David Indiviglio pens an interesting piece in The Atlantic this week questioning the college bubble from the employer side.  He wonders if college degrees are necessary for jobs where they clearly are not. Indiviglio argues that ubiquitous college degrees degrade the value of degrees themselves and artificially fuel the higher education industry. (I wrote a piece on that a few months back.)

He writes: “a college degree has become a proxy for determining whether a job applicant has a minimum level of intelligence necessary to perform a job. But with many private college educations exceeding $120,000 these days, that’s a pretty expensive means for identifying adequate intelligence.”

In other words, employers only care to know where a job applicant could get in. For my youngest child, that will come at an estimated price tag of a half million dollars.

Virtually everything I do professionally I learned from on-the-job training.  That math I didn’t think I’d use?  I don’t. Ever. And sure, Plato’s Cave and Montesquieu’s reflections inform me, but they are available at Amazon for $3.99.

I’m not going to stop saving for my daughter’s education — I want her to have her four years at Yale — but I can’t help questioning, like Indiviglio, where the college cost madness will stop. We are all getting taken for a ride.

http://youtu.be/EC9j6Wfdq3o

In case you have forgotten it, here is the historic and controversial “Willie Horton Ad” that obliterated Michael Dukakis’s chances for the presidency in 1988. The ad was called racist by the Dukakis campaign, but it was hugely effective.  When tested in focus groups in July of that year, audiences turned instantly against Dukakis after seeing the spot.  I hadn’t watched it in 23 years, and my reaction to viewing it today was as visceral as the first time I saw it: Weekend furloughs for first-degree murderers? Are you kidding me? This guy cannot be President.

Call it what you want.  But it was a powerful political ad. Simple, straightforward, inexpensive — and devastating.

photo via asiaportal.info

The United Nations is finally getting around to trying senior leaders of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime for genocide, The New York Times reports today.  The trial, which is targeting just four defendants, comes 32 years after the Vietnamese military ousted the fanatical agrarian socialist government from power.  The cost of the trial – to date – is $100 million. One hundred million dollars to try two septuagenarians and two octogenarians.

It is estimated that between 1.5 million and 2 million Cambodians were executed during the Khmer Rouge’s four year reign (1975-’79) —  approximately 25% of the country’s population – and four people are on trial. Four.

The U.N. has outdone itself.

A Satellite Image of Marxist North Korea (top) and Capitalist South Korea (bottom)

The ABC news (Australian public television) is reporting that food shortages in North Korea are becoming so bad that soldiers are going unfed.   This is a stark departure from the famine in the early 1990’s when North Korea’s military was insulated from food shortages, while well more than a million citizens died of starvation.

The army is what keeps the Kim Dynasty in business.  If it becomes disgruntled, anything can happen on the Korean Peninsula.  The issue of instability in nuclear North Korea, or an outright regime collapse, could –and should — creep its way into the presidential race. It is the most dangerous situation in the world today.

There is a fine line between driving media and chasing headlines.  Sarah Palin, in scheduling her film premier in Iowa tomorrow, has slipped into the latter category.  Her five minutes of fame are about up.  Irrelevancy is looming; you can feel it in her actions.

I am not a Palin basher.  Never have been.  I’m neither that trendy nor that hypocritical.  I voted for McCain-Palin in ‘08, so who I am to pile on?

But Palin’s recent bus tour and now film premier is smacking of desperation – of trying just a little too hard to retain the spotlight.

It wasn’t long ago that Palin’s hiccups and hairstyles were covered in the greatest detail in the news media.  Everything she did was indicative of some future move. Gamely wearing a “McCain-Palin” hat with “McCain” blacked out or tweeting a provocative remark or wearing leopard-pattern heels on a trip to New York all meant something. She played the speculation game to the hilt.  She teased the press mercilessly and created headlines effortlessly.  And she did it as recently as a month ago (think biker rally).

But now, suddenly, Palin is confronted with relative obscurity.  And it is all because of one person: Michele Bachmann. It may sound patronizing to lump the two would-be female presidential candidates into a single category, but it is impossible not to.  Bachmann and Palin are the first high-profile Republican women talked about as presidential contenders, and both are darlings of the Tea Party movement.  There is only room for one, and Bachmann’s recent debate and media appearances are making it pretty clear which one is going to win this round of Survivor.   (Ed Rollins, as usual, was spot on.)

