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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ManyMoose who wrote (23247)	10/11/2007 12:09:04 AM
From: calgal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

Attacking talk radio By Walter Williams jewishworldreview.com \| The major news media no longer have the monopoly they once enjoyed. The way millions of Americans get their news and news analysis is through talk radio. The Rush Limbaugh Show stands at the very top of talk radio, carried on more than 650 radio stations and listened to by an estimated 20 million people each week. As an occasional fill-in for Rush, and being a professor, I see the show as being my big classroom, but I learn a lot as well. Over the span of some 20 years, Rush has been attacked from just about every leftist corner, as would anyone who tirelessly espoused the founding principles of our nation — private property, rule of law and limited government. What has made Rush so effective with this message has been his ability to put things, and ask questions, in a manner that the average citizen can understand and relate to, and do so with a bit of humor. Humor creates madness among leftists who want their interventionist agenda taken seriously. Rush's show, as well as many of his competitors' shows, has ended much of the isolation among Americans. For example, if you were against racial quotas, you were made to feel like a racist by the major media. With the growth of talk radio, people found out that they were not alone and that being against racial quotas didn't make one a racist. As such, talk radio has been a painful thorn in the sides of those whose agenda is to control the news and debate as a means to control our lives. This is why the priority agenda for leftists is to attack talk radio, and their biggest target is Rush Limbaugh. The latest attack from the left alleges that Rush referred to our fighting men, who disagreed with our Middle East policy, as "phony soldiers." The truth of the matter is that Rush was referring to people like Jesse Macbeth, who became the poster boy for the anti-war and anti-military movement. Macbeth passed himself off as an Army Ranger and a Purple Heart recipient. He said he participated in gruesome war crimes with other U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. An investigation proved that none of his claims was true; he wasn't an Army Ranger or a Purple Heart recipient, and he didn't serve in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, he was kicked out of the Army after 44 days of boot camp. Last September, Macbeth was sentenced to five months in jail and three years' probation for falsifying a Department of Veterans Affairs claim and his Army discharge record. Macbeth, idolized by the anti-war movement, is truly a despicable person. On a video translated into Arabic, for Middle East consumption, he said, "We would burn their bodies . . . hang their bodies from the rafters in the mosque." False misrepresentation of oneself as a soldier has become so widespread that Congress enacted the Stolen Valor Act of 2005 to prosecute people posing as veterans. In fact, a Sept. 29 ABC News report by Charles Gibson did an expose on people such as Macbeth, and they were called "phony war heroes." The members of Congress who are attacking Limbaugh know all of this, but they're trusting that the average American doesn't so they can pull the rope-a-dope. By attacking Limbaugh, they hope to breathe some life into the Fairness Doctrine, which was repealed by a unanimous vote by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 1987. The doctrine, said the FCC, "restricts the journalistic freedom of broadcasters and actually inhibits the presentation of controversial issues of public importance to the detriment of the public and the degradation of the editorial prerogative of broadcast journalists." Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., is leading the charge in misrepresenting Limbaugh's phony soldier comment. In a few weeks, I shall have a column about phony congressmen and Harry Reid, and about 500 of his colleagues are among them. jewishworldreview.com

To: ManyMoose who wrote (23247)	10/11/2007 12:15:01 AM
From: calgal	Respond to of 71588

