Media, not economy, to blame for negative perceptions

By Laura Hamilton / May 19, 2006

Yesterday, Gallup released a poll analysis titled “Views on Economy Take Slight Downturn.” The article opened, ominously, “Americans’ views of the economy, already decidedly negative, slid back to levels observed last fall in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.” Indeed, the results indicate this. According to the poll (conducted May 8–11), when asked to “rate the...

CSPI knows what you really want

By Laura Hamilton / May 5, 2006

Wednesday, Michael Jacobson, director of the Center for Senseless Policy Ideas (CSPI), released a victory statement following the conclusion of contra-soda litigation. Apparently Jacobson, the CSPI, and their pack of plaintiff-lawyer friends succeeded in cowing soda manufacturers into removing caloric sodas from school vending machines. Worse, they did it in the name of the public....

Media, academic journals in cahoots on global warming

By Laura Hamilton / April 21, 2006

According to Brian Montopoli writing for the CBSNews.com blog, 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley said, “There is virtually no disagreement in the scientific community any longer about global warming. The science that has been done in the last three to five years has been conclusive…. What you do see in the data again and again...

AMA’s junk science gets debunked

By Laura Hamilton / April 6, 2006

The liberal intelligentsia decided years ago that it knew what was best for John Q. Public. On March 17, 2006, the Associated Press published an authoritative-sounding news article (“Girls warned not to ‘go wild’ on Spring Break”) about an American Medical Association (AMA) survey which “all but [confirmed] what goes on in those Girls Gone...

Florida, soon to be hacker-central

By Laura Hamilton / March 7, 2006

Florida has never made good decisions. It gained notoreity in 2000 with the butterfly ballots, pregnant chads, and general inability to reach conclusions during the presidential election. But that wasn’t an isolated episode of incompetence; the state has generally been fairly befuddled and bizarre, always doddering a few golf balls short of a pail. Apparently,...

What do the cartoons actually depict?

By Laura Hamilton / February 21, 2006

In “The Cartoons Of Muhammad Are Only Racist Islamophobia,” Rahaf Kalaaji wrote, “Like most Muslims, I wholeheartedly condemn the violence that has been part of the protests.” I applaud his explicit condemnation of the violence that has led, to name a few examples, to the deaths of at least 10 in Libya and at least...

Bush’s fiscal policy: Spend, spend, spend

By Laura Hamilton / February 14, 2006

The President has made it perfectly clear that although he is a Republican he is not a conservative, and nowhere was this more apparent than in the recent budget proposal. The first problem with Bush’s budget is that it is $2.77 trillion. The only thing more disturbing than the size of the figure is John...

The trouble with boys? I don’t think so.

By Laura Hamilton / January 23, 2006

It’s been a weird week for the gender war. First, we hadthe radical feminist left engaged in a bizarre assault against Kate O’Beirne’s Women Who Make the World Worse. The attack consisted, from what I can tell, of writing unfavorable reviews on Amazon, modifying the image of the book’s cover in Microsoft Paint and posting...

The Italian attack on Christ is offensive

By Laura Hamilton / January 9, 2006

The United States is waging a stealth war against religion—Christianity, to be specific—comprising a handful of court battles and the quiet replacement of “Merry Christmas” with “Happy Holidays.” Most people are mildly amused rather than worried or insulted. But Italy has taken the fight to a new level. According to a January 4 Reuters article...

Cheese eating and other unmentioned rights

By Laura Hamilton / November 28, 2005

In an earlier column, I wrote: “If tomorrow California passed a law forbidding people from eating cheese on Tuesdays, that law would be perfectly constitutional.” It was one of the mildest and most defensible sentences in my article. In his editorial “The Strict Constructionists Are Dead Wrong,” (11/18) Harry Schmidt argued that such a law...

Fears of a bird flu epidemic are overblown

By Laura Hamilton / November 17, 2005

I do not entirely understand the proliferation of ominous pandemic-bird-flu articles. They greatly exaggerate the magnitude of the danger as well as the imminence of catastrophe. Are there not more mischievous things a New York Times reporter can accomplish with his column-inches? The “flu-is-coming” story is quickly becoming a journalistic standby. If you recall, it...

The Left’s legal sleight of hand: Will it work?

By Laura Hamilton / November 7, 2005

Liberals have completed their politicization of the Supreme Court. A Supreme Court justice, once a relatively obscure legal scholar whose job it was to determine whether a law was forbidden by the Constitution, has been elevated to the status of Emperor King and granted the power to draft and veto legislation according to whim. It’s...

Father and son explore terrorism’s impact on schools

By Laura Hamilton / June 3, 2005

In Innocent Targets: When Terrorism Comes to School, terrorism and school-safety experts Michael Dorn and Chris Dorn catalogue past incidents of school terrorism and discuss cost-effective precautionary measures. Innocent Targets provides a matter-of-fact account of the natural and human threats facing schools today, and provides broadly applicable tools for crisis prevention and preparedness. Dorn and...

