Like just about every other Beltway pundit Richard Cohen is not delighted with what he’s seen of the Pelosi Presidency. Yes, that’s right. She seems to be running the show two-thirds of the time in the First 100 Days. While Obama was cracking unfunny jokes with Jay Leno, what was Madame President up to?
Using the tax code to exact punishment for political reasons is both bad policy and bad law — why not put gun-shop owners and cigarette manufacturers in the 100 percent bracket? — but it hurtled through Pelosi’s branch of the government with nary a hearing and few discouraging words, and only the mildest suggestion from the president that the bill was really a dumb idea.
Likewise, the stimulus pork-a-thon was largely her doing, as was the $410 billion earmark-stuffed omnibus spending bill. Cohen frets that Republicans are using Pelosi’s excesses to seize the high ground and that Obama’s poll numbers are slipping.
But it’s not like we don’t have an actual president, right? He could have sent up his own stimulus plan, threatened to veto the omnibus spending bill and declared that the House can rant all it likes but in America we don’t go after citizens to grab what the Congress itself has secured by law. That would be leadership — bold, bipartisan and mature.
So why hasn’t he done any of that? You got me. Maybe he actually likes Pelosi’s radicalism and is hiding behind her skirts. Maybe he doesn’t have the force of will or the legislative acumen to head her off. Or maybe he simply prefers to campaign and hold summits, leaving the governing to others. But the result is a far-left agenda and a nice juicy target for his opponents to aim at. Oh — and mounds and mounds of debt.
This is exactly the kind of issue that conservatives must keep before the voters as long as it exists.
Now why would we libs want to give up our monopoly? Especially when young minds are so malleable. We’ve engineered the extinction of conservatism. How’s that for long-term planning?
Absolutely. It should be personalized–the victims have names, and faces–and we should pull no punches: this is Bull Connor, loose the dogs on poor black people stuff, and should be put to the public in those terms. We should remind the public daily that this is the same party that retained power for forty years by accepting Jim Crow, the same party that fought for slavery, the same party that wages relentless war on the poorest and least organized members of society through its obeisance to laws designed–yes, designed–to thwart their competition with organized labor.
Numerous elections have shown that school choice is a loser. So what–so was abolition in 1860. Some things simply have to be opposed. If we can’t convey the moral bankruptcy of this action, wrenching poor children out of their school to serve the interests of far richer people, we should surrender our right to speak.
When it comes to keeping poor children out of good schools the Democrats are standing in the school house door and chanting “segregation today, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever!”. Somewhere that old Democrat George Wallace is smiling…
I read the other day that one Detroit inner city district graduates something like 24% of its entering high school freshmen. I wonder if that districts success rate at ensuring black illiteracy is better or worse than the old method in the slave states that forbade education for slaves.
The race hustlers need uneducated minorities; hence it’s reasonable to suspect that they organize the public schools to provide those uneducated minorities.
President Obama is simply going along with the program.
But the president is so courageous to challenge the teachers’ unions on the subject of merit pay. Isn’t he??
“Public education means educating the public not slavishly supporting a government-run monopoly on education.”
No truer words on the subject have ever been spoken (written). But then, it’s not really about educating the public, is it.
Funny, even in years when a black man isn’t on the ticket, blacks vote more than 90% Democratic. Clearly, your concern for the poor black children of America must strike them as disingenuous. How else do you explain the revulsion minorities feel toward the GOP? Democrats are racist (who elected that black president again?). George W was a good president. Up is down.
2010 is going to be so much fun!
David #7, your statistics simply prove that blacks are as stupid as Jews if not more. After all, as one Jew told me: we traditionally vote democratic, no questions asked. So if Jews can support all liberal antisemites who supported Freeman for no other reason than for being antisemite, why blacks cannot support racists? After all KKK was a military wing of Democratic party and even that does not open eyes of most African-Americans. Left hates Israel because it is Jewish State, no other reason ( they do not hate Saudi Arabia or Syria or Sudan), but stupid Jews (all 80% of American Jews) still vote for their enemies.
Some people have suicidal tendencies.
“this is Bull Connor, loose the dogs on poor black people stuff”
Since we’re exagerating, why not go with Lampshades and bars of soap?
