Hypocrisy update
Rep. Patrick McHenry is the latest member of Congress to show up at a local event to present a check from the federal government that he says is spending too much on local grants. This time it was $7,505 for the Linville Volunteer Fire Department.
The High Country Press in Boone reported on McHenry's check presentation without asking him about his hypocrisy, which is almost as troubling as McHenry's doubletalk.
No word yet on how McHenry and other Congressional Republicans can explain their shocking hypocrisy on Medicare. After months of incorrectly claiming that President Obama's health care reform plans would slash billions in Medicare benefits for seniors, Congressional Republicans are lining up behind a budget proposal by Rep. Paul Ryan that explicitly slashes billions from Medicare in an attempt to reduce the budget deficit.
The North Carolina Republican Party paved the way for this blatant hypocrisy, running ads last summer blasting the health care reform plans for what it said were damaging cuts to Medicare benefits. But recently the state GOP began running an ad on its website featuring former President Ronald Reagan in a speech from the early 1960s opposing the creation of Medicare.
Maybe Republicans were really complaining about what they claimed were proposed cuts in Medicare by the Obama Administration because the GOP didn't think the cuts went far enough. Maybe they'd rather abolish Medicare altogether and stay true to Reagan's wishes.
The Stam Commission
Wake County officials have caved in to the far right and ended coverage of abortion services in the health plan that covers county employees. Now that House Minority Leader Paul Stam and his allies have prevailed, what's next?
What if a handful of politicians object to birth control or fertility treatments? Will coverage be ended for those things too?
Maybe we should just set up a commission run by Stam and Apex Mayor Keith Weatherly and let them pick and choose what is covered. It would save everybody a lot trouble. They seem to be deciding everything already.
There is no evidence except the evidence
A committee of the Wake County Board of Education held its first discussion this week of the school system's widely praised student assignment policy that the new Gang of Five board majority wants to abolish in favor of resegregated schools.
Gang of Fiver Deborah Prickett said that there is no proof that diversity works in schools. If somebody sent her even a fraction of the mountain of studies that do prove it, she wouldn't be able to find her desk for a month.
She should at least read one cited in a recent speech by UNC law school Dean Jack Boger. It was published in 2008 by Charles Thompson of East Carolina University and Gary Henry of UNC-Chapel Hill, who were researching how schools were using their financial resources to improve students' education.
Boger cited many of the relevant findings in his address, including this one.
"…low-income students perform worse on EOC exams when they are in schools with high percentages of other low-income students. . . . The combined effects of students' individual characteristics and the overall composition of a high school's student population are extremely powerful influences on the average level of academic performance in that school."
Seems like pretty powerful evidence, Ms. Prickett.
Wake County parents seem to get it, at least the 94.5 percent of them who said they were satisfied with their child's school under the assignment plan that Prickett and her allies are so determined to dismantle.
Advice for the Nobel Committee
The folks on the right can't help themselves when it comes to illogical rants. They even come on the rare occasion when they are noting something interesting about progressives that they normally can't stand.
Locker Mitch Kokai recently cited the agreement between Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman and conservative Bill Kristol about President Obama's decision not to object to huge bonuses for Wall Street CEOs.
But Kokai refers to Krugman as the "economics challenged economist of the left."
The Nobel Committee seems to have made a terrible mistake. It should have checked with the real economic experts of the world-the folks in Lockerville.
