Marquette Warrior

Obama Teleprompter Failure

2009-11-19T21:09:00.002-06:00

Aspin Center Honorees: Push Gay Agenda to Persecute Christian Social Service Agencies

2009-11-18T10:51:00.005-06:00

We have blogged before about how Marquette’s Les Aspin Center has a pattern of honoring members of Congress who not merely take positions contrary to Catholic teaching, but extreme positions contrary to Catholic teaching.

Two egregious cases: Congresswoman Gwen Moore and Congressman John Lewis. (Check here for more on Moore.)

Now what have Moore and Lewis done?

They are cosponsoring a bill by California Democratic Pete Stark (H.R.3827) that would “prohibit discrimination in adoption or foster care placements based on the sexual orientation, gender identification, or marital status of any prospective adoptive or foster parent.”

In short, it would force Catholic and other Christian adoption agencies to give children to homosexual couples. In Massachusetts, the Catholic Church got out of the adoption business rather than than comply with a demand that fundamentally violated its religious conventions.

This bill, if it is passed, would have the same effect all across the nation, even in conservative states that would never impose the gay agenda on Christian social service agencies.

While the notion of “prohibiting discrimination” might sound nice, the fact is that Christian social service agencies would equally “discriminate” against potential adoptive parents engaged in adulterous relationships, those with a history of drug abuse or domestic abuse, or a whole host of other things that make them less than the best parents for a child.

Even if one thinks there is nothing wrong with homosexual acts, in a tolerant society one should not try to impose that view on people with different views.

And morality aside, there is every reason to believe that every child needs both a male and a female parent, since every child needs both a male and a female role model.

This bill, by the way, would prohibit discrimination on the basis of marital status. But heterosexual couples who won’t make the commitment that marriage involves are poor candidates to be parents.

Of course, black people in general aren’t keen on the gay agenda, as the voting on California’s Proposition 8 showed. So Moore and Lewis, who are black, aren’t representing the black community very well. This may be because they are trying to placate gays and liberal yuppies that are part of their electoral coalitions, or it may be that they simply think like white liberals.

Either way, the Aspin Center showed bad judgment honoring either of them. Whether this was a reflection of the liberal views of the leadership of that institution or an attempt to curry favor with Washington politicians is hard to tell. It was probably both. But it wasn’t what any part of a supposedly Catholic university should do.

The Very Narcissistic Mr. Obama

2009-11-14T21:30:00.005-06:00

Never has an American president been so smitten with himself.

Or if one has, he was smart enough to conceal it.

The truth is, Obama is pretty much an empty suit. Yes, he has the standard liberal/left views of community activists and academics. He can seem like a good orator if his teleprompter doesn’t break down.

But mostly the mania for Obama has been the result of people projecting on him their own hopes. For liberals, he was going to be the “transformative” president who bought European-style socialism to America. For blacks, it was going to be a huge historical breakthrough. (They were right about that, but when it becomes obvious that being black does not by itself make a president very capable, the achievement looks less lustrous.)

For a lot muddle-headed youth he represented “hope” and “change,” and they weren’t inclined to look beyond naïve hopes.

But increasingly, the illusions drop away, and the callow narcissist becomes more transparent.

Marquette Sociology Professor: Don’t Blame Hasan’s Muslim Views for Fort Hood Shooting

2009-11-12T11:43:00.005-06:00

The Muslim faith of Fort Hood assassin Nidal Hasan so obviously played a part in the murders he committed that even the mainstream media have covered the evidence in detail.

Facts have overcome political correctness.

But in academia, especially sociology departments, facts have little traction against ingrained assumptions about who is the “victim” and who is the “oppressor.”

Thus we have Louise A. Cainkar, who is a professor in Marquette’s Sociology Department, insisting that “Questions abound as to what drove him to commit these acts, but a rush to connect his actions with Islamic extremism is irresponsible.”

Even worse, she summarizes by saying:

The media’s coverage of these killings thus far appears to be another effort to reduce complexity to stereotype, to demonize Islam, and to shift the focus of public thought away from a deep questioning about war, American military activity, and the damage these are doing to people (including “our own” people), and to refocus it on the ubiquitous, evil “them.”

Right. Don’t ask questions about jihadist Islam, just question “the damage we are doing to people.” It’s really America that is at fault.

It’s always America that is at fault.

Unfortunately, a dangerous number of Muslims have decided to define themselves as “them.” It’s nowhere near a majority of Muslims, and fewer in the U.S. than in Europe, but Islamic radicalism is an enemy of America. We didn’t make them the enemy. They chose to be the enemy.

Sociology, as a discipline, is stiflingly politically correct. Perhaps that’s why the number of students enrolled in sociology courses has declined. Even academics, comfortably ensconced in tenured positions and free to spew nonsense with complete impunity, eventually face a market test.

