Over at Becker-Posner, the gentlemen scholars are debating the connection, if any, between poverty and terrorism. In general, Becker argues that a connection exists to the extent that the growth of a nation's economy, and the concurrent expansion of political liberties, seems to reduce terrorism. Posner, while offering (and shooting down) an excellent encapsulation of the liberal tendency to see terrorism as a "symptom" of a "root cause," namely poverty, argues that no correlation seems to exist. To bolster his point, he offers examples of terrorism that originates in affluent societies, from Timothy McVeigh to the Red Army Brigades to nineteenth century anarchists in the U.S.

Read both opinions, as they're sophisticated and thought-provoking. Behind them, of course, lies the debate over current U.S. foreign policy, particularly the belief of the administration that terrorism can be stamped out or at least dramatically reduced through democratization in the Middle East.

While Posner is certainly correct in noting historical examples of terrorism in seemingly stable countries, one trait of his examples that he doesn't mention is that, in most cases, they're home grown terrorists attacking their own people (or their immediate neighbors and former rulers, as with the IRA and the English). Basque terrorists haven't targeted New York or Washington; the KKK didn't go after the royal family.

And, most notably, with the fall of the Soviet Union, several groups he mentions -- the Baader-Meinhof gang and the Red Army Brigades, lost their sponsor and ceased to exist. That doesn't mean that domestic terrorists won't continue to pose a problem -- one could argue that the brigands of the Roman Empire were terrorists of a sort. But it does at least indicate a variety of terrorism that neither man mentions has indeed been reduced by the demise of totalitarianism in Europe. The IRA, for that matter, has lost much of its public support in our post 9/11 world; even Ted Kennedy is no longer reflexively on their side.

I'm off to Washington until tomorrow evening (more elder care).

As you would expect, many blogs have both excellent posts, along with loads of links, to mark Memorial Day. Blackfive reprints a moving letter about a Marine killed May 9 in Iraq. He advises those of us who remember such sacrifices to mark this day, at least in part, by enjoying our freedome with families and friends, since that's what those who died would have wanted.

At Winds of Change, you'll find an updated version of their annual list of links through which you may express your support to troops from America and other lands. There are links to aid organizations, for expressions of support, and other worthy causes. H/T, Arthur Chrenkoff.

The Washington Times, which can be counted on to commemorate Memorial Day with respect, runs a story on 104-year-old Frank W. Buckles of West Virginia. Mr. Buckles is one of about 50 remaining WWI veterans in America. The article contains many statistics on our country's population of vets, and notes that the VA still supporst five children of Civil War veterans! Here are two more stories from the piece:

The VA "can and does treat other veterans, but they have to make co-payments." Many older veterans fail to find out whether they are eligible for benefits.

Others choose not to use them.

Among those is Maudie Hopkins, 89, of Lexa, Ark., who emerged last year as a surviving Confederate widow, the last, and surely the last such link to the War Between the States that ended nearly a century and a half ago. In 1934, when she was 19, she married William M. Cantrell, then 86. Mr. Cantrell served in a Kentucky regiment and was captured in April 1863.

The VA does not provide benefits to Mrs. Hopkins because she doesn't want government assistance.

Lloyd Brown, a 105-year-old World War I veteran who lives in Charlotte Hall, Md., in St. Mary's County, does not receive VA benefits, either.

"He has never used [VA] benefits," says his daughter, Nancy Espino. "We looked into it and were told he has too much income to qualify."

Mr. Brown was a teenager in Missouri when he enlisted in the Navy in 1915. For most of World War I, he was part of a gunnery crew on the USS New Hampshire, based in Norfolk. The New Hampshire was assigned to search for German U-boats, as submarines were called, keeping the shipping lanes open between the United States and Europe.

Mr. Brown spent hours at a time in the crow's-nest of the coal-powered battleship.

"We saw a German sub, captured it and brought it into the Philadelphia Navy Yard," where the crew was imprisoned, Mr. Brown says.

In the pages of the same paper, Bob Dole commemorates last year's WWII veteran reunion, and a rousing editorial calls all of us to remember why sacrifice is necessary if freedom is to last in a dangerous world.

Allison Hayward has left her employment at the FEC and has started a blog, Skeptic's Eye. It's new, it's refreshing, and it's sure to become a daily stop, which is something I can't say about many old blogs, much less the legions of new ones that crop up every day.

If we can count on more entries like this one, for example, we'll all be thankful to Allison for her good works. In this post, she disagrees a bit with a thesis put forward by Terry Teachout on his own fine blog, Arts Journal.

Be sure to bookmark Allison and, if you're a blogger, add her to your blogroll.

We've been caring for the elderly relative again, and will be again this coming week, so blogging has been light. So it may be odd that the first thing I mention is . . . sparklers. As I often do to keep up with the news down home, I took a quick look at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's web site a moment ago, and the one story that jumped out at me (other than the tower killer who didn't jump) was word that sparklers are once again legal in Georgia.

Now, this speaks to me in a way it won't to those of you who didn't grow up there in the '60s and '70s. But throughout my childhood, sparklers were illegal. Yes, those tiny little hand-held wonders that have amazed children for generations were suddenly declared too dangerous to handle by the nanny-staters who make it their business to run our lives.

Of course, that didn't mean we didn't have them, any more than the banning of fireworks meant that we never lit a firecracker. As is usually the case when something the public demands suddenly becomes contraband, our demand was met by other means: we simply headed over the nearby state lines to Tennessee or Alabama and bought our fill. Everyone did, in fact, so much so that only the most sanctimonious, or uptight (often one in the same), law enforcement officers cited anyone for burning sparklers.

Now comes word that Georgia governor Sonny Perdue signed a bill rescinding the sparkler ban. As the bill's sponsor said:

"Everyone was doing it anyway," said Sen. Don Balfour, a Republican from Snellville who sponsored the sparkler bill. "There weren't many injuries, and there was not a single law enforcement officer in Georgia enforcing the ban on sparklers."

But of course it isn't that simple; it never is when the do-gooders become "concerned" and "afraid" that people are just too stupid to get by without their help. Some folks are already lobbying municipalities to outlaw sparklers at the local level, and in places they're succeeding. Their fears that children will burn themselves are grounded in reality, of course: that I don't deny.

Nevertheless, the logic they employ is frightening in our low-risk society. I'm not suggesting that truly dangerous stunts like bungee-jumping or hang-gliding wouldn't go on absent a ban on sparklers. Yet it's difficult to understand such actions (and I once seriously contemplated hang-gliding, since one of the best spots in the nation was close by when I grew up) absent an official, politically correct aversion to anything riskier than sitting at home. Except sitting too much, which will of course make you obese and kill you.

I toss the sparkler ban in with anti-smoking campaigns (I've never smoked and never will), anti-fat campaigns (I'm reasonably trim, I think), anti-drinking campaigns (moderation in all things), and anti-handgun campaigns (I take the Second Amendment seriously). All are designed to prevent people from taking care of themselves, and all (with the possible exception of the anti-smoking campaign's early years) are utterly ineffective at achieving their stated goals. For the most part, they're the playthings of establishment elites who lie awake at night, worrying that someone, somewhere, is doing something that isn't good for them.

I hope Georgians from Waycross to Hiawassee empty the shelves of sparklers this weekend, and hold one aloft in memory of our brave servicemen and women who've sacrificed everything for our freedoms. And, while they're at it, perhaps they'll remember that this year the simple act of lighting a sparkler is, in some small way, a victory over those for whom personal responsibility is a personal insult.

A shrewd South Korean opposition leader is headed for Beijing. Could this visit portend a shakeup in the so-far ineffectual Six Party negotiations with North Korea?

In a move that demonstrates that the South Korean opposition Grand National Party (GNP) is comfortable flexing its international muscles, dynamic GNP leader Park Geun Hye announced an official trip to the Peoples Republic of China. This could be a dramatic new development in unraveling the Gordian knot of North Korean nuclear negotiations that have been stalled by convoluted machinations by all sides. Till now South Korean spokesmen came mostly from President Roh Moo Hyun’s hard left-leaning Uri Party. Recall that Roh, as was his predecessor Kim Dae Jung, is a born-again appeaser who is willing to cut any possible deal with the rapacious regime of Kim Jong Il rather than have to face difficult, courageous decisions. Conversely, GNP leadership is approaching the issue from an entirely different point of view, demanding accountability and responsibility from North Korea.

It is appropriate that America focuses some attention on Ms Park. She is a substantive leader beginning to make her presence felt on a world stage. She is drawing significant attention in the gray, inward-looking world of Korean Peninsula politics. Surprising Westerners, Ms Park is a serious contender for the presidency in a male dominated culture. Be advised that Ms Park is no neophyte in dealing with difficult issues. As a fifty-something, extraordinarily bright, attractive daughter of the late military leader of South Korea, Park Chung Hee, she has undergone a rough initiation into the often violent world of North-South confrontation. Her mother, Yook Young Soo, was assassinated on August 15, 1974 by a North Korean terrorist posing as a Japanese businessman. The killer raced down the aisle of South Korea’s National Theater, wildly shooting a pistol at the stage while then President Park was reading an Independence Day address. Park Geun Hye’s mother was seated on stage and was hit by a stray bullet. She was highly loved by the Korean people, and is mourned to this day.

In a display of Korean toughness and commitment to duty that some Westerners find difficult to comprehend, her father stoically completed his address then dashed to the hospital. Park Geun Hye had to assume First Lady’s duties during a difficult, tragic period, when many of us were convinced that the assassination might be prelude to a second North Korean invasion. By 1976 America’s newly elected President Jimmy Carter threatened troop withdrawal from Korea compounding the uncertainty and instability of the times. These years were highly unsettled; a stressful period for Park Geun Hye and her father. In October 1979 President Park himself was felled by an assassin’s bullet, this time by his KCIA director, a long time friend and boyhood classmate. Losing both parents to murderers within five years meant that the world crashed down of Park Geun Hye. But she inherited a lot of her father’s toughness and proved more resilient than most anticipated.

