Daily Archives: 9 July 2014

A Thought on a European Polity

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I wrote about this a bit ago. Daniel Hannan, Conservative Party MEP for South East England, has a more recent thought.

Churchill [as early as 1946] makes clear that this United States of Europe should not include Britain:

There is already a natural grouping in the Western Hemisphere. We British have our own Commonwealth of Nations. Why should there not be a European group which could give a sense of enlarged patriotism and common citizenship to the distracted peoples of this turbulent and mighty continent and why should it not take its rightful place with other great groupings in shaping the destinies of men?

In case anyone had missed the point, Churchill ended with a call for Britain and the Commonwealth, along with the United States and perhaps even Russia, to “be the friends and sponsors of the new Europe, and champion its right to live and shine”.

Hannan and a number of his fellow Center-Right MEPs are working out the details of a new proposal to achieve that:

a European Common Market—a lightly but effectively regulated free trade area, stretching from Iceland and the Faroe Islands to Turkey and Armenia—within which a smaller group of states could form a political union without prejudice to the non-participants.

At this point, it’s a long shot, but today is different from 1946. There’s a better chance. I say good luck to Hannan and his fellows.

The Obama Administration and Education

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Here’s just one example, via The Wall Street Journal. Last month,

Department of Education imposed a 21-day hold on Corinthian’s [Colleges, a for-profit college system with campuses across the USS] access to federal student aid because it “failed to address concerns about its practices, including falsifying job placement data used in marketing claims to prospective students.” The funding freeze triggered a liquidity crisis, which has culminated in Corinthian’s decision to wind down or sell its 97 US campuses.

Never mind that, among other things, DoE itself can’t figure out how to measure job placement for college graduates. The National Center for Education Statistics, an arm of the DoE, found itself tasked with generating just such a metric, but in 2011, it was forced to admit that the challenges of using institutional tracking of students, which include the reporting burden on institutions as well as the potential for inconsistent documentation and reporting, simply wasn’t feasible.

Then there’s the data the DoE demanded of Corinthian:

  • a list of all students placed by name and Social Security number
  • the students’ most recent telephone numbers and cell phone numbers
  • graduation dates and academic programs
  • job titles
  • start dates
  • employers’ names and contact information

Never mind the difficulty of collecting those data from folks who’ve already graduated and moved on with their lives. Think about the invasion of privacy this administration demanded Corinthian perpetrate on those graduated adult American citizens.

Corinthian couldn’t meet DoE’s data delivery deadline, despite having assigned an additional 100 employees the single full time task of collecting these personal data from its hundreds of thousands of students. As a result, it’s had to close its doors—that funding freeze.

This is this administration’s arrogance at its most powerful and its worst.

Funding Israel’s Enemies

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Last week, Hamas terrorists butchered three Israeli teenagers—one of them holding dual citizenship: he was an American, too. Shortly after, a Palestinian was butchered in an act of claimed vengeance. The Israelis promptly tracked down and arrested six suspects in the Palestinian’s murder. Hamas celebrated the butchery of the three Israelis (and American) and have pressed their terrorism with a continuing barrage of rocket attacks into Israel, ostensibly to “punish” Israel for its impertinence in objecting to the murders and, more so, for Israel’s rudeness in existing.

The Obama administration has pushed both the Israelis and Palestinians to “show restraint,” as though President Barack Obama seriously believes there is a moral equivalence between the two acts and between the two societies. Indeed, Obama wrote in his op-ed for Haaretz

[I]n President Abbas, Israel has a counterpart committed to a two-state solution and security cooperation with Israel.

We’re seeing now the Hamas Palestinian Authority leader’s view of “security” cooperation with Israel.

Yet, the moral equivalence which Obama insists exists between a democratic Israel—a democracy that includes its Arab citizens—and the terrorist organization that the Palestinian Authority has become since its integration with Hamas acts to justify $400 million in annual aid, first to the PA, and now to Hamas.

Whether it’s the intent or not, the effect is that this continued aid funds a terrorist gang whose primary goal is the destruction of Israel. And Obama knows this.