Category Archives: culture

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?

What Do Progressives

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…have against equal opportunity?

The Justice Department is trying to stop a school vouchers program in Louisiana that attempts to help families send their children to independent schools instead of under-performing public schools.

The agency wants to stop the program, led by Republican Gov Bobby Jindal, in any school district that remains under a desegregation court order.

Because, you know, helping students actually to do better so that they can be effectively integrated with their age peers is a Bad Thing.

The federal government argues that allowing students to attend independent schools under the voucher system could create a racial imbalance in public school systems protected by desegregation orders.

After all, parents of underperforming students might wind up aggregating them into schools that actually teach and get academic results in their students.  Since most of the underperforming students in Louisiana tend to be minority children, especially black children, this might tend to aggregate black children into those successful voucher schools rather than leave them trapped in Louisiana’s failing public school system.

Eric Holder’s DoJ made their argument with a straight face.  Consummate actors, they are.

Let’s look at that “minority” status in the Louisiana schools, though.

The New Orleans public school system is 88% African-American.  Now, how could allowing 570 kids to flee the public school system possibly “create a racial imbalance”?

Oh, it’s those minority white students, who would become even more concentrated, that Holder is worrying about.  Yeah, that’s the ticket.  We’ll go with that.

Jindal had this about Holder’s move:

After generations of being denied a choice, parents finally can choose a school for their child, but now the federal government is stepping in to prevent parents from exercising this right.  Shame on them.  Parents should have the ability to decide where to send their child to school.

Can you say disparate impact?  This is the racist outcome—intended or not—of using this meme, even sotto voce.

Rule By Law vs Rule Of Law

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The Justice Department said Thursday that it will sue Texas over its voter ID law and, separately, look for ways to intervene in a lawsuit over the state’s redistricting policies

It’s just one harassment of a State after another by a Federal government disgruntled that it can’t get its way just for the demanding.  Attorney General Eric Holder justified the attack, saying this is just part of DoJ’s

continuing effort to protect the voting rights of all eligible Americans.  We will not allow the Supreme Court’s recent decision [that Congress must update its Voting Rights Act pre-clearance criteria] to be interpreted as open season for states to pursue measures that suppress voting rights.

Emphasis on that “We will not allow.”  Holder will not allow the Supreme Court decision to have effect; the United States’ chief lawyer will simply ignore it.  Never mind that his actions are designed to attack the voting rights of all eligible Americans by preventing states from ensuring that only eligible Americans vote.  Indeed,

[f]ollowing the [Supreme Court] ruling, Holder called the court’s decision and its reasoning behind it “flawed,” and vowed to find other ways within the law to challenge the ruling.

This is rank rule by law—cynically using law (or creating it, which is not, strictly speaking, the case here) to achieve government ends, rather than living within law the We the People have made through our elected representatives in order to protect us…from government, among others.

As an aside, it’s interesting to note that the center of other criticisms of states’ voter ID laws is a claim like Colin Powell’s: “there is no voter fraud.”  Even if this were true, there’d be no harm in taking steps to keep it that way.  As the objectors know; hence their objection plainly centers on their need for the ineligible to be able to vote early and often.

Another Take

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…on the relationship between Progressives and their plantation hands of a certain group.  Here‘s Louisiana State Senator Elbert Lee Guillory (erstwhile Democrat, now Republican):

It’s no longer the American Dream, it’s the American nightmare of relying on a monthly government check.

And

Only capitalism can provide the upward mobility for the meekest among us to break the shackles of poverty and rise into the middle class. This is what we call “The American Dream.”

Guillory has more here.

The Free at Last PAC also looks like a group worth serious consideration.

He Doesn’t Get It

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Baptist Minister Bruce Prescott, with the aid of the ACLU, is suing Oklahoma (specifically, the Oklahoma Capitol Preservation Commission) in a state court over the presence of a monument representing the Ten Commandments on the state’s Capitol grounds.

Prescott told Oklahoma City’s News9

It’s inappropriate, it’s not the right place.  Put it on the doorpost, that’s what the Bible says; it doesn’t say to put it at the State Capitol.

Here’s what he doesn’t get: the State Capital is the doorpost for all the citizens of Oklahoma.

Too, his ACLU representatives are ignoring the facts that this is a privately funded and erected monument and that the Supreme Court already has ruled that such monuments in the public square—or on government grounds—are entirely appropriate so long as displays representing other religions or atheism are not barred.  Of course, the ACLU is not alleging such a barring.