30 November 2006 >> France launches airstrikes against an African town. Surprisingly, there are no demands yet that French foreign policy be submitted to the rest of the world for approval.

30 November 2006 @ 8:52AM >> The CEO of the world’s largest music publisher is attempting to extract money from everyone who buys a digital music player.

Universal Music Group’s Chairman and CEO Doug Morris said of iPods and similar players, “These devices are just repositories for stolen music, and they all know it. So it’s time to get paid for it.”

By accusing everyone who bought a digital music player of piracy, Universal hopes to coerce manufacturers of these devices to pay a per-unit fee, a surcharge that is then passed on to the consumer. (Universal apparently figured out that running a profitable business is much easier without the burden of convincing customers that your product is worth buying.) That’s exactly what the music giant did with Microsoft, which now pays Universal for every Zune music player sold.

Now, Universal is targeting the iPod. And with 25% of the market, Universal has quite a bit of leverage against Apple. The company can threaten to pull all of its music from the iTunes Music Store unless Apple complies with a demand to impose a per-unit fee on all iPods. If successful, anyone who buys an iPod will be considered an assumed pirate, and Universal will receive money, regardless of whether any music from that label ever ends up on one of those iPods.

Is this really a road that music publishers want to go down? Aside from the obvious ill will it engenders from honest customers, such a move runs the risk of changing the purchasing calculations of people who own these devices. In effect, it legitimizes piracy in the minds of consumers.

If you’re an honest customer who purchases music today, your decision making may change if you know that record labels charge you simply for buying a music player. You’re already paying once up front—before you’ve even spent a dime to fill the device with music—so why pay again for the same thing when you want to download music? People will feel entitled to download whatever music they want, because they will know that they’ve already been billed for it.

Treating your customers like crooks is never a good way to encourage repeat business. And imposing a blanket music surcharge simply for buying a player is a surefire way to get people thinking that they’ve got a right to download music that they’ve already paid for.

If record labels wanted to ensure that paying customers today become pirates tomorrow, they couldn’t have designed a better way.

29 November 2006 >> Many professors say they leave their politics at the classroom door, but at least they they put their money where their mouths are:

Professors and other educators donated more than $12 million to political candidates in this last election cycle, with 69 percent of their contributions going to Democratic candidates and PACs, according to the Center for Responsive Politics (CPR).

The overwhelming majority of this giving came from the higher-education sector, judging from the CRP’s top-20 list: Employees at major colleges and universities accounted for 17 of the 20 biggest sources of donations. The University of California system led the way, with contributions totaling $406,000 (87 percent for Democrats), followed by Harvard ($315,000, with 90 percent for Democrats) and the University of Pennsylvania ($196,000, with 94 percent for Democrats).

[...]

These patterns in 2006 are nothing new. In 2004, when political giving kicked into overdrive for the presidential race, educators contributed $36.8 million to candidates, with 78 percent going to Democrats.

28 November 2006 >> How much longer must women endure the suffrage?

27 November 2006 >> Maybe the problem with academia is that not enough victim groups have their own political advocacy “studies” programs:

[F]at studies is emerging as a new interdisciplinary area of study on campuses across the country and is gaining interest in Australia and Britain. Nestled within the humanities and social sciences fields, fat studies explores the social and political consequences of being fat.

For most scholars of fat, though, it is not an objective pursuit. Proponents of fat studies see it as the sister subject — and it is most often women promoting the study, many of whom are lesbian activists — to women’s studies, queer studies, disability studies and ethnic studies. In many of its permutations, then, it is the study of a people its supporters believe are victims of prejudice, stereotypes and oppression by mainstream society.

[...]

Fat studies is still a fringe area of scholarship, but it is gaining traction. Three years ago, the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association, which promotes scholarly research of popular culture, added a fat studies component to regional and national conferences.

Professors in sociology, exercise physiology, history, English and law are shoehorning discussions of fat into their teachings and research.

