Showing posts with label poverty. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poverty. Show all posts

Sunday, January 31, 2016

Public schools fail . . . to fail as badly as private sector


Public policy in education has come to this in Louisiana -- and too much of the rest of America.

What is "this"? "This" is a Brookings Institute report on research showing students who "win" Louisiana's school-voucher lottery and escape their "failing" public schools . . . lose. Big time.

From Brookings:

The affected students had won a voucher to attend, at no cost, a private school in Louisiana. Nineteen states have such voucher programs, with Louisiana’s the fifth-largest in the country. The vouchers, averaging $5,311 per student, must be accepted as full tuition at the private schools that participate in the program; schools are not allowed to ask students to “top-up” their vouchers if the school has a higher sticker price. Further, schools can’t pick and choose among the voucher winners. Instead, they have to take any student who holds a voucher.[ii]

Nationwide, 141,000 students use a voucher to attend a private school.[iii] Louisiana’s voucher program launched in New Orleans in 2008. It was expanded to include the entire state in 2012. Students from families with incomes below 250 percent of the federal poverty threshold are eligible for the voucher as long as they attend a public school the state has labeled as low-performing. Over half of Louisiana’s public schools fall into this category.

Researchers have long attempted to understand the effectiveness of private schools. It’s a difficult task, because parents choose their children’s schools, either by living in a certain school district or by applying to a private or charter school. The challenges are identical to those in evaluations of charter-school effectiveness: kids who attend private school are different from those who attend a public, neighborhood school, who in turn are different from those who attend a charter school.[iv] When comparing school performance, researchers struggle to distinguish differences in schools’ effectiveness from variation in the types of students who choose those schools.

A voucher lottery provides an unusual opportunity to measure the effectiveness of private schools. The lottery serves as a randomized trial, which is the gold standard of research methods. Random selection means that lottery winners and losers are identical, on average, when they apply for the voucher. Any differences that emerge after the lottery can therefore be attributed to the private-school attendance of the winners.

The results were startling. The researchers, a team of economists from Berkeley, Duke, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found that the scores of the lottery winners dropped precipitously in their first year of attending private school, compared to the performance of the lottery losers. The effects were very large: roughly a quarter of a standard deviation in math, social studies, and science. There were no effects on reading scores. On a per-year basis, these negative effects are as large as the positive effects that a similarly-designed study found for charter schools in Boston (the authors of the Louisiana study are my collaborators in the charter research).[v]
HERE'S HOW you get to the abject cluster(expletive) that exemlifies "this," and here's where you like go from "this":
1) We declare public education a failure, blaming it for not magically taking the sociological deviance amid the student population and turning it, alchemist-style, into 24-karat gold. And MIT scholarships.

2) We take a page from our highly successful Vietnam playbook: We must destroy this village in order to save it.

3) As part of the destroy-to-save process, we starve public schools of funds so we can give it to a motley crew of private and charter schools . . . because private sector.

4) We sit back and watch the chaos ensue as the private sector f***s the whole thing up worse than the public sector at $5,500 a head, if not more.

5) Wait! A solution to make the whole thing work just like we know it can! Double down -- with taxpayer money -- on what hasn't yet worked.

6) Look! A liberal! Git a rope!

7) Pay no attention to that social scientist aggregating data sets.

8) Look! Pinko-commie-fag academics talkin' trash about free enterprise and educational choice! Grab your guns!

9) We'll surely get the right charter- and private-school partners this time!

10) Well, shit.

11) Pay no attention to the poverty, chaotic lives and toxic culture of "that part of town." Public schools! Bad!

12) Avoid "that part of town."

13) MY kid's private school is pretty good -- a bargain at $9,500 a year!
14) Raise property tax on my house by $100 to fund those failed government schools?!? What, I'm made of money???

ON THE other hand . . . don't worry. Be happy. Donald Trump will fix it all.

Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Still there, nowhere.


Spring is here, and the abandoned homeless camp in the middle of Omaha isn't.

Abandoned anymore, that is. When we visited the site in February, it appeared that the person or persons using the primitive flop had wisely flown the (ramshackle) coop for the winter.


Nestled in the treeline between a park and the Keystone Trail -- and across the Little Papillion Creek from an apartment complex and supermarket -- the rough lean-to shows signs of life. And liquor.

Bicyclists ride by and joggers plod past the wooded flop without noticing what, and who, might be yards away. Ditto for the skate-park skateboarders and the softball players.

Because you don't notice a shelter that isn't much of one, however, does not mean it's not there. And because we long ago stopped noticing those among us who are cash poor but -- oftentimes -- flush with addiction, mental illness or both, it doesn't mean they're not lurking among the trees and brush of the urban greenscape. 

Or perhaps a downtown bus shelter.

Or a park bench.

Maybe beneath an overpass.

Or a van down by the river, for all you know.

We want "something done" about the problem when the homeless start to annoy us. 

