1994 v 2010

James Taranto opens his Tuesday BOTWT with an insightful comparison of the 1994 and 2010 political environments.

I was especially struck by this Gingrich-Obama parallel:

Speaker Newt Gingrich, meanwhile, had something of an Obama problem: Having run a stunningly successful campaign, he was too full of himself, overambitious and insufficiently disciplined to do his new job well.

Spot on.

Also, the obvious theme:

Some of the Democrats' biggest mistakes of 2010 have been the result of "learning the lessons of 1994." That year, the Dems failed to enact a ruinous and unpopular health-care "reform" package, and they got trounced in midterm elections. Somehow this year they convinced themselves that if they succeeded in enacting a ruinous and unpopular health-care "reform" package, things would turn out differently.

There is a staggering level of cognitive dissonance, and lack of self-awareness, in thinking that there is something wrong with the voters or their understanding of Obamacare.

The problem is the very idea. Americans would prefer to make their own medical and health decisions, not have them imposed by force by an overbearing federal government. That is something that is unlikely to change, given that decades of propaganda gone into selling the idea to multiple generations has failed.

Although I guess trying to make future generations dumber by giving teachers' unions free reign over education policy is a solid back up plan.

Quick hits 5/5

Items of note from my stack of reading material:

The individual who wrote "Dear Lord . . . this year you have taken away my favorite actor, Patrick Swayze, my favorite actress, Farrah Fawcett, my favorite singer, Michael Jackson, and my favorite salesman, Billy Mays. . . . I just wanted to let you know that Chris Christie is my favorite governor" in a New Jersey teacher’s union memo still has a job. Why is that, exactly?

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Larry Elder on Michael Steele’s unfortunate decision to play the black victim card as excuse for his own incompetence:

Steele blames his difficulties on the "African-American … slimmer margin for error" — the same hazard that Obama deals with. Honestly. From the traditional media to the punditry class to academia to the monologues of late-night comics, never has any president enjoyed a more groveling, fawning, obsequious, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil, see-no-evil quasi-deification.

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Charles Krauthammer on Obama’s nuclear foolishness:

Under President Obama's new policy, however, if the state that has just attacked us with biological or chemical weapons is "in compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)," explained Gates, then "the U.S. pledges not to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against it."

Imagine the scenario: Hundreds of thousands are lying dead in the streets of Boston after a massive anthrax or nerve gas attack. The president immediately calls in the lawyers to determine whether the attacking state is in compliance with the NPT. If it turns out that the attacker is up to date with its latest IAEA inspections, well, it gets immunity from nuclear retaliation. (Our response is then restricted to bullets, bombs and other conventional munitions.)

However, if the lawyers tell the president that the attacking state is NPT-noncompliant, we are free to blow the bastards to nuclear kingdom come.

This is quite insane. It's like saying that if a terrorist deliberately uses his car to mow down a hundred people waiting at a bus stop, the decision as to whether he gets (a) hanged or (b) 100 hours of community service hinges entirely on whether his car had passed emissions inspections. […]

This administration seems to believe that by restricting retaliatory threats and by downgrading our reliance on nuclear weapons, it is discouraging proliferation.

But the opposite is true. Since World War II, smaller countries have forgone the acquisition of deterrent forces — nuclear, biological and chemical — precisely because they placed their trust in the firmness, power and reliability of the American deterrent.

Seeing America retreat, they will rethink. And some will arm. There is no greater spur to hyper-proliferation than the furling of the American nuclear umbrella.

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Mickey Kaus: “It’s getting highly annoying to hear Obama and Senate Democrats pretend that to have effective border control we have to take a package deal that includes amnesty. They’re worse than the cable company when it comes to package deals.”

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Phil Jackson, on the silly decision by the Suns to alienate more than half their fan base by making a heavy handed political statement tonight:

“I don’t think teams should get involved in the political stuff. And I think this one’s still kind of coming out to balance as to how it’s going to be favorably looked upon by our public. If I heard it right the American people are really for stronger immigration laws, if I’m not mistaken. Where we stand as basketball teams, we should let that kind of play out and let the political end of that go where it’s going to go.”

