SEN. TOM COTTON: How I Would Deal With Iran.
Archive for 2015
April 1, 2015
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Racketeering Convictions In Atlanta Public Schools Cheating Scandal.
SOUTHERN CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE GEORGIA CHAPTER PRESIDENT: Arm Yourself Against The Police.
YEAH, BUT THEY’RE SUBSIDIZED FOR PURELY POLITICAL REASONS: MSNBC ratings crater as NBC looks for new direction. “Strident demagoguery may sell for a short period of time, but it has little staying power. In contrast, the talking head shows on Fox and CNN deal with dissent in a much more mature manner, and usually features more of it than MSNBC prime-time shows do. For that matter, Morning Joe has a much different dynamic than the channel’s prime-time shows, and it’s thriving.”
I WONDER, ACTUALLY, IF THERE ISN’T MONEY TO BE MADE IN SUING THEM: Massive denial-of-service attack on GitHub tied to Chinese government.
EDUCATION: Why I Teach Plato to Plumbers: Liberal arts and the humanities aren’t just for the elite. “There are among future plumbers as many devotees of Plato as among the future wizards of Silicon Valley.”
THE NEW LINCOLN CONTINENTAL CONCEPT: “Take a Ford Taurus, rub it sparingly with the sad ham of luxury appliqué, and you get the Lincoln MKS. In fact, there may not have been a car more cynical in Ford’s repertoire since post-Malaise downsizing of the 1980s. Finally, Lincoln has decided to erase this blight upon its name, and if the new Continental concept car isn’t the blocky, presidential pomp machine the fashionably tattooed were hoping for, it’s certainly a step away from the baleen-waterfall-stache visual grammar Lincoln has been selling of late.” Okay, that’s not the highest praise. But it’s not bad looking, though this fake Lincoln is prettier.
IN THE MAIL: The Best 379 Colleges, 2015 Edition.
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TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 692.
EDUCATIONAL BENEFITS FEW, OPPORTUNITIES FOR GRAFT, EXCELLENT: The Myth of Universal Pre-K: There is little proof that universal pre-K programs fulfill their promises for disadvantaged children.
The claim that investing a dollar in high-quality pre-K can save more than $7 down the line has been repeated so often it’s achieved the status of received wisdom.
The problem is that there’s no evidence that universal pre-K comes even close to its touted capacity to move the needle for disadvantaged children. Pre-K advocates widely cite two well-run demonstration projects from a half century ago – Perry Preschool and the Abecedarian Project – as proof that pre-K has lasting benefits for low-income kids. Perry Preschool, run from 1962 to 1967 in Ypsilanti, Michigan, placed a total of 64 three- and four-year-old poor children in morning preschool for two-and-a-half hours per day and made weekly home visits to their mothers. Abecedarian, run from 1972 to 1975 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, placed a total of 57 poor children in a full-time, full-year, high-quality childcare/preschool setting from infancy through age five. Both programs had major positive impacts on participants’ educational and life outcomes, sustained for decades into adulthood, with big economic benefits to society through lower social welfare costs, decreased crime rates and increased tax revenue over the lifetimes of program participants.
Skeptics point out that Perry and Abecedarian were small, boutique programs, carried out decades ago, with limited applicability to large-scale pre-K in 2015. But perhaps the most important problem is that the design of those programs bears little resemblance to pre-K – much less universal pre-K – in the first place. Perry could just as well have been called the Perry Home Visiting Project, since the weekly home visiting component of the program was at least as intensive as the 15-hours-per-week preschool part. And Abecedarian wasn’t even a pre-K: Children were enrolled full-time starting when they were infants, not at the preschool age of three or four. . . .
The unfortunate bottom line is that big scale-ups of “pre-K for all” are much more useful to politicians and the middle class than to the disadvantaged children most in need of help.
But they produce lots of unionized, Dem-voting public employees. Stay-at-home moms, on the other hand, show a disturbing tendency to vote Republican.
MARK HEMINGWAY: Meet the Men Behind Hillary Clinton’s Private ‘Spy Network.’
SMART DIPLOMACY: “There are still nearly two years left in Barack Obama’s presidency, but historians looking back on his record in foreign policy will surely identify one costly error: his refusal to follow through on the implied threat in stating that the Syrian regime’s use of chemical weapons would be a ‘red line.'”
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AUSTIN BAY: Evaluating the Pan-Arab “Joint Army.”
AN EVIL SO UNSELF-CONSCIOUS IT IS AN AWFUL PARODY OF INNOCENCE: Harry Reid is proud he lied about Mitt Romney’s taxes.
You know, if I were Mitt Romney, I’d put a million or so toward hiring some investigative journalists to ensure that Reid’s remaining years were uncomfortable.
ANDREW SULLIVAN: Blogging Nearly Killed Me. “He described the grueling pace that he maintained along with a small editorial staff.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: One-Third Of Federal Student Loan Borrowers Are Delinquent.
OPPOSING TOTALITARIANISM: Paper: Don’t ‘turn colleges into overseers of student sex lives.’
Colleges and universities in New York and, presumably, elsewhere shouldn’t enact “yes means yes” consent policies that force colleges to oversee student sex lives, according to an editorial in the New York Daily News.
The Daily News’ editorial page typically leans slightly to the Left (with the notable exception of endorsing Mitt Romney in 2012), which makes its editorial all the more interesting. The editorial comes on the heels of an op-ed by K.C. Johnson, who co-wrote the book on the Duke Lacrosse hoax, which expressed similar sentiments.
Given the quick debunking of the Rolling Stone article about an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia, the Daily News editorial board suggests colleges rethink their current scorched-earth methods of handling campus sexual assault. Specifically, Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s support of the controversial “yes means yes” consent policies that require college students to obtain “clear, unambiguous, knowing, informed and voluntary agreement” before each individual sexual act from kissing to touching to intercourse. These policies not only leave college students vulnerable if they cannot prove they obtained such consent, but also void consent if the accuser had been drinking.
“Nice idea, but unrealistic,” wrote the Daily News. “Without getting an openly stated yes and then another and another, a party who failed to get an explicitly positive response to the question, ‘May I?’ would be subject to sexual assault discipline. Even a thousand yeses might not suffice if a partner had been drinking, as does happen at college.”
The Daily News also faulted Cuomo’s policies for providing a “bill of rights” for students making accusations of sexual assault that provides no due-process rights for the accused. The editorial board also faulted Cuomo and President Obama for continuously citing the debunked statistic that one in five college women have been sexually assaulted.
How many politicians could survive an “affirmative consent” regime?