Zero-tolerance run amuck

In yet another story about how school administrators can't use their common sense in trying to discipline students, here is the story of a Virginia teenager who got a two-week suspension for having birth control pills at school despite the fact that the pills were prescribed by a doctor and her mother knew about them.

For two decades, many schools have set zero-tolerance policies on drugs. That means no over-the-counter drugs, no prescription drugs, no pretend drugs in student lockers or pockets. When many teens have ready access to medicine cabinets filled with prescription medications such as Xanax and Vicodin, any capsule or tablet is suspect.

Still, some parents and civil rights advocates say enforcement has been overzealous. Stringent rules have ensnared not only drug dealers and abusers, but a host of sniffling and headachy students seeking quick medical relief. The Supreme Court will consider this month the case of a 13-year-old Arizona student who was strip-searched in 2003 by an administrator who suspected that she was carrying ibuprofen pills.

Fairfax School Board members have debated over time whether to allow students to carry Tylenol or other over-the-counter medicines without registering them with the school nurse. County policy permits cough drops to be carried on campus, for instance, but not shared. Arlington County policies permit high school students to carry over-the-counter pain relievers. A 2006 state law in Maryland overturned some local rules requiring a doctor's note for children to use sunscreen at school.

In Virginia, school systems must comply with state code regarding prescription medications and illegal drugs on campus. Students face expulsion if they bring to school any "controlled substance" or addictive drug regulated by the federal government. "Imitation controlled substances," which could include virtually any prescription pill, are subject to the same hefty repercussions. Local school boards can give a lighter punishment after a review.

Instead of targeting regulations at the real problem - students sharing medications, school administrators figure that they might as well ban everything. And just as they don't believe that students can exercise discretion in taking their own medications, the administrators demonstrate that they themselves can't exercise any sort of discretion in deciding penalties for transgressors. So we get these sorts of silly results.

During two weeks of watching television game shows and trying to keep up with homework online, the Fairfax teen, an honor student and lettered athlete, had time to study the handbook closely. If she had been caught high on LSD, heroin or another illegal drug, she found, she would have been suspended for five days. Taking her prescribed birth-control pill on campus drew the same punishment as bringing a gun to school would have.

Just words won't do it

Jonah Goldberg notes all the examples of the Obama administration acting as if changes in rhetoric and symbolism will achieve what substance can't.

Indeed, Obama spent the week telling Europeans everything they wanted to hear, but got little for it. The French and the Germans still belittled America's "Anglo-Saxon" capitalism and refused to follow our lead.

This might lead to a painful realization for Obama. While he may think words are everything, for our enemies and even our friends, words are — still — just words.

Cheers are all well and good, but they still don't translate into foreign nations doing what we would like them to do. In the end, they'll still act as they perceive benefiting their interests despite the popularity of Barack Obama in their countries. And no matter how we relabel the "war on terror" or give pretty speeches on Islam and talk in mysterious ways about how Islam has helped shape our country's history, there will still be Islamicists who want to kill us. And Iran and North Korea will still pursue their nuclear ambitions.

Links around the web

The Washington Post editorial page thinks that the Obama administration approach to North Korea is "confused."

Still, it doesn't seem likely that either the North Korean or Iranian regimes will be swayed by these policies. Such concessions as have been extracted from Mr. Kim in the past have followed tough steps by the United States and China, above all the squeezing of the regime's foreign bank accounts. It's hard to believe that the Obama administration will make more progress than its predecessors without more consistency in administering that kind of medicine.

Don't look now, but just as the Pentagon wants to cut back on missile defense and Obama is talking about only using missile defense that has been successfully tested, the Israelis just had a successful test of their Arrow II defense system.

Israel carried out a test launch of its Arrow II interceptor missile on Tuesday, the Defense Ministry said, a system designed to defend against possible ballistic missile attacks by Iran and Syria.

"It was a successful test," the ministry said, adding that 90 percent of test launches – 16 in all, according to Israel Radio – have been successful.

Jim Geraghty notes unintended consequences from the Obama economic plans.

Scott Wilson, the former Washington Post correspondent in Colombia, has some intriguing comments on what we could learn from President Uribe's struggle against terrorist guerrillas to apply to our efforts in Afghanistan.

Disarmament by example won't work

President Obama seems to think that the rest of the world chooses their foreign policy based on what the Americans have done in the past, rather than on the basis of what is in their own national interests. So his nuclear disarmament policy seems to be based on the idea that, if we just lead the way, others will follow. As Anne Applebaum writes in Slate, expecting the world to imitate Obama's worthiness is just not a viable foreign policy plan.

This is all very nice—but as the central plank in an American president's foreign policy, a call for universal nuclear disarmament seems rather beside the point. Apparently, the president's intention is to lead by example: If the United States cuts its own nuclear arsenal and bans testing, others will allegedly follow.

Forgive me for joining the chorus of cynics, but there is no evidence that U.S. nuclear arms reductions have ever inspired others to do the same. All the world's more recent nuclear powers—Israel, India, Pakistan—acquired their weapons well after such talks began more than 40 years ago.

