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Kevin Williamson writes on a Florida program that grants $5,700 tax credits to parents who send their children to private schools. Or course the teacher’s union is suing to halt the program.  

… This isn’t about religion; it’s about protecting the narrow financial interests of a monopolistic public-sector cartel that produces a whole lot of six-figure salaries, $28-an-hour baby-sitters, and $90,000-a-year shop teachers. You think it’s not about the money? Consider that Florida uses a similar system to provide pre-kindergarten education to 140,000 low-income children, about 40 percent of whom are in religiously affiliated schools. Florida offers college scholarships, too, which students are free to use at religious institutions. (Three of Florida’s historically black colleges are Christian schools — shall we revoke their students’ federal aid?) Nobody is filing any lawsuits about college scholarships — the union goons are not looking out for anything but their own selfish interests.

Which would be more or less fine, if they didn’t stink quite so much when it comes to educating children.

We know they do a terrible job. The data show that they do a terrible job. And, most significant, they know that they do a terrible job, too: That’s why they do not want families to be allowed to choose. Given a choice, 70,000 low-income Florida families are saying “No” to the monopoly. If more families are allowed to choose, more are going to tell the cartel to pound sand, thus putting its members at a higher risk of being forced to work for market wages.

And let’s remember who these families and children are: 100 percent low-income, 75 percent minority, 60 percent single-parent families, heavily immigrant black and brown families earning on average about half of the median income.

Underpaid, you might say.

Ricochet writes on a subversive conspiracy to provide good education. It comes from HillsdaleCollege.

I’ve been reluctant to write about Hillsdale’s conspiracy to educate our K-12 children, for fear of betraying one of the most effective schemes to restore the Republic ever devised by the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.

But, since public education is a perpetual topic of debate here among the center-right (see here, here, and here), I thought readers might like to know about my kids’ public charter school, which teaches a classical curriculum provided by Hillsdale College. Yes, that Hillsdale. The Hillsdale of Ricochet’s own Paul Rahe, the online courses on The Constitution and The Great Books, Imprimis, and the most excellent Hillsdale Dialogue interviews by Hugh Hewitt of President Larry Arnn and other members of the faculty.

When my daughter began her career at The Vanguard School as a freshman, we didn’t even know the curriculum was provided by Hillsdale. We only knew that Vanguard was the top-performing high school in Colorado as measured by standardized test scores, college attendance by graduates, and scholarship earnings of its graduates. Vanguard’s first graduating class of 22 students earned over two million dollars in scholarships.

We were also unaware that the school appears to be a job-placement program for Hillsdale graduates, who have been, uniformly, some of the best teachers (and most decent people) from whom my daughter has ever had the privilege of learning. And since she’s been educated in charter schools since 3rd grade, that’s saying something.

What does $6,000 per pupil of tax funding (roughly the going rate in Colorado) buy you? Allow me to share just a sampling of the freshman reading list (see a complete listing for all grades here): …

Roger Simon says patriotism is not the last refuge of scoundrels, it is global warming.

Samuel Johnson had it wrong when he famously said that “patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels!”

“Global warming is the last refuge of scoundrels!”

(Or “climate change” or “extreme weather” or “bad storms” or whatever the euphemism du jour happens to be.)

Of course, the good doctor can be excused, opining as he did in the late 18th century, long before Al of Gore emerged from a massage parlor to warn of us of impending ecological doom if we didn’t mend our ways (and start some lucrative carbon offset funds that would net him millions, or is it billions, before they disappeared in a haze of corruption somewhere in the bowels of a Beijing bank, so help me Al Jazeera).

But never fear — climate change is back, this time on the back of our president, who has emerged not from a massage parlor but from the golf course — where else? — to guide us into the promised land of clean energy.  According to — where else? — the New York Times: …

Jonathan Tobin has good news for polar bears and bad news for algore. 

That some of Al Gore’s global warming predictions turned out to be bogus is no longer much of a surprise. As far back as seven years ago, a British court ruled that Gore’s Oscar-winning environmentalist documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth, contained several errors and exaggerations that illustrated the alarmist spirit that motivated the filmmaker. But the news about nature contradicting another one of the former vice president’s predictions should not so much encourage skeptics about global warming theories as inspire both sides in this controversy to lower their voices and to be a little less sanguine about computer models, whether they predict warming or cooling.

The report in yesterday’s Daily Mail concerns the extent of the ice cap covering the Arctic. Gore had warned in 2007 while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize that within seven years the ice cap would vanish in summer. However, satellite photographs confirm that not only has the ice not vanished, in the last two years it has increased somewhere between 43 and 62 percent since 2012. It turns out that in that time some 1.715 million square kilometers of the Arctic are now covered by ice that were water during the 2012 presidential campaign.

Does this mean that global warning is a myth? Not necessarily. Scientists say 2012 was a year of “freak weather” and that the cooling since then is a regression to the mean rather than a complete reversal of past warming trends that some say remain in place in the long term. But since the evidence shows that the ice cap is larger than at any point since 2006, it’s certainly worth noting. …

Here’s the Daily Mail article.