At the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, the subject has emerged in a course, “The Social Construction of Obesity,” taught by Margaret Carlisle Duncan, a professor in the department of human movement sciences, who takes a skeptical view of the “war on obesity.”

At the New College of California School of Law, Sondra Solovay, a diversity lawyer and author of “Tipping the Scales of Justice,” talks about weightism in her torts classes.

Out of the classroom, students on at least a dozen campuses are organizing groups focusing on fat politics and acceptance.

[...]

As with most academic disciplines that chronicle the plight of the disenfranchised, fat studies grew out of political activism over body size. In 1973, a group of women formed the Fat Underground, a faction of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, which was founded four years earlier. In 1983, they published “Shadow on a Tightrope,” a collection of essays, articles and memoirs on fat liberation that’s viewed as the seminal work in this field.

[...]

“How far back does the black civil rights movement go in America before we have a field called African-American studies?” Ms. Koppelman said. “The academic world, like the American government, has a system of checks and balances that makes change very slow to happen.”

Others argue, though, that a movement does not make a scholarly pursuit and that this is simply a way to institutionalize victimhood.

“In one field after another, passion and venting have come to define the nature of what academics do,” said Stephen H. Balch, president of the National Association of Scholars, a group of university professors and academics who have a more traditional view of higher education. “Ethnic studies, women’s studies, queer studies — they’re all about vindicating the grievances of some particular group. That’s not what the academy should be about.

[...]

Or as Big Arm Woman, a blogger, wrote: “I don’t care if people are fat or thin. I do, however, care that universities are spending money on scholarship about the ‘politics of fatness’ when half of the freshman class can’t read or write at the college level.”

[...]

THE destigmatization of fat people is the thread that runs through fat studies pursuits. The subject is most likely to show up on campus as a focus of a paper or thesis, or be incorporated into a broader course curriculum.

Anna Kirkland, an assistant professor in women’s studies and political science at the University of Michigan, discusses it in classes on gender, identity and the law.

“We talk about the classic occupants of antidiscrimination laws — race and gender — and then I bring in transgender discrimination and fat discrimination,” she said, adding that Michigan is the only state where it’s illegal to discriminate on the basis of a person’s weight. (The cities of Santa Cruz, Calif., San Francisco and Washington have laws on the books).

[...]

Fat scholars believe they are serving justice and many hope that one day fat studies will be as ubiquitous on campus as Shakespeare. Professor Bucholz said he sees the attention on “groups that have been ignored” as crucial to improving their lot.

“There’s an element of trying to right the balance,” he said. “It’s time for the fat to receive their due.”

24 November 2006 @ 3:00PM >> The New York Post notes that it’s been over a month-and-a-half since left-wing students at Columbia University launched a near-riot in order to silence a speaker invited by the student College Republicans group:

[W]hat transpired that night is clear: Just as Jim Gilchrist, founder of the anti-illegal-immigration Minuteman Project, opened his remarks at a campus event sponsored by the college’s Republican Club, thugs bum-rushed the stage and physically attacked the speaker.

Their assault was premeditated. Gilchrist was barely able to utter a word before being hustled away by security.

Apart from some boilerplate rhetoric immediately after the attack, university President Lee Bollinger has had little of substance to say about it.

Despite promises from the university to investigate the incident, so far, nothing has happened:

Since then, not a word of apology has been offered to those whose rights were trampled - nor an ounce of punishment meted out to the offenders.

The only thing, in fact, that Columbia’s administrators have done is to announce an “investigation” - which, of course, they would do.

Beyond that, Columbia’s silent.

* No comment on when the investigation might wrap up.

* No comment on how many students are under investigation.

* No comment on how many face possible expulsion.

Maybe Columbia’s hoping the whole matter will simply go away.

Or perhaps the administration is just too scared to confront its brownshirts.

Shortly after the incident, Lee Bollinger issued a nice-sounding statement:

This is not complicated: Students and faculty have rights to invite speakers to the campus. Others have rights to hear them. Those who wish to protest have rights to do so. No one, however, shall have the right or the power to use the cover of protest to silence speakers. This is a sacrosanct and inviolable principle.

