Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Red State Update Pull an Alec Baldwin

Personally, I’d prefer moing to Australia, but YMMV:

RSU on the Election

How did I forget to check out Jackie and Dunlap for their take on the election?

I wonder what the job market’s like for law professors in Australia?

Fire Diantha Harris

My gosh, but I’m glad I don’t have kids in public schools:

This “teacher” is grossly abusing free speech and academic freedom. Unfortunately, she’s probably got tenure and civil service protection. If I had my druthers, she’d be fired today. (HT: Hot Air)

Good for us

John Hawkins on how the right is coping with defeat:

… you’d think the howling would have been unearthly after Obama’s victory. There should be conservatives threatening to move overseas, on medication, heading off to the psychologist, and non-stop attacks on the American people for being so stupid. Why not? After all, that’s what the left did after their loss in 2004.

And yet, the most common reaction across the right side of the blogosphere was either a congratulations to Obama, a recognition that having the first black president was a historic moment for America, or some combination thereof.

Beyond that, there was a real sense of the need to get back to work rebuilding the conservative movement to get ready for 2010 and, naturally, a dread of what the Democrats may do to the country over the next four years.

He’s got a point. You just don’t see conservatives rioting in the streets when they lose. Liberals are another story.

Indeed, the only post-election protest I’ve encountered (or even heard of) was the one last night in West Hollywood by groups upset by Proposition 8’s passage:

The passage of California’s Proposition 8 — a ballot measure that sought to amend the state’s constitution to eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry — has sparked outrage and sadness among gays in that state. It’s also provoked protests, riots and lawsuits. ...What began as a small protest of 1,000 swelled to more than 4,000 before the night was through. Protesters blocked traffic, and reports suggest that up to seven people were arrested for disturbing the peace. Aerial footage of the protest also seems to indicate that police used force against at least some of those who attended the rally. Other footage shows at least one marcher standing atop a police car. He was wrestled to the ground by police.

An additional group of about 500 protesters gathered outside CNN’s Los Angeles bureau, where they were seen banging on the doors and walls and hoisting signs protesting the ban. In response to the rally, the Los Angeles Police Department issued a tactical alert, which called on all the department’s officers, and some from surrounding precincts, to respond.

It was “largely peaceful” but hardly convenient for those us trying to get through West Hollywood to get home ... and more than a little scary too.

Treasury Secretarys I Could Live With

Fortune:

Fortune believes that former Treasury Secretary Lawrence (Larry) Summers is in the lead to get the job [of Treasury Secretary]. Summers, who served in the Clinton Administration, wouldn’t be a surprise pick. He along with other economic experts, ex-Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and former chairman of the Federal Reserve Paul Volcker, have advised Obama during the campaign, especially as the economic crisis unfolded. Volcker is said to be highly interested in the Treasury job, but Summers, with support from Rubin, has the inside track.

Volcker isn’t out campaigning for the post, but wouldn’t mind getting it because he believes he could help Obama figure a way out of this mess. Still energetic at 81, Volcker thinks he has the mojo to do so.

One knock on Summers are some controversial comments he made about men and women and innate intelligence and other subjects while serving as president of Harvard. Even so, don’t be surprised if Larry Summers is named the next Treasury secretary.

Volcker’s probably too old for the job, but he doesn’t get enough credit these days for having had the stones to do what was necessary to break the stagflation cycle. He was overshadowed by Alan Greenspan, but in many ways was a much better Fed Chairman than Greenspan. He’s one of the few Carter appointments that still looks good thirty years later.

Larry Summers is a grown up in a party with too many nutroot kids. Along with Robert Rubin, he did a pretty good job of running the economy during the Clinton years (although he was helped by being in office during the right part fo the economic cycle and having a GOP Congress to dampen the spirits of the economic liberals in the Clinton administration). Plus, if you judge a man by his enemies, the people he pissed off while at Harvard stand as a great recommendation in his favor.

Summers recently wrote of the financial crisis and the coming political fallout that:

All of these considerations suggest that the pendulum will swing – and should swing – towards an enhanced role for government in saving the market system from its excesses and inadequacies. Policymakers need to be attentive to potential government flaws as well. For example, they need to recognise that, even as events compel larger deficits in the short run, they reinforce the need for longer-term measures to keep government finances on a sound footing. They must also be wary of measures that have a short-term superficial appeal, yet have adverse long-term consequences.

I can live with the guy who wrote that running the economy.

This week just keeps going from bad to worse: FFB version

The week started off badly with a horrible football Sunday (the real world Redskins and my fantasy football Bruinskins and Redbruins teams all lost). Then there was the election. Today in class a student pointed out that I had said something contrary to what was in the book, which is always a problem because I wrote the damn book!

