You've Got to be Kidding, Girls

A decade or so ago we all laughed about political correctness.  It was so stupid that nobody could have been taken in by it.

But here we have, in 2007, a program of deliberate indoctrination of college students, political correctness run wild at the University of Delaware, according to Mike S. Adams.

The University of Delaware has just become one of the most Orwellian campuses in America. Students in its residence halls are now being subjected to a re-education program that is actually dubbed - in the university’s own tax-payer funded materials - as “treatment” for students who have incorrect attitudes and beliefs.

You know what those incorrect attitudes are.  And you know the penalty.

One student was identified in a write-up as the “worst” one-on-one session stating that she was tired of “having diversity shoved down her throat.”

Now we have Congress working on another major problem, writes Allison Kasic.  It’s the underrepresentation of women in STEM—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—in the university. In the first day of hearings conducted by Congressman Brian Baird (D-WA),

[n]o Committee Member or panelist challenged the presumption behind the hearing—that discrimination is the primary cause of women’s underrepresentation among science and engineering academics[.]

I’m sorry, girls, but this doesn’t pass the smell test.  Do you really think that, in 2007, there is a male faculty member in the university who would dare to discriminate against a woman, for any reason whatsoever?

Oh sure, there may be some men around who might sneer behind a woman’s back.  But no academic today in America would dare to risk a career in such a way.

Anyone who has the kind of cojones you need to buck the system like that is in finance or a technology startup, not in the university.

But let us suppose that women do suffer discrimination in STEM.  Is it really a problem that rises to the level of legislation?  Is this egregious discrimination that amounts to a civil rights matter?  Or is it just an annoyance?  Should important solons be taking time out from other important educational matters, such as the abysmal state of K-12 education, for instance, to solve this problem?

Come on, girls, you’ve got to be kidding.

We conservatives could take a Leninist view of this: The Worse The Better.  Or we could take a Rhett Butler view of it: Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.

After all, conservatives have been run out of the university and marginalized in academe to an extent that must certainly exceed any discrimination that women suffer in STEM.

But the fact is that we do care.  The universities do matter.  And it matters that liberals are running the universities into the ground as they slowly ratchet up the level of compulsion and as they force every student, every faculty member, every building, and every ivied wall to conform to their belief system. 

Just as they have ruined everything else in the government by an excessive faith in the power of rational compulsion.

But really, what can we do?

Stuck on Stupid? Dems Want Carter Era Tax Rates

The central idea of the Reagan revolution was that punitive tax rates, like the 70 percent top rate on “unearned” income, was a jobs killer.  Greedy entrepreneurs just won’t go out and risk capital when the government is going to claw back up to 70 percent of their earnings.

Liberals sneered at the Laffer Curve and called it “trickle-down” economics.  But they pocketed their TIAA-CREF pensions swollen with the gains from a stock market that went from 1,000 to 10,000 in 20 years with nary a squeak.

Now Democrats like the sepuagenarian Charles Rangel want to return to those days, last seen in the Carter administration, by raising tax rates for high-income Americans.   James Pethokoukis explains.

[Rangel’s 4.6 percentage-point surtax on high incomes] only looks like a restoration of [Clinton’s tax rates]. But if the Bush tax cuts expire, the four-and-a-half points stays on top of the 39.6 [top Clinton tax rate]. So they are taking the rate to 44 percent. Then you add on 1.3 points ... another 2.9 points on top of that for the Medicare tax. So we are back to the 50 percent marginal rate under that plan.

But that’s just the beginning.  In addition, the Democrats are talking about raising the cap on FICA taxes.  So that’s another 7 1/2 percent.  Now we are talking about 60 percent marginal taxes.  On wages.

Let’s not forget, by the way, that the top 1 percent of taxpayers already pay 37 percent of federal income taxes, and that the top 50 percent of taxpayers pay 97 percent of federal income taxes.  Check it out at RushLimbaugh.com (truth in taxes) or the IRS(xls).

