Grade This! - April 1, 2005
The weekly wrap-up with pirates, gun-toting teacher, Laura Bush, Jerry Springer, cuss words, a surprising new media critic and more.
Stryker Strikes Out
The Army’s new troop transport vehicle has a lot of pretty dope features – as they should, given that they cost taxpayers $11 billion dollars. The Stryker, a lightly armored, wheeled vehicle which has been deployed in Iraq since October 2003, has an "armoring shield to protect against unanticipated attacks by Iraqi insurgents using low-tech weapons," a fancy computer system, and a $157,000 grenade launcher. Sounds unstoppable, right? Wrong. A classified Army study obtained by the Washington Post details roughly a gazillion flaws in the hypothetically bad-ass Stryker. That hefty armoring shield? Too heavy – nine tires a day have to be changed after busting under the weight of the thing. The fancy computer system? Overheats at high temperatures (which thankfully are not common in the desert) or freeze up at the most inopportune of times, such as "when large units are moving at high speeds simultaneously." The pricey grenade launcher? Unable to hit targets, oh but don’t worry, only when the vehicle is MOVING. As if that weren’t enough, the seatbelts won’t buckle around soldiers in armored gear and they’ve had to jerry rig homemade sand-filled tin cans on the outside to protect the gunner’s hatch. On the upside though, according to the Army’s director of force development, it’s a really smooth and quiet ride.
The brave men and women in our armed forces putting up with this horseshit: A+
The Army letting them ride around in these overpriced tin cans while they risk their lives: F
Emily Hawkins, Campus Progress
Give Guns to the Teachers
Years after the rampage of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, students are still taking out their anger on their fellow peers with tragic results. A Chippewa teenager from Minnesota killed nine people and then committed suicide. The teachers at Red Lake High School were able to somewhat contain the situation with their lockdown plan. The NRA’s solution to this problem? Give guns to the teachers! The NRA’s vice president, Sandra S. Frontman, looks back to the shooting in Pearl, Mississippi, in which "a teacher retrieved a gun from his car when a student opened fire, then held the student at bay until police arrived." Our future for tomorrow’s America is looking bright.
NRA’s problem solving skills: F
Red Lake High School teachers’ problem solving skills: B+
Courtney Foley, George Washington University
Conservatives Threatened by Coffee Cups
Starbucks’ most recent efforts to critically engage the masses in the form of famous quotes printed on their coffee cups have come under fire from conservative consumers, who simply cannot tolerate drinking from a coffee cup that makes them think (funny, I drink coffee so I can think in the morning). It seems that even though the thinkers range from Yo-Yo Ma, the cellist, to Jonah Goldberg, founding editor of the National Review Online to Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia, these conservatives just can’t handle it, with some consumers threatening to find other brands. Good luck. It was liberals who were trying to defend the independent coffee shops, remember?
Starbucks: B
Trying to Get People to Think: A
Trying to Avoid Having Your Own Ideas Questioned: F
Matt Singer, University of Montana
The Pirate President
While internet piracy is a huge issue on college campuses, North Carolina State University has an advocate for piracy, period: a student going under the name of “The Pirate Captain” is running for student body president. His platform (or as he calls it, his “plank”) includes policies such as “holding meetin’s open to all yae landlubbers.” The Captain showed up at the candidate debate in full pirate regalia. "Voting for someone who wants to rid the campus of scurvy dogs is not really an effective way of having student government," said sophomore Christopher Sanchez, who was immediately recognized as a complete dork for actually saying that out loud.
NCSU’s performing arts program: A, apparently
Pirate stuff in general: A-
August Pollak, Campus Progress
All in an Afternoon’s Work for Laura
There are a lot of things that you can do in five hours. You could sit through a double feature at the movies. You could assemble a couch from Ikea. You could google all your old high school classmates. You could write a living will. Laura Bush, however, managed to take on the entire thorny nation of Afghanistan in a mere five hours. The focus of her trip was to celebrate the women of Afghanistan and all of the progress made towards women’s rights since the United States took over. Perhaps that is why her trip was so brief. According to the U.N. Development Program’s National Human Development Report for Afghanistan, released in February, the situation for women in Afghanistan is still very grim. There is just something about a trip that short that proclaims a bit to baldly its true p.r. motives. Maybe Laura had to dash because she was needed back in the hood of South Central Los Angeles.
