Appeals Court Reinstates Political Discrimination Lawsuit

As we mentioned in a prior post about James Franco, adjunct or part-time college faculty (i.e., without tenure or job security) usually have to navigate a public relations minefield in terms of student evaluations to make sure their contracts get renewed.

Getting a college teaching job (and especially qualifing for a full-time or tenured positon) often requires a strong publishing track record, but there's a Catch-22 in relation to political ideology: Try getting hired or promoted in academia if you have right-of-center publications or activity. In general, fuggedaboutit.

So anyone who supports the First Amendment should applaud the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit for reinstating a political discrimination case for trial in federal district court.

As a result of the appellate panel's ruling, Teresa Wagner "who alleges she was denied a job at the University of Iowa College of Law because of her conservative politics can proceed with a discrimination lawsuit against the school’s former dean," The Wall Street Journal reports.

Wagner, a registered Republican and known social conservative, was a part-time instructor at the college's Writing Resource Center who was turned down for a full-time gig despite apparently having the appropriate credentials and recommendations. A lower court judge had dismissed the case but the appeals court determined that there was enough of a dispute over whether then law school dean Carolyn Jones “would have made the same hiring decisions in the absence of Wagner’s political affiliations and beliefs” to put the case back on the trial docket.

According to the On Brief blog, there is only one registered Republican among the 50 faculty members at Iowa's law school.

Justice Department: Vote Early, Vote Late, Vote Often

In daily life, we in general have to assume good faith in our transactions with others, otherwise as a practical matter we'll be consumed with doubt and unable to get things done.

But can anyone attribute good faith to th U.S. Justice (so-called) Department?

The latest outrage is that DOJ rejected South Carolina's voter ID law on the basis of alleged "racial disparities" according to Assistant AG Thomas Perez. Relying on the provisions of the Voting Rights Act, the agency will likely block similar measures recently enacted in other states.

This phony-baloney decision really amounts to the DOJ under Eric Holder simply wanting to make vote rigging and vote fraud easier just in time for the 2012 presidential election. Again, as we have mentioned previously, if you need to show a picture ID for mundane activities such as getting on a plane, buying booze or cigarettes, picking up a package at UPS or the Post Office, or in some cases completing a credit card transaction, why in the world should any reasonable person oppose showing a driver's license or other valid photo identification at the polls? And isn't it an insult to any individual or group to assume that they can't get it together to obtain a photo ID?

Presenting a picture ID at the polls was "endorsed by the Commission on Federal Election Reform headed by President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker in 2005 to protect the integrity of the ballot," the WSJ adds.

The DOJ action based on make-believe discrimination defies common sense. But it comes from the same fantasy world federal government that fails to enforce immigration law but sues states that do.

Earlier this week (before the South Carolina decision was announced, although the handwriting was on the wall), The Wall Street Journal decried Holder's use of the race card to oppose voter ID in a recent speech:

Mr. Holder says the Civil Rights Division led by Thomas Perez will review the policies and impartially "apply the law." If that's true, Mr. Perez's job should be easy: In 2005, Justice approved a nearly identical law in Georgia. In 2008's Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, the Supreme Court likewise ruled 6-3 that an Indiana law requiring photo ID at the ballot box was constitutional....

That isn't good enough for Mr. Holder, who says his department's priority is to "expand the franchise." But expand it for whom, exactly? The vast majority of voters already have the necessary photo ID, which they need to get through airport security or register for a grocery-store savings card.

Plaintiffs put up by liberal lawsuit shops routinely claim that ID laws endanger the rights of hundreds of thousands, but lawsuits in Indiana and Georgia were dismissed because they couldn't produce a single eligible voter who'd been turned away due to the ID requirement. Turnout has risen in states that have passed the voter ID laws, with no adverse impact on minorities.

Texas is apparently next on the chopping block. DOJ whistleblower J. Christian Adams recommends that "The way to save Texas voter ID is to withdraw the objection, immediately, and file in federal court on Tuesday.  The way to save South Carolina voter ID is to file in court immediately.  Stop wasting time with the corrupt leftist bureaucrats at the Justice Department."

Hopefully South Carolina, Texas, and other similar situated states will immediately use all the legal means at their disposal to overturn the DOJ bureaucracy.

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.