Tag Archives: ethics

Hillary Clinton and Minority Students

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In another flip-flop evolution of belief, Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has decided she’s against charter schools, since she was for them before the unions the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers endorsed her.

Most charter schools, they don’t take the hardest-to-teach kids, or, if they do, they don’t keep them. And so the public schools are often in a no-win situation[.]

Of course, this isn’t true, but hey—union endorsement. The facts, though, as noted by The Wall Street Journal at the link are these [emphasis added]:

Charters don’t exclude difficult students. Like other public schools, they aren’t allowed to discriminate. Nearly every state requires a random lottery to choose students if there are more applicants than openings. The reason some charters turn away students is that they lack the resources to accommodate every desperate family trapped in a teachers-union compound.

Charters serve some of the most troubled students, including a higher percentage in poverty than all public schools, according to Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes. In urban centers in particular, charters serve mostly minority students and include more who are learning English than do public schools as a whole.

The question arises: what has Clinton against minority students, students whose parents choose charter schools over other public schools in order to get an actual education?

The answer is clear: students don’t vote, and unions do.

Democrats and the VA

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I’ve written a number of times about the Veterans Administration and the need to get rid of this dysfunctional government entity.

Now we get Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton doubling down on this failed VA and on her desire to expand Big Government further and to extend crony capitalism to a new arena.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is offering her vision for veterans’ health care, promising to fight full-fledged privatization while proposing the government contract with private providers for a range of health services.

Government has shown its incompetence in matters of health (among others), so her answer—the typical Progressive Democrat answer—is to have more of it. Crony capitalism has shown its profitability for politicians of any stripe, so this Progress Democrat wants more of that pie for herself. She wants Big Government to stay involved in the health care of our nation’s veterans, but she wants to shift that involvement to the health providers her administration will favor.

This would be foolishness if it weren’t dishonesty.

Veteranos administratio delende est.

Because Power Addiction

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The headline and sub-headline in the Wall Street Journal article pretty much tells the story.

China Delays Economic Liberalization

As Beijing debates how to quickly boost economy, it delays long-term plans to loosen financial grip

The men governing the PRC do not see the contradiction between their behavior and their actions.

China has taken new steps to slow plans that had been meant to loosen control over the financial system, adding to similar delaying moves since summer.

Never mind that loosening these controls, and all other government controls—all other CPC controls, all other controls maintained by President Xi Jinping and his cohorts—would produce exactly that boost. Leaving money and decision-making in the hands of the general population citizens, the hands of the folks who earned that money and who, as rational adult human beings, are fully capable of making their own decisions would let those folks allocate their money according to their imperatives, their goals, their desires and to do so far more efficiently than any government can do. These strictly voluntary exchanges between themselves and their fellow citizens are what in their aggregate strongly boosts economies.

It’s hard to believe that the leadership of the CPC and of the PRC’s government, themselves rational adult human beings, don’t understand that.

However, freeing up the economy would let the citizenry make decisions of which these government men disapprove; freeing up the economy would lessen the personal power of these government men.

These government men are too addicted to their power; that addiction prevents them from making rational decisions, just as any drug addiction prevents the addict from making rational decisions.

Hand of Friendship and Nuclear Weapons

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President Barack Obama has made a point of his foreign policy of extending the hand of friendship to our enemies in the expectation of their friendship, or at least a reduction of their enmity toward us. In the case of Iran, he even gave them a path to nuclear weapons with his recently agreed Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, to which he cajoled the rest of the P5+1 to sign.

That worked well. Iran has “arrested” yet another American traveling in Iran, the second since the JCPOA was signed by Obama. Iran continues to refuse to release—even on good will, let alone their fundamental innocence—three other Americans being held there, one since 2011.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has stepped up its cyber attacks against our government and government officials, particularly those potentially involved in dealing with Iran’s latest arrest of an American.

Yeah—offering friendship and nuclear weapons has worked really well. Just not for us.

Debates and Journalism

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Howard Kurtz, of Media Buzz, had a couple of thoughts. Which means that so do I.

[W]e’re hearing that some campaigns want to vet the moderators, approve the on-screen graphics, limit the scope of questions or decree that all candidates be asked the same questions. Sorry, but those are editorial decisions to be made by journalists.

I’ll leave aside the blatant rumor-mongering that that “we hear” opening is, and that is so demeaning to what used to be a profession of journalism.

Kurtz’ journalists “decisions” on those are driven by personal and station TV ratings, not by the purpose of the debates. On-screen graphics? The CNBC failure demonstrated that journalists can’t be trusted with them. It may be too much for the candidates to vet their own graphics, but journalists need oversight, badly.

Limit the scope of the questions? Of course. A proper debate focuses on an area—as that CNBC thing agreed in advance to do, and then they welched on their agreement. Trust journalists on this?

All candidates be asked the same questions: what is it about “debate” that’s unclear to Kurtz? How is it a debate, exactly, if all of the candidates aren’t challenged to lay out their views/policies on the same subject? If that limits the number of questions there’s time to ask, well, there’s that focus thing, again.

Then there’s this from Kurtz:

The danger for the candidates is that they will be seen as overreaching, as wary of facing challenging questions.

There’s Kurtz’ own, and deliberate, distortion. The candidates will seem overreaching and fearful of tough questioning only as journalists, including Howard Kurtz, choose to paint them that way. Wary of facing challenges? Where is that demonstrated in the push to have all the candidates asked the same question? In fact, it’ll be exactly that challenge for those candidates who are in some way unprepared for the question because they’ve not yet formulated or articulated a position on a question’s subject.

Kurtz’ piece is a clear demonstration of why the public—and the candidates—cannot trust them.