Both Morton Grove and Wilmette were among the cities sued on Friday by the NRA. Their decisions are sensible. While the issue of Second Amendment incorporation is still unresolved, Richard Daley’s government in Chicago can spend its own funds to fight the issue all the way to the Supreme Court. If Daley wins, the suburbs can re-institute their bans. If Daley loses (an outcome that seems more likely than not if the Supreme Court takes the case), then Wilmette and Morton Grove have saved themselves hundreds of thousands of dollars of attorneys fees, since they would have to pay their own lawyers, and have to pay the plaintiffs’ lawyers for bringing a successful civil rights claim.

(Volokh Conspiracy, The First Dominos Fall: Morton Grove and Wilmette Handgun Bans)

Don’t worry, folks. After all, the cities can still take your property if someone whose taxes will be higher wants to buy it from them….you needn’t go into shock at the sight of a Constitutional liberty being upheld. There’s still plenty being trampled.

Ref: Power Line’s take on the background to the Delahunt story.

Much of the leadership of higher education today has lost its way through a creeping “corporatization” of academic culture. Money matters, of course—a lot. Without it, nothing else is possible. But university leaders today often place financial considerations ahead of the university’s core institutional mission of education. Presidents are chosen largely for their fund-raising prowess rather than their intellectual leadership. Universities spend millions of dollars on glossy mailings and PR professionals to promote the institution’s “brand” rather than on improving educational quality.

(NAS–The National Association of Scholars)

I disagree only in the sense that I do not see this “corporatization” as creeping–it is rushing upon us by leaps and bounds. Franchising McUniversities that exist primarily in the imaginations of the undereducated seeking “degree completion” as an Aladdin’s lamp to la dolce vita and the cubicles of faceless processing centers are increasingly pressuring the intellectual integrity of the scholar, while the pressure to build heavily-endowed research centers continues to bear down on the teaching mission of even well-established universities. There is, of course, no reason great scholarship cannot coexist with great teaching (there is in fact no way to get the latter without the former, I think); but the managerial competencies required to balance these are subtle, intellectual, and not primarily focussed on “brand identity” and licensing deals.

Another writer on the same theme manages some rhyme, and some pointed comments, too.

Here’s a short and sweet one from me:

If someone went mad and let me run the zoo,
We’d say what we like from front desk to the loo, (more…)

Sanger [ . . . ] brilliantly used the language of liberation to convince women they weren’t going along with a collectivist scheme but were in fact “speaking truth to power,” as it were. This was the identical trick the Nazis pulled off. They took a radical Nietzschean doctrine of individual will and made it into a trendy dogma of middle-class conformity. This trick remains the core of much faddish “individualism” among rebellious conformists on the American cultural left today. Nonetheless, Sanger’s analysis was surely correct, and led directly to the widespread feminist association of sex with political rebellion. Sanger in effect “bought off” women (and grateful men) by offering tolerance for promiscuity in return for compliance with her eugenic schemes.

In 1939 Sanger created the above-mentioned “Negro Project,” which aimed to get blacks to adopt birth control. Through the Birth Control Federation, she hired black ministers (including the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Sr.), doctors, and other leaders to help pare down the supposedly surplus black population. The project’s racist intent is beyond doubt. “The mass of significant Negroes,” read the project’s report, “still breed carelessly and disastrously, with the result that the increase among Negroes…is [in] that portion of the population least intelligent and fit.”

A letter-writer replies to Goldberg’s damning (and not new: I read this data first in a Pat Buchanan column more than fifteen years ago, and no one is pretending this is a shocker; it’s just very carefully suppressed) with the inspired argument that Helen Keller, former Justice Holmes, and a wide array of prominent figures were no better.

Well, uh, actually…yes. Now, not all of the figures the letter-writer names were equally rapacious, or equally successful, but beyond a doubt the dominant policy voices up to World War II were almost uniformly eugenicist upper-class white liberals, otherwise known as Progressives. They were also usually men with some serious libidinal blockages, which is where having brilliant players of the game like the murderous Sanger and the Communist Keller came in so handy.

Oh, Jonah’s response could be summed up in a word: “duh!“

Quoth Dale Carpenter regarding the Heller decision:

1. We’re all originalists now. One of the most extraordinary things about this case is that it presented, for the first time in modern memory, a chance for the Supreme Court to decide the meaning of a constitutional right without a heavy overlay of “constitutional law” – a body of relevant decisions from the Supreme Court itself. For “faint-hearted” originalists, like Scalia and others, the existence of non-originalist precedents can be a barrier to reaching originalist results. But here the issue was one of truly first impression, presenting a “clean” controversy. It therefore allowed the Court to address the issues on first principles of constitutional interpretation.

So what principles did the justices reach for? It’s not surprising that Justice Scalia turned to the text and to originalist sources to determine the meaning of the words of the Second Amendment. And while the Stevens dissent makes noises about United States v. Miller as if it controls the outcome in favor of the constitutionality of heavy regulation of firearms, most of his dissent grapples with originalist questions. Stevens might not be a very accomplished originalist, or you might think he was wrong in this instance, but the mere fact that he and the three who joined him paid such obeisance to originalism on a matter of constitutional first impression confirms again its ascendance as a methodolgy.

In other words, there has definitely been some progress–despite the ongoing degradation of our constitution–in the Supreme Court’s willingness to read the document, rather than dictate it.

Meanwhile, our esteemed (or S-themed) candidates for bossa dis here post-colonial former republic weighed in, and Jonathan Adler was there in cyberspace to tell us about it. Long story short, Barack Obama has always believed the the 2nd Amendment guaranteed an individual right he doesn’t care about when he’s doing legislating/politicking things; and John McCain thinks Obama’s fellow Chicagoans need weapons to defend themselves. I’m with McCain on this one.

Ilya Somin wants you to notice that a “right” only matters if the people who control the power to exercise it–well, if they are us. That is, property is essential to liberty. That is–he’s right, but this is making my head hurt. Basically, don’t get too excited about Heller while Kelo is still on the books.

And estimable and persistent 2nd Amendment defender David Kopel weathers the server’s wrath to bring us some short, happy remarks on the case.

www.scotusblog.com will have all the details beginning tomorrow morning at 9am eastern.

I’d like to say I’m fairly confident that they will rule correctly in that the 2nd amendment provides an individual right, but obviously recent decisions have me much more on edge than I should be.  Assuming Justice Kennedy takes a moment to pull the knife out of the back of the USA, we might get a 5-4 ruling in favor of the Constitution.