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Archive for 2015
February 19, 2015
Governments (and sometimes even hospitals) are financially incentivized to attach paternity to the children of single mothers, particularly those seeking welfare benefits. Departments of Child Support Services will sometimes go on information as flimsy as “Dude with this name living in Southern California”; if a records search turns up only one dude, he will likely be mailed a court summons. That court summons will often be very confusingly written, so that the men don’t realize that they are just 30 days away from being declared the father via default judgment. Once you have been named the father, you owe all back child support (sometimes with interest), said support will be garnished from your wages, and it is devilishly hard to get your paternity undeclared, even with DNA proof and sworn affidavits from the mother.
So why don’t we hear about this outrage more? Because nobody likes to defend “deadbeat dads,” and the people hardest hit are typically poor men who have even less political and media clout than they do access to good lawyers.
Name some judges and legislators as the dads, and things will change fast. . . . And note that the judge in this case, who treated the man — a victim, remember, not a perpetrator — so shabbily is a woman, Wayne County Circuit Court Judge Kathleen McCarthy. It’s sexism and racism all down the line here.
FASTER, PLEASE: Breast Cancer Cocktail Buys More Than a Year of Life. “I can’t think of something that improves survival by this much. Often, we debate over changing practice for something that extends survival by a few months, so 15.7 months that is so impressive. And really that’s exactly what I see in the clinic.”
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SHOCKER: Study: Occupational Licensing Raises Prices, But Not Service Quality. “A new study claims that occupational licensing laws contribute to unemployment and raise prices for consumers without measurably enhancing quality of service.”
AND DE-COLONIZATION IS WHY ISLAM IS SINKING BACK INTO THE MUCK: Sultan Knish: European Colonialism is the Only Thing That Modernized Islam.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: 61 Incredible Things Robots Can Now Do.
SPYING: Google Calls FBI’s Plan to Expand Hacking Power a ‘Monumental’ Constitutional Threat: Any change in accessing computer data should go through Congress, the search giant said. Yeah, well, so should changes in immigration law. . . .
WAIT, I THOUGHT THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: Limited airborne transmission of Ebola is ‘very likely,’ new study says. “The West Africa Ebola epidemic surprised even the most astute infectious disease experts in the global public health community; we should not assume that Ebola viruses are not capable of surprising us again at some point in the future.”
SO I GUESS “RAPE CULTURE” IS REAL AFTER ALL, IT’S JUST HAPPENING IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS: AP: 2,500 teachers punished in 5 years for sexual misconduct. Of course, since it’s not the Catholic church this doesn’t represent any kind of a systemic problem.
OUCH: The Defenders of the Faith Apologize for America. “Barack Obama and his minions have set themselves up as official interpreters and defenders of the Muslim faith. . . . This is simply insane. Does the Obama administration think that pleading guilty–falsely–to discriminating against Muslims is somehow going to pacify ISIS, al Qaeda, Hezbollah and the rest? And what, exactly, is the ‘plight’ of American Muslims? How does it compare with the plight of Muslims who live in Syria, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Libya and elsewhere in the Islamic world? Not to mention the plight of Christians and Jews who live in those places, to the extent there are any left.”
The Obama Administration’s communications strategy seems to involve living up to the worst fears of its critics.
Related: State Dept.’s Jen Psaki To Become White House Communications Director. This isn’t even the Peter Principle, as she was beyond her level of competence in her previous job.
ASHE SCHOW: Joe Biden’s Woman-Touching Habit.
Plus: Flashback: Joe Biden in 2000: No man has the right to touch a woman without her consent. “Of course Biden’s comments included sex crimes like rape, but also broadened definitions of inappropriate touching that have come to be commonly applied in the workplace. Now, a number of critics are asking whether Biden himself is behaving in ways that contradict his words in the past.”
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 651.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, U. TEXAS CULTURE OF CORRUPTION EDITION: Dallas Observer: Wallace Hall Was Right About UT All Along.
