Washington DC Opportunity Scholarship program under threat, again

The WSJ reported that the program initiated in Washington, DC, to give kids an opportunity to escape failing public schools was only authorized for this year, versus the expected five years. The program has been around since 2003 and has been taken advantage of by thousands of kids. It has been opposed by President Obama, the local teachers’ union and the “representative” E.N. Holmes from the inception. The program spends HALF of what the public schools get per student, accepts all, and has much better results. When will we realize that outcomes are more important than inputs. When will we realize that leadership is more important than seniority. From the article a mother tells the journalist, “Sheila Jackson tells me she feels insulted by the black Democrats who claim to look our for her and her family interests–You want my vote but you don’t care about my children”

WSJ; February 16, “Fighting Congress for a Capital Education”

2014 Hottest Year since 1880? It depends!

These two articles, both siting data, disagree about the results, or causes. It would seem that before we spend billions of dollars, put thousands out of work, we should come to some sort of agreement that data will support two sides of an argument. We humans like to be right, scientists stake reputations and their future on what they say and an opposing view is always put in the “denier” category, as though other scientists haven’t looked at the data. The same data actually in many cases! Politicians have different motives, power and money. The two most powerful levers to pollute a decision.

So, read these two articles. Make up your own mind but group think causes most wars, most human suffering, wrongheaded policies, and huge costs to fix once the data is overwhelming to those who forced a solution for whatever reason.

Reason, we are blessed to have it as humans. Too bad we allow our self-centered selves to overwhelm it.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/16/2014-hottest-year-on-record_n_6479896.html

2014 Was The Hottest Year Since At Least 1880, Government Finds

01/16/2015 11:06 am ET | Updated Jan 16, 2015

James GerkenGreen Editor, The Huffington Post

ASSOCIATED PRESS

2014 was the hottest year in 135 years of record-keeping, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA announced on Friday. The year’s average combined global land and ocean surface temperature was 58.24 degrees Fahrenheit, according to NOAA. This is 1.24 F above the 20th-century average. Global average land temperatures were 1.80 F above average, while ocean surface temperatures were 1.03 F above average, the agency said. Land temperatures alone were only the fourth-warmest on record, but ocean temperatures were the warmest, which helped to make 2014 the warmest year overall. NOAA and NASA record temperature observations independently, but both agencies confirmed 2014 to be a record-breaking year. NASA reported 2014’s average temperature to be 58.42 F, which the agency reported was 1.22 F above a 1951-1980 average. Previously, 2010 and 2005 held the record, but the 2014 temperature edged out both years by 0.07 F. The 10 warmest years on record have all been after 1998, and 2014 marked the 38th straight year with global average temperatures above the 20th-century average. Six months in 2014 also set monthly global heat records: May, June, August, September, October and December of last year were all the warmest such months on record. “Viewed in context, the record 2014 temperatures underscore the undeniable fact that we are witnessing, before our eyes, the effects of human-caused climate change,” climate scientist Michael Mann told The Huffington Post. “It is exceptionally unlikely that we would be seeing a record year, during a record-warm decade, during a multidecadal period of warmth that appears to be unrivaled over at least the past millennium, if it were not for the rising levels of planet-warming gases produced by fossil fuel burning.” For the U.S. alone, as opposed to the planet overall, 2014 was only the 34th warmest year on record. But temperatures in the U.S. that year still exceeded the country’s 20th-century average, for the 18th consecutive year. Seventeen major U.S. metropolitan areas, representing 9 percent of the country’s population, were on track to have their warmest years on record, as of a December 2014 analysis from Climate Central. Ten of these 17 are located in California, one of five states that were projected to have one of their top five warmest years in 2014. “Perhaps more important than the global temperature story are the impacts of record regional heat,” Jonathan Overpeck, co-director of the University of Arizona’s Institute of the Environment, told HuffPost. “In places like California, the Southwest U.S. more generally, Australia and parts of Brazil, record heat is exacerbating drought and leading to more stress on our water supplies and forests.” “With continued global warming, we’re going to see more and more of these unprecedented regional conditions, and with them will come more and more costs to humans and the things they value,” he added. “2014 shows that humans are indeed cooking their planet as they continue to combust fossil fuels.” 1985 was the last year that any urban area in the U.S. saw a record-cold year. February 1985 was the last time the planet saw a colder-than-average month. “If you are younger than 29 years old, you haven’t lived in a month that was cooler than the 20th-century average,” said Marshall Shepherd, a professor at the University of Georgia and former president of the American Meteorological Society. “You will hear some skeptics say that the satellite-based temperature records don’t support these findings, but we also used ground-based instruments like thermometers and rain gauges to validate these measurements.” The new global record is also notable because 2014 was not an El Niño year. Theweather phenomenon is marked by warmer-than-average surface ocean temperatures in the equatorial Pacific and leads to above average near-surface air temperatures and other impacts across the globe. El Niño has been observed during previous record-warm years like 1998, 2005 and 2010. “A record or near-record warm year, especially absent a strong El Niño, is mostly a reminder that the long-term trend for Earth’s temperature is up, up, up,” Princeton University geosciences professor Michael Oppenheimer told HuffPost. Along with rising temperatures, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases continue to increase. Carbon dioxide concentrations surpassed 400 parts per million in May 2013, for the first time in at least 800,000 years. CO2 concentrations rise and fall slightly in an annual cycle, but remained above 400 parts per million for several months in 2014 and have already surpassed 400 again in January 2015. The last time carbon dioxide levels were this high, temperatures were up to 11 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than today, and sea levels were dozens of feet higher. The 400 parts per million milestone is somewhat symbolic, but it serves as a reminder that the massive consumption of fossil fuels continues to remake the chemistry of our atmosphere and trap more and more heat from the sun. “The record temperatures should put to rest the absurd notion of a “pause” (what I refer to as the “Faux Pause”) in global warming,” Mann added.

