Win Myers has more on The King’s College here and (for deeper context) here.

Win also posted a long "Letter to the Columbia Trustees" from Candace de Russy, the Democracy Project’s Chairman. If you scroll down the DP site, you’ll find more on anti-Semitism at Columbia.

Pew Research offers a profile of those who supported Howard Dean:

But Dean activists are far wealthier, better educated, more secular and much less ethnically diverse than other Democrats. A disproportionate number of Dean activists are white, well-educated Baby Boomers ­ fully a third are college graduates between the ages of 45 and 64, compared with just 9% of Democrats in the general public. But the image of younger Deaniacs as political newcomers has been borne out. For more than four-in-ten (42%) Dean activists ­ and two-thirds of those under age 30 ­ the Dean campaign represented their first foray into active presidential politics. And among those who were political veterans, a sizable number (36%) said they were more engaged this time than in previous campaigns.

I’m sitting in my hotel room in Vancouver, just reading the Globe and Mail, "Canada’s national newspaper." You’d think I’d know better, having spent eight years of my life being irritated by this rag. But it was free, and I’m a sucker.

Today’s G & M contains the following column (available only to premium subscribers on-line, but please, please don’t give these people any money):

Pope’s protracted death a PR-boon for Catholicism

Pope John Paul II was the first pope to die in the era of the 24-hour cable-news network. He was not the first celebrity: The mourning of Diana, Princess of Wales, probably came close to rivalling his in terms of sheer broadcast hours. But John Paul took much longer to die than producers had planned, and his dying days pushed the constant-news medium to its conceptual limit....

This event was also the best illustration we have yet seen of how the presence of a constant visual news flow actually shapes perceptions and thus alters history. What the news channels did, out of the necessity of their schedules, was to vastly inflate both the significance of an event and the popularity of a man. [Come again?] They instantly canonized a pope who had up to that point been characterized by the secular media as at best controversial and at worst regressive. they quickly convinced themselves that they were all Catholic. And they probably changed forever how a Pope’s death will be seen and understood.

Let me stop here to catch my breath, for this is breathtaking stuff. Russell Smith, the author of this column (a self-described "skeptical atheistic urbanite"), taxes the media with altering our view of Pope John Paul II, "canonizing" him when the truth (established also by the media, i.e., by those "skeptical atheistic urbanites" like himself) is that he was "at best controversial" and "at worst regressive." O.K., here’s some more, after a brief summary of the Schiavo and Easter coverage :

It has been an extremely good month for the Catholic church, PR-wise. [Which matters to whom?] The sheer number of priests on American airwaves in the last month must itself dispel the notion of liberal media bias. [Which Smith is doing his darnedest to re-establish, bless his heart.]

Certainly, a great many of the world’s one billion Catholics seriously loved and admired the man and feel genuine grief and loss at his death. And this grief, and the gathering of great crowds in churches and public places around the world, is a genuinely newsworthy event [gee, ya think?], and provides a stock of genuinely moving imagery about the power of faith. It is also arguably good for skeptical atheistic urbanites like myself to be reminded that although we may be overrepresented in the media, we really do not represent most people.

It’s tempting to give him this last word, but the next paragraph is just too smug, stupid, and infuriating to let go:

But there are certain other facts which did not appear, at least for the first five days of the death-watch. Such as: One billion is still only one-sixth of the whole. That is, five-sixths of the world’s population--and about three-quarters of the U.S. population--is not Catholic. [Does this mean we shouldn’t care about the death of a world-historical figure, whom many non-Catholics admired immensely?] John Paul II was not, it turns out, a great reconciler and revolutionary, but a hard-line conservative whose refusal to endorse safe sex in Africa makes him complicit in that continent’s holocaust.

I can’t take any more. This guy wins the Christopher Hitchens Award, hands down. Hitchens is at least smart, literate, and witty. Russell Smith lacks any of those (somewhat) redeeming qualities. By his obtuseness, he disqualifies himself as a serious commentator on even the secular significance of the reign of Pope John Paul II.

The column continues for another four paragraphs of ranting and lamenting that religion is getting so much (too much) airtime. While we, of course, should see the Pope for what he was, as defined by the non-sensational, truth-seeking secular print media. Heh.

It turns out that someone in Mel Martinez’s office drafted this piece of tripe. He has resigned. Here’s the WaPo article; here’s Powerline’s commentary; here’s what Michelle Malkin has to say; and here’s Mickey Kaus’s take on the whole thing.

