"I don't want public attention because I don't want the story to be about me. I want it to be about what the US government is doing."

-- Edward Snowden, June 9, 2013

Media References, June 9-30, 2013

So it turns out that New York University has bought its president a summer home on Fire Island (h/t Tenured Radical). Or rather, a special foundation associated with New York University has loaned the university president, John Sexton, around a million dollars to buy a beach house, and there seems a real possibility that much of that million-dollar mortgage will eventually be forgiven, so that Sexton won't have to pay it back. NYU has also made similar vacation-home loans to other top administrators and VIP faculty, at least some of them on the same forgive-over-time plan. This represents a brave new financial frontier in higher education. No other university buys its executives second houses. This seems like an obvious story of an out-of-control administration. But more importantly, it's the story of a board of trustees failing to do its job.

Sept. 1, 1948: Actor Robert Mitchum and starlet Lila Leeds were reportedly caught smoking marijuana during a police raid at the actress' Hollywood Hills home. Two others were also arrested.

Mitchum told police that he and another friend were in the neighborhood looking to buy a house when they stopped to visit Leeds and her roommate, dancer Vickie Evans.

I'm delighted about the Supreme Court's decision striking down the Defense of Marriage Act in United States v. Windsor. It's a triumph for human dignity, and also a triumph for federalism. The federal government should not be in the business of restricting the rights that individual states extend to citizens. If thirteen states see fit to recognize same-sex marriage, Washington should not interfere. 

I admit it, my underdog leanings are with Edward Snowden.  I'd like to see him avoid prosecution.  Beyond that, I don't think it's necessary or important to prosecute him.  Oddly enough, commodities trader and former fugitive villain Marc Rich died today.  When I think about the U.S.'s real interest in Snowden, I can't help but thinkof Rich, safely snowed into Zug, Switzerland, making billions of dollars for years, out of reach of Rudy Giuliani, the man who had him indicted him for trading with Iran and for tax evasion.

Last February, I wrote what columnists like to call a "think piece" about an alternative approach to gun control (with the implication that most punditry does not involve thinking).

My proposal was to tax gun manufacturers and retailers based on the lethality of their merchandise, as measured by crime statistics. The hope was to incentivize companies to create their own safeguards against misuse, in essence to financially discourage them from making weapons that appeal to criminals and from selling to customers who are likely to use the guns for crime.

Public debates over affirmative action in college admissions, such as all the hubbub about Fisher v. Texas (in which a not-so-qualified white student named Abigail Fisher sued before the Supreme Court to end affirmative action at the University of Texas), usually run into basic confusion about how college admission works in the first place.

For fuck's sake.

The comments on some of these blogs are unbelievable. I'm specifically referring to a news item at TPM announcing that what's-his-face has made the move from China to Russia and will soon be traveling to Cuba with the intention of settling in Venezuela. Hero? America as a fascist dystopia? Obama as the worst dictator in the world? 

Newsflash. If Obama is the worst dictator in the world, every single idiot claiming that to be true in yelling, hysterical, incredibly public fashion would not be here tomorrow. 

Where I live, at the 46th Parallel in Michigan, the sun rose this morning at 5:44.  It will set at 9:29 tonight.  We will have close to 16 hours of daylight today. It’s the Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year, and up here, where we endure long dark winters, this is a day to celebrate.

Larry Meyer of Macroeconomic Advisers is a smart guy and, as a former Federal Reserve Governor, is one of the more looked to voices for opinions about Fed policy moves and appointments.  He believes that Obama has essentially fired Ben Bernanke and that the president wasn't kind about it.

If you ask anyone what colleges and universities are for, they'll give you more or less the same answer: to educate people.  That's a good answer. It's the one I give myself. But it's only half the truth. Colleges and universities actually fulfill two separate roles. We all know about both of them. We only talk about one of them. And because of that, we misunderstand almost everything about how higher education works and how it might be improved.

Hassan Rouhani, Iran's newly elected president, will serve for four years. By the end of his term, Iran and the U.S. will either reach an agreement, or they will go to war.

Last March, Obama told an Israeli television station that it would take "over a year or so" for Iran to develop a nuclear weapon, the first time an American president stated a timeframe on the record. The dates coincide with a U.S. intelligence estimate during George W. Bush's administration: "sometime during the 2010-2015 time-frame."