Category Archives: Political Commentary
The New Holocaust
Democrat hysteria and hyperbole over modest budget cuts reaches new highs. Or lows:
“The mean-spirited bill, H.R. 1 … eliminates the National Endowment of the Humanities, National Endowment of the Arts,” said Reid. “These programs create jobs. The National Endowment of the Humanities is the reason we have in northern Nevada every January a cowboy poetry festival. Had that program not been around, the tens of thousands of people who come there every year would not exist.”
Who knew that these benighted cowboy poetry afficianados were not only dependent on Washington for their rodeo clown fix, but their very existence?
[Update a while later]
Yippi-ki-o, yipp-ki-a, cowboy poets on the dole.
On Firing Schoolteachers
The benefits:
I doubt that the lowest possible turnover rate is compatible with the best possible education. Turnover has costs, but it also has benefits: fresh blood, lower burnout rates, and an incentive for teachers to keep performing. The whole idea of hiring someone in their early twenties and employing them forever seems like an unhealthy organizational structure to me–in the military and old-school law firms as well as teaching, though the military and law firms do more to weed out the number along the way. It breeds an organization that is insular–resistant to new ideas, suspicious of outsiders, resentful of its nominal clients. We should be looking for ways to make teaching more open to part-timers and people in second, third, or eighth career cycles, and to make it easier for teachers to move around between schools and districts, and between teaching and other industries.
It will never happen, though, as long as the NEA retains its power, because it’s never about the children with them. And it’s another good argument against public-employee unions.
Demography Is Destiny
…and Europe’s is looking pretty grim.
More On The War Against Science
Really, they only like science when it gives them the “correct” answers.
Eerie Coincidence?
Or launch sabotage? My thoughts on whether someone can’t handle the truth about climate change.
Big Government
What we’re talking about:
In a century, Big Government transformed an essential and minimalized service, the Federal Highway Administration, into the Department of Where the F*** Do You Think You’re Going, and the above fog machine is just the genetics of one department. I noted earlier that the GAO had “found” massive amounts of redundancy; it was a poor word. The GAO simply took the time to report on the disgust. Any rational man could look at the following, which is nothing more than a collection of current federal agencies, and understand the waste is of a scale difficult to comprehend and inspiring of our worst tendencies to rage.
It’s frightening, really.
How The Public-Employee Unions…
…are destroying California.
High-Speed Rail Troubles
…in China. I’m shocked, shocked.
John Edwards Should Not Be Indicted
I agree with Mickey. I do think, though, that campaign finance laws should be tossed on the ash heap of history. One of the few good things that Barack Obama did in 2008 (or ever, for that matter) was to make spending limits irrelevant.
[Update a couple minutes later]
I also agree with Mickey that while he shouldn’t be indicted, he hasn’t been punished enough.