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Bill McGurn alerts us to today’s DC school choice rally.
Some hypocrisies are apparently more equal than others. If, for example, you are a politician who preaches “traditional values” and you get caught in a hotel with a woman who is not your wife, the press is going to have a field day with your tartuffery.
If, however, you are a pol who piously tells inner-city families that public schools are the answer — and you do this while safely ensconcing your own kids in some private haven — the press corps mostly winks.
Today at 1 o’clock in Washington, we’ll learn if anything has changed. Two groups — D.C. Children First and D.C. Parents for School Choice — are holding a rally at Freedom Plaza, just across from the offices of the city government. As their flier explains, “D.C. families deserve the same kind of choices that the Mayor, City Council Members, and Federal leaders with children have.”
The precipitate cause of this rally is the Democrats’ passage of an amendment tucked into the omnibus spending bill. Sponsored by Sen. Richard Durbin (D., Ill.), the amendment effectively ended the Opportunity Scholarship Program, a lifeline now used by more than 1,700 schoolchildren to escape one of America’s most miserable public school systems. Rally organizers say that the silence from local leaders was a big reason the Democratic Congress felt free to kill off the program. …
David Harsanyi tells us about Jon Stewart’s history lesson.
It’s fun to be idealistic in a world of moral absolutes. I know, I’m a columnist. But when we start discussing history, things always seem to get complicated.
Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show”learned this recently when debating the Foundation for Defense of Democracies president Cliff May about the harsh interrogation techniques administered during the Bush administration.
When May asked Stewart if he also considered Harry Truman a war criminal for dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the host said yes. A few days later, however, Stewart apologized for his blasphemy, saying Truman’s decision was, in fact, “complicated.”
Things were indeed complicated. They are always complicated.
That’s the point. …
Thomas Sowell has a second part to his column on the Supreme pick. He writes about Oliver Wendell Holmes who never would qualify according to the empathy doctrine.
After a lunch with Judge Learned Hand, as Holmes was departing in a carriage to return to work, Judge Hand said to him: “Do justice, sir. Do justice.”
Holmes had the carriage stopped. “That is not my job,” he said. “My job is to apply the law.”
Holmes wrote that he did not “think it desirable that the judges should undertake to renovate the law.” If the law needed changing, that was what the democratic process was for. Indeed, that was what the separation of powers in legislative, executive and judicial branches by the Constitution of the United States was for.
“The criterion of constitutionality,” he said, “is not whether we believe the law to be for the public good.” That was for other people to decide. For judges, he said: “When we know what the source of the law has said it shall be, our authority is at an end.”
One of Holmes’ judicial opinions ended: “I am not at liberty to consider the justice of the Act.”
Some have tried to depict Justice Holmes as someone who saw no need for morality in the law. On the contrary, he said: “The law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life.” But a society’s need to put moral content into its laws did not mean that it was the judge’s job to second-guess the moral choices made by others who were authorized to make such choices.
Justice Holmes understood the difference between the rule of law and the rule of lawyers and judges.
And Richard Epstein warns against “empathy.”
… It might be smart politics for Obama to play to his natural constituencies, but intellectually there is, I think, no worse way to go about the selection process. Empathy matters in running business, charities and churches. But judges perform different functions. They interpret laws and resolve disputes. Rather than targeting his favorite groups, Obama should follow the most time-honored image of justice: the blind goddess, Iustitia, carrying the scales of justice.
Iustitia is not blind to the general principles of human nature. Rather her conception of blindness follows Aristotle’s articulation of corrective justice in his Nicomachean ethics. In looking at a dispute between an injurer and an injured party, or between a creditor and debtor, the judge ignores personal features of the litigant that bear no relationship to the merits of the case.
So in a tort action, determining the fault of a driver doesn’t turn on whether he or she is rich or poor, citizen or alien. It’s simply turns on who was in compliance with the rules of the road. And in a collection case the first order of business is whether the debtor has paid his debt, not his or her wealth or citizenship. …
Glenn Garvin, Miami Herald columnist says Joe Biden is just the tip of the stupidity iceberg.
You know what they say about monkeys, typewriters and Shakespeare. My question is, if you sat an infinite number of Joe Bidens at an infinite number of microphones, would any of them ever say anything that wasn’t infinitely stupid? From his reminiscences about Franklin Roosevelt’s famous White House television address on the day of the 1929 stock market crash (that is, three years before Roosevelt was president and 20 years before Americans bought TVs) to his campaign-rally exhortation to Missouri state Sen. Chuck Graham to ”Stand up, Chuck, let ‘em see ya!” (Graham’s in a wheelchair), Biden’s serial stupidities have become a national mortification.
