Sweet Jesus

A Texas court issued a warrant Wednesday for former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay to appear for booking, where he is likely to face the fingerprinting and photo mug shot he had hoped to avoid. - AP

Kanye: Not Republicans' Favorite Rapper

College Republicans at the University of Florida in Gainesville held a protest outside a Kanye West concert on their campus, showing their disapproval of Kanye's comment, "George Bush doesn't care about black people." (hat tip: Campus Progress)

They claimed to have factual evidence that Bush does, in fact like black people: "I can give you two clear examples, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, close friends of George W. Bush," [organizer Matt] Dean said.

Ah, those "some of my best friends are [insert minority]" argument--ever the reserve of people that probably shouldn't have friends in the first place.

But this makes me wonder: who is the favorite rapper of Republicans? What if Cheney secretly were a huge Wu Tang fan? The country would be so much better off if he were.

NBA: No Bling Allowed

David Stern, the commissioner of the NBA and Kermit the Frog lookalike, recently issued rules for a new NBA dress code. Pre- and post-game, ballers cannot wear:

• Sleeveless shirts
  
• Shorts
  
• T-shirts, jerseys, or sports apparel [especially throwbacks]
  
• Headgear of any kind
  
• Chains, pendants, or medallions worn over the player's clothes
  
• Sunglasses while indoors
  
• Headphones (other than on the team bus or plane, or in the team locker room)
  

and must wear

• A long or short-sleeved dress shirt (collared or turtleneck), and/or a sweater
  
• Dress slacks, khaki pants, or dress jeans
  
• Appropriate shoes and socks, including dress shoes, dress boots, or other presentable shoes, but not including sneakers, sandals, flip-flops, or work boots
  

Stern clearly has a right to make these demands (the NBA is a business), but I don't really understand why he has decided to wield his power so arbitrarily. I fail to see in what ways this new image of the NBA is going to improve anything, other than maybe get Kobe an endorsement deal with Joseph A. Banks.

Some have suggested that this move, like the proposal to raise the minimum age at which you can enter the draft, is racially motivated. That may seem to be a pretty extreme accusation, and I'm not saying it isn't, but let's just try something.

When I say "bling" or "Watch out for the medallion, my diamonds are reckless / Feels like a midget is hangin from my necklace," what pops into your head?

Larry Bird? John Stockton? Steve Nash? Dirk Nowitzki? Vlade Divac?

I personally think that everyone that looks good in anything looks better in a suit, but I really don't understand the reasoning behind rules like this or the no-celebration rules in the NFL.

The hip-hop culture is clearly a large part of the NBA culture right now, and I do not see that as a bad thing. And I have no idea what removing it is supposed to solve, improve, or create.

A New Chomsky Hierarchy

Congrats to Noam Chomsky, who came out on top of the Prospect/Foreign Policy poll of the world's top 100 intellectuals. Coming in second was Umberto Eco, third, Richard Dawkins, and fourth, Vaclav Havel. Apparently Christopher Hitchens also came in the top 10.

Here's the accompanying article and here's the original slate.

I voted for Richard Rorty, Salman Rushdie, Julia Kristeva, Jurgen Habermas, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Why not Noam? Despite the fact that I've interviewed the guy (for the DFP), I'm stubbornly opposed to his distaste for the humanities. He's called English profs glorified "clerks" before, which hardly endeared him to me, an English major.

Recipe for more Con-dissension

CNN reports this morning that Harriet Miers tripped over her tongue in a conversation with Arlen Specter.

In talking about constitutional law, Specter claims that Miers told him that she believed Griswold v. Connecticut was "rightly decided." Griswold is, as CNN says, "the legal underpinning" for the Roe v. Wade decision. Whoops.

Harriet apparently got on the horn not long after Specter related this tidbit to the press, saying that he had "misunderstood" her. Yeah, that sounds like what a husband tells his wife when he knows his goose is cooked.

