On September 16th, 11 Iraqis were killed and 20 more wounded in the gunfight involving Blackwater USA, a private contractor security firm that the U.S. State Department has been paying off to the tune of $1 billion dollars since 2001. The sticky issue Blackwater chairman Eric Prince seems to be working through now with the help of House Oversight Committee Chairman Henry Waxman and his ilk is that Prince's organisation has been involved in 195 shooting incidents since 2005 alone.  The NY Times reported that a bullet struck an Iraqi man driving his mother to pick up his father, a pathologist, at a hospital. The dead man's weight probably stayed on the accelerator and propelled the car toward a Blackwather convoy who opened fire on it, supposedly after getting spooked. The ever-sneering Maureen Dowd started playing connect the dots last week in her column with her explanation that some of the no-bid contracts from the State Department to Blackwater were based on years of support by Prince and his family for Republican candidates and specifically the President. With me, this registers a big, fat happy...SO? Would you rather be overlooked as a friend when a job comes up with one of your friends that is in your industry or be rewarded for your loyalty? All this confirms is that human beings do, in fact, like to support their friends when they are able. God, that is one sinister plotline! Add to that the no-bid contract debacle and you have D.C. tabloid material of the highest grade. Call me a simpleton but no-bids contracts sometimes come out of convenience by way of NECESSITY. If I need to get my package of curds and whey to Grandma by dinner tomorrow, I don't go bargain shopping for the cheapest and most value-driven option of all the options strewn on the landscape that is the residential shipping industry, I go next door and FedEx for $5 dollars more. I bet even Maureen Dowd goes back to her short list of contacts when a column is under a hard deadline.
But for politicians and journalists most adept at stumbling all over themselves to pass the buck, no one plays the "didjaknowit hand-in-the-cookie-jar" game better than John Edwards. He connected the lines of guilt by loose association to Hillary Clinton for her employment of Mark Penn, a PR man and her "primary adviser" according to Edwards, who is also representing Blackwater USA.  Despite the fun subplot, Mark Penn in fact owns the PR firm Burson-Marsteller, he's not a politician. (Cue the cynic: Yeah, right, everybody's a politician). Nevertheless, pushing the cynic aside, Penn takes work from whence it comes. He gives strategic advice as it is requested of him by the dead president's that are wired to his business account. Is he responsible for making sure none of his clients, if linked together, screw themselves over in a political orgy? I think not. And as hard as it might be for we civilians to admit it, a war struggle where one's military is expected to honor Geneva Conventions and fight fair against a terrorist network not bound by those rules of engagement may need a little outside help to get the job done. Either that or risk the literal diplomatic fallout of diplomats falling out of convoys after the spray of gunfire or a roadside bomb.

Listen to The Hub Radio Show on Saturdays at 6PM on 920am WGKA. Streaming online at www.920wgka.com. For more information log on to www.thehubradioshow.com. Call in during LIVE Talkback segments at 1-888-920-2665.

Toby Byrum has become a bit of an exhibit for a cultural phenomenon, not because he decided to get a vasectomy, but because he did it early-on at age 28 as an only-child and, thus, the only hope for preserving the Byrum franchise. Byrum expressed to Matt Lauer recently on The Today Show that having a child simply to continue his legacy would be selfish. He continued to explain that he views the next 15-20 years of [his] life as some of the best years. "I wanted to make sure those years were...going to make me ultimately the happiest person I could be." Apparently Byrum's tubes weren't the only thing from which he was experiencing a disconnect at the time he snipped the branches on the family tree. His logic seemed to be failing. How does a man make a decision to end his reproductive years out of a desire to not "be selfish" while at the same saying he wants the next 20 years of his life (the best years) free from the burden of children so that he can insure his highest level of happiness? So it's all about YOU and YOUR happiness and that isn't selfish?
Urologists around the country are reporting a small but growing number of young men who are deciding to throw the switch on fatherhood at a young age. My question is, how ready is a guy to make that decision in his late 20s anyway? Aren't our early years ruled by self-centered hedonism and isn't that expanding culturally into later and later in life? Doesn't make it right, just an observation. But at a minimum, wait until you are at an age when you have enough responsibility to garner the need for life insurance!

