ConservativeINC

Fine, America’s fourth graders aren’t actually “illiterate” but we are falling behind other countries according to a story from AP. The last time this test was given was in 2001 and since then our scores have stayed flat while others have increased. Now we’re ranked twelfth in the world behind countries like Russia and Hungary. What’s to blame for our lack of improvement?

The story gives a hint: No Child Left Behind. Bush’s brainchild educational reform emphasizes reading more but scores are still just treading water. Personally I think that NCLB is a decent idea but it doesn’t really address the problem head on. If we want to dramatically increase scores then we’re going to have to overhaul the education system with free market reforms. Kids get stuck in failing schools and many teachers don’t care about improving themselves because there is no financial incentive for doing so. A move to vouchers would increase our scores.

Or our scores could be treading water because there has been a massive influx of non-English speaking immigrants. That could be it.

Venezuela has made an intriguing move of their own by all but severing ties with their neighbor, Columbia. After getting the boot from Columbian President Alvaro Uribe from a mediation role between the Columbian government and leftists rebels (FARC), Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez recalled his ambassador to Columbia and said many harsh words about his conservative neighbor.

One question: Why would the Columbians call on Hugo Chavez, the resurgent communist, to help negotiate with leftist rebels in the first place? I understand that Chavez is close to the rebels but shouldn’t that have been more a warning sign then anything else? Columbia is contending that Chavez had unilateral talks with the head of Columbia’s Army, which is a big time no no. Could he have been planning a leftist coup in Columbia? Probably not but the end result is that there is no doubt that he is untrustworthy.

6,000 Sunnis join the fight in Iraq. They’ve joined with the side of democracy because al Qaeda has killed too many of their brethren to be seen as anything but murderous thugs. The Sunnis will provide help with a couple hundred checkpoints and will hopefully stem off the movement of insurgents and terrorists into the oil rich regions of North Iraq. Oh, and the last paragraph of the story mentioned how a bunch of refugees were getting bused into Iraq from Syria. Good news.

Is there good news for our beleaguered markets? No one can be sure and anyone who puts credence into the day-to-day fluctuations of the Dow Jones Industrial Average is a fool. The recent bump in the market is directly attributable to the Fed’s hinting at future rate cuts. But think about it, has the value of Coca Cola increased a couple of percentage points since last weak just because of possible rate cuts? How about any of the other companies? The market is fickle and reading too much into a good day or a bad day is folly.

Bill Clinton on Iraq in 2004:

That’s why I supported the Iraq thing. There was a lot of stuff unaccounted for. So I thought the President had an absolute responsibility to go to the U.N. and say, “Look, guys, after 9/11, you have got to demand that Saddam Hussein lets us finish the inspection process.” You couldn’t responsibly ignore [the possibility that] a tyrant had these stocks. I never really thought he’d [use them]. What I was far more worried about was that he’d sell this stuff or give it away. Same thing I’ve always been worried about North Korea’s nuclear and missile capacity. I don’t expect North Korea to bomb South Korea, because they know it would be the end of their country. But if you can’t feed yourself, the temptation to sell this stuff is overwhelming. So that’s why I thought Bush did the right thing to go back. When you’re the President, and your country has just been through what we had, you want everything to be accounted for.

Now he says that he has been against the Iraq War “from the beginning.” To be fair to the former president he was not explicitly for the Iraq War. But he was not against it either. He wasn’t for or against the war and yet here he comes saying he was always against the thing. I don’t see how this helps Hillary at all but I do see how it helps her husband.

He’s in the news again. Everyone thinks he’s such a brilliant speaker and he has a blanket immunity from the media to say whatever he wants and to get away with it. This is just Bill being Bill and he’s going to make sure that his legacy is intact no matter what.

Remember how I said you shouldn’t put too much into the daily fluctuations of the market? You shouldn’t put too much into the yearly fluctuations of the weather either. 2007 is going to be the seventh warmest year on record (reliable records start around 1860) meaning that the world is slightly cooling yet still warm. My question: What’s going to happen when there is significant cooling one year? How about for five years in a row so that there’s a trend?

This story talks about how Bulgarian bears are already hibernating, which is right on track based on historical data. If you want to thank anyone for making sure that the bears got to bed on time then you should probably be thanking America because we were able to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 1.5% last year. Yeah for us!

