In the wake of the horrifying tsunami, I’m sure all of our thoughts are with Oprah Winfrey and the other celebrities whose lives have been indirectly touched.
Archive for 2004
An ugly fight is brewing over a new charter school upstate, here in New York. My latest column in The Post gives the details:
Pastor Richard Hague, the man behind the charter school proposed in Niagara County, is breathing fire — because injustice is staring him right in the face. As Hague brings his application to start a new school before the state’s Board of Regents today, the guardians of the status quo have stacked the deck against him.
“Our problem isn’t a poorly performing school district,” Hague tells The Post — though the Niagara Falls City school district is performing poorly, with more than 60 percent of its eighth-graders unable to pass state English tests (including more than 70 percent of black and Hispanic students) and nearly half unable to pass math. “Our problem is that the district won’t give us a chance to present our case fairly to the board.”
Board members of the proposed charter school have been intimidated into resigning, parents have been intimidated into not signing petitions in favor of the school and the Assembly has tried to intimidate the head of the state’s Board of Regents (whose term as a Regent is up in 2005 — it’s the Assembly that would reappoint him).
An ugly story all around as the teachers union and the local school superintendant tries to stop poor and minority kids from getting a shot at a decent education.
Covering this stuff can make a person sick. Anyway, the Regents vote on the school’s application this afternoon.
We’ll see.
UPDATE (12/16/04, 5:30 p.m.): The Niagara charter is denied… for now. This fight isn’t over, no matter how spineless the state’s top education officials are. More coming on this topic from The Post and yours truly.
My latest piece on Tech Central Station notes some recent odd goings on:
Whoever thought there’d come a day when the Democrats would launch a “Draft Scalia” campaign for Chief Justice of the United States?
Yet, amazingly, that’s just what’s happening.
The key, of course, is Justice Thomas.
Here’s my latest on campaign finance:
Anyone wondering whether campaign-finance reform did what it was supposed to in the 2004 election need look no further than the last week’s headlines — at two stories in particular.
The short answer is: It didn’t. The longer answer is that the Democrats, in particular, ought to be worried about how spectacularly it failed.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t expect the Democrats in Congress to start calling for the repeal of McCain-Feingold — though, in their own self-interest, they should — but some of them are waking up.
So, really, I have no problem with the reporter who planted a question for Rumsfeld with a willing soldier.
But here’s a question: If the e-mail that’s been circulating from the reporter in question is authentic, then why doesn’t the Times reporter mentioned in the e-mail (who seems to have known that the question was planted) get that fact into the Times’ front-page story Thursday?
Seems like kind of a big thing to leave out…
Blogging, as a very, very few of you may have noticed, has been curtailed in recent days. Partly, that’s because I’m just getting back up to speed after a week with a nasty cough/cold that’s affected my usual work habits (i.e. staying up until 2 a.m. every night).
Blogging will be a little more frequent going forward, but somewhat scaled back for a while due to other projects consuming my time.
What kinds of projects, you ask? Well, Scott Peterson’s prison memoir isn’t going to write itself, now is it…
I blog at my desk these days, thank you very much.
Watch as Columbia University takes the next step in whitewashing anti-Semitism in its Middle East studies department.
M.O.perative Darcy has this answer to the unemployed Kerry staffer:
I want to get employedrepublicanstaffer.com
“I am employed. But there’s not a lot of work right now. So I sit around, reading about how the Dems whine about how they are unemployed, and blame each other for how they lost. It’s great.”
“I went to work today. But I just cruised the internet. I read the pathetic job listings for the Dem jobs open. God, why don’t they just go become janitors?”
“I got my bonus today. Not only do we control the House, Senate, White House, and the Supreme Court, but I got a really fat check while Democrats got laid off. God bless America.”
Again, not sporting.
This isn’t terribly sporting, but what can you do?
I’ve enjoyed the new CNN ads, where viewers harass various anchors. There’s other questions I’d like to ask Anderson Cooper, but whatevs.
Anyway, there’s a new one with Christiane Amanpour (my spell checker just loves her name), where she repeatedly corrects a viewer’s pronunciation of Iraq (the commercial is named “Eraq”) and also hits her on “Eran.”
I’m sure she’s got a point and all that, but do viewers need a commercial telling them that they’re idiots? I mean, a lot of them are idiots — a lot of people, if not the majority the world over, are idiots — but they usually don’t like being told so. And it can’t help CNN with its “liberal elitism” problem. You know, the one that gave us Fox News.
Don’t get me wrong. I ain’t switching over to Fox any time soon. Give me Wolf Blitzer and Jeff Greenfield any day over the Fox crew. But it’s a stupid commercial in an otherwise clever campaign.
A sign of blue-state media retrenchment?
