A furor has erupted over a "residence life education program" at the University of Delaware. As Bryan Preston says, you can't make this stuff up. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) explains:

According to the program's materials, the goal of the residence life education program is for students in the university's residence halls to achieve certain "competencies" that the university has decreed its students must develop in order to achieve the overall educational goal of "citizenship." These competencies include: "Students will recognize that systemic oppression exists in our society," "Students will recognize the benefits of dismantling systems of oppression," and "Students will be able to utilize their knowledge of sustainability to change their daily habits and consumer mentality." (Emphasis added)

The university plays dumb. Michelle Malkin says, "I smell CYA."

Does that acronym stand for Communist Youth Aliiance?

— Robert Stacy McCain, assistant national editor, The Washington Times

That's the headline atop today's On the Edge column from The Washington Times' Scott Galupo, a guy who, by the way, knows his way around a vinyl bin.

Scott notes the decades-long hate-hate affair between music critics and the Eagles, who have a new record out next week. But his column is just the tip of the iceberg here in the newsroom, where peaceful, easy Eagles fans have squared off against the The-Forces-Who-Refuse-To-Give-Don-Henley-And-Company-Their-Due.

Scott, in his column, calls them a "musical proxy for a broader distaste for mass culture." Some of us contend it's an East Coast/West Coast thing. I say you can just get out of the car if you don't want to hear "Take It to the Limit," turned up to 11.

-- David Eldridge, managing editor, WashingtonTimes.com

Students for a Democratic Society promised to "challenge capitalism" with a "mass disruptive action" in Georgetown to protest the International Monetary Fund. The result? An innocent bystander got hit in the head with a brick:



(Hat tips: Memeorandum, BreitbartTV.)


Tom Knott saw it coming:

The oppressed revolutionaries are calling for "disruptive actions," unspecified though they may be. . . . Comrade Che Guevara would be the first take up arms against the ruling class of Georgetown if he were still around to inspire the unwashed masses. . . .
Power to the people who own nothing but the clothes on their backs and the bricks in their hands.

Michelle Malkin has a suggestion:

If just one city targeted by these criminal punks would crack down hard instead of slapping them on the collective wrist, the property damage and assaults would stop.

Courtesy of Reason.TV, America's favorite funny man explains how free-market solutions could fix traffic congestion:

-- Robert Stacy McCain, assistant national editor, The Washington Times

For decades, organizations like Young America's Foundation, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and the Leadership Institute have worked to organize, train and support conservative students on campus.

Conservatives in Britain, however, lacked similar organizations until quite recently, with the establishment in 2003 of the Young Britons Foundation, whose executive director, Shane Greer, writes about "winning on campus":

One of the biggest battlegrounds for conservatives in Britain is on university campuses. They've always been breeding grounds for the Left, but winning the minds of the next generation is crucial if the Party is to shift the centre ground to the right. The Left have for years been streets ahead of conservatives when it came to campus activism and winning the visual battle - when it came to presentation the Left reigned supreme.

By its nature campus activism has to be fun, edgy, and of course exciting. So it's fair to say that the new YBF posters will prove just the ticket for university conservative groups across the UK:

Here's Shane hosting an 18 Doughty Street discussion in May:

Shane, who comes from a working-class Ulster background, has visited the United States often in connection with the YBF's Summer in Washington program.

Perhaps the effectiveness of YBF activism -- and their clever new posters -- explain the Tory surge in the polls?

-- Robert Stacy McCain, assistant national editor, The Washington Times

Erick Erickson is a young lawyer and Republican campaign consultant who lives in Macon, Ga. I first became aware of Erickson in early 2006, when his Peach Pundit site was an invaluable source for inside information on the battle for the Georgia GOP nomination for lieutenant governor between Ralph Reed and Casey Cagle.

Since then, Erickson has become managing editor of the political blog Red State, where Saturday he warned fellow conservatives that liberals are developing an agenda:

[W]hile you and I are having our pity party and observing the Republican Party cracking up around a lack of ideas, there's life over at Mordor. They are mobilizing behind a set of ideas to entrench their power.