This brings to mind another misunderstanding the Post (among others) caught--Miers told Patrick Leahy that her favorite Supreme Court Justice was George W. Bush "Warren." When Leahy asked her if liberal giant Earl Warren was really her most favoritestst Justice, Miers corrected herself, saying that she was talking about Warren Burger, which is just a bad choice instead of a weird one.

Like that "mix-up," this "misunderstanding" on Griswold shows a few really scary things about Miers. Here's what Jim Lindgren of Volokh Conspiracy said about the Warren fuck-up:

Perhaps Miers couldn't think of anyone appropriate off the top of her head and thought that Leahy would like it if she said Earl Warren, but then caught herself when she realized that (rightly or wrongly) he was the poster boy for judicial activism. It would be odd to refer to Chief Justice Burger simply as "Warren." So perhaps the question was too difficult for her to answer without stumbling (of course, we all stumble in answering questions some time).

A second possibility is that she really does admire Earl Warren the most, but was unwilling to admit it to Leahy. That would seem a reasonable choice for a Democratic nominee, but not for a Republican. Further, to try to hide her choice from Leahy would show both cravenness and a lack of candor.

The third possibility is that she genuinely admires Chief Justice Warren Burger more than any other Justice that she could think of. If so, one wonders about the quality of Miers' judgment or whether she has read enough Supreme Court cases to form a reasonable opinion.

So we've either got a person who can't think on the spot and who can't make up her mind or doesn't know her own mind (all great qualities in a judge), someone who doesn't have a basic understanding of Court history, or someone who is more liberal than anyone may think, but is totally controlled by Bush and Co.

Ummmm...

Thou shalt not pre-judge

Bush and company have recently gotten a lot of mileage out of the o so insidious (and invidious) concept of "pre-judging." Bush is at it again here, saying that he's "not going to prejudge the outcome of the investigation"--that is, the Plame/Rove/Libby investigation. He was responding to a question of "whether he would remove an aide under indictment."

But honestly, what is wrong with pre-judging? Not only do we all do it, but isn't it an important part of our thought processes and long-term planning? Bush has a problem with long-term planning, it appears, but I would imagine he would occasionally do it.

Pre-judging is valuable insofar as it lays out possible routes for action based on a variety of probable outcomes. It's also called "contingency planning." If this happens, I plan to do this; if that happens, I plan to do that. Bush could easily have given the reporter a yes or no answer.

Similarly, it is valuable to know how a Supreme Court nominee approaches certain significant issues at this point in time. If it is readily understood that he or she may change and that no single issue should ever act as a litmus test, then I don't see the harm in asking someone to lay bare the types of jumps their mind takes to get from point a to point b. Senators probably aren't qualified to judge the quality of a legal mind in action, but I think it would be good if someone tried.

Free Falling

Bush approval rating: 39%--lowest of his presidency.

Disapproval rating: 58%

How bad is this? More people say they would like Miers to be confirmed (44%) than think Bush is doing a good job at running the country. Ouch.

Some weird numbers about Miers, though. Although 44% would approve of her confirmation, only 31% have a favorable opinion of her. Does this little glitch come from liberals who don't like her, but think she might be a Souter, or from cons who don't like her but want to stay loyal to the party?

Or do Americans just suck at taking polls?

Millions More, One Dartmouth Grad Less

Joe Malchow and Adam Shpeen of The Agenda Gap have had some coverage of the Millions More March, which was organized primarily by Louis Farrakhan, a man who has made repeated verbal attacks on homosexuality and Judaism and who recently accused the government of bombing the levees of Louisiana.

Despite the polarizing (to put it politely) nature of its organizer, many disparate groups have seen the March as a way to drive home the social realities of poverty and the ignorance thereof "uncovered" by Katrina.

Among them was the Black Justice Coalition, "the country’s only national civil rights organization for Black lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgendered people." The leader of that organization is Keith Boykin, a Dartmouth grad.

