Download Full Content – Printable Pickings
The end of the baseball season is a reminder we haven’t had a Ladies Day for awhile.
So today’s Pickings all come from some of our favorite distaff scribes; Debra Saunders, Anne Applebaum, Mary Anastasia O’Grady, Ann Coulter, etc. and includes Pickerhead’s sixth child who is a freshman at VA Tech and a staff writer for The Collegiate Times. In the About section you can find a picture of her from our ’97 Alaska cruise. She’s the one that was still a yard ape.
Kathleen Parker takes us into the world of slavery – present day!
… In “Sold,” a documentary by former ABC producer Jody Hassett Sanchez, we meet Pakistani boys as young as 3 sold into service as camel jockeys in the United Arab Emirates. We also meet little girls as young as 5 who had been sold as sex slaves.
One of the challenges of modern-day slavery is that good people are often unknowingly complicit. Many of the children featured in the documentary are sold by their impoverished parents, who were promised that their children would have better lives. The reality is something different. Little girls end up as abused prostitutes, while little boys sold as jockeys spend 12 or more hours a day strapped onto the backs of camels, are shocked with metal prods and fed saltwater to prevent their gaining weight.
At a screening here Wednesday, Sanchez told an audience that included U.S. Reps. Mary Bono, R-Calif., and Connie Mack, R-Fla., that she wanted to focus on people who were working to end slavery. She followed three faith-driven people — a Hindu, a Muslim and a Christian from India, Pakistan and Togo, respectively — who have suffered threats and beatings to save women and children. …
Mary Anastasia O’Grady reports that our sole socialist senator, Bernie Sanders of Vermont, is in Costa Rica fighting a free trade pact and carrying water for Hugo Chavez. Thanks Vermont!
Ann Coulter has some opinions. How’s that for a news flash? Today her righteous wrath is pointed at academia.
… Contrary to all the blather about “free speech” surrounding Ahmadinejad’s appearance at Columbia, universities in America do not invite speakers who do not perfectly mirror the political views of their America-hating faculties. Rather, they aggressively censor differing viewpoints and permit only a narrow category of speech on their campuses. Ask Larry Summers.
If a university invites someone to speak, you know the faculty agrees with the speaker. Maybe not the entire faculty. Some Columbia professors probably consider Ahmadinejad too moderate on Israel.
Columbia president Lee Bollinger claimed the Ahmadinejad invitation is in keeping with “Columbia’s long-standing tradition of serving as a major forum for robust debate.”
Except Columbia doesn’t have that tradition. This is worse than saying “the dog ate my homework.” It’s like saying “the dog ate my homework” when you’re Michael Vick and everyone knows you’ve killed your dog.
Columbia’s “tradition” is to shut down any speakers who fall outside the teeny, tiny seditious perspective of its professors.
When Minutemen leader Jim Gilchrist and his black colleague Marvin Stewart were invited by the College Republicans to speak at Columbia last year, the tolerant, free-speech-loving Columbia students violently attacked them, shutting down the speech. …
Anne Applebaum reports on the effects of Putin on the still born Russian middle class.
… The mere fact of living in a post-Communist country doesn’t explain their tribulations, however. I reckon my friends in Warsaw must be the rough socioeconomic equivalents of my friends in Moscow, but my Warsaw friends are flourishing despite the chaotic coalition government that currently runs their country, and despite the corruption that sometimes prevails in their city government. They might not be zillionaires, but their children study abroad, their apartments have new Ikea bookshelves, and they don’t regularly tell horror stories about their daily lives. They aren’t a would-be middle-class, they’re a real middle class, and eventually they’ll vote like one, too. …
Suzanne Fields writes on college students’ ignorance of history.
… In a shocking study by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), “civic literacy” is found to be declining at some of our finest (and most expensive) colleges and universities. Many graduates leave college with less knowledge of American history, government, foreign affairs and economics than when they entered as freshmen. Knowledge apparently just evaporates. If the survey questions administered by a team of professors to 14,000 college students at 50 colleges had been a test in a college classroom, the average score would be 53.2 percent — or simply an “F” for failure. …
Debra Saunders does her Edwards obit.
… Elizabeth Edwards disingenuously told the Progressive that when her husband voted for the war resolution, “Mostly the anti-war cry was from people who weren’t hearing what he was hearing. And the resolution wasn’t really to go to war. The resolution, if you recall, was forcing (President) Bush to go to the U.N. first.”
That’s simply not true. The resolution title was clear: “to authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against Iraq.” There was no language requiring Bush to win U.N. approval.
How does Edwards deal with a vote he now calls a mistake? At a February Democratic forum, John Edwards crowed, “I think I was the first, at least close to being the first, to say very publicly that I was wrong.”
Elizabeth Edwards is trashing the front-running Democrats because her husband is trailing in the presidential polls – and rather than take each of them on directly, he is hiding behind his wife’s skirts.
Melanie Phillips records the descent of Britain from a results oriented society, to one controlled by process.
Did you happen to assume, by any strange chance, that the purpose of the emergency services was to rescue people in an emergency from the prospect of death or injury? Indeed. So did we all.
Well, more fool us! It turns out that their purpose is to avoid anything that puts themselves at risk – and they’ve got a health and safety rule book that says so.
The more we learn about how ten-year-old Jordon Lyon drowned in a pool in Wigan while two police support officers at the scene did nothing to save him, the more surreal and preposterous life in Britain appears to have become.
In any normal society, these officers would have been disciplined for failing to carry out what one might have presumed to be the essential duty of a police support officer, namely to protect people from harm – not to mention the basic instinct of any decent human being to try to prevent a tragic accident.
But no – their employers, the top brass of the Greater Manchester Police, say they behaved perfectly correctly. This is because both the police and fire service have instructions not to save people who are drowning.
The reasons pile absurdity upon absurdity. Police and fire officers, we are told with the straightest of faces, are not taught to swim or trained to save people from drowning. This apparently means that even if they can swim, they still have to fold their arms and stay put. …
Liza Roesch’s latest assignment for the VA Tech Collegiate Times was to report on a Seung-Hui Cho professor who refused to be interviewed.
… While in Hicok’s English class in spring 2006, Cho wrote a play about a student who plots a school shooting. Hicok voiced his concerns about Cho to Lucinda Roy, English department head. Roy declined comment on this incident.
Much of the poem, called “So I know,” includes thoughts about Cho, notably a line in which the speaker expresses his wishes that he would’ve taken Cho’s life and then his own to prevent the deaths of many more.
“Maybe I should’ve shot the kid and then myself given the math. 2<33,” the poem reads. …
Kathryn Jean Lopez makes a pitch for National Review Online.