Category Archives: Issues

Maybe Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio Could Share A Pair of Crutches

The Wall Street Journal reported late yesterday afternoon, HERE, that Paul Ryan (R-WI) is beginning to articulate his vision for the upcoming Illegal_Immigrants_2“immigration reform” legislation.  So, first Marco Rubio, and now Paul Ryan have shot themselves in their respective feet and disaffected the conservative Republican base by succumbing to the fallacy that legitimizing illegal immigrants will cause a majority of them to vote for Republican candidates once they meet the requirements for a voting citizenship.  What fools these mortals be.

From the article:

Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI), a leading GOP advocate for tackling immigration, confirmed Wednesday that Republicans are looking to give illegal immigrants legal status right away, with the chance for a green card—and citizenship—down the line.

[snip]

First, illegal immigrants would be offered a “probationary” status, allowing them to work while the government tightened border security and interior enforcement.  Officials have explained that this would allow people to work legally while they wait for permanent legal status.  (Officials have explained that this group could revert to illegal status if enforcement benchmarks are not met.)

Mr. Ryan said it would make sure that the Obama administration went ahead with the enforcement provisions.  “We want to make sure that we write a law that he can’t avoid,” Mr. Ryan said.

Yeah, Paul, good luck with that.

The XS1 Computerized Sniper Rifle — When You Only Get One Shot

You got your Smart cars, your smart pet doors, your smart bombs, your smart phones, why not a smart rifle?  From a new article up on Strategy Page, HERE, this excerpt:

The U.S. Army recently bought six XS1 computerized rifles.  These usually go for up to $27,000 each and are expensive because they are sensor equipped and computerized to the extent that over 70 percent of first time users can hit a target over 900 meters distant with the first shot.  For a professional sniper, first shot success averages about 25 percent and 70 percent on the second shot.  Second shots are not always possible as the target tends to duck after the first one.

The XS1 with the bipod, loaded and with the scope, weighs 9.25 kg (20.4 pounds).  It is bolt action with a five round magazine and fires the .338 Lapua Magnum.

For sale to civilians, too, if any of them had twenty-seven grand to put into a hunting rifle.

NC Board Of Dental Examiners vs. FTC: The Details

This is a case which may end up before the Supreme Court.  So, in today’s post to the Volokh Conspiracy, Sasha Volokh takes us into the weeds a bit to explain the intricacies of the case and the legal issues that were before the Fourth Circuit Court and that may be before SCOTUS if they take the case up for review.  The full post can be read HERE, but, spoiler alert, the case is about how North Carolina limits the provision of teeth-whitening services to licensed dentists only, and how this violates US anti-trust law.  In other words, rent-seeking behavior sanctified by the State.  This is a key bit:

First, what is this Board?  The North Carolina State Board of Dental Examiners is, by statute, “the agency of the State for the regulation of the practice of dentistry” in North Carolina.  The board consists of six dentists licensed in North Carolina, one dental hygienist licensed in North Carolina, and one citizen member.  The dentist members serve three-year terms and are elected by North Carolina-licensed dentists.  The dental hygienist member also serves a three-year term and is elected by North Carolina-licensed dental hygienists.  The citizen member serves a  three-year term and is appointed by the governor.

Iraq & Iran want to take on Saudi Arabia in Crude Oil Production

London’s daily Telegraph newspaper is reporting that Iraq, with Iran’s cooperation, plans to greatly increase its current crude oil production over the next six years or so from the current production level of three million barrels per day to nine million or so.

An excerpt from the article, HERE:

Al Shahristani said on Tuesday that Iraq plans to boost its capacity to produce oil to 9m barrels a day (bpd) by the end of the decade as Baghdad rushes to bolster its economy, which is still shattered by war and internal conflict.  Iraq was producing 3m bpd in December, according to the International Energy Agency.

Iraq’s intention to challenge Saudi Arabia’s status as the “swing producer” in the OPEC cartel could see a dramatic fall in oil prices if Baghdad decides to break the group’s quotas and sell more of its crude on the open market.

The Burr / Coburn / Hatch ObamaCare Replacement Plan

Who says the Republicans have no health care proposals!  What follows is the entire text of James Capretta’s article from yesterday in The Weekly Standard:

As Bill Kristol and Jeff Anderson noted earlier today, the introduction by Republican Senators Burr, Coburn, and Hatch of an Obamacare replacement plan is an important milestone in the health care debate.  This is a serious and practical replacement proposal, offered by three prominent legislators.  It could easily serve as the starting point for a legislative effort, perhaps even next year if Republicans regain control of the Senate, to undo Obamacare and replace it with something far better.

