'If you are not illiterate, you can use civilization, monarchy, dominance, correspond, emphasize, opposition, chlorine, commotion, medicinal, irresponsible, and succession in one sentence...'

Via Mellow Jihadi:

Deportee Returns to the United States After More Than Year in Mexico

I have nothing to add on this one. The Times just makes heroic the illegals flooding over our borders.

See, "A risky return to the U.S.":

Luis Luna returned to his hometown of South Gate in May. His arms and legs were scraped raw from cactus needles and his eyes kept blinking, still starved of moisture from his eight-day journey through the Arizona desert the week before.

His friend, Julio Cortez, said it was hard to believe that this gaunt young man with patches of missing hair was the same person he knew at Southeast Middle School.

"I was in shock to see him back and see all he had gone through," Cortez said. "It made me sad and angry."

Cortez, a 22-year-old Cal State Long Beach student, took Luis to buy some clothes. Another former classmate gave Luis a cellphone. Luis slept on couches and in spare bedrooms and spent his days passing out resumes filled with the jobs of his teen years: flipping burgers, waiting tables at I-Hop. He fudged the dates to account for the 15 months he spent in Mexico after he was deported for being in the country illegally.

Luis had been pulled over three years ago for a broken headlight in Pasco, Wash., where he and his mother lived. He was cited for driving without a license, jailed and ordered out of the country in February 2011.

He had a wife back in Washington, but she had left him, in part because of the long separation. Luis decided to build a new life in Southern California, where he had grown up and where he still had friends

Weeks after arriving, he was still jobless and borrowing money to eat when he decided his future might lie in his past. He started retracing the route he took as a boy selling chocolates at warehouses and factories. The assembly line workers, truck drivers and managers knew him as Anthony, the name his mother told him to use to hide his identity.

They could vouch for his strong work ethic — that he'd been working for a living since he was 5 years old.

He eventually found the barrilero job, and a place to live. A swap meet vendor who picked through the bins of cast-offs looking for vintage garments told Luis he had extra space at his house.

Luis goes home to a converted two-car garage with no address in a middle-class neighborhood with trim lawns and streets lined with late-model cars. Much of his clothing is stuffed in a battered dark green suitcase that sits at the foot of his bed. The only other furniture is a mini refrigerator and two lawn chairs.

In some ways, he's a typical youngster with edgy tastes. He has a sleeve tattoo, wears skinny jeans and earrings, and is part of a deejay crew that plays at house parties. He cheers his beloved Los Angeles Lakers and hangs out in hookah bars, and is constantly texting flirty messages.

But his future is dimmer than most. Many of his friends are planning for life after college. Some are applying for work permits and temporary reprieves from deportation, taking advantage of an Obama administration program, announced in June, to help young people who were brought into the country as children.

Continue reading.

The Obama administration's "program."

Yeah, illegal immigrant voter registration program. Again, another massive fraud on our supposed system of rule of law. The Democrats certainly don't care.

That's all.

Progressives Push 'Social Justice' in Public Education

A great post and video at Blazing Cat Fur, "Ending Progressive Public Education."

Also at Eye Crazy, "Good news everyone! Canadian school kids are now getting Marxist indoctrination in Math class."

The Joy of Hate

Greg Gutfeld's new book, The Joy of Hate: How to Triumph over Whiners in the Age of Phony Outrage.

Gutfeld goes on about intellectual fascism, at the clip:

RELATED: "Progressives Are the Biggest Threat to Freedom of Speech in America." Progressives are the least tolerant people despite espousing tolerance as basic to their creed. They're awful, just f-ked people.

Some Texas Schools Teaching Boston Tea Party Was Terrorism

From Warner Todd Huston, at Right Wing News:

It has been revealed that some Texas schools were teaching that the Boston Tea Party, an event widely understood as having helped spark the American Revolution, was actually a “terrorist” attack on British authorities.

At least up until January of 2012, Texas schools utilizing the history curriculum from CSCOPE, a non-profit and supposedly non-partisan education service, taught that the most famous tax protest in American history was akin to terrorism.

More at that top link, and at The Blaze, "Was The Boston Tea Party Terrorism? Texas Schools Are Teaching Just That."

Butler University Liberal Arts Indoctrination

Quite the story, "STUDENTS TOLD TO DISAVOW 'AMERICAN-NESS, MALENESS, WHITENESS, HETEROSEXUALITY'."