As for the North Koreans, they chose the very day of the Prague speech to launch (unsuccessfully) an experimental missile. In its wake, neither China nor Russia wanted to condemn the launch, since to do so might set a precedent uncomfortable for them. "Every state has the right to the peaceful use of outer space," said a Russian U.N. envoy. His government does want arms-reduction talks, it is true, but only because the Russian nuclear arsenal is rapidly deteriorating. By agreeing to start them, we've unnecessarily handed over a bargaining chip.

But, apparently, President Obama believes that the strength of his moral example paired together with some meaningless words patched together from the lowest common denominator that the UN Security Council will permit are enough to deter future nuclear wannabes such as North Korea and Iran. The Wall Street Journal captures the fecklessness of this approach.

"Rules must be binding. Violations must be punished. Words must mean something."

So declared President Obama Sunday in Prague regarding North Korea's missile launch, which America's U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice added was a direct violation of U.N. resolutions. At which point, the Security Council spent hours debating its nonresponse, thus proving to nuclear proliferators everywhere that rules aren't binding, violations won't be punished, and words of warning mean nothing.

Rarely has a Presidential speech been so immediately and transparently divorced from reality as Mr. Obama's in Prague. The President delivered a stirring call to banish nuclear weapons at the very moment that North Korea and Iran are bidding to trigger the greatest proliferation breakout in the nuclear age. Mr. Obama also proposed an elaborate new arms-control regime to reduce nuclear weapons, even as both Pyongyang and Tehran are proving that the world's great powers lack the will to enforce current arms-control treaties.

Meanwhile, at this very time when North Korea is tweaking the rest of the world and Iran is proceeding with its own nuclear ambitions, the Obama administration has decided that it is the perfect time to cut back on missile defense. Although Obama told the audience in Prague that he would go forward with a missile defense system, Byron York notes the important qualifications that Obama put on his pledge. He said he would "go forward with a missile defense system that is cost-effective and proven." Obama has long been against missile defense and his artful phrasing doesn't mean that he's gone back on his earlier campaign pledges to cut back on spending on missile defense. In his mind, it's always been and perhaps always will be unproven. Rather like education vouchers, I guess.

So what does the president's statement mean? I asked Lawrence Korb, the former Reagan Defense Department official who is now a senior fellow at the left-leaning think tank Center for American Progress. Korb, who ran the Obama campaign's military-policy team, recently wrote a report recommending the European missile-defense system be "halted until it has proven itself in realistic operational tests." Korb told me he believed Obama said "basically the same thing" in Prague that Korb and his colleagues wrote in their report. "When it's cost effective and proven, we'll do it," Korb said. "But it's not ready yet."

That's not how the untrained ear would interpret Obama's latest remarks. So here is the lesson. When the president says he will "go forward with a missile defense," don't assume that he will go forward with a missile defense. Don't listen to what he said in Prague. Listen to what he said in Iowa.

So now that we've seen how going to the UN won't do anything to stop North Korea and disarmament by example is not going to work, what is the President's next great idea?

Governing from the Big Tent

Last week I posted a criticism of Jonathon Chait's cri de coeur about how Democrats can't govern because they're just not as ruthless as those nasty Republicans. Chait was upset that there were a handful of moderate Democrats who weren't jumping in line to support the Obama-Pelosi-Reid agenda on everything from the budget to health care to cap and trade. As I wrote then,

the major problem that Chait has with the Senate is that whole democracy thing. Dang those senators who are representing their constituents rather than the party. This is why we have a Senate and don't just have representatives elected at large or have the party select all the senators.

Sure the arcane rules of the Senate are a pain and antidemocratic. But you can't have it both ways and decry the filibuster when your party runs the place but celebrate the role of filibusters and holds when the other party is in control.

We have a two-party system and for a party to win it must encompass a very large tent. So the Democrats range from Evan Bayh and Kent Conrad to Barbara Boxer. That's what happens when you win a large majority - you have all sorts in the tent. And they'll have to govern with the party they have, not the party Jonathan Chait would like to have.

Today, Sean Trende has a detailed response to Chait's original argument and he places the blame on how the Democrats do redistricting for the House as well as the make-up of the Senate.

The problem for Democrats comes from the nature of the districting schemes the chambers use. Senate districts are pretty much set in stone. Chait has a valid point that he does not emphasize enough when he says the small-state bias of the Senate presently favors Republicans. This bias - which is an integral part of our founding and Constitution - is a structural barrier to Democrats so long as Republicans continue to dominate rural areas, which tend to be conservative. To win a filibuster-proof majority, Democrats have to win at least 14 Senate seats in Republican-leaning states ("Republican-leaning" is presently defined as a state or district where Obama's margin was less than his national average of 7.2%). Republicans only have to win 6 Senate seats in Democratic-leaning states to win a similar majority.

The current House has built-in Republican biases as well. Democrats waste a lot of votes when redistricting. Democrats, joined by some Republicans (for different reasons) decided that it is important to maximize minority representation in Congress. The result is that the most reliable Democratic voters are clumped together into heavily Democratic districts. Because of this there are only about a dozen districts that lean Republican by twenty points or more, but there are over fifty districts that lean Democratic by twenty points or more.

This gives Democrats some stability, and a larger floor beneath which they cannot fall (especially in the South). But by clustering Democratic voters, Democratic representation is diluted, meaning that there are fewer seats that lean to the Democrats overall. That means that there will usually be more Democrats who answer to a conservative-leaning constituency than vice-versa (and paradoxically, the larger the Democratic majority, the more members answer to rightward-leaning voters).