Americans taking a true, long-term interest in Afghanistan: A
Using Afghanistan as the backdrop for a photo-op: C-
Elana Berkowitz, Campus Progress
Springer Joins Air America
Happy April Fools Day! I’m sure that’s what some progressives were hoping Air America would say this morning as Jerry Springer’s show joined the station’s lineup. But it was no joke, the king of trash television’s radio show debuted today as the station passed their one year anniversary. Air America has been an oasis for progressives to turn for informed and witty news and commentary and they’ve proven all their critics wrong. But can Springer succeed? The bar is set pretty high, but if he can get through his first month without lesbian love confessions, cat fights, chair throwing and the incessant drone of “Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!” he may surprise us.
Air America’s First Anniversary: A+
Jerry Springer’s Attempt at Being Taken Seriously: The Jury’s Still Out
Marcus Mrowka, George Washington University
Wolfowitz’ School Daze
Paul Wolfowitz is now President of the World Bank. I think I hear the gallops of the four horsemen of the apocolypse coming around the bend. What’s the big deal, you ask? Um, relevant experience, international stewardship, oh yeah, and he orchestrated the Iraq invasion. Before Wolfowitz was deputy secretary of defense, he was the dean of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced Studies. While Wolfowitz was dean, Riordan Roett, head of SAIS’ Latin American Studies Department stopped teaching to consult for Chase Manhattan Bank. During that same time, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) took over four towns in Chiapas, Mexico at gunpoint. Their demands? A real minimum wage, free elections, you know, a little democracy. For the most part they wanted big investment bankers like Chase Manhattan to stop draining the local coffee and oil economy. Roett’s response to Chase’s international investors was for the Mexican government to eliminate the EZLN. He went on to say, “(w)hile Chiapas does not pose a fundamental threat to Mexican political stability, it is perceived to be so by many in the investment community.”
Paul Wolfowitz as President of World Bank and Dean of SAIS: F-
Riordan Roett as steward to the international investment community: A- (Hey, he did what was best for his investors, conscience be damned!)
Jennifer Daniel, Alabama
Britney Spears, Media Critic
For those who don’t regularly frequent the homepage of this fading pop tart, Britney checks in with her fans every once in a while in the form of rambling letters about her husband, honeymooning, Kabbalah, growing up, and her mom. This week, she posted a bizarre missive castigating “false tabloids,” particularly singling Us Weekly, In Touch, and Star. Perhaps inspired by her newly meditative, spiritual self, Britney begs the tabloids to look inside their own souls. She asks them to ask themselves “What am I lying to myself about?” Just when she almost sweeps you in, she proceeds to wonder whether these false tabloid reporters are such big fat liars because they are, in fact, big and fat. And then she goes on to give props to People magazine. What?
Scientifically proven correlation between weight and mendacity: F
The guilty pleasure of “false tabloids”: B+
Elana Berkowitz, Campus Progress
Why you should have paid more attention to all those AV geeks in high school
Right-wing pundits and similarly intolerant twits have had their share of problems this week understanding the basics of audio equipment. First, “Great American” Sean Hannity decided that the best way to represent his idea that liberals are the side that’s intolerant and angry would be for the conservative host to ignore an active mic and get himself recorded calling Democratic Congressmen Jim Moran an “a**hole.”
Meanwhile, 911 operators in California were given the challenge of their lives this week when they received a distress call from an endangered mother at a Burger King drive-through in Laguna Niguel. The call, which you can listen to in full here, reflects the sheer terror that must have been going through her head as the devious drive-through employees failed to make her burger according to her specifications.
An amazing pair of people ignorant to the world around them, but we’ve got to give credit to Hannity when making a comparison. While Hannity missed the lecture during AV class on what the blinking light means, it’s clear our outraged Mother of the Year was asleep during the grade school lessons on what 911 is for. (Hint: it’s not for complaining that you didn’t get the Western Burger.)
Sean Hannity’s AV skills: C-
Crazy mother’s Zen-like patience: F
911 Efficiency rating: A
Burger King Efficiency rating: C+
Burger King’s Western Burger: not worth writing home about, let alone calling 911
August Pollak, Campus Progress
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