God I hate that question. But during another FB conversation, I was confronted with that idiotic platitude. Not in those exact words, but that was the sentiment.

In response to one of my slightly disparaging remarks about BHO (peace be unto him), someone said this:

one more thing… we as a people have to get over this REP/DEM thing… and unite to do what is right for ALL OF US… that is the TRUE reason why we can’t move forward!

Well, we can’t just get along because our visions are diametrically opposed. It’s not a question of being republican or democrat, it’s a question of support for or opposition to constitutional government.

People like me want the government to be smaller, less intrusive, and restricted in power to those specifically enumerated in the constitution. BHO (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) believes that the government should meddle in all sorts of things they are not empowered to do. McCain-Feingold was unconstitutional on its face. “Congress shall make no law…abridging freedom of speech.” It could not be more simple. Yet BHO (May Allah honor him and grant him peace) and McCain both voted for it. And Bush signed it, even while acknowledging its dubious constitutionality.

So it’s not a “DEM/REP thing.” It’s a pro- or anti- constitution thing. BHO’s (may his name be blessed) obvious disdain for the constitution is shown in his choices for the supreme court, his unconstitutional czars, his socialist health care plan, and his contemptuous treatment of private industry.

We’re not interested in moving forward if that means being stripped of the liberties bestowed upon us by our Creator, and supposedly protected by the constitution. When politicians ignore their oaths to uphold the constitution, it is we who suffer. And whether that politician is republican or democrat, if they defy the constitution, then those who honor the constitution will do everything in their power to remove those politicians from office.

So no, we can’t get along with those who would destroy our constitutional republic. There is a story, probably apocryphal, that Benjamin Franklin, as he was leaving the constitutional convention, was asked, “Dr. Franklin, what have you given us, a republic or a monarchy?” To which he supposedly replied, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”

I pray we can keep it. I fear we will lose it.

fiat lux!

Several years back, when I was doing some software training at a company in Green Tree, we (the trainers) were all standing around the reception desk during the students’ morning break. Our supervisor came by (a former trainer, and an Ed major), and passed around a resume for us to look at as a potential hire. Everything about the resume was of no particular interest to me except the following two pieces of information: the applicant’s degree was from a public college of education, and the applicant’s GPA was 2.67. So I stated the obvious. I said that if I had graduated with an Education Degree, I would never admit to a 2.67 GPA. My boss and half a dozen coworkers were glaring at me. One of the trainers (M. Ed., PSU) said, “Why not?”

Shit.

Oh well – in for a penny, in for a pound. I explained that education majors have the lowest standardized test scores and the highest GPA’s of any major. And while grade inflation is bad in most departments at American colleges and universities, it is particularly egregious in public colleges of education. An Ed major with a B- probably could not even finish a real degree.

My mother was right. A career at the State Department was never in my future.

So now my boss and coworkers were glaring at me, and, before turning their backs, one of them (B. Ed., Pitt) said, “That just your opinion.” The rest nodded in quiet affirmation and walked away.

Now, to understand this, it really must be heard. It was not said in anger, more like dismissively. And the emphasis was not on the word “your.” It was on “just.” As in, I heard what you said, but it’s merely an opinion.

And there’s the crux of the biscuit. I was surrounded by seven people holding a total of eleven degrees, all of them in education, and not a single one of them was aware of the difference between a falsifiable statement and a non-falsifiable statement. Or, for you state school ed majors, a statement of fact and a statement of opinion. It was the sort of thing I learned in elementary school.

The other day, I posted rather a lengthy piece on why education costs so much, and was having an online conversation with the person who posted the original message that got me wound up in the first place. Eventually, this was posted to the discussion:

…i appreciate your view on this topic kevin but we will continue to just state our opinion..and believe the way we want…

I was not dealing in opinions, but rather facts. And facts are stubborn things. You can’t wish them away. Allan Bloom describes the problem succinctly:

There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.

