Later On

The news industry has been subverted from its normal mission of reporting fact-based stories and speaking truth to power. It’s been co-opted by political hit men. Mark Bowden in the Atlantic Monthly:

If you happened to be watching a television news channel on May 26, the day President Obama nominated U.S. Circuit Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, you might have been struck, as I was, by what seemed like a nifty investigative report.

First came the happy announcement ceremony at the White House, with Sotomayor sweetly saluting her elderly mother, who as a single parent had raised the prospective justice and her brother in a Bronx housing project. Obama had chosen a woman whose life journey mirrored his own: an obscure, disadvantaged beginning followed by blazing academic excellence, an Ivy League law degree, and a swift rise to power. It was a moving TV moment, well-orchestrated and in perfect harmony with the central narrative of the new Obama presidency.

But then, just minutes later, journalism rose to perform its time-honored pie-throwing role. Having been placed by the president on a pedestal, Sotomayor was now a clear target. I happened to be watching Fox News. I was slated to appear that night on one of its programs, Hannity, to serve as a willing foil to the show’s cheerfully pugnacious host, Sean Hannity, a man who can deliver a deeply held conservative conviction on any topic faster than the speed of thought. Since the host knew what the subject matter of that night’s show would be and I did not, I’d thought it best to check in and see what Fox was preoccupied with that afternoon.

With Sotomayor, of course—and the network’s producers seemed amazingly well prepared. They showed a clip from remarks she had made on an obscure panel at Duke University in 2005, and then, reaching back still farther, they showed snippets from a speech she had made at Berkeley Law School in 2001. Here was this purportedly moderate Latina judge, appointed to the federal bench by a Republican president and now tapped for the Supreme Court by a Democratic one, unmasked as a Race Woman with an agenda. In one clip she announced herself as someone who believed her identity as a “Latina woman” (a redundancy, but that’s what she said) made her judgment superior to that of a “white male,” and in the other she all but unmasked herself as a card-carrying member of the Left Wing Conspiracy to use America’s courts not just to apply and interpret the law but, in her own words, to make policy, to perform an end run around the other two branches of government and impose liberal social policies by fiat on an unsuspecting American public.

In the Duke clip, she not only stated that appellate judges make policy, she did so in a disdainful mock disavowal before a chuckling audience of apparently like-minded conspirators. “I know this is on tape and I should never say that, because we don’t make law, I know,” she said before being interrupted by laughter. “Okay, I know. I’m not promoting it, I’m not advocating it, I’m … you know,” flipping her hands dismissively. More laughter.

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Glenn Greenwald explains an important concept that many seem to overlook:

In 2006, when the British police — using (among other things) electronic surveillance conducted by both the U.S. and British Governments — thwarted a Terrorist plot to blow up transcontinental airplanes over the Atlantic Ocean, right-wing polemicists everywhere claimed that this was vindication for the Bush/Cheney warrantless eavesdropping program.  But there was one rather enormous problem with that claim:  namely, the surveillance in question was entirely legal, conducted by obtaining warrants under the supervision of the FISA court where required by law.  The disruption of that Terrorist plot thus proved exactly the opposite of what was widely claimed:  namely, the extremely broad parameters of FISA easily allowed surveillance of dangerous Terrorists, and there was therefore no need to break the law as Bush officials did.  But because the distinction between “legal” and “illegal” is no longer recognized when it comes to government acts, that fact eluded virtually all discussions of the British airplane plot.  To prove that “legal surveillance is good” was to prove that “Bush’s illegal eavesdropping was justified.”

Yesterday, the three individuals who spearheaded that Terrorist plot were convicted in a British court.  The New York Times‘ Robert Mackey wrote about these convictions today and noted that a major piece of evidence used in the trial was email messages intercepted by the National Security Agency.  Mackey ends his commentary with this question — one he obviously thinks is both piercing and provocative:

Given the continuing controversy in the United States over N.S.A. surveillance when it involves U.S. citizens, do readers who oppose letting the authorities read the private e-mail correspondence of Americans feel any differently about the issue knowing that the agency’s monitoring of these foreign nationals may have helped disrupt a major plot in this case?

This reflects the core ignorance — the central deceit — that has driven national security discussions in the U.S. since 9/11, at least.  Contrary to Mackey’s assumption, there is no controversy over whether the NSA should be able to engage in surveillance of telephone conversations and emails.  There is virtually nobody who believes that the NSA should be barred from intercepting the emails or eavesdropping on the telephone conversations of actual Terrorist suspects.  The category of people to whom Mackey purports to address his question — those who “oppose letting the authorities read the private e-mail correspondence of Americans” — does not exist in any meaningful number, and it never has.  To frame the issue this way is to reveal a radical ignorance of the issues — almost four years after his newspaper first revealed the illegal eavesdropping program.