This plan is well thought out substantively and politically.  It would cover ten of millions of Americans with private insurance, solve the pre-existing condition problem, inject cost discipline into the marketplace, and begin the process of reforming the nation’s massive health entitlement problems.  And it would do all this without unduly disrupting current insurance arrangements (including employer plans), and without the federal power grab or massive spending and taxes of Obamacare.

The plan would solve the pre-existing problem, which is real but not nearly as widespread as the president would like Americans to believe it is, in a manner that is something like the opposite of the Obamacare approach.  The irony of Obamacare is that it makes insurance less desirable as a product by requiring insurers to sell it to anyone who comes in the door, regardless of their health status.  This means consumers have far less incentive to get coverage when they are healthy because they know they can sign up when they are sick without penalty.  The Obamacare solution is to try to compel enrollment through the individual mandate tax.

The Burr-Coburn-Hatch approach makes insurance attractive by attaching a new and unambiguous right to continuous insurance enrollment: anyone who stays insured will be allowed to move between insurance platforms without facing higher premiums based on their health status. This right, already operative when Americans move between employer groups, is not in place when Americans move from employer plans to the individual market (the 1996 law that smoothed the transition between employer plans was also supposed to improve the situation for transitions from job-based plans to the individual market, but it did not work for a number of reasons). Senators Burr, Coburn, and Hatch propose to clear away the current obstacles and ensure those with continuous insurance can buy a product in the individual market without facing higher premiums based on pre-existing health conditions.

They also understand that granting this right will likely drive up costs in the near term, as some people who have felt compelled to stay in the employer system to keep their insurance would exit for the individual market because of this new protection. To keep costs down, state high risk pools, with additional federal funding, would help stabilize premiums during a transition period.

The Burr-Coburn-Hatch reform also deftly handles the issue of the tax preference for employer coverage.  Proponents of a market-based solution for American health care have long pointed to this tax preference as a major distortion in the marketplace.  And that criticism is of course accurate.  But it is unwise to propose abandoning the tax preference altogether in favor of a universal credit, as Senator McCain did in the 2008 presidential race.  Such a move would be perceived today, as it was in 2008, as disrupting coverage for tens of millions of people who are perfectly satisfied with their existing employer plans.

The three senators have proposed a far more sensible approach this time around.  They would leave the employer tax preference in place, and thus not displace any of the stable employer plans in force today.  The only change would be to put a reasonable upper limit on the tax preference, to encourage employers and workers to select cost effective coverage.

The Senators then provide a refundable tax credit to anyone who works in a small firm or who doesn’t have access to employer coverage at all with incomes between 100 and 300 percent of the federal poverty line.  This ensures that everyone who is uninsured and low income today will have the financial wherewithal to get insurance that, at a minimum, protects them from major medical expenses. With this credit, the Burr-Coburn-Hatch plan can rightfully be called a genuine universal coverage plan, with every American ensured of reasonable access to an insurance plan.

The final key piece of the legislation is Medicaid reform. A major problem of American health care is that Medicaid is not integrated with mainstream insurance for working families. So someone on Medicaid who gets a better paying job often will lose his current insurance and may not get new coverage through his place of work. The Burr-Coburn-Hatch plan would give states much greater flexibility to use Medicaid as a supplement to the federal tax credit for insurance. This would allow lower income households to buy from the same coverage options as middle class households, and thus get the better provider networks that those insurance plans offer and to keep the same insurance as they move into better paying jobs.

Polls continue to show that far more Americans disapprove of Obamacare than approve of it.  But that does not mean Americans want to go back to the pre-Obamacare status quo.  What the public wants is real reform, the kind that will actually solve the problems that have been present for many years in American health care, without all of the big government baggage of Obamacare.  The Burr-Coburn-Hatch plan demonstrates conclusively that such a plan exists and could be passed by Congress under the right political circumstances.  Getting the word out about this realistic plan to save the country from Obamacare might be the most important thing conservatives could do in the 2014 election cycle.

The complete text of the Burr/Coburn/Hatch proposal is HERE.  I especially like Section 101.

On Immigration Reform: Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There!

