Kerry for president??

Bring It On
January 27, 2006; Page A8

According to CNN, Senator John Kerry announced yesterday that he will attempt to rally his fellow Democrats to stage a filibuster to stop the confirmation of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. Apparently, this is not a parody.

Mr. Kerry made this dramatic political intervention from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he was communing with his political base. He wants his Democratic colleagues to revisit the filibuster strategy that they used to such brilliant effect during President Bush's first term. Republicans assailed Democrats for this obstructionism in 2002 and 2004, and the issue helped them win a mere seven or eight seats in red states.

And this was after filibusters on obscure appellate nominees. Imagine the political gain for Republicans after a Supreme Court filibuster -- with all of its 24/7 publicity -- by blue-state liberals against a modest Italian-American with impeccable legal credentials and stainless ethics. Mr. Kerry really seems to believe that the country will rise up in fury when it discovers that Judge Alito believes that the Constitution gives a President wide powers to defend America.

Back on planet Earth, at least three red-state Democrats have now said they'll vote for Judge Alito. Two of them -- Robert Byrd of West Virginia and Ben Nelson of Nebraska -- happen to be up for re-election this year. Mr. Kerry may not care much about the Senate because his real goal is winning the Democratic nomination for President again in 2008. Republicans should be so lucky.

Teacher's Unions vs. Education

Teacher's Unions vs. Education
January 23, 2006;

Teachers unions keep telling us they care deeply, profoundly, about poor children. But what they do, as opposed to what they say, is behave like the Borg, those destructive aliens in the Star Trek TV series who keep coming and coming until everyone is "assimilated."

We saw it in Florida this month when the state supreme court struck down a six-year-old voucher program after a union-led lawsuit. And now we're witnessing it in Milwaukee, where the nation's largest school choice program is under assault because Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle refuses to lift the cap on the number of students who can participate.
ilwaukee's Parental Choice Program, enacted with bipartisan support in 1990, provides private school vouchers to students from families at or below 175% of the poverty line. Its constitutionality has been supported by rulings from both the Wisconsin and U.S. Supreme Courts.

Yet Mr. Doyle, a union-financed Democrat, has vetoed three attempts to loosen the state law that limits enrollment in the program to 15% of Milwaukee's public school enrollment. This cap, put in place in 1995 as part of a compromise with anti-choice lawmakers backed by the unions, wasn't an issue when only a handful of schools were participating. But the program has grown steadily to include 127 schools and more than 14,000 students today. Wisconsin officials expect the voucher program to exceed the 15% threshold next year, which means Mr. Doyle's schoolhouse-door act is about to have real consequences.

"Had the cap been in effect this year," says Susan Mitchell of School Choice Wisconsin, "as many as 4,000 students already in the program would have lost seats. No new students could come in, and there would be dozens of schools that have been built because of school choice in Milwaukee that would close. They're in poor neighborhoods and would never have enough support from tuition-paying parents or donors to keep going."

There's no question the program has been a boon to the city's underprivileged. A 2004 study of high school graduation rates by Jay Greene of the Manhattan Institute found that students using vouchers to attend Milwaukee's private schools had a graduation rate of 64%, versus 36%

Illiterate College Graduates

Many College Graduates in U.S.
May Lack Complex Literacy Skills
ASSOCIATED PRESS
January 21, 2006; Page B4

WASHINGTON -- More than half of students graduating from four-year colleges in the U.S. -- and at least 75% from two-year colleges -- lack the literacy to handle complex, real-life tasks such as understanding credit-card offers, a study found.

The literacy study funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, the first to target the skills of graduating students, finds that students fail to lock in key skills -- no matter their field of study.

The results cut across three types of literacy: analyzing news stories and other prose, understanding documents and having math skills needed for checkbooks or restaurant tips.

Without "proficient" skills, or those needed to perform more complex tasks, students fall behind. They cannot interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit-card offers with different interest rates and annual fees or summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school.

"It is kind of disturbing that a lot of folks are graduating with a degree and they're not going to be able to do those things," said Stephane Baldi, the study's director at the American Institutes for Research, a behavioral and social-science research organization.

Most students at community colleges and four-year schools showed intermediate skills. That means they can do moderately challenging tasks, such as identifying a location on a map.

There was brighter news: Overall, the average literacy of college students is significantly higher than that of adults across the nation. Study leaders said that was encouraging but not surprising, given that the spectrum of adults includes those with much less education.

Also, compared with all adults with similar levels of education, college students had superior skills in searching for and using information from texts and documents.

"But do they do well enough for a highly educated population? For a knowledge-based economy? The answer is no," said Joni Finney, vice president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, an independent and nonpartisan group.

"This sends a message that we should be monitoring this as a nation, and we don't do it," Mr. Finney said.

ACLU Has Lost It's Way

High Wiretap Act
January 19, 2006; Page A14

There once was a day, many years ago, when the American Civil Liberties Union bothered to read the U.S. Constitution before it brought a lawsuit. If it did so today, it might discover that the judiciary isn't the only branch of government. The Founders created three branches, along with a system of checks and balances that are both judicial and political.