They want the "Employee Free Choice Act" to start growing unions again by denying free choice to employees. They want "clean election laws" to force taxpayers to fund Democratic candidates for office. . . .

The left has begun again to organize around socialist ideals. Bush hatred will no longer get them moving forward. They need new energy and they have these new ideas.

This Open Left agenda has also been discussed by Dan Riehl, who calls it a "frightening vision," and by Brian Faughnan at the Influence Peddler, who writes:

As a conservative, this ought to scare you. . . .

Of these reforms, which ones do Democrats back because they're the right thing to do, and which do they support because they promise to cement the progressive hold on power? Does it call into question the legitimacy of a political movement to taint their agenda for the betterment of the human condition, by associating it with tightening the grip on the levers of power?

As far as the liberal media elite are concerned, it is conservative Republicans who represent the dark forces of Mordor.

To the elite, Chris Bowers is not a political partisan, but a heroic soldier in a humanitarian crusade for social justice. The biggest problem with this perception is that social justice is a "mirage," as Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek observed.

But when was the last time anybody heard Hayek mentioned by a prominent Republican politician? Oh, yeah -- it was him, wasn't it?

-- Robert Stacy McCain, assistant national editor, The Washington Times

UPDATE 11 p.m.:

Responding to the report that anti-war activists had confessed to the poster hoax , Jason Mattera e-mails: "What did I tell you!"

Bryan Preston at Hot Air links and observes:

So this was an anti-war group's ploy to attack patriotic young Americans by smearing them as racists ...

As soon as I saw it, the name Adam Kokesh rang a bell. He's the Marine vet who got in trouble for wearing his uniform to anti-war protests, and who heads up the Iraq Veterans Against the War. They were so careful about who they associate themselves with that they touted phony soldier Jesse MacBeth -- until Hot Air and others outed him.

-- RSM

Monday morning, students at George Washington University discovered that their campus had been decorated with hundreds of posters proclaiming, "Hate Muslims? So do we!!!"

Though the posters were an apparent attack on Muslims, the real target was the campus chapter of the Young America's Foundation. "We were shocked and appalled," Sergio Gor, leader of GW's YAF chapter, told The Washington Times on Tuesday. "Our group does not support any kind of hatred or intolerance. We promote democracy, freedom and liberty for all."

Tuesday night, the GW Hatchet reported:

A group of seven GW students sent an e-mail to The Hatchet late Tuesday night admitting to hanging hundreds of controversial posters around campus early Monday morning.

The students - Adam Kokesh, freshman Yong Kwon, senior Brian Tierny, freshman Ned Goodwin, Maxine Nwigwe, Lara Masri and Amal Rammah - said their motives were misinterpreted. . . .
Kokesh, a graduate student and Iraq War veteran, gained celebrity over the past year because of his vocal opposition to the war. Nwigwe and Rammah are also graduate students.

"We want to promote this very important message about the dangers of extremism," Gor said of the group's plans.

There was "outrage" over the posters at a Monday meeting of students, the Hatchet reported:

Many of the students in attendance at the event said they were personally hurt by the posters that were hung.

"This is the first time I felt attacked," said Manalle Mahmoud, a junior who is of the Muslim faith.

Representatives from more than a dozen groups on campus and from Muslim, Catholic and Jewish faiths spoke in unison condemning the posters and the unidentified subjects who hung them.

The Left is notorious for self-inflicting themselves with incidents of "hate" and then turning around to attribute such incidents on alleged intolerance ...
Accusations of hate speech make great headlines for newspapers, even if those accusations turn out to be wrong -- or even worse -- contrived. Such is the case at The George Washington University.

During Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week, Gor said, the GW group will sponsor a speech by conservative author David Horowitz, sponsor a campus petition condemning terrorism, show the ABC miniseries "The Path to 9/11," and also host a panel discussion that will include "Muslim women who escaped persecution in Islamic countries. . . . Women who got flogged for wearing nail polish in Iran."

According to Memeorandum, the GW incident has been blogged at Little Green Footballs, Jihad Watch and Solomonia.

