female suffrage didn’t insist that women’s right to vote was already in the Constitution, waiting to be discovered by a judge in the penumbra of the Bill of Rights. They fought for a 19th Amendment that would make that right unambiguous. Likewise, Americans who wanted an end to poll taxes secured it through the 24th Amendment.
Americans may disagree vehemently on just where the Constitution needs fixing. But hats off to those who propose to “fix” it the way the Framers prescribed: by amendment, not lawsuit. Much harder that way. Much more legitimate.
We may wind up doing it via convention.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Brandeis Officials Distance Themselves From Bizarre Anti-Israel Rants on Faculty Listserv.
July 16, 2014
THE ROMAN POLANSKI OF SCIENCE FICTION? More on Marion Zimmer Bradley.
THE LAMENESS OF TWITTER: Free Salondotcom! Twitter Shuts Down Hilarious Salon Parody Account.
STUDY: Who’s Unhappiest? She’s 42, Single, and Working. “Fluke? Poor research design? Captured women when they were having a collective bad day at the office? I’m not so sure. In fact, a comprehensive analysis of the trends in subjective well-being across several decades revealed similar findings regarding female happiness. In The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness published by the American Economic Journal, researchers Betsy Stevenson and Justin Wolfers found that although women’s life circumstances by most objective measures have improved greatly over the past few decades, women’s happiness has declined both absolutely and relatively to men.”
Weirdly, those were the very decades in which feminism exploded onto the scene.
WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Hungry U.S. Power Plant Turns to Russia for Coal Shipment.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Exclusive: MTV’s ‘Virgin Territory’ Star Shares Her Secrets for Staying a Virgin at 22.
What once was bourgeois is now transgressive.
MICHAEL TOTTEN: Hamas Is Losing And Everyone Knows It. “It’s pathetic, really, and must be extraordinarily humiliating. . . . The Israelis are seriously considering a ground invasion since Hamas won’t stop firing, but they’ve already proved to the population of Gaza that Hamas, even with its all its longer-range missiles, is capable of inflicting no more damage on the Zionist Entity than a lone killer armed with only a steak knife.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Adjuncts Urge Labor Dept. Inquiry Into Working Conditions.
More than 500 adjunct professors and their advocates have signed a petition calling for the U.S. Department of Labor to investigate their working conditions. The petition’s authors, all current or former adjuncts at various colleges and universities, allege that they are being paid for only part of the work they do, and that that amounts to wage theft. The petition is addressed to David Weil, director of the agency’s Wage and Hour Division, and urges him to “open an investigation into the labor practices of our colleges and universities in the employment of contingent faculty, including adjunct instructors and full-time contract faculty outside the tenure track.” The investigation should be conducted at the “sector” level, they say, rather than individually.
The petition says that average yearly income for adjunct professors “hovers in the same range as minimum-wage fast food and retail workers,” since adjuncts typically are paid only for the time they spend teaching — not the time they spend preparing or meeting individually with students.
Note the absence of Adjunct Administrators.
GOING TO A HOOKAH BAR: Like Smoking 40 Cigarettes & Kissing Everybody.
WELL, THAT’S A RELIEF. Yellowstone’s Not About to Erupt, It’s Just Burping Up Water.
SO, PRETTY MUCH THE WAY THEY ANSWER EVERYTHING, THEN: Administration ‘Answers’ Tesla Direct Sales Petition With A Brief ‘No’ And Several Paragraphs Of Self-Congratulatory Text.
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