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Interesting look at education philosophies from WSJ OpEd.

I had a teacher once who called his students “idiots” when they screwed up. He was our orchestra conductor, a fierce Ukrainian immigrant named Jerry Kupchynsky, and when someone played out of tune, he would stop the entire group to yell, “Who eez deaf in first violins!?” He made us rehearse until our fingers almost bled. He corrected our wayward hands and arms by poking at us with a pencil.

Today, he’d be fired. But when he died a few years ago, he was celebrated: Forty years’ worth of former students and colleagues flew back to my New Jersey hometown from every corner of the country, old instruments in tow, to play a concert in his memory. I was among them, toting my long-neglected viola. When the curtain rose on our concert that day, we had formed a symphony orchestra the size of the New York Philharmonic.

I was stunned by the outpouring for the gruff old teacher we knew as Mr. K. But I was equally struck by the success of his former students. Some were musicians, but most had distinguished themselves in other fields, like law, academia and medicine. Research tells us that there is a positive correlation between music education and academic achievement. But that alone didn’t explain the belated surge of gratitude for a teacher who basically tortured us through adolescence.

We’re in the midst of a national wave of self-recrimination over the U.S. education system. Every day there is hand-wringing over our students falling behind the rest of the world. Fifteen-year-olds in the U.S. trail students in 12 other nations in science and 17 in math, bested by their counterparts not just in Asia but in Finland, Estonia and the Netherlands, too. An entire industry of books and consultants has grown up that capitalizes on our collective fear that American education is inadequate and asks what American educators are doing wrong.

I would ask a different question. What did Mr. K do right? What can we learn from a teacher whose methods fly in the face of everything we think we know about education today, but who was undeniably effective?

As it turns out, quite a lot. Comparing Mr. K’s methods with the latest findings in fields from music to math to medicine leads to a single, startling conclusion: It’s time to revive old-fashioned education. Not just traditional but old-fashioned in the sense that so many of us knew as kids, with strict discipline and unyielding demands. Because here’s the thing: It works.

Now I’m not calling for abuse; I’d be the first to complain if a teacher called my kids names. But the latest evidence backs up my modest proposal. Studies have now shown, among other things, the benefits of moderate childhood stress; how praise kills kids’ self-esteem; and why grit is a better predictor of success than SAT scores. …

The Journal also reviewed the latest Malcolm Gladwell offering – David and Goliath. Written by a psychology professor at UnionCollege in Schenectady, it is a first class criticism of Gladwell’s approaches.

… In a section on what Mr. Gladwell calls “the theory of desirable difficulty,” he asks: “You wouldn’t wish dyslexia on your child. Or would you?” You might if you were aware that Mr. Boies himself attributes his success to his dyslexia, as do Gary Cohn, the president of Goldman Sachs, and Brian Grazer, the Hollywood megaproducer. Examples like these are the main source of evidence Mr. Gladwell marshals for the claim that dyslexia might actually be a desirable trait. Difficulty reading is said to have forced Mr. Boies to compensate by developing skills of observation and memory, which he exploited in the courtroom. It’s an uplifting story; what seems on the surface to be just a disability turns out, on deeper examination, to be an impetus for hard work and against-all-odds triumph.

Mr. Gladwell enjoys a reputation for translating social science into actionable insights. But the data behind the surprising dyslexia claim is awfully slim. He notes in passing that a 2009 survey found a much higher incidence of dyslexia in entrepreneurs than in corporate managers. But this study involved only 102 self-reported dyslexic entrepreneurs, most of whom probably had careers nothing like those of Mr. Boies or his fellow highfliers. Later Mr. Gladwell mentions that dyslexics are also overrepresented in prisons—a point that would appear to vitiate his argument. He addresses the contradiction by suggesting that while no person should want to be dyslexic, “we as a society need people” with serious disadvantages to exist, for we all benefit from the over-achievement that supposedly results. But even if dyslexia could be shown to cause entrepreneurship, the economic analysis that would justify a claim of its social worth is daunting, and Mr. Gladwell doesn’t attempt it.

To make his point about the general benefits of difficulty, Mr. Gladwell refers to a 2007 experiment in which people were given three mathematical reasoning problems to solve. One group was randomly assigned to read the problems in a clear typeface like the one you are reading now; the other had to read them in a more difficult light-gray italic print. The latter group scored 29% higher, suggesting that making things harder improves cognitive performance. It’s an impressive result on the surface, but less so if you dig a bit deeper.

First, the study involved just 40 people, or 20 per typeface—a fact Mr. Gladwell fails to mention. That’s a very small sample on which to hang a big argument. Second, they were all PrincetonUniversity students, an elite group of problem-solvers. Such matters wouldn’t matter if the experiment had been repeated with larger samples that are more representative of the general public and had yielded the same results. But Mr. Gladwell doesn’t tell readers that when other researchers tried just that, testing nearly 300 people at a Canadian public university, they could not replicate the original effect. Perhaps he didn’t know about this, but anyone who has followed recent developments in social science should know that small studies with startling effects must be viewed skeptically until their results are verified on a broader scale. They might hold up, but there is a good chance they will turn out to be spurious.

This flaw permeates Mr. Gladwell’s writings: He excels at telling just-so stories and cherry-picking science to back them. In “The Tipping Point” (2000), he enthused about a study that showed facial expressions to be such powerful subliminal persuaders that ABC News anchor Peter Jennings made people vote for Ronald Reagan in 1984 just by smiling more when he reported on him than when he reported on his opponent, Walter Mondale. In “Blink” (2005), Mr. Gladwell wrote that a psychologist with a “love lab” could watch married couples interact for just 15 minutes and predict with shocking accuracy whether they would divorce within 15 years. In neither case was there rigorous evidence for such claims. …

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit writes his weekly TODAY column on the IRS and our mistrust of government and the creeps who work there..

So last week, while most of the country was talking about football or fears of a government shutdown, Rasmussen released a poll that should worry everyone — but especially incumbent Democrats in Congress. According to Rasmussen’s survey, most Americans think the IRS broke the law by targeting Tea Party groups for harassment, but few expect it to be punished. Fifty-three percent think the IRS broke the law by targeting the Tea Party and other conservative groups like the voter-integrity outfit True The Vote; only 24% disagreed. But only 17% think it is even somewhat likely that anyone will be charged, while 74% think that criminal charges are unlikely.

So a majority of Americans think that government officials who exercise an important trust broke the law, but only a very small number think anything will be done to punish them.

There are a couple of lessons to draw from this. One is bad for the country in general, but the other is bad for congressional Democrats.

The lesson for the country is that trust in the government is very low. (In another Rasmussen poll, 70% think that government and big business often work together against consumers and investors. According to Gallup, trust in government is lower than during Watergate.) But it’s worse than that.

Believing that government officials break the law is one thing; believing that they face no consequences when they’re caught and it becomes public is another. Not only is this a sort of “broken windows” signal to other bureaucrats — hey, you can break the law and get away with it — but it’s particularly damaging where the IRS is concerned. …

Andrew Malcolm with late night humor.

Leno: Treasury Secretary Lew says the U.S. will run out of money in three weeks. I’m no financial wizard, but at $16 trillion in debt, didn’t we run out of money $16 trillion ago?

Fallon: President Obama won’t postpone his Asia trip over the government’s fiscal problems. Obama said, “Who do you think I’m gonna ask for the money?”

Leno: A happy wedding today in Washington state–a 90-year-old bride married her 93-year-old boyfriend. They both found someone they wanted to spend the rest of the month with.

Conan: Analysts say Apple’s actual manufacturing cost for the iPhone is $199. That’s just parts. When you add in the labor, it’s $200.

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Megan McArdle with the latest madness from left/liberal mess that is Detroit. 

I’m rarely speechless, but I’m having trouble putting my emotions into words after reading the latest report on the Detroit pension situation. Now, I admit it: I’m kind of naïve. Usually when I see an underfunded pension, I think to myself “poor pensioners — undone by a combination of stupid tax rules, volatile stock markets and mismanagement by trustees who tried to restore depleted fund assets with an investment approach you might call ‘desperate optimism’.” Thus, I was not entirely prepared for the new revelations about the Detroit trustees’ custom of handing out annual holiday “bonuses” to workers, retirees and the City of Detroit. Between 1985 and 2008, they handed out roughly $1 billion this way. Had they been invested, one estimate says those funds would be worth almost $2 billion today — or more than half the current shortfall in the funds.

