Why the Left is loony… and the BBC is worse.

Connecticut’s corrupt lying son-of-a-bitch governor (family-website rules temporarily suspended to accurately describe John Rowland’s character) is rapidly losing all his support. Two of the state’s three Republicans in Congress, and 11 of the 15 GOP state senators, have called for him to resign. Meanwhile the Republicans in the state General Assembly unanimously support taking the initial steps toward impeachment.

It’s over, Mr. Governor.

Of course, it would be totally in keeping with Rowland’s petty, arrogant, imperious nature if he were to steadfastly refuse to resign, and force the state to suffer the turmoil of impeachment, even as it becomes completely obvious that no one supports him. Indeed, so far it would seem that’s exactly what he’s doing.

This does not surprise me at all, and I will not be remotely surprised if Rowland sticks it out to the bitter end. John Rowland has never particularly cared about, nor even respected, the wishes of anyone other than himself. We’re talking about the man who laid off 3,000 state employees apparently in large part because the union negotiator at one point addressed him as “John.”

Then again, Richard Nixon was a petty, arrogant, imperious son-of-a-bitch too, and even he eventually saw the handwriting on the wall and resigned. So maybe Rowland will, too. But in that case, the question (which my dad will no doubt speculate upon soon) is, who will be his Barry Goldwater?

Check the Mom & Dad blog, the Hartford Courant website, and the excellent Connecticut Political Watch blog for the latest developments.

Or, “A Computer Geek In Paradise.” :) Check this out: I set up Gallery on my website to manage my photos, then downloaded an ingenious plugin called iPhotoToGallery, and now all I have to do is drag a group of photos into an iPhoto album, crop and rotate them as desired, then do a simple Export, and — voila! — they’re on my website! Awesome!!!

I also discovered an equally cool plugin called iPhoto2Weblog which will, in theory, allow me to post picture(s) directly from iPhoto to this blog with just a few clicks of the mouse! Unfortunately, there is a bug in the software that is preventing it from working for me at the moment (it is beta, after all). But supposedly a new version will be coming out soon, so I have much hope for this.

Anyway, iPhotoToGallery is working perfectly, and here, courtesy of that wonderful program, is the promised gallery of photos of Becky’s and my hike earlier today.

Woohoo!!!

The Hobbit on the big screen? Yes, my precious, yes!

Chris has complimented and linked to my “Irish Trojan” song, over on his blog. Thanks, Chris!

My blog-children have been blogging, too. My dad has various comments on Rowland (and the cold weather) over on the parental blog; Jen tells us she has given up on Michael Jackson (but not on The Simpsons); Tim laments the stigmatization of competitive sports; and Becky discusses WMD and burning down the house. :)

This is a sad but unsurprising testament to the state of affairs in academia:

This past week, about 8,000 professors and graduate students gathered here for the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association. … Among the panels…were a surprising number of sessions dealing with the war in Iraq, terrorism, patriotism, and American foreign policy.

Not that there was much actual debate. In more than a dozen sessions on war-related topics, not a single speaker or audience member expressed support for the war in Iraq or in Afghanistan. The sneering air quotes were flying as speaker after speaker talked of “so-called terrorism,” “the so-called homeland,” “the so-called election of George Bush,” and so forth.

Yup, that’s about how it was at USC, and Becky has experienced an awful lot of this at ASU, too. So-called “liberal” academics, supposed champions of free speech and dissent, will suffer no dissent from their own views. Disagree and you are scorned, shunned. There is no respect for the opposition, no willingness to acknowledge that there might be two plausibly arguable sides to an issue. So no one publicly disagrees. There is no dialogue. [These are generalizations, of course; there are exceptions. But alas, precious few.]

I already knew all of that, of course, and so did you, probably. It just pisses me off every time I read about it. This is why I was positively thrilled when I asked a student at Notre Dame about the ideological breakdown of the law faculty, and he replied that it’s “probably about 50-50″ between liberals and conservatives. 50-50? Sounds like paradise!! At USC, it’s more like 95-5.