Ideological Discrimination at University of Iowa Law School

At The TaxProf, "Jurors Agree: University of Iowa Law School Discriminated Against Faculty Applicant Due to Her Conservative Views" (via Memeorandum):

Following up on my previous posts (links below) about Teresa Wagner's federal lawsuit: Des Monies Register, Jurors Say They Saw Hiring Bias at University of Iowa; But University, Not Former Law Dean, Wronged Conservative Job Applicant:

A federal jury believed the University of Iowa’s law school illegally denied a promotion to a conservative Republican because of her politics, former jurors told The Des Moines Register.

However, jurors said they felt conflicted about holding a former dean personally responsible for the bias. They wanted to hold the school itself accountable, but federal law does not recognize political discrimination by institutions. “I will say that everyone in that jury room believed that she had been discriminated against,” said Davenport resident Carol Tracy, the jury forewoman.

Meanwhile, attorneys for Teresa Wagner on Tuesday filed a motion for a new trial in the case that scholars agree could have national implications in what some argue is the liberally slanted world of academia.

Des Moines Register editorial: U of I Needs to Respect Diversity of Thought, Too: The Claim of Political Bias in Hiring at the Law School Should Not End with the Deadlocked Jury...

Continue reading.

Hey, when you go after bias at the universities, you're hammering away at the enemy's beachhead of Marxist cultural power and ideological indoctrination.

More at Volokh, "Jurors in Bias Case Believe University of Iowa Engaged in Ideological Discrimination."

Progressives Are the Biggest Threat to Freedom of Speech in America

An excellent clip from FIRE.

Rauch, who is a far-left progressive, nails it on who's the biggest threat to freedom of speech, thought and expression in the country today. What's surprising, though, is that harassment-blogger Walter James Casper III "liked" it on Twitter --- tweeting it out a couple of times in fact. And it's ironic too, since Repsac3 is the epitome of the hateful, speech-controlling progressive that Rauch is denouncing. From racism to anti-Semitism to the recent attacks on Ann Coulter at Fordham, Repsac3 is down with it. He never, ever speaks out against it, and in fact joins in with his progressive hate-commentariat in mounting campaigns of personal destruction against those with whom he disagrees. I've chronicled Repsac3's criminal campaigns of intimidation many times. If he truly "likes" the ideas of Jonathan Rauch he should in fact practice them. Sadly, the record shows that while the demonically hate-addled Repsac3 purportedly champions this kind of classical liberal thought, his actual political loyalties are with those who stand against it. It's not just that Walter James Casper III is a stupid man. It's that he's also been psychological corrupted by progressive evil. Where there's a bodily inclination in him that says leftist thought suppression is not just wrong but massively vile, his raging primordial rage at conservatives kicks in to advance the exact kind of censorship that Rauch excoriates above. Repsac3 is a rodent of a person, and hardened, blackened chip of human refuse. Honestly, his only hope is to follow the words of people like Rauch and literally repent his ideology of hatred and secular demonology.

PREVIOUSLY: "Wall Street Journal Weekend Interview: Greg Lukianoff, 'How Free Speech Died on Campus'."

Wall Street Journal Weekend Interview: Greg Lukianoff, 'How Free Speech Died on Campus'

At the Wall Street Journal, "How Free Speech Died on Campus":

At Yale University, you can be prevented from putting an F. Scott Fitzgerald quote on your T-shirt. At Tufts, you can be censured for quoting certain passages from the Quran. Welcome to the most authoritarian institution in America: the modern university—"a bizarre, parallel dimension," as Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, calls it.

Mr. Lukianoff, a 38-year-old Stanford Law grad, has spent the past decade fighting free-speech battles on college campuses. The latest was last week at Fordham University, where President Joseph McShane scolded College Republicans for the sin of inviting Ann Coulter to speak.

"To say that I am disappointed with the judgment and maturity of the College Republicans . . . would be a tremendous understatement," Mr. McShane said in a Nov. 9 statement condemning the club's invitation to the caustic conservative pundit. He vowed to "hold out great contempt for anyone who would intentionally inflict pain on another human being because of their race, gender, sexual orientation, or creed."

To be clear, Mr. McShane didn't block Ms. Coulter's speech, but he said that her presence would serve as a "test" for Fordham. A day later, the students disinvited Ms. Coulter. Mr. McShane then praised them for having taken "responsibility for their decisions" and expressing "their regrets sincerely and eloquently."

