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Page 4 • The News-Banner • SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2011
Today in History
By The Associated Press
Today is Saturday, Sept.
17, the 260th day of 2011.
There are 105 days left in
the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On Sept. 17, 1911, Calbraith
P. Rodgers set off
from Sheepshead Bay, N.Y.,
aboard a Wright biplane in
an attempt to become the
first flier to travel the width
of the United States. (The
49-day journey required
69 stops before Rodgers
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Red-Meat Slam Dance
A full complement of Republican
presidential candidates gathered for
the battle royale at the Ronald Reagan
Library in Seamy (Simi) Valley, Calif.
And though he was only there in
spirit, the Great Communicator could
easily have supplied the power for the
entire proceedings had the networks
harnessed him spinning in his grave
like a rotisserie chicken in the middle
of a power surge.
The eight challengers for
his mantle didn’t just
break the Gipper’s 11th
Commandment, “Thou
shall not speak ill of other
Republicans,” they stomped
on it with football cleats and
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arrived in Pasadena, Calif.,
on Nov. 5.)
On this date:
In 1787, the Constitution
of the United States
was completed and signed
by a majority of delegates
attending the Constitutional
Convention in Philadelphia.
In 1908, Lt. Thomas E.
Selfridge of the U.S. Army
Signal Corps became the
first person to die in the
crash of a powered aircraft,
the Wright Flyer, at Fort
Myer, Va.
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Will
Durst
TheRaging
Moderate
shoved it down a sewer grate with a broken rake handle.
It was a red-meat, power-tie slam dance with operatic
overtones.
Anticipation ran higher than Charlie Sheen on New
Year’s Eve that a hockey match would break out and
the bloodthirsty audience was not going to be satisfied
until lecterns dripped with copious spillage. Before Rick
Perry could answer Brian Williams’ question about the
execution of 234 inmates on his watch, they erupted into
applause like an emeritus alumni crowd at Assassins
State University during homecoming. Creeping the
moderator out more than pinworms in the bottom of his
footie pajamas.
Eyes on the prize, Newt Gingrich cautioned panel
mates to keep the attacks focused on Obama, while
castigating the media for trapping them in this internecine
warfare. The rest of the contingent affectionately
dismissed his admonition the way a group of Oakland
Raider tailgaters would an elderly aunt wandering into a
discussion on blitz protection. Newt Gingrich -- the soul
of reason. Something has gone horribly awry.
We did learn that Michele Bachmann believes in
$2-a-gallon gasoline and “a strong, bold leader... who
will lead,” and that she spent the last three weekends
going to restaurants and thinks drilling for oil in the
Everglades is a good idea. So, apparently she’s planning
an electoral strategy that disincludes Florida’s mighty
27.
Rick Perry hates cancer and called Social Security “a
Ponzi scheme,” not once, but three times, so Florida is
obviously not on his front burner either. Arch-enemy to
all things science, Perry supported his “climate change,
what climate change” philosophy by comparing himself
to Galileo. You can’t make stuff up like this.
Ron Paul has been mauled by the TSA and is not
happy about it or much of anything else. Second time
through, it is virtually impossible for Willard Mitt
Romney to be out-smugged by anybody, even an unctuous
Texan. Herman Cain likes Chile. The country,
not the food. And the major difference between Elvis
Presley and Rick Santorum’s candidacy is... there is
none, they’re both rock-salt, shaved-dust, dead.
Jon Huntsman may be running for the wrong party’s
nomination. Trying to steer the group from the edge of
various abysses, he and Newt shared the big-boy babysitter
role, while Bachmann lost more momentum than a
dark matter anvil hitting a freeway sound wall. Big winner...
Sarah Palin. For being prescient enough to not to
have made up her mind yet.
But there’s plenty of time. This was just the premier
stop for the traveling abattoir. There are dozens of
chances for continued bloodletting until either Perry or
Romney drops from the death of 1000 cuts, or they take
each other out in a murder-suicide pact. While Team
Obama roots for Perry from the sidelines the same way
Jimmy Carter cheered on Bonzo’s sidekick back in ‘80.
Be careful what you wish for.
Emmy-nominated comedian and writer Will Durst recently published
a book, “The All American Sport of Bipartisan Bashing.”
durst@caglecartoons.com.
