A medical resident in Mexico was caught sleeping on the job and attempts were made to shame her. Residents from across the western hemisphere responded with pictures of them also sleeping on the job.

How the minimum wage moved from a national and state issue to a local one.

Child care providers in Los Angeles are concerned that they won’t be able to cope with a rising minimum wage.

Chinese businessman Li Hejun went to a clean energy conference, and lost $14,000,000,000 in the process.

Erik Kain’s piece on outrage culture is worth a read, in which he starts with this story where Internet Avengers managed to get two elderly hearse drivers fired on account of their need for sustenance.

Here’s an incredibly sad story of a woman who, on a plane, was texted by her husband that he was going to commit suicide, and the flight attendants wouldn’t let her try to call him to talk him out of it.

Bryan Lowder seems to really want to put gays in a pretty small box.

I found #CancelColbert to be silly until I realized that it was just a catchy phrase to raise a pretty ordinary complaint, and found the backlash against Suey Park to be kind of overdone. Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig wrote a piece on Park, and Freddie and Jay Caspian Kang had a dialogue about it.

The “bake my cake” argument, in reverse. A jeweler in Canada who opposes same-sex marriage agreed to make a wedding ring for a gay couple, and the gay couple is upset and wants their money back.

A DC councilmember wants to restrict charges of assaulting an officer to people who actually assault officers.

Courts in West Virginia ruled that drug addicts can sue their physicians even if they admit they have obtained the drugs illegally. Frances Coleman argues that bad pain doctors make things more difficult for good ones.

This pediatric dentist is the supervillain of the nightmares of young children.

Even though she lost, and I’m not on board with the anti-circumcision movement, I am with Heather Hironimus here. Circumcision should require the ongoing consent of both parents.

The atrocious ‘Innocence of Muslims’ ruling has been reversed.

The Supreme Court that two states can’t tax the same income. Alito, Roberts, Kennedy, Breyer, and Sotomayor were in the majority, and Ginsburg, Scalia, Thomas, and Kagan dissented. This will be of limited utility when state borders have sales tax on one side and income tax on the other, however.

Sarah Kliff argues that college newspapers provide good training for modern journalism:

Becoming editor-in-chief of my college paper broadened my perspective. I had to think about all the important ways to draw readers into stories: things like headlines and layout and photographs and illustrations. I spent lots of late nights in our basement office with the paper’s copy chief and lead designer. These produced an absurd number of inside jokes, as well as a granular understanding of how words and design have to work together for any publication.

Today I work for a website that looks really different from the one I edited in 2006. But my day-to-day job is surprisingly similar: generate interesting story ideas. Write about them. Use layout and design to draw readers in. And always try to do better the next time.

I was a contributor to the Daily Packer for most of my tenure at Southern Tech, but I was an opinion writer which is not quite the same thing. Even so, this site wouldn’t exist without my experience there.

The Daily Packer had no relationship with the university’s journalism school. More than that, very few actual journalism majors worked at the paper. From what I understand, they almost all thought it was beneath them. Which, to me, says something about journalism majors (or at least the ones at our school). Experience is experience, and clips are clips. There were multiple writers at city news outlets who actually cut their teeth at the Packer, though. It was actually pretty cool to see people graduate from the Packer to Colosse Weekly or even the Colosse Herald. I do wonder how the actual journalism majors did…

As we know newspapers have fallen on tough times. It falls into the category of things I hadn’t really thought about, but that would apply to college newspapers, too. Before becoming an opinion writer, I was a regular reader of it. I did what everybody did, which was pick up a copy on my way to class and read it while waiting for class to start. What else was there to do? Well now, of course, there is the smartphone, which has access to just about everything.

As such, the Daily Packer is no more.

Well, they do publish weekly. And there is a website that’s updated daily. Given that anybody accessing that site also has access to everything else on the Internet, though, I doubt it gets the attention that it used to. I would regularly have people talk to me about my columns, including strangers who recognized me from my pic. I wonder if that happens anymore. I’m afraid it probably doesn’t. But maybe it does. When they did a revamp of the site my last year, I did check the DP’s website every morning.

