Friday - July 16, 2010

‘Must Reads’ for 7/16/10

From the American Spectator:

America’s Ruling Class…

If, for example, you are Laurence Tribe in 1984, Harvard professor of law, leftist pillar of the establishment, you can “write” your magnum opus by using the products of your student assistant, Ron Klain. A decade later, after Klain admits to having written some parts of the book, and the other parts are found to be verbatim or paraphrases of a book published in 1974, you can claim (perhaps correctly) that your plagiarism was “inadvertent,” and you can count on the Law School’s dean, Elena Kagan, to appoint a committee including former and future Harvard president Derek Bok that issues a secret report that “closes” the incident. Incidentally, Kagan ends up a justice of the Supreme Court. Not one of these people did their jobs: the professor did not write the book himself, the assistant plagiarized instead of researching, the dean and the committee did not hold the professor accountable, and all ended up rewarded. By contrast, for example, learned papers and distinguished careers in climatology at MIT (Richard Lindzen) or UVA (S. Fred Singer) are not enough for their questions about “global warming” to be taken seriously. For our ruling class, identity always trumps.

Incestuous, isn’t it?

From The American Thinker:

Future of the News

Taxes, taxes, and more taxes on BMEWS…

Under the proposed changes, government would have the right to impose taxes on selected media (including internet service providers and internet sites) and redistribute funds to traditional liberal news media. Government could impose a fairness doctrine on the internet as well as on radio—thus forcing conservative media to “balance” their programming by including liberal commentary. Government would also be granted a wide range of options for subsidizing liberal media, including perpetual grants of taxpayer money to left-leaning publications like the New York Times and to increase funding for “progressive” media such as National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System. No wonder the Nation magazine has lavished praise on the FTC and FCC proposals: Based on its longstanding liberal bias, the Nation might qualify for a generous handout.

From the National Review:

The Jobs Americans Should Not Have To Do

The second reason the administration’s internship-killing policies got my attention is that my own princess, aged 17-and-a-half, has just begun her first-ever internship, as a trading-floor clerk at a Wall Street firm. Since she still has a year of high school to go, it’s a real plum of an opportunity, and we are everlastingly obliged to the firm that made the offer. It is also Ms. Derbyshire’s first real job of any kind, other than dog-walking gigs. Onward and upward, Nellie.

According to that New York Times report, though, the summer internship may become an endangered species; according to the CIS report, lower-level summer jobs already have, thanks to reckless immigration policies.

What seems to be going on here is a war against the notion that any American citizen should do any kind of non-academic work before the age of 25 — before, that is, a college degree and a couple of years of law school have been completed.

I wrote about this before, though I think it was in a comment. By the time I was 25 I’d flipped burgers for McDonald’s, made pizza’s for Pizza Hut, sold beer and liquor at a carry-out, and done any number of ‘degrading’ house-keeping jobs in the Navy. (you know, swabbed the decks, cleaned the heads, painted, etc. Despite being a E-5/nuke-ET/qualified RO/SRO, we still had to keep our living spaces clean.) Exactly ‘non-academic’ work. 

Posted by Christopher     on 07/16/2010 at 08:14 AM   
Filed Under: • Daily Life • Democrats-Liberals-Moonbat Leftists • Economics • Government •  
• Comments (1) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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