Krauthammer on immigration reform

 Legislative process  No Responses »
Jun 162007
 

Charles Krauthammer has a very sensible article on how to do immigration reform (and in the process, call the bluff of the extremists on both sides of the issue):

He states the problem thusly:

Comprehensive immigration reform is in jeopardy because it is a complex compromise with too many moving parts and too many competing interests. Employers want a guest worker program; unions want to kill it. Reformers want to introduce a point system that preferentially admits skilled and educated immigrants; immigrant groups naturally want to keep the existing family preference system. Liberals want legalization now; conservatives insist on enforcement “triggers” first.

There is only one provision that has unanimous support: stronger border enforcement.  Why not start by passing what everyone says they want?

And his conclusion:

Comprehensive immigration reform has simply too many contentious provisions to command a majority of Congress or the country. We all agree on enforcement, don’t we? So let’s do it. Make it simple. And do it now. Once our borders come visibly under control, everything else will become doable. Including amnesty.

The article: The Jeopardy of Reform

…but acknowledged…

 Bash the Messenger, Schools  1 Response »
Jun 132007
 

Time to pick on the Kalamazoo Gazette and Julie Mack some more.

Bureaucracy or efficiency? Granholm would expand role of intermediate districts; critics say they are a waste.

One reason given for ISDs is that they do things that school districts themselves cannot easily manage. And to some extent, that’s true. It’s hard for smaller school districts to run specialized facilities and hire highly specialized workers who serve only a few students. That doesn’t mean ISDs are the best way to deal with it, though.

A couple of  paragraphs from the article:

Olson, the education analyst for the Mackinac Center, said ISDs are a waste of money and should be scrapped. He said local districts could pick up services such as vocational and special education, but acknowledges a funding mechanism would be necessary.

“We could have an incentive structure that would allow schools to compete for the privilege of educating special-education children,” Olson said.

There is a sneaky put-down of this Olson here.  It’s those two words, “but acknowledges.”  Given what he is quoted as having said, Julie Mack could as well have written “and suggests a funding mechanism.”  Or even more exuberant words, such as “can barely contain his enthusiasm for the possiblilities.”  But instead she makes it sound as though she did a gotcha that put him on the defensive.    It’s a good ploy, if your editor lets you get by with it.

 I mean, it’s as if I tell her I’d like to go on a bicycling vacation in Russia (which is true) and then she goes back to her office and writes, “…but he acknowledges that he will need to travel outside the country to do this.”  Well, duh.   But if she wants to make it sound as though I’m being defensive about some huge flaw that I hadn’t planned on, that’s the propaganda technique to use.

I hereby propose a journalism reform.  News writers should not be allowed to say “but acknowledges.”  Maybe they shouldn’t even be allowed to use the word “but”.   Most of the time “and” would do just as well, and would be more neutral.

Julie Mack’s Consensus on ISVs

 Bash the Messenger, School decentralization  No Responses »
Jun 122007
 

Finally, after years of remarkably good behavior for a Democrat, Jennifer Granholm may be letting her true colors show.

The following headline is from the lead article on the front page of the Kalamazoo Gazette (Sunday June 10, 2007):

Bureaucracy or efficiency? Granholm would expand role of intermediate districts; critics say they are a waste.

That could be the article that launched a thousand blog posts, but let’s start with this paragraph.

There is general consensus that Granholm’s proposal is a move in the right direction. But educators question the idea of mandatory collaboration, saying flexibility is needed.

General consensus? Perhaps there is a lot of support for the general thrust of Granholm’s proposal, but no data were presented to support this assertion. Now I suspect that if you add up all the time that reporter/writer Julie Mack spent talking to people about this issue, you’d find that the vast majority of her time was spent talking to people who support this kind of centralization of schools. Maybe she mistook that for general consensus. (I don’t know that for sure, but I have as much data to support my statement as Julie Mack presented to support hers.)

BTW, back in Mrs. Bredberg’s English class in the 1960s, we learned that Ms. Mack’s propaganda technique is known as the bandwagon ploy.

Would Henry VIII exchange his wives for flush toilets?

 Free markets  No Responses »
Jun 092007
 

I’m a huge fan of private property and free markets, but this is nuts. Unfortunately it’s a kind of nuttiness we see all too often from certain Republican types. It handicaps them. If they don’t understand the limits on what private property and free markets can do for us, they will not be adequately prepared to defend these institutions from the onslaught by the left.

