Photo Credit: Los Angeles Times, "Wind-Driven Blaze in Santa Barbara."
With David Souter set to retire from the Supreme Court next month, there is much speculation that Sonia Sotomayor, a judge on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in New York, ranks at the top of Barack Obama’s list of replacements. Considering President Obama’s stated preference for selecting a minority candidate who “understand[s] what it’s like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old,” Sotomayor – a Latina from a Bronx housing project – may be a frontrunner for the nomination. This fact should trouble those who believe a Justice’s principal qualification for the country’s highest court should be his or her ability to interpret the Constitution accurately.Hmm, a Latina "quota queen." We've been down that road before.Sotomayor considers her ethnicity of paramount importance, as well. She began consciously developing a sense of her ethnic identity as a young woman and has allowed identity politics to act as a lens through which she sees her jurisprudence. During her student years at Princeton University in the 1970s, Sotomayor became actively involved in two campus organizations devoted chiefly to the celebration of an ethnicity distinct from that of the white majority. She reminisces: “The Puerto Rican group on campus, Accion Puertorriquena, and the Third World Center provided me with an anchor I needed to ground myself in that new and different world.”
The self-described goal of Acción Puertorriqueña (AP), which remains active, is to “unite Puerto Rican and Latino students both in the University and in the greater community and promote our culture.” But in practice, this means supporting increased rights and privileges for illegal aliens. In 1994, AP lobbied against Proposition 187, the ballot initiative designed to deny social-welfare benefits to illegal immigrants in California. Nine years later, AP sponsored an event focusing on the societal “inequality” that allegedly persisted in suppressing Latinos’ “access to higher education...throughout our nation.”
The other group to which Sotomayor belonged, Princeton’s Third World Center (TWC), was established in 1971 “to provide a social, cultural and political environment that reflects the needs and concerns of students of color at the University.” A 1978 Princeton publication explained that the TWC had arisen chiefly to address the fact that “the University’s cultural and social organizations have largely been shaped by students from families nurtured in the Anglo-American and European traditions,” and that consequently “it has not always been easy for students from different backgrounds to enter the mainstream of campus life.”
Thus indoctrinated, Sotomayor states that even though she holds one of the highest positions in her profession and is being considered for a lifelong appointment where her opinions would become precedent for the entire legal profession, she has never shed her sense of being an outsider looking in on American society:The differences from the larger society and the problems I faced as a Latina woman didn’t disappear when I left Princeton. I have spent my years since Princeton, while at law school and in my various professional jobs, not feeling completely a part of any of the worlds I inhabit…. As accomplished as I have been in my professional settings, I am always looking over my shoulder wondering if I measure up and am always concerned that I have to work harder to succeed.
Sotomayor describes Latinos as one of America’s “economically deprived populations” which, like “all minority and women’s groups,” are filled with people “who don’t make it in our society at all.” Attributing those failures to inequities inherent in American society, she affirms her commitment to “serving the underprivileged of our society” by promoting Affirmative Action and other policies designed to help those who “face enormous challenges.”
In February I was among a group of USS Cole and 9/11 victims' families who met with the president at the White House to discuss his policies regarding Guantanamo detainees. Although many of us strongly opposed Barack Obama's decision to close the detention center and suspend all military commissions, the families of the 17 sailors killed in the 2000 attack in Yemen were particularly outraged.There's more at the link.
Over the years, the Cole families have seen justice abandoned by the Clinton administration and overshadowed by the need of the Bush administration to gather intelligence after 9/11. They have watched in frustration as the president of Yemen refused extradition for the Cole bombers.
Now, after more than eight years of waiting, Mr. Obama was stopping the trial of Abu Rahim al-Nashiri, the only individual to be held accountable for the bombing in a U.S. court. Patience finally gave out. The families were giving angry interviews, slamming the new president just days after he was sworn in.
The Obama team quickly put together a meeting at the White House to get the situation under control. Individuals representing "a diversity of views" were invited to attend and express their concerns.
