A new Harvard Study (yes, that Harvard) concludes that patriotic events, like 4th of July parades, creates more Republicans.
Hey, it’s not often a Harvard Study supports conventional wisdom, so we must take the time to point it out.
Here’s the money quote:
“Our estimates are significant: one Fourth of July without rain before age 18 raises the likelihood of identifying as a Republican by 2 percent and voting for the Republican candidate by 4 percent. It also increases voter turnout by 0.9 percent and boosts political campaign contributions by 3 percent. Taken together, the evidence suggests that important childhood events can have persistent effects on political beliefs and participation and
that Fourth of July celebrations in the US affect the nation’s political landscape.”
This 4th of July we celebrate our 235th birthday as a nation and we hope and pray for political unity, but it must be a unity centered around patriotism and our nations founding. Often we hear politicians and media talk about where the “middle ground” should be, where we should find common ground and unity. We find common ground and unity in our Founding Documents and celebrating what we should all hold dear and in common.
There is a misconception that the mainstream media hates all conservatives. That’s just not true. The MSM loves some conservatives – the ones who combine a willingness to stick their conservative brothers and sisters in the back with a stereotypical, tweedy doofusism that ensures absolutely no one would ever want to be one of them. Their poster children are David Brooks and David Frum. Call them the Conservanerds.
Conservanerds aren’t hard to identify. You can tell one by listening to him for about 15 seconds, by which time you will be overcome by a desire to either slap him or take his lunch money. You can find them dwelling at the fringes of liberal culture – they are allowed to attend the cocktail parties as the token conservative, tolerated by their masters in return for passive obedience and the occasional swipe at Sarah Palin and her intolerable uppityness.
If they were simply annoying, that would be one thing, but the problem is that the MSM loves to present them as the true face of conservatism, a face that is reasonable and harmless and that always – always – loses out to the liberals. Conservanerds play up to the awful stereotype of the bookish, passive-aggressive “traditional” conservative with a disdain for popular culture and, critically, for the other 95% of modern conservatives out there today.
Tea Party folks? Heaven forbid – those simply are not our kind of people. Those vulgar Tea Partyiers enjoy NASCAR and beer and guns and some actually believe in God. Many of them work with their hands, and most of them didn’t even go to Harvard!
Sure, there’s class at play – it goes without saying the Conservanerds feel more at home with an Ivy League Hillary Clinton than a Middle-American Sarah Palin – but it’s also MSM wish fulfillment. Liberals love the idea of conservatives who pose no threat at all, who are happy to take the scraps from the MSM’s table just as long as they get invited to the dinner party.
This is not a new phenomenon. Starting with Goldwater and up through the Reagan years, a bunch of new folks flooded into the Conservative movement, folks that were less William F. Buckley and more John Wayne – or even Johnny Rotten. The old line conservatives, the tweed-wearing country club types, found it quite a culture shock. During college in the 80’s, half the staff assembling the California Review, UCSD’s right-wing paper, would be trying to appreciate to some Respighi concerto while the rest of us would be cranking the Ramones and swilling Coors.
The real conservative today is aggressive, outspoken and (worst of all for the Conservanerds) cares nothing for the approval of the elite. That makes us anathema. No wonder they are so eager to pounce – we’ve committed the sin of not caring what they think. Whether you’re a tee-totaling Georgia Evangelical, a concerned mama grizzly from Kansas or a beer-swilling LA cavalryman with a four letter vocabulary and the Sex Pistols on his CD player, we’re the new face of conservatism. And it’s driving the Conservanerds bonkers.
Daniel Levy is the archetype of a media-friendly Middle East analyst. He has a pedigree of far left-wing government activism that allows journalists to label him a “veteran diplomat.” He’s available to turn convoluted geopolitical struggles into simplistic conspiracies, valorizing Walt and Mearsheimer while ginning up outrage toward shadowy neoconservatives. He’ll advocate all the proper bien pensant positions – Iran and Hamas should be coaxed, Israel should be pressured, and politicians who agree with that should be admired – in exquisitely pseudo-sophisticated terms. He’s even somewhat of a journalist and media figure himself, with a personal blog and a presence on the Huffington Post.
Even more importantly, journalists covering Levy’s anti-Israel talking points can write that he comes from a Jewish organization, since he co-founded and continues to sit on the board of advisors of J Street. Instant credibility! And so he ends up everywhere.