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Interesting article by Will Wilkinson in the new issue of Atlantic Monthly:

As the clock struck midnight on April 17, 2009, the Canadian citizenship of my Saskatchewan-born but subsequently naturalized American father was restored. And thus, thanks to Bill C-37, an amendment to the Canadian Citizenship Act, so was mine. Under its terms, all Canadians who had lost their citizenship when they took on a new nationality—i.e., Canadians like my dad, who became an American in June 1965—regained it, as did their first generation of offspring.

Maybe it takes an Iowan to get stoked about becoming Canadian, but I was sufficiently stoked to travel to Ottawa a couple days shy of this magical moment so that I would suddenly become always Canadian in Canada’s capital, among other so-called lost Canadians.

I work for a libertarian think tank, and libertarians are supposed to disdain the land of poutine and Dan Aykroyd for its socialist health-care system and general failure to really love liberty. Yet not only can you get gay-married in any of the provinces, or almost-legally toke up in your toque up there, but Canada’s economy is also slightly freer than that of the global hegemon to its south. According to the Cato Institute, at least.

But even more important to me is the conviction—a libertarian conviction, I believe—that crossing national borders ought to differ little from crossing the imagined line between Iowa and Minnesota. That’s really why I’m so keen about being Canadian. I want my own boundaries to widen, as I’d like everyone’s boundaries to widen. Also, I can now put the Canadian flag on my backpack.

After dining with other lost Canadians the evening before I became a citizen, I found myself walking the not-so-mean streets of Ottawa alone an hour before midnight. So I wandered into the Royal Oak, an English pub on Bank Street. I persuaded some game locals, Austin and Rachelle, to share a toast and snap my picture in front of the Maple Leaf hanging behind the bar. Midnight! To gain a citizenship in one magical moment, without exertion or will, is to experience as an adult the national baptism that comes with birth. I felt exhilarated, if a bit of a fraud. Austin and Rachelle were exceedingly kind to me. We exchanged cell-phone numbers. We agreed to connect on Facebook. We all understood that I am a thoroughgoing American, qualifying as Canadian through a weird technicality. But they were happy for me, happy to have me. Because they’re Canadians, I suppose.

My first full day as a citizen turned out to be overclimactically surreal…

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A family-values Republican, of course. Brad Johnson reports at ThinkProgress:

A “family values” California legislator has been caught on tape bragging about having sex in his office with two different women, both married and both lobbyists. Michael Duvall, who sits on the “Rules Committee that oversees member ethics,” was recorded at a public hearing by a committee room microphone he evidently did not realize was turned on. KCAL-9 reporter Dave Lopez revealed yesterday that Republican Michael Duvall, a two-time assemblyman representing Yorba Linda who is married with two grown children, was recorded “talking about a very sensitive subject into a hot microphone without realizing it”:

She wears little eye-patch underwear. So the other day she came here with her underwear, Thursday. And we made love Wednesday a lot. … I like spanking her. She goes, “I know you like spanking me.” I said, “Yeah, that’s ’cause you’re such a bad girl.”

Watch it:

K-CAL’s Lopez relates that sources told him Duvall “loves to talk about his quote sexual conquests,” and “it’s very difficult to get him to change the subject.” According to the OC Weekly, one of the lobbyists Duvall is having sex with is Heidi De Jong Barsuglia, who became a lobbyist for a major California utility after Duvall became vice chairman of the utilities committee:

In April — two months after Duvall became vice chairman of the Utilities & Commerce committee — privately owned California utility giant Sempra Energy hired Barsuglia as one of its top lobbyists, according to Secretary of State records.

Sempra has given Duvall “$1,500 in campaign contributions,” and in May, “the assemblyman officially adopted the company’s negative view on Assembly Bill 64, which proposes increasing the percentage of electricity the utilities must procure from environmentally sensitive sources.”

The anti-gay-marriage Capitol Resource Institute’s Karen England has praised Duvall for voting “time and time again to protect and preserve family values in California,” giving him a “perfect 100% score.”

Update Assembly Speaker Karen Bass today stripped Duvall "of his spot as vice-chair of the Assembly Utilities and Commerce Committee."