On Feb. 6, the president arrived in the Roosevelt Room to a standing though subdued ovation from some 40 family members. With a White House photographer in his wake, Mr. Obama greeted family members one at a time and offered brief remarks that were full of platitudes ("you are the conscience of the country," "my highest duty as president is to protect the American people," "we will seek swift and certain justice"). Glossing over the legal complexities, he gave a vague summary of the detainee cases and why he chose to suspend them, focusing mostly on the need for speed and finality.
Many family members pressed for Guantanamo to remain open and for the military commissions to go forward. Mr. Obama allowed that the detention center had been unfairly confused with Abu Ghraib, but when asked why he wouldn't rehabilitate its image rather than shut it down, he silently shrugged. Next question.
Mr. Obama was urged to consult with prosecutors who have actually tried terrorism cases and warned that bringing unlawful combatants into the federal courts would mean giving our enemies classified intelligence -- as occurred in the cases of the al Qaeda cell that carried out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and conspired to bomb New York City landmarks with ringleader Omar Abdel Rahman, the "Blind Sheikh." In the Rahman case, a list of 200 unindicted co-conspirators given to the defense -- they were entitled to information material to their defense -- was in Osama bin Laden's hands within hours. It told al Qaeda who among them was known to us, and who wasn't.
Mr. Obama responded flatly, "I'm the one who sees that intelligence. I don't want them to have it, either. We don't have to give it to them."
How could anyone be unhappy with such an answer? Or so churlish as to ask follow-up questions in such a forum? I and others were reassured, if cautiously so.
News reports described the meeting as a touching and powerful coming together of the president and these long-suffering families. Mr. Obama had won over even those who opposed his decision to close Gitmo by assuaging their fears that the review of some 245 current detainees would result in dangerous jihadists being set free. "I did not vote for the man, but the way he talks to you, you can't help but believe in him," said John Clodfelter to the New York Times. His son, Kenneth, was killed in the Cole bombing. "[Mr. Obama] left me with a very positive feeling that he's going to get this done right."
"This isn't goodbye," said the president, signing autographs and posing for pictures before leaving for his next appointment, "this is hello." His national security staff would have an open-door policy.
Believe . . . feel . . . hope.
We'd been had.
Binyam Mohamed -- the al Qaeda operative selected by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) for a catastrophic post-9/11 attack with co-conspirator Jose Padilla -- was released 17 days later. In a follow-up conference call, the White House liaison to 9/11 and Cole families refused to answer questions about the circumstances surrounding the decision to repatriate Mohamed, including whether he would be freed in Great Britain.
The phrase "swift and certain justice" had been used by top presidential adviser David Axelrod in an interview prior to our meeting with the president. "Swift and certain justice" figured prominently in the White House press release issued before we had time to surrender our White House security passes. "At best, he manipulated the families," Kirk Lippold, commanding officer of the USS Cole at the time of the attack and the leader of the Cole families group, told me recently. "At worst, he misrepresented his true intentions."
So we have proven results, happy students and parents, and saving money. What to do with such a program? Well, the Democrats want to close it down. Can't have a vouchers program showing success right there in the nation's capital. That might ruin the whole argument of the teachers unions against anything that allows children to escape the regular public schools when those schools are failing so miserably.
Justice David H. Souter, who is retiring in June, during his confirmation hearings in 1990.
It turns out that Justice David Souter leaves a middling record on the Supreme Court. In fact, Court-watchers are welcoming his replacement as a chance to appoint a larger personality on the court:
In replacing Justice Souter, President Obama will almost surely pick another liberal. But Mr. Obama may also consider Justice Souter as a kind of counterexample and choose a bigger and bolder figure, one who sets agendas, forges consensus and has a long-term vision about how to shape the law.It's amazing how Souter, a Republican appointee, has been spared the diabolical lynchmob attacks that Justice Clarence Thomas endured over the years. Both justices were appointed by George H.W. Bush. But Thomas is a black conservative. He's never been accorded even a shred of decency by the same kind of bigoted leftists who today look the other way when President Barack Obama guts the successful D.C. school voucher program (a program providing a chance for black kids to get a good education).
Legal scholars have praised Justice Souter’s care, candor and curiosity. But they have said that he is, by temperament and design, a low-impact justice devoted to deciding one case at a time, sifting through the facts and making incremental adjustments in legal doctrine to take account of them.
Other justices have had more impact, gaining influence through personal and intellectual persuasion.
