Monthly Archives: October 2017

A Blow for Standards

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And it’s struck by California’s state Supreme Court, yet, which is the controlling factor in setting the passing score, the cut score, on the State’s bar exam which prospective lawyers must pass in order to practice in California.

The Court has decided to keep the cut score at its current level, which is the second highest in the US.  The State’s law school deans are in an uproar over that; they wanted the cut score significantly lowered.  They’re complaining that

many competent graduates will continue to suffer the consequences of not being able to become certified to practice….

The deans decline to explain how are “graduates” can be considered competent if they can’t pass the test that assesses their competency.

Their excuse for wanting the standard lowered is risible.

Bar-exam-passage rates for incoming lawyers have plummeted in California in recent years, in parallel with similar drops in other states….

Of course, this couldn’t be a degradation in the quality of teaching through lowered standards of expertise credentialing, or of students through lowered admission standards, or both.

Never mind that UCLA’s first-time pass rate of 82% proves that the current cut score is not too high.  Gotta lower standards, the deans say, to meet declining performance rather than requiring the hard work of elevating performance to meet standards.

Here’re a couple of thoughts: do a better job of teaching. It looks like an old jibe that those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach, is thriving in California.

Also: do a better job of selecting students for admittance. Not every snowflake who takes a notion to be a lawyer should be one.

Media Bias

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Media “critic” Howard Kurtz says he decries it.  In a recent piece about media credibility he noted that, according to a Morning Consult/Politico survey, 46% of voters think the media makes up stories about President Donald Trump.  Even 20% of self-identified Democrats think that.

Then he wrote this.

In short, the president’s constant “fake news” attacks are working.

It couldn’t possibly be that the “media” really do make stuff up about Trump.  They don’t ever publish stories containing only rumors claimed by carefully unidentified sources, with nary an on-the-record bit of corroboration, like journalism standards used to require.  Nossir.

He also noted this outcome from the poll:

[I]n light of Trump suggesting scrutiny of TV licenses, the poll says 51% think the federal government shouldn’t have the power to revoke broadcast licenses of fabricating networks—not exactly a ringing endorsement.

It’s true enough that communications licenses shouldn’t be based on content.  But Kurtz wrote that in the context of his larger piece that while the media often are unfair (the token nod to another side of his argument), they don’t as a matter of routine fake the news.  It couldn’t possibly be that faint-praise damnation is because the media do, in fact, routinely make stuff up.  Uh, uh.

Talk about media bias.  Jeez.

Thurgood Marshall’s Politics Deserve Respect?

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Jason Riley certainly thought Justice Thurgood Marshall’s approach to it deserved respect.

One of the final scenes in “Marshall,” a new film about the early legal career of civil rights superstar Thurgood Marshall, shows the future Supreme Court justice in a train station in Mississippi. It’s 1941—peak Jim Crow —and a large “Whites Only” sign hangs above a water fountain beside him.

Marshall ignores the sign, takes a paper cup from the dispenser, and draws water from the fountain. An elderly black gentleman quietly watches him, in seeming awe of this defiant act. The two men exchange glances but no words as Marshall exits the station, yet his message to the older man is clear: don’t be afraid.

That much is to the good, most assuredly.

Unfortunately, the movie that Riley reviewed seems to have omitted another aspect of Marshall’s political behavior.  Marshall deliberately dragged politics into the courts.  Speaking at a traditional Supreme Court mid-term lunch for the Court’s clerks, for instance, Marshall said this, in all seriousness:

You do what you think is right and let the law catch up.

A judge ruling on any basis other than what the law says pulls what are solely political branch authorities into his court.  That’s utterly disrespectful.

A Mistake

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Would a partitioned Iraq be a better pawn for Iran?  Or would a freed-up, independent Iraqi Kurdistan serve as a buffer to mitigate Iranian influence in the area—and an impediment to an Iranian road to Damascus and on to Latakia and Tartus on the Mediterranean Sea?  And an impediment to that road, passing as it would, right by Israel via Hezbollah?

An Iraq weakened by the partition would be easy prey for Iran?  No, that’s a wash for the weakened Iraq that’s already in Iranian sway, via all those Shiite “militias” that are funded and armed by Iran’s terror support organ, the Iranian Republican Guards Corps.

Recall two things: one is the Peshmerga and their courage and battlefield skill and tenacity in rescuing Yazidis from a mountain “island” during the initial Daesh barbarians’ rout of the Iraqi “army,” in stopping the barbarians’ rush east into Kurdish Iraq, in helping clear Mosul, and other events and campaigns.

The other thing is that all of this was done without support from Baghdad, done even with active Baghdad obstruction of US arms going to the Kurds so they could better fight the Daesh, who already were armed with American heavy weapons, courtesy of the Iraqi “army” which had abandoned all of that as they abandoned their duty and ran south before the Daesh, like grains of sand on a desert wind.

Now President Donald Trump is professing American neutrality as Baghdad, supported by Iranian forces (those “militia”) and Iranian weapons, moves into territories liberated by the Kurds from the Daesh and seeks to subjugate the Kurds, once again, to Baghdad’s diktat.

We don’t like the fact that they’re clashing.  …  We’re not taking sides.

And: what is the stability in the region before Iran’s advances with Iraq riven by civil war rather than stabilized by a settled Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan?

Where would an Iraqi Kurdistan, or even a subjugated Kurdish region, be regarding its policy toward the US were we to betray them in the present situation, as we betrayed them after the first Gulf War, implying they should revolt against a surviving Saddam Hussein government only to stand by while he gassed them into submission?

And there’s this bit from a Wall Street Journal editorial:

A central tenet of the Trump foreign policy, a work in progress, has been that the US would rebuild its relationship with America’s allies.

Who are the Kurds, if not an American ally?  Who are the Kurds, if not one of the staunchest allies we’ve had?

Health Plan Providers Are Concerned

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These providers, which surprisingly The Wall Street Journal misapprehends as insurers, are bracing for a drop in enrollment in the ongoing health plan provision program “turmoil.”  There’s this key passage in the article at the link:

[M]any firms say they expect to lose consumers who will bear the full brunt of the rate increases—those who aren’t eligible for the health law’s premium subsidies, which help enrollees with annual incomes of less than around $48,000.

Yet it’s the “health law” that exploded health plan costs—premiums and deductibles, especially—by mandating coverage for things citizens don’t need or don’t want and by mandating that many of those coverages be provided at no cost to the plan purchaser.  This has led to a burial of many of those costs into the charges made rather than listing them openly as separate line items on the charge sheet and a parallel creation of the claimed need for the subsidies.

Those costs put a premium on getting rid of Obamacare and replacing it with a private economy program of market oriented, actual health insurance policies sold by private companies not fettered by Federal government diktats.

That, in turn, requires three self-important Republican Senators to get with the program.  Senators John McCain (AZ), Lisa Murkowski (AK), and Susan Collins (ME), especially, need to hear about our dismay with their reticence—and on a national scale.  These worthies are responsible to their State constituencies, to be sure, but the US Senate is a national body; these Senators also have a national constituency to whom they’re responsible, for all that the rest of us don’t vote for them.