It’s high time.

Health Care Debate Tonight

2009-11-11T13:35:00.003-06:00

Unaffordable or Unavoidable:
A Forum on Health Care Reform

A town hall forum featuring:
Dr. Susan Giaimo
Panelist: Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science
Dr. John McAdams
Panelist: Associate Professor of Political Science
Dr. Robert Kraig
Panelist: Executive Director, Citizen Action of Wisconsin
State Rep. Leah Vukmir
Panelist: Representative for Wisconsin’s 14th Assembly District

Wednesday, November 11, 6 p.m. in
Marquette Hall, Room 200
Here is the flyer for the event.

This ought to be pretty good, especially since we are talking about legislation that could radically change a sixth of the U.S. economy, and affect the quality of health care that Americans get for the rest of their lives.

Fort Hood: Lessons About Gun Control

2009-11-11T12:17:00.002-06:00

The “20/20” segment below was produced before the Fort Hood tragedy, but it’s especially relevant now.

This point is explicitly address on the Reason blog.

When Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan started shooting up the Soldier Readiness Processing Center at Fort Hood, Pfc. Marquest Smith dove under a desk. A.P. reports that “he lay low for several minutes, waiting for the shooter to run out of ammunition and wishing he, too, had a gun.”

Neither Smith nor the other victims of Hasan’s assault had guns because soldiers on military bases within the United States generally are not allowed to carry them. Last week’s shootings, which killed 13 people and wounded more than 30, demonstrated once again the folly of “gun-free zones,” which attract and assist people bent on mass murder instead of deterring them.

Judging from the comments of those who support this policy of victim disarmament, Smith’s desire for a gun was irrational. According to Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, “This latest tragedy, at a heavily fortified army base, ought to convince more Americans to reject the argument that the solution to gun violence is to arm more people with more guns in more places.”

Note how the reference to “a heavily fortified army base” obscures the crucial point that the people attacked by Hasan were unarmed as a matter of policy. Also note the breathtaking inanity of Helmke’s assurance that “more guns” are not “the solution to gun violence.” In this case, they assuredly were.

The first people with guns to confront Hasan, two local police officers, were the ones who put a stop to his rampage. And while Sgt. Kim Munley and Sgt. Mark Todd acted heroically, they did not arrive on the scene until a crucial 10 minutes or so had elapsed and Hasan had fired more than 100 rounds.

If someone else at the processing center had a gun when Hasan started shooting, it seems likely that fewer people would have been killed or injured. Furthermore, the knowledge that some of his victims would be armed might have led him to choose a different, softer target in order to maximize the impact of his attack.

There would have been plenty of targets to choose from: any of the locations in Texas, including public schools, universities, and shopping malls, that advertise their prohibition of gun possession. The problem is that crazed killers tend not to follow such rules.

The liberals’ antipathy toward guns is not based on any kind of sound policy analysis. It’s the outgrowth of cultural bias.

In the first place, there is the belief that crime should be dealt with by more government welfare programs, social workers, rehabilitation and so on. The kind of things the liberals do, and have a class interest in seeing expanded.

But perhaps more important is the fact that gun owners, at least stereotypically, don’t drink lattes, don’t drive Priuses, don’t shop at Whole Foods and just generally ignore the yuppie culture of self-righteousness. They are even likely to vote Republican. Thus they are the kind of people who need to be put in their place by being dictated to by their “betters” in newsrooms, on college faculties, and in liberal interest groups and foundations.

It really, at the very bottom, has nothing to do with wanting gun violence reduced.

Is Dissent Patriotic?

2009-11-10T20:30:00.003-06:00

From Bob Hamer on Biggovernment.com:

Earlier this year as I was filling up at the gas station I noticed a faded bumper sticker - vintage Bush 43 - on the car next to me: “Dissent is Patriotic.” When I pointed to the bumper and asked the driver if she still believed that, she suggested I do something to myself which I am certain is physically impossible. I just laughed and said, “I’ll take that as a no.”

It does seem to matter a lot who is doing the dissenting, doesn’t it?

Fort Hood Shooter’s Motivation

2009-11-06T09:13:00.004-06:00

It now seems pretty obvious that what we had was a lone nut.

That’s not to say that there was no political content to the act. The guy had a sharp Islamic grievance, and he was acting on that. Yet he appears to have been part of no sort of organized terrorist plot. A malcontent, he had gotten a poor performance evaluation at Walter Reed Medical Center. The act was clearly planned in advance, since he had been giving his furniture away.

Something very like this happened decades ago. But then, when the killer was confronted by Officer J.D. Tippit, the killer got the drop on Tippit and killed him.

This time, the killer confronted an officer named Sgt. Kimberly Munley. He hit her with one shot through both legs. She hit him with four shots. She is in stable condition. He is on a respirator.

Way to go, Sgt. Munley.

