Cruising the Web

President Obama pretends that he would like the free-trade agreements passed by Congress. They've been hanging around for 2 1/2 years. But all he does is mouth platitudes. We don't see him putting any effort into getting the agreements through Congress. The Republicans would support the agreements. It's the Democrats who are blocking them because of their fealty to the labor unions. They don't care that the agreements could add thousands of jobs to the economy. The labor unions will always trump the country's interests for the Democrats.

This dialogue between Jake Tapper and Jay Carney is just wonderful. Tapper is starting to sound like a right-wing terrorist. How dare he press the press secretary on what President Obama is doing on jobs?

TAPPER: Well, what is the president doing? We know that he went to a -- -- he went to fundraisers last night. What's he doing today?

CARNEY: Jake, that is --

TAPPER: What is he doing --

CARNEY: The president -- as the president has worked --

TAPPER: We hear him hectoring Congress about all the stuff that needs to be done to help create jobs --

CARNEY: That's right. And Congress --

TAPPER: -- and then he flew off to Chicago. What is he doing today?

CARNEY: The president is having meetings with his senior staff. The president has called on Congress to move quickly on things that have bipartisan support and are in Congress's lap, the trade --

TAPPER: The same stuff he was doing a couple months ago, calling on Congress to pass things.

Read the rest. Tapper just nails Carney that Obama does a lot of calling on Congress but nothing really for all that he claims that he's focused like a laser on creating jobs. Finally, Carney is forced to admit that "the White House doesn't create jobs." Let's remember that when Obama tries to take credit for any growth in employment. Oh, wait. He's already done that.

Ace reminds us of how just back in April Joe Biden was predicting that "we're going to be creating somewhere between 100[,000] and 200,000 jobs next month, I predict." And he notes the switch how when they're talking about jobs being created it's the President who gets credit; when they're talking about jobs not being created, it's all up to Congress.

Just hold on. Some of the redistricting maps that have been drawn may get redrawn if the state's legislatures change hands in 2012.

This could probably be a regular feature: Obama's energy policy kills jobs.

The Washington Post's Charles Lane takes the Democrats to task for all their ugly rhetorical excess calling the Republicans terrorists. he compares it to "Obama-is-Hitler" posters at rallies in 2009. The difference is that whatever posters that appeared were being held by anonymous individuals. The Republicans are terrorists line is being used by Democratic politicians and members of the media. I do like Lane's calling out Tom Friedman for labeling the tea party as the "Hezbollah faction" of the Republican Party. Meanwhile, Friedman also argues that we should not demonize actual Mideast radicals because they are

“change agents who are seen as legitimate and rooted in their own cultures.”

“They may not be America’s cup of tea,” Friedman instructed. “But we need to know about them, and understand where our interests converge — not just demonize them all.”

As Lane writes,

Shouldn’t progressives extend the Tea Party that same courtesy, given that they are at least, you know, Americans?

Nope. It's typical of liberals to show more deference to foreign opponents who despise us and want to harm us and our allies than their actual American political opponents.

Ace of Spades does a splendid job of answering Stanley Greenberg's supposedly brilliant poll analysis to show that the American people like liberal policies when they're asked about them in isolation. Apparently, it's just Democrats that they don't like. As Ace points out, asking people in isolation if they like all sorts of great-sounding things is all well and good, but you have to look at the tradeoffs for adopting those policies. Once people realize how much Democratic policies would cost, they're not so interested in them.

Consider this analogy: Ask me if I'd like a very top-line sportscar. I'd say yes. Ask me if I'd like to do 0 to 60 in under 4 seconds. Yes again. Ask me if I'd like road-gripping $3,000 racing tires. Yes, I do. Ask me if I'd like that turbo charged. Yup.

Okay, I said yes to all of those things. So, if I want all of those things, why do I not own a Ferarri, or a Corvette?

Answer: Because you didn't ask me if I'd be willing to pay $150,000 or at least $70,000 for them. You didn't ask me about all elements of the bargain at once -- including price.

Because no car dealer is actually offering me these things for free. He's offering me a car in exchange for $70,000 or $150,000, and I may wish to keep that money for other purposes. (In fact, I might not even have that money at all.)

So to just ask this laundry list of "Do you want...?" is as absurd as the conclusion that every man in the country must own a Corvette or Mustang or refurbished Jaguar Mk. II simply because he agreed, in the abstract, that the things you were talking about sounded nice.

They did sound nice. I genuinely want those things. But I don't have the money, and if I did, I'd spend that money on other things which I want more.

