An interesting story in the Washington Post about JFK’s race against Richard Nixon:

It began in the fall of 1960, when the Kennedy campaign spread word that Vice President Nixon had secretly pocketed money from billionaire Howard Hughes, whose far-flung business empire was heavily dependent on government contracts and connections. Reporters for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Time magazine corroborated the allegations, but their editors feared publishing such explosive information in the last days of the tightly fought campaign.
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So the Kennedys turned to two crusading liberal columnists, Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson, who had been attacking Nixon for the past decade. It was “a journalistic atrocity” to conspire with “the Kennedy hawkshaws to help us get the goods on their opponent,” Anderson admitted, but scoring a scoop to destroy Nixon was simply too tempting to pass up.

I took a US History class that covered from 1946 to 1960, ending (of course) with JFK’s election. I had planned to take the next course, covering 1961-1976, but was turned off by the professor (of both courses). Even though JFK (and Nixon, somewhat) played a relatively bit role, it was obvious that the professor held Kennedy in the highest esteem. I have a number of biased professors (a couple conservative, actually), but there was something about this professor’s particular sanctimony that I found extremely off-putting. The end result of it all was that the contrarian in me prevailed and I came out of it with a distaste for JFK and Kennedyism in general.

One of the cool parts of the class, though, was that we poured over the opinion media at the time. Even in the height of the Clinton years, it punched a pretty big hole in the notion that in the wonderful days of yore people had respect for the presidency if not its occupant. Criticisms of Eisenhower at the time actually closely matched later criticisms of George W Bush: an unintelligent, unenlightened hick who never had any business being president. And, of course, the obvious Kennedy/Clinton parallels.

In the event that a drug-sniffing dog is alerted to someone’s car, more often than not there are no drugs nor any drug paraphernalia:

The dogs are trained to dig or sit when they smell drugs, which triggers automobile searches. But a Tribune analysis of three years of data for suburban departments found that only 44 percent of those alerts by the dogs led to the discovery of drugs or paraphernalia. {…}

Dog-handling officers and trainers argue the canine teams’ accuracy shouldn’t be measured in the number of alerts that turn up drugs. They said the scent of drugs or paraphernalia can linger in a car after drugs are used or sold, and the dogs’ noses are so sensitive they can pick up residue from drugs that can no longer be found in a car.

But even advocates for the use of drug-sniffing dogs agree with experts who say many dog-and-officer teams are poorly trained and prone to false alerts that lead to unjustified searches. Leading a dog around a car too many times or spending too long examining a vehicle, for example, can cause a dog to give a signal for drugs where there are none, experts said.

On the face of it, 44% sounds pretty bad. Reason, with their typical sense of perspective, says “a drug-sniffing coin would be cheaper.” Well, only if you disregard what that 44% figure actually means. Given that the actual number of cars with drugs is exceedingly low, a dog-sniff being correct nearly 50% of the time actually isn’t all that bad. If 1% of cars had drugs (a high estimation, for sure), and you cointested 200 cars, a coin would would falsely implicate 99 cars for ever 1 it actually finds drugs in. A dog would alert two cars, one of which would have drugs. I recognize that Sallum is being hyperbolic, but he’s pretty much stretching it beyond all reason.

Now, because dogs are right a little less than half of the time, should that legally justify probable case? I really don’t know. Does anyone know how the law would treat tips from an informant who is right a little less than half the time? I’d consider such an informant to be reasonably reliable. On the other hand, with that human informant you would need a judge and a warrant involved. Maybe the cops should have to call up a judge to sign off on the barking dog?

I know that I would be pretty pissed if cops were taking my car apart for an hour because of some false positive. And heaven knows, Hit Coffee is often unfriendly to law enforcement in general. But I do think that we have to keep things in perspective here and not compare this to a coin-flip or police dogs assaulting people.