Now I learn that Steven Jackson is almost certainly out for Sunday’s game. The combination of Drew Brees and Steven Jackson had been a strong 1-2 punch for the Bruinskins. Now, however, I am left to choose between Maurice Jones-Drew. Julius Jones, and Deuce McAlister, none of whom have exactly set the world on fire recently.

Once again, I’m also left wishing this were a PPR league. With Andre Johnson, Wes Welker, and either Donnie Avery or Steve Breaston at WR, I’d be golden in a PPR format.

Incipient Toryism

The very same Beltway elites that got the GOP into trouble apparently are about to meet to plan a recovery:

20 leading conservatives will gather Thursday at the home of Media Research Center chairman Brent Bozell.

“There will be about twenty key leaders attending who are either top fundraisers or grassroots organizers, along with several political strategists,” says Keith Appell, a Republican consultant who helped to organize the meeting.

Other attendees include Leonard Leo, the executive vice president of the Federalist Society and an adviser to the Bush White House on judicial and Catholic issues, Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform and Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council.

Why we should trust Norquist or Perkins with the future of conservatism is beyond me. They’re at the core of the problem.

In any event, I think we need to take David Frum’s argument seriously:

In the wake of yesterday’s bruising result, the Republican party faces an excruciating and divisive choice between two very different futures.

The first choice is the choice on display at the excited rallies that cheered Sarah Palin all through the fall. This is a choice to fall back on the core base of the Republican party. The base is almost entirely white, almost entirely resident in the middle of the country, moderately affluent, middle-aged and older, more male than female, with some college education but not a college degree. Think of Joe the Plumber and you see the core of the Republican party. ...

Joe has not changed much over the past two decades or so. But the country has. The Hispanic population of the United States has almost doubled since 1990. The proportion of white Americans with a college degree has jumped from 22% in 1990 to almost 28 ½% . ...

Frum contends that these demographic realities render continued reliance on the Joes a losing propostion. trying to rally them with a Sarah Palin-type candidate won;t work. Instead, Frum argues for a second path:

A generation ago, Republicans dominated among college graduates. In 1984 and 1988, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush won states like California, Pennsylvania and Connecticut – states that have been “blue” for a generation. (America’s least educated state, West Virginia, went for Michael Dukakis in 1988.)

Those days are long gone. Since 1988, Democrats have become more conservative on economics – and Republicans have become more conservative on social issues.

College-educated Americans have come to believe that their money is safe with Democrats – but that their values are under threat from Republicans. And there are more and more of these college-educated Americans all the time.

So the question for the GOP is: Will it pursue them? To do so will involve painful change, on issues ranging from the environment to abortion. And it will involve potentially even more painful changes of style and tone: toward a future that is less overtly religious, less negligent with policy, and less polarizing on social issues. That’s a future that leaves little room for Sarah Palin – but the only hope for a Republican recovery.

The analogy here thus is to see Barack Obama’s election as the equivalent of Tony Blair’s 1997 victory in the UK. Just as the Tories were exhausted and corrupt, so too are the current GOP leaders. Just as John Major bumbled the Thatcher legacy, George Bush bumbled the Reagan legacy.

In order for the Tories to recover, they had to find somebody like David Cameron who could convince the UK electorate that their values would be as safe with the Tories as with Labour.

Who then is the Republican Cameron and what would he/she stand for? As for the latter, let’s look at some Cameron policies that might help the GOP broaden its base without abandoning its core principles:

• Reduce government budget deficits
• Accepting that human activity contributes to global warming and using some combination of a carbon tax and cap-and-trade programs to address it.
• Telling Big Oil to take a hike.
• A fuel price stabilizer tax under which the tax goes up as oil prices come down and vice-versa?
• Explain why free trade is in American interests in a way Bush never did.
• Pro-life but willing to accept that political reality requires that abortion should be legal, safe, and rare, with an emphasis on the latter.
• Educational reform that busts the teachers’ union monopoly on education.
• Federal civil partnerships for nontraditional couples, along with bans on discrimination against LGBT people.
• Decriminalization of pot and an emphasis on treatment rather then imprisonment for more serious drug offenders.
• Defend fox hunting (okay, I’m just kidding about that one).
• Sensible immigration reform and border security, only after which we address the issue of regularzing the existing undocumented population.
• A return to the realist school of conservative foreign policy and a repudiation of the Bush foreign policy.

My kind of insider trading ring

DealBook:

A former Goldman Sachs analyst accused of running a $6.7 million insider-trading ring — an international network that included a Merrill Lynch research analyst, an exotic dancer and a Croatian underwear seamstress — has gone missing and may have fled the United States, a lawyer for the Securities and Exchange Commisssion said late Monday.

If I were going to have an insider trading ring, I’d want to have an exotic dancer and an underwear seamstress in my ring.

BTW, I wonder what kind of underwear? The kind exotic dancers wear or tidy whities?