The news is that gambling goes on in casinos and that liberal shenanigans are practiced by university professors: in a poll conducted by Siena College in Loudonville, New York, and released today, professors, aka the best and the brightest, rank FDR as the greatest president of all time, and George W. Bush as one of the five scraping the political barrel. Interestingly, Obama comes in at 15.

Why so low? I mean of course, Obama not Bush. Though Obama was rated 6^th in imagination, 7^th in communication ability, and 8^th in intelligence, he scored poorly on “background” which the survey defines as, “family, education and experience.”

Clearly, Obama has received a top-notch education—so we can only assume that the professors think poorly of his family background and experience. It’s obvious that Obama was not very experienced when he entered office—but what could the survey mean by ranking Obama low on “family”? Could it be because he had an unwed mother and an absent father in Kenya? That would be too bad. I thought we were past that sort of thing.

George W. Bush, meanwhile, comes in next to last in the categories of intelligence, communication ability, foreign policy accomplishments, the ability to compromise, and the handling of the U.S. economy.

This Politico story notes that in the overall rankings, Bush came in at “number 39, qualifying him as one of the five worst presidents”—which may be a glass half-empty way of looking at the survey. The way many see it, as with Politico, Bush isn’t one of the five worst presidents of all time, but the 39^th best.

But seriously, will history redeem the Texan from the scowls of academics?

Since its inception nearly thirty years ago, this survey has always ranked FDR as the greatest president of all time--in part because Adlai Stevenson wasn't actually elected president. Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt fall in line, in varying orders, as two, three, four, and five after.

The Screen Actors Guild, one of the unions I'm required to belong to, has sent its 2010 diversity census form to its members. There are just four questions, numbered 1, 2, 3 and (I swear) 3. The first Question #3 is: Do you identify as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and/or Transgender (LGBT)? Two additional questions leaped immediately to mind. I'll call them questions number 1 and 1. First, and/or? The mind boggles at the and possibilities. Second, what does the parenthetical LGBT mean? Is that one of the "and/ors?" Well, it turns out (and, heck, you probably knew this) it stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender. So it was just restating the options; a kind of internal redundancy (like ATM Machine--Automated Teller Machine Machine or PIN Number--Personal Identification Number Number).

Being somewhat sheltered, apparently, I was surprised to learn there was a catch-all abbreviation for the alternative lifestyles crowd. Like LOL and BFF, I can now add LGBT to my personal lexicon. It was a little like when a smarmy Anderson Cooper introduced me to the term "teabagging" on CNN. You're never too old to learn.

But I digress. The SAG census form explained that, "In order to best serve you, we must identify the demographics of our diverse membership." However, inasmuch as a talented member of that fine guild should be able to portray several letters in the LGBT category, I don't quite understand the point. Nor do I understand how I'm being served better.

By the way, for those of you wondering about it, Question #1 asked us to identify our race; Question #2 asked about our disabilities; and the second Question #3 asked us to identify our primary zip code. I have to think about answering that last one. After all, there's such a thing as privacy.

This morning on the Ricochet podcast we were talking about the signifiers that bind the members of the media together - the emblems of class and tribe one can reasonably expect from a middle-aged J-school grad. For some reason I thought of a New York Times piece on summer treats. Like popsicles, and how they can be ruined with a light glaze of faddish pretension.

Popsicles were once a a simple thing, with simple rules: the bag stuck to the treat, but yielded when you pulled. The popsicle could be cleaved on a metal porch railing, a countertop, or cracked with brute force. Sometimes it broke wrong; that was life. Banana was rare and highly prized. The last few bites always tasted of wood. That was enough, no? No: they’ll be ruined right after Sno-Cones. From the New York Times:

“American food lovers, who seem to be re-examining every humble snack — beef jerky, pretzels, soft-serve — for artisanal potential, are now turning their attention to shaved ice. They are abandoning the Day-Glo aesthetic and fake flavors that they grew up with in favor of the true colors of summer fruit.”

 As usual, “they” probably means the author’s friends, quickly followed by people who read the Times’ Style section as a guide to life instead of a sociological equivalent of an Economist story on Uruguay politics.