That wasn’t the only paycheck I collected from the Packer, though. I was also the delivery guy. That involved waking up at 5:30 every morning, walking across campus (past the DP building, which was never open for me to collect the writing paychecks) and driving a little go-cart and dropping off lots and lots of papers. It wasn’t a bad gig, all be told. I’d usually be done by 7:30 or 8 but was paid for 3-4 hours a day. (I could theoretically start later, but it was way easier to do it before there were lots of people walking around the campus.) The downside was that if I had a morning class, I didn’t have time to take a nap. I actually enjoyed my 8:30 Business Law class, but had a lot of trouble staying awake for it.

But I will always remember the degree of disgusting I felt whenever I finished. There was newsprint all over my hands. It was often really hot even before the sun rose, so I would be incredibly sweaty. I used an open blade to cut the binds, which meant that I would often cut my fingers (and almost all of my jeans had tears as a result). I don’t think there has been a ritual in my entire life as wonderful as that cold morning shower wiping off the newsprint, sweat, and sometimes blood.

We made $6 or $8 a column. Which was so little, and the office so far away, I rarely picked it up. The result was that some years ago, I found out that the university owed me over $100 in pay that I had never collected. The delivery money actually came out of a separate account – facilities, instead of student activities – and so they would mail me that check. Which wasn’t much money, but it was pretty great money.

… now the water’s wide and deep and brown, she’s crossing muddy waters”

This is a pretty great rendition of the John Hiatt classic you’ve probably never heard.

The song is from the point of view of someone left – with a child – behind by their significant other, with the implication of suicide as the method of exit. It makes me think of my wife’s uncle, who was left behind with a daughter and a son. The entire Corrigan family is success story after success story, except him. The next generation of Corrigans is similarly positioned to be successful in their endeavors… except the daughter who was left behind. Not that their failures, but they mostly seem to be just getting by. And in his case, oscillating between a fight against and a submission to alcoholism.

Here’s John Hiatt singing the song:

In may of 2011, I wrote the following on Facebook:

Michael Barone writes that Mitt Romney should not be considered the front-runner (link at bottom). I actually agree. He’s not substantively ahead in the polls (and is behind in many of them) and you shouldn’t call someone a front-runner unless they’re in the lead. But he remains the likely nominee. Barone’s writing, rather than refuting this point, actually supports it to an extent. He says that there are “only six” cases of the “next-in-line” (NIL) getting the nomination since the primary model was deployed in the 70’s, but that constitutes every non-incumbent nominee since the primary model was deployed in the 1970’s. There is not a single counter-example.

There are, as Barone points out, a number of “almost” counterexamples (Reagan in ’76, Alexander in ’96), but they remain “almosts” for a reason. It didn’t happen. The fact that the NIL nominee’s nomination was in doubt through the primary season actually supports the likelihood of a Romney nomination. Why? Because the second strongest argument against Romney’s nomination is that people aren’t really excited about him. But as past performance indicates, it doesn’t really matter. The next strongest argument is that Romney did something in Massachusetts that is very unpopular with GOP voters. This is the same party that nominated John McCain. Doesn’t matter.

I actually overstate my case somewhat. If a really strong candidate were to come forward, I don’t doubt that Romney could be unseated. In fact, if Huckabee runs, Romney shares the NIL title (though I think his establishment support will probably put him on top). But no candidate really comes to mind. All of them have substantial drawbacks. We’re likely seeing a replay of 2008, where all of the candidates have something that makes them “unacceptable” for some reason or another. The odd thing about 2008 was that it was full of candidates that I just couldn’t see winning the nomination. But one of them had to. The odder thing is that 2012 seems to be the exact same issue.

Absent Huckabee or a really strong candidate (no names come to mind, and I know a lot of names) entering, the only other way I see Romney losing is if it’s essentially a two-man race between Romney and Pawlenty. Pawlenty is not sufficiently exciting that he will stand out from a pack of candidates, but if voters are essentially given two choices, and one of them is the guy that ran the dry-run for Obamacare, I could see Pawlenty getting the nod. But that depends on a dearth of new candidates and a lack of traction among the people already running.

It’s a longshot. I say this as someone that is somewhat lukewarm about Romney and will likely support Pawlenty (or Daniels, if he runs). On the other hand, if Romney does pull out the nomination, I don’t think that the lack of enthusiasm for him (same goes for Pawlenty) means that he can’t win. John Kerry almost won, after all. As long as the GOP nominee meets a general threshold (which Romney, Pawlenty, Daniels, and Huckabee would all meet), the 2012 election will be a referendum on Obama more than anything else.