Of course, an understanding of tradeoffs is basic economics, a concept that liberals seem to have trouble with.

Charles Krauthammer lays out his proposals for a grand bargain for the super-duper debt committee. Basically, they can build on what the Bowles-Simpson Commission already laid out. There were some good ideas in there even though President Obama ignored the report of the commission that he himself had created. Perhaps the new committee can revisit those proposals.
Stephen Moore also thinks that such tax reforms might be the only chance the government has to institute a policy that would lead to greater job growth.


Michelle Malkin takes Matt Damon to school. One more example why we shouldn't pay attention to Hollywood stars when it comes to public policy.

Jay Cost explains why there will be no primary challenge to Barack Obama. And then he explains why the left won't abandon Obama.

A quirk in the way that the Massachusetts lottery was established allowed people who were willing to invest big would have much greater odds of winning. This is reminiscent how Voltaire and some associates realized that a French lottery to send Paris municipal bonds was promising more money in awards than the cost of the tickets being sold. They put together a syndicate to buy the tickets and Voltaire alone won over a million francs which helped set him up for life. That is why Ambrose Bierce write,"Lottery: A tax on people who are bad at math."

Diversity is great except when it comes to doing homework

In my county, "reformers" want to institute a new homework policy that would mandate that teachers give students up to five days to hand in late assignment with the penalty for being late capped at only 10%. Students should also be allowed to take retests and have their higher score used in their grade. And they want to cut back on the amount of homework and how much it counts.

And why is there a need for a countywide policy for how teachers use homework in their classes? It just seems so unfair that different teachers have different policies.

Administrators have justified the need for changing grading practices by pointing to how inconsistently grades are handed out now.

For instance, teachers of the same subject at a school might have different policies on late assignments, how much to count retests and whether to issue extra credit.

Once again, we see the tendency to write a blanket rule instead of letting teachers use their own discretion. And we see the lack of trust in administrators to administer their own schools.

Having diversity is all well and good unless it's on homework policy. For example, for some subjects it might be easy to write a new test. I know that a math teacher at my school regularly offers retests. He claims that it doesn't take much time to take the same questions and insert new numbers into them. However, it takes me several hours to write a test. Since I teach Advanced Placement subjects, I give the students lots of practice with the type of multiple choice questions they'll face on the A.P. exam. It takes a lot of time to write decent multiple choice questions with good disguisers that don't make the right answer too obvious, but that test a student's mastery of the point I'm testing. There is no way I could put together two tests for each unit. Students either study and do well, or they pay the consequences. Hopefully, they'll learn the lesson that "luck" favors the prepared mind.

That's my testing philosophy, but I recognize that other teachers find a different policy fits their material and teaching style. But it just doesn't seem fair to these reformers that some teachers have different approaches.

What lunacy! For the ten thousandth time, I'm so glad to be teaching at a charter school where our administration has more respect for the teachers that they've hired. Their approach is to hire dedicated, smart people and then let them do their jobs. Good things will follow. It might be different in different classes, but children will also learn that not everything in life will be the same. Learning to adapt is also an important skill. Having to adapt to different homework policies is not such a big deal in the scheme of things.

The pedagogy of cheating

With all the news about teachers cheating on their students' test, one Philadelphia teacher has decided to go public with how and why she helped her students cheat on the test.

“I wanted them to succeed, because I believe their continued failure on these terrible tests crushes their spirit,” the unidentified teacher told the Notebook.org, a Philadelphia Public School site that serves as an independent voice for parents, educators and students. The teacher says she regularly provided assistance including definitions to unfamiliar words, comments on writing samples during tests, and says that she even discussed reading passages that they didn’t understand.

“They’d have a hard time, and I’d break it down for them,” she said she did it in response to receiving intense pressure from administrators to raise scores at her former school.

In a city made up of 43.2 percent Blacks and with the possibility of schools being shut down and teachers losing their jobs, she says cheating was “widespread” and “constant” amongst almost all of her students who were “poor and African-American.”

“Math teachers were sitting down in the seat next to the children, with a pencil, actually working out problems with them. I saw that many times,” she said.

So fear of consequences for the students who might fail, she considers that it was just fine to help poor and minority students out on the tests. What she doesn't seem to fathom is that the tests are just a diagnostic to figure out if students are learning. If she helps them cheat and get promoted when they haven't mastered math and reading whom is she really helping? It's clear that her real concern is helping the teachers that might lose jobs if failing schools get shut down.

