Eric the Red

Is my university biased? This picture makes me think so:

Posters, reading “Who dies for Bush lies?”

These posters have been on display in a window of the campus administration building for more than a month in a high traffic area of the campus.

When a campus condemns a students criticism of the left while actively patriotic displays, it is obvious that a bias exists. But is academic freedom at risk?

The administration did not punish Diamondback cartoonist Daniel Friedman when he published a cartoon mocking the death of Rachel Corrie. The university did refer to the cartoon and the paper as “an embarrassment”.

There is a campus policy prohibiting the display of flags for “safety” reasons. This policy was used to prevent such displays during the first Gulf War in 1991.

I recently read this article by UMCP Junior philosophy major Yarden Catz, who targets David Horowitz. Horowitz promotes an academic bill or rights, which is supposed to prevent politically-motivated grading and hiring.

For instance, a right wing student (such as myself) gets into a disagreement with my professor in a class discussion by saying that Marxism is bad. Since the professor disagrees with me, he may fail me. Or if I, as a professor of history find evidence that a key first-hand account of a slave is really a collection of second hand acounts, I could be fired by my left-wing administration.

Says Catz:

“Horowitz tries to motivate the need for this bill by a series of junk studies that “show” the overwhelming majority of professors are leftists. Upon closer look, it turns out these studies surveyed only select departments such as gender/women’s studies departments, English and others. Of course, nobody bothered to check the political leaning of people teaching in business schools or various engineering departments, where I assure you Marx is not generally cited with enthusiasm during coffee break. And as Horowitz knows, his “study” will yield much more useful results for his hypothesis if he picks on Berkeley or NYU rather than, say, Oral Roberts or other conservative schools.

Catz continued:

“The bill also claims that “academic institutions … should maintain a posture of organizational neutrality with respect to the substantive disagreements that divide researchers on questions within, or outside, their fields of inquiry.” This principle can amount to nothing less than an end to any sort of substantive argument put forth by any academic institution.”

While Catz says that a academic bill of rights would end substantive argument, I disagree. A bill or rights wold protect students from politically-motivated punishment from their professors for expressing an unpopular conservative point of view. Leftist professors such as Nicholas de Genova, Ward Churchill and Peter Kirstein would as well. The bottom line: policy defending academic expression benefit everyone and harm no one. Lets clean the mud off our ivory towers and make it happen.

Since the supreme court reinstated capital punishment in 1976, 1,000 people will have been executed by the end of next week.

Death penalty opponents have played many cards to try to have the death penalty overturned. Some people that I know don’t even think we should have prisons. I feel that the death penalty should only be used for cases where there is a preponderance of evidence convicting the defendant.

When the Massachusettes state Supreme Court ruled that a ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional, a debate ignited amongst all sorts of politicians over the implications. The governor of Massachusettes called for a constitutional amendment to overturn the decision. President Bush stated that:

“Marriage is a sacred institution between a man and a woman,” he said. “Today’s decision … violates this important principle. I will work with congressional leaders and others to do what is legally necessary to defend the sanctity of marriage.”

So whats this “marriage” thing? Marriage is both a religious and social contract. It establishes and reinforces both emotional and economic ties. Some particulars include property ownership, inheritance, sharing health benefits, hospital visitation, power of attorney and more.

Many sociologists draw distinction between religious and civil marriage. A religiously sanctioned marriage is completely seperate from a civil one, even though the state sanctions religiously administered marriages.

Civil marriage supports a state interest in fostering and supporting stable family units. Aaron Goldstein references Dr. Ellen C. Perrin, a professor of pediatrics at Tufts University School of Medicine, who conducted research indicating that children of same sex parents have fewer issues with discipline and self esteem, as well as fewer psycological problems at home and at school.

From a legal point of view, a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage flies in the face of our constitutional principles of equality before the law for several reasons. First, such a ban presumes that gay couples universally follow stereotypes such as sexual obsession and drug abuse. Second, a ban on gay marriage would inject religious law into an environment where the seperation of church and state is sacrosanct. Unless we succumb to stereotypes, there is no rational legal basis for objecting to gay marriage unless religious rules are considered.

Many laws have come up in Maryland and California, among other states, guaranteeding various civil rights to gay couples. In Maryland, Governor Bob Ehrlich vetoed a bill that would establish visitation rights to unmarried couples where one partner was hospitalized. In California, legislators have postponed voting on a gay marriage bill until 2007. Texas recently approved a ban on gay marriage through a referendum.