Professors: Just As Liberal, Or More Moderate? By John Leo jewishworldreview.com \| The Chronicle of Higher Education, the voice of liberal academia, says that an important new study shows that liberal dominance among professors is much less than commonly believed. Not really. The study, by sociologists Neil Gross of Harvard and Solon Simmons of George Mason University, found that in 2004, 78 percent of faculty voted for John Kerry (77percent) or Ralph Nader (1 percent), while only 20.4 percent voted for President Bush. Among social science professors, Ralph Nader and "other" received a percentage of the 2004 vote as large as that of President Bush. Other findings: Liberals outnumber conservatives by 11-1 among social scientists and 13-1 among humanities professors. 25.5 percent of those who teach sociology identify themselves as Marxist. Self-identified radicals accounted for 19 percent of humanities professors and 24 percent of social scientists. Although business school professors are believed to be predominantly conservative, professors of business voted 2-1 for Kerry. These professors were barely more conservative than liberal. Only 19.7 percent of respondents identify themselves as any type of conservative, compared to 62.2 percent who say they are any type of liberal. At elite, Ph.D-granting schools in general, 60.4 percent of faculty members are Democrats, 30.1 percent are independents and 9.5 percent are Republicans. Gross and Simmons believe that liberals are losing ground to moderates among faculty, though conservatives are not gaining at all. Faculty members who are 35 or younger are less likely that their elders to be left-wing, and less likely to be conservative as well. The survey drew 1,417 repsonses from full-time instructors at 927 colleges. Gross and Simmons created a new category - "moderates" - by lumping together middle-of-the-road professors with "slightly conservative" and "slightly liberal" respondents. In this analysis, 43.5 percent were liberal, 47 percent moderate and 9 percent conservative. Even with the removal of the "slightly" conservatives, who were less numerous than the "slightly" liberals, conservatives were outnumbered by liberals by almost 5-1. Still, Gross and Simmons concluded that because the "moderate" category in the study is larger than the liberal one, the academy is actually more moderate than left-wing. That opinion was challenged yesterday by Ilya Somin, an assistant professor at the George Mason University School of Law. Writing on the Volokh Conspiracy site, Somin noted that surveys of the general public showed that moderates voted 54-45 percent for Kerry, while nearly all the moderates in the Gross-Simmons analysis seem to have voted for the Democrat. Somin wrote that "this result certainly suggests that self-described academic centrists are on average much further to the left that moderates in the general population." Endless polling on ideology among professors may have taught many respondents to heave toward a moderate identity as a way of disarming conservative critics and making the campus appear more balanced. The study did not take on one crucial question: what percentage of instructors feel entitled to use the classroom as a political stage, promoting social change and inculcating a particular political viewpoint in their students? One surprise in the study is that almost half of all those polled oppose affirmative action preferences. This means that a massive opposition to preferences has remained silent and hidden for years, not speaking out or attempting to protect the students punished for bucking preferences (stolen newspapers, canceled speakers, punishment for "bake sales" that mock preferences). Another finding is that more than two-thirds of all instructors (68.8 percent) say "the goal of diversity should include fostering diversity of views among faculty members." Question of the day: How many professors have actually said this out loud? Fear or indifference may be the reason for reticence. Or maybe a great many professors are caught in a persistent vegetative state, too paralyzing to let them say on campus what they tell pollsters they actually believe. Jonathan Zimmerman, professor of the history of education at New York University, was appalled by the 31 percent of instructors who couldn't bring themselves to tell the Gross-Simmons survey that intellectual diversity should be fostered. "What were they thinking?," Zimmerman asked Saturday at a Harvard symposium on the study. Lawrence Summers, deposed president of Harvard, got it right at the symposium, noting that not one social science instructor at a PhD-granting institution reported voting for President Bush in 2004. "There is an overwhelming tilt toward the progressive side," Summers said, "Compared to the underrepresentation of other groups whose underrepresentation is often stressed, the underrepresentation of conservatives appears to be rather more, perhaps." Yes. this certainly seems so. No perhaps about it. jewishworldreview.com

To: ManyMoose who wrote (23247)	10/11/2007 12:21:06 AM
From: calgal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

And now for the important news .... URL:http://www.jewishworldreview.com/1007/hamilton101007.php3 By Argus Hamilton jewishworldreview.com \| . Bruce Springsteen was sued Friday for backing out of a deal to buy a horse for eight hundred thousand bucks. It wasn't overpriced. With all the meat recalls last week due to the E. coli scare, the horse is worth millions if he's put out to hamburger. Lindsay Lohan will check out of her rehab in Utah Friday and begin filming her next movie, Dare to Love Me. A hit would be great for her career. Lindsay Lohan's last movie was so bad that everybody walked out on it, and it was the in-flight movie. Jane Seymour missed her appearance on Dancing with the Stars Tuesday to attend her ninety-year-old mother's funeral in England. It had to be agonizing for her. Now she has to persuade everybody in show business that she was adopted when her mother was sixty. Cleveland Cavaliers star LeBron James sat in the front row at the Cleveland Indians home playoff game Thursday wearing a New York Yankees cap. No one can believe he did it. He might as well have worn an Osama bin Laden mask to the president's prayer breakfast. Wall Street celebrated a good labor report last week as the Dow Jones averages neared a new high. Profits soared for stocks and bondholders. People who live on Soledad Mountain in La Jolla were so relieved to see that life is returning to normal. Mitt Romney revealed Friday he's loaned his own presidential campaign seventeen million dollars. It's a sign he could be in trouble. Hillary Clinton just proposed that the U.S. government give a five thousand dollar bond to each of the Romney children. Rudy Giuliani addressed the Americans for Prosperity Friday in Washington. The candidate urged tax cuts and fiscal prudence. The only way he could fill the house was if the people handing out the tickets promised he wouldn't talk about nine-eleven. Southern California cities voted Tuesday whether apartments and condos can ban smoking. It's an idea whose time has come. As long as your neighbors are in your refrigerator policing the obesity epidemic, they may as well throw out your cigarettes. Don Imus was reported near a new deal with ABC Radio on Saturday. He was fired by CBS for using rap slang to describe black women. His new contract requires him to say The State of Idaho whenever he mentions Idaho, otherwise he's liable for all damages to Ida. The Minnesota National Guard learned Friday they don't qualify for GI education benefits. It seems they were deployed one day short of the seven hundred thirty days required to qualify. If the soldiers want cash from the U.S. government, their best bet is to take off their National Guard uniforms and dress up as corrupt Iraqi moderates.