And, if you are both curious and self-motivated, you can verify my statement about Ed majors, GPA’s, and test scores at the web site of the US Department of Education. It’s not just my opinion.

fiat lux!

So I’m going through Facebook tonight and I see the following:

Way to go Gov. Kasich cut 132 million from the schools and laying [off] many teachers…just keep cutting the future away…

So what are the actual facts? Let’s start with something I heard Huckabee say a while back. I’m paraphrasing here, but the gist was that governors spend 90% of their budgets doing three things: educating, incarcerating, and medicating. A quick look at the Ohio budget shows this to be entirely accurate. When you add up education (32.2%), health and human services (52%), and justice/public protection (6.2%), you get 90.4% of the state’s budget. The cuts have to come from somewhere. While $132 million sounds like a huge cut, it actually amounts to 1% of the state budget for primary and secondary education. That’s right, 1%. If you can’t cut 1% from a budget, you’re just not trying.

Remember, the State of Ohio does not educate anyone. Local school districts do that. So money is collected from citizens all over Ohio, sent to Columbus, then redistributed among the school districts. Why do local dollars have to go to Columbus first? So it is the local school districts that are going to lose state money, and this might result in some layoffs. Oh well. All over private industry, workers are facing layoffs, or, if they are lucky, just pay cuts. So why not teachers? Or janitors? Or local administrators?

Of course, there are other considerations here as well. First, there is no correlation between the amount of money that governments throw at something, and the efficacy of the solutions. Americans spend over $9300 per pupil for public education, an increase of 23.5% over the past 10 years. This has not resulted in anything like a 23% increase in test scores. In terms of real dollars (that is, adjusted for inflation), spending since 1970 has doubled ¹ in terms of dollars per pupil. American students are not twice as bright as they were then. In fact, if you look at the percentage of college freshmen requiring remedial courses (over 20% on average, as high as 75% at CUNY’s community colleges), it’s easy to see that primary and secondary education are failing our children despite these huge increases in spending.

This leads to two really obvious questions: Why does it cost so much and why are we getting so little?

The first thing to look at is how teachers are paid. They are paid not on their results, but rather on two things, years of experience and years of education. For each year a teacher teaches in a district, their pay increases. However, those increases are not equal. A teacher moving from their first year to their second will see an increase in the neighborhood of about 1% – not even enough to keep up with inflation. However, a teacher will see an increase of about 5% per year in the last few steps of a contract. The net result is that a teacher at the highest step makes about twice what a teacher at the lowest step makes. For instance, looking at the Mt Lebanon collective bargaining agreement, a first year teacher with a Bachelor’s degree will make $45,000, while a teacher with 17 years experience and the same degree will make $89,600. All things considered, not a bad rate of pay for a job with summers off (as well as long breaks at Christmas and Easter). Excuse me – a spring break and a winter break.

This defies rationality on so many levels. First, let’s consider other union workers – specifically, the building trades. While there is a substantial difference in pay between apprentices and journeymen, once an apprentice becomes a journeyman, those differences disappear. A journeyman pipefitter of 10 years makes the same as one with 5 years or 20. The differences, when they occur, are the result of increased responsibility (foremen make more than journeymen, and general foremen make more than foremen) or from differences in environment (construction tradesmen make more than those in fabrication shops). These differences seem reasonable and rational.

Yet why should a teacher moving from year 16 to year 17 get a 5% increase, while one moving from year 1 to year 2 sees only a 1% increase? If anything, the greatest marginal improvements in teaching skills are likely to come early in a career rather than later. And why, as a parent, would I want my child in the rookie’s classroom as opposed to the veteran’s? If there is really that much of a correlation between pay and performance, then why would I allow my darling angel to suffer the indignity of learning from a rookie when the veteran is right down the hall?

