Terrorist lipstick
By Jessica Peck Corry

This article original appeared in the Denver Post on May 18, 2007.

Terrorists have stolen my lipstick.

While in line at Denver International Airport earlier this spring, an agent with the Transportation Security Administration pulled me aside after screening my luggage. As a responsible diabetic used to frequent questions, I was ready to pull out my prescription needles, my medication, or even my digital blood-sugar meter.

But the agent wasn’t interested in any of this. She wanted my lip balm.

She insisted that the balm, the perfect blend of beige and pink, was banned by the TSA. It was, she said, a gel-like substance that should have been in a clear, zip-top plastic bag before I came through screening.

I should have known better, she reprimanded me. She then rifled through the rest of my luggage. I cringed at each of her additional discoveries. My favorite cucumber lotion. Into the trash. My eye cream. Gone. I begged her to let me borrow a zip-top bag from someone else in line. She said no.

The diabetic supplies, however, remained untouched. She didn’t even bother to look at them - including my insulin.

It was at that moment I officially realized the terrorists have won. We have entered into a strange new world where lip balm is terrorist territory and yet needles are fine.

Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, we’ve convinced ourselves that government knows best. We silently tolerate abuses of sanity because we’re worried we won’t be allowed to board planes, that the government will begin surveillance on our homes or, worse, that our friends will call us paranoid. Well, call me paranoid.

We live in confusing times. After Sept. 11, new agencies started popping up. Border security is no longer an INS problem, but has fallen under the control of ICE. And suddenly, every movement we make seems to be under the tracking capabilities of the Department of Homeland Security.

A New York media executive and frequent flyer told me she has resorted to putting her eye cream in her contact lens case. No one ever looks there for terrorist loot. Maybe someone should start a website outlining such suggestions. Major retailers are already selling “TSA Approved” travel kits for $9.99 that include the plastic zip-top bag that eluded me. At least terrorism hasn’t killed capitalism altogether.

In spite of all of our government’s efforts, we really aren’t much safer than we were in 2001. In fact, in many cases, terrorists today could just as easily infiltrate our system. Maybe they can’t do it by breaking down a cockpit door, but they’ve got plenty of other opportunities. Major California and New York commercial ports are just as vulnerable. Our infectious disease specialists are still stumped when it comes to developing a comprehensive strategy to prevent or respond to a bio-terror attack like small pox or anthrax.

Of course, the “no-gel” policy came after British authorities broke up a terrorist ring that would have used similar substances to bomb a trans-Atlantic flight. Our response: You can bring your gel on the plane, but it has to go in a plastic bag that you can easily access during your flight. It’s a policy designed to fail.

There have been victories in our battle against terrorism. The Department of Justice has broken up terrorist cells all over the country, from Seattle to Buffalo, resulting in a multitude of deportations. Not surprisingly, however, it appears not a single one of these documented victories has involved the confiscation of lip balm.

I proudly consider myself an American loyalist. I was working in the U.S. Senate on Sept. 11 and watched in horror as flames rose from the Pentagon. Just a month later, I was one of a couple dozen people who tested positive for anthrax exposure on Capitol Hill. Walking to work every day, I passed military tanks manned by machine gun-carrying soldiers, and saw men in moon suits conduct bio-terror testing on my office. At night, my windows rattled from the power of fighter jets above.

I know what it’s like to be afraid and want to fight back. I’ve also learned that we must be logical in this pursuit. Until, as a nation, we can fully dismantle al-Qaeda’s 60-nation terrorist training network, we must act logically at home.

Let’s all say it aloud: Lipstick is not a terrorist threat.

Jessica Peck Corry (Jessica@i2i.org) is a policy analyst with the Independence Institute, where she specializes in civil rights, land use, and higher education policy.

From the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:
by Katherine Kersten

Race and Sex Discrimination May Bite the Dust
Wednesday, April 25th, 2007

Here’s a law everyone should be willing to support:

The state shall not discriminate against or grant preferential treatment to any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education or public contracting.

Voters in bastions of liberalism like California and Washington have passed laws like this — most recently in Michigan. Now civil rights activists have announced a “Super Tuesday of Equality” campaign to do the same in Colorado, Missouri, Arizona and Oklahoma in 2008.