We're seeing more and more stories of teacher cheating scandals in major cities such as Washington, D.C., Atlanta, and Philadelphia. The information was out there because the same machines that read the bubble sheets can also detect erasures and whether there was an inordinate amount of wrong-to-right erasures. These data were available to school leaders in each of these locations, but the school officials seemed to have ignored it until the media started to go public with the story. USA Today had been dogged in pursuing these tales. Here is their story about cheating in Washington schools. Sadly some of the schools that were most touted by Michelle Rhee and other observers for their purported remarkable improvement in test scores were some of the schools with the most suspicious numbers of erasures.

Just this week the results of the 2011 DC tests came out. Performance in the regular public schools was basically flat. The school district touts its improved test security. The Washington Post's main focus in covering the scores was to note that those schools suspected of cheating now, under stricter test security, saw score decline.

That's an important story to note, but there is an equally important story. While the regular public school students were flat, the charter schools are showing steady improvement. And some of the greatest improvement was in schools where great majorities of the students are on free and reduced lunch. They're strongly out-performing the neighboring regular public schools.

There are some interesting comparisons when you get down to the individual school level. Students at Achievement Preparatory Academy PCS in Ward 8, where 87 percent of students are on free or reduced lunch, scored 87 percent proficient in Math and 75 percent in reading. Compare this to Ward 3 schools Murch (86 percent proficient in math and reading), Eaton (73 percent proficient in math and 79 percent proficient in reading), and Stoddert (83 percent proficient in math and 78 percent proficient in reading.)

Similarly, students at Thurgood Marshall Academy (75 percent proficient in Math and 67 percent proficient in reading) and KIPP DC College Prep (92 percent proficient in math and 78 percent proficient in reading), both in Ward 8, outperformed Wilson Senior High School in Ward 3 (52 percent proficient in math, 65 percent proficient in reading.)

At the elementary level Achievement Prep Academy had the highest proficiency in math (86.92 percent) and Two Rivers had the highest proficiency in reading (77.94 percent)

Right now, around 40% of Washington, DC's students attend public charter schools. Charters are working with a wide range of students and many of them have student bodies that largely minority students on free and reduced lunch. And they're achieving great things with those students. They're not taking the attitude of that Philadelphia teacher who thinks that students who are poor and minority should be helped to cheat on exams. Instead they're buckling down and doing the hard, tiring work of actually teaching their students. They're spending long hours with those students. There are no easy, magic lessons to help these children. Other schools should be studying what works at these schools instead of simply cheating to try to emulate those test scores.

Their students are learning another important lesson. Achieving anything worthwhile demands constant effort. Compare that to the lesson or our Philadelphia teacher where her students were taught to give up if something was hard and just cheat.

(Full disclosure: my daughter teaches middle school math at one of those charter schools that saw impressive improvement in student math scores. I know how hard she works. Her students learned fractions instead of cheating.)

Cruising the Web

If you need an update on the silliness underlying the FAA extension bill, here is a quickie explanation. As usual, the Senate Democrats didn't need to do what they had to do and so decided to blame it all on the Republicans and politics. And of course, sucking up to the unions is behind the whole thing. The House passed an extension to fund the FAA through mid-September and all the Senate had to do was pass that extension, but they just didn't get around to it.

Check out this map and the links to stories of where local governments have either shut down children's lemonade stands or required children to get city permits for their stands. The nanny state now is protecting us from the children along with preventing the kids from getting some small business experience. (h/t Iain Murray at NRO)

Paul Gigot explains how the whole debt-ceiling showdown demonstrates why, of the two houses, it's more important to control the House.

Find out where the smelliest block in New York City is. We were just in that neighborhood a few weeks ago. We can testify.

Allahpundit exposes the projection of Martin Bashir. So right.

Why trying to learn clear writing in college is like trying to learn sobriety in a bar.

James Taranto takes on the new theme bubbling up among some liberals to blame Obama's poor performance on the debt-ceiling debate and other issues when he's coming up against the GOP House on the racism of his Republican opponents.

Ross Douhat examines how the liberals are threatening their own priorities by fencing off the entitlements. It's just too tough to cater to all those interest groups simultaneously in a universe of limited money. What a shame.

In honor of HBO renewing Bill Maher's show for a 10th season, John Hawkins revisits the 10 most obnoxious Bill Maher quotes.

Fred Barnes feels Nancy Pelosi's pain. She just doesn't enjoy being in a climate of spending cuts instead of out-of-control federal spending. None of the Democrats do. That's why they're so extreme in their anti-Republican rhetoric. The Democrats just don't understand that we can't live with a government that keeps increasing its spending.

