Tonight! Liberty or Lies: Milwaukee Conservative Talk Radio

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Gingrich and the Moon Base

On the Issues at the Marquette Law School

Just got this via e-mail:

February 2 — On the Issues with Mike Gousha: Republican U.S. Senate candidate Tommy Thompson. He was elected Governor of Wisconsin an unprecedented four times. He was Health and Human Services Secretary in the administration of President George W. Bush. Now, after a stint in the private sector, Tommy Thompson is running for public office again. What’s driving his decision, and what does he think about the current political climate in Washington and Wisconsin? Find out when the former Governor and current candidate joins us at the Law School. Marquette Law School, Eckstein Hall, 12:15 to 1:15 p.m. Reserve your spot.

February 16— On the Issues with Mike Gousha: Mark Block, Chief of Staff for former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain—Running for president is a long, tough, even strange journey. Nobody knows that better than Mark Block, Herman Cain’s top advisor. A longtime Wisconsin political operative, Block will share his stories from the campaign trail; the rise and fall of the Cain candidacy; and Block’s starring role in a low-budget campaign ad that went viral (remember the cigarette?). Block will also discuss the state of the GOP nomination battle and his role in Cain’s latest political project. Marquette Law School, Eckstein Hall, 12:15 to 1:15 p.m., Reserve your spot.

April 5— On the Issues with Mike Gousha: Vice Admiral James W. Houck, Judge Advocate General of the United States Navy—Vice Admiral Houck is the principal military legal counsel to the secretary of the Navy and Chief of Naval Operations. He leads the attorneys, enlisted legalmen, and civilian employees of the worldwide Navy JAG Corps community. Houck will discuss what he calls the Navy’s “global law firm” and the issues it faces today, including the handling of detainees, piracy on the high seas, and meeting the legal needs of sailors stationed around the world. Houck is a graduate of the Naval Academy and the University of Michigan Law School. He later earned a Masters of Laws from the Georgetown University Law Center. Marquette Law School, Eckstein Hall, 12:15 to 1:15 p.m., Reserve your spot.

April 9— On the Issues with Mike Gousha: Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Tammy Baldwin—Congresswoman Baldwin has represented Wisconsin’s Second Congressional District since 1999. Now, she’s trying to make history. Running as the lone Democrat in the race to replace retiring U.S. Senator Herb Kohl, Baldwin is seeking to become the first woman elected to the Senate in Wisconsin. Baldwin is a University of Wisconsin Law School graduate. She’ll address the major issues in this year’s campaign during her visit to Eckstein Hall. Marquette Law School, Eckstein Hall, 12:15 to 1:15 p.m., Reserve your spot.

May 9— On the Issues with Mike Gousha: Yale University Professor John Lewis Gaddis, author of George F. Kennan: An American Life—Born and raised in Milwaukee, George Kennan went on to become one of the preeminent diplomats of the Cold War era. He is credited with being the architect of the American policy of containment toward the Soviet Union. Now the story of his profound influence and his complicated life has been told in a book written by John Lewis Gaddis, the noted historian of the Cold War who is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of History and Political Science and Distinguished Fellow in Grand Strategy at Yale. Professor Gaddis knew Kennan for decades, and was granted full access to his personal papers. He has produced a remarkable biography praised by critics and diplomats alike. Henry Kissinger has called it “magisterial” and “seminal.” Professor Gaddis will reveal the Kennan he came to know during this appearance in his subject’s hometown. Cosponsored by the Marquette University Department of History. Marquette Law School, Eckstein Hall, 12:15 to 1:15 p.m., Reserve your spot.

Gay Censorship in Shawano

From the Green-Bay Press Gazette:

SHAWANO — A gay couple with school-age children is outraged over a Shawano High School newspaper column that cites Bible passages and calls homosexuality a sin punishable by death.

The column ran on the editorial page of Shawano High School’s Hawks Post recently as part of an opinion package about gay families who adopt children. The other side said sexual orientation does not determine a person’s ability to raise kids.

“This is why kids commit suicide,” said Nick Uttecht, who is raising four children with his partner, Michael McNelly.

