Tag: politics

A new study has found that there is zero correlation between increased spending and improvements in education.

9:03 am

A new study has found that there is zero correlation between increased spending and improvements in education.

While spending has just about tripled in inflation-adjusted dollars and the number of school employees has almost doubled since 1970, reading, math and science scores for students have remained stagnant.

“That is remarkably unusual,” Coulson wrote in his study. “In virtually every other field, productivity has risen over this period thanks to the adoption of countless technological advances — advances that, in many cases, would seem ideally suited to facilitating learning. And yet, surrounded by this torrent of progress, education has remained anchored to the riverbed, watching the rest of the world rush past it.”

Click on the link just to see the main graph. While math, reading, and science scores have remained unchanged for literally decades, spending has skyrocketed. To put it bluntly, we aren’t getting our money’s worth.

Note this quote also:

But if spending has no affect, then why do students at private schools, which charge tuition, perform better than students in public schools? “Actually, the average per-pupil spending in private schools is substantially below the average per-pupil spending in government schools,” Coulson said. He pointed to a study he conducted in New Mexico’s neighboring state of Arizona in which Coulson said average per-pupil spending at private schools was about 66 percent of the cost of public schools.

I wonder if the phrase “public sector unions” comes to anyone’s mind as an explanation for this sad situation,

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Uninstall Firefox.

8:39 am

Uninstall Firefox.

As Princeton Professor of Jurisprudence Robert George warned on my radio show, today the left fires employees for opposition to same-sex marriage. Tomorrow it will fire employees who are pro-life (“anti-woman”). And next it will be employees who support Israel (an “apartheid state”).

The reason to boycott Firefox is not that it is run by leftists. Nor is the reason to support the man-woman definition of marriage. It is solely in order to preserve liberty in the land of liberty. If Firefox doesn’t recant and rehire Eich as CEO, McCarthyism will have returned far more pervasively and perniciously than in its first incarnation. The message the gay left (such as the Orwellian-named Human Rights Campaign) and the left in general wish to send is that Americans who are in positions of power at any company should be forced to resign if they hold a position that the left strongly opposes.

And switching to Google’s Chrome might not be a good political option either.

I use Seamonkey, which though based on the same Mozilla code is now a separate and independent organization.

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On Sunday the Bureau of Land Management arrested a man, after deploying snipers against him, for taking photographs of agents rounding up his family’s cattle.

9:10 pm

On Sunday the Bureau of Land Management arrested a man, after deploying snipers against him, for taking photographs of agents rounding up his family’s cattle.

On Sunday, the Logandale, Nev.-based Moapa Valley Progress reported that Dave Bundy, son of rancher Cliven Bundy, was arrested while taking photographs of his family’s cattle that are being rounded up by federal agents. According to the report, Bundy was violating an arbitrary “First Amendment” zone that had been established by federal agents. Worse yet, federal agents also deployed snipers against the man.

Since when does a federal agency have the right to declare the first amendment void in certain places?

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According to the testimony of IRS agents to a House committee investigating the IRS scandal, the harassment was specifically aimed at conservative groups.

9:49 am

Working for the Democratic Party: According to the testimony of IRS agents to a House committee investigating the IRS scandal, the IRS harassment was specifically aimed at conservative groups.

“Only seven applications in the IRS backlog contained the word ‘progressive,’ all of which were then approved by the IRS, while Tea Party groups received unprecedented review and experienced years-long delays. While some liberal-oriented groups were singled out for scrutiny, evidence shows it was due to non-political reasons,” according to the Oversight staff report, which was obtained by The Daily Caller.

I think the basics of this scandal need to be restated again: The Obama administration, in league with Democrats in Congress, used the IRS to harass their political opponents. They didn’t do it because they had some honest desire to improve IRS operations, they did it to do direct harm to people they disagreed with in order to increase their own power.

If they do not suffer for this corruption of power, we, the free people of the United States, will suffer far more in the coming years.

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Obamacare rules have killed a New Jersey healthcare plan aimed at providing healthcare for children.

9:11 pm

Finding out what’s in it: Obamacare rules have killed a New Jersey healthcare plan aimed at providing healthcare for children.