Park Geun Hye brings a dimension of strength of character to the South Korean political scene that has been bereft of moral substance for almost a decade. Largely through her force of personality, great intelligence, and keen political sense, she has been able to pull together various opposition factions within the Grand National Party, galvanizing both the party and the public with the need to restore honesty and moral focus after a succession of failed presidential administrations. She has her work cut out for her.

The ruling parties since 1997 have capitulated completely to the Kim Jong Il regime in North Korea. Offering only a humiliating appeasement policy, both Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyun have been venal and corrupt. They deliberately deceived the South Korean people in regard to the threat from North Korea, and tried to pretend that South Korea is nothing more than a mediator between America and North Korea. This move was characterized by former National Security Advisor Richard Allen as ‘extremely duplicitous.’ Both presidents bribed, cajoled, and entreated North Korea to come to the bargaining table knowing full well that Kim Jong Il was cheating on agreements, engaging in illegal activities, building nuclear weapons, and abusing his population in a most horrific manner. They callously risked the security of their own citizenry by ignoring Kim Jong Il’s weapons buildup, and abrogated national honor by willful disregard of the horrific oppression of the North Korean people.

The South Korean government discourages North Korean refugees from escaping the hellish existence they endure. South Korea has only grudgingly accepted a pathetically few refugees. The Kim-Roh presidencies have colluded with China in its policy of rights denial and forcible return of refugees. Further, and most shamefully, in the past two years the South Korean government has abstained from voting to condemn the North Koreans in the UN’s Human Rights Committee. This behavior is considered inexcusable cowardice by those who seek relief for the oppressed citizens of North Korea.

Ironically, it has been this craven, despicable, corrupt behavior by the ruling parties that has helped to energize the Grand National Party. Many citizens of South Korea have begun to find their consciences, despite an unseemly attachment to their consumer comfort items that they have been told would be lost with North-South reunification,. Scrape away the façade of materialism and the South Korean people are smart, tough, resilient, and care for their fellow Koreans. An appeasement-based policy can only play for so long before a backlash occurs.

The revitalization of the GNP is certainly part of that resurgence of politics of morality. Predicted success in upcoming elections will mean a swing back to the center by a political pendulum that has swung so far left since 1997 that it threatens to tip over the government. A large part of the GNP policy is economically focused, calling for increased opening of the domestic business sector through policies of transparency, lower taxes, and smoother bureaucratic regulatory policies. Additionally, the GNP has gained a lot of popular support – especially but not exclusively in the South Korean Christian community – by its emphasis on a moral policy in regard to escaping North Koreans.

High on Ms Park’s agenda when she makes the trip to Beijing is going to be human rights, especially regarding the need for China to adhere to treaties that it has freely signed regarding these refugees. North Korea openly flaunts imprisonment, torture, and execution of many of the refugees who are forcibly repatriated but unconscionably China continues to send them back. It has become an international human rights crisis that is only now coming to light, in part because of the impenetrability of China and North Korea.

Concomitantly, Park Geun Hye is certain to take a tough line regarding North Korea’s continued development of nuclear weapons, poison gas, and biological agents. This will be a change from US State Department representatives who arrogantly ignore the will of both Congress and the President expressed in the North Korea Human Rights Act voted unanimously earlier this year. State spokesmen continue to separate human rights from nuclear issues. Unlike them, Park is going to place human rights reform on the same agenda as WMD discussions. Her visit is certain to draw a hostile response from South Korean officials and, embarrassingly, from our own American representatives also. However, for China, with a longer horizon than most countries, Park’s policy will have serious import as China weighs options concerning Korea, North and South.

China realizes that foreign policy initiatives are long term. It has visions of ultimately bringing Taiwan back into the sphere of Greater China just as it did with Hong Kong. A crisis in Korea could quickly undo gains China has made in this sector. Furthermore, China recognizes that it can deal with an economically dynamic South Korea – indeed its companies are among the largest investors in China. Beijing understands that continued democracy means that in only two more years another president will run South Korea. That the new winner could well be Park Geun Hye is not lost on the Chinese leadership. She is a force to be reckoned with and will demand attention.

For these reasons this trip by Park Geun Hye to China will no doubt give the Beijing leadership something additional to chew over regarding the sluggish Six Party talks. At best she may have a positive effect by encouraging the Chinese to toughen their stance toward Kim Jong Il and call him to task. At a minimum attention drawn to her visit will galvanize the South Korean opposition and add another sorely needed voice in the international outcry for justice for the oppressed people of North Korea.

Betsy Newmark draws my attention to George Will's latest column, "'Extraordinary' Rhetoric," which deals with the Democrats' pledge to filibuster future judicial nominees only under "extraordinary circumstances." Betsy zeroes in on the central text:

By giving the filibuster sacramental status, Democrats have become, with the zeal characteristic of recent converts, devout communicants in the church of tradition, willing to die in the last ditch in defense of the Senate as the Framers of the Constitution supposedly wanted it. But of course that Senate was done away with in 1913.

The Framers' carefully considered requirement was that each state's senators would be "chosen by the legislature thereof" rather than by direct popular election. Do Democrats, in the purity of their newfound reverence for the Framers, now favor repealing the 17th Amendment?

That's the principle problem with unprincipled stances: the cry "give me tradition or give me death" rings hollow when it emanates from a party that bases much of its operating philosophy on the condemnation of the past. Except, that is, for their own past, which has come to take on the power of divine writ. From Social Security to foreign relations, the left's answer to contemporary problems is to hold the fort, deny any reason for change, and demand that the status quo (or, in the case of foreign diplomacy, status quo ante) stand. The same is true for their insistence that certain Supreme Court decisions, most notably Roe, cannot under any circumstances be re-examined. Or, to take just one more example, that public education, in its current form, has attained a level of achievement sufficient to ward off all attempts at reform.

In this, the left has proved itself to be, in our day and age, the reactionary party. But their new-found respect for, of all things, the filibuster, and their insistence that the Senate's integrity rests upon a mere rule, doesn't pass the smell test, and it opens them up to myriad intellectual inconsistencies in their juridical philosophy. Expediency, not justice, is their goal; passion, not reason, their driving force.

As for the Seventeenth Amendment, the left has made itself the logical party to attempt its repeal. Since such action would return the election of Senators to state legislatures, the key question would be whether Democrats would stand to gain or lose under a return to the Founders' original plans.

Take a look at this map: you'll see that, after the 2004 elections, Republicans control the state houses in 21 states, Democrats in 19; in ten states, the legislatures are evenly split. If legislators voted according to this patter, the GOP would count 42 Senators, Democrats 38, and some compromise would have to be found in the remaining states.

Of course, things wouldn't work out this neatly, as some states, such as Alabama, would be unlikely to send two Democratic Senators to Washington in spite of that party's majority in the state legislature. Other states that lean blue, such as Delaware, have two Democratic Senators now, but there the state house is Republican, the state Senate Democrat. And this document, on the Senate's web site, points out that many states already enjoyed some of the effects, if not the mechanism, of direct election of Senators before the Seventeenth Amendment was adopted. Perhaps Robert Byrd will find a new ally here.

All this is but an academic exercise, since no one is about to repeal the Seventeenth Amendment. But when mere expediency trumps justice, nothing emanating from Washington should shock us. Strange bedfellows indeed.

I just received a trackback to this post from the blog In Context, which has posted a timely reminder that the Libyan dissident, Fathi El-Jahmi, is still missing. My post to which they linked was written last September 9.

Their post is titled "Another Forgotten Dissident," and the veracity of this claim is borne out by the fact that Google News lists no returns on his name. The principal op-ed quoted at In Context is by Claudia Rosett, who's done superb work on this case, but the date on her essay, again, supports the blog's contention: September 8, 2004.

Pushing democracy in the Middle East is a noble and worthwhile goal for the reasons we've argued here since our blog began in early 2004. Part of that effort must be directed to freeing political prisoners languishing in dictator's prisons, even when the dictator in question has come clean, at least to an extent. Perhaps the administration could bring up Fathi El-Jahmi, first to the Libyan ambassador, and then, via the President himself, to the world.

That's the title of Eugene Oregon's latest post at the Coalition for Darfur, of which Democracy Project is a member. And while I appreciate very much the work the Coalition has done to spread word of the horrors in Darfur, and to raise money to help, I can't agree with Eugene's angle in this particular post, namely that Paul Wolfowitz has been "disingenuous" in describing the complexities of Darfur, especially as compared to Rwanda. Even if Wolfowitz is wrong, and I'm not saying he is, he does not strike me as a disingenuous man under any circumstances.

Read the post for yourself and see what you think.

I wish I'd coined that phrase, but it's from Arthur Chrenkoff, who's written a commentary on the new Star Wars flick (which I haven't see). Arthur isn't wild about the picture, for what it's worth, but his insight into Lucas's worldview, and its place in his movies, is insightful and on target:

It's true that the price of liberty is the eternal vigilance, but for the left the price of the eternal vigilance, in turn, has been the eternal paranoia, and the eternal tendency to see its own government as a greater threat to America and the world than any of the actual, existing, reality-based totalitarian tyrants that have ever roamed the earth. One can have reasonable discussion about the growth in size and reach of the government over the past two centuries, but the left's role in this debate has always been a boy who cried empire [emphasis added]. Thus (to is critics) the United States seems to be perpetually on the verge of tumbling into tyranny (the Civil War, the Gilded Age corporatization, World War One, News Deal, World War Two, Vietnam, the war on terror, or generally whenever the Republicans are in the White House), but somehow it never does (except to some of these critics, for whom it already had).

I think something similar can be said about the gloom and doom right, which sees America as a state in perpetual decline. Think of the venerable Richard Weaver, who, for all his insights into the malaise of modernity, may have gone just a bit overboard with his claim that the West has grown increasingly decadent since William of Ockham (d. 1347)! If that's true, we'd all be better off in, say, China, if not the back side of the moon. Among people worth reading, Weaver's pessimism is trumped perhaps only by that of Herodotus, who wrote that a man would be better off if he were never born at all.

But, of course, that isn't true, and those who think we're going to hell in a hand basket can't always be right (neither are they always wrong). A question I'd have for both factions of naysayers is: against what are you measuring our current conditions? What are your historical, cultural, moral, and intellectual yardsticks?

