I haven’t been posting much here, as I’ve been putting up a lot of news and videos on the Sendai earthquake on my personal blog.
But I did think this bit caught in my spam filter over there was worth sharing: the text says “Please Donate To Japan’s Quake and Tsunami Victim’s,” but the link goes to “foxnews-boycott.com”.
You stay classy, liberals…
Another week of Jihad news from the usual sources:
It’s a busy week for me, so here are a few links to tide you over:
Evidently I wasn’t the only one struck by Iowahawk’s masterfully takedown off Paul Krugman and The Economist on the middling (at best) performance of Wisconsin’s unionized education system. Now Iowahawk strikes again to confirm that, yes, he was right the first time. He also goes into more detail of the various dropout statistics, ACT/SAT scores, etc.
Also, Iowahawk reader Michael Pollard helpfully supplied statistics showing the comparison between Texas and Wisconsin also held generally when comparing the other maligned non-union states to Wisconsin. Sayeth Iowahawk: “Wisconsin is a (1) middling performer for white students; (2) below middling for Hispanic students, and (3) an absolute disaster for black students.”
Read the whole thing.
Iowahawk took time out from his busy schedule as the web’s premiere political satirist to evaluate some claims Paul Krugman and The Economist made about the educational achievements of Texas.
Wait, did I say “evaluate?” I meant “demolish like a bulldozer ripping through a condemned shantytown” (or an “Obamaville,” if you prefer). Kruggers and the EcoMen (which, I have to point out, would be a good name for a rock band) have been as thoroughly pwned as a hungover frat boy waking up after a late-night kegstand to find male genitalia Magic Markered across his face. It’s an epic take-down.
Let’s start with assertions that started the whole thing, and which exemplify a specific type of liberal desire to wish away Texas’ deeply inconvenient economic success. From Krugman:
And in low-tax, low-spending Texas, the kids are not all right. The high school graduation rate, at just 61.3 percent, puts Texas 43rd out of 50 in state rankings. Nationally, the state ranks fifth in child poverty; it leads in the percentage of children without health insurance. And only 78 percent of Texas children are in excellent or very good health, significantly below the national average.
Next comes the bit from The Economist:
Only 5 states do not have collective bargaining for educators and have deemed it illegal. Those states and their ranking on ACT/SAT scores are as follows:
South Carolina – 50th
North Carolina – 49th
Georgia – 48th
Texas – 47th
Virginia – 44thIf you are wondering, Wisconsin, with its collective bargaining for teachers, is ranked 2nd in the country.
With that background, you’re now ready for Iowahawk to demolish the subject like Charlie Sheen demolishes an ounce of cocaine. First, the necessary context:
A state’s “average ACT/SAT” is, for all intents and purposes, a proxy for the percent of white people who live there.
Actually this is not strictly true; it’s more accurate to say its a proxy for the percent of white and Asian people who live there. But close enough for government work.
Iowahawk goes on:
In fact, the lion’s share of state-to-state variance in test scores is accounted for by differences in ethnic composition. Minority students – regardless of state residence – tend to score lower than white students on standardized test, and the higher the proportion of minority students in a state the lower its overall test scores tend to be.
But don’t take his word for it. Take his facts for it, as he provides grade-by-grade comparisons of each of the two sates students broken down demographically (by white, black and Hispanic students). Go over and take a look at the data if you haven’t already. His conclusion:
To recap: white students in Texas perform better than white students in Wisconsin, black students in Texas perform better than black students in Wisconsin, Hispanic students in Texas perform better than Hispanic students in Wisconsin. In 18 separate ethnicity-controlled comparisons, the only one where Wisconsin students performed better than their peers in Texas was 4th grade science for Hispanic students (statistically insignificant), and this was reversed by 8th grade. Further, Texas students exceeded the national average for their ethnic cohort in all 18 comparisons; Wisconsinites were below the national average in 8, above average in 8.
Perhaps the most striking thing in these numbers is the within-state gap between white and minority students. Not only did white Texas students outperform white Wisconsin students, the gap between white students and minority students in Texas was much less than the gap between white and minority students in Wisconsin. In other words, students are better off in Texas schools than in Wisconsin schools – especially minority students.
He does the same job for Krugman’s dropout rates:
White and Hispanic Texas students indeed seem to dropout at a higher rate than their counterparts in Wisconsin, although in both cases (a) the difference is not statistically significant; and (b) in both cases, both states are significantly below the national average. Among black high school students, Texans have significantly lower dropout rates than their national cohort and Wisconsinites. Black high school students in Wisconsin have significantly higher dropout rates than national.
Your first question is probably, “why do the union teachers in Wisconsin hate black students?” Sorry, can’t help you there, I’m stumped too.
Ouch! You know that’s going to leave a scar…
Another week, another Jihad roundup. I’m not sure I can keep up…
(Hat tips: JihadWatch, Instapundit, Michael Totten, Creeping Sharia.)
A few links to tide you over while I’m fighting the alligators:
After voicing my concerns, Mickey Kaus finally shows up at his new gig with The Daily Caller. No word on the nearly four week gap between his last Newsweek piece and this one. The two explanations that come most readily to mind are:
This being the web, naturally I’m going to assume B…
Many critics have opined that if Hamlet had immediately followed the urging of his father’s ghost, Claudius would have been slain in the next scene and Hamlet would have been a one-act play.