Maybe the University of Texas at Austin and its many passionate defenders had reason to beware of Wallace Hall when Governor Rick Perry appointed him to the UT System board of regents in 2011. Perry was pushing some plan he got from a rich oilman to eliminate research as a criterion for granting professorial tenure, an idea scathingly denounced by detractors as tantamount to book-burning.
But having a good motivation only makes this story worse. When Hall began to criticize the way UT-Austin was run on strictly administrative grounds, he was roundly denounced as a sort of fifth-columnist for Perry’s assault on tenure. Later when he accused the university of corruption, he was hunted like a witch.
A campaign launched against Hall included impeachment proceedings in the Legislature and a criminal complaint brought to the Travis County district attorney. Even the establishment press turned on Hall, whose greatest sin was doing what the press is supposed to do — ask questions that make powerful people uncomfortable. An unbroken chorus of editorial page shrieking from Texas’ biggest newspapers denounced Hall and called for his resignation.
The dramatic denouement is threefold: Hall has been vindicated of charges he abused his role as a regent. The charges of mismanagement and corruption he brought against UT are all being re-investigated because now people are admitting he was on to something. And finally, Hall’s biggest accusers are starting to look like the biggest rats, the ones who had the most to hide.
Well, that’s often how it works. Plus: “And maybe all of that is Austin politics. But what is to be said for the Texas press and its handling of the Wallace Hall story? Every major newspaper in the state has either called for Hall’s head at one point or questioned his integrity, most of them basing their complaints on an allegation that Hall asked for too much information from the university — in other words, that he did too much reporting. . . . That feels like the sort of thing beat reporters in the capitol covering the story from the beginning should have been able to discover early on, perhaps by asking Hall what he was doing. Instead, the establishment press parroted the charge brought against Hall by detractors that he was asking too many questions and for too much public information — an accusation especially strange when brought by the press.”
Not so strange as all that. The press sees itself first and foremost as political allies of Democrat-dominated institutions, which most emphatically includes universities, a major source of funding, foot-soldiers, and ideological suport for Democrats. When outsiders want information that might hurt Democrat-dominated institutions — see, e.g., ClimateGate — they are always portrayed by the press as partisans, malcontents, and evil. That is because the press today functions largely as a collection of Democratic operatives with bylines.
RUDY GIULIANI: “I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America.”
UPDATE: A response to the inevitable media pearl-clutching:
To be fair, they say you always hurt the one you love. So maybe Obama loves America a lot.
NATIONAL JOURNAL: Obama Changed His Party, Not the Country: President Obama has gotten Congressional Democrats to do what he wants. No one else is following suit.
As a presidential candidate, President Obama expressed his desire to “change the trajectory of America” along the lines of Ronald Reagan, rebuking the legacy of Bill Clinton’s pragmatic presidency in the process. Now that his own presidency is winding down, Obama is finding that his main legacy is only half-achieved. He has indeed transformed the Democratic party to his liking, but failed to get anyone else to follow suit.
At the same time, there’s no doubt he’s successfully pushed Democrats to adopt his favored policies with minimal dissent—and that will have lasting consequences for many elections to come. Despite uneven personal relations with his own party in Congress, there have been very few instances when his party’s members have split from his governing course, even on issues where the politics would dictate they should.
That’s the consequence of being the most polarizing president in history, according to Gallup’s latest polling analysis. Obama maintains strong support from his core supporters, even as Republicans have entirely abandoned him and independents have followed suit. Gallup found 79 percent of Democrats still backing him, even with a 42.6 percent average approval rating in his sixth year in office. That unusually large disconnect has emboldened the president to push forward on controversial issues that few other Democrats would touch, thanks to unyielding support from his base.
That doesn’t seem to be working for down-ticket Dems.
NOW OUT: Frank J. Fleming’s new novel, SuperEgo. It’s a must-read.
