"The campaign for 'intellectual diversity' legislation is a neoconservative ploy to secure the teaching of right-wing propaganda in the classroom, plain and simple."

"The authors of the campaign hide behind the mask of educational reformer, but what they seek is nothing short of educational control."

That's what I read when I followed the link at the end of this comment of Irene's:

Using the phrase "intellectual diversity" is itself an act of courage in the academic arena.

I once uttered "intellectual diversity" in a debate with a leftie (I use that term endearingly, of course).

The "discussion" ended with a link to an explanation that the phrase is code for a neoconservative plot.

Later, in that comments thread, there's this:

Scott M said... If "intellectual diversity" and "personal responsibility" have been deemed as code words of right-wing oppression, just what the hell words or phrases do they use when they are trying to talk about intellectual diversity or personal responsibility?...

Irene said... @Scott M, "Social Justice."

"Last fall anthropology declared itself no longer to be a science."

Is that a fair statement of what happened?



Note that John Hawks is at the University of Wisconsin—Madison (where I am), which made this other segment — "Does academic blogging fit a university’s mission?" — especially interesting to me. According to Hawks, the UW has always been especially savvy about the value of blogging professors. And here's Hawks's blog. (Did you know it's "Darwin Day" here on campus today and also Friday and Saturday? I guess the commitment to science represented by the celebration of Darwin doesn't exclude calling 3 days a "day.")

"I used to think the New Yorker was for cutting edge intellectuals, but now that I see its articles are matching the current story line of Mary Worth..."

Writes Jason (the commenter), responding to Jaltcoh's reaction to the "one great passage" in Adam Gopnik's article on "How the Internet gets inside us."

Here's Mary fretting about the internet:



The best way to keep up with Mary Worth is via The Comics Curmudgeon:

Now we know why now why Mary shuns the Internet: it’s full of people, talking about their lives, unprompted by Mary’s probing questions, a prospect she finds completely ghastly.

Food price warning.

The severe drought in China:

"China’s grain situation is critical to the rest of the world — if they are forced to go out on the market to procure adequate supplies for their population, it could send huge shock waves through the world’s grain markets..."

"The Army and the people in one hand."

Chanted in Egypt.

"But yeah, smart administrators understand that intellectual diversity on the faculty is a good thing, for purely self-interested reasons alone."

"Back in the 1990s when I was writing a lot of second amendment stuff, somebody tried to get my dean to fire me, saying that I was fomenting domestic terrorism. But my dean told me that he was glad to have me writing that stuff, because when alumni or legislators talked about ivory-tower liberal faculties, he could just send 'em a copy of my 'Critical Guide To The Second Amendment.'"

Heh. Yeah. Think about it. Let's say you have a state law school the legislators and alums imagine must be about 95% left-wing. Get one conservative lawprof out there in the public eye — maybe with a blog that's supposedly right-wing — and that vague mental percentage might readjust to 80% or so. That's value! Treasure your house conservative, oh lefty law school!

Why did Congressman Christopher Lee give up so easily?

It's weird, isn't it?

Lee resigned less than four hours after Gawker posted the emails and photo.

His office first claimed his email account had been hacked - which didn't really explain the topless photo of himself flexing his biceps in a mirror.

About two hours later, Lee told Fox News he couldn't discuss the issue because "I have to work this out with my wife."

At 6 p.m. Wednesday, Lee issued a brief statement saying he was resigning the seat he won in 2008. "I regret the harm that my actions have caused my family, my staff and my constituents," he said. "I deeply and sincerely apologize to them all. ... I promise to work as hard as I can to seek their forgiveness."

There must be a lot more below the surface, and the quick resignation was to get us to move on. I'd like to know what inspired the desperation. Or was it that he got no support from his GOP colleagues in Congress. Perhaps he was told, quite clearly, that they didn't want to burn any political capital defending him. If so, I think that was probably an excellent choice. They can't want him as the torso face of the party for the next month.

"Pedal misapplications."

"Now there's a euphemism for the bureaucratic ages."

At the Blue Snow Café...

... you can talk all night.

Do you need anything?

If you can find it through this portal...



... you will effortlessly and costlessly make a contribution to this blog, and I am thanking you in advance.

"Senator Jim Webb, Democrat of Virginia, has decided not to run for re-election..."

"...  avoiding a blockbuster rematch with the man he beat in 2006, George Allen, and giving Senate Republicans another opportunity to help them reclaim the majority."

Care to speculate on why Webb won't put up with a second electoral encounter with Allen?  Or should I say why he doesn't feel enough affinity for Senate Democrats to want to help them keep their numbers up?

"Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, recovering from shooting, regains ability to speak — asks for toast..."

Toast!

("Breaking news" email from CNN. Story here.)

Arianna Huffington "has always been on the move ideologically..."

