She says not. But her fellow progressives seem to ♥ Warren even more than they ♥ Hillary.
Take a look a this speech of Warren’s to see how it goes.
One thing I had not realized before, but which Dan McLaughlin at Red State pointed out: Warren is roughly a contemporary of Hillary Clinton’s, which means that if she waits till 2020 to run she’ll be over 70 years old at the time. So 2016 may be her last chance.
…and recall how snarkily he mocked Romney in 2012.
I’m not sure why I’m going there. After all, there’s nothing to be done about it now. Maybe I’m just a glutton for punishment.
But when Russia invaded Ukraine, I thought about that exchange. And now that the Russian-leaning Ukrainian rebels (or separatists or whatever we’re choosing to call them these days) have shot down the Malaysian plane with 298 souls on board, I’ve thought of it again.
Here was Romney’s response to Obama, just to refresh your memory:
What about the experts? They got it wrong, wrong, wrong too. But how many will ever utter a word of apology to Mitt Romney?
I will take a wild stab at it: none. To do so, they’d have to come down hard on themselves. They’d have to abandon their fantasy world in which they were correct to have supported Obama all along.
[NOTE: This is a very reworked version of an older post.]
Those newest illegal entrants to this country from Central America have come with the promise of being able to stay and receive benefits. And sure enough, right on schedule, that permission and those benefits are starting to flow.
Did anyone ever doubt this would be the case? Did anyone think that the phrase “expedited deportation process” had anything to do with actually being forced to leave the country? Exactly as expected—and fully expected by the new arrivals, too—what’s being expedited is the liberal (in several senses of the world) granting of asylum to droves of newcomers [emphasis mine]:
The Judiciary Committee says asylum approval rates have “increased dramatically” under the Obama administration. Overall, according to the committee statement, “Approval rates by asylum officers have increased from 28 percent in 2007 to 46 percent in 2013 and approval rates by immigration judges in affirmative cases have increased from 51 percent in 2007 to 74 percent in 2013.” And that does not count appeals.
“Once individuals are granted asylum,” the report notes, “they have access to all major federal welfare programs.
Anyone who followed the Boston bomber case was already aware of the vast amount of aid those granted asylum can and do regularly receive (even, or especially, under false pretenses, which is not at all unusual). When did it come to this? When did the law begin to take nearly all comers and, instead of giving them an opportunity to work, began to give them rewards and handouts for breaking the law and living off others?
And it all came true.
But it’s not easy being a mermaid:
This is one of the saddest articles I’ve ever read.
It describes the genesis of the cheating behavior that was exposed in 2010 in a scandal in the Atlanta public school system, where administrators and teachers in predominantly black schools in poor neighborhoods had practiced a systematic, organized, and institutionalized form of cheating for many years, with the goal of raising test scores to conform with laws such as No Child Left Behind, and to received other incentives (such as awards and honors) too.
You may think the morality of this is cut and dried, and in fact it is. What they did was wrong, and there are neither ifs nor ands nor buts nor excuses. But it’s a fascinating story of how the motivations and rationalizations worked, and how it was that teachers told themselves it was necessary to go along with the deception. The few who spoke out against it either were ignored (some of the higher-ups to whom they complained were in cahoots with the cheating as well) or transferred to the school equivalent of an even-colder Siberia.
For example:
After two years of improvement, teachers began taking attendance later in the day so that students had more time to get to school. Eventually, [a teacher named] Lewis recalled, the teachers ceased marking absences altogether. In a letter of complaint, the school secretary, who refused to delete absences from the records, informed the district’s central office that her attendance duties had been taken away and “given to someone whom my principal calls a team player.” “I am lying low because I feel my job is on the line,” she wrote. “I am so overwhelmed by what I’m seeing.”
Without offering it as an excuse, rigid outcome-based laws such as No Child Left Behind do not take into account the deep and broad handicaps faced by teachers in inner-city schools. Yes, great things can be accomplished by isolated schools here and there. But the teachers, even the best ones, are swimming upstream against a strong tide of cultural/societal/familial/social currents that impede their progress.
The cheating process as described in the article reminds me very strongly of what recently happened at the VA hospitals, as well. Do you need to generate statistics that support a certain outcome? Are you frustrated at being unable to produce that outcome? Then lie about the statistics, and the world smiles on you—for a while, anyway.
One of the most dreadful parts of this already very sad article is when the teachers at Parks Middle School (the institution described in-depth by the author) find themselves lauded for the seemingly-remarkable progress they’ve made with difficult students, and have to explain to what they owe their astounding success. They are equal to the task:
[Parks School Principal] Waller was lauded by the district, and became a minor celebrity of the reform movement. [Atlanta School Superintendent Beverly] Hall invited him to attend the Harvard Leadership Conference with her, and she arranged a “Tour of Georgia” bus ride for civic leaders which made a stop at Parks, where Hall gave a speech. Once, at a meeting, when the principal of a middle school said that the targets were out of his students’ reach, Hall responded, “You have to make your targets,” and then pointed to a chart with data from Parks, explaining, “Parks did it.” Waller thought it would have been “evident even to a blind man that the scores were not legitimate.”
