Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Birthdays, and Dinosaurs, and Slavery, Oh My!

Recently, the New York City public school system put out guidelines to providers of test materials to the district. The guidelines included a list of naughty words that should not be included in the materials, so as not to stress out, offend, or cause boo-boos to the children of the city, who are mainly made of glass it would seem. Among the no good, very bad words were “birthday”, “dinosaur”, “Halloween”, and references to junk food, swimming pools, and computers.


This, dear friends, is unarguably a good thing. Take, for example, birthdays. Did you know that some people don’t celebrate birthdays? And since they don’t celebrate them, they would obviously be emotionally distressed to consider that other people do. Tsk, tsk. Likewise, Halloween might evoke paganism, and everyone knows school children are vehemently and actively opposed to such talk, ever since the Great Pagan and Gradeschooler War of nineteen aught seven.


Swimming pools and computers, you would imagine, are banned because some people don’t have one or both of these things, and might therefore forget what two plus two equals when presented with the horrible reality that some people do.


Now yes, I know that computers are actually IN many classrooms. But that;s different. Because,

And it’s not just naughty, religiousy, class-warfarey, and birthday .. er .. ey words that are verboten get the frowny face. It’s scary words too, like “slavery”, “terrorism”, “space aliens” and Lady Gaga (but I repeat myself). All in the interest of protecting virgin minds from seeing words on tests they see every day in life and, indeed, the normal course of their classrooms.


Some say this list goes too far. Well I say it doesn’t go too far enough. Consequently (consequences are scary) Therefore, I propose the addition of a few more words to the list that shall not be named. But let’s name it anyway. Presenting: The Protecting Our Children From Seeing Things Written Down Or Printed That Might Remind Them Of Stuff That They Don’t Do, Don’t Have, Don’t Like, or Wouldn’t Want To Be Chased By While In A Jeep With Jeff Goldblum List, Part Deux (some people aren’t French) … Part Two.


1. ADDITION: This word should never be on a test. Rich people sometimes build “additions” to their houses, which is very traumatic information for children who live in normal houses, apartments, town-homes, or hot air balloons. I mean seriously, why do you hate poor people?


2. DIVISION: Why divide when you can bring together? Can’t we all just get along?


3. CHAIR: What if a child lost a loved one to the electric chair? Or what if a child has an irrational fear of chairs? What? IT HAPPENS. I’m working with a therapist though, and the other day I very nearly confronted a stool (baby steps).


4. PEN or PENCIL: What do you think of when you think of a pen? Wait, I just realized I can’t hear you. What do I think of when I think of a pen? I think of a pen. Which reminds me of a stylus. Which reminds me I don’t have a Tablet device. Which reminds me that I’m nearly 40 and taking tests with schoolchildren. SO STOP REMINDING ME OF THAT!


5. PEOPLE’S NAMES: Some people aren’t named those names, and, well, that’s just chaos man.


6. GRAND FUNK RAILROAD: “The seventies are over, old man. Take your mood ring and go home!” [Legal argument courtesy Dana Gould.]


7. LAPTOP: Might make people think of strippers, and that’s just not right. They’re kids for pete’s sake. What is wrong with you people??


8. FUNERAL: Don’t you know some people don’t celebrate funerals? DID YOU LEARN NOTHING FROM THE “BIRTHDAY” INCIDENT??


9. WHALE: “Your momma’s so fat …” I rest my case.


10. TEST: This should be obvious. The whole reason we’re doing this is because tests are stressful, and the idea is not to add extra stress to the already stressful test. So talking about the already stressful test during the already stressful test would be like … stress-ception! Not good!


So there you have it. In “Protecting Our Children From Seeing Things Written Down Or Printed That Might Remind Them Of Stuff That They Don’t Do, Don’t Have, Don’t Like, or Wouldn’t Want To Be Chased By While In A Jeep With Jeff Goldblum List, Part III (there are a few children in New York who aren’t from ancient Rome) .. Part Three, we’ll look at broad concepts that should be stricken from tests, such as video games, anthropomorphized animals, thanking Dr. Pepper, and people who say things like “hey bro, wanna hackey?” (Who should also be stricken from all other public life, incidentally.)


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The Budgetmania Begins

Late last night, the House began voting on the substitute budget amendments to the Ryan budget.  Here is a quick rundown.


Simpson-Bowles


Every single Republican in Washington is committed to doing everything in his or her power to terminate Obamacare, right?  Wrong!


