All posts by Wintery Knight

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Commentary

A closer look at the life of Ted Kennedy

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ECM sent me this magnificent essay about the life of Ted Kennedy.

I like this essay because it really explains where liberals get their liberal ideas. Ideas like bailouts, big spending, moral relativism and lack of personal responsibility, are the direct result of his silver-spoon upbringing.

Here are the topics:

  • his academic record, including his expulsion from Harvard for cheating
  • how his father pulled strings to shorten his Army contract
  • his sparse resume
  • his role in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne
  • the inconsistencies between his policies and his personal behavior

Excerpt:

Insulated by the consequences of his behavior, Kennedy was also shielded from the consequences of his policies. He was the champion of busing who kept his own children far from the public schools; an advocate of publicly funded campaigns who bankrolled his political career with his family’s shadowy financing; an icon of feminists who used women like Kleenex, serially harassed members of the opposite sex, and spent ten hours attempting to rescue his political career as he denied the young women suffocating in an air pocket in his Oldsmobile professional rescue attempts; and the primary booster of socialized medicine who assembled a dream team of neurosurgeons to consult on his treatment for brain cancer. The proverbial limousine liberal was made real in Trustfund Ted.

It’s fun to contrast this story with the life stories of self-made moms like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann. They started out in normal families, married and had children. There is a reason why people use expressions like “trust fund liberal” or “limousine liberal”.

News

NH court orders home-schooled child into government-run school

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Story from the Alliance Defense Fund.

Excerpt:

The parents of the child divorced in 1999.  The mother has home-schooled their daughter since first grade with curriculum that meets all state review standards.  In addition to home schooling, the girl attends supplemental public school classes and has also been involved in a variety of extra-curricular sports activities.

In the process of renegotiating the terms of a parenting plan for the girl, the guardian ad litem involved in the case concluded, according to the court order, that the girl “appeared to reflect her mother’s rigidity on questions of faith” and that the girl’s interests “would be best served by exposure to a public school setting” and “different points of view at a time when she must begin to critically evaluate multiple systems of belief…in order to select, as a young adult, which of those systems will best suit her own needs.”

The WND story is here, but I don’t like WND.

News

Ignorant leftists beginning to learn about economics the hard way

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Schadenfreude is such a wonderful thing.

First, young people are beginning to realize that taxing the rich is not as great as they thought. (H/T Hot Air)

Excerpt:

The proportion of people ages 16 to 24 who were employed in July was 51.4 percent, the lowest July rate since records began in 1948 and 4.6 percentage points lower than in July 2008. …

The Labor Department said 4.4 million youths were unemployed in July 2009, or about 1 million more than in July 2008, putting the youth jobless rate at 18.5 percent, about double the overall national percentage.

Fewer young people were even trying to be part of the labor force this year than in recent years, perhaps choosing summer school, odd jobs around the house or idleness instead.

Let’s be clear. If you raise the price of labor while leaving production levels constant, people will be laid off. Period. This is non-negotiable among rational individuals. My recommendation to the young people: put down the Che Guevara t-shirt and step away from television.

Meanwhile, public school teachers are striking against their own union in order to save their jobs. (H/T Hot Air)

Excerpt:

A group of teachers in the North Clackamas School District took the initiative Thursday, amid losing their jobs because of budget cuts, by gathering signatures in an effort to have their voices heard by their union.

The teachers, who gathered outside their union office, said they want a response from the union and put their demands in writing in the form of a petition.

Those speaking out said it shouldn’t have reached this point, and they would have accepted the district’s offer, favoring a wage freeze to save jobs.

“We took a poll in the spring and they got our opinion and the majority said wage freeze,” said Monica Whiteley, who was laid off. “So I would like them to look at the poll or honor it and have us look at the memo of understanding that is out there.”

It’s good to see reliable Democrat voting blocs finally moving beyond rhetoric into reality. The world is dangerous place, and willful blindness has consequences. Next time, they should learn economics the easy way – by reading Thomas Sowell.