The state of state education

Why do we need school choice? Check out this comment from a Volokh post:

My fourth grader has been assigned four essays so far this year. They were on MLK, Michael Jordan, Dr. Charles Drew and his mother. He knows who Eleanor Roosevelt was, but not FDR. He identifies Albert Einstein as “a famous immigrant”. He knows who Rosa Parks was, but not Abe Lincoln.

This despicable school has moved from education, right past indoctrination, all the way to brainwashing. Have they no shame?

Your brain on union

Gotta love how the Los Angeles School District, awash in red ink, ordered a hiring freeze:

The only exceptions to the hiring freeze will be for classroom teachers, principals, assistant principals, cafeteria managers, school police officers, bus drivers, teachers' assistants, education aides, special education assistants and plant managers.

In other words, they ordered a hiring freeze except for union workers, whom they will continue to hire without regard to minor concerns like budget deficits.

The entire state is an object lesson in how not to govern. That they can still find new ways to sell out the people to unions is a testament to the enduring creativity of the bureaucratic mind.

Presidential hate

Jay Nordlinger takes on the (frankly absurd) notion that hate directed against the president is on the rise in this administration:

Let me make a couple of predictions: I predict that the chairman of the Republican National Committee will never say, “I hate the Democrats and everything they stand for. This [politics, basically] is a struggle of good and evil. And we’re the good.”

Howard Dean said that about the GOP: “I hate the Republicans and everything they stand for. . . .”

I predict that an editor of a conservative magazine will never write a piece called “The Case for Obama Hatred,” beginning, “I hate President Barack Obama.”

A New Republic editor did this, about Bush.

And there is increasing worry about assassination: that someone will take a shot, not just at the president, but at the first black president, which would be extra-catastrophic for the country. A few protesters have carried signs urging violence against Obama, or smacking of violence. Let me make some more predictions:

I predict that a network talk-show host will not show a video of President Obama giving a speech and put the following words on the screen: “SNIPERS WANTED.”

Craig Kilborn of CBS did that to George W. Bush.

I predict that U.S. senators will not joke about killing Obama.

In 2006, Bill Maher had a conversation with John Kerry. He asked Kerry what he’d gotten his wife for her birthday. Kerry said he had treated her to a vacation in Vermont. Maher said, “You could have went to New Hampshire and killed two birds with one stone.” Kerry replied, “Or I could have gone to 1600 Pennsylvania and killed the real bird with one stone.” [...]

I predict that a New York official will not tell a graduating class about assassinating President Obama.

Also in 2006, comptroller Alan Hevesi said to students at Queens College that Sen. Charles Schumer, his fellow Democrat, would “put a bullet between the president’s eyes if he could get away with it.”

I predict that no columnist for a leading European newspaper, and leading world newspaper, will write, “John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr. — where are you now that we need you?”

Charlie Brooker of the Guardian did that to George W. Bush.

I predict that no major writer will write a novel debating the morality of killing President Obama.

Nicholson Baker did that to Bush, with Checkpoint.

I predict that no filmmaker will make a “fictional documentary” that fantasizes — and I’m afraid that is the word — about murdering President Obama.

Some Brits did that to President Bush with Death of a President.

Dear readers, I have made very, very safe predictions. If a CBS talk-show host pictured President Obama and said “SNIPERS WANTED,” he would lose his job, of course. He would never work in the media again. I wonder what else would happen to him.

I could go on, but you’ve heard enough. [...]

Regular readers may be sick of hearing this story — I think I’ve told it twice — but let me tell it again. I tell the story, not because the person featured in it is evil, but for the opposite reason: She is basically wonderful. She just had a fever, that hate-Bush, kill-Bush fever.

I was at an Upper East Side dinner party, and talk turned to 9/11. I mentioned that the “Pennsylvania plane” was apparently destined for the Capitol or the White House. My hostess said, “I wish President Bush had been killed that day.”

The school speech wasn't so innocent after all

I'm shocked, shocked to read this:

"When critics lashed out at President Obama for scheduling a speech to public school students this month, accusing him of wanting to indoctrinate children to his politics, his advisers quickly scrubbed his planned comments for potentially problematic wording."

