Tag Archives: freedom

Buncha Crybabies

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Officials at Six Rivers Planned Parenthood of Eureka, CA, launched a “40 Days of Prayer” “prayer campaign” in March that offers daily prayers for pregnant women and clinicians who perform abortions.

Naturally, the Progressives have their panties in a twist over it.  Liberty Counsel, a pro-life…litigation group…is bellyaching that this is just a “desperate attempt” to garner publicity and funding by mocking pro-choicers.

They whine, for instance,

Planned Parenthood’s prayer crusade is an attempt to mock and marginalize the highly effective “40 Days for Life,” which has unified half a million voices for the cause and saved at least 5,838 lives….

Here’s Liberty Counsel founder Matthew Staver:

“Planned Parenthood’s ‘prayer’ campaign is offensive.”

I might think, “poor babies,” were the beef not so cynical.

As a commenter at Villainous Company puts it in a related venue,

Pro-choice? Most on the Left side of the aisle are extremely ANTI-CHOICE; do it their way or don’t do it.  Applies to lifestyles (no conservatives, no big families, no religion), work (no traditional one-worker families), the environment (no industry, assumed to pollute without question, global warming), and so on.  NO CHOICE ALLOWED which contradicts, interferes or denies leftist policy; no flexibility, even when the participants agree on what they want.
WE MUST OBEY or be criticized in every available arena….

Banks and Governmental Reform

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The World Bank report, “China 2030: Building a Modern, Harmonious, and Creative High-Income Society,” concerns China’s future over the next 25, or so, years, and it describes a number of “challenges” its economy faces.

The report suggests, with regard to the financial sector in particular (beginning in Chapter 5 of “Supporting Report 1”):

Despite the many reforms introduced so far, the Chinese financial system remains repressed, unbalanced, costly to maintain and potentially unstable….

and

Banks have been used as instruments of the government’s macroeconomic and sectoral policy goals and have not always been in a position to lend prudently.

The Epoch Times summarizes this way:

The report suggests that China’s financial sector is constrained by state ownership and regime interference. The Chinese state uses the financial sector to enforce its policies, preventing lending institutions from becoming a true market force.

Sound familiar?

 

h/t to Belmont Club

National Security and Education

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We don’t have enough concerns for our future.  Now a couple of items point out yet another.

The Council for Foreign Relations commissioned a report by an Independent Task Force which was co-chaired by chaired by Joel I. Klein, former head of New York City public schools, and Condoleezza Rice, former US National Security Advisor and Secretary of State.  The report laid out in so many words the failure of our K-12 education system, and the costs to our nation’s ability to survive if we don’t correct these failures.

A member of the task force, ex-Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings, has one summary:

We don’t have nearly enough people who are capable in the STEM fields: science, technology, engineering and math.  When we think about the modern world of defense, the fact that we don’t have people who are capable to do this work is scary.

And

We don’t have people who know and understand foreign languages and other cultures….

The report itself summarized those concerns and put them in the context of five key aspects to the US’ competitiveness, and by extension, our survival as an independent nation:

Educational failure puts the United States’ future economic prosperity, global position, and physical safety at risk

These, according to the report, consist of economic growth and competitiveness, US physical safety, Intellectual property, US global awareness. and US unity and cohesion.

Moreover, funding isn’t the issue, actual performance is:

[While] the United States invests more in K-12 public education than many other developed countries, its students are ill prepared to compete with their global peers.

The failures, the report says, include these:

  • More than 25 percent of students fail to graduate from high school in four years; for African-American and Hispanic students, this number is approaching 40 percent.
  • In civics, only a quarter of U.S. students are proficient or better on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
  • Although the United States is a nation of immigrants, roughly eight in ten Americans speak only English and a decreasing number of schools are teaching foreign languages.
  • A recent report by ACT, the not-for-profit testing organization, found that only 22 percent of U.S. high school students met “college ready” standards in all of their core subjects; these figures are even lower for African-American and Hispanic students.
  • The College Board reported that even among college-bound seniors, only 43 percent met college-ready standards, meaning that more college students need to take remedial courses.

For a nation of immigrants, and a nation whose demography requires a large and steady influx of immigrants, these are especially damaging.  How can we expect to remain the nation we have been, retain the cultural imperatives that made us so great, if we can no longer recognize who we are, or teach these to our newcomers—whether newborn or new immigrants?  How can we expect to remain the nation we have been, retain the cultural imperatives that made us so great, if we can no longer recognize where we came from, or identify where we want, as a nation, to go?

Klein added, and this is especially a propos that lack of a civics education, as well as our economic and defense technology competitiveness,

A massively undereducated country is not going to be competitive. It’s not going to be cohesive.

