Thursday, February 4. 2010
Obama’s Chicago enforcer Rahm Emanuel got lots of heat for calling my-way-or-the-highway liberals “f**king retards.” All the criticism was for him using the disparaging word “retards” and none for his frequent use of the adjective. Hmm? Via Instapundit, an Emanuel theme song. That’s the Chicago way, and mine from Brooklyn, and probably yours too.
The peaceable kingdom? Or already filled up with antelope meat? Daily Mail
 The O admin seems determined to quietly undo Clinton's welfare reforms. We have learned over the years that the Dems and the Lefties want all the people on the government plantation that they can collect. That's what "health care" is was all about, but the people saw through it.
It's what most Dem programs are about: everybody a slave to the Massas in Washington, and relying on their "generosity" (see Medicare).
Heather MacDonald now reports in Championing Dependency that New York is experiencing attacks on Clinton's welfare reform. Good essay. One quote:
This double-sided attack on New York’s welfare reform lacks all empirical basis. Since 1995, the city’s welfare rolls have dropped nearly 70 percent, from 1.1 million to 350,000. Rather than increasing, as opponents of welfare reform warned, the child poverty rate in New York City dropped 34 percent during the same period, compared with a 5 percent drop nationwide. In 2008, New York City had the lowest child poverty rate—26.5 percent—and the lowest total poverty rate—18.2 percent—of the country’s eight largest cities.
Work, even at minimum wage, remains the best route out of poverty. When tax credits and medical and housing benefits are included, an average single mother of two with an $8.25-an-hour job in New York City receives a $63,000 annual income. On welfare alone, that same mother would pull in $43,000 a year—a whopping amount for non-work, to be sure, but still less than work provides.
Re Ted Kennedy, via Never Yet Melted:
...Kennedy waxed sentimental about Washington in the early 1960s: “It used to be civilized. The media was on our side. We’d get our work done by one o’clock and by two we were at the White House chasing women. We got the job done, and the reporters focused on the issues. . . . It was civilized."
I visited Venice for a few days many years ago, and do not feel driven to return - it's a giant tourist trap with a pickpocket team on every block - except that I wouldn't mind catching the Venice Regatta in August:
On further thought, I wouldn't mind getting a little more experience with Venetian cooking. All I know about it is Risi e Bisi, which doesn't look like much but which is killer delicious when Mrs. BD makes it.
Here's When I Paint My Masterpiece live with The Band in 1971:
A new documentary, coming out in May. It's about applying to charter schools. Looks good.
The website of the producers has The Education Constitution.
Email from a friend:
One of our institutional equity market strategists reacted to Pres O's proposal to tax banks to recover TARP money. Everyone knows the the gov't is net ahead on its bank investments, but here are the actual returns (costs or benefits to taxpayers) as calculated by my colleague:
Bank bailouts: + 16.9 billion profit to date
AIG bailout: - $30.4 billion projected loss
Automaker bailout: - $30.5 billion projected loss
Homeowner bailouts: - $50 billion projected subsidy
Looks to me that the logic leads us to tax homeowners. Ooooooooops! I just realized that he is proposing that, too.
Who says there's nothing amusing in the newspapers anymore?
(From yesterday's MarketWatch)
 Justice Department seeking "retarded" or "mentally ill" lawyers.
Art as manifesto: The Bauhaus group
Our blog pal Mr. Free Market signs off. I guess his site has not been corporate enough. We shall miss him.
TREES WILL NOT BECOME UNSTOPPABLE KILLING MACHINES, ADMIT CLIMATE SCIENTISTS
College life: The Hamilton follies cont'd
Burlington VT: Our experiment in socialism
Kudlow vs. Schumer?
Blue Crab:
Longtime readers know that I have a brother with Down Syndrome.
My brother is considerably more decent, honorable, polite and has a better vocabulary than Mr. Emanuel.
By a very large margin.
Why does the US MSM ignore all of the climategates? Perhaps they do not wish to confuse us.
Powerline: Obama Attacks Churches, Charities and Home Values
Is the O's dishonesty harmful? Reason
Obama Budget Includes $4 Billion Bonanza for ACORN
Our friend Roger begins:
Last week, Howard Zinn, reigning anti-American historian of America, died of a heart attack. He was 87. Zinn’s gift to posterity was A People’s History of the United States, a book that has done more than any other textbook to instill hatred and contempt of America in the nation’s teachers and their students. No wonder it was such a runaway success. First published in 1980, it has gone on to sell some 2 million copies. And its brief against America was memorialized in “The People Speak” a 4-part mini-series that aired in December.
The outpouring of sentimental pap that Zinn’s passing occasioned was as large as it was nauseating. Typical was Bob Herbert’s emetic eulogy in The New York Times...
Americans do care about the "greater good." Right now, that means caring about the federal debt.
Wednesday, February 3. 2010
From Front Page's Class War in the Classroom:
“We must encourage students to access the antagonist class positions of texts in order to demonstrate how the oppositional voices contained in them identify evidence of class struggle,” Christopher Craig writes in the December 2009 issue of Radical Teacher, “a socialist, feminist and anti-racist journal on the theory and practice of teaching.” “Through this critical process, we can show how the values and interests of the dominant class are not universal but repressive, intended to keep the power relations between the ruling and working class one-sided.”