My latest from TCS, on medical marijuana and the killing of Peter McWilliams:
As the Supreme Court considers the constitutionality of state medical-marijuana laws, Americans might want to pause to remember a man named Peter McWilliams. McWilliams was killed by the federal government on June 14, 2000.
No federal agent put a gun to McWilliams’ head or beat him up or threw him into the line of fire, but he died at the government’s hands, nonetheless, as sure as if he had been locked in a cell and denied food and water.
McWilliams, a Californian, a computer genius and a poet, had been suffering from AIDS and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma since 1996. And under California’s Proposition 215, which passed in 1996 and legalized marijuana for medical purposes in the state, he used pot to suppress nausea and keep down his food and medication.
In what many consider to have been a politically motivated prosecution — McWilliams was a popular author and medical-marijuana activist whose book, “Ain’t Nobody’s Business If You Do,” argued fervently against the criminalization of consensual acts — McWilliams’ home was raided by federal agents in 1997, and he was charged as a drug kingpin with conspiracy to sell marijuana.
A federal judge ruled that McWilliams could not rest his defense on his illness or on Proposition 215, which made his actions legal in his state, because federal drug laws superseded California’s. McWilliams pled guilty to avoid a 10-year mandatory-minimum prison sentence.
While out on bail and awaiting sentencing, prohibited from using medical marijuana, McWilliams died. He was found dead in his bathroom in Los Angeles at age 50. He choked to death on his own vomit — unable to keep down his medication.
Something to remember as the Supreme Court abandons federalism.
Another one bites the dust.
To be fair, I know virtually nothing about Fathi.
Oh, fuck fairness… Burn in hell, Fathi.
Here’s a column of mine from today’s New York Post. It’s on the city’s teachers contract, which smothers the public school system in red tape. Ultimately, the only real solution is a combination of charter schools and vouchers (we already have some charters — some very good ones — but we need more, and the teachers union is, of course, fighting against it tooth and nail).
In the meantime, however, the contract desperately needs reform, just to get the system out of the gutter. Now, when you say this, people automatically accuse you of “hating teachers” and whatnot. Of course, that’s just sleazy nonsense. But here I’ve talked to teachers with criticisms of the contract, just to drive the point home:
Of course, teachers’ views aren’t uniform. But the public usually hears only from teachers who support the contract — because the union has created a culture of intimidation that prevents many teachers from speaking out, lest they face retribution from their colleagues.
The teachers I contacted on this for the most part either wouldn’t talk or spoke only on condition of anonymity. Here’s what some of them had to say.
It is astounding the level of fear in the system — teachers affraid of retribution and harassment from their union and their colleagues if they speak out. But a few brave souls talked. Maybe now more will come out of the woodwork.
Cato’s Radley Balko has posted an 8,000-word response over at Tech Central Station to my piece earlier this month on what I termed “libertarian minimalism” in foreign policy.
I’ll have a longer response to Balko’s piece sometime in the near future. I don’t particularly think it does much more than restate the extreme libertarian position that we should withdraw from virtually all overseas engagements — with some nice libertarian I-told-you-so outrage about Iraq and even September 11 thrown in to boot — but, again, I’ll get to that later.
In the meantime, I leave it to readers to decide for themselves whether Balko blames America for 9/11 — because, apparently, we didn’t listen to Cato — or whether I’m being “unserious”:
If you look at much of what Cato’s foreign policy team wrote prior to 9/11, you could make the case that had U.S. policymakers paid more attention to actual “libertarian minimalist,” “pre-9/11″ thinking, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are today.
Back in 1999, for example, Cato’s director of defense policy studies at the time, Ivan Eland, wrote “Does U.S. Intervention Overseas Breed Terrorism?” In it, Eland laid out a litany of terrorist strikes against U.S. interests that were inspired by unnecessary U.S. interventions in foreign conflicts that posed little threat to our national security. Eland warned — and bin Laden later confirmed — that more recent U.S. interventions, in Kosovo, Somalia, and even Gulf War I, could soon provoke a catastrophic attack on the U.S. homeland.
Actually, anyone who takes the War on Terror seriously probably wouldn’t mention Somalia while making the case for American retreat. Somalia, after all, as this Time profile recounts, is where bin Laden learned an important lesson:
In 1993, 18 U.S. soldiers, part of a contingent sent on a humanitarian mission to famine-struck Somalia, were murdered by street fighters in Mogadishu. Bin Laden later claimed that some of the Arab Afghans were involved. The main thing to bin Laden, however, was the horrified American reaction to the deaths. Within six months, the U.S. had withdrawn from Somalia. In interviews, bin Laden has said that his forces expected the Americans to be tough like the Soviets but instead found that they were “paper tigers” who “after a few blows ran in defeat.” Bin Laden began to think big.
Interesting. What was that about the virtue of retreat? Or whatever you want to call it?
Of course, maybe my Thanksgiving could have been saved by some delicious holiday medical marijuana.
