Is the Atlanta Public School for Scandal Typical?

USA Today has a piece noting few states check for suspicious erasures on standardized tests, in the wake of systematic cheating by Atlanta teachers:

A survey by USA TODAY of state education agencies found that 20 states and Washington, D.C., did erasure analysis on all pencil-and-paper tests required during the 2010-11 school year under the federal No Child Left Behind education law.

That means nearly 45% of the annual reading and math exams this year were scored without analyzing erasures.

A D.C. check found problems with over half.

A better approach would of course be to let the tax dollars go to the parents and follow the child. Parents know how well their children are learning, and even if some parents don’t care there are enough who do to force improvement through school competition.

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Shorting Stay at Home Moms on Credit

The Credit Card Act was supposed to rein in eeeevil financial institutions. Now that the Federal Reserve is proposing rules based on the legislation mandating consideration of independent income rather than household income as has been the norm, stay at home moms may have to have their spouses co-sign their card applications. TWS on the WSJ article. They go on:

This comes on the heels of another proposal by the Fed (subsequently tweaked), under which “retailers would have had to require customers to provide pay stubs and tax documents when applying for a credit card at the cash register.” Moreover, it’s par for the course. The Obama administration’s and Democratic congressional leaders’ preferred mode of legislating is to vest incredible amounts of quasi-legislative power in the hands of unelected officials (see Obamacare), who then proceed to issue legally binding “rules” that declare what Americans can or cannot do, nationwide.

Pretty archaic and demeaning. This stuff is making me mad.

Another unintended consequence of the Dems and Obama administration legislation–or was it intentional?

We know NOW and their ilk consider at home moms second class citizens. Now their allies are trying to implement it.

Rule-making without representation, another form of tyranny.

P.S. First Lady O receives no salary, perhaps she can take up this issue–if she can tear herself away from her latest vacation. Will she have to travel with her spouse next time?

Sticky Wiki Morality

No Sheeples has covered the subject admirably in the previous two posts. Victor Davis Hanson explores the man-child playing god that is Julian Assange.

The closest I can come to judging this lack of morality play is in the context of school board meetings. The agenda was online, the attachment packet could be picked up a few days in advance, the meetings were on cable, and there was room for public comment. The board retired to the back room only to discuss personnel issues.

And there still could be incredible rancor.

It is very telling that the Obama administration is only now getting exercised about this all legally when diplomats and their administration’s cover is being blown. It was pretty much OK for our military and friends in Iraq and Afghanistan to be exposed–you know when actual lives, not reputations were at stake.

But why are we surprised by the dangerous, yes dangerous vanity of this presidency.

 

 

Building the Next Bailout…and BUST

TWS:

In July, Illinois went to market with a $900 million BAB issue that attracted 93 investors, including 17 from overseas. The international investors accounted for about 30 percent of the offering. Illinois state officials even joined their underwriters, Citigroup, on a road show through Europe and Asia to drum up interest in the sale.

Setting up the next bust in Illinois and around the country.

Screwing up the current one. From e21 Morning eBrief:

In Foreclosure Controversy, Problems Run Deeper Than Flawed Paperwork (Round Up)Millions of U.S. mortgages have been shuttled around the global financial system – sold and resold by firms – without the documents that traditionally prove who legally owns the loans. Now, as many of these loans have fallen into default and banks have sought to seize homes, judges around the country have increasingly ruled that lenders had no right to foreclose, because they lacked clear title. The court decisions, should they continue to spread, could call into doubt the ownership of mortgages throughout the country, raising urgent challenges for both the real estate market and the wider financial system. The White House has announced that President Obama will pocket veto H.R. 3808 which would have allowed banks to shortcut the current notarization process. See Alphaville for and the Washington Post for more more.