This morning's Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that the Gwinnett County School Board will not reconsider its decision to fire former Dacula High physics teacher Larry Neace:

Lawyers representing Gwinnett County's public school system said school board members won't reconsider their decision to fire a high school physics teacher.

Lawyers for Larry Neace filed a motion this month asking the school board to reconsider the dismissal, arguing the punishment was too harsh and did not fit the facts of the case.

But Monday, lawyers for the school system filed a motion saying board members are not authorized to reconsider such decisions. The motion said the correct course of action is for Neace to file an appeal with the state Board of Education. Michael Kramer, one of Neace's attorneys, has said they will appeal to the state.

Neace, who had taught at Dacula for 23 years, was fired May 6 because he lowered a student's grade for sleeping in class. Board policy forbids teachers from lowering grades as a form of punishment. School officials said Neace was asked to restore the grade, but he refused, and was fired for insubordination.

Neace said he knew that using grades to discipline students violated board policy, but he thought sleeping in class was an academic, not a disciplinary, problem. For 10 years, Neace had a policy of reducing the grades of students who wasted time or slept in class.

So, next stop, Georgia's State Board of Education. Let's hope they do the right thing for Larry Neace and, in the long run, that they set a precedence that will benefit Georgia students for years to come. Retaining talented teachers is difficult under the best of circumstances; firing them for running afoul of power-hungry principals and legalistic school boards is intellectual and societal suicide. Georgians deserve better than they're getting from the Gwinnett Inquisition.

Dan Pipes has an excellent article up detailing the re-introduction of polio to many predominately Muslim countries. But the dread disease, which had been eradicated in these areas of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, hasn't made a comeback in spite of mass vaccinations. No, it has reappeared because superstitious people have believed a conspiracy that Americans are using the polio vaccine to infect the children to whom it is administered.

Read this account and remember to place it in the context of, first, all conspiracy theories, which necessarily defy reason, and then of the Muslim world in particular, where such theories are commonly used to scapegoat others for a people's shortcomings.

This past March, when Ryan Sager of the New York Post broke the story of former Pew program officer Sean Treglia's remarkable and revealing talk before a room full of journalists in March, 2004, at USC's Annenberg School of Journalism, many bloggers immediately jumped on the story. And with good reason, since Mr. Treglia revealed not simply how Pew and seven other liberal foundations spent $123 million pursuing the "reform" agenda in national election campaigns, but why. You may watch the entire Treglia performance, which Ryan made available, by going here and following the links. A partial transcript of the tape is available here.

This story is back in the news thanks to Mr. Treglia himself, who has written a response to William Schambra's recent article, "In a World of Bloggers, Foundations can expect more Scrutiny," in the Chronicle of Philanthropy. Mr. Treglia's article is titled, tellingly, "Philanthropy and Blogs can be a Dangerous Mix." Perhaps a more accurate title would have been, "Philanthropy and the First Amendment can be an Embarrassing Mix." If getting caught telling the truth can be awful, how much worse it must be to be raked over the coals anew for attempting to deny what you're caught on film saying plainly.

I've written about Sean Treglia many times before, perhaps most notably here and here, and I covered the Schambra article, too. In fact, as I noted at the time, I was honored to be noted by Mr. Schambra for my coverage of the Treglia story, which should itself be seen against the broader, and ongoing, attempt by the political class to use the FEC to crack down on political speech, including that of bloggers.

Mark Tapscott, who's followed the story closely from the start, called my attention to Mr. Treglia's piece, and he spends some time answering Mr. Treglia's charges. You'll want to read Mark's refutation, since it proves that thorough research and the truth trump rear-guard actions designed to distort every time.

Mr. Treglia's response to William Schambra is a curious piece of work. It seeks to discredit bloggers qua bloggers, asserting that their ilk (including this one) are not journalists, but mere partisan hacks; that we pursue not the truth, but a right-wing agenda; that we botched the Pew story top to bottom; and that all this bodes ill for the future if William Schambra is correct in his contention that bloggers have forever changed the nature of reporting on public foundations (and, one assumes, nonprofits such as Pew, which is no longer a foundation).

This attempt to cover his backsides, which area of his anatomy Mr. Treglia himself chose to expose, results in contortions that are as ineffective in achieving their desired end as they are painful to watch, or to imagine when transferred to anatomical metaphor. One almost concludes that these remarkable positions must result in -- or is it derive from? -- a flexibility or willingness to bend almost anything in order to achieve a desired end. Oh, to be a political cartoonist!

Let's dissect a few of Sean Treglia's charges against bloggers, and against William Schambra, and see what we discover. And let's start with one of his concluding paragraphs, which, I think, further enforces the perception that liberal foundations have enormous disdain for the unordained among us who, working without portfolio or license, pose a grave threat to the established order.

Some will continue to argue that the bloggers promoting the theories of conspiracy and cover-up are journalists. In my opinion they are not. They remind me of the lonely misanthropic men I see on the beach where I live each morning with metal detectors and headphones combing for hidden treasure buried just beneath the surface of the sand. Occasionally they raise their voice to interact with civilized society by shaking around a bag full of dented old cans and worthless rusted slugs claiming in some incoherent manner that they found treasure that no one else was crafty enough to locate. Of course, we all know the bag is filled with garbage. Just like the noise being made by some bloggers about my remarks.

Bloggers as beach-combing misanthropes? The bloggers I know are, in fact, gregarious creatures given to good fun and fellowship. Is Glenn Reynolds a surly loner? John Hinderaker a hater of men? Mark, Ryan, or I friendless collectors of junk? If anyone is sounding a sour note these days, its principal source isn't the blogosphere. And if you can't be happy living on the beach in Southern California, is there reason for hope?

Moreover, Mr. Treglia completely ignores the obvious fact that the story was broken by Ryan Sager writing in the New York Post, and not on his blog, Miscellaneous Objections. Several big media outlets picked up the Pew story, including the Washington Times, the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and the Weekly Standard. A lengthy report ran on Fox News. Mr. Schambra lists all of these sources, yet Mr. Treglia chooses to write as if bloggers alone took him at his word when he spoke at USC.

Mr. Treglia also engages in hyperbole and obfuscation on a scale that few bloggers could get away with. He writes:

By way of background, it is helpful to summarize the accusations made on the blogs at issue, something Mr. Schambra refers to as mere rhetorical excesses:

In fact, Mr. Schambra does not refer to any rhetorical excesses of bloggers, but rather to those of philanthropies:

Bloggers should also do shoe-leather reporting and investigating. Hollow, exaggerated claims for a foundation program's success could quickly be deflated by behind-the-scenes reports on what is really happening on the ground.

Amen to that. Then comes Mr. Treglia's list of alleged false charges made against him by bloggers, helpfully listed in one succinct paragraph:

As an executive at the Pew Charitable Trusts, I led a hidden liberal conspiracy that duped Congress, the President, and the Supreme Court into passing and upholding the constitutionality of campaign-finance reform. The conspiracy consisted of a group of eight of the nation's largest and most prestigious foundations, included all of the mainstream media who were silent co-conspirators, and was accomplished through hidden foundation grants to phony groups and organizations. As the story goes, I then delivered a secret speech (that just happened to be taped and that was later uncovered by a blogger) in which I describe the details of the conspiracy.

"Hidden liberal conspiracy," the MSM as "silent co-conspirators," "phony groups," and "a secret speech." The Bilderbergers never had it so good, it seems. But here Mr. Treglia is engaging in his own conspiracy mongering. Drawing on Sean Treglia's own words, bloggers and conservative news outlets never resorted to such a primitive characterization of Pew's handiwork. Rather, as I wrote at the time, what Mr. Treglia revealed was the degree to which the political class has worked, through the reform lobby in Washington, myriad studies funded by liberal foundations, and the creation of what John Fund of the Wall Street Journal called an "Astroturf" campaign, to restrict the means by which political campaigns could be funded, all in the name of the public good.

These efforts have had as their goal, and as their effect, the diminution of the franchise as a means of controlling who gets elected to office, and how often. Again, as many others have noted, campaign finance reform serves, first and foremost, incumbent politicians of both parties, their permanent staffs on Capitol Hill, and elite media outlets that form strong bonds with them and share their generally liberal political philosophy.

Here's how William Schambra described this scenario:

Traditional journalists tend to take at face value the research on public policies generated by major foundations and nonprofit organizations. Mr. Treglia tried at the University of Southern California meeting to explain to an audience of journalists how this can prepare the ground for political change, but they still saw nothing newsworthy in what he said. Most reporters pass on study results unskeptically, seldom inquiring into possible deeper political agendas.

That is because modern journalism and modern philanthropy are ideological twins. Both are heirs of American progressivism, which championed the displacement of parochial, partisan wrangling in public life by the nonpartisanship, objectivity, and professionalism of public-policy experts.

[Pew President] Ms. Rimel captured this perfectly in her response to "Pewgate" in a letter she wrote to The Wall Street Journal: "In an era of personal attacks and polarization, the Trusts strive to provide objective information and to seek common-ground solutions to many of our country's most vexing problems." Its approach has worked. As Martin Morse Wooster observed in a column in the Journal, "on NPR and in David Broder columns," Pew and its grantees "are treated as benign truth-tellers, so high-minded as to be beyond politics."

This is the crux of the problem: the presentation as apolitical and necessarily true studies funded by parties who have a decidedly partisan interest in their outcome. Mr. Schambra notes that conservative foundations have never been accorded the degree of latitude their liberal brethren have enjoyed, as journalists regularly cite "the conservative Heritage Foundation" and the like, but rarely give studies funded by left-leaning outfits similar levels of scrutiny. Martin Morse Wooster is correct: the liberal media treat these sources of information, much of it complex and detailed in social science studies or long academic treatises, without casting a critical eye toward the source of the funding, the agenda of the donor, or the veracity of the results.

That isn't to argue, and I have not done so, that such studies are never accurate, or that they should be viewed as necessarily false. That is surely not the case. It is to insist, however, that no journalist, from the left or right, meekly accept at face value research that may reflect the political beliefs and worldview of the funder. And it's also to demand that the liberal establishment be treated with as much skepticism as the right already receives.