Perhaps Chait would like to do away with majority-minority districts so that the Democratic votes would be less diluted. We know that many liberals would like to do away with the Electoral College precisely because of the advantage that it gives small and rural states; how big a jump is it to then decry their representation in the Senate?

As Trende goes on to detail, the parties have had this historic split for the past century. The Democrats have a more diverse population. Since the 1930s New Deal coalition, the Democratic Party encompassed southern conservatives and northern urban liberals. It was often an uneasy partnership and often the source of weakness or tension for the party. However, since the old southern Democrats have been dying out or transferring to the Republican Party, the Democratic Party has a smaller ideological spread. This helps it vote cohesively as they did in blocking President Bush's agenda in his second term as well as in passing President Obama's budget and bailout plans.

The good news for Democrats is that this flexibility allows them to compete in just about every district in the country. This is part of why they have chalked up wins in odd places like LA-06 and MS-01. They have an easier time winning majorities than Republicans. The bad news, as Chait observes, is that this flexibility makes it harder for them to use their majorities to advance an ideological agenda.

But the better news is that these divisions in the Democratic party are dying out, and the party is much more ideologically cohesive than it was even ten years ago. Ike Skelton is conservative, but he is no John Rankin. Obama will probably have the most liberal Congress since 1964 or even 1932, as witnessed by the relative ease with which his budget package eventually passed both Houses of Congress.

But Obama still has a number of members from conservative districts who will have to watch their backs with their constituents. Until Democrats find a way to address the structural problems described above - and are willing to shed some members of their coalition in the process - they will continue to have a difficult time governing. In the meantime Obama will have to set an agenda that can be sold in some Republican-leaning states and districts, or risk having that agenda derailed.

What Chait was upset about is exactly a result of the Democrats winning a large majority. Whenever a party has a large majority, it will encompass members who represent districts that necessitate an across-the-aisle appeal. If the Democrats don't want those members or don't have concern for how those members must appeal to their constituents, then the party must give up its hopes for maintaining a large majority in both houses. If they insist on governing from the far left of their party, they're going to have trouble with those members who must appeal to conservative-leaning districts. That is politics, not as Chait assumes, wimpiness.

Food police don't need no stinkin' controlled study

John Tierney takes on Mayor Bloomberg's diktat to New York city restaurants and food industry to halve the population's salt intake. Tierney cites all sorts of conflicting evidence on the benefits of limiting our salt intake.

First, a reduced-salt diet doesn’t lower everyone’s blood pressure. Some individuals’ blood pressure can actually rise in response to less salt, and most people aren’t affected much either way. The more notable drop in blood pressure tends to occur in some — but by no means all — people with hypertension, a condition that affects more than a quarter of American adults.

Second, even though lower blood pressure correlates with less heart disease, scientists haven’t demonstrated that eating less salt leads to better health and longer life. The results from observational studies have too often been inconclusive and contradictory. After reviewing the literature for the Cochrane Collaboration in 2003, researchers from Copenhagen University concluded that “there is little evidence for long-term benefit from reducing salt intake.”

A similar conclusion was reached in 2006 by Norman K. Hollenberg of Harvard Medical School. While it might make sense for some individuals to change their diets, he wrote, “the available evidence shows that the influence of salt intake is too inconsistent and generally too small to mandate policy decisions at the community level.”

In the past year, researchers led by Salvatore Paterna of the University of Palermo have reported one of the most rigorous experiments so far: a randomized clinical trial of heart patients who were put on different diets. Those on a low-sodium diet were more likely to be rehospitalized and to die, results that prompted the researchers to ask, “Is sodium an old enemy or a new friend?”

Those results, while hardly a reason for you to start eating more salt, are a reminder that salt affects a great deal more than blood pressure. Lowering it can cause problems with blood flow to the kidneys and insulin resistance, which can increase the risk of strokes and heart attacks. (See original for links.)

But being one of those liberals who purports to know what is best for us, Mayor Bloomberg and his health commissioner don't need to look at controlled studies to see what the effects of reducing salt would be on an entire, diverse population. They know what's better for everyone and so they will implement their wisdom. Heck, the government knew what was best for us when we had that old food pyramid recommending limited fat consumption, didn't it? Actually, not so much.

That antifat campaign, like the antisalt campaign, was endorsed by prominent groups and federal agencies before the campaigners’ theory was tested in rigorous trials. It too seemed quite logical — in theory.

But in practice the results were dismal, as demonstrated eventually by clinical trials and by the expanding waistlines of Americans. People followed the advice in the “food pyramid” to reduce the percentage of fat in the diet, but they got more obese, perhaps because they ate so many other ingredients in foods with “low fat” labels.

It's nice that the Mayor of New York City has solved all the other problems facing that city today so that he can move on to the salt consumption of its inhabitants. But some of the rest of us prefer to wait for more research before we take Bloomberg's say-so for our diet.

Smothering results that school vouchers work

The Department of Education allowed Congress to kill off a pilot program in the District of Columbia even though the latest federal research shows that the program is already achieving results. And, certainly not by coincidence, the Department of Education didn't release the results of that research until after Congress had safely sunsetted the program. As the WSJ writes,

It's bad enough that Democrats are killing a program that parents love and is closing the achievement gap between poor minorities and whites. But as scandalous is that the Education Department almost certainly knew the results of this evaluation for months.

