SOMEONE’S BEEN MESSING WITH PAPA BEAR: Do you remember the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears? Of course you do. There was Papa Bear, Mama Bear, and Baby Bear. And Goldilocks was the naughty girl who intruded into their happy home. But happy nuclear families are too old-fashioned. Publisher Laughing Elephant purports to present classic stories “retold for today’s children.” And apparently “today’s children” aren’t used to having a Papa Bear around, so instead the three bears are Mother Bear, Brother Bear, and Sister Bear.

“SCHOOL DISCIPLINE SHOULDN’T BE A FEDERAL ISSUE“:  Well I definitely agree.  It  shows how messed up the country is that we even have to fight about this.

DID TRUMP CHOOSE WISELY?  IT LOOKS LIKE HE DID:  This is from Kavanaugh’s letter to Senators Grassley and Feinstein:

These are smears, pure and simple.  And they debase our public discourse.  But there are also a threat to any man or woman who wishes to serve our country.  Such grotesque and obvious character assassination–if allowed to succeed–will dissuade competent and good people of all political persuasions from service.

As I told the Committee during my hearing, a federal judge must be independent, no swayed by public or political pressure.  That is the kind of judge I will always be.  I will not be intimidated into withdrawing from this process.  The coordinated effort to destroy my good name will not drive me out.  The vile threats of violence against my family will not drive me out.  That last minute character assassination will not succeed.

He’s right, of course.  This is the kind of thing that causes good people to decline to be nominated.  Indeed, it will dissuade people even if it doesn’t succeed in his case.

DISPARATE IMPACT LIABILITY COULD COST NEW YORK CITY OVER A $$BILLION$$:  If so, it’s really past time for the federal government to start explaining why all this is even constitutional. My recommendation is for the Executive Branch to start by conducting a Disparate Impact Inventory. As Justice Scalia recognized in his Ricci v. DeStefano (2009) concurrence, the issue isn’t easy. But ignoring it won’t make it any easier.  Sooner or later it has to be litigated.

IS IT TRUE THAT WITH ONLY 4.5% OF THE WORLD’S POPULATION, THE UNITED STATES ACCOUNTS FOR 31% OF ALL MASS PUBLIC SHOOTERS? According to John Lott, the answer is no. He writes: How a Botched Study Fooled the World About the U.S. Share of Mass Public Shootings: U.S. Rate is Lower than Global Average.

THE NEW COLOR LINE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS: I can’t help but believe that Heman Sweatt would be baffled by the move toward campus separatism.

MICHAEL FARADAY, THE FATHER OF ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING, WAS BORN 227 YEARS AGO TODAY: He was the son of a blacksmith and received only a basic formal education. But at the age of 14, he was lucky enough to apprentice to a kindly bookbinder and bookseller. Reading the books in his master’s shop was an eye-opening experience for him. In that way, he educated himself.

At the age of 20, Faraday impressed Britain’s then-leading scientist/inventor, Humphry Davy, who hired him as his scientific assistant. But there was a small catch: In addition to his scientific duties, Faraday was assigned to act as Davy’s valet while Davy and his wife were on an extended tour of Europe. This would have been a somewhat unusual arrangement. Scientific assistants were ordinarily well-educated and hence well-treated. But Davy’s wife was keen on keeping the low-born Faraday in his place. She saw to it that he would eat and sleep with the servants.

Still, that didn’t stop him from being one of the most consequential men of his generation—surpassing even Davy himself. Faraday’s experiments with electromagnetism and electrochemistry were groundbreaking. It was through his painstaking efforts that electricity became a practical source of energy that could fuel the new technologies that mushroomed around it.

As his fame grew, Faraday was called upon to give public lectures at which he tried his best to convey that beauty of the natural world as he saw it. “I am no poet,” his lecture notes read, “but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your mind.”

