Dem on Dem Action
Rep. Eric Massa (D-NY) is being forced out of office today by the White House (and union supporters) because he does not support Obamacare.
Here is Massa, in his own words, explaining the bizarre pressure the current administration (namely, Rahm Emmanuel) has been putting on him.
Tribune Editorial Page: Keep The Best Teachers
The Chicago Tribune is anything but a bastion of conservative opinions, but today's opinion from the editorial page is something all Americans ought to be able to get behind.
Last fall, Washington, D.C., schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee laid off 229 teachers. Here's what was unusual about that: She chose who would stay and who would go based on the competence of the teachers.
That's a radical departure for public education. Most schools across the country make personnel decisions largely or entirely based on seniority. Last in, first out. Illinois law requires that teacher layoffs be based on seniority unless a school district and its local union negotiate different rules. Result: seniority is the deciding factor everywhere, according to the Illinois State Board of Education. So law and custom protect older teachers — whether they're good teachers or bad teachers.
What a shock to learn that the Peoples' Republic of Illinois has such a backwards, ineffective system for hiring and firing teachers!
Many cash-strapped Illinois school districts face the prospect of layoffs in the coming months. Unless outdated rules are scrapped, the schools will have to fire some of their best teachers because they happen to be younger teachers.
They also will have to fire more teachers. Younger teachers have lower salaries, so when schools operate strictly on seniority, they have to let more teachers go to achieve a certain dollar savings.
Yes, there is value in experience. But the National Council on Teacher Quality reports that "teachers in their third year of teaching are generally about as effective as long-tenured teachers."
Seniority can be considered, but along with such factors as competence, drive, classroom performance and willingness to learn new skills. Younger teachers, for instance, may be more computer-savvy and thus more capable of teaching the tech skills children need to succeed.
I don't think it's a stretch to say that almost everyone has a teacher who impacted their life in a positive way. We want to honor teachers, and we want the best possible teachers in our school systems. But tax dollars aren't charity to be doled out based on a general feeling of good will towards people who enter the teaching profession. People must earn those dollars, same as any other job.
And it is the constitutional duty of those running these bloated bureacracies at the state and federal level to do everything in their power to see that the best possible people are hired in the most efficient way.
All governments have to find ways to lure and keep the best and brightest in their work force. Where is that more important than in the classroom?
School vouchers, anyone? Real change requires real change. Enough talk. If we're serious about education, then let's put our votes where our mouths are and let our elected officials know that changes like the ones the Tribune is talking about matter to us.
Obamacare Is A Loser
You simply cannot explain the scope and breadth of the Obamacare debacle in one column...unless your last name is Krauthammer.
As an aspiring writer and commentator, I spend a great deal of time reading the books and articles and speeches of the people I feel effectively communicate the ideas I believe in better than anyone else.
Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post and Fox News Channel is one of those people.
Every night of the week, at roughly 6:40 p.m. (Eastern Time), Dr. Krauthammer is a member of the "All-Star Panel" on Special Report With Brett Baier. (You should be watching or DVR-ing this every day). And each Friday, his nationally syndicated column is read in newspapers all across the country.
Today he treated his reading audience to this gem on the current state of the Pelosi-Reid-Obama health care plan:
After 34 speeches, three sharp electoral rebukes (Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts) and a seven-hour seminar, the president announced Wednesday his determination to make one last push to pass his health care reform.
The final act was carefully choreographed. The rollout began a week earlier with a couple of shows of bipartisanship: a Feb. 25 Blair House "summit" with Republicans, followed five days later with a few concessions tossed the Republicans' way.
Show is the operative noun. Among the few Republican suggestions President Obama pretended to incorporate was tort reform. What did he suggest to address the plague of defensive medicine that a Massachusetts Medical Society study showed leads to about 25 percent of doctor referrals, tests and procedures being done for no medical reason? A few ridiculously insignificant demonstration projects amounting to one-half of one-hundredth of 1 percent of the cost of Obama's health care bill.
The Health Care Summit last week was a dog-and-pony show, meant to portray the Republicans as obstructionists and big old meanies. But the president was confronted by the likes of Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), and the fact-based disagreements conservatives have with Obama's brand of "reform." Republicans DO have ideas, and many key members of the GOP on the state and national level have been promoting them all year.