[Update]

It appears that another officer aided Munley in taking down Hasan. But she was every bit as brave (being the first to confront the shooter), and every bit as effective (shooting Hasan in the chest) as the early reports imply.

Obama Cult of Personality in Public Schools

2009-11-04T12:32:00.002-06:00

It’s more than just one school.

The Obama Cult of Personality has apparently become pretty common in public schools.

All the more reason to push for school choice.

ObamaCare: Demagoguing the Insurance Companies

2009-11-02T20:26:00.009-06:00

From Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe:

TWO THINGS supporters of a government-run “public option” for health insurance know for sure. One is that private health insurers are raking in obscenely high profits. The other is that only a government rival can force them to compete on price.

In a clever new commercial featuring Heather Graham as an agile sprinter named “Public Option,” the left-wing pressure group MoveOn combines both themes, describing insurance companies as “lazy” and “bloated from the profits of raising our health care costs sky-high.” Why, it asks, should anyone resist the competition a public option would generate? After all, “competition is as American as apple pie.” In a less amusing print ad a few weeks ago, MoveOn charged that “insurance companies are willing to let the bodies pile up, as long as their profits are safe.”

President Obama also attacks health insurers as avaricious profiteers.

“The insurance industry is making this last-ditch effort to stop reform,” he declared on Oct. 16, “even as costs continue to rise and our health-care dollars continue to be poured into their profits (and) bonuses.” When he addressed Congress in September, Obama insisted that only a public option will “keep insurance companies honest.” On the White House Blog, ObamaCare opponents are accused of “fighting to protect insurance industry profits.”

Indeed, there is no shortage of voices characterizing health insurers as greedy villains. Earlier this year, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi praised her party for highlighting “the immoral profits being made by the insurance industry.” On CNN last week, Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown demanded a public option “so the insurance industry can’t continue to game the system and discriminate” against women and the disabled — tactics insurers have used to “quadruple their profits in the last five years.” If quadrupled profits don’t seem rapacious enough, the union-backed Health Care for American Now! ups the ante, claiming, according to the AFL-CIO’s news blog, that “during the past five years, health insurance company profits have soared by 1,000 percent.”

Outbidding them all is Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Health insurance companies “are so anti-competitive,” he said last month, “because they make more money than any other business in America today.”

To such overheated agitprop, the only useful response is a cold shower of facts, and the Associated Press supplied a timely one last week. For all the impassioned talk about obscene profits and bodies piling up, AP’s Calvin Woodward reported, “health insurance profit margins typically run about 6 percent” of revenues, a return “that’s anemic compared with other forms of insurance and a broad array of industries.”

87 cents out of every premium dollar pays for medical services, according to a PriceWaterhouseCoopers study for America’s Health Insurance Plans. Insurance company profits account for just 3 cents.

On the Fortune 500 list of top industries, health insurance companies ranked 35th in profitability in 2008; their overall profit margin was a mere 2.2 percent. They lagged far behind such industries as pharmaceuticals (which showed a profit margin of 19.3 percent), railroads (12.6 percent), and mining (11.5 percent). Among health insurers, the best performer last year was HealthSpring, which had a profit of 5.4 percent. “That’s a less profitable margin,” AP noted, “that was achieved by the makers of Tupperware, Clorox bleach, and Molson and Coors beers.”

For the most recent quarter of 2009, health-insurance plans earned profits of only 3.3 percent, ranking them 86th on the expanded Yahoo! Finance list of US industries. The application-software industry, by contrast, is pulling in profits of nearly 22 percent. Why aren’t MoveOn and the Democrats demanding a “public option” to compete with Microsoft and Adobe and drive down their “immoral" profits?

There are certainly industries doing worse than health insurance — airlines and newspapers, for example — but the notion that health insurers “make more money than any other business in America today” is preposterous. Advocates of a public option may find it tactically expedient to paint insurers as insatiable predators, swollen with ill-gotten profits. The reality is otherwise.

Still, the critics do have one thing right: More competition would bring down health-care premiums. But the way to increase competition is not by adding a government-run health plan to the 1,300 private firms already providing Americans with health insurance. After all, there’s no public option for auto insurance and life insurance, yet they’re sold in a highly competitive national market. There is no reason health insurance can’t be sold the same way.

Let’s be clear on this: the pro-Obama Care liberals, when they attack the insurance companies, are no different from the late and unlamented Senator Joe McCarthy in their willingness to demonize any group that stands in the way of their agenda.

And their tactic dates back to the demagogues of Ancient Greece, who would demonize the groups they wanted to oppress — typically the wealthy whose property they wanted to seize. They are, in other words, not merely misguided. They are sleazy.

Treason From Boston Store?

2009-10-31T11:40:00.005-05:00

Right now on the Boston Store website, they are selling Minnesota Vikings Brett Favre replica team jerseys.

