Monthly Archives: August 2013

It’s Circular

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Allison Benedikt, over at Slate, wrote this:

You are a bad person if you send your children to private school.  Not bad like murderer bad—but bad like ruining-one-of-our-nation’s-most-essential-institutions-in-order-to-get-what’s-best-for-your-kid bad.  So, pretty bad.

And this:

[I]t seems to me that if every single parent sent every single child to public school, public schools would improve.  This would not happen immediately.  It could take generations.  Your children and grandchildren might get mediocre educations in the meantime, but it will be worth it, for the eventual common good.

Plainly, given her demonstrated ability to think, she must be a product of just such a public school education.

Oh, wait—proudly so:

I went K-12 to a terrible public school.  My high school didn’t offer AP classes, and in four years, I only had to read one book.

It just doesn’t get any clearer than this.

Playing With Guns

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…in this case, just another version of Obamatalk.  Here’s President Barack Obama’s latest [emphasis added]:

If we are saying in a clear and decisive but very limited way, we send a shot across the bow saying, ‘stop doing this,’ that can have a positive impact on our national security over the long term[.]

“Shot across the bow,” indeed.  Another example of avoiding doing anything of substance, but rather of satisfying himself with “sound and fury.”

Despite his ego telling him otherwise, no one in the world takes him seriously.  But his playing-with-guns ego trip will kill people.

I Wonder

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…whether this might be doable in the US.  An English gentleman has a solution to those annoying cold calls from someone, or some robot, wanting to pitch you this or collect your personal information for that.

A man annoyed by cold callers has turned the tables by setting up his own premium rate number which earns him money.

Lee Beaumont said he paid £10 plus VAT to set up his personal 0871 line in November 2011 and has made £300 from calls he has received since.

It certainly has had a useful effect from my perspective:

…fewer calls, falling from up to 30 per month last year to 16 so far this month.

Hmm….

An Argument for Reducing Federal Spending

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Treasury Secretary Jack Lew wrote a letter to House Speaker John Boehner (R, OH).  The gist of it:

[T]he Obama administration warned House Republicans that a deal on increasing the federal debt limit may have to come sooner than expected.

Anyone but a Progressive would see this as confirmation of the need to reduce spending, so as to reduce the debt and, consequently, the need to raise the debt ceiling.  The Progressives in our government, though, see this as a need to raise the debt ceiling: we have a credit card; of course there’s still money in the bank.

Or, it’s Mardi Gras all year ’round for Progressives.

Laissez le bon temps rouler.

As Sander Levin (D, MI), Ranking Member of the House Ways and Means Committee confirms:

It is time for Republicans to do the right thing

and spend and borrow more.

Political Honesty

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The German poet Matthias Claudius commented some years ago,

Say not all that you know, but know all that you say.

Spiegel Online International thinks that’s good advice in a particular circumstance today:

That would be a good lesson for those politicians who are handling the euro crisis.  Absolute honesty, which many are now demanding of the German government after its most recent comments on Greece, is simply not wise.

SOI justifies their position this way:

…the EU approaches the euro crisis through negotiations between member states.  And a fundamental principle of these negotiations is that not all cards are laid on the table at once.  It’s a classic way in diplomacy of avoiding bursts of outrage.

And, citing an aspect of Robert Putnam’s Two-Level Games Theory,

Politicians have to sell their policy goals both at home and abroad.

Which is true enough in winning games, but it overlooks one essential secular fact, and one fundamental moral fact: the only place the sale has to go through is at home—those are the folks who will be forced to pay for the politician’s…decision.  The fundamental moral fact is this: the folks at home are the ones who will have to give up a significant portion of the security and prosperity they’ve hard-won for their families in order to pay for the politician’s…decision.

Such a policy might have been defensible early, in the run-up—even the after math—of the EU’s first Greek bailout.  But now, after the debacle of two failed Greek bailouts and amid talk of yet a third, the policy has outlived its usefulness.  It’s time to lay it all out.  Let the people who will be required to pay for yet another bailout with their hard-earned money taken as tax know what the politicians know and think they know about the situation.  Let the people whose money it is decide for themselves whether a third bailout is warranted.

Else, what are the politicians covering up?