What made the whole debt-ceiling debate so new was the Republicans' insistence that there should be dollar-for-dollar cuts in spending for every dollar of the debt ceiling increased. Prior to now, politicians would grouse about raising the debt ceiling and, depending on whether their party controlled Congress, would vote for or against it. It was often just raised regularly along with passing a budget. But now we have the new Boehner rule. Senator Portman recommends that the Boehner rule about matching cuts with debt-limit increases be made a permanent rule with all spending on the table. Now there's an issue for the Republicans to tout since we know that the Democrats would not support this.

Myron Magnet takes on the cultural "broken windows" of major retail outlets celebrating drugs, violence, and stupidity in how they're merchandising their goods to kids wanting to emulate street thugs. Why do we need a slogan "SMART MAY HAVE THE BRAINS, BUT STUPID HAS THE BALLS."?

Jonah Goldberg notes the difficulty Obama will have making a new first impression with the American voters.

Just as Obama's administration came out with new fuel efficiency standards, we learn that no one seems to want GM's Chevy Volt. They sold a grand total of 125 Volts last month. ALl that government help and no one seems to want the car.

Ben Smith says that the internet and 24-news cycle has made this the "Golden Age of Oppo." The media used to do a lot of this and be the sole outlet for campaign operatives peddling dirt on their opponents. Now there is a host of sites on both sides that can put news out there and then watch it seep into the mainstream. Then the people can decide if they care.

Cruising the Web

Finally, some MSM refutation of the idea that it was the tea party freshmen who forced the Republicans to their position in the debt ceiling negotiations. Only half of the Republicans who ended up last week opposing Boehner's bill were members of the House Tea Party Caucus. The great majority of the GOP freshmen supported Boehner's bill. But the media and Democrats are so enamored of the idea that the tea partiers are "terrorists" holding the Republican Party and U.S. budget hostage that they didn't bother to check their facts.

Michael Barone and the National Journal have looked at who was more likely to vote for the final deal and they determined that those who voted for were more likely to be from swing districts while those from safe districts were more likely to oppose the bill. The pattern was more notable for Democrats than for Republicans. In other words, those with a safe district were more likely to vote no if they came from Democratic safe districts. Barone points out that this trend is the reverse of the votes on TARP when those from swing districts were more likely to oppose the bill.

It's pretty sad for Obama when the New Jersey Star Ledger wishes that Obama had the guts of their governor.

If you haven't read this behind-the-scenes story of the mission to get Bin Laden, you should head on over and read it.

Walter Williams has an easy method to help people get more jobs: end the restrictive licensing provisions that are barriers for people to form their own businesses providing services such as braiding hair, providing interior decorating services, driving jitneys, or providing tour services. Why should you need a government-issued license and six years of education and experience to be an interior director or take hundreds of hours of expensive classes in order to provide eyebrow threading? As Williams writes, these are just laws put up by those already in business to keep others out of the business.

Another politician has to resign because of sending out pictures of his crotch. What is it with these guys? He is blaming his political enemies for setting him up. Hmmm. Wouldn't it be easy to thwart such enemies if you just don't send out pictures of your crotch? Job accomplished.

So Obama is going to pivot, yet again for the 16th time, to jobs. What does he have to offer that he didn't have before when he had control of both houses of Congress? All he will have is rhetoric to demonize Republicans for not going along with his proposals that didn't work when he implemented them for the three years? Think of how many jobs he could instantly create if he allowed more drilling in the Gulf and the construction of the Canadian pipeline to the Gulf of Mexico.

The GOP is ready to fight back against such accusations that they're the do-nothing Congress on jobs with ads like this.

At least the GOP has learned that they need to block Obama from making any recess appointments. Since we no longer have to worry about 18th century travel woes in getting a Congress back to the capital to vote, isn't it about time that we scrapped once and for all the recess-appointment privileges of the President?

Timothy Carney has some more examples of government exercising petty tyranny including how DC residents are getting tickets for mixing recyclable goods with their regular trash. You can get fined over $100 if you mix in cans with your trash instead of recycling them or if you put out something too large to be picked up by the garbage truck. It used to be that they just left the couch you put out for the garbage. Now you get a fine. Even if someone else put the couch out by your trash. And don't even try to volunteer to clear away debris to help out tornado victims without a government permit.

Let Harry Reid tend his own garden

Harry Reid feels very sorry for himself. He's just had to spend so much darn time in Washington arguing with those GOP terrorists that he can't make it back to his home in Nevada.