Voucher recipients were tested last spring. The scores were analyzed in the late summer and early fall, and in November preliminary results were presented to a team of advisers who work with the Education Department to produce the annual evaluation. Since Education officials are intimately involved in this process, they had to know what was in this evaluation even as Democrats passed (and Mr. Obama signed) language that ends the program after next year.

Opponents of school choice for poor children have long claimed they'd support vouchers if there was evidence that they work. While running for President last year, Mr. Obama told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that if he saw more proof that they were successful, he would "not allow my predisposition to stand in the way of making sure that our kids can learn . . . You do what works for the kids." Except, apparently, when what works is opposed by unions.

Mr. Duncan's office spurned our repeated calls and emails asking what and when he and his aides knew about these results. We do know the Administration prohibited anyone involved with the evaluation from discussing it publicly. You'd think we were talking about nuclear secrets, not about a taxpayer-funded pilot program. A reasonable conclusion is that Mr. Duncan's department didn't want proof of voucher success to interfere with Senator Dick Durbin's campaign to kill vouchers at the behest of the teachers unions.

The decision to let 1,700 poor kids get tossed from private schools is a moral disgrace. It also exposes the ugly politics that lies beneath union and liberal efforts across the country to undermine mayoral control, charter schools, vouchers or any reform that threatens their monopoly over public education dollars and jobs. The Sheldon Silver-Dick Durbin Democrats aren't worried that school choice doesn't work. They're worried that it does, and if Messrs. Obama and Duncan want to succeed as reformers they need to say so consistently.

Andrew Coulson sums up the results, after three years, of the program.

The latest federal study of the D.C. voucher program finds that voucher students have pulled significantly ahead of their public school peers in reading and perform at least as well as public school students in math. It also reports that the average tuition at the voucher schools is $6,620. That is ONE QUARTER what the District of Columbia spends per pupil on education ($26,555), according to the District’s own fiscal year 2009 budget.

Better results at a quarter the cost. And Democrats in Congress have sunset its funding and are trying to kill it. Shame on them.

I wonder how many other federally funded education programs show results like that? President Obama has said that he would be guided by results, not ideology. Horsefeathers! Here are results that show steady progress in reading by the students receiving the vouchers and the President and his party, despite their fine words about wanting to examine the evidence just don't care. Senator Durbin, the sponsor of the provision killing the program claimed to want to see the evidence that the program worked. Well, Senator. What do you say now about these results?

The Department of Education has been funding a multiyear random-assignment study of the program’s impact. In the most recent evaluation, participating students showed gains equivalent to 3.7 months’ worth of additional reading achievement, a statistically significant difference from the control group.

This is typical of random-assignment studies of voucher achievement. Students do not instantly bolt ahead of their peers. Instead, they make steady progress over time until the difference between participants and non-participants becomes statistically significant. After the fourth year of the program, the differences would grow steadily larger.

How convenient it is that the Department of Education waited until after the program was killed to release these results. And how typical that the Democrats and President Obama didn't wait a few weeks to decide the fate of the program until after the results had come out.

You know that, if this were a program that the teachers unions supported, the Democrats would be pouring billions into it and talking about expanding it across the nation instead of smothering it in the cradle. Once you realize that union opposition is the only reason why these Democrats have taken the position they have on the program, you know all you need to know about their fine rhetoric about school reform and wanting to put evidence ahead of ideology.

Politicizing the Justice Department

Ed Whelan writes on how Eric Holder, just a few months into his tenure as Attorney General, has already politicized his the Justice Department.

At his recent confirmation hearing, a chastened Holder assured senators that he had learned from the past and was committed to upholding the department's high standards. He specifically promised not to politicize DOJ's legal positions: "We don't change OLC opinions simply because a new administration takes over," he said. Any review "will not be a political process, it will be one based solely on our interpretation of the law."

Alas, less than two months into his tenure as attorney general, according to accounts in The Post last week, Holder has abused OLC for partisan political purposes. The facts, admittedly, are somewhat sketchy -- largely because Holder isn't complying with President Obama's promise of transparency. But here's what they show.

In the course of its usual task of reviewing pending legislation to identify constitutional problems, OLC determined that the D.C. voting rights bill, which would give the District of Columbia a voting member in the House of Representatives, is unconstitutional. The acting head of OLC, David Barron -- a liberal Harvard law professor appointed by Holder -- signed an opinion setting forth OLC's conclusion. That conclusion is no surprise, as it has been the Department of Justice's consistent position, under presidents of both parties, at least as far back as Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy in 1963 and as recently as two years ago.

When Holder, a longtime supporter of the voting rights bill, learned of the OLC determination, he acted to override it. He contacted another of his appointees, deputy solicitor general Neal K. Katyal, to ask whether Katyal's office could, under its usual standards, defend the bill in court. Katyal said it could, and Holder then overruled OLC.

