Flash! Academic Achievement Is Racist

Alas. The little red schoolhouse, and the not so little ones, were supposed to get another boost from the federal government which just felt it didn't have enough control over national curricula. President Obama wants everyone to go to Columbia and Harvard Law, so he cobbled-together a $4.5 billion program called "Race To The Top."

Obama and his Indoctrination (oops, Education) Secretary should have known it's not nice to inject race into the title of any bill, even if human race has nothing to do with it (sort of like "black" in "black hole"). If they had called it "Equal Failure In The Schools," it probably wouldn't have drawn the attention of the NAACP, Rainbow/Push Coalition and the National Urban League, among others. But since the program is designed solely to reward some nebulous federal standard of success in academics rather than provide funds based solely on race or ethnic background, the usual suspects are in high dudgeon.

Since the passage of No Child Left Behind, the race and color-based organizations have been suspicious of any federal program that is niggardly in providing huge sums of money for "disadvantaged youths" and emphasizes instead accomplishment over "racial empowerment." In that bill, Senator Ted Kennedy managed to put in lots of goodies for special programs based almost entirely on race and ethnic background, but not enough to suit the big race-based organizations. George Bush enabled the bill by once again misplacing his veto pen.

But now "those people," apparently including their former messiah in the White House, have added insult to injury by throwing more federal funds at, horrors, incentives for competitiveness in education, a healthy dollop of funding for charter schools, and the closure or takeover of failing schools. Several of the spokespeople for the big organizations have essentially called Obama a race-traitor, even though that could at best be only a half-truth. This is a major problem since it pits him and his administration against major funders of his perpetual campaign, and not just the race-based organizations. The teachers unions don't much like it either, because they know that success among black, ethnic, and white students depends in large part on good teachers. That is a classification sorely lacking among public school union teachers. Please note that I do not include teachers who would rather not join the union, but have no choice.

The whole flap is comically ironic. The goal of progressive education since time immemorial has been to use poor (mostly black and/or foreign) neighborhoods for social engineering and untested methods of pulling the disadvantaged out of ignorance and poverty. Obama has billed himself and his gang of Democratic lefties as Progressives. Yet now he proposes to raise student accomplishment rather than reward failure and racial happenstance by funding programs based almost solely on academic success. Has anybody told him that if he's not careful, he's going to sound like the conservative educators who have been proposing this sort of thing, unsuccessfully, for years. Next thing you know, he'll start quoting Martin Luther King, Jr.--correctly.

Using the words of the earlier fund-fest, Obama's critics in the race industry say that the proposed bill stacks the deck against the "majority of low-income and minority students who will be left behind." They haven't quite yet found a way to explain how additional incentives for academic success will negate all the billions of dollars that will still be spent to provide a dubious safety-net for poor students in failing schools.

President Obama spoke before the National Urban League recently and couldn't figure out why his speech was not received with the usual euphoria. "Let me tell you, what's not working for black kids and Hispanic kids and Native American kids across the country is the status quo. That's what's not working." Something tells me that Obama did not get script approval for that statement from his buddy, Weather Underground Education Professor William Ayers.

Obama spent most of his post-academic career raising and obtaining funds for all kinds of ridiculous and expensive programs in the ghettoes and barrios, but education wasn't among those goals. So naturally, he chose the former superintendent of the Chicago public schools, Arne Duncan, to be Secretary of Education. He praised Duncan for raising Chicago school standardized test scores by 29%. What he didn't mention is that it would be nearly impossible to lower Chicago's achievement on test scores. For instance, after his seven year tenure as superintendent, Duncan's 11th graders failed to meet minimum standards to the tune of 70% of students taking the tests. Well, I guess that's better than 80% failure. And then, of course, there's the matter of raising scores by lowering the standards of the tests.

I don't know if someone slipped something into the administration's evening merlot, or whether it's just a simple case of mass hysteria, but even Duncan is now praising charter schools. But like the race-based organizations, I think I smell a rat as well. While he was Chicago's superintendent of public instruction, he spent most of his time going to fund-raisers and political get-togethers put on by the Chicago political elite. Duncan carefully categorized these powerhouses by both income and political clout, and amazingly, the children of those on the lists were fast-tracked out of the worst public schools and into the best public and private schools. Sure, some of those rewarded were black, but for Progressives looking out for the deprived and oppressed, the fast-tracking didn't do any good for indigents, the powerless, or poor minorities.

