Two decades of research produced a consensus among social scientists of both left and right that family structure has a serious impact on children, even when controlling for income, race, and other variables. In other words, we are not talking about a problem of race but about a problem of family formation or, rather, the lack of it. The best outcomes for children–whether in academic performance, avoidance of crime and drugs, or financial and economic success–are almost invariably produced by married biological parents. The worst results are by never-married women.
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The upshot of these studies is that America is confronted by a form of poverty that money alone can’t cure. Many of us think social breakdown is a result of racism and poverty. Yes, they are factors, but study after study shows that alterations in norms and values are at the heart of economic and behavioral troubles. That’s why so much research boils down to the old rule: If you want to avoid poverty, finish high school, don’t have kids in your teens, and get married.
Tag: politics
Patrick Leahy, U.S. Senator from Vermont, on the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court:
Is this a nominee who will protect and expand our constitutional rights, or will she neglect and narrow those rights? Learning the answer will be at the core of what the American people and the Senate need to know from the hearings on this nomination.
I call your attention to two words in the first sentence: “and expand“. Since when is the Supreme Court charged by the United States Constitution, Senator Leahy, to “expand” constitutional rights? (Oh, that’s right, ever since FDR stacked the Court with non-constructionists to get his way with the federal bureaucracy. My mistake.)
Expansion of constitutional rights is a duty assigned to the people, through their legislators in Congress and in their state bodies. Congressional rights are “expanded” through constitutional conventions, not through judicial activism. Such ignorance on the part of a majority of the American people is why our elected officials are able to get away with such foolish statements as that uttered above by Senator Leahy. Since basic civics are apparently not getting taught in our public schools any longer, how can we expect our citizens to fully comprehend how their government is supposed to work?
Here’s a little secret about conservatives and Roe v. Wade, just in case you’re wondering: not all conservatives are pro-life. I know this may come as a shock to the mouth-foamers on the Left, and even to those on the Right who like to walk around with blinders on, but it’s true. (Personally speaking, this conservative is pro-life.) Yet these same conservatives who are not pro-life oppose Roe v. Wade. Why? Because it came about in precisely the same way Senator Leahy seeks, based on his statement above: judicial fiat.
You would find far less vocal opposition from the Right if the right to an abortion was in the Constitution as a result of a constitutional convention, passed by the Congress, and two-thirds of the states. We wouldn’t like it, but at least we would know it was there as a result of the process set forth by the Founding Fathers, not arbitrarily created by men in black robes. For the expansion of rights to occur otherwise is to have, as The Federalist Patriot put it, “James Madison is rolling in his grave!”
One of the many negative consequences of America’s defeat in The Vietnam War has been the uncontrolled proliferation of Vietnams since then.
Nicaragua threatened to become another Vietnam. Lebanon nearly became another Vietnam. Had Grenada been only slightly larger than a manhole cover and lasted one more hour, it would have become a Caribbean-Style Vietnam. The invasion of Panama was rapidly degenerating into a Narco-Vietnam, right up until we won. Likewise, the First Gulf War was certainly developing into another Vietnam, but then sadly, it ended quickly and with few casualties.
For people of a certain age or political stripe, Vietnam is like Elvis: it’s everywhere. For example, during a long wait at a Chinese Buffet in Georgetown in 1987, Ted Kennedy was reported to have exclaimed “QUAGMIRE!” and attempted to surrender to a Spanish-speaking busboy.
And that was probably the smart thing to do, because the lesson of Vietnam is: it is best to lose quickly, so as to avoid a quagmire.
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If you liked what our quick, casualty-saving withdrawal from Somalia did for us at the Khobar Towers, at our embassies in East Africa, at the waterline of the USS Cole, and at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, then you’ll love what a quick “casualty-saving” withdrawal from Iraq will do for us for the next twenty years. It’ll finally make you stop worrying about Vietnam.
Read the entire column for Johnson’s thirteen edifying points, and stop saying every geopolitical event the United States gets involved in is going to disintegrate in to a Vietnamesque “quagmire.”
If you want to understand the Left, the best place to start is with an understanding of hysteria. Leading leftists either use hysteria as a political tactic or are actually hysterics.
Take almost any subject the Left discusses and you will find hysteria.
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No event is free of leftist hysteria. On the third day after Katrina, civil rights activist Randall Robinson reported that blacks in New Orleans were resorting to cannibalism. Indeed, most of the news media coverage bordered on the hysterical. Not to mention the hysterical predictions of 10,000-plus dead in New Orleans.
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But the irony in all of this is that the Left sees itself as the side that thinks intellectually and non-emotionally. And that is hysterical.
Stephen Moore, in today’s Political Diary:
There’s an old saying that the only Marxists left on the planet are found in the faculty lounges at America’s elite universities. Now the Leadership Institute has helped quantify the leftwing bias at our premier institutions of higher learning.
Its new report, “Deep Blue Campuses,” raked through Federal Election Commission records of political donations in 2004 by university faculty and found — surprise, surprise — that the vast preponderance of these donated dollars went to John Kerry for President. This is a free country, and donating to political candidates is, or at least should be, a protected expression of free speech. But this report blows through the facade that the political views of university faculty are in anyway representative of the general community.
