Andrew Young Shills for Wal-Mart!

Another Wal-Mart nightmare. Famed civil-rights activist Andrew Young has gone over to the dark side. Yes, here he is boogie-ing with Wal-Mart workers at the grand opening of a Wal-Mart in a black area of Atlanta. And judging from the photo, a grand time was had by all.

It was just a month ago, reports Errin Haines of the Associated Press, that Andrew Young and his company GoodWorks International were hired

to promote Wal-Mart at public appearances, in interviews and in op-ed pieces, said Kevin Sheridan, spokesman for Working Families for Wal-Mart, a group organized with backing from the company.

Guess what: The inequality police aren’t happy.

Akinyele Umoja, a professor of black studies at Georgia State University, complained: "What he's doing is providing credibility and legitimacy for some of these corporations that have policies that just reinforce inequality."

You could see that coming. It’s a pity that the learned scholars in our nation’s universities are still peddling this immiseration stuff, 150 years after the proletarians of the nineteenth century got good jobs, bought houses, and starting driving around in big cars.

On Wednesday, Young hugged customers, signed autographs and posed for pictures with local dignitaries while singing Wal-Mart's praises. He cut the ribbon at a store that replaces an abandoned Kmart that closed two decades ago in the mostly black neighborhood.



The new store has received more than 8,000 applicants for 500 jobs.

That’s a bit over the average for Wal-Mart. They usually expect about 10 people to apply for every job at a new store.

Good luck to the customers and the new employees at the new Wal-Mart in Atlanta. Because who knows, the evil Wal-Mart may end up making eevil Republicans out of them.

Wal-Mart to Sell Sushi

As if Wal-Mart didn’t have enough on its plate, what with every sushi-loving liberal sneering at its products and its shoppers and trying to unionize is employees, now Wal-Mart wants to sell sushi.

Its new Plano, Texas, store will be targeted at a higher income demographic, according to David Koening of Associated Press. The new store will come

with an expanded selection of high-end electronics, more fine jewelry, hundreds of types of wine ranging up to $500 a bottle, and even a sushi bar.

Of course, we all wish Wal-Mart the best in its new venture, but still, there’s a feeling of regret. Wal-Mart has come to represent everything that liberals love to hate, from its low prices to its limited employee “benefits” to its out-and-out bigness. And we conservatives loved Wal-Mart for that.

We loved it when Chicago told Wal-Mart to get lost, and Wal-Mart opened a store right across the city line in Evergreen Park. And we loved it that 23,000 people applied to work at that Wal-Mart store.

Of course, it isn’t going to be easy for Wal-Mart to go upscale.

"The challenge they face is value, and upper-end consumers define value differently than a moderate-income shopper," said Patricia Edwards, who helps manage retail funds for Wentworth, Hauser and Violich investment counselors.

The whole point of upscale shopping is that other people can’t afford it. It’s like the old story about a reporter asking J. Pierpont Morgan how much it cost to own his yacht, the Corsair. “If you have to ask, you can’t afford it,” replied America’s banker.

But perhaps Wal-Mart can prosper by selling upscale stuff cheap. That way people can show off their upscale loot to their upscale friends but fail to mention that they got it cheap at Wal-Mart.

But when we read that Wal-Mart is chi-chi-fying itself, well, something dies inside, that’s all.

School Choice Advocate Offers Steak Dinner

Are you an opponent of school choice? Do you know in your bones that taking money away from the “common school” will hurt kids? Do you have a pile of academic, peer reviewed studies sitting on your kitchen table that prove without a doubt that choice choice is “right-wing utopianism?” Now is your chance to teach the school choice shills a lesson and win a steak dinner!

School-choice advocate Matthew Ladner is offering on NRO a steak dinner to anyone who can

provide two random assignment control-group studies of the attitudes of parents who have actually used a private school-choice program showing anything less than substantial improvement in satisfaction with their child's school.

Actually he is offering more than that. “I'll even throw in drinks and dessert — the whole nine yards,” he writes.

Of course, nobody is going to be fooled by that. You can see that Ladner is really a mean-spirited conservative after all. A confident, non-conformist liberal would have offered steak dinners for two, not just for one. Anyway, the liberal would not have offered a bloody gunky mess of a steak dinner, but a fair-trade meal at a vegetarian restaurant.