The editors of National Review have nailed it with today’s editorial, titled “Don’t Do It”, and reproduced in its entirety below:Illegal_Immigrants_2

The House Republican leadership has been confronted by devilishly difficult tactical choices over the years.  But what to do on the issue of immigration right now isn’t one of them.  The correct course is easy and eminently achievable: Do nothing.

The old Reagan catchphrase calling for non-action — don’t just do something, stand there — has never been more apt.  Yet the House leadership is about to roll out a set of immigration principles reportedly including an amnesty for illegal aliens, and presumably will follow up with a push to pass them through the House.  This is legislative strategy as unforced error.

The basic tactical reason not to act now is that the last thing the party needs is a brutal intramural fight when it has been dealt a winning hand on Obamacare.  It is not as though the public is clamoring for an immigration bill.  Only 3 percent cited immigration as the biggest problem facing the country in a Gallup poll earlier this month.  In the key contests that will decide partisan control of the Senate, Republican candidates are much more likely to be helped than hurt by refusing to sign onto any form of amnesty.

The other prudential reason not to act is that President Obama obviously can’t be trusted.  Any immigration deal would have to trade enhanced enforcement for an amnesty.  Since the president refuses to enforce key provisions of his own health-care law, let alone provisions of immigration law he finds uncongenial, he obviously can’t be relied on to follow up on his end of any bargain.  It is hard to fathom how any Republican can possibly believe otherwise.

Finally, the path set out by the House leadership will — if the early reports are to be believed — represent bad policy.  Unfortunately, many Republicans have convinced themselves that the key question is whether or not illegal immigrants eventually get citizenship, and insist that only a law that creates a “path to citizenship” is amnesty.  They are wrong on both counts.  The central question is whether illegal immigrants are allowed to work and live here legally.  As soon as they are, that’s the amnesty.  For most of these immigrants, eventual citizenship will be an afterthought.

The leadership is also likely to sign on to increased levels of legal immigration.  In this it reflects the obsession of the business establishment, for which the answer to the dire employment crisis among low-skilled workers is always to import more low-skilled workers.  We salute Senator Jeff Sessions for blowing the whistle on this folly and relentlessly making the pro-worker case against ever-higher levels of immigration.

We believe in incremental immigration reform, but pace the Republican House leadership, that doesn’t mean simply chopping up the Gang of Eight bill and passing its constituent parts piecemeal.  It means insisting on real enforcement, including an E-Verify system to confirm the legal status of workers and an exit-entry system to track foreign visitors, that is up and running before anything else passes.  Then there can be the grand bargain of the sort outlined by Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies in our latest issue, trading an amnesty for lower levels of legal immigration.

For now, nothing worth having can pass the Democratic Senate or get signed into law by President Obama.  Rank-and-file conservatives in the House should firmly reject the course that their leadership wants to take, and convince it to reconsider.  We hope, in short, that they make a clarion call for inaction.

Cuba: Let’s Preserve It As A Museum To A Failed Political Ideology

With China gradually and grudgingly adopting capitalist reforms, there are really only two countries left that are firmly in the grip of Communism.  One, of course, is Dennis Rodman’s favorite getaway, and the other is Cuba.  Who knows what will become of North Korea, but we’ll always have Cuba.  I hope.  Because any time someone begins to extol the virtues of the communist system, we can always inject a dose of reality by pointing to the island nation to our south that actually “walks the walk”, and to the deprivations its citizenry is subject to.

Michael J. Totten lends a hand with that with his two recent dispatches from the stronghold of the Castro brothers, the first of which is HERE.  A tidbit:

Police officers pull over cars and search the trunk for meat, lobsters, and shrimp.  They also search passenger bags on city busses in Havana.  Dissident blogger Yoani Sanchez wrote about it sarcastically in her book, Havana Real.  “Buses are stopped in the middle of the street and bags inspected to see if we are carrying some cheese, a lobster, or some dangerous shrimp hidden among our personal belongings.”  If they find a side of beef in the trunk, so I’m told, you’ll go to prison for five years if you tell the police where you got it and ten years if you don’t.

No one is allowed to have lobsters in Cuba.  You can’t buy them in stores, and they sure as hell aren’t available on anyone’s ration card.  They’re strictly reserved for tourist restaurants owned by the state.  Kids will sometimes pull them out of the ocean and sell them on the black market, but I was warned in no uncertain terms not to buy one.

