Liberal College Kid

If you are a current or former college student, try to think about all of the professors that you have taken over the years. On which side of the political spectrum do you believe most of them fall? If your experience was, or is, like that of most American students, you’ll find that the majority of them were either explicitly liberal, or at least gave you that general impression. Traditional logic says that the Ivory Towers are, in most cases, a Leftist stronghold, and empirical data is beginning to show that this may be the case, particularly within certain disciplines.

In the February 22, 2008 edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education, there is an article spotlighting the work of a married couple, Dr. Matthew Woessner and Dr. April Kelly-Woessner, both of whom are professors, looking into why there is a gap between the number of liberals and conservatives in academia. What is particularly interesting is that Matthew, an assistant professor of public policy at Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg, is a conservative, while April, associate professor of political science at Elizbethtown College, is a liberal. Later this year, they will be publishing a piece titled “Left Pipeline: Why Conservatives Don’t Get Doctorates” in an American Enterprise Institute book. Seeing two people from opposite ends of the political spectrum come together professionally (not to mention the fact that they are married) is very refreshing in the increasingly polarized political environment in which we have found ourselves. Their work is integral to the discussion of politics within the academic world. Everyone should check out their forthcoming paper, “Left Pipeline,” which can be found here (pdf) (great thanks to the Woessners for linking permission). It may be of particular interest to those of you who consider yourself “far left” or “far right.”

As the Woessners’ paper explains, there is a wide array of possible explanations for why this phenomenon occurs. It could be personality differences between liberals and conservatives that lead them into different fields of study. Maybe conservatives are more achievement-oriented, and therefore predisposed to the professional majors, like accounting and computer science. Or, its possible that the liberal environment on many American campuses dissuades conservatives from pursuing a doctorate and the life of a professor. Conservatives may have a stronger desire to make more money and raise a family, desires that may not be compatible with a career in academics. The answer isn’t entirely clear, yet. What is clear, however, is that the reason there are more liberal professors does not relate to intelligence or performance in school. It’s not, as I am sure many of you are eager to conclude, because conservatives are stupid.

My intention in publishing this post is to ask some questions of our readers, and hopefully start a discussion on the role of politics in academia. I would like to see what your personal opinions on the issue are, and how, if at all, the political ideology of your professors influenced your experiences. Again, if your not entirely familiar with the issue, I would highly recommend the Woessner paper linked above. If you want a more fiery and partisan take on the topic, check out David Horowitz’s Students For Academic Freedom website (caveat: there are some pretty extreme ideas being promulgated on the SFAF site (i.e. “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week”), and personally, Horowitz turns my stomach, although his Academic Bill of Rights is worth reading into).

So, if you’ve got a few extra minutes and want to add to this conversation, here are a few questions to answer in the comments section below this post:

1. Have you, or did you, notice that your college professors were, in general, more liberal or conservative? If so, which one?

2. What do you think best explains the disparity between the number of liberals and conservatives who pursue doctorates and go on to be college professors? Is there one good answer, or is it a combination of many factors?

3. Do a professor’s ideological convictions have a serious influence on their job as academics and teachers? If a professor actively tries to keep his or her politics out of the classroom, is that enough to prevent bias from influencing the way material is presented or how they interact with their students?

4. For conservative readers: Did, or do you, feel isolated or discriminated against because of your ideological beliefs? Does it seem that special preferences are given to liberal students or that their opportunities for post-graduate studies are greater?

5. For liberal readers: Do explicitly liberal professors ever seem to appreciate your presence in their class more because you agree with them ideologically? Is all this talk of bias against conservatives just delusion?

6. For everyone: Do you feel that your political beliefs relate in away way to the major, and therefore the career that you chose?

Hopefully we’ll get some good comments, and maybe some vicious arguments going here. I look forward to it.

• Leave a comment... (7)

Last nights historic election will be remembered for one reason: Obama. My intention here is not to demean him in any way, and the fact that the young voters came out like never before is also reassuring to me. However, there was another election last night in Iowa, one that seemingly no one is talking about…

<Get down Huck, go head get down>
Mike Huckabee won the Republican nomination by 9 percent. 9 PERCENT!! Huck carried 34% of the total vote leaving Mitt Romney, who had outspent Huckabee by millions of dollars in the dust. The Evangelical vote came out strong, with sixty percent of the GOP electorate in Iowa being born-again Christians. This is why the Republicans should be scared.