We offer this lesson in Con Law 101 in response to the news that the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights have filed suit in federal court charging that President Bush exceeded his constitutional authority in authorizing the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on international phone calls involving al Qaeda suspects.

The groups understand their lawsuits will almost certainly be dismissed before they even get to trial, but never mind. Theirs is a purely political exercise, designed to capture headlines and further bathe the wiretap issue in the false aura of "illegality." In fact, their own suits are the real misuse of the courts.

The plaintiffs lack the legal standing to sue because they can show no evidence that they've been harmed. They are journalists, academics, lawyers and interest groups that claim that the U.S. government violated their privacy and free-speech rights by possibly listening in on their phone conversations without a warrant. But even they admit that they have no evidence -- zero -- that any of them have in fact been wiretapped.

Another reason for dismissal has to do with something called the Totten doctrine. This is based on an 1875 case involving a Civil War spy for Lincoln and says a lawsuit can't proceed if it would inevitably lead to the disclosure of sensitive intelligence matters. Its most frequently quoted line is relevant here: "Public policy forbids the maintenance of any suit in a court of justice, the trial of which would inevitably lead to the disclosure of matters which the law itself regards as confidential."

It's always possible the plaintiffs will find some district court judge who wants to grab a few headlines by hearing the case. But barring any new evidence about the NSA wiretaps, the higher courts will surely dismiss.

The battle over the al Qaeda wiretaps isn't in fact a legal issue at all. It is basically a political battle between Congress and the White House over supremacy on matters of national security. President Bush has forthrightly defended the use of wiretaps as essential to fighting the war on terror. If the ACLU disapproves, it has every right to lobby Congress to exert political pressure on the White House to reverse its policy. But its charge of "illegality" is nothing but a political weapon designed to suggest something more nefarious.

The ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights are engaged in a phony judicial exercise whose sole aim is to damage the Bush Administration. But the greatest harm is being done to the reputation of these once intellectually honest organizations.

Kyoto Facts

Kyoto's Big Con
January 19, 2006; Page A14

The Kyoto environmental protocol committed nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. By this standard, the pact's biggest fans, the Europeans, are failing. And what about the U.S., the global villain for withdrawing approval of the accord in 2001? It's doing very well, thank you.

Let's go to the latest numbers from the European Environment Agency in Copenhagen. Most European countries have seen an increase in greenhouse gas emissions since signing Kyoto with great fanfare in 1997. No fewer than 13 out of the 15 original EU signatories are on track to miss their 2010 emissions targets -- by as much as 33 percentage points, in the case of Spain.

Or consider Denmark, home of the EU's environmental watchdog. Rather than reduce levels by 21% as the accord stipulates, Denmark has so far notched a 6.3% increase in emissions since 1990, the base year used in Kyoto. The likely gap between its Kyoto commitment and its emissions levels projected for 2010 is 25.2 percentage points.

The U.S. dropped its signature from Kyoto because arbitrary emissions targets are both pointless and economically damaging. No proof exists that lower emissions reduce global warming. The idea that human activity influences climate change one way or another is far from proven, given the overwhelming role nature itself plays in atmospheric changes. And if the warming trend of recent decades continues -- by no means a certainty -- it might well be a boon to humanity.

The Bush Administration has continued a longstanding U.S. policy of pushing states, municipalities and private industry to reduce emissions that actually lower the quality of air and water. The U.S. thus saw a modest decline in greenhouse emissions of 0.8% between 2000 and 2002, according to data from the U.S. Department of Energy. Overall since 1990, American greenhouse emissions are up 15.8%, but this still puts the U.S. far ahead of many of its European and Asian critics. And this despite U.S. economic growth (and increasing energy demand) that has far exceeded Europe's.

Some countries -- like France and Germany -- are being pressed to implement additional measures. These are going to be proposed later this year as part of each country's National Allocation Plans required under the EU Emissions Trading Scheme. The Trading Scheme allows individual countries to allocate limited "emissions allowances" to their industries that can then be traded on secondary markets.

Alas, no one is talking about reducing the amount of hot air produced by politicians. At the U.N.'s environmental summit in Montreal last year, EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas of Greece spoke grandly of Europe's continuing leadership in the reduction of greenhouse gases. Prime Minister Paul Martin of Canada, another Kyoto diehard, chimed in that America lacked a "global conscience." For the record, Greece and Canada saw emissions rise 23% and 24%, respectively, since 1990, far above the U.S. rate.

The nonsense that passes for debate at U.N. gabfests isn't news. But it is newsworthy that Kyoto's arbitrary targets were mainly cant. Countries that reduce those emissions potentially damaging to health or property do so by investing in cleaner technology. That is possible because of policies that promote economic growth and business investment. Unhampered by Kyoto targets, America's economy is more nimble and better able to adapt to changing technology. We knew Kyoto was bad for the global economy. It turns out it's bad for the environment as well.
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