And finally, a Dutch lawmaker with a death wish has said he’s going to make a ten-minute long movie showing how the Quran has passages in it that are used “by bad people to do bad things.” Perhaps the most disturbing thing about this whole thing was this:

The interior and justice ministers said they were concerned, but believed they had no authority to prevent the lawmaker, Geert Wilders, from screening his film.

When I first read this passage I thought they must have been talking about protecting Mr Wilders but I’m not so sure after reading the whole article a couple of times. I’m now pretty sure now that they are just talking about shutting this guy up because it might offend some people. This is just one of many battles that are being waged, mostly in Europe, between the West and Islam.

These battles mostly do not involve bombs and guns but legalese and sensitivity codes. I like to believe that the vast majority of Muslims want to live in peace in their adopted homelands but I’m not so naive as to think they wouldn’t rather be living under Islamic law with Islamic leaders. Using hate speech codes and bending over backwards to not offend minorities is the surest way to lose all Western identity and this is what is happening in the Netherlands right now.

BigT’s Linkapalooza:
British teacher charged with offending Islam in the Sudan.
Militants march against the teacher.
The bear wasn’t even named after the prophet, but after the kid who suggested the name (who’s doubtlessly named after the prophet himself).
40 lashes.
Was Annapolis a false start?
Musharraf has been honorably discharged.
BigT

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15,000+ have died in Bangladesh from a cyclone. This is a huge disaster. What it shows is that there is no way on God’s green earth we can do anything to prevent or even predict something that comes from nature. The forces of weather and climate change are well beyond our control and no matter what we do we can only nudge it a minuscule amount.

“Milk your rat.” Heather Mills is one leg short of a, sorry, too easy I guess. Also below the belt. But when someone comes out saying that in order to go green you have to get down on all fours and milk rodents and pets, a la Ben Stiller in Meet the Parents, then not much is “below the belt.”

I have this sneaky feeling that a couple hundred years from now they are going to look back at this time in history and think we’re nuts just like we look back on others in history and think the same things. We’re responsible for the most dynamic world economy ever, the standard of living for the poor in America is better then the standard of living for 99% of people throughout history, and basically nothing is out of the realm of possibility in America and yet we have stories about milking rats to save the world. The last thing I have to say is that Ms. Mills is milking her previous marriage and environmentalism as much as she can.

France’s economy sucks:

France is ranked as only the 18th most competitive nation in the world; the country’s public debt has grown faster than anywhere else in Europe. Unemployment sits at 8.4 percent, but is 22 percent among people under age 25 and up to 50 percent in some troubled suburbs.

And to top all of that off there are a multitude of strikes already in place or being threatened. President Sarkozy should seize this as an opportunity and get rid of as many of these unions as possible. The problem with France’s economy is that it is paralyzed because there are draconian regulations put in place that makes it nearly impossible to fire anyone and extremely costly to hire any new employees. It is imperative that this stranglehold is broken if France wants to have a chance at being competitive once again. Maybe Sarkozy should take a page out of Reagan’s book and fire a bunch of these strikers. But, seeing as this is France after all, that would probably be illegal.

Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf declared emergency rule a couple weeks ago to, some cynically say, make sure that he became the president. One of the bonuses that comes along with declaring emergency rule is that he got to unilaterally reappoint the Supreme Court and that very Supreme Court has dismissed the important challenges against another Musharraf term as president. After this “surprising” development Musharraf has said he will step down as general by the end of this week.

All of this leads to a couple of interesting questions. First, was martial law necessary? I think that it is because Pakistan is being overran by insurgent forces from al Qaeda, the Taliban, and other assorted bellicose groups. About a month ago the left’s leading light for “democracy,” Benazir Bhutto, almost got blown up into 1,000 little pieces. Waziristan makes “Indian territory” seem like a week at Disneyland. The place is falling to the wrong people.

The second major question should be was there an ulterior motive to declaring martial law? Short answer, yes. It’s no secret that Musharraf has political enemies, enemies that may not specifically want to be overran by seventh century Islamic retreads, but enemies nonetheless. These political enemies seem to be blinded by the fact that Musharraf isn’t a ray of sunshine in a troubled land and would back anyone but him for democracy.

Musharraf recognizes this and acted to make sure that he remained president because he thinks (and I think) he’s what is best for Pakistan right now. I hope that his line of reasoning is that any political disintegration in Pakistan will lead to radical Islam taking over Pakistan and not that he just wants to keep his position of power. We’ll find out soon enough.

