New Jersey Gov. Chris Chris Christie Schools Mika Brzezsinki on Liberal Bias

Although the payroll tax cut debate is (for now) moot, America's Governor, Chris Christie, staged an intervention for Obama worshipper Mika Brzezsinki on Morning Joe on Tuesday.

Brzezsinki is hardly the only "journalist" in the media that defines compromise as caving to the Democrats and the administration, however.

Does anyone know why Christie watches this lame show every day?

Fesitivus for the Rest of Us...

Happy Festivus!
 

Surveillance Video: Alleged Copper Thief Takes Fall

Copper thievery seems to be a crime wave in America. A Miami police official told local media that "copper theft has become a major national security and public safety issue."

The Coalition Against Copper Theft explains:

Since commodity prices for copper have more than doubled in the past two years, the theft of copper from telephone lines, electrical substations, highway infrastructure and residential homes has grown exponentially. A conservative estimate by the Department of Energy indicates copper wire theft costs this nation almost $1 billion per year. More importantly is the human cost with a clear and definitive link between stealing copper and illegal drug use, primarily methamphetamines.

In this Miami school surveillance video, a burglar falls about 25 feet in his attempt to cop some coppper. The suspect, who crawled away from the scene, is still at large.

Wisconsin Teacher Threatened for Speaking Out

A Wisconsin teacher who exercised her First Amendment rights to support Scott Walker and oppose the attempt to unseat him in the recall effort is being harassed and threatened by union operatives using "Saul Alinsky" tactics:




BigGovernment.com notes the irony: "We could have sworn we recently read something about teachers unions in various states working to curb school bullying. Apparently they don’t practice what they preach."

The sky actually didn't fall after Walker's modest collective bargaining reforms went into effect:

Is Law Review Another Scam?

If you've ever sat down in a college library (as we have) and read through some of the humanities journals, you would have discovered that much of academic scholarship consists of tedious political propaganda masquerading as legitimate research.

We always thought that the legal scholarship as published in (presumed) prestigious and resume-enhancing law reviews was in general different. After all, the material is based on real-world cases--at least as appeals courts review the "facts"--with real-world application.

So in the spirit (or more particularly, dis-spirit) of the season, is it time to stop believing in Santa Claus as it were?

In yet another compelling blog post at the muckraking Inside the Law School Scam, "LawProf" maintains that law reviews are also bogus and, to make matters worse, lack the peer review that is usually standard in other disciplines:

Legal scholarship is produced under pseudo-academic conditions that form a fertile breeding ground for (very heavily footnoted) bullshit. Consider how legal academic publication almost always takes place. People who generally possess no formal academic training beyond what they received in law school (that is, none) write "law review articles." In the vast majority of cases, these articles consist of "doctrinal analysis," i.e., treating appellate court opinions... as texts that deserve to be taken seriously on their own terms. We are already, in other words, knee-deep in bullshit.

But it gets worse. Who is doing the evaluating of the supposed cogency of this analysis? Law students, that's who. So people who, incredibly enough, are even more ignorant than law professors about the actual legal system are charged with undertaking the equivalent of academic peer review for the purposes of legal scholarship. That contemporary research universities tolerate this charade can best be explained by examining the average law school's balance sheet, which will reveal that a nice chunk of the revenue generated by the school's operations is mulcted by central administrators in an example of what medieval Vikings called "raiding," but contemporary academic bureaucrats refer to as "cross-subsidization."

Read the whole posting here.

James Franco: D Student

[image credit: Vanessa Lua]

Rise of the Planet of the Apes star James Franco was apparently monkeying around when he was supposed to be in class at New York University--but it was the professor that gave him a D for poor attendance that got into trouble according to a wrongful termination lawsuit filed by the professor.

James Franco’s tired James Dean act got an NYU professor booted from the school last year — after the teacher dared to give the overhyped Hollywood hunk a “D” for blowing off class, a lawsuit charges.

 José Angel Santana said he slapped the “127 Hours’’ star with the bad grade because he missed 12 of his 14 “Directing the Actor II” classes while pursuing a master’s in fine arts. Santana said he then suffered all kinds of drama — first from Franco, who publicly ridiculed him, then from his department, which axed him over the “D.”

“The school has bent over backwards to create a Franco-friendly environment, that’s for sure,” Santana, 58, told The Post. “The university has done everything in its power to curry favor with James Franco.”

Santana, who is suing NYU in Manhattan Supreme Court for his job back, asserts that Franco, whose career took off after a 2001 portrayal of James Dean, acted like a rebel without a clue in his other courses, too, blowing off just as many classes. But the star’s other professors at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts still gave him good grades, Santana said.

...“In my opinion, they’ve turned the NYU graduate film degree into swag for James Franco’s purposes, a possession, something you can buy,” Santana said.

Leaving aside the facts or allegations of this particular case, we know from personal knowledge that adjunct professors (who are often on a semester-to-semester contract) often have to run a public relations tightrope if they like and want to keep the gig. While they have to uphold academic standards and treat all students fairly and equally, even one bad student evaluation or a complaint--even if bogus--could result in the non-renewing of the teaching contract.

Santana is listed as a "visiting professor" which is at a much higher level than an ordinary adjunct but nonetheless does not provide the same kind of job security as those enjoyed by tenure-protected faculty members.

Here is Prof. Santana talking about the case with the guys from TMZ:




Added: Here is the take of the Franco case by Taiwan CGI studio Next Media Animation:

Evil Republicans Explained

If you wonder what makes those greedy, fascistic Republicans tick, Bill Whittle may have the answer in this video:




Whittle also explains the difference between the Occupy movement and the Tea Party: