Time Magazine Confesses: Rush Is Right!

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You don’t see this every day:

President Obama has called the BP oil spill “the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced,” and so has just about everyone else. Green groups are sounding alarms about the “Catastrophe Along the Gulf Coast,” while CBS, Fox and MSNBC slap “Disaster in the Gulf” chryons on all their spill-related news. Even BP fall guy Tony Hayward, after some early happy talk, admitted the spill was an “environmental catastrophe.” The obnoxious anti-environmentalist Rush Limbaugh has been a rare voice arguing that the spill — he calls it “the leak” — is anything less than an ecological calamity, scoffing at the avalanche of end-is-nigh eco-hype.
Well, Rush has a point. The Deepwater explosion was an awful tragedy for the 11 workers who died on the rig, and it’s no leak; it’s the biggest oil spill in U.S. history. It’s also inflicting serious economic and psychological damage on coastal communities that depend on tourism, fishing and drilling. But so far — while it’s important to acknowledge that the long-term potential danger is simply unknowable for an underwater event that took place just three months ago — it does not seem to be inflicting severe environmental damage. “The impacts have been much, much less than everyone feared,” says geochemist Jacqueline Michel, a federal contractor who is coordinating shoreline assessments in Louisiana.

The simple answer is this: The ocean is so large that even the catastrophic spill of several million gallons of oil is, by comparison, a drop in the bucket. Whatever the short-term damage done, in terms of destroyed sea life and damaged habitat, will be slowly repaired by natural processes over the course of several years.

Mother Earth is a lot more resilient than environmentalists give her credit for. I remember the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969 — a horrible thing, but Santa Barbara today is as lovely a place as you’d ever want to visit and I’m not aware that there is any residual damage from that spill.

Now that Time has admitted Rush is right about the BP spill, how about some belated recognition for Undeniable Truth of Life No. 24?

Matthew Yglesias: ‘Got Mine, Jack’

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Harvard alumnus declares that getting into Harvard is no big deal, at least for poor white kids:

People who are plausible admission candidates at Harvard and don’t quite make the cut end up at Columbia or Penn. People who don’t get into Berkeley go to UCLA. And they all end up fine. There’s just absolutely no need to cry for someone who got into Bryn Mawr instead of Wellesley thanks to affirmative action or legacy preference or structural bias in the SAT or anything else. This is a made-up social problem. . . .
If you were to start writing a list of the problems faced by poor people in the United States of America you’d run out of paper long before you got to elite university admissions policies.

Strangely enough, I agree with Yglesia as to these facts. Why, therefore, did Jesse Jackson lead protest marches against Proposition 209? Why, as a general rule, do liberals rush to the barricades to defend affirmative action programs for minorities, if such programs are a response to “a made-up social problem” and if admission to elite universities doesn’t actually help the supposed beneficiaries?

And isn’t it strange that Yglesias is making such arguments now, when we have a black president with a bachelor’s degree from Columbia and a law degree from Harvard?

Surprise: Federal Judge Upholds University’s ‘No Christians Allowed’ Policy

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The limits of “diversity”:

A federal judge has ruled in favor of a public university that removed a Christian student from its graduate program in school counseling over her belief that homosexuality is morally wrong. . . .
U.S. District Judge George Caram Steeh dismissed [Julea] Ward’s lawsuit against Eastern Michigan University. She was removed from the school’s counseling program last year because she refused to counsel homosexual clients.
The university contended she violated school policy and the American Counseling Association code of ethics. . . .
The case is similar to a lawsuit the [Alliance Defense Fund] filed against Augusta State University in Georgia. Counseling student Jennifer Keeton was allegedly told to stop sharing her Christian beliefs in order to graduate.
Keeton’s lawsuit alleged that she was told to undergo a reeducation program and attend “diversity sensitivity training.”

Approval of homosexuality is therefore now compulsory in public universities. Christians pay taxes to support universities which forbid Christian students from expressing their beliefs.

You will not be surprised to learn that, just like the judge who blocked the Arizona immigration enforcement law, Judge Steeh was appointed by Bill Clinton.

(Via Memeorandum. More at Hot Air, Weasel Zippers and Red State.)