It’s just like the 1930s when for ten years, the United States was Stuck on Stupid.

NYT Hoping Religious Right Will Go Away

It’s as regular as clockwork: the article in The New York Times reporting that the religious right is about to go away.  This time it’s David D. Kirkpatrick’s turn.

The old warhorses of the Religious Right are dying off, and many church communities are tired of hearing about politics from the preacher’s lectern.  They are also tired and conflicted about the Iraq War.  And what about Rudy Giuliani?

[He] could hardly be less like their kind of guy: twice divorced, thrice married, estranged from his children and church and a supporter of legalized abortion and gay rights.

That is, unless he turns out to be their kind of guy.  Then comes the inevitable paragraph:

Democrats, meanwhile, sense an opportunity. Now the campaigns of all three Democratic front-runners are actively courting evangelical voters. At a White House event to mark the National Day of Prayer that I attended in the spring, Senator Clinton even walked over to shake hands with Dobson. Visibly surprised, he told her she was in his prayers.

All three Democratic candidates are speaking very personally, in evangelical language, about their own faith. What does Clinton pray about? “It depends upon the time of day,” she said. Edwards says he cannot name his greatest sin: “I sin every single day.” Obama talks about his introduction to “someone named Jesus Christ” and about being “an instrument of God.”

The trouble with this sort of wishful thinking is that it rather ignores the elephant in the room.  It is one thing for Democratic presidential candidates to make nicey nicey with the voters about their religious beliefs.  But it doesn’t change the fact that the Democratic Party is a party of the secular, the single, and the childless.

Real Democrats expect their leaders to advance the banner of Peace and Justice, meaning more and bigger government programs for slacker liberals and more and more stringent hate-crime laws to protect the GLTB community from the tsunami of gay-bashing that we all know is poised to engulf America.

Evangelical Christians just aren’t into all that stuff.  Whatever The New York Times may say.

Evangelicals are mostly nice decent married people with children who believe in being decent and neighborly and in live-and-let-live.

Most us us could learn something from them.

"Limited Lives" of Media Professionals

How can we best understand the Scott Thomas mess?  Why did the editors at The New Republic not realize that the “Baghdad Diaries” of Scott Thomas Beauchamp didn’t pass the smell test?

It’s because they only “saw it in a movie,” writes Peggy Noonan.  You remember, the great anti-war movies of “Kubrick and Coppola and Oliver Stone.” 

Shall we say that those movies were a little too focused on sending a message?

What we are seeing here is the naivete of the modern media.  Says Noonan:

It has to do with what sometimes seems to me to be the limited lives that have been or are being lived by the rising generation of American professionals in the arts, journalism, academia and business.

Noonan was lucky, she realizes.  She came up through CBS News—she used to write Dan Rather’s radio commentaries—and in those days the network was still under “the influence of the Murrow boys.”  Those guys had lived a little, and they had a nose for “a bunch of hooey.”

But our modern media boys and girls do not.

What is the Difference Between Kerry and Beauchamp?

What’s the difference between John Kerry and his Winter Soldier accusations and Scott Thomas Beauchamp and his Baghdad Diarist (cached) accusations?

Both of them were shown to be false.

Yet John Kerry went on to become a United States Senator and a nominee for the office of President of the United States.  It looks like Pvt. Beauchamp will just serve out his term in the army and then disappear. 

I’ll tell you the difference.  John Kerry is an elite liberal.  Beauchamp is just a slacker liberal. 

John Kerry went to Yale, met with Hubert Humphrey and went from strength to strength.  He knew how to play politics and how to keep his nerve when peddling utterly false propaganda about US atrocities in Vietnam.

Scott Thomas Beauchamp was just a kid from St. Louis with a fantasy about being the next Hemingway.  He just didn’t know how to play the game of liberal politics.

Anyway, while the New Republic is obviously in full coverup mode, it looks like the Army is looking after its own.  Michael Yon happened to meet Beauchamp’s commanding officer, LTC George Glaze, in Iraq.