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ROGER KIMBALL: None Dare Call It Islam. “Islam or perversion of Islam? At some point, as Hillary Clinton might put it, what difference does it make? Under Barack Obama, it is painfully clear that ‘We are not at war with Islam.’ The trouble is, it has become increasingly obvious to every one except Barack Hussein Obama that Islam is at war with us.”
UPDATE: Islam As Authoritatively Defined By The Prophet Obama: “Obama purports to opine on the true meaning of Islam, as if he has the authority to judge religious orthodoxy and identify heretics within Islam. . . . When and why do we doubt the sincerity of other people’s declarations of religious belief? Obama says the claims of religious beliefs and motivations are ‘a lie.’ To my ear, the statement that it’s a ‘lie’ is itself a lie, unless we interpret Obama to be saying that Al Qaeda and ISIS subscribe to an untrue version of Islam. Normally, Americans don’t accuse religious believers of lying when what we mean is that their religious beliefs deviate from what we consider to be a more orthodox or more acceptable and benevolent set of beliefs under the same name. Imagine a President saying that Roman Catholics lie about Christianity or that Reform Jews lie about Judaism.”
To be fair, the Obama presidency involves a lot of things that normally Americans don’t do or say. But I can’t imagine that Muslims pay much attention to what Obama says about Islam, or regard him as having much authority there. So who is he trying to convince then, and why?
LEGAL EDUCATION: Older Law Faculty Are Just As Productive As Junior Faculty. And usually better teachers. Actually, that’s not surprising. What used to look like an age-related productivity decline was probably actually a generational productivity difference. By now, pretty much everyone from the last generation of law professors that didn’t care much about scholarship is retired or dead.
DEFENDING DUE PROCESS: Ashe Schow: UPenn law professors speak out against new campus sexual assault policy.
Law professors at the University of Pennsylvania are not happy about the university’s new sexual assault policies, which they say undermine due process.
Nearly one-third (16 out of 49 tenured or tenure-track professors) signed a letter to school administrators denouncing the new policy, which institutionalizes the low “preponderance of evidence” standard for sexual assault allegations and disallows cross-examination of the accuser.
“Due process of law is not window dressing; it is the distillation of centuries of experience, and we ignore the lessons of history at our own peril,” the faculty members wrote. “All too often, outrage at heinous crimes becomes a justification for shortcuts in our adjudicatory processes. These actions are unwise and contradict our principles.”
The professors cite five reasons they disapprove of the new policies, including an ambiguous definition of consent, lack of due process in mostly “he said/she said” situations, the federal government’s involvement and penalties and of course the lack of due process.
Good for them.
JEB BUSH: ‘There were mistakes’ in Iraq.
Yep, but the biggest mistake was Obama’s unforced error of a complete pullout in 2011, after his own administration was bragging about how well things were going in 2010.
The war was won, Iraq was on a peaceful path, and Obama threw it away for a campaign line in 2012. If you’re going to talk about Bush’s mistakes pre-2008, you’ve got to talk about Obama’s mistakes, post-2008. And they were huge, both in Iraq and in Afghanistan, where he sent extra troops, but not as many as the military said they needed, then set a pullout timetable that signaled to the Taliban that he wasn’t serious — again, for political reasons.
Related: National Journal: The World Will Blame Obama If Iraq Falls. And someone needs to ask the 2016 Democratic candidates how they’d avoid Obama-like screwups in the future. Because between now and November of 2016, avoiding Obama-like screwups is going to become more salient than avoiding Bush-like screwups.
Related: What Kind Of Iraq Did Obama Inherit?
Plus, I’m just going to keep running this video of what the Democrats, including Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton, were saying on Iraq before the invasion:
Because I expect a lot of revisionist history.
Plus: 2008 Flashback: Obama Says Preventing Genocide Not A Reason To Stay In Iraq. He was warned. He didn’t care.
And who can forget this?
FACT: President Obama kept his promise to end the war in Iraq. Romney called the decision to bring our troops home “tragic.”
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) October 22, 2012
Another Romney foreign policy prediction, derided by all right-thinking people at the time, that turned out to be spot-on.