I can’t wait for the Supreme Court to take this up. Now we’ll see if that federalist revolution supposedly underway is a crock, or if the conservative justices will adhere to principle and recognize that the federal government has no business overturning state laws in this area.
No turkey this year, as Thanksgiving found me flat on the floor ready to die from some horrid illness. Really, Thanksgiving is the best holiday of the year — I prefer turkey to presents, by far — so I’m tremendously depressed.
I’ll just have to make up for lost turkey at Christmas I suppose. Goodbye Christmas ham, hello yuletide turkey!
Thanksgiving is a typically American holiday … The lavish meal is a symbol of the fact that abundant consumption is the result and reward of production.
– Ayn Rand
Now, I enter the Turkey Dome, a place where there will be much sleep and little blogging over this holiday weekend.
I may check in periodically, but mostly I’ll be recuperating from a nasty cough and plotting against my enemies.
I have many.
Eduwonk lets the New York Times off a bit easy here, about their latest charter-schools piece.
Now, it’s true that the Times scaled back their planned hit piece on charters — I suspect, in no small part because The Post called their bluff before they could write it.
Nevertheless, the Times still does its worst to distort the facts. I’ll let The Post’s editorial speak for itself as to the importance of the recent DOE report on our understanding of how charter schools are doing — basically, the report is from a handful of states, is based on old data and doesn’t compare apples to apples.
So, what are the problems with the Times piece?
For one, there’s its absolutely remarkable recap of this August’s union-planted, discredited, front-page slime job on charter schools, as such:
The [recent] study follows several recent efforts to track charter performance, including a report by the American Federation of Teachers, which showed students in charter schools lagging behind their public school peers on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Advocates of charter schools, including Education Secretary Rod Paige, criticized that report for generalizing about charter schools, which offer extremely varied educational programs in states from Massachusetts to Oregon.
That’s an exceedingly odd way of saying, “We pulled a fast one on you in August by not admitting what even the union’s report had to admit: All differences between charter schools and other public schools disappeared when you accounted for the fact that charter schools take more poor and minority students.”
But, we can’t expect honesty from the Times on education policy, now can we?
And then, the Times finally gets around to reporting a months-old, extraordinarily thorough study, by a Harvard education economist, showing that charter schools are improving kids’ test scores — and pretty significantly, at that.
Well, I’m glad they finally got that one out there — even if they did it by burying it in another story.
Note to Times readers: They are lying to you when it comes to education. Read the Washington Post, The New York Post or Eduwonk when you want to know the truth on the subject.
Democrats Should Value Choice
Published by November 23rd, 2004 in Misc. Education and Misc. Self Promotion. 0 CommentsIn this week’s Tech Central Station column, I make the case that the Democrats — if they want to fix their values problem — should pick up the school choice issue where President Bush has left off:
Republicans have long owned the issue of school choice, at least at the national level. But Bush has done his worst to leave an opening for the Democrats here. In his first term, he signed the No Child Left Behind law, which did little or nothing to promote school choice. And now, in the past week, he has appointed an education secretary, Margaret Spellings, who is known to be all-but-hostile to vouchers and charter schools.
If Democrats had any sense, they would see that now is the time to strike — hitting Bush from the left and the right at the same time on a values-laden domestic issue.
All Democrats have to do, it turns out, is follow the lead of minority politicians from the inner cities who have jumped on the choice bandwagon.
Whole thing here.
New York City’s teachers union, the United Federation of Teachers, seems to blame a certain “New York Post columnist,” at least in part, for the fact that it can’t re-up its horrible, innovation-crushing, principal-smothering contract:
[UFT President] Weingarten said that a New York Times article in mid-October created the false impression that the city and the UFT were on the cusp of an agreement. The article created a hypothetical deal that merged the union’s wage demands and management’s demands.
That article, she said, spurred union opponents, including a New York Post columnist and City Council Education Committee Chair Eva Moskowitz, to exhort Mayor Bloomberg to stand up against the union and not to agree to any deal that did not gut the teachers contract.
Weingarten told the delegates that the union would not surrender its contract under any circumstances.
Well, I’m more than happy to take credit, now that Ms. Weingarten mentions it — along with the lovely and talented Eva Moskowitz and the entire editorial page of The New York Post, which has stood opposed to the current set up for years.
Bloomberg came into office promising education reform, and the single most important thing he has to accomplish in that area is to give principals — and teachers, for that matter — the ability to do their jobs without a book-thick contract telling them what to do every minute of the day and who they can hire and fire.
The union is weaker than it’s ever been, I believe. Bloomberg should stand strong. And a lot of people in this city are going to make noise if he doesn’t.
At the start of this debate on libertarians and foreign policy, I called the current state of libertarian foreign policy “pacifism combined with isolationism.” This was meant as hyperbole, to get under some people’s skin, and was met with a predictable amount of anger.