The "status quo" of which Obama speaks is almost entirely attributable to liberals, progressives and social engineers--people much like himself. The concept of being rewarded for what you've done rather than what you are is not ordinarily in their philosophy. So it's no shock that the race-based organizations and special pleaders are upset with Obama on this issue. What is a little surprising is that Obama seems to be as tone-deaf to his own base as he is to the will of the majority of Americans. By the time he leaves office, he may have set the record for the number of political groups of all persuasions that he has alienated.
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Ted Reaches Out From The Grave

The People of the Commonwealth of Massachussets have spoken. Ted Kennedy has an immediate successor. Well, the people haven't exactly spoken. Ted Kennedy gave his Democrats marching orders before going to that great swimming hole in the sky. "Change state law and get a Mini Me into office in time to vote on socialized medicine!" And it came to pass that the legislature did that and the governor signed the bill.

The seat formerly held by Kennedy for forty-seven years has been bestowed upon Paul Kirk. The whole affair, from start to finish, stinks of partisan politics, thwarting the will of the people, and changing the nature of the Massachusetts election and succession process overnight (for the second time in a decade) solely to keep the entrenched Democrats in power.

In a mad rush, the Massachusetts legislature carried out Teddy's wishes. Previously, Massachusetts law provided that in the event of a vacancy in the office of Senator, the office was to remain vacant until the legislature authorized a special election and the governor set a date. Some states have that system, more have the system that went into place in Massachusetts last week. So what's the complaint? As we discussed on these pages last month as Teddy was fading into his final reward, the system just tossed out was a direct result of the Kennedy/Kerry machine's last change in Massachusetts law. And in both cases, the people of the Commonwealth were never heard from.

You see, the last time the Senator wanted a change, there was a Republican in the Massachusetts state house, and the Kennedys were sure as hell not going to allow him to put a Republican Senator into Congress. So they hastily threw together a new law in the legislature leaving the seat vacant until the Democrats could elect their own man three to six months down the road. Better to have only one Senator than to have a Republican incumbent to face at the special election. The people of Massachussets were not consulted.

And they weren't consulted this time either. The chances that Kennedy would have been replaced at a special election by another liberal Democrat approach 100%. But it would be too late for his replacement to get into Congress in time to vote on Obama socialized medicine. So in his barely living will, Kennedy ordered his entrenched minions to change the law, preferably before the flight of angels took him to his rest, but afterwards if necessary.

So the legislature once again hastily changed the law, giving the governor (left-wing Obama supporter Deval Patrick) the power to appoint a Senator and to set an election 90 days hence. But the legislature did not provide for immediate appointment, so the governor simply declared an emergency and did it anyway. And dead Ted gets his way. Of course the Democrats are certainly willing to let the people make a fair choice, since everybody knows it's going to be a Democrat who gets appointed, right?

Wrong. The politicians in the capital had several names in the hopper, and Democratic caucuses and statewide political activists also suggested viable nominees. And they settled on a widely-popular elder Massachussets statesman--George Dukakis. However foolish he may have looked with his pinhead sticking up out of an army tank during the Presidential election, he remained a much beloved figure in Massachusetts. He is known to support Obamacare, and had an extremely liberal record while in office.

But once again, the hand of Ted Kennedy reached out from the grave, with some help from his extended family. Adding political manipulation on top of political manipulation, the Kennedys decided that Dukakis just wouldn't do. It must be either a Kennedy, or a Kennedy intimate. And so it was. Paul Kirk was the choice of Kennedy's second wife, Victoria Reggie Kennedy, Ted Kennedy Jr., and Rep. Patrick Kennedy of Rhode Island. He was one of Ted's closest confidantes and advisers. At age 71, it is unlikely that he will attempt to hold onto the seat at the election, giving the Kennedy machine plenty of time to come up with a younger candidate whom they can control.

So despite a pending lawsuit filed by Republican legislators to stop the appointment from going forward (a judge rejected the suit at close of business on Friday), the annointing has gone forward with undue haste. With the court case still under advisement on Friday, crazy Joe Biden showed up in the US Capitol to swear the new Senator in at 3:55 PM. A large contingent of the Kennedy family was there, along with a substantial number of Kennedy's staff, prominent Democrats, and a few Republicans Congress critters. Noticeably missing from the whole affair were the people of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
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No Vacation Goes Unpunished. . .