When they don't, it's all good -- we go back to worrying about the zombie apocalypse . . . which doesn't actually exist. 


The spiders, after all, aren't in our clothes.

Saturday, April 12, 2014

%*(#!^& brilliant!


OK, this isn't safe for work. Or your little kids.

But come to think of it, neither is life.

Anyway, watch the brilliant video that came out of a social experiment by the British poverty charity, The Pilion Trust, to see whether people really do care about the poor. Turns out they do. Which sets the charity up to deliver the advertising kill shot.

Just watch.

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

The legacy of lead: A heavy weight to bear?


Omaha has one of the poorest black populations in the United States, one unusually bereft of a middle class.

Educational achievement lags in this community, while unemployment and social pathologies soar.

The city's African-American community, centered on the near north side of town, also is the center of violent crime in Omaha.

The near north side of Omaha also happens to lie within an EPA Superfund site, where scores of millions of dollars are being spent to clean up widespread lead contamination, the unwelcome legacy of some 120 years of the area's history. The legacy is that of the ASARCO lead refinery, which called Omaha home for all that time and where several smelters were consolidated at the corner of Fifth and Douglas in 1899.

The combined operation eventually became the largest lead smelter in the world, and it stayed in business until 1997.

It belched massive amounts of toxic lead particles into the Omaha sky. For decades and decades the pollution spewed, and where it landed, we pretty much knew -- the near north side, largely.


THE NEAR north side, the heart of black Omaha. Largely poor black Omaha. Often uneducated black Omaha. Often dysfunctional black Omaha.

Often violent black Omaha.

You think a century or more of lead contamination -- lead ingestion by decades of inner-city children -- might have anything to do with any of the above? After all, we do know of the neurological effects of chronic lead exposure. They're not good, FYI.

You ever wonder -- after accounting for socioeconomic, family and cultural variables -- how much of the intractable majority-minority achievement gap in education might be due to chronic lead exposure? I'm starting to.

AND IT SEEMS, concerning violent crime in America, some Tulane University researchers and others have been wondering, too.

That wondering led to extensive research and number crunching, which led to a just-published paper concluding
"Yes. Yes, lead does play a part." A story about the research appears on the Science Daily website:
Childhood exposure to lead dust has been linked to lasting physical and behavioral effects, and now lead dust from vehicles using leaded gasoline has been linked to instances of aggravated assault two decades after exposure, says Tulane toxicologist Howard W. Mielke.

Vehicles using leaded gasoline that contaminated cities' air decades ago have increased aggravated assault in urban areas, researchers say.

The new findings are published in the journal Environment International by Mielke, a research professor in the Department of Pharmacology at the Tulane University School of Medicine, and demographer Sammy Zahran at the Center for Disaster and Risk Analysis at Colorado State University.

The researchers compared the amount of lead released in six cities: Atlanta, Chicago, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, New Orleans and San Diego, during the years 1950-1985. This period saw an increase in airborne lead dust exposure due to the use of leaded gasoline. There were correlating spikes in the rates of aggravated assault approximately two decades later, after the exposed children grew up.

After controlling for other possible causes such as community and household income, education, policing effort and incarceration rates, Mielke and Zahran found that for every one percent increase in tonnages of environmental lead released 22 years earlier, the present rate of aggravated assault was raised by 0.46 percent.
IF CAR EXHAUST can do that, one has to wonder what societal havoc the onetime world's largest lead refinery might have wrought, and to what degree, upon our fair city . . . and its most vulnerable population.

You just have to wonder.

Perhaps it's high time the city's newspaper, the
Omaha World-Herald, started wondering, too. Every little bit of information helps in tackling the most intractable of maladies.

Wednesday, November 02, 2011

The Big (not so) Easy


If this surprises you, you don't know much about New Orleans (or the South), do you?

And I'll bet you missed the media coverage of that whole Katrina thing six years ago. You probably were partying in the Hamptons and didn't have time for TV or newspapers.

A lot of people think this is the iconic view of the Crescent City:


Not me. For my little bit of money, I think the iconic picture of New Orleans is the one at the top of this post.

I guess your mileage could vary.

Saturday, September 24, 2011

Never mind the bollocks


Because we Americans seem to be, at heart, a most unserious people, we have outraged national campaigns over this.

A naughtily named new flavor of Ben & Jerry's ice cream, "Schweddy Balls," has inspired a national boycott call and hungry curiosity in Omaha, as elsewhere.

Members of OneMillionMoms.com want the ice cream company to stop making the flavor.

The limited-edition flavor, launched this month, is a tribute to "Saturday Night Live." The name refers to a 1998 sketch in which Alec Baldwin played holiday goodie baker Pete Schweddy.

Monica Cole, director of the online activist campaign, said she's seen the skit, but she's not laughing at it or its namesake dairy treat.