We don’t actually mind, but it is interesting that their commercial calculation is that people in the Milwaukee area do still like Favre, and are willing to overlook his antics in recent years and remember all those great years with the Packers.

Republicans Better Informed

2009-10-30T19:08:00.003-05:00

I’m sure a lot of readers know snobby liberals who insist that all the well-informed people agree with them, and only know-nothings could possibly be Republicans.

Well . . . from the Pew Research Center, data that won’t be new to anybody who knows about public opinion. It shows Republicans more likely to give the right answer on a broad range of politically-relevant knowledge issues.

First, issue by issue.

Then we have a summary scale that shows the number correct out of the twelve items on the test.

The partisan gap is biggest for knowing who Glenn Beck is. This might seem natural, since Republicans are more likely to watch Glenn Beck. But shouldn’t liberals at least know who Glenn Beck is, especially given that he’s being vilified by the White House?

Great Vacation Idea!

2009-10-28T15:31:00.002-05:00

The most politically incorrect vacation one can imagine, but then all the fun things are these days!

United Church of Christ: Stifle “Hate Speech”

2009-10-25T22:09:00.008-05:00

UCC supposedly stands for “United Church of Christ,” but the old jibe is that it really stands for “Unitarians Considering Christ.” A very liberal denomination, its ruling elites (and to a considerable extent, the members who haven’t yet left) use Christian rhetoric, but they won’t assert anything that rankles the secular politically correct sensibility -- opposing abortion or gay marriage, for example.

But they do oppose “hate speech.”

And their definition of “hate speech” is terribly vague and broad. For example:

Hate speech takes various forms, from words inciting violence, to those creating a climate of hate towards vulnerable groups. Hate speech has one common outcome: it creates an environment of hate and prejudice that legitimizes violence against its targets.

The presence of hate speech so widely in media creates a climate that makes it impossible to have reasonable policy discussions on issues like immigration reform, and cultivates a climate that condones violence against targeted groups.

Categories of hate speech:
False Facts consist of incorrect, exaggerated, or de-contextualized facts.
Flawed Argumentation is rooted in hidden assumptions, guilt by association, and appeal to fear.
Divisive Language creates and/or encourages an “us vs. them” mentality. Hard times often incite blaming “others” as the source of trouble. Catholics, Jews, and African Americans have been routinely targets as scapegoats for those wishing to further their own agendas.
Dehumanizing Metaphors evoke messages relating to warfare, heroism, disease, and biblical characters.

Of course, what are “false facts” is often a matter of opinion. And so is the proper “context.” The last thing governent should do is decide that “facts” are allowed to be broadcast.

And of course, “divisive language” aimed at conservative Christians, or white males, or the military, or insurance companies is apparently fine.

The statement makes it entirely clear that it’s only “vulnerable groups” that get protection.

The statement is addressed to the Federal Communications Commission.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration released a report in 1993 on The Role of Telecommunications in Hate Crimes. Members of the So We Might See Coalition are encouraging them to update this report.

The National Hispanic Media Coalition has filed a Petition for Inquiry in the Matter of Hate Speech in the Media at the Federal Communications Commission. Members of the So We Might See Coalition support this petition.

Then we get a really Orwellian formulation:

The First Amendment does protect even the most vile speech. The government, however, can play a role in compiling statistics and adopting rules that will help members of the public form their own opinions and hold broadcasters and other media outlets accountable for purveying this speech.

So, they are against censorship but in favor of “holding accountable” broadcast outlets that allow “hate speech.”

This is what happens when a Christian denomination gets taken over by a secular clerical elite. While people in the pews drift away, they engage in a series of moralistic crusades.

The Future of U.S. Health Care (If the Liberals Get Their Way)

2009-10-19T13:28:00.004-05:00

Further news on an issue we have blogged on before.

From The Times:

AN 80-year-old grandmother who doctors identified as terminally ill and left to starve to death has recovered after her outraged daughter intervened.

Hazel Fenton, from East Sussex, is alive nine months after medics ruled she had only days to live, withdrew her antibiotics and denied her artificial feeding. The former school matron had been placed on a controversial care plan intended to ease the last days of dying patients.

Doctors say Fenton is an example of patients who have been condemned to death on the Liverpool care pathway plan. They argue that while it is suitable for patients who do have only days to live, it is being used more widely in the NHS, denying treatment to elderly patients who are not dying.

Fenton’s daughter, Christine Ball, who had been looking after her mother before she was admitted to the Conquest hospital in Hastings, East Sussex, on January 11, says she had to fight hospital staff for weeks before her mother was taken off the plan and given artificial feeding.