Thus the claim that the only objectionable thing was the Department of Education's (later removed) indoctrinatory lesson plan is debunked.

Those who don't learn from history...

This story is hard to believe, but it's true:

Three Duke University students were the victims of the highest-profile fraudulent rape claim in modern American history. That fact alone should make the University particularly sensitive to the dangers of false rape allegations, and the need for a firm commitment to due process in handling any allegation of sexual misconduct.

But Duke administrators seem to worry not about violating the due process of rights of their students but instead about running afoul of politically correct campus ideologues. So, starting this semester, the University has adopted a new “sexual misconduct” policy—a policy that even some Duke administrators fear will lead to an increase in false rape claims against Duke students.

Only in academia would a policy that encourages false rape claims in the name of political correctness make any sense.

Unions 101

I've written before on the adversarial relationship between teachers unions and students, whose respective interests almost always clash. But here's a case where the union not only ended up screwing the students, but also the teachers:

When Oregon’s North Clackamas School District found itself faced with a tight budget, it asked its teachers to agree to a wage freeze in order to avoid layoffs. Teachers told our affiliate station KATU that they took a poll in the spring and the majority of teachers agreed to the wage freeze. But because the teachers are represented by a union, the union handled the negotiations with the school district.

The result? The union refused the wage freeze and teachers were laid off. Teachers say the layoffs could mean 45 kids in some classrooms.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: teachers unions are the biggest problem with education in this country, and the biggest obstacle to improving it.

Rapid punches

More political shorts combined into one post:

A couple of recent columns, by Jonah Goldberg and Jeff Jacoby, build on my post on Ginsberg’s comment and its implications and are well worth a read.

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Nice to see Obama blame Medicare and Medicaid for driving up the costs of healthcare in his televised prime time presser. Admitting that government is the problem is step one…

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Tom Maguire on Henrylouisgate: “So - do feminists and domestic violence experts agree that if the man of the house shouts at the cops that everything is cool so get out, the cops should simply leave?”

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That 378-0 resolution that, in part, confirmed Obama having been born in Hawaii? 88.8% of the Republicans voted for it, but only 86.3% of the Democrats did.

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Obama said in a Business Week interview “I haven't signed a bill that's raised taxes yet.”

That’s a lie that takes some serious chutzpah, given that it took him only until his 16th day in office to do so: "President Barack Obama signed legislation Wednesday to more than double the federal cigarette [tax] to pay for an expansion of health insurance for poor children."

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Ann Althouse: “If studies show that divorce damages health, then horning into our marriages will become the government’s business too. Obviously another blue pill. You expect us to pay for the red pill, when there’s a blue pill?”

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Education 101: “I worried that a homeless person had wandered onto the school grounds. When I pointed him out to a fellow parent, she giggled and explained that he was a new teacher.

That can’t be true, I thought, and went off to see the principal, who briefed me about the seniority transfer clause in the teachers’ contract. Among all the applicants for a posted vacancy at P.S. 87, our obviously impaired new teacher had the most years in the system, so he automatically got the job.”

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Who took the most money from HMO’s in 2008, by more than a 2-1 margin? Barack Obama! No wonder he wants the whole country run like an HMO.

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For all of the propaganda painting Republicans as obstructionist on health care reform, it should be noted that Jim DeMint led an effort to allow Americans to purchase individual health insurance across state lines, only to see it defeated 62-37 including no votes by Senators Reid and Obama. The same pair also rejected an effort (as part of a 55-32 vote) to allow for the expansion of health care access and reduced costs through the creation of small business health plans.

It would be more accurate to say that Democrats have blocked health care reform, Republicans have blocked a government takeover of health care.

Why are teachers underpaid?

It's pretty simple: because so much education money is siphoned off to salaries and perks that reach well into the six figures for administrators and union bosses. A classic example of the former from the Chicago Sun Times:

A Niles Township school superintendent made $411,500 last year -- a record in a year that saw top public elementary and high school administrators' pay climb past $400,000 for the first time.

But the taxpayer tab for Neil Codell, 56, didn't stop after he left his post June 30.

