What is the deal with this Stesak guy?
I've had a few people ask me about the "Stesak situation" everyone's been hearing about. Today's Wall Street Journal editorial does a great job of both quickly re-capping what all has gone on thus far, why it matters, and what might be done about it.
Last summer, Mr. Sestak said he'd been offered a high-ranking federal job in return for ending his ultimately successful bid to depose Arlen Specter, an act of interfering in an election that would constitute a felony if it was direct enough. The account released yesterday by White House counsel Robert Bauer says that Rahm Emanuel enlisted Bill Clinton "to determine whether Congressman Sestak would be interested in service on a Presidential or other Senior Executive Branch Advisory Board." And the post "would have been uncompensated."
So a two-term President who is now ambassador to the world is running errands for the White House chief of staff, and the plumb job he has at his disposal is a seat on the President's Intelligence Advisory Board, or perhaps the President's Commission on White House Fellowships? And the Congressman was supposed to give up his reasonable chance at a U.S. Senate seat for such a sinecure? As a simple matter of political respect, Mr. Clinton could at least have thrown in a consulting gig with Yucaipa.
The editorial continues:
It's possible that all we really have here is a case of the Obama White House playing Washington politics as usual, which the White House refused to admit for three months because this is what Mr. Obama promised he would not do if he became President. However, this is clearly what he hired Mr. Emanuel to do for him, and given his ethical record Mr. Clinton was the perfect political cutout. So much for the most transparent Administration in history.
It goes without saying that if this had taken place 2 years ago under President Bush's watch, we'd have around-the-clock-coverage of "Sestak-gate". I'm past the point of even dreaming that the media will be as appropriately critical of this president as it should be. While I'm not going to lose much sleep over the Sestak "scandal", it would be nice for a special prosecutor to be dispatched, and a grand jury convened, to figure out what went on here. There is a potential felony involved here, and the Chief of Staff of the President of the United States would be in the middle of it.
My New Hero, Chris Christie
Republican Chris Christie (R-NJ) shocked the political world by winning the New Jersey gubernatorial race last fall. He is a man who does not mince words, and has no problem cutting budgets, reducing taxes, and standing up to the entrenched union and bureaucratic powers that have dominated New Jersey for decades.
For a small glimpse of what a candid, honest, and un-compromising Republican actually looks (and sounds) like, PLEASE watch this:
Preach it, brother!
I love how the first lady who complained said that, in her mind, she wasn't making enough money...and when reminded by Gov. Christie that, like the rest of society, she "didn't have to" pick the line of work she was in, suddenly remembered that she (and all teachers) only do their jobs because they want to and they love it.
Oh, and by the way, that woman's name is Rita Wilson, and she works in the Rutherford School District...and makes $86,000 per year.
The point here is not that teachers aren't as valuable to society as say a professional baseball player, but simply that the state (and federal government) is not an endless supply of funds as the governor pointed out. You can't run a budget based on emotional outbursts form angry women in a townhall meeting. School choice, something I would have thought open-minded liberals would love, is the best alternative for well-qualified, hard-working teachers, as I'm sure Ms. Wilson is. I WANT good teachers to be rewarded, but when the unions (who are also the single biggest contributors to the political campaigns of Democrats) rule a state like they do in New Jersey, California or Illinois, we're forced as a society to pay the horrendous ones more and more as well. This is unsustainable.
Everyone loses when there is no competition and people are guaranteed jobs for life.
The End of a LOST Era
For those of you who don't already know, for the past two years I have maintained a LOST blog (Show Me Your LOST) where each week I review the most recent episode and explore the references to literature, philosophy, theology, and pop-culture within. If you aren't a fan of LOST, then you care less about this post than I do about Joe Biden's views on economics.
But for the rest of you, here is my last and final LOST blog. Enjoy.
Criminalizing Kids
The Heritage Foundation recently published a book entitled One Nation, Under Arrest which makes the case that our nation, especially congress, is turning to criminal law to "fix" all of society's problems. The term they use to delineate this disturbing tendency is "overcriminalization".
“Overcriminalization” describes the trend in America – and particularly in Congress – to use the criminal law to “solve” every problem, punish every mistake (instead of making proper use of civil penalties), and coerce Americans into conforming their behavior to satisfy social engineering objectives. Criminal law is supposed to be used to redress only that conduct which society thinks deserving of the greatest punishment and moral sanction.
But as a result of rampant overcriminalization, trivial conduct is now often punished as a crime. Many criminal laws make it possible for the government to convict a person even if he acted without criminal intent (i.e., mens rea). Sentences have skyrocketed, particularly at the federal level.
My friend Scott Burton wrote a great review of the fifth chapter, "Criminalizing Kids", in One Nation, Under Arrest. He shares the story of one particular 12 year old student in Georgia who had his life turned upside-down for no other reason than he brought his Boy Scouts pocket-knife with him to school one day last year.