This all started when

Jon Talton of the Arizona Republic... used a Sunday column to describe a school-choice program that passed the Arizona legislature with bipartisan support as "right-wing utopianism,"

Ladner was outraged. Why, he had shelves full of studies showing that school choice worked. Where had Talton come up with the notion that school choice was mere right wing vaporware? So he wrote a reply to Talton challenging him to back up his fighting words.

If within the week Mr. Talton can provide two control-group studies of the attitudes of parents who have actually used one of the private school choice programs showing something less than substantial improvement in satisfaction with their child's school, I will happily buy him a steak dinner at a downtown restaurant of his choice. I can produce a large number of studies that demonstrate the opposite, but two will do the trick for Mr. Talton.

Thus far, Ladner reports, Mr. Talton has not collected on his steak dinner. But perhaps that is because he is a vegan liberal and would not want to be seen dead in a steak restaurant.

Imagine a News Media That's Customer Focused and Market Driven

Will there be newspapers in 2010? People are beginning to wonder. Instapundit Glenn Reynolds thinks there will be newspapers in 2010, but maybe not on paper.

What must the media do to stay in business? Get back to basics, of course. It must get back to its forte, “actual gathering and reporting of truthful, accurate, hard news.”

But it has got to get out of the union mentality. That makes sense, of course. You can only have unions, with their workplace rules and their “attitude” when there is a rent-seeking opportunity.
Rents are down in the newspaper business. Sorry about that, unions.

Reynolds expects that the new reporters will do it all:

I'd expect a broader range of competency: My reporters would also all be photographers, equipped with digital cameras, and videographers, shooting clips of video that could be placed on the website along with their stories.

See what I mean? Right now, reporters are reporters and photographers are photographers. Reynolds also suggests that the media forget about leaning left. It insults their readers, who do not—lean left. But here is his really revolutionary suggestion:

I'd get readers involved. I'd incorporate readers and bloggers into the reporting, fact-checking, and revision of news stories. I'd be generous about handing out credit, too -- people will do a lot for a little bit of ego gratification. With digital cameras, cameraphones, etc., all over, there's usually somebody on the scene when something happens. I'd take advantage of that. I'd also take advantage of readers with special expertise in particular areas -- in fact, I'd build a roster of those people and use them as color commentators on stories in their areas. If union rules interfered, well...

Exactly. It’s time to forget about union rules and lifetime employment. It’s time to get the community involved, with stringers and part-timers, and photo and video clips from readers.

In the future the news business will be a business like any other service business: customer focused, flexible, market-driven.

It won’t be your father’s Oldsmobile.

The other question is: where will the news media get its advertising revenue?

Study: Whiny Kids Turn into Conservative Adults

It just confirms the suspicion that every liberal has had since childhood. Remember those whiny, insecure kids in elementary school? They all turned into bible-thumping conservative Christian bigots, didn’t they?

Yes, it’s true. Now a researcher has confirmed what many liberals suspected. By following 100 children from Berkeley, California, through their lives they have found a 7% correlation between whininess and conservatism. According to Kurt Kleiner in the Toronto Star:

In the 1960s Jack Block and his wife and fellow professor Jeanne Block (now deceased) began tracking more than 100 nursery school kids as part of a general study of personality.

...

A few decades later, Block followed up with more surveys, looking again at personality, and this time at politics, too. The whiny kids tended to grow up conservative, and turned into rigid young adults who hewed closely to traditional gender roles and were uncomfortable with ambiguity.

...

The confident kids turned out liberal and were still hanging loose, turning into bright, non-conforming adults with wide interests.

Oh dear. The truth is out at last!

Needless to say, conservative bloggers like Red America’s Ben Domenech are not amused.

But let us face it, the study just confirms what another study from Berkeley discovered a couple of years ago.

Four researchers who culled through 50 years of research literature about the psychology of conservatism report that at the core of political conservatism is the resistance to change and a tolerance for inequality, and that some of the common psychological factors linked to political conservatism include:



* Fear and aggression

* Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity

* Uncertainty avoidance

* Need for cognitive closure

* Terror management



"From our perspective, these psychological factors are capable of contributing to the adoption of conservative ideological contents, either independently or in combination," the researchers wrote in an article, "Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition," recently published in the American Psychological Association's Psychological Bulletin.

