Tag: news

Iowa’s critically important Democratic presidential caucus is just weeks away, but students at Iowa State University (ISU) are facing serious restrictions on their ability to advocate for and against various candidates and policies due to an absurd and possibly unconstitutional ban on offensive sidewalk chalking.

The policy, implemented in November, states that only registered student organizations may write chalk messages on campus sidewalks. These messages may not editorialize: They can only advertise upcoming events, citing names, locations, and other logistical details. And they can only be seven words long.

ISU President Wendy Wintersteen did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but told Inside Higher Ed that the school “fully embraces its role as a First Amendment campus and is deeply committed to constitutional protections of free expression.” Nevertheless, she claims the policy is a necessary effort to combat the spread of hateful and bigoted chalk messages that have appeared on sidewalks and perturbed some students.

Not all students agree. The university’s College Republicans oppose the policy, arguing that it restricts political messaging.

The College Democrats, on the other hand, were disappointed to lose the ability to promote their candidates via chalking, but said that “if restricting [chalking] can reduce incidents of hate-filled messages on campus, the organization would prefer students feel safe,” according to Inside Higher Ed.

“Making sure our campus is a safe and welcoming place for all, but particularly for people of marginalized identities, is extremely important to the ISU College Democrats,” said the group in a statement. “We welcomed the temporary chalking policy as an immediate solution to stop the hateful, racist, neo-Nazi, transphobic, homophobic and anti-Semitic messages that were overwhelming our campus this past fall…Iowa State does not have a free speech problem—we have a white supremacist problem.”

The policy was introduced following incidents of racist and transphobic chalkings on campus. A student activist group, ISU Students Against Racism, demanded zero tolerance for anyone caught writing such statements.

Seeing hateful messages is no doubt unpleasant, but Iowa State is a public university and its desire to suppress hateful speech does not supersede students’ First Amendment right to express political speech on campus. The policy has thus earned a well-deserved legal challenge from Speech First, a legal advocacy group that defends free speech and due process on campuses.

“Iowa State University and its officials have created a series of rules and regulations that restrain, deter, suppress, and punish speech about the political and social issues of the day,” wrote Speech First lawyers in a preliminary injunction that seeks to halt the policy.

The Speech First lawsuit also objects to ISU’s bias incident reporting system, as well as a little known policy that prohibits the use of university email addresses for political causes. The latter of these is rarely, if ever, enforced, according to the administration.

The chalking policy, though, is a significant restriction on campus free speech at a particularly pivotal moment for political expression. The university should move swiftly to repeal this egregious restriction.

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You could almost see the flushed glow of nostalgia rising in the cheeks of Nikki Haley Monday night when the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations snarled to Sean Hannity that the “only ones that are mourning the loss of [Qassem] Soleimani are our Democrat leadership, and our Democrat presidential candidates.”

But as Haley and other hawks—such as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.)—are already discovering, it ain’t 2004 anymore.

“Despite Haley’s claims,” countered Mike Brest in the Washington Examiner, a conservative publication, “2020 Democratic front-runners former Vice President Joe Biden, former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren all labeled Soleimani a murderer, but they also questioned Trump’s larger Middle East strategy.”

“Even Haley’s expanded definition of ‘mourning’—in which she claims Democrats are arguing the world would be better with Suleimani still in it—strikes us as unfair,” judged factchecker Declan Garvey at The Dispatch, another conservative publication.

Yet the “mourning” crack apparently didn’t go far enough for the Democrat-batiting Rep. Doug Collins (R–Ga.). Echoing the disreputable they’re not antiwar, they’re on the other side discourse surrounding the Iraq War, Collins asserted to #MAGAtastic Fox Business Network host Lou Dobbs Wednesday that Democrats are “in love with terrorists….They mourn Soleimani more than they mourn our Gold Star families who are the ones who suffered under Soleimani.”

Rubio has also been peddling crude Manichaeism in place of persuasive argumentation:

Natl Security officials gave a compelling briefing to Senators just now. They answered every important question.

Anyone who walks out & says they aren’t convinced action against #Soleimani was justified is either never going to be convinced or just oppose everything Trump does.

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) January 8, 2020

To which one of the living exceptions to Rubio’s bogus rule, Sen. Mike Lee (R–Utah), tartly responded: “I literally find it difficult to imagine how my friend Marco, who is smart, who listens carefully, who cares about these things, how he could emerge from that meeting at say that it was good. It was terrible. It was an unmitigated disaster.”

In the three years after 9/11, Republicans discovered that they could preempt policy debate by saying variations of George W. Bush’s September 20, 2001, formulation: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Behind that blocking, they rushed through a series of heavy-handed initiatives many Americans would come to regret and oppose: the Iraq War, mass warrantless surveillance, torture.

But public opinion has long been upside-down on whatever the U.S. missions are in Afghanistan and Iraq. And after the instability-sowing, Iran-enhancing debacle of Barack Obama’s intervention against Libyan ruler Mohammar Gaddafi, the worm decisively turned against military intervention in Syria.

