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WSJ editors comment again on the end of the DC voucher program. Among those who acted dishonorably were the National Education Association, who care more about protecting union power in a mediocre school system than helping students get ahead.
The waiting is finally over for some of the District of Columbia’s most ambitious school children and their parents. Democrats in Congress voted to kill the District’s Opportunity Scholarship Program, which provides 1,700 disadvantaged kids with vouchers worth up to $7,500 per year to attend a private school.
On Sunday the Senate approved a spending bill that phases out funding for the five-year-old program. Several prominent Senators this week sent a letter to Majority Leader Harry Reid pleading for a reconsideration. Signed by Independent-Democrat Joe Lieberman, Democrats Robert Byrd and Dianne Feinstein, and Republicans Susan Collins and John Ensign, it asked to save a program that has “provided a lifeline to many low-income students in the District of Columbia.” President Obama signed the bill Thursday.
The program’s popularity has generated long waiting lists. A federal evaluation earlier this year said the mostly black and Hispanic participants are making significant academic gains and narrowing the achievement gap. But for the teachers unions, this just can’t happen. The National Education Association instructed Democratic lawmakers to kill it.
“Opposition to vouchers is a top priority for NEA,” declared the union in a letter sent to every Democrat in the House and Senate in March. “We expect that Members of Congress who support public education, and whom we have supported, will stand firm against any proposal to extend the pilot program. Actions associated with these issues WILL be included in the NEA Legislative Report Card for the 111th Congress.” …
A couple of Corner posts on the health care bill. Mark Steyn found the best line.
I like the way this guy puts it: “Cash for cloture.”
This line from Congressman Cantor caught my eye:
They’re allocating taxpayer dollars as if those dollars belonged to the senators. It borders on immoral. Just look at the way Senator Landrieu put her vote up for sale. Senator Nelson did the same.
You can’t even dignify this squalid racket as bribery: If I try to buy a cop, I have to use my own money. But, when Harry Reid buys a senator, he uses my money, too. It doesn’t “border on immoral”: it drives straight through the frontier post and heads for the dark heartland of immoral.
David Warren discusses Copenhagen, and waxes philosophical on related topics, which you may read in his full article.
The farce in Copenhagen continues. As I have intimated before, I am not without hope for this “earth summit.” I see more and more evidence that people — “electorates” in all the western countries, where we do have elections, and can throw the bums out, which is about the only pleasure we have as “electors” — have seen through this imposture completely. …
…But as I say, this gives me reason for hope. The environmentalists have taken the “global warming” imposture so far, have pushed it with claims so ridiculous, and are by now so well exposed, that some real good is being achieved.
The participants in Copenhagen may or may not succeed in burning through another trillion or five in borrowed money, to fuel new environmentalist bureaucracies. At the moment of writing, it appears even this accomplishment will be denied to them, for they are falling out among themselves, and Barack Obama’s big galvanizing speech has impressed nobody. …
…For the most part, even the most primitive of “third world” dictators saw through the Copenhaggling immediately, and joined in only as a way to board the latest gravy train of western guilt money. This is by now a venerable suckering operation, that began the morning after each backward country became nominally independent. It has kept their politicians rich and their peoples poor. …
David Warren references Gerald Warner‘s blog in the Telegraph, UK. Mr. Warner is about to become one of our favorites.
When your attempt at recreating the Congress of Vienna with a third-rate cast of extras turns into a shambles, when the data with which you have tried to terrify the world is daily exposed as ever more phoney, when the blatant greed and self-interest of the participants has become obvious to all beholders, when those pesky polar bears just keep increasing and multiplying – what do you do? …
…This week has been truly historic. It has marked the beginning of the landslide that is collapsing the whole AGW imposture. The pseudo-science of global warming is a global laughing stock and Copenhagen is a farce. In the warmist camp the Main Man is a railway engineer with huge investments in the carbon industry. That says it all. The world’s boiler being heroically damped down by the Fat Controller. Al Gore, occupant of the only private house that can be seen from space, so huge is its energy consumption, wanted to charge punters $1,200 to be photographed with him at Copenhagen. There is a man who is really worried about the planet’s future. …
In the Club For Growth, Michael Connolly reports on the club president’s sarcastic response to ‘meaningful accord’ reached in Copenhagen.
The Club for Growth today hailed President Obama’s announcement in Copenhagen of a “meaningful accord” with China, India, and South Africa about climate change and green house emissions. Club President Chris Chocola made the following statement after the accord’s announcement:
“Like most Americans, I feared President Obama went to Copenhagen to sign a binding, job-killing, economic suicide pact.
“I am greatly relieved that the last-minute agreement President Obama negotiated is being widely described as ‘meaningful.’ When politicians call something ‘meaningful,’ that means it isn’t.
“Without even reading the accord, pro-growth, limited government conservatives today can celebrate the word, ‘meaningful.’ Today that adjective probably saved thirty million jobs.”
Howard Bloom, in the WSJ, gives a few glimpses of a number of factors that affect earth’s climate, none of which are ‘human-caused’.
Climate change activists are right. We are in for walloping shifts in the planet’s climate. Catastrophic shifts. But the activists are wrong about the reason. Very wrong. And the prescription for a solution—a $27 trillion solution—is likely to be even more wrong. Why?
Climate change is not the fault of man. It’s Mother Nature’s way. And sucking greenhouse gases from the atmosphere is too limited a solution. We have to be prepared for fire or ice, for fry or freeze. We have to be prepared for change.
