Combs Spouts Off

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Posts Tagged ‘education’

Tragic consequences of the left’s control of education

Posted by Richard on October 22, 2016

Those of us who intelligently embrace the concept of American exceptionalism don’t do so in the “Rah, rah, we’re number one” way that sports fans embrace their team; we do so because the United States is unique among nations because of the nature of its founding. America isn’t based on a shared ethnic or religious or geographic heritage, it’s not based on conquest or assimilation by royal marriages. Instead, it’s based on a set of ideas, the ideas of John Locke and the Enlightenment: the sovereignty of the individual, the natural rights of all human beings, government as the servant of the people and not their master. The Declaration of Independence outlined these ideas and the Constitution was their implementation. As Margaret Thatcher said, “Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.”

For as long as there has been an organized “progressive”/leftist movement in this country, it’s tried to diminish and destroy those ideas and with them American exceptionalism. It has succeeded to a large extent because the left gradually, and in the last couple of generations almost completely, took over education all the way from kindergarten through college. The result today is young people full of ignorance and indoctrination.

Some of the consequences of the left’s current monopoly of education are on display in the depressing results of a recent public opinion survey (emphasis added):

The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation released its first “Annual Report on U.S. Attitudes Towards Socialism” Monday. The survey showed a distinct generation gap regarding beliefs about socialism and communism between older and younger Americans.

For example, 80 percent of baby boomers and 91 percent of elderly Americans believe that communism was and still is a problem in the world today, while just 55 percent of millennials say the same.

Just 37 percent of millennials had a “very unfavorable” view of communism, compared to 57 percent of Americans overall. Close to half (45 percent) of Americans aged 16 to 20 said they would vote for a socialist, and 21 percent would vote for a communist.

When asked their opinion of capitalism, 64 percent of Americans over the age of 65 said they viewed it favorably, compared to just 42 percent of millennials.

The survey also revealed a general lack of historical knowledge, especially among young adults. According to the report, one-third (32 percent) of millennials believed that more people were killed under George W. Bush than under Joseph Stalin.

Let that last statistic sink in for a moment.

Where do you think they got such an insane idea?

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CA school to kids: look at both sides of Holocaust controversy

Posted by Richard on May 6, 2014

I kid you not: Eighth-graders in Rialto, California, were assigned to write an essay regarding the Holocaust. They were given 18-page instructions (!) that referred them to specific online sources they were to use, including a Holocaust-denial website. Their essays were to argue either for or against the claim that the Holocaust was a hoax.

Incredibly, the school district initially defended the assignment and said it had received no complaints from parents, teachers, or administrators. But after the Los Angeles area chapter of the Anti-Defamation League brought the matter to public attention, the school district said it would revise the assignment.

“It is ADL’s general position that an exercise asking students to question whether the Holocaust happened has no academic value; it only gives legitimacy to the hateful and anti-Semitic promoters of Holocaust Denial,” read an email to the school district from ADL Associate Regional Director Matthew Friedman.

The ADL posted a statement, including the quotes from Friedman, on its blog on Monday.

“ADL does not have any evidence that the assignment was given as part of a larger, insidious, agenda,” the blog post read. “Rather, the district seems to have given the assignment with an intent, although misguided, to meet Common Core standards relating to critical learning skills.”

Apparently because of this reference to Common Core standards, PJMedia’s Bryan Preston tried to make this a Common Core issue. I’m no fan of the top-down, one-size-fits-all Common Core standards, but this has nothing to do with them.

As for ADL’s statement regarding an agenda, I see at least some circumstantial evidence of one. We don’t know who is on the district’s CORE committee that created the assignment, but we do know who the superintendent and his spokeswoman are (emphasis added):

Interim Superintendent Mohammad Z. Islam was set to talk with administrators to “assure that any references to the holocaust ‘not occurring’ will be stricken on any current or future Argumentative Research assignments,” a statement from district spokeswoman Syeda Jafri read.

Why, yes, I am profiling.

I’m going to jump to another conclusion, too. I bet if students were told to write an essay defending either creationism or evolution, or arguing for or against anthropogenic global warming, and given sources to use for both sides of each issue, “progressive” parents and teachers would have been picketing noisily in front of the school district offices.

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Public miseducation on 2nd Amendment

Posted by Richard on March 24, 2014

If you have kids in the government schools, you might want to check into what they’re being taught about the Second Amendment. In at least one Illinois school, it’s this:

“This amendment states that people have the right to certain weapons, providing that they register them and they have not been in prison,” the handout says.

