Blogs For Victory

Andrew Coulson over at Pajamas Media on Head Start:

“Head Start,” the flagship pre-kindergarten program introduced in 1965, has been a $166 billion failure. That’s the upshot of a sophisticated multi-year study just released by the Department of Health and Human Services.

An earlier iteration of the study, published in 2005, had found a few modest improvements in the language skills of participating students while they were enrolled in the program. But by the end of the first grade, even those few effects have disappeared, according to the follow-up released this month. Out of 44 separate cognitive tests given to former Head Start students at the end of the first grade, only two showed even marginally significant effects. The other 42 showed no statistically significant effect at all.

But even that overstates the case for Head Start. That’s because, on each of the 44 separate tests, there is a 1 in 10 chance of a false positive…After controlling for the likelihood of false positives, the study’s authors found no “socio-emotional” benefits and no “parenting practice” benefits either. No benefits to Head Start of any kind at the end of first grade. None.

Cheerleaders for the program has this mealy-mouthed response to the study:

…This study demonstrates that Head Start programs are of good or better quality (Ed. Note: compared to what?) and finds favorable cognitive, socio-emotional, and health impacts for children who attended Head Start and positive impacts on parenting practices. Yet the study indicates that many of the early gains made in Head Start prior to kindergarten might be lost at the end of first grade…

…Head Start has a 45-year history of continuous improvement. This study was conducted from 2002 to 2006. Two years ago, Head Start reauthorization included many significant improvements to the program which are currently in the process of implementation.

Translation: “Ok, so the program doesn’t work, but its been in place for 45 years and we started to improve things right after the study ceased collecting data. Trust us – in another 45 years, it’ll be swell. Can we have a budget increase?”

Here is the mission statement of Head Start:

Head Start is a national program that promotes school readiness by enhancing the social and cognitive development of children through the provision of educational, health, nutritional, social and other services to enrolled children and families.

As the first linked article goes on to note, Candidate Obama promised us that he would terminate any program found to be a failure. Given the mission statement of Head Start and the results of the study, Head Start should be on the President’s “cut” list. Naturally, there is no move to cut Head Start – if anything, we’re likely to see increased funding for it. Why? Because its a program which spends a lot of money in a way which pleases liberals and, of course, funds ever more AFSCME union dues and thus campaign donations to the Democrat party. There isn’t a chance in heck that Obama will cut even a dime, no matter how much a failure the program is.

In the grand scheme of things, $166 billion over more than 40 years is not that big a deal – but it has been money entirely wasted. It is money which could be used henceforth on the one program which has demonstrated ability to improve education outcomes for disadvantaged children: school choice. Liberals still find this hard to believe, but the fact is that when you give parents the choice and the power, things work out better for kids. Flabbergasting as it seems, parents are better judges of the needs of the child than Head Start bureaucrats. I know – very weird, but there it is.

We need to completely reform our government – go through it with no pre-conceived notions and from top to bottom decide if what we’re doing is actually worth the cost of doing it. It’ll take a very brave President backed up by a very brave Congress – both happily willing to lose office at the next election – to do this.

NRO reports:

Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.), the ranking member of the House Budget Committee, tells National Review Online that House Democrats are planning to use the budget-reconciliation process in order to pass Obamacare. “They’re meeting with each other this weekend to pursue it,” says Ryan. “I’ve spoken with many Democrats and the message is this: They’re not ready to give up. They’ve waited their entire adult lives for this moment, and they aren’t ready to let 100,000 pesky votes in Massachusetts get in the way of fulfilling their destiny. They’ll look at every option and spend the next four or five days figuring it out.”

If the Democrats pass a health-care bill through reconciliation, it means they would need only 51 votes in the Senate for final passage. To start the process, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) would need to bring a new health-care bill to the House Budget Committee with reconciliation instructions, with the Senate doing the same.

Well, go ahead, make my day.

Nothing like having opponents bent on political suicide. If they so much as try it, the impression will be not just of a party out of touch, but determined to hold the people – and their views – in contempt.

Interesting:

Folks at Public Citizen, the Ralph Nader group that has supported litigation to limit freedom of speech through campaign finance laws, are so outraged by today’s Citizens United Supreme Court decision that they are calling for a constitutional amendment to limit freedom of speech.

In their statement responding to the decision, Public Citizen demanded public financing of congressional elections, then added its call for an amendment, saying:

“Public Citizen will aggressively work in support of a constitutional amendment specifying that for-profit corporations are not entitled to First Amendment protections, except for freedom of the press. We do not lightly call for a constitutional amendment. But today’s decision so imperils our democratic well-being, and so severely distorts the rightful purpose of the First Amendment, that a constitutional corrective is demanded.

“We are formulating language for possible amendments, asking members of the public to sign a petition to affirm their support for the idea of constitutional change, and planning to convene leading thinkers in the areas of constitutional law and corporate accountability to begin a series of in-depth conversations about winning a constitutional amendment.”