Uttecht told school district officials he thinks the piece opposing gays as parents is hateful and should not have run. He worries the strong language will hurt his children and could lead students to bully gay classmates.

School officials apologized and said they will review the process for editing and producing the paper.

“Offensive articles cultivating a negative environment of disrespect are not appropriate or condoned by the Shawano School District,” district Superintendent Todd Carlson said in a written statement.

According to the 2010 U.S. Census, out of 17,019 households in Shawano County, 82 were same-sex households, and nearly half reported children in the home. In Wisconsin, 13,630 out of 2.28 million households in 2010 were same-sex, and 5,978 of those households had children.

A step back?

The student newspaper column against same-sex couples says: “If one is a practicing Christian, Jesus states in the Bible that homosexuality is (a) detestable act and sin which makes adopting wrong for homosexuals because you would be raising the child in a sin-filled environment.

“A child adopted into homosexuality will get confused because everyone else will have two different-gendered parents that can give them the correct amount of motherly nurturing and fatherly structure. In a Christian society, allowing homosexual couples to adopt is an abomination.”

Uttecht said his 13-year-old son, Tanner, who is in eighth grade, saw the article and asked about it.

“When I saw this I was in shock,” said Uttecht, who is raising four children, three who are his biological kids and the biological daughter of his partner. Three are in the Shawano school system; the youngest is 4.

“I talked to the school superintendent; he said he was shocked,” Uttecht said

Carlson told the Green Bay Press-Gazette “appropriate steps are being taken” to remedy the situation, but did not provide details.

He sent the following written statement:

“The Shawano School District would like to apologize for a recent article printed in the Hawks Post newspaper. Proper judgment that reflects school district policies needs to be exercised with articles printed in our school newspaper. Offensive articles cultivating a negative environment of disrespect are not appropriate or condoned by the Shawano School District. We sincerely apologize to anyone we may have offended and are taking steps to prevent items of this nature from happening in the future.”

Uttecht said he’s worried about the lasting impact of the column.

“I’m worried about how this is going to affect my kids,” said Uttecht, who also is an elected member of the Menominee Indian Head Start Policy Council. “And I’m worried how gay students in school will be treated. It took me a long time to come out, and I think this just really sets things back by being so closed-minded. This sets things back 20 or 30 years.

“I know there are at least three openly gay families in the district, there’s probably more. What effect is this going to have on my kids? And how are other people going to react?”

Free speech

David Hudson, an expert for the Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group First Amendment Center, said the column may be distasteful to some, but student journalists were practicing their constitutional right to free speech.

“Bullying is a serious concern, and I don’t take it lightly. But I hope it doesn’t lead to squashing different viewpoints. I do think (gay adoption) is an issue people are deeply divided about. Hopefully student journalists don’t have to fear they’ll be squashed if they take a controversial view.”

Editors and advisers have the job of toning down language if it is too sensational, Hudson said.

“Freedom of speech includes speech about religious viewpoints,” Hudson said. “If you took that away, it could be seen as discrimination. Someone could have an atheist opinion, and that’s OK, too.

“Any controversial issue is a lightning rod for censorship.”

Although students have the right to voice their opinion, it doesn’t mean they should say it in a school paper, said Christine Smith, assistant professor of psychology, human development and women’s studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.

Her academic specialization, of course, makes it clear what she is going to say.

“High school students are at a time in their life when they are developing intellectually and socially,” she said. “To see something like this debated in the paper could be devastating. How would you feel if someone said your family is abnormal, is not acceptable, that your parents never should have been allowed to have you, that they’re not suitable to raise you?

“Of course, it’s got to be harmful. Kids this age are so worried about discovering who they are and what they are. To have them told their family is immoral and not suitable has to be devastating. To be told by your peers, people you see in the hallways, these people who clearly have passed judgment.”

This, of course, is the theory universial among politically correct people: you can’t say bad things about homosexuality, because that might make gays (or the children of gays) feel bad.

A consistent policy of not saying things that make people feel bad might have something to recommend it. Unfortunately, the people who want to censor anti-gay speech are quite willing to attack Christians who view homosexuality in a negative light.

