BREITBART:  Breitbart’s Susan Berry weighs in on the Civil Rights Commission’s ill-considered school discipline report.  (My dissenting statement here.)

WARREN KANDERS SHOULD GET HIS $10 MILLION BACK:  And the Whitney Museum staffers who chased him off the board of directors should have to cough up the money out of their own pockets.  What pompous fools.

WHO SAYS COWS CAN’T BE HEROES?:  Irish bovine assists police in catching a burglar.  Moo.

PETER KIRSANOW:  “Racial Disparities and School Discipline.”  The Commission on Civil Rights has come to the wrong conclusions. Again.

CONSTITUTIONAL ORIGINALISTS HAPPILY COMMUNING TOGETHER: The Federalist Society is going back to basics this year by holding its annual lawyers’ convention on the theme of originalism, which is a tiny bit easier to do now that Mike Rappaport and John McGinnis have written Unifying Original Intent and Original Public Meaning. If you haven’t read it yet, I recommend it. Mike and John do a great job at reconciling these two approaches to originalism. And they do it in an approachable style.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Some related thoughts on originalism, from me, can be found here.

“TIME TO DIE”:  Glenn just noted the passing of Rutger Hauer at the age of 75.  Here’s the You Tube of the “Time to Die” scene from Bladerunner.  It’s still haunting after all these years.

WHEN THE COMMISSION ON CIVIL RIGHTS LOSES THE WASHINGTON POST …: Even the Washington Post seems to understand that the report the Commission released yesterday on school discipline is not on the up and up. It writes: “[T]here was little, if any, evidence in the report to back up the conclusion that there are no racial disparities in behavior.” (Thank you, WaPo.  I would have said “zero evidence anywhere,” but I understand you have to be careful in dealing with issues you haven’t been studying for a long while.)

Here is my dissent. Please take a look if you have the time and the inclination. The report is not just on race. It is also on disability (or rather the intersection between race and disability) . One of the weirdest parts of the Commission report is its finding that disabled students are disciplined more often than non-disabled students. Well duh. These are students whose disability is defined in terms of misbehavior. We’re not talking about students in wheelchairs (who are disciplined less often than usual). The Commission’s finding is the equivalent of a finding that says “Students who misbehave a lot misbehave a lot.” Students who have meltdowns in class prevent other students form learning. From time to time, they must be removed.  Yet the Commission fails entirely to point this out. Readers are left to imagine that teachers have it out for the deaf and the blind.

THE TOW-HAIRED TORY SPEAKS: “The people who bet against Britain are going to lose their shirts.”

THE NIXON-KHRUSHCHEV KITCHEN DEBATES: On this day in 1959, Vice President Richard Nixon, on a trip to Moscow to open a trade show exhibit of American wares, engaged Soviet First Secretary and Premier Nikita Khrushchev what came to be known as “the Kitchen Debates.”

The Exhibit contained a full-scale model of a modern American kitchen. Khrushchev insisted that the Soviets had such things. But Nixon countered by telling him that “any steel worker” could afford them in America.

The debate was friendly and inconclusive. But no doubt many Soviet citizens who visited the Exhibit knew they didn’t have such things. And … well … some of them probably got to wondering about how things were in America.

THE SCARIEST TITLE IX STORY EVER TOLD:  I believe that women overwhelmingly know better than to get themselves into this kind of a situation.  But guys?  Some do not.

HOT OFF THE PRESS!: Today, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is releasing a new report on school discipline at the intersection of race and disability. Just one example of its many errors: The report claims that students of different races misbehave at the same rates. That would be great if true it were true.  But it isn’t true.  And it isn’t doing students any favors to pretend.

If you prefer truth to the Commission’s many errors, please read my dissent.

Local control of schools is important.  The Commission’s majority is trying to justify federal control.  Don’t let them.

“PROGRESSIVES ARE CONVINCED THAT TRUMP IS TOAST”:  That could hurt them.

THE PERSONAL MEMOIRS OF ULYSSES S. GRANT: On this day in 1885, Ulysses Grant died at the age of 63, essentially penniless. Only a few days before he had completed his final task—writing his memoirs. Those memoirs would soon make his widow a wealthy woman. And that is exactly what he had been praying for.

Grant had been diagnosed with throat cancer not quite a year before his death. In order to run for President, he had forfeited his military pension, and a series of bad investments had left the Grant family in a dire financial condition. So he feverishly set about to write his memoirs so that his beloved Julia would be supported after his death. Mark Twain, an admirer of Grant, arranged for a book contract on very favorable terms to the former President.

