Oklahoma

I support an individual's, or an organization's, giving as much (or as little) of its own money to relief efforts in Oklahoma.  Good people believe in and practice charity, and history shows that Americans are a very generous people.

It's impossible to be "generous" with other people's money, though.  I don't support the massive amounts of federal money that make up so much aid after such disasters, and if you would like to know why, read this post.  In it I relate a story about Davy Crockett (who as a Congressman voted for $20,000 for relief for Georgetown after a fire) and one about Grover Cleveland (who vetoed a bill providing drought and famine relief to Texas--because there was no authority to do so in the Constitution!).

You can donate to the American Red Cross here.

When You've Lost Eugene Robinson...

I've mentioned Eugene Robinson before, not very flatteringly in this post.  Let the Obama administration go after his kind of people (journalists) and not my kind of people (Tea Partiers) and Robinson finally sees the light:

The Obama administration has no business rummaging through journalists’ phone records, perusing their e-mails and tracking their movements in an attempt to keep them from gathering news. This heavy-handed business isn’t chilling, it’s just plain cold.

It also may well be unconstitutional...

The unwarranted snooping, which was revealed last week, would be troubling enough if it were an isolated incident. But it is part of a pattern that threatens to redefine investigative reporting as criminal behavior...

After discussing the AP story:

The Fox News case is even worse.

Wow, even Fox gets respect from some liberals now.  Too bad it took a direct threat of the loss of 1st Amendment freedoms to make that happen.

If this had been the view of prior administrations, surely Bob Woodward would be a lifer in some federal prison. The cell next door might be occupied by my Post colleague Dana Priest, who disclosed the CIA’s network of secret prisons. Or by the New York Times’ James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, who revealed the National Security Agency’s eavesdropping program.

Robinson sees the threat now. Welcome to the party.

I've heard it said that these current scandals have taken distrust of the government from the "tinfoil hat crowd" to "mainstream America".  I disagree.  I think they've confirmed what the Founders knew about excessive power, what conservatives have always believed about government power, and shown liberals to be flat out wrong.  That they believed these threats to be "tinfoil hat" just shows their own biases and blinders.

Why I Don't Support So-called "Hate Crimes" Legislation

From the major Sacramento newspaper:

The defense attorney for accused hate attacker Clayton Garzon asserted Monday that the March beating of another Davis man was not fueled by anti-gay sentiment.

Garzon, 20, faces three felony assault charges and hate crime allegations connected to the beating of Lawrence "Mikey" Partida early March 10 near Third and I streets in Davis. The attack occurred outside a birthday party for Partida that was across the street from where Garzon lives...

The attorney called Brigham Young University linguistics professor William Eggington, who testified that slurs targeted at Partida were "more consistent with challenging someone's masculinity," than with hate speech.

The professor also said that a tolerant upbringing at home in a liberal community "would lower the possibility that this would be a gender- related crime."

So if you grow up in Davis, you're less likely to be a bigot than if you grow up on Salt Lake City or Omaha.  Did you catch that?  But let's continue:

"I walked out and saw Mikey covered in blood," Cooper said. "Clayton was walking away. He said, 'Your (gay slur) cousin, was talking (expletive). I had to (expletive) him up.' "

Why isn't it bad enough that he beat the man to death?  Is it better, or worse, to have beaten the man to death because he's gay rather than because Garzon wanted to rob him or because the victim shot his mouth off at Garzon?

This stuff is too Orwellian for me.  Hate crime = thought crime.
(I've addressed this before--scroll to the bottom of the page and type 'hate crime', without the quote marks, into the search box.)

We Only Care If It's Women

Maybe it’s perfectly natural to expect the gender differences by academic discipline that are represented in the chart above, and maybe we should give up trying to socially engineer perfect gender parity for each academic field. And when there is so much concern about female under-representation in some of the STEM fields like engineering and computer science, where is the concern about male under-representation in the STEM field of biology, where is the concern about the significant male under-representation in female-dominated fields like health professions, public administration, education and psychology, and where is the concern about the gender imbalance favoring women for college degrees in general at all levels – associate’s degrees, bachelor’s degrees, master’s degrees and doctoral degrees?

Also included in the article is a chart of major by sex.

