I was curious to see what would happen to Rick Santorum after being subjected to the harsh glare of the media spotlight, now that he's the Republican flavor of the week. It speaks highly of him that one of the worst things you can say about him is about a comment he made about college attendance.

On MSNBC Monday night, Ed Shultz expressed shock that Santorum would say that President Obama is a snob for insisting that everyone goes to college. The progressive media framed his comment like this:

"President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob," Santorum said Saturday at the Americans for Prosperity Presidential Forum in Troy, Michigan.

At first glance, it seems odd that Santorum would think that Obama wanting people to be educated somehow makes him a snob. But here is his comment in context to some blue collar workers:

"There are good decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to test that aren't taught by some liberal college professor to try to indoctrinate them. Oh, I understand why he wants you to go to college -- he wants to remake you in his image."

Santorum is saying that Obama is assuming that a worker doesn't have value if he doesn't possess a college degree.

I'd argue that people who go to college nowadays are often less useful to society than those who don't. The immigrant laborer who operates a Bobcat, drives a forklift, or digs trenches has more practical value to our nation than some college graduate who got his degree in communications or psychology or sociology or music or environmental science or education. The former's experience tethers him to reality; the latter is taught things that sever his ties to reality.

College is sort of an alternate universe--students go there without paying (up front, anyway), professors teach without having to worry about achieving results, and the money keeps flowing, thanks to generous government-backed loans.

When President Obama says that everyone needs to go to college, I start thinking about who is going to pay for that. Currently, it's the students, although they don't realize it yet. They can defer payments, but one day they wake up and realize they are $100,000 in debt and have no marketable skills.

Why does college cost so much more than it did a decade ago? Joe Biden said, "By the way, government subsidies have impacted upon rising tuition costs."

More people going to college means more people buried in debt, thanks to government subsidies. It might not be so bad if the students were learning something useful, but sadly, that's not the case. 

It's been seventy years since the United States government rounded up 110,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans and locked them in internment camps for the remainder of World War II. The anniversary passed with little fanfare.

On February 19, 1942, two months after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which created military zones where citizens and immigrants with "foreign enemy ancestry" could be relocated into prison camps.

Amazingly, the Supreme Court upheld the law, as American citizens sat in out-of-the-way camps under guard towers.

Not much is left of the camps--I visited the one at Manzanar. The barracks and other structures are gone, save some guard towers.

I first learned about the internment camps in elementary school, and I have to admit I remember my first reaction was that it made sense to protect the country from espionage and sabotage. I had only a limited knowledge of World War II, which was just limited to which countries were involved, some important battles, some significant dates, and of course, the weapons and vehicles of war. Having only a little knowledge of history may be worse than having none at all--I thought the German army was cool because it had the best tanks, machine guns, and planes. Of course, I didn't think they were so cool after I learned about the Holocaust. Superficial thinking also led me to agree with internment at an age before I understood the dangers of government, the Constitution, and the rule of law.

Similarly, at that age I thought FDR was a good president. He won the war, after all. I've grown out of that belief, too, but sadly, the man that forcibly took a hundred thousand people from their homes is consistently ranked behind Washington and Lincoln as the greatest president.

Not only did FDR blatantly violate the rights of so many people, he also ushered in the era of big government, extended the length of the Great Depression, and wouldn't leave office after completing his second term.

Another highly ranked president with some major overlooked problems is Woodrow Wilson. He also violated civil rights in the name of fighting espionage during wartime. Here's what Wikipedia has to say about it.

To counter opposition to the war at home, Wilson pushed the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 through Congress to suppress anti-British, pro-German, or anti-war opinions.While he welcomed socialists who supported the war, he pushed at the same time to arrest and deport foreign-born radicals.Citing the Espionage Act, the U.S. Post Office, following the instructions of the Justice Department, refused to carry any written materials that could be deemed critical of the U.S. war effort.Some sixty newspapers judged to have revolutionary or antiwar content were deprived of their second-class mailing rights and effectively banned from the U.S. mails.Mere criticism of the Wilson administration and its war policy became grounds for arrest and imprisonment

Mere criticism of the Wilson Administration was enough to land you in prison, and the FDR Administration would throw you in a prison camp if you looked like you belonged to the wrong race. Hard to believe these are American leaders and not 1930s Spanish, German, or Italian dictators.