It’s sad, because really, many professors are making themselves far less relevant than they could be. Instead of teaching their students lessons that could last a lifetime, they are letting their ideological blinders get in the way of common sense, which leads to one-sided lessons that temporarily create of an army of naive leftists — the vast majority of whom, of course, drop the nonsense within a few years of entering the “real world.” Only the rare die-hards, and those who become academics themselves and stay in the Ivory Tower forever, hold onto the lessons they learned in those ideologically driven college classes. The rest end up dismissing those lessons, to varying degress, as totally unrealistic and utterly misguided youthful idealism.

College should be more than that.

UPDATE/CLARIFICATION: I’m not suggesting that liberalism is inherently unrealistic and that everyone becomes a conservative when they enter the “real world.” I would never argue that; I’ve always found that idea to be an extremely insulting oversimplification. What I am trying to say is that unchallenged, unchecked liberalism, which is so common in the university environment, tends to lead to a preaching-to-the-choir echo chamber of views that become utterly divorced from reality. (One might say the same about any unchallenged, unchecked ideology — one might even apply this lesson to the Bush Administration, if one wanted to.)

If only the Angry Left was more willing to engage those with differing views in a reasoned discussion, we might find they have some good ideas to offer (and they might find, to their astonishment, that the rest of us do, too).

The terror alert was lowered from Ernie to Bert today… or to “Exercise Vague Caution”… it all depends on whose satire you believe. :)

I am working on a possible, eventual site redesign (or maybe not so eventual — I tend to go nuts once I get going on these things) that would be ripped off from inspired by The Command Post, with its CSS-based design and its meshing of multiple blogs on one homepage.

That “meshing” is the central idea underlying the change I am trying to implement: giving greater visibility to the blog-children, while still maintaining the independence of each blog and especially of this flagship blog. As a part of this, I’m drifting toward the idea of having only headlines on the site’s overall homepage (again, like the Command Post).

I’m still working on this, and probably will be for a while, but in the mean time, here is a page I made just to test the multi-blog functionality. It’s ugly but potentially useful: links to all blog-child posts in the last 14 days.

Thanks to my dad for sending along this excellent New Republic article explaining convincingly why Joe Lieberman is the best Democratic candidate for president. I would excerpt it, but I’d end up quoting the entire article. Just read the whole thing, okay? :)

I like Lieberman; I have all along. Yes, I’m slightly uncomfortable with his censor-ish tendencies, but honestly, what’s he going to do if elected that’s so worrisome? Personally rip up the First Amendment and order all the studios to clean up their act or else? Joe and Hollywood don’t get along, that’s for sure, but really, I just don’t see him as some great threat to freedom. (Howard Dean is a much greater threat to freedom, in the sense that his nomination would virtually ensure four more years of Bush and Ashcroft.)

Anyway, Lieberman’s positive qualities are overwhelming, especially as compared to his competitors. TNR elucidates wonderfully. For me, the central question is simply whether Joe will survive as a credible candidate long enough to get my vote. If he’s still alive and kicking when Connecticut and 12 other states vote on March 2 (yes, I’m voting absentee in CT — I missed the deadline to register in AZ), then I will very likely vote for him. If not, I will probably vote for whatever “anti-Dean” has emerged by then (Wesley Clark is my tentative favorite after Lieberman).

[UPDATE, 7/31/06: Welcome, ND Nation readers! As you can see, this post is more than 2 1/2 years old. It is the origin of the phrase “Irish Trojan,” which is now the name of this blog. Anyway, for more recent posts, visit my homepage.

Incidentally… I’m looking for extra tickets to several Irish home games. I have various tickets that I’m willing to trade. Click here for details! If you’re looking for tickets to Georgia Tech, Purdue, Stanford, North Carolina or Army, you may be interested. Please e-mail me at bloy [at] nd.edu if so!

Oh, and as for the “wussiest songs of all time” contest, it’s an honor just to be nominated!]
 
