You may have read the Inside Higher Ed article I linked to a few days ago, about how the American Bar Association's pressure on George Mason Law to accept more black students resulted in unbelievably high failures rates among those accepted at lower standards.

Inside Higher Ed has another excellent piece out, discussing how universities obsessed with an image of physical diversity are putting out viewbooks with pictures that are much more diverse than the schools' actual demographics. In some cases, they are even doctoring photos of white students to add minorities in them.

I wrote a column on this issue more than a year ago. Excerpt:

I decided to track the website of Cornell University, my alma mater... On one of my visits to the site, the pictures showed a total of eight students, all minorities, with seven of them being women. For reference purposes, Cornell is split down the middle gender-wise, with blacks making up five percent of the student population.

This quote from the Inside Higher Ed article says it all: “Sometimes you see the same black kid in every picture."

In keeping with my higher academia theme of the last couple of days, here is a long article from the New York Times discussing how some of the paper's best ideological allies, meaning university professors whose formation years were in the nutty 1960s, are finally getting to that age where they are retiring from the institutions they should have never gotten hired to in the first place.

We can only hope that the next generation of professors doesn't teach students to chain themselves to trees and to embrace socialism, as some of my 1960s Cornell professors did (check out my latest column for the details on that).

With the Berkeley tree-sitting fiasco coming back to light in recent weeks, and considering its parallels with similar events in recent years at Cornell, my alma mater, I wrote a column on the subject. Enjoy!

The Merriam-Webster dictionary has added new words again. Some are the typical suspects, which are technology and internet-related.  Another is "pescatarian," meaning a vegetarian who eats fish. My favorite, however, is mondegreen:

In a category of its own, it describes words mistaken for other words. A mondegreen most often comes from misunderstood phrases or lyrics.

It comes from an old Scottish ballad in which the lyric "laid him on the green" has been confused over time with "Lady Mondegreen."

Among the best-known modern examples: "There's a bathroom on the right" in place of Creedence Clearwater Revival's "There's a bad moon on the rise" and "'Scuse me, while I kiss this guy" in place of "kiss the sky" in the 1967 Jimi Hendrix classic "Purple Haze."

Even Sokolowski, a word expert by trade, has a favorite mondegreen: "Lucy in the sky with diamonds," as sung by the Beatles in 1967, made obvious sense to the preteen Peanuts comic fan as "Lucy in the sky with Linus."

Yeah that word was much needed.

The Club for Growth has a nice chart detailing how often this season each U.S. Senator has voted with Majority Leader Harry Reid (the same guy who last year declared the war "lost" just when our troops were turning things around).

Not surprisingly, the two Senators who voted most often with him were Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, with nearly 91% each. The three Senators who voted the least often with Reid were small government heroes Tom Coburn and Jim DeMint, and... John McCain!

A new bill in Mississippi would revoke the license of any restaurant that feeds obese people. It is quite possibly the most asinine bill I have heard of in months, on so many levels. Are restaurant owners supposed to weigh their diners? And even if rejected, what do you think the obese people will do? Might they not go buy doughnuts in bulk or ask their friends to pick up the easiest carry out food for them: fast food? Besides, irrelevant of all of this, who do Mississippi legislators think they are, telling people whether or not they can buy food from private establishments?

Of course, if Mississippi didn't spend $220 million on "free medical care," as the article notes, people just might begin to have true incentives to remain healthy.

HT: Club for Growth

I haven't done "Today's Reading" in several days, consequently some of these links are a few days old. But they are all excellent:

Dreams From His Grandmother (Victor Davis Hanson, NRO)

Obama: Change Agent Goes Conventional (Kenneth Vogel, Politico)

Dire News from My Colleagues (John Stossel, RealClearPolitics)

There Is No "The Economy" (Zachary Karabell, WSJ)

Obama Fumbles NAFTA (Washington Times Editorial)

Markets for the Poor in Mexico (Mary Anastasia O'Grady, WSJ)

According to a Rasmussen poll, 63% of voters agree with the Supreme Court's ruling on the landmark gun case D.C. v. Heller. Only 25% don't. Half of those are burglars.

But... But... Barack Obama says that President Bush has made us less safe! How could this CNN poll find that Americans' fears of terrorism are fading?

According to the poll, 35 percent of Americans believe that a terrorist attack on the U.S. is likely over the next several weeks. This is the lowest number since 9/11.

Could it be that the President has protected the homeland? Or could it be that he has taken out much of Al Qaeda's leadership around the world? Or could it be that he took the fight to the terrorists, who are much more intent on taking Iraq and Afghanistan than on attacking the U.S.?

It's not like the terrorists have not tried to attack  the U.S. since 9/11. We have been able to stop at least ten terrorist plots in the past seven years. Indeed, the President has fought the War on Terror well, and America is safer for it - however inconvenient our safety is to Barack Obama.

Berkeley protesters have spent 18 months a the top of trees to "protect" an oak grove from planned construction work.

"They're very well-trained tree climbers. They're very experienced, and I have trust in them that they're going to keep themselves safe and they're going to keep defending the grove," said a ground supporter who would give her name only as Citizyn.

Wait, you train for these things? Oh Citizyn, did you not make it out of tree-climbing boot camp yourself? It's ok, I bet you're the best bra-burner out there.

