It’s Wednesday, May 9th, 2012….and before we begin, Indiana Republicans have chosen to abandon a broken past and look to the future:

Longtime Sen. Lugar Defeated in Indiana

 

Lugar’s problems can be summed up by three snippets from the Journal article:

“….Mr. Lugar, 80 years old, never recovered from the revelation during the campaign that he had sold his Indianapolis home after winning his Senate seat in 1976 and moved to the Washington, D.C., area. It didn’t become an issue until this campaign, in part because he has had so little opposition in his previous re-election bids.”

“….His signal achievement was the 1991 Nunn-Lugar program, co-sponsored with former Sen. Sam Nunn (D., Ga.), which helped dismantle thousands of warheads and was considered a major foreign policy success. But that didn’t help him make the case that he was attuned to voters’ daily concerns.” 

“….Mr. Lugar sought the GOP presidential nomination in 1996, and in the mid-2000s he became a mentor to then-Sen. Barack Obama, a junior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.“

Let’s see….moved out of state immediately after his election; his “signal achievement” was a warhead reduction treaty….after Reagan had already won the Cold War; oh,….and he mentored the first Manchurian Candidate in our nation’s history.  Hey, what’s not to like?!?

Can you say “absolutely out of touch”?!?  We knew you could!  It’s obvious Dick Lugar couldn’t….or wouldn’t.  And that, far more than the likes or dislikes of the Tea Party, is why this today he’s a very old, very lame duck.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, the AEI‘s Marc Thiessen poses.…

Ten burning questions for Obama’s secret terrorist release program

 

The Washington Post reports this morning that the Obama administration “has for several years been secretly releasing high-level detainees from a military prison in Afghanistan as part of negotiations with insurgent groups”—a program “U.S. officials acknowledge poses substantial risks.” The Post writes:

[T]he releases are an inherent gamble: The freed detainees are often notorious fighters who would not be released under the traditional legal system for military prisoners in Afghanistan. They must promise to give up violence — and U.S. officials warn them that if they are caught attacking American troops, they will be detained once again.

I’m sure that threat is quite a deterrent. The paper continues:

[O]fficials would not say whether those who have been released under the program have later returned to attack U.S. and Afghan forces once again.… Unlike at Guantanamo, releasing prisoners from the Parwan detention center, the only American military prison in Afghanistan, does not require congressional approval and can be done clandestinely…. U.S. officials would not say how many detainees have been released under the program, though they said such cases are relatively rare. The program has existed for several years, but officials would not confirm exactly when it was established.

This is unacceptable. The Obama administration owes the American people some answers. Specifically:

1.    The Obama administration has been openly critical of the Bush administration for its “secret detention” of captured terrorists. Now it turns out the Obama administration been conducting the “secret release” of captured terrorists. How long has it kept the existence of this program secret from the American people, and what is the justification for this secrecy?

2.    Exactly who are these admittedly “notorious” detainees who have been released in Afghanistan and precisely how many has the Obama administration set free?

3.    Did any of these released terrorists and insurgents have the blood of American service members on their hands?

4.    Were any implicated in war crimes?

5.    An administration official tells the Post that, “When the insurgency appears to be gathering steam in certain provinces, for instance, prisoners have been released to alleviate mounting tension.” Where has this been tried, how often has it succeeded, and how often has it failed?

6.    How many of those released have, instead of helping us quell the insurgency, gone back to the fight instead?

7.    The administration keeps recidivism statistics for detainees released from Guantanamo and makes them public on a regular basis. Why has it not done the same for detainees released from Parwan? (One need not be clairvoyant to accurately anticipate the answer.)

8.    Have any of the high-value detainees released by the administration in Afghanistan been involved in the killing of American service members following their release? If so, how many? (From Team Tick-Tock’s refusal to publicize the results of this puerile program, we sense it’s not a question of “if”, only the number.)

9.    Have any released detainees been recaptured and detained again, or killed on the battlefield? If so, how many and under what circumstances?