“I have a home in Nevada that I haven't seen in months,” a tired-looking Reid said. “My pomegranate trees are, I’m told, are blossoming and have some pomegranates on them. I have some fig trees and roses and things that I just haven't seen. So I have constituents that I’m anxious to see, friends I need to visit with, relatives I need to visit with.”

Doesn't your heart bleed for him. George Washington yearning for Mount Vernon has nothing on Harry Reid and his pomegranate trees.

Didn't Harry Reid spend millions of dollars fighting for reelection to make sure that he could spend time in Washington away from his pomegranate trees and rose bushes? Republicans would be quite happy to let Harry Reid follow Voltaire's advice to "cultivate [his] garden."

How the Democrats are selling this deal

John Hinderaker posts the letter that the Senate Democratic Policy & Communications Center is sending out to their members with the talking points about why the debt-ceiling increase deal was a good thing. Their first point that they proudly make is that the Senate won't have to do any stinkin' budget resolution for the next two budget years. They can just "deem" it to have been passed with the aggregate figures in the deal.

The compromise expected to pass today, in effect, “deems” a budget resolution passed for each of the next two fiscal years. This effectively sets the top-line spending levels–the so-called “302(a) allocations–for both FY 2012 and FY 2013. These top-line levels are specified as follows: $1.043 trillion for FY 2012, and $1.047 trillion for FY 2013. These figures represent a reduction of $7 billion and $3 billion, respectively, in budget authority, relative to FY 2011 levels.

Well, that gets them out of a lot of work, doesn't it? No messy details that they can get criticized for later. Of course saving $7 billion or $3 billion from the 2011 baseline is no big shakes. We're still on an unsustainable track.

They then go on to brag that 50% of the cuts will come from spending on "security." That's what they're proud of. So, to summarize: they're happy that they won't have to pass budget resolutions before the election and they're proud of cutting security funding. Great.

When Democrats eschew euphemisms

In the Democratic version of the "New Civility," Democratic congressman Mike Doyle and Vice President Joe Biden can refer to the GOP negotiators as terrorists. (Biden later denied it, but in so denying implied that the GOP were holding a nuclear weapon that they were threatening to detonate.) Chris Matthews can call tea party Republicans terrorists kidnapping a baby. Many journalists adopted the tone of referring to conservatives who opposed various versions of the debt-ceiling deal as unhinged, irrational hostage-takers. Nancy Pelosi can talk of Republicans going to the "dark side."

With all this heated language denigrating conservatives and the tea-partiers, let's not forget that those speaking are of the party whose Secretary of Homeland Security calls acts of terrorism "man-caused disaster." So actual killing people is not terrorism. Fighting to lower federal spending - now that is the true opportunity to drop the euphemisms and bring out the terrorism label.

Cruising the Web

Bret Stephens finds an alphabet soup of all the miserable aspects of Obama's presidency.

For all the liberal heartache over the supposed steep cuts in the debt-limit deal, remember that it is only cutting for 2012 .7 percent of all government spending. If that slight amount of cuts is enough to cause liberals to freak out, imagine how difficult it will be to get any true cuts.

A friend has been sending me articles about online dating. Here is a more comprehensive article about the whole world of online dating and the various options out there. Just so you know, here are two of the more predicative questions.

Rudder [a founder of OK Cupid] has discovered, for example, that the answer to the question “Do you like the taste of beer?” is more predictive than any other of whether you’re willing to have sex on a first date. (That is, people on OK Cupid who have answered yes to one are likely to have answered yes to the other.) OK Cupid has also analyzed couples who have met on the site and have since left it. Of the 34,620 couples the site has analyzed, the casual first-date question whose shared answer was most likely to signal a shot at longevity (beyond the purview of OK Cupid, anyway) was “Do you like horror movies?”

Newt Gingrich should have known that, if he jumped into the presidential race, all his personal peccadilloes would become fodder for journalists and everyone else. And he should have known that he has a lot of peccadilloes to feed the maw. Now there is a new story out there, written by Marvin Olasky, a Christian conservative and no liberal, with the accusation that Bill Clinton knew about Gingrich's affair with the woman who became his third wife, Callista Bisek, during the 1998 impeachment imbroglio and used that information to pressure Gingrich to cool it in his criticism of Clinton. Who knows if it is true, but its mere reminder of Gingrich's tawdry behavior back then is enough to remind us all of why he should not be the GOP nominee.

Look for Pennsylvania to be the next state with a major teacher cheating scandal. What is amazing is that state officials had the evidence of suspicious erasure results back in 2009 but did little to track down the culprits except for commission more studies.