Goldman Sachs: The US Economy Is Weaker Than You Think (Seeking Alpha)Goldman Sachs issued a very bullish note on the Euro this morning. Not because they think Europe is entering a period of robust growth. No, in fact they reduced their estimates for European growth based on the recent Euro strength; however, they see the U.S. economy simply deteriorating more than Europe. The chart in this presentation that jumped out was the ISM’s index compared to the orders & inventories. The orders and inventories data shows a very strong leading indication of future ISM growth. Currently, the orders and inventories data is forecasting ISM readings in the low 40s.

Peggy Noonan on Greece and America’s reaction:

Mr. Lewis: “The Greek state was not just corrupt but also corrupting. Once you saw how it worked you could understand a phenomenon which otherwise made no sense at all: the difficulty Greek people have saying a kind word about one another. . . . Everyone is pretty sure everyone is cheating on his taxes, or bribing politicians, or taking bribes, or lying about the value of his real estate. And this total absence of faith in one another is self-reinforcing. The epidemic of lying and cheating and stealing makes any sort of civic life impossible.”

Thus can great nations, great cultures, disintegrate, break into little pieces that no longer cohere into a whole.

Read it all.

Outrage. Outrage.

This election is so damned important.

Related post: Obama Desperately Trying to Save His Own Senate Seat

–crossposted at BackyardConservative (I’m going crazy, people)

Obama: But that’s not the superhero I promised to be!

Oh, the handwringing! From the LA Times:  

If Ronald Reagan was [sic] the classic Teflon president, Barack Obama is made of Velcro.

Through two terms, Reagan eluded much of the responsibility for recession and foreign policy scandal. In less than two years, Obama has become ensnared in blame.

Cosmic irony, no?  That the President who blames his predecessor for absolutely everything has become the superhero he didn’t sign up to be: Velcro-Man.

Read the rest at  pjMom.

Krugman Koolade

The Democratically controlled Congress has deemed as passed a 1.12 Trillion dollar budget with no budget attached for 2011 http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=37893 and Paul Krugman has explained that the only reason we’re not awash in good fortune is the idiots who have bought into the idea that trippling the debt in 18 months is somehow a bad thing are not investing.

No really.

He even calls it the Myth of Austerity.  And I thought all those struggling with jobs or finding their costs of living going up or feeling anxious about the future and taxes and our prosperity was based on facts like the looming tax hikes, the ever-increasing entitlements and debt and ever-increasing size of local, state and federal government.  It was all just in my silly woman’s head. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/02/opinion/02krugman.html?_r=1 

Apparently because we don’t believe Krugman’s theories or Keynesian economics, we’re all just stupid lemmings not to believe that priming the pump a’la  stimulus bills will bring about a recovery, (the fact that it hasn’t is a mere detail).  Given my apparent ignorance, I have to ask this simple question of true believers.  

At what point will the government have spent enough money to have us arrive at Utopia?  At what point will the primed pump gush forth its bounty the way oil is currently surging into the gulf?   At what point will you be able to tell us, “See.  See!  And You thought we were headed towards bankruptcy and massive inflation and ever spiraling worse debt!” 

What are the markers, the indicators of your success?  When will they show up?  Why will they show up?  At the moment, all I see is you scolding us for not believing because in our own simple hum drum lives if we spend three times what we make, we eventually have those bills come due and we wind up in huge trouble.  Do you live your lives this way, floating massive debt and having economic growth as a result?   Show me the money.

Show me the country, the past studies, the past history where this worked, on a micro scale, a macro scale, any scale other than the world of theory that this would all work if only…the government spent more…if only this had not happened…if only the states had done this…if only the businesses had believed in Tinkerbell just a little bit more.   Show me when Keynesian theory has worked and why.  Show me why you have such blind faith in these theories when the people whose business it is to make money and make money for other people, have no such trust in these scenarios: i.e. the investment class that you declare evil because they are unbelievers.  

This type of thinking by the existing congress, existing administration, existing elite economic theorists who write for the New York Times maintains, we just haven’t done enough.   So I ask, what is the number, the magic number at which you must declare that maybe, perhaps, this theory is just that, and not actual economic reality or do you have a number at which you would be willing to consider that possibly, real dollars and cents don’t work the way theoretical ones do.   