Per Eli Lake’s first story, Ben-Ami seems to have been the one who did most of the “misleading” about J Street’s fundraising, from furtively squirreling away Soros’s cash to opaquely raising 50% of the group’s 2008 money from a single foreign source. (more…)
As a Harvard-trained lawyer, are we really to believe that BHO II forgot the most famous line in the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence?
There are only three options that explain why Obama omitted the words “by the Creator” in his speech to Hispanics over the weekend.
The teleprompter was loaded incorrectly–omitting the words “by the Creator.”
The teleprompter was loaded correctly—and Obama misread it, omitting the words “by the Creator” accidentally.
The teleprompter was loaded correctly—and Obama omitted the words “by the Creator” intentionally.
The first possibility illustrates cowardice by Obama– if “by the Creator” was omitted by a speechwriter (and not ordered so by POTUS) then why aren’t heads rolling?
The second option would illustrate ineptitude on the part of the Harvard-educated “constitutional lawyer.” If “by the Creator” was in the teleprompter, and Obama “forgot,” then it is a gaffe to remember, such as his “57 states” remark during his campaign. Where are the Dan Quayle genre jokes by late night television folks mocking his stupidity? Don’t suppose we’ll hear much from the LSM about that one! (more…)
With the report from Chris Matthews that Obama uses a TelePrompter even when he’s having private meetings at the White House, it’s time once again to trot out this perennial favorite of the Punahou Kid:
William Buckley achieved notoriety, if not celebrity, with the publication of God and Man at Yale in 1951. The book was asuccès de scandale. In it Buckley attacked the undergraduate education on offer at Yale for its hostility to Christianity and its adulation of collectivism; he also sought to dispel the indifference of Yale alumni to their supervisory responsibility. In 1955 Buckley founded National Review as the voice of the conservative movement. Recall, as John Judis does in his biography of Buckley, that the fortunes of the American Right had never appeared dimmer; the principal right-wing organizations were anti-Semitic and neo-isolationist throwbacks to the thirties and forties. Recall also that in the Publisher’s Statement of National Review’s first issue, Buckley defined conservatism as the willingness to “stand athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who do.” He was an outrageous character.
Dartmouth English Professor and long-time National Review senior editor Jeffrey Hart captured Buckley in his glory at the moment National Review was about to make its debut:
A debate had been announced, to take place in Harvard’s Lamont Library, between Buckley and James Wechsler, the diamond-pure liberal editor of The New York Post… What happened on the appointed night in an auditorium at Lamont Library gave a preliminary indication of at least one of the many qualities that would render Buckley famous and National Review successful: Buckley’s bravura… At the podium, after thanking the host for his introduction, Buckley observed, with an elfin grin (soon a signature feature), that he was very pleased to see Professor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., there in the audience. Then he added, “His many books would be dangerous if they weren’t so boring…”
Whatever sober points Wechsler might have made, he was obliterated by the stylistic contrast and, ink-stained wretch that he obviously was, slunk back to the then-liberal New York Post. Right there, I saw the conservative movement being born, and liberalism made otiose. Right there was the esprit that caught the attention of early National Review readers — especially the young. This was no stuffed-shirt or classroom policy wonk. This had nothing to do with the dismal science and its green eye-shades. This was great theater.
Considering his esprit as well as well as the splash of his Web sites, it seems to me that Andrew Breitbart may be the Wililam Buckley of the Internet Age — part journalist, part showman, part conservative visionary and ideological entrepreneur. He has an instinctive understanding of the media environment that is the base of the left’s cultural monopoly and he means to do his best to overthrow it. (more…)
Richard Cohen of the Washington Post is a troubled soul these days. Having seen the triumph of the “narrative” so dear to so many liberal columnists and editors’ hearts, he and they are now forced to witness the disintegration of presidential authority even as the aggrandizement of presidential power continues apace — unchecked either by any decent Democrats or the hapless idiots who pass for the leadership of the Republican party.
His column today is another in Cohen’s occasional series of reflections along his asymptotic way to the truth: “President Obama’s Enigmatic Intellectualism.” That’s one way of looking at it:
It can seem that at the heart of Barack Obama’s foreign policy is no heart at all. It consists instead of a series of challenges — of problems that need fixing, not wrongs that need to be righted. As Winston Churchill once said of a certain pudding, Obama’s approach to foreign affairs lacks theme. So, it seems, does the man himself.