They don’t at all mind if the open promotion of homosexuality by a school district tends to marginalize Christian students. In fact they want that to happen.

It’s interesting to see politically correct school bureaucrats talk about “a negative environment of disrespect” when they are in fact encouraging and promoting “a negative environment of disrespect” for Christian values and thus for Christian students.

If the school is worried about negative consequences of controversial columns in a student newspaper, they should refuse to run such columns, banning both sides of the argument. In fact, a large body of Constitutional law holds that any government-imposed restrictions on speech must be “content neutral.”

You can file this case under “gay fascism.”

Brits Used to Talk Like Americans

From Life’s Little Mysteries:

In 1776, whether you were declaring America independent from the crown or swearing your loyalty to King George III, your pronunciation would have been much the same. At that time, American and British accents hadn’t yet diverged. What’s surprising, though, is that Hollywood costume dramas get it all wrong: The Patriots and the Redcoats spoke with accents that were much closer to the contemporary American accent than to the Queen’s English.

It is the standard British accent that has drastically changed in the past two centuries, while the typical American accent has changed only subtly.

Traditional English, whether spoken in the British Isles or the American colonies, was largely “rhotic.” Rhotic speakers pronounce the “R” sound in such words as “hard” and “winter,” while non-rhotic speakers do not. Today, however, non-rhotic speech is common throughout most of Britain. For example, most modern Brits would tell you it’s been a “hahd wintuh.”

It was around the time of the American Revolution that non-rhotic speech came into use among the upper class in southern England, in and around London. According to John Algeo in “The Cambridge History of the English Language” (Cambridge University Press, 2001), this shift occurred because people of low birth rank who had become wealthy during the Industrial Revolution were seeking ways to distinguish themselves from other commoners; they cultivated the prestigious non-rhotic pronunciation in order to demonstrate their new upper-class status.

“London pronunciation became the prerogative of a new breed of specialists — orthoepists and teachers of elocution. The orthoepists decided upon correct pronunciations, compiled pronouncing dictionaries and, in private and expensive tutoring sessions, drilled enterprising citizens in fashionable articulation,” Algeo wrote.

The lofty manner of speech developed by these specialists gradually became standardized — it is officially called “Received Pronunciation” — and it spread across Britain. However, people in the north of England, Scotland and Ireland have largely maintained their traditional rhotic accents.

Most American accents have also remained rhotic, with some exceptions: New York and Boston accents have become non-rhotic. According to Algeo, after the Revolutionary War, these cities were “under the strongest influence by the British elite.”

Smug Liberals Demand “Civility” in Discourse

Washington Post: Stop Electric Car Subsidies

The Washington Post has a reputation as a liberal newspaper, and indeed that’s what it is.

But it has shown itself able to take a cold hard look at some of the programs that give liberals the warm fuzzies. One recent example dealt with one of the Obama Administration’s favorite class of subsidies.

THERE MAY NOT have been a party in Times Square to celebrate, but two of the most wasteful subsidies ever to clutter the Internal Revenue Code went out with the old year. Congress declined to renew either the 45-cent-per-gallon tax credit for corn-based ethanol or the 54-cent-per-gallon tariff on imported ethanol, so both expired Dec. 31.

Taxpayers will no longer have shell out roughly $6 billion per year for a program that badly distorted the global grain market, artificially raised the cost of agricultural land and did almost nothing to curb greenhouse gas emissions. A federal law requiring the use of 36 billion gallons of ethanol for fuel by 2022 still props up the industry, but the tax credit’s expiration is a victory for common sense just the same.

Meanwhile, a lesser-known but equally dubious energy tax break also expired when the year ended Saturday: the credit that gave electric-car owners up to $1,000 to defray the cost of installing a 220-volt charging device in their homes — or up to $30,000 to install one in a commercial location. As a means of reducing carbon emissions, electric cars and plug-in hybrid electrics are no more cost-effective than ethanol. What’s more, only upper-income consumers can afford to buy an electric vehicle (EV); so the charger subsidy is a giveaway to the well-to-do.