Now, it's legitimate, if exceedingly rare, for an attorney general to contest OLC's advice. The office is, after all, exercising the advisory function the attorney general has delegated to it. But there's a right way to overrule OLC, and then there's Holder's way. The right way would have been for Holder to conduct a full and careful formal review of the legal question. If that review yielded the conclusion that Holder's position was in fact the best reading of the law -- an extremely unlikely conclusion, in my judgment -- then Holder would sign a written opinion to that effect.

Holder instead adopted a sham review that abused OLC's institutional role. In particular, the answer he solicited and received from Katyal was virtually meaningless. Holder didn't ask for Katyal's best judgment as to whether the D.C. bill was constitutional. He instead asked merely whether his own position that the bill is constitutional was so beyond the pale, so beneath the low level of plausible lawyers' arguments, so legally frivolous, that the Solicitor General's office, under its traditional commitment to defend any federal law for which any reasonable defense can be offered, wouldn't be able to defend it in court.

Apparently, that whole Constitution thing isn't of interest to our Democrats in Congress.

Eleanor Holmes Norton, the nonvoting D.C. delegate to the House who aspires to be its voting representative, has made clear that she regards questions of constitutionality as irrelevant and that she thinks members of the House and Senate do, too. "I don't think members are in the least bit affected in their votes on the question of its constitutionality," she said just last week. "People vote their politics in the House and in the Senate."

If true, that's a very sad commentary on Congress. It's even sadder that it appears to apply to our attorney general as well.

Don't look now, but the cost of the bailout just went up

Expect stories like this at regular intervals.

U.S. congressional budget analysts have raised their estimate of the net cost to taxpayers for the government's financial rescue program to $356 billion, an increase of $167 billion from earlier estimates.

The Congressional Budget Office had originally projected the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program would cost taxpayers $189 billion.

The additional cost, which applies to TARP spending for fiscal years 2009 and 2010, was included in the CBO's March projection of a $1.8 trillion deficit for fiscal 2009, which ends Sept. 30.

The TARP cost projection was raised due to changes in financial market conditions, new transactions and a shift in expected timing of payments, the CBO said.

Too close to the truth: Munsingwear yes, Fruit of the Loom no.

This SNL skit bites a bit too close to home as they have President Obama in his new role as our nation's CEO deciding which companies should be allowed to survive and which ones just don't make it.

Link via Hot Air where Allahpundit writes, Not so much “funny ha-ha” as “funny this-isn’t-nearly-as-far-from-reality-as-it-should-be.”

Though I wonder how many of the Obamabots who watch SNL even get the too-close-to-the-truth humor here.

Back from Gettysburg

We had a fantastic trip despite the weather. Even though it rained off and on during our five-hour tour of the battlefield, the kids were game to get off the bus and explore the area and listen to the guide. With some foreshadowing of tonight's NCAA Finals, we stopped at a spot where, during the first day's fighting, North Carolina troops fought it out with troops from Michigan with terrible casualties on both sides. The rain stopped propitiously just when we got to climb down Big Round Top to Devil's Den. The licensed tour guide that I've used for the past five years has written a book on Devil's Den and really made the area come alive for the kids. And what teenagers don't like climbing around big boulders and picturing the deadly fighting that went on there.

If you haven't visited Gettysburg since the new Visitors' Center opened last spring, you really should go there. The new museum is amazingly well done. How many museums would a bunch of teenagers express the wish that they had more time to spend there? They've put together interactive displays, primary documents, moving photos, and videos that really draw you into the story of the Civil War and the fighting at Gettysburg and its effect on the civilians of the town. I remember all the fuss that was made a few years back about whether the Civil War battle sites should talk about slavery and Emancipation. Well, the Gettysburg museum has really done a splendid job of weaving the role of slavery in with the military history and demonstrated that it is absolutely possible to do both and not slight either.

The next day we traveled to Washington, D.C. to see the Library of Congress bicentennial exhibit on Abraham Lincoln. This is an exhibit that should be on permanent display. You can see the booklet that was put together of news clippings that Lincoln used to prepare for his debates with Stephen Douglas. Then you can see the book that Lincoln himself put together after the debates of clippings from each man's speeches. They showed political cartoons together with news coverage plus Lincoln's own notes from his speeches and other events in his life. And you can see the original of Special Order 191, Lee's lost orders that the Union soldiers found before the Battle of Antietam. And then there is the collection of items that were in Lincoln's pockets the night he was assassinated. Talk about a chill running down your spine!

After that, we visited the National Museum of the Marine Corps. If you're traveling I95 in Virginia, you really should stop here. They have done a great job teaching the history of the Marine Corps and their role in wars from the Revolution to today. There were two 11th graders in our group who want to join the Marines so this had special meaning for our group. And even our senior who is bound for West Point was moved at studying the history of the Marines at Iwo Jima and Chosin Reservoir.

We had a great trip; my students were a wonderful bunch to travel with - not a complaint the whole weekend from them or about them.

Off to Gettysburg

I'm leaving with my class today for a visit to Gettysburg. Unfortunately, it's projected to rain all tomorrow - the day I have a five-hour tour of the battlefield planned. I'll be so disappointed if we don't get to go down to Devil's Den and let the kids climb on the rocks and envision the deadly fighting there and then climb up Little Round Top as they picture what it was like there on July 2, 1863 as those tired and thirsty Alabamians climbed it for three assaults on the the flank. But we have a great guide and I'm sure he'll be able to make it entertaining for the kids even if we have to do it all from the bus.