Maybe Donald Trump could buy the whole she-bang and turn it into a tourist destination, like Disney World, except in this case it could be a giant “Museum To A Failed Political Ideology”.

The second of Totten’s dispatches is HERE.

Some UNC-CH Athletes Can’t Read, Sun Rises In The East

Mary Willingham, a learning specialist who has worked extensively in the UNC-CH athletics department, has ignited a conflageration with her recent reports on the illiteracy rate among the universities football and basketball players. From the article, HERE, in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Expecting all athletes to handle the high caliber of academic work required at Chapel Hill is about as realistic as expecting her to suit up for a Division I football game, says Ms. Willingham, an instructor in the university’s College of Arts and Sciences.  “It would be like dropping me off on the football field, giving me a jersey, and telling me to just figure it out.”

Dinesh D’Souza, maker of the film “2016: Obama’s America”, arrested today.

GangstaGuvThe Hollywood Reporter, and later Fox News, are reporting the arrest.  From the Hollywood Reporter article, HERE, the lead paragraphs:

Conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza, whose documentary 2016: Obama’s America took a critical look at President Barack Obama and was a surprise hit in 2012, will be arrested in New York on Friday for allegedly violating campaign-finance laws, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.

Federal authorities accuse D’Souza of donating more than is legal to the campaign of Wendy Long, who ran in 2012 for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Hillary Clinton but lost to now-Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand. Long, though, is not mentioned in an indictment obtained by THR on Thursday.

Later reports indicate that D’Souza has been released after pleading not guilty to the charges.

Public School Controversies in Carteret County: First, Teacher Tenure

In case you missed it, the Carteret News-Times is reporting this week on two hot-button education issues.  The first involves changes in North Carolina law related to tenure for teachers in the state system.  From the full article, HERE, this excerpt:

County school officials and teachers are struggling with a new state law that offers a payment if teachers give up their tenure status.

The law requires school systems to offer 25 percent of teachers four-year employment contracts and pay raises in exchange for the teachers giving up their tenure.

It’s part of a new law designed to phase out teacher tenure by 2018. The N.C. Association of Educators, the state’s teacher lobbying group, filed a complaint against the state Dec. 17, claiming the law violates the federal and state constitutions by eliminating basic due process rights of teachers.

School board members across the state are expressing outrage about the new law, including Carteret County Board of Education Chairman Al Hill.

MAC Meeting At Camp LeJeune

MillPondPost_Logo

John Droz has kindly reported on the Military Affairs Commission (MAC) meeting that took place today over in Jacksonville.  There were roughly two dozen in attendence, with about a half-dozen of those being active military (including three retired Generals) and the remainder being from ACT, the Allies for Cherry Point’s Tomorrow.

John spoke for fifteen minutes or so on Torch Energy’s proposed Mill Pond wind turbine farm, with a particular emphasis on the military aspects.  His talk was well received, and he spent another forty-five minutes or so responding to follow-up questions.

At the end of the meeting, the Committee voted to formally request that the NC General Assembly “upgrade” H484 to better address the issues that area residents have come to recognize about wind energy.

The M29/M69 Davy Crockett: Pocket Rocket With A Wallop

And now, for something completely different, the two-minute video below.  Deployed during the early sixties when I was an Army grunt, the M29 was a three-man tripod-mounted recoilless rifle that fired a version of the 50-pound W54 atomic warhead, a 76-lb shell with an 18-ton (NOT kiloton) yield against battlefield targets a mere three miles away.  It was not precisely accurate, and thus was considered to be primarily an anti-personnal and anti-tank weapon since it’s detonation would provide a lethal radiation dose to every enemy soldier within a radius of 500-feet, and have a high fatality rate for enemy soldiers up to one-quarter mile away.  Although it was true that the firing crew could be in jeopardy if the wind was blowing the wrong way, it was deployed in areas that might find it essential as a “weapon of last resort”, such as if and when Soviet tanks suddenly came pouring through the Fulda Gap.

[embedplusvideo height=”315″ width=”420″ editlink=”http://bit.ly/1eTGr1M” standard=”http://www.youtube.com/v/khyZI3RK2lE?fs=1″ vars=”ytid=khyZI3RK2lE&width=420&height=315&start=&stop=&rs=w&hd=0&autoplay=0&react=1&chapters=&notes=” id=”ep9076″ /]

Amazon Begins Collecting NC Sales Tax On February 1st

WSOC-TV in Charlotte is reporting that Amazon will “be required” to collect sales taxes from NC customers beginning February 1st (Hat Tip to the Daily Haymaker).