More than anything else, it's the fact that Mr. Treglia's story was noticed, first in a traditional newspaper, then in blogs, and then in traditional outlets again, that illustrates the changes occurring in the world in which liberal foundations operate. It's why Sean Treglia's year-old talk became a huge story and an embarrassment to his former employer. And it's why his apostasy from the liberal foundation world has gone neither unnoticed nor, I'm sure, unpunished.

Update: Ryan Sager has responded to Sean Treglia's letter, and he easily refutes some of the former's more outrageous claims. In particular, Mr. Treglia says that an unnamed reporter called him and admitted that, in effect, he had done virtually no research. Ryan denies that flat out, and I think the quality of his work stands as yet another refutation of charges against him.

The saga of Gwinnett County, Ga., high school physics teacher Larry Neace continues to gain attention. Neace was fired after 23 years at Dacula High School for marking down the grade of a football player; my initial post covered the story and provides links to newspaper articles.

But the most informative, and impassioned, writing I've come across thus far is from reader Karen Armsby, a mother of two former Dacula High students with personal knowledge of the situation. Her letter, which I've reproduced below and edited to remove some personal information, is, first and foremost, filled with high praise for Larry Neace. But it is also a damning look at the process by which he was fired, and at the way Dacula High is run.

The picture that emerges is of a school where talented teachers feel unwelcome; many have voted with their feet and simply fled. It's a school in which academics are lower on the totem pole than process, where student spirit is crushed, and where the principal fails to adhere to professional standards of conduct. Ms. Armsby believes, in brief, that principal Donald Nutt allowed this conflict to escalate, and handled it poorly, in order to rid himself of this meddlesome teacher. In her conclusion, Ms. Armsby proposes a compromise to reinstate Larry Neace.

One further comment on Ms. Armsby's letter: note her family's extraordinary success in educating girls (who've grown into successful women) in the sciences and engineering. Given the uproar surrounding Harvard president Larry Summers's comments about women, the sciences, and innate differences in the sexes -- an uproar that ended with a $50 million capitulation by the Harvard administration -- it's noteworthy that Larry Neace, and of course Ms. Armsby, are in the forefront of creating opportunities for women in science and engineering. And her own children's academic success proves that she knows what she's talking about. This is an academically accomplished family, and their strong support for Larry Neace is an example of the kind of families who support him fully.

Here's the letter:

Dear Mr. [Superintendent J. Alvin] Wilbanks and GCPS Board Members,

I am writing to each of you in support of Dacula High School teacher Larry “Doc” Neace, a fine educator with the highest academic and ethical standards. I first had the pleasure of meeting Doc Neace about ten years ago on a Saturday field trip to a Georgia Tech program to inform middle and high school girls about engineering education and career opportunities. At that time I did not have a high opinion about science education in Gwinnett County, where in elementary and middle school the only science experiment seemed to be growing bean plants year after year. After our conversation that Saturday, I felt that Doc Neace was a shining light of hope in Dacula for science education, and that my kids could learn some good science at Dacula High School.

And my hopes were fulfilled. My oldest daughter graduated with high honors from Georgia Tech last year in architecture and is now a graduate student at Rice University in Houston. The physics she had with Doc Neace at Dacula HS helped to prepare her for the rigors of Tech physics and her present studies at Rice. My second daughter completed her sophomore year at Georgia Tech, and is doing well in physics, which is fundamental to her major of mechanical engineering. She had Steve Flynt for chemistry and physics, and my son Gardner had Jonathan Crymes for physics. I have nothing but praise for the Dacula HS science department, which over the years has developed high standards, in great measure I believe, under the experienced guidance of Mr. Larry Neace.

I was stunned when I heard that Mr. Neace was being fired. After talking to parents and former teachers of Dacula HS I knew I had to attend the hearing before the Board, which I did, and stayed to the very bitter end, stunned again.

Mr. Neace has had his class policy of “not wasting time” in place for ten years, and testified that he studied the board policies each year to make sure that his syllabus policies were in compliance. He submitted his syllabus each semester for approval by the administration and never received any negative feedback. He sent his syllabus home with his students who reviewed it and signed an attestation that they understood it, and agreed to abide by the policies.

If you look at Mr. Neace’s policy in his syllabus he does not say directly that there will be points awarded for participation, and this fact was accurately pointed out by Mr. Wilbanks’s attorney in the hearing. However, in reply Doc Neace explained that participation “was built into his policy.” Doc sees “wasting time in class” as a failure to participate. Positive points awarded for “participation” in one class syllabus would apparently pass muster with the school system and board as an academic assessment, but the negative statement that “wasting time results in zero points” is viewed by the school system and board as a discipline issue. I think it is reasonable to say that if someone is wasting time in class, then they are not participating. In the past ten years there had not been even one previous challenge to Doc’s participation policy. He thought he followed the rules. But suddenly, with one student complaint, his policy was declared invalid, and his career ended. [emphasis added]

I understand the central issues that Mr. Wilbanks presented to the Board were the charges of insubordination and neglect of duty; that Mr. Neace apparently violated the Board policy which prohibits disciplining a student with grade reductions, and that he refused to change the grade. What I cannot understand is how the firing occurred within four workdays, over a two week span, one week of which was spring break! How could you rush to judgment, and give an ultimatum of resign or be terminated to an accomplished veteran science teacher who had an unblemished 23 year career record, without first doing a full investigation of the facts, without getting Mr. Neace’s statement, without answering, but instead dismissing his concerns about his state issued teaching certificate, and without giving him even an ounce of the respect he has earned? [emphasis added] And let’s focus on the impact on student learning; how could you abruptly deprive his 140 students of their teacher at the end of the year?

Because of the failure to fully investigate this matter you did not discover that Mr. Neace was essentially set up. The root of the problem is Dacula High School’s Principal, Donald Nutt, who first showed his intentions when he removed Mr. Neace as Science Department Chairman soon after Nutt became principal. Mr. Nutt, as Mr. Neace’s superior, should have had full knowledge of Mr. Neace’s syllabus, and should have known whether it complied with county policies. Mr. Nutt should have first gone to Mr. Neace to discuss the parent’s complaint, but instead he sent an AP to set up a meeting. Mr. Nutt obtained no information from his own teacher, but he had both talked on the phone and met with the parent before the meeting. Clearly, Mr. Nutt abandoned all professional behavior when, as he testified, he allowed the parent to begin the meeting, when he allowed the parent to rant and curse at Mr. Neace for 10-15 minutes, and finally when Mr. Nutt confronted and admonished Mr. Neace in front of the parent, and demanded that he change the grade. I can’t believe that Mr. Nutt followed any GCPS professional guidelines, or Board policies in his manipulation and mishandling of this situation. [emphasis added]

I believe that Mr. Nutt used this opportunity to rid himself and Dacula High School of Mr. Neace. Mr. Nutt’s actions have been authoritarian, and he’s had a lock-down policy since he arrived at Dacula. His rules and policies squashed student spirit the very first year when he forbad students to decorate lockers or hang banners for sport or academic achievements, a tradition at Dacula and many Gwinnett high schools. He stopped morning and afternoon club announcements. He turned off the TV’s on 9/11, creating intense anxiety in our students! If you recall, several years ago a complaint was made by a DHS English teacher about a white student portraying a black character in their theater production of John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men.” (no black students auditioned for the part!) The Theater teacher, whose production was approved, had coordinated with the language arts teachers teaching the novel that term. The protesting teacher had not even read the classic, shame on him, and he gave his students extra credit for writing protest letters to the Principal. Rather than correct the errant English teacher, Mr. Nutt decided that the Dacula community would be harmed by viewing the timeless classic and he stopped the show. Fortunately, the show went on at the 14th St. Theater in Atlanta, thanks to their generosity. [emphasis added]

Mr. Nutt’s policies have also created a low morale environment for staff and teachers. According to my kids’ former teachers who transferred to more teacher-friendly schools, you only have to look at the turnover of Dacula HS teachers and see the loss of veteran teachers and influx of newer inexperienced ones, essentially a dumbing down of the faculty. Nutt has a staff and faculty comprised of those he can control, or those that don’t complain. However, Mr. Nutt couldn’t break Mr. Neace, and Doc wasn’t about to leave the school he loved and where he had spent most of his career. I propose that Mr. Nutt seized this parent’s complaint as his opportunity to get rid of Doc Neace, and that the confrontation unfolded and escalated as Mr. Nutt allowed it to develop. [emphasis added]

I am not a teacher, just a mom of three kids who have gone entirely through Dacula schools, K-12, and I volunteered in the schools in many ways over the years. We have lived in Dacula almost 21 years, and I cannot stand by idly and let Doc Neace’s dismissal stand. I am not alone, and there has been a huge public outcry to support Doc. There are over 900 entries on three blogs set up on the AJC’s Get Schooled website, plus many news articles, TV interviews, and blogs across the state and the country, from the “OC” in California, to North Dakota, Pennsylvania, and even up to Toronto, Canada. Once again, Dacula and the Gwinnett County Public Schools look like dunces.

The biggest problem I see with GCPS is that there has been an increasing trend over the years to establish more rules, guidelines, policies, and layers of bureaucracy. The “business” of education is losing its focus on learning. The black and white adherence to rules and no tolerance policies doesn’t reflect what happens in the real world where dialogue, intent, totality of circumstances, and due process are considered. [emphasis added] I think GCPS management has lost the power of dialogue, of listening and discussing. If dialogue and critical thinking are constrained at the top, that attitude flows down through management and affects the teachers and students. Sadly, Dacula’s own Board representative, Carol Boyce, who knows Dacula High School best, who voted against Doc’s termination, was overruled by the influence and dicta of the GCPS management.

Dacula High School is “Focused on Learning.” So, what is learning? It seems to me that to GCPS administrators it is achieving the AKS skills; it’s test performance statistics; and it’s adhering to rules, even in the face of ambiguities. There are many rules we have to follow throughout our lives, and I am not saying rules are not needed. However, I think our teachers and students should not be so constrained by a rule and policy structure that they lose the power of dialogue and the freedom of critical thinking, with the result that they can’t develop the love of learning that goes on long after formal education has finished.

