Red White & Blue Hens

College students in Delaware who think right is right, and left is wrong. We study hard, party hard, and play hardball.

Tuesday, September 27, 2005

Diversity Is Unfair...For All

Victor David Hanson has a great op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today on equality on campus. Well worth reading:
The signs of erosion on our campuses are undeniable, whether we examine declining test scores, spiraling costs, or college graduates' ignorance of basic facts and ideas. In response, our academic leadership is not talking about a more competitive curriculum, higher standards of academic accomplishment, or the critical need freely to debate important issues. Instead, it remains obsessed with a racial, ideological, and sexual spoils system called "diversity." Even as the airline industry was deregulated in the 1970s, and Wall Street now has come under long-overdue scrutiny, it is time for Americans, if we are to ensure our privileged future, to re-examine our era's politicized university.

Read the whole thing.

Monday, September 26, 2005

Energy Policy Disinformation

Maybe some of you saw the College Dems with a kiosk in Trabant today. I did and stopped to pick up their flyer. It was all about Bush and how he is destroying the enviroment. While Republicans and Democrats may disagree on energy and enviromental policy, some of the Left's arguements are unfounded and simply hypocritical.

For example, the letter (if my scanner was working you'd be able to see it) chastizes Bush for subsidizing six new nuclear power plants. While I am impressed that they didn't go for a twofer by writing "nucular," it does point out a hypocrisy about nuclear power:
But, as Peter Huber and Mark Mills remind us in a book ("The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why we will Never Run out of Energy") considerably less self-indulgent than Miss Fonda's, the substitution has been outrageously wasteful. It takes four tons of coal to provide the power needs of one inhabitant of Chicago's Lake Shore Drive for a year. A few ounces of enriched uranium could cover the same need. There is also the damage to the environment. The central hypocrisy of the green movement in our era is that anti-nuclear policy has driven the US to use the hydrocarbon fuels so much opposed by the anti-global warming movement. Or, as Mr. Huber puts it: "If we had built all the plants that were in the pipeline at the time of Three Mile Island, we would have reduced current coal combustion sufficiently to satisfy the Kyoto treaty."


In pretty much the rest of it, they complain on two ends. They call for better cheaper energy and lament what they view as enviromental loss at the same time.

While both sides are searching for a way to meet energy needs, the Dems do not offer oppurtunity, just contradictory rhetoric.

Monday, September 19, 2005

Who Ya Gonna Call?

Porkbusters!

Here are the project details:
Identify some wasteful spending in your state or (even better) Congressional District. Put up a blog post on it. Go to N.Z. Bear's new PorkBusters page and list the pork, and add a link to your post.

Then call your Senators and Representative and ask them if they're willing to support having that program cut or -- failing that -- what else they're willing to cut in order to fund Katrina relief. (Be polite, identify yourself as a local blogger and let them know you're going to post the response on your blog). Post the results. Then go back to NZ Bear's page and post a link to your followup blog post.

I've been trying to find some in my home Congressional District, Pennsylvania's 8th, but have been unsucessful as of yet.

Also, none for Delaware, so I am going to get on that. Any help would be appreciated!

UPDATE (7:22)
: Found a lode of pork for Delaware just by going through Subtitle G of H.R. 3 (that gross Transportation Bill). I found $80,300,000 worth of pork (click the link and scroll), and I know there is more out there! My favorite is the one million to improve pedestrain and bicycle access here at the University of Delaware. That Roselle!

Sunday, September 18, 2005

Bush 7, Axis of Weasels 1

Chris Christener:
Is it OK to gloat now?

Since President Bush was elected, a favorite criticism from Democrats and other liberals in this country has been that we're hated by the rest of the world because we've got this go-it-alone, simplisme cowboy running our country. Enlightened socialist leaders (particularly those in France, Germany, and Spain--aka The Axis of Weasels) have delighted in trash-talking the US and Bush while doing their best to undermine the War on Terror.

Now it's time to evaluate what their nuanced strategy has accomplished:

Elections resulting in a Bush win

* John Howard re-elected for an historic fourth term in 2004
* Hamid Karzai elected in 2004 in Afghanistan's first democratic election
* George Bush re-elected in 2004 in an election that leaves Republicans in control of Congress, the Senate, most state governorships, and with an excellent chance to reshape the Supreme Court
* Iraq holds first democratic election in its history in 2005
* Tony Blair re-elected for an historic third term in 2005
* Junichiro Koizumi and his LDP party in 2005 win a landslide mandate
* Angela Merkel defeats Gerhard Schroeder today and thus one of the back-stabbing, America-bashing members of the Axis of Weasels goes down to defeat!

Elections resulting in an Axis of Weasels win

* Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero wins election as Spanish voters capitulate to Al-Qaeda
* I think that's it for the weasels... Oh wait, there was that vote for the E.U. constitution that Chirac wanted to win so badly--well actually the weasels lost that one too. But, hey, at least Chirac's still in office. . .for now.

Friday, September 16, 2005

Kyoto: Dead And Loving It

And who finally killed it? Not the Bush Administration, though they certainly drove some admirable holes through it, but the Blair Administration.Speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative, Blair had this to say:
Blair, a longtime supporter of the Kyoto treaty, further prefaced his remarks by noting, "My thinking has changed in the past three or four years." So what does he think now? "No country, he declared, "is going to cut its growth." That is, no country is going to allow the Kyoto treaty, or any other such global-warming treaty, to crimp -- some say cripple -- its economy.

Looking ahead to future climate-change negotiations, Blair said of such fast-growing countries as India and China, "They're not going to start negotiating another treaty like Kyoto." India and China, of course, weren't covered by Kyoto in the first place, which was one of the fatal flaws in the treaty. But now Blair is acknowledging the obvious: that after the current Kyoto treaty -- which the US never acceded to -- expires in 2012, there's not going to be another worldwide deal like it.

So what will happen instead? Blair answered: "What countries will do is work together to develop the science and technology….There is no way that we are going to tackle this problem unless we develop the science and technology to do it." Bingo! That's what eco-realists have been saying all along, of course -- that the only feasible way to deal with the issue of greenhouse gases and global warming is through technological breakthroughs, not draconian cutbacks.

Tech Central Station has the whole story. Condi was also there, and had some positives to say about nuclear power.

Wednesday, September 14, 2005

Pledge Unconstitutional?

Runaway 9th Circut strikes again!
A federal judge declared the reciting of the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools unconstitutional Wednesday in a case brought by the same atheist whose previous battle against the words "under God" was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court on procedural grounds.

U.S. District Judge Lawrence Karlton ruled that the pledge's reference to one nation "under God" violates school children's right to be "free from a coercive requirement to affirm God."

Karlton said he was bound by precedent of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which in 2002 ruled in favor of Sacramento atheist Michael Newdow that the pledge is unconstitutional when recited in public schools.

Tuesday, September 13, 2005

Right To Privacy

Reflections of a libertarian Republican looks at this with some depth.

"Big Government" failed us again

You know, the American people amaze me everyday when tragedy's like Katrina take place. Walmart had more than 32 big rigs prepared to help 24 hours before the hurricane even hit, Budwiser sent its big rigs full of water... Rental properties have been donated to shelter evacuees, big rigs have been donated (at a large expense) for donated supplies to reach the Gulf region, and the countless volunteers from across the United States and other countries as well to take part in the relief efforts. The private corporations and private citizens proved to be spectacular given the situation.

However, it was mainly "big government organizations" that failed us in many regards. FEMA is one of those such big government organizations, big beauracracy that failed to get the job done. In fact, when those walmart trucks arrived, someone from FEMA said they weren't needed (but then again i heard that on the news so you can't trust that notion completely).

For years, conservatives like myself have railed against big government and big beauracracy for years to no avail. In our arguments for tax cuts we said "You can spend your money wiser than the government." This, is a perfect example. Also, in the race for Governor in New Jersey, Conservative Republicans note that the you could have a 30% decrease in property taxes, if you simply eliminated Government waste, pay-to-play, and made it more efficient.

A long term solution to fixing these problems is to do just that: eliminate big government waste, eliminating a large amount of big government organizations that serve no "real" purpose, except drain our tax revenues, and the creation of privately run organizations that can participate in bidding for government contracts so efforts are done efficiently, and are also done by professionals. Then again, conservatives like myself have been saying this for years...

As I recall it was the Democrats who put their faith in FEMA, the Democrats who put their faith in big government, and the Democrats who wished to continue such organizations and grow them by leaps and bounds. How ironic that now they attempt to blame such organizations for their faults as well.

Who knows, maybe they'll join me and support eliminating such useless government organizations? I doubt it. Liberal Democrats rail against conservatives and Republicans to no end, if only for the sake of going against them (albeit with no platform at all, or without any solutions whatsoever).

Sunday, September 11, 2005

Never Forget

Friday, September 09, 2005

A Great Op-Ed

This was in the Irish Times yesterday:
As the full horror of Hurricane Katrina sinks in, thousands of desperate columnists are asking if this is the end of George Bush's presidency. The answer is almost certainly yes, provided that every copy of the US Constitution was destroyed in the storm. Otherwise President Bush will remain in office until noon on January 20th, 2009, as required by the 20th Amendment, after which he is barred from seeking a third term anyway under the 22nd Amendment.

You really need to read the whole thing. It is a masterpiece.

Monday, September 05, 2005

Bush Blamers

Interesting theory from the Philippines:
Why the Liberal Media and Dems are blaming it all on Bush
Because they are worried that the Katrina disaster will push aside Iraq and Cindy Sheehan from the news, and Americans will rally behind Bush (which will probably lead to a upward spike in his approval ratings) when he asks for their support to help the refugees in Louisiana.

So the liberal media and other dems are pre-emptively trying to poison the atmosphere by engaging in the blame game and partisan politics. See Robert Kennedy. See Randi Rhodes. See Kanye West. See CNN. They want to see Bush fail so that they will reap the benefits in the 2006 midterm elections.

Thursday, September 01, 2005

Kids Like Us Coping With Katrina

I found an interesting article on what all those Tulane and LSU, etc. students are doing:
Thousands of students affected by Katrina were forced to improvise on their fall-semester plans, and many were inquiring about taking classes elsewhere.

Dozens of colleges around the country said they would help displaced students find spaces, and extended deadlines, waived application fees and promised to streamline paperwork. The federal Education Department also pledged to relax student-loan guidelines to help transferring students.

The American Council on Education estimates 75,000 to 100,000 college students in the New Orleans area have been affected by the storm, and close to three dozen universities in the region have been seriously damaged.


My heart goes out to all of them as we start our fall semester.