We’re over the hump. But the fun is just beginning. Tomorrow is the day the Republican Supreme Court gives President Obama the defeat on health care that Antonin Scalia also wanted to deal him on immigration law. CLOSING OUT:

* WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? I received today — and have printed in full on the jump what you can also get at the link — the large and tangible benefits to Arkansas from the health care law Republican justices will legislate out of meaningful existence tomorrow. A little late to be selling this now, don’t you think, Obama administration? When chest-beating Republicans get through winning a few more state and federal legislative seats through the largely uncontested demonization of this law, then they’ll really give public health and welfare a whuppin’. Repent at leisure those who joined the chorus of naysayers. By the way, should I be wrong and the law is upheld, Insurance Commissioner Jay Bradford says the state is ready to do its part. If it is overturned, well a half-million uninsured Arkies are SOL. Here, a prominent liberal says what the strategy should be if the law goes down. Democrats should go after a Medicare expansion and emphasize Republican plans to wreck a successful program that does have cost control mechanisms.

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* ANOTHER BLACK YOUTH GUNNED DOWN: An elderly man gunned down a 13-year-old black Milwaukee youth he suspected of a crime. Problem: the crime occurred while the child was in school. The man has been charged with homicide, at least. But I don’t think this Crooks and Liars account exaggerates a worrisome trend toward vigilantism and the prevalence of firepower that enables summary execution. AND SPEAKING OF GUNS: Research indicates stand your ground laws” are producing more homicides.

* PERCHANCE TO DREAM: The Arkansas Citizens First Congress, a progressive grassroots group, has adopted a wish list for the 2013 legislature. Highlights: Adoption of best practices legislation for the gas industry, the Equal Rights Amendment, election reform, wage theft prevention and more good-sounding stuff that the powers-that-be are sure to hate.

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* NEW AGRICULTURE CHIEF: Roby Brock says former state Rep. Butch Calhoun will be named to succeed Richard Bell as the state’s agriculture commissioner.

* WORSHIPPING THE CORPORATE GOD: Good piece in Huffington Post on corporatists’ effort to run off the academically respected president of the University of Virginia in favor of someone ready to push harder for cheaper on-line education and more inculcation of the supposedly superior corporate way of doing things in education. (Does that include enormous salaries and benefits for college presidents who fail to make a profit?) On-line education is high on the University of Arkansas agenda and, at Fayetteville, it long ago outsourced its birthright to corporate control, particularly as embodied by Walton family philosophy. I liked this passage about UVa:

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For some, it is emblematic of how the cult of corporate expertise and private-sector savvy has corralled the upper reaches of university life, at the expense of academic freedom and “unprofitable” areas of study.

“There is this sort of shift in the zeitgeist,” says Tal Brewer, chair of UVA’s Philosophy Department. Brewer sees a new, heightened cultural “adoration of the business mind as capable of bringing clarity, organization and efficiency to any kind of institution…I just think that’s a deep mistake.”

In an era in which the best and the brightest financiers laid the groundwork for the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and the Supreme Court allowed corporate sponsors and wealthy donors to upend the political system with unlimited campaign contributions, Brewer says he sees the upheaval in Charlottesville as more of the same.

* ANDREW ZIMMERN HAS NOTHING ON THE CLINTON SCHOOL: Fun post today on the Clinton School of Public Service blog on the unusual food students sample on study abroad. Hot and spicy spiders in Cambodia. Royal Rat in Belize. Ostrich chili in South Africa. Nobody went to Malawi, apparently. My daughter reports on a roadside snack there — mice on a stick, fur and all. (The picture below is not from her, but from a blogger working in Malawi.)

MIGHTY GOOD MICE: In Malawi.

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  • teachinginmalawi.blogspot.com
  • MIGHTY GOOD MICE: In Malawi.

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