Riddle Me This

Here's a question that comes to mind when reading a couple of things in the New York Times today: Why are some theories "academic freedom" issues and others under concerted liberal assault? Ah, it must be that if it's conservative in nature it must be eradicated from public thought. But it's perfectly OK to let an instructor teach 9/11 conspiracy theory.

Less than a year after a conservative Republican majority on the State Board of Education adopted rules for teaching science containing one of the broadest challenges in the nation to Darwin’s theory of evolution, moderate Republicans and Democrats are mounting a fierce counterattack. They want to retake power and switch the standards back to what they call conventional science.

The Kansas election is being watched closely by both sides in the national debate over the teaching of evolution. In the past several years, pitched battles have been waged between the scientific establishment and proponents of what is called intelligent design, which holds that nature alone cannot explain life’s origin and complexity.

Last February, the Ohio Board of Education reversed its 2002 mandate requiring 10th-grade biology classes to critically analyze evolution. The action followed a federal judge’s ruling that teaching intelligent design in the public schools of Dover, Pa., was unconstitutional.

A defeat for the conservative majority in Kansas on Tuesday could be further evidence of the fading fortunes of the intelligent design movement, while a victory would preserve an important stronghold in Kansas.

The curriculum standards adopted by the education board do not specifically mention intelligent design, but advocates of the belief lobbied for the changes, and students are urged to seek “more adequate explanations of natural phenomena.”

Not advocating one way or another in this particular debate, but it does show a glaring double standard in action, does it not? Kevin Barret is allowed - even encouraged - to teach his demented drivel, but if you question evolution theory, you're a dangerous renegade.

Let's just go with Mark Twain's explanation of it all:

In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made School Boards.
- Following the Equator; Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar

Courage

A South African man used nothing but the traditional spear to kill a rogue leopard that had just killed a pregnant woman. He was savagely attacked in the process, but managed to kill the leopard.

"A 22-year-old pregnant woman, Nomusa Mncwango, was killed on Sunday morning while fetching water. Her two sisters ran and sounded the alarm," said Maureen Zimu, spokeswoman for KZN Wildlife, the conservation arm of KwaZulu-Natal province, where the incident occurred on communal farm land.

Her neighbour, Thengukuphila Mlambo, went to investigate armed with a spear and was "savagely attacked" by the big cat but managed to stab it. Mlambo, 43, is recovering in hospital.

Attacks by leopards on humans are relatively rare in South Africa and conflicts usually revolve around the predator's fondness for livestock.

Leopards are not confined to fenced reserves, roaming free throughout the country, though in dwindling numbers.

"Our rangers are combing the area because sightings suggest there may be two other leopards in the vicinity," Zimu said.

The incident happened in KwaZulu-Natal province, the home territory of the Zulu nation. One then is probably safe to assume the spear in question is a Zulu Assegai spear. That is one short weapon to go after a leopard with. Personally, I prefer something with a bit more reach. About .460 Weatherby magnum would do it. Hat's off to a very, very brave man indeed, Thengukuphila Mlambo. May your recovery be swift and complete.

More On Castro - Death Watch?

Media stories this morning about the sudden announcement that Fidel Castro was turning the reins over to his brother due to surgery seem to be waiting for a death announcement. Havana is quiet, but Miami is celebratory.

The surprise announcement that Castro had been operated on to repair a "sharp intestinal crisis with sustained bleeding" stunned Cubans on the island and in exile, and marked the first time that Castro, two weeks away from 80th birthday, had relinquished power in 47 years of rule.

People went about their business as normal on the streets of Havana early Tuesday, standing in line for buses to school and work, and jogging along the city's famous Malecon seawall.

Some government work centers called workers to participate in outdoor political gatherings later Tuesday to express their support for Fidel Castro.

The news came Monday night in a statement read on state television by his secretary, Carlos Valenciaga. The message said Castro's condition was apparently due to stress from a heavy work schedule during recent trips to Argentina and eastern Cuba. He did not appear on the broadcast.

