In less awful news, 95 percent of the students surveyed said that free speech is important to them. However, as I have long predicted and discussed, when you ask Americans if they like free speech, they nearly always say “yes.” But when you get into the nitty gritty details about what kind of speech warrants protection, you discover that some folks (especially college students) are more in the “I love free speech, but…” camp. And I fear the list of exceptions is growing larger by the day.
Not sure which is more dismaying, that they’re unaware of the First Amendment, or that they oppose it. But clearly the Left is continuing its march through the institutions. Which is why books like this one could be very valuable:
Why a father-son collaboration? That’s what I wanted to know, too, so I asked the elder Paulsen, who was a year ahead of me at Yale Law School. Mike reported that he had given a lecture at Princeton in 2006, after which the law professors and college professors at dinner complained about their students’ “goofed-up ideas” about the Constitution. The law professors blamed the college professors, the college professors said “they came to us this way,” and blamed pervasively bad ideas about the Constitution in the culture, the media and even textbooks. Stuck in an airport the next day, Prof. Paulsen killed time writing an outline.
If they can get them to read it. The problem starts in kindergarten, and extends all the way into post-docs.
My prediction: The FBI will recommend prosecution, Justice will ignore, than a steady drip of leaks from the FBI all the way through election day, and the administration won’t be able to do a damn thing about it.
It shouldn’t be. This was blatant political interference with an ongoing investigation (as was his “not a smidgen of corruption” comment about the IRS).
[Update a couple minutes later]
Oh, just noticed this obligatory “But Booooosh!”
Mr. Obama is not the first president to generate criticism for weighing in on cases. George W. Bush was criticized when he told an interviewer that he believed Representative Tom DeLay of Texas was innocent of illegal fund-raising charges. Mr. DeLay’s conviction was overturned last year.
Did I miss the part where the prosecutor in Texas worked for the president?
A much older case is when Nixon weighed in on Charles Manson’s guilt. That was another one where it wasn’t as big a deal, because it was a local prosecution, not a federal one.
This whole debate assumes that the only purpose of space exploration is science. But if we want to settle space, we have to accept the fact that we are going to “contaminate” it with earthly life.