Codell continued to receive his superintendent's salary -- even while in a lesser job -- for an additional six months. Niles Township High School District 219 now faces a potential penalty of well over $100,000 from the Teachers' Retirement System because of Codell's early retirement and large spike in pay, state officials say.

"This may turn out to be a platinum parachute by the time all the bills are paid,'' said the agency's executive director, Jon Bauman. [...]

[A] contract option, for both Codell and his family, committed the district to cover 100 percent of hospitalization and major medical premiums for 10 years after Codell's retirement. The deal also included, while he was employed, a $500-a-month auto allowance and a term life insurance policy for twice his salary. [...]

Both the district ACT score and its Prairie State Achievement Exam pass rate are lower now than when Codell became superintendent.

Remember that story when you hear about how more taxpayer money needs to be funneled into education.

There is plenty of money, way too much really, going to education. But the majority of it is seized by greedy unions and bureaucrats.

Why do private schools so outperform public schools despite much lower costs per student? It's elementary (pun intended); an average of 80% of private school budgets go to teachers, the corresponding figure for public schools being 40%.

Is there really any coherent argument against school choice at this point? But when the interests of poor children run up against the interests of teacher's unions, guess who wins?

Demagoguing education

From factcheck.org, some lies used by Oabam to make his case for funneling more money into public schools (read: teacher's unions).

* The high school dropout rate hasn't "tripled in the past 30 years," as Obama claimed. According to the Department of Education, it has actually declined by a third.

* Eighth-grade math scores haven't "fallen" to ninth place compared with other countries. U.S. scores have climbed to that ranking from as low as 28th place in 1995.

* Obama also set a goal "of having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world" by 2020. But in terms of bachelor's degrees, we're nearly there. The U.S. is already second only to Norway in the percentage of adults age 25 to 64 with a four-year degree, and trails by just 1 percentage point.

She made the right choice, etc.

My favorite take on the Palin pick comes from Mark Swanson (via James Taranto):

I think we can all agree that Palin's pick of an experienced statesman like John McCain to head her ticket shows that she is much better prepared to be VP than Biden who is trying to thrust an unqualified youngster who was a do-nothing state legislator before being elected to the Senate where he put in a few months of attendance before going AWOL to run for president.

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If only John Edwards had been the father of Bristol Palin’s baby, it would never have made the news. Then again she would have had to sleep with John Edwards, which might be too much of a burden to take for the team.

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As for the pregnancy itself, I don’t really see it as having any effect on the election unless it turns abortion into a campaign issue. I suspect that the Democrats are smart enough to avoid that at all costs.

The only other possibility is some electoral blowback, particularly from women, over the relentless attacks on Sarah and Bristol by the mainstream media. The Dems are practiced in distancing themselves from the kooks at Kos and such, and fortunately for them only the tiniest minority of voters is aware of the over the top hate speech that is the site’s stock in trade.

But it’s a bit harder to distance from the vitriol that is coming from the editorial and front pages of most major newspapers and newsmagazines and all of the TV news organizations except Fox News. Surveys show that voters have become sophisticated enough to realize that big media is openly campaigning for Obama, and are thus likely to associate the Palin family attacks with the Democrat party.

But even with this factor, and even if Democrats overplay their hand in their newfound distaste for women with children having careers (which would be there even without the pregnancy), it’s hard to see this whole thing swinging more than a point or two on election day, which is still two months away after all.

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College basketball’s greatest rivalry spills over to the gridiron:

Two parachutists who was supposed to drop into Cahpel Hill’s Kenan Stadium with the game ball for the UNC-McNeese State game instead dropped into Wallace Wade Stadium, where Duke and James Madison were warming up, startling players and coaches. One of them almost landed on a player and the JMU coach compared it to a scene from Red Dawn.

The official explanation: “Bad weather nearly forced the skydivers from Virginia-based Aerial Adventures to cancel the leap, but the clouds opened enough for them to see a stadium, and they jumped.”

My guess: they just wanted to meet Sonny Jurgensen.

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Random stat: According to the CBO, a 15% cut in CO2 emissions would raise the average household’s annual energy bill by $1300.

I’m sure they won’t mind…

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The Copenhagen Consensus estimates that merely lowering trade barriers would increase global output by $3 trillion per year, well over 5%. And that more than 80% of that gain would go to poor countries.