The situation is quite ridiculous generally, but in the past couple of weeks, it has gotten quite, err, gross:

Protesters howled, flung excrement and shook tree branches as campus-hired arborists cut supply lines and removed gear.

But by late this week, campus police were conducting delicate negotiations with tree-sitters, offering to provide food and water if protesters would lower their waste on a daily basis in the interest of hygiene.

Campus officials ended up giving up the water without concessions; protesters declined to yield their urine.

Ok, whatever, they're animals. What I don't get is, why is the administration negotiating with them? It should do one of two things: Have the police get them down, or leave them up there starved and climbing in their own poop.

These monkeys might have gotten their inspiration from an incident a few years back at Cornell, where I went to college. The university was planning to make a much-needed parking lot out of a hideous collection of brush and bushes severely mislabeled as "Redbud Woods." The "Redbuddies," from students to professors, chained themselves to the woods and climbed up trees in order to stop the construction work. Of course, instead of getting them for trespassing, the university administration set up a tent in the woods, and had the university president sit under that tent next to a young, smelly tree-climber to sign an "agreement" whereby the school made several concessions in exchange for the Redbuddies leaving the woods. It was a very classy sight, worthy of an Ivy League institution.

Today, the Redbud Woods have become the Redbud parking lot. I understand that a memorial to the woods has been set up there, but for some reason I have become immune to being surprised by idiocy. A year after the protests, my friend Jamie Weinstein wrote a nice piece reminiscing about the events. Excerpt:

It is difficult to imagine anything could be that magnificently beautiful and serene. I write this having just come from lying down in a parking lot. Not just any parking lot. Redbud Parking Lot.

As my skin touched the dark black asphalt of the Redbud Parking Lot, I was filled with a happy spirit... 

Of course, the Redbuddies only monkeyed around for a few weeks, and were far outdone by the professionally trained Berkeley tree-climbers.  Here's how the CNN article puts it:

Since [the protest began], Democrats have chosen their first black presidential candidate, the housing market has taken a dive, and gasoline prices have boomed.

I would say that since the protest began, Democrats have chosen yet another white male presidential candidate, we have won Iraq back from Al Qaeda and other terrorists,  and the Supreme Court finally confirmed that Americans have an individual right to own guns.

A man who shot and killed two burglars crawling out of his neighbor's home has been cleared in court. I haven't been following this case and I don't know its details, but obviously to me, if the burglars got down on their knees and put their hands up, you don't shoot them. But according to him, they were still threatening him, which, if that is the case, makes him a hero. I bet you no one's gonna burglarize any homes in that neighborhood anytime soon.

One of the reasons I dislike political pundits is that they tend to make false predictions left and right without ever being held accountable for them. This is why, as a pundit myself, I usually stay away from making predictions, and only make them when I can solidly back them up.

Well, today is one of those rare days. After one of my friends directed my attention to the fact that my recent blog post about Obama losing Virginia amounted to a prediction, I thought I might as well turn it into a column and ask my readers to hold me accountable for it. So, here we go: Why Barack Obama Will Lose Virginia.

You may have read this piece a couple of months ago in the Wall Street Journal detailing how the American Bar Association has pressured the George Mason University School of Law to accept more minorities at lower standards, even threatening to revoke the school's accreditation.

Well, GMU Law had no other choice but to begin to comply, and the results, as we see in other affirmative action programs, were not so hot. My friend Andy Guess over at Inside Higher Ed wrote a very good (yet sad!) article about what happened to GMU Law upon being forced to accept less than qualified minorities. Excerpt (emphasis mine):

The “mismatch” theory, as it’s been called, posits that some African-American students have struggled and at times dropped out of highly competitive law schools even though they might have thrived at lower-ranked or less rigorous institutions, and gone on to pass the bar exam. The article concluded that without affirmative action, black students would be better “matched” with institutions that meet their qualifications, and that disparities in failure rates would disappear.

Now, an organization that opposes race-conscious admissions policies asserts that it has found data from one particular institution illustrating the sort of dynamic the study would predict. According to data obtained through a public records request, from 2003 to 2005 some 45 percent of African-American students at George Mason University School of Law, outside of Washington, had grade-point averages below 2.15, defined as “academic failure.” For the rest of the student body, however, the figure was 4 percent.

Insane, isn't it?

Gail Herot, author of the WSJ piece I linked above, adds in her blog:

The pity is that, as Richard Sander's research suggests, some of these who failed at GMU might have succeeded at less competitive schools and had a greater chance of ultimately passing the bar.  Because somebody at the ABA thought that it was more important for George Mason's student body to look like America, a number of students have now wasted a year of their lives and saddled themselves with debt with little or no chance of ever practicing law.

A pity indeed.

Congratulations to all those of us who love and cherish the Second Amendment! Yesterday, the Supreme Court confirmed that the Second Amendment does indeed protect individuals' right to own guns.

I would like to congratulate everyone who worked so hard on both this case and this cause, particularly the fine people at my law school, the George Mason University School of Law, who helped like no other legal academics and students ever would.

I haven't yet had the time to read Scalia's decision in is entirety, but I found this amusing piece in a news article:

Scalia noted that the handgun is Americans' preferred weapon of self-defense in part because "it can be pointed at a burglar with one hand while the other hand dials the police."

First, the Spanish socialists turn their back on Iraq and withdraw their contribution to Iraqi human rights.

Then, they turn around and gives those same rights of "life" and "freedom" to apes in Spain.

What insanity.