These “bonuses” were used to lower the contribution the city was required to make, to give retirees a little something extra around Christmas time, and to fund individual savings accounts that workers are offered along with their pensions. In 2009, when the financial markets were completely frozen and the automakers were shotgunning through the bankruptcy courts, the pension trust paid 7.5 percent interest into those accounts — which is about 7.5 percent more than they would have gotten at a bank. This while the pension funds were busy losing about a quarter of their value.

I literally slapped my forehead while reading some of the explanations that the trustees offered for their behavior. …

The Cruz phenomenon covered by John Fund.

… Cruz has for now become the “it” guy for the conservative base as a result of his speech, probably boosting his presidential ambitions. But he has also helped reshape the entire approach Republicans are taking to Obamacare. House speaker John Boehner is suggesting that Republicans will seek a one-year delay in implementing Obamacare as part of any deal to continue funding the government. The Cruz speech may be partly responsible for rattling Senate majority leader Harry Reid so much that he admitted that Obamacare’s tax on medical devices was “stupid,” even while insisting he’d accept no changes in the law. Cruz’s speech may also have spurred Democratic senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia to announce that he wants a one-year delay of Obamacare’s mandate that individuals buy health insurance. And Cruz’s criticisms of Obamacare were partially validated Thursday when the White House announced it was postponing enrollment in most of the small-business exchanges, originally scheduled to open on October 1.

The editorial board of the New York Times has dismissed Ted Cruz as “the public face of the aimless and self-destructive Tea Party strategy to stop health-care reform.” In reality, his speech may have reignited intense opposition to a law many conservatives had fatalistically accepted as unstoppable. It’s too soon to know if Cruz’s speech will have a lasting impact, but the over-the-top criticism by some liberals has revealed just how worried they are about both Cruz’s potential and Obamacare’s future. Cruz “is the most talented and fearless Republican politician I’ve seen in the last 30 years,” Democratic strategist James Carville told ABC News in May. “He is going to be something to watch.”

After all, when Ronald Reagan burst into the national consciousness with his televised “Time for Choosing” speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater’s candidacy in 1964, liberals were united in their scornful dismissal of him. As I recall, the Gipper bested his critics with the last laugh — many times over.

Matthew Continetti explains why Ted Cruz is so hated.

How fitting that Senator Ted Cruz’s 21-hour anti-Obamacare speech on the Senate floor in Washington, D.C., happened to coincide with the opening of the U.N. General Assembly and the annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative in New York City. Rarely is the distance separating the caste that rules our world from its few, heavily despised critics so literal.

At the midpoint of the Acela corridor, heads of state, foreign ministers, and assorted luminaries from around the world gathered to toast themselves, make new friends, snub the president of the United States, and recycle platitudes on climate change, gun control, global poverty, the health care cost curve, and the Global South, all while clogging Midtown traffic, occupying posh hotels, fooling gullible media personalities, and enjoying the best of Manhattan’s entertainment, nightlife, culture, and cuisine.

At the other end of the tracks the freshman conservative from Texas stood on the floor of the Senate and spoke for close to a day in an effort to deny money to President Barack Obama’s chief legacy—a misbegotten and unpopular law whose unintended consequences are already being felt in labor and insurance markets. Digressive, flamboyant, ideological, earnest, theatrical, self-promotional, at times touching and at other times goofy, Cruz deserved applause for his commitment and, at least, for his stamina. He established himself as the leader of the anti-Obamacare forces, forced the Democrats to defend their misbegotten law, and pulled the public discourse rightward. And while one might disagree with his strategy—neither Cruz nor his supporters have fully answered, in my view, the question of what they will do after this plan fails—one cannot help admiring the boldness and tenacity with which Cruz pursues his goal.

But that’s just me. Many other people, reasonable people, Republicans, Democrats, conservatives, and liberals, have been more than able to resist Cruz’s charms, such as they are. And their resistance has been so visceral, so virulent, so out of proportion to the reaction to earlier marathon floor speeches and filibusters that explanations seem necessary. …

Ann Coulter wants Cruz Control on all GOP models.

… Those guys waived Obamacare for themselves. If national health care is so great, why don’t they want it?

In every single category of Crap Forced On the Country by the Left, liberals always have a work-around for themselves.

They love the public schools and denounce school choice — but their kids go to St. Albans or Sidwell Friends. As Al Gore responded to a question from a black journalist for Time magazine who asked him why he opposed school vouchers while sending his own kids to private schools, “My children — you can leave them out of this!”

Oh, now I see.

Liberals are always eager to release criminals and block crucial crime-fighting strategies such as stop-and-frisk — which they announce from the safety of their antiseptic, crime-free neighborhoods. They love the homeless, but try putting a homeless shelter in their doorman buildings.

They tell us guns won’t protect us — and then we find out the loudest of them all have armed guards. Staunch gun-control advocate Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago had three armed guards with him at all times, as well as an armored car. Mayor Rahm Emanuel also has armed guards and an armored car. Chicago aldermen are allowed to carry any guns they like. But until very recently (we hope!) the people of Chicago were virtually prohibited from being armed.

Are you beginning to see the pattern?

Liberals love affirmative action — provided their offspring still get into Harvard, Yale or Princeton. How about they give up their kids’ seats to disadvantaged minorities?

Class warriors Warren Buffett and the Nation magazine’s Katrina vanden Heuvel hired phalanxes of lawyers to fight the IRS when informed they weren’t paying the government what they owed. George Soros and the Kennedy family stash their money in offshore accounts, safe from U.S. taxation.

Liberals also strongly support every manner of environmental regulation — unless it blocks the view from the Kennedy compound. In deference to Teddy Kennedy’s ferocious opposition to wind farms off the coast of Cape Cod, the federal government reduced the number of turbines, moved them farther off the coast and ordered them painted white to blend in with the view.

And now these government do-gooders shoving Obamacare down our throats have managed to exempt themselves from its wonderful provisions. Supreme Court justices won’t have to suffer under Obamacare, but will continue to have their health care subsidized by us, the hapless taxpayers forced into this rotten system. …

Peter Wehner will have none of this. He thinks Cruz is a disaster.

… As I’ve argued several times before (including here), this whole gambit was based on the fiction, perpetrated by Cruz and others, that the Affordable Care Act could be defunded (without even a single Democratic vote, according to Cruz). That was never true. That goal was an illusion. A mirage. A delusion. And surely Mr. Cruz, an intelligent and well-educated man, knew it. There was simply no way a Democratic Senate and Barack Obama would abolish his signature domestic achievement. And defunding the ACA would require just that.

No matter. Senator Cruz, along with several of his colleagues, convinced many grassroots conservatives and Tea Party members that the end game was to put a stake through the heart of ObamaCare, once and for all. If you sided with them, you were a principled conservative who opposed ObamaCare; if you were against them, you were part of the “surrender caucus.” This was cast as a Moment of Truth. 

Now the whole thing is being exposed for what it was – a game. And the (inevitable) failure by Cruz and the others will leave these people crushingly disappointed and enraged. They were led to believe something that was simply not true – and many of them still don’t know they were misled.

Beyond all that is the damage this inflicts on conservatism. Conservatism, after all, is a political philosophy that is (or should be) anti-utopian, empirical, prudent, somewhat modest in its expectations and firmly grounded in reality. That’s certainly not all that conservatism is, but those elements comprise it. Yet here we are, with a large part of the conservative movement having taken a journey through the looking glass.

This whole episode was a low moment for genuine conservatism.

Victor Davis Hanson on the late great middle class.

… Obama promised to restore the middle class. In truth, he has enacted the very policies that have done it the most damage in years. That paradox may explain why his base of support remains the very rich and the very poor. Goldman Sachs, federal bureaucrats, and aid recipients are helped in a way that the strapped hardware-store owner, Starbucks barista, and part-time welder are not.

For all the talk of infrastructure or stimulus, the latest $6 trillion in federal borrowing seems to have been wasted on bailing out insider banks and green companies, growing the federal work force, regulating the private sector into stasis, and subsidizing those who are not working.

The Federal Reserve still keeps interest rates at near zero. That mostly helps Wall Street, where money flows madly in search of any sort of return.