Parks attracted so many visitors who were eager to understand the school’s turnaround that teachers had to come up with ways to explain it. At Waller’s direction, they began maintaining what they called “standard-based mastery folders,” an index of all the objectives that each student needed to grasp in order to comprehend a given lesson. Lewis [a math teacher at Parks], who was taking night classes at the School of Education at Clark Atlanta University, wrote his master’s thesis on the technique. “It was a wonderful system,” he said. “But we only put it in place to hide the fact that we were cheating.”
Lewis took pride in the attention that Parks was receiving, and he liked the fact that his students had developed egos about their education. A few tattooed the number of the school zone on their arms. The only time an accolade made him uncomfortable was when Parks won a 2009 Dispelling the Myth Award. He and other teachers were sent to Arlington, Virginia, for a ceremony in the ballroom of a Marriott hotel. Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education, gave the keynote speech. “I swear to God, I need to write that man, Duncan, a letter of apology,” Lewis told me. “I stood in his court and acted like I was doing something I wasn’t. He held us at the tip-top of education.”
How sad is it that these children were duped by the teachers and principals and superintendents to be proud of accomplishments they didn’t actually achieve? This isn’t just the self-esteem movement run amok, though. The goal was not just to make the students feel good. Nor was it just to receive honors; money was another prize awarded for the fake statistics:
On September 8, 2009, the Atlanta city council declared that the date should be known as Dr. Beverly L. Hall Day. Hall had just been named Superintendent of the Year by the American Association of School Administrators, and the city held a ceremony to honor her for making the district one of the highest-performing urban school systems in the nation. Under her leadership, the district had received more than forty million dollars from the G. E. Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. When she began as superintendent, fewer than fifty per cent of eighth graders met the state’s standards in language arts. By 2009, ninety per cent of eighth graders had passed the exam.
Too good to be true, but also too good to be challenged. Ultimately it was a newspaper, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, that finally led to the corrupt system’s downfall by questioning the results at Park and some other schools as improbable, leading to a state probe that uncovered rampant abuse:
…[O]ne in five schools exhibited an abnormal pattern of erasure marks, in which a wrong answer had been corrected. At Parks and at one of its feeder schools, there were suspicious erasure marks on tests from more than seventy-five per cent of the classrooms.
An Atlanta investigation was a coverup, and a special prosecutor was appointed by the governor. Atlanta and Georgia were not the only places where there was evidence of this sort of behavior, but it may have been one where it was most widespread, and it certainly was one where the investigation was deepest.
Even to some of the perpetrators, the revelations of wrongdoing were experienced as relief. You may think that the following is self-serving, but to me it has the ring of truth:
As soon as Lewis learned of the investigation, he was ready to confess. Occasionally, in the middle of teaching a lesson, he had to step outside the classroom and lean silently against the wall, closing his eyes. He and his wife had separated””they shared custody of a young daughter””and he found himself lying in bed, startled awake by nightmares. In one, he heard a knock at his door, and when he opened it one of his former students shot him.
His first meeting with investigators was in Waller’s office. He wondered if Waller was clever enough to bug the room and told the agents, “I’d feel a lot more comfortable at your office.” A few weeks later, he and several other teachers met at the downtown law office of Balch & Bingham, which was assisting with the investigation. The agents told the teachers that anyone who coé¶perated would be granted immunity from criminal prosecution. A social-studies teacher asked, “Can we all huddle for a minute?” When the agents left the room, Lewis told everyone, “The jig is up. I’m not letting this shit drive me crazy.” He urged his colleagues to blame the cheating on him, but they refused.
They all decided to tell the truth.
Well, immunity will do that for you.
Most of the teachers who cheated made it clear that they did not think there were any victims, because they disagreed with the premise of the tests. That tells us something about what’s happened to morality these days: hey, let’s break the rules because we don’t agree with them. Of course, civil disobedience is supposed to be open and above-board and this most definitely was not. How could the teachers not have had a conscience about what they were doing to these children? They rationalized that they were helping them by keeping the school from being closed, by encouraging them to think they could achieve, and by actually teaching them, albeit not at the fast pace dictated by the law.
Institutions these days—whether they be school systems or the VA or some other bureaucracy—which are evaluated by statistics are going to face this sort of temptation among workers and administrators to fudge those statistics. The problem has become much bigger than Altanta or the school systems or race or the VA hospitals, it is one that has come to encompass much of our entire culture and our morality or lack thereof.