The breakdown of the Doha trade talks was a severe blow to those living in poverty. We can mitigate some of the damage by signing as many smaller free trade agreements as we can negotiate, but something that everybody buys into would be a great thing for all of the world’s citizens.

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I’m not sure which is funnier:

- That there is a town called Intercourse, PA
- That it has a newspaper called the Intercourse News
- Or that Intercourse is in Amish country, of all places

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The more government has gotten into the college financial aid business, the more college costs have gone up. Funny how that works. Thomas Sowell has a great alternative to the usual “government confiscates assets from taxpayers, wastes a significant portion on administration, distributes what’s left over haphazardly” manner of subsidizing college expense, as well as keep parents from having to run up huge amounts of debt.

Allow students to sign contracts with lenders who would pay their college expenses in exchange for a set percentage of their future earnings over some period. It would essentially be a system of students selling stock in themselves. The competition of lenders shopping for the best students and students shopping for the best deals on lenders would benefit all concerned. And even the poorest of students would find college within their reach.

As with most of Sowell’s ideas, it’s brilliant but so simple that you wonder why it hasn’t already been done.

Somebody call Webster, etc.

Did Obama seriously say that Clarence Thomas did not have enough experience to serve on the Supreme Court? Wow. We need some new words, irony and chutzpah are no longer sufficient for some situations.

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Kirk Mitchell has an idea of where to house current Guantanamo prisoners in the wake of Boumediene: “a minimum security facility should be established in Washington D.C., equidistant between the Capitol and the Supreme Court Building."

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Another baseball tidbit, this one courtesy of Clem Comly.

Five players have played for both World Series teams during the season:

Jack Kramer, 1951 Giants and Yankees
Johnny Schmitz, 1952 Dodgers and Yankees
Sid Monge, 1984 Padres and Tigers
Lonnie Smith, 1985 Cardinals and Royals
Jim Bruske, 1998 Padres and Yankees

Only Smith actually appeared in the Series in question.

If this kind of research interests you, you might want to look into joining SABR. Disclosure: I was a longtime moderator of and now train and supervise current moderators of the research e-mail list, but I have no financial stake in recommending the organization.

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Jack Kelly echoes my observation (first item) on antiwar hypocrisy:

Did you see the huge crowd outside the Russian Embassy protesting the war in Georgia?

Neither did I. Now that we have a genuine war of aggression, the silence on the Left is deafening. […]

It is scandalous to liberals that terrorists at Gitmo don't have easy access to lawyers, but most don't care how many Georgians the Russians kill.

Vladimir Putin is counting on this.

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A couple of environmental factoids:

Glaciers are advancing in Northern California, Norway, Sweden, Pakistan and New Zealand.

Arctic ice has been thinning by 3% per decade, but Antarctic ice has been growing by 1% a decade. Antarctic ice is 20 times bigger, which means that overall global polar ice is growing by 8/10 of 1% a decade.

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On a related note, the California legislature passed a bill that would have required the state’s public schools to teach “climate change,” which fortunately was vetoed by Governor Schwarzenegger. An increase in such inconvenient truths has led greens to sense some urgency in their quest to indoctrinate our youth; gone are the good old days when you could wait until college to start the brainwashing.

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Energy analyst Vinod Dar (Dar and Company) on why global action on climate is unlikely to happen: The US and Japan will not tell Asia and Africa to choose poverty, disease, hunger and illiteracy over electricity. Europe might, but nobody will listen.”

Dar (sorry Ticket fans, his nickname is probably not “Eight Dollar”) lays out his vision of what we should do:

“Contingency planning should entail strategic responses to a warming globe, a cooling globe and a globe whose climate reverberates with laughter at human hubris.”

Indeed, the thing to keep in mind is that not only do we not know if the planet is going to warm or cool long term, we also do not know whether warming would be beneficial or harmful to man. We do know, from relatively recent experience (a little over a century ago), that a world more than a wee bit cooler would be harmful.

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Is Rep. Jack Murtha ever going to apologize to the US Marines for his shameful “killed innocent civilians in cold blood” slander from May 17, 2006? His allegations, irresponsible at the time, have by now been conclusively shown to be false.

