Creepy child-man Jonathan Krohn goes on the record with The Daily Beast as to which college he wants to attend. Guess where a 14-year-old conservative “pundit” thinks is cool! (Hint: not Brown!)

Jonathan has his heart set on Princeton for college, where he’d be able to do radio from New York, he says, and then shuttle back for class. He’s particularly drawn to the conservative Christian professor, Robert P. George, who teaches there.

Ooh, we can’t wait for Krohn to pledge an eating club–and to find out the Frists are  vacuous. People do realize that 14-year-olds are literally incapable of holding political opinions that are not either in agreement with or as rejection of their parents’, correct? And that maybe, besides the initial spectacle of someone who hasn’t yet hit puberty writing a book called Defining Conservatism, that, um, someone is buying the “business cards” and signing the permission slips for missed days of middle school? Yep, Jonathan Krohn is the product of a stage mom, one Marla Krohn, who says:

A lot of people have trouble understanding how a 14 year old could know more about the issues than they do.

Congratulations and welcome to the Ivy League in advance, Jonathan! You’ll fit in just fine.

Watch out liberalism; after a long hiatus, the Young Cons are back.

Take good rap music. Now remove its lyrical virtuosity, high production values, swaggering badassery, renegade ethos, and just-don’t-give-a-fuck attitude. Now add two awkward white guys in suits and sideways caps. Sprinkle in some Dartmouth and cheesy iMovie effects; oh, and don’t forget a remixed Ronald Reagan.

Congratulations; you’ve got the Young Cons, the dorky Dartmouth “rap” duo that sends the right-wing into rapture and Notorious B.I.G. spinning his grave, spitting earnest rhymes in a totally badass quest to spread their Christian Conservative beliefs. Now, Josh “Stiltz” Riddle and David “Serious C” Ruffle’s heavily exploitative videos were never great. (It’s okay though, because the video starts with an obligatory black person.) However, we think you’ll agree that this one takes the cake. The young men practically grind up on a cardboard cutout of Ronald Reagan, delivering devastating lyrics like:

Let’s set the record straight, I’m no Mr. Mathers / I rap about politics and stuff that matters.

No disagreement there. And:

To all the young cons there’s no time to retreat / Conservatives are hungry, let’s eat the rhino meat.

These guys are about as awkwardly incongruous as Michael Steele. But ideology aside, only one word springs to mind: lame. Gut-wrenchingly lame. Even for the Ivy League, these guys are white bread.

What we can only assume to be the Young Cons’ next video:

Gawker points us to a 2001 Crimson profile of America’s next top conservative pundit, and erstwhile Harvard student, Ross Douthat. In the dwindling of Kristol’s limelight and Glenn Beck moving to some off-the-grid commune with his followers (a boy can dream!), Douthat is one of the more influential conservative pundits, if only for the rare penumbra of sanity — if, you know, prickishness — that comes from his columns. “Move Over Limbaugh,” says the Crimson, but Douthat’s really more like the kid in your Econ lecture who won’t shut up about Ayn Rand. Still annoying, but more human. Sort of. Also, he’s just striking a pose of conservatism so he can be different, which is also like current college students we know!

Douthat has always stood apart from the crowd. As the sole Republican in a “staunch, hardline-Democrat family”, [sic] he formed his conservative worldview from an early age as “a way of rebelling against my parents”. [...] “I am most proud of the fact that I have made—and kept—friends, in spite of the fact that my public persona is to disagree with everyone here.”

At least he knows that writing is all about persona, and not at all about knowing the adjective “Democratic.” Why the Crimson ran a profile of one of their own columnists, we aren’t sure, but thankfully they were wise enough to plant the seeds of doubt in our mind as to whether or not Douthat’s position on “homosexuality” (which he apparently… opposes? Like, in general?) is informed by hard-won experience:

Indeed, his room is adorned with posters of Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe – stars from Hollywood’s glamour heyday – as well as a towering tribute to Gladiator. “I think that Russell Crowe’s evocation of manhood is something all men should aspire to”

Mm-hm. It’s not just glamorous screen divas our Ross loves, though — it’s also power!

“Coming to Harvard, I now have a new sense of the power and success that is at our fingertips – I know I will be one of the 25 richest writers of the future”, [sic] he says.

Well, it’s not the future yet — we’ll know when conservative columnists write their columns from green moon cheese, but Ross, you’re well on your way! Congratulations on leveraging a Harvard degree into, um, what it is you do now.

This Labor Day weekend, I interviewed Lauren Salz, Executive Director of the Columbia University College Republicans, for a Q&A with Youth Vote ‘08. According to her, all of the right-wing groups on Columbia’s campus have a budget smaller than the International Socialist Organization. This *exclusive* IvyGate iteration has bonus questions and a picture. Swanky!