Recognizing same-sex marriage, wether it is called marriage or civil union, can do no harm beyond pressure gays to pursue constructive, healthy relationships. Legitimacy is a healthy thing, repression and ignorance are not. For the moment, it would seem that as far as gay rights are concerned, we are on our we down a slippery slope as a nation. Which side are you on?

Would you hump a lawn ornament? Well, this deer did.

Deer everywhere should follow this ones example and watch out for their cornholes:

My earlier Wilson piece prompted an interesting barrage of email. Writers either based Bush in some pre-canned manner or tried to argue that I was somehow “anti-war and un-American”. One or two went so far as to tell me I was a disgrace. Despite all I could write about these fine folks, I’m going to stick to something more meaningful.

Some people have written about the difference between a mistake and a lie, as far as the Wilson/Plame/pre-war intel is concerned. I don’t like dealing with quotes of quotes, so I’ll stick to facts. Namely, those contained in the findings of the Silbermann-Robb Commission.

The two key issues presented are the sale of yellowcake uranium by Niger and the purchase of aluminum tubes for use in gas centrifuge production. For those who don’t know, a gas centrifuge is used to concentration certain uranium isotopes, primarily from yellowcake.

According to the Robb Commission, the CIA and other intelligence agencies identified the Aluminum tubes for use in centrifuge production. The Department of Energy disagreed, instead finding that that the tubes were more suited for producing rockets. DOE concedes that the tubes could be used for producing centrifuge rotors. In his campus address, Wilson states that since the tubes were anodized, they were completely useless for centrifuge use.

The intelligence community goes on to list other dual use technology as evidence of a reconstituted nuclear program in Iraq. These include:

The report also indicates that intelligence analysts interpreted information that contradicted the views of their peers as “deception” on the part of the Iraqi government. From the text:

“[the NGIC] characterized the Iraqi claim that the tubes were for use in tactical rockets as “a poorly disguised cover story,” reasoning that Iraq was claiming such an end-use for the tubes because Iraq was aware that its intentions to use the tubes in a nuclear centrifuge application “have been compromised.”

The report goes further:

In some quarters, then, the thesis that the tubes were destined for centrifuges took on the quality of a hypothesis that literally could not be disproved: both confirming and contradictory facts were construed as supporting evidence.

And what of the sale of yellowcake by Niger? In his UMD address, Wilson stated that he was sent to Niger to verify a British report that such a deal was in the works. According the the Robb report, the British memo was released in September 2002, while the Wilson trip occured in March of that year.

Now here is the fun part: in lieu of this apparent disagreement, why was Wilson sent to Niger in the first place?

The Robb commission indicates that the only information available to justify Wilson’s trip to Iraq were three reports including information that Iraqi officials were arranging a visit to Niger through representatives at the Vatican. The Commission indicated that these three reports were retracted by the CIA in April of 2003.

There is some mention of the famous forged documents, but these were received by the US in October, months after Wilsons visit to Niger. Furthermore, those documents were not reviewed by intelligence analysts for several months.

Wilson suggests that his trip was at the urging of Vice President Cheney, but there is no information as to how Cheney became aware of any uranium issues relating to Niger and Iraq.

The Silbermann-Robb report tells me that the intelligence community was cherry-picking evidence that Iraq was re-vamping its nuclear programs. All of this evidence was either shaky in the beginning or disproved around the end of the war in 2003.

Ultimately, a concrete, factual basis to conclude that Iraq was developing a nuclear program never existed. Indications that Iraq was seeking to purchase uranium ore from Niger were either disproved by Wilson or recanted by the intelligence agencies pushing this hypothesis.

The reasons for the aluminum tube purchase was doubted by Department of Energy (DOE) experts, but the reasons for those doubts were construed by analysts to be evidence of deception. The same goes for the magnet production facilities.

There is also no evidence that the objections posed by Wilson or DOE experts were passed to higher authorities.

So where does the cherry-picking begin, and where does it end? Were intelligence officials on a mission to find a reason for war? If so, who was ultimately behind the mission? Who pulled the strings that led to war?

With al-Zarqawi’s family publicly severing its ties with him, I wonder if this is the beginning of the end of popular support for terrorism in the Middle East.