"We find it vulgar, not what we would like our children to be seeing or asking for at the supermarket or a Ben & Jerry's outlet," Cole said from the group's headquarters in Tupelo, Miss.

-- Omaha World-Herald,
Sept. 24, 2011
But not this.
Black babies are dying in Omaha.

That's the simple, straightforward message the group of about 40 people — most of them black women — had to work with. Their assignment was to take 10 minutes to come up with a way of spreading that message to the people who need to hear it.

The fact that the infant mortality rate is high among blacks in Omaha was no surprise to many of those at a community forum earlier this week at the Turning Point campus in north Omaha. That for every 1,000 black babies born in Douglas County, more than 14 will die in their first 12 months.

Or that the rate is three times higher than the county's white infant mortality rate: 4.7 deaths per 1,000 babies.

But a Douglas County Health Department map showing that the highest concentration of baby deaths was near 33rd and Lake Streets, in the area around Salem Baptist Church, surprised Thelma Sims, director of the Salem Children's Center.

Sims first saw the map about a month and a half ago.

"I was really devastated and sad," she said.

She lives and works in the area but hadn't known that from 2005 through 2009 the neighborhood's infant mortality rate was 27 to 33 deaths per 1,000 births — in the range of the rates seen in Indonesia, Zimbabwe and Kyrgyzstan.

Rates are harder to grasp than actual numbers, so when looking at the state's vital statistics for 2005-2010, for example, you find that 113 black infants died in Douglas County during that period.

Of those, the leading causes of death were listed as sudden infant death syndrome, 21; maternal complications of pregnancy, 20; prematurity, 16; and birth defect, 14.
-- Omaha World-Herald,
Sept. 24, 2011
Really, America?

Really?


On this ship of fools, steerage is a dangerous place to book passage. Obviously.

Friday, September 02, 2011

The rich man's burden: Poor folks voting


Over the past couple of years, writers at The American Thinker have had trouble keeping their demagoguery straight.

Basically, they can't decide whether President Obama is a mortal threat to the republic because he's too Nazilike or because he's not Hitlerian enough. If you ask me, it'd be a trip to sit in on their editorial meetings.

For his part, Washington "investigative journalist" Matthew Vadum comes down squarely on the side of "more Hitler, dammit!" The least the government could be doing, he writes this week, is to keep the parasites away from the voting booth.


You don't say.

ACTUALLY, I took liberties in describing his position. Vadum didn't actually call the poor "parasites." He just referred to "nonproductive segments" and how the poor "burden society."

And said that "empowering" them is "antisocial" and "un-American."
Why are left-wing activist groups so keen on registering the poor to vote?

Because they know the poor can be counted on to vote themselves more benefits by electing redistributionist politicians. Welfare recipients are particularly open to demagoguery and bribery.

Registering them to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals. It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country -- which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote.

(snip)

Encouraging those who burden society to participate in elections isn't about helping the poor. It's about helping the poor to help themselves to others' money. It's about raw so-called social justice. It's about moving America ever farther away from the small-government ideals of the Founding Fathers.

Registering the unproductive to vote is an idea that was heavily promoted by the small-c communists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, as I write in my new book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama's ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.

In an infamous 1966 Nation magazine article, the radical university professors urged that the welfare apparatus be used to destroy the American system. Borrowing a phrase the ultra-leftist Leon Tro
tsky used in one of his many anti-Stalin tracts, The Platform of the Joint Opposition (1927), they titled their blueprint for radical change "The Weight of the Poor."

By "weight," Cloward, Piven, and Trotsky meant power or influence. All three wanted to use the poor as a battering ram against the systems they sought to overthrow.

Trotsky thought too many bureaucrats and middle-class people were involved in the Soviet Communist Party and that it was moving too slowly in its efforts to change that society. He wanted more poor people in the party in order to overthrow Stalin's obstructionist bureaucracy and clear the way for "true" communism.

Stateside, Cloward and Piven wanted to use the "weight" of the poor to bring down American capitalism and democracy.
IT IS but a small leap one makes from lebensunwerten das Wahlrecht to lebensunwerten Lebens -- "life unworthy of the right to vote" to "life unworthy of life." This is especially true when one uses rhetorical trampolines such as "antisocial," "un-American," "nonproductive segments" and "burden to society."

Vadum's paranoid vision is that of a Marxist Obama destroying society with all manner of collectivist insanity made possible by registering parasitic hordes of poor Americans and making sure they vote early . . . and often.

A couple of years earlier, though, Cliff Thier fretted over the president's nascent "Obamacare" plan for polar-opposite reasons -- that a Naziesque Obama would deny medical care to old folks because
they no longer were productive. From The American Thinker of Aug. 24, 2009:
Under ObamaCare, the older you get, the more likely it will be that you will not be permitted to have an operation, or to receive the optimal medicines. The reason is that you likely will be taking more out of society than you will be contributing in taxes. Which leaves us with a simple question: Who in his right mind would dare to retire?

