Erin Burnett, the New Money Honey

See Howard Kurtz' Washington Post article about NBC's new star business reporter: Erin Burnett. He is all but stepping on his tongue. Actually, Erin is pretty good; that is, she is pretty and she is good. Check her out on Street Signs on CNBC.

Oregon Colleges Very 1960s

This article in the The Oregonian reports on the college students at Lewis & Clark and Reed:

Students at Reed and Lewis & Clark are mostly hippie atheist liberal nerds -- at least according to the Princeton Review's 2008 edition of "Best 366 Colleges."

Reed and Lewis & Clark also both made the lists of schools with "students most nostalgic for Bill Clinton" and "Birkenstock-wearing, tree-hugging, clove-smoking vegetarians."

I can't speak for Oregon State and Portland State, but I spent 3 years as a grad student at the University of Oregon and these descriptors fit most of the students I knew at U. of O. in the Business School! I suspect the article describes most of Oregon's college students.

Oregon is a weird state; it has a very Twin Peaks feeling. The western part of the state, where most people live, is swathed in rain seven or eight months of the year. If you've read the diaries of the Lewis and Clark Expedition you know how depressing they found the Oregon winter.

While I studied in Oregon the most common automotive fatality was a one-car accident - in other words, vehicular suicide. The beleaguered acting President of the U. of O., Chuck Johnson, killed himself in this fashion. He swerved his VW head-on into a speeding logging truck on the McKenzie Highway.

Oregon's constantly gray skies are depressing. It is no place for someone with even a hint of seasonal affective disorder (SAD), take my word for it.

Good Intentions Are Not Enough

You've got to read this Wall Street Journal article summarizing research which concludes that affirmative action policies at top law schools have resulted in fewer black attorneys. Here is the key paragraph:

Easily the most startling conclusion of his research: Mr. Sander calculated that there are fewer black attorneys today than there would have been if law schools had practiced color-blind admissions--about 7.9% fewer by his reckoning. He identified the culprit as the practice of admitting minority students to schools for which they are inadequately prepared. In essence, they have been "matched" to the wrong school.

Political Correctness in Seattle

Two men were acting oddly on a ferry in the Seattle area, taking photos of technical workings and walking into areas labeled "crew only." The Captain took a couple of pictures of them and the FBI would like to talk to them. No one alleges they have necessarily done anything wrong, but their behavior does resemble that of would-be terrorists casing a target. You can see one of the pictures yourself here.

Believe it or not, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer refused to run the picture of the two men. Here is their rationale. See if you agree. Local TV stations did run the pictures.

Some people's self-preservation instinct is so underdeveloped as to make them likely winners of the Darwin Award. True, Seattle is a hotbed of coffee-addicted, tree-hugging, software-writing liberals, leavened with a few Boeing aerospace engineers. In spite of that, you'd think they would understand that ferry boats make wonderful terrorist targets and that they would be the folks doing the dying.

Here is an article that really gets P.O.'ed about political correctness, maybe a little extreme but fun.

Conservative Humor Alert

"Never Underestimate the Power of Makeup" is the title of a set of photos making their way around the conservative humor sites on the web. It really ties into the topic in the previous post.

The Likability Factor

In the 1600s, a student at Christ Church, Oxford, named Tom Brown is famous for his couplet in extemporaneous translation from the Latin:

I do not love thee, Dr. Fell,
The reason why I cannot tell;
But this I know, and know full well,
I do not love thee, Dr. Fell.

This is a classical expression of the experience we've all had of disliking someone without being able to say just why. I share this with you by way of introducing an article concerning the high 'negatives' of Hillary Clinton. The polling data suggests a lot of folks truthfully could recite the following couplet:

I do not love thee, Mistress Hil,
The reason why I cannot tell;
But this I know, and know full well,
I do not love thee, Mistress Hil.

Of course others could and would tell you at great length the reasons why they dislike the former First Lady. I suspect many Republicans secretly hope she is nominated. The danger in that is that world circumstances might result in her election by a narrow margin.

Can the country really stomach another four years with a President so many of us cannot stand? Is it possible that we are headed for a period where widely hated Presidents are the norm? You could reasonably argue that we've been in that situation for the past 12 or more years. The mind fairly boggles....

R. Peters Says J. Warner Doesn't Get It

Ralph Peters, writing from Anbar Province in Iraq, observes that Senator John Warner has missed half the equation with his call for a symbolic troop withdrawal. Says Peters, Sunnis are helping the Marines whomp Al Qaeda in Anbar. This is better-than-good news, and Warner has missed it.