We’ve been deceived by a stroke of luck. In the two million years during which we climbed from stone-tool wielding Homo erectus with sloping brows to high-foreheaded Homo urbanis, man the inventor of the city, we underwent 60 glaciations, 60 ice ages. And in the 120,000 years since we emerged in our current physiological shape as Homo sapiens, we’ve lived through 20 sudden global warmings. In most of those, temperatures have shot up by as much as 18 degrees within a mere 20 years.
All this took place without smokestacks and tailpipes. All this took place without the desecration of nature by modern man. …
You would think it’s an exhausted subject, but you will learn it is not. In the National Journal, Stuart Taylor reports on Duke University: the hatred directed at the lacrosse players in 2006 still festers in academia. Actually, it is hatred towards our country.
…Vanderbilt (University) was so proud to have signed up Baker, a professor of English and African and African-American studies at Duke, in April 2006 that it prominently featured a photo of him on its website for months. This was shortly after Baker had issued a March 29, 2006, public letter pressuring the Duke administration to dismiss the lacrosse players — whom he deprecated 10 times as “white” — and all but pronouncing the entire team guilty of “abhorrent sexual assault, verbal racial violence, and drunken white, male privilege” against a “black woman who their violence and raucous witness injured for life.”
For such conduct, the official Vanderbilt Register admiringly characterized Baker as Duke’s “leading dissident voice” about the administration’s handling of the rape allegations.
In June 2006, Baker falsely suggested that Duke lacrosse players had raped other women. In a pervasively ugly response to a polite e-mail from the mother of a Duke lacrosse player, he called the team “a scummy bunch of white males” and the woman the “mother of a ‘farm animal.’ ”
In 2007, Cornell proudly lured another of the 88, Grant Farred, with a joint appointment in African studies and English.
This, after the following events: In September 2006 and before, Farred produced such faux scholarship as a nonsensical monograph portraying Yao Ming, the Houston Rockets’ Chinese center, as representing “the most profound threat to American empire.” In October 2006, Farred accused hundreds of Duke students of “secret racism” for registering to vote against Nifong, who was subsequently disbarred for railroading the indicted lacrosse players. In April 2007, North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper declared the players innocent. Then Farred smeared them again, as racists and perjurers.
Cornell elevated Farred this year to director of graduate studies in the African-American studies department. …
…The fact that these five people of questionable judgment have subsequently won glorification by Duke or advancement to other prestigious positions may reflect the interaction of academia’s demand for more “diversity” with the small supply of aspiring black professors who are well credentialed in traditional disciplines. These factors, amplified by politically correct ideology, have advanced many academics who — unlike most African-Americans — are obsessed with grievances rooted more in our history of slavery and racial oppression than in contemporary reality. …
In Volokh Conspiracy, Harvey Silverglate has a dark commentary on government prosecutorial abuse and press collusion. This blog post has interesting questions to ask about the whole government case against Blagojevich.
In a discussion on WAMU Radio yesterday, host Kojo Nnamdi noted that vagueness in the federal criminal law has recently made “strange bedfellows” of the political left and right. This same “emerging consensus” was also the subject of an insightful November 23 article by Adam Liptak, The New York Times’ Supreme Court reporter.
What has occasioned this coming together? As I mentioned here on Monday, individuals and organizations of all political stripes are realizing the danger to all when prosecutors are empowered with exceedingly broad and—worse—hard-to-define federal laws. A diverse coalition of groups—including the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, the Cato Institute, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and the ACLU, among others—have been sounding a clarion call against this species of executive expansion. They have pointed out that, from webmasters to fund managers, no segment of civil society is safe.
But this phenomenon is not new. As I document in Three Felonies a Day, the proliferation of vague laws—and prosecutions under them—began in the mid-1980s. Why has widespread recognition, especially from the American public, taken so long?
For one thing, the Department of Justice has a very effective public relations machine. With every major indictment, there is a press release and, not infrequently, a press conference that major national media typically attend with bated breath. Flanked by FBI, IRS, DEA, SEC, and members of the other myriad supporting agencies, prosecutors feed reporters the government’s side of the case, often a matter of hours after a hapless defendant has been rousted out of bed and paraded in the infamous “perp walk” (much to the delight of press photographers who have been tipped off in advance). At the end of this prejudicial circus-like performance, prosecutors often refuse to answer media questions on the ironic ground that they are bound by the federal court’s rules against pre-trial publicity and, in any event, they do not want to cause the public (especially potential jurors) to prejudge the case! …
John Stossel writes about the electric car tax credit.
…Colangelo says: “I never, in my entire life, got anything back from the government, and I’ve always paid taxes. Why shouldn’t the people who worked hard for their money get something back?”
Because government shouldn’t be in the business of taking money and giving it back! That just gives the venal cretins more power over our lives. …
…The electric-vehicle subsidy is ludicrous not just because it is a form of industrial policy — which almost always picks losers — it’s also destructive because it creates more pollution, not less. That’s because much of the electricity needed for their operation comes from burning coal. As the National Research Council puts it:
“Although they produce no emissions during operation, they rely on electricity powered largely by fossil fuels for their fuel and energy intensive battery manufacturing.”
…Congress makes life worse every time it meets, and green hysteria sucks so many good things from the country.
Government is a meddling presumptuous pain in the neck. The sooner we get it to stop manipulating us through tax laws, the better.