Ball, 42, from Robertsbridge, East Sussex, said: “My mother was going to be left to starve and dehydrate to death. It really is a subterfuge for legalised euthanasia of the elderly on the NHS. ”

Fenton was admitted to hospital suffering from pneumonia. Although Ball acknowledged that her mother was very ill she was astonished when a junior doctor told her she was going to be placed on the plan to “make her more comfortable” in her last days.

Ball insisted that her mother was not dying but her objections were ignored. A nurse even approached her to say: “What do you want done with your mother’s body?”

On January 19, Fenton’s 80th birthday, Ball says her mother was feeling better and chatting to her family, but it took another four days to persuade doctors to give her artificial feeding.

Fenton is now being looked after in a nursing home five minutes from where her daughter lives.

Peter Hargreaves, a consultant in palliative medicine, is concerned that other patients who could recover are left to die. He said: “As they are spreading out across the country, the training is getting probably more and more diluted.”

A spokesman for East Sussex Hospitals NHS Trust, said: “Patients’ needs are assessed before they are placed on the [plan]. Daily reviews are undertaken by clinicians whenever possible.”

Well that’s reassuring. Just how often is it “possible” in a system starved for resources.

In a separate case, the family of an 87-year-old woman say the plan is being used as a way of giving minimum care to dying patients.

Susan Budden, whose mother, Iris Griffin, from Norwich, died in a nursing home in July 2008 from a brain tumour, said: “When she was started on the [plan] her medication was withdrawn. As a result she became agitated and distressed.

“It would appear that the [plan] is . . . used purely as a protocol which can be ticked off to justify the management of a patient.”

Deborah Murphy, the national lead nurse for the care pathway, said: “If the education and training is not in place, the [plan] should not be used.” She said 3% of patients placed on the plan recovered.

Of course, even 3% is a large number of people who are literally being starved and dehydrated to death.

But nobody knows how many would have recovered had they never been placed on the plan to begin with.

Even if “the education and training” is in place, no assessments from even well-trained people can be perfect, and the inevitable effect will be to kill patients who could recover and live a year or two or five years of meaningful life.

And, under any system of socialized medicine, budgetary constraints will bias the assessments toward the option that releases scarce resources for other uses, that is, which lets people die.

The phrase “death panels” just can’t be avoided here.

Big Labor and Whole Foods’ Health Care Sanity

2009-10-18T16:42:00.002-05:00

Anti-Christian Censorship in the Public Schools

2009-10-16T17:59:00.005-05:00

Public school administrators continue to censor Christian expression. First, a kid who drew a poster of Jesus.

The case of a former kindergarten student whose art project with Jesus was censored by his New York school will be heard in an appeals court Friday.

Antonio Peck, the student, had drawn a poster with several religious figures with the words, “The only way to save the world,” for an art project that had to show understanding about the environment. Antonio meant to express his belief that God is the only way to save the environment, according to his legal representative Liberty Counsel.

The poster was rejected by his kindergarten teacher because of its religious content and he was told to create a second poster.

For the second poster, Antonio had children holding hands around the globe, people recycling trash, and children picking up garbage. On the left side of the poster was the figure of a bearded man wearing a robe that was kneeling on the ground with hands stretched toward the sky. Although the figure is not identified, Antonio said it was Jesus.

The second poster was allowed to be displayed on a cafeteria wall, along with 80 other student posters. But what made Antonio’s poster different was it was folded in half to hide the Jesus figure.

“Despite the federal guidelines on religion in public schools recognizing that students may include religious themes in assignments, school officials insisted on folding Antonio Peck’s poster in half to hide the figure they interpreted to be Jesus,” said Mathew Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel. “What a terrible message to send to students that everything is permissible so long as it is not Christian. These educators need educating about the Constitution and American history.”

Then we have this:

HARRISBURG, Pa. — On the day President Obama addressed the nation’s schoolchildren, a middle school student donned an anti-abortion T-shirt to protest Obama’s proposed overhaul of the nation’s health care system.

The student wore the “Abortion is not Healthcare” T-shirt without incident until his fifth-period teacher sent him to the principal’s office. He was ordered to turn the shirt inside out because it might offend other students.

The boy’s father, William Boyer of New Cumberland, Pa., filed suit last Monday against the West Shore School District, alleging that his son, E.B., was unfairly censored by school officials on Sept. 8.

Valerie Burch, a staff attorney with the Pennsylvania chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the student’s T-shirt represented political speech, the most protected form of speech, even inside schools.

If the district does not have a dress code that prohibits wearing T-shirts, then it has to permit this one, she said.

The district’s dress-and-grooming policy prohibits clothing “which creates a hostile educational environment or evidences discriminatory bias or animus” or displays “inappropriate words.”

Boyer is seeking to have the district’s policies struck down and to remove any references to disciplinary action from his son’s record. He also is seeking damages such as court costs and attorneys’ fees.

Chronically, school bureaucrats censor any religious expression in the public sector. But the Bill of Rights does not require that religious expression, coming from private citizens, must be censored.