Unfortunately for Democrats, that seven-hour televised exercise had the unintended consequence of showing the Republicans to be not only highly informed on the subject, but also, as even Obama was forced to admit, possessed of principled objections -- contradicting the ubiquitous Democratic/media meme that Republican opposition was nothing but nihilistic partisanship.
Republicans did so well, in fact, that in his summation, Obama was reduced to suggesting that his health care reform was indeed popular because when you ask people about individual items (for example, eliminating exclusions for pre-existing conditions or capping individual out-of-pocket payments) they are in favor.
Yet mystifyingly they oppose the whole package. How can that be?
And now, in what can only be described as the most brilliant summation of the American peoples' opposition to Obamacare, please enjoy the wit and wisdom of Charles Krauthammer in its rarest of forms:
Allow me to demystify. Imagine a bill granting every American a free federally delivered ice cream every Sunday morning. Provision 2: steak on Monday, also home delivered. Provision 3: A dozen red roses every Tuesday. You get the idea. Would each individual provision be popular in the polls? Of course.
However (life is a vale of howevers) suppose these provisions were bundled into a bill that also spelled out how the goodies are to be paid for and managed -- say, half a trillion dollars in new taxes, half a trillion in Medicare cuts (cuts not to keep Medicare solvent but to pay for the ice cream, steak and flowers), 118 new boards and commissions to administer the bounty-giving, and government regulation dictating, for example, how your steak was to be cooked. How do you think this would poll?
Perhaps something like 3-1 against, which is what the latest CNN poll shows is the citizenry's feeling about the current Democratic health care bills.
Late last year, Democrats were marveling at how close they were to historic health care reform, noting how much agreement had been achieved among so many factions. The only remaining detail was how to pay for it.
Well, yes. That has generally been the problem with democratic governance: cost. The disagreeable absence of a free lunch.
That's it, folks. Everything the Left promises sounds nice on an individual level, which is how they present their collectivist policies. The problem is, of course, that all of their policies are implemented on a national level and cannot possibly succeed. This is the heart of the debate between Right and Left: can the few rule, and provide for, the many? Can "experts" in Washington "control" the expenses and costs of 300 million-plus liberty-loving Americans?
The good intentions of liberals are heart-warming and bone-chilling, all at the same time.
Chuck closes out his devastatingly informative column with the following:
The time for debate is over, declared the nation's seminar leader in chief. The man who vowed to undo Washington's wicked ways has directed the Congress to ram Obamacare through, by one vote if necessary, under the parliamentary device of "budget reconciliation." The man who ran as a post-partisan is determined to remake a sixth of the U.S. economy despite the absence of support from a single Republican in either house, the first time anything of this size and scope has been enacted by pure party-line vote.
Surprised? You can only be disillusioned if you were once illusioned.
Responsibility is for losers
Greece is bankrupt and counting on Germany to bail them out. Sound familiar? The United States is moving closer to European-style socialism with every government annexation of power. THIS is why something like the health care debate matters.
Mark Steyn, writing for National Review Online, breaks down the broken-down economy (and collective mentality) of the Greeks.
While Barack Obama was making his latest pitch for a brand-new, even-more-unsustainable entitlement at the health-care “summit,” thousands of Greeks took to the streets to riot. An enterprising cable network might have shown the two scenes on a continuous split-screen — because they’re part of the same story. It’s just that Greece is a little further along in the plot: They’re at the point where the canoe is about to plunge over the falls. America is farther upstream and can still pull for shore, but has decided instead that what it needs to do is catch up with the Greek canoe. Chapter One (the introduction of unsustainable entitlements) leads eventually to Chapter Twenty (total societal collapse): The Greeks are at Chapter Seventeen or Eighteen.
He continues:
We hard-hearted small-government guys are often damned as selfish types who care nothing for the general welfare. But, as the Greek protests make plain, nothing makes an individual more selfish than the socially equitable communitarianism of big government: Once a chap’s enjoying the fruits of government health care, government-paid vacation, government-funded early retirement, and all the rest, he couldn’t give a hoot about the general societal interest; he’s got his, and to hell with everyone else. People’s sense of entitlement endures long after the entitlement has ceased to make sense.