Here are some interesting poll results:

A poll after the attacks found 87 percent of respondents in Jordan consider al-Qaida a terrorist organization whose attacks do not represent Islam. That is a striking contrast with a finding this year, by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, that support for suicide bombing (57 percent) had increased in Jordan since 2002, while it had declined in most other Muslim nations.

While I may support the war in Iraq, I would grow weary of it if its battles were raging outside my front door. I imagine the same holds true for those living in countries bordering Iraq. while they do not like the U.S., the like being blown to bits by a madman even less. Not in my back yard, eh?

As Zarqawi broadens his fight against Shiites and expands his holy war beyond the borders of Iraq, popular support for his campaign will only plummet as the death count rises.

The President of NBC had some not-so-kind thoughts over blogging.

But Zucker said he is wary of some of these advances, especially the blog craze and its effect on TV.

“We pay too much attention to blogs,” he said. “It is absurd how much attention they receive.”

Zucker is annoyed, but in reality I think he’s scared. Scared, because blogs have the ability to bring balance to the media world. Blogs brought about the fall of Dan Rather, from CBS in 2004. CNN systematically buried evidence of atrocities inflicted on the Iraqi people by Saddam Hussein over the greater part of a decade.

If the mainstream broadcast “media” is willing to ignore the heinous acts of a dictator, why isn’t it the responsibility of the public to bring that information into the public view. This is what makes the internet a powerful tool: no matter what the bias in the mainstream “media”, individuals have the choice to look elsewhere for their information and may balance whatever they read against any other typing head. Due to the bias shown by CNN and Dan Rather in memogate, it comes as no surprise the people want to read differing points of view. Perhaps free competition is why the networks are so upset, but its exactly what they need.

I have finally gotten around to writing about the Alito nomination. The fight over Judge Alito has already hit the airwaves, with liberals labeling him as a “…darling of conservatives like Pat Buchannan and Rush Limbaugh.”

Many Democrat Senators seem to believe that he is to the right of O’Connor on many social issues, such as abortion because of his 1985 memorandum.

Lets take a look at the record:

Alito appears to be the sort of judge who allows congress free reign as long as their Constitutional condiments are in order. He is also the sort of judge who will respect constitutional precedent, not weave his way around it. This makes him a conservative, not a crusader. Let him pass.

Joe Wilson served in the United States foreign service from 1976 until 1998. He acted as ambassador to Gabon under George H.W. Bush, and directed Clinton Administration policies in Africa for the NSC. During the months leading up to the first Gulf War, Wilson sheltered more than a hundred americans at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad.

In 2002, Wilson was sent to Nigeria to investigate the possibility of yellowcake uranium sales to Iraq. This investigation was motivated by a British intelligence report speculating that Iraq attempted to purchase yellowcake from Niger in 1999. This report is the origin of the famous “16 words” from the Bush State of the Union address in 2003. While Wilson was not able to secure a definate “No” from Nigerian officials regarding such a sale, he remains certain that one would not take place due to the structural nature of the uranium mines. When the administration more or less ignored Wilsons findings, Wilson authored an op-ed in the New York Times titled “What I Didn’t Find in Africa”. Wilson suggests the Administration officials retaliated by indentifying his wife, Valerie Plame, as a covert CIA operative.

Some in the blogosphere attempted to counter Wilsons claim with allegations that he was responsible for leaking Plame’s identity. The right-wing of internet publishing attempts to blame Wilson as well. Critics of Wilson point to conversations he had with his contemporaries while acting as a commentator for Fox News. But these claims do not stand up to an analysis of the records of the shows in question (see another link about these). In fact, they are nothing more than a house of smoke and mirrors.

I have always believed that there are lines that politics is never, under any circumstances, permitted to cross. One of these is intelligence operations. As far as the facts of law are concerned, Administration officials stooped to the level of outing a covert operative out of political spite.

Wilson was sent to verify the accuracy of the British report, and his findings most definately did NOT do this. The Administration chose to ignore his findings, and punished him when he attempted to set the record straight in public.

Ultimately, it is unacceptable for any government official to betray a member of the intelligence under any circumstances. Anyone who does so should hang by the neck until dead, decayed and reduced to dust. So they have Libby, who might be next? Rove? Cheney? I don’t know, but I sure hope we find out.

Listen to Ambassador Wilson’s speech (14 M, *.wma)