2020 Watch: Marianne Williamson Put a Spell on Me
“Of all the low-profile candidates vying for national attention in the Democratic debates,” Spectator USA’s Matt McDonald sees one standout: Marianne Williamson. With just five minutes of time in the first debate, “she made those seconds count.” First, a strike “against her arch nemesis: plans” by explaining that President Trump “didn’t win by saying he had a plan . . . [but] by simply saying ‘Make America Great Again.’ ” Her performance, McDonald notes, “turned her from political nobody to Twitter darling and gay icon.” And while she didn’t get the chance to get her full message out, as she told the reporter after the event, “Tomorrow is another day.”
Inside Albany: Cuomo’s Blue-Wave Agita
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Gov. Andrew Cuomo “should be reveling in the achievements of the most successful legislative session in his tenure,” but instead “can’t quit taking swipes at his fellow Democrats,” reports Politico’s Nick Niedzwiadek and Anna Gronewald. After last year’s progressive victories in state Senate elections, he “has tried to tack to the left” but it hasn’t “been smooth sailing,” from Senate leaders’ interference with his Amazon deal to tensions over rent control and driver licenses for undocumented immigrants — along with battles over “credit-taking and blame-shifting.” At the heart of the conflict: “Like another prominent Queens native, Cuomo’s political instincts run towards the pugilistic, irrespective of party affiliations, which perpetuates distrust.”
From the left: Beware the CEO as Social-Justice Warrior
JPMorgan, Wells Fargo and now Bank of America have won liberal plaudits for pledging not to finance the development of private prisons and detention centers — but Jill Priluck warns at The Guardian that corporations “aren’t necessarily altruistic.” Executives are most likely just bent on attaching “themselves to ideas and policies that elevate their economic or moral status — in corporate America’s case, policies that generate profits or, at least, don’t get in the way of generating profits.” The end goal for the likes of Apple and Amazon is to boost “a firm’s power and cachet” and ultimately create “mini fiefdoms that dictate the political sensibilities of not only their employees, clients and those in their sphere, but sometimes the public at large.”
From the right: The Lefty Violence Is Nothing New
Antifa’s attack on journalist Andy Ngo last weekend is another example that “those who engage in violence in defense of the left’s program are often lauded for their refusal to adhere to outdated and insufficient norms of civil conduct,” argues Commentary’s Noah Rothman. Violence from the left is seldom noticed, but when it “becomes impossible to ignore,” the abuse is “often excused or even lionized” in the media. Instead of calling out the assailants, lefties have “questioned Ngo’s journalistic credentials” as a ploy for “tacitly legitimizing the attack on him.” The sick logic here: Violence is required “to drum people of a particular political persuasion out of civic and cultural life.” Eventually, the left’s bloodlust will meet real resistance; “the only question is the scale of the tragedy that will force us to confront the threat.”
Legal reformer: The Misrule of Law Schools
Most US law schools don’t even try to prepare students to practice, Mark Pulliam notes at City Journal: “Tenured faculty leave the real training to the lesser caste of clinical instructors and adjuncts, postgraduation cram courses, and on-the-job training by law firms,” which leaves “plenty of time for conducting research and writing scholarly articles.” This leads to “high and rising tuition, mounting student debt loads” as well as “poor skills training” and “uneven (and uncertain) job placement.” One promising new alternative: Lincoln Memorial University’s Duncan School of Law in Knoxville, named a Best Value Law School, which “applies rigorous instruction in skills essential to practicing law.” And since “lawyering is in many respects a trade — like being a plumber, electrician, mechanic, or welder,” LMU could teach “elite law schools . . . some useful lessons.”
— compiled by the Post Editorial Board