:: blame the extended gestation.... ::

:: Monday, November 29, 2004 ::

Executive Summary of The Forgotten Population: A Look at Death Row in the United States Through the Experiences of Women

:: Jim Nichols 11/29/2004 07:04:00 PM [+] ::
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Court Allows Universities to Bar Military Recruiters

Universities may bar military recruiters from their campuses without risking the loss of federal money, a federal appeals court in Philadelphia ruled today.

:: Jim Nichols 11/29/2004 07:01:00 PM [+] ::
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The Decembrist on Republican behavior since winning:

The ability to simultaneously maintain the triumphalism of a mandate, and the sense of being an embattled minority has much to do with the continued political success of the far right. It allows them to maintain the energy and righteousness of opposition even while they claim the most autocratic control of American political institutions since the 1920s. It is also a defensive shield that made it very difficult for Democrats in the past election to treat the Republican right as what it is: the ruling party, and a particularly corrupt one.

And then onto Democrats

Democrats lose elections and comfort ourselves that our views represent a majority and we just have to convey them better. Republicans win elections and comfort themselves that they are still an embattled minority and need to keep fighting like hell -- ends justify the means and all that -- against the entrenched liberal power. We're both a little crazy.

:: Jim Nichols 11/29/2004 06:53:00 PM [+] ::
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I'm just now hearing about this ballot measure in alabama.

New Donkey has some comments:

The irony in all this is that Alabama conservatives are deeply devoted to the idea that the state's economic future strictly depends on doing everything imaginable to attract business investment. But a lot of businesses aren't terribly crazy about committing themselves to a community that can't quite bring itself out of the 1950s. So the defeat of Guin's amendment was really an atavistic two-fer: establishing a lack of interest in quality public education at a time when employers care more about a skilled workforce than ever before, and reminding the whole country of Alabama's unsavory history of race relations.

:: Jim Nichols 11/29/2004 06:30:00 PM [+] ::
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News:

"The average street price of illegal drugs is at the lowest level for a decade, according to new figures."

:: Jim Nichols 11/28/2004 05:52:00 PM [+] ::
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CBS News | Poll: Creationism Trumps Evolution | November 23, 2004?21:02:35:

"Americans do not believe that humans evolved, and the vast majority says that even if they evolved, God guided the process. Just 13 percent say that God was not involved. But most would not substitute the teaching of creationism for the teaching of evolution in public schools.

Support for evolution is more heavily concentrated among those with more education and among those who attend religious services rarely or not at all"

:: Jim Nichols 11/28/2004 05:30:00 PM [+] ::
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Leiter on George Will on academia
Leiter Reports: Black is White
One of the most disappointing features of actually making it to University was the fact that it wasn't the leftist paradise I was led to believe by the mass media. Instead I found myself in a intellectually tough free-zone of independent thought as long as you can back it up. George Will is just playing up to his readers in Kansas who already believe Universitys are left wing hell holes. Leiter puts it nicely:

So here's what things look like once you've fallen through the looking glass: a representative of the monochrome mass media--where diversity means a political spectrum so narrow that no social democrat, socialist, or genuine libertarian finds a regular home--has the audacity to suggest that the only institution where genuine intellectual diversity in the United States still exists (where it is possible to teach, as I do [and my situation is not atypical], with Burkean conservatives, free market utopians, socialists, social democrats, Clintonite democrats, and regular 'ole boring liberals) lacks diversity of "thought"! Perhaps never having had one, he doesn't recognize where it still exists.

But let us translate: what Mr. Will really means is that universities are places where the banalities and misinformation which are the lifeblood of the mass media are not taken seriously; where people who think Iraq attacked the World Trade Center have a tough time holding their own in grown-up conversation; where apologists for state terror have to confront the arguments of those who know an apology for state terror when they see it; where lies about economic and social policy are perceived as lies, and made to answer to facts and evidence; where, in short, the parochial smugness of an effete little simpleton like George Will (and his many clones who constitute the "diversity" of the mass media) is perceived as exactly that.

:: Jim Nichols 11/28/2004 05:23:00 PM [+] ::
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