10.    An administration official tells the Post that in some cases “the benefits of release could outweigh the reasons for keeping [the detainee] detained.” What evidence is there to back up this contention? (Which might well be true….but why not come clean and tell America the facts?)

The administration owes the American people answers to these and other questions. Expect the House Armed Services and Intelligence Committees to demand those answers.

Based on Team Tick-Tock’s lack of response to questions relating to Operation Fast & Furious, expect this White House to respond with an amazing lack of cooperation.

And since this Administration is so keen on drawing comparisons between them and the prior occupants of the White House, here’s Dubya’s version of “Catch-and-Release” for jihadists:

George W. Bush’s “Catch-and-Release” Program

 Meanwhile, in racist, homophobic North Carolina….

North Carolina Backs Ban on Gay Marriage

 

North Carolina: Where Even Our Dogs Are A Bit “Tetched”!

North Carolina voters on Tuesday approved a constitutional amendment defining marriage as strictly between a man and a woman. The amendment led 58% to 42%, with 39% of the precincts reporting statewide. But that included nearly all the results from here and many of the results from nearby Durham, where anti-amendment sentiment is particularly high.

The amendment has driven record turnout for early voting, surpassing even the 2008 presidential primary here, when Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton.

Which is of course why, despite Hairplug Joe’s opinions to the contrary….

….The Obamao’s continues to vote “present” on the issue of gay marriage; sorry, his “position continues to evolve”!  Joe’s as much a practicing Catholic as The Dear Misleader is a Christian.

Speaking of a total misunderstanding of Christianity, as Best of the Web reports….

Anthropologist Discovers Exotic ‘Christian’ Tribe

 

If you found that last story aggravating, here’s an academic tale that will make you smile. Tanya Luhrmann, a Stanford anthropologist, did some field work on an exotic tribe called “evangelical Christians.” She explains their mysterious ways to the open-minded, curious readers of the New York Times.

“If you want to understand how evangelicals conceive of their political life, you need to understand how they think about God,” she explains. “I saw that when people prayed, they imagined themselves in conversation with God. They do not, of course, think that God is imaginary. . . . They imagine God as wiser and kinder than any human they know.” (Imagine the conflict this concept causes in the Liberal mind, accustomed as it is to the fact that The Obamao is wiser and kinder than any human they know!)

Fascinating, isn’t it? Apparently some of these people live right here in America! In her fieldwork, Luhrmann reports, “I met doctors, scientists and professors at the churches.”

And they vote–but they vote differently from the way regular people–oops, make that “secular liberals”–vote: “When secular liberals vote, they think about the outcome of a political choice. . . . When evangelicals vote, they think more immediately about what kind of person they are trying to become–what humans could and should be, rather than who they are.”

Uh-oh, that could spell trouble for liberal politicians. But don’t worry, Luhrmann has figured it out: “If Democrats want to reach more evangelical voters, they should use a political language that evangelicals can hear.” And don’t worry: “The good news for secular liberals is that evangelicals are smarter and more varied than many liberals realize.”

And hey, we’ve always found that when we’re trying to persuade someone of something, it’s always helpful to say: “Wow, you’re smarter than I realized!”

Yeah, and Jesus was a Liberal….

Which provides the perfect lead-in for Tales From the Darkside, and another telling tale of intolerance courtesy of the Higher Education Establishment:

The Cravenness of Higher Education

The Chronicle fires a writer for doing what she was hired to do.

 

The Chronicle of Higher Education has fired our former editorial-page colleague, Naomi Schaefer Riley, for a blog posting on the Chronicle’s website that offended 6,500 professors. Well, they’re not all professors yet, but they are members of what calls itself the “higher-education community,” for which the Chronicle is its trade paper.

As best we can make out, the Chronicle’s editor, Liz McMillen, fired Naomi Riley for doing what she was hired to do—provide a conservative point of view about current events in academe alongside the paper’s roster of mostly not-conservative academic bloggers. We should point out that Naomi is married to Journal editorial-board member Jason Riley.

