STAY ROCK STEADY, DUBYA, STAY ROCK STEADY

Hugh Hewitt, who seemed to be wobbly on the ports deal just days ago, seems to have figured some things out:

The president appears to be counting on his well-earned reputation for sincerity on matters of security to settle the ports issue. It may, or it may not. But it is clear he doesn't mind the debate. And increasingly it is obvious why not.

As with the Patriot Act, as with the debate over the NSA program to conduct surveillance of al Qaeda communicating with its agents inside America, and as with the war on all of its fronts, the president and the party he leads are serious about the debate and the stakes.

The Democrats aren't.

A photo op at the harbor with [Chuck] Schumer and Hillary is just another in a long line of stunts that is supposed to pass as a policy: Congressman Murtha's demand for an immediate withdrawal; Harry Reid's gloating that he "had killed the Patriot Act," John Kerry's never-ending campaign --they are all the same stunt.

It didn't work in 2002. It didn't work in 2004. And it isn't going to work in 2006.

If the issue is the nation's secuirty in a time of grave and growing threats, the answer isn't, and probably won't be for at least a generation, the Democrats.

Bush is setting up the next eight months to be yet another referendum on the war's conduct. Incredibly the Democrats have agreed to the terrain, which always has them fighting uphill. They seem to think that some combination of Katrina and the ports debate will allow them to emerge as a credible alternative on national security --when they refused to allow exploration in ANWR, opposed SCOTUS nominees in large part because Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito might agree that the president has stand-along war powers pursuant to Article II, and routinely argue idiocies like Dick Durbin's assertion that members of the American military are similar in their action's to the thugs of Hitler's, Stalin's and Pol Pot's regime or Howard dean's blanket assertion that the war can't be won, and that it is another Vietnam.

The sneering and jeering of Democrats on the ports issue is instantly recognized as rank posturing, the political equivalent of a demand for better exercise equipment from the morbidly obese.

I think these folks still haven’t figured out that they will not be running against George W. Bush in 2008 nor 2006.

Oh well.

As I’ve written before, President Bush has backbone where it matters most. To his credit, he immediately made it clear he was sticking with this deal – polls be damned. Especially when those polls amount to nothing more than taking the temperature of a gossip index.

 

BLACK REPUBLICANS CURRENTLY HOLDING ELECTIVE OFFICE IN FLORIDA

Pioneers, all of them:

Jennifer Carroll– Fla. House of Representative,

District 13 (Duval & Clay Counties)

 

Arthur Graham- Council Member,

District 13, Jacksonville

 

Glorious Johnson- Council Member-at-Large,

Jacksonville

 

Elizabeth Wade- City Council,

District 3, Riviera Beach

 

Esther Berry- Commissioner,

Vice-Mayor, South Bay

 

Gow Fields- Commissioner,

Northwest District, Lakeland

 

A good, representative group.

 

THE NFL SCOUTING COMBINE

It’s very interesting to watch the NFL Combine live on the NFL Network. Money is being made and lost, based on some standardized drills. Chad Jackson from Florida was the number one timed receiver in the 40-yard dash. Ingle Martin, a transfer from Florida to Furman, just made a couple of good throws in the QB drills and may find himself a place in the League, too.

 

DANCIN’ WITH THE MOONBATS

Been there, done that: Gerard Van Der Leun calls out those who have a convenient problem with making money (except when it’s them making the money):

Over the nearly four decades since 1968, the list of regimes dedicated to, and capable of, the destruction of the United States shrank. They either took a long dirt nap in history or are now shambling towards the graveyard of all other failed but deadly fascist ideologies. The political genius and destiny of the United States lies, after all, in the fact that we do not require you to be a friend. You simply have to not be an enemy. The American Way is, after all, that nothing need be personal when it can just be business. One on one, we can be very warm, understanding and generous. But piss us off too much and we'll bomb your cities to rubble. We don't like business to be disrupted too much.

In all this, the world at large has gone forward and, all in all, improved for the better. We call it "Globalization" and it seems, slowly, to be working out well for most of those people who have, as they say, "gotten with the program."

But there remains a group of us who, although they batten off the program, don't want to get with it at all -- except when it comes time to buy a new Prius or get a country home. They take pride in never having sold out, even as they buy in.

Those Americans of the 60s whose fantasies were lit by a dream of a destroyed United States have very few friends left out of the long list of countries once dedicated to totalitarianism. And the list becomes shorter with each passing year.