Perhaps some of this is just timidity. Principals and school boards are used to being scared of secular forces (usually including the ACLU), and in the past have seldom had trouble from people defending relgious freedom. To a degree this is changing, but it’s pretty obvious that the cases that get publicized and get to court are just a tiny fraction of the censorship going on.

A lot of censorship is happening under the radar.

But it isn’t just timidity. There is a positive anti-Christian animus behind a lot of this, coming from liberal school administrators.

Government Run Health Care and Killing Patients

2009-10-07T21:19:00.005-05:00

From National Review Online:

Compare America’s system with Canada’s and Great Britain’s. The latter are single-payer, universal health-care programs in which medical treatment is free at the point of service (Yay!), although citizens eventually pay for it through higher taxes (Boo!).

According to Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development data, there were 26.6 MRI machines in the U.S. per million people in 2004. In Canada, there were 4.9 such devices, while Britain enjoyed 5. For every 100,000 Americans, 2006 saw 436.8 receive angioplasties. Among Canadians, that figure was 135.9, while only 93.2 Britons per 100,000 got that cardiac procedure.

Maybe that’s why, among American men, heart-attack deaths in 2004 stood at 53.8 per 100,000. In Canada, 58.3 men per 100,000 died of cardiac arrest, while coronaries buried 69.5 of every 100,000 British males.

The fatality rate for breast cancer, according to the National Center for Policy Analysis and Lancet Oncology, is 25 percent in the U.S., 28 percent in Canada, and 46 percent in Great Britain.

Among those diagnosed with prostate cancer, 19 percent die of the disease in America. In Canada, 25 percent of such patients succumb to this disease. And in Great Britain — an Anglophone NATO member and America’s closest ally — prostate cancer kills 57 percent of those who contract it. That is triple the American fatality rate.

The Senate Finance Committee should sink Obama-Baucuscare and instead craft a patient-friendly, pro-market, limited-government approach to health-care reform. Perhaps some senators cannot fathom the Hippocratic Oath’s key insight: First, do no harm. If that’s Greek to them, here it is in language they understand: First, don’t kill your voters.

Unfortunately, a fair number of politicians are in thrall of an ideology that favors government, and a fair number of others don’t much mind hurting people if they can’t be blamed for it.

Academic Affirmative Action for Conservatives?

2009-10-06T12:28:00.004-05:00

A former student or ours, a conservative, got the following e-mail:

You are invited to the

Harvard Kennedy School

GOP Recruiting Reception

Hosted by

Judy Kugel, Acting Dean of Students

The University Club

1135 Sixteenth Street, NW

Washington, DC

October 7, 2009

6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

Acting Dean of Students Judy Kugel will discuss Harvard Kennedy School’s degree programs, admissions procedures & updates from campus.

Please RSVP to dana_garfunkel@harvard.edu by September 30.

Mid-Career Master in Public Administration

The one-year Mid-Career Master in Public Administration (MC/MPA) is an intensive eight credit program, preceded by a one-month summer program exclusively for Mid-Career professionals. The MC/MPA is designed to increase the knowledge and skills of well established, high-performing professionals, who seek to enhance their public service careers or to move from the private sector to a leadership position in either the public or non-profit sectors.

These experienced professionals, in consultation with their advisers, plan individual academic programs designed to develop new skills or to pursue emerging professional and intellectual interests. In doing so, MC/MPA students are constrained only by the requirement to take at least one course in each of the Harvard Kennedy School foundational methodological areas of analytics, management and leadership. Not surprisingly, the MC/MPA program includes some of the school’s most accomplished students. They represent many professional backgrounds and come from across the United States and around the world. They typically range in age from thirty to the early sixties, but HKS has also graduated a septuagenarian. Mid-Career students make valuable contributions to the school’s intellectual community during their year at Harvard.

People who really believe in diversity, as opposed to those politically correct people who are always talking about “diversity,” will see some logic here. Academia is often stiflingly left/liberal and politically correct, and if there really is benefit in having different viewpoints represented, it’s conservatives who are in short supply.

Politically correct academic “diversity” hustlers, in contrast, want more blacks, Hispanics, and women in traditionally male fields, but they want them to think pretty the way they do, with the proviso that articulating racial grievances or gender grievances can be useful in intimidating people who might be inclined to argue with white male leftist professors.

Of course, affirmative action for conservatives has some of the same dangers as affirmative action for (say) blacks. Will people come to assume that conservatives in academic settings are not as well-qualified as liberals and leftists, just as they now assume that blacks in academic settings are not as qualified as whites? That’s a real danger, but of course it’s a danger that liberals and leftists blow off then applied to their favorite beneficiaries.