 
* * * * ORIGINAL POST BELOW, FROM JAN. 9, 2004 * * * *
 
 
Having received an e-mail yesterday officially welcoming me to Notre Dame Law School (they received my deposit check and enrollment form on Wednesday), the self-descriptive phrase “Irish Trojan” occurred to me at some point this afternoon. Catchy, eh?

Naturally, since everything always goes back to Ireland — and more specifically, to the Clancy Brothers — this passing thought inspired me to write an entire song: a knock-off of The Irish Rover. It is entitled, of course, The Irish Trojan.

I present it here, in its entirety, knowing full well that my dad is probably the only reader who will fully appreciate it (though Sean may remember some of the tune from when I used to sing The Irish Rover on the playground in third grade). Now then, I don’t want no grief about how the rhymes with “Trojan” are imperfect. Nothing rhymes with Trojan. :) I did my best. The scansion is also suspect in spots, and there is one place where “Dame” is rhymed with “dame,” always a no-no. But what can I say? I rather like it anyway.

The Irish Trojan
by Brendan Loy

In the year of our lord
Twenty hundred and two
Brendan’s life’s road arrived at a fork
Which career path to take?
Which profession to choose?
For the erstwhile journalism dork
Going to grad school seemed daft
But he tired of his craft
His inspiration frozen
So to much shock and awe
He decided on law
Now they call him the Irish Trojan

Seven big-city law schools
Back east, close to home,
Were the ones whose admissions he sought
But he also applied
To a Midwestern school
‘Twas a virtual afterthought
For Rebecca, his dame
Sought out Notre Dame
To join their history program
Brendan thus followed suit
Though he planned no such route
Nor to be called the Irish Trojan

When the offers came in
And the rejections, too
Brendan’s options were narrowed to four
UConn, BU, Cardozo and old Notre Dame
Were the choices he had to explore
Cardozo was free
No tuition or fees
Their offer made them golden
Few indeed could foresee
That a day there would be
When they’d call him the Irish Trojan

The scales started to tip
On a fateful road trip
With fair Becky in May of ‘03
They decided to spend
A few hours in South Bend
Took the tour — after all, it was free
Around campus they walked
And oh! What a shock!
It seemed the fates had chosen
For he loved every inch
Now the choice seemed a cinch
Soon they’d call him the Irish Trojan

Brendan’s not in the habit
Of closing the book
On his options when they’re still alive
So he dragged out his choice
And considered it well
Though his friends for finality strived
But a trip to the sticks
And two football tix
Convinced him to quit rovin’
Now he’s finally enrolled–
Hail green, cardinal and gold–
And they call him the Irish Trojan!

Hehehe.

Hmm. That second-to-last line makes me think of a possible follow-up song… “It is the biggest mix-up that you have ever seen! His undergrad was cardinal, but his law school, it was green…” :)

On a more serious note, the first day of school at ND is Aug. 23. Expect a countdown to appear on this site fairly shortly — and also expect that word “probably” to be removed from my self-description at left.

President Bush is set to announce an initiative to go back to the Moon, and go to Mars. (I wonder if he will also demand that we “do the other things.”) His target dates are rather far off into the future, but hey, this is better than nothing.

More bad news for Governor Rowland:

A new University of Connecticut poll, conducted after Gov. John G. Rowland’s speech Wednesday night, suggests the governor’s plea for forgiveness did him no good and may even have worsened his standing with the public.

Only 11 percent of those polled said that Rowland’s solemn speech made them more supportive of the governor, while 24 percent said the televised address made them less supportive.

The first Hartford Courant girls basketball ratings in two weeks came out today, and undefeated Newington, 8-0 for the first time since my freshman year in high school, is… unranked.

The Indians didn’t even make the Top 20.

(more…)

Andrew wanted a post on Bush’s new proposed immigration policy. Here it is. I haven’t read enough about it yet to have an informed opinion, though I agree it is very important. But nevermind me — comment away! :)

I just got through watching Governor Rowland’s address to the state earlier this evening. It’s a good speech, and he seems sincere in apologizing for being a lying bastard.

Of course, the fact that he apologized for being a lying bastard doesn’t change the fact that he should also resign for being a lying bastard.