In a piece nearby, (Featured below) Naomi describes the sequence of events that led to her dismissal. After she posted an item critical of contemporary black studies on the Chronicle’s ironically named blog—Brainstorm: Ideas and Culture—a petition drive instantly demanded her dismissal. It came and quickly.

Ms. McMillen’s Note to Readers explaining the dismissal is itself worthy of note. “I sincerely apologize,” she writes, “for the distress these incidents have caused our readers and appreciate that so many of you have made your sentiments known to us. (Liberals are BIG on apologies!) One theme many of you have sounded is that you felt betrayed by what we published.”

As such things go, the McMillen apologia will enter the higher-ed Hall of Fame for Cravenness. Anyone with a passing interest in university life the past 25 years knew that editor McMillen’s commitment to diversity of opinion would vanish the moment the “betrayed” staged an online sit-in outside her office.

It is hard not to note the context in which Ms. McMillen dismissed Naomi Riley for committing speech. Now more than ever, too many college graduates discover that their expensive higher educations send them into a modern workplace with skills that few employers want or need. The graduates sit home, unemployed and unemployable. Meanwhile, back inside the school walls, the Chronicle of Higher Education stands ready to eliminate any writer who causes distress to the modern generation of scholars who teach these students.

Next, Naomi Riley tells the story in her own words:

The Academic Mob Rules

Instead of encouraging wide discussion, the Chronicle of Higher Education fires a blogger.

 

Recently, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a cover story called “Black Studies: ‘Swaggering Into the Future,'” in which the reporter described how “young black-studies scholars . . . are less consumed than their predecessors with the need to validate the field or explain why they are pursuing doctorates in their discipline.” The “5 Up-and-Coming Ph.D. Candidates” described in the piece’s sidebar “are rewriting the history of race.” While the article suggested some are skeptical of black studies as a discipline, the reporter neglected to quote anyone who is.

Like me. So last week, on the Chronicle’s “Brainstorm” blog (where I was paid to be a regular contributor), I suggested that the dissertation topics of the graduate students mentioned were obscure at best and “a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap,” at worst. (Racist!)

For instance, the author of a dissertation on the history of black midwifery began her research, she told the Chronicle, because she “noticed that nonwhite women’s experiences were largely absent from natural-birth literature.” Another graduate student blamed the housing crisis in America on institutional racism. And a third argued that conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas and John McWhorter have “played one of the most-significant roles in the assault on the civil-rights legacy that benefited them.”

The reaction to my blog post ranged from puerile to vitriolic. The graduate students I mentioned and the senior faculty who advise them at Northwestern University accused me (in guest blogs posted by the Chronicle editors) of bigotry and cowardice. The former wrote that “in a bid to not be ‘out-niggered’ [their word] by her right-wing cohort, Riley found some black women graduate students to beat up on.” (I confess I don’t actually know what that means.) One fellow blogger (and hundreds of commenters) called my post “racist.”

Gina Barreca, a teacher of English and feminist theory at the University of Connecticut, composed a poem mocking me. (It begins “A certain white chick—Schaefer Riley/ decided to do something wily.”) MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry spewed a four-minute rant about my post, invoking the memory of Trayvon Martin and accusing me of “small-mindedness.”

Scores of critics on the site complained that I had not read the dissertations in full before daring to write about them—an absurd standard for a 500-word blog post. A number of the dissertations aren’t even available. Which didn’t seem to stop the Chronicle reporter, though. And 6,500 academics signed a petition online demanding that I be fired.

At first, the Chronicle stood its ground, suggesting that my post was an “invitation to debate.” But that stance lasted for little more than a weekend. In a note that reads like a confession at a re-education camp, the Chronicle’s editor, Liz McMillen announced her decision on Monday to fire me: “We’ve heard you,” she tells my critics. “And we have taken to heart what you said. We now agree that Ms. Riley’s blog posting did not meet The Chronicle’s basic editorial standards for reporting and fairness in opinion articles.”