The question is, why?  It seems unlikely that they were forced to do so by the McCrory administration, so it may be that they have established a warehouse and shipping hub in the state (a “nexus”) that would trigger the applicable conditions under which the SCOTUS has ruled that states may require an online vendor to collect state sales tax.

In any case, bummer.

Duke Energy Prez: We can’t say “no, thanks” to Green Energy

MillPondPost_LogoIn yet another perspective from an industry insider on how dumb green energy initiatives really are, here is Duke Energy President Paul Newton in testimony before the North Carolina Joint Legislative Commission on Energy Policy:

“We essentially can’t say, ‘No thanks,’ ” Newton said. “The price our customers pay for QFs [ qualifying facilities ] coming onto our system is higher than they would otherwise pay for electricity.  QFs represent the highest cost generation on our system.”

As Newton also notes, the underlying problem is PURPA, the 1978 Public Utility Regulatory Policy Act, passed during the Carter administration as a measure intended to reduce our reliance on middle eastern oil suppliers.  PURPA mandates subsidies for renewable energy produced by qualifying facilities, which would, of course, include facilities such as Torch Energy’s proposed Mill Pond wind turbine farm.

Read the whole nauseating thing HERE, reported on by Dan Way via Carolina Journal Online.

George Will on Doubts About Common Core

EndCommonCore_LogoOver this past weekend, I posted John Stossel’s views on Common Core.  Now, via his article yesterday in the Washington Post, conservative columnist George Will weighs in.  An excerpt:

The Common Core represents the ideas of several national organizations (of governors and school officials) about what and how children should learn.  It is the thin end of an enormous wedge.  It is designed to advance in primary and secondary education the general progressive agenda of centralization and uniformity.

Understandably, proponents of the Common Core want its nature and purpose to remain as cloudy as possible for as long as possible.

To read the entire article, click HERE.

Inside A WW2-Vintage German Submarine

On June 4, 1944, two days before the allied landings in France on D-Day and well into her twelth patrol, the German submarine U-505 was captured by a US Navy anti-submarine task force in the area of the western Atlantic that lies just south of the Canary Islands.  The capture of the sub itself was a great coup, made even greater by the fact that it was captured with a functional Enigma machine on board.

From the boat’s Wikipedia entry:

All but one of U-505’s crew were rescued by the Navy task group.  The submarine was towed to Bermuda in secret and her crew was interned at a US prisoner of war camp where they were denied access to International Red Cross visits.  The Navy classified the capture as top secret and prevented its discovery by the Germans.

The sub is now a museum ship in Chicago, and THIS video, from the Travel Channel and less than three minutes in length, gives a brief tour of the boat’s interior.

Give Up The Cows, Buster, Or We Drone You

Property owners whose neighbors do not adequately maintain their CopsAbusePowerfences often find themselves in possession of unwanted livestock.  That might have been what happened when North Dakota cattle rancher Rodney Brossart found six cows that had wandered onto his property.  Then, perhaps in an effort to teach the neighbor a lesson, he refused to return them, triggering a very unfortunate chain of events.

The neighbor called the cops, the cops called SWAT, the SWAT called in a Predator drone from Homeland Security, and Brossart was captured and jailed, along with his three sons.

The full story, notable because it reports on the very first instance of federally-owned drones being used in domestic law enforcement against a United States citizen, is HERE.  [ US News & World Report, via Drudge ]

Wrapping Up the Special Commissioners Meeting of Jan-2nd.

MillPondPost_LogoBelatedly and briefly, my takeaways from the January 2nd Special County Commissioners meeting held at the Civic Center in Morehead City to hear public comments of the proposed permitting moratorium and the Mill Pond wind turbine farm idea:

First, the room was packed and there were about sixty speakers over a three-hour period.  There is a lot of public interest in this issue, particularly within Carteret County.

Second, virtually everyone present favored the adoption of the 60-day moratorium, and the Commissioners recognized that sentiment by adopting it soon after the last speaker left the podium.  Also, although the greenies were well represented by Mark & Penny Hooper along with Robert Scull of the Sierra Club, the speakers (and, I think, the entire crowd) ran about three-to-one in opposition to the Mill Pond wind turbine farm proposal.