Update:  Here's an entirely different angle on the "we only care if it's women" issue:

I often think about how men are silenced these days on anything having to do with gender issues. I received an email from a male reader who is concerned about the same thing: he is told he is a “rape apologist” for even suggesting that men might be unfairly accused of rape. Here is his letter....

Graduation

I attended today, at least for awhile.  I'll update this tomorrow with impressions.

Update, 5/21/13:  I wasn't impressed with much at the ceremony.  I don't want any individual to take offense so I won't specify what I didn't like or why, choosing instead to say nothing when I don't have anything nice to say.

One thing I thought was very nice, though, was what was done with our two foreign exchange students.  Since they don't really graduate, our previous principal wouldn't let them participate in the ceremony at all.  Our current principal, though, brought with him from his previous job the nice gesture of allowing them to participate by calling them up onto the stage and presenting them each with an American flag.  Very classy.

Star Trek: Into Darkness

Let me start with the positive:

The run time of 2 hrs and 3 minutes goes by with a quickness.  It was certainly action-packed.  As an action movie, I genuinely enjoyed it.  Usually I leave Star Trek movies slightly disappointed; I haven't enjoyed a Star Trek-themed movie this much, the first time I saw it, since the 80s, with Wrath of Khan and The Voyage Home.  Also, the campiness and silliness present in the last movie (and the original series) was thankfully missing from this outing.

But this wasn't a Star Trek movie.  It was a great action/adventure/sci-fi movie, but it wasn't Star Trek.

I've figured out what the problem is.  This wasn't Star Trek, it was an action movie with Star Trek characters in it.  (I'm not the only one to comment on this.)

Part of the problem is that I have no affection for the people on the screen.  Part of the allure of Star Trek is the relationship, if you will, the viewer has with the characters.  The first 6 movies relied on characters we'd seen for 3 years on tv and dozens of years in syndication.  We knew and loved them.  The same goes for The Next Generation characters; we knew them so well after 7 seasons on tv, we cared about them in their movies.  We could see them as our friends.

In the new movies you can say that's Captain Kirk up there, but it's not.  I know who Captain Kirk is, and it's Shatner.  You can't just say this person on the screen is Captain Kirk.  He's not.  Same goes for the other characters.  And for better or worse, the two newest movies are really Kirk movies, with the rest of the characters thrown in because they're supposed to be there.  The attempt at recreating the bond between Kirk and Spock is failing, and totally lacking is any development of the third leg of that triad, McCoy. Let's not forget that it was the three of them that made for such compelling stories--the brash Kirk, the stoic Spock, the emotional McCoy.  All we have in the current movies is their names, their characters are missing.  The others--Scotty, Uhura, Sulu, Chekov--they exist now only to move the story along, not because they're important to us.

You know what else is missing?  The biggest and most understated character of all, Enterprise herself.  Who among us didn't cry when Enterprise was destroyed in Search For Spock?  Who didn't cheer when we saw Enterprise-A?  We'd already seen an Enterprise destroyed by the time Generations came around so the loss of Enterprise-D in that movie wasn't as big a shock, but it was still a loss.  And didn't you ache when Enterprise-E rammed Scimitar, probably saving humanity by doing so?  Enterprise is a beautiful thing, her captains speak of her with reverence--or at least they used to.  In the new movies you don't get that sense.  She's a set, not a ship with a crew that's like family.  She's a method of transportation.  Into Darkness didn't have a single shot of Enterprise porn, those sweeping exterior views of the ship that make you long to be aboard.

In Star Trek you must have shots of Enterprise.  In battles you must see her flying by, firing phasers, maneuvering--you cheer for her not just because of her crew, but because you want that particular ship to win the fight.  In Into Darkness you see brief shots of Enterprise being hit and damaged, severely, what's missing is any attempt to make you feel affection for the ship itself.  As for "grand shots", we're treated with one of her rising out of an ocean (really?  freakin' seriously???) and one of her rising out of clouds (as if she's an atmospheric vessel--what's next, landing gear?).

Can you identify any specific place in the new Enterprise besides her bridge?  We don't know this new ship.  On the original Enterprise and Enterprise-D we knew what crew quarters looked like, we knew Main Engineering, we knew the transporter room, we knew the shuttle bay, we knew sick bay.  On Enterprise-D we also knew 10 Forward, the captain's ready room, and even the battle bridge (used what, only twice?).

We don't know this new Enterprise.  Enterprise herself isn't taken seriously in the reboot movies.  She exists only to take Pine/Kirk where he needs to go.

