Sarah Palin told ABC’s Charles Gibson yesterday that she favors admitting Georgia and the Ukraine, both on Russia’s borders, to NATO. When Gibson asked her if she would go to war with Russia to defend Georgia, she said, “”Perhaps so. I mean, that is the agreement when you are a NATO ally, is if another country is attacked, you’re going to be expected to be called upon and help.”
Right you are, Ms. Palin, but help doesn’t always mean military help, else the NATO countries would have chosen up sides and embroiled themselves in war when Greece and Turkey went at it over Cyprus. You are technically correct, though, because the defense clause of the treaty reads: Full story »
Jack Abramoff was sentenced to four years in prison today, much less than the maximum time for his crimes. You may remember him as the man who bribed, stole, and otherwise slimed his way to the top of the K Street lobbying establishment in Washington. He also defrauded the Chippewas, an Amerind tribe, of tens of millions of dollars in a scheme with a PR firm he called the self-congratulatory name, “High Five!” Yet, in a letter filed with US District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle, Abramoff insists:
I am not a bad man (although to read all the news articles one would think I was Osama Bin Laden), but I did many bad things. Full story »
Republican candidates are running as far away from President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney as possible, because their approval ratings are at or near historic lows for a sitting administration. The upcoming GOP convention in Minneapolis presented a difficult issue for the GOP: It would be an admission of Republican failure to exclude the nominal party leaders from the convention, but their appearance would be an aid to the Democrats, who are trying their best to defeat John McCain on George W. Bush’s abysmal eight-year record. An appearance by the two most unpopular and incompetent men in the White House’s recent history would further tie this year’s GOP candidates to them.
An unknown candidate, a gathering of Minutemen, Bob Barr (or maybe not), and immigration. Do progressives have anything in common with these people on this topic? Well, maybe. Just a bit.
As delegates pour into Denver for the Democratic National Convention, a local theater company is bravely sticking its neck out for the city’s political junkie guests. This first edition of Scholars and Rogues News, our assault on Web TV, explores the Bovine Metropolis Theater’s talents, motivations, and deep emotional illnesses.
Jackson Browne is suing the McCain campaign and the Ohio Republican Party for copyright infringement. It seems there was an ad in Ohio mocking Barack Obama’s advice to inflate tires to save gasoline, and the Republicans decided to use Jackson Browne’s Running on Empty as a theme song.  They didn’t license the rights from Browne, which presents a small problem.
I suppose I should really address this to your campaign managers, since you don’t know how to use a computer to read this. But maybe they’ll print it up and hand it to you.
Anyway, John, your campaign is starting to smell like a beached sturgeon. The whole thing with Paris Hilton and the other bimbo? Lame, lame, lame. I want you to win, man, but you seem to be trying your best to blow it. Trying to link Obama to some dumb blonde chicks is not gonna get you to the White House, OK? If you want to get there, you’re going to have to explain yourself and your positions to the American public.
Take affirmative action, for example. Full story »
WASHINGTON – Washington mayor Adrian M. Fenty announced today that his city will soon issue interested motorists the US’s first pedestrian hunting license (PHL). The new license will allow drivers to collide with pedestrians anywhere within the District of Columbia on a prepaid basis.
Unlike most hunting licenses, which charge a single fee, the PHL will allow motorists to deposit as much money as they like in a prepaid account. They may then run down pedestrians for $50 each, up to the account limit.
“In no way do I want to give the impression that there is an absolute bag limit on the PHL,” said Fenty in a morning news conference at the Mayflower Hotel. Full story »
I cancelled my last newspaper subscription just a few minutes ago. I used to get two newspapers delivered every day. I cancelled the first one when I got tired of calling circulation to get the paper that was supposed to be delivered in the morning delivered, eventually, whenever they got around to it. I figured I would cancel just for a while to make a point, but a strange thing happened.Â
For better or worse, cultures tend to rank genres of fiction. So-called serious works, written by the likes of William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce, rate well above mysteries, westerns, romances, science fiction, and (certainly) comic books on the literary org chart. There’s justification for this. We rank the stunning complexity of Mozart’s music ahead of chopsticks for a reason: Mozart exhibits genius of the highest order, taking our most talented musicians years of study and practice to understand and master, and the first rendition of chopsticks was composed and taught to a wildebeest in under 19 seconds.
Or, to put it another way, Hamlet is clearly a more complex and wonderful work than Everyone Poops.