"People get bent out of shape about the fact that when I was a kid, you could not drink out of certain water fountains. Well, the water was the same. My grandfather always said that, 'The water's exactly the same.' But those same people are extremely comfortable saying I can't drink from this fountain of knowledge," Thomas says. "They certainly don't see themselves as being like the bigots in the South. Well, I've lived both experiences. And I really don't see that they're any different from them" ....The real bigots are the Democratic leftists who've given David Souter - who's scholarly but undistinguished - a free ride, while subjecting the formidable Justice Thomas to a 20-year lynching that only the left can give.
Thomas spoke at length about how his own experiences as a black conservative and a black justice prove his point. Because he was admitted to Yale Law School under affirmative action after graduating with honors from Holy Cross, he said people have questioned his qualifications and discounted his achievements. Even as a Justice, he says, people continue to believe he merely has "followed" Justice Scalia because a black man couldn't possibly hold those views or be smart enough to come up with them on his own.
"Give me a break. I mean this is part of the, you know, the black guy is supposed to follow somebody white. We know that," Thomas says. "Come on, we know the story behind that. I mean there's no need to sort of tip-toe around that. The story line was that, well I couldn't be doing this myself, he must be doing it for me because I'm black. That's obvious.
"Again, I go back to my point. Who were the real bigots? It's obvious," Thomas says [emphasis added].
As we learned during the Clarence Thomas hearings, character assassination is the stock and trade of Democrats in the SCOTUS wars. Refresh your memories of how outrageously Ted Kennedy and companytried to beat Justice Alito over the head with the race card. Kennedy then attempted to paint Alito as hostile to women, while maintaining a membership at a club that bans women from membership. They have no shame.Read the whole thing, here.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has been a punching bag for the Left ever since his bruising confirmation hearings. Failing to derail his nomination with Anita Hill’s ambush of unsubstantiated sexual harassment charges, the Left has attacked Thomas ever since on everything from betraying his race to being a right-wing ideologue in the shadow of Justice Scalia. I have always thought that he was unfairly maligned during his confirmation hearings and that he has been given short shrift as an independent jurist who takes his constitutional responsibilities to interpret - not invent - the law seriously.
Now comes along a book that should make every one of Justice Thomas’s Leftist critics immediately apologize for their lies about him (which, no doubt, they are too cowardly and intellectually dishonest to do): The Supreme Court Opinions of Clarence Thomas, 1991-2006: A Conservative’s Perspective by Henry Mark Holzer. Mr. Holzer has written the definitive rebuke to Clarence Thomas’s detractors in the media, academia and the political elite. In doing so, he also provides an excellent survey of the history and current landscape of constitutional law for anyone generally interested in this subject.
See also, Top of the Ticket, "White House aide out after $357,012 photo-op with Air Force One," via Memeorandum.Here’s the official review of the incident. It does not cover DoD or FAA involvement. The report says “Initial planning” began in “March 2009 or earlier” without specifying who exactly initiated the planning and why. Caldera blames “severe back muscle spasms” and his recent return from a trip to Mexico for his failure to read e-mail concerning the mission. Also: He had a grand total of two email accounts. You can’t expect a crony paper-pusher to keep track of all that!
The White House report blamed “organizational” and “structural ambiguities” for the crony paper-pusher’s incompetence.
The White House also released a photo. Your tax dollars at work.
One of the reasons I dislike the agenda of "progressive Rebublicans" so much is because current Democratic power in Washington is mostly "of the moment." Americans demonstrated Bush-fatigue by the end of 2008. Partly due to the fading urgency of September 11, but also weariness from the costly price of defending against radical Islam, Barack Obama was able to combine demands for change with an undeniable charisma to win the presidency.
Still, what we saw was a classic short-term swing to the party out of power. The Democratic victory fell well short of a long-lasting partisan realignment in the electorate. As I've noted many times here, Republicans may very well be consigned to a couple of electoral cycles in the minority. The party will work on reorganization and rejuvenation, while the Democrats build a record of big government overreach. Thus, to hear people like David Frum, Meghan McCain, Christine Whitman, and now Colin Powell argue that GOP needs to "move to the center" and compromise bedrock conservative principles makes little sense. The chatter among these "establishment" Republicans simply feeds into the Democratic meme that leftist philosophy forms the natural ideological framework for the coming decade of 21st century politics.
