AS WHITE AS A HOWARD DEAN MEETUP, A MOVEON CONVENTION, OR AN OBAMA CAMPAIGN HEADQUARTERS: The Nation worries about “The Unbearable Whiteness of The American Left.”
Archive for 2014
April 29, 2014
DRIP, DRIP: New Benghazi Emails Show Blaming Video Was Effort to Protect, Re-Elect Obama. Nobody who’s paid attention could doubt this, of course, but the evidence is now clear.
NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY: Shameful: WIPO Threatens Blogger With Criminal Charges For Accurately Reporting On WIPO Director’s Alleged Misconduct. “This is the same Gurry who was already involved in highly questionable scandals involving ignoring UN sanctions against both North Korea and Iran, to send them computers, which WIPO idiotically believed those countries would use to bolster their local patent systems. Because, when you think of Iran and North Korea, I’m sure you think about their patent systems.”
ACTUALLY, THIS KIND OF MAKES SENSE: Protecting our nuclear forces from cyberwar by using technology so obsolete no self-respecting hacker understands it.
CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Watchdogs want more answers about DHS inspector general’s abuse of power. “Government watchdog groups have new questions about the Obama administration’s commitment to executive-branch oversight after a Senate report showed that an acting inspector general played politics with his investigations and altered his reports to benefit senior officials.”
SEND SPACEX TO PICK THEM UP: Russia says US astronauts could be hurt by Ukraine sanctions. I talked with Rand Simberg on what Russia could, and might, do in this InstaVision episode. And, of course, his book is only becoming more relevant with these new developments.
TEST-DRIVING THE BMW i8.
K.C. JOHNSON: The White House Joins The War On Men. “Two new documents out from the White House–the Vice President’s task force recommendations and a question and answer document from the OCR–continue the assault on due process at the expense of males accused of rape or sexual assault on campus. The administration tips its hand quickly with a telltale verbal switch–referring to complainants as ‘survivors,’ rather than as accusers. This language, which assumes guilt and the fact of a sexual offense before any hearing, is the terminology of hardline feminists who have the ear of this administration and have made it clear that they want more guilty findings. Yet what many observers call rape is viewed by others as a growing prevalence of ambiguous and drunken encounters fueled by an anything-goes campus culture.”
How many men will want to attend colleges run along those lines? And how many women will want to attend colleges with lopsided gender ratios?
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Georgetown of Kentucky Cuts Faculty by 20% Due To Enrollment Decline.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: 15 Ways To Fix Everything With Toothpaste.
ROGER KIMBALL: “Daniela Hernandez: who’s that? Why that’s the ever-so-sensitive junior at Dartmouth who shut down a charity event, intended to benefit cardiac patients, because she found the theme of the event—’Phiesta,’ i.e. ‘Fiesta’—offensive.” Even more offensive is that Dartmouth’s lame, PC administration went along. So, you’re supposed to embrace other cultures, but you can’t use their words because that might be racist or something? I guess the only way to prevent that is to segregate schools by race, ethnicity, and gender so that no one is offended. Progressivism: Back to the future!
Roger observes: “There has been a lot of talk recently about the ‘higher education bubble,’ and no wonder. By reneging on their obligation to foster independence and free inquiry, those privileged bastions have utterly forfeited the moral authority our society invested in them. The accumulation of repulsive and cowardly episodes like this one at Dartmouth will sooner or later—probably sooner—erode pubic trust to the point that the entire higher educational establishment will implode.” Why spend six-figure sums to subject your kids to this sort of absurdity?
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 355.
“SMART DIPLOMACY” UPDATE: John F. Kerry’s Israeli gaffe a diplomatic nightmare. I think they gave him this job so Hillary’s tenure would look good by comparison, but for the first time in his life he’s over-performing.
UPDATE: Kerry Echoes His Boss. “John Kerry is attempting to walk back his smear of Israel as an “apartheid” state. That the current secretary of state is a clownish figure has been well known for decades. But what should not be lost in the latest gaffe is that it is not a gaffe. In what he foolishly thought was a safe place to let his hair down, Kerry merely gave voice to what the Obama administration thinks. . . . Forget Kerry. This was made explicit in Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech—for anyone who didn’t infer it already from Obama’s friendships with notorious Israel bashers like Rashid Khalidi and Bill Ayers (see P. David Hornik’s FPM report on Ayers joining his fellow tenured radicals in a 2010 petition accusing Israel of — all together now — apartheid policies).”
Related: John Kerry’s Jewish Best Friends.
HOW’S THAT SMART DIPLOMACYTM WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): David Brooks: “All around, the fabric of peace and order is fraying.” This a direct consequence of who we elected in 2008. You, David, were a part of that.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: University of Michigan faculty question administrator pay in letter to Board of Regents.
An open letter to University of Michigan’s Board of Regents from about a dozen of the school’s faculty criticizes the school’s administrative pay and bonus system.
“The University is in desperate and urgent need of fiscal reform,” the letter, dated April 20, states. Reform, it continues, should include: “arresting the steep increases in salaries to top administrators, reforming the secretive bonus culture of the Fleming administration building.”