Time and chance also makes the list of those Americans still dedicated to becoming life-long friends of countries and movements dedicated to the destruction of AmeriKKKa shorter every year. Yet most still live and thrive in the place they hate the most. They have made prosperous lives for themselves in local, state and national governments and politics, as well as in academia, the entertainment world, and the media. Greying now they still continue in their quest for an enemy of their enemy to make their friend. They are the American Left and, risen from their impoverished conditions in 1968, they have now tenure, high position, or acolytes from which they draw comfortable stipends. Of late, they've taken more and more to coffee klatches with Islamic fundamentalists who, if they don't have the armies to bring about the destruction of the United States, have at least shown they've got enough hate to kill Americans here and abroad retail and wholesale. Besides, they're out shopping for a nuclear weapon and some smallpox, so what's not to like about these guys from an American Leftist's point of view?

I wouldn’t say this of “the left” but I would of “the far left,” also lovingly known as the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party. You know, those folks who think Nancy Pelosi is “a moderate with an edge.” Right!

One of Gerard’s readers put it quite nicely:

Dancing with the Moonbats,
Everybody feeling warm and right,
It's such a fine and natural sight--
Everybody was dancing with the Moonbats.

 

Yeah, buddy. Good music from those days, updated quite nicely.

 

HARVARD PRESIDENT LARRY SUMMERS AND (FORMER) FLORIDA PRESIDENT JOHN LOMBARDI

Ruth Wisse, a literature professor at Harvard, speaks up for Larry Summers – the soon-to-be former President at that beacon of American higher education:

For the moment, the attackers have won the day, asserting their right to dictate to the rest of the university the accommodations they favor.

But student response to the ouster suggests another long-term outcome. Although the activists of yesteryear may have found a temporary stronghold in the universities, a new generation of students has had its fill of radicalism. Sobered by the heavy financial burdens most of their families have to bear for their schooling, they want an education solid enough to warrant the investment. Chastened by the fall-out of the sexual revolution and the breakdown of the family, they are wary of human experiments that destabilize society even further. Alert to the war that is being waged against America, they feel responsible for its defense even when they may not agree with the policies of the current administration. If the students I have come to know at Harvard are at all representative, a new moral seriousness prevails on campus, one that has yet to affect the faculty members because it does not yet know how to marshal its powers.

As long as FAS [the Faculty of Arts and Sciences] went about its business as usual, no one may have noticed its skewed priorities, but its political victory sets its actions and inaction in bolder relief. The same professors who fought so hard to oust their president did not once since the events of 9/11 consider whether they owed any responsibilities to a country at war.

FAS continued to ban ROTC from campus on the excuse that the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy discriminates against homosexuals. Many students realize that this is tantamount to letting others do the fighting while advertising their moral superiority. Several years ago, the Undergraduate Council voted to give ROTC its approval. Although the faculty ignored this vote and simply waited for that cohort to graduate, other students will sooner or later stand up for their contemporaries who want to serve their country.

Yes, they certainly will.

There’s been much discussion, of course, on this turn of events. Instapundit, and Power Line, among many others. My contribution to this discussion is to introduce another university President into the discussion. John Lombardi, former President at the University of Florida and presently Chancellor at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst, in 1992 delivered an address before a national meeting of American Liberal Arts and Sciences Deans in Tampa on November 12, 1992 that strikes me as relevant today. Lombardi was a truly great President at Florida and the factors chasing him away from Gator Country may be the subject of another writing soon. However, in his 1992 address (designed to be a wake-up call to all academicians who care about arts and sciences education in the United States) he said then, in part:

We know the university cannot stand without its arts and sciences. We recognize that the college carries the university's primary mission and defines its place in western civilization. Yet, we still find the arts and sciences under attack and on the defensive. In most of our great universities, the arts and sciences have drifted out of the institutional focus. The arts and sciences disciplines find themselves competing with professional schools for institutional attention and resources and they struggle against attacks on their intellectual integrity from interdisciplinary programs that dilute their disciplinary authority. Where once the college controlled the destiny of its university, its moral imperative grows weak under the fragmenting power of micro-specialization and political controversy and under the dissolving agendas of race and ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation, class and entitlement.

Our popular audience, that once embraced us for our ability to explain science and history, literature and arts, politics and society, now rejects us as our discourse grows ever more abstract, specialized, and inaccessible. Historians write for historians, but the public looks to amateurs for its history. We reward research of such mind-numbing obscurity that the audience shrinks to a dozen, and we scorn the popularizer, the great teacher of the general public. Our incantation might go thus:

"Woe unto the academic who makes a popular success of her work, for she shall be scorned by her peers."

