Free Republic

Voodoo on Kindle Sarah Schaerr Norton, December 8, 2009 WASHINGTON, December 7, 2009–In Voodoo Anyone? How to Understand Economics Without Really Trying, journalist and educator Christopher T. Warden shows how markets work and what happens when they are bypassed. Warden passed away in January of 2009; Voodoo Anyone? is being published posthumously by Accuracy in Academia. “This is a book that’s long been needed–and is needed nowadays more than ever… As the reader of these pages will discover, [Warden] had a knack for putting complicated things in everyday language, using anecdotes and familiar examples that made his points in forceful,...

Title IX Expansions Bethany Stotts, November 20, 2009 During a November 10 press call on “Women Scientists and American Competitiveness,” speakers suggested that Title IX should be used to focus on “educational equity” and not just athletic equity. One speaker stressed, in particular, the importance of reaching out to federal agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes for Health (NIH), the Department of Defense (DOD), and the Department of Energy (DOE) for additional grant money. (Predoctoral women received 63% of the NIH’s awards in 2007, but only 25% of “competitive faculty grants” that same year, reports...

Taxation: Compulsive Failure Sarah Carlsruh, November 2, 2009 Leslie Carbone spoke on October 15th at Accuracy in Academia’s Author’s Night on her book Slaying Leviathan: The Moral Case for Tax Reform. Her book, she began, discusses “how the federal government is uncritically, if not compulsively, making things worse through its wealth-spreading fiscal policies.” Referring to the Constitution, Carbone stated that the main purpose of a government is to ensure peoples’ rights and that progressive taxation—taking a person’s money “simply because they have acquired more than another”—violates those rights. Such policy, she said, is an “affront to justice.” Her book outlined...

No Accuracy for Rosa Bethany Stotts, October 30, 2009 Earlier this week Accuracy in Academia called out Campus Progress associate editor and blogger Erin Rosa for attempting to characterize the contributors to CampusReform, a social network site designed by the Leadership Institute, as conservative bullies. Several hours later Rosa responded to our critique, writing that “Recent reporting by Campus Progress on a new conservative social networking website has apparently stuck in the craw of another right-leaning group dedicated to exposing ‘political bias’ in education.” “In fact, Accuracy In Academia—a sister organization to Accuracy In Media, a longstanding nonprofit that specializes...

Was it a spy, or would-be spy, in that SUV? Despite CIA mementos and other evidence, Roland Carnaby's life remains an enigma

AIA at CPAC by: Malcolm A. Kline, February 07, 2008 Accuracy in Academia will share a booth with its sister organization Accuracy in Media at the Conservative Political Action Conference. If you are in the neighborhood, please visit us. We will be there for the entire conference in the Exhibit Hall from February 7-9, 2008. At 5:00 PM on Feb. 7 in the Empire Room of the Omni Shoreham in Washington, D. C.—the site of the conference—AIM will bestow its Reed Irvine award for investigative journalism on Dr. Lee Edwards....

The administrator of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration was named chief executive of the Aerospace Industries Association on Tuesday, the top lobbying group for aerospace manufacturers. Marion Blakey's five-year term at FAA ends on Sept. 13. She will remain with the agency until that time, a spokeswoman said. Blakey will succeed John Douglass, who has led the trade organization since 1998. Blakey's successor at FAA has not been named. AIA members include Boeing Co., General Electric Co., United Technologies Corp, Northrop Grumman Corp., BAE Systems PLC and Lockheed Martin.

Does The Internet Lean Left? by: Elliott Bachus and Matt Hadro, August 15, 2007 High-profile pundits such as the Fox News Channel’s ubiquitous Dick Morris have alleged that the left has taken over the internet and enjoys an advantage there similar to the edge that conservatives have in talk radio. These observers usually offer no evidence to support this claim beyond the observation that there is more feedback on the liberal sites. At least one wag has posited that liberals can provide such input because they are unencumbered by full-time employment. Certain statistics drawn from internet search engines just might...

Al Gore's speech Saturday at the American Institute of Architects convention was closed to the media, but you can read about it in today's Express-News on Page 1B. How we cracked the former vice president's iron curtain is a mildly entertaining story, but more on that later. The why we crashed the speech is more important. Here is Express-News Editor Robert Rivard's reasoning in asking the paper's environmental reporter, Anton Caputo, to find a way to infiltrate the AIA confab: "Al Gore and his crusade to raise awareness about global warming and climate change are issues of great public interest,...

Clemson Board Member Les McCraw of Greenville (“Tension Inevitable at Great Universities” August 30) is to be congratulated for entering the debate now raging over the freshman campus-wide reading, “Truth and Beauty.” The content of education is important and board members should be paying attention to it. McCraw’s approach to the controversy comes in the form of a response to Professor J. David Woodard’s article (Clemson reading assignment offers no moral standard, August 25). Alas, Mr. McCraw’s contribution to the debate does not do much to help us appreciate “Truth and Beauty” but only tells us why Woodard’s comments should...