Wilson and FDR have one other thing in common--both were progressives. Wilson was an early leader of the progressive movement, and FDR implemented many of their social programs. Not surprisingly, these two advocates of huge government also turned that government on their own people.

Seventy years later, we remember that no small government ever rounded up its citizens.

Gender inequality on Valentine's Day isn't a big topic of discussion in the news, normally, because that subject is only important when there's a perception that women are being discriminated against. Nobody cares about men. So give the Star credit for running an article Monday that pointed out that men spend twice as much on their gifts than women do.

Why the discrepancy? There are lots of theories, but first let's dispense with the worst one. Men do not spend a lot of money because testosterone makes them competitive and they want to outspend other men. If that's what you think, you need to spend more time with the guys. Men would much rather that President Obama issue an executive order that caps how much we have to spend on Valentine's Day. But the president isn't stupid--would you want to tell Michelle you're going to do that? Instead, he wisely told American men to "go big."

The Star mentioned another theory.

"For women there's a tendency to think that a man loves me based on how much he spends on me," offered Deborah MacInnis, a USC business administration professor who studies consumer behavior. "There's an expectation that you come through with the goods."

And what happens when you bring home the goods?

About 85 percent of Valentine's Day shoppers at Passion Flowers in Ventura are men, said store owner Michelle Rein. They spend an average of maybe $100, although purchases stretch from $10 for wrapped gerbera daisies to $500 for enough floral bling to win over a diva. The lower part of that range includes men in new relationships, who tend to be more conservative.

The guys make a bigger investment, but they also garner dividends in terms of romance, Rein said.

"If they're happy," she said of the giftees, "one leads to the other."

Uh, is she saying that if the gift passes muster, then the man gets his "gift?"

So the first lady says that women equate money with romance, and the second lady says that women trade sex for gifts. Not a pretty picture we're painting here.

I think both are wrong, as far as Valentine's Day is concerned.

The discrepancy of how much more a man pays for Valentine's Day has to do with intrinsic value. Men tend to appreciate practical gifts, for example, tools or food. Women tend to like items with sentimental value, like flowers or cards.

There's not a man among us who hasn't scratched his head at why he's paying so much for flowers that will be dead in three days.

The price is so high because you're not really paying for the flowers.

The prices of practical items are anchored to their intrinsic value. A hammer of a given quality will not suddenly go up in price by 500% around a certain date on the calendar every year like a dozen red roses will. And a manufacturer of hammers would have a tough time selling a hammer with a markup that greeting card makers get with their $5 cards that cost five cents to produce.

The presents men want are limited by their intrinsic value. Sentimental gifts, which lack intrinsic value, have no such limitation, and thus cost more.

The result is that men have to spend more than women on their gifts. Throw in that women know Valentine's Day is a woman's holiday and the obligation is on the man to make his ladies happy on Valentine's Day, and you have the recipe for gender inequality.

Should we form a special interest group to defend men from having to spend so much on Valentine's Day? Should we boycott florists and See's candy?

No. We just need to realize that gender inequality happens because genders are not the same. Men and women are physically, biologically, and physiologically different, and we're not always going to act the same, or have the same outcomes in life, even though government and progressives will try.

Syrian President Assad is attacking citizens at random, according to eyewitness accounts.

"Women and children have got used to seeing bodies in the street and blood in the street and body parts," one anti-Assad activist said. "We are asking for help."

The U.N. cavalry isn't on its way, thanks to China and Russia's veto of a resolution to urge Assad to step aside, proving once again that the United Nations is a tool that hampers good actions and legitimizes bad ones.

Syria is of great strategic importance in the Middle East because it's the latest proxy battleground to fight spreading Iranian influence. Stratfor put it this way:

Should the al Assad regime -- or the Syrian regime without al Assad -- survive, Iran would therefore enjoy tremendous influence with Syria, as well as with Hezbollah in Lebanon. The current course in Iraq coupled with the survival of an Alawite regime in Syria would create an Iranian sphere of influence stretching from western Afghanistan to the Mediterranean. This would represent a fundamental shift in the regional balance of power and probably would redefine Iranian relations with the Arabian Peninsula. This is obviously in Iran's interest. It is not in the interests of the United States, however.