Why is a Master’s degree worth only a $2,000 pay boost to a rookie, but almost $5,000 to a veteran teacher? Is there really any evidence that says your child is getting a $65-150 more in educational value because of that master’s degree²? I have yet to see a study that says teachers with master’s degrees are that much better than those with just a bachelor’s degree. In fact, the one factor most correlated with the attainment of educational outcomes has nothing to do with the educational level of either the students or the teachers – it is the infectious enthusiasm of the teacher for the subject. Anyone from Monroe who took any class from Mr. Straub can attest to that.

Ever since the days of Alfred C Marshall, economists speak in terms of margins. You may have heard of the phrase “diminishing returns.” The correct wording is “diminishing marginal returns.” Basically, this means that if I spend 10% more money, am I getting 10% more value? If I get 12% more value, than it’s worth spending the 10% more money. If I get only 8% more value, than it is not worth it. This is something businesses deal with every day. But while the decision process in business is affected by the bottom line, in the public sector it is a question of politics. No rational businessman would keep someone on the payroll who will cost 5% more unless that person can deliver at least 5% more value. Yet public institutions do exactly that. One of Governor Kasich’s proposals is to get rid of the LIFO (last in first out) principal in determining which teachers should be laid off. These layoffs, should they become necessary, should be based on the marginal cost of keeping an employee versus the marginal value they bring to the job, instead of the seniority based system that is currently in place.

The simple fact is that teacher pay has little or nothing to do with teacher performance, which should at least partially answer the question of why education costs so much. As to the second question I posed, why are we getting so little?

That question is a little more complicated. Let me start with an illustration. I have a friend who went to Texan A&M University, and started as an Education major. She soon became fed up with the pop psychology and labor relations (read: pro-union drivel) that was being taught in her required courses, and changed her major to engineering. She was fed up with bullshit.

Here is an uncomfortable fact: Among college students, education majors have the highest GPA’s and the lowest standardized test scores of any major. The highest standardized test scores are found in the hard sciences (Physics, Chemistry, Biology, etc.) and in areas like Math and Economics. The only area that approaches Ed majors in terms of low test scores are some of the Business majors (specifically, those in Human Relations).

Here is another illustration: At Robert Morris University, as well as most other universities, many courses come in three distinct flavors. Let’s take statistics (as an example). First, there is real statistics. This involves an intimate knowledge of calculus, and is beyond most students except for those majoring in Math, Engineering, and Economics. Then there is Business Statistics. This involves knowledge of algebra only, and is within the grasp of anyone taking accounting or working on an MBA. Finally, there is Stats for Ed majors. There the students read stories of how statistics work and answer questions about the stories. And most of them struggle with the course.

Finally, one last illustration. My mother, who went to Columbia University, described 120th Street in New York as the “Widest Street in the World,” because it was the street that separated Columbia University from Columbia Teacher’s College. And that was 50+ years ago. It’s only gotten worse.

The reasons for this are more complex than the fact that we are saddled with dumb teachers in public schools. Part of the reason can be found in a Stanford University study that has this to say:

The roots of this lack of connection between K-12 and higher education reflect the fact that they were created as two separate systems. In 1900, the educational systems were briefly, if loosely, linked because the College Board set uniform standards for each academic subject, and issued a syllabus to help high school students get ready for college entrance subject-matter examinations. This K-16 academic standards connection later frayed and then broke open…. This is an American phenomenon: there is a much greater disjuncture between secondary and postsecondary education here than in most other nations.

In other words, American high schools seem to be unaware of the requirements of American colleges and universities. To say the least, this is a little bizarre. Is this the fault of under-prepared teachers? Or is it because of administrators whose decisions regarding high school curricula are screwing the students? I can’t really tell, yet. I will delve more into this in the next post, when I have had a chance to do more research.

fiat lux!

1. U.S. Department of Education, Digest of Education Statistics, Tables 102 & 171.
2. This figure is obtained by dividing the differences in pay by a classroom of 30 students.

So I tried to watch the Oscars last night. After the third acceptance speech were somebody said something complementary about their union workers I decided I had had enough.