On rare occasions, though, a writer takes the unique features of a lowly literary genre and uses it to illuminate life in a manner that, perhaps, could be accomplished in no other way. In 1895, HG Wells published The Time Machine, transforming science fiction from a mere, gee-whiz exploration of technical wonders to a spelunking crawl through the human psyche, illuminating the toothy growths of social terror clinging to the walls and ceilings along the way. Only science fiction gave him the freedom to vastly alter the world and explore the unchanging human condition as it adapts to that world. Only science fiction could give anthropologist Ursula Le Guin the platform she needed to explore humanity in the absence of fixed gender, as she did in The Left Hand of Darkness, or Isaac Asimov the frame of reference he needed to study the very meaning of what it means to be human in I, Robot. Full story »
The Republicans have found a new weapon in their desperation to capture the White House again and retain as many seats as possible in Congress: oil drilling. Yesterday, President George W. Bush lifted a moratorium on offshore drilling his father implemented in 1990. Note that this will make only a political difference, since Congress maintains its own moratorium. It does do two very important political things for the Republicans, though.
1. It allows Republicans to say that the Republican president wants to do something about the oil crisis and gasoline costs, even if the Democratic Congress does not, and
2. It allows Congressional Republicans to introduce a bill lifting the moratorium, forcing Democrats to vote on the measure, while robbing Democrats of the ability to say that what Congress votes doesn’t matter, because the presidential executive order is still in effect. Full story »
The New Yorker’s newest cover features Barack and Michelle Obama in the White House, an Osama bin Laden poster on the wall, the American flag burning in the fireplace, and Michelle in an Afro with an assault weapon slung over her shoulder. Barack is in Middle Eastern garb.
The cover has drawn widespread outrage from both the right and left, with the left complaining that it reinforces smears already put forward by the right, and the right shouting that the New Yorker should also cover the smears circulating about John McCain (whatever those might be).
David Remnick, the magazine’s editor, told the Washington Post that, “It’s clearly a joke, a parody of these crazy fears and rumors and scare tactics about Obama’s past and ideology, and if you can’t tell it’s a joke by the flag burning in the Oval Office, I don’t know what more to say.”
Barack Obama is currently ducking the incoming from the something-for-nothing right on his assertion that Americans should learn Spanish. To be sure, he also says that immigrants to the US should learn English, as if all those immigrants are sitting at home thinking, “Gee, why should I learn English just so I can stop cleaning hotel rooms for $2 an hour and start earning a six-figure sales income?”
Obama’s assertion that learning a foreign language is a “powerful tool” in the job market is only partly right. It’s a useful skill, certainly, for some jobs, but not necessary for most. Anyone who travels much outside this country is already aware that English is spoken almost everywhere there is a decent educational system. Heck, my clumsy attempts to learn a bit of the local languages when traveling have often been met by hurt feelings. It would seem that many Europeans, at least, feel that Americans trying to speak their language is an indication that we think they’re poorly educated.
Somewhere in the 1970s, the right had a stroke of genius. Cognitive theorists have long known that guilt-by-association or virtue-by-association is an effective persuasive technique. Tie a candidate to a scary image – like Willy Horton – and tie your own candidate to a beloved image – like the flag – and you stand a very good chance of winning. And if you can create a lasting negative image of your opponents by using a simple slogan (four words or less preferred, and the fewer syllables the better) that sticks, and that requires a complex argument to refute, you win. You win big.
Enter the phrase: “Tax and spend liberal.” The phrase is marvelous in its brevity and semantic weight. First off, no one likes to be taxed or pay taxes. “Tax” is a strongly negative word, even when we may know, on some level, that taxes are necessary to provide such services as police, fire, military, safe food, schools, and the like. “Spend” is also a negative word buried deeply in the American public’s psyche. Notice that the right didn’t call the left “tax and invest liberals,” or “collect money for necessary services liberals.” The word “spend” is short, to-the-point, and implies profligate behavior. Coupled with a secondary message attacking those who are “lazy” and on welfare – a program that was always a drop in the bucket in public spending – and the phrase was and is closely associated with taking money from hard-working Americans and giving it to the shiftless. Moreover, conservatives were also able to paint liberals as those who buy votes with giveaways from wealth transfer programs. Full story »
So, now you’re repentant, are you? I suppose that’s something. It doesn’t absolve you any more than it absolved Lee Atwater when he apologized on his death bed for being one of you, but it probably drops you a notch below Joseph Goebbels in the Public Relations Society of America’s Hall of Heroes. Maybe if you devote the rest of your life to good works, you’ll come back as E. coli.Â
War has to be the strangest human institution. It brings out the the most brutal territorial animal and tribal human in us. It also showcases extremes of selflessness, courage, and even compassion. Today, in the United States, we celebrate our warriors in a manner that, all too often, centers on the “glory” of death in battle. I’d like to extend this tribute to our living warriors — the ones who came home — and the battles they never left.