The private intelligence firm stated that preventing the spread of Iranian influence to Syria is a "primary concern" but needs to try to do so "without crossing Iran's red lines" that might lead to a disruption of oil (particularly in an election year).

Options in Syria are limited for the United States. Direct military intervention is not realistic given the overextension of our forces. The U.N. route ran into problems with Russia and China, both of which have an interest to help Iran, namely weakening the U.S. Covert action and supporting the uprising is really the only hand the United States can play, and the Syrians are responding to that with a brutal crackdown.

This country's dominance in the world introduced a sort of Pax Americana, whereby widespread peace accompanied widespread stability. Our slow retreat from the top echelon of global power will leave us  standing idly by, only able to helplessly watch more and more human catastrophes. Those internal dissidents who helped chip away at U.S. hegemony over the decades are indirectly responsible for the ensuing chaos America is increasingly finding harder to stop.

After Germany's World War II defeat, the shamed postwar German government banned Nazi symbols on everything from flags to model airplanes, in an attempt to suppress Nazi sympathizers--although the need to forget that they allowed the Holocaust on their soil probably played a role in banishing swastikas and iron crosses from their sight.

Others, especially in the United States, want to remember the Holocaust and keep pointing to its atrocities so that mankind might not make the same mistake. Whereas the German anti-swastika laws even ensnare anti-fascists, who, for example, might display a swastika being smashed to pieces by a fist, Americans have been more common sense in their approach.

Like the Germans, however, sometimes we can overreact to the subject of Nazism and the Holocaust and try to stamp it out of existence altogether.

While it's poor form to label your political opponents Nazis, fascists, and anti-Semites simply because they disagree with you, sometimes it's appropriate if certain clinical definitions are met.

True, Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies is at play, which states that as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of someone calling someone a Nazi or Hitler approaches one. If you use this Reductio ad Hitlerum attack, you've probably lost the argument.

However, that's not to say that you should never use it. In fact, if we can never mention Nazism or Hitler aren't we bound to forget it, and isn't that exactly what we don't want to do?

The Left disproportionately benefits from Godwin's Rule, because, let's face it--Hitler was a socialist. The Nazi Party was the National Socialist Party. They believed in big government, big education, big social programs, and top-down social engineering.

Now, that's not to say that all socialists are like Hitler because Hitler was a socialist. To say so would be to introduce a fallacy to the discussion. However, if Hitler liked socialist policy X (or libertarian policy Y), then it would be fair to point that out so that people might realize, "oh wait, maybe this is a bad idea."

Unfortunately, if someone makes that point now, they are attacked as poisoning the debate.

A Catholic bishop in Pennsylvania found himself in that position recently when he said Hitler and Mussolini would have loved to have a powerful government-run education system.

The bishop made a comparison between the interests of the public school system and totalitarianism, while discussing what he sees as a lack of school choice in Pennsylvania.

"In the totalitarian government, they would love our system," McFadden said. "This is what Hitler and Mussolini and all them tried to establish -- a monolith; so all the children would be educated in one set of beliefs and one way of doing things."

He said the "H" word, and the Anti-Defamation League and the ACLU jumped on it.

McFadden's comments drew immediate criticism from the Anti-Defamation League and the American Civil Liberties Union - which complained that the bishop had raised the specter of the Holocaust.

You'd think the Anti-Defamation League, of all groups, would not want to stifle criticism of Hitler's policies.

"The Holocaust was a unique experience.  It does not lend itself to inappropriate analogies.  We have an obligation to protect the memory of those who suffered because of it from those who would distort it and undermine and trivialize the history of the Holocaust, however inadvertently.  Our role should be to honor those who fought to defeat the murderous Nazis, and not to inappropriately draw reckless comparisons."

But in this case, the analogy is true. Hitler and Mussolini wanted state-run education that promoted the state. It's not inappropriate. If the ADL wants people to remember the Holocaust, than it should want to remember what sort of conditions made it possible. Government propaganda was one important factor.

It's also appropriate to point out that the Catholic Church would benefit financially from a voucher system that promotes more school choice. Dollars that would be spent on public schools would instead be attached to students that went to Catholic schools.

Adults need to be mature enough not to shut down a debate when the H-word is mentioned, or when schools are attacked, or when it's pointed out that non-profits might be motivated by money.  Not being able to talk about certain things merely ensures they'll occur again.