All in the (federal) family
In societies governed by persuasion, politics is
mostly talk, so liberals’ impoverishment of their
vocabulary matters. Having damaged liberalism’s
reputation, they call themselves progressives. Having
made the federal government’s pretensions absurd,
they have resurrected the supposed synonym “federal
family.” Having made federal spending suspect, they
advocate “investments” -- for “job creation,” a euphemism
for stimulus, another word they have made
toxic.
Barack Obama, a pitilessly rhetorical president,
continues to grab the nation by its lapels, demanding
its attention, and is paying the price: The nation is no
longer listening. This matters because ominous portents
are multiplying.
Bank of America, which reported an $8.8 billion
loss last quarter, plans 30,000 layoffs out of a workforce
of nearly 300,000. The Postal Service hopes to
shed 120,000 of its 653,000 jobs (down from almost
900,000 a decade ago). Such churning of the labor
market would free people for new, more productive
jobs -- except that to reduce unemployment, the economy
needs an approximately 3 percent growth rate,
triple today’s rate.
Consumers of modest means are so strapped that
Wal-Mart is reviving layaway purchases for the
Christmas season. The Wall Street Journal reports
that Procter & Gamble, which claims to have at least
one product in 98 percent of American households,
expects hard times for a long time: It is putting new
emphasis on lower-priced products for low-income
shoppers.
Just as Obama administration policies have
delayed the housing market reaching a salutary bottom,
Europe’s policies designed to delay Greece’s
default on its debt are probably making that inevitability
worse. If the contagion reaches Italy or Spain
(“Too big to fail and too big to bail”), we shall learn
how hollow Europe’s banks are, and how much U.S.
banks are entangled with them.
During the debt-ceiling debate, The New York
Times, liberalism’s bulletin board, was aghast that
Republicans risked causing the nation to default on
its debt. Now two Times columnists endorse slowmotion
default through inflation: The Federal Reserve
should have “the deliberate goal of generating higher
inflation to help alleviate debt problems” (Paul Krugman)
and “sometimes we need inflation, and now is
such a time” (Floyd Norris).
Ken Rogoff, a Harvard economist, suggests “trying
to achieve some modest deleveraging through
moderate inflation of, say, 4 to 6 percent for several
OPINION
years.” This is an antiseptic way of saying
we should reduce the weight of our
indebtedness by reducing the value of the
dollars in which it is denominated. But
does the nation need more uncertainty?
And note Rogoff’s serene confidence in
government’s ability to control such things
-- inflation will be fine-tuned within a narrow
band, switched on for just a few years,
then off, like a government-approved light
bulb.
George
It is a wonder, this faith-based (and often
campus-based) conviction that the govern- Will
ment that brought us the ethanol program
can be trusted to precisely execute wise policies that
will render the world predictable and progressive.
For two years, there has been one constant: As
events have refuted the Obama administration’s certitudes,
it has retained its insufferable knowingness.
It knew that the stimulus would hold unemployment
below 8 percent. Oops. Unemployment has been at
least 9 percent in 26 of the 30 months since the stimulus
was passed. Michael Boskin of Stanford says that
even if one charitably accepts the administration’s
self-serving estimate of jobs “created or saved” by the
stimulus, each job cost $280,000 -- five times America’s
median pay.
And research by Garett Jones and Daniel M. Rothschild
of George Mason University’s Mercatus Center
indicates that just 42.1 percent of workers hired by
entities receiving stimulus funds were unemployed
at the time. More (47.3 percent) were poached from
other organizations, and 10.6 percent came directly
from school or outside the labor force.
Obama’s administration, which is largely innocent
of business experience, knew its experts would be
wizards at investing taxpayers’ dollars. Oops. After
more than half a billion stimulus dollars in loan guarantees,
bankrupt Solyndra has shed nearly all of its
more than 1,100 workers.
