Attention Internet Students

Here is your next assignment (assignment 2):

2301: Using your email searching skills, do the following: Get comfortable with the way that the terms "liberal" and "conservative" are used in contemporary discourse. Then look up the respective positions taken by the two principle presidential candidates on issues like the economy, social and moral issues, energy, immigration and more. What are the liberal positions on these issues and what are the conservative positions? Is there a key ideological distinction between the two candidates on these issues or do they take similar stands? On which side does the American public tend to stand? Which do you think is the winning side of the issue?

Email me 500 words on this subject by Monday September 8th.

2302: Read the three Federalist Papers assigned in your syllabus. You'll note that page on the wiki also contains the Anti-Federalist response (you are not responsible for reading them--but ought to anyway). Outline each of these and point out the way that each takes human nature into consideration in the design of the republic.

Email me 500 words on this subject by Monday September 8th.

Feel free to use the comments section below this post to ask questions. I do read them and will respond if necessary.

Out of Town Until Sunday

Note: I will be out of town until Sunday night. I will try to stay on top of my emails, but can't guarantee that. On Monday I will start adding material to the two wiki pages devoted to the readings and assignments for week two. Remember that we do not have class on Monday due to Labor Day.

2301 week two

2302 week two

Remember that I want one full page written on the fallacies assignment. When we get back in I want you to have hard copy with you so we can discuss it in class. Internet students, please email it to me.

A Note to Internet Students

Apparantly there are about 40 of you, but I've heard from maybe five. You need to get in touch--but how would you be able to read this if haven't touched base?

hmmmmm.

For those who are following along: In case I haven't been clear enough, please email me all your work to my ACC address: kjefferies@alvincollege.edu.

A Witch! May We Burn Her?

A classic exercise in logical analysis:

The Witch Scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

An Amazing Elections Website

Check it out:

Voting America.

It contains dynamic representation of American election results spannign over a century and a half.

Thanks to ACC Head Librarian Tom Bates for pointing this out to me.

Fallacies and Marketing

I'm going to throw a monkey wrench into the fallacies assignment. I've asked you to consider whether the messages we hear from and about the candidates are logical or fallacious, and to give me examples of fallacious arguments, but might also want to think about how successful logical arguments are.

Are simple messages that appeal to emotion or fear or whatever, more effective than logical arguments. A lot of the money pumped into campaigns is spent on determining what messages work best. Polls and focus groups are used to ensure that messages hit their targets.

Is there something in our DNA that makes us more receptive to emotional arguments than logical ones?

Links to follow

Blogging About Myself

Thanks To Rick Casey for my 15 seconds of fame.

Professor worries TAKS test breeds ignorant voters.

The comments are my favorite part. Here's this choice bit: Question. Why is it that most 4 year degrees in collage now take 5 years? Could it be because our kids are not prepared from high school and are taking courses the first year to get up to the level of ability required in collage?

It's so sad that we aren't preparing kids to excel in collage, or macrame either.

I need a drink.

The Bad News is that Gas Prices Went up to $4 a Gallon

The good news is that traffic fatalities haven't been this low in almost 50 years:

Experts who have studied motor vehicle fatality trends said one reason for the dramatic decline is that people are reducing their nonessential driving first, which is often leisure driving at night or on weekends. That also happens to be riskier than daylight commuting on congested highways at lower speeds.

Teenage and elderly drivers — who also have higher accident rates — are more likely to feel the pinch of higher gas prices, and thus may be cutting back more than other drivers. Federal data also shows that driving declines have been more dramatic on rural roads, which have higher accident rates than urban highways.

And, some drivers are simply trying to save on gas by slowing down, which also decreases risk. "It could be that the safety benefits of driving slower are proportionately greater than the fuel economy benefits," Sivak said.

The steepness of the fatality decline underscores a point several experts have made recently — that raising the price of gas is more effective than almost any other means of reducing fatalities.

So does this mean the rise has been worth it?

Warning--Don't Make a Fallacious Argument Yourself

After talking to a couple of you, I'm worried that this exercise might turn into a chance to whine about candidates you don]t like.

