Young and Stupid

The Young Assholes Foundation has once again attempted to expose liberalism on American campuses, and is once again left with its own nuts flapping the breeze:

Commencement addresses at the nation's top colleges and universities this year mostly were given by left-leaning or Democratic speakers with few conservatives snagging the honor, according to a report released yesterday by the Young America's Foundation.

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The list included "liberal media personalities," such as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and CNN's Wolf Blitzer at George Washington University. With some schools yet to announce their speakers at the time of the review and some schools' speakers listed as neutral, YAF found 42 "blue" speakers and eight "red" speakers.

Alexandra Acker, executive director of the Young Democrats of America, called the list laughable, especially for how it categorized who is liberal. She said "NBC Nightly News" host Brian Williams was counted as left-leaning, as was Microsoft founder Bill Gates, even though most Americans wouldn't categorize them that way.

"They're really going to extremes," she said of YAF.

The YAF list described Mr. Gates, who spoke at Harvard University, as giving money "to many left-wing causes, including gun-control ballot and tax-hike initiatives."

It described Jared Diamond, a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles who spoke at California Institute of Technology, as someone who "strongly believes in the leftist positions of overpopulation and man-induced global warming," and it criticized Duke University's president and speaker, Richard Brodhead, because he "allowed leftist professors and racists, including Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, to accuse members of the Duke lacrosse team of rape."

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[Ward] Connerly said conservatives such as himself, Ann Coulter and David Horowitz rarely make it past the "gatekeeper" at top universities and colleges.

If you're going to criticize universities, shouldn't you at least take the time to compose grammatical sentences?

And shouldn't you know something -- anything -- about Wolf Blitzer, Brian Williams and Tom "The Unit" Friedman before you express opinions about them?

The obvious solution: If you don't like what happens on campus, go homeschool yourself.

Bozell. T... W... A....

While Media Matters and left bloggers shine a spotlight on media malfeasance in coverage the Iraq War, the Bush Administration and the crimes of Scooter Libby, the wingnut site NewsBusters is whining as hard as it can about liberal bias in reporting poindexter competitions*:

B-I-A-S: Media Largely Ignore Spelling Bee Champ's Homeschooled Status

When California homeschooler Evan O'Dorney, 13, won the National Spelling Bee on Thursday night, the nation's press reacted with a yawn.

Instead of focusing on the winner, The New York Times ran a story about an immigrant from India who lost in the second round of the competition. That boy, Kunal Sah, 12, who is living in Utah, had hoped a victory would secure his family’s legal status in the United States. Thus, the Times managed to use the National Spelling Bee as one more forum for pushing the plight of immigrants.

Not until the middle of the story did The Times get around to announcing the winner, noting only his name and hometown and the fact that the AP reported his victory.

Meanwhile, USA Today and The Washington Post chalked up Evan's triumph to his penchant for eating fish right before each round. The Post's Elissa Silverman, in "The Sweet Spell of Success," ignored completely the fact that Evan is homeschooled, and noted that Evan liked to eat tuna sandwiches from Subway. That’s right. The subheadline reads: "Fueled by Tuna Sandwiches, California Teen Tops 300 students."

On CBS, "Early Show" host Russ Mitchell interviewed Evan and his parents, but home schooling never came up. Same with Al Roker's and Meredith Vieira's interview with the family on NBC’s "Today" show.

ABC's "Good Morning America" host Robin Roberts, on the other hand, was right up front about Evan's education during an interview this morning with him and his parents, introducing Evan's mother as his "homeschool teacher and coach."

More fish, anyone?

For a fuller item on this, check the MRC's Culture and Media Institute Web site.

Update (Ken Shepherd 14:50 EDT): Seven years ago the National Spelling Bee winner was also homeschooled, but as NB editor Brent Baker noted, of the three major networks, only CBS ignored that fact in their coverage.

The lesson to be drawn is obvious: Both our public and parochial schools have failed in teaching rote memorization of useless knowledge, leaving it up parents to fill that void. Only a liberal press would suppress that truth.

Of course, much of the coverage also failed to mention that young Evan plans to take a calculus class at U.C. Berkeley and not, say, Regent University or Bob Jones U. I'm sure the clowns at NewsBusters could find bias in that fact if it fit their little fantasy.

* I was once a spelling poindexter, but never got further farther than my own school.

Shorter Jonah Goldberg

"If I steal half of my column from a website, the column almost writes itself."

Sam Brownback, Flip-Flopper

Shorter Sammy Browncrack: "I am for inquiry and facts ... up to a point."

But limiting this question to a stark choice between evolution and creationism does a disservice to the complexity of the interaction between science, faith and reason.

