Monthly Archives: March 2006

Beyond Parody

Please reassure me that the person responsible for this campaign commercial has no chance at all of being elected dog catcher, much less to the House of Representatives,

This is isn’t a joke or a parody commercial. It’s just insane. Robinson is running for Congress in North Carolina and he uses the Twilight Zone theme to attack gays, judges, African Americans and just about anything or anyone else you can think of.

Video-WMP Video-QT

(spotted at Crooks & Liars).

Posted in Politics: The Party of Sleaze | 1 Comment

Last-Minute Rally Downtown?

Maybe, probably, I’m not on the right mailing lists, but I just got the following e-mail, which was the first I’d heard of this event:

Rally to Support Striking UM Workers,

Friday March 10, 4:30 pm County Bldg. 111 NW 1st ST That’s Government Center in downtown!!

Every Miami Worker Deserves A Chance for a Better Life. You Can Help UM Janitors Get That Chance.

IT’S NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE TO MAKE ENDS MEET in Miami on $6.40 an hour. Yet that’s all many contract cleaners at the University of Miami are paid. $51 a day with no health benefits. Less than half the county median wage. On these tiny salaries, we’re forced to make choices we never thought we’d be faced with in the United States: Do we pay rent or buy groceries? Buy shoes for our kids or fill a prescription? UM’s mostly Cuban-American janitors have been joining together to build a better life for ourselves one where we don’t have to make these choices. But the company we work for–UNICCO, the cleaning contractor hired by the university–has been punishing those who speak out by threatening, intimidating, and even suspending union supporters. So we’ve decided we must strike to make our voices heard. You can help send a message to UNICCO:

Give Miami janitors a chance to live the American dream.

Support Striking Janitors
RALLY: Friday, March 10 ? 4:30 p.m.
County Building, 111 NW 1st Street

For more information, contact SEIU Local 11 305-672-7071, ext. 246
Service Employees International Union Local 11

This all seems rather last minute. I’m certainly not in a position to go. I hope they know what they are doing.

Update: The organizers’ account of the rally — 300+ is a good turnout for this sort of event.

Posted in U.Miami: Strike'06 | 5 Comments

UM Law Sets Up a Strike Blog

The law school has set up a strike blog to aid communication between the school and students. It’s brand new, so there isn’t much content there yet, but I’m told there will be more within 24 hours.

From: “Coker, Donna K.”
Subject: Strike Blog & Other Related Matters

Dear Students,

I want thank those students who participated in the two events on Tuesday – the information session organized by students at noon and the town hall discussion in the afternoon. While faculty differ in their responses to the strike, the conversation at the town hall meeting made clear that they are strongly committed to student education. The video of the town hall meeting will be posted on the “web cast” page of the web site.

The strong differences of opinion and the robust nature of public debate regarding those differences exemplify the kind of thoughtful community that is the University Of Miami School Of Law. We would expect no less from our passionate and intellectually engaged faculty and students. While some of these issues divide us, we share commitments to intellectual honesty, to justice, and to the value of a community of learning.

The Law School has established a blog to continue the conversation about the strike. You can find it at http://www.umlaw.net/strike/. We asked faculty to post strike-related messages to students on the blog rather than via email. The blog, of course, gives students an additional way to communicate with each other as well as with administration and faculty.

We will continue to monitor the situation with the strike and the ramifications for the law school community. We anticipate sponsoring further informational sessions. If you are having difficulty with locating taped classes (web or otherwise), please let us know. Our AV department is working overtime to keep up with the demands of the current crisis.

Donna Coker
Associate Dean

Posted in U.Miami: Strike'06 | Comments Off on UM Law Sets Up a Strike Blog

Changes in Attitudes, Changes in Latitudes

This will probably get me in trouble, but I wanted to respond to one of the comments to UM Promises to Be Good About Something, which actually seems to be responding to something I said in Class Warfare. There I wrote,

I’d expect that most of the faculty see students as junior versions of themselves and their friends. After all, we were (almost) all law students once. What the current fracas reveals is that many students not only don’t see the faculty as senior versions of themselves, but seem quite unaware that even when it doesn’t feel their pain, the faculty wants them to learn, and to go out into the world prepared to do good and to do well.

The commentator disagreed,

Your students see you and your colleagues as the Havard/Stanford/Yale elites that you and they are. When a Miami student looks around, they do not see senior versions of themselves because you are not that. Miami students do not see themselves as attorneys in the top DC/NY law firms, as federal clerks (and certainly not federal judges), as US/DOJ attorneys, and certainly not as law professors. How are you a senior version of the students that you teach? Almost none of them will be a tenured professor at a law school. You know that.

To which a former student replied, “Shoot higher…people in other UM Law classes certainly saw themselves in those roles…and are currently in those roles.”

I think that’s absolutely the right answer, and that the first commentator has let his reverse elitism get the better of him.

It’s true that the odds of getting a teaching job coming from UM are low compared to a top 10 law school, although it has been done. But most of the students in any law school other than Yale, which is both small and a bit of teacher factory, are not going to be professors either, so this is hardly unusual. (If you want to teach, write publishable stuff: get on a law journal, publish a note and also write something else for publication in a non-UM journal — something a number of my students have done while in law school. After graduation, work a bit, then get a pre-teaching fellowship from one of the schools that offer them. It can be done.)

OK. Here’s where I get myself in trouble:

Continue reading

Posted in Law School | 19 Comments

One More Reason to Just Say No to Windows Vista

From what I’ve heard so far, Windows Vista, the planned successor to WinXP, is objectionable on moral grounds as it instantiates “DRM” and thus cripples your computer. But for those not entranced by arguments that having other people able to decide what your computer can do is a bad idea, here’s a more practical concern: Vista set to swallow 800MB of RAM. That’s just for the OS. Wait until you see how bloated the programs are.

Last week we installed SuSE on an Pentium II/400 we had gathering dust. So far it works great, although KDE is no speed demon with the limited RAM and tired old graphics card card on that one.

The next step is to turn a couple of the newer, faster XP machines into dual boot systems. Perhaps by the time Vista becomes a standard the whole family can be weaned onto some flavor of Linux?

Posted in Software | 3 Comments

Gen. Odom Looks at Iraq and Sees Vietnam — but Worse

Gen. William E. Odom (ret.), ex NSA Chief, looks at Iraq through the prism of Vietnam and what he sees is not pretty:

Will Phase Three in Iraq end with helicopters flying out of the “green zone”� in Baghdad? It all sounds so familiar.

The difference lies in the consequences. Vietnam did not have the devastating effects on U.S. power that Iraq is already having. On this point, those who deny the Vietnam-Iraq analogy are probably right. They are wrong, however, in believing that “staying the course”� will have any result other than making the damage to U.S. power far greater than changing course and withdrawing sooner in as orderly a fashion as possible.

But even in its differences, Vietnam can be instructive about Iraq. Once the U.S. position in Vietnam collapsed, Washington was free to reverse the negative trends it faced in NATO and U.S.-Soviet military balance, in the world economy, in its international image, and in other areas. Only by getting out of Iraq can the United States possibly gain sufficient international support to design a new strategy for limiting the burgeoning growth of anti-Western forces it has unleashed in the Middle East and Southwest Asia.

History repeats itself, this time as tragedy.

Posted in Iraq | 3 Comments