For instance, it’s not clear that Obama is appalled by China’s appalling human rights record. He seems hardly stirred about continued repression in Russia. He treats the Israelis and their various enemies as pests of equal moral standing. The president seems to stand foursquare for nothing much.
This, of course, is the Obama enigma: Who is this guy? What are his core beliefs? The president himself is no help on this score. When it comes to his own image, he has a tin ear…
When most people think of junk science, they picture test tubes and laboratories. But not all junk science emanates from the stuff that comes out of Petri dishes or Erlenmeyer flasks. In this case, I’m talking about a research report that claims the SAT is biased against minorities, particularly African-Americans.
This report, authored by Maria Veronica Santelices with Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and Mark Wilson from the University of California at Berkeley, ostensibly looked at the results of SAT tests, examined which kids got which questions right and which questions wrong, and concluded that African American students didn’t do as well on the test as white students because the SAT people used certain words that minorities have a hard time understanding.
The Santelices/Wilson report was published by the Harvard Educational Review in April and idled around the Internet for a couple of months until Washington Post blogger Jay Mathews decided to write it up for his blog. His post revealed shocking details and ramifications involving the SAT:
“The confirmation of unfair test results throws into question the validity of the test and, consequently, all decisions based on its results,” said Maria Veronica Santelices, now at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile in Santiago, and Mark Wilson of UC Berkeley. “All admissions decisions based exclusively or predominantly on SAT performance–and therefore access to higher education institutions and subsequent job placement and professional success–appear to be biased against the African American minority group and could be exposed to legal challenge.”
Legal challenges to college admissions decisions! Could anything be more dire? As a matter of fact, things could be much more dire because this report is nothing more than junk science masquerading as scholarship. (more…)
Yesterday’s story on the “Cry Wolf” project has exposed a dangerous pretense that has been prevalent, yet well disguised, for some time in our institutions of higher learning. It’s an important post. A small committee of professors and academic professionals, normally held in high regard, have blatantly betrayed the trust of the public and quite possibly smeared the reputations of all colleges and universities nationwide. By soliciting “paid activists” to create research papers that are intentionally designed to silence opposing viewpoints, they have undermined the political system and manipulated the governmental policy making process. And in the meantime, they’ve also implicated all of academia in the manufacturing of their propaganda.
It is an abuse of their power, and an abuse of the institutions they represent. It is appalling and repellent. Perhaps even against their employers’ rules or the industry’s ethical code. Consider it an ominous warning — this will have a dire impact on our political and economic system in the future, if we remain apathetic in the face of such a rhetorical and intellectual assault.
In fact, both the rhetoric and the intentions demonstrated in Peter Dreier’s email are a classic example of much of what is wrong with today’s educational institutions: hypocrisy, bias, recklessness, and a blatant disregard for differing beliefs and viewpoints.
As Americans, we place an enormous amount of pride in the quality of our nation’s system of higher education. In our country, colleges and universities have long been the bastions of research, the sources to which we turn for information that is expertly developed; for data that is honestly mined, analyzed, reviewed and responsibly published by noted researchers so that individuals, business people and policy makers can make well-informed decisions.
This piece originally ran on the Opinion page of the May 17, 2010, edition of the Washington Times.
Elena Kagan’s problem is not that she has too much empathy but that she has too little. President Obama famously made “that quality of empathy, of understanding and identifying with people’s hopes and struggles” his key qualification for a seat on the Supreme Court. What little we know of Ms. Kagan’s record demonstrates that she does not meet even that nebulous standard.
Empathy would require that Ms. Kagan place herself in the position of the “despised and downtrodden,” as her mentor Justice Thurgood Marshall put it. And who could possibly be more despised than a United States Army officer assigned to recruiting duties at Harvard Law School?
Did Dean Kagan put herself in his place before enforcing her law school’s repugnant ban on military recruiters? Did she imagine the feelings inside that young captain, perhaps limping from the fragments still in his leg from an improvised explosive device that hit his convoy outside Ramadi, as he walked through Harvard’s gates? Did she consider the stares he drew at the training academy from the liberal elite, the palpable contempt directed at him as one whose mere presence Harvard had officially designated as morally unworthy? (more…)
Did you ever wish you were one of those big-time journalists in Manhattan, sitting in a nice office, opining on the state of the world each week and getting well paid for it? Would you like to say the same thing over and over again at tiresome length, in prose that reads like it was translated from the original Hungarian? Would you like to occupy and depreciate some of the most valuable journalistic real estate in the country?
