Jason Riley must be suffering from whiplash. This spring, the Wall Street Journal columnist and scholar with the prestigious Manhattan Institute was invited, then disinvited, and now finally re-invited to give a lecture at Virginia Tech's Pamplin College of Business as part of its Distinguished Lecture series.
Why all the back and forth? The controversy stems from the fact that Riley is a conservative in an era when conservative viewpoints are unwelcome on many college campuses. Riley thus joins a long list of right-leaning analysts and policymakers – including George Will, Greta Van Susteren, Ann Coulter, and Scott Brown — whom activists have sought (with mixed results) to "disinvite" from campus speaking engagements around the country.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Amtrak engineer whose speeding train ran off the rails in Philadelphia last year was apparently distracted by word that a train nearby had been hit by a rock, federal investigators concluded Tuesday, pinning most of the blame on him for the wreck that killed eight people.
"He went, in a matter of seconds, from distraction to disaster," National Transportation Safety Board member Robert Sumwalt said.