The word “artisanal” is the grandson of “gourmet,” which was an all-purpose prefix in the 80s: jelly beans and dog biscuits and hand-glazed Cracker Jack nodules. It had a cheap gilded Trump-like connotation - instant class! Just add 15% to the cost. Artisanal isn’t enough, though. Oh, it’s good - but things must also be Sustainable. A menu my daughter brought home from a San Francisco bakery a menu that reassured patrons their store was built with sustainable lumber, lest anyone worry that their cake was being eaten under timbers harvested by people who weren’t thinking seven generations into the future.

Unsustainable dessert stores will only hasten the death of the planet, and future cakeless generations will curse us bitterly. But if a store promises it sustains, you can be guaranteed that some offerings will be artisanal. It’s meant to suggest that skilled popsicle craftsman bring years of experience to their job, working in humble sun-splashed studios with David-Byrne-approved 3rd world music on the stereo, gently shaving the skin of a blueberry to extract the essence, hand-planing the stick (sustainably grown) with recycled sandpaper, then adding a drop of peasant-harvested, shade-grown honey, as they were taught when they studied Organic Popsicles from a wise old lady, preferably in a barrio.

Many readers, over the years, have come to weary of the artisanal snow-cone story, and feel as though they’re somehow a lesser person, a gustatory philistine, for not caring about artisanal snow-cone stories. They’re not of the tribe. But if anyone gives you trouble for having a mass-produced popsicle, nod sagely, and tell them it’s “Quiescently frozen.” Might keep them off your back, at least until they look it up.

From Boombox:

Snoop Dogg recently tried to redefine the concept of "going big" by tapping the small European country of Liechtenstein as the set for an upcoming video shoot. No, we don't mean he wanted to film at a specific lot or property -- we mean the entire country.

It turns out that the country would gladly rent itself out to the rapper, but next time they need just a little more notice.  

"We've had requests for places and villages but never one to hire the whole country before," explained Karl Schwaerzler, a Liechtenstein property agent, in a recent interview. "It would have been possible, but Snoop Dogg's management did not give us enough time."

Ricochet editor Peter Robinson posted a couple of questions about Afghanistan the other day, mentioning that, the next time he ran into me, he'd ask me about them.  I'm traveling just now--I'm on a book tour--but I thought I'd offer at least brief answers, saving Peter the wait.

Question #1: What's victory? How should we define it?

Answer: A sort of success in Afghanistan analogous to the constitutional monarchy that was pretty stable, given definitions of that term in the region, between say 1919 and 1973: a state that does not harbor terrorists and does not butcher its own. Afghanistan will never resemble Carmel.

Question #2: Does Afghanistan matter nearly as much as Pakistan, which has nukes and a population of more than 100 million?

Answer: They are not so easily separable; remember a backward nonnuclear Afghanistan has done us more damage than a nuclear Islamist state like Pakistan. Right now there are two concerns: one is to deny radical Islam a base of operations in inhospitable areas of the sort that were integral to 9/11. The other is not to leave in defeat, since we know that radical Islamists care in matters of recruitment, popular support, and long-term strategy for perceptions of strong and weak horses; the blowback from the Soviet defeat should warn us on that score. I don't quite understand how we are the more demoralized after a stunning turnaround in Iraq, and Islamic terrorists the most emboldened after seeing Islamism fail in Iraq.

This morning, President Obama gave his first speech devoted entirely to the topic of immigration reform.  As usual, the President talked out of both sides of his mouth and avoided taking a firm stance on any one approach to solving the nation's immigration problems.  Predictably, Obama blamed Republicans for being partisan, and perhaps unpredictably, he acknowledged that his approach toward immigration reform would mirror his predecessor's.

Over at The Corner, Mark Krikorian took a stab at analyzing the president's speech:

What was the news that came out of it?

Nothing. Bupkes. Zilch...No announcement of a new legislative package. No details on a bill about to be dropped. No unilateral grant of amnesty.  The speech was just one more effort at stringing the open-borders folks along while trying to blame the Republicans for not helping the Democrats pass an amnesty. (Wait, don’t the Dems have majorities in both houses?) In a kremlinological sense, you might infer White House openness to a piecemeal approach to amnesty, since the only actual piece of legislation Obama mentioned was the Dream Act, but even that is pure speculation.