This is just all too typical of liberal-fascism. You see, what they are doing is identifying an enemy who has no rights (in their view), in this case “for profit corporations”, and demanding that the laws be changed to reflect their view on whom the enemy is. Why do they do this? Because they believe that the enemy may deceive the people and thus prevent the electoral victory of liberalism, which always has the public interest at heart, in their view.

Now, I ask: anyone out there want to differentiate between the morality of the Big Three auto makers donating to politics and the UAW doing ditto? To the liberals, its ok for the UAW to donate – they are not “for profit”, and thus their purity cannot be questioned…the regular indictments and sundry corruptions we see in unions notwithstanding. This is one of the most monumentally stupid ways to look at the world imaginable – but it is based in the fundamental flaw of liberalism: that Man is perfectible by the actions of men.

Because liberals believe that we can fix ourselves, they believe they have been fixed – by being liberals, they have proven themselves to be rescued from the benighted bigotry of the non-liberals. Not-for-profit organizations, run by liberals, are thus organizations which simply cannot get it wrong. They’ve been cured, you see? The UAW, a not-for-profit organization, not only can get involved in politics, but must do so because liberals must be able to propagandize for their views in a relentless manner in order to get those hill-ape morons, the non-liberals, to vote the right way. Allowing wicked, evil for-profit organizations to do so might confuse the liberal message, and thus can’t be allowed (of course, those wicked, evil, smelly corporations can donate zillions of dollars to other liberal organizations to use in politics – that is ok: once the money is filtered through liberal hands, it ceases to be blood money sweated from the poor).

But, of course, liberals haven’t been fixed – they are just as apt to greed, lust, laziness, etc as the rest of us. A union boss can look at the pension fund as a personal piggy bank and live as swank a life as a CEO – and be just as indifferent to the lives of the workers as the CEO is. To forbid one person to donate because he is for-profit and to allow another to do so because he’s non-profit is to allow one sinner an unfair advantage over another. Such a action is both immoral and, of course, un-American.

Thus it commends itself to liberal-fascists.

A nasty, anti-American hate-fest comes to a well-deserved ending:

It is with the greatest regret, on behalf of our Board, that we must announce that Air America Media is ceasing its live programming operations as of this afternoon, and that the Company will file soon under Chapter 7 of the Bankruptcy Code to carry out an orderly winding-down of the business.

Goodness, I hope this happens:

Republicans nation-wide are celebrating Brown’s victory in the heavily Democratic state. Many are sending out fund-raising appeals hoping to capitalize on the grass-roots enthusiasm captured by his candidacy, and surely premature buzz about a possible presidential run.

And the victory is starting to have an impact on candidate recruitment. At the National Republican Congressional Committee, the win has galvanized Chairman Pete Sessions’ attempt to get a GOP candidate on the ballot in all 435 House races, according to party officials.

“We want to have 435 Republican candidates who, like Scott Brown, have also had enough of the spending and taxing and heavy-handed governance,” Sessions, R-Texas, wrote in a column posted at RedState.org last night.

That effort is aimed at making sure Republicans are in place to take advantage of a favorable climate no matter where it presents itself — and to siphon Democratic resources in the fall, by expanding the potential playing field.

Hard as it would be, it must be done – and, also, we must contest every single State legislative seat up for election – and then go right on down the ballot to the lowliest city council. Any partisan race which has a Democrat, must have a Republican. Will we win all of them? Of course not – but the people are counting on us to give them a choice.

And Obama was supposed to be of, by, and for the people?

K Street’s top 25 firms cashed in on the aggressive legislative agenda unleashed by the new president and bigger Democratic majorities in Congress in 2009 to post double-digit growth of about 10 percent over the previous year.

Despite economic uncertainty and the promise by the Obama administration to clamp down on the influence industry, the majority of top lobbying firms posted higher numbers in 2009, with 11 firms showing dramatic growth.

Looks like while working Americans are struggling, Obama is helping lobbyists cash in.

Pam Meister over at Big Hollywood discusses.

So, liberals, how is that hopey change thing working out for you? Is Obama all you dreamed he’d be?

I doubt it – with massive majorities in Congress and coming in to office with an amazing amount of good will on the part of the American people, Obama has managed to make himself terribly unpopular and, more important, managed to get people to hold him in contempt. All of this in one short year.

It might not be so much that we miss President Bush but that we miss having a President we can rely upon. Think about it – after 12 years of Reagan/Bush, people had regained confidence that, at the least, the men in charge were adults who would at least try to do the right thing. Then came 8 years of Clinton – a President who acted like an adolescent with an Administration crowded with school yard bullies. After that, we got President Bush – and after 9/11 we all breathed a sigh of relief that the President was named “Bush” rather than “Gore”.

And for 8 years, come what may, we had a President – once again – we could rely upon to at least try to do the right thing. And then came Obama – and he’s proven that if the right thing presents itself to him all wrapped up in a pretty, little package – he’ll go on and do the exact opposite. Our prayer is to be spared any major crisis because we’re afraid that Obama will fail the test – and let the economy some how improve, just so that Obama’s policies won’t be as devastating as they could be. And we keep our fingers crossed, and mark off the days until January 20th, 2013.