Mr. Lukianoff says that the Fordham-Coulter affair took campus censorship to a new level: "This was the longest, strongest condemnation of a speaker that I've ever seen in which a university president also tried to claim that he was defending freedom of speech."

I caught up with Mr. Lukianoff at New York University in downtown Manhattan, where he was once targeted by the same speech restrictions that he has built a career exposing. Six years ago, a student group at the university invited him to participate in a panel discussion about the Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad that had sparked violent rioting by Muslims across the world.

When Muslim students protested the event, NYU threatened to close the panel to the public if the offending cartoons were displayed. The discussion went on—without the cartoons. Instead, the student hosts displayed a blank easel, registering their own protest.

"The people who believe that colleges and universities are places where we want less freedom of speech have won," Mr. Lukianoff says. "If anything, there should be even greater freedom of speech on college campuses. But now things have been turned around to give campus communities the expectation that if someone's feelings are hurt by something that is said, the university will protect that person. As soon as you allow something as vague as Big Brother protecting your feelings, anything and everything can be punished."...

In his new book, "Unlearning Liberty," Mr. Lukianoff notes that baby-boom Americans who remember the student protests of the 1960s tend to assume that U.S. colleges are still some of the freest places on earth. But that idealized university no longer exists. It was wiped out in the 1990s by administrators, diversity hustlers and liability-management professionals, who were often abetted by professors committed to political agendas.

"What's disappointing and rightfully scorned," Mr. Lukianoff says, "is that in some cases the very professors who were benefiting from the free-speech movement turned around to advocate speech codes and speech zones in the 1980s and '90s."

Continue reading.

'For all its issues and faults, California is the closest thing that the U.S. has to European-style social democracy...'

A mind-boggling blog post and comment thread at the communist academic blog, Crooked Timber, "Open up your Golden Gate":

I think it’s important to situate “California is ungovernable”–which has *never* been true in any recognizable sense–in the broader political discussion about American political life. For all its issues and faults, California is the closest thing that the U.S. has to European-style social democracy. It has strong state-provided social services, such as a very robust state OSHA program, relatively pro-worker wage-and-hour laws, and a massively successful (if declining) public university system–which provides far more to state public life than in other states with premier universities, such as Massachusetts, where such are privatized. It has politically active unions like the CTA and CNA on the winning side. It has strong environmental protections and lots of public lands and public trusts. It has a broadly politically empowered populus in its major cities; and so forth.

This isn’t to say that California is perfect, by any means. But it is to say that reiterating the discourses without situating them in those broader conversations often tends to legitimize a discourse that implies that social democracy is “ungovernable” and neoliberalism is a neutral, invisibile, natural state of affairs.

This state's bankrupt, but for these idiot commies, it's like heaven on earth.

Meanwhile, "Prop. 30 Won't Quench California's Big Government Thirst."

The Democrats own it now, as if they hadn't already. The state's going down. Ten percent unemployment still after almost four years, and listen to these shitbag progressives sing the praises of the bankrupt blue state morass. We're about as close as you'll get to a European social democracy, alright. Take your pick: Greece, Spain. Shoot, Italy, the San Bernardino of Europe, came close to dragging down the entire European project all by itself. No matter, let's raise taxes. Yeah, that'll work. Forward! To growth and prosperity!

Wake me up from this nightmare. This country is populated with chest-thumping pinhead progressives who haven't got a freakin' clue.

Inland Empire Previews Fate of California Republican Party

At the Los Angeles Times, "Republican losses show Inland Empire's political shift":

Stirred by a decade of astronomical growth, economic heartache and the rising political influence of Latinos, the Inland Empire proved treacherous territory last week for a Republican Party that just a decade ago considered it the new GOP frontier.

Voters in Riverside and San Bernardino counties on Tuesday elected three Democrats to Congress — two Latinos and a gay Asian American — after having sent only two Democrats to Washington in the last four decades.

Before the election, Republicans represented the city of Riverside in Congress, the state Senate and the Assembly. On Tuesday, Democrats took all three seats.

The rumblings of an impending seismic shift in Inland Empire politics have been heard for years, with pressure slowly building as the GOP's share of voters declined. California's new political boundaries, crafted last year, allowed pent-up Democratic power to push to the surface and reshape a political landscape that's now more evenly divided. Contests will be much harder to predict.