The poets of the day–like Percy Bysshe Shelley, author of The Necessity of Atheism—were sometimes atheists. Many were convinced that the natural world as it was being revealed by scientists like Faraday was inconsistent with a belief in God. But Faraday himself saw no such inconsistency. He was a devout Christian—specifically a Sandemanian. On his deathbed, he was asked, “Have you ever pondered by yourself what will be your occupation in the next world?” His last words: “I shall be with Christ, and that is enough.”

“MICHIGAN RANKED 9^th WORST STATE FOR BULLYING”: For some reason, that headline caught my eye today. Really? Ninth worst? Not 3^rd or 23^rd? How does one even measure these things?

A little while ago, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued a report on the Department of Education’s intensive efforts to combat bullying in schools.  Somehow this was (and still is) viewed as an issue of “discrimination” in violation of federal law.  As usual, I filed a statement dissenting from the report.  Here’s an excerpt:

Remember when children used to say “Don’t make a federal case out of it”? In those days even fourth graders understood that not every problem is best dealt with at the federal level. These days, however, everything seems to be a federal case—even schoolyard bullies.

The point is not that bullying is unimportant. Few things are as important as ensuring that all our nation’s children can attend safe schools that are conducive to learning. But, in the absence of extraordinary circumstances, the problem can only be dealt with effectively at the local level. Individual teachers and principals backed up by active parents, school boards, school district officials, and students themselves must be in charge. They are the heroes of the story, not the Department of Education. …

One could argue that any help in this regard should be welcome. But help from the 800-pound gorilla can be worse than no help at all. And that is what anything as large and powerful as the federal government inevitably is. The fact that it may be well-meaning is nice to know, but it shouldn’t make anyone want to trust it with a china tea set.

I wonder if school children still say “Don’t make a federal case out of it.”  It might not make any sense to them anymore.

GOOD TIMES:  Dow hits new record.

NOT THAT LONG AGO: On this day in 1893, Charles and Frank Duryea road-tested the first American-made, gasoline-powered automobile on a stretch of road located in Springfield, Massachusetts.

(Others sometimes credit John William Lambert’s 1891 3-wheel Buckeye Gasoline Buggy with being America’s first, but because he never sold one–and because it was a %#* tricycle–Lambert tends not to get the same attention.)

Alas, the Duryea Motor Wagon Company never really made it big.  In part this may have been because the brothers had a falling out with each other. And in part it was because Ford had a better idea.

SAY IT AIN’T SO:  Cory Booker, 15-year-old groper?

SCHOOL DISCIPLINARY POLICIES SHOULD BE LOCAL:  And the Obama Administration’s effort to federalize those policies is both wrongheaded and contrary to law.

FORD WANTS FBI TO INVESTIGATE BEFORE SHE TESTIFIES:  Put differently:  Stall, stall, stall.

TRUMP TAKES ON THE ICC:  I’m so old that when I see that I think of the Interstate Commerce Commission.  My bad.

WILL THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S BEN CARSON JUST ADOPT A CONSERVATIVE-STYLE VERSION OF OBAMA’S AFFH POWER GRAB? Shouldn’t the federal government just let local governments run their own %^&* affairs?

THE IMPORTANCE OF VOTING RIGHTS … as illustrated by the behavior of two politicians in history.

THE NEW YORK TIMES GETS IT JUST PLAIN WRONG: I posted on Wednesday about the claim that the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights’ new voting rights report was adopted “unanimously.” The claim was made in the Commission’s press release and in the Chair’s transmission letter to President Trump. But as I wrote in the post:

This is technically true, but highly misleading. My mother died about an hour before the telephonic meeting at which the vote was taken, so I was unable to call in. As I wrote in my Commissioner Statement, if I had been present, “I would have voted no.” I believe the same is true of my colleague Peter Kirsanow, who was stuck in a deposition at the time. Only Commissioners appointed by Democrats voted to approve the report.

The New York Times story parrots the claim of unanimity. But it does so in a way that is not even technically true. Under the headline, Protection of Voting Rights for Minorities Has Fallen Sharply, a New Report Finds, it states that the report’s “key recommendations were unanimously supported by the commission’s eight members—six Democrats and two Republicans.” That is just plain false.