Thus I got kick out of Gary Andres' new piece at the Weekly Standard, "The Center-Right Trap: The Limits of Ideology in Politics."
Citing political scientist James Stimson and data from the American National Election Studies, Andres notes that "Republicans did not lose the 2008 election because they were out of step ideologically with average Americans." The argument, based on solid research, which won't make (empirically-minded) folks on the left very happy (like Chris Bowers and David Sirota). The key theme Andres stresses is that most Americans are mostly non-ideological in orientation, and the key goal for each party is to consolidate the hardline activists at the base while expanding appeal to the roughly 20 percent or so of the electorate who make "electoral decisions based on criteria other than just ideology":
So tell that to the next pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, or pro-amnesty Republican who tells you that the GOP is too conservative.The way to victory for both parties seems pretty clear. It's about winning on the margin and realizing Americans are not homogeneous in the way they conceptualize politics. So the key is to retain and mobilize those who agree and think ideologically, and persuade enough of the rest. But who are those people? Here again Stimson has an interesting take. He calls them the "scorekeepers." He doesn't conjecture about the exact size of the group, but it's probably 20 percent of voters--clearly enough to swing any election. They don't ask if a politician's or party's views are "correct." They ask, "Will they do a good job?"
These are the voters Republicans lost in droves in the last two cycles. Thinking that winning them back means simply "moving to the center" is a prescription for more electoral failure.
Note Schiff's statement comes at the same time that congressional Republicans are being attacked for their bill, the "Keep Terrorists Out of America Act."
A man suspected of killing a Wesleyan University junior may be targeting the university and its Jewish population, Middletown, Connecticut, police said Thursday.Note: CNN has changed this story to "Sister urges Wesleyan shooting suspect to surrender." The blockquote above is from the original version.
Police have launched a nationwide search for Stephen Morgan, 29, who is suspected of killing Johanna Justin-Jinich.
The young woman was shot and killed Wednesday at a bookstore in Middletown near the Wesleyan campus, police said.
"Evidence uncovered overnight suggests that Mr. Morgan may be focused on the Wesleyan community campus as well as the Jewish community," said Middletown Police Chief Lynn Baldoni, who did not elaborate.
A statement from the university alleges that Morgan had written threats against "Wesleyan and/or its Jewish students."
While Justin-Jinich is a student at Wesleyan and is Jewish, there was another connection between her and her alleged killer, authorities said.
In July 2007, Justin-Jinich filed a harassment complaint against Morgan while the two were both taking the same six-week summer course at New York University, NYU spokesman John Beckman told CNN.
The complaint, in which Justin-Jinich said she was receiving harassing e-mails and phone calls from Morgan, was filed with the university's public safety department toward the end of the course, Beckman said.
The public safety department brought in the New York Police Department, and after conversations with Morgan and Justin-Jinich, she declined to follow up or press charges, Beckman said.
Less than 18 months ago, Sasha Lessin and Janet Kira Lessin gathered before their friends near their home in Maui, and proclaimed their love for one another. Nothing unusual about that—Sasha, 68, and Janet, 55—were legally married in 2000. Rather, this public commitment ceremony was designed to also bind them to Shivaya, their new 60-something "husband." Says Sasha: “I want to walk down the street hand in hand in hand in hand and live together openly and proclaim our relationship. But also to have all those survivor and visitation rights and tax breaks and everything like that.”Before folks attack this post as "out there" or polyamory as "fringe," don't forget my earlier post, "From Gay Marriage to Polygamy."
Maine this week became the fifth state, and the fourth in New England, to legalize gay marriage, provoking yet another national debate about same-sex unions. The Lessins' advocacy group, the Maui-based World Polyamory Association, is pushing for the next frontier of less-traditional codified relationships. This community has even come up with a name for what the rest of the world generally would call a committed threesome: the "triad."
