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Archive for May, 2005

Dear Ted Rall:

May 9th, 2005 by melissa

This column is BS. Please have unprotected sex with Ann Coulter so you two can bear moderate libertarian twins to cancel yourselves out of the gene pool.

Thanks,

M-Dog

Title Also Applies to the ASUO

May 6th, 2005 by melissa

Chuck Slothtower talks about “A complicted, expensive, rubric-ridden farce”. Of all the things he could finally be recognizing, it is the CIM.

Sure, I have issues with the CIM (Certificate of Initial Mastery). I think it’s bullshit, but just as much bullshit as anything else they put upon high schoolers in effort to make education worthwhile. The CIM falls into the same hole as everything else in high school curriculum: some people don’t want to go to college, and that is a perfectly acceptable path to choose.

Chuck’s argument is right on track, and is a vailant attempt to right the wrongs of one Ailee Slater: “The CIM is a solution in search of a problem. Long ago, teachers invented these things called ‘grades’… students who did well enough earned a ‘diploma’…An even simpler way to deal with grade inflation would be to grade tougher and make assignments more difficult.”

Sure, but that would make things a lot harder for the kids who come to class drunk after lunch. Like I did. Suckers.

Faraway Countries Of Which We Know Nothing

May 5th, 2005 by olly

Oh, I almost forgot. Looks like Blair’s back. Not sure if I voted for him or not, but I think this probably the least bad outcome.

UPDATE: This post contains the text of a letter to Blair from Iraqi President Talibani. On the other hand, this Reason piece is somewhat optimistic about the Lib Dems, for whom I think I may actually have cast my ballot.

DOUBLE UPDATE: Impossible to say for sure, but I am told I voted for the local Lib Dem candidate. I would have liked to cast a farewell vote for Blair (call it a “reverse protest vote”) but where I come from Labo(u)r is pretty much dead in the water.

“Clarence Thomas In A Fright Wig” Redux

May 5th, 2005 by olly

I’m a little confused about something. Here is an unsurprisingly laudatory Reason article on Janice Brown, the DC Circuit nominee who is liable to be filibustered unless Senate Republicans exercise the “nuclear option”. (There’s a decent joke about a “Frist strike policy” to be made there, but unfortunately Bill beat me to it.)

What’s disconcerting here, though, is not that Reason is writing pieces that endear me to a libertarian judge, but that when I go looking for the bad news on Brown, I can’t find it. This is representative of the form, and although it is a non-insane, soberly written, substantive piece intended to be critical of Brown, I don’t come away from it thinking any less of her. (You mean she has “[c]alled for the Supreme Court to return to its pre-1937 pattern of sweeping away many federal and state economic regulations by imposing severe limits on Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce…”? Say it ain’t so!) The leftish side of the commentariat seems convinced that Brown is the worst thing since unsliced bread, but I’m not sure why. I know she opposes affirmative action, but that by itself hardly seems to merit her being made the poster child for Evil Bush Judges. Am I missing something here, or what?

(We discussed this before a bit, here. Janice Brown, Terri Schiavo, and me using labored metaphors relating to the slicedness of bread: truly, there is no new thing under the sun.)

Just Another Day In Paradise

May 3rd, 2005 by olly

Sign outside the EMU today: “COME FIND OUT WHY EGGS & DAIRY AREN’T FEMINIST FOOD”.

New Issue

May 1st, 2005 by Tyler

Check out the new post-election issue. It’s chock full of goodness. Read Olly Ruff’s memorial of Andrea Dworkin, or Ian Spencer’s piece on the new stipend model. Hell, you can even read my rambling, far-too long piece on the ASUO.

Enjoy.