When it comes to foreign policy, Obama is our age’s Hamlet. Gadhafi is tottering, and both his own people and everyone outside the Axis of Assholes (Iran, Venezuela, etc.) wants to see him gone, but Obama is so hostile to using military power that he refuses to even broach the topic. Instead, he’s issued sanctions. Yeah, sanctions. I’m sure the guy who’s bombing his own people is quaking with fear at the very prospect.
Says William Kristol:
The dithering of the Obama administration has raised a more fundamental question: Have our elites — and not just those running the Obama administration — become so encumbered by self-doubt, so weakened by sophistication, so seduced by the excuses provided by the claim of helplessness, that they are incapable of acting decisively? Once Americans tried to seize every moment of opportunity. Now we are far more likely to stand back and watch history unfold, while explaining why we can’t do anything to shape that history. After all, our foreign policy establishment explains condescendingly, the challenges are daunting. So many forces are beyond our control. The risks are great. The obstacles are overwhelming.
There is another word for this widespread attitude of passive self-doubt. That word is decadence.
Last week’s farcical ferry, bobbing aimlessly in the waters off Tripoli, was an image for our government’s embrace of helplessness, for its acceptance of decline. It recalled the downed helicopters in Iran in early 1980, emblems of the failed Carter administration. But at least President Carter sent helicopters. In so doing he overruled his secretary of state, who wished to do nothing. So far, this president is performing in this crisis at a sub-Jimmy Carter level of assertiveness and command.
It’s one thing when the editor of The Weekly Standard calls you a wuss, but it’s quite another when you’re too timid for even The New Republic:
Is a no-fly zone really too complicated to negotiate? Then let NATO planes fly over Tripoli to shoot down any Libyan aircraft that make war on the Libyan population. Is the United States really prevented by its past from deploying the small number of troops that would be required to rescue Tripoli from Qaddafi’s bloody grip? Then let a multilateral expeditionary force be raised and a humanitarian intervention be launched to free Libya from its tyrant and then leave Libya to the Libyans. Europeans, Africans, even Egyptians may join the campaign. And impose sanctions; and freeze assets; and summon The Hague. There is no lack of proposals for acting against this monster out of Tacitus. But the president is not yet interested in action. His outrage seems to be satisfied by “consultations” with our “allies and partners,” and with the Human Rights Council in Geneva next Monday. Yes, next Monday: what’s the rush? The main point of Obama’s statement on Libya was that “the nations and peoples of the world speak with one voice,” and that “we join with the international community to speak with one voice.” He is calling for words! He actually said that “the whole world is watching,” that foul old slogan of the bystander.
Why is Obama so disinclined to use the power at his disposal? His diffidence about humanitarian emergencies is one of the most mystifying features of his presidency, and one of its salient characteristics. These crises—in Tehran two years ago, in Cairo last month, in Tripoli now—produce in him a lame sort of lawyerliness. He lists the relevant rights and principles and then turns to procedural questions, like those consultations. The official alibi for Obama’s patience with Qaddafi’s atrocity is his concern for the Americans who are still stranded within Qaddafi’s reach; I was amused to learn from a friend that the spin out of the White House includes the suggestion that Obama’s restraint is actually the wisdom of the hostage negotiator. But Obama’s statement about Libya suggests another explanation for his slow pace. This was its climax: “So let me be clear. The change that is taking place across the region is being driven by the people of the region. This change doesn’t represent the work of the United States or any foreign power. It represents the aspirations of people who are seeking a better life.”
They are fighting authoritarianism, but he is fighting imperialism. Who in their right mind believes that this change does represent the work of the United States or any foreign power? To be sure, there are conspiracy theorists in the region who are not in their right mind, and will hold such an anti-American view; but this anti-Americanism is not an empirical matter. They will hate us whatever we do. I do not see a Middle East rising up in anger at the prospect of American intervention. I see an American president with a paralyzing fear that it will. In those Middle Eastern streets and squares that have endured the pangs of democratization, the complaint has been not that the United States has intervened, but that the United States has not intervened. The awful irony is that Obama is more haunted by the history of American foreign policy in the Middle East than are many people in the Middle East, who look to him for support in their genuinely epochal struggle against the social death in which their tyrannies have imprisoned them.
When both the President of France and the UN commissioner on Human Rights have more aggressive postures on establishing a no-fly zone than the Obama Administration, we have a problem. Who knew that “smart diplomacy” would be a code-word for “We’re never actually going to us force ever again, even when our allies want us to”?
Obama could have gotten the credit from providing the final shove that knocked Gadhafi into the dustbin of history; instead, Obama’s dithering may ensure the continuance of Gadhafi’s repulsive reign, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
(PS: I found this image of Obama as Hamlet out on the Internet, but since it was on a lefty blog, I thought it unfair to embed it…)
Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert officially enters the race.
Leppert joins a crowded field that the presumptive front-runner, David Dewhurst, hasn’t even entered yet.
This is the most crowded Texas Senate Republican primary race I can remember.