Castro, who took control of Cuba in 1959, resisted repeated U.S. attempts to oust him and survived communism's demise elsewhere, also said in the statement that he was temporarily handing over leadership of the Communist Party to his younger brother.

Raul Castro, the defense minister who turned 75 in June, also did not appear on television and made no statement on his own. For decades the constitutional successor to his brother, Raul Castro has assumed a more public profile in recent weeks.

Fidel Castro last appeared in public Wednesday as he marked the 53rd anniversary of his July 26 barracks assault that launched the revolution. The Cuban leader seemed thinner than usual and somewhat weary during a pair of long speeches in eastern Cuba.

"The operation obligates me to undertake several weeks of rest," Castro's letter read. Extreme stress "had provoked in me a sharp intestinal crisis with sustained bleeding that obligated me to undergo a complicated surgical procedure."

The calm delivery of the announcement appeared to signal that there would be an orderly succession should Fidel Castro become permanently incapacitated.

White House spokesman Peter Watkins said U.S. authorities were monitoring the situation: "We can't speculate on Castro's health, but we continue to work for the day of Cuba's freedom."

Val Prieto reports that he is unable to make contact with any of his usual sources on the Island. I rather suspect this is another indication that it is only a matter of a very short time until Fidel begins his journey to accountability for the evil he has done in his life.

The Spread Of Insanity

Kevin Barrett is back in the news, this time in the New York Times. The article paints the entire controversy at the University of Wisconsin - Madison as an issue of "academic freedom". They pronounce Mr. Barret a "skeptic" on 9/11.

Mr. Barrett, 47, described how some news orgainzations (the French daily newspaper Figaro and Radio France International, in fact) had reported that an agent from the Central Intelligence Agency visited with Osama bin Laden two months before the attacks. He also said fires could not have caused the collapse of the World Trade Center towers at free-fall speed, as reported by the special Sept. 11 commission. “The 9/11 report will be universally reviled as a sham and a cover-up very soon,” said Mr. Barrett, who has been a teacher’s assistant or lecturer on Islam, African literature and other subjects at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, since 1996. “The 9/11 commission has its conspiracy theory, and we have ours.”

Mr. Barrett’s views, which he described on a conservative radio talk show in June, have outraged some Wisconsin legislators and generated a fierce debate about academic freedom on a campus long known as a haven for progressive ideologies and student activism.

“They apparently have no limits to what can be taught in the classroom,” Representative Steve Nass said of the university’s decision to allow Mr. Barrett to teach a class this fall titled “Islam: Religion and Culture.”

“Barrett has got to go,’’ Mr. Nass, a Whitewater Republican, said. “It is an embarrassment for the state of Wisconsin. It is an embarrassment for the university.”

The week of July 24, Mr. Nass, who is up for re-election this year, sent a resolution signed by 61 state legislators — all but one of them Republican — to Gov. James E. Doyle, a Democrat, and university officials condemning Mr. Barrett’s “academically dishonest views” and demanding that his one-semester contract to teach the class for a salary of $8,247 be terminated.

Mr. Barrett, a co-founder of a group called Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth, argued that he had never presented his personal opinions in class and that he was free to offer those opinions on his own time outside the classroom.

“Why is liberal Wisconsin going bananas over an $8,000-a-year lecturer who’s not even teaching his own views in the course?” Mr. Barrett asked. “I go out of my way to bring in diverse interpretations for students to look at.”

I have always maintained that this is not an issue of academic freedom, it is a matter of employment. When he teaches his conspiracy theories, he is taking time away from the subject matter he is being paid to teach. To the extent he is getting much more attention than he deserves because of the uproar, the issue is being inflated.

Barrett's views are corrosive, irresponsible and downright deranged. That he takes time away from the subjects he is supposed to be teaching to inflict is insanity on students is enough reason to terminate his employment.  