Two Yale professors, Jacob S. Hacker and Oona A. Hathaway, argue that we are having a crisis of democracy. Congress can't get things done so the President steps in to assert more executive powers through regulation or executive orders. By the way, where has that whole debate over the War Powers Act gone? The only thing Congress can seem to do when they're stuck is hand the power over to some other group like the Base Closing commission or the debt-ceiling super committee or to make things automatic like pay raises so they don't have to sully their political hopes by voting on the hard stuff.

Fouad Ajami dissects the fundamental pessimism in Obama's view of America.

ESPN looks for the originator of the high five.

Marco Rubio and the right metaphor

Conservatives have been enjoying this video of Senator Rubio's speech on the Senate floor on Saturday explaining how we got to the position we are today. He was then interrupted by Senator Kerry doing his typical Kerryesque explanation of how it doesn't matter that Democratic leaders such as Senators Obama, Biden, and Reid all voted against raising the debt ceiling previously because hey, their votes didn't matter back then so it wasn't significant if they voted irresponsibly. It's a great exchange and so revealing of the way Kerry thinks. This is in accord with the research that Byron York did finding that Democratic leaders such as Majority Leader Harry Reid and Whip Dick Durbin voted against raising the debt ceiling when Republicans controlled the Senate, but in favor of increases when the Democrats controlled the Senate. Mitch McConnell's voting pattern is not as partisan. For Democrats, partisan votes on the increasing the debt ceiling are perfectly okay as long as their votes don't matter. That's typical of their concept on responsible leadership.

But that wasn't the main point of Rubio's speech. Rubio wanted to make the much more important point that our goal shouldn't be simply to have a compromise to get past this current debt-ceiling compromise; instead we need to have a plan to address the fiscal catastrophe that we're facing.

“Compromise is fantastic.

“I would love nothing more than to leave this building tomorrow night having said the republic still works. I was able to stand shoulder to shoulder with people from states far from mine with views different from mine but who love their country so much that we were able to come together and save it when it faced this catastrophe.

“I would love nothing more than compromise. But I would say to you that compromise that's not a solution is a waste of time.

“If my house was on fire, I can't compromise about which part of the house I'm going to save. You save the whole house or it will all burn down.

“We either save this country or we do not.

“And to save it, we must seek solutions.”

He's absolutely right. This deal is just the start. We need to work to solve our situation where, as Rubio laid out earlier in his speech, we're borrowing about 40 cents for every dollar we spend.

His burning house metaphor reminds me of two other famous fire metaphors in American history. In 1831 in his inaugural issue of The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison wrote an editorial to declare that he would fight to end slavery immediately and would accept no compromise with the evil that was slavery.

I am aware, that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire, to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; —but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—AND I WILL BE HEARD.

Now that is determination not to compromise. And like the historical metaphor that John Podhoretz used below, it took Garrison over 30 years to accomplish his goals of abolition. The fight was long, but we needed those who were regarded as extremists back then such as Garrison in order to move the fight forward just as we need those to the right of Boehner who are keeping us focused on the ultimate goal.

And here the Democratic hero with another burning house metaphor. This is FDR in a December, 1940 press conference explaining his Lend-Lease program.

Well, let me give you an illustration: Suppose my neighbor's home catches fire, and I have a length of garden hose four or five hundred feet away. If he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help him to put out his fire. Now, what do I do? I don't say to him before that operation, "Neighbor, my garden hose cost me $15; you have to pay me $15 for it." What is the transaction that goes on? I don't want $15--I want my garden hose back after the fire is over. All right. If it goes through the fire all right, intact, without any damage to it, he gives it back to me and thanks me very much for the use of it. But suppose it gets smashed up--holes in it--during the fire; we don't have to have too much formality about it, but I say to him, "I was glad to lend you that hose; I see I can't use it any more, it's all smashed up." He says, "How many feet of it were there?" I tell him, "There were 150 feet of it." He says, "All right, I will replace it." Now, if I get a nice garden hose back, I am in pretty good shape.

In other words, if you lend certain munitions and get the munitions back at the end of the war, if they are intact haven't been hurt--you are all right; if they have been damaged or have deteriorated or have been lost completely, it seems to me you come out pretty well if you have them replaced by the fellow to whom you have lent them.

This is regarded as one of the most successful metaphors in presidential rhetoric to explain in clear language why we couldn't worry about Great Britain paying us right away for the military equipment we were going to be lending them because their house was burning down and we didn't have time to dicker about the price.

I think Marco Rubio's metaphor is the right image for the situation we're in. We don't need a compromise just for the sake of a sweet photo op. We need one that will go towards changing the trajectory we're on.