The book was a hit, and Twain’s marketing strategy on behalf of Grant’s family was shrewd. Union army veterans flocked to buy it.

Historians, although enthusiastic about his literary talent, are sometimes surprised to find themselves praising Grant as possibly the best book-length author among the nation’s Presidents. They should not be. Those who knew Grant knew that he was a wonderful storyteller with a detailed memory for the events of the Civil War and much else. They weren’t in the least surprised at his ability to put it all down on paper.

Yes, the book is still available.

(p.s. these days former Presidents seem to do pretty well financially. There is no need to worry about penniless widows, widowers, or starving Presidential offspring.  Obama’s net worth has been estimated at $40 million. The Clintons have made $240 million since leaving the White House.  George W. Bush has been estimated to come in a little behind Obama, which may be surprising to some given that, unlike Obama and Clinton, he was born to wealth.)

PUT ME IN THAT LAST DORM:  UNLV provides separate dorms for African Americans, LGBT, and students who go to college to study.

FEDERAL SCHOOL DISCIPLINE POLICY:  The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights will release a perfectly terrible report on school discipline at the intersection of race and disability in the morning.

If you have an interest in the issue and would like to call in to hear the Chair Catherine Lhamon discuss the report, there will be an opportunity to do so at 10:45 am Eastern time tomorrow morning.  Details here.  I will not be on the call.  I was not invited.  But my dissent should be available on Instapundit a little before then.

KARL MENNINGER, PATRON SAINT OF THE DEINCARCERATION MOVEMENT: On this day in 1893, psychiatrist Karl Menninger was born. In his 1960s-era book The Crime of Punishment he argued that all punishment is cruel and useless and should cease. As Menninger saw it, those who asked us to spare a thought for crime victims were being “melodramatic” and “childish” and appealing only to the “unthinking.” Some saw Menninger’s kind of thinking as a bit of a joke right from the beginning. As crime rates soared over the next few decades, more and more Americans got the message.

It may well be that there are things that can be done to decrease our current incarceration rates without seriously raising crime. Some new technologies may make that possible. But, as I have written about here, I fear policy advocates are getting carried away. When urban neighborhoods are reasonably safe, its residents flourish.   When they aren’t, they don’t.

JOHN HASNAS:  “The Diversity Distortion.”  Why are the so-called “grievance studies” programs growing while other university departments are being cut back?

WE’RE DOOMED:  Math teachers go off the deep end.  (With my usual coda.)

ROBERT GEORGE CALLS ON CONSERVATIVES TO BE MORE COURAGEOUS:  May I add that this is especially needed in the area of race-, ethnicity-, and sex-based identity politics?  You’ve never seen terror until you’ve asked a Member of Congress or Congressional staff member to do some tiny thing to help stem the tide of this destructive trend.  “Deer in headlights” doesn’t do justice to the look.

The current identity-obsessed state of the nation isn’t just a cultural change.  It is the result of law and policy.  The left has passed federal laws and instituted policies that beg people to think of themselves as members of victim groups.  Perfectly sound laws have been interpreted by courts and agencies to mean to opposite of what they say.  All the while conservative leaders ignore it, because they haven’t thought enough about it to recognize the long-term consequences or because they understand completely, but are afraid to speak up.  Until something is done to change significant parts of that body of law and policy, things will not get better.

(Here is an extremely minor example.  This bill should have been a no-brainer, but when opposition was voiced from an ill-informed civil rights advocate, who clearly didn’t understand the bill at all, it died.)

MAYBE A HOSPITAL ISN’T THE BEST PLACE FOR ANTI-VAXXERS TO WORK (REGARDLESS OF THEIR REASON FOR BEING ANTI-VAXXERS): The EEOC just announced it reached another settlement (this one for $74K) with a hospital that had declined to hire a job applicant with religious objections to flu vaccines. The hospitals want workers who, in the event of a flu epidemic, will show up for work and won’t make other people sick.

I wrote sympathetically about religious accommodations here. But I was responding to my totalitarian colleagues on the Commission on Civil Rights who wanted to coerce people with sincere religious beliefs into doing things they didn’t want to do. Some of the stuff they were writing was pretty scary.  Now the EEOC is coercing hospitals into hiring someone that they don’t think is the best person for the job. And their reason doesn’t sound at all crazy to me.