Mike Huckabee’s message is about change. He is an Evangelical minister who is not afraid to tell you his fix for immigration is to out law abortion, so that those babies will fill America’s demands for labor. He’s been outspent 15 to 1 in this campaign and he represents a dramatic turn for the Republican old guard. For more on the crazy be afraid of science kind of rhetoric go here.

As Howard Dean put it,

“Iowa caucus voters rejected the mainstream Republican frontrunners, and gave right-wing extremist Mike Huckabee a surprise victory in Iowa last night. He made a last minute surge - without money, and without staff - and has suddenly become a contender in the upcoming primaries.”

The Seattle Times wrote on the Republican results

“They [Republican insiders] realize that what happened Thursday in Iowa could be part of a national phenomenon favoring change, which scares the party now holding the White House. Iowa’s results also could reflect widespread GOP voter discontent, which could portend disastrously low.”

The Republican establishment should not like Huckabee. He’s not a pro-business conservative, he’s not especially pro-war, and he’s yet another Presidential candidate with hardly any foreign affairs experience.  While many on the right are trying to distance themselves from Bush he is still the current leader of the party.  Huckabee, while sharing Bush’s religious view points, would not put business interests ahead of domestic issues close to the hearts of born-again Christians.  This, however, is not what the Republicans need to be afraid of.

The lack of quality candidates is very likely to keep Republicans home come November.  This trend can already be seen just by looking at Iowa.  115,000 people showed up to cast their votes in the Republican caucuses in Iowa last night.  The Democrats had 239,000.  More than 100,000 more people showed up to the Democratic caucus then ever before… More than twice as many people voted in the Democratic caucus than in the Republican one. Iowa is not a state that is particularly blue… They are split almost exactly down the middle 50 - 50 just like the country at large.  This means that Iowa is a perfect model for voter efficacy come November and the national election.

Rejoice my liberal friends, rejoice.

• Leave a comment... (1)

On Friday the Washington Post published its biweekly column by Michael Gerson, this time titled “Democrats in Denial.” Before we discuss the basis of the article and the claims made within it, a little about Michael Gerson himself.

Gerson is a former senior policy adviser to the Heritage Foundation, an important and influential conservative think tank. He left that position in 1999 at the bidding of Karl Rove who thought that Gerson would be a nice addition to the presidential campaign for George W. Bush. After Bush was elected, Gerson became one of his speech writers and eventually became the head of the White House speech writing group. If anyone were to doubt the effect that his work has had on the rhetoric and political language of the current time, they would only need reminded that, according to Gerson himself, he was the originator of the “smoking gun - mushroom cloud” image, the term “axis of evil” and that he was one of the most prolific speech writers for Bush (it should be mentioned that other White House speech writers have accused Gerson of exaggerating his contributions, although the point is that even if he did not come up with all of the memorable lines of this administration, he desires to have people believe that he did - which may be even more revealing). In 2006 Gerson left the White House, wrote for a time at Newsweek, and ultimately was given a column at the Washington Post.

Now that we are familiar with Gerson’s past and his obvious interests in defending the actions of the administration, policies that he himself helped persuade the American public to accept, let’s look at some of the claims made in his latest piece.

The mood of this article strongly suggests that it is a reaction to the events in Iowa last night; specifically, that such an overwhelming amount of independents and even Republicans came out to participate in the Democratic caucuses. Gerson seems angry about this, and would like to convince us that most of the platforms of the Democratic candidates are no better - in fact, much worse - than those of the Bush administration. First he takes on the Iraq war. Again, let’s keep in mind the “smoking gun - mushroom cloud” metaphor that convinced the world that the war was justified in the first place, a metaphor that proved to be meaningless.

Gerson says:

“In Iraq, coalition casualties are down significantly, along with Iraqi civilian casualties, roadside bombings and suicide attacks. Large sections of Baghdad have been pacified, and the military rolls toward Mosul. Al-Qaeda in Iraq is in reeling retreat. And, most impressive, we have seen the first example of a large-scale Sunni Arab uprising against Islamic extremism. By one estimate, 30,000 former insurgents and tribal leaders are now fighting the enemy in Iraq, adding their surge to our own.