I wonder if the same voucher proponents would be so sanguine if these vouchers were used in an Islamic madras – every bit as legitimate as a Catholic or other religious school – that’s the MAIN objection to vouchers…that, and they drain money from the public schools which – we all know, conservatives disdain in their starve the beast strategy. Instead of worrying about vouchers for a few kids, why not fix the schools for the vast majority of the kids…
oh, it’s that beast thing agian…
Neither the GOP nor conservatives want an uneducated underclass (although the left seems bound and determined to have one). We believe in the “soft bigotry of low expectations” and that race-based preferential treatment would be unnecessary if all children were allowed access to a quality education. Why any “minority” should find those convictions revulsive, disingenuous and racist is quite beyond me. It’s Democrats and the left who seem to think minorities incapable of standing on their own. So, who are the real bigots here? Not us, pal. You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye…
##7 & 9-Doesn’t matter to me if black people view my support for poor black children as disingenuous– It’s not a political gambit, it’s simply right. (Though it happens to put me on the same side as a lot of black people, who are disproportionately likely to support vouchers). And the test for “racism” or any other “ism” isn’t rhetoric, it’s the reasonably foreseeable effects of a given policy. Minimum wage laws, Davis-Bacon, and much else, articles of faith for the Democrats, predictably have a disparate, negative impact on the poorest and least organized segments of society–who are, disproportionately, black. The same is true of Democratic opposition to vouchers: poor, black people are to suffer for the benefit of middle class, white people. If that isn’t Bull Connor redux, it’s close enough.
While, as I say, foreseeable results and not stated intent determine purpose, a review of the legislative history of much wage & hour legislation, passed before PC made it necessary for proponents to disguise their intent, make it crystal clear that its purpose was to spare white men the wage competition of black men. Whether current champions of these laws are aware of this history or not, they should have no trouble seeing that this remains the necessary effect of these laws, as thwarting the aspirations of poor black children and their parents is the inevitable effect of Democratic shilling for the predominently white, middle class teachers’ unions.
Hence I say: the Democrats were the party of slavery, then the party of Jim Crow, and are now the party determined to keep black people on the liberal plantation; racism is in the party’s dna.
11
“Neither the GOP nor conservatives want an uneducated underclass”– SukmeTawdry
Of course you do. Without the uneducated, you’d have no voters, as Alan Wolfe pointed out in TNR during the election. Education has become the dividing line between right and left. The ignorant go right.
“Whites without a college degree favor McCain by 17 percent while those with one prefer Obama by 9 percent. If this trend continues, the implications for American politics deserve a bit of speculation.
“For one thing, a divide such as this suggests that Democrats will continue to expand access to higher education while Republicans will oppose it. Here one must note the arguments of the conservative writer Charles Murray who, long before this particular poll was published, began arguing that they are too many college educated people in America. This makes little sense in economic terms in a knowledge-based world, but if you like Republicans in power, it makes a great deal of sense in political terms.”
Republicans have a vested interest in seeing our children fail. They want Obama to fail, our kids to fail and America to fail, and a few –like Rushbo– are honest enough to say so.
blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_plank/archive/2008/09/24/how-education-is-changing-politics.aspx
#13. Let’s not waste time on “who’s trying to manufacture dummies.” Seventeen hundred kids in DC are about to learn a lot less than they would have without Democratic education policy. Hell, the US Department of Education is a monument to dumbing down our children–want to get rid of it? Q.E.D.
What you do have right is that we want Obama to fail. If I wanted to live in a France, I’d move to the original–better cheeses. I expect you wanted Bush to fail; God knows Democrats worked hard enough to ensure it, and I know you’re bitter you weren’t able to force failure on us in Iraq. There’s no disgrace in wanting people to fail in their efforts to create something one considers undesirable, and I don’t know why “Limbaugh wants Obama to fail” is supposed to wound. Why repeat inanities?
12
“Hence I say: the Democrats were the party of slavery, then the party of Jim Crow, and are now the party determined to keep black people on the liberal plantation; racism is in the party’s dna.”
An excellent example of what happens when your history education is incomplete. The policies of FDR, which sought to increase opportunities for blacks, precipitated a shift in parties. Then, when LBJ (D) pushed for passage of JFK’s (D) civil rights act of 1964, the white southern bigots abandoned the Dem party for the Republican Party. To this day, these bigots of the South form the backbone of the GOP (see Red States). But certainly, I can understand why you’d want to stop your argument with Lincoln. After all, your party has done nothing since for minorities, as their voting patterns attest.
Lots of so called republicans or conservatives hate socialism or welfare except when money will go to support their private or parochial schools: tax dollars going to support them in the disguised form of vouchers and in other ways if at all possible.