UPDATE: James Joyner offers criticism that does not, however, contradict the fundamental point: That state universities are now denying diplomas to students whose Christian beliefs contradict pro-gay academic orthodoxy. Whatever its legal basis — in this case, requiring students to conform to the guidelines of a professional licensing organization — this amounts to an agency of government penalizing Christian students.

We ought to call things by their right names, rather than to permit ourselves to be deceived by clever sophistry.

Surprise: Police Say ‘Walt Whitman Devotee’ Molested Teenage Boy Students

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 Wow, who could have ever suspected he was into twinks?

Kevin Ricks was a gregarious, well-traveled English teacher at Osbourn High School, a Walt Whitman devotee who was so popular that a photo of him in class was chosen to fill the opening page of the yearbook. A writer and photographer himself, Ricks would walk the halls of the Manassas school with a leather-bound journal of his musings tucked in his bag, next to his laptop computer.
What teachers, parents, students and even his wife didn’t know was that his journals contained decades of dark secrets, a running handwritten commentary of Ricks’s world of obsession, infatuation, pursuit, sexual abuse and international child exploitation.
They didn’t know about his library of homemade pornographic videos and explicit photographs capturing his tequila-soaked sex acts with teenage boys he had handpicked. They didn’t know about the makeshift shrine boxes containing mementos of the episodes, including sex toys, soiled tissues and hair trimmings. . . .
[H]e spent months infiltrating their lives, their families and their youth groups. He plied them with expensive gifts, trips, event tickets, attention and ultimately loads of alcohol.
When the boys were in a drunken stupor or asleep, Ricks would molest them, using a camcorder and camera to capture the graphic, secret sex acts, according to victims and law enforcement officials. . . .
One [of Ricks’ journal entries], from Christmas Eve 2009, spoke directly of the Manassas victim’s abuse, authorities said. In it, Ricks writes about giving the boy a Heineken and five shots of tequila while watching a movie. He then describes deep, passionate kisses and notes details about the boy’s genitals. Ricks wrote that he was in love and that it was the best 12 hours of his life, authorities said. . . .
[I]n the mid-1980s, he taught at private schools in the Atlanta area, at least once serving as the dorm master for a boys’ boarding school.

You can read the whole thing, including how Ricks began hosting foreign-exchange students whom he now is accused of molesting. Pundette suggests Ricks should be boiled in oil.

M Is For Machiavelli

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by Smitty

My addition to this fun project in bold:

So let’s create a children’s song titled “The DEMOCRAT Anthem.”

I started with D and Rudolph Carrera answered with E.

D is for double standards: our flags wave proudly in the westerly breeze. . .
E is for enemy: they willingly side with idiots and cretins rather than the sane.
M is for Machiavelli: mendacious mutterings with ease. . .
O
C
R
A
T

Who are the next four to finish this fine ditty?

Surprise: ‘The Treasury Department Claims That Fannie Mae . . . Screwed Up’

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How effective is the Obama administration’s program to help people with mortgage problems? The answer is, we have no freaking clue:

The Obama administration has revised its latest monthly report on its signature foreclosure-prevention plan, deleting a heavily-criticized performance metric used to measure whether assisted homeowners are re-defaulting on their taxpayer-financed mortgages.
The Treasury Department claims that Fannie Mae, which administers its Home Affordable Modification Program, screwed up. As a consequence, the public can no longer tell whether homeowners with HAMP modifications, which limits monthly payments to 31 percent of income, are being placed in sustainable mortgages.

Daniel Indiviglio explains that when Treasury issued a report showing that only 5% of mortgages for these high-risk borrowers were 90 days past due, “It looked good, a little too good.” The suspicions of analysts forced Treasury to admit that the “too good” numbers were wrong, but the geniuses at Fannie Mae can’t seem to figure out what the actually numbers are.

Is anyone really surprised? Congress passes laws without reading them, spending billions of dollars of money we don’t have on people living in houses they can’t afford. Naturally, responsibility for monitoring the results of this program is assigned to the same bankrupt “government-sponsored entity” that taxpayers were forced to bail out two years ago. And then we expect Fannie Mae’s accountants to be competent?