-- Robert Stacy McCain, assistant national editor, The Washington Times

It's a sad day when a court declares that Kevin Federline is a better parent:

Britney Spears was ordered Monday to surrender custody of her children to ex-husband Kevin Federline.

Superior Court Judge Scott M. Gordon ruled that Federline will take custody of Sean Preston, 2, and Jayden James, 1, beginning Wednesday "until further order of the court."

In February, I suggested that Britney was driven off the deep by watching her first love, Justin Timberlake, do a star turn at the Grammy awards.

But let's face it: Britney's problems have much deeper roots. Her show-biz childhood and her precocious stardom pushed her prematurely into an adult role, while simultaneously not allowing her time to grow up. Now, in her mid-20s, she's an over-the-hill divorced mom with the emotional maturity of a 14-year-old.

This is not the media's fault, no matter what Chris Crocker says.

-- Robert Stacy McCain, assistant national editor, The Washington Times

Many TV critics have treated Ken Burns' 17-hour PBS documentary "The War" like a sacred cow since it premiered Sept. 23, heralding the production as the definitive message about World War II. Sorry, folks, but there's plenty of subtle revisionist content couched in all that black and white footage. The effect is cumulative. The Burns' version of World War II ultimately suggests that the conflict was not our finest shining hour, but rather that America was a bully, and the war itself ill-planned. Why, it was probably our fault, too.

Consider the melancholy tone and style of the series.

The series bears the standard PBS stamp: A mournful announcer and lots of cello music to accompany combat film footage shot by cameramen who were much braver 60 years ago than Mr. Burns is today. He couldn't keep his agenda out of things, not even World War II. Every episode seems to linger on death, destruction, death, injury, death, loss, death — with the genuine political upheaval and global turmoil as a secondary feature. The Burns message? War is bad, bad, bad. This war was a TRAGEDY. These battles had no rhyme or reason. Just look at this dead kid in uniform. Oh, and look at him again. And again.

Mr. Burns dwells on melancholy defeat in this so-called documentary. While the film footage, archival photos and occasional swing music may be stirring in the series, the war has been painted as a horrific showcase rife with thoughtless aggressors and unnecessary violence. But wait one star-spangled minute. World War II of course had its flaws and horror. But it was also a shining example of American morality, can-do spirit, generosity and resilience — at home and abroad. It deserves an unabashed "hurrah," not a wincing probe.

The incredible generation who fought that war chose to keep their mouths shut about their horrors and their loss. They did not wallow in what happen to them, and it is not up to someone like Mr. Burns to come along — with taxpayers' money — and recast the experience solely as a consummate national tragedy, trimmed with contemporary "blame America first." Others are peeved, though. The filmmaker has come under vigorous fire from Latino and American Indian groups for overlooking ethnic contributions to the war. PBS itself has been cited by the Los Angeles Times for inflating their audience numbers, claiming 18 million viewers when the number was actually 8 million.

As for me? I think I'll watch "The Fighting Seabees" or "Men at Sea" for now, and hope that Mr. Burns does not take on any more projects for a while.

-- Jennifer Harper, media reporter, The Washington Times

The American Film Renaissance festival wrapped up Saturday night at the Arlington Cinema & Drafthouse, where AFR founders Jim and Ellen Hubbard said they were pleased with the success of the festival's first-ever DC event, and hope to return next year.

Saturday afternoon's program featured a series of short film's, including "Open Wound," director Nikki Brake's documentary about the murder of her aunt.

Jason Talley's crew from Bureaucrash — including Erin Wildermuth — presented three short productions, including this film about protesting Micheal Moore's "Sicko":

Mary Katharine Ham of Townhall.com also presented three short productions from her "Hamnation" series of Internet videos, including a parody of Alicia Silverstone's PETA ad.

As much as sportsmen will appreciate the pro-venison sentiments, the funniest episode of "Hamnation" was when MK mocked the Republicans as pork rind gobbling "dysfunctional exes" after their 2006 election defeat:

-- Robert Stacy McCain, assistant national editor, The Washington Times