Spouting the only thing still tax free, my own two cents.

Obama’s View: Gulf Spill Recovery Only a Part-Time Job

I might think I was hallucinating, but I have witnesses: commenters on Potluck’s Oval Office live open thread, plus the dozens of millions of people who watched, listened to, or read Barack Obama’s Oval Office speech of only four days ago, Tuesday, June 15. In that speech, according to The New York Times, Obama said:

Already, this oil spill is the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced. And unlike an earthquake or a hurricane, it’s not a single event that does its damage in a matter of minutes or days. The millions of gallons of oil that have spilled into the Gulf of Mexico are more like an epidemic, one that we will be fighting for months and even years.

But make no mistake: We will fight this spill with everything we’ve got for as long as it takes. We will make BP pay for the damage their company has caused. And we will do whatever’s necessary to help the Gulf Coast and its people recover from this tragedy.

So Obama appoints a guy to lead the Gulf recovery: a part-time guy. That’s what Obama considers “everything we’ve got for as long as it takes.” If only he had hired a part-time guy to push through his socialized health-insurance fiasco. But no, for that he had to tie up the 111th Congress for an entire year and whip them into voting on Christmas Eve.

From ABC News:

President Barack Obama’s point man charting a new future for the oil-poisoned Gulf Coast will do the job part-time. Some environmentalists said the job demands someone’s full attention.

Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, who oversees 900,000 Navy and Marine personnel, is inheriting an amorphous second job as the Obama administration’s leader of long-term environmental and economic planning. His task is no less than rebuilding a region still suffering after Hurricane Katrina and beset by decades of environmental problems.

Mabus won’t resign from his Navy job. When President George W. Bushpicked Donald Powell to lead the recovery after Hurricane Katrina, Powell resigned as head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

Mabus was Clinton’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia for two years, after serving as governor of Mississippi.

“The president talked to the governor about this, and they both agreed that he had the ability to do both,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Thursday after Mabus met with Obama at the White House.

That prompted quick criticism from the Defenders of Wildlife, which is working to save animals from the oil that has gushed from an offshore BP oil well for nearly two months. “The idea that he is only going to work on this part-time is disturbing,” said Robert Irvin, the group’s vice president for conservation programs. “If this is the equivalent of war, as the president has been saying, it needs a full-time general.”

True, the recovery will benefit from focused, strong coordination of help from the federal government. But something tells me that’s not what this president has in mind for the Gulf states.

Cross posted at Bread upon the Waters.

The concept of Courageous Restraint has merit.  We should give out medals to Congress if it opts not to spend or even just proposes the idea. That alone would be courage indeed.  The Economic theory these days that governs policy creation and government spending operates through the “Think system.”  http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/05/galbraith_the_danger_posed_by.html

I read it.  I read it again.  I read it a third time and the closest I could come to understanding was this is where the economic realities of my life and those of the theories that win Pulitzers are 180 degrees polar opposite.  I can’t see how it works ergo, I must be an idiot.

Galbraith represents this sort of thinking.  One particular strain of Keyesian economics as it were, rules the day. 

http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/KeynesianEconomics.html 

Aparently debt plays a neutral part in monetary policy or aggregate demand for public/private money.  The theory goes like this: “inflation, unemployment, real GNP, and real national saving should not be affected by whether the government finances its spending with high taxes and low deficits or with low taxes and high deficits. Because people are rational, he argues, they will correctly perceive that low taxes and high deficits today must mean higher future taxes for them and their heirs. They will cut consumption and increase their saving by one dollar for each dollar increase in future tax liabilities.” 

Starting with the first principle, People are rational, please tell me another bedtime story.  Also, there’s the idea that one must and that cutting consumption so as to pay for more taxes is a good thing as versus spending it on anything else other than the state.

“Because the government needs to run a deficit, it’s the only way to inject financial resources into the economy. If you’re not running a deficit, it’s draining the pockets of the private sector.” 