NS: Why did you get involved with the CUCR?
LS: I wasn’t originally planning to join any campus political group. I had just taken a year off from school and worked on a campaign [Tom Kean for U.S. Senate] and I had enough of partisan politics. But then I got to Columbia and realized I needed to have an outlet to talk to other conservative students.

Did you anticipate feeling politically isolated at Columbia?
Not at all. Maybe I was naive, but I thought that since Columbia was such an elite university, I would find people willing to listen. I also had no idea about Columbia’s radical activist tradition. Prior to my first week of classes, I had never heard of the events in ‘68, although I did hear about the Minutemen incident. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not easy being a Republican at Brown these days. Dessert-tossing anarchists and child pornographers abound. Brigades of Speedo-clad men roam the campus with impunity. Residence hall kitchens, once reserved for late-night snacking and polite conversation about Reagan’s legacy, are pioneered for unspeakable X-rated acts. Surely, then, it was only a matter of time before the small but now very angry cabal that is the Brown conservative movement took to the Internets with something like this.

Proudly awarding “demerits” to their liberal enemies for their recent debauchery (and, of course, “merits” to themselves), a spunky group of traditionalists calling themselves the Nathanael Greene Society make it clear that they have had enough. On the Web site, the mysterious group writes (in verse!) about the campus’ loss of “Faith” and “Reason” (capitalizing plenty of nouns along the way) and goes batshit over opinion columns in the Brown Daily Herald and other outrages no one else quite, um, noticed.

Taking few hints from political correctness, the society (named for the dashing Revolutionary War general pictured above) even bestows the “Order of Robert Mugabe” (this already can’t be good, right?) on a black columnist for the BDH. Clever, indeed.

The secret e-society does have some sense of humor (those seeking pecuniary grants form NGS must compose rhymed couplets), but whoever is behind the site apparently wants to remain anonymous, going so far as to register the domain name through a special “private registration” company — whose existence indicates that, apparently, that’s something you can do.

Click through the site, and find out why a pro-choice activist gets a demerit named for Adolf Eichmann, and serial plagiarist and hero Zachary Townsend is likened to Rasputin.

So members of the Brown Republican Club stage a “Honk to Bomb Iran” protest. A local progressive filmmaker accosts them. Hilarity ensues as you might expect, but ultimately everyone in this video loses. From the young Republican character douched-out in argyle and oxford-cloth who shrilly protests, “Sir, sir, sir, I’m telling you if could not flash that in my face,” to the low-rent Michael Moore character who has taken it upon himself to bravely document the affair (“My dad was in da big one. India-China-Burma. He really fought, not like you gois.”

Some highlights:

Filmmaker: “You guys really go to school here, huh?”

…

Girl: “What kind of message are you going to like send to other people.”

Brown Republican: [holding a "honk to bomb Iran" sign] “The message is pretty clear. It says honk to bomb Iran.”

…

Girl: “Do you understand what democracy is?

Brown Republican: “No, can you explain it to me?”

..

Brown Republican: “I’m not a Republican, I’m a libertarian.”

Filmmaker: “Oh that’s a big difference.”

.. 

Filmmaker: “Do you believe that freedom is free?”

Brown Republican: “I don’t believe in quoting Toby Keith.”

Filmmaker: “Who is Toby Keith?”

In a tragic turn of events for college students nationwide, birth control costs on campuses are going through the roof. Last year’s Deficit Reduction Act has recently been fingered as the culprit in the rising costs.

The $39 billion in cuts were leveled at things like subsidized student loans, Medicaid, candy, children’s toys, etc; Gawker alerted us this morning to a Wall Street Journal article which dished the full details of its implications for subsidized contraceptives.

Anne Marie Chaker writes that “through an arcane set of circumstances” the act has disincentivized drug companies from subsidizing their product for school markets.

The contraceptive prices offered to schools are now included in a complex calculation that determines certain Medicaid-related rebates that drug makers must pay to states. In this calculation, deep discount prices would have the effect of increasing drug makers’ payments.

Colleges and universities say the change is having a significant impact on their health centers and the students they serve. Prices have begun skyrocketing for many popular brands of birth control. Health centers are having to reconfigure their offerings and write new prescriptions. And college students are making some tough choices, such as switching to cheaper generic brands or forgoing their privacy in order to claim their pills on their parents’ insurance.

The higher prices took effect earlier this year but savvy college health providers stocked up before the changes, forestalling the impending contraceptive cost crisis. Don’t just feel bad for the “very fertile” college women who will now have to suffer higher prices or a lack of privacy to get their birth control, though. The schools that received those subsidized products were making a tidy profit, too, which has now evaporated as they turn to subsidize contraceptives for their students.

Free market solutions, anyone? I hope you’re happy, Republicans.

–SAM JACKSON