This progress is reversible, especially while Moqtada al-Sadr’s militias maintain the capability to mount their own mini-Tet Offensive. But Gen. David Petraeus’s counterinsurgency strategy has succeeded with disorienting speed. Its combination of vision and competence will fill chapters in military textbooks.”

If the statistics Gerson is referring to are assumed to be accurate (this administration has been less than competent in compiling accurate numbers, especially in respect to the war where they have bet so much of their credibility. A key phrase here is “by one estimate” - almost certainly the highest estimate), then they do reflect that the surge may be working. And this is, at the risk of stepping out of the holy party line, a very good thing. We can debate the merits of the war as a whole, whether or not it should have happened in the first place, but if the surge is working, and therefore fewer Americans and innocent Iraqi’s are losing their lives, it should be congratulated. In this case, partisanship is not only irrelevant, it’s irresponsible. However, Gerson’s characterization of the surge as having worked with “disorienting speed” is an obvious exaggeration meant to insinuate that Petraeus completely blew everyone’s expectations out of the water. I also highly doubt that it will appear in future military textbooks. He wants us to believe that this has been one of the most impressive military undertakings in history, a claim that is almost laughable.

Next, Gerson says:

“In spite of these gains, Democratic presidential candidates still insist on reckless timetables for withdrawal — the surest way to rescue defeat from the jaws of victory.”

One wonders how closely Gerson has actually listened to the Democratic Candidates. Now that the race has effectively been reduced to Obama and Clinton, with moderate hopes left for Edwards, only one of the candidates has pledged to pull out all combat forces by 2013 (Edwards). Surely, both Obama and Clinton would like the war to be over, and they would definitely take whatever measures necessary to achieve these goals. But no matter how politically advantageous it is for any of them to claim they will end the war immediately (which they really have not anyway), they all know that a complete, and in Gerson’s words, reckless immediate withdrawal would indeed probably be a bad idea, and none of them would actually do it.

So far, the column is nothing too spectacular, embodying what most people on the right and definitely everyone inside the White House already thinks. But then he turns his attention to education and the Orwellian No Child Left Behind.

“Democratic rhetoric on education is also an assault on reality. Attacking No Child Left Behind is a reliable campaign applause line — Hillary Clinton promises to “end” the law, because it is “just not working.” Actually, the imposition of educational standards and testing has improved math and reading scores and begun narrowing the gap between disadvantaged and affluent students.”

While Gerson is very correct that attacking the law is a great platform for a campaign, he reveals in this statement more than he means to. Why is it, I would like to ask him, that so many people feel so passionately against No Child Left Behind? Gerson condescends to the nearly the entire American public in his assertion that he knows more about what is or is not working in their own school districts than they do. People are angry about NCLB because they see what it is really doing. It is taking the focus off of real education, the kind that molds students into free thinkers and better members of society and instead concentrating solely on arbitrary test results. If a school fails to meet up to these pointless standards, then they do not get sufficient funding. There is a GLARING logical problem here. Shouldn’t those schools that are not meeting the cut actually receive more funding so that they have a chance of improving their programs? Instead, in the twisted mind of Bush administration members like Gerson, schools that are already disadvantaged and poor (a subject that requires an entire look of its own) are punished and their students are, well, there’s no other term for it other than “left behind,” hence the Orwellian, call it exactly what it is not, sense of the program. In addition, it would be nice if Gerson would provide us with some of the data that he interprets as showing that the gap between rich and poor (sorry, “disadvantaged and affluent”) students is closing. Surely, these incredible findings should be on the front page of every major newspaper, since they directly contradict what any respectable social scientist has found lately.

“There is an angry backlash against NCLB among some Democratic interest groups. Suburban districts resent being labeled as failures just because some minority and disabled children aren’t making progress. But that is the whole purpose of the law — to prevent districts from hiding the poor performance of minorities behind the success of other students. Such districts should feel less resentment and more shame.”