Mr. Bollinger was right: this isn’t complicated. There wasn’t much to investigate; the perpetrators were caught on video and could be easily identified by other members of the campus community. The only real question was whether Columbia University had the institutional fortitude to punish people whose crime was shutting down the speech of an ideological minority. Would President Bollinger stand up to the brownshirts, especially when those brownshirts seem to represent so many on campus?

At the time, I was skeptical:

These are reassuring words. And I hope Mr. Bollinger intends to stand by them and see that the principles therein are enforced at Columbia. I’ll believe it when I see it, though; Columbia doesn’t exactly have a stellar reputation when it comes to these politically-charged investigations.

I’d prefer for my suspicions to be proven wrong. But there’s not much time left for Columbia to stand up for the principles that President Bollinger claims are cherished by the university he leads.

In this case especially, justice delayed is justice denied. As this semester draws to a close, some students will leave campus with their degrees. The school won’t be in a position to punish students once they’ve already graduated. So unless the school is holding its fire until people forget or until any punishment would be moot, Columbia should either announce its findings or a timetable for delivering them. Otherwise, it looks like yet another cover-up at Columbia.

23 November 2006 @ 10:13AM >> ...because there are folks like this in the world.

22 November 2006 @ 8:22AM >> Alexander Stephens writes:

I enjoyed your posting about the political makeup of the NY Times editors and officials. One thing to ponder might be why they are registered with a party at all? Time was that at least for the sake of objectivity, journalists would register as unaffiliated with any party.

That’s a good point. In the past, journalists hid their political leanings from the world by registering to vote without declaring a party affiliation. Some journalists discovered the benefit of doing this relatively recently.

Until sometime before the 2004 election, Katie Couric—who in conservative circles is perceived as being rather liberal—was a registered Democrat. But according to the New York City Board of Elections, she has since changed her party affiliation to “blank” (which in New York State parlance means unaffiliated; the same as “independent” elsewhere). Perhaps she became frustrated with the Democratic party, or perhaps she grew weary of being labeled a partisan journalist.

I think it’s a good thing that we’re able to discover so much about the people who package the news for us. Knowing the personal political leanings of the producers of the news helps us become smarter consumers of the news. When members of the media withhold that information from us, there withholding an important part of the story. Because as much as we’d like to think otherwise, we all view the world with our own biases, and those biases will inevitably color the way we present our view of the world to others.

Rather than pretending bias doesn’t exist—which is what the old-world journalistic notion of “objectivity” does—bias should be considered a built-in flaw of an imperfect system. And if each of us, as news consumers, is aware of the flaws in the system, we can account for them when evaluating what we’re told by the media.

Only journalists who don’t want you to know the full story will try to hide their beliefs from you. The honest ones will expose their biases to the world and let the public make informed evaluations of their work.

21 November 2006 @ 6:05PM >> In response to my recent post on transparency in education, reader J. Gates e-mailed a link to an article from the Ludwig von Mises Institute that included this revealing snippet (emphasis added):

Excluding student financial aid, public universities receive about 50 percent of their funding from federal and state governments, dwarfing the 18 percent they receive from tuition and fees. Even “private” universities like Stanford or Harvard receive around 20 percent of their budgets from federal grants and contracts. If you include student financial aid, that figure rises to almost 50 percent. According to the US Department of Education, about a third of all students at public, 4-year colleges and universities, and half the students at private colleges and universities, receive financial aid from the federal government.

Given the amount of money taxpayers are forced to spend on higher education, we have a right to demand financial transparency from these institutions. What other industry receives this much of its funding from the public without any oversight or accountability to the taxpayers who are paying for it?