Well, you can. All you have to do is follow a few simple rules.
Like most of his fellow, very bad, Op-Ed writers on the New York Times, Frank Rich — non-bestselling author and showbiz wannabee — has a few little bugbears and bogeymen he likes to write about each week in the course of wasting oceans of ink and newsprint in his mind-numbing essays about… well, pretty much nothing, except the usual suspects: show tunes, gay rights, and Those Darned Republicans.
Should reporters who believe that most of America is stupid and insane be in the journalism business? Let’s consider the question.
Take left-wing journalist Marc Ambinder of the Atlantic. He’s not bad at his job. His insights are often worthwhile and occasionally wise. Yet Ambinder sometimes writes things so foolish that one might expect to read them at the leftist propaganda site Media Matters for America.
His latest adventure in pseudo-intellectual self-absorption passing for journalistic analysis is, “Have Conservatives Gone Mad?” It brims with elitist condescension.
Ambinder observes that:
Serious thinkers on the right have finally gotten around to a full and open debate on the epistemic closure problem that’s plaguing the conservative movement.
The issue, to put it in terms that even I can understand, because I didn’t study philosophy much in college: has the conservative base gone mad?
If even a blind pig can find an acorn or a truffle every once in a while, even a mainstream media journalist can figure out that there’s a new sheriff in town, although it generally takes him or her a while.
For a good example, consider this colloquy at the august Nieman Foundation at Harvard between “Internet thinker” Clay Shirky and investigative journalist Walter Robinson of the Boston Globe, who led the paper’s prize-winning coverage of the Catholic Church’s sex scandal.
There’s some discussion specific to the state of the Catholic Church, but for the most part it’s a conversation about how investigative work is made both more effective and (arguably) less common by the Internet — with an emphasis on how the declining role of giant, storied newspapers is impacting what some powerful folks can get away with.
Of particular interest to readers of the Big sites are the following remarks:
Shirky: So if you want to bury a story now, to take the second half of your question, there’s been a curious inversion of the news cycle. It used to be the front-page news was bad for you because that would indicate some synchronization of the public. But with the news cycle now down at 36 hours if you want to bury a story, get it all out at once right away. Everything. Everything on one day, and then the next day say, “That’s yesterday’s news.” The thing that kills people now is drip, drip, drip.
Here’s Florida Congressman Alan Grayson, probably the most obnoxious member of that august body (if you don’t count Barney Frank), barging into a meeting of the Orange County Republicans executive committee yesterday and — this being “Die Quickly” Grayson — hilarity immediately ensued:
But wait! There’s more!
This is the man whose official biography on his House website includes a heartbreaking, and heartwarming, Dickensian tale of his young life in the Bronx. Try to control your tears as you read this triumph of the human spirit: (more…)
That would be Lt. Col. Allen West, running for Congress in Florida’s 22nd district. Because America needs more clear-eyed, unflinching truth-tellers like him:
You may recall the Atlanta-born Col. West from his service in Iraq, during which he was became embroiled in controversy for his actions in the field and was made subject to an Article 32 hearing, from which he emerged with both his dignity and service record intact and, in the eyes of many, his stature increased.
From his website, here are some of Col. West’s awards, citations and decorations:
In his Army career, Col. West has been honored many times, including a Bronze Star, three Meritorious Service Medals, three Army Commendation Medals (one with Valor), and a Valorous Unit Award. He received his valor award as a Captain in Desert Shield/Storm, was the US Army ROTC Instructor of the Year in 1993, and was a Distinguished Honor Graduate III Corps Assault School. He proudly wears the Army Master parachutist badge, Air Assault badge, Navy/Marine Corps parachutist insignia, Italian parachutist wings, and German proficiency badge (Bronze award).
Wouldn’t he be more interesting to hear from once in a while than another Florida congressman — and MSM darling — the snarky Alan Grayson (FL-8)? You remember him: (more…)
On Tuesday, March 23, a symposium will convene in Laurel, Maryland on “Climate Change and Energy Imperatives for Future Naval Forces.” Sponsored by Johns Hopkins University/Applied Physics Laboratory and the US Navy, it will include roundtable discussions on a variety of topics to include: potential effects of global climate change, temperature increases, and reduction of sea ice, melting glaciers, desertification, deforestation, water and fuel shortages, rising sea levels, and forced population migrations. Alarming topics all, events that, should they happen, are the stuff of nightmares, of an environmental apocalypse, even the end of humankind.