If money is a zero sum game, then the money is either draining the private or public sector; ergo either the government or the governed shall have money to invest. 

If money is not a zero sum or fixed amount, how is it that not running a deficit by the federal government drains the pockets of the private sector?  To my way  of thinking, i.e. logic,  if you run a deficit, to pay the government so it can service it’s debt while providing the services you demand it provide, you must tax more, draining the pockets of the private sector to maintain or sustain a deficit. 

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64B53W20100512

Further, if the government runs a deficit in perpetuity that only grows, the money to pay those bills comes from somewhere and that is the tax payers –through fees, through state taxes to make up the difference in unfunded mandates, through federal taxes, through the “closing of loopholes” through value added taxes, sin taxes and tolls, interest on federal loans, limitations on profit, additional audits, and limitations on services.  Taxes will “drain the pockets of the private sector” to pay for the public sector.  It’s the only way the public sector exists, if the private sector pays.  

The creature that is Government unchecked, unrestrained, unmeasured and unending will devour everything it can. The hypothetical typical American family will be able to sustain itself at its current state only as long as nothing happens to increase debt or limit income.  Taxes do both at the same time.   If the government will not give up one red cent, then the tax payer must give up the red cents for it.

But I’m a mere Haus Frau so obviously I can’t understand.

Finally, and this is my 2 untaxed cents worth of thought here, how could the effect of the deficit being zero be true in perpetuity?  If people are rational as the orriginal premise of this arguement declares, wouldn’t they think spending one’s self in to further and further debt will eventually yeild diminishing returns by the state and for the self?  

If we spend more than our nation can bear in taxes, no matter how many times you shuffle the deck or redistribute the wealth, there will be people hurt by the government’s need for more money, who are on the line where the government deems too much, not enough and the only solutions are for those people unlucky enough to be targed will be to cut services and things they want or perhaps need, thereby increasing unemployment or lowering demand for goods and services, hurting other businesses. 

The consequence will be  an economic spiral of more demand for government services by those hurt by the cutbacks in business to make up the difference and less revenue, resulting in less generated tax revenue that had been heretofore budgeted to pay for those services.

Greater demand will spur further raise taxes to meet existing debt demands and services, ultimately meaning, still more people will have to surrender their little comforts for the good of the state. And our state will become less good. 

We will become a thin nation by default or because of default; our wallets will weigh considerably less anyway; that people are only angry and showing up at tea parties to voice concerns about the spiraling deficit and the wretched relenteless and seemingly perpetual excesses of Congress despite being labeled racists, homophobes, bigots, rednecks, ignorant yokels and the like, that might be the true definition of Courageous restraint.   After all, according to the smartest theorists running the country, we’re rational.

Wonder if we could get medals for our trouble. 

Don’t You Dare Ask For My ID, But You Are Welcome to My Body Parts

Of all the creepy, nightmare, sci-fi scenarios that liberal lunacy is assaulting us with, I think New York’s assumption that American citizens don’t even own our own bodies is the topper.

Here in New York, we are so thoroughly considered the property of the state that when we die, our lawmakers plan on having the state move in and harvest our organs, no questions asked. Die in New York State, and your heart, lungs, eyes, and liver go to the highest bidder, the state, nobody’s saying.

What could go wrong? Especially in the age of death panels, world demand for transplant organs and the enormous profits to be made by selling organs, not to mention the inevitable desire to get an organ while it’s nice and fresh, maybe from a body that’s still warm (not quite dead, perhaps). Who’s watching, anyway? After all, it can’t happen here (here, maybe).

Oh, I’m telling you, my dear, that it can’t happen here.

Don’t be nervous about going into a hospital for that risky surgery. If you are viewed as a prospective donor, you don’t need to worry about how hard a medical team will work to save you if they (or the government) perceive a greater benefit to harvesting the organs. Nah. They’ll return you with all your parts. You can always trust the state.

