PhD program in Woman's Studies

I know something about PhD programs, having flunked out of 3 of them, at 3 different schools, in 3 different schools (I didn't really flunk out, but I didn't finish any of them).

Most fields tend to characterize the top programs in the field as rigorous.

Somehow I'm not surprised that top Woman's Studies programs are considered torturous.

I can't help myself. I just think that's so funny.

Obama

Obama is a weasel and a coward. New politics my ass.

Health Care

Why would we expect the Chairmen of the Fed to know anything about health care?

Either Or

It's common for political advocates to know they're right about some topic and then naturally conclude that anyone who doesn't agree with their position must be either stupid or a liar.

Ed Brayton makes that mistake when talking about some of the nonsense that McCain has been spouting about the Gitmo habeas corpus Supreme Court decision.

McCain's statement was so ridiculous that one has to wonder if he is really that ignorant of the law or if he was simply lying through his teeth. Here's what he said:

We are now going to have the courts flooded with so-called, quote, Habeas Corpus suits against the government, whether it be about the diet, whether it be about the reading material. And we are going to be bollixed up in a way that is terribly unfortunate, because we need to go ahead and adjudicate these cases.

I think McCain might have been making a crude attempt at making a slippery slope argument.

Mistakes of Hillary Clinton

Columbia Journalism Review thinks most of the press gets it wrong when they try to analyze the mistakes Hillary made in her run for President.


Most of the press tends to focus on tactical campaign issues such as

Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal led the pack with a front-pager headlined “Clinton’s Road to Second Place,” which identified four broad categories of mistakes made by Clinton and her campaign: “mismanagement,” a “flawed message,” a “failure to mobilize,” and “Clinton craziness.”

CJR attributes her failure to win the nomination to one thing -- her vote for the Iraq war a few years ago.
I think it was more a combination of things and what it told swing voters about who she really is.
She's just another opportunistic politician who looks to see which way the wind is blowing before she takes a position. She voted for Iraq when it looked like that was the popular thing to do. Without admitting it was a bad vote she later changed her opinion about the war when public sentiment seemed to turn against it. She was all for a temporary gasoline tax reduction because she thought it would show blue collar voters she "cared" about them.
The feminist nutcases think she lost because she was a victim of a woman hating society. The reality is that she lost because she was perceived as an opportunistic twit and people saw a possibility of actual personal honesty in Obama.

They won

The terrorists have won.

(h/t)

Prison ships

Some are claiming that the US is operating secret prison ships. It's not clear whether or not the claims are true, and I find it a little hard to swallow that we could keep a ship full of sailors from talking about it. But you'd think we'd have learned from previous experience with prison ships that it's not a good idea.

The dumbest people on campus

It used to be that the dumbest people on pretty much any college campus could be found in Schools of Education. A lot of people seem to persist in the belief that's still true, although it really hasn't been true for quite a few years.

Criminal Justice programs now house the dumbest students and faculty on campus.

Rhetoric of Law Schools

The standard course grading system in United States colleges and universities is A, B, C, D, F. A five grade system. For most graduate and professional schools that effectively collapses into a four grade system since D and F are effectively the same (I been a student in 3 graduate schools and a faculty member in a couple others and I've never seen a grad program that will give a student credit for a course he got a D in).

Now we learn that our nations leading law schools are all deviating from the norm. Pretty edgy stuff. Tbey've established 4 and 5 point grading systems that use words instead of letters to represent grades.

Stanford’s new system — which will award grades of honors, pass, restricted credit and no credit — resembles that at Yale Law School, whose four grades are honors, pass, low pass and fail. Across the bay, the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law also eschews letter grades but has two levels above pass: honors and high honors.

To a lawyer, someone who has been trained to believe that meaning has no meaning, changing the name of something changes the thing itself. I'm pretty sure Shakespeare wasn't a lawyer.

“The new system includes a shared norm for the proportion of honors to be awarded in both exam and paper courses. No grading system is perfect, but the consensus is that the reform will have significant pedagogical benefits, including that it encourages greater flexibility and innovation in the classroom and in designing metrics for evaluating student work,” wrote Stanford Law dean Larry Kramer

This stuff is just pathetic.

Althouse blogged about this.

Trip to Iraq

Michille Malkin seems puzzled that apples and oranges don't always look alike.

Barack Obama doesn’t want to go to Iraq and re-evaluate the situation there. John McCain has invited him along on an Iraq junket, where he could meet with Prime Minister Maliki and some troops as well. Obama still says no.

As Baldilocks points out, that’s sort of an odd double standard. Obama won’t go meet with our ally, Iraq, yet he has offered to meet, without preconditions, with the leadership of North Korea, Iran, Syria, Cuba and Venezuela.

Obama isn't even the official democratic nominee yet. It would be a little premature for him to plan a trip to Iraq and even then the security requirements of such a visit certainly diminishes the stunt value of such a visit.

And she got that part wrong anyway. He hasn't been in a while, but he hasn't said he doesn't intend to go. What he's said is that he's not going to go just to provide a photo op for McCain -- he's not going to go with McCain. That's a little different than the way she's characterizing it.

The real difference is that she's comparing a trip to Iraq to a meeting with Iran. He's never said he intends to go to Iran and meet with them. He's said he's willing to meet with them. The comparable meeting would be for the current head guy of Iraq to come to Chicago and visit Obama.

There's not reason for Michelle to think Obama would stiff him if he made the trip and asked to visit with him.