Last night, 16 Republicans from the ‘pale-pastel caucus’ voted for the Simpson-Bowles budget alternative in the form of the Cooper-LaTourette amendment.  This budget fully funds Obamacare. Period.  There would have been more supporters if not for the fact that Heritage Action and other organizations scored against the vote.


Over the next few months, we will hear many self-ingratiating protestations over our conservative choices for Congress, particularly our Senate candidates.  They will claim that we must elect any Republican that they deem to be electable, as the only means of garnering 51 votes to repeal Obamacare through reconciliation.  Anyone who thinks that “just any Republican” would have the courage to seek full repeal through expedited parliamentary measures (especially if the Supreme Court strikes down only part of the law) is not grounded in reality.


As an aside, the Simpson-Bowles budget also raises $1.2 trillion in taxes to feed the voracious bureaucracy, fails to deal with the major drivers of the deficit, cuts the military, and fails to close one agency or abolish a single program.  The amendment was defeated 38-382; 22 Democrats and 16 Republicans voted for it.  The list of Republican supporters is below the fold.**  And no, they’re not all from swing districts.


In addition to the Simpson-Bowles budget, the House held votes on several other proposals.  The final vote on the underlying bill – the Ryan budget – and the RSC alternative will take place later on Thursday.  Here are the roll call results for those budget alternatives:


Obama’s Budget


Mick Malvaney offered an amendment in the form of Obama’s budget proposal to see how many votes it would attract.  Well, it didn’t attract any.  It was defeated 0-414.  What a bunch of cowards.


CBC Budget


The annual Congressional Black Caucus budget, which proposed $595 billion more in spending than Obama and raised $4 trillion in taxes, was defeated 107-314.  Yes, there are that many inviolate kooks in the House.  If only we had 107 unvarnished conservatives on our side in the most conservative districts like they have in the most liberal districts.


Tomorrow, the House will vote on the RSC budget and the Democrat Budget Committee amendment before voting on final passage of the Ryan budget.


Here is one cautionary note about the vote tally on the RSC budget.  While a yay vote on the annual RSC budget is often a good litmus test for where the member is holding, there are some wolves in sheep’s skin that muddle the tally with unprincipled yay votes.  Confident that the budget will ultimately fail to win passage, they cast a yay vote as a means of protecting their identity.  Last year, Democrats exposed these imposters by voting present on the RSC budget.  Fearing that the present votes would give conservatives the low-threshold majority to pass the bill, many of the pale-pastel Republicans changed their yay votes back to nay in order to ensure that Democrats wouldn’t “saddle” them with the RSC budget.  It will be interesting to see what happens this time around.


**GOP yay votes for Simpson-Bowles


Bass, C. (NH-02)


Buerkle (NY-25)


Dent (PA-15)


Dold (IL-10)


Gibson, C. (NY-20)


Johnson, Timothy (IL-15)


LaTourette (OH-14)


Lummis (WY-AL)


Meehan (PA-07)


Petri (WI-06)


Platts (PA-19)


Reed, T. (NY-29)


Shimkus (IL-19)


Simpson, M. (ID-02)


Wolf (VA-10)


Young, D. (AK-AL)


Cross-posted from The Madison Project


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Morning Briefing for March 29, 2012

RedState Morning Briefing
For March 29, 2012Go to www.RedStateMB.com to get
the Morning Briefing every morning at no charge.

There’s a lot to like about Paul Ryan’s budget proposal. It cuts some spending. It flattens the tax code down to just two individual marginal tax rates. It also includes some innovative policies designed to halt the unsustainable growth of health care entitlement spending. However, on balance, the budget is disappointing for fiscal conservatives for two main reasons: It waives the spending restraint that was agreed to in last year’s debt limit deal, and it doesn’t balance the budget until 2040. Broken promises and unbalanced budgets as far as the eye can see are neither good policy nor a good campaign rallying cry.


Last year, an agreement was reached in which Republicans gave President Obama a massive increase in the debt ceiling, in exchange for promised spending cuts that supposedly had “real teeth.” As part of the deal, Congressman Ryan and most Republicans voted to require an annual spending cap and $110 billion in automatic spending cuts for next year – otherwise known as “sequestration” – if the so-called “super-committee” failed to find $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction.


Since the predictable collapse of the super-committee, the House GOP should have been working toward a budget proposal that allows for the sequester to take place for the coming year. Such a budget would include the $110 billion in reductions. Ryan’s budget achieves vastly less. It contains $19 billion in discretionary savings and, at most, $53 billion in cuts to mandatory spending — $38 billion short. Thus, it leaves House Republicans breaking the terms of the deal they agreed to just seven months ago.


Please click here for the rest of the post.