http://www.investors.com/2014-not-the-hottest-year-on-record/

1/16/2015 6:27 PM EST

Climate Change: The news is ablaze with a report that 2014 was the “hottest year.” But there’s no reason to be excited. The story the global warming alarmists are trying to tell isn’t the only one out there. ‘For the third time in a decade,” shouted the AP, “the globe sizzled to the hottest year on record, federal scientists announced Friday.” The Washington Post reported that “the year 2014 was the hottest ever measured, based on records going back to the year 1880.” Bloomberg News challenged readers to “deny this” and directed them to “animation below” that documents “2014: The Hottest Year.” Hysteria also reigned at the BBC in Britain, the New Era in Africa, Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald and all points in between. In one sense, the breathless stories are correct: 2014 was the hottest year on record — by no more than four-hundredths of a degree. But that’s based on surface thermometer records, which are not reliable. Better measurement is done by satellites, and they indicate 2014 was the third-warmest in the 36 years that satellites have been used to document temperatures. John Christy, a professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, says the satellite data show that temperature changes since 2001 are “statistically insignificant.” As expected, though, some scientists — a few of whom are considered “distinguished” — take the hottest-ever report as confirmation that man is dangerously warming his planet due to fossil-fuel use. But a few have kept their heads. Roger Pielke, professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University, told the Post that “there remain significant uncertainties in the accuracy of the land portion of the surface temperature data, where we have found a significant warm bias.” Judith Curry, professor at Georgia Tech’s school of earth and atmospheric sciences, said that “with 2014 essentially tied with 2005 and 2010 for hottest year,” the implication is “that there has been essentially no trend in warming over the past decade.” “This ‘almost’ record year does not help the growing discrepancy between the climate model projections and the surface temperature observations,” she added. There’s simply nothing to see here. But that’s the way it’s always been with the global-warming swindle.

Venezula

There are too many articles that highlight what happens when government moves to fascist actions, national socialism. But Venezula certainly is the poster child.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/americasview/2010/12/hugo_ch%C3%A1vezs_venezuela

Investors Business Daily, “Socialist Venezuela Feels the Bern”.

The voting and poll data shows the younger you are the more you think socialism is a good thing, whether at the extreme like Venezuela and Cuba or more soft like Denmark. Do some reading, please, and ask, do you trust the government to do better with your money, than you do? Margaret Thatcher famously said, “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”

U.S. declines again as a “Free Economy”

The Heritage Foundation publishes a yearly Index of Economic Freedom, http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking, that measures exactly that, how free a country’s is, how easy it is to participate, start a business, etc. Our country fell again, we are now 13th. Why? Government interference, higher taxes, more control by the nomenklatura, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomenklatura, etc.