[An aside. In Nazi Germany, the mentally ill and physically disabled were labeled as "unproductive members" of society. As were, of course, the Jews. Euthanasia was the inevitable and logical result of such thinking then. It is also the inevitable and logical result of such thinking today.

The prophet Ezekiel was supposed to have resurrected the dead. That it is an Ezekiel authoring the Obama Administration's "Robert's Rules of Death" must be God's little joke.

That it's an Israeli doctor who is advocating this system of rating the values of different human lives must be Dr. Mengele's little joke. ]

You and I will have no choice but to continue to work into our 80s (God willing) and beyond. We will have to do everything we can to convince the government that we put more into society than we take out.

If, however, you are younger than 15, older than 40, you've got a problem. If you're younger than 2, or over 65, or mentally ill, or physically disabled, you've got an even bigger problem.

If you love someone who is over 65 or physically disabled and they contribute something important to your life, that won't count. Only if they pay taxes will their lives be rated as worthy.

Good luck to you.
AND GOOD LUCK to The American Thinker and its contributors as they wrestle over whether they want to fight phantom Nazis or, instead, become real ones.

Monday, August 22, 2011

Help! Help! They're being repressed!


I am one of those Catholics who believes in God, not cultural self-identification.

I believe that God exercises a "preferential option for the poor." I believe that's in the Bible -- somewhere toward the back.

I believe that how we govern ourselves, and how our governing structures implement a basic vision of social justice, is a direct reflection on a democracy's citizenry, which grants consent to its agents.

I believe that God does not sleep, that nations come under judgment and that we are in big, big trouble.


I ALSO BELIEVE that Louisiana -- my home state -- is working hard to sink from mere banana republicanism to fascistic banana republicanism, and that this stinking turd some self-righteous collegiate twerp left on the opinion pages of LSU's student newspaper is Exhibit A. From the soiled July 28 edition of my old stomping grounds, The Daily Reveille:
Obama and the Democrats love to paint a picture of the "poor" as innocent people "just trying to stretch every dollar as far as it will go."

I wonder how many Democrats have ever been to a Third World country to see what poor really means. For two weeks I stayed with a family in Costa Rica who had no air conditioning, no hot water, no washer or dryer, and the roof of the house was raised above the walls so that air could circulate in and out. And yet they washed all my clothes, gave me meals every day and never complained about it.

There are definitely some Americans who are truly needy, but it would be ridiculous to think the 47 percent of Americans not paying federal income tax are eating food out of dumpsters.

It's sickening to hear Obama and the Democrats portray the poor as blameless people in dire need of government help when our poor live lives of luxury in comparison to the poor of other countries.

It isn't the rich who are paying less than their fair share in taxes. To the contrary, they're paying much more than everyone else. It's America's poor who get free health care and new SUVs who aren't sharing the sacrifice.

And if we don't start taxing the rich, Obama wants to withhold Social Security checks. How about the government withholds welfare checks from the "poor" instead of Social Security to those who have actually paid their fair share?

It's about time the so-called poor Americans share the sacrifice and pay their fair share of taxes.

BACK IN MY DAY, the "f*** the poor" crowd complained about "welfare Cadillacs" and ghetto dwellers buying bottles of Mad Dog and Colt 45 tall boys with food stamps. Now, apparently, it's "free health care" and "new SUVs" that are the problem.

My assumption, though, is that the faces behind the stereotype are still brown ones.

What I don't understand is why the smug Reveille columnist, Austin Casey, didn't aim lower for whom he considers real poor people. Why not starving Somalians instead of Costa Rican peasants?

That could have made him feel even better -- or worse, depending -- about how rich America's poor are in the grand scheme of things. After all, it doesn't look quite so bad that the richest 1 percent of Americans controls 40 percent of its wealth and takes home a fourth of its annual income if we get to put quotation marks around our poor.

Sorry, make that "poor."

OF COURSE, the whole construct of inequality in the United States is unique to "socialists" like . . . well, me. I actually give a rat's ass about stuff like this. Austin Casey and the rest of Tea Party America don't.

When Austin Casey encountered the poor of Costa Rica, they sheltered him, fed him and wished him well. When Austin Casey encounters the poor -- sorry, "poor" -- of America, he pouts, stamps his feet and screams "Help! Help! I'm being repressed!"

Tea Party America is not the land of e pluribus unum -- out of many, one. Instead, it is the land of ad te sorbet -- it sucks to be you.

Jesus has an opinion on that. It's in the Bible -- somewhere toward the back.

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Miami Vice 77, America's Future 0

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy


The good news is the United States has all the money it needs to slash the national debt.

It has all the money it needs to maintain critical social services, too.

And to stimulate a sick economy.

It has all the cash necessary for rebuilding our crumbling national infrastructure.

We also have all the money we need to help poor children and their families.


