Yes, well, that's assuming that Americans Elect was a good-faith effort at electoral reform and not an exercise in narcissism and nepotism, engineered in large part to funnel money to consultants. Or am I being too cynical?

The Teaparty succeeded with, if anything, less organization than the Occupy people. But it seems to me that they succeeded because there were candidates who were well funded and it was an off year election when the party of the president ‘always’ loses seats.

The candidates who are ready to carry the Occupy message this year are women. They are not as ideological as the Teaparty winners, but the 99 versus 1 means more to them than to many male candidates. The Republicans ‘war on women’ has ‘helped’ a lot.

What was really spooky however, was when I went to trace the NAS a bit further, and found them involved with things such as a Supreme Court case (regarding minority affirmative action in college admissions [you guess which side they were on]}, where they used numerous research articles, from seemingly forthright academic institutions, to support their arguments. The spooky part is not that they were involved in such arguments, that was to be expected. The spooky part was when you go a bit deeper and research the institutions/academies behind the research articles, quoted by the NAS in their arguments, and you find what could be considered a somewhat scary, and very well organized web of right wing academies/institutes, with no further apparent purpose than to support modern day far right ideologies, and whose research articles are anything but scientifically based. The whole thing sort of makes the Illuminate look like a bunch of disorganized Cub Scouts.

If there is anything to be really concerned about, it would be this seemingly vast web of right wing groups hiding behind seemingly innocuous titles/mission statements that appear to actually portray them as liberal to middle of the road organizations. Nothing like truth in advertising.

But, hey, back to the main point here. If you want a really good retort to the recent CAS report, I came across the following, which went well beyond any expectation I had for finding something of its nature, and I do mean well beyond. My hat is off to them. http://academeblog.org/2012/04/03/a-crisis-of-censorship-a-response-to-the-national-association-of-scholars/

To clarify/feed-the-trolls, I didn’t say that the report “MUST be false.” I said that the problems I hear about from University of California professors stem from the defunding of higher ed. That’s a series of factually true statements: (1) I don’t teach in the Cal system (so I don’t have firsthand knowledge), (2) I do hear about Cal system problems from friends, and (3) those problems are unrelated to the subject of this report.

The narrative purpose of that passage was to highlight the disconnect. I’m a scholar. I know California scholars. They’ve never mentioned this issue. So this report, coming from the “California Association of Scholars,” leads me to wonder “hmm, who is the California Association of Scholars?”

I’m not sure where you reached the conclusion that this blog post was a critique of the report.* The title of the post is “What the hell is the National Association of Scholars?” The topic of the post is about this organization that I had never heard of, and how it clearly has engaged in some… creative self-naming. The conclusion of the post is that such self-naming is dishonest, and runs counter to their own mission statement. So, please explain further: how and why do you feel the critique is poorly constructed?

*Yes I am. You’re a troll. You reached that conclusion because its the trolly thing to do.**
**See, THAT was an ad hominem. My critique of the organization, notsomuch.

P.S. I got a great laugh after you briefly concluded the conclusion of the report MUST be false considering you have a couple of friends involved in the UC system. Scientists like yourself CERTAINLY know that a couple of examples out of an incredibly large sample group without a doubt constitute an accurate an accurate analysis.

A+ friendo.