Another day, another book I need to buy and hopefully read some day. In the March 21st NYT, Nicholas Kristof reviews a new book: ”The Righteous Mind”. In it, author Jonathan Haidt discusses some original research that investigates some key values held by conservatives and liberals – and how these two groups perceive each other on these values. I have long been interested in why Republicans and Democrats believe as they do, and this type of research on values zeroes in on this question.


A couple of key observations emerge. First, the author points out how both conservatives and liberals adhere to values that are formed around a moral code, but conservatives follow some additional core values that liberals do not.


Please click here for the rest of the post.


Recently, the New York City public school system put out guidelines to providers of test materials to the district. The guidelines included a list of naughty words that should not be included in the materials, so as not to stress out, offend, or cause boo-boos to the children of the city, who are mainly made of glass it would seem. Among the no good, very bad words were “birthday”, “dinosaur”, “Halloween”, and references to junk food, swimming pools, and computers.


This, dear friends, is unarguably a good thing. Take, for example, birthdays. Did you know that some people don’t celebrate birthdays? And since they don’t celebrate them, they would obviously be emotionally distressed to consider that other people do. Tsk, tsk. Likewise, Halloween might evoke paganism, and everyone knows school children are vehemently and actively opposed to such talk, ever since the Great Pagan and Gradeschooler War of nineteen aught seven.


Swimming pools and computers, you would imagine, are banned because some people don’t have one or both of these things, and might therefore forget what two plus two equals when presented with the horrible reality that some people do.


Now yes, I know that computers are actually IN many classrooms. But that is different. Because.


Please click here for the rest of the post.


Union thugs protesting outside the homes of their targets has become a weapon more and more unions have added to their already-large arsenal. Now that the State of Georgia may become the first state to outlaw the offensive tactic, oddly enough, unions are getting support from an unlikely source–the Tea Party Patriots.


Last year, when 45,000 union members struck telephone carrier Verizon, IBEW union radicals showed up outside the home of Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam’s House causing a disturbance in McAdam’s neighborhood (see video below). In another incident, up to 3,000 CWA protesters conducted a mock funeral outside the home of Verizon’s chairman.


Though it shouldn’t be necessary for any legislature to even have to consider the protection of private residences from protesters, these incidents (and others like it) have drawn the attention of Georgia’s legislature, which has moved to pass Senate Bill 469 to prohibit the targeting of individuals at their private residences.


Please click here for the rest of the post.


On September 22, 2008, Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) sounded like a conservative in the below speech. Candidate for President Obama railed against programs “that don’t work” like a “reading program that hasn’t improved our children’s reading.” This talk was music to the ears of independent and conservative leaning democratic voters who don’t like government waste.


Please click here for the rest of the post.