Most real interest rates for consumer purchases somehow remain exorbitant. Banks obtain their money cheaply and lend it out expensively. No wonder that so many Wall Street and banking executives — Timothy Geithner, Jack Lew, Peter Orszag, Gene Sperling, Larry Summers — revolve in and out of the highest levels of this “no revolving door” administration.

Middle-class workers see little chance of retiring when their meager savings earn almost no interest, so they are apt to stay on the job longer. Their continuance only makes unemployment rates for young entry-level workers even worse.

Obama always threatened higher taxes on the well-off. He achieved that goal with a new 39.6 percent federal rate on upper incomes, a rate paid on top of state and payroll taxes. Yet such steep taxes do not much affect the super-rich. Their income is often exempted through sophisticated tax avoidance or, more often, earned through lower-taxed capital gains. …

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Mark Steyn thinks our prospects are poor.

A few years ago, after the publication of my book America Alone, an exasperated reader wrote to advise me to lighten up, on the grounds that “we’re rich enough to be stupid.” That’s to say, Western democracies and their citizens are the wealthiest societies ever known, and no matter how much of our energies are wasted on pointless hyper-regulation for the business class and multigenerational welfare for the dependency class and Transgender and Colonialism Studies for our glittering youth, we can afford it, and the central fact of our wealth will ensure that our fortunes do not change. Since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, we have been less rich, and our stupidity ought in theory to be less affordable. Instead, it’s been supersized. To take only the most obvious example, President Obama has added six-and-a-half trillion bucks to the national debt, and has nothing to show for it. As Churchill would say, had his bust not been bounced from the Oval Office, never in the field of human spending has so much been owed by so many for so little.

The West’s rivals do not think like this. China is now the second-biggest economy on the planet, but it has immense structural problems: As I’ve been saying for years, it will get old before it gets rich. Thanks to its grotesque “one-child” policy, it has the most male-heavy demographic cohort in history — no chicks and millions of guys who can’t get any action, which is not normally a recipe for social stability. Despite being extremely large, the country is resource-poor. But you can’t say it’s not thinking outside the box. The Daily Telegraph in London reported this week that the Chinese have just signed a deal to lease five percent of Ukraine (or an area about the size of Belgium) to grow crops and raise pigs on. …

… Obamacare is something new in American life: the creation of a massive bureaucracy charged with downsizing you — to a world of fewer doctors, higher premiums, lousier care, more debt, fewer jobs, smaller houses, smaller cars, smaller, fewer, less; a world where worse is the new normal. Would Americans, hitherto the most buoyant and expansive of people, really consent to live such shrunken lives? If so, mid-20th-century America and its assumptions of generational progress will be as lost to us as the Great Ziggurat of Ur was to 19th-century Mesopotamian date farmers. …

David Harsanyi thinks its the Dems who caused the hostage crisis over healthcare.

… In a recent exchange on “Real Time with Bill Maher,” panelists went a few rounds on the GOP’s strategy for the upcoming budget showdowns (wily anarchists or slack-jawed yokels?) and talked about the pros and cons of “hostage taking” before MSNBC’s Chris Hayes chimed in with a pretty revealing comment, saying, “I think it is useful to separate the kind of tactical question here from the substantive one, which is to say, like, you know, if there were a liberal caucus in the United States government that could, you know, hold the continuing resolution hostage to try to stop a war that I thought was horrible, I would say, ‘Yeah, do it.’ The thing that they’re trying to stop here is 30 million people getting health insurance!”

It’s the substantive question liberals have a problem with these days, not the tactical one.

A potential shutdown over the continuing resolution or the debt ceiling would be fine if the issue happened to move the liberal soul. But Republicans can’t possibly have a legitimate reason to want to defund/delay/defeat/de-anything Obamacare. The GOP opposes the law because of an insatiable impulse to deny millions of poor Americans health insurance. If Hayes were to concede that genuine objections existed — however misguided he might find them — he’d also be conceding that conservatives have a purpose beyond his own cartoon depiction of free market beliefs.

In this cartoon, Republicans are obstructionists, and that’s that. When Reid says any Republican House budget he dislikes is “dead on arrival,” how many nonpartisan publications will call him out on his uncompromising position? When the president states that negotiating with Republicans over the debt ceiling “is not going to happen,” how many reporters are going to point out that his stubbornness could lead to a government shutdown? …

Turns out Dems led by Ted Kennedy threatened to refuse to raise the debt ceiling during Nixon’s second term. Instapundit links to a James Taranto column suggesting Kennedy must have been a “terrorist” then since that is what the GOP is labeled now.

… Yet Obama is now in a position very much analogous to that of President Nixon in 1973. We now know that government corruption–namely IRS persecution of dissenters–was a factor in Obama’s re-election. To be sure, Obama himself has not, at least so far, been implicated in the IRS wrongdoing as Nixon ultimately was in Watergate. On the other hand, Nixon’s re-election victory was so overwhelming that no one could plausibly argue Watergate was a necessary condition for it. The idea that Obama could not have won without an abusive IRS is entirely plausible.

The Obama supporters who counsel intractability overlook the practical political risk of such an approach. Maybe Republicans will back down in the end, but maybe they won’t. That is to say, Obama’s intransigence could trigger a catastrophic result, and whether it does is beyond his control.

If that happens, maybe the majority of voters will blame Republicans, but maybe they won’t. Courting and then presiding over a catastrophe is not exactly a fail-safe plan for strengthening one’s presidency. …

io9 Blog posts on the mysterious fire that destroyed America’s greatest city in 1170!

One thousand years ago, in the place where St. Louis, Missouri now stands, there was once a great civilization whose city center was ringed with enormous earthen pyramids, vast farmlands, and wealthy suburbs. For hundreds of years it was the biggest city in North America. Then a mysterious fire changed everything.

The city that once existed in St. Louis’ current footprint is known today as Cahokia, and its creators are commonly called the Mound Builders because of the 120 or so enormous mounds they left behind. Shaped much like the stone pyramids of the Maya civilization to the south, these mounds rose up hundreds of feet, and were often built on top of tombs. At their summits were ceremonial buildings made from wood and thatch. Unfortunately, many of these magnificent creations were destroyed in the nineteenth century when St. Louis was built. Below, you can see one of the only remaining pyramids, known as Monk’s Mound. …

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Thomas Sowell on how things are going for the administration.

This has been the worst time, politically, for President Barack Obama since he took office. Recent polls reveal that public confidence in both his domestic and foreign policies has been falling, amid revelations about their defects and dangers. Even people who once supported and defended him have now turned against him.

There have even been rumblings against Barack Obama in the Congressional Black Caucus and among labor unions that were a major factor in helping him get elected and re-elected.

Two of President Obama’s own former Secretaries of Defense have publicly criticized his gross mishandling of the Syria crisis, which has emboldened America’s enemies and undermined our allies around the world.

As ObamaCare continues to go into effect, step by step, its high costs and dire consequences for jobs have become ever more visible — as have the lies that Obama blithely told about its costs and consequences when it was rushed into law too fast for anyone to see that it would become a “train wreck,” as one of its initial Democratic supporters in the Senate has since called it.

As more and more revelations have come to light about the cynical and dangerous misuse of the Internal Revenue Service to harass and sabotage conservative political groups, the lies that the Obama administration initially told about this, as part of the coverup, have also been exposed.

So have the lies told about what happened in Benghazi when four Americans were killed last year. Their killers remain at large, though they are known and are even giving media interviews in Libya. …

Andrew Malcolm notes this record of failure has brought about announcements of what the administration will not do.

… Obama announced to the waiting nation what he wasn’t going to do. He wasn’t going to attack Syria. And he wasn’t asking Congress anymore to grant him the authority to attack.

Which prompted Jay Leno to comment: “You can tell Fall is coming. The leaves are changing faster than Obama’s positions on Syria.”

On Friday in a rare gesture for this arrogant administration, Obama reached out by telephone to GOP House Speaker John Boehner on looming fiscal votes in Congress, especially raising the national debt ceiling so Obama could spend even more money than was coming in.

But in an unexpected and gratuitous twist, Obama announced that unlike his predecessors, he wasn’t going to negotiate with Capitol Hill about matching spending cuts or raising the limit, which he used to oppose.

Then, in his weekly remarks, Obama announced that he wasn’t going to take the word of Assad or Russia’s Vladimir Putin about collecting Syria’s vast stocks of chemical weapons for disposal. How’s Obama’s verification demand looking so far? …

WSJ Editors point out another thing the administration won’t do. 

Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett has extended a lifeline to Philadelphia’s hemorrhaging schools attached to a requirement for modest education and fiscal reforms. No thanks, says the teachers union. Herewith a parable of education decline.

Philadelphia’s schools are a textbook case of chronic, systemic failure. Woeful finances and academics compelled the state in 2001 to install a five-member School Reform Commission. Test scores have improved but are still pitiful. Last year only about 40% of students scored proficient or above in reading on the state standardized test, but 99.5% of teachers are rated satisfactory. …

… Meantime, union leaders will whipsaw the GOP Governor for increasing corporate tax credits for private school scholarships that benefit low-income students in failing schools and then for not caring about Philadelphia’s poor, black kids. The tragedy is that Mr. Corbett’s ideas will help those kids while the union is dooming most of them to lives of underachievement and poverty. Where are Education Secretary Arne Duncan and President Obama when they really could help?

Jay Sekulow, one of the attorneys in the Lois Lerner hunt writes on her future.

… As the evidence of her wrongdoing quickly piled up, Lerner improperly pled the Fifth Amendment before a congressional panel, proclaiming her innocence before refusing to speak – a move that would never work in federal court.

Lerner has been on paid administrative leave, collecting a paycheck from taxpayers even as IRS officials kept signing her name to official correspondence. Now she’s retired, and will still cash her checks from taxpayers.

This is intolerable.  If Lerner worked in the private sector, she would have been fired long ago.  But our federal bureaucracy protects its own, and few agencies are better at evading responsibility than the IRS.

According to an unnamed Democratic staffer, Lerner retired after the IRS found that Lerner was “neglectful of duty,” but the IRS still maintains there was “no evidence of political bias.”

The IRS needs to re-read the definition of “evidence.”

Lerner has retired, but her legal troubles are not over.  The FBI is conducting a criminal investigation, Congress is continuing its own probes, and the ACLJ is pressing forward with its federal lawsuit — brought on behalf of 41 conservative groups in 22 states — to hold Lerner and other senior IRS officials accountable for their unconstitutional abuse of the First Amendment.

The IRS may have decided that Lerner was merely “neglectful,” but the IRS doesn’t have the last word.  The FBI, Congress, and – ultimately – the federal courts will have their say.

And their judgment could be harsh indeed.

Instapundit spots craziness in VA Beach schools.

Kid expelled for playing with airsoft gun in own yard.

Two seventh grade Virginia Beach students previously suspended for shooting an airsoft gun have been expelled, WAVY.com has learned.

During a hearing Tuesday morning, Aidan Clark and Khalid Caraballo were expelled in a unanimous vote. Clark was offered the option of attending an alternative school, but his father, Tim, told WAVY News’ Andy Fox he will be homeschooled.

Caraballo will attend an alternative school.

Like thousands of others in Hampton Roads, Khalid Caraballo plays with airsoft guns. Caraballo and his friend Aidan were suspended because they shot two other friends who were with them while playing with the guns as they waited for the school bus.

The two seventh graders say they never went to the bus stop; they fired the airsoft guns while on Caraballo’s private property.

Aidan’s father, Tim Clark, told WAVY.com what happened next lacks commons sense. The children were suspended for possession, handling and use of a firearm.

Khalid’s mother, Solangel Caraballo, thinks it is ridiculous the Virginia Beach City Public School System suspended her 13-year-old son and Aidan because they were firing a spring-driven airsoft gun on the Caraballo’s posted private property. “My son is my private property. He does not become the school’s property until he goes to the bus stop, gets on the bus, and goes to school.”

The bus stop in question is 70 yards from the Caraballo’s front yard.

Homeschooling is the right solution. The school district should worry that others will follow suit. And the parents should (1) file suit: (2) oppose funding for the public school system, which has obviously gone off the rails.

WSJ with the story of yesterday’s America’s Cup victory.

… Six weeks before the Cup began on Sept. 7, Oracle examined a sailing technique called foiling. This involves lifting its boat’s two hulls out of the water, by balancing on L-shaped boards called foils, to reduce drag and increase speed. The boats had already foiled downwind, so the team studied whether it could do so on the course’s upwind leg, where boats must sail about 45 degrees to the wind and make a series of zigzag turns.

The problem was that the yacht needed to be moving especially fast to elevate on its foils. And to get the extra speed, the boat would have to avoid headwinds by sailing on a less-direct zigzag course.

Oracle didn’t like the test results and decided against the tactic. “They had it so wrong out of the blocks,” said Ken Read, a former America’s Cup skipper and current NBC Sports analyst. “It’s shocking how much technology they had at their disposal and came out so wrong upwind.”

But when the regatta started, one team did foil upwind: New Zealand. The Kiwis trounced Oracle in six of the first seven races, building enormous leads on the upwind segment.

During that first week, a flustered Oracle team called a “timeout” to postpone a race and regroup. The team’s 11 sailors spent the off days studying upwind foiling again. They realized the technique had two advantages: the speed boost offset the greater distance the boat had to travel. And they could better maintain speed on zigzag turns, which are called tacks, with the boat’s hull above the water. “You cover more ground, but you’re going into the tack at a faster speed,” Oracle chief Russell Coutts said Sunday.

Oracle adopted the technique and immediately started equaling the Kiwis on the upwind leg. Then, in the last few races, breezed past them. “We just had to configure the boat properly,” Ellison said Wednesday. “The guys on the engineering team finally…broke the code. Russell talked about driving the boat lower and faster, rather than higher and slower.”

In Wednesday’s clincher, Oracle turned a three-second deficit at the start of the segment into a 26-second advantage. It won by 44 seconds. …

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Noodles & Co’s successful IPO provided a delicious example of how stupid our government is. WSJ’s Money Beat has the story.

The Securities & Exchange Commission has a warning for the restaurant IPO craze: Don’t call your patrons “guests.”

The euphemism, common in the food-service industry, caught the attention of the regulators in the IPO filings of Noodles Inc., according to correspondence released Monday.

“Please refrain from referring to your customers as ‘guests,’” the SEC wrote in a letter dated in April. “We note that ‘customers’ denotes persons who pay for goods or services.”

Noodle’s granted the SEC several language changes but attempted to push back on a complaint about guests. Noodle’s lawyers at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher LLP on May 10 said it would add a note to the filing that defined its customers as guests, but would continue using the term.

“The Company notes that Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary defines ‘guest’ as ‘a person who pays for the services of an establishment (as a hotel or restaurant)’. This characterization is consistent with a number of companies in the restaurant and hospitality industries, and the Company believes it is consistent with the evolving use of the term ‘guest’ in public filings and in common usage in recent years. … Accordingly, the Company respectfully submits that it does not believe its use of the term ‘guests’ creates confusion with potential investors regarding whether or not these individuals pay for their good or services and has also provided a definitional term to further clarify the usage.”

But the SEC literally doesn’t care about Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary. It continued to demand a change two weeks later. …

A WaPo story on the growth of a DC area business shows how to succeed in business by really trying.

… The Bethesda native, the youngest of five children of a tax lawyer, has been scrapping since his student days at WashingtonCollege in Chestertown, Md., in the late 1980s. The summer before his senior year, an elderly woman who lived across the street from his family asked Alexander to take her and her mixed terrier to the veterinarian.

“I said sure,” he recalled. “I started driving errands for her in my parents’ Oldsmobile station wagon.”

Word spread, and he used the new Saab his parents gave him for graduation to expand the errands business. He shopped at grocery stores. He ran people to the doctor. He drove their cars to emissions tests. He charged $15 an hour and worked seven days a week. He even drove a kid to and from private school. He drew the line when a man asked Alexander to represent him in court for a speeding ticket.

After a couple of years, he had an epiphany.

An executive at Studley, the real estate management firm, asked Alexander to drive him to Union Station. Then the executive kept calling for rides and errands. Alexander realized that the businessman, who was expensing many of the charges, was a better client than the everyday customers who were paying out of their pocket.

“I saw very, very quickly that the corporate market is where the dollars are,” he said.

He expanded. He bought a 1985 Chrysler limousine for less than $5,000. He ran an advertisement for chauffeur services in The Post. People began calling. Living at home with his parents, he saved like mad and used the profits to buy more vehicles.