The house is burning. Let's save it.

Cruising the Web

Time Magazine has six reasons why the European debt crisis will go on...and on...

Watch this video by the Israeli Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Danny Ayalon to explain why the term of "occupied territories" is misleading. It's a clear, entertaining, and honest explanation and counters all the deceptions that we've heard for so long.

Andrew Ferguson writes his usual sparkling prose as he takes on the fatuous claims to a New Civility by Obama's head of the NEH, Jim Leach.

Illinois's high tax policies drive another company to move out to another state. This time it's the company that runs the Chicago Board of Trade.

Joel Kotkin explains how Los Angeles lost its economic mojo. And don't bet on it returning.

Either he's ignorant or just a liar. Dick Durbin went on TV today and said that the reason that the Democrats haven't passed a budget in over 800 days is because they couldn't get 60 votes. But as the GOP is happy to remind him, Senate rules protect budget votes from a filibuster. They could have passed a budget with 51 votes. And until January 2010, they had 60 votes. You think a Senate leader like Dick Durbin doesn't know these basic facts. I'm just a high school teacher, but I knew that budgets can't be filibustered. That's why parties like to attach some of their desired policies that they don't think can get through otherwise to budget bills.

Stupid is as stupid does

Missouri has passed a law to ban teachers from friending students on Facebook and other social networks.

According to Missouri Senate Bill 54 that goes into effect on August 28, any social networking — not just Facebook — is prohibited between teachers and students. It’s all part of an effort to “more clearly define teacher-student boundaries.” However, KSPR reports that it’s only direct social media contact that’s prohibited; teachers are allowed to create Facebook Pages where all students have direct access to the teacher in a more public setting.

Inappropriate contact between students and teachers is at the root of the legislation. Senate Bill 54 is designed to protect children from sexual misconduct by teachers, compelling school districts to adopt written policies between teachers and students on electronic media, social networking and other forms of communication.

This is another example of a school district or states adopting a sledge hammer to kill a fly. The problem is not communication on Facebook between students and teachers. The problem is that there are creepy adults out there who are acting inappropriately with children. There are laws and school policies against that sort of thing. In a logical world, if a student was being harassed by a teacher, an administrator could investigate and take appropriate action even firing the teacher. But with teacher unions and tenure laws, that's not so easy anymore. We've all heard stories about the New York rubber rooms where teachers that the school district fears shouldn't be in classrooms are kept on the payroll doing nothing. Here's a similar story from Wisconsin on how the union protects a creepy guy who shouldn't be in the classroom.

A high school teacher in Cedarburg was fired for viewing porn at school while working on his school district computer, in violation of the high school’s computer use policy which strictly prohibited “accessing, sending or displaying offensive messages, pictures or child pornography.” (Among other images, Robert Zellner had retained photographs of female students of the district wearing bikinis while on a school-sponsored trip to Hawaii that Zellner chaperoned.) Zellner was a union activist, so the teachers’ union dug in and resisted the personnel change, filing suit in federal court and taking the matter all the way to the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. The union eventually lost, but in its nearly three-year effort to keep fired teacher Robert Zellner from returning to Cedarburg High School, the school district spent roughly $267,000 on legal expenses — enough to pay the annual salary and pre-Walker benefits of four teachers. (links in the original)

Sure, there could be some teachers whom would be unjustly accused by a student. I would hope that administrators would be sensitive to such accusations, but I'm also sensitive to the concerns of an administrator who must juggle the needs of the students versus those of the teacher. I would prefer to trust the administrator just as I would prefer to trust their judgment instead of having these zero tolerance rules that require kids to be suspended for bringing an Alka Seltzer or plastic knife to school. School districts don't trust the administrators to have the flexibility to deal with such cases so they make a blanket rule that covers everything from the most serious infractions to more innocent events.

And that is just what this Missouri law is - an over-broad law to address the inability of the state to trust the judgment of its school administrators.

As the article points out, there are going to be problems policing the policy.

However, we wonder how this will be policed. Will the state be allowed access to Facebook accounts, personal computers or Internet service provider records to see who’s befriending teachers or students? Inappropriate relationships will be hard to detect, especially since teachers and students engaged in such relationships would probably be concealing their communications, electronic or otherwise.

Does such a law pass the teacher's rights of association? I have no idea.