"... from her early squabbles with feminism to her role as a minister with the new-age Movement for Spiritual Inner Awareness, from her membership in Newt Gingrich's brain trust to her stint as populist activist - all before her greatest act, the Huffington Post."

Says Dana Milbank "with admiration."

Huffington deserves every one of those millions she'll be paid by AOL for creating this online sensation. She was once derided as "the most upwardly mobile Greek since Icarus" because of her many well-connected friends, but Huffington has earned her place as one of the extraordinary personalities of our time: an entrepreneur and writer who is always chasing the next big idea, wherever it is on the ideological spectrum.

Good for her. We need some extraordinary personalities for our time.

"The Patriot Act represents the undermining of civil liberties," says Dennis Kucinich, who got 26 Republicans on his side.

What happened in the House yesterday?!

House Republicans suffered an embarrassing setback Tuesday when they fell seven votes short of extending provisions of the Patriot Act, a vote that served as the first small uprising of the party's tea-party bloc.

The bill to reauthorize key parts of the counter-terrorism surveillance law, which expire at the end of the month, required a super-majority to pass under special rules reserved for non-controversial measures....

The vote was the latest signal... that on certain matters House leaders could face a sizable resistance to compromise from within their own ranks, both from the 87 GOP freshmen and from conservative veterans who have been emboldened by the newcomers.

Good! The Republicans don't own the Tea Party movement.

"God Bless America and the Anthem? And the fly-by? Could you militarize this event just a tad more?"

"And what in the name of the FSM was the point of giving us both Sam Elliott and Michael Douglas for the pregame Heroic Voiceover Brigade? And, Michael Douglas, how exactly do we link JFK's inaugural, MLK's Dream speech, the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima, Ali's KO of Liston in Lewiston, and this football game? A journey? More like a trip, actually. The pregame show was what Leni Riefenstahl would have done had she emigrated here as a child and gone to work for Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Price."

So wrote Charles P. Pierce about the Super Bowl intro, and I almost didn't post that because I had to check the Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Price reference  — is it "Mad Men"? yeah, sorry, I still don't want to watch it — not to mention the FSM reference — eh. It flicked my bloggable toggle switch and then came very close to toggling back. But I'm quoting it, really because I agree that they overdid it. Leni would have been much more insidiously subtle. But that's a good thing, right? You can defend against the ridiculously overdone. We can feel patriotic and festive in a mixed up clutter of history and pop culture, and then it's on to the football game.

The Pierce quote is embedded in this James Wolcott blog post. Wolcott is crankier than Pierce:

I had the pre-game on mute and every time I glanced up I wondered if we had declared war on Iraq or a hologram of Ronald Reagan was going to materialize on stage, raising a ruddy hand in blessing as Peggy Noonan ascended into heaven. The Super Bowl is bombastic enough without being a fanfare for World War III or IV, but who's counting? Or is it that the country requires this much self-affirmation now to reassure itself that it's still proud and virile? Maybe Stanley Fish can figure this out for us.

No link on the Stanley Fish reference, which is not something I can untangle with a Google search. I know who Stanley Fish is. I'm even in the middle of reading his new book, "How to Write a Sentence." (Check it out: I just wrote a sentence!) I'll assume Wolcott means to say something like: All those words and images require interpretation and Fish is the interpretation-meister.

But let's try to answer Wolcott's question: Does the country require this much self-affirmation now to reassure itself that it's still proud and virile?

I anticipate, instead of real answers, your snarky reframings of the question, asking whether Wolcott needs to reassure himself that he's still proud and virile. Indeed, I got the impression that his paragraph paralleled Pierce's, that he was envious of Pierce's writing prowess and trying to outmatch it. Ending with that limp Fish, he failed, which probably explains the flailing about "the county" and its imagined self-esteem problem. It's so problematic, raising the flag.

O'Reilly interrupting Obama 48 times — in 3-minute montage form.

ADDED: This, of course, make O'Reilly look very rude, but I didn't watch the interview and I don't know how rude it actually was. To some extent, I like interruptions. I like the back and forth of overlapping conversation with someone who does it well and isn't actually trying to dominate. Overtalking can be an important component of flowing conversations. It's no good when one person holds forth and the other one, instead of listening, is distracted thinking about when it's going to be his turn.

That said, an interview of the President is different. He commands respect. But he can abuse that. Obama could have pursued the strategy of running out the clock, blathering tediously and preventing good pointed probing by the interviewer he perceived as an opponent (if not an enemy). He'd have played O'Reilly, I suspect, if O'Reilly hadn't broken in with questions. The YouTube montage is effective at making O'Reilly look brutish, but that's not necessarily so, and if O'Reilly had patiently waited for Obama to bring each meandering answer in for a landing, it would not have been possible to make a YouTube montage that would show Obama's running out the clock to avoid serious questions.