But don’t you find it just a tad interesting that a group of New York’s lowly state assemblymen and assemblywomen are so confident of the state’s ownership of us that they have no problem blithely informing us that they (reluctantly) will approve of individuals owning their own body parts (for now), only if individuals petition the state, in writing, for ownership of their own body parts. That’s for those of us who are in a good situation to write, of course. In enlightened, ultra-charitable New York State, there are no poor, disabled, illiterate, or sick people (or even non-English speakers) who could be taken advantage of — or, let us say –who could “fall through the cracks.” No. Uh, uh. Not here. It can’t happen here.

I mean, some politician wouldn’t dream of confiscating your organs for one of his family members. Nah. Well, maybe the guy who dreamed up New York’s latest “New York wants your heart” legislation because he had a hard time finding new kidneys for his daughter and didn’t want to wait for “an act of God” to provide her with organ donors.

Under current New York State law, if I want to donate my organs and tissues to someone after I die, all I have to do is check a box on my drivers license renewal form (or license application), and my license will be mailed to me clearly emblazoned with the words “ORGAN DONOR.” All legal and set to go.

But that’s not good enough. Or convenient enough.

I keep saying it, and I’ll say it again:  The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Cross-posted at Bread upon the Waters.

Your government at work

Ooookay:

Arriving at Harv’s Metro Car Wash in midtown Wednesday afternoon were two dark-suited IRS agents demanding payment of delinquent taxes. “They were deadly serious, very aggressive, very condescending,” says Harv’s owner, Aaron Zeff.

The really odd part of this: The letter that was hand-delivered to Zeff’s on-site manager showed the amount of money owed to the feds was … 4 cents.

h/t: Mark Steyn

Anybody Seen My Night Vision Goggles?

As a follow-up to One Ticked Chick’s post last week about the DHS “losing” hundreds of firearms, it seems they can’t keep up with their computers, Blackberries, or vehicles, either.  Anybody seen those night vision goggles anywhere?

Whoops! DHS Loses Hundreds of Firearms

How’s this for a devastating assessment – the Department of Homeland Security did not adequately safeguard and control its firearms during FYs 2006 through 2008 reporting 289 firearms as lost. While some of the reported losses were beyond the officers’ control, most occurred because officers did not properly secure firearms.

Big oops!

An audit conducted by the DHS Office of Inspector General determined the department’s management and oversight of safeguards and controls over firearms were not effective.

Gee, no kidding!

From the report:

Personnel did not always sufficiently safeguard their firearms and, as a result, lost a significant number of firearms between FY 2006 and FY 2008. The lost firearms created unnecessary risk to the public and law enforcement personnel; in some cases state and local law enforcement officials recovered lost DHS firearms from felons and gang members.

The following examples…demonstrate the inappropriate practices some officers used to store firearms in vehicles and residences:

A Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) officer left a firearm unsecured in an idling vehicle in the parking lot of a convenience store. The vehicle and firearm were stolen while the officer was inside the store. A local law enforcement officer later recovered the firearm from a suspected gang member and drug smuggler.

A CBP officer left a firearm on a toolbox in the bed of a truck, and the firearm fell off when the officer drove home. Law enforcement officials later recovered the firearm from an individual who resisted arrest and assaulted the arresting officer.

An ICE officer left an M-4 rifle and a shotgun unsecured in a closet in his home; subsequently, both firearms were stolen during a burglary. State and federal law enforcement officers later recovered these firearms from a felon.

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer left a firearm on the bumper of a vehicle, which fell off as the officer left his place of employment. A civilian found the firearm and turned it over to the local police.

Other CBP and ICE officers left firearms in places such as a fast food restaurant parking lot, a bowling alley, and a clothing store. Although our review focused on CBP and ICE, other components described similar incidents. For example, a TSA officer left a firearm in a lunch box on the front seat of an unlocked vehicle; the officer realized the firearm was stolen when he returned to the vehicle 2 days later. Officers may have prevented many of these losses had they exercised reasonable care when storing their firearms.

Some things need no comment from me. Bureaucratic incompetence, speaks for itself.