All those criticisms above relate to the Star Trek ethos; notice I haven't even addressed the storyline and plot problems in the current movie--and they are legion, if you're a Star Trek fan.

If you're not a fan, Into Darkness is a thrilling movie that keeps your attention almost non-stop from beginning to end.  It's a good movie, but definitely not a fanboy movie.  It's too bad these reboots have to be one or the other, and not both.

When You've Lost Jon Stewart...

Taking Statements Out of Context

Do you remember the brouhaha during the last election cycle, when people knowingly took out of context a Romney statement about the poor?  This is what people fixated on:

I’m not concerned about the very poor.

The entirety was much different:

“I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it.”

“I’m not concerned about the very rich, they’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of the America, the 90, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling and I’ll continue to take that message across the nation.”

How easy would it be to take this statement, regarding the IRS scandal, out of context?

I can’t speak to the law here. The law is irrelevant.

Here's more context:

“I can’t speak to the law here. The law is irrelevant. The activity was outrageous and inexcusable, and it was stopped and it needs to be fixed so we ensure it never happens again,” Pfeiffer said.

Stephanopoulos asked Pfeiffer if he really thought the law is “irrelevant.”

“What I mean is, whether it’s legal or illegal is not important to the fact that the conduct doesn’t matter. The Department of Justice has said they’re looking into the legality of this. The president is not going to wait for that. We have to make sure it doesn’t happen again, regardless of how that turns out,” Pfeiffer said.

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine why the press fixated on the former but not the latter.

Leftie Professor Figures Out What I've Been Telling You For Years

From Twitchy, via Instapundit, we learn of one Marc Lamont's tweets:

Marc Lamont Hill        ✔ @marclamonthill

We have a permanent warfare state and liberals say nothing. Sometimes, it feels like the Left wasn't anti-war. It was just anti-Bush.

To which I say to Mr. Lamont, You are correct, sir.

Let's read on:

Stop the presses! Did über-lefty Prof. Marc Lamont Hill just admit that Bush Derangement Syndrome is a real phenomenon?
...
Let’s be clear, here: we’re not trying to suggest that Hill suddenly “gets it.” Rather, we’re drawing attention to the fact that he’s figured out that maybe, just maybe, the biggest issue the Left had (and still has) with George W. Bush is George W. Bush. 

Yep.

Score Another Point For The Anglosphere

And look, it regards diversity!

Here’s what the data show:
• Anglo and Latin countries most tolerant. People in the survey were most likely to embrace a racially diverse neighbor in the United Kingdom and its Anglo former colonies (the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) and in Latin America. The only real exceptions were oil-rich Venezuela, where income inequality sometimes breaks along racial lines, and the Dominican Republic, perhaps because of its adjacency to troubled Haiti.

The Last Day

For reasons I won't go into, our seniors graduate this coming Monday.  The only reason they were on campus at all today was to do their senior check-out--and at about 11:00 they went to a local park and had a catered lunch.  The next, and last, time they'll all be together will be together will be at graduation.

Several asked me if I was going to be at graduation Monday and seemed genuinely disappointed when I told them I probably wouldn't.  If one kid had acted that way I'd treat it as a one-off, but enough asked that I'm actually reconsidering not going. 

And I really would like to hear one of this year's speakers.

Without Data, All You Have Is An Opinion

A few years ago our math department created a new math class, sort of an "Algebra 1.5".  In the traditional Algebra 1-Geometry-Algebra 2 track, too many students just weren't ready after a 10-day intensive review of Algebra 1.  We created a "bridge" course just for them.

Our current principal doesn't like the course.  He doesn't think kids need it.  As a result, the course isn't scheduled for next year.  So instead of meeting the students where they are and offering a course than can help them progress, they'll now either sink or swim.

I provided much background information in the introduction to this post a couple weeks ago.

I received the data today.  Analysis begins next week!

Why next week, you ask?  Well, for reasons I won't go into in this post, our seniors graduate Monday, but our underclassmen attend school until the first week of June.  My statistics classes will be empty except for 2 juniors.  I'm going to give them the data and have them do a chi-square analysis to see if that Algebra 1.5 course adequately prepared students for Algebra 2.

You want real-world application?  I gotcher real-world application right here!