Third, Weyerhaeuser remains on board.  Although some of our local political representatives had expressed the optimistic hope that Weyerhaeuser would see the strong anti-Mill Pond opinions as posing a potential problem for the continued sale of their timber products to the wood chip operation at the State Port in Morehead City, I spoke at length with Weyerhaeuser spokesperson Nancy Thompson about this.  She was clear and emphatic on two points:

There have been formal discussions between Torch Energy and Weyerhaeuser regarding a possible lease on the property around Mill Pond, but no long-term lease contracts have been entered into or are contemplated for the short term.  Moreover, Weyerhaeuser would not consider it appropriate to enter into such a contract until after Torch Energy had jumped through all the pre-requisite hoops, including the ones mandated by the NC Utilities Commission and the issuance of appropriate permits by Carteret County and the town of Newport.

Like any corporation, Weyerhaeuser is in business to make profits.  They see the Torch wind turbine farm as an opportunity to gain additional revenue from a large tract of their timberland without having to relinquish the usual revenue arising from their wood products, as only a few trees would have to be removed in order to accommodate the wind turbines.  They remain, therefore, receptive.

Stay tuned for further developments, as both Newport and Carteret County are presently considering the enactment of stringent permitting ordinances.

And lastly, some additional resources that readers may find useful:

  • The CITIZEN’S CASE, the text of remarks made by John Droz before the NC Military Affairs Commission on December 19th.
  • The BULLET POINTS, compiled by John Droz.
  • The full fifteen-page HANDOUT, which lays out in some detail the problems with the Mill Pond project.
  • The website for AWED, the Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions.

John Stossel on Common Core

EndCommonCore_LogoOn January 1, 2014, the well-known libertarian and Fox News commentator wrote this about Common Core:

Most Americans don’t even know what that is.  But they should.  It’s the government’s plan to try to bring “the same standard”  to every government-run school.

This may sound good.  Often, states dumb down tests to try to “leave no child behind.”  How can government evaluate teachers and reward successful schools if there isn’t a single national standard?

But when the federal government imposes a single teaching plan on 15,000 school districts across the country, that’s even more central planning, and central planning rarely works.  It brings stagnation.JohnStossel_1

Education is a discovery process like any other human endeavor.  We might be wrong about both how to teach and what to teach, but we won’t realize it unless we can experiment – compare and contrast the results of different approaches.  Having “one plan”  makes it harder to experiment and figure out what works.

Some people are terrified to hear “education” and “experiment” in the same sentence.  Why take a risk with something as important as my child’s education?  Pick the best education methods and teach everyone that way!

But we don’t know what the best way to educate kids is.

As American education has become more centralized, the rest of our lives have become increasingly diverse and tailored to individual needs.  Every minute, thousands of entrepreneurs struggle to improve their products.  Quality increases, and costs often drop.

But centrally planned K-12 education doesn’t improve.  Per-student spending has tripled (governments now routinely spend $300,000 per classroom!), but test results are stagnant.

“Everyone who has children knows that they’re all different, right?  They learn differently,” observed Sabrina Schaeffer of the Independent Women’s Forum on my show.  “In the workplace, we’re allowing people flexibility to telecommute, to have shared jobs.  In entertainment, people buy and watch what they want, when they want.”  Having one inflexible model for education “is so old-fashioned.”

No Child Left Behind programs were an understandable reaction to atrocious literacy and graduation rates – but since school funding was pegged to students’ performance on federally approved tests, classroom instruction became largely about drilling for those tests and getting the right answers, even if kids did little to develop broader reasoning skills.  So along comes Common Core to attempt to fix the problem – and create new ones.

Common Core de-emphasizes correct answers by awarding kids points for reasoning, even when they don’t quite get there.

A video went viral online that showed a worried mom, Karen Lamoreaux – a member of the group Arkansas Against Common Core – complaining to the Arkansas Board of Education about complicatedly worded math problems meant for fourth-graders.  She read to the Board this question: “Mr. Yamato’s class has 18 students.  If the class counts around by a number and ends with 90, what number did they count by?”

Huh?

But I could be wrong.  Maybe this is a clever new way to teach math, and maybe Lamoreaux worries too much.  Unfortunately, though, if Lamoreaux is right, and the federal government is wrong, government still gets to decree its universal solution to this problem.