That's a great way to get a low grade, and bore me to tears. You'll note that at no point did I ask: "Tell me what you don't like about X." That's a great way to fall into a fallacious way of reasoning yourself. Your emotions about a candidate begin to govern your assessments of the truth.

Stick to the arguments made by others and make an objective analysis of that argument. When I want your opinions, I will ask for them.

Obama's Economic Agenda

The New York Times provides an overview of Barack Obama's economic plans.

Save this for when we discuss the contemporary state of ideology. Is this a liberal plan? Are there conservative aspects to it? How do we know?

About that Fallacy Assignment

If you are not sure how to start on the first assignment, here are a few links that should help search for arguments that may or may not be fallacious:

1--The McCain website has a nice "bad stuff about Joe Biden" page.
2--The Obama website has a page confronting McCain's accusations.
3--The Republican National Committee's research briefings site digs the dirt on Obama.
4--The Democratic National Committee's press release page has loads of negativity on McCain.

You might also like to check out the following site: FactCheck.org to get their assessment of the truth or falsity behind recent adds.

There's more out there, but this gives you a head start on the assignment.

Rulemaking: The Endangered Species Act

From today's Washington Post, word of administrative changes in how the Endangered Species Act will be implemented:

The Bush administration yesterday proposed a regulatory overhaul of the Endangered Species Act to allow federal agencies to decide whether protected species would be imperiled by agency projects, eliminating the independent scientific reviews that have been required for more than three decades.

The new rules, which will be subject to a 30-day per comment period, would use administrative powers to make broad changes in the law that Congress has resisted for years. Under current law, agencies must subject any plans that potentially affect endangered animals and plants to an independent review by the Fish and Wildlife Service or the National Marine Fisheries Service. Under the proposed new rules, dam and highway construction and other federal projects could proceed without delay if the agency in charge decides they would not harm vulnerable species.

This appears to be an additional attempt to expand executive powers at the expense of the legislature.

Is McCain's Strategy Working?

The Washinton Times indicates that it just might be. The story suggests that race may play a factor in a shift away from Obama.

State Republican Party leaders interviewed by The Washington Times said fear of a far-left Obama presidency is warming once-skeptical voters to Sen. John McCain, fueling growing enthusiasm among Republicans that Mr. McCain's more aggressive campaigning can lead to victory.

"It appears that the more that Obama speaks, the more afraid folks in South Carolina get," said Spartanburg County Republican Party Chairman Rick Beltram. "We are seeing 'die-hard' Democrats tell us that Obama is not their man.

"We are expecting the white Democrats to be fleeing the Democratic ship when November 4 comes around - plus, the Democratic candidate [Bob Conley] that is running against Senator [Lindsey] Graham is also running away from the Democrats, and you can quote me on that," Mr. Beltram said.

In union-dominated Michigan, a state targeted by both major parties, state Republican Party Chairman Saul Anuzis said he is seeing signs that independents and Reagan Democrats are moving toward Mr. McCain.

"People who may have been apprehensive about McCain now see this race as potentially winnable," Mr. Anuzis said.

The latest daily tracking poll by Gallup shows the presidential contest in a statistical dead heat, with the Illinois Democrat three percentage points ahead of the Arizona Republican, 46 percent to 43 percent. National tracking polls of likely voters

Campaigning: Money Talks

If you want to know why River Oaks does as well as it does, it helps to understand just how much money flows from that neighborhood into the hands of Republican and Democratic office seekers.

Campaigning: Another peak inside the McCain Campaign

From today's NYT:

...Mr. McCain is called the White Tornado by some people who have worked for him over the years. Throughout his presidential campaign, he has been the overseer of a kingdom of dissenting camps, unclear lines of command and an unsettled atmosphere that keeps aides constantly on edge.

Even now, after a shake-up that aides said had brought an unusual degree of order to Mr. McCain’s disorderly world in the last month, two of his pollsters are at odds over parts of the campaign’s message, while past and current aides have been trading snippy exchanges debating the wisdom of attack advertisements he has aimed at Mr. Obama.

In an interview, Mr. McCain said he believed an organization consisting of sometimes colliding centers of power made sure that a candidate, or a president, reached fully informed decisions. “You’ve got to have competing opinions,” he said.