In terms of economics, what exactly is the function of the union? In order to understand that, let’s consider the following scenario. You own a bar. Tony Soprano comes up to you and says, “If you don’t use our service for collecting your trash we will put you out of business. And if you don’t use my cousin to buy your booze we will put you out of business.” Now, most people will rightly recognize this as extortion pure and simple. Basically, Tony wants you to pay more than market prices for commodity goods.

When a single person or company holds a monopoly on a good or service they can charge a higher price than would exist in a competitive marketplace. By restricting access to market choices they force their customers to pay more than they would otherwise pay.

Now let’s look what happens when union thugs are involved. The thugs come up to you and tell you that if you don’t use them as your sole source of labor, they will put you out of business. In my view, there is no moral distinction between the union thug and the Mafia. In each case, you are forced to pay more for a good or service that it would be worth in a free market, and it is backed up with the threat that failure to do so will result in bankruptcy.

When companies are forced to pay more for labor than it is actually worth, the difference between the value of the labor and the cost of the labor is passed onto the consumer in higher prices. The only difference between the Mafia scenario and the union scenario is that the latter is sanctioned by the government.

So every time some Hollywood actor makes a fuss over the unions, he or she is basically telling you that they want you to get screwed every time you buy something.

Just something to think about next time you go to the movies.

fiat lux!

Of all reporting on the events happening in the Islamic world, the most disturbing is the notion put forth by the American press that these protests are in any way pro-democratic. In Islamic nations, the notion of democracy includes none of the rights that are associated with Western democratic countries – specifically such rights as freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association. To them, democracy means one man, one vote, one time.

Never has a revolution in an Islamic country led to a more tolerant, modern, secular state. Once the clerics obtain power, all secular government is obliterated. This is in line with the Qur’an, which states, “What! Do those who seek after evil ways think that We shall hold them equal with those who believe and do righteous deeds,- that equal will be their life and their death? Ill is the judgment that they make” (45:21). And this: “It is not fitting for a Believer, man or woman, when a matter has been decided by Allah and His Messenger to have any option about their decision” (33:36).

Finally, consider 9:3, which says, “…Allah and his messenger are free from obligation to the unbelievers….” In other words, constitutional secular governments hold no power over true believers. Remember, the whole idea of moderate and radical Muslims is a creation of the western media and groups like CAIR. In Islamic countries, there are only believers and unbelievers.

The early writings of Mohammad stated that religious belief should never be a matter of compulsion, and that Muslims should live side-by-side with their non-believing neighbors. Later, Mohammad himself abrogated these early writings, replacing them with hate-filled urges to kill or convert non-believers. These later writings heavily influenced the Hadiths (collections of writings on Mohammad’s life and deeds, but not actually the words of Mohammad himself). And these writings have great influence over today’s clerics. On the subject of tolerance, a typical passage is this: “The Day of Resurrection will not arrive until the Moslems make war against the Jews and kill them, and until a Jew hiding behind a rock and tree, and the rock and tree will say: ‘Oh Moslem, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him!’” (Sahih Bukhari 004.52.176).

I believe with all my heart that unless the patriarchs of Islam, as a group, repudiate the virulent screeds of Mohammad, along with the more virulent Hadiths, and re-frame their their religion along the earlier views of Mohammad, then there can never be peace between Muslims and non-Muslims.

During his campaign, BHO stated that he is uncomfortable with the idea of victory in war. In the last few days, BHO has stated that violence is not the answer. This is an insane and naive view. Just ask the the survivors of Auschwitz whether violence settles things.

Nothing good will come from the overthrow of Mubarek and the likely chain reaction in other Muslim countries, whose clerics see their own political leaders as corrupt only because they will not destroy Israel and because they have dealings with the West.

It is time to world to compel the repudiation of the virulent aspects of Islam, and compel the formal surrender of Islam’s patriarchs. Until that surrender occurs, there will be no peace.

fiat lux.