Ruh-roh. After sticking around 460,000 for weeks, jobless claims jumped to 472,000 last week. Economists had expected them to fall to the high 450s. That's not a good sign in advance of tomorrow's unemployment report. In fact, it's not a good sign at all. My colleague Neil Irwin, who knows about these things, tweets, "Semi-Benign explanation: Pessimistic workers are quicker to file claims. Non-benign: Double dip time." -- Ezra Klein

Ezra cries that "the government did quite a lot -- though not enough -- to help." But in a world where the government's long train of outsized outlays is pegged to predictions that don't hold, my prediction is that experts on Ezra's side of the fence will be forced to insist that only more than enough is enough. How much more? The power to guess is the power to destroy.

I know, I know. He's supposed to be so smart. But there's one word for this: stupid.

First, House Minority Leader John Boehner calls the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill overkill, like "killing an ant with a nuclear weapon."

Not a great line, to be sure, but not much of a gaffe, either. Democrats predictably pile on, which you can't really blame them for. But then, Obama, who seems to have taken a stupid pill after running a brilliant, almost flawless political campaign, responds also. Stupid move.

So now it's Obama -- who, even though he seems to forget it, is President of the United States of America -- mixing it up with the House Minority Leader. Rule one of the presidency: Never get into a word fight with someone who only has to win a gerrymandered district.

Boehner blasts back today:

"For someone who asked to be held to the highest standard, President Obama spends an awful lot of time making excuses and whining about others. The American people want leadership from the White House, not childish partisanship."

Boehner, of course, can keep this going for a long time. It's in his interests to do so. Obama, not so much. All this "smart" president has done is elevate John Boehner. And diminish himself. Dumb move.

Watch Representative Pete Stark (D, CA) eloquently address constituent concerns about illegal immigration. And, for most of you at least, be very, very happy that you live elsewhere.

Wasn't it only a few years ago that the press was baying for the head of my then colleague Karl Rove, when they thought he was the man who had leaked the name of Valerie Plame (turns out there was a lot less interest when it emerged the leaker was Richard Armitage.

Well, here's the lead paragraph in a story about an explicit effort to unmask CIA operatives:

The CIA probably doesn't want you to know this, but unmasking its covert operatives isn't as hard as you'd think. Just ask John Sifton. During a six-year stint at Human Rights Watch, the attorney and investigator was hot on the trail of the CIA and some of its most sensitive Bush-era counterterrorism programs, including extraordinary rendition, secret Eastern European detention sites, and the legally dubious and brutal methods used to extract information from detainees. "Even deep-cover CIA officers are real people, with mortgages and credit reports," Sifton once told CQ Politics. For researchers with a trained eye for the hallmarks of a CIA alias, there are obvious giveaways: "A brand new Social Security number, a single P.O. box in Reston, Virginia. You disregard those and focus on the real persons who lie behind, and you can find them."

National Review? The Wall Street Journal? No ... Mother Jones. Read it here.

Remember John McCain's "Complete the Danged Fence" ad?

Now Arizona Governor Jan Brewer has an ad out of her own in which she demands, in the sternest of tones, that President Obama do his job and secure the borders.  

I wonder if the administration will think twice about proceeding into a legal brawl with this feisty governor after they see some of the fireballs she's capable of.

Remember when Al Gore mauled Tipper in the 2000 presidential campaign, during that awkward, clumsy, and drawn-out kiss? His outburst of manly exuberance was something short of the romantic ideal one might expect from the man so in love with all things planetary.

Apparently, that's his style. In the embarrassing saga of masseuse-gate, a 73-page police report was just released. In it, masseuse Molly Hagerty--the woman, as Claire pointed out, who accused Gore of sexual assault--gives her take on what happened that autumn night in 2006 when she was called into a hotel in Portland Oregon to give the Nobel Prize and Oscar Award winning vice president the respect his libidinous torso deserved.

