Charter School Tipping Point?

Are we approaching the tipping point on charter schools? The point at which the hard up-hill slog
against powerful interests like the teachers’ unions and liberal gate-keepers suddenly breaks through
the barriers? There’s a
political storm
brewing in New York that might be the hurricane that sweeps
all before it. A New York State assemblyman has realized that there may be more political mileage
in supporting choice in education than in opposing it.

Undereducated of the World Unite!

Straight from the reading room of the Library of Congress comes this manifesto from
“Karl” Brooks.
“In the information age, in which knowledge is power and money, the class struggle is fought between the educated elite and the undereducated masses.”
Yes. How true. “The educated class has torn away from the family its sentimental veil and reduced it to a mere factory for the production of little meritocrats.”
Right On, brother!

Undereducated workers of the world, unite! Let the ruling educated class tremble! You have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a world to win!

Halleluiah!

What's Wrong With Single Moms?

The Brits are having a media frenzy over a family of single moms. Julie, single mother of three girls
is now the proud grandmother of three grandchildren, one each from her daughters, who became single mothers at age 12, 14, and 16.
What’s wrong with that, asks aging feminist
Germaine Greer?

What indeed? Apart from the trifling $50,000 a year in various government benefits.

Let us leave aside the merely aesthetic and the economic, the culturally determined distate for
bastardy, and the probability that the children of “lone parents” are less likely to get a
good education and contribute to society. Let us think about safety.

Did you know, Ms Greer, that the child of a woman who is living unmarried with a man who is not the child’s
father is 33 times more likely to suffer physical harm than a child living with its married, natural
parents? You can find the numbers in James Bartholomew’s
The Welfare State We’re In, page 271. Not impressed?

Well, let us put the argument in another way. Suppose that a social scientist published a study showing that the
children of fundamentalist Christians were 33 times more likely to suffer physical abuse
during childhood than average. Who can doubt that the author of the study would be on the Today show the very next
day and that Katie Couric would be interviewing her with deeply furrowed brow? And who can doubt that
Democrats would be sponsoring legislation within days to “make our children safe?”

Yet here we have data that show that children being raised outside of marriage are significantly less
safe, and that children in a house with a man not their father face an increased risk of 3,300 percent. Yet
the liberal experts and the liberal activists and the liberal legislators and the liberal media celebrities are strangely silent. What is going on?

Hansen to US Critics: You are Boring

Fed up with PepsiCo CFO Indra Nooyi and her middle-finger insult to the US? Pissed off by the
Pakistani cricketer Imran Khan who incited the Koran riots?
Victor Davis Hanson is too. And he has advice for international elitists that scorn
the US. Shuck it off. Cleanse yourself of the $5 million job at Pepsi. Forswear the filthy western
lucre that you earn playing international cricket. Otherwise, you are like all the rest that criticise
the West but wallow in its pleasures and its freedoms.

Otherwise, you are “hypocritical,” “predictable,”
and worst of all, “boring.”

WaPo: Wow! House Rules Committee Rules

The Washington Post publishes an article that concludes that Republicans,
having won Congress and the presidency, now have more power. Yes, this is startling. But
there is more. Apparently
they now, according to reporter

Jim VandeHei, control the Rules Committee in the House of Representatives and this gives
them control of legislation in the House. Another shocker.

But here is the corker. Some Republicans think that some judges have
“deliberately decided to be in the face of the president and Congress,” and they
mean to do something about it. You mean that over the last generation the courts have been finding penumbras and emanations in the
constitution, penumbras and emanations that they use to foil the intent of the nation’s elected
legislators? No!

Return to Sanity? or Craven Sellout?

Most conservatives and Republicans are outraged by the moderate compromise that
was brokered in the Senate Monday night. But Dick Morris reminds us that
the average voter hates all the partisan posturing and vitriol, and that a return
to sanity was desperately needed.
He points out that the Democrat signatories were overwhelmingly from Southern states
that could easily elect a Republican to the Senate at the next election. They need a way to
escape from the discipline of their left-wing caucus.
Meanwhile conservative talk-show host Michael Reagan offers the “sellout” meme.

Who is right? The answer will come down the road. Let us not forget that the moderate Democrats
are just as much a problem to partisan Democrats as the squishy Snows, Chafees, and McCains are to partisan
Republicans. And they need a cover when they need to break with their caucus to save their seats.

