It’s hard to imagine a teacher’s union making themselves even more despicable and obstructionist, but they’ve found a way. First, the Los Angeles Times published an analysis on teacher performance:
With Miguel Aguilar, students consistently have made striking gains on state standardized tests, many of them vaulting from the bottom third of students in Los Angeles schools to well above average, according to a Times analysis. John Smith’s pupils next door have started out slightly ahead of Aguilar’s but by the end of the year have been far behind.
In Los Angeles and across the country, education officials have long known of the often huge disparities among teachers. They’ve seen the indelible effects, for good and ill, on children. But rather than analyze and address these disparities, they have opted mostly to ignore them.
Most districts act as though one teacher is about as good as another. As a result, the most effective teachers often go unrecognized, the keys to their success rarely studied. Ineffective teachers often face no consequences and get no extra help.
…Though the government spends billions of dollars every year on education, relatively little of the money has gone to figuring out which teachers are effective and why.
This is exactly what one would expect from an industry shielded from the competitive pressures of the market, and instead dominated by the influence of powerful unions. In a free market, understanding what makes one teacher successful over others would be a top priority, as schools sought to attract students by providing the highest quality education possible. But our public education system is more like a jobs program for union members, and it’s too much of a bother for them to worry about the little things like whether or not students are learning, and why.
Rather than attempt to improve upon their performance and learn from this analysis, the LA Times reports that union leaders are threatening to boycott the paper.
The Los Angeles teachers union president said Sunday he was organizing a “massive boycott” of The Times after the newspaper began publishing a series of articles that uses student test scores to estimate the effectiveness of district teachers.
“You’re leading people in a dangerous direction, making it seem like you can judge the quality of a teacher by … a test,” said A.J. Duffy, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, which has more than 40,000 members.
Duffy said he would urge other labor groups to ask their members to cancel their subscriptions.
Measuring teacher quality based on student performance, how outrageous!
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The recently passed $26 state and public union bailout bill, which Pelosi called Congress back from recess to pass in an emergency session, sparked some deserved criticism on the House floor:
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Reagan is more right now than ever before. This video from the Republican Study Committee speaks for itself:
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The Daily Caller recently reported on a twitter exchange between Matt Yglesias, blogger savant at Think Progress, and and Washington Examiner’s Mark Hemingway. During the discussion, Yglesias basically endorsed lying and deception as legitimate when used to advance the left-wing agenda.
“Fighting dishonesty with dishonesty is sometimes the right thing for advocates to do, yes,” said Yglesias.
The exchange, with Washington Examiner writer Mark Hemingway, came on the heels of a debate between the two on transportation policy.
Yglesias pressed his point with another conservative writer, saying, “Do you really think deception is immoral in all circumstances?”
Well, no. But who’s talking about all circumstances? We’re talking about public debates and policy. Stay focused, Matt.
…[W]hat set off a flurry of Tweets today – and Yglesias’s advocacy of lying – was a charge by Yglesias via Twitter that Washington Times reporter Eli Lake has a “deserved reputation for dishonesty.” Hemingway, Lake and others confronted Yglesias on Twitter about the charge, pointing out that Yglesias himself had actually advocated dishonesty.
“When [Yglesias] gets frustrated because he can’t counter an argument, he calls people ‘dishonest’,” Lake said, also calling him “a child.”
Yglesias’s Twitter opponents also charged he does not take criticism well.
Then, Yglesias dug in, saying lying was a necessary part of politics.
In concluding his interview with The Daily Caller, Yglesias said “go fuck yourself” and hung up the phone.
Stay classy.
Lying is a part of politics because liars are a part of politics, but it’s hardly necessary.
This ends-justify-the-means attitude seems unfortunately common on the left. That’s not to say it doesn’t exist on the right – it does – but it’s not publicly embraced and doesn’t seem as prevalent.
Just look at Saul Alinsky, the intellectual father of nearly everyone in the Obama administration. He was no high-minded idealist out to convince others of his views. Deception was an integral part of his disgusting strategy.
The reason the left is so willing to accept the use of dishonesty to advance their agenda is correlated with the very nature of their beliefs. The reason they support big government nanny states is because they think people are too stupid to take care of themselves. It should come as no surprise, then, that they’d also think people are too stupid to reach the correct conclusions (in their minds) given an honest accounting of the facts.
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Play the Real or Fake game, where you guess if a government program is real or fake:
These people were surprised by the answers. I give my readers more credit.
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Thanks to laws enacted by the government on behalf of the funeral lobby, Monks can’t sell simple caskets:
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Expecting politicians to direct taxpayer dollars in a manner that “stimulates” the economy is foolish. Politicians will waste your money every time.
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With the public unconvinced of the wisdom of soaking the rich, the latest hot idea floating around in statist circles is not to soak the rich, but rather the really, super-duper, ultra rich.
In a class-warfare filled screed, James Surowiecki wrote in the New Yorker on the need to “Soak the Very, Very Rich.”
A better tax system would have more brackets, so that the super-rich pay higher rates. (The most obvious bracket to add would be a higher rate at a million dollars a year, but there’s no reason to stop there.) This would make the system fairer, since it would reflect the real stratification among high-income earners…
Ezra Klein then blogged at the Washington Post that he is “very sympathetic to the idea that there should be more tax brackets,” reasoning that “It would be a lot easier to fight the super-rich than to fight the super-rich, the really rich, the pretty rich, and well-off.” If there was a bracket just for the super-duper-really rich, you see, it could be more easily raised to unconscionable and economy killing levels without public objection.
Adding more tax brackets would complicated an already inexcusably incomprehensible tax code, resulting in increased economic waste and compliance costs, more expenditures on lobbying and even greater uncertainty than is currently holding down economic growth.
Furthermore, tax policy should not be decided based on which group is easiest to demagogue and demonize. Nor is it the purpose of the tax code to enshrine into law a particular view of economic fairness, which in the case of Surowiecki and Klein, means redistribution.
There is one legitimate reason and one legitimate reason only for taxes, and that’s to raise the funds necessary for the limited functions of constitutional government and rule of law. There is no honest assessment of those functions as enshrined in the US Constitution which can find that the present revenues received by the state are insufficient to provide for those functions.
I’m sure it’s too much to ask, but rather than ruminate on which of its citizens the government and its statist boosters should declare war on next, the Ezra Klein’s of the world should think about how government spending can be reduced, and our federal government brought back into the bounds of legitimate, constitutional governance.
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Consider this a perverse form of the circle of life. It goes like this: politicians tax citizens – > politicians use taxes to bailout businesses -> businesses donate money to politicians.
Leave a commentSeveral companies that escaped financial failure two years ago through massive taxpayer-funded bailouts are spending millions of dollars to make donations to political causes and even some candidates’ campaigns.
General Motors, Chrysler and Citigroup are just three of the biggest bailout recipients who have continued to remain politically active, through their political action committees, federal lobbying or direct donations to the pet projects of lawmakers.
The potential public relations disaster for firms spending big dollars on political causes and federal lobbying after being extended a taxpayer lifeline has led some, such as AIG, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to suspend their political activities until they pay the government back in full.
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Congressman Pete Stark informs us that the federal government is largely without limits:
Senator’s DeMint and Baucus debate on tax rates:
Republican Senator Susan Collins explains her support for confirming Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court:
Senator Inhofe discusses runaway government spending:
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I am a libertarian-conservative blogger living in the DC area. I have a Master's degree in Political Science and work in public policy, but please don't hold that against me.
