We're still talking about Janet Jackson's 'wardrobe malfunction?'

LOS ANGELES (November 2, 2011) – The Parents Television Council® condemned the Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruling claiming the Janet Jackson striptease during the 2004 Super Bowl was not indecent and does not merit a fine. The PTC and its 1.3 million members led the public outcry after the incident by calling on the Federal Communications Commission to levy a hefty fine against CBS and its affiliates for violating the federal broadcast indecency law.

via parentstv.org

You know what's really indecent? That any part of our government is still occupied with a two-second flash of flesh that occurred nearly eight years ago. CBS clearly didn't intend to air such a moment; it hasn't led to a parade of prime-time stripteases—because alienating family viewers clearly isn't in the broadcast network's best interest. End it already.

Big corporations pay a lower tax rate

You often hear people argue that the United States’ corporate tax rate of 35 percent is much higher than other nations, but don’t be fooled. Thanks to loopholes, the actual tax rate is much lower—about 18.5 percent according to a survey of the 280 largest publicly traded companies by the left-leaning Citizens for Tax Justice. About a quarter of the companies paid less than 10 percent in taxes over the past three years, while 30 companies—including Boeing, Wells Fargo, and GE—appeared to pay no taxes whatsoever.

via thedailybeast.com

I don't actually have a clean take on this, though I thought it was important to note. It could be an argument for tax reform—lowering the rate but removing the loopholes. On the other hand: The loopholes always seep back in, and the new lowered rate would probably be seen as the ceiling, meaning that eventually the government would be deprived of necessary revenue.

And on the other other hand: Maybe the loopholes aren't always bad. Boeing didn't pay taxes, for example, because it used tax credits for creating 9,000 jobs. Would those jobs exist without the tax credits? I don't know; I suspect they probably would. But the incentive probably doesn't hurt, either.

George Will wants freedom of association ... for conservatives

There's a lot to unpack in George Will's column today about Vanderbilt University's decision to withhold recognition from the Christian Legal Society, a campus group that (naturally, given its orientation) wants to ensure that only Christians can be in its leadership.

I think Will goes wrong by starting to compare apples to oranges. Will must be quoted at length:

In 1995, the Supreme Court upheld the right of the private group that organized Boston’s St. Patrick’s Day parade to bar participation by a group of Irish American gays, lesbians and bisexuals eager to express pride in their sexual orientations. The court said the parade was an expressive event, so the First Amendment protected it from being compelled by state anti-discrimination law to transmit an ideological message its organizers did not wish to express.

In 2000, the court overturned the New Jersey Supreme Court’s ruling that the state law forbidding discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation required the Boy Scouts to accept a gay scoutmaster. The Scouts’ First Amendment right of “expressive association” trumped New Jersey’s law.

Unfortunately, in 2010 the court held, 5 to 4, that a public law school in California did not abridge First Amendment rights when it denied the privileges associated with official recognition to just one student group — the Christian Legal Society chapter, because it limited voting membership and leadership positions to Christians who disavow “sexual conduct outside of marriage between a man and a woman.”

It seems to me that these three cases, though, are entirely consistent. The first two uphold the rights of private organizations to choose their members and their message. The third doesn't change that! The Christian Legal Society still has a right to exist in the California case—it just doesn't have the right to use the college's funds and facilities if it's going to exclude some students from membership. As Justice Ginsburg said in writing for the majority on that case: "In requiring CLS—in com­mon with all other student organizations—to choose be­tween welcoming all students and forgoing the benefits of official recognition, we hold, Hastings did not transgress
constitutional limitations. CLS, it bears emphasis, seeks not parity with other organizations, but a preferential exemption from Hastings’ policy."

If anything, Vanderbilt has a stronger defense of its policy to deny the CLS the use of its funds and facilities: Unlike Hastings, it's a private university! Surely it, like the parade organizers and the Boy Scounts, has the right to chose its own expressive associations as well! But Will smells the smoke of pernicious progressive plotting:

Although Vanderbilt is a private institution, its policy is congruent with “progressive” public policy, under which society shall be made to progress up from a multiplicity of viewpoints to a government-supervised harmony. Vanderbilt’s policy, formulated in the name of enlarging rights, is another skirmish in the progressives’ struggle to deny more and more social entities the right to deviate from government-promoted homogeneity of belief. Such compulsory conformity is, of course, enforced in the name of diversity.

