We Win, They Lose
The Wit and Wisdom of Three Guys Named Brent, Mark and Mike
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
This Just In! Law Schools Are Liberal Bastions!!
At least, that's the conclusion of the study done by UC Berkeley School of Law Ph.D. candidate Douglas Spencer.
The National Law Journal goes with this headline: "Research: Law schools skew liberal, but liberals don't get all the prestige jobs" The actual study is a bit less nuanced, however. As the article notes, the researchers found that:
the extreme discrepancy between the proportion of new professors who can be clearly identified as liberal or conservative indicates either unequal hiring patterns or environments less conducive to openness and debate in the law school setting.
The article continues:
The researchers noted the recent praise for Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan for increasing the political diversity of the Harvard Law School faculty while she was dean. Of 32 tenure or tenure-track hires, three were openly conservative — which illustrates the large ideological imbalance in law schools, according to the study.
Spencer and Phillips compiled a sample of 149 entry-level, tenure-track hires made during 2005, 2007 and 2009. They assigned a measure of ideology for each hire based on political donations, Facebook profiles, work experience, publications and the political party of the president who appointed any federal judge for whom the professor clerked.
The researchers could not determine a clear ideological bent for 60% of the sample, yet the number of hires who were easily identified as liberal far outpaced those who were very clearly conservative. They determined that 52 of the hires were liberal, compared to 8 who were conservative — a ratio that "doesn't speak well of intellectual diversity in American law school hiring."
The findings suggest that conservative law professors may be more discreet about their political leaning early in their careers, the researchers said.
Gee, I wonder why conservatives would be "more discreet about their political leanings"? Maybe because they won't get hired?!
In the study, the researchers stated of Kagan's hiring of three conservatives:
However, that only three openly conservative law professors were hired among thirty-two others — and that three is considered an unusually high number — speaks to the ideological imbalance in the hiring process at Harvard Law, a process that is replicated at nearly every law school in America.
Anyone for a little diversity? Intellectual diversity, that is.
PS - Do not miss Table 3 (p. 24 of the download) in the study; it is eye-opening to say the least. If you want a clue as to why our country is going down the toilet, it is contained therein. In short, virtually all of our lawyers are "educated" by extreme liberals, and then set loose on the country to deform -- oops! I meant "reform" -- it in the image of their professors.
Monday, March 29, 2010
Back in the Saddle Again
It's time to return to blogging, at least a couple of times each week. So much has happened since I frequented the blogosphere. I want to get back to adding my two cents, for what it's worth (which undoubtedly is less than two cents). In any event, it will be fun to get back into the swing of things.
Sunday, February 08, 2009
Walmart
is vilified, supposedly by everyone, really mostly by unions. Check out this article for an enlightening read on how WalMart treats its employees. It contains a very interesting statement:
My starting wage was so low (around $7 per hour), a modest increment still didn't leave me with enough to live on comfortably, but when I looked at the alternatives, many of them were worse. Coworkers assured me that the nearest Target paid its hourly full-timers less than Wal-Mart, while fast-food franchises were at the bottom of everyone's list.
I found myself reaching an inescapable conclusion. Low wages are not a Wal-Mart problem. They are an industry-wide problem, afflicting all unskilled entry-level jobs, and the reason should be obvious.
In our free-enterprise system, employees are valued largely in terms of what they can do. This is why teenagers fresh out of high school often go to vocational training institutes to become auto mechanics or electricians. They understand a basic principle that seems to elude social commentators, politicians and union organizers. If you want better pay, you need to learn skills that are in demand.
The blunt tools of legislation or union power can force a corporation to pay higher wages, but if employees don't create an equal amount of additional value, there's no net gain. All other factors remaining equal, the store will have to charge higher prices for its merchandise, and its competitive position will suffer.
This is Economics 101, but no one wants to believe it, because it tells us that a legislative or unionized quick-fix is not going to work in the long term. If you want people to be wealthier, they have to create additional wealth.
To my mind, the real scandal is not that a large corporation doesn't pay people more. The scandal is that so many people have so little economic value. Despite (or because of) a free public school system, millions of teenagers enter the work force without marketable skills. So why would anyone expect them to be well paid?
In fact, the deal at Wal-Mart is better than at many other employers. The company states that its regular full-time hourly associates in the US average $10.86 per hour, while the mean hourly wage for retail sales associates in department stores generally is $8.67. The federal minimum wage is $6.55 per hour. Also every Wal-Mart employee gets a 10% store discount, while an additional 4% of wages go into profit-sharing and 401(k) plans.
The two bold sentences above say more about today's workforce, markets and educational system than most books on the subject.
Monday, January 28, 2008
Interesting Article?
This abstract looks pretty interesting.
Title: The Religion Clauses and the “Really New” Federalism
President Hinckley has Died
What a great man. He will be missed.
Thursday, January 10, 2008
This is unbelievable...
I was in Detroit for an arbitration the other day, and of course received my free hotel copy of USA Today. It carried an article from the Associated Press, by a reporter named Bradley Brooks. The article told a story of how three Iraqi soldiers sacrificed their own lives, and probably saved many others, by throwing themselves on a suicide bomber wearing an explosive vest. True courage and self-sacrifice, that. Very admirable.
What is not so admirable is the AP's insistence (still) on referring to terrorists in Iraq as "insurgents." This was much commented on long ago, when the media first adopted the term, and has mostly passed into the realm of those things we all just ignore now. But in this instance, the term stood out. Check out this quote from the article:
Sortly before the bomber struck the Army Day festivities, about two dozen Iraqi soldiers demonstrated for unity in Iraq. The troops, their AK-47 rifles raised in the air, chanted pro-army slogans and a common anti-insurgent taunt: "Where are the terrorists today?"
These soldiers must be idiots. Don't they know that their slogan (being "anti-insurgent") is incorrect? Why is such an incorrect slogan so "common"? It should be "Where are the insurgents today?"
Boy, you would have thought the AP had made that clear by now...
On the other hand, perhaps the AP has got it wrong. It seems the Iraqis believe the so-called "insurgents" are more properly labeled as terrorists. The question is, why doesn't the AP?
Sunday, January 06, 2008
Key Moment in Last Night's Debate (For Me)
SEN. MCCAIN: -- have sued -- have sued the pharmaceutical companies because of overcharging of millions of dollars of Medicaid costs to their patients. How should that -- how could that happen? How could pharmaceutical companies be able to cover up the cost to the point where nobody knows? Why shouldn't we be able to reimport drugs from Canada? It's because of the power of the pharmaceutical companies. And we should have people -- pharmaceutical companies competing to take care of our Medicare and Medicaid patients.
MR. : Okay, don't leave me.
MR. ROMNEY: Don't turn the pharmaceutical companies into the big bad guys. I --
SEN. MCCAIN: Well, they are.
MR. ROMNEY: No, actually they're trying to create products to make us well and make us better, and they're doing the work of the free market. And are there excesses? I'm sure there are, and we should go after excesses. But they're an important industry to this country.
What does McCain mean, "well, they are"? What an absolute moron. He sounds like a Democrat, ripping into businesses that are creating jobs.
Geez...
Sunday, November 04, 2007
Two articles on abortion...
the first declares that "abortion isn't a religious issue," as if that declaration can be made - who says? If someone believes it a part of their religion to oppose (or support) abortion, why can't it be a religious issue for that person? How can anyone declare otherwise? But my main point in linking to the article is to show you how poorly a very famous intellectual can argue his case. Gary Wills comes across like a high schooler in a debate class.
The second article says that abortion is a non issue. I don't have time to comment on it, just wanted to link.