To be sure, Iraqi politicians are hopeless idiots, perhaps even worse than our own. Still, to expect any politicians to accomplish much is to emulate Pollyanna. Give Peters' article a look.

George Will's September Song

Read George Will's Washington Post column on the reception likely to be received by the report of General Petraeus concerning progress (or the lack thereof) in Iraq. As he astutely observes, everyone in Washington will be listening for what they want to hear, and essentially nothing else. As he notes:

When Gen. David Petraeus delivers his report on the war, his Washington audience will include two militant factions. Perhaps nothing he can responsibly say will sway either, so September will reinforce animosities.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi parliament goes back into session at about the same time he makes his report. Nobody has much optimism in their ability to put together a self-ruling country out of their three main groups: Kurds, Sunnis, and Shia.

Global Warming Can't Get a Break

See this article which shows that New York City yesterday tied the record for the coldest August day on record, a record set in 1911. July averaged 1.5 degrees colder than normal, and August is headed in the same direction. How frustrating when the weather just won't cooperate with the Chicken Littles crying about a global warming falling sky.

Americans Reject World Knowledge

This article reports a study which shows that Americans aren't very interested in U.S. politics and even less interested in the politics of other countries. Well...duh! Current U.S. politics aren't very interesting; a bunch of second-raters yelling "yo momma" at each other in tinny little voices.

Politics overseas can be more interesting but for residents of the world's sole superpower, perhaps not very relevant to everyday life. It takes something like 9/11 to interest most Americans in the political concerns of folks overseas. Without a recurrence, that interest doesn't persist. And why should it? If you don't personally travel overseas and trade overseas, what happens there doesn't seem much relevant to daily life here.

GWOT Humor

The following story is making the rounds on the Internet, the author and source are unknown. It is, however, funny in its own way.

While hiking through Pakistan, Osama Bin Laden found a bottle on the sand & picked it up. A female Genie rose from the bottle and with a smile said, "Master, may I grant you one wish?"

Osama responded, "You ignorant, unworthy daughter-of-a-dog! Don't you know who I am? I don't need any common woman giving me anything."

The shocked Genie said, "Please, sir, I must grant you a wish or I will be returned to that bottle forever."

Osama thought a moment, then grumbled about the impertinence of the Genie and said, "Very well, I want to awaken with three American women in my bed in the morning. So just do it and be off with you."

The annoyed Genie said, "So be it!" and disappeared.

The next morning Bin Laden woke up in bed with Lorena Bobbitt, Tonya Harding, and Hillary Clinton at his side.

His manhood was gone, his knees were broken, and he had no health insurance.

God is Good!

Peters on Iran

Ralph Peters, Lt. Colonel, U.S. Army Ret., often has a savvy take on matters military, and he writes a column for the New York Post. Here he notes an overlooked implication of the U.S. government formally designating the Iranian Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization.

Apparently, a formal designation as terrorists creates an option to attack their bases in Iran, as we've stated we will attack terrorists wherever they may be found. The Bush White House may figure they've nothing to lose in attacking Iran; nobody on Pennsylvania Avenue is running for reelection.

Broder on Fred Thompson

The Washington Post's David Broder is the dean of mainstream Washington political journalists. His knowledge of American politics is legendary. He reports on a two hour interview he conducted with soon-to-be candidate for the Republican presidential nomination Fred Thompson. Considering that he writes for a key member of the MSM with a liberal editorial policy, Broder has a relatively positive response to Thompson.

Broder quotes Thompson as follows:

There's no reason for me to run just to be president. I don't desire the emoluments of the office. I don't want to live a lie and clever my way to the nomination or election. But if you can put your ideas out there -- different, more far-reaching ideas -- that is worth doing.

Thompson waiting until September to announce his candidacy will either turn out to be a masterstroke or a disaster, nobody yet knows which. I hope for all our sakes it turns out well.

Potentially Huge News

If this story in the London Telegraph proves to be true, it is likely to be your first notice of the most important story happening during your lifetime. If the speed of light can be exceeded, space travel becomes feasible and everything we think we now know about physics will need to be reexamined. The implications are potentially enormous.

We have every reason to be skeptical of this story and others like it. Remember the flurry of stories over "cold fusion" which proved to be, if not exactly a hoax, relatively bad science and certainly untrue?

Coulter Lists Dem Losers

Ann Coulter trots out a list of former Democratic icons that have become laughingstocks when we learned more about them. Check out her Yahoo News column here. She chronicles eight darlings of the left whom we now see as losers.