Promoters of Common Core say, “Don’t worry, Common Core is voluntary.”  This is technically true, but states that reject it lose big federal money.  That’s Big Government’s version of “voluntary.”

Common Core, like public school, public housing, the U.S. Postal Service, the Transportation Security Administration, etc., are all one-size-fits-all government monopolies.  For consumers, this is not a good thing.

With the future riding on young people consuming better forms of education, I’d rather leave parents and children (and educators) multiple choices.

Despite Common Core, Schaeffer pointed out that this year did bring some victories for educational freedom.  “We saw new education tax credit programs and expansion of tax credit programs in numerous states – Alabama, Indiana, Iowa and others.  Education Savings Accounts expanded in other states; voucher programs expanded.”

This is good news.  Vouchers, Education Savings Accounts, and tax credits create competition and choice.

Details Behind The Dismissal Of Major Gen. Michael Carey

There have been a number of reports in recent months about what is perceived to be the Obama Administration’s excessive culling of military leaders who do not adhere to Obama’s world view, but there seems to be at least one instance, that of Air Force Major General Michael Carey, in which the dismissal was justified.

In late July of 2013, General Carey was interviewed by Popular Mechanics magazine.  From their current piece:

At the time, Carey was Commander of the 20th Air Force, which controls America’s land-based nuclear missiles. He was in town to meet with members of NASDAQ, where we would ring the opening bell in September, and a visit to PopMech happened to fit his schedule. Carey toured the office, checked out our view of Central Park, and sat for an interview about intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) tests for a feature coming up in our March 2014 magazine.

[ snip ]

But just months later, Carey was disgraced. In October the Air Force fired him. Officials offered no details, saying only that the dismissal involved personal conduct.

Now, however, Popular Mechanics has a piece up, HERE, in which they give the gory details.

Special Commissioners Meeting to Hear Public Comments

MillPondPost_LogoFor any who may not have been keeping up with the chain of events relating to Torch Energy’s proposed Mill Pond wind turbine farm, next on the agenda is a special meeting of the Carteret County Commissioners.  The meeting is set for 6pm on Thursday, January 2nd for the purpose of hearing public comments and otherwise considering the adoption of a 60-day moratorium on County permit issuances for such projects, pending additional review by the Commissioners.  Due to the anticipated turnout, this meeting will be held in the Crystal Coast Civic Center in Morehead City.

A local citizen leading the opposition to the project, John Droz, will speak in favor of the moratorium.  Droz and I urge all concerned citizens and residents to attend the meeting also, and to speak in support of the moratorium.   The time allotted to each person wishing to speak is three minutes, and the process is simple and straightforward:

Write down your intended remarks.  They should begin with your name and approximately where in the County you live.  Beyond that, make them as elaborate as you wish, but be sure to include

  • your support of the 60-day moratorium and;
  • the Bullet Points, in whole or in part (see the link below).  

Arrive early enough to get your name entered on the list of those wishing to speak.

When your name is called, go to the podium and read your remarks.

If you cannot attend the meeting in person, the commissioners will be made aware of your input if you e-mail the text of your remarks to the Commissioners Board Clerk, Jeanette Deese <jeanetted@carteretcountygov.org>.

Some additional resources that you may find useful:

The CITIZEN’S CASE, the text of remarks made by John Droz before the NC Military Affairs Commission on December 19th.
The BULLET POINTS, compiled by John Droz.
The full fifteen-page HANDOUT, which lays out in some detail the problems with the Mill Pond project.
The website for AWED, the Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions.

Let’s try for a big turn-out on Thursday night.  We need to impress the Commissioners with the depth of our feeling about the crafting of the County’s Tall Structures Ordinance, and about this proposed wind turbine farm.

Quote Of The Day

From Mike Rowe, the guy who starred on the Discovery Channel show “Dirty Jobs“:

“If we are lending money that ostensibly we don’t have to kids who have no hope of making it back in order to train them for jobs that clearly don’t exist, I might suggest that we’ve gone around the bend a little bit.”

A friend of mine spent an average of $40K per year for the seven years it took for his kid to get an MD from Duke Medical School.  Since he footed the bill, the kid had no real debt upon graduation, but many take a similar path on borrowed money.