I kid you not, I gasped when I read these sentences. This, above anything else Gerson posits in this piece, is shocking. He doesn’t even make an attempt to conceal his racism. Disabled children?! School districts should be ASHAMED that their disabled students are not meeting up to George Bush’s standards?! No, Mr. Gerson, YOU are the one who should feel shame.

Whether it is intentional or not (and I would bet that at some level, it is), the real result of education policies like No Child Left Behind is to form students into the kind of intellectually numb, power yielding adults that fit so well into the corporate world, where idiotic targets and goals are now the norm as well. And those schools who do not mold enough of their students into this picture will simply have to fend for themselves. It has resulted in many schools being forced to abandon many of their usual and time tested curricula and only teach “to the test” in order to ensure that they don’t fall short. A shocking number of students entering college are entirely unprepared for the sort of real challenges that await them, because they will be required to actually think once in a while.

Gerson accuses the Democratic presidential candidates of being out of touch with reality. But obviously it is he who has become so indoctrinated with the Bush-world view, having spent many years shoving it down the American public’s throat, that he can no longer see reality. The policies that he helped articulate for the president are, in his mind, beyond scrutiny, even as their blatant failures are becoming obvious throughout the country and the world. Now that there is good evidence that the Democratic party is stronger than it has been in a very long time, Gerson and others like him will scramble to find reasons why they are not to be trusted and are incompetent liars. But the public is sick of the nonsense that is constantly spewed by the administration, and many of them can feel at a visceral level and see at a intellectual one that there is in fact substance to what the Democrats are saying. They are finding a vision that has been completely absent in the current administration. And when one of them is elected as president, Gerson is going to have to finally pull himself out of his own denial and myopia and see that it was partly his own fault, with his glaring lies and misconceptions, that the Democrats are back in power.

• Leave a comment... (1)

It is a great night for America’s youth. The results coming out of the Iowa caucuses show that people of college age do indeed have the potential to sway the direction of politics in the United States. Barack Obama, who now seems to be the clear winner of the Democratic caucus, benefited the most of the upper tier candidates from this monumental surge of youthful participation.

As I write this, John Edwards and Hillary Clinton are receiving virtually the same number of delegate votes and jockeying for a second place finish in Iowa. Obviously, both of their campaigns will be disappointed with anything but a first place win, but the sting will be most acute for Clinton. With the record amounts of money raised, enormous efforts in advertisement, and the overall name recognition that she has enjoyed, this result is dismal at best. Clearly, many of the voters of Iowa are not prepared to support a candidate who represents the picture of establishment status quo, corporate sympathy and Washington insider rhetoric. Even, gasp, women preferred Barack Obama this time.

Despite the promising results of this initial caucus for the youth of America, I must admit my disappointment that Edwards did not finish in first place. Amazingly, he did not carry the union or low income housing area votes, which are normally his strongest holds. But he did manage to achieve what now seems like a second place win, a fact that the mainstream media is already ready to forget about. They have already attempted to frame this outcome as a further extension of the two-campaign fight between Clinton and Obama and to count Edwards out once again. This should be no shock to anyone aware of the interests held by those who own the major media outlets of the country, those who ultimately decide the way in which these stories are shaped and reported. They do not want John Edwards to become a more viable candidate in this campaign. He is the only candidate to refer to the War On Terror as the fallacy that it is. He is the only of the top three Democrats to completely boycott donations from big business. Clinton openly accepts the money and therefore the political influence of Corporate America. And while she claims that she wants to reform health care in a meaningful way, she receives financial backing from major pharmaceutical and health insurance companies: surely the last groups in this country interested in making health care more affordable.

As the reporting of votes wound down and it became clear that he would have a slight lead over Clinton, Edwards gave a powerful speech. Rather than comment on the substance of his words, on the vision that he was attempting convey, Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann instead attacked Edwards for not explicitly congratulating Obama and made it seem to all who were watching that this was effectively the end of Edwards’ campaign. This is entirely untrue. There are still 49 states left to hold primaries, and as we saw this evening, the results predicted by polls and self-righteous pundits are not as accurate as they would have us believe. He has proven that he is just as promising of a candidate as Hillary Clinton, if not more so, and the quickness with which people like Olbermann and Matthews dismiss him is shameful and a bit shocking. Olbermann in particular frequently criticizes the overbearing role that the opinions of his peers has on the public perception of the candidates, and yet engages in the same sort of favoritism.