Unlike open marriages and the swinger days of the 1960s and 1970s, these unions are not about sex with multiple outside partners. Nor are they relationships where one person is involved with two others, who are not involved with each other, a la actress Tilda Swinton. That's closer to bigamy. Instead, triads—"triangular triads," to use precise polyamorous jargon—demand that all three parties have full relationships, including sexual, with each other. In the Lessins case, that can be varying pairs but, as Sasha, a psychologist, puts it, "Janet loves it when she gets a double decker." In a triad, there would be no doubt in Elizabeth Edwards’ mind whether her husband fathered a baby out of wedlock; she likely would have participated in it.
Slang term used by people of homosexual persuasion to refer to heterosexual couples, who have a significantly higher risk of contributing to the population increase than the homosexuals do.Setting aside for the moment Yglesias' sexual orientation, there's a lot in that definition that's revealing of secular progressive ideology. It's not just that heterosexual norms are dominant in society, but that heterosexuals are at "risk" of having more babies, and thus "destroying" the environment.
Most, if not all, of the goals of the gay marriage movement could be satisfied in the absence of gay marriage. Many sorts of individuals, and not just gay couples, might be allowed to form "civil partnerships" dedicated to securing mutual support and other social advantages. If two unmarried, elderly sisters wished to form such a partnership, or two or more friends (regardless of sexual intimacy) wanted to provide mutually for one another "in sickness and in health," society might furnish them a variety of ways of doing so--from enhanced civil contracts to expanded "defined benefit" insurance plans, to new ways of dealing with inheritance. (Though tempting, this is not the place to tackle the issue of polygamy--except to say that this practice might well be disallowed on policy and even more basic constitutional grounds without prejudice to other forms of civil union.) In short, gay couples and those who are not sexually intimate should be permitted to take legally supported vows of mutual loyalty and support. Such partnerships would differ from marriage in that only marriage automatically entails joint parental responsibility for any children generated by the woman, until and unless the paternity of another man is positively established.
As for the having and raising of children--this, too, can be provided for and supported short of marriage. If two siblings need not "marry" in order to adopt a child together, neither need two friends, whether or not they are sexually intimate. Civil unions might be formed in ways that especially address the needs of such children. The cases of gay men who inseminate a willing surrogate mother, or lesbians who naturally conceive and wish to designate their partner as the child's other parent, can also be legally accommodated short of marriage, strictly understood, on the analogy of adoption by step-parents and/or other relatives. As in all cases of adoption (as opposed to natural parenthood, where the fitness of the parent is assumed until proven otherwise), the primary question is the welfare of the child, not the psychic needs and wants of its would-be parents.
What gays have a right to expect when seeking to adopt children is that their homosexual relationship as such not be held against them when the state weighs their claim to parental fitness. A liberal approach takes moral condemnation of homosexuality out of the public sphere. Individuals remain free, according to the dictates of their religion or conscience, to abhor gay relations. But they may not publicly impose that view on others. The civic dignity that gays may properly claim includes the right not to be held publicly hostage to sectarian views they do not share.
That liberal sword cuts both ways, however: American citizens should not have the sectarian beliefs of gay-marriage advocates imposed on them unwillingly. If proponents of gay marriage seek certain privileges of marriage, such as legal support for mutual aid and childbearing, there may well be no liberal reason to deny it to them. But if they also seek positive public celebration of homosexuality as such, then that desire must be disappointed. The requirement that homosexual attachments be publicly recognized as no different from, and equally necessary to society as, heterosexual attachments is a fundamentally illiberal demand. Gays cannot be guaranteed all of the experiences open to heterosexuals any more than tall people can be guaranteed all of the experiences open to short people. Least of all can gays be guaranteed all of the experiences that stem from the facts of human sexual reproduction and its accompanying penumbra of pleasures and cares. To insist otherwise is not only psychologically and culturally implausible; it imposes a sectarian moral view on fellow citizens who disagree and who may hold moral beliefs that are diametrically opposed to it.
