Archive for 2022

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: MSM Ignores Fact That CNN Went Into the Toilet Under Zucker. “It has been almost 18 years since Dan Rather was caught lying about George W. Bush in an attempt to use the power of CBS News to influence a presidential election. He was the first of the heavyweights to be exposed by new and alternative media types. There have been many since but, bless their biased hearts, the MSM hacks don’t seem to grasp that we’re watching.”

“THE BETRAYAL:” That’s the title of a long article in The Atlantic by George Packer about the Biden administration’s handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Plus: “Though no one from the White House would say so on the record, Packer reports that Biden’s people continue to claim there was no way they could have foreseen how quickly the Taliban would complete its takeover. But it was foreshadowed, notably by Dexter Filkins in the New Yorker in March of last winter. His report portrayed a robust Taliban and an Afghan government already collapsing.”

First the press, then an administration: 27 year olds who literally know nothing. Or, you know, superannuated presidents who literally know nothing, and their advisors who only know how to play bureaucratic politics.

ACADEMIC FREEDOM ALLIANCE CALLS ON GEORGETOWN LAW SCHOOL TO END ITS BULLSHIT INVESTIGATION OF ILYA SHAPIRO: “The Academic Freedom Alliance has released a public letter to the Georgetown University Law Center objecting to its treatment of a senior lecturer. Ilya Shapiro was director of the Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute. It was recently announced that Shapiro had been appointed to be the executive director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution and a senior lecturer at the Georgetown University Law Center. He was to begin his duties on February 1, 2022. . . . The Academic Freedom Alliance wrote to Dean Treanor explaining that the law school was itself violating the university’s policies on free expression by investigating a member of the faculty for his Twitter posts and was threatening to erode free speech protections for all of its faculty. Unfortunately, Georgetown University Law Center does not have a good record of late in standing up for free speech and academic freedom.”

No, it’s run by cowards and losers.

Related: Georgetown Students Reportedly Request Place to ‘Cry’ as Dean Addresses Ilya Shapiro’s SCOTUS Tweets. If you’re crying over tweets, you’re mentally and emotionally unsuited for the practice of law.

UPDATE: Georgetown Law students silence anyone who defends Ilya Shapiro. “The only thing that is going to stop this is for someone at Georgetown to stand up to the mob and refuse to give in to their demands. Unfortunately, given the behavior of the dean at yesterday’s sit in, it’s not clear that anyone at Georgetown has the backbone to do that.”

WITH DNC IN MIND, CITY BANS CARRYING URINE, FECES: San Francisco’s BART reopens bathroom shuttered for 20 years bringing ‘new era’ of rider relief. “For over 20 years, the restroom at BART’s Powell Street station in downtown San Francisco remained shuttered. That changed on Wednesday with a toilet-paper-cutting, first-flush ceremony and a frenzy of news photographers cramming into a single stall. BART officials unveiled a fully remodeled bathroom adorned with white tiles and two stainless steel toilets — to the relief of passengers who have been scrambling for decades for somewhere to go at one of the transit system’s busiest stations. This week’s reopening comes after a years-long push from some BART board members to reopen bathrooms that were closed for security reasons in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Oakland’s 19th Street station bathroom is slated to reopen on Feb. 25 as part of a pilot program that is nearly four years behind schedule.”

(Classical reference in headline.)

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: COVID-19 Tuition Refund Fights Heat Up In Appeals Courts. “Many of the lawsuits, alleging universities breached contracts by shifting to virtual courses while charging in-person prices, were dismissed by district court judges, though results have been mixed. Claims that survived tended to be those seeking compensation for specific fees, such as student activities promised but not delivered during campus closures, observers say. No circuit courts have issued decisions on the matters yet, but recent oral arguments hint that the idea schools overcharged for remote learning has weight with some judges, said Stetson University Law School professor Peter Lake. . . . Lake says unjust-enrichment claims may have solid footing. Under unjust enrichment, students contend that in the absence of contracts, universities unfairly profited by switching to inferior remote learning.”

FLASHBACK: A solution to secession fever — federalism.

America has an unfortunate history with secession, which led to the bloodiest war in our history and divisions that persist to this day. But, in general, the causes of secession are pretty standard around the world: Too much power in the central government, too much resentment in the unhappy provinces. (Think Hunger Games).

So what’s a solution? Let the central government do the things that only central governments can do — national defense, regulation of trade to keep the provinces from engaging in economic warfare with one another, protection of basic civil rights — and then let the provinces go their own way in most other issues. Don’t like the way things are run where you are? Move to a province that’s more to your taste. Meanwhile, approaches that work in individual provinces can, after some experimentation, be adopted by the central government, thus lowering the risk of adopting untested policies at the national level. You get the benefits of secession without seceding.

Sound good? It should. It’s called federalism, and it’s the approach chosen by the United States when it adopted the Constitution in 1789. As James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 45, “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.”

It’s a nice plan. Beats secession. Maybe we should give it another try.

The problem with federalism is that it limits the opportunities for graft and self-importance provided by the central government.