His next big break came when he put on a suit, drove to the new Marriott near Montgomery Mall and secured a lucrative account for the hotel’s business travel to and from the airports. …

Government does not only interfere in the markets. It also interferes in our lives. Also with disastrous results. Remember Reynolds’ Law? It was named after Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit who said; “The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.”  The LA Times has a story on college grads working at jobs that heretofore did not require any college.

… A college degree once all but guaranteed a well-paying job and higher earnings than high school graduates. But fewer of these good jobs are now available because of both long-term economic changes and the lingering effects of the Great Recession.

People such as Flagherty with college and advanced degrees are working jobs that don’t require them, whether by choice or necessity. That in turn pushes people without college degrees out of those jobs.

In 1970, only 2% of firefighters had college degrees; now 18% do, according to Richard Vedder, an economist at Ohio University. Fewer than 1% of taxi drivers had a college degree in 1970; now 15% do. About 25% of retail sales clerks have college degrees, Vedder said.

“The main reason is a pretty simple one,” he said. “The number of college graduates has grown vastly faster than the number of jobs that require high-level education skills.”

In the 1980s and 1990s, the demand for college graduates started booming, especially in the lead-up to the tech boom, said Paul Beaudry, an economist at the University of British Columbia who has studied this trend. Wages grew and a college education paid off.

But when the tech bubble burst, the economy was left with an oversupply of college graduates. Some went into industries related to housing or finance, and then the recession wiped out those jobs. No industry has emerged to employ all the people who got college degrees in that time, he said.

As more college graduates have flooded the market, employers are able to offer lower wages. The earnings of college grads have fallen about 13% in the last decade, according to DrexelUniversity economist Paul Harrington. …

Andrew Malcolm with late night humor.

Conan: Russia’s President Vladimir Putin says he may seek a fourth term, adding, “But that’s up to the people to decide.” Then, he laughed for 10 minutes.

Leno: Obama is now getting a lot of criticism from his own party. It’s gotten so bad that Jimmy Carter has started comparing Obama to Jimmy Carter.

Leno: Critics says ObamaCare will require doctors to ask you about your sex life. That’s outrageous! Your sex life is between you and the NSA.

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Peter Wehner with a post that will make you reflect.

A recent interview in Relevant magazine caught my attention. In it, the journalist Peter Hitchens made this observation:

“This is a period of great material wealth and the worships of economic growth and the century of the self, in which religious belief is going to be in trouble. The best metaphor for the state of mind in which we find ourselves is this is the first generation of the human race which doesn’t generally see the stars at night. It has blotted them out with street maps and car headlights and everything else. You simply can’t see the stars in most places where human beings are concentrated, and, in the same way, the triumph of consumerism and growth and the temporary joys of pleasure as a substitute for happiness blotted out the metaphorical stars of religious faith. It’s very hard to expect people who can’t see the stars to examine the significance of the stars or see their beauty.”

This is an insightful and eloquently stated point. In acknowledging that, I need to insert a couple of qualifications, the first of which is that I believe wealth is better than poverty for all the obvious reasons – from mitigating human suffering to creating the conditions to foster human flourishing. (Among many other good things, wealth allows people to participate in uplifting cultural experiences, provides assistance to the needs of their children, supports worthy charities and funds college educations.) And my own situation qualifies me as wealthy, at least relative to most of the rest of the world and to those who have lived throughout history. Let’s just say no one will confuse my lifestyle with that of St. Francis of Assisi. (There is no record of him owning the 13th century equivalent of a plasma TV, at least after his pilgrimage to Rome in his early 20s.)

Still, one can appreciate the truth of what Hitchens is getting at. It’s no secret that often the danger posed to Christians over the millennia is less persecution than worldliness; that it is wealth and power that often undermine spiritual discipline and draw our affections away from the Lord; and that riches can be distractions, averting our gaze from what matters most. …

Salon reviews a book about how the country of Denmark saved its Jews from the German occupiers.

It is “one of the oldest and most sticky humanistic dilemmas,” wrote George Kennan in 1940, referring to the choice between “a limited cooperation with evil in order to alleviate ultimately its consequences” and “an uncompromising, heroic but suicidal fight against it.” Kennan, quoted in Bo Lidegaard’s “Countrymen” (translated from the Danish by Robert Maas) was in Prague, contemplating the Czechs’ response to the Munich agreement, but “his observation,” writes Lidegaard, “is equally true for Denmark during the German occupation.”

We all know that 6 million European Jews died in the Nazis’ campaign of genocide during World War II, but the degree of slaughter was not consistent across borders. Ninety percent of the Jewish population in Germany, Austria, Poland and the Baltics was murdered. In Yugoslavia and Ukraine, it was closer to 60 percent, and in France it was 26 percent. In Denmark, a nation occupied by Germany from the spring of 1940, less than 1 percent of the nation’s Jews were killed by the Nazis. (There’s also a legend that the King of Denmark wore the yellow Star of David himself to protest the label the Nazis forced on Jews, but Denmark’s Jews were never compelled to wear it.)

“Countrymen” is the story of how Denmark’s Jews survived, and one of the more inspiring narratives of the war. Despite occasional rough spots and repetitions, Lidegaard, a diplomat turned newspaper editor, delivers a skillful braiding of two threads. The first is an account of intricate realpolitik among Danish officials, German administrators and the fanatical regime back in Berlin. The second centers on the diaries — published for the first time — of several members of an extended family forced to flee Denmark for Sweden in the autumn of 1943. Lidegaard fleshes out this closer-to-the-ground tale with other first-person stories by and about the many Danish citizens who helped their Jewish countrymen to safety. …

The Atlantic writes on people who use check cashing stores rather than banks.

The alternative financial services industry—check cashers, payday lenders and the like—is growing rapidly, largely among low- and moderate-income people. Industry studies estimate that there were more than $58.3 billion in check-cashing transactions in  2010, up from $45 billion in 1990. Payday lending has grown from $10 billion in 2001 to nearly $30 billion in 2010.

As part of my research as an urban policy professor at The New School, I recently spent four months working weekly, eight-hour shifts as a teller at RiteCheck, a check cashing business in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the South Bronx. I wanted to understand how and why the people who frequent these “alternative” financial institutions use them. Like the majority of my academic colleagues, I believed check cashers, with their per transaction fee structure, and payday lenders, preyed upon the unbanked. But I learned quickly that many RiteCheck customers have made a conscious choice to be unbanked.

Policy makers, consumer advocates and academicians, are troubled by the numbers: 17 million nationwide are unbanked, and 43 million have a bank account but also continue to use alternative financial services providers.

In poor areas like the South Bronx, the statistics are starker still. The South Bronx has only one bank per 20,000 residents. In Manhattan, one bank serves every 3,000 residents. More than half of the residents of Bronx Community Board 1, which includes Mott Haven, have no bank account. Almost three-quarters of Bronx residents have no discretionary income, which often provides the impetus for establishing savings and other commercial bank accounts.

When I arrived at RiteCheck in mid-November, I spent weeks training at the elbow of Cristina, a veteran teller from the Dominican Republic who has worked at RiteCheck for more than ten years. Like the more experienced waitresses I worked with at a greasy spoon during college summers, Cristina often knew what her customers needed before they reached her window. Indeed, the relationships I encountered between tellers and customers at RiteCheck were much more like those I had witnessed as a child at Pulawski Savings and Loan than what I currently experience at the multinational brand name bank I use. …

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The president said we’re not ”some banana republic.” Mark Steyn reacts.

This is the United States of America,” declared President Obama to the burghers of Liberty, Mo., on Friday. “We’re not some banana republic.”

He was talking about the Annual Raising of the Debt Ceiling, which glorious American tradition seems to come round earlier every year. “This is not a deadbeat nation,” President Obama continued. “We don’t run out on our tab.” True. But we don’t pay it off either. We just keep running it up, ever higher. And every time the bartender says, “Mebbe you’ve had enough, pal,” we protest, “Jush another couple trillion for the road. Set ’em up, Joe.” And he gives you that look that kinda says he wishes you’d run out on your tab back when it was $23.68.

Still, Obama is right. We’re not a banana republic, if only because the debt of banana republics is denominated in a currency other than their own — i.e., the U.S. dollar. When you’re the guys who print the global currency, you can run up debts undreamt of by your average generalissimo. As Obama explained in another of his recent speeches, “Raising the debt ceiling, which has been done over a hundred times, does not increase our debt.” I won’t even pretend to know what he and his speechwriters meant by that one, but the fact that raising the debt ceiling “has been done over a hundred times” does suggest that spending more than it takes in is now a permanent feature of American government. And no one has plans to do anything about it. Which is certainly banana republic-esque. …

Joel Kotkin says there is bipartisan distrust of the government. Is this a glimmer of hope?