That is the amount Democrats want to increase the debt limit:

Senate Democrats on Wednesday proposed allowing the federal government to borrow an additional $1.9 trillion to pay its bills, a record increase that would permit the national debt to reach $14.3 trillion.

The unpopular legislation is needed to allow the federal government to issue bonds to fund programs and prevent a first-time default on obligations. It promises to be a challenging debate for Democrats, who, as the party in power, hold the responsibility for passing the legislation.

It’s hardly the debate Democrats want or need in the wake of Sen.-elect Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts. Arguing over the debt limit provides a forum for Republicans to blame Democrats for rising deficits and spiraling debt, even though responsibility for the government’s financial straits can be shared by both political parties.

Indeed, it can – but, Democrats, it is you who are in charge. Here’s the thing: if you have a bit of courage, you can actually freeze spending at current levels (better if you could actually do a 10%, across-the-board cut) and thus allow this pill to be swallowed a bit easier…but, I know you won’t.

Why won’t you? Because you’re just incapable of thinking of government in terms other than spending money. Its what you do. Its all you know. Its killing the country and you just can’t think of anything else to do.

Ah, well, you’ll pay the proper price for this.

But will anyone in charge pay attention?

….In 1996, Mr. Clinton was the first Democrat to win re-election since FDR—expanding the electoral map once again into western, southern, and sunbelt states. He did so by creating a new ideological hybrid for a still-progressive Democratic Party: balanced-budget fiscal conservatism, cultural moderation, and liberal social programs administered by a “lean and mean government.” This New Democrat combination appealed to Ross Perot independents concerned about deficits, and also to traditional Republican suburbanites who were culturally moderate on issues like abortion and gay rights but opposed to high taxes and wasteful, big-government bureaucracy.

Then, in 2008, Barack Obama added something extra: a commitment to a “new politics” that transcended the “red” versus “blue” partisan divide. He explained this concept clearly in his 2004 Democratic Convention keynote speech and during his 2008 presidential campaign. It meant compromise, consensus and bipartisanship, even if that meant only incremental change. The purists on the left of the Democratic Party who demanded the “public option” or no bill at all apparently forgot that candidate Obama’s health-care proposal did not include a public option; nor did it include a government mandate for everyone to either purchase insurance or pay a significant tax approximating the cost of that insurance—the “pay or play provision” in both the Senate and House bills.

Bottom line: We liberals need to reclaim the Democratic Party with the New Democrat positions of Bill Clinton and the New Politics/bipartisan aspirations of Barack Obama—a party that is willing to meet half-way with conservatives and Republicans even if that means only step-by-step reforms on health care and other issues that do not necessarily involve big-government solutions.

That’s what Massachusetts Democrats and independent voters were telling national Democrats yesterday. The question isn’t just, will we listen?…

Of course I would disagree that the people want liberalism even if done by careful compromise – but the point made is fundamentally sound: Democrats need to drop the left and come back to the center if they hope to survive. Right now, with the course Obama has set, Democrats are heading for disaster in 2010 and 2012 isn’t look to hot, either. And, remember, in 2012 and 2014 it is the Democrats who will have a whole bunch of first-term Senators up for re-election, many of them in strongly GOP States…failure to change course could, by January of 2015, result in as many as 65 Republican Senators to go along with a House majority and control of the White House. Such power given to the GOP – if matched with a desire to really reform (which is becoming a white-hot passion) – would spell doom for liberalism.

I don’t think Obama has it in him – certainly, Pelosi doesn’t have it in her and Reid has sold himself entirely to the left: he needs massive campaign funds in order to keep his seat and the price being demanded is liberalism, liberalism, and more liberalism. Time will tell…

That’s the way to show us you’re paying attention after Massachusetts:

President Obama’s biggest mistake so far is being an overachiever?

“If there’s one thing that I regret this year is that we were so busy just getting stuff done and dealing with the immediate crises that were in front of us that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are and why we have to make sure those institutions are matching up with those values,” Obama told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos in an exclusive interview at the White House.

And he went into office, he says, giving us more credit for quickness than we really deserve:

The president said he made a mistake in assuming that if he focused on policy decisions, the American people would understand the reasoning behind them.

“That I do think is a mistake of mine,” Obama said. “I think the assumption was if I just focus on policy, if I just focus on this provision or that law or if we’re making a good rational decision here, then people will get it.”

A President’s day is too full for him to read the news and get a direct feel for what is going on – but he has a huge staff to do just that for him. Is anyone at the White House cluing the big guy in, at all? No one likes to be the bearer of ill tidings, and subordinates are likely to soft peddle bad news to spare the boss…but, after a while, the truth does have to get in there.

Or, does it?

Carter never figured it out and he eventually got mad at us for not being smart enough to see what a wonderful job he was doing. This went over like a lead balloon and Carter was crushed in his re-election bid. We all joked that Obama was “Welcome Back, Carter” – but perhaps we were being prescient? Its hard to be as obtuse and self righteous as Jimmy Carter, but Obama is clearly shooting for it, so far.

Barry, time to get Carville on speed dial…you need someone out there who can give you some good advice and let you know what the real world is up to.