The Task Force offered three high-level policy recommendations:

  • Implement educational expectations and assessments in subjects vital to protecting national security.  Science, technology, and foreign languages are essential—as are creative problem-solving skills and civic awareness.
  • Make structural changes to provide students with good choices.  States and districts should stop locking disadvantaged students into failing schools without any options….  Enhanced choice and competition, in an environment of equitable resource allocation, will fuel the innovation necessary to transform results.
  • Launch a “national security readiness audit” to hold schools and policymakers accountable for results and to raise public awareness.  At the heart of this recommendation is the creation of more meaningful assessments and simulations of student learning and, then, a coordinated, national effort to create targets and repercussions….

The full report, U.S. Education Reform and National Security, is here:

As always, the devil is in the details.  These standards, this accountability, must be strict, rigorous, and followed with prompt reassignment or termination of those teachers or administrators who do not deliver.  The STEM courses not only should be taught at all grades, they should be supplemented at all grades with courses in American history, American civics, and the history of civilization.

And the standards and accountability must be applied to the students, also.  Those who do not perform must be held back until they do measure up.  And that, in addition to enabling our nation’s continued success, is the true path to Johnny’s self-esteem.

It’s Not My Fault

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In his diatribe against the Supreme Court over its potential (not realized) to overturn the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, President Obama is not demonstrating a breathtaking ignorance of our Constitution or of the Federal Courts’ power of review of Congressional legislation.  Instead, he’s just beating an old familiar drum: any failure is somebody else’s fault.

In “framing the court as a potential villain that substitutes its judgment for that of elected legislators,” he’s just setting up the next set of villains in his serial pulp novel, I Didn’t Do It.

Mr. Obama ticked off a string of popular benefits that would disappear if the law is shot down….

Thus, Obama cynically ignores the fact that, were they good ideas, they could have been enacted, after public debate rather than locked door deals, through constitutional legislation.  Or he could have let a free market agree that they’re good ideas and generate a (potentially large) niche for them.

But Mr. Obama…said he was confident the high court would not [strike down PPACA], partly because conservatives—who are in the majority on the court—have long argued against what some refer to as legislating from the bench.

He, just as cynically, conflates upholding the Constitution as judicial activism.  Also,

He said that without the mandate, it would be impossible to require insurance companies to cover everybody, including those with pre-existing conditions, at a reasonable price.

He ignores the fact that it’s impossible to require this at any price.  A free market, however, would allow such coverages at costs commensurate with the risks being transferred.

President Obama, through his Press Secretary Jay Carney, even argues with a straight face that for the Court to overturn PPACA would be to undo 80 years of precedent vis-à-vis the Commerce Clause.  This disingenuously ignores recent Commerce Clause overturnings that others have described.  Even more disingenuously, it ignores the fact that those “80 years of precedent” began with Supreme Court’s overturning of 100+ years of Commerce Clause precedent in Jones & Laughlin and Wickard—the former by a Court thoroughly intimidated by FDR’s court packing effort, and the latter carried out by an FDR-packed Court, a Court in which 8 of the 9 Justices were FDR appointees.

And it puts Obama in the strange position of implying that Brown was wrong because it overturned 80 years of precedent flowing from Plessy.

It’s not my fault.  The devil made me do it.

The Supreme Court and Rule By Law

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Steven Hayward, at Power Line, wonders whether the Supreme Court could take a mulligan on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act case before them.  The background for his question is this:

What people forget is that Citizens United was reargued, because the Justice Department also could not give a coherent answer to a killer question, this time from Justice Alito, as to whether the campaign finance laws that prohibited the distribution of Hillary, the Movie wouldn’t also allow the Federal Election Commission to regulate the distribution of books near election day.  Then-solicitor general Donald Stewart answered Yes, notwithstanding that pesky little First Amendment thingie.

Alarmed, the Court ordered the case reargued, specifically expanding its scope to ask whether certain previous cases that provided the basis for Stewart’s answer had been erroneously decided and should be overruled.  During the second oral argument, a new solicitor general—Elena Kagan—was asked the same killer question, and answered: “No [we can’t regulate books]; the government’s position has changed.”

Stop and dwell on that one phrase for a moment: “The government’s position has changed.”  That says about all you need to know about the rule of law in the liberal wonderland of today’s administrative state.

The question in the Court’s present PPACA case that raised Hayward’s concern was Justice Kennedy’s “Can you create commerce in order to regulate it?”

The question I have, though, concerns the Court’s position on the rule of law vs rule by law.  Why did the Court need to wait on the Executive’s instruction to it of the distinction between one form of free speech and another form of the same speech?  Surely it knows that there is no distinction, and it can rule on its own initiative.  Surely, it could have recognized on its own judgment that a proper ruling in Citizens (i.e., that speech really is a matter of freedom) would require acceptance that it had decided erroneously on earlier cases, and that those opinions would have to be overruled.  How many times was Brown argued on the recognition that Plessy would have to be overruled?

Surely the Court knows that when commerce does not exist, there is nothing to regulate, and by extension, government cannot create commerce out of the æther in order to have something to do.

That this Court needs these answers makes me wonder about its own attitude toward rule of law.  It got Citizens right, but it shouldn’t have needed additional (and in the event both erroneous and irrelevant) instruction from the Executive in order to do so.  It shouldn’t need additional instruction here, either.