Boykin was promised by Farrakhan and Willie Wilson a chance to speak, but was not allowed to do so. Boykin claims that Wilson was the one who barred him from speaking, and that Farrakhan has actually been considerably more open to a dialogue with Boykin.

The whole story is here, on Boykin's website, along with the text of the excellent speech he would have given and some clarifications of what happened as opposed to what was said to have happened.

The "Lone Pine Revolution"

LGB bloggers have very rarely posted on the trustee elections, alumni relations, etc.I can't recall any liberals posting on trustee elections, alumni relations, etc. in awhile, so I thought I'd fix that.

They still don't, but, due to a desire to keep long posts on Vox in Sox, there now is one on the politicization of the so-called Lone Pine Revolution in the context of national politics.

My take: things don't line up--the issues that separate Rodgers, Robinson, Zywicki and the men and women who voted for them from the administration are not merely a province of the national culture wars. Support for or dissent from the administration's policies and attitude do not map onto national political boundaries (which I think are seriously misunderstood anyway).

The Review and the conservative blogging scene has done a great job convincing us they got their candidates onto the board, but I have a feeling Rodgers, Zywicki and Robinson just might have minds of their own.

I, for one, hope alumni tell the Alumni Governance Task Force (AGTF) just what they can do with their new constitution, their Alumni Assembly, and their opaque operations at this year's Homecoming vote.

Edit: Apologies to Bateman: I had searched the archives for "trustee" and for "alumni" and it returned few results. However, Bateman blogged a great deal about Zywicki and Robinson in May: here, here, here, here, and most significantly, here. He and I disagree in our assesments of Zywicki/Rodgers/Robinson's sinisterness, so if you think I'm letting them off too easily, read the above Bateman posts.

Dartmouth Prof Shows Why Racism Makes You Stupid(er)

Dartmouth's very own Jennifer Richeson, a professor in the Psychology and Brain Sciences department and part of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience has just released a report that comes to a startling point:

Racial prejudice actually ties your brain's concentration capacity up so that a person becomes less able to perform common cognitive tasks.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

According to the findings, the more biased people are, the more their brain power is taxed by contact with someone of another race, as they struggle not to say or do anything offensive. The effect is so strong, the team found, that even a five-minute conversation with a black person left some of the white subjects unable to perform well on a test of cognitive ability.

Here are the details of the project itself:

Richeson and her colleagues began by recruiting a group of white Dartmouth undergraduates and asked them to perform an "Implicit Association Test," a test that is widely used to measure unconscious racial bias. The subject is given a screen and two buttons. First, the subject is asked to push the button on the left if the word that appears on the screen is a positive word, like beauty, or a common first name for a white person, such as Nancy. Otherwise, they are instructed to push the button on the right.

After a session, the test is changed slightly, and the names given are those more common for a black person, such as Tyrone. The greater the difference between the reaction times in the two sessions, the more the person has trouble associating black names with positive concepts.

Next, the team had each of the students speak briefly with a black experimenter and then perform a test of cognitive ability called the Stroop test. They showed that the higher a bias score the student had in the IAT test, the worse they did on the Stroop test after speaking with the black experimenter.

Here's more coverage.

Dr. Richeson has previously done interesting work about "ethnic clumping" at Dartmouth.

Also of note: the departing Dr. Michael Gazzaniga was recently lauded for his work on technology and ethics by the World Technology Network.

Hanover, Norwich: Not Buoyant about Tubestock

Tubestock in trouble?

Officials from Hanover and Norwich want to put the onus of cleanup and control on the Dartmouth College students who organize the annual summer party on the Connecticut River known as Tubestock, and they are seeking leadership from the college in doing so.

Representatives from Hanover, Norwich and Dartmouth are scheduled to meet Thursday to discuss how to manage the event...