Read the rest of his latest column here, and ask yourself this: "What worth having in this life does not come with sacrifice?" There really is no such thing as a free lunch, and we're going to have to make the tough, unpopular decisions if we want to preserve economic, personal, political, and religious liberty.
What are you willing to do for those things?
Steyn closes his piece with a wake-up call to those who think "It can't happen here."
Think of Greece as California: Every year an irresponsible and corrupt bureaucracy awards itself higher pay and better benefits paid for by an ever-shrinking wealth-generating class. And think of Germany as one of the less profligate, still-just-about-functioning corners of America such as my own state of New Hampshire: Responsibility doesn’t pay. You’ll wind up bailing out anyway.
The problem is there are never enough of “the rich” to fund the entitlement state, because in the end it disincentivizes everything from wealth creation to self-reliance to the basic survival instinct, as represented by the fertility rate. In Greece, they’ve run out Greeks, so they’ll stick it to the Germans, like French farmers do. In Germany, the Germans have only been able to afford to subsidize French farming because they stick their defense tab to the Americans. And in America, Obama, Pelosi, and Reid are saying we need to paddle faster to catch up with the Greeks and Germans.
What could go wrong?
Newt vs. Jon Stewart
My boy Newt Gingrich has been a guest many times on Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and it's always a wild ride.
Last week the former Speaker of the House duked it out with Stewart over the president's handling of the War on Terror.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Newt Gingrich | ||||
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Smugness: Stewart is thy name.
Walter E. Williams Isn’t Happy About The Census
Dr. Williams is certainly one of the clearest thinkers and best communicators of free market principles in the country, but no one has ever accused him of mincing words. His target this week: the 2010 U.S. Census.
The Census Bureau estimates that the life cycle cost of the 2010 Census will be from $13.7 billion to $14.5 billion, making it the costliest census in the nation's history.
That's a pretty penny in a time of economics crisis. Williams sees not only wanton waste in the Census, but a unnecessary (and un-Constitutional) intrusion into the lives of American taxpayers and voters.
What purpose did the Constitution's framers have in mind ordering an enumeration or count of the American people every 10 years? The purpose of the headcount is to apportion the number of seats in the House of Representatives and derived from that, along with two senators from each state, the number of electors to the Electoral College.
He continues
The Census Bureau also asks questions about race, and I want to know what does my race have to do with apportioning the U.S. House of Representatives?
If I'm asked about race, I might respond the way I did when filling out a military form upon landing in Inchon, Korea in 1960; I checked off Caucasian. The warrant officer who was checking forms told me that I made a mistake and should have checked off "Negro." I told him that people have the right to self-identify themselves and I'm Caucasian. The warrant officer, trying to cajole me, asked why I would check off Caucasian instead of Negro. I told him that checking off Negro would mean getting the worse job over here. I'm sure the officer changed it after I left.
Most people don't care that the government incrementally intrudes into their lives more and more each year. People want jobs and food on the table and some vacation time. I get that. Dr. Williams gets that.
But there are some principles and values and ideals that are worth taking a stand for NOW so that we can avoid things like top-down Socialism LATER. On a very basic level, and if nothing else raises your ire about this year's Census, consider the absolute waste of time and taxpayers' money it is to hire the workers to administer and collect the Census data (many of whom quit after getting paid for their "Census Training").
From The Washington Post:
Thousands of workers hired last year for temporary positions by the U.S. Census Bureau were trained and paid but never worked for the agency, while others who fulfilled assignments overbilled for travel expenses, according to an audit released Tuesday.
Nice. Here's more from Williams on the waste in government:
Senator Evan Bayh: Gone, Baby, Gone
We are likely witnessing the implosion of the Democrat Party. Think of how different things were a year ago!