Unfortunately, cases like these have become increasingly common. In an effort to solve specific problems, lawmakers and public officials are eager to pass laws and implement policies that criminalize behavior regardless of the offender’s intent. Miles’s case is a perfect example. After showing some of his friends the two-inch pocket knife, one of them informed the teacher. None of the students who saw the knife said they felt threatened, nor did they think Miles might harm someone. There was no evidence that Miles had any intention of doing anything wrongful with the knife. While a school has every right to impose reasonable and appropriate discipline upon a student if his behavior violates school policy or poses a risk to others, the school board’s actions in this case were downright ludicrous. As if the humiliation of being treated like a common criminal in his own school and in front of his peers was not enough, that is only half of Miles’s story.
After being taken to a detention facility, Miles was brought to juvenile court where Henry County officials added additional restraints. The presiding judge, who coincidentally also served as the attorney for the school board, decided that Miles should remain in the detention center. Only after Miles had spent 48 hours away locked up were his parents able to pick him up on conditional release. Following his stint in juvenile detention, the school held a disciplinary hearing, where he freely admitted to bringing the knife to school. The frightened 12-year-old was subsequently expelled for the remainder of the year. The Rankin family appealed the punishment, but the Henry County school board simply reviewed the transcript without conducting an independent inquiry of its own before affirming the school’s decision. Compounding the hardship Miles faced, the juvenile court deemed Miles “in a state of delinquency” and ordered him to serve thirty days under house arrest, imposed a curfew on him, and placed him on 180 days of probation.
Everyone is afraid of a lawsuit and thus we live in a country of cowards and reactionaries.
Miles Rankin’s legal troubles stemmed from the zero-tolerance policy in his school. Zero-tolerance policies result in part from the propensity of many parents to challenge and even sue school officials for almost any exercise of professional judgment and discretion. Many school boards and administrators try to protect themselves by adopting zero-tolerance policies that allow for no exercise of judgment at all. Zero-tolerance policies do nothing, however, to engender respect for the law or for the officials who tie their hands with them.
Of course, protecting students is a top priority, but in the process of ensuring safety, lawmakers and public officials must not abandon common sense and professional judgment. Miles Rankin and his family’s life have been scarred by an indiscriminate group of administrators who found it easier to hide behind a zero-tolerance policy than to exercise sound judgment. They were so caught up in their own policy that they could not appreciate the real-life consequences of such an irresponsible application of law.
I don't know what the solutions to this problem are, but I intend on finding out when I read One Nation, Under Arrest this summer. You should do the same.
Read Mr. Burton's full column right here (and send it to 10 people today).
Newt Defends His Controversial Comments
Newt Gingrich's latest book, To Save America, has taken predictable flack from the mainstream media and liberal Democrats everywhere. Here is part of the interview he gave on Fox News Sunday last weekend, in defense of his claim that the modern secular-progressive Left (typified by the current Obama-Pelosi-Reid leadership in Washington D.C.) poses as great a threat to the traditional American way of life as did our foreign enemies of the past century.
I have ordered Speaker Gingrich's book and will be writing up a short review on it at some point in the next few weeks.
Unions “Uber Alles”?
The American public feels it is drowning in red ink. It is dismayed and even outraged at the burgeoning national deficits, unbalanced state and local budgets, and accounting that often masks the extent of indebtedness. There is a mounting sense that taxpayers are being taken for an expensive ride by public sector unions. The extraordinary benefits the unions have secured for their members are going to be harder and harder to pay.
Mort Zuckerman is the Editor-in-Chief of US News & World Report, and was an initial supporter of Barack Obama in 2008 and 2009. But lately, Mr. Zuckerman has changed his tune as he (and America) has watched the president, Speaker Pelosi, and Majority Leader Reid throw economic caution and fiscal responsibility to the wind.
In his latest column, Zuckerman makes the critically important point that there is rampant and nefarious collusion between the public employee unions and the politicians they work tirelessly to elect.
The business community and a growing portion of the public now understand the dynamics that discriminate against the private sector. The public sector unions organize voting campaigns for politicians who, on election, repay their benefactors by approving salaries and benefits for the public sector, irrespective of whether they are sustainable. And what is happening with California is happening in slower motion in the rest of the country. It must be one of the reasons the Pew Research Center this year reported that support for labor unions generally has plummeted "amid growing public skepticism about unions' power and purpose."
There has been a transformation in the nature of our employment. Labor is no longer dominated by private sector industrial workers who were in large part culturally conservative and economically pro-growth. Over recent decades public sector employment has exploded and public workers have come to dominate the labor movement. These public sector employees have a unique and powerful advantage in contract negotiations. Quite simply it is their capacity to deliver political endorsements and votes for the very people who are theoretically on the other side of the negotiating table. Candidates who want to appear tough on crime will look to cops, sheriffs' deputies, prison guards, and highway patrol officers for their endorsement.