“I think a certain amount of tension is very healthy, and a certain amount of different views,” he said. “Because of the bubble that a president is in, and the bubble that a candidate is in, sometimes you find out afterwards something that — ‘Oh boy, I wish I had heard thus and such and so and so.’ So I appreciate and want some of the tension; I don’t want too much of it, obviously, because we have to have certain efficiencies. But I think there is a balance there.”

Mr. McCain hungers for information. He can regularly be seen reading newspapers from cover to cover, and aides say he embraces the briefing books given to him each night. His aides say he is especially studious when it comes to economic issues, an area in which he has admitted weakness. A former fighter pilot, Mr. McCain preaches the need to improvise under pressure, subscribing to the military maxim that no plan survives first contact with the enemy. The bursts of temper fellow senators have endured are rarely directed at his underlings. Indeed Mr. McCain has a history of being surrounded by people who are intensely loyal to him — and remain so even after being pushed off his ship.

But if Mr. McCain’s management style has kept him well informed and flexible, its drawbacks have been especially evident in the many often turbulent months since he began his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. It offers a contrast to the more rigidly controlled and nearly corporate management style that has marked the campaign of Mr. Obama, his Democratic counterpart. If anything, it recalls the freewheeling ways of the last Republican senator to win his party’s presidential nomination, Bob Dole in 1996.

Agenda Setting: The Sherman Bus Cash

Behind most every regulation lies a tragedy. Today's Chron tells us that the bus crash in Sherman (17 dead at this moment) is likely to lead to bus safety reform:

...the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has announced its intention to do more testing aimed at developing standards for seat belts and safety glass in charter buses.

But the agency has stopped short of mandating the same for the large yellow school buses, making it optional. U.S. Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, and Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, are sponsoring a bill that would bypass safety testing on charter buses by immediately requiring such protections. Brown became involved in the bill after seven baseball players from Bluffton University in his state died when their charter bus fell off an overpass in Atlanta on their way to a tournament.

Lack of seat belts was cited by the National Transportation Safety Board as one of the causes of the injuries. "It's all about cost, and we're looking for the money to help pay for bus safety," Forman said. Forman noted the most protected person on a charter bus is the driver, who has a seat belt and a laminated windshield.

Haven't we been through this before?

Enemy Deprivation Syndrome

This is a phrase I picked up from a Samantha Power essay on foreign policy. Presumably it refers to an ear when an enemy does not exist and interests that benefit from having a concentrated enemy suffer.

Democratic Platform circa 2008

Click here for comments on a preliminary version of the Democrat's 2008 platform, and here for background information on the platform writing process itself.

Creative Budgeting

Michael Granof, an accounting professor at the University of Texas writing in the New York Times, discusses the budgetary tricks that state government are going through in order to balance their books. It involves techniques where bonds are issued in order to finance the purchase of one part of government to another. The purchase is then entered into the books as revenue, which balances the books, without actually increasing revenue. All involve some way of ensuring that current obligations are passed onto the next generation:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California wants to reduce his state’s deficit by borrowing money from the future. His plan is to issue $15 billion in bonds that are backed by future lottery revenues. More than a third of that money would be used to ease California’s current-year deficit.

Borrowing from the future to pay for the present is, unfortunately, becoming routine. In 2006, Indiana leased a toll road to a foreign consortium from Australia and Spain. The state received $3.8 billion upfront by surrendering the next 75 years of toll revenues. Other states have sold tobacco bonds that provide one-time infusions of cash — in return for forgoing 25 years of payments from cigarette companies that were supposed to pay for health care related to tobacco-caused illnesses.

Another trick is to move up the due dates on merchant-collected sales taxes from early next year to late in the current year. These taxes then are counted as revenues for the current year.

Other states have moved employee paydays from the last day of the month to the first day of the next month. This enables them to eliminate an entire month of employee pay from the year’s budget, because for one year there are only 11 paydays instead of 12. In subsequent years, the budget includes 11 paydays from salaries earned in the current year and one payday for money earned the previous year.

States also transfer money from a “rainy day” reserve account to the general fund and then count the amount transferred as revenue. This is the equivalent of solving personal fiscal problems by moving money from a savings account to a checking account and calling it “income.”