I mention this not because I stand by it 100%. I have doubts that Huck would have met the “acceptable alternative threshold), Pawlenty was even weaker than I had imagined, and Romney’s relationship with the establishment was (I found out after the election) much worse than I thought. But I bring this up because I want on the record that I am a believer in the establishmentarian advantage, I’m not one of those “anything could happen” people. I mention it in hopes of bolstering my credibility when I say that Jeb Bush has a long and difficult road to the nomination that Mitt Romney did not. Enough so that I’m not positive he will even be in the race come Iowa.

Phil Plait is the Bad Astronomer. That is, he writes the column Bad Astronomy. I think he’s probably a pretty darn good astronomer. He is not, however, a good Constitutional Scholar. Back in 2008 (yes, I know, but I’m a slow reader, ok?), critiquing a silly claim by Vox Day (as if there were any other type of Vox Day claims), Plait wrote:

The US, despite claims by the far right, actually was and is built on a secular basis, and that is not only written in the Constitution, but in the very first right it lays out. Secular in this case doesn’t mean non-religious, it means not favoring any particular religion.

Plait is obviously referring to the religion clauses of the First Amendment, but he is, oh, so terribly, astronomically, wrong.

To begin, the First Amendment does not contain the first right laid out in the Constitution, as Alexander Hamilton made clear in Federalist 84.

The most considerable of these remaining objections is, that the plan of the convention contains no bill of rights. …

…I answer that the constitution proposed by the convention contains, as well as the constitution of this state, a number of such provisions.

Independent of those, which relate to the structure of the government, we find the following: Article I. section 3. clause 7. “Judgment in cases of impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honour, trust or profit under the United States; but the party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to indictment, trial, judgment and punishment, according to law.” Section 9. of the same article, clause 2. “The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.” Clause 3. “No bill of attainder or ex post facto law shall be passed.” Clause [8]. “No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no person holding any office of profit or trust under them, shall, without the consent of the congress, accept of any present, emolument, office or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince or foreign state.” Article III. section 2. clause 3. “The trial of all crimes, except in cases of impeachment, shall be by jury; and such trial shall be held in the state where the said crimes shall have been committed; but when not committed within any state, the trial shall be at such place or places as the congress may by law have directed.” Section 3, of the same article, “Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.” And clause [2], of the same section. “The congress shall have power to declare the punishment of treason, but no attainder of treason shall work corruption of blood, or forfeiture, except during the life of the person attainted.”

Setting aside the limits on the effects of impeachment (which I would not count as a general right of citizens), and the prohibition on granting titles of nobility (not, properly speaking, a right at all), but adding in one he glossed over, the execrable right to import slaves (sadly, the very first true citizen right listed in the Constitution), I count about eight rights that textually precede the religion clauses.

But at least in the Bill of Rights, the amendment containing those important clauses was intentionally listed first, right? But, no, contrary to what seems to be popular opinion, there is no significance to the First Amendment being first. Madison’s original bill put the religion clauses in his fourth article of amendment. Further, he did not propose a discrete set of articles to be added on as a postscript to the body of the Constitution, but proposed to directly amend the text, in a way that would have embedded the religion clauses the third clause of Section 9 (the section that lists actions Congress is forbidden to take).

Fourthly. That in article 1st, section 9, between clauses 3 and 4, be inserted these clauses, to wit: The civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretext, infringed.

But obviously that’s not how Congress sent out the amendments to the states for ratification, so perhaps they corrected Madison’s clumsiness, and put the religion clauses first to signal their importance? No, not even that, because the bill they passed and sent to the states included twelve amendments, among which the amendment protecting religious freedom, speech, etc., was the third. If we accept the “first because most important” logic, then Congress must have thought their first two proposed amendments concerning the apportionment of Representatives and the timing of their pay raises–neither of which was ratified at the time, although the latter finally was ratified 202 years later, to become, rather than the second, the Twenty-Seventh Amendment–were more important than religious freedom.

So to recap, the religion clauses are not the first rights written into the Constitution, nor did Congress propose them as the first rights in the Bill of Rights, nor were they even the first amendments listed in Madison’s original proposal. At no point prior to ratification did religion appear first in a list of rights. Their priority even within the additional set of rights added to the Constitution is entirely a fortuitous accident of history, not a symbolic statement of their importance.

I don’t want to come down harshly on Phil Plait, whom I quite admire. But it is ironic that in writing a column based on rebutting bad arguments about one field, the author makes equally bad arguments about another field.