The point here isn't to pile blame on every union and every member of those unions. But to deny that there is a conflict of interest for the politician who marries his or her campaign to the same union workers that are being paid (exorbitantly) with the tax dollars that this same politician will have some control over.
City government was developed to serve its citizens. Today the citizenry is working in large part to serve the government. It is always hard to shrink government spending. It is particularly difficult when public sector unions have such a unique lever of pressure.
We have to escape this cycle or it will crush us. One way is to take labor negotiations out of the hands of vulnerable legislators and assign them to independent commissions. They would have a better shot at achieving a fair balance between appropriate salary increases and the revenues and services of local municipalities. The electorate won't swallow any more red ink.
Free markets aren't perfect, but state-controlled economies, the kind we're seeing implode in Greece, always lead to societal collapse.
"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money."
-Alexis de Tocqueville
Textbook Controversy in Texas
The state of Texas has such a large public school system that much of the curriculum in the textbooks your state uses is decided upon by the Texas State Board of Education. In order to make money, publishing companies have to mass produce and apparently it is too expensive to modify the books for each respective state. But putting that point aside for a moment, the fact remains that the decisions made by this panel of 15 elected public servants in Texas have a tremendously important impact on American education.
From FoxNews.com:
What do liberal lawmakers in California share with their conservative counterparts in Texas? Very little. But this week both are watching the 15 member Texas State Board of Education, which will choose the next generation of history textbooks for most American children.
The left-right culture war will play out over the choice of words, photos, who to honor and what events in American and world history should receive a few lines of text. It may sound innocent, when it is anything but.
Years of research, months of editing, hundreds of hours of debate will be boiled down into a single document – a statement of curricula – that will define the parameters followed by virtually every social studies textbook and test for students from kindergarten to through 8th grade for the next decade.
The story continues:
On one side are conservatives, who contend academia has been hijacked by liberals. A point supported by studies that show 90 percent of humanities teachers identify themselves as Democrats.
And nowhere is their bias more visible than the one-sided treatment of American history in U.S. textbooks, where words like ‘man’ and ‘mankind’ have been stricken, ‘Founding Fathers’ has been replaced by ‘Framers’ and ‘Founders’ and racial quota’s are applied to the number of photos used in any one book.
Everyone in this country agrees that education is important. There's no debate there. The disagreement is over what type of education children will (and should) receive. I don't believe that only conservatives should teach conservatives, and only liberals teach liberals. But, elections have consequences, and these State Education Board members are entitled to make decisions in these matters, same as President Obama gets to nominate who he wants for the Supreme Court.
As the report mentioned, more than 90% of "Humanities" (i.e. History, Social Studies, etc.) teachers in the public school system are self-described Democrats. In 2008, more than 80% of public school teachers and university professors voted for Barack Obama. The numbers are almost identical going back decades.
To say that there is a slant toward the Left among our nation's educators and their administrators is like saying that the Cubs haven't won a World Series "in a few years now."
Liberals contend the board is out of touch and the block of social conservatives have manipulated the process to reflect teachings out of the mainstream.
“They have politicized the textbook process. And I think that our schoolchildren deserve better than politicizing it,” Terri Burke, Texas ACLU Executive Director . “We really believe this curriculum should be turned over to experts who know something about history, about education, about the learning levels of schoolchildren. We ought to have people who really know it being the ones who write it and vet it and tell us that this is what kiddos oughta learn.”
Nice. Liberals comprise no more than 20% of the nation's population. Yet they comprise more than 80% of the academic world's population. The Left has a distinctively different perspective on the history, economy, and political structure of the United States of America. Conservatives, a block of at least 40% of the nation's population, want their kids to be given a more balanced view of this country and the world around them.
But when parents on the Right get involved in the decision making process they are told to shut up and sit down at School Board meetings. When they ask for school vouchers or more school choice their voices are drowned out by the voices of teacher unions who have the ear of far too many politicians. When they finally take their kids out, and either home-school them or place them in private (usually religious) schools, they are labeled nut-jobs and described in demeaning terms by the media.
So what are conservatives to do?
In California, a key state Senate Committee passed a bill Tuesday designed to prohibit any textbook approved in Texas to be used in the Golden State.
“While some Texas politicians may want to set their educational standards back 50 years, California should not be subject to their backward curriculum changes,” said Leland Yee, D-San Francisco. “The alterations and fallacies made by these extremist conservatives are offensive to our communities and inaccurate of our nation’s diverse history. Our kids should be provided an education based on facts and that embraces our multicultural nation.”
But we on the Right are the close-minded "haters" trying to impose our worldview and morals on the nation...
Eric Holder Is A Clown
I'm sorry, but he is. Watch this exchange he had with a congressman during a hearing this last week on the recent slew of terrorist attacks (and what common denominator they "might" all have):
Feel safer, knowing this guy's the top law-man in the country right now?
Mark Steyn doesnt, and here are his thoughts on the matter.
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