Doc Neace is dedicated to that love of learning, and he has inspired so many students, regardless of what grade they made in his classes. He taught them to think critically, to research, and to interact with him and their classmates; in other words, to have a meaningful dialogue.

I think this situation can be salvaged with both sides gaining a favorable and face-saving outcome. It would take concessions by both sides, adjustment of the wording of Board Policy and a change of Doc’s wording of his policy on his syllabus. And it should be carried out with the guidance of a registered third party neutral, or mediator. In the process the school system should examine the confrontational process used in this case and adjust its policy of how administrators handle GCPS business with the teachers who are handling the education. Everyone lost in this situation. Gwinnett County Schools lost a great teacher and is getting a lot of bad press. Doc Neace’s stellar career has been put in jeopardy, and the most damaged are the Dacula HS physics students, who lost their teacher at a critical time in the semester. If both sides can admit that a series of misunderstandings, miscues, mishandlings and mistakes were made, and then work to a reasonable adjustment, then GCPS can save face, Doc can resume teaching, and the students can salvage their learning. It is not just about who’s the boss or letter of the law, it’s about each side caring for the human outcome of students learning.

Sincerely,
/s/ Karen Armsby
Karen Armsby

Copy via e-mail: Mr. Larry Neace, State School Superintendent Kathy Cox, and members of the State Board of Education

Update: Yesterday Neace was the subject of an excellent editorial in the Toledo Blade, hardly the place one would expect to find editorial space devoted to Georgia education matters.

But the machine that Larry Neace ran into -- unprincipled principals, politicized board members, and a good ole' boy network to rival Tammany Hall -- isn't peculiar to Gwinnett. Unfortunately, it's commonplace these days, especially given the enormous influence of the National Education Association, one of the largest lobbying organizations in Washington. That, coupled with the anti-intellectual, politically correct practices of most colleges of education, produces too few teachers such as Larry Neace, and too many administrators similar to the folks in charge in Gwinnett.

Here's the Blade's editorial, which is worth quoting in full:

Sports vs. academics

Here's more evidence that sports too often trumps academic achievement in our schools: A Georgia school board fired a high school science teacher who refused to raise a football player's grade on an assignment because the young man appeared to be asleep in class.

Common sense suggests that Dacula High School science teacher Larry Neace should be congratulated instead. In an era when too many American students are not keeping pace with their competitors elsewhere in the world, he struck a blow for responsible behavior. If anything, the incident should have proven that athletes who don't follow the rules don't get favors at Dacula High School, near Atlanta.

But the Gwinnett County School Board didn't see it that way, and voted 4-to-1 to fire Mr. Neace, who taught there for 23 years. The district's sane and sensible people, including students, parents, and other teachers, were properly shocked and attended a school board meeting to support Mr. Neace, whose attorneys will appeal the dismissal to the Georgia state board of education.

For years the teacher enforced a policy that wasting class time can result in a failing mark. No administrator had previously complained. The football player turned in his assignment on time, and he would have received good marks for it. But his inattention during class brought him a zero.

Instead of applauding Mr. Neace, the district nailed him for insubordination. The teacher refused to restore the football player's grade as instructed, and was told he could resign or risk being fired because of a board policy not to use grades as a disciplinary tool.

Frankly, it's the district, not the teacher, that needs to re-examine its policy. Georgia's board of education should restore the physics teacher to his job. And then the voters of Gwinnett County need to do some firing of their own in the next election - namely, the school board members who ousted a teacher for daring to demand his students' best effort.

That's about as succinct and spot on as anything I could write, so I'll let it pass without further comment, except to congratulate the editors of the Blade for doing their homework and helping to bring what might have been a small, local story to national attention.

Here's the lineup for TRUE NORTH, for the week of MAY 23, 2005:

Monday: KEN MASUGI, Director of the Center for Local Government at California’s Claremont Institute. Ken and I will discuss whether the so-called “nuclear option”** would be a judicious means of finally resolving years of obstruction of nominations to the federal judiciary. Ken served as a special assistant to the Chairman of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, who at that time was Clarence Thomas. After a career in Washington, Ken held a number of university appointments, including as the Olin Distinguished Visiting Professor at the U.S. Air Force Academy. He is the author, co-author, or editor of a number of books concerning the Constitution and American political thought. Ken also publishes widely in the popular press, including the Los Angeles Times, Orange County Register, Washington Post, Washington Times, National Review, and the Weekly Standard.

**This goofy term was coined not by Democrats, as is popularly assumed, but by that perpetual embarrassment to the Republican party, Mississippi Senator Trent Lott. Lott’s wingtip-in-mouth problems go back WAY before his Strom Thurmond birthday blunder. Back in 1997, Kate O’Beirne got his number just right, in this discussion of the Kelly Flinn fiasco. True to form, the opportunistic Lott has been urging a "compromise," cheerfully offering to help the Democrats tank several of the President’s ABA-qualified nominees.

In response to Focus on the Family’s objections to this, Lott, as intemperate as he is opportunistic, lashes out at James Dobson’s daring to question his ‘conservative credentials’ by questioning Dobson’s Christian credentials:

"'James Dobson: Who does he think he is, questioning my conservative credentials? Some of his language and conduct is quite un-Christian, and I don't appreciate it,’ the senator said."

Tuesday: JIM BEERS, who retired from the US Fish and Wildlife Service after a 30-year career as a wildlife biologist, wetlands biologist, special agent, and refuge manager. Jim was a Congressional Fellow in Washington, D.C., and held the high position of Chief of Operations for the National Wildlife Refuge System. He was, for seven years, the wildlife biologist in the National Wildlife Refuge System’s Central Office. During the Clinton Administration, Jim exposed $45 million of government-agency abuses done in collusion with animal rights and environmental organizations. (You can read his Congressional testimony online.) He was rewarded for exposing this monumental corruption by having all work assignments taken from him, and being sent home. After 9 months, Jim accepted a cash settlement and retired. He then began writing columns and has become a much sought-after speaker on property rights. You can read some of Jim’s columns in Outdoors Magazine and at the web site of Alliance for America.

Wednesday: JIM BARNETT, the EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF THE VERMONT GOP, will give us his insights into what’s happening—or failing to happen—in this legislative session.

Thursday: BILL SAYRE, formerly with the U.S. Federal Reserve, now a Member of the Board of Directors of Associated Industries of Vermont; of the Vermont Chamber of Commerce; and of the Vermont Forest Products Association. A student of Milton Friedman's (among other Nobel Laureates), Bill received his MBA in economics/finance from the University of Chicago. We’ll be discussion John Bolton’s nomination to the U.N.

Friday: ROB ROPER, Vermont State Director of the grassroots organization FREEDOMWORKS, whom you’ll find here. An award-winning copywriter from Young & Rubicam, he’s a long-time Vermont communications and marketing professional. Prior to becoming Founding Director of the state’s chapter of Freedomworks, Rob served as Media Relations officer for Jack McMullen’s 2004 campaign for the U.S. Senate. We'll be discussing the attempt to force through an Early Childhood Ed bill that has the potential to put many, perhaps most, private daycare providers out of business. We'll also discuss the uneasy compromises being forged in universal health care legislation.

Contact the show:

Waterbury/Montpelier area: 244-1777

Long distance from anywhere: 1-877-291-TALK or 1-877-291-8255

HOW TO HEAR THE SHOW

Tune in to WDEV 550 AM/96.1 FM or to WSYB 1380 AM to hear TRUE NORTH live, from 11:05 a.m. till noon, EDT, Monday through Friday.

Should you miss a show, don't forget: each week we post the previous week's shows on our website, so you can listen to those you missed online. Just go to truenorthradio.com, and click on ARCHIVES.

The murders taking place in Iraq are being carried out, post-invasion, by terrorist elements of the old Baathist regime who seek to bring back tyranny and stomp out all hopes for democracy. That fact, which is beyond dispute, is distorted when reporters refer to these killers as "insurgents," which grants them a patina of legitimacy they don't deserve.

But at least reporters refer to them (and with gusto). After all, they highlight what the far left (and far right) see as efforts by indigenous forces to drive the Yankee invader out of their nation; to "reclaim" it, they chant, for Iraqis. This stance, which costs its advocates nothing, shouldn't surprise us, though, because we've seen it all before in Iran (and Vietnam, and Afghanistan, and Cuba, and Nicaragua, and El Salvador, and even the USSR).

In Iran, we saw in the West's response to the overthrow of the Shah an excellent example of the moral nihilism Pope Benedict has condemned. When the Shah was expelled, there was much rejoicing among academics in America, who saw the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as the embodiment of justifiable, indigenous anti-Americanism. Even after the mass executions begin, I recall hearing a distinguished history professor at UGA declare that we weren't in a position to condemn anyone, since this was "indigenous culture" at work. That argument is echoed in some of the reporting from Iraq today.

In contemporary Iran, where the mad mullahs slay and torture their people with abandon, few Western journalists transmit an accurate picture of just how awful life there is for those who love freedom. Search Google News for "Iran" this morning, and you'll discover that the only execution reported is of a convicted rapist.

This MSM silence means that bloggers need to take the lead in ensuring that democracy activists in Iran are not forgotten in the West. The blog American Daughter has catalogued, in two recent posts you'll find here and here, the torture and execution of these brave souls. Warning: these photos are alarming, and sickening, and you should steel yourself before viewing them.

But view them you should, and, if you're a blogger, link to them as well. The fascistic regime in Iran poses a grave threat through its nuclear programs, yet there exists a home-grown opposition. But few in the West know much about it, or its sufferings, because it has received precious little attention from elite media here. After all, the mullahs are anti-American, and so, like the Iraqi "insurgents," they can't be all bad, can they?

Update: American Daughter has linked to several posts that follow up their superb, and vital, work on this unjustly neglected story. I urge you to follow the links and, again, spread the word if you're a blogger. There is really no excuse for the silence this story has received from the MSM.

Which is to say, some of it -- a great deal of it, in fact -- is good. But, as usual, you'll have to turn to sources that originate somewhere in that great gray world where people don't worry about traffic around the outer loop of the Beltway or tie-ups at the Lincoln Tunnel.

