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 December, 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.
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