How to cope with rising college costs: send your kid somewhere else.

For sixty years, blue-collar Americans have beavered away with the assumption that “my kid’s gonna go to college.”

And for all too many, the punishment has been a dream achieved.

As a result, we have more home-equity loans and college-educated waiters than any other country on the planet.

This is not like the WW2 vets who flooded the universities under the GI bill, a social revolution that ensured that college would no longer be the refuge of rudderless twits with wealthy parents. (Luckily, many of those vets would become teachers to accommodate the flooding of baby boomers into the elementary schools.)

Today’s notion of college as a passageway to a higher class is as much a chimera as an exclusive club that anyone can join.

Pundits endlessly debate whether colleges should be glorified trade schools or monasterial institutes where pure knowledge can be pursued for its own sake.

Too often they are neither, serving as remedial camps for high school graduates who are largely illiterate, innumerate, and crashingly ignorant of elementary geography, let alone skills in reasoning and rhetoric that were once learned from McGuffey’s Readers by eighth-grade students.

When I was in business, I had a procession of highly-educated secretaries, from Yale English majors to holders of master’s degrees. But what I really needed was a Katherine Gibbs graduate.

Of course, nobody aspires to be “just a secretary” anymore. But even as the position has been gussied up to administrative assistant, it has been dumbed down. Try finding someone who can properly format a letter to a senator, or consult a secretary’s book of letters so a boss doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel in writing a condolence letter.

It may offend our democratic yearnings to emulate Japan or Germany, separating secondary students onto different tracks to produce better trade-school graduates and fewer mal-educated college grads.

But do we want a better, more adaptable workforce? Or more purchased vanity?

As to those non-college graduates who fret about their lack of academic knowledge, my advice is simple: sell your television and buy an old set of Britannica, which can be had for a peppercorn.

You’ll be more educated than the average college graduate before you get out of the B’s.

Bob Hope and Jimmy Cagney

From one of my Far Flung Correspondents:

We tend to forget how talented these guys were.

—Gibson

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOoNOs8Ql28

You must watch this to see what performers could do in bygone Hollywood, before one-shot wonders complained that "my trailer [Winnebago] isn't bigger than X's."

I read that Cagney endured a lot of physical pain in doing this scene. This film ("Seven Little Foys") was done 13 years after his rousing "Yankee Doodle Dandy," which showed him at his best stiff-legged dance style.

Although only four years older than Hope, who here is at his absolute best in dancing, the years had taken more of a toll on Cagney. Probably because he worked at this so long in vaudeville, whereas Hope went into comedy much sooner.

A tragedy is that Hope stayed in the limelight* too long. He outlived Jimmy (100 vs.. 87), but he should have retired more gracefully.

An even less flattering depiction of Hope is in the biography by Arthur Marx (yes, Groucho's son) of Hope and Crosby.

Mister K

* and BTW, if you ask me , as a former cinematographer I can tell you the derivation of "Limelight."

I wish my memory was filled with more important things.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWpU8sX10_4&NR=1

The real hard times

"Bound for Glory" ran last night. I hadn't seen it for years.

A film buff can't help but admire Hal Ashby's direction, Haskell Wexler's cinematography, and David Carradine as star — the latter having beat out many high-profile actors for the role, including Dustin Hoffman, Robert DeNiro, and even Robert Dylan.

It's a work that shows what Depression times really were like —at least for Okies— as opposed to today's proclaimed woes, where not getting enough cheese on your pizza is viewed as penury.

But as is often the case, it's a Hollywood Version of actuality, making Guthrie seem irritatingly noble, albeit self-destructive in his behavior.

In actuality, Guthrie was a pedictable liberal/radical/collectivist and naif who followed the Party Line and wrote weekly columns for The Daily Worker.

Initially Guthrie helped write and sing what the Almanacs Singers termed "peace" songs; while the Nazi-Soviet Pact was in effect, until Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Communist line was that WWII was a capitalist fraud. After Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union the topics of their songs became anti-fascist.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woody_Guthrie

Anyhow, it's a fine film, so long as you don't confuse it with reality.

Bombshells sometimes have long fuses

A correspondent wonders why I didn't spark to an email and link about a 2001 radio-interview potential bombshell of Obama talking unabashedly —and even admiringly— about "redistributive change."

I responded:

I didn’t read it because it was three screens deep of unformatted tiny type on my large-acreage 30” Apple LCD screen. (And just as tedious to read on Glenn Beck’s website.)

This is why God invented art directors. And editors.

If the content is a bombshell, I don’t need it obscured by Beck hogging the stage.


Drudge links sent me to vastly more accessible versions of the same content via Breitbart.com and YouTube.

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=081027191640.ak3b09o7&show_article=1

Is it powerful? Yeah, sort of. If you have enough time and GRPs to really seat the charge in the public's mind.

With respect to "October surprises," the revelation of Bush's DWI was a simple, undeniable fact, impervious to spin by W’s handlers.

Obama's comments on “redistributive change” are more amorphous and need to be inextricably linked through repetition and elaboration to the precepts of welfare and socialism.

At this late date, they've already been spun by Obama apologists into yet another Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.

Accuracy doesn't even come into play when the other side has at its disposal millions of dollars and a pliant media.