“This will not be Iraq, this will not be Afghanistan, this will not be Libya,” then-U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power tried gamely to insist while rallying the progressive troops to back a Syrian operation. But by then, interventionist promises had lost a lot of their potency.

Candidate Donald Trump capitalized on the vast gap between Beltway interventionists and the considerably less gung-ho population at large by campaigning in the long-submerged Jacksonian tradition of American foreign policy—irritably nationalist, dismissive of international institutions and mores, ready to rain hell (or at least threaten to) on anyone who messes with Washington, yet also contemptuous of nation-building and regime-change wars. His victory scrambled American politics, and it buttressed those withered Jacksonian poles under the GOP’s big tent, which makes this week’s atavistic chest-thumping that much more ineffective.

In 2004, so strong was the neoconservative pull on both the Grand Old Party and the country writ large that the Republican National Convention could import Democrats to deliver the warmongeriest speeches. Triumphant ideological scribblers dreamed of becoming a “majority party for the next few decades” by embracing the “death of small-government conservatism.” Those Republican war skeptics who did pipe up were marginalized in the pages of National Review as “unpatriotic conservatives.” It was enough to start and finish any foreign policy argument by selectively quoting George Orwell’s famous quip that “Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist”—a line, written in besieged 1942 London, that Orwell himself later repudiated.

Well, that rhetorical dog no longer hunts. It’s not just the anti-Trumpers at MSNBC sounding the alarm at Trump’s Iranian policy. It’s one of the most popular and influential Fox News hosts: Tucker Carlson, whose program Tuesday reached a staggering 5.6 million viewers.

“It’s harder to get rich and powerful in Washington during peacetime, so our leaders have a built-in bias for war,” Carlson said. “And so they descended on television studios over the weekend to describe in detail the kind of violence they’re prepared to wreak on a country very few of them know anything about.”

For years, observers have been pointing out foreign policy parallels between Trump and former Old Right presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, one of the aforementioned allegedly “unpatriotic” conservatives. So where’s Pitchfork Pat on the Soleimani strike? “Killing Soleimani was just,” he wrote this week. “But what is just is not always wise.” More:

Oddly, what the America-haters of the Middle East seek is what Soleimani wanted, and what Trump promised in his campaign of 2016—an end to U.S. involvement in the forever wars of the Middle East.

Perhaps, rather than sending troops into Iraq and Kuwait to defend U.S. troops already there, we should accede to the local nationalist demands, start bringing our troops home, and let Iranians, Iraqis, Libyans, Syrians, Yemenis and Afghans settle their quarrels.

At The American Conservative, which Buchanan co-founded in 2002 in part to agitiate against the pending Iraq War, founding editor Scott McConnell went so far as to declare the Iran action casus belli to regret his previous support for Trump.

“He has hired to key positions Beltway types who had nothing but contempt for him, and they have led him down well worn paths. One of those paths leads to a major war with Iran, an obsessively pursued project of the neoconservatives since long before 9/11,” McConnell concluded. “It’s now hard to see how a Hillary Clinton presidency could have turned out worse.”

Regardless of what one thinks of Trump, or Hillary Clinton, or U.S. policy toward Iran, it is a cheering development that disreputable interventionist demagoguery is losing steam. “I think it’s sad when people have this fake sort of drape of patriotism, and anybody that disagrees with them is not a patriot,” Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) said Wednesday. Hopefully there will come a day soon when this weariness at playground political rhetoric translates into a restoration of Congress’ long-squandered responsibility for deciding when and where America goes to war.

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From 2016 to 2017—the most recent period for which we have complete statistics—America’s death rate for cancer saw “the largest single-year drop ever recorded.” So says the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Facts & Figures 2020 report, which notes that the 2.2 percent drop that year was part of a larger 29 percent decline since 1991. Back then, there were 215 cancer deaths for every 100,000 people; by 2017, the figure had fallen to 152 per 100,000.

An accompanying article in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians notes that this translates into an “estimated 2.9 million fewer cancer deaths than would have occurred if peak rates had persisted.” The report adds that “the 5-year relative survival rate for all cancers combined has increased substantially since the early 1960s, from 39% to 70% among whites and from 27% to 64% among blacks.”

For nearly three decades, the death rates for the four most common cancer types—lung, colorectal, breast, and prostate—have dropped substantially. This follows from a steep decline in smoking tobacco as well as increased early screening and improved therapies:

What about incidence rates? They too have fallen substantially from their peaks in the 1990s, but they have flattened out in recent years:

Why the flattening? The American Cancer Society suggests this is, in part, because of an increase in malignancies associated with rising rates of obesity, including uterine, esophageal, breast, thyroid and pancreatic cancers. “Almost 1 in 5 cancers is caused by excess body fat, alcohol consumption, poor nutrition, and a sedentary lifestyle,” notes the Cancer Facts & Figures 2020 report. By comparison, smoking tobacco is associated with nearly 30 percent of cancer deaths.

So there’s more to be done. But overall, this is good news: There is no rising cancer epidemic in the United States, and we’re getting a lot better at treating the cases that do occur.

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