It’s been a difficult vacation for Obama. His worshipers won’t leave him alone: CNN, ABC News, CBS, they’ve all followed him, fighting for just a glimpse. They gushed over his reading list -- all white male authors, by the way. They’ve gushed over Michelle’s shorts. And they’ve sung his praises for choosing a vacation spot like Martha’s Vineyard, where the ultra rich mingle freely with the moderately ultra rich. . . it’s true Americana. But while he’s basking in the glory, things haven’t been going so well at the office.

On Tuesday, Obama’s economic team finally conceded what the rest of us already knew: he understated the deficit. Rather than being a trifling $1 trillion next year, the deficit will in fact be $1.5 trillion. Wow, $500 billion off! That’s nine times what they claim health care reform will cost each year.

Team Obama also admitted that they’d under-estimated unemployment. . . again. Unemployment will now hit 10% instead of the 9% estimated in July, which was itself an increase from Team Obama’s original maximum estimate of 8% for unemployment. No word this time if nobody could have seen this coming.

These direr numbers caused members of Team Obama to suggest that a second stimulus could be needed -- a “ministimulus” of only $250 billion. But Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisconsin) shot that idea down quickly.

Feingold, apparently taking out some frustration on Obama’s agenda, also stated that Team Obama’s proposal to revive the assault weapons ban “would die a quick death in the Senate.” Feingold also will oppose legislation to require gun registration.

And the bad news didn’t stop there. Feingold stated that there would be no health care bill in the Senate until Christmas. . . so much for the August deadline. He also rejected an effort to use federal funds to pay for abortions: “There’s no way we’re changing this to offer public funding of abortions. Nobody wants to open up that issue in the middle of this. That’s one thing you won’t have to worry about.” Truly, he has become a right-wing extremist. Welcome Senator.

Then the thinkable happened: Ted Kennedy (D-Masshole) died. So what you ask? Well, suddenly the Democrats lack a supermajority in the Senate. And because of some nasty legal maneuvering by Kennedy a few years back to try to deprive Romney of the chance of appointing a Republican until a special election could be held, no one can be appointed to replace Kennedy until a special election is held early next year.

However, the real ObamaCare-killer is not the actual lack of the supermajority. We all know that when ask comes to nudge, certain Republicans can be counted on to support whatever bill the Democrats want. Thus, the supermajority is safe. But the Democrats are nervous beyond the extreme about ObamaCare. They blew it, they lost the people’s trust on this issue through a series of missteps. Now they don't want to touch this bill for fear that it will terminate their careers with extreme prejudice. But not ramming through socialism will anger their base.

So whatever will they do? They will claim that without the sixty seat majority, it would be hopeless to bring this bill to a vote. . . pay no attention to the two Democratic-groupies from Maine. Thus, tragically, they will claim, this issue must be put off until 2010. . . er, 2011, after the election. Team Obama and their friend The Pelosi will use the corpse of Ted Kennedy to pressure these Democrats, but fear of the dead is not as strong as fear of a lively electorate. And this may be the final nail in the coffin for ObamaCare.

Finally, as if all of this wasn't enough to ruin his vacation, we now hear that Afghanistan is falling apart. It’s been a summer of rising casualties, divisive elections, and falling support. This week, even Adm. Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described the Afghan situation as “serious and deteriorating.”

What else can go wrong for Obama? Wait a minute, has anybody seen his dog lately? Wasn't he tied to the back of Air Force One. . . never mind.

Maybe Obama shouldn’t have gone on vacation. . .

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The Democrats Have A Death-Grip On The Senate--Or Do They?

Amidst all the other news of the past week, one item which got surprisingly little press was the "filibuster-proof" supermajority attained by the Democrats in the Senate with the concession of Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman to Saturday Night Live comic Al Franken. Maybe even Democrats and their compliant press figured out that it's just not that easy.