If we want to affect the incomes of the middle class, our economy should be more free, not less.

http://dailysignal.com/2016/01/31/americas-economic-freedom-has-rapidly-declined-under-obama/?utm_source=heritagefoundation&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=saturday&mkt_tok=3RkMMJWWfF9wsRovs6jAZKXonjHpfsX57ewtXqWwlMI%2F0ER3fOvrPUfGjI4ASMtjNa%2BTFAwTG5toziV8R7jHKM1t0sEQWBHm

Deportation

This political season has seen immigration rise again in its’ importance. Some say there are 11 million “illegals” in our country, half of those are visa ‘overstayers’ per the data. Deportations are currently legal, and always have been. Per the WSJ, “Restarting Deportation Is Needed to Deter Illegals” 2 million people have been apprehended but not detained or deported. 1 million have removal orders issued but not carried out. Cities have declared themselves as sanctuary cities, not cooperating with ICE. “E Verify”, the program to verify a persons’ citizenship is voluntary but proven to be a significant barrier for undocumented people, the only jobs they can get are in the cash economy. Some conservatives like the cheap labor, most progressives want more votes, the rest of us are ticked off that neither side will enforce the law.

Undocumented workers lower wages for the entry level jobs here in the U.S. This is another factor in the income inequality we see rising. Many of us however do not want to pay more for food, waiters, lawn care, etc. as those prices will rise as wages will have to rise when we clean up the mess.

What’s “best” for country has lots of meanings. My meaning is clean it up, I will pay more if needed.

COrporate leaders attacked, government employees and legislators go free

Teh below article talks about Sen. Warren going after corporate leaders for alleged malfeasance, as well they should be if laws were broken. What isn’t talked about are the many federal employees, and legislators that invoke their “brilliance” and throw millions into enconomic or personal tragedies. Examples: The VA; Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae; the ACA; need I go on? Everyone but her is evil, us versus them, no effort to solve problems, only blame someone else. That attitude is the foundation for wars, totalitarianism, fascism. Sad.

http://blogs.rollcall.com/wgdb/warren-releases-rigged-justice-report/?pos=eam&dczone=emailalert

As Congress considers overhauling the criminal justice system, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., is working to show that law enforcement is “shockingly weak” when it comes to corporate crimes.

Warren’s office released a 13-page report on Friday, titled “Rigged Justice: 2016; How Weak Enforcement Lets Corporate Offenders Off Easy,” which argues that the justice system is rigged in favor of corporations and executives who commit crimes. The report highlights 20 cases that, in Warren’s staff’s view, demonstrate how the federal government failed to hold corporations and executives accountable for breaking the law.

“When government regulators and prosecutors fail to pursue big corporations or their executives who violate the law, or when the government lets them off with a slap on the wrist, corporate criminals have free rein to operate outside the law,” according to the report. “They can game the system, cheat families, rip off taxpayers, and even take actions that result in the death of innocent victims—all with no serious consequences.”

Prosecuting corporate crimes has become a topic of discussion as Congress looks to overhaul the criminal justice system. Such overhaul efforts have become entangled over whether to change laws relating to criminal intent, also known as mens rea. Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, R-Utah, said at a Jan. 20 Judiciary hearing, “I believe that any package of criminal justice reforms that passes Congress must include meaningful provisions to shore-up mens rea protection.”

Hatch argued that such provisions, submitted in an amendment to a bipartisan sentencing bill, would protect citizens from being prosecuted for a crime that they did not realize they were committing. But Democrats raised concern that altering such provisions would make it more difficult to prosecute corporate crimes.

The authors of Warren’s report furthered that argument, writing, “If adopted, this amendment would severely weaken the already anemic enforcement of federal white-collar criminal laws.”

As the debate continues, Warren’s report sought to demonstrate the extent to which such “anemic enforcement” exists. The cases detailed in the report grabbed headlines throughout the year, including the BP Deepwater Horizon settlement with the Justice Department and five states, where BP is required to pay nearly $21 billion, though $15 billion of that would be tax deductible.