The economic policy the “federal family” should
adopt can be expressed in five one-syllable words:
Get. Out. Of. The. Way. Instead, Energy Secretary
Steven Chu, whose department has become a venture
capital firm for crony capitalism and costly flops at
creating “green jobs,” praises the policy of essentially
banishing the incandescent light bulb as “taking away
a choice that continues to let people waste their own
money.” Better to let the experts in his department
and the rest of the federal family waste other people’s
money.
georgewill@washpost.com
Racial preferences in Wisconsin
The campus at the University
of Wisconsin-Madison
erupted this week after
the release of two studies
documenting the heavy
use of race in deciding
which students to admit to
the undergraduate and law
schools. The evidence of
discrimination is undeniable,
and the reaction by critics
was undeniably dishonest
and thuggish.
The Center for Equal
Opportunity (CEO), which I
founded in 1995 to expose and challenge
misguided race-based public
policies, conducted the studies based
on an analysis of the university’s own
admissions data. But the university
was none too keen on releasing the
data, which CEO obtained through
filing Freedom of Information Act
requests only after a successful legal
challenge went all the way to the state
supreme court.
It’s no wonder the university wanted
to keep the information secret. The
studies show that a black or Hispanic
undergraduate applicant was more
than 500 times likelier to be admitted
to Wisconsin-Madison than a similarly
qualified white or Asian applicant.
The odds ratio favoring black law
school applicants over similarly qualified
white applicants was 61 to 1.
The median SAT scores of black
undergraduates who were admitted
were 150 points lower than whites or
Asians, while the median Hispanic
scores were roughly 100 points lower.
And median high school rankings
for both blacks and Hispanics were
also lower than for either whites or
Asians.
CEO has published studies of
racial double standards in admissions
at scores of public colleges and
universities across the country with
similar findings, but none
has caused such a violent
reaction.
Instead of addressing the
findings of the study, the
university’s vice provost
for diversity, Damon A.
Williams, dishonestly told
students that “CEO has one
mission and one mission
only: dismantle the gains
that were achieved by the
civil rights movement.” In
fact, CEO’s only mission is
to promote color-blind equal
opportunity so that, in Martin Luther
King’s vision, no one will be judged
by the color of his or her skin.
Egged on by inflammatory comments
by university officials, student
groups organized a flashmob via a
Facebook page that was filled with
propaganda and outright lies about
CEO wanting to dismantle their student
groups. More than a hundred
angry students stormed the press
conference at the Doubletree Hotel
in Madison, where CEO president
Roger Clegg was releasing the study.
The hotel management described
what took place in a press statement
afterward: “Unfortunately, when
escorting meeting attendees out of
the hotel through a private entrance,
staff were then rushed by a mob
of protestors, throwing employees
to the ground. The mob became
increasingly physically violent when
forcing themselves into the meeting
room where the press conference had
already ended, filling it over fire-code
capacity. Madison police arrived on
the scene after the protestors had
stormed the hotel.”
But the outrageous behavior didn’t
end there -- and it wasn’t just students
but also faculty who engaged in disgraceful
conduct. Later the same day
of the press conference, Clegg debat-
Linda
Chavez
ed UW law professor Larry Church
on campus. The crowd booed, hissed,
and shouted insults, continuously
interrupting Clegg during the debate.
Having used Facebook to organize
the flashmob, students and
some faculty extended their use of
social media and tweeted the debate
live. Even with Twitter’s 140-character
limit, you’d think participants
would be able to come up with
something more substantive than the
repeated use of the label “racist” to
describe Clegg and his arguments
against racial double standards, but
hundreds of tweets exhibited little
more than hysterical rants and personal
attacks.
Perhaps the most offensive tweet
was posted by Sara Goldrick-Rab,
an associate professor of educational
policy studies and sociology. After
announcing that she was “Getting
set to live blog this debate between a
racist and a scholar,” she tweeted that
Clegg sounded “like the whitest white
boy I’ve ever heard.” The only racism
in evidence came from the defenders
of the university’s race-based
admissions policies, such as Professor
Goldrick-Rab.
You’d think that a responsible university
would denounce the intimidation
and lack of civility by its students
and faculty. Instead, Vice Provost
Williams told the student newspaper,
“I’m most excited about how well the
students represented themselves, the
passion with which they engaged, the
respectful tone in how they did it and
the thoughtfulness of their questions
and interactions.”
It appears that not only are the
university’s admissions policies
deeply discriminatory, but also that
university officials applaud namecalling,
distortion and outright physical
assault.
© 2011 CREATORS.COM