GOOD FRIDAY

Remembering the day that a government murdered the greatest teacher the world has ever seen.

May his wisdom always live on in the hearts of men

A CONSERVATIVE FEMALE NEWSPAPER COLUMNIST HITS THE NAIL ON THE HEAD:

Last month, when syndicated columnist Susan Estrich went public with her feud with Los Angeles Times Editorial Page Editor Michael Kinsley for not running enough columns by women and local writers, she put the gender card back on the table. Credit Estrich for getting the pack journalists to find a big story in a phenomenon any rube can see. Stop the presses: Most opinion writers are men.

Estrich may say she wants to promote diversity of opinion as well as gender diversity, but I've been watching the diversity game for some years. In journalism, diversity is a club the left uses to increase the hiring of lefties. Feminists say they want more female columnists when what they really want are only more liberal female columnists. Or, in their lingo, they want "authentic" women. So when the left pushes for more diversity in a profession that is overwhelmingly liberal already, it really is pushing for less diversity of ideas.

Why are there fewer female opinion-page columnists than men? It's funny: Opinion mavens -- who can chime in on everything from steroids to farm policy -- suddenly can't quite figure it out. Kinsley told his paper he can't explain it. New York Times Editorial Page Editor Gail Collins told the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz, "There are probably fewer women, in the great cosmic scheme of things, who feel comfortable writing very straight opinion stuff." (Note: If Harvard University President Larry Summers had said what Collins said, feminist professors would be demanding one of his body parts.).

When I speak in public, there are two questions people invariably ask: One is, "Why is journalism so overwhelmingly liberal?" Recently a Bay Area journalism professor actually told me that conservatives shouldn't be journalists because conservatives are less likely to question the status quo. I disagreed with his definition, but I responded that this region is filled with liberals, so if you want reporters who will question the status quo, you should push Bay Area media to hire more conservatives. To this, he said nothing, and then left the room. There went his noble reason for muzzling the opposition.

(Excerpts only above. The rest is here. Michael Kinsley, the original target of Ms Estrich, has some rather amusing recent comments on it all too.)

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ELSEWHERE

Looks good: "Kyrgyzstan's opposition looked to have seized control of the Central Asian country on Thursday after days of violent protest but there was no word on the whereabouts of President Askar Akayev, the man it wants to oust. Rumours flew that Akayev had fled the mountainous country which appears likely to become the third ex-Soviet state in two years to see its entrenched leadership fall to popular protests after disputed elections, following Ukraine and Georgia". [Looks like another Muslim country going democratic. More egg on the face for the Leftists and more kudos to GWB]

The Alien People's Republic of Berkeley: "Parents, students and teachers at Berkeley's Thomas Jefferson Elementary School will soon vote on whether to rename their school because the nation's third president was a slave owner. The question of whether to rename the school has been debated for more than two years -- since several teachers, including an African American mother of three former Jefferson students, said Jefferson's moniker offended them and suggested a name change. On Monday, Principal Betty Delaney released a list of potential new names -- one nominated by a student, the rest by adults. Parents, students and teachers must first vote on a new name, then take a second vote on whether to replace Jefferson with the new name. The school board must officially approve any name change."

The British solution to illegal immigration: Make it legal: "Britain has cut asylum claims - by handing out tens of thousands of work permits, it emerged last night. Applications for asylum fell from 60,047 in 2003 to 40,402 last year. But the figures are dwarfed by the 240,000 a year who swarm into Britain as legal migrants - that's almost equal to the combined populations of Portsmouth and Cambridge. Sir Andrew Green of MigrationWatch UK said: "The number of asylum claimants has been cut to about 40,000 but this is now just one fifth of the immigration total. This is partly because the number of work permits has been quadrupled from 42,000 in 1997 to 156,000 in 2004. The issue for Britain is the total immigration - and that has substantially increased." Another issue is the slow removal rate of illegal immigrants, barely one in five of whom are sent home

A nasty one for the opponents of free-trade: "A funny thing happened on the way to dollar devaluation -- America, apparently, has become a source of cheap labor -- at least in currency exchange-rate terms. According to a report from Thursday's Wall Street Journal, Japan's Nissan plant in Canton, Miss., will begin producing Quest minivans for export to -- get this -- China. Ha! And Nissan isn't even the first Japanese automaker to be producing cheap goods in the new Third World, for export abroad. Toyota and Honda are playing this game as well, producing thousands of cars in the U.S. for export to Europe, every year".

Doomed by special rights: "Consider that employment among disabled people had reached a high in 1989, after years of economic expansion, rising in compassion for the disabled, and advances in technology that permitted their more thorough integration into the workforce. Then something awful happened: the government granted the disabled special rights (the ADA) and thereby made them more expensive and dangerously litigious to hire. What followed was a human rights disaster: the longest slide in disabled employment ever recorded, according to five different measures used to record unemployment among the disabled."

Stefan Karlsson explains as simply as it can be explained that America's huge current trade deficit is not a problem of itself. The real problem is high U.S. government spending. High deficits actually mean that foreigners like investing in the country concerned.

Asbestos phobia: "Officials in the town of Asbestos, Quebec are considering changing the name of their town because nobody likes asbestos anymore. Sure it saved untold thousands from death because of its fireproof properties, but it's killed a bunch of people too. So the word "asbestos" is now on the politically correct hit-list. Never mind that the town was named for its primary product, that it exists basically because the stuff was under the ground, that it reflects their proud history."

I have got a few postings up on GUN WATCH about the recent school shooting.

My latest posting on "A scripture blog" looks at what happens to the earth after the Day of Judgment.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftist movers and shakers is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

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