If Murtha is an honorable man, he will do the honorable thing. I won’t be holding my breath.

Scattershooting

Scattershooting while wondering whatever happened to Chico Salmon:

News you may have missed, as most US media tried to ignore or bury it: the latest BLS report shows that September 2007 is the 49th consecutive month of job growth, setting a new record for the longest uninterrupted expansion of the U.S. labor market, and that more than 30 percent of the nation's net worth has been added since the President's 2003 tax cuts. The effect of presidential policies and actions on the economy is almost always overstated (cf the Clinton mythology), but to the degree they do matter President Bush has objectively been a godsend for the US economy.

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High def may be the future, but it still isn’t the present. When an NFL game on CBS, in this case Houston at Atlanta on September 30, is not in HD while at the same time a women’s college soccer game on the Big Ten Network is, you realize this whole thing still isn’t ready for prime time.

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Just when you think you can no longer be shocked…19% of Democrats think that the world would be better off is the US loses in Iraq and another 20% are not sure? Seriously? That’s about an order of magnitude higher than I would have expected even from a group so infested with anti-American sentiment. It is shocking that such a significant group of Americans, perhaps one in ten overall, could be so fundamentally ignorant of the world around us. Our schools must, sadly, have been doing a terrific job of brainwashing young Americans to hate their country in the past couple of decades.

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And lest you think that brainwashing youth is purely an American phenomenon, recall this story from the Great White North:

“First it was his world history class. Then he saw it in his economics class. And his world issues class. And his environment class. In total, 18-year-old McKenzie, a Northern Ontario high schooler, says he has had the film An Inconvenient Truth shown to him by four different teachers this year.”

Sadly for the “educators” involved, even after so many repetitions of this propaganda the message still did not take with young McKenzie. It takes a strong-minded kid to get through school these days and retain the ability to think critically.

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Here’s some footage of Wilt Chamberlain at age 17. Money quote from narrator Marty Glickman: “Remember the name, Wilt Chamberlain - It will probably make big sports copy for years to come."

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Did Barack Obama really say “I’m going to tell the American people what I believe will make this country great”?!? Is he unfamiliar with the first 231+ years of our history? Shouldn’t understanding why this country IS great be a bare minimum prerequisite for presidential candidates?

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James Taranto notes that Paul Krugman stole the exact title to his new book from the late Senator Paul Wellstone, who had in turn stolen it in 2001 from former Connectivut governor Chester Bowles, who had in turn had in 1962 co-opted the idea from Barry Goldwater. The idea of Krugman stealing from, ultimately, Barry Goldwater, would be enough fun for some days but I bring the whole thing up to quote Taranto’s genius introduction:

"Remember Paul Krugman? Once a promising young economist, he ran into hard times in the 1990s, when he served as an adviser to Enron, an ill-fated energy company. Subsequently he was reduced to writing angry op-eds for the New York Times. In 2003 he published a memoir, and two years later he mysteriously disappeared from public view. But last month he resurfaced, still writing his Times column."

Hammernailhead.

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I figured that this week’s matchup of unbeatens between New England and Dallas was unusual, but I had no idea it was this unusual…hope you had the dog and the under in that Buffalo-Akron tussle.

NFL Games in which both teams were unbeaten with 5+ wins:

Date Teams - Result
11/13/21 Buffalo All-Americans (6-0) at Akron Pros (7-0) - BUF 0, AKR 0
11/04/23 Canton Bulldogs (5-0) at Chicago Cardinals (5-0) - CAN 7, CHI 3
10/28/73 Los Angeles Rams (6-0) at Minnesota Vikings (6-0) - MIN 10, LA 9
10/24/04 New York Jets (5-0) at New England Patriots (5-0) - NE 13, NYJ 7
10/14/07 New England Patriots (5-0) vs. Dallas Cowboys (5-0)

The Columbia School of Genocide Enabling

Roger Simon wonders about Columbia's requirements for prospective speakers:

"I have a question for the Columbia crowd, since Holocaust deniers are welcome, would you allow a speaker in favor of a return to black slavery?"