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Ultimately, on the question of the origins of the universe, I am happy to let the facts speak for themselves.

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Biologists will have their debates about man's origins, but people of faith can also bring a great deal to the table. For this reason, I oppose the exclusion of either faith or reason from the discussion.

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While no stone should be left unturned in seeking to discover the nature of man's origins, we can say with conviction that we know with certainty at least part of the outcome. Man was not an accident and reflects an image and likeness unique in the created order. Those aspects of evolutionary theory compatible with this truth are a welcome addition to human knowledge. Aspects of these theories that undermine this truth, however, should be firmly rejected as an atheistic theology posing as science.

Found Comedy

Joe Klein opines:

"David Yepson [sic] on Joe Biden, a profile in courage."

"Broder is right about this, for sure: John Warner will be the key to what happens next."

"A Note of Etiquette: ....

Yokelfied cracker Fred Thompson throws his corncob pipe into the ring with a vow to become the first Internet candidate ever:

In an interview with USA TODAY, however, the former Tennessee senator not only makes it clear that he plans to run, he describes how he aims to do it. He's planning an unconventional campaign using blogs, video posts and other Internet innovations to reach voters repelled by politics-as-usual in both parties.

Yee-haw!

Do we call Fred's supporters Tommiacs or Tommy Babies? Or The Internet Hillbillies?

Cock Tails and Bull Tales

Will disgraced dissemblers Cliff May and Victoria Toerag finally be called to account for their lies about Valerie Plame? Will the Washington Post and CNN and Howie the Putz Kurtz refuse to give the spotlight to shameless liars? Note: For any newcomers to the site, these are rhetorical questions.

Glenn Greenwald has a list of those who lied about Plame in the service of the Administration and I. Scooter Libby. And David Corn has more, including my favorite, from the Pantload:

On September 30, 2003, National Review writer Jonah Goldberg huffed, "Wilson's wife is a desk jockey and much of the Washington cocktail circuit knew that already."

That's not the only thing Goldberg is huffing, David.

Terrorist Dry Hump

I tried last night and again this morning to open the Moonie Times' .pdf of the Department of Homeland Security report on its investigation into the Treehouse of Terror that was Northwest Flight 327. It didn't work either time, but I'll try again later. So we'll just have to look at the Moonie Times article touting the report for now.

Interestingly, the paper's URL for the .pdf is "www.washingtontimes/elections/DHS-IG-Northwest-327...." Not too subtle there.

As I suspected, the air marshals quoted by the Moonie Times as claiming a "terrorist dry run" had no personal involvement in the flight or the investigation, and (apparently) are not quoted in the report. They were called upon to opine by the Moonie rag itself.

The first marshal quoted is P. Jeffrey Black, a current federal air marshal. Interestingly, Pee is reportedly a member of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition, whose other members include Siebel Edmonds, Daniel Ellsberg, Larry Johnson, Ray McGovern, the guy who wrote "Bush League Diplomacy: How the Neoconservatives are Putting the World at Risk" and a guy who blew the whistle on a covert operation "by Edwin Meece the then US Attorney General." Pee also co-authored an op-ed piece on whistleblowers with Colleen Rowley and others which can be seen on Dennis Kucinich's website.

According to the NSWC website, Pee claims that he "is currently receiving severe and continual retaliation from his agency in response to his whistleblowing disclosures ––retaliation that has caused detrimental changes in his official duties, responsibilities, and working conditions." Think that information might be relevant to the determination of Pee's credibility and potential bias? The Moonie Times sure doesn't. Instead, the paper identifies Pee as someone "who told The Times that he has been involved personally in terror probes that were ignored by federal security managers."

Doesn't Pee's claim that the probes were ignored by federal security managers seem inconsistent with the claim that Pee's been subject to retaliation by his superiors? Never mind.

The second marshal, Robert McLean, is, as the Moonie Times suggests, an individual fired by the TSA who claims whistleblower status and is suing (or sued) to get his job back. He even has his own glowing but scrupuously objective entry on Wikipedia. The Times says the third marshal, Jeffrey Denning, quit the TSA last month. I can't find anything on him through Google; therefore he probably doesn't exist.

The article does note that the actual report states the marshals assigned to the flight observed that "the men were sweaty, appeared nervous and arrived after the boarding announcement." People appearing sweaty and nervous after running to catch a airplane. If that's not terrorist behavior, I don't know what is. All such passengers should be detained, cavity-searched and, of course, shot if they try anything else funny.