So with Bachmann formally announcing her candidacy in Waterloo, Iowa tomorrow, Sarah Palin and her advisors panicked and scheduled a Iowa media appearance of their own.  It was the worst thing they could do.  It will provide the pallet for someone in the news media to paint Bachmann’s political ascent beside Palin’s descent into eventual sideshow status.  That is a storyline from which Palin will not recover.

Palin’s moment may not be gone today, or even tomorrow.  But it almost will certainly be gone the day after that. Her actions – and no one else’s – are telegraphing it.

I’ve been reading horrific stories of late about gender selection abortions across the globe.  So many pregnancies where the unborn child is female are being terminated that it is significantly altering the natural ratio of girls to boys worldwide. The practice is particularly prevalent in Asia, where the norm of 105 boys to every 100 girls is becoming skewed in some regions to as high as 120 males to every 100 females.

Ph.D.-bearing population control types might cheer this as progressive, but it leaves me feeling angry and sickened. Not just as the lucky father of three girls, but as a member of the human race. The practice seems Mengele-like to me.  If there is any wrathfullness in God, this would demand its demonstration.

Pro-choice and pro-life Americans mostly agree, according to polling, that gender-selection abortions are creepy — and not the purpose of the country’s reproduction laws. Which leaves me wondering, especially in the wake of Friday’s new gay marriage law in New York, how abortion would be perceived today had it always been legal.

If abortion, since the days of
Ancient Greece, had been commonplace — routine — would the civil rights issue of the day be protecting the unborn? Would that be considered progressive, a call to our better angels?  I think it might be. And I think the cry for protections would come from the American Left.

As it is, though, allowing abortion is considered the civil right, a woman’s right. But is that because of the way history played out?

Gender selection abortions are not going away. If the current trend holds, they will only increase in number, just as the number of abortions in the African-American community is steadily increasing (60% of all black pregnancies in New York City are terminated). But I feel certain they will reframe over time how the average person perceives the practice of abortion.

Pro-choice activists might want to get ahead of this curve and speak out on unconscionable practices rather than be stuck defending the indefensible.

Many years ago, on the eve of a highly contested congressional election in New York, a guerrilla telephone campaign was waged within the New York City gay community against the Republican candidate for whom I was working.  There was a sizable gay community in the district, and the whisper calls were suggesting that my candidate was a virulent homophobic, which could not have been farther from the truth.

The person we called that night for help — we woke him up — was City Councilman Tom Duane (D).  I didn’t expect much from the call, but Duane listened to what we had to say and publicly came to our campaign’s defense.  The calls stopped. I have almost always been on the opposite side of fights with now Senator Duane, but I always remember that call in thinking of him.

But that memory will be bumped aside by the graciousness Duane showed tonight in the New York State Senate chamber when addressing the gay marriage legislation, which just passed.

“There are no villains here tonight,” he said. “Only heroes.”

It is as classy a thing as I can remember said on the Senate floor. And it is how I will think of Tom Duane from here on out.

http://youtu.be/q-0ecuS8tWs

Talk reportedly is rampant in the Venezuelan capital about the possibility that Hugo Chavez may be physically incapable of retaking the reins of government after he returns from a Cuban hospital stay.  But who could replace the animated and ubiquitous Chavez?  Who could capture the essence of his rule?  Is there anyone out there who could replace such a persona on the world stage? Anyone?

President Obama is getting tagged today for his continued tap-dance around the issue of gay marriage.  His ever-“evolving” position seems always to fall short of the “M” word – just like it does for so many Republicans in New York State.

The President soft-shoed before an audience of 600 gay and lesbian dinner goers last night, who paid $1,250 per head for the honor of watching their President be evasive.  He said gay couples “deserve the same rights as every other couple in our country,” but then implicitly contradicted himself in not coming out of the closet for marriage.

I sympathize with the President.  This is a big country, and, politically, he cannot support same-sex marriage.  It would kill him in conservative states like Virginia and North Carolina, which he needs for re-election. Core constituents of the President – African-Americans and Latinos – are among the fiercest opponents of gay marriage, too. The issue is politically untenable for him.

Most of last night’s dinner guests, according to news reports, seemed to understand the President’s conundrum.  They gave him a break.  There were a few vocal  protests from the audience, but there was a greater amount of applause.

I wonder how many of last night’s dinner attendees would be willing give a Republican representative the same break.  Very few I would venture.  Republicans are the party of Neanderthals because most of them – not all – share the President’s position.