Liberal interest groups will fight tooth and nail to prevent this, as will the legislators beholden to them. Both are loath to abandon the race and sex preferences written into current laws, university admissions policies and government contracting practices.

But in states where these measures have passed or are being proposed, supporters can go straight to the people in ballot initiatives.

In Colorado, civil rights initiative advocates are optimistic, says the Washington Times:

They pointed to the furor surrounding University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill, who is under investigation for comments comparing victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks to Nazis. Mr. Churchill was awarded a full professorship despite weak academic credentials, and critics say the university gave him special treatment because he claimed Cherokee Indian ancestry, which is now in dispute. ‘We know people are with us on this in the aftermath of Ward Churchill,’ said Jessica Peck Corry of the Independence Institute based in Golden, Colo. ‘People are clearly saying that…it’s time to start treating women and minorities as the competent people we are.’

California — which passed the nation’s first civil rights initiative 11 years ago — is providing inspiration in the new campaign. Ward Connerly, the black former University of California regent who masterminded the initiative, points to its benefits:

[Connerly] and other initiative organizers say preference programs often harm the groups they intend to help…. Since preferences were banned in California’s public universities, Mr. Connerly said, the dropout rate for minority students has plummeted while the graduation rate has soared.

Racial preferences, says Connerly, resulted in mismatches between students and institutions of higher learning — placing them in a context where they were “doomed to fail.” “Once we eliminated preferences, retention went up,” he said.

Windels hurting schoolkids and her party
Friday, April 20

By Jessica Peck Corry, Independence Institute

It’s been a tough month for state Sen. Sue Windels, D-Arvada.

First, her conspiracy to dismantle Colorado’s Charter School Institute comes to light. Second, she angers minority leaders when she calls charter students “lazy.” And finally, when a Fort Collins education leader expresses outrage at the situation, Windels identifies such concerns as “unnecessary hysteria.”

Sen. Windels, for the sake of Colorado’s public school children, please stop the name-calling and start taking responsibility. You have lost your ability to effectively govern the Senate Education Committee. The time has come for you to resign your chairmanship.

Windels’ troubles began late last month when an e-mail conversation she had with state Rep. Mike Merrifield, D-Colorado Springs, came to light. After the exchange was posted on the Internet, it spread like wildfire, ultimately forcing Merrifield to resign his House Education Committee chairmanship for saying “There must be a special place in hell for these Privatizers, Char\[t\]erizers and Voucherizers. They deserve it!”

Windels’ comments, while less offensive on their face, revealed that she wanted a “full repeal” of the institute - which was created in 2004 as an alternative to local school boards for parents seeking to establish public charter programs for their children. The institute is essential for public school parents and teachers being bullied by local school districts.

In the e-mail exchange, the duo strategized on Windels’ legislative effort to dismantle the institute. In the aftermath of Merrifield’s resignation, vocal outrage flew from fellow Democratic legislators and Windels was forced to concede that her bill was dead. She did not, however, apologize. At minimum, if Windels disagreed with Merrifield’s comments, she should have said so. Her complacency can only be read as an endorsement of Merrifield’s extremist views.

Windels next went on the attack. In an e-mail to Kim Miller, co-founder and board president of the high performing chartered Ridgeview Classical Schools in Fort Collins, Windels called the public outrage to the e-mail exchange “unnecessary hysteria.” Miller is now calling on Windels to resign. Windels continues to attack public charter schools, most recently calling some online charter school students “lazy” and saying they see such schools as a “quick, easy” way to earn a high school diploma.

These latest comments, reported in the Rocky Mountain News, came late last week in an e-mail Windels sent to Mark Lopez, director of a Hope Online Learning Academy Co-op in Denver. While she had some good things to say about the school, calling it “truly innovative,” she did attack such programs for attracting “kids who are struggling or lazy \[and\] see online as a ‘quick, easy’ way to get a diploma without having to put in all the seat-time and effort.” Lopez saw the remark as an attack on the school’s large minority student population.

As reported in the Rocky, co-chairmen of the Community Coalition to Access and Equality in Education, Butch Montoya and the Rev. Reginald Holmes, are echoing Miller’s calls for resignation.