Trouble Continues To Build In The South China Sea

A few days ago I posted on the confrontational situation that is building in the South China Sea.  To recap the essence of that post:

In November, China unilaterally declared an air defense zone covering islands controlled by Japan but claimed by Beijing, creating apprehensions in Japan and elsewhere that the aggressive posture on the part of the Panda could result at some point in an unplanned military encounter.  The several small uninhabited islands, known to the west as the Senkaku group, lie just to the northeast of Taiwan (formerly known as Formosa) in the southern portion of the East China Sea.

Last week, the US Air Force flew two B-52 heavy bombers through the area, serving notice to the Chinese that their claim of exclusivity was repudiated.  Now the British newspaper MailOnline is reporting that the US Navy is sending P-8 Poseidon patrol aircraft to strengthen America’s ability to hunt submarines and other vessels in seas close to China.

Now, Bill Gertz of the Washington Free Beacon is reporting that:

A Chinese naval vessel tried to force a U.S. guided missile warship to stop in international waters recently, causing a tense military standoff in the latest case of Chinese maritime harassment, according to defense officials.

The guided missile cruiser USS Cowpens, which recently took part in disaster relief operations in the Philippines, was confronted by Chinese warships in the South China Sea near Beijing’s new aircraft carrier Liaoning, according to officials familiar with the incident.

[snip]

… the run-in began after a Chinese navy vessel sent a hailing warning and ordered the Cowpens to stop. The cruiser continued on its course and refused the order because it was operating in international waters.

Then a Chinese tank landing ship sailed in front of the Cowpens and stopped, forcing the Cowpens to abruptly change course in what the officials said was a dangerous maneuver.

Foreign military adventurism climbs markedly anytime the President of the United States is viewed, particularly by our adversaries, as weak, inexperienced, and indecisive.  Such tendencies are exacerbated when the President is seen to be beset by domestic problems that he cannot resolve.  I am old enough to remember such instances, the Cuban Missile Crisis (Kennedy) being one example and the Iranian Embassy Hostage Crisis (Carter) being another.

President Obama is another example of a Commander-In-Chief that is widely viewed as an incompetent pushover.  The Chinese certainly see him that way, and that is exactly what is going on in the South China Sea.

The United States is both a maritime nation and a commerce-dependent nation, and in that connection, virtually all our presidents going back to Thomas Jefferson have understood that it is vital to the interests of the free world in general, and to our national interests in particular, to take all necessary measures to maintain the freedom of navigation in every sea and ocean around the globe.

When Muammar Khadafy declared the Gulf Of Sidra to be sovereign Libyan territory, and in August 1981 sent up MiG-25 Foxbat fighter jets to enforce his edict against the incursion into that area by the carrier USS Nimitz, President Ronald Reagan’s unequivocal response was to authorize their F-14 Tomcats to shoot down two of the Libyan planes.  Khadafy never again tried to enforce a claim over the Gulf Of Sidra by force of arms.

President Obama must take up this banner as well.  This situation is, in my view, largely of his doing, and now he must be resolute in disabusing the Chinese of their notion of turning the South China Sea into their sovereign territory.

For further reading on this subject, and on the history of defending the international right of navigation, Bill Schanefelt and Gary Crowder have up an interesting and informative article at the online American Thinker, HERE.

Teachers File Lawsuit Against School Voucher Law

From WTVD, the ABC television station in Raleigh:

Advocacy groups representing parents and public education are suing North Carolina officials after the General Assembly passed a law this year allowing taxpayer money to help pay private school tuition.

The North Carolina Association of Educators and the North Carolina Justice Center filed their lawsuit Wednesday in Wake County Superior Court, saying the new law violates the state constitution’s requirement that public money go exclusively to free, public schools.

“Now we have no problem with private schools, no problem with home schools … we have a vibrant system of home schools in North Carolina, it’s terrific, but we don’t ask taxpayers to fund it,” said Burton Craig, the union’s attorney.

The state’s top two lawmakers said in response that more than a dozen other states have similar, successful programs.

The law will allow low-income students to take $4,200 a year in taxpayer money to pay for private school tuition beginning in 2014. Lawmakers say they want to expand the program beyond the $10 million budgeted in the first year.

Uncertain Future For Taxation On Public Pensions

Paul Caron, Pepperdine University Law Professor and purveyor of the TaxProfBlog site, is calling attention to THIS new wrinkle arising from the IRS position on changes to public pension systems that would allow municipalities to shift workers into new, less-expensive plans without losing any tax advantages they had under the old plan.  The situation originated in Orange County, California, but could be coming to a municipality near you.