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Just as the Dems stood in the school house door fighting
integration, they now stand in the way of education reform. Here’s the story of
one South Carolina Democrat who is fighting for
school choice.

Getting arrested doesn’t normally bolster a politician’s
credibility. But when South Carolina state Sen. Robert Ford told me recently
that he saw the inside of a jail cell 73 times, he did so to make a point. As a
youth, Mr. Ford cut his political teeth in tumultuous 1960s civil-rights
protests. 

Today this black Democrat says the new civil-rights struggle
is about the quality of instruction in public schools, and that to receive a
decent education African-Americans need school choice. He wants the president’s
help. “We need choice like Obama has. He can send his kids to any school
he wants.”

Mr. Ford was once like many Democrats on education — a
reliable vote against reforms that would upend the system. But over the past
three and a half years he’s studied how school choice works and he’s now
advocating tax credits and scholarships that parents can spend on public or
private schools.

He’s not alone. …

When he was president of Washington College,
Robert E. Lee admonished the staff for planting neat rows of trees on the
grounds saying nature did not organize planting that way.  David
Warren votes for chaos too.  

Call me an anarchist, but I don’t like books to be all the
same size. They aren’t, of course, but there are people who would like them to
be. I don’t want them to be all the same colour, or smell. I can handle a
fairly long set, here or there, but not the prospect of interminable rows. I am
inflamed by the sight of matching spines on the shelves in the offices of
lawyers.

I don’t like envelopes to be in standard sizes, or
notepaper, either; or magazines. …

… And as readers who have followed me over the years may
recall, I do not like the metric system, which, among its other notorious
evils, is the mother and father of innumerable standardization schemes. It is a
quirkless system, and must therefore be condemned.

All these things are a source of irritation, though I must
boast that Nature is on my side, and that she may be relied upon to put an end
to all projects of regimentation, in due course; and in the meantime, to be a
constant source of sabotage. …

Mark
Steyn Corner post on Britain in the ’70′s.

Bill
Kristol says the Sotomayor confirmation process will get very interesting
when the Court rules on the New Haven firefighters’ case.

… we will have an unusual moment in the Sotomayor
confirmation process–one that will stand out from the customary small-bore
senatorial back-and-forth during judicial confirmations. We’ll have a
high-profile Supreme Court ruling highlighting a very questionable judicial
decision by the president’s nominee. Most Court observers expect the judgment
in which Sotomayor joined to be reversed. But even if it isn’t, there will be a
closely observed decision by a probably closely divided Supreme Court that will
bring home the importance of the Sotomayor nomination for jurisprudence in this
area. The public will have occasion to see how a nominee, herself picked for
identity-politics reasons, was unempathetic, one might say, and unjust to the
victims of identity politics, the firefighters of New Haven who were denied
promotions.

Sotomayor will probably be confirmed. But nothing is
certain. And a Ricci-focused debate over her confirmation will serve to remind
Americans of the unseemliness and injustice of the Constitution-corrupting,
identity-politics-driven agenda so dear to the hearts of the modern Democratic
party, the Obama administration, and Sonia Sotomayor.

Jennifer
Rubin has thoughts on the subject.

… That is what this will boil down to: does Sotomayor (and
by implication, the president) believe in trying to get it right, trying to set
an impartial standard of justice for all Americans? Conservatives suspect by
word and deed (her perfunctory dismissal of Ricci (New Haven), for
example) on the bench she does not. Whether she does or not, she’ll need
to convince the Senate that she does — or face a very rocky road to
confirmation. Average Americans, unlike law professors and liberal pundits,
like to think “equal justice under the law”  means something and judges
aren’t merely surrogates for special interest groups.

Michael
Barone thinks the GOP should run against the center.

… So I think Republicans today should be less interested
in moving toward the center and more interested in running against the center.
Here I mean a different “center” — not a midpoint on an opinion
spectrum, but rather the centralized government institutions being created and
strengthened every day. This is a center that is taking over functions
fulfilled in a decentralized way by private individuals, firms and markets.