Lombardi then continued his address by noting the excesses resulting from the environment of the 60s and 70s:

Those of us who grew up in the universities of the late 1960s and early 1970s participated in the weakening of faculty authority and responsibility within our colleges of arts and sciences. We watered down the curriculum, we declined to accept responsibility for defining the core of our intellectual focus, we abdicated our authority for academic judgment and discretion, and we rushed into our sub-specializing research as a refuge against the bitter conflicts of the times. In the 1980s and increasingly now in the 1990s we have begun to recapture some of that lost ground and that abdicated authority and responsibility, but oh how slowly it goes!

Were these dilemmas not enough, the muckrakers of academe attacked our universities bitterly, irresponsibly, and effectively. A cottage industry of academic exposés sprang up, detailing the crass hypocrisy of the professor, outlining the college teacher's flight from teaching, and glorying in examples of a greedy grasping professoriat. Angry and pained, shocked at the welcome these attacks earned from the public, and hurt by the general failure of anyone to appreciate our self-recognized virtues, we in the universities struck out, crying foul, seeking solace in the belief we had been misunderstood and misrepresented.

Our response fell on deaf ears. Our public believed our attackers and not our protests. While recognizing the excess of muckraking, our public saw the basic truth in these books and articles and, in that truth, found a reason to lose faith in our achievement and our dedication.

That loss of faith hit hardest at the arts and sciences because, for the most part, the muckraker's examples came from arts and sciences departments, programs, and disciplines. Oh, to be sure, a shot here and there landed on a professional school, but by and large the big hits came against English, history, political science, sociology, physics, chemistry, comparative literature, foreign language, and the other pillars of our colleges of arts and sciences.

If you take the time to read Lombardi’s full address, I think you’ll agree that it is an interesting insight into the battle between Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and President Summers. There is a war going on inside academia and it is being fought all over the nation. On point, check out this closing observation at Power Line blog:

Reader Jack Lifton asks us to quote the last three paragraphs of the [L.A. Times] story:

...Harry Lewis, a computer science professor and former dean of Harvard College who left under pressure from Summers, said campus politics here had been shifting for decades, as more students from less affluent backgrounds enrolled.

A more diverse group, they are also "eager to prosper and less willing to take risks by rebelling," Lewis said. His upcoming book, "Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education," traces what he considers to be the decline in the quality of education at Harvard. It's left them far more likely to support the power structure, he said.

"The Harvard student body looks more like America than the Harvard faculty," he said. "That's what's happened."

Jack comments:

The statement by a man who felt he could not remain on a faculty headed up by Summers unwittingly wrote an epitaph not only for the hard left wing of the Harvard faculty but also for the hard left wing of the Democratic Party.

So true; he (Lewis), I can virtually guarantee, never comprehended the condescension quite evident in his statement. “Oh dear,” he seems to be lamenting, “we’re being overrun by the less affluent riff-raff and they are absolutely RUINING our university.”

Eager to prosper, as if that’s a bad thing. Less willing to take risks, as if that [risk-taking] is their primary purpose at Harvard, rather than obtaining a first-class education.

The Arts and Sciences folks are killing their cause at universities all across America.

 

HERE’S WHY THE RPI CAN’T BE RELIED UPON TOO HEAVILY

This point is shamelessly lifted from Rishi's Ratings:

WHY THE RPI IS FLAWED

The RPI uses a system of averages. Because 50% of your overall score is from your opponents record this can overpower the 25% that comes from winning percentage. Often when very good teams play very bad teams, their RPI goes down even though they won the game. Likewise the RPI for the very bad team rises even though they lost the game. Since winning margin is not a factor, it should be impossible to have your score drop after a victory. After all winning was the best possible result. When ranking the very top teams, the key to gaining a great RPI is not so much winning, but rather avoiding the really terrible teams.

That last sentence explains why the RPI is a tool for use at the end of the season and is incredibly misused as a tool during the course of the season.

 

REST-IN-PEACE, CURT GOWDY

One of the first national announcers I remember watching on TV, Curt Gowdy, has died in Palm Beach County.

Many Miami Dolphins fans [RattlerGator: count me in that number] remember the epic postseason game Gowdy worked on Christmas Day, 1971. The Dolphins and Chiefs played into the second overtime period at Kansas City before Garo Yepremian won it for Miami at 82 minutes and 40 seconds, the longest game in pro football history. Gowdy recalled it years later with the same matter-of-fact style that framed all of his work in reality as much as drama.

“There was a full moon and when Yepremian’s kick tumbled through the goalposts, it was the quietest I ever heard a packed stadium,” Gowdy said. “It was eerie. ...They just packed up their seat cushions and left.”

Those were the days. Godspeed, Curt Gowdy.

 

COLLEGE BASKETBALL 2005-2006: UP YEAR FOR THE SEC, DOWN FOR THE ACC

For starters, take a look at how the SEC finished up the basketball season last year:

MEN’S 2004-2005 FINAL STANDINGS