What I do know is that I'm a Facebook friend with quite a few of my students. I don't ever initiate the friendship, but if they're comfortable with letting me see their posts, I appreciate the opportunity to get to know them a bit better. Quite a few of the teachers at my school are friends with their students. Some of us have fun communicating about non-school subjects. A lot of this generation would much prefer to communicate via Facebook rather than email. We've found it a handy way to share Quiz Bowl information and trivia with our team. Student post links to stories or sites they've found and we have some fun talking about them. And it's also a good lesson for the students to be careful about what they're posting so that they don't put up something that would come back to bite them later. If they have at the back of their minds that several of their teachers can see what they post, they're less likely to put up something that they don't want a future employer to see.

Why shut off this element of teacher-student communication just because the state is afraid of a few bad actors? Are they going to ban email between students and teachers next? That could also lead to creepy and inappropriate interactions. Why draw the line at social networking?

Instead of writing such a stupid law, give some credit to your school administrators to decide if something untoward is going or has gone on. Give credit to your teachers to not be idiots with their students. If they're going to be idiots, it will show up on other ways than just Facebook. The problem isn't Facebook, it's the teachers who are already violating school policies about inappropriate behavior with students. Address that, not Facebook and stop making stupid blanket rules. Gosh, it's one more reason why I think my stars to be teaching at a charter school where we can trust the judgment of both the teachers and the administrators.

What passes for intelligent argument by the teachers unions

On Saturday, thousands of teachers rallied at the White House to protest testing. Matt Damon even came in to give them his support. Jon Stewart sent a taped message. So you know their cause must be righteous.

Their rallying cry: “No testing, no testing, 1-2-3.” They're objecting to No Child Left Behind and the trend towards high-stakes testing in schools. So we get the upside down cry of this poster.

“Teach Me, Don’t Just Test Me.”

This represents the utopian vision of students that these sorts of teachers believe in. We can just provide entertaining inputs and the little darlings will happily soak it up. They don't need to be tested to see if they actually mastered the material. Heavens no!

The testing regimen that we've had the past decade has revealed what we all expected was true. Too many kids are going through school and not learning. They come out barely able to master what we expect students to know. But these teachers simply want to quarrel with that result and blame it on the tests, not the lack of learning that is occurring.

Sonya Romero, 36, said she flew from Albuquerque because “No Child Left Behind is demoralizing New Mexico.” The state has a population that is poorer and more diverse than much of the country, she explained. By now, the vast majority of the schools statewide have been classified as “failing” under the federal law, which sets increasingly high pass rates for state tests each year.

Under that “failing” label, Romero’s school has cut back time for physical education and recess, and she has been required to use a new reading curriculum, she said. The regimen “stifles imagination,” she said.

yes, imagination is wonderful. But if the kids can't read, it's time to focus on the basics. If the students aren't learning, perhaps they need a new reading curriculum. That should be her focus, not traveling across the country to complain about having to give her students test.

Yes, I will agree that there are definite problems with No Child Left Behind. States were given the latitude to design their own testing formats and, at least in my state, designed poor tests that don't really evaluate mastery of the material when it comes to the subject tests in history that I'm familiar with. I'd prefer to have a national respected test like the NAEP tests used across the board so that we'd have a true standard of comparison and states couldn't play around with pass rates to make their schools look better.

And of course we need better test security to block the sort of cheating that went on in Atlanta. But deciding that the answer is to get rid of the tests is to throw the baby out with the bath water. Instead, we need accountability to find out what students know and then teachers who can design lessons to address those holes rather than to whine about the fact of their students' ignorance being exposed to the rest of the world.

The Washington Post has no patience with the convoluted reasoning of the teachers' union that blames testing for stories like the Atlanta cheating scandal.

Teachers who admitted to cheating said they were under enormous pressure to raise test scores. That’s prompted some to see the tests, a requirement of No Child Left Behind, as the real culprit. What did you expect, goes this thinking, when you put such high stakes — a school’s evaluation, federal funding, teacher compensation, even jobs — on test scores? That’s a little like suggesting an end to keeping score in baseball because it’s an incentive to use steroids, or eliminating the SAT because some students will try to cheat.

What’s most troubling about this argument is that it demeans the integrity and honor of America’s educators, the vast majority of whom don’t believe that the pressure to perform is a license to cheat. There’s no better method of gauging knowledge and skill than testing; to suggest doing away with this vital tool because of a few bad apples is mad. That’s not to suggest that there isn’t a need for some changes. Attention should be paid to how tests are administered and how suspicious test activity is investigated. Efforts to create useful tests and to move from snapshots to measuring student improvement must be accelerated.

Apparently, such logic is too much for the teachers who traveled to DC this weekend and their celebrity supporters like Matt Damon and Jon Stewart.