The report also highlighted an agreement with General Motors that the company pay a $900 million fine for covering up ignition switch problems that resulted in more than 100 deaths and nearly 300 injuries. The report’s authors argued that no individual was held accountable for the cover up, or charged with a crime, and pointed out that criminal charges against GM were suspended.

In addition to these cases, the report covers settlements over violations that span such areas as the financial sector, education and student loans, automobile safety, environmental laws, trade laws and drug manufacturing. The authors noted that only one of the examples, a coal mine blast that killed 29, resulted in a trial and conviction.

Warren has worked to make corporate settlements in criminal and cases more transparent. Her “Truth in Settlements Act” won approval in the Senate in September, and has been referred to House Oversight and Government Reform. The bill would require federal agencies to release settlement agreements on their websites, and list information including payments involved in the agreements and where the payments will be collected.

“Hate” crimes faked, media buys in without fact searching

Hype: As the attorney general threatens to prosecute Americans for anti-Muslim hate crime, Muslims are faking anti-Muslim hate crimes across the country to prop up the fiction that Muslims are victimized in the U.S.

The latest fabrication involves the torching of a Houston mosque on Christmas Day. The arson was quickly seized on by the national media and Muslim-rights groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which demanded that police investigate it as a hate crime.

“We urge law enforcement authorities to investigate a possible bias motive for this fire,” CAIR’s Houston chapter said in a statement.

Federal authorities did investigate, and they collared a suspect. Sorry, CAIR, he’s not a Muslim-hating Trump supporter. He’s a Muslim.

Not only that, he’s a longtime member of the damaged Islamic Society of Greater Houston mosque, where he prayed five times a day, seven days per week.

Last Christmas, a similar incident was reported at a mosque in Fresno, Calif.; and in a similar rush to judgment, the media joined Muslim groups in accusing anti-Islamic bigots for the vandalism of the Islamic Cultural Center there.

Only, it turned out that the incident was not an act of “Islamophobia” at all.

As in Houston, the damage was self-inflicted by a member of the mosque. Police arrested Asif Mohammad Khan. They said that he was an admirer of Osama bin Laden.

These are hardly isolated cases of Muslim groups and their media apologists misleading the public about anti-Muslim hate crimes.

They are part of a long series of events — including pure fabrications — that serve to portray non-Muslims as threats and deflect attention away from Muslims as the real threats. Learning from other groups, they’ve discovered that racism can be blamed for almost everything.

• October 2014: Two Muslim activists released a video showing NYPD cops harassing and “racially profiling” Muslims just for wearing Islamic garb. The video went viral; CAIR demanded an investigation for discrimination. But the whole thing was staged. The cops weren’t even real.

• June 2014: After three burned Qurans were found in front of a mosque in Dearborn, Mich., the imam there led a campaign to pass a local statute criminalizing the desecration of holy books. The media ran with it, and his crusade gained traction — until it was revealed that the Quran barbecuer was none other than a Muslim named Ali Hassan al-Assadi.

• April 2014: After murdering his wife, a Muslim man in El Cajon, Calif., made it look like an anti-Muslim bigot did the crime. He left a note with her body that read: “Go back to your country, you terrorist,” which led the media to report the murder as an “Islamophobic” hate crime.

Liberal Media quiet about sex scandel in one of its’ own

Media Bias: Fitzgibbon Media, a left-wing public relations giant, shut down suddenly Friday in a huge sex-harassment scandal. The press is strangely silent, which wouldn’t be the case if this progressive firm was on the right.

Remember the War On Women? That was the campaign pitch used in recent elections to smear conservatives as ogres.

It was a phrase used by FitzGibbon Media, a left-wing PR firm, as its operatives hounded GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney into a campaign flap over his inept turn of phrase, “binders of women,” on female hiring. Radio host Rush Limbaugh also was caught in the PR dragnet, with a hullabaloo over his description of a birth control campaigner as “a slut.” Conservatives, in short, are raked over the coals for minor verbal transgressions, with wall-to-wall media coverage for days.