The bad news is that we'd rather spend it all on s*** like this instead of stuff like that:

A University of Miami booster, incarcerated for his role in a $930 million Ponzi scheme, has told Yahoo! Sports he provided thousands of impermissible benefits to at least 72 athletes from 2002 through 2010.

In 100 hours of jailhouse interviews during Yahoo! Sports’ 11-month investigation, Hurricanes booster Nevin Shapiro described a sustained, eight-year run of rampant NCAA rule-breaking, some of it with the knowledge or direct participation of at least seven coaches from the Miami football and basketball programs. At a cost that Shapiro estimates in the millions of dollars, he said his benefits to athletes included but were not limited to cash, prostitutes, entertainment in his multimillion-dollar homes and yacht, paid trips to high-end restaurants and nightclubs, jewelry, bounties for on-field play (including bounties for injuring opposing players), travel and, on one occasion, an abortion.

Also among the revelations were damning details of Shapiro’s co-ownership of a sports agency – Axcess Sports & Entertainment – for nearly his entire tenure as a Hurricanes booster. The same agency that signed two first-round picks from Miami, Vince Wilfork and Jon Beason, and recruited dozens of others while Shapiro was allegedly providing cash and benefits to players. In interviews with federal prosecutors, Shapiro said many of those same players were also being funneled cash and benefits by his partner at Axcess, then-NFL agent and current UFL commissioner Michael Huyghue. Shapiro said he also made payments on behalf of Axcess, including a $50,000 lump sum to Wilfork, as a recruiting tool for the agency.
ALSO, there's this to consider:
While there may not be many boosters with such an over-the-top story, Shapiro knows he wasn’t the only fan doling out the under-the-table money. Maybe most damning for the sport is the fact that while he took care of current players, he says Miami coaches never asked him to buy a football recruit. Mainly because they felt it was fruitless.

“Miami is not the school where payouts are made to prospective student athletes,” Shapiro said. “Miami is a private institution, it’s in a transient city. We didn’t have the money to pay recruits. There is so much more money in big public universities. In the SEC, the money is an endless river.

“If Miami relied on cash payoffs for players to come to Miami, they’d be out of business. They’d lose every bidding war.

SO, YOU SEE the problem isn't, per the Republican Party, that poor little rich people couldn't possibly afford to be "job creators" any longer if they had to pay a tax rate commensurate with Joe Six-Pack's.

No, the problem is that the priorities of well-to-do Americans are, too often, completely f***ed up. Come to think of it, so are ours.

We get the leadership we deserve, and we get the society we tolerate. Boosters, hookers, football gods, rogue "collegiate" athletic programs and all the rest.

A banana republic . . . if you can afford it


We're high for a poor country, in terms of inequality, and we're a rich country. We're about the same level of inequality as China. And, of course, China, half the population are rural peasants who are not part of the modern world.

And if we were to compare us with African countries, dictators in different places, you know, taking a lot of the wealth from normal people, we would be among the top half of the African countries of inequality. So, the U.S. really has reached an extraordinary level of income inequality.

-- Richard Freeman,
Harvard economist

Wednesday, August 03, 2011

Have fun the last month? Just wait.


4:48.

That's where you need to go in the above video.

At 4:48, we find Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., confirming that, yes, congressional Republicans
are, too, a bunch of extortionists and political terrorists.

4:48. That's the point, at the end of Monday's interview with
CNBC's Larry Kudlow, where McConnell vows there never again will be a "clean" debt-ceiling bill.


IN OTHER WORDS, Republican legislative policy now is to hold the government and the economy hostage -- just like what we've witnessed the last excruciating month or so -- in order to ram savage spending cuts down Americans' throats while ensuring tax rates increase not a whit for the rich or big business.
"What we have done, Larry, also is set a new template. In the future, any president, this one or another one, when they request us to raise the debt ceiling, it will not be clean anymore. This is just the first step. This, we anticipate, will take us into 2013. Whoever the new president is, is probably going to be asking us to raise the debt ceiling again. Then we will go through the process again and see what we can continue to achieve in connection with these debt ceiling requests of presidents to get our financial house in order."
WHEN YOU TELL an entire nation that you are perfectly willing to let the government default in 2013 as a means of getting your fiscal way (because if you aren't, you don't have a bargaining chip), you are announcing you are a terrorist. Or, to be polite about it, an extortionist on a global scale.

If a group makes demands, then plants a nuclear bomb in an American city, then announces that if the United States doesn't commit to policies X, Y and Z, there will be a mushroom cloud to pay, no one would hesitate to use the T-word to describe what was going on.

Likewise, if a political party makes demands, then says that if the United States doesn't commit to policies X, Y and Z, it will make sure the country defaults, thereby blowing up the stock market, shutting down most of the government and causing all manner of economic carnage . . . how exactly would that not be political terrorism? This is what a top GOP officeholder has just publicly stated will happen if his party still holds a majority in at least one house of Congress in a year and a half.