Here's Gore as seductor, via Byron York:

The masseuse asked Gore what he wanted. "He grabbed my right hand, shoved it down under the sheet to his pubic hair area, my fingers brushing against his penis," she recalled, "and said to me, 'There!' in a very sharp, loud, angry-sounding tone." When she pulled back, Gore "angrily raged" and "bellowed" at her.

Then, abruptly, the former vice president changed tone. It was "as though he had very suddenly switched personalities," she recalled, "and began in a pleading tone, pleading for release of his second chakra there."

 In new age speak, second chakra is jargon for the "energy center" located in the lower abdomen and associated with passion. Gore was looking for a sexual release. But that might not be the most pathetic part of this tale. That distinction is reserved for this:

The accuser said Gore maneuvered her into the bedroom. His iPod docking station was there, he told her, and he wanted her to listen to "Dear Mr. President," a lachrymose attack on George W. Bush by the singer Pink.

"As soon as he had it playing, he turned to me and immediately flipped me flat on my back and threw his whole body face down over atop of me," she said. "I was just shocked at his craziness."

Wow. Just wow.

I was just sitting here contemplating the silence (you are all, presumably, in your chrysalises, waiting for Morning in America), when I noticed with some alarm that compared to the other contributors, I look orange. In fact, my skin isn't orange at all. Not that there would be a thing wrong with it if there were, I of course celebrate and cherish the vivid rainbow of our diversity, but in point of fact, my skin simply isn't that color and I don't believe any member of the species homo sapiens' ever has been. Could it be the color settings on my computer screen? Or do I look orange to all of you, too?

Here's a fascinating article by Pooja Bhatia about the unhappy fate of an indigenous Haitian peanut butter company.

Unfortunately, the Medika Mamba tale has been far too common in Haiti for years, emblematic of what has been wrong with foreign aid. Local producers can rarely compete with the influx of food, medicine, and other supplies that aid agencies bring. This is part of the reason why today -- after decades of aid dependence -- Haiti has almost no local economy for these goods.

Since our foundation was having so much contact with so many uninsured Americans, Stanford and The Wharton Business School were interested in doing a study on the impact of our site on the uninsured. They simply wanted to take 5k uninsured who knew about us and 5k who didn't and see how many actually got signed up. Our advisory board thought it was a good idea, but like any good litigator we should have an idea of the answer before we ask the question. So we asked a prominent hospital system if they would ask all of the folks coming into the emergency room uninsured the eligibility quiz to discover who should have been liable for the bills experienced by the patient. Over two months the hospitals asked over 4000 uninsured patients. The results were astounding. 99% were eligible for either a private program or a highly subsidized State or Federal program. 75% were eligible for a State program that would be free or highly subsidized. About 22% were eligible for MediCal which is California's Medicaid program.

What most people do not know is that the hospital and doctors are eligible to collect payment if they can show that at the time of service the patient was eligible for MediCal they can collect retroactively. It used to be acceptable for the provider to collect up to one year after the service. This gave them time to work through the system. As the budget got tighter and tighter they lowered the time from 1 year to six months and now 90 days. So while they are supposed to be able to collect, if the bureaucratic delay is greater than 90 days there is no payment. In almost all cases the delay was greater than 90 days so it has become impossible for the servicers to collect from MediCal. They simply treat and release the non-admitted patients, and try as hard as they can to collect on the patients who are admitted, but it is terribly difficult. In the next chapter find out how the service was when we called MediCal 50 times over two weeks during working hours.

The press is alive this morning with reports of the secret meeting between Israeli and Turkish ministers. Since this obviously isn't a secret at all--every detail of the meeting appears to have been leaked to every organ of the Turkish, Israeli and international media simultaneously--I'm once again left scratching my head and wondering just what kind of game these crazy local kids are up to now.

Anyone up for another round of Ricochet Risk, Middle East Edition?

After three days of hearings, the Senators couldn't lay a glove on Kagan. The closest they came was the discovery that Kagan, as a White House policy advisor, had helped draft the expert opinion of a doctor's group in opposition to a bill to ban partial-birth abortion. Even then, the questioning wasn't over Kagan's view of Roe v. Wade, or its extensions, such as the looming question of same-sex marriage.

