Why can't conservatives at the DI ever tell the truth?

It looks like the Daily Illini has replaced John Bambenek with Paul Schmitt as one of their resident conservative wingnuts. In today's DI, Schmitt has a rant about Planned Parenthood and the evil they do against women. As usual for these sorts of things, it's full of half-truths and distortions.

Quick summary for the non-locals: Planned Parenthood is trying to open a clinic in Aurora, a Chicago suburb. Because of how anti-choice zealots behaved when PP opened a clinic in Austin, much of the paperwork was in the name of a PP subsidiary Gemini Office Development. The Aurora City Council knew that the permits were for a medical clinic and approved them. When it was revealed that this would be a PP clinic, the Jesus hit the fan, and the crazies came out of the woodwork. Aurora is now suing to stop the opening of the clinic.

Schmitt's column today reads:

In Texas, contractors that were building a new clinic for the organization refused to finish their work upon learning of what exactly they were constructing.

Well, that's not exactly what happened. Schmitt makes it sound like the contractors discovered what they were building and quit the project in a huff of moral outrage. Actually, anti-abortion activists started a campaign of intimidation and harassment, including following workers home and bothering the residents in their neighborhoods. This caused enough of the smaller contractors to drop out that the general contractor did as well. Hardly the implication that Schmitt's piece leaves.

Schmitt continues:

The facilities, which have faced repeated lawsuits by parents of its clients, pro-life groups and others, claim to offer necessary and important services to the communities where they are located. Looking at the situation in Aurora, however, one might easily draw a conclusion that Planned Parenthood advocates nothing more than an abdication of personal responsibility, honesty and self-respect.

You know, I went over to Planned Parenthood's website, and I couldn't find any information about abdicating personal responsibility. I did find information on birth control, avoiding STDs, and even how to care for yourself if you are or want to get pregnant. Nothing about dishonesty. So one also might easily draw the conclusion that Schmitt has no idea what he's talking about.

It's funny that Schmitt brings up the Austin Planned Parenthood clinic as an example of a success. One thing that Schmitt doesn't mention is that another woman's health clinic in Austin was bombed by anti-abortion activists this year. Suddenly, that crowd doesn't seem so "pro-life" after all.

Forget the Chief and hit the books

After the Daily Illini's recent redesign, readers can now post comments on articles and editorials. Basically, they've enabled blog comments in the online version of the newspaper. This isn't exclusive to the DI; Salon has done the same thing. Frankly, I don't think it's a good idea, for reasons I'm not going to go into here.

Today, the DI had an editorial about the board's decision to get rid of Chief Illiniwek. There were a handful of comments. A commenter named "lyn" left this:

how about we do that and then we do something more than just symbolic. Why not a lasuit agaisnt the NCAA funded by the money from fans, alumsm students and faculty who intend to withhold said money from the U in protest of the CHief decision. There are to start with 12,400 signaturs on the web petition pledging to so scuh.

We can go afterafter the NCAA for capricious implementation of subjective policy that exceeded their (Ncaa"s) authority and resulted in the violation of first amendment rights. The damages to the reputation and image of the UICU as well depriving 10s of thousands of a meaningful tradition could be a beginning. Dan Maloney was deprived of his 1st amendment rights also...

It goes on. She posts two more times. The third time was in ALL CAPS BECAUSE SHE HAS SOMETHING IMPORTANT TO SAY.

Seriously, this is just embarrassing. I hope to God that lyn is not a UIUC student. In the above quote, I was going to point out each misspelling, grammatical mistake, and other error that a moment's proofreading would have caught, but realized that would be every single word. Parts of it are so incoherent I actually can't figure out what she's trying to say.

The ineptness of the writing aside, she seems to be claiming that there's some First Amendment issue with the Chief. I'm sorry, but that's just bunk. The NCAA is a private organization. UIUC was welcome to keep the Chief, but the NCAA didn't want to associate with us if it did. End of story. They were well within their rights to do so.

Getting back to lyn's comments, if this is the quality of writing our undergraduates display, we need to attract a better caliber of student. I don't care if you're studying nuclear physics, political science, or freaking physical education, decent communication skills are imperative. UIUC is ranked as the 25th best university in the world, for crying out loud. Our students should be able to throw together half a dozen coherent sentences, even on the spur of the moment.

Then again, I should probably just look on the bright side. Maybe she was just drunk.