19 November 2006 @ 2:22PM >> A proposal for more transparency in higher education pricing is being resisted by the educrat class:

All she wants, [Secretary of Education Margaret] Spellings says, is better information made available to families, taxpayers and policymakers so they can make better decisions about how they spend their money. And given how little is really known about how well students are served by higher education, she says, she doesn’t see why anyone would find that unreasonable.

“If you want to buy a new car, you go online and compare a full range of models, makes and pricing options,” she says. “The same transparency and ease should be the case when students and families shop for colleges, especially when one year of college can cost more than a car.”

[...]

“The secretary does not seem to appreciate the extent to which colleges are already voluntarily looking at how to measure their effectiveness. We don’t need a federal one-size-fits-all solution,” says Richard Ekman, president of the Council of Independent Colleges, a Washington-based non-profit that represents small private colleges.

“If the federal government wants to help parents, it could start by providing more money for low-income students.”

Spellings has heard that before. She calls it the “give us more money and leave us alone” strategy.

In an interview in her office recently, she said, “There’s a little reality check going on here, which is that the American people want and expect more from every institution, every consumer good.”

[...]

One reason some college leaders are balking, he says, is because, historically, “institutions define for themselves how they’re going to measure progress.”

But some college leaders acknowledge that higher education has been disappointing in that regard. In his book, Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More, out last January, Harvard’s former (now interim) president Derek Bok cites numerous studies and examples to build the case that higher education has not made a systematic effort to improve student learning.

And, he recently told or a group of higher education numbers-crunchers, “We have a long way to go before convincing the federal government that we don’t need some nudging from the outside.”

One reason educators don’t want to divulge greater detail about where the money of taxpayers, parents and students goes is that it will become painfully obvious how much of it is being put towards political activity and other frivilous ends.

When gas prices were rising during the summer, virtually every news article I read quoted some academic about the need for greater government regulation. Yet, despite a college education being one of the most vital and expensive services in our society, academics demand a free pass from outside oversight.

It’s interesting that so many academics become strong supporters of free markets the minute the spotlight shines on them.

15 November 2006 >> In an editorial entitled “A Grand New Republican Party,” the New York Times gives New York State’s Republicans a bit of advice:

A pragmatist like Mayor Michael Bloomberg could serve as the vanguard of a new New York Republican Party. He won twice in a heavily Democratic city by adding probity and managerial expertise to Mr. Pataki’s issues list. Some upstaters regard Mr. Bloomberg as too independent — their term is RINO, or Republican in Name Only. That’s a self-destructive attitude for a party on the ropes. New York’s G.O.P. should embrace the city’s dynamic mayor as its guiding star.

Asking Republicans to be more like Mayor Bloomberg is akin to asking Republicans to be more like Democrats. In fact, until shortly before deciding to run for Mayor, Mike Bloomberg was a Democrat. One theory to explain his party change is that it was borne out of political expedience.

In a city where the Democratic primary is usually the election that determines who will fill a given office, Mayor Bloomberg’s late switch to become a Republican enabled him to sidestep the competition in the Democratic primary. So, while five Democratic candidates were bashing each other in the primary campaign, Bloomberg sat on the sidelines, unbloodied by the primary fight, and used his fortune to edge out Mark Green, the Democratic opponent who barely survived a run-off just weeks before the general election.

Bloomberg’s been a decent mayor, and I probably would have voted for him regardless of party affiliation, but if he’s the future of the Republicanism, then there really is no difference between the two parties. Party labels should represent something more than a mere brand name; they should tell you something about the candidate’s underlying philosophy. Parties should stand for some defining and distinguishing ideas.

But what’s laughable is that the editors of a paper that hasn’t endorsed a single Republican presidential nominee in over fifty years would decide, out of the kindness of their hearts, to try and help Republicans with some unsolicited advice.

Still, maybe we should give the Times the benefit of the doubt. Maybe there are some well-placed Republicans at the paper using the editorial page to try to righten a ship that has clearly veered off course.

How do we find out? Check the voter database maintained by the New York City Board of Elections. It’s a matter of public record, so anyone can conduct their own search.