Riner Update: Noah Has a Sense of Humor

Date: 16 Oct 2005 13:35:48 EDT
From: Student Assembly
Subject: Noah Riner on Trial
To: (Recipient list suppressed)
*****************************************************
EVER WONDER WHAT HAPPENS

WHEN A DARTMOUTH STUDENT GETS IN TROUBLE?

Student Assembly Presents:

*********THE COS MOCK HEARING*********

MONDAY, OCTOBER 17
7-9 PM

TRI-KAP FRATERNITY
1 WEBSTER AVENUE

On Trial: Student Body President Noah Riner
Judged By: The REAL COS Committee

Followed by a discussion with April Thompson,
Director, Undergraduate Judicial Affairs Office

I'm assuming this will be a trial about the Convocation Speech. If not, this will probably be extraordinarily dull.

If it is, though, this is an amazingly insightful way to address this issue. Ideally, it will take both a serious look at what Riner actually did (and didn't do) and also put everything in a self-consciously ironic and self-deprecating light.

Let's just hope the evangelical blogs don't get a hold of this--they'll probably think it's real and that St. Noah is actually in danger.

Dartmouth Is Pong

As I energetically roused myself from bed this afternoon, I opened up my New York Times to find this:

"Beer pong seems to be the drinking game du jour. Legend has it that the game, also known for some reason as Beirut, started years ago at a Dartmouth College fraternity party."

Well, not quite. The beer pong they speak of is not the beer pong we play. Ours is an activity that deserves its own article, not some passing mention in an article about games, binging, and corporate sponsorship. The story I've heard, between the Review's take on things and discussions with "frat historians," is a little more complex. It involves ping pong evolving into speed pong, then slam pong, then finally something resembling our current pong, which was then bastardized across the country into Beirut, maybe.

Web Crawl

A few stories to highlight:

• Candian researchers find cannabis acts as an anti-depressant. Brown University collectively says, "O? Really?"


• Maggie Thatcher expresses doubts about the basis of the Iraq War. Ronald Reagan could not be reached for comment.


• Bush stages teleconference with soldiers, calls it a conversation. After all, it's the only way to get the "facts" straight.


• Florida passes law that allows deadly force as a first resort. This will undoubtedly boost ratings for the Florida/Florida State football game. No, seriously, this is really disturbing. Read the article.

Elitist Bastards!

Inside Higher Ed recently reviewed the touchy and controversial book, The Chosen, Jerome Karabel. The book is a vigorous and thorough examination of admissions policy by the so called "Big Three," Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.

The picture Karabel (or more accurately, Higher Ed writer Scott McLemee) paints is that these universities essentially admitted students on a grade-based meritocracy, with exceptions made for the not-so-bright progeny of wealthy alums. While mere academics were never the main focus of these institutions, admissions criteria expanded to account for "character" only when the intelligent and bright children of Jewish, Eastern European immigrants began to out-compete the more traditional stock of Ivy material.

In my opinion, the admissions process is part of a larger picture that includes prep schools, the public schools of wealthy suburbs (of which I am a graduate) - general social phenomena that combine with policy in a way that leaves America with lower social mobility than most other first-world nations. At the same time, while Dartmouth is in its largest minority recruitment event of the year, I'd like to think there is, at least at some level, an effort to build a fairer society instead of an effort to placate the non-elite segment of society.
Unfortunately, despite noble statements that have been made by the leaders of these institutions that would affirm my hopes, the socioeconomic composition of this institution and our peers indicates that this is just the same old game as always.

Get It Straight, Joe

Joe Malchow posts about the movement at Harvard to abolish the Solomon Amendment, which forces institutions of higher learning to allow military recruiters access to their students. [Edit: I have now been pointed to The Harvard Crimson article that Joe's source mentions. It's here.]

The Agenda Gap has a good post covering the legal aspects of the issue and Joe's post, but they leave Joe's statements about homosexuality and the military alone. I won't.