They are also the boilerplate propaganda of anthropogenic global warming fanatics that have been so humiliated by exposés of their contrived science, they are frantically trying to stem the tide of public outrage, so much of their evidence has been debunked. Manipulations of research data to support warming fabrications have been too systemic for their claims to be taken seriously any longer. As the nation endures mammoth snowstorms and low temperatures, and as record low temperatures are being set across the globe, one wonders if it will take glaciers on Al Gore’s front lawn for them to see the fallacies of their ideology-driven “science.”
True to form, the media is publishing articles claiming the warming is causing the cold. “Global warming” has morphed to “climate change.” Their outrageous journalistic acrobatics would be hilarious were they not so pitiful. Time Magazine has a doozy entitled: “Snowstorm: East Coast Blizzard Tied to Climate Change” and apparently the citizen rabble are not buying it. One need only read the comments to this article on line to see what the peasants in fly-over-country think of press delusions. (more…)
Will the Chicago Machine corruption story break wide open in 2010?
If you think Chicago crook and long-time Obama buddy Antoin Rezko is serving out his jail sentence, think again.
Antoin “Tony” Rezko is a forgotten man. During the presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton tried to make Barack Obama’s connection with Rezko an issue.
On June 4, 2008, Rezko was convicted in federal court on 16 charges of corruption. For a day or so, he was big news.
After that, a national media that ignored Obama’s connections with the corrupt Chicago political machine lost all interest in Rezko. After all, there was an “historic” election to influence, and anything that made Obama’s shady past the subject of a national conversation had to be squelched. (more…)
In researching the ever-intensifying Massachusetts Senate race between Democrat Martha Coakley and her Republican challenger Scott Brown, it only takes a few keystrokes to unearth her ongoing history of questionable judgment and puzzling prosecutorial decisions. Even though the election has been effectively nationalized, with some polls showing the underdog Brown within two points or so of the colorless Coakley, she remains largely unknown outside New England.
So as a public service to the voters of the Bay State, during the run-up to the special election on Jan. 19, Big Journalism will be offering some of the Martha’s Greatest Hits, so that they can fully make up their minds whether she would make a suitable successor to the late Edward Moore Kennedy – who, as you recall, began his illustrious career by being expelled from Harvard for cheating, went on to drown Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick, and then turned to a life of drinking and debauchery, including the infamous “waitress sandwich” with soon-to-be-retired Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodd, before attempting to inflict “universal health care” on the country shortly before his death last year.
Homework done? Good. Because Martha Coakley, the current Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and thus its top law enforcement officer, is shaping up as a worthy heir to the Lion of the Senate. (more…)
As a scientist, I have long been troubled by the way the mainstream media covers science in general and the environment in particular. Long before “global warming” became a watchword and Al Gore started burning tens of thousands of gallons in aviation fuel to lecture people around the world about their profligate energy use, journalists routinely butchered scientifically-focused stories so badly that it would make a high school physics teacher cringe. While many people have been shocked to learn how close the ties between leading global warming alarmists and some environmental reporters are, the only surprise for many of us in the scientific community is that it has taken this long to reveal those connections. For the truth is that global warming coverage in the mainstream media is merely a symptom of a larger disease.
The latest boil to burst forth upon the body of environmental journalism began to fester on Thursday, January 7, when the USEPA announced that it was proposing the latest, greatest and most-badly- needed-ever smog standard. (Officially the pollutant is “ground-level ozone”, but we’ll stick with “smog” for convenience). Mainstream media outlets everywhere fell over themselves to heap praise on the EPA for imposing a standard that administrator Lisa Jackson described as “long overdue.” This lead, from the Chicago Tribune’s lead environmental reporter/head Sierra Club cheerleader Michael Hawthorne’s January 8 story, was typical:
“Chicago and other urban areas across the U.S. would need to clamp down harder on air pollution under tough smog limits proposed Thursday by the Obama administration, which scrapped a George W. Bush-era rule that ignored the latest scientific advice.”
During the rise of the tea party Anderson Cooper called conservatives "tea baggers" on CNN and remarked about "teabagging." The network featured a multitude of guests and contributors who likened tea partiers to nazis, bigots, pick your poison. No pressure was ever brought about to censor the speech of those...
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