The latest Democrat to abandon the proverbial sinking ship is Senator Evan Bayh (D-IN). Writing today at National Review Online, RiShawn Biddle diagnoses what he believes to have been Senator Bayh's fatal flaw:
Certainly there is speculation that Bayh may seek the Democratic presidential nomination — or even attempt an independent presidential campaign
— in 2012 or 2016. This assumes that Bayh can repeat his past success in presenting himself as one of the Democratic party’s more centrist players. But it was precisely this well-practiced fence-straddling between conservatism and liberalism that led to Bayh’s downfall. The anger and fatigue among Hoosier voters over the current recession — combined with President Obama’s unpopularity — are hurting all Democrats, but Bayh was hurt even worse by the perception among both conservatives and liberals that he stood for his own political ambitions (and occasionally, his wife’s business interests) than for any consistent ideology.
The danger of demonstrating such an absence of strong, thoughtful political positions should be kept in mind by Republicans and Democrats alike. It is often better to be principled (and even a tad ideological) to a fault than to be milquetoast by a mile.
Please understand that the precipitous decline in the popularity of Democrats among voters does not spell certain success for the GOP come 2010 and 2012. Nor should it. Republicans absolutely blew their chance to curtail spending, drastically cut taxes, and return our national focus to the original intent of the US Constitution. That didn't happen.
But things can change. Parties can change. They change when voters show up to primaries and town halls and call/email their local representatives. They change when voters start following their leaders and keeping score for themselves (instead of letting the media re-writer history every chance they get).
The folks in Washington are terrified of you and me. Evan Bayh is just the latest in an increasingly long line of politicians who have read the poll numbers on the wall (so to speak) and know they are donzo.
Although he declared that his decision was motivated by his desire to escape the “strident partisanship” of the present-day Senate and his interest in finding “better ways to serve my fellow citizens,” he faced the prospect of losing the seat in the same fashion his legendary father did 30 years ago. According to internal party polls just three months ago, he was polling at 63 percent; by late January, the junior senator from Indiana had the support of a mere 45 percent of likely voters surveyed by Rasmussen Reports.
Keep up the fight, America. Charles Krauthammer and the Fox News All-stars are behind you:
Happy Birthday, Gipper
Ronald Reagan would have been 99 today. He was born February 6th, 1911 and passed away from Alzheimer's in the summer of 2004. It comes as no surprise to any of my readers that I think of him as the greatest president of the 20th century, and a member of the "Big Three" along with Washington and Lincoln.
He was an important figure in our nation's history, regardless of your politics, and unlike the "cult of personality" that surrounds our current president (and surrounded him before he had even served a single day in office), my respect and admiration for Ronald Reagan is based on his ideas, ideals, and values...not simply his ability to give a rousing speech. Reagan could and did do that, but it wasn't merely what he said: it was how he followed through.
Enjoy this excellent slide show that Fox News.com has put together.
Here's Reagan at his first inauguration:
And here he is at the Brandenburg Gate, calling for an end to Soviet tyranny in East Germany:
Finally, here is a montage of some of the best moments from Reagan's prolific public career:
God bless.
What is “Mere Conservatism”?
The basic ideas, ideals, and values that generally define and characterize the central tenets of what today might be termed "modern conservative thought."
We believe that a proper understanding of history, economics, and theology leads to certain conclusions. Many of these are the same conclusions our Founding Fathers arrived at in constructing a "more perfect union."
All ideas and opinions are welcome; not all are correct.
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A View From The Left
As one of my intellectual mentors Dennis Prager likes to say, "Clarity over unity." In other words, we don't have to all agree...but we would do well to know what it is we disagree about, and why. I've made it a goal to frequently post the columns of thinkers and writers on the Left here at AVITW.
She's not too happy with Dick Cheney going on different Sunday Morning Talk Shows to point out the current president's less-than-inspiring policies when it comes to terrorism, and has created a fictional, hypothetical dialogue between Obama, Sec. of Defense Robert Gates, and Cheney to vent out her frustrations.
It continues on from there, which you can read here, but I suppose you get the gist of it. Bush was/is dumb; Cheney is insensitive and "batty"; Obama is patient and non-ideological in his pragmatic benevolence. (Note: If you just threw up a little bit in your mouth, don't worry...me too.)
Just like Howard Dean claiming after Scott Brown's election in MA last month that it was really a signal from the electorate to get socialized medicine passed even quicker, liberal columnists like Dowd seem incapable of accepting the fact that this is still a Center-Right nation.
This last quote from her piece sums up the mantra we will continue to hear for decades after Barack Obama fails to win re-election in 2012.