Churchill update

Paul Campos writes a very good column about what's wrong in academia. It's all the more refreshing because Campos is himself a "liberal" law professor.

The University of Colorado hired Churchill onto its faculty because he claimed to be an American Indian. Anyone who has the slightest familiarity with research universities can glance at his résumé and state this with something close to complete confidence.

Churchill thus represents the reductio ad absurdum of the contemporary university's willingness to subordinate all other values to affirmative action. When such a grotesque fraud - a white man pretending to be an Indian, an intellectual charlatan spewing polemical garbage festooned with phony footnotes, a shameless demagogue fabricating imaginary historical incidents to justify his pathological hatreds, an apparent plagiarist who steals and distorts the work of real scholars - manages to scam his way into a full professorship at what is still a serious research university, we know the practice of affirmative action has hit rock bottom. Or at least we can hope so.

Who Killed Rafiq Hariri?

Belmont Club has a roundup of theories.

PC at Le Moyne

It would seem that policies on freedom of expression excempt the administration of Le Moyne, if this is true.

Yet in January 2005, with no prior warning, Leogrande dismissed McConnell from Le Moyne.  In the dismissal letter, Leogrande stated that she had reviewed McConnell’s grades for courses he took during the summer and fall semesters and had “discussed” his work with his professors.  Leogrande wrote, “I have grave concerns regarding the mismatch between your personal beliefs regarding teaching and learning and the Le Moyne College program goals.  Based on this data, I do not believe that you should continue in the Le Moyne [Master of Science for Teachers] Program.” At the time he was dismissed, McConnell had achieved a grade-point average of 3.78 for the fall semester and had received an “excellent” evaluation for his work in an actual classroom. 

Racism and gun control

David Kopel writes of The Klan's Favorite Law in Reason, expanding on Clayton Cramer's excellent The Racist roots of Gun Control.

As one Florida judge explained, the licensing laws were "passed for the purpose of disarming the negro laborers... [and] never intended to be applied to the white population."

Beltway Buzz

NRO has just announced that Eric Pfeiffer will be writing the Beltway Buzz:

My main focus here is to provide readers with a fresh angle on political news: the story behind the story you get on the evening news, the counter-story to the conventional wisdom of the day, etc. The Beltway Buzz will be a filter for anyone who wants to be in the know. And it will break some news, too.

Maybe she's just bipolar

Andrew McCarthy writes on NRO of his personal relationship with terrorist lawyer Lynne Stewart. He points out

there are lines between proper advocacy and misconduct, and they are well known. Here, Lynne was so far over them that, to be blunt, it is insulting for her and her allies to suggest otherwise.

And yet he has to admit right up front that he likes her.

Ray Haynes gets the facts straight

I always look forward to Ray Haynes' Monday Morning Memorandum, even though it's been arriving on Tuesdays of late. (He said they've had server problems.) Today he offers a correction to a claim he made earlier:

I estimated that, based on the increases in costs that government health insurance mandates would have on health insurance policies, the number of uninsured people in our state would increase from 4 million in 1999 to 6 million in 2004.

He was wrong. It's really 6.5 million.

Oh, the irony

I had to chuckle that the very day Google approved my Adsense account this story appeared.

Well, so what? I'm sure that the vast majority of my coworkers contribute to the Democrats. That's no reason not to go see our movies.

Still, for a long time, my preferred search engine has been Teoma. Check it out.

Even worse than a tax

Be afraid. Be very afraid. California is toying with the idea of taxing by the mile. This is the brainchild of a company in Oregon who wants to plant a GPS receiver in your car that talks to the gas pump. The social engineers are already salivating.

The system could also track how often you drive during rush hour and charge higher fees to discourage peak use. That's an idea that could break the bottleneck on California's freeways.

People who think that sort of intrusiveness is all fine and dandy simply cannot be trusted not to seriously abuse the ability to track every car in the State.

Bad, bad idea.