The media does love Barack Obama, and their endorsement of him, I think, is a good thing. Although my personal first choice (as I’ve surely made apparent by now) is John Edwards, Obama is a great candidate and this win is a fantastic indicator of the state of both the country and the Democratic party. Iowans came out in record numbers to support him and the other Democratic candidates, most of which embody the ideas of real, not just rhetorical, change. Currently he is making his victory speech, and is showing as clear as ever that he is an incredibly powerful orator and a highly intelligent and inspiring man. The energy surrounding him is awe inspiring, and this energy is a direct result of his enormous support from young Americans, who came out for him overwhelmingly in Iowa. Although it has not dominated his campaign to the point it has for Edwards, Obama does have many strong populist ideals and the presence to make them possible, which is what real Americans want and need.

All told, I am very excited about the results. It has just been reported that 57 percent of voters under the age of 30 voted for Obama; they were clearly the most important demographic in the Iowa Democratic caucus. Our generation has often been characterized as one of the most apathetic and apolitical in the history of America, and these assumptions have been shattered tonight.

• Leave a comment... (3)

Over the holiday break I normally get a chance to catch up with my friends from home, since I go to school out of state.  This trip home, however, something a little different happened.  I ran into someone I’ve known since I was six years old or so.  We met on the tee-ball field, and I have known him ever since.  Our lives since high school, however, have been quite different. I want to share his experience with you, because it feels far more real than anything I’ve seen on the news or read on the web about the soldiers fighting in Iraq.  This is a kid I grew up with, and this is his story.

Like so many young people do, Eric signed up for the National Guard immediately after high school.  He had in fact, signed up in his high school cafeteria with Guard recruiters who were often there trying to solicit teenagers into joining.  Immediately after school was out in June Eric headed to basic training.  He was there for 6 months.  When he came back he was home just in time to marry his high school sweet heart.  They had a small wedding and a short honeymoon.  Following a short stint at home, Eric packed his begs for what would be a 15 month deployment to Iraq.

Unbeknowst to him, his new wife had become pregnant.  Eric was not there the day his son was born.  In fact, because he was stationed in Baghdad and their base was under attack he wasn’t able to hear how his wife was doing until three days after his son was born.  Fortunately, everything was fine back home.

Being stationed in Baghdad was less than ideal.  Eric quickly developed an addiction to alcohol.  He explained that with explosions going off all night and all around you the only way he could bring himself to fall asleep was to drink himself to sleep.  He told me the first two weeks he was over there he slept maybe 20 hours.  Of course, being in the big city alcohol wasn’t hard to come by.  Neither were drugs, which he didn’t use, nor were prostitutes, which he didn’t use.

Just a few months into his first tour Eric was driving a humvee when he was shot, in the arm.  His description of the aftermath was that his military doctors just picked the bullet out, slapped a band aid on it and told him to get back out there, he had a purple heart on the way.

Months later, his base was attacked and a piece of shrapnel hit him square in the chest.  Fortunately he was wearing the protective vests that are standard issue for soldiers, or else he would have died.  The shrapnel broke several ribs, and also displaced several vertebrae.  When his friends and fellow soldiers pulled Eric from the rubble they thought he was dead.  When he woke up in a hospital he was told that his ribs would heal, though it would be slow and painful and that his back would never be the same.  He is considered “disabled” by the military now, though he does not get full benefits.  For his injuries he was given the title 20% disabled, and another purple heart.

Once Eric was back in the US life just wasn’t the same.  He had a wife, a child, a house he’d never been in but had been paying for.  He tried a couple different manual labor jobs but he didn’t like them.  He said he needed someone telling him exactly what to do and when to do it.  While he said that post-traumatic stress was never an issue he said he’s had a few nightmares.

He’s now working as a paper boy, with two shifts and going to school at a local technical college.  He’s being called up again to go to Iraq in June.  He’s due to be finished with the guard in November, however, his 18 month tour of duty will not be cut short simply because he has fulfilled his commitment to the guard.  Perhaps most unfortunately, he will miss the birth of his second child, who is due in July.

