Starting today, The Commentariat brings you a daily round-up of Columbia in the news (or in the crosshairs, as the case may be). Enjoy!

City Journal is occupied by Columbia’s ‘68 anniversary line-up. (Har har.)

Oh well. E-Publishing was never much of a boxer to begin with.

Columbia Law alums sound off about being shut out of improvements to the school’s debt relief system. They’ve got a petition, too.

Ring any bells?

Columbia researchers discover that Amino acids are left-handed. So does that make protein gauche?

And in case you missed it, Yale’s resident fraudster spent a few semesters hoodwinking Columbia, too.

American politics is a dog and pony show of the lowest order. Despite the worldwide coverage our presidential elections generate, the attention is hardly deserved. It’s not rocket science; it’s not even political science.

The high-minded among us would like the democratic process to be a contest of ideologies fought in the halls of power. Instead, a presidential campaign is a bare-knuncle brawl between two beauty queens with enornous sums of cash and a legion of expensive stylists. Are you smarter than a 5th Grader? If so, try to tone it down. All that fancy policy talk won’t fly at the Iowa State Fair or Koop’s Frozen Custard.

How do I know? I worked on the frontlines of the 2004 presidential race in Seattle, Washington. Seattle is the most educated city in the United States, where more than 25 percent of residents have at least a bachelors degree. It’s also one of the bluest enclaves on the West Coast. In spite of these fact I heard an unimaginable litany of irrational, inarticulate reasons why people were voting for George W. Bush and why they couldn’t stand John Kerry. Ideas had nothing to do with it.

Pop quiz: how did the Kennedy clan first make its money? If you answered bootlegging and other questionable activities, you are a winner. While we love the notion of Camelot or the image of John F. Kennedy Jr. saluting his father’s casket, the reality of our politician’s private lives is something different entirely. We should be distrustful of any person who claims to want to lead us, but instead we follow politicians like sunflowers in the early morning light.

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Yesterday, I wrote about some of the gaps in the Spec’s coverage of the Madonna Constantine plagiarism saga. Mea Culpa, newsies–as far as I’m concerned, today’s article just about settles the issue, and shows that the clinical psychology professor probably won’t be a clinical psychology professor much longer.

The key details:

“I am left to wonder whether a White faculty member would have been treated in such a publicly disrespectful and disparaging manner,” she added….

TC and Constantine first entered the spotlight when a noose was found on Constantine’s office door in early October in a still-unsolved hate crime that drew national media attention. In her statement, Constantine drew a connection between the noose incident and the plagiarism investigation.

Laaaaame defense, Madonna. The last thing this woman should do is draw even implicit or rhetorical connections between the noose-hanging last semester and the accusations of plagiarism–These don’t work in her favor, since they couldlead people to the conclusion that she hung the noose on her own door knowing her academic career was in jeopardy, and knowing that casting herself as a victim of racism could be her only shot at saving it. I think it’s too early to jump to conclusions about plaigarism-noose hanging connections, although Constantine clearly disagrees with me.

Former TC professor Christine Yeh, who now teaches at the University of San Francisco, was one of three former colleagues and students identified by TC as having formally accused Constantine of plagiarism. Yeh said she gradually became concerned about Constantine’s research over the course of a decade of working in the same department.

“It was a few years ago when it came to my attention and I started to actually read what she had published, my work … it wasn’t until later that I was told that students had come forward saying they’d had work stolen as well,” Yeh said.

Looks like Constantine’s habitual academic fraud was something of an open secret. Worse still, it looks like it was perpetrated against people in her own department. Stealing from grad students is about the slimiest thing you can do, since accusations of plagiarism against them could sink their degree, never mind their career outlook. If this accusation is true, Constantine needs to get far the fuck away from 120th St.

Despite the allegations now facing Constantine, her attorney Paul Giacomo said that in fact it was Constantine who was plagiarized by her accusers and not the other way around. The investigation was not neutral, he said, because TC did not grant legal indemnity—protection against potential liability—to his client, though the school did to Yeh and former students Tracy Juliao and Karen Cort, who were also officially identified as complainants. Juliao said in a phone interview with Spectator that she had noted specific publications by Constantine that reproduce verbatim portions of Juliao’s dissertation.

Also just as we predicted yesterday: this thing turned into such a departmental bloodbath that the possibility of lawsuits and counter-lawsuits required some kind of non-biased, outside intervention. I was wrong in saying that Yeh was the one who started lawyering up, but the important point is that this went from being an internal, academic issue to an external, legal one.

And also as we predicted yesterday, Constantine is very, very guilty. It’s a scandal that she’s tried to turn this into a racial issue, although this final, delusional flourish is probably fortunate for TC: the school doesn’t seem to have an intra-departmental plagiarism problem. It just has a Madonna Constantine problem.

Lisa Lewis isn’t sure. Although she does a good job of weighing the usual pros and cons of Patriots perfection (pro: history! con: they’re fucking assholes. Trust me, I’m a Redskins fan).

I actually have no answer to this post’s titular question. The Jets and Patriots harbor a bitter hatred towards one another, and their early season hijinks have given rise to a classic intra-division blood feud. But what’s good for the Giants is, by definition, bad for the Jets, especially since a Giants victory would probably replace the Jets’ 1969 Superbowl win as the greatest upset in NFL history.

And speaking of dilemmas. Over at Slate, John Dickenson saves you whatever time you were going to spend reading about last night’s debate:

Also, both campaigns think they’ve picked the right final strategy. Clinton is ahead in the polls; she doesn’t need to tear down Obama. Obama thinks he has the momentum after his win in South Carolina and the big Kennedy endorsements and doesn’t need to go on the offensive. Plus, they can still do the mean stuff in phone calls and mailers and through surrogates. (emphasis added)

Dickenson suggests that last night’s debate was a manufactured lovefest in spite of offering some scattered moments of substantive policy discussion. And manufactured it was: both candidates avoided raising the character issues that plagued the last Democratic debate, as they correctly realized that such petty bickering reflected as poorly on the state of the party as it did on the individual candidates. But this is America. Innuendo and petty bickering win elections.

Policy positions lose them, and Clinton said something that will likely come back to haunt her, should she become her party’s nominee: “the tax rates will go back to what they were before Bush became president.” Really, Hilary: have you, victim #1 of the “vast right-wing conspiracy,” learned nothing? Rehashing the Kosovar refugee fiction didn’t help her either (click on the link to find out what she was really doing in the Balkans in 1999. I’ll give you a sneak preview: not an awful lot)…

Only once a week? Do your research, New York Times editorial board. Not that they aren’t dead-on correct here…

HERE IT IS YOUR MOMENT OF ZEN: “The authors are from the Center for Hip and Knee Replacement, Columbia University Medical Center, New York, NY.”