The same goes for the $7,500 tax credit that the government offers purchasers of electric vehicles, a subsidy that, alas, did not expire at year’s end. The Obama administration says that the credit helps build a market for EVs, which helps create jobs. Given the price of eligible models, like the $100,000 Fisker Karma, that rationale sounds an awful lot like trickle-down economics.

Backers of the charger tax credit may lobby Congress to renew it when lawmakers tackle the payroll tax extension issue again in the new year. We hope that Congress says no. Not only is it a case study in upward income redistribution, it also would represent a deepening of the taxpayers’ commitment to what looks increasingly like an industry not ready for prime time.

Sales of electric vehicles were disappointing in 2011, with the Volt coming in below the 10,000 units forecast. In addition to its high price, the Volt brand is suffering from news that some of its batteries burst into flames after government road tests. Meanwhile, Fisker, the recipient of more than half a billion dollars in low-interest Energy Department loans, repeatedly delayed the introduction of its ballyhooed Karma — while repeatedly raising the sticker price. And now Fisker has announced a recall of the cars because of a potential defect in its batteries — made by A123 Systems, another large recipient of Energy Department support.

Evidence is mounting that President Obama was overly optimistic to pledge that there would be 1 million EVs on the road by 2015. Electric cars are not likely to form a significant part of the solution to America’s dependence on foreign oil, or to global warming, in the near future. They simply pose too many issues of price and practicality to attract a large segment of the car-buying public. More prosaic fuel-economy innovations such as conventional hybrids, clean-diesel cars and advanced gasoline engines all show much more promise than electrics.

The ethanol credit was on the books for 30 years before it finally died. Let’s hope Congress can start unwinding the federal government’s bad investment in electric vehicles faster than that.

The problem, of course, is that policies like this have nothing to do with a cool-headed policy analysis. Rather they are mostly symbolic. The liberals who favor them want the “committment to green energy” that these programs claim, and aren’t inclined to ask whether they are really “green” and if so whether they are green at any sort of reasonable price.

After all, they are paid for with other people’s money.

Easy To See Who the Real Bigots Are Here

All You Really Needed to Understand About Federal Fiscal Policy

Milwaukee Conservative Talk Radio to be Discussed on MPTV

It’s official.

Brien Farley’s documentary “Liberty or Lies” will be aired on Milwaukee Public Television at the end of January.

We were Farley’s academic adviser on the project, although in fact Farley is a seasoned broadcast professional who needed little advice or guidance.

Farley is himself rather conservative and favorably inclined toward conservative talk radio, but his documentary gives both the defenders and supporters of the genre plenty of time to state their case. It includes extensive interviews with all the local conservative talkers (Belling being the only exception) and equally extensive interviews with journalistic critics (Bruce Murphy and the late Tim Cuprisin, for example). and local political activists (Jay Heck of Common Cause and Chris Kliesmet of Citizens for Responsible Government, for example).

This will be a “must watch” show for anybody interested in local politics.

California: Home of Locally Grown, Organic Food, Fruits and Nuts

Foundation for Individual Rights in Education Takes Note of Harassment of Marquette Warrior

From the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education: an article on the fact that Marquette has “investigated” a complaint from a student who accused us of sexual harassment based on gender for our debunking of feminists’ bogus statistics on campus rape.

FIRE notes that the incident:

. . . provides a good example of how unwarranted investigations of campus speech can cause a deeply problematic “chilling effect” at a university. Universities must not pursue investigations of protected expression just because someone submits a complaint; as soon as it is clear that the expression in question is protected speech, the inquiry must end, even if there are other factual disputes. Prolonging the investigation tells everyone on campus that the university will pursue charges against you no matter how frivolous or malicious the complaint. The likely result is that people self-censor and keep their mouths shut rather than risk such investigation and a possible punishment.

Of course, for the politically correct types on campus, this is the point. They are deeply hostile to free and open debate.

FIRE goes on the quote Marquette’s own Student Handbook on the legitimacy of differences of opinion:

It is clearly inevitable, and indeed essential, that the spirit of inquiry and challenge that the university seeks to encourage will produce many conflicts of ideas, opinions and proposals for action.