This should come as no surprise. Kagan's day job is to argue the fine points of the law with her future colleagues; the Senators never had a chance, especially with the limited time they have to ask questions and the, let us say, infirm grasp some of them have of constitutional law. Evading Senators' questions should be child's play compared to bobbing and weaving at the counsel's table in the Supreme Court.

What should be clear is that the confirmation represents a Democratic Senate confirming a nominee who will vote to uphold the Obama administration agenda in all of its particulars. Her resistance to the idea that the Commerce Clause wouldn't reach government-ordered diets is a clear signal that she would uphold Obamacare. She criticized Citizens United, the decision attacked by Obama during his State of the Union address for freeing corporations from campaign spending limits. She also, to her credit, supported the administration's use of military commissions to try terrorists.

Republican Senators don't have the votes to stop Kagan. It's been 23 years since the Senate actually voted down a Supreme Court nominee (Judge Robert Bork), and even then, the Senate was held by a different party than the one that occupied the White House. The last time, I think, a majority party in the Senate could not confirm their own President's candidate was the nomination of Abe Fortas by LBJ to be elevated to Chief Justice -- and even then, it was because he was taking money from private clients.

So what should Republicans do? They can use the rest of the hearings, committee vote, and floor debate to make clear to the electorate their differences with the administration over constitutional vision. Turn the vote into a confirmation of Obama -- especially since several of his core agenda items, like Obamacare and global warming control, depend on an expansive reading of the Commerce Clause, and his terrorism policies reflect a desire to reduce the President's Commander-in-Chief powers in wartime. Perhaps the voters can show their buyers' remorse in the November elections.

This just in from a shy Ricochet member who wishes to remain anonymous:

An InTrade contract ended today on what the U.S. troop level would be in Iraq on June 30, 2010 if a Democrat was elected president.  

The results were interesting.  Right after the election, the price plummeted to about $28, which corresponds to 56,000 troops (price x 2000 = troop level).  The anticipated troop levels rose pretty steadily throughout Obama's term, until they're higher than when the betting began back in early 2008.  

On foreign policy, at least, Obama has been a lot less idealistic than people anticipated.

But he's also been a much bigger spender than expected. 

The vertical axis value is calculated as the increase in U.S. Government debt between September 30, 2010 and September 30, 2011, divided by $10 billion.  Our deficit spending for the fiscal year in question is almost twice what people anticipated immediately after the election.  

Christopher Hitchens, the brilliant writer whose memoir Hitch-22 just came out, had to cancel his book tour to receive chemotherapy. The former smoker has been diagnosed with esophageal cancer.

I have been advised by my physician that I must undergo a course of chemotherapy on my esophagus. This advice seems persuasive to me. I regret having had to cancel so many engagements at such short notice.

Read an excerpt of his memoir here.

As Founding Director of The Foundation For Health Coverage Education, I have interesting access to areas of health care and health insurance others do not get to see. Our web site has the entire US health insurance system on line. Folks simply answer 5 questions and the program tells them the plans, public or private, for which they are eligible. It provides them applications, contact information and eligibility requirements. It takes about one minute.

As part of the healthcare reform bill, the US government is creating a copy of our web site. We have had over 2 million unique visitors to our site. We built the site over the last 6 years in order to help lower the uninsured numbers. We invested about $500,000 in software and information gathering. Our site is ranked the number one site in America for health insurance information by Kiplinger's.

Enter the government.  When we heard about their effort to copy our concept, we offered to let them have our site for free or use what we have already created. We contacted HHS, Congressmen and Senators to no avail. They liked what we had but it "was not invented in Washington DC." In their first effort to create a site, that does not do nearly what ours does, they put a budget out of $12.5m. Add in all of the government workers and I would double the cost to $25m to get this done.

Once completed they will have an army of federal workers and contractors on board to keep it up to date. They really did not need to make this site, but it creates lots of jobs. Did I mention that our foundation which handles all of this information for millions of citizens only has two employees. The world is flat, but not in Washington DC.