Perhaps this is simply a rather benign form of affirmative action, an attempt to let quite well-qualified conservatives know that they are welcome to apply. There are indeed plenty of well-qualified conservative policy wonks -- on congressional staffs, in conservative think tanks and interest groups, and even a few in academia (especially in economics departments). If they are welcome at the JFK school, that’s good. There is a clear tendency (which we have seen in our own students) for conservatives to self-select out of academia, which they view (rightly) as hostile territory. If the JFK school wants to appear less hostile, good for them.

Gore Vidal Unhinged

2009-09-30T14:08:00.005-05:00

From The Times:

Today religious mania has infected the political bloodstream and America has become corrosively isolationist, he says. “Ask an American what they know about Sweden and they’d say ‘They live well but they’re all alcoholics.’ In fact a Scandinavian system could have benefited us many times over.” Instead, America has “no intellectual class” and is “rotting away at a funereal pace. We’ll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together. Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the American people. His problem is being over-educated. He doesn’t realise how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is. Benjamin Franklin said that the system would fail because of the corruption of the people and that happened under Bush.”

So is he just a crotchety old author, venting the sort of crackpot opinions that old curmudgeons are expected to have?

No, this is an extreme outcropping of the general contempt with which the intellectual class (including people who don’t have much intellectual distinction — say, your average academic or average journalist) view this nation.

Few of them would say this so bluntly, but then even in the heyday of racism in America, few Americans would actually lynch a black person. But when that happened, it was an outcropping of widely held racist attitudes.

Gaming the College Rankings (It’s Not Just Marquette)

2009-09-29T20:25:00.005-05:00

Three years ago we reported how Marquette had begun to manipulate the ACT and SAT scores of the entering freshman class, in order to improve our ranking with U.S. News & World Report.

We, for course, had no illusions that Marquette was the only university doing this. According to an essay on Minding the Campus.

The most obvious examples of gaming are efforts to increase colleges’ standing on the U.S. News rankings lists. Years ago the University of Miami created a scandal by omitting the scores of athletes and special admits when calculating average SAT scores of entering freshmen. The president of a major liberal arts college in New England told her admissions director to make SAT scores the major criterion for admissions decisions until the school made it into the top 25 schools in its category. Once that happened, she had the chutzpah to announce that they would no longer require SAT scores from applicants because they don’t really mean much.

Earlier this summer Catherine Watt, a former administrator at Clemson, gave a well-publicized presentation in which she explained how her institution approached the “reputation” part of the US News survey, which asks officials to assess the academic quality of peer undergraduate programs. This is a silly question in the first place - college administrators are the last people you would ever go to in order to get accurate information about a competing institution - but it accounts for a quarter of the rankings formula. Watt showed how Clemson simply sought an edge by rating competing schools as below average. Other gambits have included sending dollar bills to alumni with a request that they send them back to the Annual Fund so as to raise the proportion of alumni donors and inflating the number of fulltime faculty members.

And more:

Clemson has drawn heavy publicity for cutting corners on data supplied to U.S. News. But other colleges and universities are involved as well. Baylor recently asked students already accepted to the university to take the SAT again, hoping for higher scores, and gave the students $300 bookstore credits for complying. Albion College reported a $30 alumni donation as $6 a year for five years so the percentage of annual gifts from graduates would rise for several years. The University of Southern California reported that 34 of its professors were members of a prestigious engineering association, though an investigation showed that the number included people who had moved to industry or retired, while only 17 were currently on staff and teaching. In the mid-1990s Boston University raised its SAT scores by excluding the verbal scores of foreign students, while including their math scores, a practice believed to be fairly common. At about the same time, the University of South Florida raised the group SAT scores of its students by lopping off the bottom 6 percent of all scores and Monmouth University improved its statistics by simply adding 200 SAT points to its group score. More recently, in an exchange on the Inside Higher Ed Web site. a writer from an unnamed northeastern university said he knew for sure that a director of institutional research at his school had forced the resignation of the provost by telling the president that manipulated data had been sent to U.S.News. Middlebury College in Vermont has a director of institutional research and its provost was asked to resign in 2007.

In spite of all this, it’s still not the case that “everybody does it” (even if a lot of people do it) and it still leaves a bad odor.

Shouldn’t a Catholic university be teaching, by word and action, that “everybody does it” is not a sound form of moral reasoning?

Dave Barry on Marquette (And Other) Censorship

2009-09-29T10:19:00.004-05:00

This was a big issue three years ago. And it’s not forgotten: the fact that the Marquette Philosophy Department was not willing to let a graduate student express a rather mild — but offensive to the hyper-leftist types there — opinion on the door of his office.

Dave Barry, in this video, comments on the intolerance that is so common on college campuses. He looks back fondly at the 60s, when free speech prevailed.

Unfortunately, libertarians like Barry very much enjoyed free speech in that decade, but the campus left didn’t like it at all — although they had to tolerate a fair amount. Indeed, they felt free to shout down campus speakers of whom they disapproved.