“For most of us, learning to read texts this way helps us to see through the ruling class ideology that exists in everything from literature to the nightly news.” Craig teaches at Emmanuel College, a Catholic institution of higher learning.
Wow. That's so cool, so advanced, and so deep. And no doubt it's exactly the lesson every $145,000 UAW worker wants his kids to be taught in school...
Thank God for teacher's ed. They do it all for the kiddies.
Rohmer died on Jan. 11. From a summary of Rohmer's movies:
Claire's knee—and the consternation it arouses in the diplomat—is a painstakingly constructed symbol of rationalisation gone amok. It gives us something by which to measure the diplomat's drift from reason. It also underlines the odd humour of the "Moral Tales": in Rohmer's world, faces are symmetrical, bodies proportional, and words are perfectly measured. Everyone is beautiful, and everything is in its right place. Everything, that is, except the intentions of his heroes.
The trailer for Claire's Knee (1970) - in French - sorry, but you can get the gist of it:
Thinking creatively about medical insurance. He says:
It was pretty crazy for Congress to decide under McCarran-Ferguson that the insurance business should be balkanized into 50 state markets.
Nowhere is the craziness more severe than in New England, where state insurance pools are tiny and health-insurance and health-care costs are the highest in the nation. Even a medium-sized state, say North Carolina (population 9.2 million), would largely escape this problem.
At Minding the Campus. One quote:
In his first and longest chapter, "The Problem of General Education," Menand takes us through the historical evolution of Columbia University's core curriculum, one that he and most fans of rigorous, highly structured general education take as America's finest model of the genre. But then he goes on to document how his own campus, Harvard, and most other elite universities disdain such a highly specified approach in favor of "distribution requirements" which leave the selection of general education content largely to the student. One senses that Menand favors (or at least approves of) a Columbia-style core curriculum but seems to be resigned to it being an anachronistic outlier: "the problem with general education is that it is perceived as an attempt to impose on general education a mission - call it 'preparation for life' - whose rationale liberal education has traditionally defined itself in opposition to. This is why ....liberal arts faculty want to own general education and to have little to do with it at the same time."
It would apppear that it is from bone fire, a burning of human bones.
At City Journal. One quote:
There remains, however, an astonishingly gaping absence in Galbraith’s worldview. While he is perfectly able to see the defects of businessmen—their inclination to megalomania, greed, hypocrisy, and special pleading—he is quite unable to see the same traits in government bureaucrats. It is as if he has read, and taken to heart, the work of Sinclair Lewis, but never even skimmed the work of Kafka.
From Dennis Prager's What I Said to the Republican Members of Congress:
It is very easy to say, "Vote for us and we will give you, we will give you, we will give you." It is much harder to advocate what is right and to say, "Vote for us, but no, we won't give you" -- even though that is the more moral and the more American position. So you have the far more difficult task.
John Rosemond, who writes books on child rearing, says that the most important vitamin you can give to a child is Vitamin N, his term for the word "No." You have given America Vitamin N.
 FOX News may have Megyn Kelly but check out one of our Maggie's Farm fact-checkers (photo).
The intolerant Left: Tebow and NOW at Hot Air
Hypocritical Repubs
What is the IPCC supposed to be doing?
Related: Global warming is dead
The wine train stimulus scam
Keep an eye on Iran this month
An excess of Ivy League
Legal Insurrection: Here's What Early Draft Of Constitution Said
Insty:
CHANGE! (Or is this Hope! instead?) Estate Tax Repeal Creates Boom for Lawyers. Yay, lawyers!
Read and weep: The new tax proposals
Frank Rich wants to see more violence
Dems worried about 2012
Government medical care: Canadian pol to US for heart surgery
Photo from Theo, of course
Tuesday, February 2. 2010
Down the mall from Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell, a new museum will open next November, the National Museum of American Jewish History. It tells the story of Jews in America, the many contributions from Nieuw Amsterdam to “God Bless America” to today in every walk of life, and the appreciation for the opportunities coming from being freer than elsewhere due to freer markets, speech and observance under the rule of law. It’s the same story for every immigrant group to America.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBmglA-yCCk
Considering a trip to the Dolomites and the Veneto this August, with visits to Venice (not again!), Padua, Verona, Castelrotto (Kastelruth), etc. Apparently the people in the Dolomites do not really think of themselves as Italian (they had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until WW1, and Mussolini Italianized the names).
Found out there are many villages up there in the Dolomites where the people mostly speak Ladin (not to be confused with Ladino). Several million people in the Veneto speak Venetian, too. People in Castelrotto speak German.
Photos below of Castelrotto, which looks more alpine-German or Swiss than Italian. It's the south Tyrol:
An education is like exhibiting good manners. If you pretend to have them, it's the same as having them.
Sippican
The Complete Calvin and Hobbes.
I am sad to say that The Complete Pogo, Vol. 1, has not yet been released. It's a damn shame.
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