Of Joe Wilson, husband of Valerie Plame, she wisecracks

Wilson is now demanding a congressional investigation into who leaked the classified information that his wife wears the pants in the family. The Joe Wilson celebrity tour officially ended when The Washington Post editorialized: "It's unfortunate that so many people took (Wilson) seriously" -- not the least of whom were reporters at The Washington Post itself.

The President Still Doesn't Get It

This article from the National Review Online starts out with a nice premise, and then doesn't do much with it. The premise is that the President is mad at us for torpedoing his amnesty-for-illegal-immigrants bill and plans to get even with us by actually enforcing the immigration laws we now have. Much of the rest of the article is a kind of boring recitation of what can be done to enforce existing laws.

However, I think author Mark Krikorian is correct that the President believes we will be inconvenienced by a lack of illegal workers in our fields and factories. He thinks we will balk at higher prices driven by the need to get the job done with legal workers. My guess is that he is wrong.

With the exception of some meat packers and vegetable growers, who will be in a bind at least temporarily, most of us will look at enforcement efforts and say "it is about time." If workers' Social Security Numbers don't match up, and the workers can't get the problems corrected within a reasonable period, fire them. If the only jobs illegal immigrants can hold in this country are casual day labor jobs, paid off the books, most will return home or stay home.

Then the next task is to really get serious about rounding up visitors who have overstayed their visas and sending them home. We need to know who is in our country, why, where they are located, and for how long. Once we get control of illegal immigration, then a streamlined legal immigration policy that focuses on engineers, nurses and others with in-demand education and skills makes sense. But only then....

Dwarf Countdown: -1

There are a host of nobodies and almost-nobodies trying to gain their parties' nominations this year. Those who have little or no chance of winning the nomination are engaged in very public ego trips, and to what end?

One of the "dwarfs" in the presidential sweepstakes, Tommy Thompson, has had a belated moment of self-insight and withdrawn from the Republican race for the party nomination. A New York Times article about the withdrawal is here.

Now if we can only weed out a bit more of the "underbrush" in these two fields, the debates may become worth a watcher's time. I have not been able to bring myself to watch one yet.

Good News from South Korea

The mainstream media (MSM) have left the impression in recent months that the U.S. image in South Korea has deteriorated badly. See this Christian Science Monitor article on Yahoo News for recent polling evidence that South Korea is still a solid U.S. ally, that the U.S. presence in South Korea remains popular and that South Koreans still view North Korea as a major threat.

The survey results also contradict the impression of an increasing public tilt toward China. In fact, one of the most striking findings is that the public strongly prefers the US over China.

When asked which of the two countries Korea should maintain close ties with for the sake of its national interest, 20 percent picked China, while an overwhelming 79 percent selected the US.

Those findings don't exactly fit the horrible international picture the MSM is trying to paint. Is it possible to pinpoint the moment when the MSM moved from reporting the actual news to "selling" a world view of the U.S. as a monster.

No sole superpower can be universally popular, neither the Brits nor the Romans were. Nevertheless, as superpowers go, the U.S. has left relatively light (or no) footprints in most parts of the world. We have mostly been what Mark Steyn calls below "a benign hegemon." Wouldn't it be nice if our MSM reported the glass to be half full once in awhile? I, for one, would find that refreshing.

Global Cooling?

NASA has released the data for average annual temperatures in the 48 contiguous states, going back to 1880. It turns out the warmest year on record was 1934. The year previously thought to be warmest, 1998, moved to second place. Third place is held by 1921, and fully half of the ten warmest years occurred before World War II. Now...where is the evidence of recent global warming in these figures?

Read Mark Steyn's Sunday ruminations on this climate story and on the liberal self-loathing implicit in all the "we have met the enemy and he is us" stories in the MSM. My favorite Steynism is the following:

There are many honorable reasons to oppose the Iraq war, but believing that our troops are sick monsters is not one of them. The sickness is the willingness of so many citizens of the most benign hegemon in history to believe they must be.

Gen. Petraeus Human Interest Story

The Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan tells a marvelous story about the general commanding in Iraq: General Petraeus. She notes that 16 years ago, as a much younger officer, he was the recipient of accidental "friendly fire" that darned near killed him.

The surgeon who took the bullet out of his chest and saved his life was a Dr. Bill Frist, who later became Majority Leader in the U.S. Senate. As a result of this interaction, they've been friends ever since. It is a small world....