Attention Elis: You may have already won the Swine Flu Clearinghouse! According to the Yale University Health Services, at least four patients are currently being treated for influenza A and awaiting test results from the Connecticut Department of Health, AKA Swine Flu Central.

While other schools seem to be sticking to the Cover Your Cough handbook, Yale looks like they might actually be taking this shit seriously. Because kids are dying. In Mexico. Accordingly, the Yale administration has put a stop on all funding to go to Mexico based on a campus-wide email that made it into our tip box. (Don't worry, students are going to go anyways. Chiapas is crazy this time of year.)

In an unexpectedly extreme move, Dartmouth is actually pulling kids out of Mexico. It looks like the 11 study abroaders at the Dartmouth Language School Abroad program in Cholula might not learn the subjunctive case after all. Hopefully they got in on the hot sauce manufactured there. You know, the one with the wooden top. IvyGate favorite, that is.

After the jump, a school-by-school report of the biggest health scare in the United States that doesn't really seem all that scary. But it's always fun seeing surgical masks in the street.

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The recent Cornell major-legitimacy dustup between Ann Coulter and Keith Olbermann lit more than a few contempt-fueled fires.  To recap, Coulter calls herself an Ivy Leaguer because she's a Cornell alum, but Olbermann is not because he's a Cornell alum.  Olbermann responds on "Countdown" by stating that he is indeed an Ivy Leaguer because he's a Cornell alum and how dare you?  So obviously, somebody's not getting invited to somebody's St. Patty's Day Party.

But what are Ms. Coulter's feelings about that other arch-liberal, smug Cornellian television host, Bill Maher?  Well, Maher graduated from Arts & Sciences, so he's an Ivy Leaguer by her standards.  The two of them yesterday concluded a three-day speaking/debate tour in three cities and The New York Times reported that they may even be "tight."

In a predebate telephone interview, Mr. Maher said that he and Ms. Coulter were good friends — “Not dating, as people try to say on the Internet, but friends” — and that he respected her resolve. “Unlike so many people in America, she was not afraid to get booed,” Mr. Maher said.

Ms. Coulter likewise said that she respected Mr. Maher’s bipartisan approach to “Politically Incorrect.” “Unlike most snoozefest political shows, Bill booked guests who didn’t all agree with one another[.]”

If nothing else comes out of this, the Maher-Coulter-Olbermann holds the slot the most polarizing, ear-splitting, and self-congratulatory Ivy love triangle so far this month. Now for the Brown alums to chance to take the spotlight. C'mon Jim Axelrod. You know you want to say something regretable.

Ann Coulter's spat with Keith Olbermann over Cornell bragging rights began the way all great battles of the mind do — Does this Rush Limbaugh make the GOP look fat? — and ends the way our comment boards do, a degenerative slinging of acceptance rates and SAT scores eventually boiling down to one guy pointing at his diploma and screaming about how smart he is.

Welcome back to the Great Ivy League Snob Off. Let's meet the contestants:

In the first corner: Cornell grad and MSNBC gravitas junkie Keith Olbermann, who says conserva-pundit Rush Limbaugh is a know-nothing plebe who couldn't tell the Constitution from his left foot. He's so dumb, he flunked ballroom dance! (True story. Check his Wikipedia.)

In the second corner: Cornell grad and journeyman blowhard Ann Coulter, who jumps to Limbaugh's defense with an astonishingly baffling 900-word diatribe about how Olbermann is not the "scary smart" messiah his fans think he is, but an Ivy League fraud:

Keith didn't go to the Ivy League Cornell; he went to the Old MacDonald Cornell. ... Keith went to an affiliated state college at Cornell, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (average SAT: about that of pulling guards at the University of South Carolina; acceptance rate: 1 of every 1 applicants).

Touché, Coulter. You hit us East Coast intelligentsia right where it hurts-- the threat of farm dirt, and athletes! This is even worse than the time we realized Obama went to some weensy school in LA* before transferring to Columbia. Her opponent reeling, the skeletor in the right wing's closet delivers a bony little knock-out punch:

Olbermann's incessant lying about having an "Ivy League education" when he went to the non-Ivy League ag school at Cornell would be like a graduate of the Yale locksmithing school boasting about being a "Yale man."

A metaphor involving blue collar labor? Low blow.

But wait! Olbermann's still got some fight in him. After the jump: The response that may require us to banish Keither Olbermann from the Ivy League forever.
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Yesterday Ann Coulter directed her incendiary commentary towards Cornell, the "plastic Ivy." By basically trashing their College of Agriculture and Life Sciences for NOT being an Ivy League school, Coulter compares Keith Olbermann's referring to his "Ivy League education" to many forms of deceit. The best of it:

Olbermann's incessant lying about having an "Ivy League education" when he went to the non-Ivy League ag school at Cornell would be like a graduate of the Yale locksmithing school boasting about being a "Yale man."

As Coulter further muddles her own understanding of the Ivy League—originally and still just a sports conference—she raps about how alums of the "Ivy League Cornell" go on to become Supreme Court justices and stuff while the Ag School grads are basically all hicks and hockey players. So does this mean that Cornell is full of imposters playing Ivy League sports but who will eventually fail in becoming the next Paul Wolfowitz?

Not if the author of the Daily Sun's Shameless Commerce has anything to do with it. Read all about it after the jump.

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