In a few (but not all) of these cases the EEOC has argued that because the hospital accommodates people who have medical conditions that prevent them from getting flu shots, they must also accommodate religion too. Of course, the hospitals probably weren’t thrilled to have to accommodate the medical condition either.  But the Americans with Disabilities Act may require them to. Note that the legal standards are very different under Title VII (religion must be accommodated only if employer inconvenience would be de minimus) and under the American with Disabilities Act (“reasonable” accommodations to disability must be made).

One day there will be a serious epidemic that we are utterly unprepared to handle. Please God let us put it off for a few hundred years.

SPEAKING OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY:  I ran across this quote from Mr. Dooley (Finley Peter Dunne):  “Th’ dimmycratic party ain’t on speakin’ terms with itsilf ….”  (I am not sure of the date, but Dunne lived from 1867-1936.  In any event, history repeats …)

And apropos of nothing in particular, here is another of Mr. Dooley’s observations that seems rather modern:

“D’ ye think th’ colledges has much to do with th’ progress iv th’ wurrold?”  asked Mr. Hennessy.

“D’ ye think,” said Mr. Dooley, “’tis th’ mill that make th’ wather run?”

Alas, the modern world’s immense wealth allows us to buy a lot of … uh … stuff that we couldn’t otherwise afford.

BUTTIGIEG NAMES HIS SPENDING PROJECT AFTER THE WRONG GUY: FREDERICK DOUGLASS WANTED NOTHING TO DO WITH WHITE GUYS OFFERING “HELP”: Pete Buttigieg is earnestly trying to bail himself out of his troubles with African American voters by throwing large sums of money in their direction. It will be like a new Marshall Plan, he says.

He calls his initiative the “Douglass Plan” after the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass. But Buttigieg couldn’t have chosen a less likely person to name his spending program after. Douglass hated that sort of thing. He famously said:

The question is asked, and pressed with a great show of earnestness at this momentous crisis of our nation’s history, What shall be done with the four million slaves if they are emancipated?

… Our answer is, do nothing with them; mind your business, and let them mind theirs. Your doing with them is their greatest misfortune. They have been undone by your doings, and all they now ask, and really have need of at your hands, is just to let them alone. They suffer by every interference, and succeed best by being let alone. The Negro should have been let alone in Africa—let alone when the pirates and robbers offered him for sale in our Christian slave markets—(more cruel and inhuman than the Mohammedan slave markets)—let alone by courts, judges, politicians, legislators and slavedrivers—let alone altogether, and assured that they were thus to be let alone forever, and that they must now make their own way in the world, just the same as any and every other variety of the human family. As colored men, we only ask to be allowed to do with ourselves, subject only to the same great laws for the welfare of human society which apply to other men, Jew, Gentiles, Barbarian, Sythian. Let us stand upon our own legs, work with our own hands, and eat bread in the sweat of our own brows. When you, our white fellow countrymen, have attempted to do anything for us, it has generally been to deprive us of some right, power or privilege which you yourself would die before you would submit to have taken from you.

I always liked Douglass.

YEAH, I GET WHAT THAT’S ABOUT:  “TV Ignores Conservative Authors of #1 Book in the Country, While Putting Liberal Author of #3421 on Major Tour.”

A SOLUTION TO A UNIQUELY INSTAPUNDIT PROBLEM:  If you purchased Glenn’s insightful little book, The Social Media Upheaval, but haven’t yet read it because the bright orange and green cover is blinding you, I have a solution.  I accidentally left my copy on my patio in the sun for two days.  Presto! Change-o!  The cover is now pleasantly aged and easy to look at.

Of course, if you haven’t yet purchased Glenn’s book, it’s time that you do.  But wear sunglasses before you open up the package.

PURR: On this day in 1920, Ed Lowe, the inventor of kitty litter was born. I’m not kidding. “Kitty litter” wasn’t invented till 1947. Before that people used sand or dirt or they just let the cat outside.

Lowe and his father ran a business in Michigan that sold sand, sawdust, and clay in bulk to heavy industry. One cold January day, a neighbor, Mrs. Draper, asked him for some sand for her cat, since her own sand pile was frozen. Instead of sand, he gave her Fuller’s earth—a type of absorbent clay. She loved it. It worked much better than sand.

Ed got a bright idea—ultimately an idea worth hundreds of millions of dollars: Why not sell the stuff? The local pet store owner was dubious. He couldn’t see how anyone would be dumb enough to pay their hard-earned money for kitty litter when dirt and sand were essentially free. But Lowe persuaded him to give it away free so cat owners could see how great it was compared to what they were using. It worked! Like Mrs. Draper, customers loved it.

See how easy it can be to make hundreds of millions of dollars? I love America. And so does my little feline Leopold.