History is showing signs of repeating itself. Last time, it took a mountain of corpses -- nearly 700,000 of them -- to finally crush the life out of an earlier era's extortionist politics and moral and political dysfunction.

St. George Santayana, pray for us.

Sunday, July 31, 2011

Barack Hussein Buchanan


The first-term Democratic president faced a dilemma. A radicalized political faction had threatened to wreck the whole nation if he did not accede to its surrender-or-else political demands.

Facing a choice between the merely catastrophic and Armageddon, the president caved. Political terrorism had triumphed.

Barack Obama vs. the Tea Party in the 2011 debt-limit crisis?

No, James Buchanan vs. the Southern secessionists, 1857. The Kansas Territory had just, in a sham vote by a small band of hoodlums, approved a pro-slavery constitution in defiance of the president's demands for a free, fair and representative political process.

Here's how Columbia University history professor Allan Nevins described the scene in the August 1956 issue of
American Heritage:

For a brief space in the spring of 1857 Buchanan seemed to stand firm. In his instructions to Governor Walker he engaged that the new constitution would be laid before the people: and “they must be protected in the exercise of their right of voting for or against that instrument, and the lair expression of the popular will must not be interrupted by fraud or violence.”

It is not strange that the rash proslavery gamesters in Kansas prosecuted their designs despite all Buchanan’s lair words and Walker’s desperate efforts to stay them. They knew that with four fifths of the people already against them, and the odds growing greater every year, only bra/en trickery could effect their end. They were aware that the South, which believed that a fair division would give Kansas to slavery and Nebraska to freedom, expected them to stand firm. They were egged on by the two reckless southern Cabinet members, Howell Cobb and Thompson, who sent an agent, H. L. Martin of Mississippi, out to the Kansas convention. This gathering in Lecompton, with 48 of the 60 members hailing from slave states, was the shabbiest conclave of its kind ever held on American soil. One of Buchanan’s Kansas correspondents wrote that he had not supposed such a wild set could be found. The Kansas News termed them a body of “broken-down political hacks, demagogues, fire-eaters, perjurers, ruffians, ballot-box stuffers, and loafers.” But before it broke up with the shout, “Now, boys, let’s come and take a drink!” it had written a constitution.

This constitution, the work of a totally unrepresentative body, was a devious repudiation of all the principles Buchanan and Douglas had laid down. Although it contained numerous controversial provisions, such as a limitation of banking to one institution and a bar against free Negroes, the main document was not to be submitted to general vote at all. A nominal reference of the great cardinal question was indeed provided. Voters might cast their ballots for the “constitution with slavery” or the “constitution without slavery.” But when closely examined this was seen to be actually a piece of chicanery. Whichever form was adopted, the 200 slaves in Kansas would remain, with a constitutional guarantee against interference. Whenever the proslavery party in Kansas could get control of the legislature, they might open the door wide for more slaves. The rigged convention had put its handiwork before the people with a rigged choice: “Heads I win, tails you lose.”

Would Buchanan lay this impudent contrivance before Congress, and ask it to vote the admission of Kansas as a state? Or would he contemptuously spurn it? An intrepid man would not have hesitated an instant to take the honest course; he would not have needed the indignant outcry of the northern press, the outraged roar of Douglas, to inspirit him. But Buchanan quailed before the storm of passion into which proslavery extremists had worked themselves.

The hot blood of the South was now up. That section, grossly misinformed upon events in Kansas, believed that it was being cheated. The northern freesoilers had vowed that no new slave state (save by a partition of Texas) should ever be admitted. Southerners thought that in pursuance of this resolve, the Yankees had made unscrupulous use of their wealth and numbers to lay hands on Kansas. Did the North think itself entitled to every piece on the board—to take Kansas as well as California, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Oregon—to give southerners nothing? The Lecompton delegates, from this point of view, were dauntless champions of a wronged section. What if they did use sharp tactics? That was but a necessary response to northern arrogance. Jefferson Davis declared that his section trembled under a sense of insecurity. “You have made it a political war. We are on the defensive. How far are you to push us?” Sharp threats of secession and battle mingled with the southern denunciations. “Sir,” Senator Alfred Iverson of Georgia was soon to assert, “I believe that the time will come when the slave States will be compelled, in vindication of their rights, interests, and honor, to separate from the free States, and erect an independent confederacy; and I am not sure, sir, that the time is not at hand.”