Much has been written and spoken about the deep divide between “red” and “blue” America, but the real chasm increasingly is between Washington and the rest of the country. This disconnect may increase as both conservatives and liberals outside the Beltway look with growing disdain upon their “leaders” inside the imperial capital. Indeed, according to Gallup, trust among Americans toward the federal government has sunk to historic lows, regarding both foreign and domestic policy.

The debate over Syria epitomizes this division. For the most part, Washington has been more than willing to entertain another military venture. This includes the Democratic policy establishment. You see notables like Anne Marie Slaughter and the New York Times’ Bill Keller join their onetime rivals among the neoconservative right in railing against resurgent “isolationism” on the Right.

Yet some people, like the Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol, who pushed for our disaster in Iraq, now insist that turning away from a Syrian involvement would be “disastrous for the nation in very clear ways.”

Yet, out in the country, where people, even those who (like me) supported Iraq initially, know that that war was not worth the price, in blood, treasure or damage to national unity. The citizens are not remotely interested in getting a second shot of neoconservative disaster in Syria. A recent CNN poll found that seven in 10 would oppose attacking Bashar al-Assad’s regime without congressional approval, which about 60 percent think Congress should not give.

This is not a partisan consensus, but an outside-the-Beltway one. Liberals, who might be expected to rally behind their president, have remained deeply divided. At the grass-roots level, both left-wing groups, like Moveon.org, and those on the right, notably Tea Party factions, have opposed entering the Syrian quagmire. One liberal writer, utterly confused by the new alignment, admitted he was looking to the “far-right fringe” with its “abominable” nativist and racist views, to “salvage our Syria policy.” …

Juan Williams of Fox News asks why the administration wants to send poor black kids back to failing schools. Because they’re owned by the teachers’ unions, Juan.  And the teachers unions have no interest in serving the students.

The Obama Justice Department filed a civil rights lawsuit last month to stop Louisiana from giving vouchers to poor students in failing schools. The Justice Department claims that the vouchers disrupt racial balance in schools.

School integration remains important. But the Justice Department’s argument is weak at best.

At the two schools cited in the Justice Department suit there is no evidence that racial diversity has been hurt because of the voucher plan. 

One is a school in which a white majority school lost black students. In the other example, a black majority school lost white students. But in both schools the use of vouchers resulted in less than one percent difference in the racial make-up of the schools.

In addition, 90 percent of the students receiving the vouchers are black students from families with incomes less than 250 percent of the poverty line. The voucher plan is not a return to the days of white flight from public schools.

And there is an even more important issue than school integration at stake: How can the Justice Department justify denying poor black students, the people with the lowest achievement record in U.S. schools, the rare chance to get out of failing schools and go to better schools? More than 80 percent of students in the voucher plan had attended poorly performing schools, rated ‘D’ or ‘F.’ …

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Pittsburgh Post-Gazette with the tragic story of the death of a modern day slave (adjunct professor) toiling in the groves of academe.

On Sept. 1, Margaret Mary Vojtko, an adjunct professor who had taught French at DuquesneUniversity for 25 years, passed away at the age of 83. She died as the result of a massive heart attack she suffered two weeks before. As it turned out, I may have been the last person she talked to.

On Aug. 16, I received a call from a very upset Margaret Mary. She told me that she was under an incredible amount of stress. She was receiving radiation therapy for the cancer that had just returned to her, she was living nearly homeless because she could not afford the upkeep on her home, which was literally falling in on itself, and now, she explained, she had received another indignity — a letter from Adult Protective Services telling her that someone had referred her case to them saying that she needed assistance in taking care of herself. The letter said that if she did not meet with the caseworker the following Monday, her case would be turned over to Orphans’ Court.

For a proud professional like Margaret Mary, this was the last straw; she was mortified. She begged me to call Adult Protective Services and tell them to leave her alone, that she could take care of herself and did not need their help. I agreed to. Sadly, a couple of hours later, she was found on her front lawn, unconscious from a heart attack. She never regained consciousness.

Meanwhile, I called Adult Protective Services right after talking to Margaret Mary, and I explained the situation. I said that she had just been let go from her job as a professor at Duquesne, that she was given no severance or retirement benefits, and that the reason she was having trouble taking care of herself was because she was living in extreme poverty. The caseworker paused and asked with incredulity, “She was a professor?” I said yes. The caseworker was shocked; this was not the usual type of person for whom she was called in to help.

Of course, what the caseworker didn’t understand was that Margaret Mary was an adjunct professor, …

… As amazing as it sounds, Margaret Mary, a 25-year professor, was not making ends meet. Even during the best of times, when she was teaching three classes a semester and two during the summer, she was not even clearing $25,000 a year, and she received absolutely no health care benefits. Compare this with the salary of Duquesne’s president, who makes more than $700,000 with full benefits.

Meanwhile, in the past year, her teaching load had been reduced by the university to one class a semester, which meant she was making well below $10,000 a year. With huge out-of-pocket bills from UPMC Mercy for her cancer treatment, Margaret Mary was left in abject penury. She could no longer keep her electricity on in her home, which became uninhabitable during the winter. She therefore took to working at an Eat’n Park at night and then trying to catch some sleep during the day at her office at Duquesne. When this was discovered by the university, the police were called in to eject her from her office. Still, despite her cancer and her poverty, she never missed a day of class. …

Instapundit comments.

Perhaps academics view the business world as cruel and exploitative toward workers because academia is so cruel and exploitative to its own workers. . . .

While slavery exists, The New Republic shows us the luxury for students.

Part of the ritual of returning to college at this time of year used to mean giving up the comforts of home, particularly the cozy private bedroom that is such a staple of American teenage life, and moving into a campus dormitory that was almost architecturally indistinguishable from public housing. Even at elite schools, rooms were the size of jail cells, beds were stacked like cordwood, and amenities consisted of a dresser and a desk. This was considered perfectly normal. Universities, after all, originated as monastic centers.

Plenty of Spartan dormitories still exist, especially at prestigious liberal arts schools that can have their pick of the litter, but they are quickly going the way of the paper textbook. Today’s student accommodations are being built to resemble the kind of apartments you would find in a new urban high-rise. It’s not unusual for a suite in one of these upscale dorms to include individual bedrooms with private baths and kitchens equipped with a full complement of stainless steel appliances—dishwashers and the obligatory granite countertops included. When admissions officers describe “amenities” to incoming students, their list now includes things like flat-screen televisions and tanning salons. At Drexel University, students are lining up for places in a new, privately built dorm designed by Robert A. M. Stern Architects, a firm known for its Hamptons beach houses and a fabulously expensive apartment building on Central Park West. Besides stunning views of the Philadelphia skyline, full-size beds, and some duplex units, its residents will have access to a private gym with a golf-course simulation room and a 30-seat screening room for practicing presentations—or holding Superbowl parties. …

Victor Davis Hanson posts on the decline of college.

For the last 70 years, American higher education was assumed to be the pathway to upward mobility and a rich shared-learning experience. Young Americans for four years took a common core of classes, learned to look at the world dispassionately, and gained the concrete knowledge to make informed arguments logically.

The result was a more skilled workforce and a competent democratic citizenry. That ideal may still be true at our flagship universities, with their enormous endowments and stellar world rankings. Yet most everywhere else, something went terribly wrong with that model. Almost all the old campus protocols are now tragically outdated or antithetical to their original mission.

Tenure — virtual lifelong job security for full-time faculty after six years — was supposed to protect free speech on campus. How, then, did campus ideology become more monotonous than diverse, more intolerant of politically unpopular views than open-minded? Universities have so little job flexibility that campuses cannot fire the incompetent tenured or hire full-time competent newcomers.

The university is often a critic of private enterprise for its supposed absence of fairness and equality. The contemporary campus, however, is far more exploitative. It pays part-time faculty far less for the same work than it pays an aristocratic class of fully tenured professors with the same degrees.

The four-year campus experience is simply vanishing. At the CaliforniaStateUniversity system, the largest university complex in the world, well under 20 percent of students graduate in four years despite massive student aid. Fewer than half graduate in six years. …

Turning out attention to DC, Daniel Henninger writes on the confused president.