If anything exciting should happen as a result of Hurricane Alex, I should be able to provide a first-hand account, due chiefly to the inability of a dispatcher to read a map.  Yesterday I had the privilege of bringing a truckload of debris to Weslaco, TX.  Actually, it wasn't called debris.  The bill of lading said it was lumber, and on close inspection it certainly looked like lumber.  People will attach it to their windows, after which the hurricane will remove it.   Once it is fully processed, it becomes debris, and no self respecting storm should be without a good supply of it.  I've often wondered, when watching television coverage of these storms, where all that debris comes from.  Now I know.  We truck it in!  I'm glad I could help in the effort to pre-position the debris. 

I was hoping to get a load assignment this morning that would take me out of the area.  After all, I wouldn't want to haul all that debris back to San Antonio.  Instead, the little computer in my cab beeped this morning with an assignment to go to Brownsville, TX, to pick up a loaded trailer and deliver down the road close to Padre Island, even as the storm homed in.  I called my dispatcher to inquire what brand of glue they had been sniffing when he promised that if I could take care of that load, he would get me out of the area.  Of course, if he failed, it wouldn't really be a problem since the storm itself could get me out of the area much faster than he could. 

I made my way east, but it was no use.  About 40 miles outside of Brownsville, the weather deteriorated rapidly.  The onslaught of rain reduced visibility to just a few feet.  The roads were already flooding.  As we say back in Louisiana, the wind was blowing so hard that one of the hens laid the same egg four times.  Am empty trailer in high winds is tough to control, and trying to keep the thing on the road was becoming more tricky by the moment. 

I decided to err on the side of safety, messaged the dispatcher that it was simply unsafe to continue, and made my way back to the truck stop in Edinburg, TX.  Tomorrow, I will try to get to Brownsville to make this infernal load work.  One good thing about the folks I work for is that they respect my judgement in these matters and do not pressure me to continue if I feel it isn't safe.  At least it gives me more time to catch up on Ricochet. 

If I see any camera crews from the Weather Channel, I will assume that the end is near and take cover immediately.

No, not mine.  Not yet, anyway.

AP reports:

San Jose State University said Tuesday that Molly Ringle of Seattle was the grand prize winner of the 2010 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which the university has sponsored since 1982.

In her winning entry, Ringle wrote: "For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity's affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss — a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity's mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world's thirstiest gerbil."

Somehow, for me at least, a gerbil cage will never look quite the same.

From Scared Monkeys:

Trouble in Obamaland: Bill Clinton Goes Against Obama and Supports Romanoff in Colorado Senate Primary Over Senator Michael Bennet

Looks like another piece of the puzzle is falling into place.

Kathleen Parker thinks so.

Parker focuses on Obama’s passivity in the face of crises, arguing that that makes him feminine.

I think that there are two more qualities that make him girly: the first is his vainglorious self-obsession. Has any president ever been as televised or talkative as he is? He's cast himself as the celebrity-in-chief rather than the commander-in-chief.

The second is his emasculating submissiveness, which was in full bloom when he wanted to hold hands with Iran and later bowed to the Japanese emperor.

It's all falling apart, at CNN. Larry King is leaving, Elliot Spitzer is coming in, ratings are down. Broadcast news is having its own slow meltdown, too. It lost one million viewers last year. And another million are probably out the door this year, too.

Then comes this news, from Goldman Sachs:

Yesterday Goldman Sachs upgraded News Corp. stock from "neutral" to "buy," and raised its price target from $15.15 to $17.
At the heart of that report was Fox News, which Goldman says is likely to negotiate a subscription fee in the vicinity of $1.25 per subscriber when it renegotiates deals with some carriers later this year.

Subscription fees are what the cable outfits pay the network for the right to carry the programming. You can raise them when you're offering a cable outfit something their subscribers really want, like Hannity and Beck and O'Reilly and the rest of the Fox News programming. If you're not doing that -- if, say, you're putting on Campbell Brown and Anderson Cooper, you're in big trouble.
The story of how CNN went from market leader to life support, and how the broadcast news operations made themselves irrelevant, should be taught in business schools for years to come. You can make pots of money in television news. Fox News does just that. Why is everyone else in that business failing so utterly?