Realists muse that every cloud has a silver lining...and every year thousands of people die (presumably starry-eyed idealistic youth wishing upon a star) from lightning strikes while they stare at dark clouds. Enter the American Civic Literacy Program and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute to seed the clouds of academia with another dose of reality. The ACLP just released their follow-up to last year's blockbuster study that concludes American university students are as dense as bricks when it comes to U.S. history and civic education (which tends to preclude involvement).  Our very own Georgia College and State University and UGA rank near the top of the bottom of the pile of 50 randomly chosen institutions.  The problem here is that in the name of political correctness we've created a textbook climate of whitewashed historical monologues where a vast throng of American college graduates would now confidently cast the Jeffersonian "wall of seperation between church and state" out of the Danbury Baptist Letters and into the 1st Ammendment itself - "freedom OF religion becomes freedom FROM religion" (notwithstanding post-modernism) and we are none the wiser. The average senior has completed only four courses in the combined areas of history, political science and economics by the time they flip the tassel and many are experiencing what ISI study mogels call "negative learning" where seniors end up knowing less than incoming freshman.

The ISI study cornered 14,000 students with a 60-question test where the vast majority scored a big red "F". (Cue the apologists: This is tragic! Scores like this can only mean that ISI tests are dangerous, misleading and must be re-written to fit the times. This test is ancient history)!  Foreign students taking classes in the States scored even worse than American students (less than one-tenth of one point) and minorities lost out to whites in knowlege gained by a 6 to 1 margin.  

So how did we arrive where we know more about Britney's custody battle than the Battle of Gettysburgh? What is our take home from these study results? For starters, prestige doesn't buy knowlege. Several schools entangled in their ivy of underperformance include Cornell, Yale, Duke and Princeton (all costing more annually than a new model Vette). If parents and students are looking to schools like these to increase their knowlege of America, then apparently their flushing money down the toilet. Why the silence in the wake of the fallout? For many parents, the criterion for schools has shifted from education to prestige that translates to higher earning potential and when results match expectations, everybody goes home happy with their student loan debts in tow. And what of alum and philanthropists forking over millions a year in donations? According to the Council for Aid to Education, individuals, corporations, religious groups and others contributed $28 billion dollars to American colleges in 2006. Is this symptomatic of the American way of throwing money at the problem (passive engagement) rather than the active involvement of seeing higher education as a supplement to efforts at home and expecting nothing less than a positive extension of those efforts? It turns out that the key factor in trending the tide is the answer to the question, "Was it Smurfs or senators at your childhood dinner table?" For students with families where history and current events were often discussed, parents were married and living together and at least one parent was in posession of a bachelor's diploma, student test scores gained an average of 2.3 percentage points over those who did not benefit from those factors (providing a veritable conundrum for new model family advocates working to drop the A-bomb over the traditional nuclear family).

When confronted with the findings, Tom Jackson, vice president for public affairs at UGA called the study "insignificant" with hidden motives (like the furthering of education) revealed by a questionable methodology (you chose my school and gave me a failing grade). Hmm, when you don't like the diagnosis, discredit the doctor. (ISI statisticians are simply Freebird shoot'n, beltway elitists). Skeptics of history would say: We learn  from history that we learn nothing from history  because history invariably repeats itself. So what of learning from repetition? If history has no power to inform the macrocosm of the human experience enough to keep us from collective train wrecks, then at a minimum, it can still inform individual souls longing for proven means to an end. It inspires a search for truth on an individual level. And that may be the biggest fear of social progressives revising your child's history textbook right now. Will we engage before a generation has no understood reason for which to say, God Bless America?