Eric told me he thinks that the US is doing good things in Iraq.  He says that people appreciate what the US soldiers are doing.  What he can’t understand, however, is why we even went in the first place.  As he put it, “it’s like Bush just wanted a war for the sake of a war and now we’re trying to make up for it.”

When he had finished recanting his story to me I wasn’t sure what to say.  Somehow a story about an especially hard final or a 20 page paper just didn’t seem appropriate.  And yet, here we are, the same age, from the same town.

In June I’ll be on my summer vacation.  Maybe working on my blog, working a summer job.  My friend will be in Iraq, fighting in a war he doesn’t believe should have ever started in the first place.  Believe me, I am counting my blessings, and if you’ve not been to Iraq, I suggest you do the same.

• Leave a comment... (0)

What a crazy year! Of course, I will especially remember 2007 for many reasons. One of which is certainly that LCK started in March of 2007. Rather than go through all of the stories we’ve posted on here, though, I thought I would go through the biggies whether or not anything about them appeared on our site.

* Where better to start than with the Presidential Election that seemed to kick off way too early?

This picture is great because it really shows that despite all of the added time this race has gotten it really hasn’t made that much difference. Well, maybe except in the case of Huckabee who inextricably is moving up the charts in the hearts and minds of Republicans. Other wise, though, the 08 race is exactly where it was at the start of 2007. Despite my best attempts, Kucinich is still waffling on the bottom of the heap and the Obama vs. Clinton match up that everyone was calling in January seems to be exactly what’s on the horizon.

* February was a great month in the news because of one person, Lisa Nowak. To be honest, I felt kind of bad for her. The story as I first heard it seemed like a love story of sorts, two astronauts who fell in love at zero gravity. How romantic right? That is, until it came out that she wore the adult diapers astronauts wear in space on her drive from Texas to Florida to stalk her man.  Nothing says I love you like a soiled diaper…

<Hottie!>

* Then of course is my pick for person of the year: Larry Seidlin. The infamous judge of the Anna Nicole Smith trial, who told stories of his days as a tennis player, his relationships in the past, orange juice, his college days… Words fail me, so here is a good highlight reel of the madness that was the Anna Nicole case:

* The story that perhaps most rocked college students this year was the Virginia Tech tragedy where Cho Seung Hui killed 32 of his peers and then killed himself. The way he went about it, however, is perhaps the most distressing. He sent his own press kit to NBC, depicting him with guns, in camouflage and many other violent and frightening images. The political fall out around this issue is of course unfortunate, with some on the right claiming that had other students been allowed to have guns on campus this killer would not have claimed so many victims. I don’t understand this logic at all, but, in 2007 everything whether it was political in origin or not, became political.

* On August 1st a suspension bridge spanning the Mississippi River in Minnesota collapsed and killed 13 people. This tragedy came with some baggage though. Minnesota and the Twin City area in particular had just approved a tax payer funded new home for the Minnesota Twins. Money was going to building a new baseball stadium rather investing in infrastructure. Of course, immediately after this reports came out that perhaps as many as 3 in 4 bridges in America were not structurally sufficient which led me to one question: why can’t we be building bridges here and not just in Iraq?

* In August, Larry Craig made us all reconsider our public restroom behavior. There were two truly horrible things about this event. The first was how Craig handled the whole thing. He has been and continues to be a bigot actively campaigning against gay rights. And second, who wants to have sex in an airport bathroom? It’s hard enough to bring yourself to just use the facilities in an airport bathroom, you know? Despite all of this, he is staying in office… Good luck with your reelection Larry.

* The evil genius, the architect, Bush’s brain… Call him what you will 2007 saw the end of the great Bush & Rove partnership. Despite him being wrong, in my opinion, on virtually every political front, I will certainly give Karl his props here. He got an idiot elected Governor and then President, then convinced the entire nation that his party would be better for them because of “morals” and “values” which should have been read “profit margin” and “tax break.” Rove may be one of the most brilliant men to ever work in the White House, and he was never elected nor approved. Nonetheless, he was a terrible dancer and rapper. And Karl, for me you will always be MC Rove!

* Our boy Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize! How sweet is that? He won it, of course, for his work with An Inconvenient Truth and shared the award with the UN group responsible for coming out with the report on global climate change.  Gore has taken the issue beyond a partisan debate to make it a sticking point on both sides of the asile and he has now accomplished something very few Americans have: he is a Nobel Peace Prize winner.  You go Gore!