For some reason, those funding efforts to lobby Congress don’t want their names known. They’d rather remain anonymous, for some reason. Wonder why? Bart Jansen in Congressional Quarterly:

When contributors hand over money to a trade group that’s lobbying on a bill before Congress, the public has a right to know who’s putting up that cash, a federal appeals panel has ruled.

In an opinion issued Tuesday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld a relatively recent law requiring public donor lists.

The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) had challenged the disclosure provision in the 2007 ethics overhaul law (PL 110-81), arguing that the First Amendment’s guarantee of the right to petition Congress means that financial backers of lobbying efforts should be allowed to remain anonymous.

The judges said that a Supreme Court decision more than 50 years ago, United States vs. Harriss, found that “who is being hired, who is putting up the money, and how much” to influence legislation are “a vital national interest.”

“Because nothing has transpired in the last half-century to suggest that the national interest in public disclosure of lobbying information is any less vital than it was when the Supreme Court first considered the issue, we reject that challenge,” said the 48-page appellate opinion.

The goal of the current law’s provision was to learn more about who was funding lobbying campaigns that were sometimes hidden behind bland names of advocacy groups.

Failing to comply with the disclosure law could result in …

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Linda in Santa Cruz thinks highly of this car wash—which has the additional benefit of being environmentally conscious. If you have a car, give it a go. From the link:

Price: 9.99  
- 24 oz waterless car wash
- cleans your entire vehicle without a hose
- promotes lustrous shine and beading
- 4 – 6 car washes per bottle
- non-toxic, biodegradable and phosphate-free

No more hose, bucket, or soapy mess. How? Simply spray your car with our waterless car wash formula, wipe clean and admire away. Eco Touch will leave your car — and your conscience — clean.

Directions:
1. Shake bottle well.
2. Spray on a microfiber towel and cool car surface.
3. Gently wipe and lift to pick up grime.
4. Quickly use a second dry towel and buff to shine.

For excessively soiled surfaces (mud or sand) pre-rinse first with water.

Interesting column by Jeff Stein at Congressional Quarterly:

So another semester begins.

Like anxious parents everywhere, we’ve got our fingers crossed that this will be the year the kid finally turns it around.

Let’s face it — after the past decade, it’s a triumph of hope over experience.

But this September there’s reason for some optimism: The CIA seems to have shed the bad influences it was hanging with and shown signs of bearing down on what’s important.

The best evidence of this came, ironically, in the agency’s explosive inspector general report, further declassified last month.

What might not have been readily apparent from all the coverage is that the CIA’s own good guys (and gals, it must be said) struggled long and hard against the juvies in the White House and Justice Department — and their own outfit — who began leading the spy agency astray after 9/11.

As the FBI counterterrorism specialist Ali Soufan wrote on Sunday, “The inspector general’s report was written precisely because many of the CIA operatives complained about what they were being ordered to do.”

As for beating up detainees, Soufan added, “the professionals in the field are relieved that an ineffective, unreliable, unnecessary and destructive program — one that may have given Al Qaeda a second wind and damaged our country’s reputation — is finished.”

We dearly hope. Because it’s time for the CIA to complete the kind of job it was invented for: the utter subversion and destruction of al Qaeda, and, hopefully, the top rungs of the Taliban as well, starting with the long elusive Mullah Omar.

If you don’t think killing or capturing Osama Bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and their henchmen are of much relevance anymore, try to imagine President Obama withdrawing ground troops from Afghanistan without at least one of those heads on a pike…

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Instead of facilitating the corporate rape of the environment. Brad Johnson at ThinkProgress:

In a letter issued last week, the Environmental Protection Agency “moved toward revoking the largest mountaintop-removal permit in West Virginia history.” Citing “clear evidence” of likely damage, the EPA has asked the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to “suspend, revoke or modify” the permit it granted in 2007 to Arch Coal to dig a 2,278-acre coal stripmine and fill six valleys and 43,000 linear feet of streams with the toxic debris:

The EPA asked the Army Corps to “suspend, revoke or modify the permit,” for the Spruce No. 1 Surface Mine in Logan County, according to the letter. “Recent data and analyses have revealed that downstream water quality impacts have not been adequately addressed.”

Obama’s EPA has granted most of the mountaintop removal permits it has reviewed. “It’s not the death of mountaintop coal mining,” said Mary Anne Hitt, deputy director of the Sierra Club’s campaign to limit the use of coal, told Bloomberg News. “But it’s clear that it’s not just going to be blanket approval of anything the Corps wants to do, which was essentially the case under the Bush administration.”