Three southern members of the Cabinet, Cobb, Thompson, and John B. Floyd, had taken the measure of Buchanan’s pusillanimity. They, with one northern sympathizer, Jeremiah Black, and several White House habitués like John Slidell of Louisiana, constituted a virtual Directory exercising control over the tremulous President. They played on Buchanan’s fierce partisan hatred of Republicans, and his jealous dislike of Douglas. They played also on his legalistic cast of mind; after all, the Lecompton constitution was a legal instrument by a legal convention—outwardly. Above all, they played on his fears, his morbid sensitiveness, and his responsiveness to immediate pressures. They could do this the more easily because the threats of disruption and violence were real. Henry S. Foote, a former senator from Mississippi and an enemy of Jefferson Davis, who saw Lecompton in its true light and hurried to Washington to advise the President, writes: “It was unfortunately of no avail that these efforts to reassure Mr. Buchanan were at that time essayed by myself and others; he had already become thoroughly panic-stricken; the howlings of the bulldog of secession had fairly frightened him out of his wits, and he ingloriously resolved to yield without further resistance to the decrial and villification to which he had been so acrimoniously subjected.”

And the well-informed Washington correspondent of the New Orleans Picayune a little later told just how aggressively the Chief Executive was bludgeoned into submission: “The President was informed in November, 1857, that the States of Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina, and perhaps others, would hold conventions and secede from the Union if the Lecompton Constitution, which established slavery, should not be accepted by Congress. The reason was that these States, supposing that the South had been cheated out of Kansas, were, whether right or wrong, determined to revolt. The President believed this. Senator Hunter, of Virginia, to rny knowledge, believed it. Many other eminent men did, and perhaps not without reason.”

Buchanan, without imagination as without nerve, began to yield to this southern storm in midsummer, and by November, 1857, he was surrendering completely. When Congress met in December his message upheld the Lecompton Constitution with a tissue of false and evasive statements. Seldom in American history has a chief magistrate made a greater error, or missed a larger opportunity. The astute secretary of his predecessor, Franklin Pierce, wrote: “I had considerable hopes of Mr. Buchanan—I really thought he was a statesman—but I have now come to the settled conclusion that he is just the damndest old fool that has ever occupied the presidential chair. He has deliberately walked overboard with his eyes open—let him drown, for he must.”

As Buchanan shrank from the lists, Douglas entered them with that gaudium certaminis which was one of his greatest qualities. The finest chapters of his life, his last great contests for the Union, were opening. Obviously he would have had to act under political necessity even if deaf to principle, for had he let popular sovereignty be torn to pieces, Illinois would not have sent him back to the Senate the following year; but he was not the man to turn his back on principle. His struggle against Lecompton was an exhibition of iron determination. The drama of that battle has given it an almost unique place in the record of our party controversies. “By God, sir!” he exclaimed, “I made James Buchanan, and by God, sir, I will unmake him!” Friends told him that the southern Democrats meant to ruin him. “I have taken a through ticket,” rejoined Douglas, “and checked my baggage.” He lost no time in facing Buchanan in the White House and denouncing the Lecompton policy. When the President reminded him how Jackson had crushed two party rebels, he was ready with a stinging retort. Douglas was not to be overawed by a man he despised as a weakling. “Mr. President,” he snorted, “I wish you to remember that General Jackson is dead.”

As for the southern leaders, Douglas’ scorn for the extremists who had coerced Buchanan was unbounded. He told the Washington correspondent of the Chicago Journal that he had begun his fight as a contest against a single bad measure. But his blow at Lecompton was a blow against slavery extension, and he at once had the whole “slave power” down on him like a pack of wolves. He added: “In making the fight against this power, I was enabled to stand off and view the men with whom I had been acting; I was ashamed I had ever been caught in such company; they are a set of unprincipled demagogues, bent upon perpetuating slavery, and by the exercise of that unequal and unfair power, to control the government or break up the Union; and I intend to prevent their doing either.”

After a long, close, and acrid contest, on April i, 1858, Lecompton was defeated. A coalition of Republicans, Douglasite Democrats, and Know-Nothings struck down the fraudulent constitution in the House, 120 to 112. When the vote was announced, a wild cheer rolled through the galleries. Old Francis P. Blair, Jackson’s friend, carried the news to the dying Thomas Hart Benton, who had been intensely aroused by the crisis. Benton could barely speak, but his exultation was unbounded. “In energetic whispers,” records Blair, “he told his visitor that the same men who had sought to destroy the republic in 1850 were at the bottom of this accursed Lecompton business. Among the greatest of his consolations in dying was the consciousness that the House of Representatives had baffled these treasonable schemes and put the heels of the people on the neck of the traitors.”

The Administration covered its retreat by a hastily concocted measure, the English Bill, under which Kansas was kept waiting on the doorstep—sure in the end to enter a free state. The Kansas plotters, the CobbThompson-Floyd clique in the Cabinet, and Buchanan had all been worsted. But the damage had been done. Southern secessionists had gained fresh strength and greater boldness from their success in coercing the Administration.