Jerry Gomez works as an IT person at a corporate law firm, Weicker & Schmidt. A woman named Beth Toomey is murdered and Jerry quickly emerges as a suspect when some emails are found where Toomey and Gomez were supposed to meet (somewhere around the time she was murdered) about something that Gomez was very upset about. When the police confront Gomez, he has a lawyer on speed-dial and refuses to say a word (refusing to even answer the question of how he knows Toomey). This only increases suspicion.

After the police do a search of his office at W&S, his boss and a corporate VP call Gomez into a meeting. Gomez assures the firm that he did not commit any crime and says that he is perfectly willing to take a polygraph to that effect provided that is the only question asked (the concern being that the police could subpoena the results and find out more than he wants to tell them). Likewise, beyond assuring them of his innocence, he will not explain any of the circumstances surrounding his relationship with Toomey for fear that they will be subpoenaed. The firm finds this unacceptable and they issue Gomez an ultimatum: fully cooperate with the authorities or you’re fired. Gomez refuses to cooperate and is fired.

Gomez is ultimately cleared of the crime (before charges are ever filed). Gomez sues the employer for wrongful termination on the basis that they should not be able to fire him on the basis of his exerting his constitutional rights. He loses the case because he lives in an Employment-At-Will state with no bad faith exemptions. That means that the firm can fire him for whatever reason they deem fit as long as it is not one of the exceptions carved out in the law (attempting unionization, whistleblowing, race/gender/etc.) and no such exception is made.

Gomez’s lawyers go to federal court on the basis that the Constitution is irreparably harmed if people are required to forego their rights in order to keep their jobs. Especially when, as in this case, no hardship is being brought to the company beyond the initial search of his office. In fact, until this lawsuit his employer was never mentioned in any of the newspapers. If Weicker & Schmidt are allowed to fire Gomez on the basis of his exerting his 5th Amendment rights, they could similarly act on other rights. For instance, they could be “good corporate citizens” and require employees to allow the police to search their car on traffic stops. If these sorts of things catch on, the protections in the Constitution become meaningless for all but the self-employed. They employer responds that the law is the law and having freedoms granted to you in the constitution does not grant you freedom from the repercussions of utilizing those freedoms. Gomez can assert his rights or not, but W&S simply doesn’t have to employ him. High-profile people are fired or punished for utilizing their First Amendment rights all the time: Whoopi Goldberg, Don Imus, John Rocker, etc.).

So the question is… do you think that Gomez has a constitutional argument? Or, in the event that precedent suggests that he does not, that he should have one? If you think that W&S is in the right here on the basis that there is no right to continued employment simply because the Constitution does not allow the government to punish you, would you also support them if they wanted to institute the “good corporate citizen” policy of forcing employees to forego their Fourth Amendment rights against search and seizure? If not, how do you draw the line? If you agree with Gomez, do you also believe that someone who publicly makes offensive (anti-American, racist, anti-Semitic, etc.) comments should also be allowed to keep their job? If not, how do you draw the line?

Note: I know that a number of you oppose Employment-at-Will doctrine on principle, but in this scenario it is the law of the land whether you agree with it or not. This question is more of how you think the constitution should be read rather than legislative preferences. So, feel free to rip on EAW, but only if you also comment on the main thrust of the post with the stipulation that the law in Gomez’s state is what it is.

Note II: If any lawyers know how the courts have responded to challenges like this, feel free to chime in. I suspect I know, but I also wanted to know what people’s thoughts on how the courts should rule are.

A while back I commented about the NFL’s asinine policy regarding leaving games at their most exciting (during overtime) to watch a bunch of men in suits talk about other games going on. Mike Hunt and others pointed out the reason for this policy, which makes sense but is still stupid.

In any event, the last several days I’ve been hearing more and more complaints about this. James Joyner, for instance:

Now, I’ve got NFL Sunday Ticket and am therefore able to watch whichever games I please. But it’s simply idiotic of the NFL not to allow some small leeway to their affiliates to show the closeout of tight games. I understand that the networks alternate double headers and that going late on the early game takes away from the audience of the network with the second game. But, come on, missing a few minutes of the first quarter isn’t a big deal.