For the reasons stated above, I didn’t have sufficient time to take on the report point by point (and, to be fair, not everything in the long report is bad). But I managed to discuss some of the issues raised in the report (and make a few historical points) in my Statement, which I have now posted as a separate document on SSRN.

UPDATE: EVEN THE NEW YORK TIMES CORRECTION NEEDS CORRECTING: The NYT’s story now states: “In a foreword to the commission’s latest report, Ms. Lhamon wrote that the panel unanimously supported the report’s key recommendations, a claim that some conservative advocacy groups said was untrue. A publicist for the commission, Vincent Eng, later said that the panel’s six Democratic members all approved the recommendations, but that its two Republican members either did not attend the session at which the vote was taken or left the room during the vote.”

This is deliberately misleading. The New York Times reporter for this article was informed via Twitter by my special assistant of the truth. She is not an advocacy group. I have no idea who Vincent Eng is, but he doesn’t work at the Commission, and when Eng’s statement was drawn to the Staff Director’s attention by my assistant, he denied that we even have a publicist. In any event, nobody “left the room” when the vote came up. Indeed, there was no room. The vote was taken on the telephone.  And by the way, I’m not a Republican. I was appointed by a Republican.

UPDATE TO UPDATE:  The Staff Director now admits that he hired Eng as a “media consultant,” which in his view is not a publicist.

VOTING RIGHTS REPORT: The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights released a report today entitled “An Assessment of Minority Voting Rights Access in the United States.” The press release repeatedly emphasizes that the report was “unanimous.” This is technically true, but highly misleading. My mother died about an hour before the telephonic meeting at which the vote was taken, so I was unable to call in. As I wrote in my Commissioner Statement, if I had been present, I would have voted no. I believe the same is true of my colleague Peter Kirsanow, who was stuck in a deposition at the time. Only Commissioners appointed by Democrats voted to approve the report.

The most remarkable part of the report can be found in the Statement of Commissioner Michael Yaki (the Pelosi appointee) on page 301:

[The Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder] has turned the concept of voting rights on its head, where officials now work to restrict, and not expand, the franchise. Worse, there is little attempt to conceal the racial animus underlying these actions or the transparency of their actions to block the franchise and empowerment of minorities. In this way, there is a direct line from Shelby to Charlottesville, where alt-right, neo-Nazi, and hate groups, in their putsch-filled delusions, believe they can turn back the clock and preserve the supremacy of their self-defined racial purity. When government is acting under the color of law to enact the legal equivalent, it becomes a distinction without a difference.

Got that? State legislatures enacting voter ID laws and other anti-fraud measures are the same as “alt-right, neo-Nazi, and hate groups” who “in their putsch-filled delusions, believe they can turn back the clock and preserve the supremacy of their self-defined racial purity.”  And it was all made possible by a Supreme Court that “turned the concept of voting rights on its head.”

Yaki has a history of intemperate statements. But the Chair Catherine Lhamon (an Obama appointee) concurred in his Statement. If it were a 40-page Statement with the crazy parts buried in the footnotes, I might be inclined to believe she just didn’t see it. But it isn’t even two pages long, and the crazy parts dominate the text. I have to assume she agrees with him.

I’ll post a link to my Statement in the report when I get a chance.

MAYBE MY SCHOOLTEACHER GRANDMOTHER WASN’T SO STUPID AFTER ALL: A Georgia charter school is seeking parental permission to using paddling as a punishment for schoolchildren. And many parents are granting it.

School discipline has changed since the 1970s, when, as a result of a number of public interest lawsuits, it became legally risky to keep students after school without explicit parental permission. This pleased teachers, who weren’t keen on working late with unruly students anyway.

Instead, in-school or more commonly out-of-schools suspensions became the norm. Two problems: First, suspended students lose instructional time. Second, many of them like to be suspended.

What’s really needed is a punishment that is quick and unpleasant, thus allowing misbehaving students to get right back to their studies—like an old-fashioned paddling.

