Politics

More Incredible (Or Maybe Not) Wash. Post Bias

If I had not provided a link in my post immediately below to the Washington Post’s biased or economically illiterate (or both) whole page headline a few days ago (“To some in GOP, ending a tax break is the same as a tax hike”), I’m sure many readers (if there are many readers) would think […]

The Washington Post: Anti-Republican Bias Or Economic Illiteracy?

If you read this front-page story in the Washington Post today, “No-tax-hike pledge creates Republican rift, potential roadblock to deficit deal,” it looks like normal WashPost anti-Republican fare — exaggerating what seems more like a difference in emphasis and negotiating positions into an alleged intra-party civil war, accompanied by a photo of Boehner and Mitch […]

Why Not Just Confiscate The Wealth Of “The Rich”?

Why not? Well, leaving aside such trifling concerns as law, morality, justice, fairness, etc, even confiscating the wealth of “The Rich” wouldn’t make a sizable dent in the deficit. “According to Internal Revenue Service data,” the Wall Street Journal reported today, the entire taxable income of everyone earning over $100,000 in 2008 was about $1.582 […]

More Startling News From Academia…

New Studies Show How Life’s Tough Turns Can Derail Students Now there’s a surprise….

I’m Sure There’s No Connection Between…

… Obama’s support among blacks slips unexpectedly, Hispanics too and Obama teams up with Al Sharpton in New York to woo African-American voters ahead of 2012 election If Sharpton, why not Farrakhan?

On Spending, Even Many Democrats Don’t Think Democrats Are Reasonable…

The Hill published some interesting poll results today. Its main finding — that “A plurality of likely voters believes Republicans have been more reasonable than Democrats in the negotiations over spending cuts” — is hardly surprising. After all, most voters aren’t stupid. But this struck me as quite interesting: A new poll conducted for The […]

Two Views Of Students As Customers

From Inside Higher Ed today, a report from Northeastern Illinois University of “a two-year anthropological inquiry into how today’s students do research.” The goal of such an approach is priming librarians to “see the library through the eyes of others,” [associate university librarian David] Green said. In other words, librarians who serve large Hispanic populations […]

A Social Psychology Hoax? (Or Is Social Psychology Itself A Hoax?)

[NOTE: THIS POST HAS BEEN UPDATED!] Remember the wonderful Alan Sokal hoax on the ponderously pontificating journal, Social Text? As the New York Times reported in May 1996, A New York University physicist, fed up with what he sees as the excesses of the academic left, hoodwinked a well-known journal into publishing a parody thick […]

The Lilly Ledbetter Chickens Come Home To Roost

Lilly Ledbetter still lives! Not the actual human person Lilly Ledbetter (although she too still lives), but the ostensible victim of pay discrimination who became the symbol of all things good and virtuous about the victorious Democrats in 2008 when, in 2009, the first bill President Obama signed into law was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair […]

Libya’s WMDs

In his speech tonight President Obush argued that his intervention in Libya was justified because “Qaddafi declared he would show ‘no mercy’ to his own people. He compared them to rats, and threatened to go door to door to inflict punishment.” In other words, we went to war in response to Qaddafi’s WMDs, his Words […]