I’d link you to the CDC site, but it’s so popular it has crashed.

This will have to do.

… the DSK mess.

An earlier suggestion here.

… hit back cleanly. Here, Newt’s press secretary defends his man against recent attacks from the lamestream media.

The press secretary strikes the right belligerent tone, but his mixed metaphors confuse us rather than rouse us to indignation.

The firefight started when the cowardly sensed weakness. They fired timidly at first, then the sheep not wanting to be dropped from the establishment’s cocktail party invite list unloaded their entire clip, firing without taking aim their distortions and falsehoods.

Instead of gaining a clear picture of the press bullies, we struggle with three incompatible images:

1. A firefight.
2. Sheep.
3. Cocktail parties.

Our minds, striving to make sense of disparate phenomena, put it all together into a picture of party-going, pistol-packing, sheep. This takes us very far away from the image of embattled heroic Gingrich that’s intended.

Also – You want to end on a strong word. Here, we have a lot of exciting build-up, and we’re panting to see what actual evil thing the media has done to Newt Gingrich. But instead of a word like “lies,” we get the careful (cowardly?) “distortions and falsehoods.”

After all that firepower, this is a letdown. Big guns don’t shoot distortions and falsehoods! Not in the US of A! They shoot lies, baby!

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Update: Now, this is good writing.

The sheer spectacle of watching Newt try to live out his man-of-destiny fantasies and failing utterly — always in ways that were cringe inducing, yet impossible to turn away from — evoked something powerful that I couldn’t quite place. But then last night, I figured it out. It must have been Newt’s $500,000 Tiffany’s account, or maybe his apology to Paul Ryan. Anyway, I realized that everything about Newt Gingrich–the operatic temperament, the multiple divorces, the six-figure credit line at Tiffany’s, the ego, the solipsism, the sheer haplessness and capacity for self-delusion–it all summons up the “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.”

You see how his build-up ends with a bang?

Newt press secretary: Take note.

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Update: Graphic.

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In recital.

Police shot at them with the guns hidden under their veils.

… [C]ollege students with laptops spend most of their time in class reading gossip blogs and trolling Facebook….

Newt Gingrich has had an epiphany:
“The music of love’s a polyphony.
I would thee endow
With five hundred thou.
Thank God for the Chevy Chase Tiffany’s.”

… and then sells antiquities in Israel.

The Israeli authorities follow him around. They watch him conduct sales of the stolen goods. His customers are foreigners he meets while acting as a tour guide at ancient sites.

So far so good. So you arrest the guy, tell reporters his name, tell his history department back in the States, and set a trial date.

But no. I guess the law in Israel is that you can’t name the guy – at least until his trial?

So while UD would love to tell you – especially since they stopped him as he was boarding a plane back to the States and found “tens of thousands of dollars” worth of artifacts on him – who this guy is, and… Wait. Boarding a plane?

The professor admitted to the offenses and after posting bail was allowed to leave the country.

So you take the goods back and then let the guy fly to back to the States? What’s that about? Have you even bothered to tell authorities here – or the guy’s university?

If your history professor were an antiquities crook, awaiting trial abroad, wouldn’t you want to know about it?

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Update: Hokay. John Lund, 70 years old, retired lecturer. (Where? I’ll see if I can find out.)

Lund was allowed to leave after posting a $7,500 bond meant to guarantee he will return to stand trial.

Huh? He’ll eat the money and stay home, no? Still don’t understand why Israel let him go.

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Is this the guy? Appears to be a Mormon…?

Dr. Lund retired after teaching for thirty-six years in the CES Institute program.

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Wow. The lands of the Book of Mormon. New one on me. (“See Educator Video.”)

His work is discussed in a recent issue of Mormon Times.

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Got his own website. Does not include in his list of books the one about blacks and the Mormon church.

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Curiouser and curiouser. The story’s growing by leaps and bounds — nobody’s calling this fraud a professor anymore — but Israel’s behavior — letting Lund go not once but twice — remains baffling.

First Release:

Antiquities officials discovered Lund selling artifacts at a lecture he gave in a Jerusalem hotel, [an antiquities security official said]. They seized the items, searched him and his hotel room, where they found hundreds of artifacts…. Because all the items had been recovered and Lund was a tourist, “We thought it was appropriate to let him off with a warning,” [the official] said. “But we kept our eyes open … and sure enough, the guy kept on doing what he was told not to.”

Wha…? Is this Mommy, or is this a fraud unit? First of all, they didn’t recover everything; he was found loaded with goodies at the airport. Second, he’s selling artifacts in the open, while giving a lecture, in a hotel. Brazen theft. Public flaunting and marketing of stolen goods. But – hey – we’re sure we got it all! All of the hundreds of artifacts! And after all the guy’s a tourist. Foreign countries never arrest tourists.

Second Release:

[H]e had stolen ancient coins in his possession and checks totaling more than $20,000 believed to be from the illegal sales of ancient coins, clay oil lamps, and glass and pottery vessels.

Lund was allowed to leave after posting a $7,500 bond meant to guarantee he will return to stand trial.

… Tiffany’s.

“It is very painful for us,” said Marc Djebali, vice president of the Sarcelles Jewish community. “I know him well. I’ve even seen him seduce a woman, but it was always with gentleness.”

… a devout Muslim!

[A] neighbor, Assetou Kamara, 33, said the woman is a devout Muslim.

… is posthumously honored with a molecular bench.

He was witty.

Indiana Tech, an undistinguished, mainly online thing, boasting a ten percent four-year graduation rate, is going to open a law school.

The ABA, which would accredit Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s tool, will certainly accredit the Indiana Tech Law School.

Mayor Marion Barry’s famous statement captures Bernard-Henri Levy’s argument here.

Among the points he makes:

[I]t would be nice to know, and without delay — how a chambermaid could have walked in alone, contrary to the habitual practice of most of New York’s grand hotels of sending a “cleaning brigade” of two people, into the room of one of the most closely watched figures on the planet.

Who knew about the always-two-chambermaids rule?

And – Why didn’t anyone tell DSK that he was one of the most closely watched figures on the planet?

It’s a mad mad mad mad mad mad world at Auburn University; but every now and then, under incredible external pressure (lawsuits, legislative boycotts, mass uprisings), a glimmer of sanity appears.

As in : The dread Bobby Lowder has decided not to seek yet another term as an Auburn trustee (he’s been one since 1983).

To be sure, the rest of the trustees are a sad bunch; but getting rid of Lowder is a big first step.

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UD thanks an Auburn reader for the link.

… let’s remind ourselves that the glories of big-class public schools, distance-ed for-profit schools, and computers instead of teachers, are reserved for children of the common people.

Of course, no member of the ruling class, … including [Bill] Gates, [Joel] Klein and [Michael] Bloomberg, would enroll their own children in a school that deprived them of smaller classes, because they want to ensure that their own children have the best chance at success. Indeed, all of them sent their own children to private schools with small classes. Chester Finn enrolled his children at Sidwell Friends (where Obama’s children attend) and Exeter; both schools feature small classes, with Exeter boasting of class sizes of 8-12.

Yet it seems for these same people, it is fine for them to recommend that other people’s children should be relegated to classes of thirty or more, and hooked up to computers for “differentiated” instruction.

Leonie Haimson takes a look at the track record of online learning. It ain’t pretty. But … you know… good enough for the little people.