Pensions are the ideal budget item for imaginative accounting. When pension expenditures are decreased, the consequences of the cuts may not show up for decades. States can simply fail to pay the amount that is actuarially sound into pension funds. The retirement checks that state employees eventually receive under a defined-benefit plan are determined by the promises incorporated into the plan, not by the timing of a state’s contributions. In effect, the state pays now or it pays later.

All this while investments in the future are cut for current economic gain. Sucks to be young.

Presidential Advising: Cheney and Addington on Bush

Here are a few q and a's in the New Republic which touch on how President Bush and VP Cheney used information in deciding whether and how to torture detainees:

Many have wondered what transformed Vice President Cheney into the Prince of Darkness. Why do you think he embraced Addington's radical legal vision so enthusiastically?

Of course, I don't really know; you can't get inside of his head. I wish I'd been able to interview him. I certainly think he had a pre-existing political agenda, which was to strengthen the executive branch. But people I've interviewed who know him well, including an old family friend who really likes him, said that he was altered in some profound way by 9/11. This particular friend said that he became steely, that he had seen something terrible that he could no longer talk about. And, of course, Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief-of-staff to Colin Powell, actually comes out and says that he thinks Cheney became paranoid. Granted, that's a clinical term, and Lawrence Wilkerson is not a doctor. But there's more than ample evidence that he became obsessed with the terrorist threat, and you could question whether his judgment became skewed.

I think one of the interesting questions is whether after 9/11 the top people in the Bush administration didn't almost poison themselves with information. They removed all the filters on the kind of intelligence information that went to the president and vice president and other top people in the administration. Prior to 9/11, the CIA and the FBI screened out all the unreliable information about what kinds of threats were coming in. But after 9/11, Cheney in particular wanted to see everything. He no longer trusted that the CIA was able to screen it properly. So, according to one of the people I quote, Roger Cressey, who was at the National Security Council at the time, they started just bombarding themselves every morning with these reports filled with what Cressey describes as mostly garbage, but that were completely alarming. And so, in the words of Jim Comey again, he describes it as locking yourself in a room with Led Zeppelin every morning. You would just lose your mind.

Why did Bush turn over so much of his presidency to Cheney and Addington? Did he understand the radicalism of the positions taken in his name?

This is such a good question. I've interviewed people who are more moderate than Cheney in the administration, who like to think that if they had only been able to get more information to President Bush, he would have put the brakes on. And they blame Cheney and Addington and a small group of others around them for too radically narrowing the information that reached President Bush. Yet there were memos that did reach the president. He certainly had the basic outlines of what was going on. What I'm told is that Cheney really knew how to play him, and would say in meetings, If we don't continue to use the most extreme possible methods on terror suspects, if anything goes wrong, you'll be blamed. And nobody ever did a Plan B kind of analysis to see whether this radical course in fact was necessary for national security. The CIA never sent in a team to see whether they got better information out of torturing people or out of not torturing people. There was no alternative program that was ever given to the president about how to treat terrorist suspects.

What about Jack Goldsmith's thesis that Bush's excesses resulted from a failure to recognize that presidential power is the power to persuade. Was Bush's problem that he had contempt for politics?

No, I think that, again, what Cheney convinced Bush of was that if they did not go to the farthest possible regions of the law, the most outermost edges of what you could do to detainees, then they would be shirking their responsibility in terms of protecting the country. So rather than having a policy debate and a political debate on what the right thing to do was, and what the smartest thing to do was, they simply let the lawyers define policy by setting the outer limits of the law. You have John Yoo saying, "Well, I'm just a lawyer; I'm just telling you what you can do legally. It's above my pay grade to have a policy debate." But his judgments became the policy because they didn't have that debate.

Inherent Powers: Did Lincoln Have the Constitutional Power to Emancipate the Slaves in the South?

Yes, because it was during a civil war and he claimed it to fall under his war powers:

The Civil War transformed Lincoln from a president into the constitutional commander in chief of the army and navy. What that meant, exactly, was far from clear. But that status might also give him yet another route toward emancipation. International law recognized that, in time of war, military commanders had the authority to suspend the normal operations of civil law and rule by decree. Only one American general—Andrew Jackson—had actually ever done this on American soil. But there had also never been a civil war in America before. And so Lincoln began gradually flexing his “war powers”—he suspended the writ of habeas corpus, he called up armies of volunteers into federal service, and he imposed a blockade of the Confederacy.

