Libertyblog

Wheelhouse

George Will on “clean elections” vs. free speech.

How Do You Get More Money?

Threaten to kill a sacred cow. (Via InstaPundit.)

Let He Among You ...

Host of perv-nabbing To Catch a Predator show nailed as adulterer by National Enquirer photogs. See the photos at the link for confirmation he’s attracted to a particular type of woman. (Via InstaPundit.)

Crimson Faces

There are two theories about elite universities. One says they’re elite because they get to pick the best students and the education they receive doesn’t hurt or help them much. The other is that the pricey education actually does some good. You could test that theory by enlarging a school and letting it work its magic on more young minds, including the next increment of (slightly less) qualified candidates:

In 1990, Harvard had an endowment of about $4.7-billion. That was still a lot of money, about $7.7-billion in today’s dollars. Only five other universities have that much money now. Over the next two decades the pile grew to colossal heights, $36.9-billion by mid-2008.

Harvard spent the money on many things. But not a dollar went to increasing the number of undergraduates it chose to bless with a Harvard education. In 1990 the university welcomed slightly more than 1,600 students to its freshman class. In 2008, $32-billion later, it enrolled slightly more than 1,600 freshmen.

So much for experimentation; I guess we know which theory Harvard subscribes to.

Then the recession hit:

Of course, we now know that the gigantic pile of gold wasn’t as high as it seemed. In early September, endowment officials announced that they had lost $10-billon, a 27-percent drop. That has produced a predictable spate of blame-casting and general unhappiness. More professors and buildings and land increased annual operating costs substantially, requiring bigger payouts from the endowment. The university budgeted for those costs without allowing for the possibility of a collapse in the financial markets and exotic investments in which the endowment was entwined, proving once again that money is a great leveler: It makes even the smartest people in the world act stupidly.

Vanity Fair sent a reporter to Cambridge this year to assess the damage. She was told that the university had lowered thermostats by four degrees and would no longer be serving free coffee. Sources mentioned “overflowing trash cans” and larger class sizes. I assume this was some kind of elaborate prank cooked up by the university’s Future Saturday Night Live Writers Club. What’s the marginal cost of free coffee? Did the university reduce class sizes when all those newly hired professors came to town?

When the thermostat gambit failed to make up for the $10-billion hit, Harvard waited until the campus emptied out for the summer and then laid off almost 300 clerical and technical workers. The top administrators who lost the money and the full-time faculty members who received the money were unscathed.

That’s because the real priority of elite higher education, as the receding tide of money has exposed, is the greater glory of elite higher education and the administrators and faculty members who work there. That’s where all the money went, and that’s where, now that some of the money turns out to have never existed in the first place, it needs to come from.

(Via InstaPundit.)

America Catches On

For some time now, Libertyblog has told you things will be bad:

I’ve called our present economic circumstances the great intersection between a short term recovery from the especially stupid things we’ve done (e.g. mortgages for deadbeats) and the long term decline wrought by changes in our culture.

Now this:

In a sign of increasing pessimism about the direction of the U.S. economy, roughly four in ten Americans now believes it is in permanent decline, according to a new CBS News/New York Times poll.

As Hot Air points out, this means Obambi may not get blamed for throwing gasoline on a badly burning fire. Hey, he’s never been blamed for not cleaning up Illinois politics.

MSNBC Rumpswab Suspended

The guy who correctly called Obambi a dick. Ed Morrissey nails it:

Did MSNBC get mad because of the word, or because it was aimed at Obama?

Some Things Are Clearer Than Others

Your TSA strikes again:

A Nigerian national boarded a Virgin America flight from New York to Los Angeles last week without a passport and with an expired boarding pass that did not belong to him, Fox News confirms.

Authorities are looking into how Olajide Noibi boarded Virgin America Flight 415 at John F. Kennedy International Airport on June 24 without a valid passport or identification.

That part is pretty mysterious.

It wasn’t until the plane was airborne that flight crew realized an extra passenger was on the flight, according to an FBI affidavit obtained by Fox News. Noibi reportedly got off the plane in Los Angeles International Airport without incident and spent the next several days in the Los Angeles area.

It remains unclear how Noibi was able to deplane in Los Angeles without being taken into custody.

Well, this part is pretty easy. The captain and crew aren’t supposed to take off unless the head count and manifest match. They were not eager to highlight their screwup by keeping everyone on board until the cops showed up to sort things out, causing missed connections for dozens of people.

Noibi was arrested Wednesday morning after he tried to board a Delta Flight 46 from Los Angeles to Atlanta while again using an expired boarding pass. Authorities searched his bag at Los Angeles International Airport and found “10 boarding passes in various individual’s names,” according to the affidavit.

Noibi allegedly told investigators that the reason for his trip to Los Angeles was to recruit people for his software business -- though FBI Special Agent Kevin Hogg, who questioned Noibi, said in his affidavit that the man said he did “not know anybody in the Los Angeles area.”

Within Acceptable Limits?

The maximum number of dead bodies permitted in Massachusetts public pools is greater than one:

There’s another strange twist after a woman’s body was found floating in a public pool in Fall River, possibly going unnoticed for days.

The mayor of Fall River says “that health inspectors from the City visited the pool on Monday and on Tuesday and inspected the facilities,” which was during the time that body was believed to be in the water.

Marie Joseph was at the pool on Sunday and hadn’t been seen since. It wasn’t until Tuesday night, when some kids broke into the Veteran’s Memorial swimming pool and found Joseph’s body floating in the pool.

The mayor said in a statement on Thursday that those city inspectors have been placed on administrative leave.

Investigators have said that, on Sunday, 36-year-old Joseph went down a slide with a 9-year-old boy and vanished.

[...]

The pool was open to the public Monday and Tuesday with lifeguards, none of whom noticed the body under 12 feet of water.

Okay, no more complaints about peeing in pools. (Via Drudge.)

Going Green, Smelling Brown, Seeing Red

Public transportation in the nation’s capital:

A Metro rider found an unpleasant surprise on his daily commute at the Franconia-Springfield station on Monday: human feces smeared on the pedestrian bridge into the station.

And making matters worse, it was still there Tuesday and Wednesday. No one had cleaned it up.

Austin Lasseter said he spoke to the Metro station manager on Monday, then each day thereafter. But she told Lasseter it wasn’t Metro’s problem. The stairs belong to Virginia Railway Express even though it was on the Metro side of the bridge.

“Everyone walks past it on their way into the station, and it stinks,” Lasseter said. “The station manager’s attitude is a perfect example of what’s wrong with Metro. They just don’t care about anything, even crap in their stations.”

(Via Drudge.)

Calling a Spade a Spade

While dining out yesterday, I had the option of listening to Obambi’s press conference or not. I chose wisely to eat in peace, because even an MSNBC rumpswab branded him a “dick” for his performance.

He displayed a monomaniacal concern with a minor tax on corporate jets, mentioning it six times. I’m sorry, I should have said monomaniacal and schizophrenic, because the tax break was part of his own stimulus package in 2009.

How small is this tax issue? It’s worth about $300 million per year in tax revenues on a static basis. That analysis appears to ignore the dynamic effects of fewer corporate jets cutting income and payroll taxes for those employed, so the real number is even smaller. Charles Krauthammer made a hilarious comparison pointing out that one would have to have collected the tax all the way back to the time of the pharoahs to make even a small dent in our federal debt.

Oh, I also found out that this $300 million price tag is awfully close to the annual cost for the world’s most famous bizjet: Air Force One. (Via Drudge.)