Doug Bandow for the Cato Institute: America’s relationship with Islam is fraught with tension. No one wins if America ends up fighting an endless war with 1.6 billion people worldwide.
Rather, Washington should encourage responsible Islamic voices. One is the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Giving the group diplomatic status would give Americans greater opportunities to influence an important forum for Islamic activism. The group was founded in 1969 and is made up of 57 states, most with majority Islamic populations. …
In 2007 the Bush administration sent an envoy to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. But the Obama administration effectively downgraded America’s representation, withholding ambassador status from the U.S. delegate. Moreover, the group continues to lack diplomatic status, unlike the Organization of American States and even the Vatican.
The Senate Relations Committee is moving legislation to grant diplomatic status to the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council, but not the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, as recommended by the administration. Yet addressing the group would allow Washington to address 57 countries around the globe with substantial Muslim populations.
Bush’s Organization of Islamic Cooperation envoy, Sada Cumber, complained that “the United States has ignored one of its most capable and effective partners in countering the rise of violence extremism around the world.” …
Ongoing engagement with Organization of Islamic Cooperation staff and representatives of member states and involving them in discussions with American advocates of human rights and religious liberty could prove useful over time. While this is possible today, diplomatic status would ease the Organization of Islamic Cooperation administration, encourage enhanced operations and smooth U.S. relations.
Uncle Sam is coming for your salt shaker
Howard Gleckman for the Tax Policy Center: The Food and Drug Administration has proposed voluntary targets for reducing sodium in American diets. Can a salt tax be far behind?
The FDA’s proposal comes as a number of jurisdictions in the U.S. and around the world mull various forms of sugar taxes, aimed at both reducing consumption of sugary drinks and raising revenue. Of course, states have steadily increased tobacco taxes in recent years. …
The FDA is proposing both short-term and long-term voluntary goals for salt in a wide range of foods, including restaurant meals and prepared foods. The plan would require producers to voluntarily “target mean sodium concentrations for each food category.”
The FDA says 35 countries have established similar programs for reducing salt in food. Hungary already has a salt tax, and New Zealand is debating one. …
Any discussion of salt taxes should include a very dark chapter in the history of such levies — the salt tax imposed by the British in India. The raj first attempted to grant a monopoly to the British East India Company on the production and sale of salt. By the early 19th century, the British had added a tax which, by some accounts, represented 10 percent of all revenues in India.
Of course, salt was not taxed in India because it was bad, but rather because it was highly prized, both as a seasoning and a preservative. It was not a corrective tax — the British were hardly worried about the health of Indians — but a revenue source and an attempt to maintain the British monopoly.
By the 20th century, highly taxed salt had become unaffordable to most Indians. While India was one of the biggest producers of salt in the world, Indians could not buy it.
In 1930, Mahatma Gandhi led a march to Dandi on the Arabian Sea to protest the salt tax. It was, in some respects, the real beginning of the Indian independence movement — essentially that nation’s equivalent to the Boston Tea Party a century-and-a-half earlier.
Students give poor grades to women, minorities
Eva Lilienfeld for the Century Foundation: While we should always encourage higher quality teaching in all levels of education, student evaluations of professors do not measure professor quality as well as they claim. Studies repeatedly show that students are biased against racial minorities and female professors in their evaluations.
According to a study published by Innovative Higher Education, students perceive their male professors as “brilliant, awesome and knowledgeable,” while the same teaching styles, when thought to come from a woman, are “bossy and annoying.”
The degree of bias is subjective and varies depending on many factors such as the student’s gender, the age of the professor and the area of study. As such, researchers have concluded that there is no way to control for all these variables. …
Instead, universities could implement alternative ways of measuring professor success. Physicist and education specialist Carl Wieman developed a new approach that takes inventory of the practices a professor uses that have been shown to correlate with student success, such as whether or not the professor regularly provides useful feedback to students.
This rubric-based system, which considers a course from the professor’s perspective, could eliminate the gender and racial biases picked up in professor evaluations while still addressing the need for an efficient teacher evaluation system.
Compiled by Joseph Lawler from reports published by the various think tanks.