"The Inland Empire was the third bastion for the GOP after Orange County and San Diego," said Shaun Bowler, a political scientist from UC Riverside. "That's not true anymore, which is a worry for the Republican Party. They've got to work harder than they have in the past."

The new normal.

More at the link.

That's Mary Bono Mack at the photo. She took office under the widow's mandate when her then-husband, Sonny Bono, died in a skiing accident in 1998. Maggie's Notebook has more: "Connie Mack Mary Bono Mack: Connie Mack Lost Senate Bid – Mary Mack Lost House Seat."

RELATED: From George Skelton, at the Los Angeles Times, "GOP might never again hold power in California." (At Memeorandum.)

Prop. 30 Won't Quench California's Big Government Thirst

At the Los Angeles Times, "Prop. 30 win won't guarantee state's fiscal safety":

SACRAMENTO — The election wasn't even over Tuesday when state Treasurer Bill Lockyer's phone started ringing. Activists of all stripes had the same message for him: With voters apparently poised to approve billions of dollars in tax hikes, it was time to spend more money.

"They had to be reminded the money has already been spent," Lockyer said.

As California tries to shake its national reputation as a financial bungler, policymakers in Sacramento will be managing an estimated $6 billion in annual revenue from Gov. Jerry Brown's newly approved tax plan, Proposition 30. The money is already included in the budget the governor signed last summer.

The bloodletting that has become a ritual part of assembling the state budget is expected to fade. But some of the issues that have made California's financial problems so persistent remain and could still create a budget gap if things don't go as planned.

In essence, analysts say, voters have stabilized the patient, but surgery may still be required.

Brown has long acknowledged that fixing the state's fiscal problems will require more work. He told reporters last week that "there are no cure-alls" and pledged to hold the line against new spending. As the former seminary student often does, he used a biblical allusion to make his point.

"We need the prudence of Joseph," he said.

The governor's plan will increase the state sales tax by a quarter-cent for four years and raise levies on high earners by one to three percentage points for seven years. Passage of Proposition 30 prevents billions of dollars in education cuts and gives the state an opportunity to end the fiscal year without a deficit for the first time in five years.

But California still has the lowest credit rating of any state. Its tax system is unstable. Borrowing costs remain high, and there are signs that the Brown administration's current $91.3-billion budget may be fraying at the seams as savings fail to meet expectations.

"By no means is California out of the woods yet," said Kil Huh, a director at the Pew Center on the States in Washington. "They've built up a set of challenges that are daunting for any state."

For starters, swings in the stock market can have an outsize effect on California's budget because the state relies so heavily on income taxes paid by the wealthy. In 2010, the richest 1% of Californians earned 21.3% of the income in the state and paid 40.9% of the state income taxes, according to the most recent government data available.

Gabriel Petek, an analyst at Standard & Poor's, noted that California has, over time, decreased more reliable sources of revenue, such as fees on motor vehicle registrations, while increasing less dependable ones, such as income taxes.

Revamping the tax base is politically treacherous. Voters approved strict limits on property taxes in 1978 with Proposition 13, which has since been considered the third rail in California politics.

"If I was dictator of the state, I would look at it," said Kim Rueben at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center in Washington. "I'm not sure it will ever be looked at."

The responsibility for handling state finances now is expected to fall completely to Democrats, who are poised to gain a supermajority in each house of the Legislature. Republicans would no longer be able to block tax increases, which require a two-thirds vote.

Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) said in an interview Friday that changes in the tax system can bring "political peril" and are not high on his agenda.

California could also face budget gaps when Proposition 30's tax hikes expire. Administration officials are banking on improvements in the economy to make up for the loss of extra tax revenue then.

Some Republicans fear Democrats will increase spending so much that they'll try to make the tax hikes permanent.

Make them permanent?

You think? All that and more, now that California's a one-party state with a permanent Democrat majority. An earthquake couldn't sink us into the as fast as the progressives.

Professor Grover Furr Denies Stalin's Crimes Against Humanity

The guy's a Stalinist holocaust denier.

At The Other McCain, "The Stalinist at Montclair State."

The murderous brutality of Stalin is one of the best-established facts of 20th-century history, and whatever “research” Professor Furr claims as the basis for his bizarre revisionism is likely akin to the “research” of Holocaust deniers, 9/11 Truthers and other fringe crackpots.