I don’t know whether I just tuned them out before or whether there is building resentment towards this policy. The NFL (along with the other major sports) receives anti-trust exemptions. The cost of that ought to be putting an end to these stupid profit-maximizing rules. And, of course, expansion.

BMW has a commercial with the theme of not accepting substitutes. Accept nothing less than what you want and all that. Presumably, they’re trying to talk people out of taking John Tierney’s advice of buying a Subaru WRX rather than a BMW with similar specs. What I find kind of amusing, though, is that if you read the small print across the bottoms, the precise models that they’re showing are not available in the US. So if you go to your local BMW dealership, you’re accepting a substitute.

Half Sigma links to some numbers as to what people are majoring in.

There are some interesting comments that follow, once you get past the “majors I don’t like are useless” mentality. A couple of the comments are from Hit Coffee Commenteers, though before I get to those I thought this one to be particularly interesting:

While it may be true that there aren’t a whole lot of “critical queer studies” majors (for which we can all be grateful), such departments have campus and policy influence far disproportionate to their numbers, having been able to bully higher ed administrations into providing them with similarly outsized shares of resources as well.

I was actually talking to my father-in-law about this when I was in Beyreuth visiting them. We were talking about how some professors, such as those in engineering and business, are able to command larger salaries and often better working conditions because if they’re dissatisfied they have somewhere to go. He responded that was a factor, as was the fact that engineers and businesspeople tend to be better negotiators. He went on to talk about exactly what this commenter is talking about. What liberal arts professors lack in options, they make up for in enthusiasm. He said that nearly every academic committee is dominated by liberal arts types because academia is their world and they throw themselves into it while a lot of science and math profs tend to be anti-social and engineering and business profs tend to view academia as a job rather than a calling. I thought that was a really interesting point.

Abel actually read my mind with this comment:

This only shows the number of people who graduate with degrees–worthless or not. What would be more interesting is to see how many students are enrolled in various degree programs and whether there’s a higher dropout rate between those pursuring “worthless” degrees and those pursuing more “practical” degrees.

You would think that those majoring in subjects that interest them might have better graduation rates. And maybe it’s so. My observational experience, though, suggests the opposite. Those with vocational majors tend to be more goal-oriented while those with more academic majors are more likely to view their more immediate needs as being more important.

I’ve commented in the past that a real turning point in my friend Clint’s academic career was when he changed his major from music education (something with vocational utility) to music composition (something without it). Well, maybe it wasn’t a turning point. But it was indicative of a problem. That college was more about doing what he wanted to do and playing to his talents rather than preparing him for a future job. His academic performance did not improve. He graduated, but did no better than I think he would have if he had stuck with his original major.

In fact, nobody I can think of that changed to a more friendly major significantly improved their academic performance. The opposite was more likely to be the case. I choose people who changed their majors because you’re controlling for a lot of variables that way.

Peter commented:

It’s curious that health-related majors rank third yet get very little blogospheric attention. Not much mainstream media attention, for that matter. I would attribute this to the fact that elite universities generally don’t offer these majors, at least not to a significant extent, and no one cares about non-elite institutions. Also, while I don’t have statistics, my reasoned guess is that health-related majors tend to have a relatively high percentage of students who are past traditional college age, and once again no one cares about them. Everyone wants to hear about a 22-year-old* who just graduated from NYU with a degree in comparative literature. No one gives a hoot about a 40-year-old who just graduated from York College with a degree in occupational therapy.

This is a really good point. We tend to think of college within a certain context, often overlooking the large and growing population of non-traditional students. I would be willing to bet that this accounts for a lot of the business majors. It could undermine Abel’s thoughts and my own as non-traditional students are likely to have lower graduation rates, on the whole. They may be goal-oriented, but they are often balancing other priorities (and are often less school-oriented in general).