It’s from an article by Steven Landsburg in the June 9 WSJ, titled “A Brief History of Economic Time.

It’s one of those articles that talks about how wonderful life is, given all the modern conveniences we have. It talks about our well-being in purely material terms. I suppose you could say it’s outdoing Karl Marx and doing it on a very superficial level.

Here’s the lead paragraph:

Modern humans first emerged about 100,000 years ago. For the next 99,800 years or so, nothing happened. Well, not quite nothing. There were wars, political intrigue, the invention of agriculture — but none of that stuff had much effect on the quality of people’s lives. Almost everyone lived on the modern equivalent of $400 to $600 a year, just above the subsistence level. True, there were always tiny aristocracies who lived far better, but numerically they were quite insignificant.

Yup, it treats the quality of human life in purely material terms, and says not a word about social relationships. One nice thing about this particular article, though, is that it reductio ab absurdums itself, saving commentators like me the trouble of explaining the nonsense this kind of thinking will lead to if not balanced by other considerations:

The moral is that increases in measured income — even the phenomenal increases of the past two centuries — grossly understate the real improvements in our economic condition. The average middle-class American might have a smaller measured income than the European monarchs of the Middle Ages, but I suspect that Tudor King Henry VIII would have traded half his kingdom for modern plumbing, a lifetime supply of antibiotics and access to the Internet.

Anyone who has read a history book or watched the turf wars at the office knows how important power is to people. Henry Kissinger said power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. George Washington understood that people think of their well-being in comparison to what their neighbors have. Does anyone really think Henry VIII would give up one bit of power? Look at how hard the left resists tax cuts, even though high taxes destroy our economic engine. What matters to the left is their slice of the economic pie in relation to the whole, not how large the whole is. It’s the same with everyone.

Henry VIII might give up a wife in exchange for a new one, or for one who would secure his continued power on the throne through his heirs. Think of all the trouble his power-grabbing caused for himself. He wouldn’t have traded a bit of it for modern conveniences, or even for the conveniences he could have had if he had not been so ambitious.

Lincoln’s spelling mistakes

 Historical  No Responses »
Jun 082007
 

In a Reuters news item, David Alexander makes much of the misspellings in a newly found manuscript by Abraham Lincoln, written after the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863.

“…A misspelling showed the rudimentary education of the 16th U.S. president, who was largely self-taught….”

and

“…Plante said in other writing Lincoln sometimes misspelled the word “literal” and sometimes spelled it correctly….”

Or maybe it’s Trevor Plante, the archivist who found the manuscript, who made much of it.

I wonder, though. Were these misspellings really the mark of a person with little formal education? Or were they pretty much typical of almost anyone at the time?

My impression, probably from reading books like Daniel Boorstin’s, “The Americans: The Colonial Experience” is that spelling took on an increasingly important role in American education throughout the 19th century. Noah Webster’s dictionary and spelling reform attempts helped get it going early in the century. But is it really the case that spelling would be such a big deal already by the 1860s?

I don’t have any manuscript transcripts in my office from that period, but I have some from the 1820s and 1830s. No, the 1830s are not the 1860s, but it’s something to look at. Ellen Whitney’s. In Ellen Whitney’s manuscript transcripts from the Black Hawk war there is a private letter from Lewis Cass dated Nov 30 1832 in which he writes, “I am allways happy to receive…”. Cass had been educated at Phillips Exeter Academy, which I presume was a cut above the log cabins where Lincoln went to school.

There are letters from Zachary Taylor that contain misspellings, but Taylor’s education probably was similar to Lincoln’s, so that doesn’t help much.

So far I haven’t found any misspellings in any of Gen. Winfield Scott’s letters. And there is a long letter from Cass to Scott with nary a spelling error. (I don’t count the occasional dropped letter in a word in a handwritten manuscript as a spelling error.)

On the other hand, other letters from people who presumably had a lesser education are full of spelling errors.

So maybe Plante is right. Maybe by the 1860s an educated person would consider it important to get the spelling right. I still don’t know for sure, but I certainly don’t have evidence to contradict what he said.

Edited formatting, 8-Jun-2007

Bernard Shaw was born yesterday

 Bash the Messenger  No Responses »
Jun 062007
 

Bernard Shaw laments:

“Unfortunately, Fox News is the ratings leader . . . on the cable side of the business, and what Fox puts on the air is not news.”

What Fox does, he said, is “commentary, personal analysis.”