The crime is that this guy is teaching at a public university. It's not surprising, though. Recall my post on Professor Robert Farley, who claims to be an expert on counterinsurgency, who showed "Che" for his students in class: "Patterson School of Diplomacy, University of Kentucky, Screens Steven Soderbergh's Che to Commemorate Fiftieth Anniversary of Bay of Pigs."

America's campuses are the training ground for the revolutionary cadres. For more on this, lots more, see Legal Insurrection, "“Shock the System” week at College Insurrection."

Support Crashes for California's Proposition 30

The Los Angeles Times released a number of poll findings over the last week, but I've been focused on national politics. The raw survey is here. And here's the write-up on the tanking support for this ridiculous tax-hike initiative, "Support plunges for Prop. 30, Gov. Jerry Brown's tax initiative":

SACRAMENTO — Support has plunged for Proposition 30, Gov. Jerry Brown's plan to raise billions of dollars in taxes, a new USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll shows, with less than half of voters planning to cast ballots in favor of the measure.

Only 46% of registered voters now support Brown's initiative, a 9-point drop over the last month, and 42% oppose it. The findings follow a lackluster month of campaigning by the governor, who had spent little time on the stump and found himself fighting off attacks from backers of a separate ballot measure that would raise taxes for schools.

Although Brown recently launched a frantic push for votes, both proposals could fail. Tax measures rarely gain support in the closing days of a campaign.

Proposition 30 would temporarily raise taxes on individuals earning more than $250,000 a year and impose a quarter-cent hike in the state sales tax. Enthusiasm for the governor's plan has fallen across the political spectrum.

The steepest decline is among voters who register without a party preference — a crucial voting bloc for Brown. Support from those Californians dropped from 63% a month ago to 48%.

"Proposition 30 has been under attack from the left and the right," said Dan Schnur, director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at USC. "It has taken a toll."

The USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences/Los Angeles Times poll surveyed 1,504 registered voters by telephone from Oct. 15 to Oct. 21. It was conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, a Democratic firm, in conjunction with American Viewpoint, a Republican company. The margin of error is 2.9 percentage points.

The Los Angeles Times editorial page endorsed the measure, mainly because the initiative's funding doesn't have to be spent on education! But see the Stockton Record, "Proposition 30 is voter manipulation at its finest":

Gov. Brown and proponents of Prop. 30 make it seem like Prop. 30 requires education cuts by saying that the initiative prevents them. But, there is nothing in Prop. 30 that mandates funding cuts to education if it doesn't pass. The governor and the Legislature can change the budget at any time. They have made a choice to cut education. This is voter manipulation at its finest. The message the governor is sending is essentially this: "Give us more money or we're taking it out on schools."

Sacramento politicians are notorious for poor budgeting. Voting yes on Prop. 30 sends a message that we are OK with the tax-and-spend system that is crippling California. We all want good schools, but Prop. 30 doesn't help them. Prop 30 is another ploy from Sacramento politicians to get us to hand over more of our tax dollars. This November, Californians must say enough is enough. Vote no on Prop. 30.

Marxist Professoriate Gets More Marxist, Survey Finds

I'm not kidding, either. When we had a S.F State urban hip-hop professor give a lecture a couple of years ago at my college, I asked him point blank during the Q & A if he really believed in the revolutionary agenda that he was spouting and teaching to his students. I asked him straight up, "Do you want to see the overthrow of capitalism in the U.S.?" He didn't even blink. Absolutely he said. And then I asked for a show of hands among my faculty colleagues for how many agreed. Every single hand went up. When you're constantly marinated in the hard left-wing curriculum of the social sciences and humanities, after a while you start to identify with the most radical theories and epistemologies. The promise of America's founding is jettisoned for a bastardized and simplistic Howard Zinn outlook on the world. We routinely have far-left speakers at the college and they're welcomed with open arms, drawing huge contingents of student Che wannabe mass-murderers. It's pretty pathetic, but it is what it is.

In any case, check this report at Inside Higher Ed, "Survey finds that professors, already liberal, have moved further to the left":

In the 1998-9 survey, more than 35 percent of faculty members identified themselves as middle of the road, and less than half (47.5 percent) identified as liberal or far left. In the new data, 62.7 percent identify as liberal or far left.

More:

Neil Gross, a professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia, has written extensively on faculty political issues. He is the co-author of the 2007 report that found that while professors may lean left, they do so less than is imagined and less uniformly across institution type than is imagined, and that many are in the political middle.