There’s plenty of blame to go around: Mike Allen for misrepresenting or misreporting how widely distributed the memo was; Tom Harkin for not coming forward sooner to clear things up; and Mel Martinez for apparently not reading the dog-gone memo before he handed it to someone else!!!!!!!

One of the nice things about travel is that you have lots of uninterrupted reading time. Today, I was able to blow through Ross Douthat’s Privilege, a memoir of his recently completed undergraduate days at Harvard (he’s Harvard ’02). He is an engaging, but not terribly demanding, writer.

My first thought as I was reading the book is that I’m glad I’m not one of his acquaintances, not because he wouldn’t be an interesting companion or interlocutor (I think he might be), but because he seems to write about virtually every consequential encounter he had at Harvard. Few people come off looking good. (To his credit, Douthat is not afraid to display his own shortcomings.)

My only hope for salvation is that, had I for some reason blundered into Harvard (I think I applied for admission back in 1974, but MSU made me an offer I couldn’t refuse), Douthat and I wouldn’t likely have moved in the same circles. Like Tom Wolfe’s Charlotte Simmons, Douthat turns out to be very status-conscious (even though he sometimes rails against the system). I wouldn’t have attracted his attention since I would likely have always had my nose in a book (not--Douthat confesses with, I think, some genuine regret--his sole mode of undergraduate being).

Douthat is, as I said, a good writer and a sharp observer, capable of ironic distance even as he plunges, sometimes despite himself, sometimes drunkenly, into what seems to be one misadventure after another. His book can profitably be read together with I Am Charlotte Simmons, plausibly qualifying and correcting Wolfe’s overemphasis on sex and bringing out more clearly the striving and climbing that characterizes what Douthat calls "Yarvton." He effectively shows that this Ivy League "meritocracy" is, by and large, old-fashioned privilege with just a few new players, who rely, yes, on native intelligence and hard work, but also on all the advantages that accrue from the opportunities and stimulations that their relatively affluent circumstances have afforded them. The book is worth reading, especially if you have a long plane ride.

Congratulations to this month’s winners of a No Left Turns mug! The winners are as follows:

Peyton Randolph
Maggie Hammonds
Jacqueline Bennett
Roy Stephen
Dean Hoffman

Joe Knippenberg notes the death of Saul Bellow below and the good link to the ’New York Times’ obituary.

In today’s ’New York Post,’ John Podhoretz offers a very nice reminiscence of Bellow teaching with Allan Bloom at the University of Chicago. Bellow stood toe to toe with Bloom as the ol’ war between philosophy and poetry was reenacted between these two old friends, the histrionic erotic representative of philosophy and the dapper, calm and rational poet. Very nice.

There is a heated discussion elsewhere on No Left Turns concerning the economic effects of immigration. In 2002, I published an academic article on this subject in the Kansas Journal of Law & Public Policy. The article relied on numerous economic and legal studies, including several books and peer-reviewed articles by Harvard economist George J. Borjas, as well as a thorough study published by the National Research Council in 1997.

I concluded, based on the economic studies available at that time, that the United States would benefit from more liberalized immigration laws. Among my proposals was a new guest-worker program between the United States and Mexico. I believed both then and now that a temporary guest-worker program would relieve many of the market pressures that lead to illegal immigration. That proposal turned out to be very similar to one made by President Bush in January 2004. Economics aside, I also believe that a guest-worker program could improve national security. With an effective guest-worker program, illegal immigration would decrease. Large amounts of manpower and other resources that are currently spent combating illegal immigration could then be more specifically targeted toward security threats.

Larry Sabato asks: Can recent history suggest anything about the 2006 Senate results? On average, the president’s party has lost three Senate seats in each of the last 14 elections (from 1950 to 2002); but this includes all midterm elections, both the first midterm election of a presidency and the second one in the sixth year of the two-term presidency.

There have been six "sixth year itch" elections in the post WWII era (1950, 1958, 1966, 1974, 1986, and 1998): The average loss for the White House has has been 6 Senate seats. And, this is the important point: "Never in modern times has a president been able to add Senate seats in the dreaded sixth-year election," for more details.

At most five or six Senate seats out of 33 will be open, without an incumbent, making party turnover harder, though not impossible, writes Sabato. There 18 Demo seats up and only 15 GOP. Tough for the Democrats to take the Senate back. And, IMHO, if the GOP picks up even one Senate seat, there is a realignment (Sabato doesn’t note this).