A recent survey indicated that most people graduating from college are not proficient in English.
Of course, as usual, they break it down by race. But what would interest me much more is how it breaks down by major. How do engineers compare to science majors compare to English majors? How about “Womens” or “Ethnic Studies”?
Especially sad, I suspect, might be the results for schools of education, and journalism. But they don’t show them.
Today is the sixty-first anniversary of the beginning of the Battle of the Bulge. Last year, on the sixtieth, I noted how today’s press would have covered it.
Check out the subhead at the WaPo:
Iraqi Vote Draws Big Turnout Of Sunnis
Anti-U.S. Sentiment Is Motivator for Many
Andrew Stuttaford has watched all of the Kong movies, so you don’t have to.
Tony Snow makes an excellent point about the Democrats’ position–that long-term central planning doesn’t work much better in war than in agriculture or industry:
The only flaw in the Orderliness Hypothesis is that it doesn’t work if people are present. The war on poverty looked great on paper. It failed miserably in real life. Air-cleansing regulatory schemes looked great in computer models, but failed abysmally in reality. Centralized health care boasted of chalkboard elegance, but is breaking the bank right here, right now. The myth of managed affluence collapsed with the Berlin Wall.
And yet, failure has not altered Democratic thinking an iota. John Kerry boasted dozens of times in his debates with George W. Bush that he had a plan — for everything: dental care, tree planting, street paving, book binding, teen rutting, mass transit, air circulation, steel production … you name it. He announced these schemes with a sense of triumph, as if having a plan were superior to having a clue.
In resisting President Bush’s infinitely variable approach to the ever-shifting situation in Iraq, Democrats have reverted to form. The cries for benchmarks and deadlines merely embody their weird faith in plans. Howard Dean unwittingly captured the absurdity of it all when he announced this week the precise number of National Guard units required to subdue Al-Qaida.
[Update at 11:30 AM]
Rich Lowry says that the Dems are dazed and confused:
The sight of Murtha denouncing (even incoherently) the war was too much temptation for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.). The House Democrats
This is a pretty funny satire, but what’s even funnier are the clueless commenters.
Is it just me, or is everyone getting redirected to the Institute for Space Law and Policy?
SpaceX will be making their next launch attempt at 11 AM Pacific time.
Stephen Schwartz writes about the real wars in which we have been, and remain engaged, and the fantasy ones in the minds of the left, and much of the media:
The degree to which the MSM, academia, and other members of the Western intelligentsia live in a fantasy world of narcissistic self-righteousness is extraordinary. But the phenomenon is not new. It first became visible during the Spanish civil war of 1936-39, the original exemplar of what I call a theory of
Mark Whittington has further (uncharitable) thoughts about the late Senator Proxmire. It’s a harsher obituary than I’d write, particularly seeing as the body has barely cooled off, but then, I’ve never been as enamored of large federal space budgets (particularly considering how ineffectively they’ve been spent, for the most part) as he is.