For simplicity, this search was limited to Manhattan, and in cases where there was ambiguity (multiple identical names, wrong professions listed, etc.), the results were ignored. Nine Times bigwigs showed up:

Arthur Sulzberger, Publisher: Democrat

Bill Keller, Executive Editor: Democrat

Gail Collins, Editor: Democrat

Eleanor Randolph, Editorial Board: Democrat

Dorothy Samuels, Editorial Board: Democrat

Carolyn Curiel, Editorial Board: Democrat

Frank Rich, Editorial Columnist: Democrat

“Automatic Bob” Herbert, Editorial Columnist: Democrat

Believe it or not, one Republican was found, although as an associate editor, he isn’t exactly the highest man on the totem pole. And whereas the Democrats listed above voted in nearly every special election, primary and general election, our lone Republican—who shall remain nameless lest it jeopardize his job—is much less active in his political involvement. According to the Board of Elections, he’s voted only 3 times since 1985. I guess that’s the only kind of Republican tolerated on the editorial board of the New York Times.

So, here’s the recap: out of nine people found, one is a Republican. Keep that in mind when you read Times editors. You may not be getting a balanced view of the world, but at least now you’ll know where they’re coming from (mostly the Upper West Side, according to the voter database).

And if you’re a Republican official in New York State trying to figure out whether to heed the advice of the Times, perhaps my friend Marcus put it best: “It’s like George Steinbrenner giving pointers to the Boston Red Sox.”

14 November 2006 @ 8:16AM >> “We are entering an era where when the Speaker instructs you what to do, you do it.“

13 November 2006 @ 8:13AM >> Yesterday, just in time for last Tuesday’s election, the New York Times editorial page finally admitted something I have contended for quite a while: that—for all their criticism—the Democrats have no real plan for Iraq:

Americans are waiting to hear if [Democrats] have any good ideas for how to get out of Iraq without creating even wider chaos and terrorism.

[...]

The Democrats will also need to look forward — and quickly. So far they have shared slogans, but no real policy.

[...]

Voters gave the Democrats the floor — and are now waiting to hear what they have to say.

Waiting to hear what they have to say? Isn’t that what campaigns are for? You’d think the Times would have noticed that the Democrats had nothing to say before the election, but for some reason the paper thought that minor detail wasn’t worthy of coverage until now. I wonder why that is.

8 November 2006 @ 10:53AM >> “I need some help. I need some mental help is what I need.” Video >>

8 November 2006 >> Reporting for Pajamas Media: I bumped into actor Ron Silver at the victory party for Senator Joseph Lieberman.

7 November 2006 >> Reporting for Pajamas Media: Earlier this afternoon, Andrew Marcus and I visited a polling place in Hartford, CT and met a few Lamont campaigners.

7 November 2006 >> Sexual harassment case law is about to get a lot more complicated:

Separating anatomy from what it means to be a man or a woman, New York City is moving forward with a plan to let people alter the sex on their birth certificate even if they have not had sex-change surgery.

[...]

The change would lead to many intriguing questions: For example, would a man who becomes a woman be able to marry another man? (Probably.) Would an adoption agency be able to uncover the original sex of a proposed parent? (Not without a court order.) Would a woman who becomes a man be able to fight in combat, or play in the National Football League? (These areas have yet to be explored.)

The Board of Health, which weighs recommendations drafted by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, is scheduled to vote on the proposal in December, and officials say they expect it to be adopted.

[...]

“I’ve already heard of a ‘transgendered’ man who claimed at work to be ‘a woman in a man’s body but a lesbian’ and who had to be expelled from the ladies’ restroom because he was propositioning women there,” Dr. Paul McHugh, a member of the President’s Council of Bioethics and chairman of the psychiatry department at Johns Hopkins University, wrote in an e-mail message on the subject. “He saw this as a great injustice in that his behavior was justified in his mind by the idea that the categories he claimed for himself were all ‘official’ and had legal rights attached to them.”

[...]