Debunking the myths about the filibuster

By Laura Hamilton / May 23, 2005

After two years of the Democrats’ zealous obstructionism, their flimsy justification has been thoroughly rhetorically dismantled. However, I am continually shocked by the campus’s utter ignorance on the history and nature of one of our Senate’s most integral traditions. I’ve encountered more overeducated students than I care to count who could name the capital of...

Art of Undressing author embarrasses herself with prose, not lack of clothes

By Laura Hamilton / April 29, 2005

How does a 25-year-old aspiring chef manage to deal with a sexually uninhibited ex-stripper mother, a callous quasi-estranged father, a moody 12-year-old half-sister, a hypercritical French cooking instructor, and utterly incomprehensible men? Stephanie Lehmann’s The Art of Undressing seeks to answer that age-old question as she follows protagonist Ginger Levine, a culinary student, through Manhattan....

Professor Wiener discounts most troubled historian of all: himself

By Laura Hamilton / February 22, 2005

Jon Wiener’s book, Historians in Trouble, claims to address some serious issues in the field of historical studies. Wiener wonders why “some charges of misconduct end up on page one and bring careers to an end” while “other equally serious charges stay out of the media spotlight and bring little or no public sanction or...

Summers’s logic shouldn’t be overlooked

By Laura Hamilton / February 22, 2005

Lawrence Summers of Harvard University and Ward Churchill of the University of Colorado at Boulder have each sparked media fervor with remarks that were, to say the least, incendiary. Summers provoked liberals by suggesting that the gender disparity in tenured positions in math, science, and engineering could be due, in part, to innate differences in...

Arguing for engagement over appeasement

By Laura Hamilton / February 18, 2005

Within the Muslim world there is a violent movement whose ultimate goal is to install a theocratic dictatorship in each country worldwide; members of this movement are, therefore, accurately termed “Islamofascists.” Every terrorist act is subordinate to that goal; every terrorist act is, by the Islamofascists’ calculation, expected to have optimal payoff with respect to...

Scalzi: From the U of C to a galaxy far, far away

By Laura Hamilton / February 4, 2005

Not only is John Scalzi a University of Chicago alum (AB ’91), he is a former Editor in Chief of the Maroon. He is also a distant relative of John Wilkes Booth. His first novel does not disappoint. Old Man’s War is a delightfully imaginative and unpredictable tale of septuagenarian John Perry’s first two years...

Big media and the left: A shameful parternship

By Laura Hamilton / January 18, 2005

Before European colonists came to the New World, American Indians had mastered the art of warfare with the bow and arrow. A favorite strategy—and one that worked well for them—was to encircle the opposing army and to shoot from all sides. Then the Europeans came and introduced the musket. According to legend, the Indians continued...

Britain’s unjust war on junk food

By Laura Hamilton / November 15, 2004

In a well intentioned but poorly conceived plan to fight its growing obesity problem, Britain plans to forbid junk food advertisements during the hours children are most likely to be watching television. Here, I abstract from the question of whether this violates the right to freedom of speech. I also abstract from the question of...

Stop blaming the big pharmaceuticals

By Laura Hamilton / October 31, 2004

According to the napkin-scribbled calculations the country’s leading health experts have been performing somewhere, America has roughly half the flu vaccines that it needs. But fortunately the experts have sage advice for you: “Take a deep breath. This is not an emergency,” suggested Dr. Julie Gerberding, head of the federal Centers for Disease Control and...

Police investigate mail scandal

By Laura Hamilton / June 8, 2004

Allegations of stolen mail and an apparent pattern of associated scams have prompted concern in Max Palevsky. Three departments—the Postal Inspector, the Chicago Police, and the University of Chicago Police Department (UCPD)—are currently investigating the matter. Concerns over the integrity of the Max Palevsky mailroom began two months ago when a student from Graham house...

Kerry proves Friedman wrong, finds free lunch

By Laura Hamilton / May 7, 2004

John Kerry is the perfect candidate. Are you pro-life or pro-choice? Either way, John Kerry agrees with you. Do you support the Iraq war or oppose it? Kerry voted for it, but he’s come to see the error of his ways. Why search for a leader who can make good decisions before the fact, when...

Vaccine-Autism connection suppressed

By Laura Hamilton / November 6, 2003

When doctors take the Hippocratic oath, they swear to “do no harm.” They do not swear to do on average less harm than good; they’re not supposed to be game theorists. Yet the medical establishment, cowering like a whipped dog at the feet of malpractice lawyers, has grown increasingly disillusioned with the world. The friendly...

Suspicions arise over absence of inquiry into Rumsfeld memo leak

By Laura Hamilton / October 28, 2003

In his infamous memo, Donald Rumsfeld wrote “My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves, although we have made many sensible, logical moves in the right direction, but are they enough?” Rumsfeld clearly leaked this memo intentionally. He is well aware of the tendency of military secrets to become public knowledge;...