This center includes the Treasury, with its $700 billion of
TARP funds voted last fall to purchase toxic assets from financial institutions
and used instead to quasi-nationalize banks and preserve union benefits for
employees and retirees of bankrupt auto companies. It includes the Federal
Reserve, which has been vastly increasing the money supply. It includes a
federal government whose $787 billion economic stimulus has so far failed to
lower the unemployment rate from where the government projected it would be
without the stimulus package. …

Bill McGurn
tells us how Hillsdale College beats Harvard.

David
Brooks looks at GM and sees six reasons for the quagmire ahead.

… First, the Obama plan will reduce the influence of
commercial outsiders. The best place for fresh thinking could come from outside
private investors. But the Obama plan rides roughshod over the current private
investors and so discourages future investors. G.M. is now a pariah on Wall
Street. Say farewell to a potentially powerful source of external commercial
pressure.

Second, the Obama plan entrenches the ancien régime. The old
C.E.O. is gone, but he’s been replaced by a veteran insider and similar
executive coterie. Meanwhile, the U.A.W. has been given a bigger leadership
role. This is the union that fought for job banks, where employees get paid for
doing nothing. This is the organization that championed retirement with full
benefits at around age 50. This is not an organization that represents
fundamental cultural change. …

Interesting piece of food
Americana from the Economist. Seems a depression era WPA project on
American food was never published until now.

… The attack on Pearl Harbour, and America’s subsequent
entry into the second world war, meant that “America Eats” was never completed.
Now, however, Mr Kurlansky has dusted off the files from the FWP archive and
chosen the best morsels from a huge amount of raw material. They range from an
essay on maple-syrup production in Vermont to squirrel recipes from Arkansas, a
poem about Nebraskans’ enthusiasm for frankfurter sausages and a description of
how Sioux Indians prepared buffalo meat. As well as providing an introduction,
Mr Kurlansky adds his own commentary and sprinkles in the occasional modern
reference point: alongside the 1940 Christmas dinner menu from the Brown Hotel
in Louisville, Kentucky, for example, the 2007 menu from the same hotel is
provided for comparison. (The modern menu includes antipasti and sushi; the
1940 menu mentions neither.) …

Brown University has become a caricature of the politically
correct. The type of place ABC’s new Show The Goode Family makes fun of on
Wednesday night at 9:00. National
Review Corner posts have more.

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David Warren trashes Canada’s version of the auto bailout.

… Very few Canadians make as much as GM and Chrysler workers, or have pension plans as generous. Many of us don’t have pension plans at all, beyond the chump change offered by our Nanny State. The autoworkers’ plan is around $2 billion in the hole. It goes without saying that at least $2 billion of the bailout will go, directly or indirectly, to rescuing it.

That the government must deny this use of our money also goes without saying. But the plan will be rescued; and the person who thinks it will happen by a spontaneous miracle is naïve.

One of the proofs that Canadians are indeed rather stupid, is that we will stand for this sort of thing: that people who themselves face penury in old age, will agree to have their pockets picked to cover $70-an-hour auto-workers. And then actually vote at the next election for the politicians who robbed them. (For not all Canadians are basically conservative.)

Alas, until some conservatives take over the Conservative party, Canadians will be in no position to prove me wrong.

Stephen Moore laments the missing man – Milton Friedman.

… The myth that the stock-market collapse was due to a failure of Friedman’s principles could hardly be more easily refuted. No one was more critical of the Bush spending and debt binge than Friedman. The massive run up in money and easy credit that facilitated the housing and credit bubbles was precisely the foolishness that Friedman spent a lifetime warning against.

A few scholars are now properly celebrating the Friedman legacy. Andrei Shleifer, a Harvard economics professor, has just published a tribute to Friedman in the Journal of Economic Literature. He describes the period 1980-2005 as “The Age of Milton Friedman,” an era that “witnessed remarkable progress of mankind. As the world embraced free market policies, living standards rose sharply while life expectancy, educational attainment, and democracy improved and absolute poverty declined.”

So the Bernie Sanders crowd has things exactly backward: Milton’s ideas on capitalism and freedom did more to liberate humankind from poverty than the New Deal, Great Society and Obama economic stimulus plans stacked on top of each other.

At one of our dinners, Milton recalled traveling to an Asian country in the 1960s and visiting a worksite where a new canal was being built. He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers had shovels. He asked why there were so few machines. The government bureaucrat explained: “You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.” To which Milton replied: “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.”