BigT’s Linkapalooza:
NY Times not completely right on subprime woes.
Which baseball bat would you get?
Chavez & OPEC.
Chavez & Ahmadinejad.
Chavez & Ahmadinejad v America.
“Shut up!” Get the ringtone that tells the Venezuelan dictator what to do.
Powell says Iran isn’t close to going nuclear.
Shepard Smith worth 7+ million dollars per year.
Christopher Hitchens tells us what is going on in Iraq.
BigT

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Very few people have any sense of history. They were never taught it and they never wanted to learn it. This is how we get stories from places like Variety that exposes this lack of historical understanding. In a story titled Strike fight rages on in a bubble we have yet another example of this ignorance.

strike rhetoric is oddly mirroring modern politics, where partisans now filter straight-ahead reporting through an “us vs. them” prism, seeking out accounts that buttress their views while shunning those that might challenge them.

This represents a relatively recent dynamic, fueled by the Rush Limbaugh era of talk radio, cable news and the Internet, which barely existed during the last strike in 1988. It’s an especially poisonous environment when applied to this fracas, since talent and the studios must eventually reunite once the saber-rattling and marching ends, whereas political combatants (or at least their public mouthpieces) are now locked in a state of perpetual warfare, the better to spice up the give and take on “Hannity & Colmes.”

Do people like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes paint issues in an “us versus them” light? Absolutely! How about during the American Civil War? How about Rome when Julius Caeser became a tyrant and was knifed in the Senate? How about the Garden of Eden when God told Adam and Eve that if they disobeyed they would get evicted? Every important event through history was based on an “us versus them” basis because that is the essence of importance. An issue that has importance to two or more divergent groups will always have contentious moments. Blaming this on Rush Limbaugh is ridiculous and is symptomatic of a greater problem for the Left; they don’t have an answer for Conservative political thinkers so they revert to blaming them for everything that goes wrong. Sad.

I’m surprised that the Left hasn’t blamed Rush for Pakistan yet. Pakistani affairs is based on an “us versus them” situation right now. Musharraf against the Taliban and the terrorists. Bhutto against Musharraf. Bhutto’s niece against Bhutto. Things in Pakistan are going to get much worse before they get any better especially if Musharraf has declared martial law in order to cement his power base. But that isn’t the only reason he declared martial law.

Al Qaeda, according to its leader Osama bin Laden, declared war on Pakistan a month ago. Terrorist organizations are taking more land in the Pakistani badlands every day and Musharraf has reacted to this threat. Is he a great option for Pakistan? No. Is he the best they have? Probably. Their other options are, well, basically their other option is Benazir Bhutto. While Musharraf is a bad option, Bhutto may be a lot worse. She is extremely corrupt (seems to go with the territory with any politician, especially those in the Middle East) and was one of three international leaders that recognized Afghanistan’s Taliban government. All I have to say right now is that just because the current guy is bad doesn’t mean he should be deposed because the alternatives may prove to be much worse.

This incessant need to “do something” isn’t just limited to Pakistan. Doing something for the sake of change itself is the mantra of the Left in general. Take climate change for example. The UN is hard at work creating a 25 page document that is supposed to lay out a plan designed to “aide” governments in combating climate change. We still don’t know what causes global warming (it could be the SUN, it could have something to do with water evaporation, who knows?) but gee golly we’re going to prevent it!

Maybe we could switch all our energy over ethanol! Well, not so fast. Cato, named after one of those Senators that was against Caeser (of course he didn’t stab Caeser because he was dead, suicide) succinctly makes this point:

“Ethanol will not lead to energy independence. If all the corn produced in America in 2005 were dedicated to ethanol production (and only 14.3 percent of it was), U.S. gasoline consumption would have dropped by only 12 percent. For corn ethanol to completely displace gasoline in this country, we would need to appropriate all U.S. cropland, turn it over to ethanol production, and then find 20 percent more land on top of that.”

Look, our insatiable appetite for oil is an extremely important issue, arguably the most important issue for the next half a century. It’s price is rising faster then a rocket and that money is going to our enemies. Heck, throw in its ill affects to the environment if that makes you feel better. Something needs to be done but the last entity I would entrust to find a solution to this dire predicament is any government (or an international body). Things will start happening in the open markets as price increases makes changes economically feasible.