No doubt the learned professors are right. Conservatives are prone to a little rigidity on things like the rule of law and the meaning of the constitution. Rather in the way that liberals are rigid about the meaning of Roe v. Wade.

Rather than representing conservatism—or liberalism—as a pathology, we could try a non-pathological world-view, for instance the developmental psychology of Clare Graves. Popularized by his students Don Beck and Christopher Cowan as Spiral Dynamics (see here,
here and
here,
and a site devoted to Clare Graves here), it experiences Bible-believing conservatives as “purposeful blue,” creative businessmen and artists as “adventurous orange,” and touchy-feely liberals as “communitarian green.”

Here is how the Graves system works. You start out an “impulsive red” victim. You rise to blue by accepting Jesus into your life; you rise from blue to orange by deciding that life is a game to be won; and you rise to green caring and sharing when you decide that the life of the ego isn’t that important after all.

However, dear reader, there is a higher, better level, “integrated yellow,” where you and I reside. Yellow looks out on all these lesser levels and colors with lordly understanding and benign tolerance. Unlike those mean-spirited liberal social science professors!

But what I don’t understand is how all this meshes with the Pew Research Center’s recent Are We Happy Yet? poll. In that poll, it turns out that conservatives are happier than liberals, and church-going conservatives happier still. Are they whiny because they are happy, or happy because they are whiny? And conservatives have been happier than liberals since they started the periodic study in 1972. What is the meaning of that?

Clearly more research is needed.

School Choice: What are They Afraid Of?

Libertarian ABC journalist John Stossel is still getting grief for his documentary “Stupid in America,” a critique of the public school monopoly. So he’s taking his liberal critics on one by one.

Yes, he says, you can skew survey results to show that public schools do better than private schools. The National School Boards Association

claims "America's public schools outperform private schools when variables ... are controlled."

OK. Except that the study they used showed that private schools outperformed public schools.

When studying education performance, it is far more accurate to compare schools using random assignment -- using kids assigned schools by lottery so that those attending public and private schools come from the same population. Eight such random-assignment studies have been done. All eight find that private school students did better.

But the problem is that the bribed apologists for the government education monopoly just don’t get it. They say that

"Public schools were created to provide a 'public good': education for all, regardless of a family's ability to pay ... By contrast, under a voucher system that gives public dollars to completely unmonitored private schools, there is no such right to expect or demand accountability for student performance or how tax dollars are spent." They don't get it. Competition brings accountability. Private schools may be "unmonitored" by bureaucrats, but... [p]arents' desire for a good education for their children is a much more powerful check on schools than any politician's law or union rule.

The problem is to persuade the American people of this truth. Because while the American people are confident that they can be the best judge of their childrens’ education they are not sure about other people.

Anyway, why do these folk protest so much?

If public schools are good, they have nothing to fear from school choice. Students and parents will choose them.

Of course, on the other hand if public schools are overgrown government monopolies that don’t deliver good service, then that’s different. Then the public schools advocates are right to be afraid.

Chavez Will End in Tears

What are we going to do about President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela? Alvaro Vargas Llosa, author of Liberty for Latin America, appeals to the left to understand how everything Chavez does goes against everything they believe.

He’s spending money on an arms buildup, he’s creating a huge militia that answers to him and not to the armed forces. He sells his oil to the US and profits from the refining of his high-sulfur oil.

And in Venezuela, poverty has gone up on his watch.

Vargas is wrong, of course. The left doesn’t care what Chavez does and whether he goes against everything they believe. What counts for the left is that Chavez is against the US. With the end of the cold war we can see that during the cold war the international left was not so much on the side of the Soviet Union as against the United States. Today, with the Soviet Union gone, the left sides with anyone willing to cock a snook at the US.

Is Chavez a fascist dictator? Who cares? At least he is trying to make trouble for the United States.

That is what it means to be on the left. It means that you are against the United States of America.

So what should we do about Chavez? Probably not very much. Hugo Chavez is going to end up ruining Venezuela, and a couple of other South American nations as well. Maybe he’ll have a cozy little war with one of his neighbors. But he will leave behind poverty and despair.

And that is a tragedy. Vargas writes that

There are between 30,000 and 50,000 Cuban advisors in Venezuela, helping with everything from building up the intelligence system to lending “social” services in the government-funded “missions.”

I wonder what the Cubans in Venezuela will do after Fidel shakes off this mortal coil.