I think this clip from a longer film demonstrates what war is in the most eloquent manner I’ve ever seen; and it’s done without words. It’s about 10 minutes long, but worth viewing for many of us. If you don’t want to watch that long, scrub ahead to around 6:08, and if you’re really pressed for time, go to 7:22, but I warn you; the impact will be greater if you don’t scrub ahead.
I predicted three weeks ago that the cops who killed Sean Bell and wounded his friends in a 50-shot barrage would be acquitted. Given the burden of proof on the prosecution and the testimony presented in court, I just didn’t see a way the judge would find the accused guilty.Â
 Today, all three accused officers were found not guilty on all charges.
As I’ve posted before, Bell was killed not because the police did anything criminal, but because they royally screwed up. They may have been cowards, they may have been trying to make a bust, any bust, to put a period on the end of their last night as a unit, but they were certainly incompetent.
Administrators at West Virginia University have demonstrated, both by their actions and their words, exactly what’s wrong with higher education in the US. In case you missed it, here’s the story.Â
Heather Bresch is the chief operating officer (COO) of Pittsburgh-based Mylan, Inc. She is also West Virginia governor Joe Manchin’s daughter. The CEO of Mylan is a longtime contributor to Machin’s political war chest. So far, it’s a pretty familiar story. A child of a close friend and associate is promoted to a top executive job.
But wait! There’s more!
Ms. Bresch published a biography claiming an MBA from West Virginia University. As a routine check, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette called WVU and, ding-ding-ding-ding-ding, there was no record of Ms. Bresch’s MBA award anywhere. Ms. Bresch protested that she had an agreement to substitute work experience for the final 22 (out of 48) hours she needed for an MBA, and that it was a records issue. A WVU committee found that it was, indeed, a records issue, and gave MS Bresch her MBA 10-years after she walked away from Morgantown. Full story »
If US News holds true to form, it will publish its 2009 undergraduate college rankings in August 2008, just in time to drill its way into the heads of all those eager new high school seniors who have to decide where to apply for early decision before November 1, and for regular decision before January 1.Â
Not to mention what the rankings do for their parents’ bragging rights.
The US News rankings are controversial, especially among those colleges that aren’t highly ranked. They complain that the magazine doesn’t measure what actually goes on in the classroom and the learning outcomes at various universities, and they’re right. Of course, the schools themselves don’t know that stuff either. No one knows that stuff. I can’t even find a college that clearly defines exactly what skills and knowledge an undergrad should have before getting a degree, nor can I find one that tests to make sure their graduates have what the schools haven’t yet defined. Full story »
By overwhelming, popular demand (and if you haven’t met Doc Slammy, you don’t know the meaning of the word “overwhelming”), here is a point-by-point translation of Lena Antman’s letter to the editor that prompted me to write the first article in this series. I know I said before that I wouldn’t do this because it would be insulting your intelligence, but rest assured: I’m not insulting your intelligence, I’m insulting Slammy’s intelligence.
Here’s my analysis. Once you’ve read it, I’ll give my take on (drum roll please) exactly why so many, many bright kids steer clear of state universities. Full story »
Sarah Palin told ABC’s Charles Gibson yesterday that she favors admitting Georgia and the Ukraine, both on Russia’s borders, to NATO. When Gibson asked her if she would go to war with Russia to defend Georgia, she said, “”Perhaps so. I mean, that is the agreement when you are a NATO ally, is if another country is attacked, you’re going to be expected to be called upon and help.”
Jack Abramoff was sentenced to four years in prison today, much less than the maximum time for his crimes. You may remember him as the man who bribed, stole, and otherwise slimed his way to the top of the K Street lobbying establishment in Washington. He also defrauded the Chippewas, an Amerind tribe, of tens of millions of dollars in a scheme with a PR firm he called the self-congratulatory name, “High Five!” Yet, 
Republican candidates are running as far away from President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney as possible, because their approval ratings are at or near historic lows for a sitting administration. The upcoming GOP convention in Minneapolis presented a difficult issue for the GOP: It would be an admission of Republican failure to exclude the nominal party leaders from the convention, but their appearance would be an aid to the Democrats, who are trying their best to defeat John McCain on George W. Bush’s abysmal eight-year record. An appearance by the two most unpopular and incompetent men in the White House’s recent history would further tie this year’s GOP candidates to them.
WASHINGTON – Washington mayor Adrian M. Fenty announced today that his city will soon issue interested motorists the US’s first pedestrian hunting license (PHL). The new license will allow drivers to collide with pedestrians anywhere within the District of Columbia on a prepaid basis.