Of course, Marquette’s Student Handbook also includes several very dangerous and over-broad statements that could be used to stifle speech. For example:

Harassment is defined as verbal, written or physical conduct directed at a person or a group based on color, race, national origin, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation where the offensive behavior is intimidating, hostile or demeaning, or which could or does result in mental, emotional or physical discomfort, embarrassment, ridicule or harm.

Read at face value, this could mean that if a frank discussion of ghetto crime makes a black student feel “discomfort” that could be harassment. Of course, a feminist talking about the evils of male sexism could make a male student feel uncomfortable, but the odds of anybody seeing any problem with that are nil.

FIRE concludes:

Yet by pursuing this investigation, Marquette is letting a single student entangle a professor in disciplinary proceedings simply due to protected classroom expression. How many professors at Marquette are now going to steer clear of sensitive topics just to avoid an Ethics Point investigation?

The truth, of course, is that even without this kind of inquisition, any prudent junior faculty member, wanting to get tenure, better stifle any urge to say anything politically incorrect. And a lot of tenured people, not wanting to “make waves” or generate hostility, tend to “lay low” and keep their opinions to themselves.

Welcome to the modern politically correct university.

Wise Men Still Seek Him

Mean Spirited Christmas Greeting from the Marquette Center for Peacemaking

While some of their activities are bland enough, a Christmas e-mail from the Center for Peacemaking reminds us that, at root, they are mean-spirited leftists. Here is part of the text:

After four weeks of Advent awaiting the coming of the Savior, December 25th can leave us a bit puzzled, if not disappointed.

Because we need a savior. Doesn’t take much in the way of spirituality to figure that out. We just need to look at the “signs of the times.” With a government pledged to “perpetual war,” and more and more wealth (as the “Occupy Wall Street” demonstrations constantly remind us) taken from the needs of the many to benefit the very few (and yes, those two facts are related), with ongoing environmental degradation, and with over 17 million US households listed as “food insecure,” our world, our country needs some serious saving.

But what do we get on Christmas day? Not a team of expert economists, not a super committee of legislators, not a war council or a national security organization, but a baby – an infant (root meaning: “can’t talk”), someone insecure, vulnerable and needing assistance, not offering it. What was God THINKING?

So there is no “peace on earth, good will toward men.” Rather, there is class warfare and hatred of the military.

If the people associated with the Center for Peacemaking were morally serious, they might actually know that government in the U.S. spends over two trillion dollars per year to pay social welfare benefits.

If they were morally serious they would actually question why “over 17 million US households listed as ‘food insecure’” notwithstanding the fact that government spends 54 billion dollars per year on the food stamp program.

Morally serious people actually care about the details of public policy. Those who prance and preen and tout their concern for the poor in blissful ignorance of how public policy works are not morally serious. They are simply engaged in a kind of moral masturbation.

Marquette Warrior Harassed by University Over Debunking of Bogus Feminist Rape Claims

Week before last, we dropped in to speak with Political Science Department Chairman Barry McCormick about a different matter, and were told he had something unpleasant to discuss.

It seems that Marquette has a whistle blowing website (Ethics Point) designed mostly to let employees rat out people who have been stealing money from Marquette, and such.

But somebody had complained that we said something that was “demeaning to rape victims.”

What in the world could be the basis of this?

What do we say about rape in our classes?

Debunking Feminist Rape Claims

We deal with the issue in our introductory American Politics class in the context of media bias, and how one can recognize media bias when the media accept bogus and inflated numbers as factual. This was the case in the 1970s with regard to the number of combat divisions the Warsaw Pact had threatening Western Europe, and in the 1980s with the number of homeless people in the U.S.

Then we get to a more contemporary example: one that the students have almost certainly been subjected to as part of their university indoctrination: the idea that 25% of all college women are victims of “date rape.”

The number is absurdly inflated. We point out that in the study most widely quoted (the Koss study) 73% of the women categorized as having been “raped” by a feminist researcher didn’t interpret what happened to them as rape. Indeed, 42% had intercourse again with the guy who supposedly raped them.