When I asked Ms. McMillen whether the poem by fellow blogger Ms. Barreca, for instance, lived up to such standards, she said they were “reviewing” the other content on the site. So far, however, that blogger has not been fired. Other ad hominem attacks against me seem to have passed editorial muster as well.

In her Monday mea culpa, Ms. McMillen wrote that her previous “editor’s note last week inviting [readers] to debate the posting also seemed to elevate it to the level of informed opinion, which it was not.” I have been a journalist writing about higher education for close to 15 years now, having visited dozens of colleges and universities and interviewed hundreds of faculty, students and administrators. My work has been published in every major newspaper in the country, most often this one, and I have written two widely reviewed books on higher education as well.

As I wrote in the book I published shortly before the Chronicle hired me, “It is not merely that [many] departments approach African-American studies from a particular perspective—an Africa-centered one in which blacks residing in America today are still deeply hobbled by the legacy of slavery. It’s that course and department descriptions often appear to be a series of axes that faculty members would like to grind.”

But why take my word for it? Scholars more learned than I have been saying the same thing for decades. In 1974, Thomas Sowell wrote that from the beginnings of the discipline, “the demands for black studies differed from demands for other forms of new academic studies in that they . . . restricted the philosophical and political positions acceptable, even from black scholars in such programs.”

Thirty-five years later in a piece for the Minding the Campus website, former Berkeley Prof. John McWhorter noted that little had changed: “Too often the curriculum of African-American Studies departments gives the impression that racism and disadvantage are the most important things to note and study about being black.”

My critics have suggested that I do not believe the black experience in America is worthy of study. That is not true. It’s just that the best of this work rarely comes out of black studies departments. Scholars like Roland Fryer in Harvard’s economics department have done pathbreaking research on the causes of economic disparities between blacks and whites. And Eugene Genovese’s work on slavery and the role of religion in black American history retains its seminal role in the field decades after its publication.

But a substantive critique about the content of academic disciplines is simply impossible in the closed bubble of higher education. If you want to know why almost all of the responses to my original post consist of personal attacks on me, along with irrelevant mentions of Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and George Zimmerman, it is because black studies is a cause, not a course of study. By doubting the academic worthiness of black studies, my critics conclude, I am opposed to racial justice—and therefore a racist.

As Ellen Schrecker, a Yeshiva University historian, writes in her book “The Lost Soul of Higher Education,” political ends were the goals of the founders of black studies. Ms. Schrecker—who is, by the way, sympathetic to these political goals—explains that the discipline’s proponents “viewed these programs as contributions to the continuing struggle for racial justice, not as conventional academic courses of study.”

My longtime familiarity with the absurdities of higher education did not, I confess, prepare me for this most absurd of results. The content of my post, after all, is hardly shocking; the same thing could have been written 30 years ago. And perhaps that’s the most depressing part of all this. Despite the real social and economic advancement that has been made by blacks in this country, the American faculty is still stuck in the 1960s.

Modern Academia: it’s 1984 come to life:

Then there’s the Jimmy Malone Memorial “THAT’S the ChiCAgo Way!” segment, courtesy of Carl Polizzi and Breitbart.com:

The Chicago Way: Justice for Sale at Holder’s DOJ

 

Holder: “Yo….Got Your Back, Bro!”  Obama: “Yo, yo….until I needs to toss yo ass undah da BUS!”

In an explosive Newsweek article set to rock official Washington, reporter Peter Boyer and Breitbart contributing editor and Government Accountability Institute President Peter Schweizer reveal how Attorney General Eric Holder and the Department of Justice are operating under a “justice for sale” strategy by forgoing criminal prosecution of Wall Street executives at big financial institutions who just so happen to be clients of the white-shoe law firms where Holder and his top DOJ lieutenants worked.

There’s more. 