But actual dirty deeds were going on inside one of the very crafters of that “narrative.” Founder Trevor FitzGibbon has been accused by his leftist employees and even his clients of soliciting naked pictures, demanding sex and harassing with impunity. Slate noted that it was “an open secret.” In other words, it was known to the press for years, which did nothing.

Instead, employees exposed the harassment. FitzGibbon called it “a distraction” before shutting his company down. Even with 30 employees laid off just before Christmas, the mainstream press has said nothing.

It’s not as if sources are unwilling to talk — they are — to the Internet press such as Huffington Post, Vox and Slate. Yet it’s a heck of a news story when the top public relations firm for activist groups that have made hay from the war-on-women meme, such as NARAL, MoveOn.org, Daily Kos and UltraViolet turn out to employ the very worst violator of it.

It’s also a pattern across the left: Democratic pols such as Bill Clinton, Anthony Weiner, Eliot Spitzer and Bob Filner pioneered these predatory acts.

Slate blames “a patriarchal society” for the barbarism. But the reality is, the left-wing philosophy itself is the root of the behavior.

Leftists, wrote P.J. O’Rourke in his 1993 “Give War a Chance” have a toddlerlike idea of freedom. They “want the freedom to put anything into their mouths, to say bad words and to expose their private parts in art museums.”

Like toddlers, they are also getting a pass in the press. But they are adults. And the media is derelict in not covering the true image behind the FitzGibbon spin.

ACA signups below expectations

Signups for ACA half of what was expected.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/12/us/almost-a-million-more-sign-up-for-health-coverage-in-february.html?_r=0

This article and others like it report that the signups for “Obamacare”, or the ACA are up over last year but far short, by 50% of what was expected.

Well, another expectation not met by the law that Nancy Pelosi famously said, “Let’s pass it before we read it”, and Johnathon Gruber also said afterwards, “You can’t do it political, you just literally cannot do it. Transparent financing and also transparent spending. I mean, this bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes the bill dies. Okay? So it’s written to do that.”

Rates are up, not down as “expected”. We don’t get to keep our current insurance if want to, another missed expectation. We don’t get to go to our doctors as expected. We don’t get the prescriptions we had in the past, another missed expectation………….

How about taking responsibility for messing up President Obama, Nancy and Harry! We are a rich country; all should have access to decent health care. We need to figure out a better way!

School choice, primary and secondary

School Choice, primary and secondary systems

In the late-19^th century, “public” education was established in all the states. It was not consistent throughout the country but gained strength and became an institution, and a positive one for our democracy. Our founders saw that an educated voter was the best foundation for the freedoms we hold dear.

Like any large organization, 150 years brings in lots of inefficiencies and waste that needs cleaning out. The economist, Schumpeter, introduced a term, “creative destruction” in the mid-20^th century that describes the process organizations must, I repeat, must undergo to produce the results needed to be successful. Although it was developed to talk about companies producing products or services, it certainly applies to any other organization. We see the lack of results from large, non-market organizations that are due to the lack of a regular cleaning out that the market brings. Congress, churches, non for profits, etc. are examples. Our education establishment is long overdue.

Education resists measuring outputs, it likes measuring inputs. Any attempt to evaluate teachers, provide for competitors that can tap into public funding, test students, etc. is met with furious resistance. The U.S. has continually slid down the scale when our kids are tested and measured against other “competitor” countries. http://www.oecd.org/pisa/keyfindings/PISA-2012-results-US.pdf.

The article below talks about the Washington DC program to grant funds for kids to attend schools outside of the DC public system. The parents love the program, the teachers and Democrat Congresswoman, Eleanor Homes Norton, hate it. They fear competition. We will lose this republic if we don’t reform education. http://www.oecd.org/pisa/keyfindings/PISA-2012-results-US.pdf.

When Ben Franklin was asked after the new constitution passed, barely by the way, what type of government did the U.S. have, he replied;
The deliberations of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 were held in strict secrecy. Consequently, anxious citizens gathered outside Independence Hall when the proceedings ended in order to learn what had been produced behind closed doors. The answer was provided immediately. A Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia asked Benjamin Franklin, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” With no hesitation whatsoever, Franklin responded, “A republic, if you can keep it.”