… Early in September, President Obama surprised Washington by announcing he would seek a congressional vote of support for taking action against Bashar Assad in Syria. This came after the red line went. In an account of that decision, The Wall Street Journal reported that after taking a 45-minute walk with his chief of staff, Mr. Obama told his staff, “I have a big idea I want to run by you guys.”

After meeting with the president, two significant political figures in Washington expressed public support for his announced plans to act against Assad—House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

The president’s decision to intervene wasn’t popular with the American public or with members of Congress, so the Boehner-Cantor commitment was a big deal. It was a public expression of political support at the moment the president needed all the political support he could get.

A week and a half later, Mr. Obama reversed course. He would not seek congressional approval. Instead it occurred to him that he could negotiate a Syrian chemical-arms reduction agreement with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The merits of that decision aside, ABC’s Jonathan Karl reported that neither Mr. Boehner nor Mr. Cantor got a heads up from the White House on the U-turn toward Russia.

Throw a dart at the names of the other 11 post-war U.S. presidents. Would any of them have hung a Speaker of the House out to dry just before heading into negotiations with that speaker on funding the government, extending the debt ceiling or the future of your legacy achievement—ObamaCare? Barack Obama did. No problem. …

Jennifer Rubin wonders if he is losing it.

As we’ve written over the last few weeks, the president has real, substantive problems in foreign policy and on Obamacare. But that doesn’t mean his problems are only substantive.

In quick succession, the Syria debacle and his frenetically partisan attack on Republicans as the Navy Yard shootings incident was unfolding have gotten the attention and approbation of a large number of usually friendly voices.

On Syria, there has been near uniform dismay among the pundits and foreign policy experts over the president’s unsteady and often confusing response to Syria’s WMD use.

Just as biting, however, was the criticism of his decision to lash out at Republicans in cartoonish terms at the same time as the killing at the Navy Yard. Politico (which is to Washington superficiality what Emily Post is to table manners) sent up the first flare. Soon CNN chimed in. (“Did Obama strike the wrong tone on Monday?”)

Maureen Dowd gnashed her teeth over the misstep: “[J]arringly, the president went ahead with his political attack, briefly addressing the slaughter before moving on to jab Republicans over the corporate tax rate and resistance to Obamacare. . . . It was out of joint, given that the Senate was put into lockdown and the Washington Nationals delayed a night game against the Atlanta Braves, noting on its Web site, ‘Postponed: Tragedy.’” Chuck Todd (who had his own issues after tweeting the incorrect name of the gunman) intoned on Tuesday that the White House “wish they had yesterday back.” Like Dowd, Andrea Mitchell saw a pattern: “It doesn’t seem as though they have got their footing here, first on Syria, now on this.” …

The Economist writes on the West’s humiliation.

IN JULY 1972 Anwar Sadat, president of Egypt, suddenly decided to turf out thousands of Soviet military advisers. Menaced by Egyptian leftists and undervalued by the Kremlin, he calculated that he had more to gain from siding with America. Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s secretary of state, administered some deft diplomacy to broker a ceasefire between Egypt, Syria and Israel in the Yom Kippur war, and American aid duly flooded into Cairo. So did American influence: the Soviet hold over the Middle East never recovered.

The plan to wrest chemical weapons from Syria, shortly to be embodied in a UN resolution, has echoes of that era—except that the modern Metternich is a serial abuser of human rights and occasional op-ed writer on democracy for the New York Times, called Vladimir Putin. Russia, the country he leads, is too frail to regain its place in the Middle East. But this week, a decade after the invasion of Iraq, it suddenly became clear just how far the influence of the West has ebbed. The pity is how few Americans and Europeans seem to care about that.

In Western capitals the sigh of relief over Syria is audible. Barack Obama, while admitting that his diplomacy fell short on “style points”, claims that he got what he wanted. Syria’s president, Bashar Assad, will sign the convention against chemical weapons and get rid of the agents that he used to kill around 1,500 of his own citizens last month (see article). Even better, Russia shares responsibility for enforcing the plan, which could lead to broader co-operation with America, while Syria’s other ally, Iran, is making noises about negotiating with the Great Satan over its own nuclear programme. …

… The West is not on an inexorable slide towards irrelevance. Far from it. America’s economy is recovering, and its gas boom has undermined energy-fuelled autocracies. Dictatorships are getting harder to manage: from Beijing to Riyadh, people have been talking about freedom and the rule of law. It should be a good time to uphold Western values. But when the emerging world’s aspiring democrats seek to topple tyrants, they will remember what happened in Syria. And they won’t put their faith in the West.

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The last post before the weekend starts with a couple of pieces of good news. First, Joel Kotkin celebrates the future of our partnership with our neighbors to the north and south – NAFTA.

OK, I get it. Between George W. Bush and Barack Obama we have made complete fools of ourselves on the international stage, outmaneuvered by petty lunatics and crafty kleptocrats like Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Some even claim we are witnessing “an erosion of world influence” equal to such failed states as the Soviet Union and the French Third Republic. “Has anyone noticed how diminished, how very Lilliputian, America has become?” my friend Tunku Varadajaran recently asked.

In reality, it’s our politicians who have gotten small, not America. In our embarrassment, we tend not to notice that our rivals are also shrinking. Take the Middle East — please. Increasingly, we don’t need it because of North America’s unparalleled resources and economic vitality.

Welcome then to the NAFTA century, in which our power is fundamentally based on developing a common economic region with our two large neighbors. Since its origins in 1994, NAFTA has emerged as the world’s largest trading bloc, linking 450 million people that produce $17 trillion in output. Foreign policy elites in both parties may focus on Europe, Asia and the Middle East, but our long-term fate lies more with Canada, Mexico and the rest of the Americas.

Nowhere is this shift in power more obvious than in the critical energy arena, the wellspring of our deep involvement in the lunatic Middle East. Massive finds have given us a new energy lifeline in places like the Gulf coast, the Alberta tar sands, the Great Plains, the Inland West, Ohio, Pennsylvania and potentially California.

And if Mexico successfully reforms its state-owned energy monopoly, PEMEX, the world energy — and economic — balance of power will likely shift more decisively to North America. Mexican President Pena Nieto’s plan, which would allow increased foreign investment in the energy sector, is projected by at least one analyst to boost Mexico’s oil output by 20% to 50% in the coming decades. …

The next piece of good news comes from James Pethokoukis. Posting on a study by Deutsche Bank analysts, he claims zero population growth is in sight.

Make room! The current world population of roughly 7.2 billion will rise to 9.6 billion by 2050 and then to 10.9 billion in 2100, according to the most recent United Nations projections.

Wait, don’t make room. Demographer Sanjeev Sanyal of Deutsche Bank thinks the UN is way off. His calculations find the world’s overall fertility rate falling to the replacement rate in 2025, although global population will continue to expand thanks in part to rising longevity, for another few decades. Then comes the Big Shrink. Sanyal:

We forecast that world population will peak around 2055 at  8.7 billion and will then decline to 8.0 billion by 2100. In other words, our forecasts  suggest that world population will peak at least half a century sooner than the UN expects and that by 2100, and that level will be 2.8 billion below the UN’s  prediction. This is obviously a radically different view of the world.

The missing 3 billion. Below are two charts, the first with the UN’s projections, the second with Deutsche Bank’s: …

… 4. Some developed countries may do surprisingly well. The one developed country that stands out in our model is the United States. Even though our population growth projections are more moderate than those of the UN, the US can be expected to continue to enjoy an expanding working-age population till the 2050s (i.e. longer than many emerging economies). Germany’s low birth rate implies a declining population but we feel that it will be much more successful in absorbing immigrants than anticipated by the UN. Thus, its demographic trajectory may not be quite as dire as generally believed. …

The failure of Summers to gain the Fed post is an indication of early onset of lameduckedness according to Jennifer Rubin. No, she didn’t dream up that word, it was the German in Pickerhead.

It’s a measure of just how far the president’s stock has fallen that he couldn’t get the Federal Reserve chairman he wanted because Democrats revolted. Democratic Senators Jon Tester of Montana, Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Sherrod Brown of Ohio all publicly said they wouldn’t support the Clinton-era economist. Certainly the liberal base was up in arms that President Obama might have the temerity to appoint a business-friendly veteran of the Clinton administration.