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Pueblo school takes kids shooting, making them and society safer

Posted by Richard on March 22, 2014

In a rational world, this story by Katie Pavlich wouldn’t be particularly newsworthy. Unfortunately, in this day and age, it is:

School officials in Pueblo County, Colorado are bucking the anti-gun trend and recently approved a field trip for middle school students to a local shooting range where they learned about gun safety and how to properly handle a firearm. The gun safety and marksman group Project Appleseed, an activity of The Revolutionary War Veterans Association, was brought in to instruct students, all of whom fired at the range with live ammunition. The trip was scheduled shortly after students learned about The Revolutionary War in their classrooms.

“We’ve never been allowed to bring actual real firearms into a school. Until this week. This is a very big deal. We had them touching fire arms, holding them and learning about how to handle them safely,” Appleseed Instructor Elizabeth Blackwood told KRDO.

Here is the money quote from student Jonah Statezny, who went on the trip: “I think everyone should learn how to use a gun but learn how to use it properly, and the precautions you’re supposed to take and how serious a gun really is.”

Jonah is pretty wise for a middle school student.

I certainly hope this sort of field trip will become more common in the future, because it will make both our youth and our society in general safer. A study published in 1995 by the Justice Department’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (PDF) tracked 4000 kids in urban Denver, Pittsburgh, and Rochester, NY, over seven years. Vin Suprynowicz summarized the key findings related to whether and how the kids were introduced to firearms:

— Children who get guns from their parents don’t commit gun crimes (0 percent) while children who get guns illegally are quite likely to do so (21 percent).

— Children who get guns from parents are less likely to commit any kind of street crime (14 percent) than children who have no gun in the house (24 percent) — and are dramatically less likely to do so than children who acquire an illegal gun (74 percent.)

— Children who get guns from parents are less likely to use banned drugs (13 percent) than children who get illegal guns (41 percent.)

— Most strikingly, the study found: “Boys who own legal firearms have much lower rates of delinquency and drug use (than boys who own illegal guns) and are even slightly less delinquent than non-owners of guns.”

This wouldn’t have surprised anyone before the rise of the modern welfare state. It used to be common knowledge that the best way to get kids to act “responsibly” was precisely to give them some “responsibility.” Why would we assume a child taught by his parents to use a gun responsibly wouldn’t also be more responsible in his other behaviors?

“Want to dramatically reduce the chance that your child will commit a gun-related crime or — heaven forbid — go on a shooting spree?” asked the national Libertarian Party in a May 21 news release detailing these study results. “Buy your youngster a gun.”

“Politicians are apparently more interested in demonizing guns than they are in facts,” commented LP national director Steve Dasbach, himself an Indiana government schoolteacher. But “The evidence is in: The simplest way to reduce firearm-related violence among children is to buy them a gun and teach them how to use it responsibly.”

As Katie Pavlich said, “This is the definition of a well rounded, quality education. Bravo Pueblo County.”

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Yes, minimum wage laws destroy jobs

Posted by Richard on February 22, 2014

The left’s cause du jour is income inequality, and the Obama administration wants to address it by increasing the national minimum wage by 40% to $10.10 per hour. The Congressional Budget Office predicts that would eliminate 500,000 jobs. Rick Manning noted that to the left that’s not a bug, it’s a feature (emphasis added):

Politically, the left benefits from another half million people off the employment roles as these new government dependents become welfare voters supporting the very politicians whose policies were directly responsible for their job losses.

At the same time, an estimated 16.5 million people are expected to see some increase in their wages. It can be anticipated that a majority of these people will also credit the Democrats for their largesse.

And the kicker is that by including automatic increases tied to the cost of living, these remaining workers will get a raise each year, regardless of whether their employer can afford to provide it. This process ensures additional job losses, accelerating the destruction of gateway jobs in America.

However, none of this matters. For those who benefit politically from government economic dependency, all that matters is that another half million dependency voters will be created with no political downside.

The inherent unfairness to the high school kid going from fast food restaurant to retailer vainly seeking employment doesn’t matter. For many job seekers, the soul-crushing realization that the above-the-table economy has no place for them destroys their connection to the legitimate free-market system. They will place the blame for this failure on our capitalist system rather than the bastardization of that system coming from craven political calculations of leftists in D.C.