… The most widely used measurements of Arctic ice extent are the daily satellite readings issued by the US National Snow and IceDataCenter, which is co-funded by Nasa. These reveal that – while the long-term trend still shows a decline – last Monday, August 25, the area of the Arctic Ocean with at least 15 per cent ice cover was 5.62 million square kilometres.

This was the highest level recorded on that date since 2006 (see graph, right), and represents an increase of 1.71 million square kilometres over the past two years – an impressive 43 per cent.

Other figures from the Danish Meteorological Institute suggest that the growth has been even more dramatic. Using a different measure, the area with at least 30 per cent ice cover, these reveal a 63 per cent rise – from 2.7 million to 4.4 million square kilometres.

The satellite images published here are taken from a further authoritative source, the University of Illinois’s Cryosphere project.

They show that as well as becoming more extensive, the ice has grown more concentrated, with the purple areas – denoting regions where the ice pack is most dense – increasing markedly.

Crucially, the ice is also thicker, and therefore more resilient to future melting. Professor Andrew Shepherd, of LeedsUniversity, an expert in climate satellite monitoring, said yesterday: ‘It is clear from the measurements we have collected that the Arctic sea ice has experienced a significant recovery in thickness over the past year.

‘It seems that an unusually cool summer in 2013 allowed more ice to survive through to last winter. This means that the Arctic sea ice pack is thicker and stronger than usual, and this should be taken into account when making predictions of its future extent.’ …

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Back to President Bystander. Craig Pirrong of Streetwise Professor gets a few shots.

Today Obama shared with the world his deep insights on ISIS and Ukraine.

The gobsmacking revelation: “We don’t have a strategy yet” on ISIS. (Precisely because he calls it ISIL, I will refer to it by ISIS.)

This brings to mind the old Lone Ranger joke, with the punchline: “What do you mean we, paleface?” (Don’t go there.)

I am sure that the Pentagon presented Obama with multiple strategies, and that he found none of them to his liking.

No doubt none of the options were all that palatable. Primarily because his previous decisions have left the United States with a set of choices that range between bad and terrible. But there are certainly several that would be better than nothing, which is what he is choosing to do. I would surmise that part of the reason that Obama is refusing to choose any of them, which would involve getting more deeply involved in Iraq and bombing Syria, is that by choosing them, he would be drawing attention to his own blunders. …

… Back to Obama. Other than the “I don’t need no steenkin’ strategy” line, what drew the most comment was his tan suit.

His sartorial choice is easily explained. He would much rather have people obsessing about the color of his suit, than noticing the fact that it is empty.

The president says things aren’t worse, it’s just that we get more news now, what with social media and all. Craig Pirrong has comments.

My grandfather told a story about his step-father, Bill Wilcox. Wilcox “shot” oil wells (the fracking of its day) in West Virginia and southeastern Ohio. He lived in very rough coal mining country, and newspapers were something of a rarity.

My grandfather related how one day in what would have been around 1910-1915, Wilcox brought a newspaper from the general store in Glouster, OH to his home in Burr Oak (now submerged under BurrOakLake). The headline was about a massive flood in China which killed many and threatened millions with starvation. Wilcox put down the paper, and said: “There’s too much damn information in the world. Now I have to worry about 5o million starving Chinese.”

Fast forward a century or more. At a fundraiser in New York, Obama blamed his current travails on too much information:

“The world has always been messy. . . . We’re  just noticing now in part due to social media.” ”Second reason people are feeling anxious is that if you watch the nightly news, it feels like the world is falling apart.”

No, actually. Obama is apparently trying to rebut claims that he bears some responsibility for the fraught state of the world, and to resist pressures that he needs to act more decisively against Putin, and ISIS, and Assad, and . . . by claiming that the current world isn’t really that much different than it’s ever been. It’s just that we notice it more because of Twitter and the nightly news. …

Noemie Emery writes on why the left keeps defending the failed presidency.

… When Republicans fail, it’s always their fault, but when things fall apart under Democrats, larger forces are always at work. In the first volume of his work, Reagan biographer Steven F. Hayward took a stroll with us down memory lane to the last time this happened, under one James Earl Carter: “The job of President is too difficult for any single person because of the complexity of the problems and the size of government,” pronounced the historian Barbara Tuchman. “As the country goes to the polls in the 47th national election, the Presidency as an institution is in serious trouble,” wrote the columnist Joseph Kraft. Political scientist Theodore Lowi said the presidency had become too big for even the likes of a Franklin D. Roosevelt. “Perhaps the burdens have become so great that, over time, no President will be judged adequate,” said U.S. News and World Report. And Newsweek added, “The Presidency has in some measure defeated the last five men who have held it—and has persuaded some of the people who served them that it is in danger of becoming a game nobody can win.”

There was much more of that, but as Hayward points out, this line of thought stopped being talked about halfway through Reagan’s first term. “There’s a .  .  . reason for that,” he noted. “The elite complaints .  .  . always abstract from the substantive views and actions of the occupant. The possibility that ‘maybe we have a crappy president’ ” refuses to enter their minds.