Suppose Blacks Deserted the Democrats?

Democrats cannot afford to lose the black vote. “If the share of the black vote that goes
to the Democrats ever falls to 70 percent, it may be virtually impossible
for the Democrats to win the White House or Congress,” writes
Thomas Sowell.
That makes it “possible to understand [the Democrats’]
desperate efforts to keep blacks paranoid, not only about Republicans
but about American society in general.”

You can understand the desperation. It takes real work to get 70 percent of any group
to agree about anything. The only way to do it is with fear and loathing.

Another Tipping Point

The day that 8 million Iraqis voted for freedom was the day that
Keith Thompson left the left. He wanted a world in which we could

focus on creating healthy, self-actualizing individuals
committed to taking responsibility for their lives, developing their talents,
honing their skills and intellects, fostering emotional and moral intelligence,
all in all contributing to the advancement of the human condition.

And he could no longer find that world on the left.

Real People Get Hurt When MSM Misfires

Our beloved media enjoy a special privilege. They don’t get to pay damages for
journalistic negligence as a physician or an engineer has to. They are special.
Unfortunately, as many elites have mistakenly imagined over the centuries, that doesn’t
mean that they are specially blessed by God (or history, or the people, or the wretched of the earth)
to minister to the great unwashed.
It means that they have special responsibilities. As Spidey learned, with great power comes
great responsibility.
Michelle Malkin reminds her media colleagues just how much damage they do when their
negligence wounds the men and women of America’s armed forces. And they do need reminding.

Experts Shocked by Public's Optimism

Americans are astonishingly optimistic, according to a new
poll reported by Jennifer Harper.

82 percent of Americans ages 18 to 24 feel optimistic about their futures; 82 percent of those ages 25 to 44 do so as well; and 75 percent of those ages 45 to 64 and 64 percent of those 65 or older agree.

The experts are worried. What would happen if Americans stopped being optimistic? “`We believe this personal optimism is sort of a last barricade,’ [the expert] said, and could prove `shaky.’”
You can find a summary of the report (here).

Warning: Egalitarians are At It Again

The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. It’s the center
of the left’s argument. In Marx, it surfaced as the “immiseration” theory, that
the workers would get poorer and poorer over time—because of capitalism.

Now Bruce Bartlett detects a new line from the left
as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal (news division) report, in the same week, on
class mobility stalling out. Yes, everyone is
getting richer, yes there is social mobility. But look, the social mobility
is not as great as it used to be. Oh no!

It’s a glorious thing to be a liberal and to know that all the evils in the
world are the other guy’s fault. But liberals, have you never stopped to
think that it is your favorite cultural change and government policies that hinder social mobility,
from the sexual revolution to
monopoly government education, to occupational licensing, to widespread
tenure in the public sector? Social mobility is a two-way street, and for over
a century, liberals have done everything they can to jam the up escalator with their
attack on middle-class values, and jam the down escalator with their income support programs and
market interventions.

Don’t push this one too far, old chum. You won’t like where it leads.

Solar Tower of Power

The Aussies are going to build a 3,000 ft high solar power generator.
according to Dr. Roy W. Spencer.
No doubt you liberal environmentalist chappies are ecstatic. Why, think
of the potential for arresting global warming! But somehow, I don’t see,
say, Senator Reid (D, NV) rushing up to propose a Tower of Power in the
Nevada desert flanked by representatives of the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and
the Wilderness Society.

Anyway, here’s the officical Tower of Power
web site.

Steyn: RU1-2? John Bolton Isn't, and That's His Problem

Remember the tsunami relief effort? You do? Then you’ll probably be shocked
to learn that containers full of aid are sitting on the dock in Indonesia and Sri Lanka, while
customs inspectors riffle through the paperwork. Canada pledged $425 million
in aid, and so far has dispatched $0.05 million. Yes, that’s forty thousand out
of four hundred million.

It all makes sense, writes
Mark Steyn.
As long as you fill out your form RU1-2 to show
you are part of the international floating crap game of the “global community,”
you’ll get the kid glove treatment. But if you are John Bolton, who scorns
the polite fictions, you could be in real trouble.