It may turn out that our principal is right.  I don't know what he's basing his opinion on, but it's not data.  I intend to find out.

Obama Is Living In A Fantasy World

'What's blocking us right now is sort of hyper-partisanship in Washington that, frankly, I was hoping to overcome in 2008,' he said. 'And in the midst of crisis, I think the other party reacted, rather than saying now is the time for us all to join together, decided to take a different path.

'My thinking was after we beat them in 2012, well, that might break the fever, and it's not quite broken yet.

'But I am persistent. And I am staying at it. And I genuinely believe that there are actually Republicans out there who would like to work with us but they're fearful of their base and they're concerned about what Rush Limbaugh might say about them.'
link

Can anyone identify for me what he's done to attempt to "overcome" this hyper-partisanship?  Was it when he told Republican congressmen "I won"?  Was it when he repeatedly made reference to the country as a car in a ditch, that Republicans drove the car there, and then should just drink Slurpees and stay out of the way while he and the Democrats fixed everything?  Was it when he said they also shouldn't talk to much?  Was it when he blamed everything on his predecessor?  Was it when he signed major legislation, specifically the porkulus bill and Obamacare, with only one or two Republican votes total out of 535 men and women in Congress?  Was it when he said to "punch back twice as hard", or perhaps when he said his followers needed to "punish" their "enemies"?

I'd really like an answer. 

Update, 5/16/13:  I'm not the only one noticing:

President Obama is once again engaging in what psychiatrists refer to as projection, in which people lay their worst attributes on others...

Mr. Obama is the ultimate ad hominem president. 

Update #2, 5/16/13:  Nope, no hyperpartisanship here:

"Don't think we're not keeping score, brother." That's what President Barack Obama said to Rep. Peter DeFazio in a closed-door meeting of the House Democratic Caucus last week, according to the Associated Press.

Press Heavyweights Smell Blood In The Water

James C. Goodale, the so-called “father of reporters’ privilege” and the author of a new book called Fighting for the Press (CUNY Journalism Press, 255 pp., $20), was in his office at the Debevoise & Plimpton law firm, where he’s a partner, comparing Barack Obama to Richard M. Nixon...

Mr. Goodale, 79, was the general counsel of The New York Times during the 1971 Pentagon Papers case, when President Nixon ordered the old grey lady to cease publication of excerpts from a 7,000-page document, which detailed America’s involvement in Vietnam over the course of three decades. The Times published the first excerpt on June 13, 1971. By June 26, the case had reached the Supreme Court. Over the course of a few days, the justices ruled in a 6-3 decision that the U.S. government could not censor the Times. Nixon then convened a grand jury to indict the Times for conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act—”which really doesn’t mean anything,” Mr. Goodale said, rubbing his forehead in distress—but the case quickly fell apart. Fighting for the Press reads like a political thriller, with Nixon providing some dark comic relief. The guy was not exactly subtle: “As far as the Times is concerned,” he said to John Mitchell, the U.S. Attorney General, “hell they’re our enemies.”

Now, the man who successfully fought Nixon says President Obama has an even more troubling record.

That's one.  Here's another:

Investigative reporter Carl Bernstein on Tuesday called the scandal involving the Department of Justice securing telephone records of Associated Press reporters and editors a "nuclear event."

"This is outrageous," Bernstein said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." "It is totally inexcusable. This administration has been terrible on this subject from the beginning.

"The object of it is to intimidate people who talk to reporters," he said. "This was an accident waiting to become a nuclear event, and now it's happened."

"This administration has been terrible on this subject from the beginning."  Why is this the first we're hearing of it from you, Mr. Bernstein?

While I have no sympathy for the press as victims—they've been absolutely complicit since before he was elected—I’m glad they’re finally starting to see the light:

The town is turning on President Obama — and this is very bad news for this White House...

Obama’s aloof mien and holier-than-thou rhetoric have left him with little reservoir of good will, even among Democrats. And the press, after years of being accused of being soft on Obama while being berated by West Wing aides on matters big and small, now has every incentive to be as ruthless as can be.

This White House’s instinctive petulance, arrogance and defensiveness have all worked to isolate Obama at a time when he most needs a support system. “It feel like they don’t know what they’re here to do,” a former senior Obama administration official said. “When there’s no narrative, stuff like this consumes you.”

This is nothing compared to the way they'd treat a Republican president, but I guess it's a start.