This is only “news” to anyone stupid enough to think that economic recovery is a special kind of magic for which only Democrats know the secret formula. Which is to say, Peggy Joseph:

If you need further evidence to fuel your suspicion that the administration is just making up numbers randomly, here’s a story I noticed a couple of days ago:

New home sales rose nearly 24 percent in June from a month earlier to a seasonally adjusted annual sales pace of 330,000, the the Commerce Department said Monday. May’s number was revised downward to a rate of 267,000, the slowest pace on records dating back to 1963. Sales for April and March were also revised downward.

So the government tells us that their housing numbers were crap for three consecutive months. But these latest numbers? Solid gold, baby.

Rick Pitino Discovers the Unsurprising Hazards of Screwing Crazy Women

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When you’re a famous basketball coach hired for a new job, perhaps the orientation process should require that you watch a video called, “Crazy Women and Your Penis: A Bad Combination.”

It is fair to stipulate that any woman who offers sexual favors to a man she just met is crazy. And when she starts doing you under the table in the middle of a restaurant, we’re talking world-class crazy:

Louisville basketball coach Rick Pitino told a jury Wednesday that a woman accused of demanding millions from him had sex with him after whispering to him and unzipping his pants in an empty Italian restaurant.
Pitino testified Wednesday that he met Karen Cunagin Sypher on July 31, 2003, at the restaurant where he’d gone following a golf outing.
Pitino said he bought Sypher a drink and the two exchanged small talk after the restaurant closed.
When he got up to leave, Pitino said she whispered something, opened his pants and the two then had sex “very briefly.”
“Unfortunate things happen,” Pitino said.

Yeah. “Unfortunate things” like that happen all the time to rich famous guys who don’t avoid crazy women. And as testimony made clear, this woman had crazy written all over her:

Margaret Cameron, a former professional golfer, testified she was having dinner at Porcini when she ran into Pitino’s entourage and began a conversation. Sypher barged into the group, Cameron said, and thrust her cell phone at Pitino asking for the coach to talk to one of her sons.
“She wasn’t going to give up,” Cameron said. “She wasn’t going to stop.”
Bartender Melissa Brent testified that Pitino’s group were regulars at the restaurant and appeared to be having a good time in a corner of the restaurant when Sypher — wearing a white top with a short white skirt — attempted to “edge herself into the scene.”

You see what I mean? Not all women who wear short skirts are crazy, but when a woman in a short skirt introduces herself in a restaurant by shoving a cell phone in your face and, next thing you know, she’s unzipping your pants, your Crazy Woman Early Warning System ought to pick up the signals.

Rick Pitino has probably asked himself the question, “What went wrong with my Crazy Woman Early Warning System that night?” I think we might guess it had something to do with the fact that “Pitino and his friends drank about $500 worth of alcohol over about four hours on July 31st, 2003.”

Yeah. That’s gonna do the trick every time.

OK, so what happens next in this predictably disastrous Coen Brothers movie scenario? The crazy woman hooks up with her Scummy Low-Rent Ex-Boyfriend who, in this case, is named Lester Goetzinger:

Goetzinger said he met Sypher while on the job as a utility repairman in 1994.  He said they remained friends for several years until 1999 when their relationship turned sexual.
After splitting up in 2002, Goetzinger says they reconnected at a U of L game in 2005 and resumed their affair a year later.  He says on February 25, 2009 they had oral sex the day before she told him Pitino had raped her twice in 2003.
Goetzinger says Sypher “begged and pleaded” with him to call Pitino and that she wanted a house and at least $200,000 from him.  He says Sypher even told him to make the calls from a pay phone so they would not be traced and to mention the words “rape” and “abortion.”

Scummy Low-Rent Boyfriend Goetzinger was obedient to her Crazy Woman commands:

Let’s point out that Sypher later married — and has since divorced — one of Pitino’s assistant coaches, Tim Sypher:

Sypher talked of regretting two abortions — one after the Pitino encounters in 2003, and another in 2004, after she started dating Tim Sypher, whom she later married. On the tape, she says, “I’m a double murderer.”

You’re also nuttier than a Snickers bar, and Rick Pitino’s “unfortunate” involvement with you ought to be a warning to men everywhere.