Foolish David–to chide me for not knowing my history. Were you better read, you’d know that FDR built a coalition of northern industrial workers–their unions were rigorously segregationist–and Jim Crow southerners. They dominated the national scene for a generation. Check the racial views of Democratic committee chairmen from 1932-to well into the 70s.
Feeling foolish already? Good, but there’s more. LBJ couldn’t pass his civil rights legislation with Democrats alone, though he had clear majorities. He had to turn to the GOP, which gave him larger pecentages than did the Democrats. The Democrats then started their current policy of treating black people as morally irresponsible wards of the state. I’d hate to see the GOP get in that bidding war.
The GOP is anything but “my party”; reality’s my party. You ought to join. As I say, the Democrats are hard-wired for racism, and that’s no place for people of conscience.
#10: “Islamic madras – every bit as legitimate as a Catholic or other religious school ”
The word for an Islamic school is madrassah.
Madras is a city in south India.
Maybe under an education voucher system,
you would have learned the difference.
The difference betwen an Islamic school and a Catholic school,
from the point of view of public policy, is also significant:
Catholic schools do not prepare suicide bombers
determined to destroy this country.
We are at war with militant Islam.
We were never at war with militant Catholicism -
but Britain was, in the days of the Armada,
and of the Gunpowder Plot, and
of the Glorious Revolution – and in those times,
she had much less religious tolerance for Catholicism
than she had for other Christian denominations.
Her Bill of Rights was not a suicide pact -
and ours should not be.
A note that I (an Irish American) sent to my wife’s cousin (also Irish American) on Rice High School in Harlem:
XXX
This is the book I mentioned on the phone.
“The Street Stops Here – A Year at a Catholic High School in Harlem.”
Think your brothers, as Rice Alum, might want to read it.
Times have indeed changed. RC schools & racial minorities were generally mutually exclusive in our day, as was the case in most public schools; now in inner cities these RC schools are populated with mostly minority students who see these schools as their last great hope. And something endures, according to the author. These RC schools are not elitist or unreasonably selective.
As the author notes:
“All students regardless of their ethnic background, social class, family programs or future plans and regardless of their scholastic level entering high school are taught basically the same way. Other factors include a demanding curriculum, high expectations, discipline, school safety, a high level of parental involvement, a dedicated faculty, and a learning environment imbued with moral values.”
…
“It is morally repugnant to the point of criminality to deny a child his or her birthright by sticking to an absolutist — in truth—secular fundamentalist view of the separation of church and state.
“The only certainty here is that the people who fight against public funding for inner-city Catholic schools would never condemn their own children to the public schools they so readily consign those children to. In fact, politicians, union officials, public school administrators, and so on, usually send their kids to Catholic, elite private or high-functioning public schools in affluent neighborhoods…
“[And] the Fact that Rice and other similar schools can succeed in educating the most difficult demographic despite scant resources as well as underpaid teachers is a powerful argument for applying the Catholic school model to urban public schools.”
***************************
So, [XXX], let me not despair that Rice, like apparently most RC schools, has removed what it sees as “emotion” from religion & substituted “social justice”, “distributionism”, “multiculturalism”, & “diversity”, empty vessels into which one can pour many things, some Christian. And cafeteria Catholicism. (“These are my principles and if you don’t like them…well, I have others” said Groucho.)
And apparently, most RC HS students today can recognize Che, but not all four gospel authors.
And they’ve instituted liturgical kitsch as a “necessary antidote” to the baroque churches & tedious Gregorian Chants, as well as the adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, The Stations of The Cross, & the pièce de résistance, St. Patrick’s Day (which has turned into a Hallmarkian Day, so all is not lost in that regard!) Oh and fish on Friday, the rosary, the Sodality – good riddance. Right?
Those fundamentalists who miss the clarity of the Pre-Vatican II Church? The heck with them. It was all, you know, so judgmental.
But I take heart because I think many of the Rice students, who would not otherwise have been able, will, unlike most of their friends in the ‘Hood, rise out of the poverty class into the middle class because of their Rice experience. I like to think that they have something more than a dumbed-down moral code, are Christians in spite of themselves (apologies to Molière) & some of their teachers, & that some will someday look back with fond memories of their Rice experience & support the school & the Church’s mission to educate the poor. That’s enough to make me feel good after reading the book.
It’s the first time I commented here and I should say that you give genuine, and quality information for bloggers! Great job.
p.s. You have a very good template for your blog. Where did you find it?
I have long argued that support for school vouchers is a progressive position. In fact, great Democrats like Hubert Humphrey and Daniel Patrick Moynihan were early supporters of school choice.