And can’t we get rid of the Army Corps of Engineers?

Amanda Terkel in ThinkProgress:

The Arlington Independent School District in Texas decided not to show President Obama’s address to students live yesterday because it reportedly didn’t want to interrupt its regularly scheduled lesson plans. However, the district has now decided to bus its students off-campus on Sept. 21 to hear President Bush speak:

District officials said it’s part of a Cowboys Stadium field trip that the North Texas Super Bowl Host Committee invited 28 fifth-grade classes to attend several months ago.

In addition to hearing from Bush and former first lady Laura Bush, the students will hear from legendary Dallas Cowboys players and North Texas business and community leaders. The event launches the Super Bowl committee’s largest-ever youth education program.

Dwight McKissic, the pastor at the Cornerstone Baptist Church, which offered an alternative venue for Arlington families wishing to listen to the President yesterday, criticized the school district’s “blatant double standard.” “Why is it appropriate for students to hear from former President Bush on Sept. 21 at the Cowboy[s] Stadium, but inappropriate for the current president to address students while they remain on school campuses?” McKissic asked. (HT: Raw Story)

The Semogue 750 silvertip badger brush worked up a fine lather from the Art of Shaving Lemon shave soap—not so fragrant as Honeybee Spa’s Fresh Lemon shaving soap with shea butter, but still a very good lather. The Mühle R41 open-comb razor with a new Astra Keramik Platinum blade provided an excellent smooth shave. This is an open comb design that, like the early Gillette’s and today’s Merkur open comb razors, places the blade’s edge directly on the comb. It certainly didn’t hamper its shaving abilities: I got a truly wonderful shave. The razor is lighter than I expected: the gauge of the metal in the hollow handle is not so thick as I thought it would be. Still, a fine shave and aptly finished with Thayers Lemon Witch Hazel with Aloe Vera (and 10% alcohol: astringent).

Andrew Sullivan, a conservative, has a lengthy open letter to former President Bush in the new issue of Atlantic Monthly:

Dear President Bush,

We have never met, and so I hope you will forgive the personal nature of this letter. I guess I should start by saying I supported your presidential campaign in 2000, as I did your father’s in 1988, and lauded your first efforts to wage war against jihadist terrorism in the wake of 9/11. Some of my praise of your leadership at the time actually makes me blush in retrospect, but your September 20, 2001, address to Congress really was one of the finest in modern times; your immediate grasp of the import of 9/11—a declaration of war—was correct; and your core judgment—that religious fanaticism allied with weapons of mass destruction represents a unique and new threat to the West—was and is dead-on. I remain proud of my support for you in all this. No one should forget the pure evil of September 11; no one should doubt the continued determination of an enemy prepared to slaughter thousands in cold blood in pursuit of heaven on Earth.

Of course, like most advocates of the Iraq War, I grew dismayed at what I saw as the mistakes that followed: the failure to capture Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora; the intelligence fiasco of Saddam’s nonexistent stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction; the failure to prepare for an insurgency in Iraq; the reckless disbandment of the Iraqi army; the painful slowness in adapting to drastically worsening conditions there in 2004–06; the negligence toward Afghanistan.

These were all serious errors; but they were of a kind often made in the chaos of war. And even your toughest critics concede that, eventually, you adjusted tactics and strategy. You took your time, but you evaded catastrophe in temporarily stabilizing Iraq. I also agree with the guiding principle of the war you proclaimed from the start: that expanding democracy and human rights is indispensable in the long-term fight against jihadism. And I believe, as you do, that a foreign policy that does not understand the universal yearning for individual freedom and dignity is not a recognizably American foreign policy.

Yet it is precisely because of that belief that I lost faith in your war. In long wars of ideas, moral integrity is essential to winning, and framing the moral contrast between the West and its enemies as starkly as possible is indispensable to victory, as it was in the Second World War and the Cold War. But because of the way you chose to treat prisoners in American custody in wartime—a policy that degraded human beings with techniques typically deployed by brutal dictatorships—we lost this moral distinction early, and we have yet to regain it. That truth hangs over your legacy as a stain that has yet to be removed. As more facts emerge, the stain could darken further. You would like us to move on. So would the current president. But we cannot unless we find a way to address that stain, to confront and remove it.