He said that he couldn't be sure why more professors were identifying as far left, but that "during periods of significant economic downturn, and significant rise of inequality, it's not surprising" that such a shift would take place, especially given that in academe, "radicalism is still a live possibility."

Gross said that the "optics" of the data could lead to criticism of higher education. "From the vantage point of some folks, that will make academe look bad. For others, it will make academe look like a place concerned with the country."

I don't know why folks like this guy Gross try to sugarcoat it. It's bad. It doesn't just "look bad." It's just bad. We are dumbing down students by denying them critical thinking skills. We're turning them into far left-wing robots ready to rubber stamp the latest far left-progressive rage, whether it's supporting stupid shit like "Israeli Apartheid Week" or the reelection of our hopelessly dishonest, Communist-trained President Eye-Candy Clusterf-k.

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Stop Paycheck Theft: Vote Yes on Proposition 32

From the letters to the editors, at the Los Angeles Times, "Letters: Prop. 32, unions and political giving":

Re "Prop. 32's real purpose," Column, Oct. 18

George Skelton calls Proposition 32, which would prohibit unions from making payroll deductions to raise money for political spending, a "self-serving sham." So should we continue to allow teachers unions to force their members to donate to their leaders' favorite political causes?

Why must my wife, a first-grade teacher, contribute to political causes she doesn't like? How would Skelton feel if The Times effectively forced him to support Mitt Romney via a paycheck deduction?

If unions want their members to give to certain causes, let them persuade the workers to do it. Forcing people to give to political causes they don't believe in runs contrary to the basic rules of a democracy.

I believe Proposition 32 would reduce the power of special interests and let candidates work for all Californians and not just for their donors. And I'm a dedicated Democrat.

Vince Scully
Long Beach

Get that? A "dedicated Democrat" and his union-member wife don't like big labor stealing their hard-earned dollars. Because that's what it is. If you have no choice about the matter, the unions are taking your money against your will. See also the recent editorial at the Orange County Register, "Editorial: Yes on Prop. 32 (unions)":

Anyone familiar with California politics knows that the most powerful forces, by far, in the state Capitol are the public-employee unions. Their clout was demonstrated this year when the California Teachers Association, the most powerful of them all, killed Senate Bill 1530, which would have made it easier to fire bad teachers for actions "that involve certain sex offenses, controlled-substance offenses or child abuse offenses."

SB1530 was not concocted by a conservative Republican, but by state Sen. Alex Padilla of Los Angeles, a liberal Democrat. The bill advanced after several cases of teacher abuse against children came to light, especially a disgusting scenario allegedly involving Los Angeles Unified School District teacher Mark Berndt. The bill passed overwhelmingly in the state Senate, 33-4. Then the CTA killed it in the Assembly Education Committee.

The episode illustrates what has happened since California public-employee unions were given collective bargaining rights in the 1970s by Gov. Jerry Brown. This occurred even though such stalwart liberal private-sector union partisans as President Franklin Roosevelt had warned that public-sector unionization would lead to too much union power and the loss of public trust in the government.

That is so nausea-induceing it's literally perverse. But that's what you get when you have the hard-left, socialist-backed teachers' unions as the most powerful political force in California. These thugs are literally bringing the state down low, morally, politically, and economically. This is how nations self-destruct. You get the image of the end of the republic right here in the once-great "Golden State."

PREVIOUSLY: "Long Beach Press-Telegram: Yes on 32."

A Treasure of Maps

This is an amazing piece, at LAT, "Treasure-trove of maps headed to L.A. Public Library":

When real estate agent Matthew Greenberg cleaned out the Mount Washington cottage after the occupant died, he couldn't bring himself to throw out a treasure-trove he discovered inside--all kinds of maps.

Instead, he invited the Los Angeles Public Library's map librarian to look at the find.

Stashed everywhere in the 948-square-foot tear-down were maps. Tens of thousands of maps. Fold-out street maps were stuffed in file cabinets, crammed into cardboard boxes, lined up on closet shelves and jammed into old dairy crates.

Wall-size roll-up maps once familiar to schoolchildren were stacked in corners. Old globes were lined in rows atop bookshelves also filled with maps and atlases. A giant plastic topographical map of the United States covered a bathroom wall and bookcases displaying Thomas Bros. map books and other street guides lined a small den.

The library's Glen Creason called the find unbelievable.

"I think there are at least a million maps here," he said. "This dwarfs our collection — and we've been collecting for 100 years."