Like, say, Australia, where Arthur Chrenkoff has posted another of his veritable volumes of alternative views: Good News from Iraq, Part 28.

Fired Gwinnett County, Ga., high school physics teacher Larry Neace continues to garner media attention. (My initial story on him is here.)

The latest is a thoughtful essay by another high school teacher, Kay McSpadden, who teaches English in York, SC. Writing in today's Charlotte Observer, she calls Neace's firing "a lose-lose situation that didn't have to happen."

Ms. McSpadden is sympathetic to Mr. Neace, at least in her tone and her belief that he needn't have been fired for his actions, which amounted to lowering the grade of a student and then refusing to raise it when ordered to do so by his principal. I hadn't known until reading it in her piece that Mr. Neace feared the loss of his teaching licence if he followed that order because, as Ms. McSpadden puts it, "Changing a grade for any reason other than computational error is grounds for losing a teaching license in many counties."

That put him in a bit of a difficult spot, to say the least, but her initial point -- that some compromise might have been reached -- makes a great deal of sense.

She also takes on the sports angle, a central fact in some critics' eyes:

"What this case really boils down to is, who is the boss," Vicki Sweeny, attorney for the school district said later.

Neace's lawyers suggest a more sinister motive. "What we have in this case is a case of a pampered football athlete sleeping in class and being given favored treatment on an academic grade. What we have here is the principal essentially attempting to coerce and intimidate a teacher," said Michael M. Kramer, one of Neace's lawyers.

Many observers agree that this case highlights some of the tricky problems that teachers navigate in the classroom. Do certain groups of students get special treatment? Do parents and administrators sometimes pressure teachers to alter grades? Could both sides in the Neace case have found common cause in a less confrontational setting?

Yes, yes, and yes. What is not so clear is the stickier issue of how grades and behavior are connected in the first place [emphasis added].

That last line is the real crux of the controversy as it pertains to public education, since there are other strict teachers who, like Larry Neace, don't hesitate to penalize students who goof off or sleep through class. Lost in much of the commentary is a simple fact: teachers who truly care about their students won't make popularity a goal, nor will they approach teenagers as peers. Rather, they'll expect more of them and, by doing so, expect them to work hard, exercise self-discipline, and thereby gain not only an understanding of the subject being taught, but learn lessons that will last a lifetime.

Ms. McSpadden's most incisive comments deal with the subject that is at the heart of Larry Neace's termination: student behavior.

Grades are affected all the time by student behavior. A student leaves out questions on a test because he doesn't have time to finish. Does that test accurately measure what he knows, or does it show how fast he can work? A student loses points for turning in a major project late, or gets a zero on homework left sitting on his desk at home. Are those grades genuine measures of his academic achievement? A student has a head cold, or he is worried about the argument that he overheard his parents having that morning, or he woke up late and didn't have time to eat anything before school. Everything that student does that day to demonstrate his academic achievement -- every test he takes, every essay he writes, every answer he gives in class -- is influenced by his behavior as he wrestles with his real life. Pretending otherwise is ridiculous.

When bureaucracies fail to account for how life is lived, whether in medicine or welfare or education, real people are affected, sometimes adversely. And few bureaucracies are run by elites who are less connected to the people most affected by their actions than that which controls public education. With degrees in "education," and little if any classroom experience, at least in the recent past, educrats, and their masters at the NEA and AFT, too often work to ensure their own job security rather than needs of the students they serve. Larry Neace learned that lesson the hard way, as did the students who depended on him to prepare them for college and, more importantly, life. Chalk one up for those for whom education is a process, not a means.

Over the last year, I've had occasion to write a fair amount about the deleterious effects on American culture and foreign policy wrought by the Boomer generation. I'm a member of that benighted demographic group, albeit a late arrival. As the most affluent and privileged generation, to that point, in American history, we were handed opportunities our parents could only dream of, and for which they and their parents' generation were directly responsible. America was ascendant in the world, a fact that too many have come to take for granted or, among the literati and political class, condemn as a blight on an otherwise pristine planet.

I've long thought that many of my peers, and most particularly those who're ten to fifteen years my senior -- the immediate post-war Boomers -- came to despise the world of their parents and grandparents not because they were graced by better ideas or clearer vision, but because they never had to worry about what, historically, has been the lot of mankind: eking out a living from poor soil; feeding a family with too little food; protecting their belongings from marauding armies or tribes; burying one dead child after another; taking refuge in foreign and often hostile lands; knowing personally the boot heel of authoritarian or dictatorial regimes.

Which is to say, they (we) have escaped, by the extraordinary blessings heaped upon our country, and the hard work and sacrifice of those who preceded us, what was until recently the common fate of all peoples. For this, we should first of all give thanks, every day. But we should also understand, in our marrow, that none of this resulted from the "accidents of history" to which our self-proclaimed intellectual betters so often attribute our success.

No, our nation, and the freedoms and security we enjoy and take for granted, was built purposefully by men and women who strove for goals that were either in sight, just over the horizon, or but a hope, a desire that could some day become reality. That's not to say they were clairvoyant, or that none would be surprised if they could see us now. But it is to argue that their labors were done with a purpose in mind, within and supported by a system of laws, rights, and obligations that gave their striving greater meaning, and happier results, than any people had known before. They did not act blindly, and when they acted capriciously, as some of course did, their failures and shortcomings, even when unethical or sinful, were not sufficient to destroy what others were accomplishing.

An analogy to this can be drawn to producing a work of literature, poetry, or nonfiction. Back when I taught intellectual history in college, we read primary sources from antiquity to the modern era. Students schooled, too often poorly, by teachers who were themselves subjected to the methodological madness that substitutes for pedagogy in most colleges of education, attempted bizarre, ahistorical, or psychological readings of works produced by the greatest minds of the West. So each semester, I labored, usually with some success, to disabuse my charges of these simple-minded views that robbed art of its artistry, and individuals of their accomplishments.

Authors write with a purpose, I told them; the works assigned to you were not produced by accident. Long hours, sometimes years of labor, went into their production. To deny that is to reveal your own ignorance, not the author's; learn to read, and you'll learn to think. Skip this lesson, and your life will be poorer until the day you die.

Victor Davis Hanson knows this, and writes about it with more verve and skill, than just about anyone who covers current events. That's because he brings not just skill, smarts, and remarkable energy to the task, but because his own reading allows him to take the long view of our contemporary world. He does that again this morning in a remarkable exercise of imagination in a Washington Times op-ed titled "Critical Astigmatism."

It consists principally of what a speech delivered by President Bush on September 12, 2001, might have looked like had it included all of the historical events achieved since that time. And, as Hanson says, had anyone on that day dared to put forward a plan so ambitious, "most of us would have dismissed him as utterly unhinged. But that is precisely what has come to pass."

It's Hanson's way of illustrating that, in spite of the adolescent whining of the President's critics, it is they, and not the President himself, who today seem unhinged. To claim, as so many in the Moveon.org or even "mainstream" opposition do, that the overthrow of the Taliban, the defeat of Saddam, elections in both countries, the removal of Syrian troops from Lebanon, the reform efforts underway in Egypt and the Gulf States are all coincidental or the happy results of the bumbling efforts of a half-literate fool is to choose ignorance over knowledge, spite over composure. And this is true in spite of the horrendous deaths still occurring in Iraq, deaths caused by remnants of the old regime whose minions intend to destroy any hope of peace and prosperity; who grew used to and fond of killing and dismembering their opponents and who are loathe to give up such privileges.

Read VDH's fictional speech end to end, and ask what he asks: would anyone have believed any of this at the time? Clearly not, and for good reasons. Then ask, why do some still refuse to acknowledge the changes this administration has caused? I'd posit that it has more to do with intellectual dishonesty, a penchant for petulance, and a desire to embrace a worldview that knows little of struggle and sacrifice, but much of privilege and opportunity, and which takes all that for granted. And which is losing ground, day by day, in a post-9/11 world that has little patience with the eternal adolescence of its most self-important generation.

Joe Knippenberg has two notable posts today, the first of which uses a word I hadn't seen before (and which gets all of nine returns at Google): Zellocrat.

Actually, Joe uses it in quoting a former student of his at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta. She stopped by for a chat and, recalling that she was active in Democratic party circles during her school days, Joe asked her if she still belonged. Here's how he explains her answer:

She chuckled and said, "well, I’m a Zellocrat." She voted for GWB last fall, for reasons that are perfectly intelligible to anyone who pays attention to these matters. She has two handsome and lovely children, ages six and eight, so the "parent gap" comes into play. And she attends this church. So, in addition to the other cultural sticking points that make it difficult for her to return to the Democratic fold, there’s abortion and gay marriage. She might have voted for Joe Lieberman, she said, so she’s not exactly a "theocrat."

But until the Democrats can appeal to the Zellocrats on these perfectly obvious grounds, they’re playing a losing hand, not only (I think) in my part of the country, but all over.

The second piece deals with the President's commencement address at Calvin College tomorrow, and the work of some faculty members and students to express their displeasure at his appearance. (I wrote about the controversy Wednesday.) Joe links to an article in Christianity Today, "Bush Visit to Calvin College Exposes Divisions," which offers a good look at campus reaction and places the Christian Reformed Church (formerly Dutch Reformed) within the wider field of evangelicalism.

There were no protests, at least not inside the building, this morning when the President spoke at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast. The speech is short and worth reading, as it demonstrates the President's comfort in addressing what, until a few decades ago, was seen as a foreign element in American culture.

The speech was humorous:

Thank you for that warm reception -- especially for a Methodist. (Laughter and applause.)

. . . The Catholic contribution to American freedom goes back to the founding of our country. In 1790, a newly inaugurated George Washington -- the first George W. -- (laughter and applause) -- addressed a letter to all Catholics in America.

Patriotic:

This morning we pray for the many Catholics who serve America in the cause of freedom. One of them is an Army Chaplain named Tim Vakoc. He's a beloved priest who was seriously wounded in Iraq last May. We pray for his recovery, we're inspired by his sacrifice. In the finest tradition of American chaplains, he once told his sister, "The safest place for me to be is in the center of God's will, and if that is in the line of fire, that's where I'll be." Father Tim's sister, Anita Brand, and her family, are with us today, and a grateful nation expresses our gratitude to a brave Reverend. (Applause.)