European Death Spiral

Here in the US the mainstream media is tut-tutting about an economic pause as
growth declines to 3.1 percent on an annual rate. But in their favorite global
region, Europe, growth is really pausing, down at 0.4 percent, and in Italy, they are
having a real recession.

So what could be the problem in good old Europe? Could it be taxes? Could
it be government spending? Could it be restrictive labor markets? Or could
it be all three? In fact, to stretch a point, could the problem
be that the Europeans have exactly the economic policy that Democrats
want to create in the United States?
Brian Carney
has the details.

Snapshot of the American People

Here’s a look at the American people in 2005, courtesy of
The Pew Research Center.
Dividing us up into three blocs, Left, Right, and Center, we look
like this:

Registered Voters CENTER   Upbeats 13%   Disaffecteds 10% Total:   23% RIGHT   Enterprisers 11%   Social Conservatives 13%   Pro-Government Conservatives 10% Total:   34% LEFT   Liberals 19%   Disadvantaged Democrats 10%   Conservative Democrats 15% Total:   44%

So there we all are. The question is: what do we do about it?

Get a Hip Replacement in India, and Take in the Taj

The latest thing is health tourism. Go to India to get your procedure done
at 25 percent, 50 percent, maybe 75 percent off prices in the US. And maybe you will recover from
your hip replacement
enough to take in the sights before you come home. An elephant ride in Jaipur,
perhaps.
Val McQueen
has your tickets ready. Maybe the night sky will soon be rumbling with squadrons
of gigantic Airbus A380s flying wingtip-to-wingtip from Europe to Delhi, full of
geezers like you and I.

The Real History of the Filibuster

So you thought that the filibuster was a 214-year tradition of the good old Senate now being threatened by evil theocratic Republicans? Not exactly.

Lee Harris traces its actual history, through the pre-civil war rantings of John Randolph, the pre-World War I anti-war speeches of Senator Robert M. La Follette, Sr. and “the willful 11,” onto the segregationist filibusters of the 1940s and 1950s. In each case, the Senate rules were changed to de-fang the filibusters.

Still, the judicious Harris opines, one should be very reluctant to stiff-arm a vociferous minority. It leads to bad blood. The history of the filibuster shows that each talkathon crisis led from
confrontation to compromise. But what would be an acceptable compromise this time?

See No Evil, Hear No Evil...

Remember the good old days when liberals thundered their moral outrage to
the reverberate hills? (A little bit of Shakespeare for you DWM aficionados.)
When they were unafraid and bellowed truth to power?
Well things are different now, at least in the modern, tenured, $40,000-per-year-tuition university.
Confronted with the outrageous grading
practices of a departmental college, here’s how a modern, scholarly academic responded,
according to provocateur
David Horowitz:
“`I don’t want to hear it,’ he said, and walked away.”

Once you have surrendered the moral high ground, liberals, you will find
that you will be surrendering other things too, sooner than you think.

And here is something to ponder. What happens when the young generation
raised on X-Box’s “Halo” starts flexing its muscles in natural,
testosterone-fueled rebellion against a flaccid, enervated academy?

When Hayek's Extended Order Goes Virtual

What will the media world be like in 2014? A couple of journalists,
Matt Thompson of the Fresno Bee and Robin Sloan of Current, a new cable news channel in San Francisco, have
produced a “mockumentary” called “EPIC 2014,” that prophesies the dominance of
Googlezon, a merger of Google and Amazon. There won’t be any media as
we know it. Googlezon will customize news and features for each customer in
its new feature EPIC, the “Evolving Personalized Information Construct,” gathering news
and video from millions of, well, “us,” and then distributing it back to—us.

Here is a transcript
of the video and here is a url to the video itself.

There is one thing missing, of course, and it is what you would expect journalists to miss.
It’s the trust factor. No doubt that “At its best, edited for the savviest readers,
EPIC is a summary of the world — deeper, broader
and more nuanced than anything ever available before,” and at its worst, they say,
is will be trivial, shallow, and untrue. (You mean just like media today?) But the amazing success of eBay, which
runs on trust, shows how the future media world will operate. It will operate on trust,
just like eBay.
Googlezon’s EPIC will
allow its customers to build ratings on its content providers and its editors, just like
eBay does today. That will build trust into the Googlezon media empire. The whole
issue of trust, and how the Hayekian “extended order” is built on
trust, is something that our modern media chappies just do not understand.