There is a completely delightful spy movie called Hopscotch that was released in 1980. It starred Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson. The movie came to mind as I was watching TV tonight, because a commercial prompted the recall of one of my favorite scenes from the movie. Glenda Jackson plays a retired spy, Isobel von Schonenberg, who is being tailed by a couple of CIA buffoons. At one point, her dog starts growling at one of her tails, and Isobel turns to him and tells him that her dog “detests the smell of stupidity.”

Now I could be writing about recent political events, many of which also reek of stupidity, but I find them mostly too depressing to write about. Democrats are calling Republicans hostage takers (terrorists), and Republicans are subsidizing unemployment, and Democrats are talking about tax breaks for millionaires, and Republicans are…whatever.

We all know the talking points.

No. I am inspired to write because of a commercial for a drug called Lunesta. You know the one. It features people trying to sleep despite the animated glowing Luna moth that’s in their bedroom. Maybe what I’m about to write about was there from the beginning, and I simply failed to notice it. Or maybe the commercial was changed to add this text to one of the scenes. I don’t really know. But I suspect the latter. Here it is:

Not actual patients.

Why is this in the commercial? I’m guessing that it’s the result of some government bureaucrat calling up Serpracor (the drug company that makes the stuff) and telling them they had to add that blurb. Or maybe it was a bureaucrat in Serpracor’s legal department. You see, in the mind of that bureaucrat, if that blurb wasn’t there, too many people would have gone on thinking that these were actual patients, and not actors.

So somebody thinks we’re that stupid. And I find that depressing as well.

There is something about that blurb that tells me more about society than all the talking points from all the bullshit artists in Washington. Like Isobel, I detest the smell of stupidity.

I think that Wonko the Sane was on to something.

fiat lux!

Back in 1994, after the Republicans won control of both houses of Congress, there was some discussion of defunding public broadcasting. However, talk was pretty much all that happened. The CPB launched a 2-pronged advertising offensive on their affiliates whose message could be summed up by the following catch phrases.

If public broadcasting doesn’t do it, who will?

Public broadcasting costs the public about the same as a postage stamp per month.

The first did not work out, as their critics responded by pointing out the new choices in cable – A&E, Bravo, etc. (It is worth noting that in the early days of both those networks, their concentration was on arts – not L&O reruns and Queer Eye.) The second was more effective, however.

According to the Census Bureau, there are about 150,000,000 registered voters in the US. Divide that into the $422,000,000 CPB federal subsidy, and the cost of CPB to the average voter is less than $3.00 per year, or 25 cents per month. Couple those numbers with the fact that the majority of CPB programming is benign, and it’s a tough sell to get voters worked up over a quarter per month.

Economists refer to this voter reaction as “rational ignorance.” It’s a simple cost/benefit problem. The cost to the voter in terms of studying the issue and writing to representatives is more than the benefit of saving 25 cents per month in federal taxes. However, to the folks at CPB, their jobs depend on that subsidy. And to the members of Congress who vote on CPB’s appropriations, the cost of risking the voter’s ire for giving CPB other people’s money is small compared to the kudos they receive for their generosity in promoting such a noble cause. Public Choice economists refer to this behavior as “rent seeking.”

Rent seeking is the process of earning income by manipulating the political process as opposed to earning profits though transactions that are mutually beneficial to buyer and seller alike. And if the CPB were the only entity engaging in rent seeking this would not be much of a problem. However, there are many interests involved in this behavior. Milk producers want price supports. Home builders and realtors want the mortgage interest deduction. Sugar cane growers want import restrictions. And then there’s Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. All of these government interventions into the economy wind up costing taxpayers in the long run, while enhancing the profits of few.

NPR’s ham-handed firing of Juan Williams could not have occurred at a worse time for them. Only a few days out from an election, it has highlighted one of the driving forces behind the tea party movement – a return to Constitutional government. If the folks in DC took their oaths to abide by the Constitution seriously, then none of this would be an issue.