Throwing away the hopes and dreams of half a million people is acceptable collateral damage to those who believe the end of achieving a permanent majority of government dependents is worth any means of attaining it.

The idea that mandating a higher starting wage eliminates entry-level jobs, which seems obvious to anyone who understands supply and demand, is disputed by various studies — that is, studies by left-wing academics (often union-funded) who manipulate their methodology to obtain the result they want. Of course, there are other studies with opposite findings — and in fairness, it may be that some of those, too, were manipulated.

The trouble with all such studies is that they invariably compare data either across states with different minimums or across time, before and after a minimum wage increase. Thus they’re comparing minimum wage level A to minimum wage level B. Such comparisons are confounded by factors such as cost of living differences across states or across time, changes in the economy (economic expansion or recession) across time, etc. And a minimum wage mandate has no significant effect if it’s below the market-clearing wage for unskilled, entry-level workers at the time.

Mark J. Perry thought a better comparison would be between places that do mandate a minimum wage and those that don’t. So where do you have to look to find a $0.00 minimum wage — some third-world country? Nope. Western Europe will do.

It turns out that nine Western European nations, including Germany and the Scandinavian countries, have no minimum wage. Their average (mean) and median unemployment rate is about half that of the nine that do mandate a minimum wage (emphasis in original):

Bottom Line: The nine countries in Western Europe with a minimum wage of $0.00 per hour, which most economists and even the New York Times argued in 1987 is the “right” wage, are apparently doing much better economically than the nine countries that have minimum wage laws legislation that makes it unlawful to employ workers whose hourly productivity is below some minimum level arbitrarily dictated by government officials.  (Thanks to Don Boudreaux for making that clarification.)

Those concerned about income inequality would do well to focus their attention on the failures of our educational system, as suggested by Nathan Smith in the December 2012 issue of The Freeman (emphasis added):

The State education system is centrally planned and run by committees, so choice and competition are lost from the system. Stagnation is therefore inevitable. Where market forces prevail, productivity improvement is normal. … But productive innovation is difficult and competition is the best school in which to learn it. State education plays hooky from that school, so it fails to learn.

Poor public schools are a major bottleneck holding back the entire U.S. economy. The recent increase in inequality has been driven not by capital but by labor income, as Saez and Piketty stress. This reflects sharply rising demand for certain kinds of skilled, educated workers, combined with little supply response. The public schools and universities are unable and/or unwilling to train the kinds of people the market wants. Eric Brynjolffson argues in his book Race Against the Machine that workers are unable to keep up with new technology. Brynjolffson illustrates his point with the chart shown below:

20121207_SmithEducationgraph

The fact that wages of high school graduates have fallen is a painful remark about how much the market values what the public schools produce.

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Males, but not men

Posted by Richard on July 12, 2013

In the last few years, a lot of people have been expressing concern and/or making urgent recommendations about the rearing of children in general and boys in particular. See, for example, this, this, thisthis, this, this, and this. The statistics regarding boys and young men that some of these sources cite are disturbing. And the problem is more wide-ranging and fundamental than the growing educational achievement gap (boys receive three-quarters of all Ds and Fs and are barely over 40% of college graduates).

For real human examples of the consequences of not properly rearing boys, Daniel J. Flynn says to look no further than the Zimmerman trial. As everyone awaits the jury’s verdict, Flynn has already reached his (emphasis added):

They don’t make men like they used to. One can consult a Danish study that shows plummeting testosterone levels for scientific confirmation of this. Or, one could more easily turn on any cable news network’s wall-to-wall coverage of the Zimmerman-Martin case, a tragedy involving two males fumbling in the dark on how to be men.

Whatever the protagonists may be guilty of they are surely innocent of being men.

Zimmerman’s screams and Trayvon slamming Zimmerman’s head into the concrete weren’t the acts of men. A man is neither a woman nor an animal. The proper response to an assault by a 158-pound teenager isn’t to scream for help or grab for a gun. It is to punch back or better yet subdue and issue a spanking. And a sucker punch, the repeated hitting of a downed opponent, and the bashing of a skull against the concrete doesn’t pass muster with the Marquess of Queensberry. Perhaps the “No Holds Barred Fighting” dojo that Zimmerman had signed up for would approve.

