Academic Preparedness

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New York City has a program, Expanded Success Initiative, that was intended to improve the city’s K-12 “black and Latino males'” (apparently, the girls just don’t matter in New York City) performance.  It’s failing; although, the piece at the link is more optimistic than that.

Students…reported better school relationships and more fair treatment than peers in comparable schools outside the program.[]

Socialization does matter in a child’s development; however….

[A]cademic outcomes and suspension rates remained roughly similar to those in the comparison schools.

Academics are the primary purpose of schools.  ESI improved nothing important.

But here’s the kicker, completely missed by the WSJ piece:

Among the first cohort of black and Latino males in the initiative, about 71% graduated high school, 17% hit state benchmarks signifying college-readiness….

In what universe do these numbers make sense?  Leaving aside the poor graduation rate, how does a student graduate from high school without being prepared for higher education?  I’ve long disputed that college is a necessary next step for high school graduates, but a student not academically prepared for that step isn’t prepared for community college or trade school, nor is he (or she!) prepared to go straight into the work place in any job other than ditch digging or burger flipping.

Budget Commitments

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Recall the hoo-raw raised when President Donald Trump signed a Republican-authored budget-busting budget [sic] earlier this year.  Now he wants to send up some rescissions to an earlier budget, with indications that he’ll submit further rescissions to the just-signed thing.

There’s a kerfuffle brewing in the Senate, and it’s not from the Progressive-Democrats there.

…[Senator Mitch (R, KY)] McConnell, who told Fox News that rescission would jeopardize future budget negotiations with Democrats: “You can’t make an agreement one month and say, “OK, we really didn’t mean it.'”

He’s right on this. The prior agreement was Congress passing, in 1974, the law that allows rescission. McConnell needs to keep that agreement.  Unless he “really didn’t mean it.”

Fiduciary Duty

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State and local governments are at it again.  Or still.

The value of investments by public pension funds declined last quarter, widening the gap between what these funds say they will earn and what they actually earn.  Pension fund managers—especially government pension fund managers—must make annual “estimates” (they’re actually politically self-serving pie-in-the-sky claims) of the market returns they expect to make on the funds under their nominal care.  These WAGs determine the amount of money “the government that is affiliated with the pension fund must pay into it”.

(Aside: notice the directionality of that emphasis.  The state or local government (and the Federal government with its own public pension funds) is an affiliate of the fund; the fund is not a benefit provided by the government.  Which controls what, now?)

But these fiduciary money managers have been off, and not just occasionally.  They’ve consistently overstated the returns they claim they’ll get compared to the returns they actually get.  Currently, these worthies are claiming they’ll get a return of 7.25% on the taxpayers’ monies with which they’re entrusted and from which they’re promising the funds’ beneficiaries retirement payouts.  The reality is that these worthies have only been able to get 6.49% on average over the last 20 years.

That difference—0.0076%–that’s just chump change; who cares?  Us taxpayers should, and so should the funds’ retirees.  On a $1 million investment—a tiny fraction of many of state-level pension funds, but a significant part of most county- and city-level pension funds, the three-quarters of one per cent difference over those 20 years works out to a more than $4 million dollar difference.

Where’s the money?

How is this not a violation of fiduciary duty?

The JCPOA, Trump, Europe, and Progressive-Democrats

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Most of you are aware that President Donald Trump has taken the steps required to withdraw from the Obama-Kerry-engineered arrangement whereby Iran would be delayed—maybe—from getting nuclear weapons instead of getting them sooner.  Among those steps are a 90-day window within which several existing business arrangements can be wound down before a set of sanctions gets reinstated and a 180-day window within which the rest of the business arrangements can be wound down before another, more stringent, set of sanctions gets reinstated, or added.