Listening to Biden’s gaffeprompter running full speed ahead on the subject of swine flu last week — he warned Americans that airplanes, subways and classrooms are microbiologic deathtraps, then promptly took a train to Delaware — my first thought was, who in the world made this guy vice president? My second was, oh, right. And my third was, no wonder people are always calling Barack Obama the smartest guy in the room. At most White House meetings, it’s probably literally — if dishearteningly — true.
Consider Lisa Jackson, Obama’s EPA boss, explaining market economics during an NPR interview. “The president has said, and I couldn’t agree more, that what this country needs is one single national roadmap that tells automakers, who are trying to become solvent again, what kind of car it is that they need to be designing and building for the American people.”
”Is that the role of the government?” asked the reporter. “That doesn’t sound like free enterprise.”
”Well, it is free enterprise, in a way,” declared Jackson. Yes, in the same way that Madonna is a chastity goddess. …
Corner posts on Specter.
Jay Nordlinger says it’s a myth that the GOP has moved to the right.
… I hope you’ll accept that National Review is a pretty good barometer of conservative opinion. A lot of people consider NR the flagship journal of American conservatism. So, as an exercise, consider NR’s positions on George W. Bush and the Republicans. You will see that we steadily criticized them and opposed them—from the right.
Bush and the Republicans spent massively, especially in Bush’s first term. We opposed that, mightily. The president’s most cherished initiative, probably, was the Faith-Based Initiative. We opposed that. Then there was his education policy: No Child Left Behind. We opposed that (mainly on grounds that it wrongly expanded the federal role). He had his new federal entitlement: a prescription-drug benefit. We of course opposed that. He imposed steel tariffs—for a season—which we opposed. He signed the McCain-Feingold law on campaign finance—which we opposed. He established a new cabinet department, the Department of Homeland Security. We opposed that. He defended race preferences in the University of Michigan Law School case; we were staunchly on the other side. He of course proposed a sweeping new immigration law, which included what amounted to amnesty. We were four-square against that.
I am talking about some things that were very dear to Bush’s heart, and central to his efforts—and self-image, as a leader. NR, the conservative arbiter, opposed those things. The Republican party, by and large, supported them—with one glaring exception: the immigration push.
What on Bush’s domestic agenda did NR support? His tax-cutting, though we had some different ideas about what to do. His Social Security reform, which didn’t get very far. Etc. All thoroughly mainstream conservative stuff. …
Jonah Goldberg agrees. And he gives us the guts of a speech he gave in 2004 laying out the spendthrift ways of G. W. Bush.
A few quick facts. George W. Bush has:
• increased federal spending on education by 60.8 percent;
• increased federal spending on labor by 56 percent;
• increased federal spending on the interior by 23.4 percent;
• increased federal spending on defense by 27.6 percent.
And of course he has:
• created a massive department of homeland security;
• signed a campaign-finance bill he pretty much said he thought was unconstitutional (thereby violating his oath to uphold, protect, and defend the constitution);
• signed the farm bill, which was a non-kosher piñata filled with enough pork to bend space and time;
• pushed through a Medicare plan which starts with a price tag of $400 billion but will — according to every expert who studies the issue — go up a gazillion-bajillion dollars over the next decade;
Walter Williams takes up grade inflation.
… Academic fraud is rife at many of the nation’s most prestigious and costliest universities. At Brown University, two-thirds of all letter grades given are A’s. At Harvard, 50 percent of all grades were either A or A- (up from 22 percent in 1966); 91 percent of seniors graduated with honors. The Boston Globe called Harvard’s grading practices “the laughing stock of the Ivy League.” Eighty percent of the grades given at the University of Illinois are A’s and B’s. Fifty percent of students at Columbia University are on the Dean’s list. At Stanford University, where F grades used to be banned, only 6 percent of student grades were as low as a C.
Some college administrators will tell us that the higher grades merely reflect higher-quality students. Balderdash! SAT scores have been in decline for four decades and at least a third of entering freshmen must enroll in a remedial course either in math, writing or reading, which indicates academic fraud at the high school level. A recent survey of more than 30,000 first-year students revealed that nearly half spent more hours drinking than study. Another survey found that a third of students expected B’s just for attending class, and 40 percent said they deserved a B for completing the assigned reading. …
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