Then, on Saturday, we're heading to the Library of Congress to see their bicentennial Lincoln exhibit and then to the Museum of the Marines. The kids are very excited and I have a great bunch this year.

I'm taking my computer and will blog as time allows.

Nancy Pelosi - just a great mother figure

The Politico pens a paean of praise to Nancy Pelosi's leadership skills. She's just using her mothering skills to shepherd her priorities through Congress.

For Pelosi, life in the House varies little from life in her house back in San Francisco when she was raising five children: Lots of listening so everyone has the chance to be heard and then an ultimatum to end the bickering.

“She listens, then she acts,” said California Rep. Xavier Becerra, a close ally in the elected leadership and a member of the Budget Committee. “At some point, a mother knows when to move the brood forward.”

If a Republican Speaker did the same thing, would we hear about his great fathering skills and how he was such a wonderful leader. Or would we hear that he was a tough guy hammering through his priorities? Just wondering.

Barney Frank - always a class act

Where is professional courtesy on the House floor?

Frank, his gravelly voice booming through the chamber, grabbed the microphone after Culberson blasted Democrats for passing the stimulus, which permitted the American International Group to lavish billions on executives after its de facto federal takeover.

Frank accused the GOP of attacking him for trying to fix the flawed stimulus, saying Republicans’ criticism was part “of a psychological disorder I am not equipped to diagnose.”

Yup, you gotta be crazy to oppose what the Frank-Pelosi-led Congress want to do on anything.

Sounds like the Democrats are getting a mite bit testy up there.

UPDATE: Byron York has another example of Barney Frank hyperbolic sarcasm.

"My colleagues on the other side," Frank continued, "are kind of like kids who have had a toy bear, or a blanket, and this security blanket means a lot to them. Their security blanket is being able to complain about something [the stimulus bill] that happened before the break."

And Barney Frank's pacifier is trying to evade responsibility for passing a massive stimulus package without his members having read or thought about the thing.

And I guess in his mind, it takes a psychological disorder to not be in favor of the Timothy Geithner determining the salaries of any employee in any company that takes federal bailout funds.

The Pay for Performance bill, whose details were reported Tuesday in the Examiner, would impose government controls on the salaries and bonuses of all employees -- not just top executives -- of companies that have received capital investments through the Troubled Asset Relief Program and other federal measures. The bill would give Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner the power to determine whether those salaries or bonuses are "unreasonable" or "excessive." Geithner would also have the authority to draw up a set of "performance standards" that the covered companies would be required to use to calculate bonuses and retention payments.

Geez. Raise your hand if you have enough faith in the government to figure out not only which cars should be produced, which loans given out, but also how much companies should play any of their employees.

Politicizing the Justice Department

Critics claimed that Eric Holder was a political hack who had already proven that he would pervert his job in order to curry favor with his president. And now, just a few months into the job, he's proven them correct with his treatment of the opinion out of the Office of Legal Counsel on the constitutionality of the bill before the House to give the District of Columbia a voting seat in the House of Representatives. He's demonstrated that he'll go further than even the much maligned Alberto Gonzales did to politicize his department.

Perhaps you remember that theme from the Bush years, offered up every other day or so by the media-Democratic Party consortium. The claim was that political appointees at the Justice Department had run roughshod over career attorneys on tobacco, or civil rights, or something -- and that such horrors would never happen in the Age of Obama.

Well, the Washington Post reported yesterday as blatant a case of political interference as one can imagine involving Attorney General Eric Holder and Democratic legislation to give the District of Columbia a vote in Congress. Career attorneys at the Office of Legal Counsel wrote a memo earlier this year arguing that the proposed law is unconstitutional on grounds that only states can be represented in Congress. Mr. Holder wasn't pleased, so he asked lawyers at the Solicitor General's office for a second opinion, which miraculously found that the D.C. bill is constitutional.

We're in favor of Administrations making their own policy decisions, and an AG is certainly within his rights to overrule career attorneys. But it is extraordinary to overrule an Office of Legal Counsel opinion that we're told is rooted in Justice Department analysis going back to the JFK-LBJ Administrations. It is also extraordinary for an AG to so blatantly politicize the Solicitor General's office, which is the home of lawyers who argue cases before the Supreme Court. Imagine if Alberto Gonzales had tried that one.

We can imagine that one. Furious denunciations from all quarters; hearings in Congress; jokes on late night comedy shows. With Eric Holder - expect silence from the usual suspects.

Hey, those CFLs aren't all they're cracked up to be

Remember when compact fluorescent bulbs were going to save the planet? Well, it just doesn't seem to be working out that way.

But a lot of people these days are finding the new compact fluorescent bulbs anything but simple. Consumers who are trying them say they sometimes fail to work, or wear out early. At best, people discover that using the bulbs requires learning a long list of dos and don’ts.

Take the case of Karen Zuercher and her husband, in San Francisco. Inspired by watching the movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” they decided to swap out nearly every incandescent bulb in their home for energy-saving compact fluorescents. Instead of having a satisfying green moment, however, they wound up coping with a mess.

“Here’s my sad collection of bulbs that didn’t work,” Ms. Zuercher said the other day as she pulled a cardboard box containing defunct bulbs from her laundry shelf.

