NO COMPROMISE:  It’s all about hating Trump.

THIS STORY (AS ALREADY NOTED BY ED AND GLENN) IS ANOTHER NICE CASE STUDY OF “PERCEPTIONS OF NEWSWORTHINESS ARE CONTAMINATED BY A POLITICAL USEFULNESS BIAS”: If some anonymous teenager in a MAGA hat is rude (or maybe isn’t even rude!) to a Native American drummer, that’s a big story.  But if a Democratic Congressional candidate (now a Congresswoman) has written “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel,” that’s not newsworthy.

DEMOCRATS’ PUERTO RICAN JUNKET WENT LARGELY UNREPORTED IN THE MEDIA … BECAUSE IT’S NOT WORTH MENTIONING WHEN IT’S DEMOCRATS WHO DON’T SHOW UP FOR WORK: This is a good example of the tendency Hal Pashler and I documented in Perceptions of Newsworthiness Are Contaminated by a Political Usefulness Bias. This tendency won’t come as a shock to any observant person who pays attention to politics, but it was fun to run an experiment that confirmed it.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): As always:

THE MYTH OF CUBAN INFANT MORTALITY:  The NYT gets it wrong again.

AS THE FEDERAL SHUTDOWN CONTINUES: I can’t help it. Yesterday morning when I ran across the shutdown notice on the web site of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (of which I am a member), I smiled so much I spilled my coffee. So far, I am enjoying the break from writing dissents.

If you’d like to get a sense of how the Commission works, check out my dissent on immigration detention centers or on environmental justice. My guess is that after reading them you won’t shed any tears over the Commission’s failure to issue reports over the last few weeks.

While I am waiting for things to start up again maybe I’ll have some time to tend to my cactus garden.  Dealing with prickly plants is good practice for Commission work.

KAMALA HARRIS NOT LEFTY ENOUGH FOR THE LEFT?: An opinion piece in the New York Times complains that “Kamala Harris Was Not a ‘Progressive Prosecutor.’” The piece contains a litany of ways she fails to measure up to the author’s standard of Progressivism.   Among the complaints is this one:

Ms. Harris also championed state legislation under which parents whose children were found to be habitually truant in elementary school could be prosecuted, despite concerns that it would disproportionately affect low-income people of color.

For me, that would be a reason to support Harris (though I have a feeling I am not the NYT’s target audience for this one). The attack on her is correct that this legislation would disproportionately affect low-income parents as well as African American and to a much lesser extent Latino parents. As I have written elsewhere about Harris’ empirical findings:

Among California students in kindergarten through 5^th grade, the African-American rate of chronic truancy (i.e. 18 or more unexcused absences) is approximately five times the rate of white students. For example, former California Attorney General Kamala Harris (who is not among those who ignore the truancy issue) reports that, among kindergarteners, the rates are 7.9% (African American), 2.1% (Latino), 1.4% (white), and 1.1% (Asian). In the 5^th grade the rates are 4.9% (African American), 1% (Hispanic), 1% (white), and 0.3% (Asian).

Harris rightly understood that making progress on closing the achievement gap requires making progress on closing the truancy gap. Good for Harris. If these “More Progressive Than Thou” types give a damn about actual low-income and minority students, they might want to cut her some slack on this.

JOHN FUND:  Pelosi’s election “reform.”

MAX EDEN: “Restorative Justice Isn’t Working, But That’s Not What the Media Is Reporting.”

For more on the failure of the Obama Administration’s school discipline policy (which the Trump Administration recently withdrew), read, The Department of Education’s Obama-Era Initiative on Racial Disparities in School Discipline: Wrong for Students and Teachers, Wrong on the Law.

ON THIS DAY IN 1689: Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, advocate of separation of powers, was born.

Montesquieu would likely have hated the modern administrative state, which liberally mixes the legislative, executive and judicial functions. I know I hate it. As Professor Gary Lawson wrote about the Federal Trade Commission in his well-regarded article The Rise and Rise of the Administrative State:

“The Commission promulgates substantive rules of conduct. The Commission then considers whether to authorize investigations into whether the Commission’s rules have been violated. If the Commission authorizes an investigation, the investigation is conducted by the Commission, which reports its findings to the Commission. If the Commission thinks that the Commission’s findings warrant an enforcement action, the Commission issues a complaint. The Commission’s complaint that a Commission rule has been violated is then prosecuted by the Commission and adjudicated by the Commission. This Commission adjudication can either take place before the full Commission or before a semi-autonomous Commission administrative law judge. If the Commission chooses to adjudicate before an administrative law judge rather than before the Commission and the decision is adverse to the Commission, the Commission can appeal to the Commission. If the Commission ultimately finds a violation, then, and only then, the affected private party can appeal to an Article III court. But the agency decision, even before the bona fide Article III tribunal, possesses a very strong presumption of correctness on matters both of fact and of law.”