It's a fair question. The most over the top KKK member remaining (there is still a KKK, right?) could not be any more objectionable than the Holocaust denying, genocide fantasizing, "Death to America" spouting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is, even as he is waging hot war against this country in Iraq. It is one of our greatest tragedies that our elite universities have devolved to the point that such a hate-monger can be an honored guest and given a platform for his psychotic vitriol.

Columbia's president Lee Bollinger, and the executives at CBS (where Ahmadinejad will appear on 60 Minutes the night before his speech) would have doubtless fawned over Adolph Hitler circa 1942, but lacking him are settling for the next best thing. As James Taranto quips in noting that Iran punishes gay sex by death while banning ROTC from campus due to Bill Clinton's "Don't ask, don't tell" policy:

"If the U.S. military executed homosexuals instead of merely discharging them, perhaps Bollinger would welcome ROTC back to Columbia."

The best advice I've seen on how we, as ordinary citizens, should react to this sorry situation is given by Death By 1000 Papercuts:

"In a world of perfect karma, Ahmadinejad would be captured by American "students" and held hostage for over a year, paraded before TV cameras and threatened almost daily with death."

UPDATE 9/22/07 11:15pm:
Glenn Reynolds has another excellent suggestion:

"Have some scantily-clad coed run up and give him a kiss. Make sure photos are distributed in Iran."

Better late than never

Justice was finally served this week as the execrable Ward Churchill, aka Chief Lies-a-Lot, was fired from the University of Colorado-Boulder on an 8-1 vote by the Board of Regents. What is disturbing is that he was there in the first place, and how many more just like him still infest our campuses.

Churchill’s entire career at Colorado was based on a lie. He misrepresented himself as an American Indian to gain a racial preference (aka affirmative action) position for which he would never have qualified as a white man. It’s not merely that he would have been “rejected for applying while white” (a close relative of “arrested for driving while black”). It’s that he was grossly unqualified for a tenure-track position at a major university. How many tenured history/[insert PC term here] studies professors do you know that have a MA in communications? This is a guy who should have been covering a couple of night classes at the local community college if he was involved in academia at all.

That alone would have been ample reason to fire him, but he was just warming up. What followed was an embarrassing body of “scholarship” that included generous helpings of plagiarism and outright fabrication. How did he survive so long with such a prolific record of dishonesty? Simple – political correctness.

One of his infamous lies is that the US Army carried out a genocide by deliberately infecting Indians with small-pox. Anybody who follows the preferred narrative that American history is one of evil white men trampling upon poor, righteous men of color can say pretty much anything he wants without being challenged. As long as it further advances the story that our universities want told, an outdated notion like truth is unimportant. And our historical record is increasingly tainted because of it.

How endemic is this kind of racist worldview? Have a gander at some of the rants on far left and/or academic blogs this week. They actually believe that he was wrongly fired, indeed that he was only removed for engaging in his hobby of contemporary anti-American hate speech (have to throw “contemporary” in there to differentiate from the historical anti-American hate speech that is his work), in particular his likening the victims of 9/11 to a Nazi who facilitated the Holocaust. That is undeniably deranged and disturbing, but if we start firing college professors for over-the-top hate speech there won’t be many of them left. Sorry folks, Churchill was fired for serial academic fraud, nothing more and nothing less.

Chief Lies-a-Lot’s demise was a very good thing for American education, but he’s only one of thousands pitching distorted and dishonest worldviews of hate to mostly young and impressionable minds. Removing one cell of a cancerous tumor can’t hurt, but the patient is still critical.

Today's lesson: steal!

Here's a story that symbolizes of the mindset of teacher's unions circa 2007:

The school district that runs the nation's largest merit pay program gave oversized bonuses to nearly 100 teachers and is asking them to give it back. The president of Houston's largest teachers' union is telling members not to return the overpayments, which range from $62.50 to $2,790.

A total of almost $75,000 was overpaid because a computer program mistakenly calculated the bonuses of part-time personnel as if they were full-time employees, according to the Houston Independent School District. Less than 1 percent of teachers were affected, the district said.

Gayle Fallon, president of the Houston Federation of Teachers, said the district can't force the 99 teachers to sign forms authorizing it to deduct the money from their paychecks, and promised legal action if it attempts to do so.

