ASMC Wastes More Money on White Party, Wedding Party

I already wrote about the $50,000 that the school is blowing on Lupe Fiasco. Agree or not about the performer -- why is it that all the performers are rap or hip hop, anyways? -- that's a lot of money. At $20 a ticket and 2500 seats, the concert barely breaks even -- and these things have a way of going far over cost.

Sources on the ASCMC budgeting committee say that the White Party will cost $15,000 and that the Wedding Party will cost between $25,000 and $30,000. (I happen to think that the White Party is money better spent for the entertainment purposes, especially if it includes a certain Scripps dean calling all of the members of the Class of 2010 racist. And the Wedding Party seems a ploy on behalf of a certain promoter to get elected VP than it does a genuine party. If I wanted to dress up and go to a Wedding-like thing, I would, you know, go to all of my weird Bostonian friends weddings. I digress.)

Oh, and the money allocated for Senate this semester? A whopping $8000. Yes, the group that funds most of the clubs on campus receives only $8000. Now I have my criticisms of Senate -- namely that people who show up once get to vote money out of other people's pockets, giving a premium to people who don't value their time or to clubs to stack the Senate with people that'll vote for their causes without regard to the common good.

But doesn't anyone else find this dispartity more than a little odd?

No Walgreens For Us

An ordinance may stop a drive-through Walgreen's from being built in this town.

More evidence that the town of Claremont is ridiculous, if you needed any after they banned beauty shops from having a larger store front windows.

Why No Mention of George's Other Major?

I have just finished watching the ACLU video where Nick George just mentions that he is studying physics. Have a look at it here.



Could it be that there have been a lot of radicals who have been trained in Middle Eastern Studies?

Mark Steyn Discusses Pomona Student Nick George's Airport Imbroglio

Mark Steyn, who was recently heralded as one of the best writers on the Right, wrote a rather scathing column for National Review in which he took up the case of Nick George. I'll have something in the coming days or so about my views on the Nick George situation, but I thought I'd leave you with a few paragraph selections from Steyn's column. I have bolded the best sections. Thanks to everyone who directed this column to my attention.

Let’s turn to an item from the Philadelphia Inquirer. A young American with a white-bread name (“Nick George”) and a clean-cut mien returns from Jordan to resume his studies at Pomona College in California, and gets handcuffed and detained for five hours by U.S. Immigration and Philly police. Why? Well, he had Arabic-language flash cards in his pocket. Also, upon his return to the United States, his hair was shorter than on his Pennsylvania driver’s license. “That is an indication sometimes,” explained Lt. Louis Liberati, “that somebody may have gone through a radicalization.” Really? As Nick George’s boomer mom remarked, once upon a time long hair was a sign of radicalization. But now it’s just a sign that you’re an all-American spaced out doofus who’ll grow up to congratulate himself for driving an Audi TDI.

At any rate, the coiffure set off a Code Red alert, and Nick George found himself being asked: “How do you feel about 9/11?”

According to the Inquirer’s Daniel Rubin, “He said he hemmed and hawed a bit. ‘It’s a complicated question,’ he told me by phone.” However, young Nick ended up telling his captors, “It was bad. I am against it.”

My, that’s big of you.

Take it as read that the bozos at the airport called this one wrong. The problem is not that Nick George, his radical haircut notwithstanding, is a jihadist eager to self-detonate on a transatlantic flight. The problem is that he is an entirely typical American college student — one for whom 9/11 is “a complicated question.” After all, to those reared in an educational system where the late Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States (now back in the bestseller lists) is conventional wisdom, such a view is entirely unexceptional. It’s hardly Nick’s fault that the banal groupthink of every American campus gets you pulled over for secondary screening when you’re returning from Amman.

America can survive a few psychotic Islamic terrorists flying planes into skyscrapers. Whether it can survive millions of its own citizens mired in the same insipid conformo-radicalism as Nick George is another matter.