Iran Announces Contempt For UNSC

If you're paying attention to what Iran is saying in some areas, you can see the way they are planning to act in others. For example, there have been multiple cases recently of Iran expressing contempt for the UN Security Council. Here's just the latest one:

Iran's foreign minister on Tuesday blasted the UN Security Council for failing to stop the Israel-Hizbullah conflict, and called the US and Israel "partners in these brutal crimes" against Lebanese civilians.

"The UN Security Council has proven its uselessness and ineffectiveness during this (Israeli) aggression," Manouchehr Mottaki told reporters after meeting with Lebanese President Emile Lahoud, a strong Hizbullah ally.

He also accused the United States, without naming it, of complicity in bringing about the destruction caused by Israel's 20-day-old offensive in Lebanon.

"We think that the protectors of the Zionist entity and those who support it are partners in these brutal crimes being committed against the innocent women and children" of Lebanon, Mottaki said.

He arrived in Lebanon on Monday, in the first visit by an Iranian official to war-torn Lebanon since fighting broke out between Israel and Hizbullah guerrillas three weeks ago. He traveled over land from neighboring Syria, since the country's only international airport was bombed in the first days of the war.

On Monday night, Mottaki met with Lebanese Foreign Minister Fawzi Salloukh and with French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy, who was in Beirut for the third time since Hizbullah captured two Israeli soldiers and killed eight others on July 12, triggering the Israeli offensive.

Both meetings took place at the Iranian Embassy late Monday, but participants made no comments to the press.

Mottaki's visit coincided with a call on Muslim states by a top Iranian hard-line cleric, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, to provide weapons to Hizbullah to use in its fight against Israel, according to the semi-official Iranian Students News Agency.

So, anyone still believe the package of incentives and sanctions will actually stop Iran's race to get their hands on a nuclear weapon? If so, you're smoking some mighty powerful stuff. And watch out, France appears to be trying to align itself with the Mullahs. Houston, we have a problem.

UPDATE: If You're not checking in with A Blog For All every day, you're missing a great, wide-ranging roundup of news from the Middle East.

Premptive Post Mortem

EJ Dionne paints us a nice, conventional wisdom based tale of primary election history. He whips out the 1980 primary in New York in which Alphonse D'Amato successfully unseated the long-serving Jacob Javits. You see, its supposed to be instructive as to what will presumably be the outcome in Connecticut with Joe Lieberman's primary against Ned Lamont.

 On Sept. 6, 1980, a group of nine Republican senators descended on New York state to help Sen. Jacob Javits, the liberal Republican running in a primary against a conservative named Alfonse D'Amato. Among them was Sen. Alan K. Simpson of Wyoming, who called Javits "an example to us, our counselor, our father confessor."

The comparison is flattering to Lieberman, given Javits's stature in the Senate, but it's not reassuring. D'Amato defeated Javits in that primary and went on to serve 18 years in the Senate.

Ideologically based primary challenges to important incumbents almost always signal major changes in the political winds. That's as true of Lamont's strong campaign against Lieberman as it was of D'Amato's victory, following as it did the primary defeats of two other liberal Republican senators — Clifford Case of New Jersey in 1978 and Thomas Kuchel of California 10 years earlier — at the hands of conservatives.

The upstarts who beat Case and Kuchel later lost the fall elections. But their cleansing of progressives from Republican ranks was part of a long conservative march that culminated in Ronald Reagan's 1980 victory and the hold that conservatives now have on the elected branches of the federal government.

The opposition to Lieberman is motivated by an effort to reverse the trend to the right. It's true that Lamont's campaign has been energized by widespread opposition to the Iraq war and the fact that Lieberman has been one of the most loyal Democratic defenders of President Bush's Middle East policies.