* And then finally and tragically 2007 ended in catastrophe in Pakistan. Benazir Bhutto was assassinated less than a month from the first formal election since 1999.  She was campaigning for that race when she was killed.  She had been living abroad for the last 8 years after General / President Musharraf seized control of the government in a military coup.  The two had reached an amnesty agreement and had agreed to restore democracy to the country.  Now, however, while the election appears to still be coming on January 8th questions still surround the assasination.  Of course Al- Qaeda is claiming it and there are numerous reports of their pressence in Pakistan.  However, Musharraf has had nothing but support from the US since he seized power and while Bush has condemned the act as cowardly it still bodes well for our strong military alliance in Pakistan as we continue the War of Terror.  Sorry, War on Terror.

Well folks, there it is!  2007 was our first year at LCK and while it had its ups and downs we hope that you will continue to read us from time to time, post some comments about how we’re too young to understand anything, and get into great debates about a Dennis Kucinich  Ron Paul campaign.  Cheers and Happy New Year!

• Leave a comment... (3)

I suppose, as they say, all good things must come to an end. I started law school (which has thus far failed to be, as I had been led to believe, nothing more than drinking, debauchery and all around tomfoolery) recently and haven’t had the time to post anything. I’ve also stopped posting because I have almost no contact to the news anymore (that may be a bit too extreme of a statement, but it’s nowhere near the level it was before) and, because of this, haven’t had any brilliant ideas for a post pop into my head.

The one thing that I have been thinking about lately, though, is the recent assertion that Congress may have inadvertently given the President the right to spy on Americans on American soil. I was listening to an NPR broadcast and they were talking about how in a year or so local police departments will be able to request the usage of photos taken from spy satellites over U.S. soil. The argument went that if a hurricane were approaching or if there had just been an earthquake, then the local emergency response units could use these very recent images (as opposed to say Google Earth which has images on it that are years old) to plan evacuation routes and gauge damages.

That may be all well and good but let me introduce you to another scenario that is, in my mind at least, all too likely:

The federal government is looking at LA and trying to evaluate how the city would respond if there were a terrorist attack at the Port of Los Angeles. In order to get an honest assessment of how the city would react and how first responders would be able to access the scene they turn a stack of extremely high resolution spy satellite pictures over to the LA County Sheriff’s Office.

While the Sheriff’s staff is pouring over these photos, marking up entrance and exit routes to the port as well as checking to see if it has any glaring weaknesses in terms of security one of their younger staffers sees something in the corner of his eye that catches his attention. “Looks like this house has a serious grow operation going on in its back yard” he says, as a joke (after all he’s just a file clerk who got dragged into looking over these pictures because everyone else was busy off fighting crime). One of his superiors hears this and snatches the photo from him and takes it to her boss who agrees that, yes, there is a modest grow operation going on in the back yard of a home near the port.

This is where it gets dangerous. The Sheriff’s office realize that they can’t get a warrant to search the home because it came from these spy satellites and the grow operation is located behind some 8 foot walls making it out of plain view from the street. The Constitutionally protected right to privacy prohibits a judge from issuing a warrant in this case because the operation (lets assume the Sheriff’s officials don’t see any actual plants, just the obvious components of a grow op.) wouldn’t have been viewable from the street. Do you think, even for a second, that patrols around the home in question wouldn’t triple over night? The Sheriff (wanting to rid the evil that is a back yard pot farm from his community) would almost certainly do everything in his power to get an officer in a position to get a view inside that house (even if it’s only through a gate or door opened for half a second as someone entered or exited the house) so that the officer could then obtain a warrant claiming that he saw pot (which the Sheriff’s office already knows is sure to be found upon execution of the warrant). Eventually an officer would be in position to see something and the entire operation would be closed down, mark up another victory for the good guys.

Sure, maybe it’s not so bad that there are 50 less pot plants growing in this country as a result of the hypothetical situation I posited above but what about our right to privacy? There is absolutely no way that the government or local police departments should be able to use American spy satellites to look at Americans. The ethics of it are horrific and the results of such action will do nothing but strip away more rights from American citizens. So there it is, my last rant (for a while at least).