The deeper phenomenal differences between heterosexual and homosexual relations are hard to specify precisely. Still, these differences seem sufficiently clear to prohibit gay marriage without denying gays equal protection under the laws. Gay relations bear a less direct relation to the generative act in its full psychological and cultural complexity than relations between heterosexual partners, even when age, individual preference, or medical anomaly impede fertility. Gay relations have a plasticity of form, an independence from natural generation, for which they are sometimes praised, but which, in any case, also differentiates them from their heterosexual counterparts. No heterosexual couples have such freedom from the facts of generation, which they can limit and control in a variety of ways but can never altogether ignore. Intimate heterosexual partners realize that they might generate a child together, or might once have done so. This colors and shapes the nature of their union in ways that homosexual love can imitate, and possibly even transcend, but cannot share in fully.
Whatever lines pundits may like to draw from the present back to the 1930s, from the standpoint of the human experience, there is absolutely no comparison between the country that lay beyond the portico of FDR’s White House and the country into which Barack Obama sends his YouTube videos today. Without question, even in relative terms the magnitude of the Great Depression far exceeds anything experienced to date or, we dare to venture, anything that lies ahead. But what is certainly true is that the extent of societal advancement experienced over the past seventy years is so great that it has transformed America from what we would today refer to as an underdeveloped country into the most prosperous nation in human history.Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing, here.
The triumph of the Western idea—the “end of history” proclaimed by Fukuyama—has not, in fact, been called into question by the global financial crisis. Nor are future developments likely to reverse the judgment in favor of liberalism. Yet the institutional architecture of liberalism remains a work in progress. Continued institutional innovations will be required to ensure that democratic societies with market-based economies are as resilient in the future as they are prosperous.
For its part, this nation has little hope of realizing the potential of such institutional innovations until its leaders become as aware as its citizens are of the futility of trying to solve today’s problems with yesterday’s tools, all the while mistaking means for ends. Economic growth, or its absence, is merely an indicator on the dashboard of our ongoing national journey. The engine that propels American capitalism forward is entrepreneurship; the fuel is opportunity; the work of foundations recycles the energy of society, making progress and widespread prosperity sustainable. Yet, just as a Tesla Roadster is no Model-T, 21st-century entrepreneurship derives from a formula far more complex than the “1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration” once cited by Thomas Edison. Far-sighted government policies are an essential element within this formula. Political leadership must do more than celebrate the “risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things” who create opportunity and extend the reach of prosperity. It must act in partnership with private foundations to ensure the existence of an environment conducive to their efforts.
I don't expect much from Thune, but I have to wonder if he realizes how incredibly ridiculous this is ....Geez, I don't know ... why would anyone?
Why would any thinking person assume that a gay nominee is necessarily someone on the ideological fringe?
President Obama will seek to extend the controversial D.C. school voucher program until all 1,716 participants have graduated from high school, although no new students will be accepted, according to an administration official who has reviewed budget details scheduled for release tomorrow.Also, check out the Reason.tv video - it's heartbreaking how this administration damages kids (via Skye).
The budget documents, which expand on the fiscal 2010 blueprint that Congress approved last month by outlining Obama's priorities in detail, would provide $12.2 million for the Opportunity Scholarship Program for the 2009-2010 school year. The new language also would revise current law that makes further funding for existing students contingent on Congress's reauthorization of the program beyond its current June 2010 expiration date. Under the Obama proposal, further congressional action would not be necessary, and current students would automatically receive grants until they finish school.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan had told reporters that it didn't make sense "to take kids out of a school where they're happy and safe and satisfied and learning," but Democrats effectively terminated the program by requiring its reauthorization. Obama must now convince Democratic lawmakers to endorse a gradual phase out by continuing to include grant funding in future appropriation bills.
The voucher program was created in 2003 and is a Republican favorite, providing low-income students with a maximum $7,500 grant to attend a private or parochial school. All students come from households with incomes below 185 percent of the poverty line, and 8,000 students entered a lottery to participate. But liberal education groups, including the National Education Association, have argued that the experimental program is poorly administered and that voucher recipients have not performed measurably better in their new schools.
See also, "Protesters Blast Congress for Axing D.C. Vouchers While Sending Own Kids to Private School."
Horowitz and Laksin provide what the book jacket describes as "the first major comprehensive, in-depth, multiyear investigation of what is being taught in colleges and universities across the country ..."
And the authors don't disappoint.