Joe says:

The 'discrimination' argument is a red herring which obscures a broader motive, one which has a grassroots movement unto itself. That movement is to hoist homosexuality upon everyone, and to jam its circle of errant minority into the square of normal majority. The movement will not be satisfied until people eat up without burping the notion that homosexuality is as normal, acceptable, productive, and generally peachy as heterosexuality.

Bullshit.

Although it is not quite accurate to compare the racial discrimination of the segregated armed forces to the orientational discrimination of the 'don't ask, don't tell' policy, there is one thing to point out about the integration of the armed forces and the larger effort to desegregate American society:

Racial desegregation was no more an effort to foist (not "hoist," Joe) African-Americanism on white America than the effort to end discrimination based on orientation today is an effort to make straight men want to fuck each other or at least think seriously about it.

Similarly, abolishing quotas on the admission of Jews to colleges was no more an effort to foist Judaism on WASPy little boys than permitting gay men and women the right to be open about their sexuality and not suffer for it--either professionally or socially--is an effort to make the military (more) gay.

The argument I assume Joe would make at this juncture is that being Jewish or being black is not "unnatural," while homosexuality is. That is a separate discussion which I will not get into in this post, but even if that were true, it would not change the argument that ending discrimination is not equivalent to foisting the discriminated sector of society's values on anyone else. It is a matter of intention, not naturalness versus "unnaturalness," and Joe has willfully misread the intention.

And regardless of its naturalness, homosexuality has no more to do with the ability to fulfill a soldier's duties than being black did (or does) in the late 40s. To deny someone a job opportunity because of something unrelated to their ability to perform the job is discrimination, plain and simple.

The only reason I can think of why conservative types seem to be unable to understand the basic difference between abolishing discrimination and homogenizing society to a minority's standard is that conservative efforts at "elevating" a statistical minority--like rich people--always do seem to end up foisting those people and their values on everyone else.

Edit: I took an unnecessary cheap shot at Joe above (the foist comment). Both words work, though foist is a little better. But the cheap shot was inappropriate and immature. I'll work on that. Apologies, Joe.

Student Assembly: Unabashed

I've always said I think honesty in government is a good thing, but this is pretty awesome:

Date: 12 Oct 2005 23:53:13 EDT
From: Student Assembly
Subject: LAST CHANCE!!!
To: (Recipient list suppressed)
**********************************************

Do you watch change or make change happen??

Would you like to have a lasting impact on campus?

Do you think student voices need to be heard before decisions are made?

Want to work with top administrators and faculty?

Need to pad your résumé?

If any of this appeals to you, then Join a College Committee!!!

The following committees are looking for student representation:
[List follows]

Chastity--It's so hot right now

Abstinence activism group forms at Princeton.

I'm joining. I bet it's a great way to meet girls.
Because, unfortunately, those ballroom dancing lessons just haven't panned out.

Stuck in the Miers

Did Bush actually get this pick right? Reason asks and suggests, yeah, he may have.

Therefore, as painful as it may be to admit, Bush might know what he is doing. He is walking away from a fight on abortion that he and his pro-life allies were likely to lose, a decision that leaves the always apocalyptic pro-lifers positively seething, denied the epic, soul-cleansing battle they long desired. But also without any other place to go.

I'm not sure I quite buy that, but only because I'm not sure he ever actually walked into the abortion fight in the first place. And I'm not convinced he's thinking of the party's future post-2008.

One thought: some have suggested (I think it was Maureen Dowd) that Bush's habit of placing less-qualified people around him is a sign of his desire to make himself look better. That argument is certainly strengthened by things like Miers's birthday note (a humorous version of which is here). If that's true, could Bush have some latent desire to see the Republican Party run aground after he's gone in order to secure his place next to Reagan (in hell)? Or am I just dreaming?

This will be the first and likely the last time I link to Ann Coulter

But it's almost kind of fun when she turns on her own party.