There’s not much more news on downed Malaysian Flight 17 than there was yesterday, but I thought I’d leave an open thread for you to discuss it as further news breaks during the day.
Here’s a bunch of articles on Memeorandum to peruse, and one from the Federalist about what this might mean for Putin.
The geopolitical aspects of the crash have for the moment overshadowed the human aspects. But with nearly three hundred victims dead, it is a human tragedy as well as a political mess. One of the many tragic stories that will be emerging as more is known about the victims is the fact that a large group of distinguished experts in the study of AIDS was on board and on their way to a conference in Australia: 108 people and their families, in fact.
Charles Krauthammer reminds us of a few facts that journalists seem to have conveniently forgotten, if they ever knew them in the first place:
“Here’s the difference between us,” explains the Israeli prime minister. “We’re using missile defense to protect our civilians, and they’re using their civilians to protect their missiles.”…
Yet we routinely hear this Israel-Gaza fighting described as a morally equivalent “cycle of violence.” This is absurd. What possible interest can Israel have in cross-border fighting? Everyone knows Hamas set off this mini-war. And everyone knows the proudly self-declared raison d’etre of Hamas: the eradication of Israel and its Jews.
Apologists for Hamas attribute the blood lust to the Israeli occupation and blockade. Occupation? Does no one remember anything? It was less than 10 years ago that worldwide television showed the Israeli army pulling die-hard settlers off synagogue roofs in Gaza as Israel uprooted its settlements, expelled its citizens, withdrew its military and turned every inch of Gaza over to the Palestinians. There was not a soldier, not a settler, not a single Israeli left in Gaza.
Read the whole thing. Instead of making their territory into something the Gazan people could be supported by and flourish in, the Gazans concentrated on their blood lust, storing their weaponry among the population the better to draw Israeli fire towards them. It is diabolical, and it works—if the goal is to get much of the world to regard Israel as the diabolical party instead.
A more backwards and morally bankrupt place than Gaza hardly exists on earth today. But in the bizarro world in which we seem to live, journalists and other leftists of the west regard the Gazan Palestinians as innocent victims and favored pets.
I went to see the Dinesh D’Souza movie “America” the other evening.
I have to say it was a mixed bag. The ads, as well as the beginning of the movie, indicated it would explore what the world would be like without America. But the movie wandered away from that interesting premise pretty quickly and never really came back to it.
The movie retained my interest, but I’m not so sure that anyone who isn’t already on the right will be going to see it. The topic is huge, and it bites off a lot more than it can chew in an attempt to debunk the propaganda from the left about how awful America is, how racist and how imperialist and how hypocritical. How can this be accomplished in less than two hours? It can’t, except in a cursory manner, although I applaud D’Souza for trying. It has to be done.
And of course most of the reviews predictably pan the movie, and would do so even if it were excellent. Unfortunately, it’s not excellent enough, although it’s not bad, either. There’s also a bit too much of D’Souza himself, who’s just not a compelling personality nor a movie star. I wish he’d found someone else with more star power to narrate the movie.
Of course, those of us who pay a lot of attention to history already know most of what the movie points out. But still, there were a number of things in it with which I was unfamiliar. I hadn’t realized, for example, that there were some freed blacks before the civil war who owned slaves. And although I already knew a lot about Saul Alinsky, seeing the movie’s clips of him talking was an eye-opener. There was something about his demeanor that was absolutely chilling and made my blood run cold.
I hope the movie is far more successful than I think it will be. We desperately need more efforts to counter the left’s lies, because it’s late, and getting later.
I’m curious what those of you who’ve seen the movie think about it.
I’ve written before that Obama reminds me of Hugo Chavez. But there’s a touch of Allende in Obama, too.
Take a look. Note that a coalition of groups in the Chilean Chamber of Deputies attempted to stop Allende when they became alarmed at the extent of his constitutional overreach. Unfortunately, I don’t think that our Congress has the guts to do something similar these days:
On 22 August 1973, the Christian Democrats and the National Party members of the Chamber of Deputies joined together to vote 81 to 47 in favor of a resolution that asked the authorities to “put an immediate end” to “breach[es of] the Constitution . . . with the goal of redirecting government activity toward the path of law and ensuring the Constitutional order of our Nation, and the essential underpinnings of democratic co-existence among Chileans.”
The resolution declared that Allende’s government sought “to conquer absolute power with the obvious purpose of subjecting all citizens to the strictest political and economic control by the State . . . [with] the goal of establishing . . . a totalitarian system” and claimed that the government had made “violations of the Constitution . . . a permanent system of conduct.” Essentially, most of the accusations were about disregard by the Socialist government of the separation of powers, and arrogating legislative and judicial prerogatives to the executive branch of government.