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A Word About Charles Fried

Charles Fried has suddenly become a very popular fellow on the Left. The former Reagan Solicitor General and Bill Weld appointee to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court is being touted by the Washington Post’s in-house left-wing activists Greg Sargent and Ezra Klein, as well as ThinkProgress and Media Matters and its frenetic professional tweeters Eric Boehlert and Oliver Willis over Professor Fried’s support for the constitutionality of Obamacare. Dahlia Lithwick went further, using Prof. Fried’s prediction of an 8-1 decision as evidence that “[t]he conservative legal elites don’t believe in the merits of this challenge”. It’s not surprising that these folks are in such a rush to get the cover of a former Reagan lawyer to restore their talking point – now in tatters after a week of serious, sober and probing questioning from the Supreme Court – that only an extremist would think there is any constitutional issue at all with Obamacare. But there are some things they’re not telling you about Charles Fried.
Now, let me preface this by saying that I have a lot of respect for Prof. Fried. He was my constitutional law professor and probably the best teacher I had in law school, a brilliant man who had taught just about every area of law under the sun and was especially talented at bringing together the strands of disparate areas of the law. I read his book about his days as the SG before I started law school, and I respected his willingness – as a guy who is not pro-life – to argue, twice, for overturning Roe v Wade. He was also the faculty adviser for the Law School Republicans, which I headed for a time. Prof. Fried has indeed been, in the past, a longstanding member of the GOP legal establishment; he testified in favor of John Roberts’ Supreme Court confirmation, and in 2006 wrote a NY Times op-ed defending his former deputy, Samuel Alito, as “not a lawless zealot but a careful lawyer with the professionalism to give legally sound but unwelcome advice” and “a person who can tell the difference between the law and his own political predilections.”
But if you think brilliant people can’t be horribly wrong, you have not spent much time studying lawyers and the law. And if you’ve been reading the left-wing activists, you might not have learned that the 76-year-old Prof. Fried has not only been a vigorous defender of Obamacare who famously testified that the federal government could mandate that you buy vegetables and join a gym, he also voted for President Obama and wrote him what amounted to a political love letter last summer, wrote a book in 2010 with his son which he characterized as showing that the Bush Administration’s anti-terrorism policies “broke the law” and were “disgusting and terrible and degrading,” and has been a vociferous critic of the Tea Party.
Prof. Fried’s big, public break with the GOP came in the heat of the last election campaign, when he joined Weld in backing Obama, citing the selection of Sarah Palin as GOP vice presidential candidate. (Fried had published an article blasting race-based affirmative action in the Harvard Law Review when Obama was its president). He has staked out an increasingly strident view of the Commerce Clause in his defense of Obamacare, testifying:
Sen. Durbin: The point raised by Senator Lee – the ‘buy your vegetables, eat your vegetables’ point? I’d like you ask to comment on that because that is the one I’m hearing most often. By people who are saying “Well, if the government can require me to buy health insurance, can it require me to have a membership in a gym, or eat vegetables?” We’ve heard from Professor Dellinger on that point, would you like to comment?
Prof. Fried: Yes. We hear that quite a lot. It was put by Judge Vinson, and I think it was put by Professor Barnett in terms of eating your vegetables, and for reasons I set out in my testimony, that would be a violation of the 5th and the 14th Amendment, to force you to eat something. But to force you to pay for something? I don’t see why not. It may not be a good idea, but I don’t see why it’s unconstitutional.
Oddly, Prof. Fried even testified that if Congress lacked the power to mandate the purchase of insurance, “not only is ObamaCare unconstitutional, but then so is RomneyCare in Massachusetts” – despite the fact that the legal basis for a state-level mandate derives from state police powers rather than the more limited, enumerated powers in Article I of the U.S. Constitution (you can hear his rather tortured reasoning on this point near the end of this video):
Last August, during the debt-deal battle, Prof. Fried went further, penning an op-ed for the Daily Beast entitled, without irony, “Obama Is Too Good For Us,” blasting basically everyone in the GOP (besides Jon Huntsman) and Palin and the Tea Party movement in particular.
It is fair and accurate to describe Prof. Fried as a former Reagan official and former member of the GOP legal establishment. But it is deeply misleading to suggest that he speaks today for some element of mainstream thought on the Right, or to tout his views on Obamacare without presenting to readers his support for Obama, his effective divorce from the modern GOP, and the extreme nature of his views on the government’s ability to make you buy broccoli.
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Daily Links – March 29, 2012

Today is March 29th. On this date in 1992, Bill Clinton admitted to having tried marijuana, but stated that he “didn’t like it, and didn’t inhale, and never tried it again.” He then asked if the host had any cheetos and pondered the odd nature of fingers. Also on this date, in 1918, Walmart founder Sam Walton was born. Walton once said: “There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.” Next time, Mitt, just use the quote. On this date in 1867, British Parliament passed the North American Act, creating the Dominion of Canada, in the hope that someday they could be major exporters of Baldwin brothers. And finally, today is Mule Day. Mule Day, one might have guessed, is “an annual celebration of all things related to mules and is held in Columbia, Tennessee, the ‘Mule Capital’ of the world.” So … there’s that. Consider this an Open Thread.


Our first billboard “The water was on fire in 1669? | Frack Nation
“As you know, one of the most widely spread allegations against fracking is the ‘flaming faucet’ made famous by Josh Fox, whose documentary Gasland claimed fracking made people’s water go on fire.” Note: Only seven more days to pledge funds for the production of the film and grab a producer credit. Click here to kick in.


Obama slams GOP in video love letter to Planned Parenthood | Twitchy
“On the Planned Parenthood Action Fund website, supporters are encouraged to watch the ‘special message’ and to sign a letter thanking the president for ‘standing strong for women’s health.’”


Obama, Menendez Push Economically Painful Anti-Energy Bill | U.S News & World Report
“… if passed, this measure would not reduce fuel prices, and in fact could add to the burden faced at the pump.”


As Goes Wisconsin, so Goes America | Sarah Palin
“Governor Walker has left the far Left unhinged, so he’s had to amass a war chest to fend off the lies and dirty dealings in the capitol; and, thankfully, it’s predicted he’ll survive his recall. But the recall fight that is just as important is Lt. Governor Rebecca Kleefisch’s.”


Today’s Word of the Day comes via Wordsmith.org.
avulse (uh-VUHLS): verb To pull off or tear away.


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