Of course, at each point, Taney and the Supreme Court hotly contested Lincoln’s use of these “war powers.” And this made him leery of pressing the “war powers” to the point of emancipating the South’s slaves. But by the summer of 1862, the military aspect of the war was going very badly. Relying on the labor of its slaves, the Confederacy was able to field armies that could easily hold their own against Lincoln’s armies. And his own generals—chief among them George B. McClellan, the commander of the Army of the Potomac—were politically unsympathetic to emancipation and sulky in taking orders from Lincoln. And to make matters worse, Delaware turned down the buy-out plan. If Lincoln waited longer, he might have victorious rebel armies surrounding Washington; or he might have mutinous generals threatening to seize the government for themselves. We “must change our tactics or lose the game,” Lincoln announced, and on July 22, 1862, Lincoln read to his cabinet a draft of an emancipation proclamation, threatening to decree the freeing of the slaves as a “fit and necessary war measure for suppressing” the rebellion. When McClellan and his army finally defeated the Confederates at Antietam in September, Lincoln published the proclamation and gave the Confederates 100 days to end the rebellion or the emancipation would take effect. The 100 days came and went without any repenting on the part of the Confederates, and on January 1, 1863, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation into law.

Into military law, that is. Lincoln had no more civil authority as president to emancipate slaves in 1863 than he had had at the beginning of the presidency, and every lawyer in the country knew it. This is why the proclamation did two very peculiar things: first, it based its emancipating authority strictly on Lincoln’s “power in me vested as Commander-in-Chief . . . in time of actual armed rebellion.” Second, it limited the reach of emancipation only to the slaves in “the States and parts of States . . . this day in rebellion against the United States.” The four slave states that had not joined the Confederacy (Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri) were not “in rebellion” and so Lincoln’s “war powers” had no reach over them.

Pardons: Is It's Necessary to Find Out the Truth About Torture?

Stuart Taylor, writing for Newsweek says so:

President George W. Bush ought to pardon any official from cabinet secretary on down who might plausibly face prosecution for interrogation methods approved by administration lawyers. (It would be unseemly for Bush to pardon Vice President Dick Cheney or himself, but the next president wouldn't allow them to be prosecuted anyway—galling as that may be to critics.) The reason for pardons is simple: what this country needs most is a full and true accounting of what took place. The incoming president should convene a truth commission, with subpoena power, to explore every possible misdeed and derive lessons from it. But this should not be a criminal investigation, which would only force officials to hire lawyers and batten down the hatches.

Pardons would further a truth commission's most important goals: to uncover all important facts, identify innocent victims to be compensated, foster a serious conversation about what U.S. interrogation rules should be, recommend legal reforms, pave the way for appropriate apologies and restore America's good name. The goals should not include wrecking the lives of men and women who made grievous mistakes while doing dirty work—work they had been advised by administration lawyers was legal, and which they believed was necessary to prevent terrorist mass murder.

A criminal investigation would only hinder efforts to determine the truth, and preclude any apologies. It would spur those who know the most to take the Fifth. Any prosecutions would also touch off years of partisan warfare. The lesson for occupants of the toughest government jobs—if the next administration could find people willing to fill them—would be that saving innocent lives is less important than covering their posteriors. Any hope of a civil conversation about lessons we need to learn would be dead.

The need for truth outweighs the prosecution of criminal behavior. Ring true? Or does this simply allow an out for any administration to claim it is above the law and do as it chooses when in charge?

Elections: The Age of Helms

A great recent article in Salon outlines Jesse Helms' influence on politics. He gave the Southern oligarchy a quasi-populist face which allowed it to preserve its privileges:

Where Jesse Helms came from was the Third World, the American South between World War I and the civil rights revolution. In the generation before Helms was born the son of a police chief in 1921, the Southern oligarchy had been terrified by Populism. The greatest threat to the white elite was the revolt of white workers and farmers. To forestall that possibility, the Southern state governments, in the decade before World War I, used literacy tests, poll taxes and other measures to eliminate not only all blacks but half of the white Southern population from the electorate. In the election of 1936, voter turnout in Georgia was 16.1 percent, 13 percent in Mississippi, and only 10.7 percent in South Carolina. (It was higher, 42.7 percent, in Helms' North Carolina, where populists had abolished the poll tax.)