Specifically, the Socialist government of President Allende was accused of:
Ruling by decree, thwarting the normal legislative system
Refusing to enforce judicial decisions against its partisans; not carrying out sentences and judicial resolutions that contravened its objectives
Ignoring the decrees of the independent General Comptroller’s Office
Sundry media offenses; usurping control of the National Television Network and applying economic pressure against those media organizations that are not unconditional supporters of the government
Allowing its Socialist supporters to assemble with arms, and preventing the same by its right-wing opponents
Supporting more than 1,500 illegal takeovers of farms
Illegal repression of the El Teniente miners’ strike
Illegally limiting emigrationFinally, the resolution condemned the creation and development of government-protected [socialist] armed groups, which . . . are headed towards a confrontation with the armed forces. President Allende’s efforts to re-organize the military and the police forces were characterized as notorious attempts to use the armed and police forces for partisan ends, destroy their institutional hierarchy, and politically infiltrate their ranks.
Allende defied the Chamber of Deputies, and he was only stopped by a military coup. Allende committed suicide rather than step down, but the left has perpetrated the myth that he was assassinated. It makes much better propaganda.
I keep thinking of Obama’s Honduras policy—not the current immigration crisis, but the 2009 shocker where Obama supported the leftist Zelaya’s constitutional overreach, and opposed that country’s lawful attempt to remove and replace him. It was one of the clearest signs that Obama was interested in doing something similar himself. I have very little doubt that, if Obama had been president at the time of Allende’s control of Chile, Obama would have tried to protect him from being deposed, too.
On July 18th and 19th a host of amnesty protests are planned across a wide section of the country. If you want to join the demonstrations, see this for a list of where they will be hold.
Unlike leftists, conservatives haven’t usually tended to participate in protests. The Tea Party was unusual in that respect, especially when the movement first began, and it scared the left. A populist conservative movement was a big threat, that that’s why there was a concerted effort to demonize the Tea Party as racists—and ultimately to squash the group through the mechanism of the IRS.
I have little doubt that demonstrations against amnesty will also be characterized by the left as racist, but I’m not so sure that ploy will work. Most Americans are very unhappy with the huge flood of illegal immigrants crossing the border and getting all sorts of services, and the public doesn’t seem to buy the line that we must allow them to stay. The real question is whether the Obama administration and the Democrats care what most Americans think. Whether or not their pro-amnesty position will hurt them in the short run, they seem to be convinced it will help them greatly in the long run, so they are willing to risk temporary disapproval from the majority of voters.
Could this be? Horrendous if true:
A passenger plane with 295 people on board has been shot down as it flew above eastern Ukraine, according to aviation sources.
The Malaysia Airlines plane, which was flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, was travelling at an altitude of 10km (6.2 miles) when it was shot down, Russia’s Interfax reported.
The Boeing 777 was brought down by a Buk ground-to-air missile, an adviser to the Ukrainian interior ministry quoted by the news agency said.
The adviser said 280 passengers and 15 crew members who were on the plane are all believed to have died…
Officials in Ukraine denied the country’s armed forces were involved in the shooting down of the plane.
It’s certainly not yet clear what has happened. I wonder if it will ever be clear exactly what has happened.
[NOTE: You may be surprised to learn how many civilian airliners have been shot down, seemingly by mistake, over the course of civil aviation history.]
[ADDENDUM: Now it’s being reported that there may have been 23 Americans on board.]
A likely story. If Cohen’s mind is like the DMV, it’s not like any DMV I’ve ever been to.
Cohen’s interview is a fascinating reflection on creativity and work:
Before I can discard the verse, I have to write it; I can’t discard a verse before it is written because it is the writing of the verse that produces whatever delights or interests or facets that are going to catch the light. The cutting of the gem has to be finished before you can see whether it shines.
That reminds me of something Robert Frost said about writing poetry:
You know, you know that, when I begin a poem I don’t know – I don’t want a poem that I can tell was written towards a good ending – one sentence, you know. That’s trickery. You’ve got to be the happy discoverer of your ends.
”¦I’ve often said that another definition of poetry is dawn – that it’s something dawning on you while you’re writing it. It comes off if it really dawns when the light comes at the end. And the feeling of dawn – the freshness of dawn – that you didn’t think this all out and write in prose first and than translate it into verse.
Note the metaphor of “light” that both poets use.
I’ve written a lot of poetry in my life, although “a lot” is relative. I’m certainly not up there in productivity with either Frost or Cohen. I’ve got maybe seventy or so poems that I wouldn’t be totally ashamed to own up to. And I have to say that almost all of them took the form both poets are describing: you write it and see whether it shines, and although you have some spark that starts the process you have no idea where the poem will end. The best ones end in pleasant surprise.