I found myself interested in the work not only as an extremely well-documented piece of research, but also from the perspective of an academic with a personal acquaintance or knowledge of many of the individual professors whose activities form the case studies. Compared to Horowitz's earlier work, One-Party Classroom shifts documentary methods from students' testimony to the actual course materials of the hardline leftist professor-activists themselves. This approach avoids the potential for contested interpretations of reported classroom indoctrination by going right to the source, to the professors' actual published course documents.
If One-Party Classroom bears any flaws, it's in its repetition - but that's not the fault of the authors. Over and over again, across the case studies, and across the humanities and social sciences curriculum, the reader is introduced to a radical, mind-numbing structure of institutionalized social justice pedagogy at the nation's top universities. Frankly, there should be little defense of such classroom teaching, particularly if the goal of such undergraduate and graduate education is train tomorrow's revolutionary cadres.
What we see in the book, in case after case, is professors with little expertise in economics, history, international relations, or political science, lecturing and leading seminars in abstract courses in empires, global inequality, Marxist political economy, and so forth. I mean literally, English professors and media specialists are teaching courses in what would be advanced global politics courses, and even many faculty members in legitimately political subfields teach courses well outside of their scholarly training. The sense is that any leftist professor with an inclination toward teaching the next batch of radicals can offer a course in social justice education. For example, Professor Anthony Kemp in the Department of English at USC offers the "Theories of History, Ideology, and Politics"; and at the University of Texas, Professor Katherine Arens teaches a course in "Marxisms" for the Department of Comparative Literature (see Kemp and Arens' college websites here and here, respectively).
The broader point is not that it's inappropriate to teach these subjects, it's that such courses are not taught from the perspective of critical inquiry and academic contestation. Radical theories of imperialism, capitalist oppression, or the social construction of just-about-everything, are offered without counter-challenge from opposite paradigms or methologies. Students are frequently evaluated not by academic scholarship but progressive activism - for example, LGBT "service learning" projects - and through uncritical writing assignments of ideological regurgitation.
I recommend One-Party Classroom to anyone interested in what's happening in higher education today, but especially to parents who are planning on sending their kids off to college, at great expense, often getting little return on the dollar in terms of classic learning or real disciplinary expertise for their children.
It's tempting to write off such professors and their courses as a few eccentric cranks here and there, easily avoidable and thus largely tolerated as ideological oddities. But it's not like that.
Just this week, the board of trustees at the College of DuPage, in Illinois, voted to rescind the implementation of a Horowitz-inspired "academic bill of rights" at the institution. Apparently, "Faculty leaders at DuPage and elsewhere" condemed the bill of rights as "an attack on academic freedom." But as we see over and over again, on college campuses around the country, there is no academic freedom for those holding traditional views to speak and discuss their ideas without disruption or threats of violence. Most recently, Congressman Tom Tancredo was prevented from giving a talk at the University of North Carolina. A mob of radical activists literally took over the campus at Chapel Hill to successfully hijack Tancredo's First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and association.
This evening, while searching for information on the decision at the College of DuPage, I came across a number of writings by Professor Dana Cloud at the University of Texas. Particularly noteworthy is her essay published this week at Dissident Voices, "The McCarthyism that Horowitz Built." As the title indicates, the piece attacks conservative challenges to leftist classroom indoctrination as "McCarthyism." As Professor Cloud alleges, "the noxious weeds of the new McCarthyism have begun to bear bitter fruit around the country."
Perhaps one might wish to take her argument seriously, except a look at her blog shows that in defending her practice of shouting down those with whom she disagrees, Professor Cloud is explicitly unwilling to extend to Horowitz the same kind of protections she claims are being denied to progressives:
... it is wrong to equate protest–even loud, disruptive protest–with censorship. Public disruption has been a staple of movements for social change in this country from the Boston Tea Party forward ....Well, it's not "more speech" if the target of the protest is unable to get a word in edgewise.
Protest is not censorship; it is simply the exercise of more speech. Where would our democracy be without disruptive protests for women’s rights, civil rights for minorities, and for the meager protections and rights afforded gays and lesbians today?
