This Washington Post editorial gets it exactly right: It calls Louisiana’s congressional delegation "looters" for trying to get another $250 billion for the state (circa $50,000 per person) from Congress.

I saw last night that CNN was reporting on how bad the initial "hyperbolic" reporting of all the media was the first few days of Katrina, especially around the dome and the convention center: Unverified rapes, inflated body counts, etc. Now the Los Angeles Times picks up the story, as does the AP. Finally.

Here’s a sample of the new American Spectator group blog. I share Jed Babbin’s concerns about the trial balloon the President floated.

It is nonetheless true that those who criticized the federal government’s Katrina response--and largely overlooked or exempted their political allies in Louisiana--to some degree brought this on themselves. It’s hard to blame a leader who wants direct control over the response mechanisms when his adversaries exploit every shortcoming for their own political purposes. A more forgiving political environment (too much to ask, I know) or a more nuanced accounting of who was responsible for what (also too much to ask) would likely not have prompted this response.

The latest issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education features an article entitled "The Loneliness of a Conservative Librarian" [sorry, subscription required]. Last year David Brooks investigated the ratio of Kerry campaign donors to Bush donors within academia, and it was in the neighborhood of 11:1--but among librarians it was 223:1.

The author of this piece, David Durant, knew back in 1997 that the profession he was getting into was made up predominantly of liberals and leftists. That didn’t matter to him--he prized himself on his ability to get along with everyone. The problem arose after September 11, and particularly after the Iraq War. At that point, he writes, the profession became "overtly politicized":

One of the most disturbing aspects of the situation is the way in which the supposedly nonpolitical American Library Association has become a platform for left-wing partisanship. The ALA’s Council, its elected governing body, is dominated by left-wing activists who recently passed a resolution calling for the United States to leave Iraq.

It is, of course, the right of the vast majority of my colleagues to hold positions I disagree with. But it’s a very different matter when the major professional association in librarianship takes openly political stands on issues that have no direct bearing on the field.

This WaPo article detailing a FEMA proposal to compensate churches for their hurricane relief work (only when it was undertaken at the request of state or local goernment) canvasses the usual issues, but also contains a couple of interesting nuggets.

Here’s one:

When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, religious charities rushed in to provide emergency services, often acting more quickly and efficiently than the government. Relief workers in the stricken states estimate that 500,000 people have taken refuge in facilities run by religious groups.

While we can argue about whether the governments (notice the plural) set an adequate standard of speed and efficiency, this is nonetheless a remarkable statement that provides evidence to support the President’s claims about the faith-based initiative.

Then there’s this from Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State:

"The good news is that this work is being done now, but I don’t think a lot of people realize that a lot of these organizations are actively working to obtain federal funds. That’s a strange definition of charity," he said.

It is impossible in a brief blog post to do justice to this characteristically Mansfieldian rumination on free speech and the university. His review of Donald Alexander Downs’s Restoring Free Speech and Liberty on Campus is, as usual, chock-full of pithy paradoxes.

Here’s a taste:

Downs notes that the difference between free speech and academic freedom is that the latter, unlike the former, relates to truth. A society can have free speech, pace the ACLU, if it does not challenge its own basic presuppositions, like those in the Declaration of Independence. But a university must, in pursuit of truth, hold those presuppositions open to inquiry. To carry out such inquiry, a university would seem to have greater need of diversity than a society. A university would not want to foreclose questions that a society might consider settled.

Conservatism is therefore closer to the mission of the university than liberalism is. Liberals, insofar as they are progressives, believe that it is possible to eliminate prejudice from society. When prejudice is gone, truth prevails, and there is no need to reconsider the errors of the past. Progress is irrevocable, and inquiry shrinks to whatever questions remain unsettled. Conservatives, believing that it is not possible to eliminate prejudice, are more tolerant than liberals; they expect society to be, and remain, a mixture of truth and untruth.

It’s great to see Tom Cerber back in the blogging saddle, providing intelligent commentary about matters north (and south) of the border. Here’s a paragraph that religious conservatives on both sides of the border need to ponder:

One of the reasons why religious conservatives don’t obtain wider support is that they fail to connect their socially and morally conservative message with the principle of liberty. While it’s true that they’re like preachers in the whorehouse, trying to preach moderation to an immoderate and hedonistic society. At the same time, they also need to do a much better job demonstrating that the immoderate and hedonistic policies that the other side supports undermines liberty. Too often they allow themselves to be portrayed as the enemies of liberty, when in fact the best arguments for social and moral conservatism sustain liberty understood as the “ordered liberty” of the responsible individual.

James Piereson--about whom more here--offers a nice and concise summary account of higher education in America, from the first colleges through the "liberal university" and the "left university." What he’d like to see is this:

These developments represent just the leading edge of a growing movement to challenge the practices of the left university. The purpose of such efforts is not to give representation to conservatives on an equal footing with other campus interest groups. Intellectual pluralism, the search for truth, and respect for the heritage of free institutions are neither conservative nor left-liberal ideals. Jefferson, indeed, understood these ideals to be at the heart of the university, and central to his vision of a "republic of letters"; Humboldt, too, saw his liberal university as the means of carrying forward the principles of liberty, free inquiry, and the unimpeded search for truth. The effort to restore these ideals on campus is thus something that both conservatives and liberals should applaud. The left university should not be replaced by the right university. It should be replaced by the real university, dedicated to liberal education and higher learning.

Kudos to John Fund for making public the endemic problem of corruption in Louisiana. Not a small issue now, considering the big bucks that will flow into the state over the next few years.

A few months ago I posted about the grassroots fight against the construction of an International Freedom Center on the former site of the World Trade Center. According to the group Take Back the Memorial, the IFC will become a center for "anti-Americanism" and will distract attention from 9/11 by focusing not specifically on the attacks, but on oppression worldwide, including presumably Abu Ghraib.

Take Back the Memorial had already attracted the support of the Uniformed Firefighters Associations, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, and several prominent New York Republican politicians. Now, apparently, it has won the favor of Sen. Hillary Clinton. "I am troubled by the serious concerns that family members and first responders have expressed to me," Sen. Clinton told The Post exclusively yesterday. "The [Lower Manhattan Development Corp.] has authority over the site, and I do not believe we can move forward until it heeds and addresses their concerns. Therefore, I cannot support the IFC."

The organization is still hoping for support from Sen. Chuck Schumer, Gov. George Pataki, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Asks the New York Post,

The House yesterday passed a bill updating the Head Start program. The biggest bone of contention was the bill’s extension of the co-religionist hiring exemption (first written into the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act, and unanimously upheld by the Supreme Court in Corporation of Presiding Bishop v. Amos).