This is a development the Democrats can no longer afford to ignore. In the interests of full disclosure, I ran against Windels for the Colorado Senate in 2004. She is passionate in her belief that charter schools are a threat to traditional public schools. Passionate, but wrong. Districts allowing public charter schools to flourish have seen public schools improve. Milwaukee and California’s Bay Area prove this well.

In the real world, there comes a time when leaders must accept accountability and, in some situations, step aside. Democrats should insist on Windels’ resignation. As the party’s point person on education, she is compromising their legislative efforts. As a result of her actions, she has now had at least two bills killed by bipartisan coalitions, including one earlier this week that would have instituted changes to public online-charter-school oversight. The time has come for new leadership. For the sake of her party, our public schools, and for all of Colorado’s children, including my own daughter, she should resign her chairmanship.

Jessica Peck Corry (Jessica@i2i.org) is a public policy analyst with the Independence Institute. She is a resident of Denver.

U. of Colorado at Boulder Is Criticized for Its Diversity Expenditures
Chronicle of Higher Education
By PETER SCHMIDT

A Colorado think tank critical of affirmative action has issued a report alleging that the University of Colorado at Boulder has little idea how much money it spends on various diversity efforts and poorly manages such expenditures.

The libertarian Independence Institute, based in Golden, Colo., says in a report issued on Monday that the state’s flagship campus has greatly understated how much it spends on diversity programs and devotes a disproportionate share of such funds to paying administrative salaries rather than helping minority students.

The Boulder campus’s efforts to promote diversity involve “an unknown number of programs that receive an unclear amount of funding for an uncertain number of employees who serve an unspecified number of students,” the report concludes. It recommends that state lawmakers and the university system’s central administration undertake an independent investigation of the campus’s diversity spending practices.

A spokesman for the university, Bronson R. Hilliard, on Tuesday challenged many of the report’s findings and called some of it “a distortion,” but said officials there were still reviewing the report and were not yet ready to rebut it point by point.

Mr. Hilliard said the report conflated expenditures by the flagship and the system, and he argued that the institute’s researchers had asked university officials to do an impossible task: to sort out exactly how much of the money budgeted for programs that serve all students goes toward helping minority members. “It is a very fundamental disagreement we have with their interpretation,” he said.

Ken McConnellogue, a spokesman for the University of Colorado system, said the system had in fact accounted for its expenditures on diversity programs and had been “quite forthcoming” in releasing such information. And G.P.
(Bud) Peterson, chancellor of the Boulder campus, said the report mischaracterized some spending, by, for example, classifying as “administrative” expenditures on the salaries of people who work with minority students to improve their graduation rates.

“Do I believe we are doing things in the absolutely most efficient and optimal manner? No,” Mr. Peterson said. But, he added, “Do I believe we are wasting money? Absolutely not.”

The controversy over the report highlights the difficulty in precisely tracking university expenditures on diversity, which at larger institutions may be promoted by hundreds of programs housed in a wide range of administrative offices and academic departments. In response to past Chronicle inquiries about their spending on diversity programs, officials at several colleges have said they do not track how much of their budget goes toward promoting diversity, and have privately acknowledged that they are hesitant to try to come up with such numbers for fear of providing ammunition to critics of affirmative action.

The Independence Institute’s Campus Accountability Project began pressing officials at the University of Colorado at Boulder to release budget numbers three years ago. In a written statement accompanying the report released on Monday, Jessica Peck Corry, the project’s director, said, “We’ve spent the last three years trying to find out how much CU spends in the name of diversity. We’ve finally gotten an answer: CU has no idea.”

Ms. Corry added: “In our view, diversity should be all about helping disadvantaged kids get to college, but clearly, as our report indicates, CU’s diversity leadership is more concerned with adding administrative positions than with trimming waste that would free up resources for scholarship dollars.”

The report says that, of the $21.8-million that the campus has reported spending on diversity programs, just $4-million goes toward student scholarships. It notes that Chancellor Peterson has acknowledged that the $21.8-million figure is “not even close” to a full total for the system’s diversity expenditures.

On Tuesday, Mr. Peterson said the line between expenditures on diversity and expenditures on education in general is blurry, and he likes it that way.
“My goal is to have diversity be so pervasive, and such an integral part of what we do, we can’t tell where the boundaries are,” he said.