And that’s ok, isn’t it? Because it means that they just don’t get it. Heh.

Steyn: It's The Bars Over The Windows, Stupid

Even though the Brits are highly taxed, they don’t seem to feel it. But
what you can see, by reading the local newspaper and taking a stroll down
a British High Street is that it’s the world capital of crime.
“That’s post-socialist Britain: materially prosperous,
but civically impoverished; wealthy villages and
upscale suburbs full of frustrated and impotent citizens.”
Mark is offering this aperçu to all evil
right-wing politicians, free of charge.

Lefty Naomi Klein Mourns End of Ration Program in Iraq

Lefty activist and author of anti-globalist bible No Logo
Naomi Klein
sees the Iraq invasion as a dark plot to sic the American Enterprise Institute
and the Cato Institure on the Iraqi people so they could practice their radical
free-market ideas on them. Now Iraq is shackled to the IMF
and World Bank that are “demanding the elimination of Iraq’s
food ration program,
upon which 60 percent of the population depends for nutrition,
as a condition for debt relief and for the new loans that have
been made in deals with an unelected government.”

I think the idea, Naomi, is that as the Iraqi people get jobs, it would
be a good idea to free them from direct dependence on the government for
the very food they put in their mouths. They could end up like Americans and
left-wing activists that
go to the store to buy their food.

Bigotry: You'll Find it on the Left

Conservative Jewish pundit
Don Feder
wonders why, if Democrats are anxious
to open a dialog with religious Americans, they are piling on the hate speech
against the “Religious Far Right,” the “far-right fundamentalists,” and so on.
He observes that:

“The cover story in the May issue of Harper’s Magazine screams
of `The Christian Right’s War On America.’
Try to imagine a reputable publication doing a story
about `The Jews’ War On America’ or `The Hispanic War On America.’ ”

Good point. You’d be on your knees to Katie Couric in a moment. But
if you were publishing “The Hasidic Jews’ War On America”
or “The Pentecostal Hispanic War On America,” maybe that would be ok.

Interview with "South Park Conservative" Brian Anderson

Author Brian C. Anderson does an interview with
Jamie Glazov from Frontpagemag.com, telling the story
of how he came to write South Park Conservatives and what to expect
in the culture wars in the near future.

Steyn: Blair Will Win

Überpundit
Mark Steyn
doesn’t really like it, but he figures Tony Blair will win the British election
on Thursday. The voters have fallen out of love with Tone, but they haven’t
fallen in love with anyone else. Not yet. To relieve the gloom, Mark
offers up this:

“The problem with the war on terror is that once it was framed
as an existential struggle for Western civilization,
it was all too predictable that the left would act as it
did the last time we had one of those, the Cold War:
They’d do their best to lose it.”

If we didn’t have Mark Steyn, we’d have to invent him.

Spengler: No Women Priests, Thank You

The commentariat’s chief disciple of Franz Rosenzweig has been exercised
by the changing of the guard at the Catholic Church. Like everyone else,
he has some
advice
for the new pope. The word from Spengler? Don’t open the priesthood to women.
In general Spengler is in favor of equality for women, if for no other reason
that if you don’t give women what they want they will punish you for it.
“Nonetheless, ordaining female priests at this moment in history would
be ill-advised.
A priest’s most important function is to forgive sins.
Women never forgive anything.”

But wait a minute, Spengler, old chum. You’ve got this upside down. It
isn’t priests that do the forgiving in Christianity. It’s God. Does that
mean that Benedict XVI can go ahead and give the girls the go code?

Dems Don't Get Religion

After the election Democrats said that they would start to pay attention
to religious voters. But when religious voters they didn’t like dared to
show up on the public square, Democrats threw a cow. How dare Senator Frist
address a religious rally called Justice Sunday, they complained,
according to
Morton Kondracke.

So Democrats respect religious voters but want to anathematize the Republicans
that speak to them. Writer Alan Wooldridge reports that during the 2004
campaign Bush got his biggest applause when he told his audience that
Bush got his best crowd response by declaring that “the Democratic Party believes
that Hollywood people represent real American values.”