But Lieberman's troubles are, even more, about a new aggressiveness in the Democratic Party called forth by disgust with the Bush presidency — an energy comparable to the vigor that a loathing for liberalism brought to the Republican right in the 1970s and '80s

So there you have it, Dionne's handy-dandy guide to all that troubles the world. A sea-change, a political loathing, etc. etc. There is only one teeny little problem with the "Conventional Wisdom" (CW), however. It's not true in this case.

Were people roundly sick of a lot of things in 1980? You bet. The Carter presidency had drained the country and people wanted a change - Reagan had a mighty big set of coat tails. But something much more important - and tragic - defeated Javits. His diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. That was the weakness D'Amato exploited. And D'Amato really wasn't being cruel, just realistic - there were real doubts as to whether Javits could complete a term. (Javits died in 1986). That, as I recall, was a bigger issue back then than the rightward drift of the party with Reagan leading. That is also why he could not win running on the Liberal ticket. The CW parallel is false.

Can The Center Hold?

Turning and turning in the widening gyre 
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

(WB Yeats, The Second Coming)

John Fund invokes Yeats poem in the title of his Opinion-Journal piece about two Democratic primary elections of great interest. There is, of course, the hoopla over in Connecticut, Fund also point out the Georgia primary where Cynthia McKinney is fighting for her political life. First Lieberman's struggle in Connecticut:

Two primaries next week will tell a lot about the strength of the hard-left wing of the Democratic party. In Connecticut, moderate Sen. Joe Lieberman faces a challenger whose single issue is opposition to the Iraq war. In Georgia, ultraliberal Rep. Cynthia McKinney faces a runoff against a moderate opponent who is wooing liberals with the slogan: "It's time to restore respect to progressivism." Despite all the hype about the power of the liberal blogosphere, the odds are better than even that voters will reject the more liberal candidate in both races and send the message that the sensible center still has a home among Democrats.

Conventional wisdom has it that Senator Joe Lieberman will lose his Aug. 8 primary. A mid-July Quinnipiac poll showed businessman Ned Lamont leading the three-term incumbent by 51% to 47% among likely primary voters. Democratic consultant Bob Shrum thinks the race is over and that Mr. Lamont can even defeat Mr. Lieberman should the senator run an independent. He says a Lamont primary victory will ensure that "we'll see by the end of 2007 virtually every Democratic [presidential] candidate, including Hillary Clinton, favoring a date certain for withdrawal" from Iraq.

Not so fast. First, Mr. Lamont's lead is within the Quinnipiac poll's four-point margin of error. Secondly, it's notoriously difficult to identify likely voters for a low-turnout primary in the dog days of August. Third, there are signs that Mr. Lamont may have "peaked too soon" in his challenge to the incumbent. He is now facing increased scrutiny on the thinness of his political résumé, his unfamiliarity with many issues, and his refusal to release his tax returns. At the same time, Mr. Lieberman's campaign is showing signs of renewed vigor.

Then McKinney's Battle Royal:

Under President Bush, she upped the volume of her outrage when she called for an investigation into whether the president had prior knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks. In 2002, primary voters threw her out of office, but when her seat became open again in 2004 she made a successful comeback with a low-key campaign that relied on her name recognition.

That recognition was increased earlier this year, when Ms. McKinney physically assaulted a Capitol police officer who tried to question her when she bypassed security without displaying a pin that identifies her as a member of Congress.

Black voters may have finally had enough of her political antics. Last month, former county commissioner Hank Johnson won 45% of the vote, just behind Ms. McKinney's showing, forcing next week's runoff. Mr. Johnson called Ms. McKinney's behavior "an embarrassment to the people of the district" and vowed to "take care of home first" by focusing on local issues rather than foreign policy. To buttress his point, Rep. McKinney was joined at her primary-night rally by Cindy Sheehan, the extremist antiwar activist whose son was killed in Iraq.

Fund's conclusion? Lieberman wins, McKinney loses and the centrists still have a place in the Democratic party. One hopes he is right, because an unelectable party in a two party system spells trouble for the whole structure of our government.