GONE GALT: from full-time to part-time to on-call (read as effectively retired) in just over a year. The moves were voluntary, but inevitable, driven by a poor economy and lack of corporate interest in keeping a senior staff member fully employed.

CAN BLACK AMERICANS AFFORD OBAMA? Walter Williams asks an unsettling question.

Early indications suggest that the Barack Obama presidency might turn out to be similar to the failed presidency of Jimmy Carter. That's bad news for the nation but especially bad news for black Americans. No white presidential candidate had to live down the disgraced presidency of Carter but I'm all too fearful that a future black presidential candidate will find himself carrying the heavy baggage of a failed black president.

I’m afraid he’s right.

WHEN YOUR ONLY TOOL IS A HAMMER, all your problems start looking like nails. Richard Fernandez writes on the Obama administration. While the article is much broader, citing several points of insanity within the administration, the key graf is this:

They are the Peter Principle writ large: they have been promoted past their level of competency.

What really frightens about this administration is that its only guiding principle is expediency in an unrelenting pursuit for unlimited power. All else is window dressing.

GIVE PEACE A CHANCE WITH GOVERNMENT-FREE SCHOOLS. “Separation of church and state has made America an exemplar of religious pluralism and tolerance. Imagine what separation of school and state could do for education.”

Imagine what separation of marketplace and state could do for the economy.

EDUCATION FOR PROFIT.

[I]n recent years, the University of Phoenix has become the poster child for everything the mainstream academic establishment thinks is wrong about for-profit higher education.... But much of what academic traditionalists see as problems, Phoenix advertises proudly as solutions. The university aims to meet underserved demand for post-secondary education, tailor-made to fit the individual circumstances of harried adults.

Give the Reason article a read. It’s a bit lengthy, but generally fair. My only quibble is in the first page where the for-profit schools are equated to subprime mortgages in the housing market. Given elite schools track record at producing political “leadership” I would be strongly inclined toward the opposite judgement.

The University of Phoenix and it’s competitors do what the mainstream academic establishment (particularly the elites) are increasingly disinclined to do: prepare students for the marketplace – and political correctness is neither measurable in any meaningful sense or marketable.

PRETTY STUPID.

WHITHER CAP-AND-TRADE? Referendum on California’s carbon-limit law qualifies for November ballot. If California is truly a bellwether state, this could be a defining moment in the return to environmental sanity.

AUSTERITY: Queen of England cuts back; Princess Nancy Pelosi doesn’t.

It’s bad enough that pork barrel spending and scores of useless, inefficient government programs have cost the public purse what they have, but for the Speaker of the House of Representatives to set the wasteful example that she has is positively disgraceful.

It would be nice if Princess Pelosi would practice some austerity with my money.

McDONALDS CEO TELLS FOOD POLICE ORGANIZATION to go pound non-fat, sodium-free sand.

About time someone did.

HEALTH CARE INNOVATION: Britain's doctors are being put in charge of patient care - after 60 years of socialized medicine.

Now if they’d take the next step and put patients in charge of their own care, they might have something worth keeping.

GLENN BECK VS. ACADEMIA: the joy of competition.

UNDER OBAMA, NASA HAS ENDED plans to go back to the moon, or go to Mars.... Budgets are tight, you know. Time to hunker down and lower our sights. But we can do Muslim outreach.

DIVERSITY ISN’T ABOUT IMPROVING SCIENCE. It’s all about providing jobs and authority for diversity specialists.

Political correctness run amok.

SHOULDN’T THE DOJ SUE RHODE ISLAND FIRST? Rhode Island already checks immigration status at traffic stops.

Link via Instapundit.

NEWSWEAK NEWSWEEK WANTS TO KNOW: Why doesn’t the Media interrogate Tea Partiers’ beliefs?

Umm, isn’t Newsweek the media?

The simple answer is that they don’t want to know; it would interfere with their carefully constructed politically correct beliefs.

SO WHAT DOES THIS SAY about higher education? I think it says more about political correctness and the economic value of a liberal education than anything else.

ON ELITISM: Of course, Michael Kinsley is a certified member of the nuanced intellectual elite who can read between the lines of what I say - and how I feel - to determine that deep down I’m really a racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, neanderthal bigot.

Obviously I disagree. And I’m not alone. Here’s what some others think of “intellectuals.”

Yuval Levin, in Commentary Magazine, on the liberal reaction to Sarah Palin.

David Thompson on the “academic” elite.

Jonah Goldberg at National Review Online on liberal condescension.

Gerard Alexander in the Washington Post on the liberal’s intellectual condescension and again in a Q&A transcript that followed.

I would suggest that "environmental smug" be within the regulatory purview of the EPA, but I fear that it already is ....