The Minnesota Supreme Court finally finished off its dirty work of selectively choosing which election laws it would apply to secure the victory of the foul-mouthed TV and Air America shock comic Franken in the race against incumbent Senator Coleman. After ruling that Franken had received "the highest number of votes legally cast," it declared Franken the candidate who should be certified to the Senate as Minnesota's next Senator. As for "legally cast," since the court itself chose which votes were legal, its conclusion was inevitable given the highly political makeup of the court. The court stuck to "the letter of the law" where convenient, thereby disenfranchising many military absentee ballots. On the other hand, when it came to voting irregularities involving missing and "discovered" ballot boxes and double-counts for Franken, the court ruled that the "spirit of the law" was more important than the letter of the law.

Coleman originally considered a federal appeal, and even though his cause was just, he finally came to realize that when it comes to the application of state election laws, the U. S. Supreme Court will find every way possible to defer to the findings of the state courts. So Coleman personally called Franken to concede the election, giving the Democrats 60 votes in the Senate, enough to invoke cloture (shutting off a filibuster). To add insult to injury, the court ordered Coleman to pay Franken $75,000 to defray Franken's costs on appeal. Note: "Bush v Gore" was not a divergence from that rule. In the Bush-Gore case, the Florida Supreme Court didn't interpret state elections laws--it rewrote them from the bench.

So, the game is over, right? Not so fast, my friends. "Filibuster-proof" is in the eye of the beholder. If this were a simple matter of mathematics, then the game is indeed over. But that assumes that all Democrats are both safe votes and safe bets, and that simply isn't the case. So it really comes down to "reliable" votes, and those mathematics are not nearly so clear.

Who are the clear and present dangers to Democratic absolutism? To start with, recent convert Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania has begun to demonstrate that he can be a pain in the posterior of Democrats as easily as he was a pain for the Republicans. Snarlin' Arlen, as he is affectionately known, has already expressed his displeasure with much of Sonia Sotomayor's jurisprudence. Specter is miffed that he did not automatically get his chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee back when he turned his coat and became a Democrat. He suffers from a very serious case of humility-deficiency, as well as certain physical ailments. And by leaving the Republican Party, he left them with only three wobbly "moderates" (aka "RINOs")--Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine and George Voinovich of Ohio (and he's only good until the end of 2010, since he has announced his retirement). The remainder of the Republicans are very likely to vote against cloture should the opportunity arise.

Given that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is not known for being a good herder of Democratic cats, he is also facing some grim realities as well. The occasionally senile Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia is a sporadic fan of separation of powers, thus making him an unsure bet on Presidential appointments of less-than-stellar Supreme Court nominees and socialist schemes for the economy. And Byrd is in very poor health, having missed multiple crucial Senate votes over the past year. That makes Byrd an unsure bet on two counts.

Likewise, Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts has been in deteriorating health since he had a seizure followed by surgery for brain cancer. He has appeared healthy in public appearances but insiders say he is good at putting on a healthy public front while becoming exhausted to the point of near-collapse in private.

There are Democrats from the Rust Belt who will vote for cloture on some issues but not on others. Rust Belt Democrats are not at all pleased with Obama's cap-and-trade scheme which will cost thousands of jobs in already-depressed states. The goofy new kid, Franken, has expressed serious doubts about the Obama health care bill (he called it "not feasible"). And several moderate Southern Democrats have expressed reservations about Sonia Sotomayor's statements about the law, race and legal precedent combined with her recent slapdowns from the Supreme Court.

Republicans will have to be very cautious in considering attempted filibusters. If they try too often and lose, they will appear to be weak and merely silly obstructionists. If they don't use them at all when the entire future of the Republic is at stake (cap-and-trade, Obamacare, the next two Supreme Court nominees), they risk looking unserious and cowardly. But given the shakiness of the Democratic cloture coalition, they can never simply ignore the possible use of the filibuster. All they have to do now is convince John McCain that he has been relegated to the back bench, and if he ever wants to be prominent in the Party again, he needs to stay out of power-broking with the Democrats who don't honor their commitments.
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Dr. Obama Writes A Prescription

The President stretched forth his healer's hands, and has diagnosed America's health care system to be in desperate need of major surgery. He has temporarily written a prescription for a new wonder drug. It's a red pill, and it costs about a trillion dollars. But the good news is that everybody will get to take the pill, whether they want to or not.

Speaking before the American Medical Association on Monday, Mr. Obama turned a crowd that had previously been openly hostile to socialized medicine into a crowd of merely semi-hostile questioners. Introducing an amorphous speechified version of the Ted Kennedy plan to turn medical care over to the government, Mr. Obama danced and parried around the details of what a huge and expensive program this would be.