Over the past eight years, the assumptions of neoliberalism—that corporate globalization would forestall economic crisis, that there is no better social system than capitalism, that preemptive war is justified and necessary, that society offers every person who works hard and keeps the faith has the same life chances, regardless of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, or nationality—have fallen like a house of cards. Whereas during the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher could announce that “there is no alternative to capitalism” and Francis Fukuyama could declare the end of history (i.e., the end of major social transformation), the present economic crisis and upsurge of hope for change have prompted a rebirth of Keynesian liberalism; one can only expect that existing social movements will pick up momentum and that new social movements will arise from the gap between what the Obama administration promises and what it can deliver ....What's interesting in reading this syllbus is how the entire thrust of Professor Cloud's seminar curriculum explicitly ignores the central purpose of graduate education: to train scholars in the research and methods of an academic field in order to prepare them to make an original scholarly contribution to the discipline. In other words, as Professor Cloud's introduction makes clear, the purpose of her seminar is to elucidate and facilitate the "conditions of possibility of change today." In contrast, in political science at my former graduate institution and at sister departments, grad students are required to produce seminar research papers of publication-quality, and such research has become increasingly a requirement for the advancement to Ph.D. candidacy (see, for a leading example, the UCLA Department of Political Science Graduate Handbook).
This course will survey these disciplinary shifts in historical context. Our main theoretical frame will be that of Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, whose theory of hegemony, culture, ideology, and oppositional consciousness unifies the concerns of most social movement theory and history through the present day. The course is also committed to providing a comprehensive survey of U.S. social movements—from the War for Independence to the contemporary movement for gay civil rights—because it is difficult to find a coherent account of this history anywhere at the graduate level. The lessons of the past are key to understanding the conditions of possibility for change today.
Gavin Newsom may be running for governor of California, but "American Idol" host Ryan Seacrest had something else in mind during his Tuesday morning radio chat with the San Francisco mayor: "What is that product that you put in your slick, shiny hair?"Hey, that's cool! Keep talking about the hair gel, buddy!
"L'Oreal," Newsom responded. "And it's the Clean Gel. It's the Total Control Clean Gel, because they've got seven or eight products, and the other ones don't work."
"I'm talking to a metrosexual," Seacrest marveled.
So began the opening day of Newsom's weeklong effort to introduce himself to Southern Californians who know little about him, apart from his attempt to legalize same-sex marriage.
I'm not a Democrat and if pushed, I'd have to say right now I'm a libertarian independent. I'm uneasy about Obama's long-term debt, to say the least, but I'm intelligent enough to know it's not Obama's as such, but mainly Bush's, and I'm also cognizant that the time to cut back may not be in the middle (or beginning) of a brutal depression. On most issues, I side with what used to be the center-right, but the GOP is poison to me and many others. Why?Andrew Sullivan was one of the biggest and most vocal backers of the War in Iraq, and hence the Bush administration's policy of regime change. He renounced his views in 2006, and has become more bitter over time. You'd think he'd be more optimistic and, well, gay, considering the number of victories his radical homosexual agenda has achieved. My sense is that Sullivan, as much as anyone, knows that the gay marriage equality issue is far from guaranteed, so he's become more unhinged by the day, insuperably bitter, marinating in his hatred amid an extreme left-wing ideological environment that's presenting a chance of a lifetime.
Their abandonment of limited government, their absurd spending under Bush, their contempt for civil liberties, their rigid mindset, their hostility to others, their worship of the executive branch, their contempt for judicial checks, their cluelessness with racial minorities and immigrants, their endorsement of torture as an American value, their homophobia, their know-nothing Christianism, and the sheer vileness of their leaders - from the dumb-as-a-post Steele to the brittle, money-grubbing cynic, Coulter and hollow, partisan neo-fascist Hannity.
I'm waiting for the first leading Republican to do to these grandstanding goons what Clinton once did to the extremists in his own ranks: reject them, excoriate them, remind people that they do not have a monopoly on conservatism and that decent right-of-center people actually find their vision repellent. And then to articulate a positive vision for taking this country forward, expanding liberty, exposing corruption, reducing government's burden, unwinding ungovernable empire, and defending civic virtue without going on Jihads against other people's vices.
If today's "conservatives" spent one tenth of the time saying what they were for rather than who they're against, they might get somewhere. But the truth is: whom they hate is their core motivation right now. That's how they define themselves. And as long as they do, Americans will rightly and soundly reject them.