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority also agreed last month to let people define their own gender when deciding whether to use the men’s or women’s bathrooms.

[...]

“It’s based on an arbitrary distinction that says there are two and only two sexes,” [Joann Prinzivalli, a lawyer for the New York Transgender Rights Organization] said. “In reality the diversity of nature is such that there are more than just two, and people who seem to belong to one of the designated sexes may really belong to the other.”

In other news, I have two brains and 58 fingers. Why? Because I say so!

6 November 2006 >> In response to a post last week which cited a New York Post piece noting recent declines in newspaper circulation, reader Ari sends this possible explanation from the Freakonomics blog:

For the past several years, newspapers have been reporting on their own circulation declines with a strange degree of intensity. They write prominent, mournful, self-flagellating stories of their own decline that remind me of a friend who used to sniff his own underarm when he knew it was particularly randy. Every six months, when the circulation figures are reported, a new round of articles appears.

[...]

Not everyone is convinced that newspapers are dying, of course. Jack Welch wants to buy the Boston Globe; Dow Jones just managed to find a buyer who paid $282 million for six smaller newspapers; and of course several months ago, McClatchy bought Knight-Ridder. Circulation declines notwithstanding, these transactions suggest an underlying value that the newspapers’ own articles do not reflect.

The media executive Allan D. Mutter makes a very interesting point on his blog about circulation declines: a lot of them are essentially intentional. That is, circulation figures are falling in part because many newspapers�in response, I am guessing, to recent audit scandals at Newsday and elsewhere�have stopped distributing free or cheap copies of their papers, which used to be helpful in padding circulation figures.

This may be true, although I don’t see how this can be spun into a sign of health for newspapers. I also find it hard to believe that newspapers aren’t losing any readers due to competition from online (and other) outlets.

But let’s be generous and assume that 75% of circulation declines are a result of gradually eliminating deceptive circulation-pumping practices. What this means is that newspaper circulation is still declining several percentage points a year (depending on the particular paper) and that newspapers are obliquely owning up to the fact that they’ve been releasing artificially inflated circulation numbers for years.

This theory suggests that long-term declines in newspaper circulation won’t be as severe as current numbers indicate, but in order for this theory to be true, newspapers have to admit to yet another ploy that undercuts their credibility. Not exactly a face-saving trade-off.

5 November 2006 >> On Monday night (November 6th), I’ll be appearing on the Comcast show It’s Your Call with Lynn Doyle. We’ll be discussing the upcoming election, including a bunch of Senate races I haven’t been following. The truth is out: political chat shows really do book people who don’t know what they’re talking about! (Hard to believe, I know.) Well, tomorrow’s my turn to be that guy, on Comcast CN8 throughout the northeast and mid-Atlantic states at 9PM ET.

And throughout election day on Tuesday, I’ll be helping Pajamas Media cover the Connecticut Senate race from Hartford and the headquarters of current Senator—and former Democrat—Joe Lieberman.

5 November 2006 >> Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe reports on a few fronts in the global Jihad:

Australia: Australia’s foremost Muslim cleric triggers an uproar when he likens women who don’t wear an Islamic headscarf to “uncovered meat” and blames them for attracting sexual predators.

Afghanistan: The kidnappers of Italian photojournalist Gabriele Torsello threaten to murder him unless Abdul Rahman, an Afghan Christian convert, is returned to Afghanistan and handed over to an Islamic court.

Iran: The president of Iran calls Israel “a group of terrorists” and threatens to harm any country that supports the Jewish state. “This is an ultimatum,” warns Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called for the elmination of Israel and the United States.

Thailand: Islamist terrorists bomb a column of Buddhist monks as they collect offerings of food in Narathiwat, a city in southern Thailand. One person is killed; 12 are injured.

France: “We are in a state of civil war, orchestrated by radical Islamists,” says police union leader Michel Thoomis. “This is not a question of urban violence any more. It is an intifadah, with stones and firebombs.”