Calling himself “very straitlaced [and] very old-fashioned,” Shaw said: “When anchors are reporting the news, they should report the news and allow the viewers at home to decide what they think about issues.

Retired anchor Shaw laments effects of Fox on his beloved CNN

It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry. People have been complaining about the editorialization of the news for long before FOX news even existed, and for good reason. Why it’s only FOX that provokes these concerns makes one wonder just how oblivious these mainstream news people are.

Here’s a small example of what has been going on for decades and decades. These are all headlines for the same news:

  1. Rice lashes out at Chavez’s closure of popular TV station
  2. Rice Speaks Out on TV Shutdown
  3. Rice Protests Venezuelan TV Closure
  4. Rice Condemns Pulling of Venezuelan TV Station
  5. Rice, Venezuelan foreign minister spar over TV station closure
  6. Condoleezza Rice Concerned About Press Freedoms in Venezuela

If that isn’t personal commentary and editorializing, I don’t know what is. If I were Chavez, I’d prefer the first one. It makes Condoleeza Rice sound like she lost control, suggesting a raving maniac. If I were Condoleeza Rice, I’d prefer one of the others, perhaps the 3rd or 6th, because it makes her sound like a responsible human-rights activist.

It’s a relatively minor thing, but this sort of things has been going on forever. It’s not new with FOX. CNN didn’t get into it by apeing FOX.

Minor edit to clarify an antecedent, 6-Jun-2007

News organization prefers dog-bites-man stories

 Bash the Messenger  No Responses »
Jun 022007
 

Man-bites-dog vs Dog-bites-man. That’s one that the leftwing news media like to trot out to excuse themselves when they’re trying to cover up Democrat scandals or manufacture Republican ones. They need man-bites-dog stories for the front page, they tell us.

So here’s Charlie Gibson of ABC news explaining why he decided to lead with a dog-bites-man story and play down the man-bites-dog one. Jerry Falwell was controversial; therefore his story didn’t deserve coverage:

From the Washington Post, May 17:

“NEW YORK, May 16 — After word arrived Tuesday afternoon that Jerry Falwell had suffered a fatal heart attack, Charlie Gibson was determined not to lead his newscast with the preacher’s death.

“”It lends importance to a figure whose legacy contained a lot of positives and a lot of negatives,” says the ABC anchor, who was once a reporter in Falwell’s home base of Lynchburg, Va. “It venerates the subject to an extent that I didn’t think belonged there. He was a controversial figure.””

The parody page of The Weekly Standard (May 28) gets credit for bringing this item to our attention.

Formatting edited, 6-Jun-2007

Ask someone else

 Bash the Messenger  No Responses »
May 312007
 

Sen. Clinton says “You’ll have to ask someone else.”

Why is that? Does she think a candidate for president should not have opinions on matters of public policy?

“Those weren’t gifts. Whatever I’ve done, I complied with Senate rules at the time. That’s the way every senator operates,” Clinton said. The senator deflected a question about whether she believed the rule, which has since been changed, was good policy.

“Those were the rules. You’ll have to ask somebody else whether that’s good policy,” she said.

Clinton defends private jet travel

That’s a misleading headline, btw. It’s not so much that she accepted private jet flights, as it is who it was who was providing those favors. I see that some newspapers obscured the issue even further, though, by headlining it: “Clinton defends jet travel.” Not a one of them headlined it, “Clinton defends relationship with Vinod Gupta.”

 Posted by at May 31 2007 21:45

They said

 Bash the Messenger  No Responses »
Mar 042007
 

From the Boston Globe, headlined: Russian riot police break up protest against the Kremlin

Police clubbed protesters and dragged them into waiting buses yesterday in response to a defiant demonstration against the Kremlin in the heart of President Vladimir Putin’s hometown.

Several thousand members of liberal and leftist groups chanted “Shame!” as they marched down St. Petersburg’s main avenue to protest what they said was Russia’s rollback from democracy. The demonstration, called the March of Those Who Disagree, was a rare gathering of the country’s often fractious opposition.

It was at least the third time police have moved in to break up an anti-Kremlin protest in recent months.

“They said,” there has been a rollback from democracy? How come that rates a “they said”? There wasn’t a “they said” for the phrase, “fractious opposition.” There wasn’t a “they said” for the word “defiant.” So how come “rollback from democracy” gets that tag? Does Putin deny that he’s rolling back democracy?

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