When they grew up, got Ph.D. degrees and began running things, their authoritarian true selves came out.

H/T The National Conversation.

Obama Hero Worship: Indoctrination in the Schools

2009-09-23T22:09:00.002-05:00

Hat Tip: Stepping Right Up!

Those Offensive Anti-Obama Signs

2009-09-22T10:44:00.002-05:00

From the RealNews blog:

Ever since the Tea Party phenomenon exploded onto the political scene a few months back, the Left has been up in arms over the inflammatory and offensive rhetoric featured on some of the signs and placards displayed by those in attendance. Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, and Rachel Maddow, among others, have fumed repeatedly about the bad taste exhibited by many of those expressing their displeasure with the President and his policies.

The Huffington Post ran a feature on this subject, titled “10 Most Offensive Tea Party Signs,” which singled out, among others, the following winners — or perhaps “losers” is a more apt term:
“Obama’s Plan: White Slavery”
“The American taxpayers are the Jews for Obama’s ovens”
“Our tax $ given to Hamas to Kill Christians, Jews, & Americans”
“Obama: What you talking about Willis? Spend my money?”
“Obama loves taxes, bankrupt USA, loves baby killing”
“Barack Hussein Obama: The new face of Hitler”
“Barack Obama supports abortion, sodomy, socialism, and the New World Order”
“Obama was not bowing [to the Saudi king]. He was sucking Saudi jewels.”

OK, that’s pretty rough stuff, and not at all civil. Of course, since there have been literally hundreds of thousands of protesters at tea party protests, carrying tens of thousands of signs, we have to expect a few to be pretty nasty.

But we have a collection of things said about the President that tops that.

One sign exhorted Americans to “kill” the President and “bomb his f—in White House.”
Another said, “I’m here to kill” the President.
Another urged the powers-that-be to “hang” the President.
Another said the President “is the disease, death is the cure.”
Another said the President is “the only dope worth shooting.”
Another showed a likeness of the President’s face with a bullet hole in the forehead, oozing red blood.
Another called explicitly for the “death” of the “pig” in the White House.
Another displayed a caricature of the President’s disembodied, bleeding head.
Others featured the President’s face accompanied by such captions as: “Wanted: dead or alive,” and “Death to the dictator.”
Another showed the President’s neck being fitted with a noose.
Still another showed the image of a noose accompanied by a caption urging us to “support” the President (i.e., with the noose).

But how in the world did the Huffington Post miss the second set of really nasty signs, and single out the first set?

Simple, the second set of signs are from protests directed against George Bush.

Apparently, demanding the murder of George Bush isn’t any big deal to the people who are crying crocodile tears over the lack of civility shown toward Barack Obama by some of the tea party protesters.

The signs on the second list, calling for the death of George Bush, can be seen here.

Unhinged Left Talks About Obama Assassination

2009-09-19T15:07:00.006-05:00

From the left-wing Media Matters:

A President was killed the last time right-wing hatred ran wild like this

That being John F. Kennedy, who was gunned down in Dallas, of course.

I’ve been thinking a lot of Kennedy and Dallas as I’ve watched the increasingly violent rhetorical attacks on Obama be unfurled. As Americans yank their kids of class in order to save them from being exposed to the President of the United States who only wanted to urge them to excel in the classroom. And as unvarnished hate and name-calling passed for health care “debate” this summer.

The radical right, aided by a GOP Noise Machine that positively dwarfs what existed in 1963, has turned demonizing Obama — making him into a vile object of disgust —into a crusade. It’s a demented national jihad, the likes of which this country has not seen in modern times.

But I’ve been thinking about Dallas in 1963 because I’ve been recalling the history and how that city stood as an outpost for the radical right, which never tried to hide its contempt for the New England Democrat.

Now, in this this month’s Vanity Fair, Sam Kashner offers up in rich detail the hatred that ran wild in Dallas in 1963. To me, the similarity between Dallas in 1963 and today’s unhinged Obama hate is downright chilling.

Of course, this entirely overlooks the fact that Kennedy was killed by a left-winger: Lee Harvey Oswald.

It also overlooks the way assassination chic prevailed during the Bush Administration.

It’s an expression of how demented the left really is. When they see conservative dissenters, they see assassins.

It’s one of the worst forms of bigotry: they can’t accept that anybody who is not evil can disagree with them.

It’s only one small step to shutting up conservative dissent as “hate speech.” A lot of people on the left would happily do that.

And it’s worth noting that a fair number of people on the left would probably welcome — in their hearts of hearts — the assassination of Obama by somebody on the political right. That would make him a martyr, and erase the memories of his now-floundering presidency. That’s what happened with JFK, except for one inconvenient fact: he was murdered by a leftist.

But that’s a fact other leftists are fully capable of denying or overlooking.