So thank you, NPR, for helping to break the grip of rational ignorance.

fiat lux!

I read a number of articles over the weekend that had the same basic theme – not only do the tea party followers not like elites, they positively love ignorance. The general conclusion is that the tea party movement is filled with people suspicious of anyone smarter than they are, which is pretty much everyone else. As usual, the critics don’t understand the issue.

It’s not that we are automatically suspicious of anyone with a Ph.D. Take Thomas Sowell or Walter Williams. These men are both brilliant thinkers at the top of the economic and social science fields. But they are not seen as elites by most of the tea party movement. So who are the elites?

Here is an easy way to spot them. Elites love to talk about free market failures. When the free market makes a decision with which they disagree, their first reaction is to point to the failure of the free market to come to the logical decision about which is the better product. Typically, they point to the same few examples. Dvorak keyboards, Apple computers, and Betamax video recorders. Lately, we can add hybrid cars to the list.

In the minds of the elites, the free market rejected the superior product in favor of an inferior product, to the detriment of society as a whole. Rather than detailing how the elitists are wrong in each of these cases, I will let you do the research yourself. (Hint: Reason.com is a good place to start.)

Joe Klein summed up the elitist position here:

There is something profoundly diseased about a society that idolizes its ignoramuses and disdains its experts. It is a society that no longer takes itself seriously. This is not a complaint about the current Republican tide, by the way: that’s part of the natural flow of political life, a result of the economy and the President’s abstruse brand of politics. I’ll welcome the arrival in Washington of smart Republicans like Ohio’s Rob Portman; I won’t welcome an ideologue like Rand Paul, but at least he’s done some thinking about what constitutes good public policy (although his notion of such is puerile and ultimately fatal to a democracy).

I’ll save you the trouble of looking up puerile. It means childish and silly. That’s the elitist view of the Constitution. Childish and silly.

It’s not that America disdains its experts. It’s that we resent having experts make decisions on our behalf that we can make for ourselves. And there’s the rub. The Constitution, that childish and silly document, spells out 18 enumerated powers of Congress. All other power revert to the states or to the people themselves. Not to the elites.

To the elites, the Constitution is not only childish and silly, it is, in Joe Klein’s own words, “ultimately fatal to a democracy.” If that’s the message of the elites, then good riddance.

fiat lux!

So let me get this straight. Some nobody pastor of about 50 congregants proposes to burn a copy of the Koran and everybody from Rush Limbaugh to BHO is up in arms. Conservatives and Liberals seem to agree that it’s a bad idea. Before I state my view, a little history is in order.

Does everyone remember the howls of protest from moderate Muslims over the destruction of ancient statues of the Buddha at the hands of the Taliban? Oh yeah, there wasn’t one. How about the hue and cry from moderate Muslims after a mob of their brethren took over the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem a few years ago. They shit on the altar and wiped their asses with pages from the Bible. And Muslims around the world decried their actions as barbaric. That’s right. The outcry against that never happened.

But Time magazine prints an incorrect story about an alleged incident involving flushing a Koran down the toilet and there were ginned up protests around the world.

I find it especially galling when the same liberals who see nothing wrong with flag burning are all of a sudden shaking their heads over this. And as to the notion that this action will be a rallying cry for extremists, they don’t need this for an excuse. They can come up with more reasons to be offended by the West than anyone can imagine.

I’m becoming more and more convinced that Islam is a religion of petulant children who are even more perpetually aggrieved than feminists. Unlike spoiled children, who fuss and cry when they don’t get their way, Muslims kill people.

Personally, I can find little moral distinction between burning a copy of Mein Kampf and burning a Koran.

fiat lux!

According to Reason.com, the Obama regime wants to regulate the last great unregulated bastion of free speech – the internet. Apparently, the regime feels that there is, paraphrasing Ernest Hollings, “too much bloggin’ goin’ on ou’dair.”