Or so it seems:

Leggings? A rumpled, too-small jean jacket? Fingerless gloves? I think those are black Chuck Taylors on her feet. And that hair! I'm reasonably certain that golden strap on her hip leads back to a cleverly concealed leopard-print man purse stuffed with old beanie babies and her one magical device (an iPad). This Wonder Woman has all the wonder of discovering that you can actually spell CHALUPA during a 3-am game of Scrabble at the Brite Spot diner in Echo Park.
(Photo: DC Comics)

Over at The Atlantic, Megan McArdle asks, "Should we encourage all-black schools?"

For decades, proponents of all-girl’s education have argued that boy-free learning zones afford girls the opportunity to be who they, unencumbered by the pressures of orienting themselves in relation to their male counterparts.

Similarly, advocates of all-black schools believe that single-race learning environments could benefit black students by neutralizing the stigma of doing well in school.  McArdle summarizes the argument in favor of all-black schools thus:

[T]he phenomenon of socially punishing students who "act white"--i.e. focus on grades--is something that happens mostly in mixed-race schools, where black students are trying to maintain a distinct identity.  When all the kids are black, getting good grades is just . . . getting good grades.

Barring the potential political and legal snags that all-black charter schools would almost certainly face, the idea strikes me as a reasonable one.  

David Weigel, the Washington Post reporter charged with covering the conservative movement, resigned on Friday after a few of his less than flattering comments about conservatives were leaked to the Tucker Carlson’s news site, The Daily Caller (via the ever-witty James Taranto).

Weigel—and about 400 other liberal journalists, among them the New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin, The Nation's Eric Alterman, and the New York Times' Paul Krugman—belonged to an exclusive conversational listserv called JournoList, founded by the precocious Ezra Klein. Andrew Breitbart describes the now disbanded JournoList as, "the epitome of progressive and liberal collusion that conservatives, Tea Partiers, moderates and many independents have long suspected and feared exists at the heart of contemporary American political journalism."

When Weigel vented his frustrations about Matt Drudge to the listserv, a mole at JournaList leaked his e-mails.

Here are some choice cuts:

There’s also the fact that neither the pundits, nor possibly the Republicans, will be punished for their crazy outbursts of racism. Newt Gingrich is an amoral blowhard who resigned in disgrace, and Pat Buchanan is an anti-Semite who was drummed out of the movement by William F. Buckley. Both are now polluting my inbox and TV with their bellowing and minority-bashing. They’re never going to go away or be deprived of their soapboxes...

It’s really a disgrace that an amoral shut-in like [Matt] Drudge maintains the influence he does on the news cycle while gay-baiting, lying, and flubbing facts to this degree....

And more on Drudge:

This would be a vastly better world to live in if Matt Drudge decided to handle his emotional problems more responsibly, and set himself on fire.

Then there are his crass and ubiquitous descriptions of Republicans, Sarah Palin, and Rush Limbaugh. Just a few months ago, Weigel appeared on the Keith Olbermann show defending Palin, and has defended other conservatives in the past.

Andrew Breitbart, who wants to know who the other 400 members of JournoList are, is offering $100,000 for the full archives of the listserv.

The failure of the Obama stimulus plan has sparked some great new economic thinking. As the pseudo-Keynesians continue their call for ever-larger stimulus, a smaller cohort of writers is suggesting counterproposals. Be sure to read:

Tyler Cowen on austerity.

Keith Hennessey on stimulus.

Greg Mankiw on crisis economics.

Allan Meltzer on stimulus.

Robert Samuelson on the limits of economics.

The moribund economy is the product of a failed liberal theory. If only the Obama team had read (and listened to!) "The Stimulus Trap" last January. A lot of this might have been avoided.

A postscript: Looking over that piece a year and a half later, I am less convinced that monetary policy has done all it can do. It worries me when I hear that the money supply may be contracting and that a lot of the liquidity the Fed injected into the banks is just sitting there. We need to get that money moving, by creating a predictable business environment conducive to risk-taking and investment.

I was reflecting yesterday on this comment thread, and it suddenly struck me how peculiar it is that this objective--which should have been the war aim above all war aims--is now hardly even discussed. Why isn't anyone angry about this monumental failure?