Shorter Will: Freedom of association is important ... for conservatives. If a private entity wants to exclude gays, he will defend to the death its right to do so. If a private entity wants to exclude a club that excludes gays, though, it's the death of freedom. Such a one-way conception of liberty isn't really liberty at all, is it? The shape of Will's argument is—as Justice Ginsburg suggested—seeking a privileged position for social conservatives under the rubric of seeking parity. That's usually what conservative groups accuse gay rights activists of doing!

It's worth mentioning that Will's column appears the same week as news emerges about Shorter University, a Christian college in Georgia that is now requiring its employees to abstain from pre- and extra-marital sex, including homosexual sex. I don't agree with Shorter University's theology—but it is a private university which takes no state or federal money. So even though I won't be sending my son there, I will defend the college's right to choose its associations. George Will would too, I imagine. He just doesn't apply the same standards in the opposite direction. Which means he's less attached to the liberty he claims to espouse than he is to opposing gays and liberals.

Community colleges on the rise

Comparatively affluent students are picking community colleges over four-year schools in growing numbers, a sign of changing attitudes toward an institution long identified with poorer people.

A recent national survey by Sallie Mae, the student loan giant, has found that 22 percent of students from households earning $100,000 or more attended community colleges in the 2010-11 academic year, up from 12 percent in the previous year. It was the highest rate reported in four years of surveys.

In the lengthening economic downturn, even relatively prosperous families have grown reluctant to borrow for college. Schools are finding that fewer students are willing to pay the full published price of attendance, which tops $55,000 at several private universities. More students are living at home.

via washingtonpost.com

My son's just 3 years old, but I've already spent a lot more time than I expected thinking about how best to provide his education. When he was born, I think I had a plan to get him into an Ivy League school. Now...not so much. It depends on his gifts and interests, of course, but I'm not interested in saddling either him or me with huge amounts of debt for his college experience. College will probably be important. An expensive college? Maybe not.

Solving the jobs crisis through despair

Some goodish news from the Fed...

The unemployment rate, it predicted, would still be at least 8.5 percent at the end of 2012, at least 7.8 percent at the end of 2013 and at least 6.8 percent at the end of 2014.

But at least that's a drop in unemployment, right?

Such reductions probably would come in part from people abandoning the search for work, rather than those finding new jobs.

 (Sigh.) Expect government officials to tout the falling unemployment rate even as other indicators—median wages, number of households in poverty—continue to stagnate or get worse.

The unseen casualties of a decade of war

Adolescent boys with at least one parent in the military are at elevated risk of engaging in school-based physical fighting, carrying a weapon and joining a gang, according to research presented today at the American Public Health Association’s 139^th Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.

 

The study by researchers at the University of Washington’s School of Public Health looked at the strain of military deployment on U.S. families, particularly its toll on adolescent boys and girls whose parents are on active duty. The research is based on data from the 2008 Washington State Healthy Youth Survey of more than 10,000 adolescents in the 8^th, 10^th and 12^th grades of public schools.

The study finds that military deployment is associated with a 1.77 higher odds of physical fighting and 2.14 higher odds of gang membership among adolescent boys in 8^th grade. Girls in 8^th grade with at least one parent in the military were at twice the risk of carrying a weapon.

via apha.org

Media Research Center on the Herman Cain scandal: Clinton! Clinton! Clinton!

The Media Research Center seems to think the media is proving its liberal bias by covering the Herman Cain scandal so closely, whereas it strained to ignore the Clinton sex scandals of the 1990s. Which is weird, because my memory of the late 1990s is that political coverage was dominated, for a time, by news of Clinton's sex scandals. There was even an impeachment or something.

Nonetheless, MRC concludes:

When one contrasts the sexual harassment scandals of Democrat Bill Clinton, which included on the record accusers, with the hazy allegations against Republican Herman Cain, it becomes clear that the networks have enthusiasm for one and ignored the other.

That's interesting framing, because the "hazy allegations" against Cain are actually confirmed cases that were settled with monetary payouts a decade ago. That makes them somewhat more tangible than the MRC suggests, it seems to me.