Rather than fight, Summers (no doubt at the White House’s behest) stepped aside, just as Susan Rice shied away from a tough nomination fight for secretary of state. But Rice was a victim of the right; Summers’s rejection by the left is a reminder that the president has disappointed his base on so many topics (the sequester, failure to repeal all the Bush tax cuts, gun control, single-payer health care and climate change) that he felt obliged to relent on this one. …

More on this from The Atlantic.

… Perhaps even more surprising is who did Obama in: a small team of Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee. On Friday, Montana’s Jon Tester announced he would not back a Summers nomination. That followed similar comments, via aides, by Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Jeff Merkley of Oregon. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, the progressive icon and former Obama aide, was also thought to be reluctant. That meant Summers would have required at least four Republican votes to clear the Senate Banking Committee, and around 10 from the wider Senate to reach the 60-vote threshold likely needed to overcome GOP procedural obstruction.

Until Sunday afternoon, these seemed like just the latest skirmishes in a war. In July, almost a third of the Democrats in the Senate sent a letter to Obama imploring him to appoint Janet Yellen to the job instead. While the letter didn’t mention Summers, it was clearly a rebuke to the White House’s reported preference. Progressives worried that Summers was too much a part of the Clinton-era economic team that they charged with helping to make the Great Recession possible, and they argued that Yellen had been right more frequently on crucial recent economic issues.

But Obama was reportedly angry at the letter, and dispatched aides to Capitol Hill to vent and get the troops in line. While Majority Leader Harry Reid promised to support whomever the president picked, he apparently wasn’t able to keep his caucus completely in line, leading to today’s withdrawal.

Here are three political takeaways from the demise of the Summers nomination. …

The Toast with tips on how to write like a NY Times pundit.

I am going to share a tip with you, a tip that thus far I have managed to keep to myself but that will benefit you enormously, whether student or amateur sociologist or writer for The Economist.

No matter what time period you are referring to, no matter what country or region of the world you are referencing, there is a single claim that you can make that will always be true and will never be challenged, not even by Malcolm Gladwell himself: the middle class is always in the process of emerging. Like a shivering, fluffy clutch of chicks poking their heads out of the membraneous shards of a newly-cracked shell, the middle class is in a constant state of emergence.

That’s it. That’s all there is to it. Want to sound like an authority on growing third-world markets, whatever those are? Talk about the increased influence of the emerging middle class.

Writing a history essay about the policies of Louis XIV? Don’t forget to include a paragraph or two about the checks on his national authority by the newly influential middle class.

What was the middle class doing during the Victorian Era? Emerging.

What is the middle class doing in China right now, this very moment? Emerging. Oh, look, what’s that over there? It’s the middle class, just down the road in India, and they’re emerging all over the place. …

 

Late night from Andrew Malcolm.

Leno: Some 312,000 Americans gave up job-hunting in August, lowering the unemployment rate to 7.3%. Obama calls this a real step in the right direction, urges more Americans to give up looking for work.

Leno: John Kerry has given Syria one week to turn over all its chemical weapons. And if they don’t, they get one more week. That’s where we are.

Letterman: Did you see Obama’s speech? First thing he said, ‘Good evening. I’m the President of the United States. I killed bin Laden.’ A good start.

Letterman: President Obama now says we may be close to a deal with Syria. So, thank you, Dennis Rodman.

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Today we turn our attention to the increase in Arctic sea ice. First we learn from Steven Goddard;

Earth has gained 19,000 Manhattans of sea ice since this date last year, the largest increase on record. There is more sea ice now than there was on this date in 2002.

Barbara Hollingsworth from CNS News puts that in Algore perspective.

A 2007 prediction that summer in the North Pole could be “ice-free by 2013” that was cited by former Vice President Al Gore in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech has proven to be off… by 920,000 square miles. In his Dec. 10, 2007 “Earth has a fever” speech, Gore referred to a prediction by U.S. climate scientist Wieslaw Maslowski that the Arctic’s summer ice could “completely disappear” by 2013 due to global warming caused by carbon emissions.

Gore said that on Sept. 21, 2007, “scientists reported with unprecedented alarm that the North Polar icecap is, in their words, ‘falling off a cliff.’ One study estimated that it could be completely gone during summer in less than 22 years. Another new study to be presented by U.S. Navy researchers later this week warns that it could happen in as little as seven years, seven years from now.”

Maslowski told members of the American Geophysical Union in 2007 that the Arctic’s summer ice could completely disappear within the decade. “If anything,” he said, “our projection of 2013 for the removal of ice in summer… is already too conservative.”

The former vice president also warned that rising temperatures were “a planetary emergency and a threat to the survival of our civilization.”

However, instead of completely melting away, the polar icecap is at now at its highest level for this time of year since 2006. …

WSJ OpEd by Matt Ridley covers more ground.

Later this month, a long-awaited event that last happened in 2007 will recur. Like a returning comet, it will be taken to portend ominous happenings. I refer to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) “fifth assessment report,” part of which will be published on Sept. 27. 

There have already been leaks from this 31-page document, which summarizes 1,914 pages of scientific discussion, but thanks to a senior climate scientist, I have had a glimpse of the key prediction at the heart of the document. The big news is that, for the first time since these reports started coming out in 1990, the new one dials back the alarm. It states that the temperature rise we can expect as a result of man-made emissions of carbon dioxide is lower than the IPPC thought in 2007.

Admittedly, the change is small, and because of changing definitions, it is not easy to compare the two reports, but retreat it is. It is significant because it points to the very real possibility that, over the next several generations, the overall effect of climate change will be positive for humankind and the planet. …

Forbes had a piece too. Although heavy on sarcasm, it is worth including.

… When you click on this New York Times article, you also aren’t seeing what you think you see, because global warming alarmists apparently told us last year the 2012 Arctic ice season was unlikely to be repeated in 2013.

According to our collective hallucination in the September 19, 2012 New York Times:

“‘The Arctic is the earth’s air-conditioner,’ said Walt Meier, a research scientist at the snow and ice center, an agency sponsored by the government. ‘We’re losing that. It’s not just that polar bears might go extinct, or that native communities might have to adapt, which we’re already seeing — there are larger climate effects.’”

“Now, some scientists think the Arctic Ocean could be largely free of summer ice as soon as 2020,” the Times continued, according to our collective hallucination.

“Scientists said Wednesday that the Arctic has become a prime example of the built-in conservatism of their climate forecasts. As dire as their warnings about the long-term consequences of heat-trapping emissions have been, many of them fear they may still be underestimating the speed and severity of the impending changes,” the Times apparently never reported. …

Bjørn Lomborg, author of the Skeptical Environmentalist writes for WaPo this week trying to get everyone to cool their globalony jets.

One of the most persistent claims in the climate debate is that global warming leads to more extreme weather. Green groups and even such respectable outlets as Scientific American declare that “extreme weather is a product of climate change.”

And the meme seems irresistible as a political shortcut to action. President Obama has explicitly linked a warming climate to “more extreme droughts, floods, wildfires and hurricanes.” The White House warned this summer of “increasingly frequent and severe extreme weather events that come with climate change.”

Yet this is not supported by science. “General statements about extremes are almost nowhere to be found in the literature but seem to abound in the popular media,” climate scientist Gavin Schmidt of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies said last month. “It’s this popular perception that global warming means all extremes have to increase all the time, even though if anyone thinks about that for 10 seconds they realize that’s nonsense.”

Global warming is real. It is partly man-made. It will make some things worse and some things better. Overall, the long-run impact will be negative. But some of the most prominent examples of extreme weather are misleading, and some weather events are becoming less extreme. …

Steve Hayward at Power Line sums up.

With two weeks to go until the slow rollout of the next IPCC climate science report begins, there’s a fresh embarrassment for the climateers from right inside their own camp: a Nature Climate Change article entitled “Overestimated global warming over the past 20 years.”

The article is dry and dusty in the usual way, but there’s no understating the devastating effects of certain passages like this:

The evidence, therefore, indicates that the current generation of climate models (when run as a group) do not reproduce the observed global warming over the past 20 years, or the slowdown in global warming over the past fifteen years. . .

In other words, the “current generation of climate models” is crap.  The authors offer some explanations of why this glaring anomaly could be consistent with the general warmist hypothesis, but ultimately repair to the “wait and see—we’ll still be right” argument.

It is going to be very interesting to see how the IPCC report handles this problem in its forthcoming report. …