This doesn’t work very well, you know.  Just ask Montesquieu.

TRADITIONAL MASCULINITY: You’re going to miss it when it’s gone.

THE 1969 GUNFIGHT AT UCLA: Fifty years ago today, rival gangs, made up in part of “High Potential Program” students, fought it out on campus, leaving two dead.

The tiny “High Potential Program” was UCLA’s early, experimental form of affirmative action. Unlike today’s affirmative action programs, which primarily benefit middle- and upper-middle-class students, this was a real effort to benefit young people born on the wrong side of the tracks. As one might expect, UCLA relaxed the academic qualifications for this project. One of the founders of the program put it this way:   “A high school diploma was not a requisite. We recruited people who were active in their community and who had the ability to lead.”

Here’s the crazy part: In practice, the leadership requirement meant that UCLA wanted—and actively recruited–leaders of street gangs, especially those involved in black nationalism. A history of violence was no barrier to admission.

Not a lot of learning went on in the special classes conducted for the program. Linda Chavez, a UCLA grad student at the time, wrote about her experiences in teaching classes for Chicano High Potential students in An Unlikely Conservative: The Transformation of an Ex-Liberal. I won’t spoil her story here. Suffice it to say it wasn’t pretty.

Among the students recruited for the program was Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter. Carter was the former leader of the Slauson gang, a mega-gang in South Central Los Angeles, and was known as “Mayor of the Ghetto.” Shortly before registering at UCLA he had spent four years in Soledad prison for armed robbery, where he had become a disciple of Malcolm X. In 1967, after meeting Black Panther Minister of Defense Huey Newton, he formed the Southern California chapter of the Black Panther Party, mostly out of members of the Slauson gang.

John Jerome Huggins was Carter’s right-hand man; it was only natural that they would attend UCLA together. Huggins’ apartment was a meeting place for Black Panthers. A cache of weapons, including rifles, shotguns, handguns and homemade bombs, was kept there.

Carter and Huggins never made it thorough their freshman year. They were gunned down in UCLA’s Campbell Hall in the course of a feud between the Panthers and a rival Black Nationalist group, the US Organization (also known as United Slaves), several of whose members were also UCLA High Potential Program students. These broad daylight murders sent shock waves through colleges and universities across the country.

The US Organization bore some similarity to the Black Panthers in that its membership was derived in large part from ordinary L.A. street gangs of the early 1960s. And like the Panthers, its veneer of Black Nationalism was thin. But the two groups despised each other (as rival gangs tend to do).

UCLA administrators never understood what hit them. They thought they were introducing young street toughs to a whole new world. And, of course, they were right. But the reverse was also true. Just as UCLA wanted to turn gang members into college students, gang members wanted to turn UCLA into a part of their protection racket.

Shortly before the gun battle, student activists pressured UCLA Chancellor Charles Young to create a Center for African American Studies—complete with an executive director and staff, office space and a generous budget. The Panthers and US were simply vying to control those resources, knowing that whoever controlled the executive director’s position would control the center. The Panthers backed one candidate for director and US another. The situation got out of hand. Two brothers, George and Larry Stiner, members of US, were convicted of murder.

The High Potential Program experiment was quietly terminated (though it is still celebrated in some quarters). After that, affirmative action programs took more conventional forms.

MONEY CAN’T BUY EVERYTHING:  The National Science Foundation pours money into university programs intended to increase the number of minority STEM majors. But the best advice to minority students interested in STEM continues to be free: “Want to Be a Doctor? A Scientist? An Engineer? An Affirmative Action Leg Up May Hurt Your Chances.”

CENTER FOR IMMIGRATION STUDIES FILES LAWSUIT AGAINST RICHARD COHEN, THE SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER’S PRESIDENT:  It seeks damages and an injunction prohibiting him from repeating the false accusation that the Center is a “hate group.”

THE SUPREME COURT CAN’T DECIDE WHETHER TO DECIDE: Powerline reports that three petitions are pending before the Supreme Court on issues of whether the law covers various LGBT-related issues, but the Court keeps putting off deciding whether to take the cases. Does this signal something about Kavanaugh’s and/or Roberts’ willingness to take on controversial issues? Or are those who think so reading too much into the tealeaves?