"If it's the district's error, then the district should bear the loss," she said.

This is revolting. Ms. Fallon's position is that it's okay to steal money if it's given to you by mistake. Doubtless she's the type who, when accidentally given extra change by a waiter or store clerk thinking she gave them a $20 bill instead of a $10, rushes out of the business and high fives her companion at having made a personal score at the expense of a low paid worker.

If she is this unethical in her personal life, let those she victimizes and her conscience (if she has one) deal with it. But in her capacity as a very highly paid official and as a public figure, you have to hope that her urging her constituents to steal money from their employer (in this case, the taxpayers of Houston) will be met with the level of public scorn it deserves. And that Houston's teachers will show that they are a group with some sense of morality and professional ethics and show this despicable woman the door at the earliest opportunity. How would you like to be a teacher, or even just a parent having to explain this story to your child? It's tough enough to instill values in children these days without them seeing their teachers as not having any.

There is a punchline to the story:

The union opposes the merit system unanimously approved by the school board last year.

That's right - Fallon doesn't think any Houston teacher should have gotten a bonus!

As you may know, the primary goal of teacher's unions is to avoid any semblance of accountability for teachers. This serves to protect the incompetent teacher from being fired and to deny reward or incentive to excellent teachers. It's a system that creates spoils for lousy teachers and union officials at the expense of quality teachers and, of course, students.

Finding a way to make teachers and schools accountable for their performance in educating is the number one problem facing American schools today. The unions have an entire political party, as well as tons of individual politicians, in their pockets, so no help is likely to come there. The best hope for the kids, and thus to a large degree our future, is getting free market principles into our education system and letting them work their usual magic - whether it be by vouchers, tax credits or via local initiatives at the ballot box.

Sponsering a teacher near you

My sister is a middle school teacher in a Dallas area school district. As with any government endeavor, silliness is sure to creep in, to wit:

"Our district has a contract with Coca Cola. Only Coke products in machines, etc. They (not sure if it's Coke or [the district]) have decided if we as teachers bring a drink from home that is not a Coke product (like my Ozarka water I take every day) we should put it in a cup or COVER THE LABEL like on TV."

You have to figure this is unenforceable and will thus be ignored, but it does bring up some interesting possibilities, not the least of which is that teachers will soon be wearing uniforms that look something like this.

A loon of epic proportions

I had seen some chatter on the blogs, particularly Ann Althouse, about the goofy Wisconsin professor Kevin Barrett, but frankly I hadn't paid much attention to it - a university professor throwing out silly anti-American hate speech is about as noteworthy as a hot day in July. But then I heard an exceprt of the podcast that made him (in)famous, and I think I see what the fuss is about now.

Sure, he throws out the standard "9/11 was an inside job" idiocy, but that's just red meat conspiracy theory for the irrational America hating crowd, as crazy as that might seem to any rational readers. But he goes well beyond the tinfoil hat level into a category that hasn't yet been labeled, let's call it the "aliens control us all via anal probes" school of thought.

In Barrett's fantasy world, not only 9/11 (an "inside job" organized and commanded by VP Dick Cheney) but the Madrid, 7/7 and Bali hotel bombings, as well as most of the "Zarqawi style" bombings in Iraq, have been carried out as what he calls "false flag terrorism/operations" by US military intelligence. All as part of a government conspriacy to spark war in the Middle East. Just when I thought I'd heard it all...if you want to spark war in the Middle East all you need to do is assert that Jews have a right to exist!

And here's the punch line - this loon is scheduled to teach an inroductory course in Islam this fall. As disturbing as it is that this guy has allowed himself to become brainwashed to the point of insanity, that pales when stop to ponder the idea of him trying to indoctrinate students in any setting, much less one as potentially volatile as a course on Islam. That could do permanent damage to the more impressionable kids. It's no different from hiring the Grand Wizard of the KKK to teach a course in black history.

Hopefully the state will do the right thing, fire the guy (he's only an adjunct) and look into their hiring process for professors, although the early returns aren't promising. I'm sure that whatever happens, or if you want to see more background on the story, Ann Althouse (linked above) will be all over it, as she has been to this point.