One of the 16 Feit Electric bulbs the Zuerchers bought at Costco did not work at all, they said, and three others died within hours. The bulbs were supposed to burn for 10,000 hours, meaning they should have lasted for years in normal use. “It’s irritating,” Ms. Zuercher said.

The culprit? Cheaply, but poorly made bulbs, particularly from China. So if you're doing the switch to CFLs, read the labels carefully and don't put them in sockets that they're not designed for "including enclosed ceiling lamps, dimmable fixtures and areas where lights are turned on and off frequently."

Not an April Fools' joke - Inspire schoolkids with Jimi Hendrix

Remember that first time you heard Jimi Hendrix? Didn't it make you think about reducing the gap between high and low-performing students? Well, apparently, that is what it made the San Francisco School Board think of. So they've submitted their new plan for reducing that gap with Hendrix's picture on the cover and are sending Hendrix-logoed freebies out to the schools in order to inspire the students with his example. Or something like that.

There was a time when teachers would freak at the sound of Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze" or "Stone Free." Now the San Francisco school district wants them to get in the spirit.

"Remember the first time you heard Jimi Hendrix?" reads the cover of the district's new 51-page education guide. "Our plan is as transformational now as his music was then!"

The manifesto is aimed at transforming the educational "experiences for every child in each of our schools."

To drive home the point, a portrait of the '60s rocker - looking somewhat pensive, somber and perhaps stoned - graces the cover and every page of the manual.

The book also comes with a Hendrix poster and Hendrix-emblazoned canvas bag, which were handed out to a couple hundred administrators at Superintendent Carlos Garcia's back-to

And what about the message of trying to inspired kids with a guy who died almost 40 years ago from an overdose of alcohol and sleeping pills?

"Hey," said Garcia. "We're in San Francisco."

And that is their Superintendent of Schools!

No joke.

Taxing the poor to help the poor

Today is the day that the new federal tax on cigarettes goes into effect rising from 39 cents to $1.01 on each pack. This is a tax that will most heavily on the poor since they are more likely to smoke. Brad Schiller describes the economic effects of that tax on the poor.

The fairness issue is particularly troubling. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only one in five Americans smokes, so the excise targets a minority -- and over half of all smokers are low income, and one of four are officially classified as poor.

Mr. Obama prefers to tout his tax cuts for low-income households. But his "stimulative" Make Work Pay tax cut gets dribbled out at $8-$10 a week. A pack-a-day smoker will pay half of that back in higher cigarette taxes. Smokers getting welfare, unemployment or disability checks instead of paychecks won't get as much in tax cuts, but they will still pay the whole cigarette tax increase. Anyone concerned about widening income inequality should have second thoughts about this distribution of the tax burden.

We should also note how this tax increase affects state finances. State governments rely on their own cigarette excise taxes for hefty revenue streams. In 2008, according to the National Tax Foundation, state governments took in $15.4 billion in cigarette taxes. Hard-hit Michigan, Pennsylvania, and California each took in over $1 billion; New York and Texas took in $1.5 billion each.

Higher taxes discourage cigarette sales. Nobel economist Gary Becker pegs the long-run price elasticity of demand for cigarettes at 0.8 -- i.e., a 10% increase in price causes an 8% decline in unit sales. The Obama tax hike translates into a 13.3% increase in the average pack price. That implies a 10.6% decline in unit sales -- which the National Tax Foundation has calculated adds up to a $1 billion overall revenue loss for hard-pressed states.

If the goal of this tax was to decrease smoking, that would be fine. But this tax is targeted to pay for the S-CHIP insurance plan for uninsured children. You can't have both goals: decreasing the number of smokers and hoping to sock those same smokers for enough money to pay for children's health care. You're basing the finances for this expansion of health insurance on a diminishing base.

And now my state's governor, North Carolina's Beverly Perdue, is considering what was once unthinkable - a massive increase in our own taxes on cigarettes.

Perdue, a Democrat, wants to raise the state tax on cigarettes by $1 -- from the current rate of 35 cents a pack to $1.35. That $1 increase would be on top of a 62-cent increase in the federal tax on cigarettes passed by Congress earlier this year and signed by President Obama. The federal increase will take effect April 1.

Reynolds, the tobacco giant based in Winston-Salem, said yesterday that the proposed state increase combined with the federal increase would cause the average retail price of cigarettes in North Carolina to grow to almost $5.50 a pack.

Once again, this is targeting the poor to pay for the state's deficit as well as the state's health care costs. This might work in the short-term, but it is no long-term way to bring the state's deficit under control.

I have no problem in raising the taxes on cigarettes if our goal is to reduce the number of people who smoke. If the increased cost will stop kids from taking up the habit to begin with - fine. But don't base our budget, particularly health care costs which will be growing whether 10% of today's kids start smoking or not. That is just evading the long-term problems with our budget.

T. S. Eliot on Animal Farm: they need more public-spirited pigs

Here is a lovely literary tidbit. The poet, T.S. Eliot's widow has released some of his papers, and among them is this letter he wrote concerning George Orwell's dystopian novel, Animal Farm. Apparently, Eliot didn't like the way the allegory depicted how the Stalin-like pig, Napoleon, perverted the communist system set up on the farm. In fact, seeing the allegory between the Trotskylike pig, Snowball, and the Stalin pig, Napoleon, Eliot didn't think that, during World War Two, it was appropriate to be knocking Stalin. And besides the pigs should be ruling the farm.