The other LGBT-related issue that has thus far escaped the Supreme Court’s decision is whether Title IX requires schools to assign transgender students to the bathrooms, locker rooms, showers and athletic teams that they psychologically identify with. When Attorney General Sessions withdrew the Obama-Era guidance that said it does, the issue suddenly became less pressing. But that doesn’t mean the issue was resolved. The argument remains, and there are still private lawsuits and potential lawsuits out there. Pete Kirsanow and I argued that Title IX does not so require here.

THIRTY YEARS AGO:  Reagan’s Farewell Address warned us not to lose our sense of “informed patriotism.”

TWITTER TWITS:  A former Portland mayoral candidate condemned the Portland police via Twitter for shooting a paranoid schizophrenic home invader who was pulling a knife on an officer.  It’s not clear what she thought the alternative was.  She recommended that we “stop funding this deadly paramilitary force and start funding things that actually keep the people of Portland safe.”  When conservative talk-radio host Lars Larson pointed out the facts of the case, the twits at Twitter banned him for 12 hours.

NO, THIS IS NOT A POST ABOUT RUTH BADER GINSBURG; IT’S ONE OF MY HISTORICAL POSTS:

On this day in history, 90-year-old Oliver Wendell Holmes retired from the Supreme Court after nearly 30 years of service. It was time, even a bit past time.  He’d been falling asleep during oral arguments and getting confused. Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes had the unenviable task of having to tell him that.

Holmes biographer G. Edward White told the story this way:

Given Holmes’s extraordinary longevity and great fame, in addition to his remarkable intellectual powers, the discussion of retirement with him was a particularly delicate matter. After consulting with Louis Brandeis, however, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes decided to bring up the issue with Holmes. He made an appointment to meet with him on Sunday morning, January 12, 1932. In a brief conversation, Hughes suggested to Holmes that work was becoming too physically demanding for him and told him that his colleagues were concerned about his health. Holmes understood that Hughes was proposing that he retire, and wrote his resignation letter on the spot. In it he said that “the condition of my health makes it a duty to break off connections that I cannot leave without deep regret.” According to Chapman Rose [Holmes’ last law clerk], Hughes left the house “with tears streaming down his face.” Holmes, however, was “then and thereafter totally stoic” about his resignation, according to Rose, showing “no expression of emotion one way or another.” “The time has come,” he wrote in his resignation letter, “and I bow to the inevitable.”

Holmes lived another few years. He remains the oldest person to have served on the Supreme Court. He died on March 6, 1935, just a few days short of his 94^th birthday. In his will, he left his residuary estate to the United States government, including his blood-stained Civil War uniform, torn by shot.

Not every Justice of the Supreme Court has been as stoic or as cooperative as Holmes was about being asked to retire. Early in his Supreme Court career, Justice Stephen Field was among those called upon by his colleagues to persuade Justice Robert Grier to retire. Grier, who had suffered several strokes, complied. Decades later, it was Field who had become intermittently senile. The first Justice John Marshall Harlan was given the task of persuading him to resign. Harlan began by reminding Field about his earlier mission to Grier. Field snapped back, “Yes and a dirtier day’s work I never did in my life!”  Field refused to budge.

ON THE RIGHT TRACK?: This WAPO report makes it sound like the Trump Administration may be gearing up to do something like what I recommended last year at the Federalist Society’s Executive Branch Review conference (though WAPO tries to make it sound like a bad thing). I hope the report is true. Disparate impact liability has been a disaster for oh so many reasons.

ROBBING BEYONCÉ BLIND: Mark Pulliam discusses how litigation under the Americans with Disabilities Act continues to run amok.

PIE AIN’T SQUARE, CORNBREAD ARE SQUARE: Pie are round.

IF BEING ANTI-COMMUNISM IS A HATE CRIME:  Then I guess I’m guilty.

HAROLD DEMSETZ, RIP:  Jonathan Adler discusses this important property rights theorist.

ABIGAIL SHRIER:  “When Your Daughter Defies Biology:  The Burden of Mothers Whose Children Suffer from ‘Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria.'”

No paywall here.

At some point, a lot of doctors are going to get sued.

MAYBE IT’S TIME FOR AN INSURRECTION:  Portland State Professor Who Exposed “Grievance Studies” Corruption Faces University Discipline.

JOHN FUND:  “Trump Veers Off Message on the Border Wall.”