Creason returned to the home Thursday with 10 library employees and volunteers to box up the maps. The acquisition will give the city library one of the country's top five library map archives, behind the Library of Congress and public libraries in New York, Philadelphia and Boston, he said.

More at the link.

Is College Really for Everyone?

Well, the educational system just assumes that it is. Mostly, though, kids have to find out for themselves, and that wastes a lot of people's time and resources. Perhaps there's a better way.

In any case, from Patrice Apodaca, at The Daily Pilot, "Is College Really For Everyone?"

Supreme Court Oral Arguments in Major New Affirmative Action Case

Althouse reports on the coverage from SCOTUS blog, "Justice Breyer directly asked whether Grutter — the case approving of a type of affirmative action admissions — should be overruled?"

And then going straight to SCOTUS blog, see the roundup, "Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin." And especially, Lyle Denniston, "Argument recap: Will Grutter be reshaped? (FINAL UPDATE)":

Affirmative action is alive but ailing, the idea of “critical mass” to measure racial diversity is in very critical condition, and a nine-year-old precedent may have to be reshaped in order to survive. Those were the dominant impressions at the close of a one-hour, nineteen-minute argument in the Supreme Court Wednesday. There is almost no doubt that the University of Texas’s affirmative action plan for admitting its freshman classes is in trouble with four Justices, but has at least qualified support from three others. The one most in doubt among the eight taking part: Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. He wanted to be convinced that the program does not use race at all costs, and it appeared that he was not.

Continue reading.

Plus, Jess Bravin at the Wall Street Journal, "Justices Clash on Affirmative Action." And from David Savage, at the Los Angeles Times, "Ruling out race in college admissions: How far will high court go?"

And from earlier at the Times, from Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr., "Do race preferences help students?" And a rebuttal from Rachel Godsil, FWIW, "Affirmative action and the unprepared minority myth."

But see Elizabeth Price Foley at Instapundit, "A LIBERAL CRITIQUE OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION: Richard Kahlenberg has an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal, evaluating the insanity of today’s affirmative action efforts by universities and colleges..."

Long Beach Press-Telegram: Yes on 32

I'm glad to see it.

"Endorsement: Yes on Proposition 32 -- Unions have inordinate amount of power in state politics":

To understand the need for Proposition 32, all a voter has to do is look at the the vast sums of cash pouring into the campaign against it. A total of more than $50 million has been donated to the "yes" and "no" campaigns. Of that, the vast majority has gone to fund advertising for the "no" side. And of that, most has come from unions representing California teachers and other public employees.

This is an example of the financial power that gives unions outsized political influence everywhere from election campaigns to the halls of the state Legislature and local city halls, too often resulting in laws that benefit union members over the interests of all Californians.

Now California voters have a chance to rein in that power. They should not miss the opportunity on Nov. 6. The editorial board urges passage of Proposition 32.

The measure would do three things: It would ban donations to state and local candidates by unions and corporations. It would ban the political use of money deducted from paychecks by unions or corporations. And it would ban government contractors from contributing to the campaigns of public officials who control the awarding of those contracts.

The measure's well-funded opponents complain that it would affect labor interests more than business interests -- because businesses don't use payroll deductions in the same way as unions, and because companies that aren't corporations are exempt from the proposition.

But the proponents don't pretend they're aiming for balance in the proposal. They want to curb the influence of unions over the decisions of state lawmakers, which has been out of balance for years.

That is a cause that this page has supported for a long time. We endorsed 2005's Proposition 75 and 1998's Proposition 226, which would have required unions to get individual members' permission before spending dues money on politics. (Those propositions lost by 8 percent and 6 percent, respectively.)

The arguments then are no less valid now.

Recent examples of Big Labor's influence in Sacramento include the power it has exerted over pension reform and prison issues. Another egregious example that arose this summer was a bill considered by the Assembly Education Committee to make it easier for school districts to fire teachers accused of terrible crimes involving sex, violence or drugs.

Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla of Pacoima had introduced the bill in the wake of several child sex-abuse cases in Los Angeles schools. The bill passed the Senate with bipartisan support. It had popular support.

But the California Teachers Association bused in members to confront the key Assembly committee, underscoring its arguments for protecting the job security of teachers with a not-so-subtle reminder of the union's 800-pound-gorilla influence. Enough committee members voted against the bill to kill it.

They bused in thugs. That's what they always do.

More at the link.