Even as President Barack Obama and Holder co-opt the Occupy Wall Street rhetoric of getting “tough” on the Big Banks and Big Finance, the Newsweek investigative report reveals that Eric Holder has not criminally charged or prosecuted a single top executive from any of the elite financial institutions thought responsible for the financial crash.  And why would they?  As Boyer and Schweizer report, “through last fall, Obama had collected more donations from Wall Street than any of the Republican candidates; employees of Bain Capital donated more than twice as much to Obama as they did to Romney, who founded the firm.”

Collecting millions from Wall Street was hardly the plan Obama and Holder telegraphed upon entering office.  In 2009, the new Attorney General said boldly:

We face unprecedented challenges in responding to the financial crisis that has gripped our economy for the past year.  Mortgage, securities, and corporate fraud schemes have eroded the public’s confidence in the nation’s financial markets and have led to a growing sentiment that Wall Street does not play by the same rules as Main Street.  Unscrupulous executives,  Ponzi scheme operators,  and common criminals alike have targeted the pocketbooks and retirement accounts of middle class Americans,  and in many cases,  devastated entire families’ futures.  We will not allow these actions to go unpunished….This Task Force’s mission is not just to hold accountable those who helped bring about the last financial meltdown, but to prevent another meltdown from happening.

Obama unloaded on Wall Street too.  In 2009, Obama created the Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force and announced that its purpose was to hold “accountable those who helped bring about the last financial crisis as well as those who would attempt to take advantage of the efforts at economic recovery.”

But Holder and Obama’s anti-Wall Street “law and order” rhetoric has turned out to be a smokescreen that allows the Obama campaign to talk the talk of the 99% while taking money from Wall Street’s 1%.  The result is extortion by proxy.  As President Obama put it to the Big Finance executives who met with him at the White House just two months into his presidency, “My Administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”

Not surprisingly, of the elite bundlers who made up Obama’s 2008 campaign, the second most represented industry after law was the securities and investment industry.  It’s a level of hypocrisy that has outraged even committed leftists.  Industrial Areas Foundation activist Mike Gecan put it squarely: “I’m from Chicago, I’ve seen this game played my whole life.”

So what have the securities and banking industries received for their political contributions?

As Boyer and Schweizer report, Department of Justice criminal prosecutions are at 20-year lows for corporate securities and bank fraud.  And while large financial institutions have faced civil prosecution, those typically end in settlement fees with the major banks that represent a fraction of their profits, often paid through special taxes on mortgage-backed securities.

It’s the most crass and cynical brand of politics imaginable, the Chicago Way writ large: pay to play justice from the nation’s highest law enforcement official.

As The Great One noted, this isn’t government….it’s organized crime!  More on this as the story develops.

Turning to the Lighter Side….

And in the Pseudo-Science Section….

Doggy daydreams: brain scans reveal Fido’s thoughts

 

Fido’s expressive face, including those longing puppy-dog eyes, may lead owners to wonder what exactly is going on in that doggy’s head. Scientists decided to find out, using brain scans to explore the minds of our canine friends. The researchers, who detailed their findings May 2 in the open-access journal PLoS ONE, were interested in understanding the human-dog relationship from the four-legged perspective.

“When we saw those first [brain] images, it was unlike anything else,” said lead researcher Gregory Berns in a video interview posted online. “Nobody, as far as I know, had ever captured images of a dog’s brain that wasn’t sedated. This was [a] fully awake, unrestrained dog, here we have a picture for the first time ever of her brain,” added Berns, who is director of the Emory University Center for Neuropolicy.

He added, “Now we can really begin to understand what dogs are thinking.…”

Sorry Greg, but Gary Larson beat you to it….in a significantly shorter time and likely for a lot less money.

Let’s be honest; the only thing Gregory Berns hopes this “research” leads to is more grant money so he and his colleagues can avoid any serious scientific studies.

And if you’re wondering why Berns & Company choose to study the thoughts of dogs versus cats, Larson has answered that question as well:

Could it be spouses, regardless of sex, are somehow related to cats?!?

Magoo