By Chris Reed

The instant national chortling Thursday over the fact that President Obama had called California’s Kamala Harris the “best-looking” state attorney general ended up being more about seeing the usual slippery standards on political correctness. Democrats can often get away with little blowback for things that would get Republicans fricaseed, and this was one more example.

But if you are Harris, you probably don’t appreciate the Obama remark because of the likelihood that it will remind people that it was her attractiveness that gave her her initial foothold in state politics.

Harris caught Willie Brown’s eye in her 20s

The first time she ever appears in a Nexis.com search of California news is March 22, 1994, when she was Assembly Speaker Willie Brown’s date at his 60th birthday party. She was 30 years-plus younger. But she didn’t just date Brown. She cashed in from knowing him:

“Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, continuing his rush to hand out patronage jobs while he retains his powerful post, has given high-paying appointments to his former law associate and a former Alameda County prosecutor who is Brown’s frequent companion.

“Brown, exercising his power even as his speakership seems near an end, named attorney Kamala Harris to the California Medical Assistance Commission, a job that pays $72,000 a year.

“Harris, a former deputy district attorney in Alameda County, was described by several people at the Capitol as Brown’s girlfriend. In March, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen called her ‘the Speaker’s new steady.’ Harris declined to be interviewed Monday and Brown’s spokeswoman did not return phone calls.

“Harris accepted the appointment last week after serving six months as Brown’s appointee to the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board, which pays $97,088 a year.”

That’s from the Nov. 22, 1994, Los Angeles Times.

Two British newspapers are going where U.S. papers won’t and connecting the 2013 compliment Harris got from America’s most powerful black politician with the 1994 “compliments” she got from California’s most powerful black politiican. Both the London Daily Mail and the London Evening Standard mentioned Harris’ history with Willie Brown, without mentioning he was double her age.

Harris’ personal history is even more exotic than Obama’s.  Her parents are Dr. Shyamala Gopalan, a breast cancer specialist, and Stanford University economics professor Donald Harris, who had Kamala after emigrating to the U.S. from India and Jamaica, respectively.

I’m sure this high-powered couple was just thrilled to see their daughter’s mentor/protege/girlfriend relationship with the aging, married Brown.

Yes, married.

“In September 1958, Brown married Blanche Vitero, with whom he had three children, Susan, Robin, and Michael. He has four grandchildren, Besia, Matea, Mateo, and Lordes, and a step-granddaughter, Tyler. The couple separated in approximately 1976 but remain married. He has a daughter, Sydney Brown, by political fund raiser Carolyn Carpeneti.”

How … continental.

By John Seiler

Youngsters finally are figuring out that going $100,000 in debt to get a degree in poststructural-prepostmodern-quasistructuralist-semiFoucaulist-political-correctness with no chance of a job isn’t exactly the best way to start out in life.

A new study released today by the Public Policy Institute of California found, in the Contra Costa Times summary:

“From 2007 to 2010, the percentage of graduates attending University of California or California State University campuses fell by 20 percent….

“Fewer than 18 percent of California high school graduates ended up at a Cal State or UC campus in 2010, down from 22 percent in 2007. And 55 percent of the most highly prepared students enroll there, down from 67 percent.

“About one in 10 who reject admissions offers from the state universities choose not to go to college at all….”

College still can be a good deal if you’re pursuing a degree in a technical or scientific subject, such as chemistry or engineering. They still have standards. If you reject Newton’s physics as coming from the “sexist patriarchal oppressors,” the bridge you build will collapse, people will die and you might go to prison for negligence.

But the humanities departments are hopeless. With only a few exceptions, they’re suffused with cultural Marxism.

Murderous Marxism lives

It’s kind of funny, in a mortifying sort of way. Political and economic Marxism died with the Soviet Union 21 years ago after murdering more than 100 million people around world, from Lenin’s and Stalin’s Gulag to Mao’s Great Leap Forward to the killing fields of Cambodia.

Yet Marxism lives in American universities as a cultural excrescence.

So, kids, stay away from it. Start your lives right now. Don’t go to college and get into debt.

Are you intersted in Shakespeare? Then read him, attend local performances of the plays and watch videos of the plays, such as those the BBC produced three decades ago (available on Netflix and in libraries).

If you’re interested in a scientific or technical field, you’ll probably still have to go to college. The way to get through the P.C. college humanities courses mostly undamaged by the academic Stalinism is to take advanced placement tests. If you can’t do that, take courses at your local community college, where the tuition is much cheaper and you’re more likely to get a non-Maoist professor.

Read on your own. Read alternative Web sites like this one. Some of my favorites: LewRockwell.com and Antiwar.com. The Mises Institute has hundreds of free books online on libertarianism and free market economics. Use it.

Want to get into business? Then start one. There are copious books an free Web sites on how to do so. Most new businesses fail. Then start again. My suggestion: Don’t go into debt doing so. Business debt can be as bad as college debt.

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates dropped out of college. Edison and Ford never went. You don’t need it.

Here’s a good Walter Williams article on how college is a waste for so many.

Another by Marc Slavo on why college is the biggest scam in U.S. history.

And here’s a YouTube of a smart girl saying “farewell to college.” She gives me hope in the rising generation.