Finally, The Student Life Lessens Bias

I'm a frequent critic of The Student Life's often very slanted coverage and holier-than-thou attitude, but at least this week, I have to given them some credit for avoiding these pitfalls.

• On page 2, they gave The Claremont Conservative credit for the blog post George wrote about President Gann's announcement on the endowment.
  

• On the editorial page, The Student Life wrote against the screening of questions by the Claremont Democrats. They write,

The members of the screening committee were not listed anywhere, nor were they made public. The only scrap of information that we heard was that the committee was composed mostly of active members of the Claremont Democrats organization. Now if the Claremont Democrats had been the hosts of the event, they would be well within their bounds to screen questions. However, it was a Pomona College event. How then did they get prominent members on the committee? And where were the Claremont Republicans to screen questions for conservative speakers like Kenneth Starr and Karl Rove? [Emphasis Added]

Answer: Conservative students, long denied free speech on campus and long maligned for the views that they hold, know better than to censor questions.

They cited Associate Dean of Students Neil Gerard's email to The Student Life that said that the efforts to screen questions were to "get quality questions without providing a bullypulpit [sic] for those with an axe to grind." The etymology of that phrase, "an axe to grind," is found here and refers to someone who has an agenda. Does everyone have an agenda of some sort when they ask a question? Whether that agenda be to get to the truth or show the speaker to be a bit full of himself or both, it shouldn't be up to the question screener to surmise the intent of the question. As usual, The Claremont Conservative was first in arguing against the screening of questions.

• Rebecca Golden's article, "The Real Bias-Related Incidents Are Political," was also an eloquent appeal against the "ultra-left" on campus. She believes -- and I'm inclined to agree -- that this group is behind much of conflicts on campus. She writes,

"Views that all white males have led easy, pleasant lives; that the sponsor program isn't diverse enough and ought to be restructured or replaced; that it's ok to remove trays in the dining halls on Tuesdays without asking the student body first; and that every bias-related incident ought to turn into a lecture on recent performances at Pomona College are not and should not be the accepted norm on campus. . . . The knee-jerk, reactive wing of the liberal party that is so vocal on our campus needs to recognize that no one- themselves included- has a monopoly on Truth."

Well said and thank you for calling attention to a real problem at Pomona College. I hope they don't go after you personally.

Video of Dan Pawson on the Tournament of Champions

Dan Pawson, CMC '2003, won the Tournament of Champions and pocketed a cool $250,000. (I think the government stole more than half, through taxes.) How did he do it? Watch the videos to find out. [Estimated runtime: 45 minutes or so, for both.]

Part 1 and Part 2. 

CMC Alums Out and About

Today, CMC alum, Thadd A. Blizzard, was named by Governor Schwarznegger to the Superior Court.

CMC alum and Claremont Institute Lincoln Fellow, Tommy Ross, was named to board of Premier Power.

A Great Evening With Fellow Classical Liberals in Los Angeles

Bryce Gerard, Sam Corcos, and I went to hear a panel discussion in downtown Los Angeles, "Is Capitalism Dead?" Wednesday evening. We were guests of the America's Future Foundation (AFF), which is the group that is funding the blogging contest in which we are finalists for a $10,000 award. 

It was put on in this really fancy hotel and most of the people there were well-to-do. They, according to David Kirby, executive director of AFF, owed their success to capitalism and all wanted to figure out ways to maintain capitalism. Many of them are exceptionally successful entrepreneurs who, like Hank Rearden types, don't apologize for their success. 

The panelists included Andrew Breitbart of Big Hollywood, Gene Healy of the Cato Institute, writer Conor Friedersdorf, (formerly of The Atlantic) and Adam Summers of the Reason Foundation.

All of the panelists were well spoken. I particularly enjoyed Healy's argument that our obsession with executive power harms our country. Whereas Bush expanded that power into national security, that provided an opportunity for Obama to reorder the entire economy. He said that our obsession with the president and how some people want him to "rule over America" effectively makes him a "talk show host with nuclear weapons." Much of Healy's remarks come from his book, The Cult of the Presidency, which I throughly enjoyed when I read it last month. 

He was right to point out that few Republicans argued against George W. Bush's spending programs, but I think he overstated the case against Rush Limbaugh, especially when he said "Dittoheads" was bad. He didn't know the history of the term. (Scroll down) [Andrew Breitbart was right to call him on it. We shouldn't be fighting over Rush. It's an effort of the Left to get us to fight one another.] Healy is wrong to suggest that there is a dichotomy between Rush Limbaugh and Pat Robertson and to say that it says anything about "where the right is intellectually."

Adam Summers and Conor Friedersdorf were also great speakers. I throughly agree with Friedersdorf that what the right needs are storytellers, people who are able to put faces to the excesses of the Left. Much of the work I've tried to do with The Claremont Conservative and now, The Claremont Independent is to that end. Friedersdorf also pointed to the Great Depression and his grandfather who refused to give up on capitalism. He asked if we would have given up on capitalism when so much seemed set up against it. Friedersdorf talked about how he discovered Ayn Rand and how much he enjoyed her work and compared it to his self-made grandfather who actually built his own home.

Adam Summers, for his part, cited Joseph Schumpeter, whose work is a big influence of mine, and who worried that democratic-capitalism would sow the seeds of its own destruction. Summers suggested that New Zealand might be the first country to escape the economic doldrums as it favors more laissez-faire economic policies. Summers was well spoken.

But the star of the show was Andrew Breitbart, who is the head of Big Hollywood, and has become the self-appointed bete noir of the Hollywood gliteratti for having the temerity to take on their sacred cows -- political correctness or moral relativism. Breitbart believes that part of the Right's big problem has been its cultural tone-deafness. The Left is chic; we're not. Breitbart is at work setting up a critical mass of conservatives in Hollywood who can defend themselves from black listing and to try and make the Right cool once more.

Breitbart, founder of Breitbart.com, the Huffington Post, and now, Big Hollywood, described his turn to the Right after being a college moron who had read all of those political correct books like Herbert Marcuse. Hollywood has gone from Gary Cooper and John Wayne to the "Cultural Revolution" of the 1960s. And contrary to popular perception, Obama is not the president. Oprah Winfrey is. She did a "make over" of Obama and introduced him to Matt Damon and George Clooney. [It definitely seems he missed the opportunity to say that Obama had taken over the "You get a car!" wrong. He nows says to the car company, "you get a billion!" I also wished he would have said something about how comics had so marginalized Sarah Palin.]

I asked Andrew Breitbart when he was going to start "Big Academia," on a lark. He told me its coming. I'm so excited. Breitbart could have left college and left the rest of us behind, but he's now working to help us keep liberty alive on America's campuses. Good for him.