Download Full Content – Printable Pickings
Pete Du Pont writes on the Utah school voucher loss.
… Utah citizens voted down the voucher plan by 62% to 38%. That is too bad–educational choices by parents for their children is an important concept–but not surprising. While there are successful school choice programs operating in Milwaukee, Cleveland and Washington, 10 state referenda on various voucher proposals have been defeated since 1972, including two defeats each in California, Michigan and Colorado.
One reason for these defeats has been the work of the teachers unions, which oppose school choice of any kind because it limits their power. Passage of the Utah school choice statute earlier this year prompted a union call to arms. The national teachers unions went to war in Utah and won.
When the choice bill was passed by the Utah Legislature last winter, Nancy Pomeroy of Parents Choice in Education enthusiastically recited the score: “Parents and Children 1. Unions and Educrats 0.” Unfortunately the score flipped on Tuesday. …
Michael Barone too.
Education is not ordinarily thought to be in the purview of a Federal Reserve chairman. So it’s striking when Alan Greenspan in his memoir, “The Age of Turbulence,” raises the subject.
“Our primary and secondary education system,” he writes, “is deeply deficient in providing homegrown talent to operate our increasingly complex infrastructure.” The result: “Too many of our students languish at too low a level of skill upon graduation, adding to the supply of lesser-skilled labor in the face of an apparently declining demand.”
So if you’re concerned about widening disparities in income, Greenspan tells readers attracted to his book by its publicists’ promise of criticism of George W. Bush, then what you need to do is to “harness better the forces of competition” in educating kids. …
Good Power Line post on what’s in a name.
One might have thought that after the Democrats’ electoral victory last November, the ideology that dare not speak its name might come out of the closet. But no: Politico points out that the Democrats still won’t let on that they are liberals:
These are heady days for Democrats. The party is favored by almost all measures in the coming presidential contest.
But while Democrats are emboldened, they remain wary of the term “liberal.†…
James Taranto covers David Brooks column on the tiresome folks that also write at the Times,YUCK. Remember the London Times is Times, UK. We needed a designation for the paper of Walter Duranty and defeat.
What’s black and white and red all over? A New York Times blood feud! On Friday David Brooks of the Times devoted his column to debunking a “distortion” that “has spread like a weed over the past few months”:
An increasing number of left-wing commentators assert that Reagan kicked off his 1980 presidential campaign with a states’ rights speech in Philadelphia [Miss.] to send a signal to white racists that he was on their side.
“The truth,” Brooks notes, is more complicated. Reagan had planned to spend the week after the 1980 GOP convention courting black voters: …
Taranto also spots gay-baiting Dems including, would you believe, Andrew Sullivan.
And Jim reports on Hillary’s thin skin according to The New Republic.
George Will talks some economic sense.
… Presidential elections are always epidemics of economic illiteracy and hysteria, for two reasons: The party not holding the White House has an incentive to talk gloomy nonsense, and the media, for whom the phrase “good news” is an oxymoron (“We don’t report the planes that land safely”), love crises. In 2004, Democrats spoke of “the worst economy since Hoover” and “Benedict Arnold CEOs.” Republicans will, in time, have their wilderness season for spouting nonsensical pessimism.
That can, however, be self-fulfilling: Worried people curtail consumption, wary businesses defer investments. Everyone should remember the witticism that the stock market has predicted nine of the last three recessions.
Terry Teachout, writing in The National Review, gives us a 50 year look at Atlas Shrugged.
As I write these words, the 146th best-selling book on Amazon.com is the trade-paperback edition of a 1,200-page-long, 50-year-old mystery novel about a physicist, two industrialists, and a South American playboy with four (count ’em, four) middle names. Though the novel in question contains a fair amount of sex, its centerpiece is a 56-page monologue about the modern-day implications of Aristotelian philosophy. The author, a squat, vain Russian émigré, was so sure she’d penned a masterpiece that she refused to let anyone change a line of it, and so stubborn that she managed to impose her will on her publisher, who readily admitted to finding her philosophy “absolutely horrifying.†Be that as it may, Random House’s Bennett Cerf had been in the book-selling game long enough to know a cash cow when he saw one, so he ordered up a first printing of 100,000 copies — and sold them all.
Cerf recalled his friendly but uneasy professional relationship with Ayn Rand in At Random, his genial autobiography:
I remember when Atlas Shrugged was being edited by Hiram Haydn. The hero, John Galt, makes a speech that lasts about thirty-eight pages [sic!]. All that he says in it has been said over and over already in the book, but Hiram couldn’t get her to cut a word. . . . I said, “Ayn, nobody’s going to read that. You’ve said it all three or four times before, and it’s thirty-odd pages long. You’ve got to cut it.†She looked at me calmly and said, “Would you cut the Bible?†So I gave up.
Cerf dictated that anecdote to an oral historian in 1968. …
Long Range Weather gives us a graph of 4,500 years of global temps. Shows Al Gore is full of it. But you knew that.