Britain: In a “true Islamic state,” sexually active homosexuals would be executed, says Arshad Misbahi, an imam in Manchester’s Central Mosque.

Meanwhile, Muslim Kurds in Iraq prefer to live in peace:

There are no insurgents in Kurdistan. Nor are there any kidnappings. [...] Iraqi Kurdistan is optimistic, full of hope, infused top to bottom with a go-go, build-build attitude.

Who would have thought that a glimmer of hope for peaceful coexistence with our Muslim brothers could be found in—of all places—Iraq?

2 November 2006 @ 10:07AM >>

Education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. And if you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.John Kerry

Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, the Democrats’ choice for president last time around, is the subject of bi-partisan criticism for what sounded like a slap at American troops serving in Iraq. Kerry claimed his statement was a “botched joke,” and his first reaction was to attack anyone who criticized him for it.

A statement on his website attributed criticism to “assorted right wing nut-jobs” and “Republican hacks”:

If anyone thinks a veteran would criticize the more than 140,000 heroes serving in Iraq and not the president who got us stuck there, they’re crazy. This is the classic G.O.P. playbook. I’m sick and tired of these despicable Republican attacks that always seem to come from those who never can be found to serve in war, but love to attack those who did.

In Kerry-land, that’s apparently what passes for an apology. Meanwhile, the “assorted right-wing nut jobs” who asked criticized Kerry included such notable Republican hacks as Hillary Clinton and a number of other prominent Democratic office-seekers.

Kerry complains that the issue is a distration from an administration that “sent our brave troops to war without body armor,” forgetting that he voted for the war and then voted against a package funding the war. (As he infamously said in 2004, “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.”)

Kerry also criticizes “Republicans [who] want to debate straw men because they’re afraid to debate real men,” although it seems like—as in 2004—Kerry still wants to debate Kerry. James Taranto noticed this little contradiction in Kerry’s appearance on the Don Imus radio show yesterday:

KERRY: The people who owe an apology are people like Donald Rumsfeld, who didn’t send enough troops, who didn’t listen to the generals, who has made every mistake in the book.

[...]

IMUS: What do you think—I understand about the Bush folks. But Senator John McCain, he seems to think—he seems to agree with the Bush administration about your comments. And you know him, obviously, better than I do, but I know him pretty well. And he probably knows what you meant, too.

KERRY: I’m sorry that John McCain has said what he said. John McCain’s been a friend for a long time. But I have to tell you, I think John McCain is wrong about this.

John McCain has been a cheerleader for a policy that is incorrect. John McCain says we ought to send another 100,000 troops over there. First of all, we don’t have another 100,000 troops. Secondly, if you send them over there, it’s going to do exactly what’s already happened, which is attract more terrorists and more jihadists. Our own generals are telling us that it’s the numbers of troops that are the problem.

There you have it. John Kerry, the man who the Democrats hoped would become president in 2004, articulates his party’s position on the war perfectly. He criticizes the president for not sending enough troops in the exact same exchange that he criticizes a proposal to send more troops. When it comes to the War on Terror, the Democrats seem to stand for nothing besides “no.”

It kind of makes you wonder what the Democrats will do if they ever take the White House. Without someone like President Bush to reflexively oppose, how will they know what positions to take?

In the meantime, for the next two years, President Bush should announce his foreign policy positions to be the exact opposite of whatever he truly believes. Maybe he can trick the Democrats into unwittingly supporting what he really wants.

1 November 2006 @ 9:59AM >> My alma mater is now considered the sixth most expensive university in the country.

You may wonder why higher education costs so much these days. Well, one of the reasons is that schools often employ a number of staffers whose job it is to push political views on students. Highly-placed school officials are sometimes called upon to spend their time micromanaging the words students use so they don’t offend politically correct sensibilities. And in some cases, the extracurricular activities paid for by the school can be quite costly.

Hey, forcing an ideology upon thousands of students each year isn’t cheap. Someone’s got to pay for it. Why shouldn’t it be you?