The Lecompton struggle left a varied and interesting set of aftereffects. It lifted Stephen A. Douglas to a new plane; he had been a fighting Democratic strategist, but now he became a true national leader, thinking far less of party and more of country. It sharpened the issues which that summer and fall were to form the staple of the memorable Lincoln-Douglas debates in Illinois. At the same time, it deepened the schism which had been growing for some years between southern Democrats and northwestern Democrats, and helped pave the way to that disruption of the party which preceded and facilitated the disruption of the nation. It planted new seeds of dissension in Kansas—seeds which resulted in fresh conflicts between Kansas free-soilers or jayhawkers on one side and Missouri invaders or border ruffians on the other, and in a spirit of border lawlessness which was to give the Civil War some of its darkest pages. The Lecompton battle discredited Buchanan in the eyes of most decent northerners, strengthened southern conviction of his weakness, and left the Administration materially and morally weaker in dealing with the problems of the next two and a half critical years.

For the full measure of Buchanan’s failure, however, we must go deeper. Had he shown the courage that to an Adams, a Jackson, a Polk, or a Cleveland would have been second nature, the courage that springs from a deep integrity, he might have done the republic an immeasurable service by grappling with disunion when it was yet weak and unprepared. Ex-Senator Foote wrote later that he knew well that a scheme for destroying the Union “had long been on foot in the South.” He knew that its leaders “were only waiting for the enfeebling of the Democratic Party in the North, and the general triumph of Free-soilism as a consequence thereof, to alarm the whole South into acquiescence in their policy.” Buchanan’s support of the unwise and corrupt Lecompton constitution thus played into the plotters’ hands.

The same view was taken yet more emphatically by Douglas. He had inside information in 1857, he later told the Senate, that four states were threatening Buchanan with secession. Had that threat been met in the right Jacksonian spirit, had the bluff been called—for the four states were unprepared for secession and war—the leaders of the movement would have been utterly discredited. Their conspiracy would have collapsed, and they would have been so routed and humiliated in 1857 that the Democratic party schism in 1860 might never have taken place, and if it had, secession in 1861 would have been impossible.


BAD THINGS HAPPEN when American presidents get bullied by political extremists up to no good.

For good reason, the U.S. government, as a matter of policy, refuses to negotiate with terrorists, much less acquiesce to their demands. The theory behind that is as simple as it is obvious -- if terrorists' extortionist tactics prove successful, they'll keep doing what works.

Give us what we want, or the little lady . . . the children in the schoolhouse . . . the jetliner full of passengers . . . the hostages in the American embassy . . . the city of New York . . . the economy and government of the United States of America gets it.

Look where caving into the politics of extortion led us a century and a half ago. Over the past day, several national commentators have rightly noted the bloody obvious -- it's back. They have stared the obvious in the face and acknowledged what cannot be denied, that President Obama's monumental collapse in the face of legislative terrorism will lead to the repeated use of a tactic as effective as it is despicable.

If it's true that war "is the continuation of politics by other means," the safety is now off.

We suspect we now are a nation as divided as we've been since 1861. We know what happened then and how we got there. Historians look at James Buchanan's actions, and inaction, in the runup to the Civil War and proclaim him one of the worst presidents in American history -- likely the worst.

SO . . . what do we do? Naturally, we do exactly as Buchanan did.

You do know what the definition of insanity is, right?

Friday, July 29, 2011

Look away, look away, look away, Teabagland


You know what John Boehner's problem is in getting his debt-ceiling bill through the U.S. House? Pell Grants.

Tea Party lunatic leges are furious, saying there's too much money set aside for helping poor kids attend college. Pell Grants, to a certain subset of the Republican Party, are this decade's "welfare Cadillac."

Now we know why the speaker of the House often needs a drink and a smoke.

Me, I'm pretty much just speechless. This takes some doing, and the Tea Party jihadists just did it.

I'll merely say the whole thing
really reminds me of this.


I'M TURNING it over to The Hill newspaper now:
Legislation crafted by House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) to raise the debt limit by $900 billion would directly appropriate $9 billion for Pell Grants in 2012 and another $8 billion in 2013.

This has shocked some conservative House freshmen who say they were elected to cut spending, not increase it. Some House Republicans think of it as being akin to welfare.

“I really don’t understand why we’re increasing spending in a bill supposed to be cutting spending,” said Rep. Andy Harris, a freshman Republican from Maryland. “It was negotiated without the input of a lot of members.”

Harris has indicated to The Baltimore Sun that he will vote no.

House Republican leaders say they included concessions to Democrats in efforts to forge a compromise that could pass both chambers.

(snip)

The inclusion of the extra money for Pell Grants could cost Republican votes.

Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-Mont.) has compared Pell Grants to “welfare”.

"So you can go to college on Pell Grants — maybe I should not be telling anybody this because it’s turning out to be the welfare of the 21st century," Rehberg told Blog Talk Radio in April. "You can go to school, collect your Pell Grants, get food stamps, low-income energy assistance, Section 8 housing, and all of a sudden we find ourselves subsidizing people that don’t have to graduate from college.”
DEAR LORD, we humbly beseech Thee . . . HELLLLLLLLP!