Whatever we end up doing it shouldn’t be done by the government. Take Don’t Look to Government to Cool Down the Planet by John Stossel:

There are good reasons to begin with a presumption against government action. As coercive monopolies that spend other people’s money taken by force, governments are uniquely unqualified to solve problems. They are riddled by ignorance, perverse incentives, incompetence and self-serving. The synthetic-fuels program during the Carter years consumed billions of dollars and was finally disbanded as a failure. The push for ethanol today is more driven by special interests than good sense — it’s boosting food prices while producing a fuel of dubious environmental quality.

Even if the climate really needs cooling down, government can’t be counted on to accomplish that. Advocates of carbon taxes and emissions trading talk about reducing CO2, but they promise no more than a minuscule reduction in temperature. Temperature reduction is supposed to be the objective.

In fact, even drastic plans to cut the use of carbon-based energy would make only a negligible difference. As John Christy, director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and a member of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, wrote last week in The Wall Street Journal:

“Suppose you are very serious about making a dent in carbon emissions and could replace about 10 percent of the world’s energy sources with non-CO2-emitting nuclear power by 2020 — roughly equivalent to halving U.S. emissions. Based on IPCC-like projections, the required 1,000 new nuclear power plants would slow the warming by about 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit per century. It’s a dent.”

I agree with Stott, who says, “The right approach to climate change is adaptation — and the way to do that is to have strong economies.”

We will have a strong economy if we don’t give up our freedom and our money to fulfill the grand schemes of big-government alarmists.

Next week: How the private sector could deal with a global-warming problem.

We’ll be waiting for that next column.

Something that really can’t wait any longer is our airport security. The GAO has found that it can smuggle bomb making components onto planes, components that can be made into bombs that could take down a plane. I’ve heard special ops guys say they can smuggle a broken down sniper riffle through most security systems (with the Israelis as an exception). But a bomb? This is what happens when the government (not counting the military, of course) does something.

The reason why the government cannot be trusted with important issues is because the politicians that run it are pathetic. Even though all the frontrunning Democrat hopefuls have put the breaks on getting the troops out of Iraq before 2013 the House has passed an Iraq war bill for less then President Bush had asked for with one disgusting caveat. The troops have to be out by the end of next year. This will doubtlessly be vetoed by the President but there’s no way he should even be put in this position.

In a different part of the world the Russians have “removed” troops from Georgia except for “peace keepers” in two separatist regions. Do I think this move is a noble gesture showing that Russia has turned a corner and doesn’t want to control those it formerly controlled? No. This seems to me to be a geopolitical chess move made to make Russian President Vladimir Putin look like a good guy. He’s positioning himself to be ruler for life in Russia and is going to need international support to make sure that everything goes smoothly.

So he has given feckless Western democracies a bone with Georgia without really giving anything up. He’s going to have his “peace keepers” work to undermine the Georgian government through the separatist regions. Mr Putin still believes in an all-powerful Soviet Union and is making it his life’s work to make that vision become a reality.

Switching back to America. Home prices seemed to have no ceiling three years ago. Everyone was worried that people would be priced out of the market and the middle class would no longer exist. Things have changed; real estate is at it lowest point in two and a half years and the floor seems to be nonexistent. The same people that were decrying the rising real estate prices are playing the same part as the prices are falling. Shouldn’t everything be better now that more people can afford homes? I mean, that was the worry just a couple years ago, prices were just too high for the normal family. I guess this just shows that you should be careful what you wish for.

Finally we are going to jet set to China where Yahoo! narked on some journalists who were critical of the commies in China. The journalists were quickly thrown in jail and Yahoo! was shamed. Now they have secretively settled with the journalists’ families and they’re hoping that his all blows over. What this situation shows is that China cannot be trusted. Yes, we still should do business with them but we need to make it on our terms, not theirs. Throwing journalists in jail for no good reason is a clear sign that you are in a totalitarian regime. China cannot be trusted.

BigT’s Linkapalooza:
Chinese sensors being sued for cutting out sex scenes in movie.
More sex, this time with nuns. Exciting!
Spitzer’s license defeat spun as “win” by NY Times.
Hugo mad at Spain.
Brangelina buy island in Dubai.
DC Liberals cheat taxes? Say it ain’t so.
Learning music = higher earnings.
A-Rod, alas, may still play in pinstripes.
BigT

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