But in the energy industry today we are trading in shovels for spoons. The Obama administration wants to power our society by spending three or four times more money to generate electricity using solar and wind power than it would cost to use coal or natural gas. The president says that this initiative will create “green jobs.” …

George Will writes on “shock and awe statism.”

… State governments, too, are expected to accept Washington’s whims, but plucky Indiana is being obdurate. Gov. Mitch Daniels, alarmed by what he calls the Obama administration’s “shock-and-awe statism,” is supporting state Treasurer Richard Mourdock’s objection to the administration’s treatment of Chrysler’s creditors, which include the pension funds for Indiana’s retired teachers and state police officers and a state construction fund. Together they own $42.5 million of Chrysler’s $6.9 billion (supposedly) secured debt.

Compliant, because dependent, banks bowed to the administration’s demand that they accept less than settled bankruptcy law would have given them as secured creditors. Next, the president denounced as “speculators” remaining secured creditors, who then folded and accepted less on the dollar than an unsecured creditor — the United Auto Workers union — is getting. This raw taking of property from secured investors penalized those “speculators” — retired Indiana teachers and state police officers who, Mourdock says, are being “ripped off by the federal government.”

He is asking a court to declare that the Obama administration’s actions have violated “more than 100 years of established law by redefining ‘secured creditors’ to mean something less” and that the actions violate the Fifth Amendment protection against the seizure of private property. Furthermore, he says, the government is guilty of “misuse” of the Troubled Assets Relief Program, which gives the Treasury authority only to aid financial institutions, not industrial companies. …

Robert Samuelson normally writes on economics, but today this subject is the media’s Obama infatuation.

The Obama infatuation is a great unreported story of our time. Has any recent president basked in so much favorable media coverage? Well, maybe John Kennedy for a moment, but no president since. On the whole, this is not healthy for America.

Our political system works best when a president faces checks on his power. But the main checks on Obama are modest. They come from congressional Democrats, who largely share his goals if not always his means. The leaderless and confused Republicans don’t provide effective opposition. And the press — on domestic, if not foreign, policy — has so far largely abdicated its role as skeptical observer.

Obama has inspired a collective fawning. What started in the campaign (the chief victim was Hillary Clinton, not John McCain) has continued, as a study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism shows. It concludes: “President Barack Obama has enjoyed substantially more positive media coverage than either Bill Clinton or George W. Bush during their first months in the White House.”  …

How long will we allow ourselves to be governed by children? NY Times has the story.

It is not every 31-year-old who, in a first government job, finds himself dismantling General Motors and rewriting the rules of American capitalism.

But that, in short, is the job description for Brian Deese, a not-quite graduate of Yale Law School who had never set foot in an automotive assembly plant until he took on his nearly unseen role in remaking the American automotive industry.

Nor, for that matter, had he given much thought to what ailed an industry that had been in decline ever since he was born. A bit laconic and looking every bit the just-out-of-graduate-school student adjusting to life in the West Wing — “he’s got this beard that appears and disappears,” says Steven Rattner, one of the leaders of President Obama’s automotive task force — Mr. Deese was thrown into the auto industry’s maelstrom as soon the election-night parties ended. …

With just another routine lie, the kid president tried to pass off the auto bailout as something the Bush folks dreamed up. Sweetness and Light has the story.

Spend $100,000,000 to save $1,000,000 a year? Cafe Hayek posts on how our government touts failure.

The Economist reports it really was pigs that started that flu.

… This new study does not answer the big questions of how, exactly, the virus crossed over to humans and why it kills some people and not others—in particular, why it hits the young (and thus, presumably, healthy) harder than the elderly. A different study by the CDC has found that nearly two-thirds of swine-flu infections in America have been in people aged between five and 24, whereas only 1% of cases affected those over 65. This is the reverse of the pattern seen in seasonal flu, which kills thousands of old people every winter. One possible explanation, according to Anne Schuchat of the CDC, is that “older adults might have been in contact a long time ago with a virus similar to the one we see now.” That, she surmises, might give them an immunity to this new menace that young people lack.

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