Their households lacked strong male role models; their society, even more so. Four in ten American kids enter the world without their father married to their mother. When schoolboys begin to exhibit traits natural to their sex, the energetic fellows earn the wrath of detention and Ritalin. Any game that highlights contact — from dodgeball to football — comes under attack. Primetime television celebrates the fop and makes a buffoon out of fathers (see Simpson, Homer; Everybody Loves, Raymond). Jobs relying on the physical characteristics favored in males have been outsourced to robots and foreigners. When a pundit asked “Are Men Necessary?” a few years back it reflected the scarcity rather than the superfluity of the genuine article.

Civilizing men out of existence has come at great cost to civilization. Instead of men, we get feminine imitations lacking beauty. We get lost boys compensating by becoming barbarians. We get Sanford, Florida, February 26, 2012.

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The cheapest food on the planet

Posted by Richard on July 6, 2012

Here’s something else from Mark J. Perry, the cockeyed optimist of the dismal science:

Relative to our total household spending, Americans have the cheapest food on the planet – only 6.6% of the average household budget goes to food consumed at home.  European countries like Spain, France and Norway spend twice that amount on food as a share of total expenditures, and consumers in countries like Turkey, China and Mexico spend three times as much of their budgets on food as Americans.

Another measure of food affordability, total food expenditures in the U.S. as a share of disposable income (see chart above, USDA data here), shows that food has become more affordable in the U.S. over time.  Spending on food has fallen from more than 25% of the average American’s income in 1933 to only 9.4% in 2010, an all-time low.  Between 1980 and 2010, the share of disposable income spent on food in the U.S. fell from 13.2% to 9.4%, which is equivalent to almost a 4% increase in the average American’s disposable income over the last 30 years.   And a number of countries in the list below spend more on food as a share of household expenditures today than Americans spent on food during the Great Depression.

Americans spend less on food as a share of our household expenditures than consumers anywhere else in the world.

Most goods and services have gotten cheaper, better, or both over time. It’s called progress. I can think of two main exceptions, which keep taking a larger and larger share of the average American’s income. Both are largely under the control of the government, with lots of regulations and subsidies (!): education and health care.

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When straws are outlawed…

Posted by Richard on June 27, 2012

Every time I think I’ve encountered the ultimate example of  “zero tolerance” policies run amok, it later turns out I was mistaken. It’s happened again.

The Supreme Court has refused to hear Mikel v. School Board. That means Andrew Mikel II will continue to have on his record a full year school suspension and a juvenile court sentence to a diversion program for anger management and substance abuse counseling. For shooting spitwads at classmates during lunch period.

Mikel was 14 and an honor student active in Junior ROTC when he committed this heinous act in December, 2010. Spotsylvania High School in Spotsylvania, PA, called it “criminal assault and possession of a weapon,” and referred it to local law enforcement, which initiated juvenile criminal proceedings.

Mikel has been homeschooled since.

The Rutherford Institute fought the case all the way to the Supreme Court (emphasis added):

“There can be no justice in a nation where young people like Andrew Mikel have their futures senselessly derailed by school administrators lacking in both common sense and compassion,” said John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute. “That the Supreme Court refused to hear Andrew’s case is a tragedy in itself, but by failing to intervene, the Court is legitimizing the perverse use of zero tolerance policies by school districts and the criminalization of America’s schoolchildren by teachers, administrators and police.”

Decrying the school’s actions as arbitrary, capricious and an abuse of discretion, attorneys for The Rutherford Institute filed a petition with the Circuit Court of the County of Spotsylvania asking the court to overturn the School Board’s decision. Although the Circuit Court ruled in favor of the school, it did acknowledge that it was “incongruous” that Andrew was suspended for the remainder of the year for spitwads while a student who punched someone in the eye could be suspended for only ten days. 

Ah, but the student who punched someone in the eye wasn’t armed with an illegal weapon — a straw and some hollow plastic “spitwad” pellets.

I have some questions for Spotsylvania school officials, police, and the courts through which this farce proceeded:

  • Is a straw automatically a weapon, or only if it’s “loaded” with a pellet?
  • What if the straw’s “unloaded,” but the student has the “ammo” elsewhere on his person?
  • Is it a worse offense if he’s carrying the straw concealed?
  • What’s going to be declared a weapon next — a rubber band? A spork?

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Government inspectors now control what moms can feed kids

Posted by Richard on February 14, 2012

At the behest of the First Lady, the federal government has been creating lots of new “guidelines” regarding school lunches. But did you know that these “guidelines” apply not just to the lunches that the schools serve, but to the lunches that the parents pack for the kids to bring to school? This shouldn’t be a surprise, since more than a year ago, Michelle Obama declared that “We can’t just leave it up to the parents” what their children eat.

