Fascinating article in the latest issue of The Nation, analyzing the attempt of left-wing philanthropists to mimic the legendary infrastructure of the right through an effort called the Democracy Alliance. I recommend it as a pick-me-up for anyone down about Republican chances in the election: if this is what the left is up to, they can count on resuming their long-term decline after a brief blip in this election. It bears all the hallmarks of stupid liberal policy: excessive centralization and an obsession with process.

Samples:

A secondary problem is the struggle these well-meaning wealthy Democrats have had in getting their own house in order. Since its inception, the Alliance has been unabashedly elitist, while also poorly run. The criteria for choosing winners have been maddeningly opaque and the grants themselves contradictory. Far from speeding up the funding of progressive organizations, the Alliance has slowed certain things down.

Meanwhile, for would-be recipients, the process of applying for money was bewildering: completely secret and seemingly changing all the time. . . The small number of groups chosen, some of whom were already well funded, and the secrecy of the process infuriated organizations excluded from the club. No one knew exactly why the nine groups had been picked. Funding progressive infrastructure was all well and good, but no one bothered defining precisely what "progressive" meant. The partners themselves, with their business backgrounds, focused on the process by which groups were funded, not what they would do with the money. "There was an almost complete lack of actual substance," one adviser to a major donor said of the Atlanta meeting. The groups were selected to mirror the right but were far less anti-establishment than their conservative counterparts.

In the second round of funding, however, the Alliance fell into the common liberal trap of needing to be all things to all people. After two grant cycles the Alliance is overextended. . . To date the Alliance hasn’t been deeply involved in idea creation in the same way conservatives have been. . . A funding shortfall only partially accounts for the Alliance’s inattention. There are philosophical reasons as well. Idea creation takes time, media development is expensive and both are risky. And the Alliance is highly risk-averse.

Liberal law prof (almost a redundancy, I know) Erwin Chemerinsky argues that by denying plaintiffs’ attorneys (from the ACLU and Americans United, for example) the ability to collect their fees if they win a case under the Establishment Clause, the Public Expression of Religion Act would deprive Americans of the opportunity to vindicate their rights:

Such a bill could have only one motive: to protect unconstitutional government actions advancing religion. The religious right, which has been trying for years to use government to advance their religious views, wants to reduce the likelihood that their efforts will be declared unconstitutional. Since they cannot change the law of the Establishment Clause by statute, they have turned their attention to trying to prevent its enforcement by eliminating the possibility for recovery of attorneys’ fees.

Those who successfully prove the government has violated their constitutional rights would, under the bill, be required to pay their own legal fees. Few people can afford to do so. Without the possibility of attorneys’ fees, individuals who suffer unconstitutional religious persecution often will be unable to sue. The bill applies even to cases involving illegal religious coercion of public school children or blatant discrimination against particular religions.

Aren’t there generous secularists and separationists who are willing to bankroll such challenges? There are plenty of good things, like school choice, which could be funded by government, but often aren’t. In some cases, the philanthropic sector has picked up the ball. Why not let Establishment Clause challenges be another arena in which we rely on the generosity (to use the word generously) of those who wish to pursue that particular agenda?

Chemerinsky assumes that the sorts of challenges he wants to encourage are always meritorious, but Congress--entitled, as it is, to its own assessment of the judiciary’s record in these matters--begs to differ. The legislative branch is certainly free to decide whether or not encouraging such suits, and implicitly approving of the string of decisions that inspired, and will be extended by, them, is a desirable goal of public policy. To my mind, little or no harm would come from reining in the separationist litigators and, in effect, compelling them to choose their cases more carefully, since they’re spending their own--or rather their donors’--money.

So says this piece from Down Under. A snippet:

The NIE states: "We assess that the Iraq conflict has become the cause celebre for jihadists." Well, let’s assume that’s correct. My question is: And? What follows from that assessment? Israel is also a cause celebre for jihadists. Does that mean we should abandon it? If the answer is: "No, that’s a ridiculous proposition", then it is logically equally ridiculous in the case of Iraq.

Of course, there are people who think we should abandon Israel, who would probably also argue that to respond in any way to jihadist provocations or to offend their sensibilities is to pour fuel on the fire, to which there is this response:

Non-action has its own consequences. There is a strong case to be made, and certainly one I support, that non-action is exactly what caused the original growth and strength of jihadism in the lead-up to 9/11. Would the world have been safer if we had continued to avoid retaliatory action? I don’t think so.

