Category Archives: Government
Scott Walker Snaps Out
Now there are fifteen.
Scott Walker followed the lead of Rick Perry and shut down his campaign. He said we was helping clear the field so a positive conservative message can rise to the top. Supporters thought he would be the one to deliver that message. Between the Donald and the other candidates in the debates he couldn’t get a word in edgewise.
There are other views.
Michael Barone thinks the Republican party now appeals to people beyond traditional conservatives, libertarians, and evangelicals. That might explain Trump, Fiorina, and Carson. And the demise of Walker.
Mark Steyn called him a “performing seal”.
Ahmed’s Clock.
Fourteen year old Ahmed Mohamed made a clock and brought it to school. Ahmed’s clock doesn’t look like other clocks. It has a bunch of wires and gizmos inside a briefcase.
Ahmed showed it off to his engineering teacher who told him not to carry it around to his classes. That might be because he was afraid someone might mistake Ahmed’s clock for a bomb. Sure enough an English teacher did just that. Being a school, the place went berserk. Ahmed was handcuffed, questioned, and sent home.
Since he didn’t point a finger like a gun, or wave around a pop-tart chewed to look like a gun, he wasn’t suspended. But he is Muslim and his dad says that’s why he was profiled.
Kevin Williamson thinks Amhed looks like your average American high school nerd destined for Silicon Valley success. That didn’t keep him from from his 15 minutes of celebrity fame as an oppressed victim. Nor from an invitation to the White House by the president.
Refugees Responsibility
IBD says that McKinley was our first colonialist president. Obama is our first anti-colonialist president. That explains why Mt. Mckinley is now just Denali. Nobody got hurt, except for some feelings here in Ohio.
AP
Refugees
The unraveling of colonial arrangements in the Middle East has been less benign. Refugees are flooding Europe.
The White House announced yesterday that it would accept 10,000 Syrian refugees in the coming year. John Kerry says the US might take up to 100,000 total refugees this year. A Washington Post editorial complains that’s less than half the number from our last big bug out – Vietnam in the 70’s.
Citizen Barack
In a 2008 campaign speech in Berlin Barack Obama called himself a “citizen of the world”. Whatever his path to citizenship, he hasn’t been a model citizen.
Since his humbling election to the presidency of just the United States, our Citizen of the World has been withdrawing America from the world. That’s left a big vacuum – if a vacuum can be big. Anyway, very bad guys have rushed in to fill the vacuum. The result has been a refugee crisis a WSJ editorial calls “the worst human catastrophe of the 21st century”.
Right on cue, enter Vladimir Putin. Russia is planning to send S-300 missiles to Iran.
During the Bush administration Putin complained about a planned missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic. The purpose of the system was to deter Iranian missiles. In 2009 President Obama withdrew the system.
Back to School
Labor Day is the traditional end of summer break but it seems most kids now stagger back to school in mid-August. All that late summer sweat doesn’t seem to be making them any smarter. The average SAT score in 2015 was 1490, down from 1524 in 2006.
School Costs
IBD says the Department of Educaton runs over 100 grant programs at a cost of $100 billion with nothing to show for it.
Meanwhile student debt is soaring. According the LA Times, tuition and fees rose from $1,832 at an average private 4 year school in 1972 to $31,231 in 2015. Student loans are up 76% to $1.2 trillion since 2009.
The median household income in 1972 was $8,282 according to US Census stats. It was $48,874 in 2012. According to my cartoon math private college costs consume 63% of a family budget now compared to 22% 40 years ago. Paul F. Campos, in the NYT, says if car prices had risen at the same rate as tuition the average car would now cost $80,000.
Why would that be?
Professor Campos blames it on exploding administrative salaries. Utah State Professor William Shugart II writing for American Thinker cites a NY Federal Reserve study to blame federal subsidy itself.