Update, 5/17/13:  And now Bob Woodward joins in:

Bob Woodward, who helped break the Watergate scandal as a Washington Post reporter in the early 1970s, sees a similarity between those events and the Benghazi scandal now embroiling the Obama administration.

He pointed to White House laundering of its talking points after last year's attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

"I have to go back 40 years to Watergate, when Nixon put out his edited transcripts of the conversations, and he personally went through them and said, Let's not tell this, let's not show this,'" the political author told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program.

"I would not dismiss Benghazi. It's a very serious issue. As people keep saying, four people were killed."

Welcome to the Party

For 4 years now, conservatives have been trying to tell Americans that Obama isn't the Lightworker he was thought to be.  A lapdog press shielded, and shilled, for him at every opportunity.  They ignored as "partisan hackery" anything that might make him look bad.  But when one of their oxes finally gets bored, only then do they open their eyes to reality.  Here's the cover of the Boston Herald, not known for its conservative leanings:

You're a little late to the party, MSM, and for quite awhile you trashed the party all you could, but we'll be gracious hosts now that you've decided to attend anyway.  The press isn't up in arms about Benghazi or the IRS, but at least they're starting to report those stories seriously.  They sure are angry about the AP story, though:

The seizure of the phone records, disclosed earlier Monday by AP President and CEO Gary Pruitt, is the latest move in a series of high profile and controversial investigations of leaks of classified information by the Justice Department. In a letter of protest to Attorney General Eric Holder, Pruitt said obtaining more than two months of AP phone records on 20 separate telephone lines without prior notice was a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into news-gathering operations.

A conservative is a liberal who's been mugged.

Here's more, this time from the AP:

President Barack Obama seemed to lose control of his second-term agenda even before he was sworn in, when a school massacre led him to lift gun control to the fore. Now, as he tries to pivot from a stinging defeat on that issue and push forward on others, the president finds himself rocked by multiple controversies that are demoralizing his allies, emboldening his political foes and posing huge distractions for all...

So far, there's no evidence that Obama knew about - let alone was involved in - the government actions in question. But a president usually is held accountable for his administration's actions, and Republicans now have material to fuel accusations and congressional hearings that they hope will embarrass him, erode his credibility and bolster their argument that his government is overreaching. Even some of his Democratic allies are publicly expressing dismay at the AP phone records seizure.

If I enjoyed schadenfreude, I'd giggle at watching an organization I've referred to in the past as "al-AP" get its knickers in a bunch over actions of the Obama Administration--but I'm far too calm and mature for such things. I'm not going to turn them away when they're doing the right thing just because they were wrong in the past.  Perhaps this experience will help those in the press remember the intent of press freedoms in the First Amendment--to serve as a watchdog, not a lapdog, over government.

This is how we on the right see things:

The past few days have seen a cascade of evidence that the administration not only feigned transparency, but may have covered up the politicization of the IRS and the response to the terrorist attack on the Benghazi consulate. Whistle-blowers on the Benghazi response moved that story back into the headlines, but not for long. Because on Friday, the IRS admitted that it had targeted conservative groups for aggressive investigations. And that wasn't even the worst of the scandals.

On top of everything, Obama's Department of Justice spied on the AP, and may have found a way to alienate a national press that had done its best to downplay any hint of corruption in this White House.

And let's not forget the burgeoning EPA scandal, wherein the EPA waived fees, or not, based on the political orientation of who's asking.

Obama has compared himself to Lincoln, has talked up Reagan, and has been compared to Roosevelt.  The scandals above are invoking comparisons to a different US president.

Update, 5/15/13:  Seems like I'm not the only one who wants to point out some of the press' own culpability:

Most pathetically, some of you are only turning on him now because he’s been exposed going after the Associated Press. Going after the good guys: you. Gasp! Hell hath no fury like a groupie scorned. Well, what did you expect? You let the guy walk all over you for four years, and then you flushed what’s left of your credibility down the toilet to get him reelected, despite all his failures. You think he ever respected you?

We told you this guy was a disaster waiting to happen. You didn’t listen. He said the things you wanted to hear, he promised everybody free candy for life, and you slobbered all over him like a bunch of idiots. Now we’re going to laugh at you while you get all indignant at him. While you pretend that only now has he gone too far.

You ruined your entire industry for this guy, MSM. Serves you right.