Real-life superhero fights crime in Seattle

SEATTLE, WA (CNN) – A real-life superhero has been patrolling the streets of Seattle, Washington in hopes of stopping crime.

Every night an anonymous Seattle man strolls into a comic store, enters a hidden back room, and emerges transformed as “Phoenix Jones”.

“Phoenix” says since he started his crime-fighting crusade 9 months ago, he’s been stabbed, and had a gun pulled on him a few times, but received no serious injuries.

Colosse had a couple of these nearly a decade back. They were mostly harmless. Crime was at an all-time low in Colosse back then, though Colosse has historically had higher-than-average crime rates.

More seriously, there was a(n unmasked, uncostumed) group of vigilantes in a particularly bad part of town. The cops arrested the ringleader. During the run-up to the trial, the CPD had to admit that they only patrolled Fifthtown (a pretty expansive place with high density) once twice a day and and that the vigilante was the first arrest they made there in over a month. The charges were dropped, if I recall.

I defended Cam Newton, but I have a harder time defending this:

Pryor even sold a sportsmanship award from the 2008 Fiesta Bowl, along with his 2008 Big Ten championship ring. More egregious to Ohio State fans, he sold a “gold pants” trinket — an iconic charm given to players who are a part of a victory over archrival Michigan. He may not be easily forgiven by Buckeyes fans who revere such traditions. Pryor must repay $2,500 for selling the three items.

His teammates also sold Big Ten championship rings — the Buckeyes have won the past six conference titles — plus football jerseys, pants and shoes.

Along with Pryor, leading rusher Dan Herron, No. 2 wide receiver DeVier Posey, All-Big Ten offensive tackle Mike Adams and backup defensive end Solomon Thomas must sit out the five games.

The Herd with Colin Cowherd

ESPN college football analyst Kirk Herbstreit says the suspension of five Ohio State players for the start of next season is “addition by subtraction” and Ohio State can get back to focusing on being a team.

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Herron must repay $1,150 for selling his football jersey, pants and shoes for $1,000 and receiving discounted services worth $150.

Posey must repay $1,250 for selling his 2008 Big Ten championship ring for $1,200 and receiving discounted services worth $50.

Adams must repay $1,000 for selling his 2008 Big Ten championship ring. Thomas must repay $1,505 for selling his 2008 Big Ten championship ring for $1,000, his 2008 gold pants for $350 and receiving discounted services worth $155.

A sixth player, freshman linebacker Jordan Whiting, who received a discount on tattoos, must sit out the first game of the 2011 season and pay $150 to a charity.

Even in the event that Ohio State did not known what was going on and it was not the case that she should have known, players selling their jerseys and rings ought to have any further eligibility revoked.

The problem with Newton was what could and could not be proven. That really doesn’t seem to be the case here. And I’m not convinced that OSU should not be on the hook here.

My father and I like to talk about TV commercials, exchanging notes on ones we either really like or don’t like. Not long after I arrived, he was telling me about some new Nissan commercial with a couple singing and goofing around. The commercial was catchy, the visuals interesting, and the female singer as cute as a button. We discussed the commercial at length and when one of us was out of the room during a commercial break the other would pause the DVR so that the other could see it.

I was telling him about Nissan being the subject of some discussion in my marketing class because they have a history of running commercials which actually minimize the exposure to this product. Within the advertising community there are two thoughts on this. The first being that as long as you’re talking about the commercial, it’s a success. The other saying that you can watch the whole commercial without actually learning anything about their product – or for that matter even remembering it – and that’s not a good thing.

After several days of seeing these commercials I don’t know how many times, I noticed something. It’s not even a Nissan commercial. It’s Hyundai. We’re not the only ones to make this mistake as we tracked down who the singers were by referring to “Nissan commercial” and others thought the exact same thing. Despite the fact that they mention the Hyundai Sonata a couple of times in the ad itself.

I think this underscores the criticism of commercials that don’t feature the product very prominently. (more…)