I have come to accept that it would be too damaging and polarizing to the American polity to launch legal prosecutions against you, and deeply unfair to solely prosecute those acting on your orders or in your name. President Obama’s decision thus far to avoid such prosecutions is a pragmatic and bipartisan one in a time of war, as is your principled refusal to criticize him publicly in his first months. But moving on without actually confronting or addressing the very grave evidence of systematic abuse and torture under your administration poses profound future dangers. It gives the impression that nothing immoral or illegal took place. Indeed, since leaving office, your own vice president has even bragged of these interrogation techniques; and many in your own party threaten to reinstate such policies in the future. Their extreme rhetoric seems likely to shape—to contaminate—history’s view of your presidency, indeed of the Bush name, and the world’s view of America. But my biggest fear is this: in the event of a future attack on the United States, another president will feel tempted, or even politically compelled, to resort to the same brutalizing policy, with the same polarizing, demoralizing, war-crippling results. I am writing you now because it is within your power—and only within your power—to prevent that from happening.

Don’t misunderstand me…

Continue reading.

I got my new marble mouse for my laptop, and I find that I like it just fine—a great relief, since I didn’t like the other trackball much at all.

The problem is my familial tremor, which made this trackball not work at all: my thumb was unsteady.

But this one, the Marble Mouse, seems to work well except for lacking a scroll wheel.

Blogged from the laptop.

Daphne Eviatar in the Washington Independent:

Few innocent victims of post-9/11 counter-terrorism policies have been able to sustain their claims against government officials in federal courts, although many have tried.  But on Friday, a federal appeals court held that a U.S. citizen detained for more than two weeks as a “material witness” and then released under severe restrictions can sue former Attorney General John Ashcroft for the policy that led to his treatment. The court also held that the U.S. government cannot “preventively” detain or investigate suspects.

Abdullah al-Kidd, a Kansan who converted to Islam in college, was arrested in 2003 after he and his wife became targets of an FBI anti-terrorism investigation involving surveillance of Arab and Muslim men. The FBI never found any evidence against al-Kidd, but believed he might have information that would be useful to another prosecution. Although al-Kidd agreed to cooperate, the FBI detained him for the next 16 days in high-security prisons in Virginia, Oklahoma and Idaho. Strip-searched and shackled, he was kept in a cell that was lit 24 hours a day.

Al-Kidd was finally allowed to leave, but only if he promised to live at his in-laws’ home in Nevada, limit his travel to only four states, report regularly to a probation officer and consent to home visits for more than a year. Fifteen months’ later, he and his wife had separated, and al-Kidd was fired from his job after he was denied a security clearance due to his arrest, he claims. He was also denied a chance to study in Saudi Arabia on a scholarship.

Al-Kidd was never charged with any crime or called as a witness in any trial.

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Daphne Eviatar in the Washington Independent:

In surprising slap-in-the-face order to the government, a federal judge ruled last month that a court can require the government to disclose classified information to an individual with security clearance even if the executive branch doesn’t want to.

Steven Aftergood at Secrecy News reports that Judge Royce Lamberth in Washington, D.C., ruled on August 26 in the case of Richard A. Horn v. Franklin Huddle, Jr. that the parties in the lawsuit need to be able to discuss classified information they possess with their lawyers. The case was brought by a former agent of the Drug Enforcement Agency who says his home in Burma was illegally wiretapped by the CIA in 1993 (apparently via a government-issued coffee table) because they didn’t like his work on the Burmese drug trade.Although the government tried to argue that the case should be dismissed on “state secrets” grounds, as it has many other cases, Judge Lamberth disagreed, and noted that the government had lied to the court about the information it said was secret. Judge Lamberth was therefore not inclined to trust the government’s judgment on what “classified” information could be viewed by the attorneys involved.

“The deference generally granted the Executive Branch in matters of classification and national security must yield when the Executive attempts to exert control over the courtroom,” Judge Lamberth wrote.

When you get caught telling lies, people stop trusting you. I thought everyone knew that. (Cf. The Boy Who Cried "Wolf!")

David Weigel of the Washington Independent has the latest example:

On July 15, with little fanfare, Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.) introduced the Czar Accountability and Reform (CZAR) Act of 2009,* written to prohibit taxpayer funds from paying the salaries at “any task force, council, or similar office which is established by or at the direction of the President and headed by an individual who has been inappropriately appointed to such position (on other than an interim basis), without the advice and consent of the Senate.”

Since then, Kingston has gotten 34 co-sponsors, including Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.), and four co-sponsors of the infamous “birther” bill–Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.), Rep. John Carter (R-Texas), Rep. John Campbell (R-Calif.), and Rep. Ted Poe (R-Texas). And according to Kingston’s spokesman Chris Crawford, the number of co-sponsors may go as high as 70 today, when members who expressed interest in the bill over the August recess are added on.