For every dollar that the professors at the top 20 elite universities gave to George Bush, they gave $10 to John Kerry. The ratio at Princeton was $302 to Kerry for every dollar given to Bush. The ratio for Harvard was 25 to 1. At Yale and Penn, the ratio was greater than 20 to 1. At Dartmouth there wasn’t a single recorded donation to Bush.
These are more lopsided results than one finds in the phony elections in Castro’s Cuba and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Universities have become fanatically committed to the idea of “diversity” as an overriding objective on campus — diversity on the basis of income, religion, disability, race, gender, sexual orientation. But political diversity? When it comes to the kind of diversity that would seem to matter most for promoting debate, intellectual curiosity and free speech, there is apparently little tolerance for differing views. What is demanded is conformity. And our top universities suffer greatly as a result.
Their unhealthy hatred for Mr. Bush dates back to the 2000 election, which they — irrationally again — believe he stole from Mr. Gore. The fact is, Mr. Gore was trying to steal the election himself and almost succeeded, through one of the most egregious perversions of the rule of law in our nation’s history, by the Florida Supreme Court.
But the real source of their animus is even more basic. They resent him because he represents their expulsion from power over the executive branch, which the Clinton eight-year heyday should have ensured them in perpetuity.
You’ll recall that their “entitlement” to the legislative branch was stolen from them in 1994, which is one of the reasons they consider Newt Gingrich another personification of evil. Adding insult to cumulative injury, they’ve also lost their monopoly on the media over the last 15 years.
Ben Stein rips in to the media and Angry Left over the Katrina-is-Bush’s-fault blame game. You know it must be bad if it’s raising Ben’s ire.
Former Enron adviser Paul Krugman actually manages to take his rage over Katrina beyond the usual Angry Left argument of blaming the devil Bush. He also blames the devil Reagan:
The federal government’s lethal ineptitude wasn’t just a consequence of Mr. Bush’s personal inadequacy; it was a consequence of ideological hostility to the very idea of using government to serve the public good. For 25 years the right has been denigrating the public sector, telling us that government is always the problem, not the solution. Why should we be surprised that when we needed a government solution, it wasn’t forthcoming?
The obvious objection is that Krugman has a cartoonish view of conservatism, which is anything but uniformly antigovernment (the Brooks/Kristol piece cited in the previous item elaborates this point). And while it’s true that Reagan described government as the problem, not the solution, 25 years ago, those words would be shockingly out of character if George W. Bush were to utter them.
The more interesting point is that Krugman’s implicit view of liberalism is about 35 years out of date. To put it bluntly, American liberals no longer believes in activist government. Oh, they believe in big government, but that’s a matter of feeding existing bureaucracies and interest groups. But suggest doing things differently–welfare reform, Social Security reform, the Patriot Act–and they have nothing to offer but fear, anger and hate.
Among the first complaints we heard when Katrina struck was that the government failed to respond because of (a) Iraq and (b) tax cuts. This is passive-aggressive politics, not activist government. Lyndon B. Johnson cut taxes and waged war both in Vietnam and on poverty. To be sure, LBJ’s administration was far from an unqualified success, but the point is that in those days liberals were confident–arguably overconfident–in the power of activist government.
To illustrate the point, consider some of the dour and whiny Democratic campaign slogans of the past two presidential campaigns: Lockbox. Risky scheme. Miserable failure. Two Americas. Wrong war, wrong place, wrong time. Let America be America again.
This is the problem with the modern Democratic Party: they are out of ideas. It would be one thing to have debates over Social Security reform if there was a comprehensive plan from the Democrats being offered as an alternative. It would be one thing if the Democrats could offer a clear blueprint for waging the war against the Islamofascist terrorists who wish us ill. They are doing neither, choosing instead to whine and complain about the administration and political party that is doing something.
Conservatives, when they are being honest, want the Left to bring something to the debate other than empty rhetoric. The current state of affairs isn’t good for anyone, as it will lead to complacency and stagnation in the realm of ideas. Persons within the Democratic Party need to have the fortitude to cast off the pockets of the Angry Left which have attached themselves like leeches to a formerly grounded organization. Until that happens, and they begin to offer reasonable alternatives instead of mouth-foaming hot air, they will continue to lose elections.
Brendan Miniter has a piece on OpinionJournal today on the opportunity New Orleans has with rebuilding its educational system, one of the worst in the nation. I can personally testify to how bad things are in some of the schools there; I spent a few days at a single elementary school, troubleshooting some classroom Macintosh-printer set-ups. The school’s HVAC system was offline, and had been for weeks. The teachers were mulling along as best they can, keeping the windows cracked so the rooms wouldn’t get stuffy, and running fans. You can imagine, however, trying to teach a bunch of third-graders with three or four box fans going at once.
Lack of funds was the reason for a less-timely repair of the system. I was there as an independent contactor, called out by the principal, because there was no one on the district’s IT staff with any Macintosh knowledge.
One aspect of rebuilding the New Orleans public school system that Miniter brings up is something I have long been in favor of: break the back of the teachers’ union. The myriad “education” unions in this country have only served to hinder the success of our children in public schools, and that is evident in New Orleans, and most of Louisiana. No, the teachers’ union is not the only problem with the school system, but if it is not providing a solution, it’s proving a hindrance.
As Miniter says, there is a unique opportunity in New Orleans now, and that is to build an educational system from the ground up. The Crescent City has a chance to be a beacon for the rest of the nation. We pray they seize it.