Yup. It’s the Heritage Foundation, all right.
It didn’t take long for the the leadership of an ultra-ideological ex-Senator to make the Heritage Foundation to jump the shark, did it?
“Jason Richwine, the co-author of a controversial immigration study released this week by the Heritage Foundation, tells Post Politics that he has resigned his position with the organization….The study written by Richwine and Robert Rector argued that the immigration reform bill would cost $6.3 trillion, but it was widely panned by conservative groups pushing for immigration reform as not accounting for the economic benefits of immigrants.
“Complicating matters were a series of revelations about Richwine, including that he had written a doctoral thesis at Harvard University arguing that the United States should focus its immigration efforts on those with high IQs and that he had written for a Web site that describes itself as “nationalist.”
Here is who else needs to resign: Jim DeMint.
Imagine: he has been in his post as president of the conservative think tank for less than four months, and the first major report it puts out on a subject near and dear to DeMint’s red, red heart, the evils of “amnesty,” is co-authored by a race-biased nativist. DeMint’s supposedly scholarly organization didn’t vet its own scholar, or worse, it did, and allowed a researcher with a particularly ugly bias to present the flagship case against the proposals for immigration reform. In record time, DeMint has made his occasionally relevant organization a laughing stock, provided invaluable validation for every open border advocate who equates opposition to illegal immigration with racism, and delivered a kick in the groin to anyone who has legitimate arguments to make against the legislation now gathering momentum…and there are many.
Wow. That’s fast work, Jim! Luckily, you also provided the Foundation’s board with a handy, effective way to begin winning back its forfeited credibility, which, with a little luck and care, may only take the rest of the decade. They can get rid of you.
And if they don’t, well, that will tell us all we need to know about The Heritage Foundation.
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Pointer: Geoffrey Baskir
Source: Washington Post
Ethics Alarms 
Doesn’t it say a lot about Harvard, too, for granting a Ph.D. based on that dissertation?
I’d rather that, I think, than have it ding dissertations for being politically unpalatable.
Political science isn’t exactly known for methodological rigor, and it’s possible to defend virtually any empirical proposition to the standards of the field with “appropriate” “research”.
That, and the entire field is a pretty thorough demonstration of the toxic effect political pressures can have on attempts to honestly answer empirical questions.
Which… ultimately means that Tom Lehrer’s comments on the matter are pretty much accurate (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfZWyUXn3So for the video).
In any case, the point of all of this is that they couldn’t honestly deny his dissertation… not based on his conclusions, anyway.
Because, seriously, I could write one justifying the conclusion that adding additional flavors to Ben & Jerry’s ice cream lineup during the winter would help solve America’s national debt.
They’ll likely double down, not back down. The Dems have lost all credibility, this will be seen as just more anti-Conservative bias by one side, the GOP just behaving like the GOP by the other.
There’s now such an ocean of misinformation and lies, truths like these get lost or ignored.
I hope I’m wrong. The clean-up must start somewhere.