Lies, damned lies and Cheney
It would appear that Vice President Dick Cheney has left his underground bunker to come out swinging. BBC News reported Friday that Cheney reasserted on a radio show that there was an al Qaida-Iraq link before the U.S. invasion in 2003. Never mind that several U.S. intelligence reports have debunked this myth, including a Pentagon report that was declassified just hours before Cheney gave the interview. Awkward. This sort of bald-faced idiocy might have been the status quo during the 2003 Bush heyday, when almost two-thirds of Americans were duped into believing that Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein regularly played golf together in Tikrit. But now, after four years of war that have proven just the opposite, Cheney has been exposed as nothing more than an emperor without his clothes.
By their own admission
If you still don’t believe the college admissions process has gone absolutely insane, look no further than a Saturday article in The Wall Street Journal. Ostensibly trying to catch serial resume-padders, some colleges have turned to “”admissions police,”” or private companies that fact-check college applicants’ essays and resumes for plagiarism, grade inflation or outright lies. The urge to cheat on college applications might seem understandable – Columbia University only accepted 8 percent of applicants this year – but this problem bespeaks a much larger problem than fudged resumes. The college admissions process, based as it is on rewarding an endless bevy of extracurricular activities, is broken and in desperate need of repair.
It’s the education, stupid
As reported by The Arizona Republic on Friday, several economists have differing explanations about Arizona’s faltering economy, but the solution (as usual) is pretty easy – shore up education. The problem is Arizona has too few college graduates to keep the state’s economic engine running, and without college grads to fill jobs (and homes), the housing market tanks, taking construction jobs with it. This probably wouldn’t be as much of a problem if the state Legislature had committed itself to building a prestigious higher education system in the past, but Arizona’s only hope now lies in building up the state universities in the future. Some legislators have indicated they’re on board. Here’s to hoping they’ll make good on their promises as they debate the universities’ budgets in the coming month.
Forecast: Steinbeck in the Southwest
Friday, The Arizona Daily Star reported that global warming could precipitate Dust Bowl-like conditions in the Southwest by the end of the decade. The notion of widespread climate disruption due to global warming is nothing new, but the immediacy of the impact should hit home for Arizona, a state precariously dependent on shrinking aquifers to fuel its booming growth. We’ve harped on state legislators before for their “”pro-growth”” policies that encourage urban sprawl to the detriment of conservation, but this new report (from the Columbia University and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) should bring the issue into focus for them: Shape up, or Arizona’s thirsty citizens will have to ship out.
Opinions Board
Editorials are determined by the Wildcat opinions board and written by one of its members. They are Justyn Dillingham, Allison Hornick, Damion LeeNatali, Stan Molever, Nicole Santa Cruz and Matt Stone.