So, to be more precise, I would call libertarian foreign policy — to the extent it exists — minimalist. As I defined it in my TCS piece, that’s “using the least amount of force possible to respond only to the most imminent of threats.”
That probably sounds awfully appealing to a lot of libertarians, but that’s how Bill Clinton reacted to terrorism in the 1990s, and the terrorists took it as a sign of weakness — one that emboldened them to undertake 9/11.
That, to me, makes it an unacceptable stance. Most of the country has recognized this. The only ones who haven’t are on the far left, the pacifist wing of the libertarian movement and the Buchananite wing of the Republican Party.
Commenter MarkN at TCS has this response to my suggestion that libertarians take a cue from their work during the Cold War and promote classical liberal ideas in the Arab world:
I can see it now: a band of libertarian gideons placing copies of ‘Man, Economy and State’ in the bedside tables of hotels in the Middle East. That’ll work, sure.
No wonder no one takes us seriously.
I obviously don’t agree with him that the idea is ridiculous (it being mine and all), but the point here is to get libertarians to start thinking about an affirmative, non-minimalist foreign policy. It’s a discussion that has barely begun.
Reader B.R. writes in:
I read your article “Rethinking Libertarian Minimalism” at TCS. Excellent work.
I would probably classify myself as a Libertarian if the party would consider a serious foreign policy. Since they do not, I side with Republicans because their view on foreign policy are in line with mine, and I am not threatened by their social policies.
I had the same observations about Cato’s views on Iraq. It is a shame that the party that understands the true meaning of liberty is unwilling to understand that in today’s world, liberty abroad is vital to our security.
A lot of the e-mail has looks like this.
Reader K.H.A. writes in:
If libertarian philosophy were operative, we would not have to discuss Iraq and all other foreign adventures, as we would not be involved in any. We would not be hated in the world. We would not be looted at home and broke paying for all the “adventures” our “leaders” get us into by daring the world to “bring it on.”
One cannot support aggression abroad and tyranny at home and be a libertarian. This is an oxymoron that only morons with oxes to gore would believe.
Oxen.
Some more comments from readers on libertarianism and foreign policy on their way (as of 7 p.m.)…
What fun: Saturday, The New York Post’s editorial page scooped The New York Times. They’d been itching to get their greasy little paws on this new report on charter schools — hoping, one can be sure, to fetch up with another hit piece like the teachers-union-planted atrocity from this summer.
It will be quite a bit harder for the Times to pull that crap now:
Get ready for another round of malevolent hand-wringing from the enemies of school choice.
The U.S. Department of Education yesterday made public a report showing that kids in charter schools in five states — Texas, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Colorado and Illinois — are slightly less likely to meet state performance standards than those attending traditional public schools.
No surprise there. Charter schools take on a disproportionate number of the most difficult students; the schools are largely targeted at urban black and Latino students, and they often serve as escapes for children struggling in the traditional public-school system.
The DOE makes this clear — calling the data “limited” and noting that more sophisticated studies have shown kids in charter schools making faster progress than other students.
But count on those caveats to be ignored by the enemies of choice.
I’ll enjoy seeing how the Times goes on to play this story — if it bothers to report it at all. After all, it’s worth remembering that the Times has still not, to this day, reported on a study put out in September by a Harvard education economist, Caroline Hoxby, encompassing 99 percent of all charter-school students in America, and finding them outperforming their public-school counterparts by 5 percent in reading and 3 percent in math.
What exactly does the Times have against charter schools? It’s hard to tell. But it’s kids lives they are playing with when they misrepresent, ignore and even lie about the news.
So tired… It’s been a long week.
I’ll post more responses and commentary on libertarianism and foreign policy soon. But for now:
Here’s my latest, from Tech Central Station, challenging libertarians to get serious about foreign policy — and answering many of the arguments that have arisen in the debate that’s been underway on this site.
Snippet:
The most common response to any call for libertarians to rethink their stances on foreign policy is that there’s no reason that libertarians should all have to agree on one approach. True enough, if libertarianism is a debating club. But that sort of thinking is a bit facile if libertarians hope to have any impact on politics and public policy.
And we should want that. We are not powerless. This year, a Rasmussen survey estimated that libertarians make up roughly 10% of the electorate — and that’s just self-identified libertarians. People who share libertarian beliefs in small government and social tolerance likely make up another 10%-20% of the electorate.
In a 50-50 political landscape — or even a 51-48 landscape — that’s real power. When libertarians are so united on domestic issues (taxes, Social Security, spending, drug laws, gay marriage, etc.), is it not worth it to begin a serious debate about what libertarians believe about foreign policy and what ideas we can offer in the War on Terror?
I go on to define what I mean by “serious,” and I also try to offer a few ideas about what seriousness might look like.
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