As I’ve pointed out, half of the people listed on a popular list of “czars” were either confirmed by the Senate or hold jobs created by previous presidents. Crawford said that Kingston’s own list of “czars” is at 34, but includes seven people who actually went through Senate confirmation hearings. “If you’re confirmed by the Senate, you’ve gone through the process, filled out applications, and answered tough questions,” said Crawford. Nonetheless, Kingston appeared “Your World With Neil Cavuto” and went after “Science Czar” John Holdren, the Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy who was confirmed unanimously by the Senate.

The list of co-sponsors so far: …

Continue reading.

And with a link to the talk. Information in the spreadsheet at the link:

• URL
• Speaker
• Name of talk
• Short Summary
• Event
• Duration
• Publish date

Take a look:

And the recipe sounds as tasty as the photo looks—plus it’s easy. Here we can also use fresh tomatillos, instead of canned. (Monica lives in the UK.)

From last April, Dan Gardner in The Ottawa Citizen:

Writing in The American Interest, esteemed political scientist Francis Fukuyama called on the United States to do more to help Mexico in its battle with the drug trade — namely by boosting security on both sides of the border and assisting reform of the Mexican justice system. So far, so routine. But then Fukuyama made an interesting observation.

The ultimate source of the problem, Fukuyama noted, is American demand for illicit drugs — and "the most straightforward way to reduce demand, of course, would be legalization under a tightly controlled regime."

Note the phrase "of course." Fukuyama is a leading American thinker, a conservative, whose views are widely respected by powerful people. And he is saying, almost with a shrug, that it’s perfectly obvious that legalization would do away with the most terrible problems associated with illicit drugs.

But then politics rushes in. "While legalization has been proposed by many people over the years," Fukuyama writes, "it has very little chance of being enacted by Congress, and therefore is not for the time being a realistic policy choice."

For those of us who think the criminal prohibition of the production, sale, and possession of (some) drugs is the single most destructive public policy of the last century, Fukuyama’s argument may be frustrating. First, he raises the possibility that serious policy thinkers finally get it. Then, he dismisses legalization as a fantasy.

But keep some history in mind.

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Another interesting article in The Washington Monthly, this one by Kevin Carey:

Like millions of other Americans, Barbara Solvig lost her job this year. A fifty-year-old mother of three, Solvig had taken college courses at Northeastern Illinois University years ago, but never earned a degree. Ever since, she had been forced to settle for less money than coworkers with similar jobs who had bachelor’s degrees. So when she was laid off from a human resources position at a Chicago-area hospital in January, she knew the time had come to finally get her own credential. Doing that wasn’t going to be easy, because four-year degrees typically require two luxuries Solvig didn’t have: years of time out of the workforce, and a great deal of money.

Luckily for Solvig, there were new options available. She went online looking for something that fit her wallet and her time horizon, and an ad caught her eye: a company called StraighterLine was offering online courses in subjects like accounting, statistics, and math. This was hardly unusual—hundreds of institutions are online hawking degrees. But one thing about StraighterLine stood out: it offered as many courses as she wanted for a flat rate of $99 a month. “It sounds like a scam,” Solvig thought—she’d run into a lot of shady companies and hard-sell tactics on the Internet. But for $99, why not take a risk?

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Very interesting article in The Washington Monthly by Tim Murphy:

People who pay attention to the field of higher education like to joke that it took decades for the overhead projector to make its way from the bowling alley to the classroom. Of course, this being academia, no one can quite agree on just how much time passed—some say thirty years, some say ten, some say forty—but the point generally goes unchallenged: colleges are conservative to a fault when it comes to incorporating new ideas. Up until the late nineteenth century, most American colleges were still feeding their students a curriculum developed in medieval Europe; faculty are still employed on a tenure system whose sole purpose seems to be to reward good work by taking away any incentive to ever do it again.

Nevertheless, ever since the first professor fell asleep during his own lecture, educators have been trying, and failing, to overhaul the system. The history of American higher education, for all the system’s enduring institutions, is littered with next big things, those game-changing innovations that were almost certainly going to add a new dimension to the Quadrangles—until they didn’t. Think of them as the Segway motorized scooters and Dippin’ Dots ice cream of higher education. So as we wait for the Internet to wash away the Ivory Tower, here’s a quick look at some of the paths not taken.

Let the people rule. Few big ideas have failed as fantastically as the one that turned administrative affairs into a Hobbesian state of nature…

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