In North Carolina, at least, the “guidelines” are more than just guidelines — there are state inspectors examining lunches from home to ensure compliance. Carolina Journal reports (emphasis added):

RAEFORD — A preschooler at West Hoke Elementary School ate three chicken nuggets for lunch Jan. 30 because a state employee told her the lunch her mother packed was not nutritious.

The girl’s turkey and cheese sandwich, banana, potato chips, and apple juice did not meet U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines, according to the interpretation of the agent who was inspecting all lunch boxes in her More at Four classroom that day.

The Division of Child Development and Early Education at the Department of Health and Human Services requires all lunches served in pre-kindergarten programs — including in-home day care centers — to meet USDA guidelines. That means lunches must consist of one serving of meat, one serving of milk, one serving of grain, and two servings of fruit or vegetables, even if the lunches are brought from home.

“What got me so mad is, number one, don’t tell my kid I’m not packing her lunch box properly,” the girl’s mother told CJ. “I pack her lunchbox according to what she eats. It always consists of a fruit. It never consists of a vegetable. She eats vegetables at home because I have to watch her because she doesn’t really care for vegetables.”When the girl came home with her lunch untouched, her mother wanted to know what she ate instead. Three chicken nuggets, the girl answered. Everything else on her cafeteria tray went to waste.

So, thanks to the government’s school lunch nazi, instead of eating a turkey sandwich and a banana, the kid ate chicken nuggets. But at least what was on her plate conformed to the government “guidelines.”

Rush Limbaugh called the USDA guidelines and enforcement program “Michelle’s ‘No Child’s Behind Left Alone’ program.”

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Sauce for the gander in New Jersey

Posted by Richard on January 6, 2012

About 350 New Jersey school board members are being forced to resign because they haven’t complied with a new law requiring them to undergo a background check:

The background check requirement was passed by the state legislature last year and is the only one of its kind in the country, according to the newspaper.

It requires board members to be measured by the same standards they use in hiring teachers, including undergoing a criminal background investigation.

Same rules for everybody — sounds fair to me. Hey, it’s for the children, right?

It’s a bit excessive and silly, however, that failure to comply with the law can result in jail time.

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Goo-goo-goolsbee, goodbye!

Posted by Richard on June 8, 2011

The funny thing about the resignation of Austan Goolsbee is his sense of timing. He announced it after several days of insisting that last week's terrible economic news was just "a bump in the road" and that the recovery is right on track.

The sad thing about his resignation is that he's going back to teaching his thoroughly discredited neo-Keynesian economics ideas to more young skulls full of mush. 

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Texas educates better than Wisconsin

Posted by Richard on March 7, 2011

Former Enron advisor Paul Krugman and The Economist recently cited shocking statistics regarding the state of education in low-tax states like Texas that don't allow collective bargaining for teachers. Iowahawk found their "factoids" so fraudulent and misleading that he departed from his usual zany satire to set the record straight.

I can't excerpt in a meaningful way — you'll have to go read it. It's really pretty amusing seeing a humble satirist school Krugman and The Economist on the basics of statistical analysis. (Although I suspect that in both cases the problem wasn't ignorance, but a deliberate attempt to manipulate the statistics to promote their agenda.)

The bottom line is that students — and especially minority students — are better off being educated in Texas than Wisconsin. 

I just love seeing some guy from Iowa saying, in effect, "Don't mess with Texas!" 🙂

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Christie: “Let me help you pack”

Posted by Richard on November 16, 2010

The Parsippany-Troy Hills (NJ) Board of Education recently voted to renew Superintendent LeRoy Seitz's contract well ahead of its expiration next summer. The board and Seitz negotiated the deal now so that Seitz, whose base salary is $212,000 ($242,000 total last year), would be exempt for the next five years from the Christie administration's salary cap plan (most local school district funding comes from the state, including chief administrators' pay). 

In addition to a base salary far above the $175,000 cap, an immediate $4,220 raise, and 2% increases each year for five years, Seitz's contract provides for a $5,000 "stipend," a 15% bonus, travel expenses, 24 vacation days, 15 sick days, 3 personal leave days, paid membership in two professional organizations, expenses paid for two conferences per year, a cell phone, and a laptop computer.  