Before I go (my torts book is calling to me as we speak) I just want to say that it has been an absolute privilege to write for this blog. I hope that LCK will continue to grow and evolve and serve as a place for discussion of current issues. I hope that the site will welcome its critics because I believe that talking about and debating our differences is what the study of politics comes down to in the end. I also want to extend a warm thanks to everyone who has read and commented on my posts in the past. No matter what you thought about my politics, my writing, or my views on the world today, you took the time to read what I had written. Thank you.

Hopefully I’ll be able to stop in from time to time and post about events in the news or, if people would want to hear it, law school. Until then, thank you again to both the readers and Liberal College Kid for giving me a chance to express myself on this wonderful site.

• Leave a comment... (0)

Greetings all, and first and foremost: SORRY!!

I spent the last two weeks plus traveling in Greece, Ukraine, and Turkey. I returned with many post ideas, so please know that our huge decrease in posts is not a permanent phenomenon.

That said, the night before I left I made a comment on a small blog written by a man named Gary Foust on a post he had written about liberal college campuses. Of course, I left the country and wasn’t able to participate in the dialog that took place there after, but you can read the comments here.

Following that a woman named Susan Baldwin picked up on the post from Gary’s site and responded with her own responses which she has titled the Liberal College Kid trilogy where she thinks being liberal is naive. You can read that post here. I’m actually really bummed I wasn’t around to mix it up with some of our conservative readers, but I’m sure the chance will spring up again.

Here is my response to Gary’s initial post:

First, it is not un-American to protest the government. In fact, that’s how a democracy is supposed to work. For centuries universities and colleges have served as places where democracy can be truly seen as people from all sides of every issue are able to participate in the market place of ideas. The fact that there are groups who are anti-American is in and of itself what is so great about living in a society that protects freedom of speech.

Next, as far as liberal professors go; you should know being on a college campus that there is a direct correlation between education and tolerance as well as education and liberal leanings. It seems, the more people know the more they care about other people, thus making them more liberal. That being said, the idea that we should question professors is a fine and noble idea. However, these people have the academic background that qualifies them to instruct in a collegiate setting, thus they should in fact be trusted and their opinions do carry an added amount of validity. It is very possible to learn from people who are from a different political party. Otherwise, someone like me could never have taken economics.

I have not met a single person who has entered a classroom a conservative and left a liberal or vice versa. That’s not where political ideologies are formed, its where they are discussed and the sooner the radical right realizes this we can move on from this war on progressive professors and start talking about things that matter: like healthcare and Iraq.

Thanks for your continued reading and I promise to not have another dry spell like this again. Later today I’ll post my first reaction piece: What the Ukraine Really Thinks about the Soviet Union.

• Leave a comment... (2)

A recent study from a UC Berkley PhD student named Danah Boyd found some fascinating differences between high schoolers who use myspace versus those who use facebook. The study’s main findings were:

The research suggests those using Facebook come from wealthier homes and are more likely to attend college.

By contrast, MySpace users tend to get a job after finishing high school rather than continue their education.

Beyond this, the study also shows that myspace users are more likely to come from homes where their parents did not go to college. Facebook users tend to be the “in” crowd in schools and are more focused on academics. Myspace caters to “most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers,” she said.

Her overarching conclusion about social networks was that “This division is just another way in which technology is mirroring societal values.”

The fact that there are people studying the two social networking sites most popular with our generation is fascinating, but the implications as far as who is actually using those sites is even more illuminating. My personal thought on the matter would be that initially Facebook was only for college students where myspace has always been open to everyone. Because of this Facebook’s college slant has carried over even though Facebook is now available to people who are not affiliated with colleges or universities. One also doesn’t see the pornographic advertisements myspace struggles with on Facebook. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Myspace is owned by NewsCorp who also owns FOX Noise, making it fundamentally evil.  Ok, that’s just my personal opinion but there might be something to it.

Whichever site you use, or if you use both, social networking is on the rise and becoming such a major force in our lives we now use verbs like facebook me, or myspacing. I hope we see more studies on these sites, maybe one that will tell us why we’re so addicted! Hang on, I just got poked…

• Leave a comment... (2)