IT must rate as the literary snub of the 20th century. T S Eliot, one of Britain’s greatest poets, rejected George Orwell’s Animal Farm for publication on the grounds of its unconvincing Trotskyite politics.

Eliot, a former director of Faber and Faber, the publisher, wrote his rejection in a highly critical letter in 1944, one of many private papers made available for the first time by his widow Valerie for a BBC documentary.

When Orwell submitted his novel, an allegory on Stalin’s dictatorship, Eliot praised its “good writing” and “fundamental integrity”.

However, the book’s politics, at a time when Britain was allied with the Soviet Union against Hitler, were another matter.

“We have no conviction that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the current time,” wrote Eliot, adding that he thought its “view, which I take to be generally Trotskyite, is not convincing”.

Eliot wrote: “After all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm – in fact there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed (someone might argue) was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.”

Isn't that just precious - the communist system would be more successful if you just had better pigs. Eliot seemed to think that it was fine for the pigs to be running the farm and nothing wrong inherently with the system, just that those particular pigs were not public-minded enough. Nothing wrong with the system, just those particular leaders.

What a great story - literary critics must be delighted.

What's wrong with Israel's electoral system

Periodically when Israel holds an election and a prime minister emerges, as Benjamin Netanyahu did yesterday, I marvel at their system and am thankful once again for our electoral system. With all its flaws, the two-party system produces presidents who represent their party's views and representatives who represent their constituents. In Israel, people vote for the party, not the representative. The party which controls the Knesset chooses the prime minister. But there are so many small parties which can exert extraordinary leverage as the prime minister tries to put together a majority. Even those who long for a viable third party in America must cringe at seeing prime ministers having to kowtow to some fringe party that has 2% of the representatives in the Knesset.

Bernard Lewis describes the weaknesses of Israel's electoral system. Yes, they're the only functioning democracy in the Middle East and that democracy has survived through major wars and a constant state of hostilities since its founding. But they sure came up with a doozy of a system.

This system of voting by lists is the source of many of the difficulties which plague Israeli public life. In the English-speaking countries -- the oldest and most stable democracies -- voting is by constituencies. The founders of the state of Israel preferred the Weimar model -- hardly an auspicious choice. Voting by lists of this kind has several harmful consequences. First, it gives undue power to relatively minor groups. They can play a crucial role in the formation and survival of coalitions. This is not a healthy way to form or end governments, or to formulate and conduct policies. It is surely significant that of all the parliaments elected since the establishment of the state, only one survived to the end of the four-year term provided by the law. All the others were broken up by internal disputes within the coalitions.

A significant disadvantage of the present system is that there is no direct relationship between the elected members and the electors. In the Anglo-American system, every member is directly answerable to the people of the place he represents. They watch their member's actions, and vote accordingly in the next election.

In the Israeli system, the member is only responsible to the party leadership or, worse still, to the party bureaucracy. His success or failure in the election depends less on the will of the electorate than on the place assigned to him in the party list. This is not a healthy system, and it can only encourage the corruption about which so many Israelis complain today. The Knesset would improve dramatically in quality and experience if its members, including the members of the government, were obliged to fight and win their own election and re-election by the electorate.

Since these small splinter parties have a stranglehold on the nation's politics, reforms that would diminish their power are unlikely. They have, in effect, a fringe veto over the nation.

It's enough to, yet again, give thanks to the system created by our Founders. They might have purported to despise parties and decried the emergence of a party system, but somehow they devised a system of representation that keeps our members of Congress connected to their constituents, even though critics like Jonathan Chait might not like it, and prevents little splinter parties from determining the fate of the nation's politics.

Tax problems for another Obama nominee

So Kathleen Sebelius had to amend her tax returns and pay over $7,000 in back taxes. Her predicament gives more substance to the humorists who joked that President Obama was going to raise more revenue and increase tax-paying compliance through his cabinet appointees.

But after the chuckles or eye-rolling that greet the story of yet another nominee who made a mistake on her taxes, there doesn't seem to be much to the story.

Health and Human Services nominee Kathleen Sebelius has paid back taxes and interest of more than $7,800 stemming from "unintentional errors" revealed during her accountant's review of recent tax returns.

The White House on Tuesday released a letter Sebelius sent to the Senate Finance Committee, detailing how she lacked proper paperwork in accounting for some charitable donations and business expenses. The Kansas governor also mistakenly claimed a mortgage interest deduction on a house she had already sold.

It's not clear whether Governor Sebelius and her husband had prepared their original taxes themselves or had someone do it for them. These do seem like errors that many people might have turn up if they were audited.

What is clear is that intelligent, public-minded people can legitimately make all sorts of errors on their taxes. Perhaps the Senate Finance Committee, after they finish with her nomination and running all the major banks in America, might lend their minds to how to simplify the tax code so that honest people don't end up finding out that they made mistakes and not pay what they should.

Aspiring cabinet nominees will learn that they must hire CPAs to do their taxes. At least then, if there is a mistake, they'll have someone to blame. Think of it as our CPA Full Employment Act.