The Obama administration has announced plans to regulate the Internet through the Federal Communications Commission, extending its authority over broadband providers to police web traffic, enforcing “net neutrality.”

Last week, a congressional hearing exposed an effort to give another agency—the Federal Election Commission—unprecedented power to regulate political speech online. At a House Administration Committee hearing last Tuesday, Patton Boggs attorney William McGinley explained that the sloppy statutory language in the “DISCLOSE Act” would extend the FEC’s control over broadcast communications to all “covered communications,” including the blogosphere.

This would seem to fly in the face of McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission (93-986), 514 U.S. 334 (1995). The usually moronic John Paul Stevens, writing for the majority, actually got this one right. The case involved a woman from Ohio who created some pamphlets on her PC in opposition to a tax levy sought by a local school board, and then distributed them herself. A levy supporter reported her to the Ohio Elections Commission, which fined her $100 for not signing the pamphlets with her own name. The scary part of this case is not merely that it was filed, but that the Supreme Court of the US had to overturn the Ohio Supreme Court.

Under our Constitution, anonymous pamphleteering is not a pernicious, fraudulent practice, but an honorable tradition of advocacy and of dissent. Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority.

The Supreme Court essentially found that the greatest debate in America’s history, Publius versus The Federal Farmer, Cato, and Brutus, would be acceptable conduct under the constitution (see below).

My little blog, with a readership that occasionally breaks into double digits, and thousands like it, are seen as a threat by the current regime. The only conclusion that I can reach from the regime’s behavior is that patriotic political dissent is the realm of noble community organizers and ACORN activists, and is protected free speech. But the modern equivalent of the time honored political pamphlet, blogs on the web, must be regulated.

During oral arguments in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission then Solicitor General Elana Kagan argued that the FEC had the authority to ban political pamphlets. This line of reasoning flies in the face of precedent and the Bill of Rights. And BHO has nominated this woman to the Supreme Court. Apparently, “Congress shall make no law abridging…freedom of speech” is beyond her understanding. The CJ concurs:

Chief Justice John Roberts didn’t find Kagan’s argument convincing: “We don’t put our First Amendment rights in the hands of FEC bureaucrats; and if you say that you are not going to apply it to a book, what about a pamphlet?” Kagan responded that political pamphlets could be banned. (Reason)

This is the decision that BHO trashed during his State of the Union show. I can see why he disliked it so much:

Rapid changes in technology—and the creative dynamic inherent in the concept of free expression—counsel against upholding a law that re-stricts political speech in certain media or by certain speakers.(558 U.S.____ (2010))

The applicability of the case to regulating the web should be obvious to both the FEC and BHO. Yet the regime marches boldly into that glorious Marxist future. In an earlier post, And speaking of morons, I worried about BHO’s replacement for John Paul Stevens:

With Stevens’ retirement, the court will be rid of a man whose utter indifference to the Constitution was evident in virtually all his opinions. While this is a good thing, I fear his indifference will be replaced with outright hostility, assuming that BHO selects another individual that reflects his own attitude toward the Constitution.

Apparently, Kagan represents Obama’s view of the Constitution, and these proposed changes to the regulating authority of the FEC will give her a chance to shine once they are challenged and argued before the Supreme Court. She is openly hostile to free political speech, which is why she was appointed. Can November arrive soon enough?

fiat lux!

post script:

Publius (Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay) argued anonymously in favor of ratification of the Constitution, while the Federal Farmer (Richard Henry Lee, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence), Cato (George Clinton, first governor of New York, and later VP under both Jefferson and Madison), and Brutus (Robert Yates, an agitator against the Stamp Act, he would later become an Associate Justice, then Chief Justice of the New York Supreme Court), argued anonymously against it. These arguments were disseminated through both newspaper editorials and pamphlets. It is hardly a stretch to think that these founders would be bloggers today.

And, while their response would be more elegant than mine, it would boil down to the same two words.