Knight Moves University officials continue to demonstrate hostility towards Catholicism that borders on persecution. We have posted stories on the failure of college administrators to take action when student newspapers publish sacrilegious cartoons. Their declarations of support for freedom of the press would be more believable if they took the same approach towards sketches that offend Islamic and Gay Rights groups. Add to the mix the University of Wisconsin’s attempt to ban the Knights of Columbus. The Catholic fraternity is already invisible enough on cutting-edge campuses loosely affiliated with the Church, such as Georgetown’s. “Although the Knights have been a...

Public schools are spending so much time on gay rights issues that about the only way left for reformers to bring Algebra back to classrooms would be to set up algebraic word problems involving cast members of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. “Just this week, police arrested a middle-school drama teacher in Waltham, Massachusetts for allegedly staging an elaborate production designed to molest male teens by offering them massages from prostitutes, then blindfolding them, donning a wig, and pretending to be the female masseuse,” author Dan Flynn notes on his web site. “On August 10, police arrested another middle-school...

In a recent discussion hosted at the Heritage Foundation, four authorities shared their thoughts and research on the current status and future of Communism today, offering a different take than the one most college students are likely to get in Cold War studies courses. “Who knows that the Soviet Union murdered twenty million people, and the Chinese murdered fifty million through various massacres, trials, and other acts under Communism?” Lee Edwards, Chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation said. “Who knows the Communism plague has exacted a death toll surpassing that of all the wars of the 20th century...

Maybe one of the reasons that we have never-ending battles over academic freedom is that many academics seem to define it differently. “Academic freedom means that if I think that there may be an intellectual payoff to be had by turning an academic lens on material others consider trivial — golf tees, gourmet coffee, lingerie ads, convenience stores, street names, whatever — I should get a chance to try,” veteran professor Stanley Fish recently wrote in The New York Times. “If I manage to demonstrate to my peers and students that studying this material yields insights into matters of general...

This past Wednesday, when I attended Students for Saving Social Security’s event on Social Security reform with roughly 300 other young people, I was overcome by an unusual Washington, D.C. emotion—hope. Having only lived in our nation’s capital for about a year, I have not yet succumbed to the total disillusionment and cynicism of many people, but it has certainly affected my optimistic tendencies. But in contradiction to my sometimes-attitude that nothing in this city ever gets done, let alone gets done right, I found myself believing something could be changed. Social Security was considered for decades to be the...

Though it has been a long 53 years since former President Harry S. Truman was in office, he was the hot topic of conversation at The Hudson Institute on Monday, July 17, where a panel discussed his legacy and influence on current policies. Truman’s defense-laden foreign policy has recently been compared to President George W. Bush’s tactics for the War on Terror; an association that was a major point of discussion for the three members of the panel. While the speakers all had their own specific opinions of the Bush-Truman comparison, they all praised Truman’s policies while he was in...

High school civics courses and even college-level political science classes on the separation of powers can sometimes differ radically from the actual practice. In a time when corruption runs rampant throughout Congress, and the legislative branch consistently succumbs to the executive branch’s agenda, change within the government is necessary, say Thomas Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, co-authors of The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track. Both Mann and Ornstein spoke about their book at the American Enterprise Institute on Wednesday, July 12 as part of a panel discussion with former Speakers...

A widely-publicized attack on supporters of Israel by two leading academics commits a fair number of inaccuracies not the least of which is their characterization of controversies surrounding the Israel Lobby as they manifest themselves on American campuses. “In September 2002, for example, Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes, two passionately pro-Israel neoconservatives, established a website (Campus Watch) that posted dossiers on suspect academics and encouraged students to report comments or behavior that might be considered hostile to Israel,” John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt wrote in a recent report which also appeared in abbreviated form in the London Review of Books....

Confronting Academic Liberalism by: Julia A. Seymour, June 16, 2006 One sued her university, another was caricatured in her college newspaper, and the third stood up against school administration and would not back down. Conservative student activists are no longer anomalies, rare individuals who stand up to fight against liberalism on their campuses. The Eagle Forum Summit not only drew student activists, it featured several student speakers who have been waging battles for conservatism in Georgia, Virginia and Utah. Ruth Malhotra spoke first about her experiences at Georgia Tech which included being singled out in class and being threatened with...

At Boston College, David Hollenbach, S. J., remains a Big Man on Campus even after his unsuccessful effort to block the awarding of an honorary degree to the Secretary of State, but the family that endowed his chair is now saying what protesters put on placards during Condoleeza Rice’s speech: Not in my name. “Well, the commencement was today, and too bad the Flatley Professor [David Hollenbach, S.J.] did not also quit,” Dan Flatley wrote to us on Monday. “If he had any integrity he would, and you can quote me on that.” “Let the public know that the Flatley...