Now we have the European signatories, Great Britain, Germany, and France decrying the withdrawal and insisting that we should have stayed in the thing.  Never mind the evident weaknesses in the JCPOA (including in particular an inability to inspect thoroughly and on a no-notice basis, so we have no way of confirming that Iran is complying at all) and the additional factors of concern—that Iran is actively pursuing a missile delivery system for its nuclear weapons, actively funding its client terrorist entities around the Middle East, and directly fomenting unrest and open rebellion around the Middle East.

We should have been willing to renegotiate rather than withdraw.  This is disingenuous.  Great Britain, Germany, and France have had the 16 months since Trump’s inauguration to renegotiate; they’ve refuse to do so.  Even French President Emmanuel Macron, who claimed to be willing to renegotiate, turned out to be only talking; he made no concrete proposals.  Never mind that Iran has said it will not renegotiate.

Meanwhile, Great Britain, France, and Germany are conducting their separate negotiations with Iran.

Now we also have Progressive-Democrats decrying the withdrawal and insisting that the Trump administration should use those windows to conduct negotiations (with the Progressive-Democrats, too) with a view to improve the JCPOA and plug its weaknesses and address those additional factors of concern.  Never mind that Iran has said it will not renegotiate.

Never mind, either, that the Progressive-Democrats have already had those same 16 months in which to renegotiate, and they’ve refused to do so.  All these worthies have been willing to do is insist that the JCPOA be kept intact, until very lately—and even lately, on claiming that the thing’s weaknesses could be plugged, they’ve declined to offer any solutions, only to make demands to…talk.

Trump took a lot of heat for not acting immediately on his inauguration to keep his campaign promise to withdraw from the JCPOA.  Instead, he gave our European partners and our Progressive-Democrats those 16 months to negotiate and arrive at a better arrangement vis-à-vis Iran’s nuclear weapons programs and its serial and concurrent misbehaviors.  They refused.

It’s no wonder that the United States had to act unilaterally, and that this administration has had to act in the face of active Progressive-Democrat obstruction.

“It Does Because It Does”

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The dishonesty of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s case against ex- and brief-Trump Campaign Manager is made manifest in the opening questions Eastern District of Virginia Federal Judge TS Ellis III and Michael Dreeben’s (arguing for the Mueller side) answers.

Ellis noted

Apparently, if I look at the indictment, none of that information has anything to do with links or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of Donald Trump. That seems to me to be obvious because they all long predate any contact or any affiliation of this defendant with the campaign.

Then, after a long soliloquy regarding the rationale for a prosecutor indicting a lesser player on lesser charges in order to squeeze that player into extruding information on a larger player, Ellis asked,

Where am I wrong in that regard?

Dreeben: The issue before you is Manafort’s motion to dismiss the charges.

Ellis: Yes, now answer my question.

Dreeben: “our investigatory scope does cover the activities [of the indictment]”

Ellis: Answer my question.

Dreeben: “the authorization for the special counsel to investigate matters is described generally in the appointment order on May”

Ellis: Yes, I have that letter.  Answer my question.  How does that letter include the indictment?

Dreeben: “So the authorization order permits….”

Ellis: “You’re running away from my question again. You know, I’m focused on the indictment that is here.”

Dreeben: “Well, Your Honor, we are the Justice Department.”

And there it is.  Mueller’s team flatly refused to explain how indictments related to 13-year-old events in Ukraine are tied in to an investigation of the relationship between the Trump campaign and Russia, choosing instead to be deliberately evasive.  Here, by the way, are the public parts of the Mueller Special Counsel Authorization Letter (my title for the thing), as quoted by Ellis:

Sub-paragraph b(i):

any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.

Sub-paragraph b(ii):

any matters that arose or may arise directly from the [Mueller] investigation.

Nothing in there about any allegedly nefarious activities in Ukraine.  “Arose or may arise” from the Mueller investigation means exactly that.  Stuff from outside the investigation—the Manafort money laundering charges, for instance—aren’t part of the investigation.  And so Dreeben’s implication that Ellis should just sit down and shut up: “We are the Justice Department.”

Which only emphasizes the Special Counsel’s team’s evasions.

The transcript can be read here.