Despite the Congressional Budget Office estimate of the cost of the plan at $1 trillion dollars over ten years, the plan would still leave 36 million Americans uninsured. So it doesn't really solve the "crisis in health coverage" and what it does cover will cost an estimated $62,500 for each new person covered. The Financial Times reported that the CBO had played the role of "the skunk at the party" in 1993, when the administration grossly underplayed the cost of Hillarycare. Although the new CBO report doesn't smell quite so bad to the Obama administration, it didn't need another "trillion dollar program" being announced by supposedly friendly accountants.

Most of the criticism and questioning at the meeting related to the cost of the program and the fact that the plan claims that individuals can keep their private and employer plans. The problem with that second part is that is assumes something that is very unlikely. Private plans won't be able to compete with government giveaways or maintain their current level of medical choices and approved medications, while many employers, facing taxes on "excess benefits" and loss of tax deductions for certain coverage will simply opt out of employer provided health benefits. The moment millions of previously covered Americans cancel their private plans or cease to have plans through their employers, they all become "uninsureds" who will join the crowd getting their care from the government (or rather, from the taxpayers).

Although the plan presented by Obama and Kennedy appears to fill a major gap, in fact it leaves much of the gap unfilled and in addition will create another huge class of uninsured Americans who will have no choice but to join the government plan or go without insurance. Specifics on how the government bureaucrats will determine level of care and availablity of care were left to the imagination. Most doctors, indeed most Americans, recognize that there is a health care delivery problem of major proportions that needs to be solved, but most also realize that nationalized health care and its ugly stepsister "single payer" health care are cures that are worse than the disease.

In addition, the number of "uninsureds" includes those who are temporarily uninsured (largely because of the increase in unemployment), and all illegal immigrants. The number of genuine, legitimate, longterm "uninsureds" is far lower than the government wishes the American people to know about. That real number is what most doctors, laymen, and charities wish to see the government working on. Only liberal politicians want to see the exploitation of another "crisis" which grants government more power over people's lives. Most of the President's advisers are getting their concepts from the national health care systems in England, Canada and socialized Europe. None of them have apparently noticed the huge dissatisfaction with those systems among the "beneficiaries," nor that all of those systems are being carefully re-evaluated to provide for more and better private care.

So how did the MSM treat the reaction to Obama's AMA speech? More evenly than we've come to expect. The AP felt the necessity to gush before reporting the actual news: "For all the young President's popularity, the response he got Monday from doctors at an AMA meeting was a sign his road is only going to get rockier as he tries to sell his plan to overhaul the nation's health care system." CNN was consistent with its all-Obama all the time reporting: "The AMA was expected to be a tough crowd but they quickly melted. This is the beginning of an essential courtship for Obama, who desperately needs this group to pass his health care reform."

NBC's Nightly News was a little more realistic in saying "there were doctors at today's American Medical Association gathering who booed the President." ABC World News actually got to the heart of the matter by noting that doctors "fear that a not-for-profit public plan will drive private insurers out of business, swamping enrollments for the public plan and forcing the government to slash doctors' rates." CBS Evening News said that Obama "made his case for change in front of a tough audience" but was honest enough to add "and he found himself on the defensive."

Obama got a "standing ovation when he said he might be open to some kind of relief for doctors from malpractice lawsuits," said CBS. But Obama giveth, and Obama taketh away. "But he then got a smattering of boos when he says he still opposes caps on jury awards." AP surprisingly reported that "former Senator Tom Daschle says controlling the cost of malpractice insurance will have to be a part of the Obama administration's overhaul of the health care system."

Even Fox News was fairly generous in reporting that the President "could be winning some support by focusing on medical malpractice suits." Well, you can't lose kicking the lawyers. Yet AP, AFP, and McClatchy all quoted Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell as saying "Americans don't want a government-run system that puts bureaucrats between patients and doctors." But AP then backed down a bit as it found some Republican disingenuousness: "Republicans are honing an attack line against Obama in an attempt to play on Americans' fears of government overreach and economic uncertainties, suggesting he is nationalizing American industry and socializing medicine." Oh, those rotten Republicans. What's the big deal about government overreach and financial disaster when you can have a health care system as good as Cuba's?
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