In the 40-page letter, the authors ask regents to freeze the salaries of upper administrators, begin releasing the full salary information of employees, instead of just releasing the base salaries that are required by law, and review supplemental pay practices at the school.
The letter’s authors suggest that faculty pay has been increasing modestly in the last decade, while administrator pay at the school has increased substantially, both through hikes in base salaries and through supplemental pay. . . .
The letter uses information obtained through leaked documents and a Freedom of Information Act request to determine that supplemental pay — in the form of administrative differentials, salary supplements, compensation for services unrelated to appointments and added duties differentials — grew by $33 million between 2004 and 2013, reaching $46 million.
“The growth of it, quite frankly, is what they need to explain,” Gaggio said. . . .
Data obtained by the professors show that some administrators received salary supplements in excess of $50,000.
For example, Rowan A. Miranda, an associate vice president for finance, earned a base salary of $330,000 in 2012, and that year also received $130,000 in additional compensation; vice president of government relations Cynthia Wilbanks received $58,007 in supplement compensation in 2013, in addition to her salary of $296,324; and chief information officer Laura Patterson earned a base salary of $279,545 in 2010, and that year also earned $70,585 in additional compensation, according to data obtained by the faculty members.
Administrators control the money, so naturally they wind up with more of it. This is, of course, a national problem.
WOULD IT GET MORE COVERAGE IF HE WERE A REPUBLICAN? Illinois Democrat Faces Child Porn Charges.
And the answer, of course, is yes, it would. “As the national electoral plight of Democrats increases, so does the incidence of stories about obscure state Republican lawmakers.” While stories about Dems get buried.
WHAT? WHY WASN’T I TOLD? Poor People Have Carbon Footprints, Too. Also, Chris Hayes’s slavery analogy makes him a putz. And in territory perilously close to that of Cliven Bundy, no?
MAY THE FOURTH IS INTERNATIONAL STAR WARS DAY, and Amazon has deals.
Plus, Mother’s Day gifts galore. Or just buy something nice for yourself.
IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: IRS Sued For Giving Republican Org’s Docs To ProPublica. Let me note that the folks at ProPublica, who have written me before to protest their nonpartisanship, don’t come out of this looking very good either.
Related: Lois Lerner’s Lawyer: Holding Her In Contempt Would Be “Un-American.” Well, given that letting government officials get away with rampant abuse of power seems to be the American way these days, he’s got a point.
21ST CENTURY PARENTING: Fox’s Tucker Carlson Won’t Let His Young Son Watch ‘Anti-Male’ Oprah. Two thoughts: (1) Oprah is still on? And (2) I guess the Insta-Wife raised his consciousness.
IT’S BEGINNING TO SEEM AS IF CAMPUS HATE-CRIME REPORTS ARE USUALLY FAKE: Montclair State Muslim Charged After Bogus Hate Crime Report.
WASHINGTON POST: Post-ABC News poll shows Democrats at risk in November as Obama’s approval rating falls. “Obama’s approval rating fell to 41 percent, down from 46 percent through the first three months of the year and the lowest of his presidency in Post-ABC News polls. Just 42 percent approve of his handling of the economy, 37 percent approve of how he is handling the implementation of the Affordable Care Act and 34 percent approve of his handling of the situation involving Ukraine and Russia.”
JAMES TARANTO: The Other Side of Title IX: A warning to higher-education administrators.
Brett Sokolow, director of the Association of Title IX Administrators, has a warning for American college and university administrators: In their efforts to enforce Title IX, he argues, they are running afoul of Title IX.
Title IX is a provision of the Education Amendments of 1972 that stipulates: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” Under the Obama administration, the Education Department has interpreted this law as requiring colleges and universities to police sexual misconduct involving students, on or off campus, under the broad rubric of “sexual harassment . . . including sexual violence.”
In a newsletter to members dated last Thursday, Sokolow reports that “in the last two weeks, I’ve worked on five cases all involving drunken hook-ups on college campuses. In each case, the male accused of sexual misconduct was found responsible. In each case, I thought the college got it completely wrong.”
He does not reveal the names of the institutions involved or any other specific details of the cases, presumably because his consultative role entails a duty of confidentiality. But he sums up the problem as follows: “Some [disciplinary] boards and panels still can’t tell the difference between drunken sex and a policy violation”–that is, a sexual assault.
Sometimes that is by design. “In a recent case,” Sokolow recounts, “the campus policy stated that intoxication creates an inability to consent.” That makes it easy to establish a violation–except that in many cases the accuser has violated the letter of the policy as much as the accused has. “If both are intoxicated, they both did the same thing to each other,” Sokolow writes. “Why should only the male be charged if both students behave in ways defined as prohibited by the policy?”
The answer is that many universities have become hostile environments for male students, because of the rampant — and, frequently, open and unapologetic — sexism of their administrators. I encourage students injured by this climate of sexism to file lawsuits, which, as Sokolow notes, are likely to succeed. “We are making Title IX plaintiffs out of them.”