Some nitwits (namely, Patterico) are astoundingly impressed by the fact that the Moonie rag found "both current and former air marshals (that's marshals, plural)" to rubberstamp the paper's two-year old conclusions. Let's hope that, in real life, Patterico shows a little more skepticism before he puts witnesses on the stand.

By the way, Fox News is all over the story as well. The mentally-challenged weatherman on Fox and Friends was interviewing Nutbag Annie Jacobson this morning. It was like watching a thumb-wrestling match that was fixed.

Comedy Gold

This is the best parody blog I've read in ages:

Fitz-Magoo is at it again, bending the law's of this country to settle vendatta's and scores with people for personal and political reasons. Between the hiding of evidence, filing false papers to the Appeal Courts and US Supreme Court, and now to making up laws as he sees fits, Fitzgerald is becoming more than a political hitman - he is becoming the law unto himself.

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Fitzgerald has quite a few screws lose if he thinks he can sentence someone for a crime he KNOWS they did not commit on the theory he and he alone is omnipotent and knows deep down what Libby was up to (i.e., can read his heart and mind). It is long past time to investigate Fitzgerald and apply the same lose standards of evidence to his motives and coordination with Comey, et al.

The General, Captain Ed and the late Bob Boudelang have some stiff competition.

Shorter New York Times

Suckers!

(Yes, the piece rejects the premise expressed in the first sentence and, no, it's not the paper's editorial. But the suggestion that the press is anti-war and that it was "politicians" alone who misled the public into supporting the war is particularly galling coming from the NYT. The article is just another glaring example of the paper's refusal to take responsibility for the blood on its hands.)

More details on Flight 327 released

The inspector general for Homeland Security late Friday released new details of what federal air marshals say was a terrorist dry run aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 327 from Detroit to Los Angeles on June 29, 2004.

Two paragraphs later, the article purports to set forth "Excerpts fom [sic] 51-page inspector general report."

Here's the bait-and-switch. The article's headline and first paragraph insinuate that the OIG report includes a finding that there was a terrorist dry run on Flight 327 or, at a minimum, that air marshals on the flight or involved in the investigation asserted that there was a dry run on Flight 327. But the article never says that. The Moonie rag says that the OIG report includes "new details," not that the report states there was a terrorist dry run on Flight 327.

In the later paragraphs purporting to summarize the article, there is no suggestion that the report concluded there was a terrorist dry run or that anyone involved in the investigation came to that conclusion.

I strongly suspect that the air marshals cited in paragraph one are wingnut kibbitzers who have reached their conclusion based on the reports of others (such as Jacobson), and not the investigating authorities actually involved in the case. If the inspector general or marshals actually involved in the investigation came to the conclusion that Flight 327 was a terrorist dry run, the Moonie Times would trumpet that claim in the clearest possible terms. And the air marshals on the flight are already on record debunking the delusions of Jacobson. (More here.)

Perhaps the DHS caved to wingnut pressures and issued a report quoting the conclusions of right-wing know-nothings. There's no reason to believe that all the insane true believers ended up in the Department of Justice. But it seems obvious that if the OIG's report concluded there were terrorist plotters plotting aboard Flight 327, the Moonie rag wouldn't be pussyfooting around with evasive and misleading language.

This isn't a new trick for the Moonie Times, either. Back in 2005, the same reporter was asserting that Flight 327 was "described by many federal air marshals and passengers as a dry run for a terrorist attack" without any corroboration that any air marshal held that view.

On the basis of that detail, you might expect a high level of fastidiousness from "Pearl Harbor."

And you would be spectacularly wrong. Because you would find phrases like "to withdraw backward was impossible," sounds like "wretching noises" to accompany vomiting, or constructions like "incredulous as it seemed, America had not reacted." Although the book has two authors, it could have used a third assigned to cleanup patrol.

This is not a matter of isolated typographical errors. It is a serious case for the comma police, since the book's war on punctuation is almost as heated as the air assaults it describes. "One would have to be dead, very stupid Fuchida thought," the book says about the fighter pilot Mitsuo Fuchida, "not to realize they were sallying forth to war." Evidence notwithstanding, the authors do not mean to insult the fighter pilot's intelligence — or, presumably, the reader's.

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Elsewhere in Hawaii, among the fighting forces, things are typically editor-proof. In a case for James's decoding skills, the book says: "The boys had money in their pockets to burn and fresh in from the West Coast the obligatory photos with hula girls, sentimental silk pillows for moms and girlfriends, and ridiculous-printed shirts had sold like crazy."

Everytime I go into a bookstore, I am amazed by the sheer volume of crap piled within 50 feet of entrance. I'm not saying that I'm capable of writing a readable book, but is it too much to ask that those who write books do so?