LTC Glaze seemed protective of Beauchamp, despite how the young soldier had maligned his fellow soldiers. In fact, the commander said Beauchamp, having learned his lesson, was given the chance to leave or stay.
...
But to his credit, the young soldier decided to stay, and he is serving tonight in a dangerous part of Baghdad. He might well be seriously injured or killed here, and he knows it. He could have quit, but he did not. He faced his peers. I can only imagine the cold shoulders, and worse, he must have gotten. He could have left the unit, but LTC Glaze told me that Beauchamp wanted to stay and make it right. Whatever price he has to pay, he is paying it.

Almost brings a tear to your eye.  We can hope, after it’s all over, that Scott Thomas Beauchamp won’t be a liberal.  He deserves better.

Government Worsens Hard Times

Remember the story of the Great Depression.  Michael Medved does.  It goes something like this:

Capitalists and speculators went wild with greed in “The Roaring Twenties,” leading to a stock market crash and hard times. Banks closed, once prosperous workers sold apples on street-corners or became hobos in shanty-towns, while the Republican President Herbert Hoover did nothing for the destitute and suffering nation.

But soon enough, Happy Days Were Here Again.

Then FDR arrived on the scene, inspiring new hope with his golden words (“the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”) and a flurry of radical reform in his first hundred days in office. While conservatives squealed, this “new deal for the American people” improved the lives of everyone and got the economy humming again — just in time to face the challenges of World War II.

Only it wasn’t like that.  President Hoover was very busy expanding government to beat the Depression, and Roosevelt expanded his policies.  The unemployment rate hit 17 percent in 1931 and stayed high for the rest of the decade. “At no point during the 1930’s did unemployment go below 14%.”

So what went wrong.  Plenty.  And most of it was caused by government.  Medved tells the tale.

1. The New Deal prolonged the depression.
2. Recessions end quicker without government intervention.
3. In the old days, the advocates for the poor called for less government, not more.
4. There was more economic mobility when government was smaller.
5. The Great Society programs of the 1960s worsened the plight of the poor.
6. Government programs crowd out private charity.
7. “Nostalgia and political correctness cloud consciousness of the recent past.”

Go ahead.  Check out Medved’s article and read the whole thing.

The End of Socialized Medicine?

Just as Hillary Clinton is about to get her hands on the nation’s health-care system, Peter W. Huber reckons it’s too late.

Universal health care is a “superstructure,” to use the Marxian term, built upon germ theory medicine.  You can eradicate cholera and neo-natal deaths with a universal one-size-fits-all program.  The problem is fairly simple and the solution is within the capabilities of government bureaucracy.

But the new medicine is life-style related.  If you eat too many Cherry Garcias, Huber writes, and you have a propensity for high cholesterol levels, then you are headed for trouble.

You can cure your cholesterol risk with a drug like Lipitor or you can fix it with healthy eating.

The government can’t really solve the problem of elevated cholesterol levels with one-size-fits-all bureaucracy.

For the government is in a bind. It subsidizes the health care of the feckless.  It the old days, this made sense because a universal program to eradicate tuberculosis really did benefit everyone.

But health care to correct poor life-style choices is different.  The healthy pay for the fecklessness of the feckless, and it ain’t cheap.

The passive, clueless, and feckless must get ruinously expensive, last-ditch care because they don’t show up until it’s too late for anything else, and universal means what it says.

That means that, sooner or later, universal health care will start to lose political support.

The pocketbook-healthy eventually tired of paying for welfare that persistently failed to end poverty; the health-healthy will tire of paying for health care that persistently fails to improve health. However selfless and generous people may be, responsible types eventually despair of trying to cure self-destructive behavior from a distance.

It’s an interesting theory.  But I think it is way out on the bleeding edge.  I’d say it will be a generation before we get real reform of health care.

There are just too many slacker liberal votes out there in favor of it.