Especially it refuses to enter their minds when the president in question is not only the spokesman for their favorite political outlook, but the embodiment of all of their dreams. If liberals felt compelled to protect a peanut farmer from Georgia, what must they feel for an Ivy League-trained exotic from Hyde Park, a man of the world and messiah, a speaker and writer, but never a doer; themselves, in short, to the ultimate power; themselves as they dreamed they could be? And that is the problem: If he fails, then they fail, and that cannot happen. So the fault is in the stars, in the cards, in unfair expectations—anywhere but where it should be.

Matthew Continetti calls the second term 1,461 days of summer vacation. 

The headline was brutal. “Bam’s Golf War: Prez tees off as Foley’s parents grieve,” read the cover of Thursday’s New York Daily News. Obama’s gaffe was this: He had denounced the beheading of James Foley from a vacation spot in Martha’s Vineyard, then went to the golf course. Seems like he had a great time. Such a great time that he returned to the Farm Neck Golf Club—sorry, membership is full—the next day.

Technically, Obama’s vacation began on August 9. It is scheduled to end on Sunday, August 24. With the exception of a two-day interlude in D.C., it has been two weeks of golf, jazz, biking, beach going, dining out, celebrating, and sniping from critics, not all of them conservative, who are unnerved by the president taking time off at a moment of peril.

Attacking the president for vacation is usually the job of the out party. But these days it is the job of all parties. …

… Criticizing the president the other day, Joe Scarborough nonetheless conceded, “Presidents are always working, whether on a golf course or behind a desk.” But is that actually so? What, exactly, does President Obama do? He seems to learn everything from the papers—from the IRS scandal to the VA scandal to the mobilization of the Missouri National Guard. International events routinely take him by surprise. His professional activities include fundraising—40 events this year so far—and perfunctory addresses to the public. He goes through the presidential motions: meeting with officials and foreign dignitaries, holding press conferences, sitting for interviews, shipping MREs to endangered populations, ordering air strikes. But there is no passion behind these activities, no restless energy, no managerial competence, no sense of purpose or mission or strategy, none of the qualities associated with leadership in business, politics, and culture.

Donors complain the president does not schmooze, or even have much interest in what they are doing or thinking. Democrats on the Hill have the same complaint. “Obama Is Seen as Frustrating His Own Party,” read the headline on the front-page of the Times this week. The story opened with a telling anecdote. The congressional leadership was meeting with the president at the White House. Harry Reid complained to President Obama that Mitch McConnell is holding up judicial nominations. Obama scoffed. “You and Mitch work it out,” he told Reid. He wasn’t interested.

What does interest Obama is celebrity: His own, and that of others. He enjoys opportunities to expound on the world, as though he were an essayist for the New Yorker, which he surely will be soon after leaving office. He wants to be recognized in public, during his choreographed stops outside the White House, and during “major speeches” that lead to applause but no discernible change in affairs, and during appearances on talk shows, the more mindless the better. He likes intimate gatherings of rich and famous people, people who enjoy notoriety—though not nearly as much as he—people of means, people of uniform opinion on the state of the world, the economy, and, most importantly, the state of Barack Obama. He is interested in good food, in good company. He likes golf.

And he is interested in television. He watches HBO. Last winter, when the network’s CEO visited the White House for a state dinner, the president asked him for copies of “True Detective,” and of “Game of Thrones.” Obama watches “House of Cards.” He subscribes to the theory that we are living in the rather oxymoronic “golden age of television.” According to CBS, “His go-tos include ‘Breaking Bad,’ ‘Mad Men,’ and ‘Homeland.’” So we know how Obama has spent at least 275 hours of his presidency. Did he punch out before watching Carrie go crazy? …

…In the 1990s, America had a holiday from history. Today, it has a president on holiday. The boundary separating vacation from vocation has disappeared. The party won’t end for years. And the hangover will be severe.

Jonah Goldberg reminds us of how some in the media called him the “Chess Master.”

… You remember the Chess Master right? Here’s Bob Herbert describing him back in 2009:

Mr. Obama is like a championship chess player, always several moves ahead of friend and foe alike. He’s smart, deft, elegant and subtle. While Lindsey Graham was behaving like a 6-year-old on the Senate floor and Pete Sessions was studying passages in his Taliban handbook, Mr. Obama and his aides were assessing what’s achievable in terms of stimulus legislation and how best to get there.

Here’s Barack Obama describing his favorite person:

“I think I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters,” Obama told him. “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.”

Yesterday at his news conference, the president said he doesn’t have a strategy yet for the Islamic State. The blowback required the White House to send out his spinners like a farmer sending out his sons in search of a wayward hog. Personally, I don’t care that the president doesn’t have a strategy for the Islamic State — yet. One of the downsides of leading from behind is that it by definition allows problems to fester and become more complex. (“In other news today, six people burned to death as firefighters watched another building burn to the ground as part of Fire Chief Obama’s ‘firefighting from behind’ initiative.”) …