Last chance at McCain gulch

In an email today, I forwarded Dick Morris's column for the day:

http://www.dickmorris.com/blog/2008/10/26/the-truman-show/

And in which forward I noted that

Dick Morris is the smartest strategist out there, but (a) McCain’s people would have to turn on a dime, and (b) the media swoon may be unassailable.

Note the red-highlighted section. This moronic act of omission by Bush led directly to the Florida recount debacle, which in turn led to the left’s “he’s not really President” paranoia that poisoned the following eight years, even after a thumping 2004 reelection.

The "red-highlighted" section I referenced was this:

In 2000, Bush's three-to-four point lead in the polls was erased over the final weekend when reports surfaced that he had been cited for DWI 20 years before and had not revealed the fact to the public. Bush still won the election, of course, but Gore won the popular vote by half a point.

This was a colossal, imbecilic move on W's part. Or non-move, since it was incumbent on the candidate to totally inoculate himself to the issue early on in the campaign.

At this point, I’m not sure what equivalently-imbecilic stunt Obama could do to squander his lead. Perhaps prancing around in a dress?

Oh, wait, that would probably solidify it, since there’s a part of the population who would say, “Yes! It’s time we had not just a minority but a transvestite Negro as President!”

Acorn: Not just corrupt, but incompetent

A Western correspondent chides this blog's author's limpid response to a NYT article on Acorn fraud:

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/23/donor-patrol-obamas-online-site-accepts-more-fakes/?pagemode=print

"You sound so blase. This is illegal .... It is a violation of campaign finance laws. Why isn't this being investigated?"

I reply thus:

Acorn is being investigated in many states, but it’ll simply come down to “justice delayed is justice denied.” And any successful prosecutions will raise cries of "racism" and “voter suppression.”

Perversely, it turns out that Acorn’s claims of the number of new voters it’s registered are wildly inflated.

As noted last evening,
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,443990,00.html

Get Out the Vote?

Despite claims by various media outlets that new voter registration is up from previous years, a new Gallup survey says that is not the case.

The poll indicates just 13 percent of registered voters will cast ballots for the first time. That is the same number found in Gallup's 2004 pre-election poll. And the number of registered voters who say they do not plan to vote has actually risen two percentage points.

These findings come as The New York Times reports a claim by the voter registration group ACORN that it had signed up 1.3 million new voters is vastly exaggerated. The executive director of ACORN affiliate Project Vote says the actual figure is closer to 450,000. He says about 400,000 registrations were rejected because they were duplicates, incomplete or fraudulent.

So Obama has been taken for a ride by the organization he’s pumped zillions into.

Meaning a better questions for the electorate would be:

"Would you trust this man to negotiate foreign treaties when he dosn't even have the skills of a Chicago politician to get delivery of the votes he's paid for?"

ObamaGötterdämmerung

Well, the final Obama/McCain debate is over. And I'm afraid it's over.

All Barry had to do was stick to his talking points and not yawn. He's succeeding in running out the clock.

McCain had already blown the second debate by not confronting Obama on his well-worn canards, like "95% of people making less than $200,000 a year* will get a tax rebate."

Well, no. As any bright 16-year-old could have riposted,

40% of Americans don't pay any income tax. If Mr. Obama sends them a check, it's not a rebate. It's opening the vault door of the Treasury and shoveling money out with a grain scoop. If you work hard and pay taxes, do you want those dollars (and those of your children and grandchildren) spent to mail checks to people who never pay taxes?

This time around, to capture the mood of the American people, McCain should have recalled the movie Network, in which Peter Finch as Howard Beale famously shouted, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!"

Not that this is a unique idea. O'Reilly and Dick Morris have preached this for several weeks. Surely someone among McCain's advisors must have a television set.

But too many of his handlers want to keep John tamped down and docile, so as to pander to independents, who are perceived as people having been born without a spine.

I submit McCain could reverse the poll numbers overnight if he'd have said

If I'm elected, the first thing I'm going to do is appoint a Special Prosecutor to bring to justice the people who made this financial mess. This was partly through government interference that forced lenders to give mortgages to people who couldn't afford them.

That includes Democrats and Republicans, but especially Barney Frank and Christopher Dodd. And there'll be special attention for those who got huge political contributions from corrupted lending organizations.

Actually, that would include you, Senator Obama, since you got the second-highest Freddie Mac wad of hush money. You didn't quite catch up to Chris Dodd this time, and I'm promising there won't be a next time.

And as for those snot-nosed Wall Street shysters who packaged and peddled these sub-prime instruments that stank like Gorgonzola cheese, you can expect some perp-walks. That's where miscreants are led into courtrooms wearing manacles and leg irons, which is my idea of humane treatment.

Afterwards, I want them wearing orange jumpsuits, being led off to prison. And none of those white-collar prisons with maid service. I want them to serve hard time, where they get a 250-pound weightlifter for a cellmate who takes one look and says, "You got a purty mouth."

Thank you and good night.

*Sometimes expressed by Obama as "$250,000 a year," sometimes as "middle class." The specifics change with the barometric pressure, as near as I can tell.

Götterdämmerung being a translation into German of the Old Norse phrase Ragnarök, which in Norse mythology refers to a prophesied war of the gods which brings about the end of the world.