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.