While the federal government was trumpeting the benefits of Obamacare to boost enrollment earlier this year, about 1,800 families in New Jersey were receiving letters telling them their children would be losing their health coverage last week. The Affordable Care Act — the federal law that mandates everyone have insurance — effectively killed FamilyCare Advantage, a low-cost option for kids in New Jersey created six years ago for parents who earned too much to qualify for Medicaid and other subsidized programs but too little to buy on a policy on their own. The state program was the first of its kind in the nation.

We have only just begun. The disaster that is Obamacare is going to continue bulldozing its way through the healthcare insurance industry, destroying everything it touches.

However, the two unintended positive consequences of this terrible law might be that 1) it will destroy the careers of many of the Democratic politicians who forced it on us. The Democratic Party has needed a house-cleaning for about two decades. Obamacare might finally give it to us. 2) The destruction of the healthcare industry as we have known it might actually be a good thing in the long run. It might return us to a system where the patient pays for the medical care, which will force prices down and get rid of the middleman insurance company.

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The Connecticut college that threatened a student with expulsion for daring to ask the governor questions about his gun control position took down its Facebook page rather than answer questions for critics posting there.

6:44 pm

The Connecticut college that threatened a student with expulsion for daring to ask the governor questions about his gun control position took down its own Facebook page rather than answer questions of critics posting there.

After a trial in which Saucier’s acquitting evidence — the video itself — was kept out of light, administrators told Saucier that any further disturbance could result in his expulsion. After the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education drew attention to Saucier’s plight, sympathetic people began posting questions on ACC’s Facebook page. ACC first chose simply to delete critical posts. Eventually, it took down its Facebook page entirely. FIRE captured screenshots of the page, however.

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The terrible close-mindedness of the left.

11:56 am

The terrible close-mindedness of the left.

Watch the video below the fold. (The link above also transcribes much of the dialogue if you have trouble hearing it.) It is very disturbing. At the National Young Feminist Leadership Conference a female reporter merely wants to interview attendees, and she gets shunned for only one reason: They discover she is from a “conservative” organization.

The irony of this behavior is completely lost on the conference participants, which proclaimed its “inclusivity” and condemned any behavior that “makes folks feel uncomfortable, threatened, or demoralized.” Moreover, their behavior suggests they know deep down that their positions are indefensible, or else they would be glad to discuss them with their opponents.

Finally, this behavior is terrifying, as it suggests these individuals think their opponents are so evil that they will be willing to do almost anything to shut them up. With beliefs like this, from women being trained as future feminist leaders, the future for freedom in American does not bode well.
» Read more

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Watch how Chicago’s middle class has been destroyed by the radical leftwing Democratic Party during the past forty years.

10:00 am

Watch as a single graph illustrates how the policies of the radical leftwing Democratic Party during the past forty years has destroyed Chicago’s middle class.

Though the propaganda goal of this story is to push the Democratic Party’s new talking point of income equality, the graph does a better job of showing us the consequences of Democratic rule. Chicago has been run by Democrats forever, but only by radical leftwing Democrats since the 1970s, which is exactly when the middle class there started to flee.

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NASA’s short statement, in connection to the Obama administration’s decision to suspend all non-ISS related activities with Russia, is almost entirely a demand for more funding for its commercial space program.

9:36 am

NASA’s short statement, in connection to the Obama administration’s decision to suspend all non-ISS related activities with Russia, is almost entirely a demand for more funding for its commercial space program.

To quote:

NASA is laser focused on a plan to return human spaceflight launches to American soil, and end our reliance on Russia to get into space. This has been a top priority of the Obama Administration’s for the past five years, and had our plan been fully funded, we would have returned American human spaceflight launches – and the jobs they support – back to the United States next year. With the reduced level of funding approved by Congress, we’re now looking at launching from U.S. soil in 2017. The choice here is between fully funding the plan to bring space launches back to America or continuing to send millions of dollars to the Russians. It’s that simple. The Obama Administration chooses to invest in America – and we are hopeful that Congress will do the same.

Though I agree with them about accelerating manned commercial space, I can’t help wondering if this suspension of activities was actually instigated to generate this lobbying effort. ISS comprises the bulk of the U.S.’s cooperative effort with Russia, and by exempting that from this suspension the Obama administration essentially exempts practically everything, making the suspension somewhat meaningless.

What the suspension does do, however, is highlight our fragile dependency on Russia, just as Congress begins debate on the 2015 budget.

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