And unapologetically pro-life:

Catholics have made sacrifices throughout American history because they understand that freedom is a divine gift that carries with it serious responsibilities. Among the greatest of these responsibilities is protecting the most vulnerable members of our society.

After his commencement address at Calvin College tomorrow, I'll relay any news I can find about the address and the audience's reaction.

This week's post from the Coalition for Darfur us up, and, again, the picture it paints is depressing. The slaughter continues apace.

If ever an organization was screaming in desperation for reform it is the United Nations. Long term John Bolton may be the UN’s last, best help for survival. But the hard core group of kleptocratic states, corrupt career bureaucrats, starry-eyed internationalists, and inveterate appeasers that make up the bulwark of UN supporters here and abroad do not see it that way. They are too committed to the true believer’s mantra of multilateralism uber alles. Consequently they are fully prepared to sacrifice any democratic country or any number of helpless citizens on the altar of the false god called Stability.

Over the rather shameful decades of the UN’s existence this tendency has been exacerbated, often aided and abetted by the internationalist hard left and, more recently by the Democratic Party and New Left in America. The traditional sacrifices to these false gods, Multilateralism and Stability, have been Israel and Taiwan, although the United States has certainly taken more than its share of castigation, libel, and slander. Truth be told: if we were smaller, weaker, and poorer, we’d be fried by these UN thugs.

While Israel and America at least have the distinction – however dubious it seems at times – of being members of the UN, Taiwan is denied even that. In a perfect world one could exercise Marxist observations – Groucho not Karl – and declare that Taiwan would not wish to be a member of any organization that would accept it. However, poor humor aside, it is utterly shameful that Taiwan is deliberately excluded from UN membership. It speaks to the moral cowardice and continued ineffectiveness of the organization that such a condition persists. Just as Bolton successfully fought the condemnation of Zionism, the admission of Taiwan to the UN would be a fitting challenge for a man of his talent.

However, he is still slogging through the abundant fray produced by insect-brained Democrat and gutless Republican Senators. Bolton chaffs in Washington while the UN sinks deeper into a morass of immorality brought about by its abject cowardice. Case in point this time is so seemingly insignificant as to make one wonder “why do they bother with this kind of petty harassment?” But they do.

There is an upcoming meeting of the World Health Assembly, an adjunct of World Health Organization, a UN sub-agency. For years China has exerted its considerable influence within the UN to keep Taiwan out of all possible UN organizations including WHO, and that includes pushing them out of a WFA conference. This is a totally illogical position, especially from a country like China that hit the panic button hard over SARS and sits on a rural time bomb of avian influenza that has the potential of launching a global pandemic. Given the possible world health disaster that China could promulgate wouldn’t it make sense to seek involvement of Taiwanese scientists and researchers as well as those from the rest of the developed world? Not to China, apparently because it persists in using all of its influence and every subterfuge to exclude Taiwan from WHA.

It a move designed to lock in the Bully of the Month award, China has successfully convinced the spineless lackeys at the UN to exclude even Taiwanese reporters from covering the above-mentioned World Health Assembly. In order to be accredited to the conference, the UN stipulated this year that reporters ‘must present a current
passport from a state recognized by the UN.’ Since every state but democratic Taiwan is a member of the UN (including, of course, some that practice the most horrible abuses upon their citizens, e.g., North Korea, Sudan, and the afore-mentioned China) the exclusion is clearly aimed at Taiwan’s press.

That this exclusion is fatuous and petty goes without saying. But more troubling, it underlies a deeper moral fault that one expects in a communist ruled state like China: The political goals of the Party outweigh all other considerations, including the possibility of launching another global plague. However, is it too much to hope for the UN rise above such behavior? In an idealized UN, closer perhaps to the version that FDR and the WWII generation visualized, the organization would reject Chinese interference and do the proper, courageous thing. Taiwan would be admitted as a member, and its representatives would be allowed, indeed encouraged, to make a contribution to world improvement.

The world realistically has higher expectations for positive Taiwanese contributions than from say Mugabwe’s Zimbawbe or Assad’s Syria, to pick but two examples from a large, indeed overflowing, pot of incompetence. On the other hand, what could we expect from an organization like the UN that condemns Israel but applauds homicide bombers? Perhaps denunciation and condemnation by the UN General Assembly is a left-handed compliment, the equivalent of praise by morally courageous people.

Despite gallant efforts by the Taipei Cultural and Information Office in New York, it is probably too late to influence the exclusionary decision in the UN for this WHA conference. Nevertheless, the Taipei Office’s acting director is asking for sympathetic Americans to contact Kofi Annan, and ask him to lift the ban. Annan is probably much too distracted with engineering his own ‘exoneration’ from the Oil for Food scandal to worry about UN moral failures. Also, we could contact the US Mission to the UN and request that America put pressure on the Annan. Unfortunately, as long as the Democrats continue to use Just Say No as the core principle for their legislative behavior we don’t have a strong ambassador to lead the charge.

The small points – harassment of Taiwan, crackdown on freedom of the press, caving to a bully’s pressure – are important and cry for action. But the greater point to be made is that the UN as a functional, productive, moral institution has disappeared, if indeed it ever existed. Universal condemnation of valiant, steadfast democracies such as Taiwan and Israel have shown the organization to be irreparably, morally bankrupt. The UN could well be past the point that even a single strong willed reformer of the caliber of John Bolton could affect change. Meanwhile, this reprehensible behavior reinforces the fact that it is proper and useful to continue a thorough inspection of the UN, exposing all of its corruption to public scrutiny. And it is time to ask ourselves, are we at the point where America, our allies, and the world will benefit more from an international organization of democracies rather than the gang of fascist, communist, kleptocracies that now dominate the UN? How may more slaps in the face do Taiwan, Israel, and America need before we make the right decision?

Such is my philosophy on the First Amendment as it applies to, of all things, political speech. It's a position I've taken many times over the course of debates over the attempt by the Democratic members of the FEC to insert the federal government into web-based writing, including blogs.

Today's Washington Examiner, a new free newspaper in the nation's capital, runs an editorial that expresses the same sentiment. More importantly, it does so to an audience desperately in need of exposure to a common sense, Constitutional approach to free speech. Here's the heart of their argument:

[O]ur democracy would happen a lot better if politicians and government regulators got their hands off the campaign finance system and realized that, when it comes to ensuring an honest, fair and accountable system, less is more.

First, let's begin by laying out two basic principles that should be common sense by now. When we talk about "freedom of speech," money is - and should be - included in that category. "But more money means a bigger voice! Bigger influence!" the critics scream. Perhaps. But try telling The New York Times or the Fox News Channel that they should stop spending money trying to make their news operations as influential and popular as possible. The First Amendment is not just for journalists, it is for everyone.

Regardless of the current Supreme Court's current twisting of the law, there are NO exceptions.

Second, politics is dirty - always has been, always will be. If there were a quick fix to this enduring truism, you can rest assured someone would have figured it out sometime since Athenians started voting for their leaders.

The question, then, is how to best minimize the corrupting effect money naturally has on politics. The answer is sunshine.

This solution -- the Constitutional approach to political speech -- is so commonsensical that one's head spins at the intellectual vacuity of arguments against it. And we've heard them all before: money is the root of all (political) evil; Americans deserve to be told the truth, not lied to by campaign flacks; politicians will be bought and sold like cattle absent some regulation.

What all of these arguments amount to, of course, is the regulation of political discourse by the political class. Nowhere was this better illustrated than Pewgate, which I've written about extensively and which William Schambra covered better than anyone else in a recent issue of the Chronicle of Philanthropy. This issue is now off-line to non-subscribers, buy you may download a pdf version of it from our site here.

At least now a debate has ensued, much to the consternation of the "reform" lobby, and legislation has been introduced into both Houses of Congress that would exempt the Net from McCain-Feingold's intrusive and, surely, unconstitutional influence. But the bottom line is, and has always been, that all regulation of political speech is forbidden by the First Amendment, and we should never allow our rights to be taken away by the self-serving do-gooders in Washington or elsewhere.

Well, at least it's time for the fifteenth Carnival of Education. They linked to this post of mine last week, for which I am most grateful.

Larry Neace, the Gwinnett county, Georgia, high school physics teacher fired for lowering the grade of a student who slept in class and then refusing to raise it when ordered to do so, is appealing the decision to fire him, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (registration).

Michael Kramer, an attorney for Larry Neace, filed a motion for reconsideration with the board Monday. The motion argues the punishment was too harsh and did not fit the facts of the case. The board could have suspended Neace for 60 days, Kramer said.

. . . In a six-page motion, Kramer wrote that the board lacked good cause to fire Neace.

Kramer said that the board's policy was ambiguous and that Neace's rules never had been challenged. He also cited Neace's teaching experience as a reason to keep him.

Kramer said he still plans to appeal the Gwinnett board's decision to the State Board of Education.

The Gwinnett Daily Post adds some information that, objectively, supports Neace:

Neace’s attorneys, appointed by the Georgia Association of Educators, asked the Gwinnett County school board to reconsider the termination and consider another punishment, citing Neace’s “unblemished” 23 years of service.

“He had never been disciplined for anything and had nothing but satisfactory evaluations in those 23 years,” said a document sent to all of the board members and the school system’s attorney. “The obvious lack of any past incident in Mr. Neace’s employment is a clear predictor of the complete unlikelihood of any future events.”

Neace said his attorneys will also file an appeal with the Georgia Department of Education before June 6.

The story was covered on NPR this past Monday by the Atlanta affiliate in a story you can listen to here. I think it's a fair wrap-up of the tale, and you'll get to hear Larry Neace defend himself. He says that the class in question had 20 minutes left before the bell rang, and so he told the students to begin an assignment to be turned in the next morning; he adds that every student knew his policy against wasting time in class. To boot, a student says that many of her peers go to sleep in their classes, including some who sit in the front row. Neace, it appears, was doing what he could to get his charges to participate in class, but the County didn't agree with his tactics.