The Scientific Hypocrites of the Left

Lefties like to think of themselves as the so-called reality-based community, but only so long as reality comports with their beliefs:

The core trait of a scientific mind is that when its commitments clash with evidence, evidence rules. On that count, what grade do liberals deserve? Fail, given their reaction to the latest evidence on universal health care, global warming, and universal preschool.

The policy world was rocked recently by a New England Journal of Medicine study showing that Medicaid doesn't improve the health care outcomes of uninsured individuals...

For two decades, progressives have castigated those questioning global warming as "deniers."

But the Economist, once firmly in the alarmist camp, recently acknowledged that global temperatures have remained stagnant for 15 years even as greenhouse-gas emissions have soared.

This may be because existing models have overestimated the planet's sensitivity. Or because the heat generated is sinking to the ocean bottom. Or because of something else completely...

Numerous studies on Head Start, the federal pre-K program for poor kids, show that its reading and math gains virtually evaporate by fourth grade. And the latest evidence from Oklahoma and Georgia, two states that implemented universal pre-K in the 1990s, only confirms this.

When the facts contradict your expectations, believe the facts.

Update, 5/17/13:  Here's another one:

What’s the Matter With Portland?
The city has been fighting fluoridation for 50 years. Will facts trump fear this month?

Update #2, 5/18/13:  If the thesis is correct, what does that say about these Harvard students?

Harvard students, outraged over a doctoral dissertation arguing that Hispanic immigrants lack “raw cognitive ability or intelligence,” this week urged the university to investigate how the thesis came to be approved and to ban future research on racial superiority...

The thesis was accepted by Harvard in 2009....

The proof is mathematics, and science. To their credit, the school stands by the work:

Ellwood, the Kennedy School dean, said in a statement that any views and conclusions by its graduates do not reflect the views of Harvard. He urged scholars and critics to engage in reasoned discussion and criticism after fully reviewing the work.

“All PhD dissertations are reviewed by a committee of scholars,’’ Ellwood said in the statement. “In this case, the committee consisted of three highly respected and discerning faculty members who come from diverse intellectual traditions.”

George Borjas, chairman of the Kennedy School’s Standing Committee on Public Policy, which accepted Richwine’s work, also defended the paper.

“Jason’s research was sound,’’ wrote Borjas, in an e-mail to the Kennedy School student newspaper, The Citizen. “None of the members of the committee would have signed off on it if they thought that it was shoddy empirical work.”

Your Graduation Isn't About You. It's About...

...compelling you to do what the government thinks is good for you!

As worries continue to grow that “Obamacare” will permanently stain President Obama’s legacy, White House officials have been instructed to use college commencement ceremonies as an opportunity to praise the health care law.

“To counter the criticism, the White House has told all Cabinet members and senior officials to use commencement speeches to drive home for graduating college students and their parents the benefits they gain from a provision of the law that allows young adults to stay on their family’s insurance plans until they turn 26,” Bloomberg reports.

Tacky. Just tacky.

Not Letting A Tragedy Go To Waste?

Gotta love this op-ed in the NYT:

EARLY last month, a triple suicide was reported in the seaside town of Civitanova Marche, Italy. A married couple, Anna Maria Sopranzi, 68, and Romeo Dionisi, 62, had been struggling to live on her monthly pension of around 500 euros (about $650), and had fallen behind on rent.

Because the Italian government’s austerity budget had raised the retirement age, Mr. Dionisi, a former construction worker, became one of Italy’s esodati (exiled ones) — older workers plunged into poverty without a safety net. On April 5, he and his wife left a note on a

The correlation between unemployment and suicide has been observed since the 19th century. People looking for work are about twice as likely to end their lives as those who have jobs.

The title of the piece is How Austerity Kills.  Interesting.  You know what kills more?  Socialism, which eventually runs out of other people’s money while preventing job growth in the first place.  Even the author implies that they killed themselves because they didn't have jobs--and it wasn't government cuts that kept them from working.

Governments trying to get solvent don't kill.  Socialism kills.

Dumb College Student

This guy is a real ba-doomp-a-doomp:

A student at Tulsa Community College brought a live, 4.5-foot alligator to campus as a visual aid for his class presentation about alligators. However, the student never made it to class; instead, campus security found him passed out in his car in the parking lot, in possession of marijuana and prescription pills, with the alligator in the backseat.