Couldn’t help that headline, as I read this terrific Gerard Baker column on the "Americanization of British politics" under Tony Blair.

Sample:

Mr Blair’s speech this week too was suffused with American echoes and cadences. A friend commented to me in the middle of the peroration that it sounded increasingly like Martin Luther King’s dramatic final declamation to the startled crowd in Atlanta.

“I may not get there with you,” Mr Blair, the soon-to-be martyred leader seemed to be telling his people. “But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land” — of city academies and foundation hospitals. If he had told us that he had a dream that one day all the little Brownites and all the little Blairites would hold hands together like sisters and brothers there wouldn’t have been a dry eye in the house.

Remember when Nixon said something like, "If the president does it, it’s not illegal"? Well, I fully expect my green friends to say something like "If nature pollutes, it’s not pollution" in response to this story in this morning’s Washington Post.

I will speaking tomorrow to the staff of the Harvard SALIENT and other conservative student organizations tomorrow at 530pm in Sever 103. You are invited and feel free to contact me for more details.

Cong Thanh Do is back in the U.S.A. after spending 38 in jail in Vietnam.

"Do’s arrest exposed a double life he had led for seven years. By day, he was an engineer at Applied Materials. By night, he was an online freedom fighter who wrote political essays under a pen name, Tran Nam, who pushed for an end to Vietnam’s one-party communist system.

He and his wife had fled Vietnam by boat, arriving in the United States as political refugees in 1982. Even as he settled into the routines of family life, fathering three children and starting a bakery on the side, Do never gave up on hopes of helping reform his native country.

Here’s an article by the courageous Stanley Kurtz on the causes and possible cures for grade inflation. In honor of Harvey C-minus Mansfield, we have to give his analysis some thought. But we also have to remember that Harvey ended up having to give both real grades and ironic grades. The ironic (or typically high Harvard) grade is the one actually recorded, the other is a more accurate evaluation of the student’s work. Harvey ddesn’t want students penalized for taking his class. And Kurtz reminds us that a B at Harvard is a genuinely subpar grade. An unironic Harvard C-minus is vritually inconceivable, although very old people tell me it once was what a B is now.

Harvard and the other elite schools put professors at more ordinary colleges in an awkward situation. Nobody is going to think a B at my college is anywhere near as good as a B at Harvard, but a B at Harvard is not so good. So wouldn’t my ironic position have to be to give someone who would have earned a B at Harvard an A? A fair number of my majors right now could, I think, scrape by with Bs at Harvard. Some could do better still, but I’m left with no grade for them.

Another pressure comes at colleges with schools of education, which often give lots and lots of As based on the principle of mastery grading. If you perform each of the sundry tasks of the course competently, you get an A. So A doesn’t mean excellent, but adequate across the board. Education schools, of course, are all about "the culture of assessment," but that really means detailed quantitative proof of adequate achievement of all the "learning outocomes."

The great injustice of grade inflation is to the admirable, overachieving student who can’t be properly rewarded for his or her outstanding work. The result is an overemphasis on standardized national tests, such as the GRE and LSAT, which should properly be viewed as supplementary, not primary, information concerning a student’s achievement and promise.

I posted a note on yesterday’s parental notification vote over at Knippenblog.

Tony Blankley reflects on some sobering news about a "separate peace" between Pakistan and Waziristan:

Whatever is going on in Pakistan (and we must hope that the men who replace Musharraf sooner or later will not be more sympathetic to the Taliban and al Qaeda, and will be at least as careful in controlling their nuclear weapons), our effort to stand up Afghanistan and suppress the Taliban and al Qaeda in the region has suddenly taken on an even more formidable dimension.

There are no ready solutions to the dilemma. With Pakistan now hors de combat, our already undermanned forces in Afghanistan will soon have to engage the tribal regions of northwest Pakistan -- fighting some of the world’s most resourceful and cruel fighters in the most unforgiving lands on earth.

Read the whole thing, as well as this.

Update: And then read this for a somewhat more hopeful analysis of the events. I’d love to think that RC2 is right that this actually frees our hands somewhat in Waziristan.

This morning, as I was consulting with my daughter (8 going on 14) about what she would wear to track, she announced that she had seen on the news that current temperatures were in the mid-40s. I didn’t think that could be right (high 50s is more like it, going up to the upper 70s), so she gave some ground. "You know, Daddy," she whispered, "the news lies." My response: "Not about the weather, honey, not about the weather."