Neace's tale has received international attention, as the Globe and Mail has a story today that paints a sympathetic picture of the dismissed teacher. In fact, this is the best single story I've found on the whole sorry tale, and I urge you to read it in its entirety. It's also notable that the reporter, William Lin, quotes Michael King, who blogs at Ramblings' Journal, as a source, an excellent sign that some of our Canadian friends understand the importance that bloggers can play in producing a more accurate story:

Some on-line commentators have echoed the sentiment:

"This is a case of a pampered football player and a school administration whose priorities are completely screwed up. The principal is obviously more concerned about this football player than about education and commensurate discipline," wrote the Ramblings' Journal, an on-line conservative blog.

Lin's piece ends with this key information, which I hadn't read elsewhere, and an apt observation from an education professor who gets it:

The footballer is actually a good student, Mr. Neace said. And because the assignment held such small weight, it wouldn't have changed his grade-point average.

Sally Zepeda, a teacher-supervision expert at the University of Georgia, said that although she thinks the school has the legal right to fire Mr. Neace, it shouldn't have.

"One of things that is very sad is that a teacher is fired for upholding a classroom rule that has seemed to work."

I'll stay atop the Neace story as his appeal progresses.

First comes a rise in violent crime, and now the decline of tea drinking? From the Daily Telegraph:

The nation's love affair with tea is in sharp decline, according to research out today.

Some 165 million cups of tea may be drunk every day but the market is rapidly shrinking with sales of tea bags falling by 16 per cent and sales of loose tea by nine per cent in two years. In 1999 the tea market was worth £707 million but last year that figure fell to £623 million.

The cause of the decline is the competition from high street coffee shops and the popularity of bottled water. Sales of bottled water have risen by more than a fifth in a year, while sales of chilled fruit juices and smoothies have risen by 13 per cent.

Ellen Shiels, of Mintel, the market analysts which carried out the survey, said manufacturers needed to make traditional tea a more fashionable beverage.

Given the left's knee-jerk characterization of American evangelicals as brainless followers of President Bush, an open letter to the President, signed by 100 faculty members at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, should give pause. Whether or not it should give any comfort is another question.

President Bush is scheduled to deliver Calvin's commencement address this Saturday, the day on which the letter will appear in the Grand Rapids Press. This morning's Washington Times covers the story, and it makes clear that those professors and staff who oppose Bush want to deliver the message that, in the words of history professor Randall Jelks, who is gathering signatures for the letter, "we are not Lynchburg," i.e. Jerry Falwell's Liberty University.

Here is the text of the letter as it appears on the Chronicle of Higher Education's (subscription) web site:

An Open Letter to the President of the United States of America, George W. Bush

On May 21, 2005, you will give the commencement address at Calvin College. We, the undersigned, respect your office, and we join the college in welcoming you to our campus. Like you, we recognize the importance of religious commitment in American political life. We seek open and honest dialogue about the Christian faith and how it is best expressed in the political sphere. While recognizing God as sovereign over individuals and institutions alike, we understand that no single political position should be identified with God's will, and we are conscious that this applies to our own views as well as those of others. At the same time we see conflicts between our understanding of what Christians are called to do and many of the policies of your administration.

As Christians we are called to be peacemakers and to initiate war only as a last resort. We believe your administration has launched an unjust and unjustified war in Iraq.

As Christians we are called to lift up the hungry and impoverished. We believe your administration has taken actions that favor the wealthy of our society and burden the poor.

As Christians we are called to actions characterized by love, gentleness, and concern for the most vulnerable among us. We believe your administration has fostered intolerance and divisiveness and has often failed to listen to those with whom it disagrees.

As Christians we are called to be caretakers of God's good creation. We believe your environmental policies have harmed creation and have not promoted long-term stewardship of our natural environment.

Our passion for these matters arises out of the Christian faith that we share with you. We ask you, Mr. President, to re-examine your policies in light of our God-given duty to pursue justice with mercy, and we pray for wisdom for you and all world leaders.

Concerned faculty, staff, and emeriti of Calvin College

The Times also reports that the student newspaper, the Chimes, is urging the 900 graduates of the school to wear black armbands to protest Bush's appearance. Calvin's press release on the commencement makes no mention of the letter, but in an effort to demonstrate bipartisanship, it does note that liberal evangelical Jim Wallis spoke there May 5.

Back when I was researching Choosing the Right College, I found student newspapers to be an excellent source for gauging what the administration of small schools such as Calvin would allow. What I found, more often than not, was that such papers reflected not the pious, reverent student body depicted in college PR, but a fairly irreverent, typical student culture that had a great deal in common with its secular counterparts. The differences centered primarily around the writers' desire to portray their independence and originality by cutting against the grain of official institutional culture.

So, for example, if Calvin's president and board of trustees project an image of proper evangelicalism, some students cultivate the image of a religious (if unformed and unread) James Dean, a tortured soul whose freedom is expressed by -- well, by spending four years at a small church college. It may seem an odd fit, but, as the letter above shows, it's a pose not limited to underage drinkers. Sometimes it's easier to be the rebel when doing so requires nothing more than voting Democratic.

Skim through the Chimes and you'll find the usual mix of crude humor, left-wing cant, and even the perennial favorite at, it seems, every campus in the nation: the "they're about to drive all the campus dogs away" tale. All in all, it's pretty standard fare, which is to say, it doesn't seem particularly religious, and it's certainly not conservative. That said, it's never safe to assume that any student newspaper speaks for the entire student body or a majority of professors, and I have no doubt that many elements of the school take seriously its mission statement and strive to live up to its high standards.

Which returns me to my initial point: not all evangelicals are for the President. My friend and Democracy Project board member, Wilfred McClay, made a similar point, albeit far more eloquently, in an address delivered at the Ethics and Public Policy Center this past February. Titled "The Evangelical Conservatism of George W. Bush, or, How the Republicans Became Red," the talk received quite a bit of attention, especially after a not-terribly-incisive Buckley column on it, and it will certainly provoke more debate in the future. One of McClay's central points was that evangelicalism is not necessarily a good match for Republican or conservative politics, although I'm not sure the letter from Calvin's faculty depicts the kind of opposition he had in mind, as it's little more than boilerplate campus liberalism.

So I'll end with a question or, better, a series of questions: if evangelicals, and especially evangelical intellectuals, are going to oppose the Bush agenda, on what will that opposition be based? And will it rest on anything that sets it apart as evangelical opposition, rather than mere liberal opposition? Are there any distinguishing features of intellectual evangelicalism that give its adherents peculiar or valuable insights into the Bush agenda, and can that opposition draw on conservative tradition rather than liberal clichés?

Update: Joseph Knippenberg at No Left Turns wrote about this controversy yesterday. Joe quotes from a Calvin alum and former history professor, Dale van Kley, who wrote a caustic, utterly predictable letter excoriating the President for killing "hundreds of thousands," etc. He's now at Ohio State, a move for which other Calvin alums who worry about their alma mater's liberal wing can be thankful. Joe also links to several letters to the editor of the Chimes.

Here in Wilmington, Del., we get Philadelphia television stations. On the local evening news earlier tonight, this ad ran on the ABC affiliate. The web site, Savethefilibuster.com, targeted Pennsylvania GOP Senator Arlen Specter in an attempt to pressure him into siding with the Democrats in the coming showdown over their use of the filibuster to block votes on the President's federal judicial nominees.

Here's how their opposition to blocking the use of the filibuster is described:

As the film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington so eloquently conveys, one of the country's most critical checks and balances has been a 200-year-old Senate tradition: the filibuster. What would our country be without it?

The filibuster is a tool created by Senate rules that allows senators to block a nominee or a piece of legislation until 60 Senators agree to end debate. It is an important part of our system of checks and balances. It prevents any one party from having too much power.

Both parties have used the filibuster to prevent action on bills or block nominations that generate strong opposition. On important issues, it encourages compromises that can get broad support from senators from both parties. But now Senate leaders are threatening to misuse their majority power and change the rules to weaken the Senate’s checks and balances. They are angry that Democratic Senators have used the filibuster to block a handful of President Bush’s most controversial judicial nominees – even though more than 95 percent of President Bush’s judges have been approved by the Senate.

As you can imagine, some folks are glad to see these judges denied lifetime seats on powerful federal courts; others want these judges confirmed. But the threat to do away with the filibuster is a bigger issue – it would change the role of the Senate and leave the country open to abuse of power by whoever happens to be in the majority.

Fortunately, common sense Republicans and Democrats understand that it is important to preserve our system of checks and balances. If you are one of those people, we encourage you to get in touch with your Senator before there’s a vote on the rule changes.

Poor Jimmy Stewart, who starred in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, isn't here to defend his old character, but it should be noted that Mr. Smith's famous fictional filibuster was brought on by his outrage at the corruption and cynicism he found in Washington. He was deeply disappointed by his mentor, a man he'd earlier admired and emulated. It's an idealistic story, a coming of age tale in which good overcomes darkness to the cheers of the people and the consternation of the old boys of the Senate.

But surely the language used in this effort, with its shoulder-shrugging "some folks want to confirm'em, some don't" manner, is disingenuous in a way that comes much closer to the positions taken by Mr. Smith's enemies than by the title character himself. It matters very much to the sponsor of the ad whether or not the people nominated are confirmed; and to block that confirmation, they know they can't allow a vote on the floor. Hence, the threat to filibuster.

Speaking of the sponsor, a link on the site (Who We Are) that announces their sponsorship; at the end of the ad, they're also listed at the bottom of the screen. Earlier today I recalled their far more secretive role in sponsoring Historians in Defense of the Constitution in 1998, so this is by no means their first attempt to cloak themselves in traditional, or scholarly, garb while pushing for liberal political victories.

When Mr. Smith finishes his filibuster, he's unshaven, unkempt, and dirty; he needs a bath. Somehow, I think he'd feel the same way all over again if, in some magical moment, he could leap off the silver screen and see how his old role is being used to block an up or down vote on the floor of the Senate. Let's hope he would bring enough soap to go around.

Correction: Last night I wrote that PAW is not listed in the ad. In fact, they are listed in small print at the bottom of the screen in the ad's final shot. I've corrected the post above.

Trevor Bothwell of the Right R