Having crushed the Republican and Populist parties, the oligarchs imposed a one-party dictatorship on the region, with secret state surveillance units and occasional collaboration between the police and the Ku Klux Klan. In its economy, the South was a banana republic, a commodity-exporting resource colony in which a "comprador bourgeoisie" of local landowners and local businessmen collaborated with investors in New York and elsewhere in fleecing the region.

To serve their interests, the old latifundist families and corporate elites hired "Dixie demagogues," who were to genuine populists like William Jennings Bryan what a Disney pirate is to a pirate. All of them were entertaining. Some began as entertainers, like musician-slash-flour miller W. Lee "Pass the Biscuits, Pappy" O'Daniel, who went from hosting the "Hillbilly Flour" radio show to the Texas governor's mansion in 1939. The "Dixie demagogues" denounced various supposed enemies of the white tribe, but with two exceptions -- Huey Long and George Wallace -- they never threatened the rule of the country clubs and courthouse gangs. Jesse Helms was one of these theatrical quasi-populists, an uncomplicated establishment conservative who parlayed a liberal-baiting radio show into a political career. Like other faux-homespun Southern conservatives, he employed rhetorical populism against blacks, homosexuals, liberals, professors, modern artists and "common-ists" in the service of his business backers, most noticeably North Carolina's tobacco industry.

Now after Helm's Republican Party has transformed the last three decades of politics, according to the author, the United States today, looks much like the South then:

So here's the real horror story. In every respect except white supremacy, contemporary America looks more and more like the South between the world wars that Jesse Helms wanted to preserve. We have growing inequality and concentration of wealth, and an elite economic strategy like that of the traditional South that focuses on importing cheap labor, outsourcing manufacturing and exporting commodities (we supply industrial Asia with timber and soybeans). Private-sector unions are all but dead, as in the South. The political parties, as organizations, are weak, as in the South. More and more elected officials are self-funded millionaires or billionaires. Contemporary American politics, like Southern politics past and present, pits elite business-class conservatives against feeble, housebroken elite progressives who are not real threats to entrenched privilege. When, inevitably, the occasional populist protest figure like Perot, Dobbs or Huckabee appears, the affluent progressives quickly close ranks with the corporate conservatives.

Jesse Helms is dead -- but his sinister influence lives on. If you seek his monument, look around.

Pardons: Some Recent News Items

Since we're covering the executive, and are coming to terms with the notion of an executive pardon, here are some recent news items on the subject. Recall that we can consider a pardon to be an executive check on judicial powers. It also can give a conservative minded judiciary a way out when it does not want to hear new evidence concerning a convicted person's innocence. This, they can say, is up to the executive, not the judiciary.

Felons are seeking pardons from President Bush as he leaves office.
Marion Jones wants a presidential pardon.
Bush may preemptively pardon many who might face various charges when they leave office.

Privitization: Can the Free Market Conquer Space?

Not yet. A privately funded rocket blew up with three satellites and the ashes of over 200 people, including Star Trek's Scotty, on board.

Is space travel too big for the private sector?

Partisanship and Activism on the Court

According to this study in the Washington Independent, Justice Thomas is the most partisan justice, and Scalia the most activist.

Executive Privilege: An Appellate Court Rules that White House Aides Must Testify Before Congress

From The New York Times:

President Bush’s top advisers cannot ignore subpoenas issued by Congress, a federal judge ruled on Thursday in a case that involves the firings of several United States attorneys but has much wider constitutional implications for all three branches of government.

“The executive’s current claim of absolute immunity from compelled Congressional process for senior presidential aides is without any support in the case law,” Judge John D. Bates ruled in United States District Court here.

Unless overturned on appeal, a former White House counsel, Harriet E. Miers, and the current White House chief of staff, Joshua B. Bolten, would be required to cooperate with the House Judiciary Committee, which has been investigating the controversial dismissal of the federal prosecutors in 2006.