(Our analysis of another campus rape study is here.)

What is happening here? Feminists are defining rape far too broadly. Ambiguous sexual encounters, often fueled by alcohol, are defined as “rape” by feminist researchers, but not defined that way by purported victims.

We point out that feminists insist that if a woman consents to sex under the influence of alcohol, she has been raped.

(Feminists have gotten this definition written into law, a fact that helps women not at all, since these kinds of sexual encounters are virtually never reported to police and even less frequently prosecuted.)

Often, some guy who hasn’t yet learned that, in academia, he’s not supposed to question any feminist claim, will raise his hand in our class and ask “suppose the guy has been drinking too? Why didn’t she rape him?”

We always respond, sarcastically “you’ve got to look at this from the feminist point of view. Males are the oppressor class, and women the victim class. So of course the guy is responsible.”

We typically add “if you wake up in the morning and ask ‘what in the world did I do?’ you haven’t been raped. If you’ve been raped you feel violated. If it requires a feminist political activist to explain to you how what happened was rape, you weren’t raped.”

This past semester we piled on a bit by pointing out to our class that “this is yet another issue, like abortion, where academic feminists simply don’t think like real women in the real world.”

Marquette Responds

Upon hearing from McCormick about the charges, we contacted a lawyer we know – one who loves to sue Marquette – and were advised that we had a right to see the precise charges against us. We conveyed this to McCormick, and just yesterday he got back to us with this:

[T]he Provost [John Pauly] . . . presses me to move forward on the response to the Ethics Point complaint in a timely manner. University Counsel has determined that you may read the text of the complaint, but that I should not give a copy of the complaint to you.

So we meet with McCormick at 2:00 p.m. today. We will report on how the meeting goes.

That we should ever be required to defend to university bureaucrats what we say in class is a gross violation of academic freedom. Faculty have a right to disagree with any political movement – including feminists. And social science faculty have a right to debunk bogus social science statistics.

But this is Marquette in 2011. Timid bureaucrats are unwilling to defend the notion that faculty have a right to say things that feminists don’t like.

[Later, after the 2:00 p.m. meeting]

The meeting was a bit dull, with McCormick insisting that the only purpose was to get our story on what happened. This was simple, since our blog post contained everything we say about rape in class, virtually verbatim.

We did get to look at the student’s complaint, and it roughly accurately recounted what we said, then went into a rant about how rape is a serious problem on campus, and thus we were engaging in “harassment based on gender.” Apparently, in the mind of this feminist, you are “harassing” women if you refuse to accept bogus and inflated statistics on rape. She rapsodized about a dorm that put out blue ribbons to oppose rape, but didn’t explain how that justifies lying about the incidence of rape.

McCormick admitted that this Ethics Point site had never been used before to register a complaint about what a professor said in class. In essence, the university is making this up as it goes along.

But the complaint should have been dismissed immediately. Taking the complaint absolutely at face value, we did nothing but disagree with feminist claims about date rape, something clearly protected by the canons of academic freedom.

We will, of course, say exactly the same things about rape when we teach the same class next semester.

In a properly run university, some administrator would sit this prissy little feminist down and explain to her “this is a university, you are going to hear things you disagree with. Live with it.” But a timid administration, used to genuflecting to all the demands of political correctness, will never do that.

Marquette Political Philosopher in New Bluegrass Group

We’ve blogged about our colleague Ryan Hanley, who until recently played in the band Cream City Bluegrass. Bluegrass bands, like other kinds of bands, often break up and reform with somewhat different personnel, and Hanley and one of the other members of Cream City Bluegrass are now with Freshwater Bluegrass.

Their music clips show the band to be accomplished, enjoyable and pretty mainstream (with the exception of an occasional cheesy cover of a 70s pop song).

You can read more in an article in the Racine Journal-Times.

Their next performance is this Friday (December 23rd) 9:00 p.m.-12:00 midnight at Paddy’s Pub, 2339 N.Murray, Milwaukee. We intend to be there.