The story of the board meeting and local citizens' angry protestations is a fascinating read. But the money quote, as usual lately in New Jersey stories, came from Gov. Chris Christie (emphasis added): 

The day before the meeting Seitz is quoted in the Daily Record as saying, "Because of the proposed salary caps, I have to look at my future and the financial welfare of my family. I certainly would have options if I didn't feel the compensation in this district, or New Jersey, is appropriate."

The governor reacted to Seitz's veiled threats to leave New Jersey and go to a nearby state where there is no state salary. "I will say in response to Mr. Seitz, 'Let me help you pack.' We have real problems in our state that we have to fix and we don't have the time, nor the money, nor the patience any longer for people who put themselves before our citizens," Christie railed.

(Half a HT to Veronique de Rugy , who quoted the story without linking to it, so I had to track it down myself.)

Here's a must-see video of Gov. Christie addressing a town hall meeting and calling out Seitz by name, demonstrating that he's learned Saul Alinsky's 12th rule for radicals (it must really stick in the craw of leftists to see people like Christie turn their own tactics against them): 


[YouTube link]

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School bans American flag

Posted by Richard on November 13, 2010

This sort of nonsense has been happening in our leftist education establishment for some time, but it seems to be more frequent now that we have a president who bows before foreign leaders, apologizes repeatedly for his country not being more like other nations, and scoffs at those who think America is special:

13-year-old Cody Alicea rides with an American flag on the back of his bike. He says he does this to be patriotic and to honor veterans, like his own grandfather, Robert. He's had the flag on his bike for two months but Monday, was told to take it down. 

A school official at Denair Middle School told Cody some students had been complaining about the flag and it was no longer allowed on school property.

"In this country we're supposed to be free," said Cody. "And I should be able to wave my flag wherever I want to. And they're telling me I can't." Cody had to take the flag off his bike and put it in his backpack, where he kept it all week.

Cody's grandfather says the school was concerned about racial tensions or uprisings because of the flag. He feels if there was really a problem it should have been brought up two months ago, not during Veterans week. And if it was an issue of safety, parents should have been contacted.

The school superintendent backed down after being contacted by KTXL Fox40, assuring the TV station that "he and the school are patriotic." Yeah, right. They just think the way to deal with potential anti-American thuggery is to avoid provoking it. Or maybe apologize to the thugs. 

But Denair residents have already planned a patriotic march from downtown to the school in support of Cody Alicea.

BTW, since the fear of "racial tensions or uprisings" seemed to be a factor in the central California school's flag ban, two questions occur to me: (1) What ethnic group did school officials fear would react violently to an American flag? (2) What ethnic heritage do you suppose the surname Alicea is from?

I'm betting that, ironically, the answer to both questions is the same. 

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Whose money is it?

Posted by Richard on November 5, 2010

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in another important Institute for Justice case, Wynn v. Garriott. I haven't been keeping up with all of IJ's fine work lately and was unfamiliar with this case, which made its way to the Supremes after the 9th Circuit reversed a ruling that the suit was frivolous.

But over at Big Government, Adam B. Schaeffer made it clear why this case is extremely important: 

The 9th Circuit’s reasoning arrogates to the state all property , dissolving the distinction between public and private funds as well as public and private choices. It is a disturbing, dangerous decision.

They assert that tax cuts are the equivalent of government funds, a conclusion possible only if one assumes that all personal income belongs by default to the state rather than to the individual who earned the money. It asserts as well that when taxpayers and parents privately choose to support religious educational organizations, they are in violation of the First Amendment. This reasoning blatantly ignores the logic and plain meaning of the 2002 Zelman decision upholding school vouchers, among others.

Here is a prediction; the court will have their absurd ruling on an Arizona education tax credit program posted on the wall of judicial shame like so many others issued from their Circuit.

But I want more from the Court. This ruling is so awful that I can only pray SCOTUS rules beyond the questionable standing of the plaintiffs and comprehensively dismembers this most egregious 9th Circuit decision.

The Obama administration has weighed in on the right side, according to the WaPo article linked above. But I suspect their motives. Acting Solicitor General Neal K. Katyal (to the apparent surprise of his former boss, Justice Kagan) argued that the taxpayers challenging Arizona's tax credit for private education donations didn't have standing to bring their suit.

I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that the Obama administration fervently hopes this case is decided on the standing issue and not on the merits because a decision on the merits is almost certainly going to go against one of their cherished, bedrock philosophical beliefs: that the government ultimately owns and controls everything.

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