In the meantime, whether it works out or not, I’m happy to see a school attempt to set it own discipline policy. The federal government has managed to impose its preferred discipline policy on most of the rest of them.

BATTLE OF VIENNA: Good morning, Instapundit readers. It’s September 12^th, the 335th anniversary of the Battle of Vienna.   That day in 1683 was a turning point in history with the forces of the Habsburg imperial monarchy, the Holy Roman Empire’s principalities, and the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, combining to stop the Ottoman Empire’s expansion into Europe. John III Sobieski, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, was their military leader.

Vienna, which had been under siege since July, was near collapse. The Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I had fled and was now begging for help from the rest of the Empire, from Poland-Lithuania and from France. Poland as well as Saxony, Bavaria, Swabia, and some other HRE principalities answered the call. (France’s Louis XIV said no, and the Lithuanians, though willing, arrived too late for the battle.)

Sobieski personally led the 18,000-man cavalry charge that scattered the Ottomans. This was the beginning of a long end for the Ottoman Empire. After the battle, Sobieski gave credit to both the High and the low, “Venimus, Vidimus, Deus vicit” (“We came, We saw, God conquered”).

Here’s my question: Why isn’t John III Sobieski more famous in the USA? The last person to mention his name to me was Mr. Newlove, my 12^th grade European history teacher.

NO GUNS AT SAN DIEGO COUNTY’S MOST POPULAR GUN SHOWS?: According the San Diego Union Tribune, the Del Mar Fairgrounds Board of Directors voted 8 to1 to suspend the popular gun shows until a “policy is developed that could include a complete ban on the possession of any firearms or ammunition.…”

“We’re not doing our kids any service if we continue this,” said Director Lisa Barkett, before voting for the suspension….

“Essentially, it’s a ban of the gun show,” said Wendy Hauffen, executive administrator of the San Diego County Gun Owners, after the decision. “You can’t have gun show with no guns.”

Next for Del Mar Fairgrounds:  No horses at the horse races.

SWEDEN IS LIKE EVERY COUNTRY, ONLY MORE SWEDISH:  In Sweden, the Elite Lost Touch with the People.

ANNIVERSARY OF THE U.S. COMMISSION ON CIVIL RIGHTS: It was this week in history that Dwight Eisenhower signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1957.  Among other things, it created the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

In 2007, I was asked to testify at a Senate hearing celebrating the Act’s 50^th anniversary. (The Chairman couldn’t make it, so I was the rookie substitute.) I had just recently been appointed to Commission and was more optimistic about the Commission’s ability to produce quality reports than I am now. It reads pretty cheerily.

Since then I suffered disappointments.   Here are just two examples:

(1) The 2015 report on immigration detention centers: The Commission members who sponsored it set out to prove that these detention centers were hellholes.   But when we visited two such centers they were nicer than expected … so the report barely mentioned our visit and instead did things like repeat a very old (and pretty much discredited) rumor that once a detention center served maggots with a meal. I dissented from the report.

(2) The 2016 report on environmental justice: The Commission members who sponsored this one set out to prove empirically that coal ash dumps are more likely be located near African Americans. But the data ended up pretty much proving the opposite … so the results got buried.   I dissented again.

I haven’t entirely given up on the Commission’s ability to do bipartisan research that (as LBJ put it) will “sift out the truth from the fancies” and “be of assistance to reasonable men.” But it’s not an easy task.

Feel free to excoriate me for my remaining optimism in the comments. But don’t spend too much energy on it, because I’m pretty sure I won’t have the heart to read them. Sad!

“WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY AND THEY ARE OURS”: On this day in 1813, American naval commander Oliver Hazard Perry defeated British commander Robert Heriot Barclay (no relation) in the Battle of Lake Erie. His dispatch to Major Gen. William Henry Harrison ranks up there with “Veni, vidi, vici” for succinctly, yet dramatically, reporting a military victory.

(And, yes, there was also Pogo’s variation on Perry’s theme.)

THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION IS HERE: Another frightening story of how an academic paper that even hints at a politically incorrect conclusion can be derailed by a howling mob.