While the ruling is the first in which a court has agreed to enforce a Congressional subpoena against the White House, Judge Bates called his 93-page decision “very limited” and emphasized that he could see the possibility of the dispute being resolved through political negotiations. The White House is almost certain to appeal the ruling.

The decision can be found here. The Judge in question was nominated to the bench by H.W. Bush.

The Latest on Political Correctness in College

Professors, it seems, still tend to be liberal at most campuses, but conservatives exist, and do pretty well for themselves.

There is less political correctness in community colleges than other types of colleges.

Here are the relevant reads:
- Defining Political Correctness and Its Non-Impact.
- The Liberal (and Moderating) Professoriate.
- The Social and Political Views of American Professors.

Since the whole PC thing is so 80s, a refresher might be in order. At its simplest, it simply refers to individuals who see racial and gender and racial discrimination as a real phenomenon that has an impact on society. Things get controversial when prescriptions are offered which include affirmative action and, at it's extreme, suppression of ideas that are seen to further suppression.

Critics of the counter movement argue that conservatives served up political correctness as a whipping boy to stir up support for their movement.

Given its state, its surprising to see references to it today. But these studies tell us interesting things about the current state of ideology on campus.

Campaigning: About McCain's Campaign Adviser

From The New Republic, a story about Steve Schmidt, post Rove guru:

Even in the hyper-competitive world of political media strategists--a line of work that tends to reward the studied deployment of affectation and outsized personality--Steve Schmidt, the tough-talking, shaven-headed, 37-year old former high school tight end from North Plainfield, New Jersey, who recently emerged from a scrum among John McCain's inner circle to become the head of day-to-day operations, arrived on the national stage trailing more colorful nicknames than most.

"He figured out pretty quickly that [a martial] reputation would work to his professional benefit," Dan Schnur, McCain's communications director in 2000, recently told me. "When he came on to the Schwarzenegger [2006 gubernatorial] campaign, I told his junior staffers: If you show up late to a meeting, Steve will waterboard you."

Schmidt's most recent promotion was announced on July 2. Campaign manager Rick Davis's duties were scaled back to fundraising, searching for a v.p., and making preparations for the national convention, while Schmidt was dispatched to the campaign's Arlington, Virginia, headquarters, where he assumed "full operational control." In Republican circles it was hailed as a move in the right direction; the question was whether it had come too late.

Read on to get an inside look at the current state of the McCain campaign.

The American Aristocracy: Eileen Slocum

Yes there is a unofficial aristocracy in the US of A and one of it's leading figures died recently. From the NYT obituary:

Eileen G. Slocum, a doyenne of Newport, R.I., society who was a stalwart of the Republican Party both in Rhode Island and nationally and whose family history is dotted with connections to the most moneyed and powerful of the American aristocracy, died on Sunday in Newport. She was 92.

...The wife of a diplomat who served in Egypt and Germany, among other places, and a descendant of the Brown of Brown University, Mrs. Slocum came to be described as Newport’s “grande dame” — “that silly name,” Ms. Quinn said — after moving full time to the family estate she inherited from her aunt in the 1960s and becoming involved in politics.

The house, which was built in the 1890s on Bellevue Avenue, often called Millionaire’s Row, has two libraries and its own marble ballroom and was the site of many Republican fund-raisers for the likes of President Gerald R. Ford, Senator Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina and Vice President Dick Cheney.

Mrs. Slocum, who was vice chairman of the Republican State Central Committee for many years, was Rhode Island’s Republican national committeewoman from 1992 until earlier this year and a delegate to several Republican national conventions. She had hoped to be present at the convention next month in St. Paul, said her son, John J. Slocum Jr.

Eileen Gillespie was born on Dec. 21, 1915, in Manhattan. Her father, Lawrence Lewis Gillespie, was a banker. Her mother, Irene Muriel Sherman, was the granddaughter of John Carter Brown, the philanthropist and bibliophile whose book collection formed the basis of the John Carter Brown Library for research in history and humanities at Brown University. His father, Nicholas Brown Jr., was the benefactor for whom the university named itself, changing it from College of Rhode Island in 1804. Other Brown family members included slave traders and abolitionists.

Its a nice life I suppose, but can she cook squirrel in a popcorn popper?