I’m baaack!

Since I last posted in December ’09, all kinds of chaos has ensued….lucky me.  As time permits, I’ll be posting all kinds of stuff with my…unorthodox take on things.

Civic Culture Watch: Education

From The Boston Globe:

Over 100 Boston parents, students, and community activists last night attended a community forum to comment on Superintendent Carol Johnson’s plan to turn around 14 academically struggling schools. One community-based group pushed for new leadership at Blackstone Elementary School in the South End, while the principal and some students at the Tobin K-8 School on Mission Hill defended their performance. It was not clear when the School Committee will vote on the superintendent’s plan.

This is why Boston’s move from an elected School Committee to an appointed body was a disaster for accountable education in the City.

Forget for the moment that “over 100” parents, students, and community activists ain’t a hell of a lot of people; forget the total incoherence of the audience.  The issue is this: the School Committee will make its decision secure in the fact that the needs of Boston’s children will remain secondary to the short-term political interests of the Mayor.

Obtuse Progressives and the Stupac Amendment

Talking Points Memo has a post, citing a George Washington University study claiming that the Stupak amendment would eventually  end all access to abortion:

In other words, though the immediate impact of the Stupak amendment will be limited to the millions of women initially insured through a new insurance exchange, over time, as the exchanges grow, the insurance industry will scale down their abortion coverage options until they offer none at all.

Not so.

 One presumes that other insurance companies – possibly even foreign ones – could see the profit potential in issuing riders for reproductive health.  Between progressive, libertarian, and liberal women, the market is there for such specific coverage at a minimal premium cost:  the procedure isn’t that expensive.

While the study attempts to refute this:

Furthermore the study finds that the supposed fallback option for impacted women–a “rider” policy that provides supplemental coverage for abortions only–may not even be allowed under the terms of the law. “In our view, the terms and impact of the Amendment will work to defeat the development of a supplemental coverage market for medically indicated abortions. In any supplemental coverage arrangement, it is essential that the supplemental coverage be administered in conjunction with basic coverage. This intertwined administration approach is barred under Stupak/Pitts because of the prohibition against financial comingling.”

This is easy to rebut in the real world.  Separate policies aren’t “comingling”.  Any halfway competent insurance lawyer can get aroud this and make a bundle for his (or her) client.

Progressives as a class aren’t terribly bright, but they’re profoundly stupid when they panic.

Debt Watch

From Andrew Sullivan:

Journalism Watch: American University

The American University School of Communication has  an online magazine that really has to be seen.  Its contributors have done wonders, IMHO, in illuminating complex subjects through intelligent use of technology.

Given my jaundiced view of contemporary journalism, it’s a more than pleasant surprise to see such  professionalism in this site.

Here’s a link to a time lapse map if the United States, showing county-by-county unemployment from January, 2007 to September 2009.

Want a show-and-tell for a country in crisis?  This is it.

For all you climate change deniers out there:

From NASA:

Nuff said?

Ethics Watch: Medicine

From the Columbia Journalism Review, we get a reminder that Doctors don’t always disclose conflicts of interest:

Kudos to the (Milwaukee) Journal Sentinel and reporter John Fauber for digging up the difference between fact and fiction when it comes to medical researchers at the University of Wisconsin medical school. At least nine doctors there told the medical journals which published their research findings that they had no conflicts of interest with companies that figured into their work. After digging into university records, the Journal Sentinel uncovered a different story.

In Boston, according to the New England Journal of Medicine, similar problems exist with disclosure of interest.

It would be absurd to consider this problem as limited to medicine.

Perhaps professionals of all sort should consider the implications of the corporate conquest of their fields…

The Paradox of Policy Progressives

The Massachusetts Democratic blog BlueMassGroup has a post today approvingly linking to criticism of Mayor Menino’s education policies.  The criticisms are accurate, but they miss the larger point.

In 1992 the Boston School Committee changed from an elected to an appointed body.  This was confirmed in a 1996 voter referendum.  During the referendum, the same people criticizing the very concept of an elected school board are the ones worrying today about the sorry state of today’s Boston schools.

At the core of most progressive thought is the belief that heaven awaits if “politics” is removed from the equation.  This ignores the fact that circular logic is not negated by advanced degrees.

What happened was that, in the absence of sustained public input, accountability was engineered out of Boston’s educational system.  The unfortunate fact is that quality education is not a major issue in Boston politics: most people who vote don’t have kids in the system, and most people with kids in the system don’t vote.

Great for incumbents.  Bad for students.

As messy as electoral politics can be, progressives should consider the possibility that they  have a place in forming policy.

Economic Growth is up…

Chart from Michael Yglesias via Andrew Sullivan:

But:

One of the things that makes American politics weird is that nobody in the administration is really supposed to talk about the fact that this is much more up to Ben Bernanke than it is up to Barack Obama.

The recovery, such as it is,  seems to be spending on durable goods, driven (pun intended) primarily by the Cash for Clunkers Program.  That, as I recall, was an Administration program…  However spending is down in the September figures, so the unemployment  numbers probably won’t improve anytime soon.

In fairness, the Administration’s announcement of the GDP numbers was measured and cautious.

The Great Realignment: the Prequel

A comparative look at the four graphs below makes me suspicious that the Obama Administration might be on the verge of engineering the biggest party realignment since the Republican shift of 1966 -1994.

The top chart breaks down Democratic Party members by ideology; the third chart does the same for Republicans.  The graph between them shows the relative percentages of liberals, conservatives, and moderates from 1992 to 2008.

The graph at the bottom displays polarization among Democrats, Republicans, and Independents respectively.

Compare the first two charts:

While weighted towards the liberal side of the spectrum, the ideological spread within the Democratic Party is not much out of balance with the country as a whole.

Now compare the relative composition of the ideology among Republicans in the chart below:

As the Right becomes more concentrated withinthe Republican Party, it tilts the GOP into an unstable position, relative to the electorate as a whole.  This is already accelerating within the GOP as its Leninist tendencies accelerate and infect downballot races.  The Republican will pick up both Congressional and Gubernatorial seats this cycle, but the damage is done.

While the United States is self-referentially a center-conservative country, it is not a Right nation.  (Indeed, I would argue that much of  the “conservatism” is actually populist anti-leftism, but that can wait for another post.)  What is occurring on the macro level is the beginning of an anti-Right realignment, based in civic conservatism.

It is not (David Broder note) based on split-the-difference centrism.