Choice We Can Believe In
Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal featured the Illinois Policy Institute's recent efforts to advance a voucher program for students in Chicago's struggling public schools along with State Senator Reverend James Meeks:
'The voucher movement seems to have been born, or seems to have been started as a Republican idea. That's the way Democrats look at it. That's the way black lawmakers look at it. This is a Republican idea. This is what the Republicans want to push on us. . . . We don't seem to see public schools not working in your area."
The speaker was the Rev. James Meeks, explaining black resistance to vouchers. The venue was a sold-out lunch put on by the Illinois Policy Institute (IPI). The result? Something new in Windy City politics: a powerful black Democrat reaching out to a free-market think tank to force reform on the city's most hidebound institution—the Chicago public schools.
As my colleague Collin Hitt wrote in the Southtown Star:
Meeks is pursuing a voucher program that would allow thousands of impoverished families a choice of schools. This new power for parents promises that many children can enroll in schools that are better able to meet their needs. It promises that surrounding public schools will improve, and it promises that everyone in Illinois, as taxpayers, will benefit.
For more on the work we're doing at the Institute to advance liberty in Illinois and beyond, check out www.IllinoisPolicy.org
Policy Prescription for Obama
In a new post at Big Government, Peter Fotos and I answer President Obama's call for help by giving him three simple health care policy prescriptions:
In his State of the Union Address Wednesday night, President Obama called on folks to let him know if there are better health care solutions he and congress should be considering...
...He echoed this sentiment at today’s House GOP retreat. Some might say he was being sarcastic, reminding us of how hard it is to govern (especially in light of all he has inherited from you-know-who.) But that would be cynical, particularly in this post-partisan era.
Just before Christmas my colleague Peter Fotos and I penned a “wish list” of simple policy proposals that constitute substantive health care reform – and it didn’t even take 1,000 pages! The health care snitch line was disabled, so we’ll give the President the benefit of the doubt that it ended up in his spam folder.
President Obama and his Congressional allies talk a lot about the need to control health care costs and avoid pressure from special interests. Unfortunately, neither the House nor the Senate versions of “ObamaCare” that he called upon congress to reconsider withstand either litmus test.
Click here for more.
SOTU Wish: Stop Talking
In my debut piece at The Daily Caller, I outline why Americans are so frustrated with President Obama just one year after his inauguration: the rhetoric and the reality just don't match up. President Obama has broken the trust of the American people too many times in such a short window of time. It's time for less talk and more (substantive) action.
Below, Paul Bedard at US News & World Report has a great wrap-up of the growing discontent across party lines throughout the nation.
MA Senate Race & The Tea Parties
I jumped on with Neil Cavuto on Fox Business last night to discuss the MA Senate vote and the tea party movement:
The Electoral Counterrevolution
Last night Scott Brown clinched the MA Senate race with a solid 5 point lead. More from the good folks at the Boston Herald here.
This is a huge victory for the tea party and for the millions of Americans the recognize the threat of ever-expanding government exemplified in policies like ObamaCare, the bailouts, cap and trade, and the rest of the President's radical agenda.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco summed it up best before the final tally. As reported in the San Francisco Chronicle:
"Regardless of the outcome ... this should be a gigantic wake-up call to the Democratic Party - that we're not connecting with the needs, the aspirations and the desires of real people right now," said San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom.
It gets even better:
...But Newsom said the Republican resurgence in Massachusetts suggests "there's real intensity and fervor out there, as represented by the Tea Party" activists expressing anger at government spending and at job losses.
"This is real," he said. "At our own peril, we dismiss these tea parties as ... some sort of isolated extremism. ... It's not."
I couldn't have said it better myself.
RedCounty.com Interview
Check out my interview with Chip Hanlon over at Red County regarding A New American Tea Party.
Update: Red County book review by Warner Todd Houston.
Tunku Varadarajan: In Defense of Tea Parties
Mr. Varadarajan has a great piece over at The Daily Beast.
He hashes out David Brooks' recent column on the movement and the broader elitism and disdain for the movement exhibited by our "betters" in the media and on the Left:
...last Tuesday, in a column titled “The Tea Party Teens,” David made irrefutably clear that he, too—like so many others in the mainstream metropolitan media—is a cultural supremacist.
...In the piece, he sets up a dialectic between “the educated class” on the one hand, and, on the other, a force that he identifies variously as “public opinion,” the “opposition,” and “the Tea Party movement.” The latter, a “fractious confederation of Americans who are defined by what they are against,” are, David writes, reflexively opposed to the beliefs of the educated class (to which he, naturally, belongs). They are, in effect, reactionaries.
...What exactly is this “educated class,” and what leads him to think that those who oppose it are not, somehow, sophisticated?
Full piece here.
For more on the anti-tea party propaganda campaign and its intellectually deficient perpetrators, see my recent post at BigGovernment.com - The Leftist Bullies.
The Leftist Bullies
Check out my latest post on the NPR tea party video and the broader tea party bashing movement at BigGovernment.com:
We live in seriously challenging times – times that warrant serious conversations on the state and direction of our nation. From the fiscal crash course our nation is on to the ever-present threat we face from Islamic terrorism, there’s plenty of fodder for constructive political discourse. Many on the Left, however, are bent on marginalizing opposing views by any means necessary. The censorship and number fudging exposed in ClimateGate is one recent example.
The tea party movement seems to perpetually be in the crosshairs of the Left’s most insidious propaganda artists.
For the full article, click here.
The Democrat Health Care Game
Despite President Obama's numerous campaign pledges to have the health care debate be deliberative and open and televised on C-SPAN, he and his congressional allies are determined to keep negotiations swift and secretive.
The President's staff met numerous times behind closed doors in the West Wing with the very "special interests" they berate in public - those of the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. The White House then tried to block FOIA requests as to the names of the visitors at said meetings. As Tim Carney reports, such visits have only increased as of late.
Now Speaker Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid are set to resort to the "ping pong" process - a back and forth closed door haggling game between the offices of Democrats in both houses to reconcile their different versions of ObamaCare. This is a clear end-run around the democratic process and an outright breaking of Democrats' continued pledges to have an open and honest debate on the reform.
Finally, C-SPAN is calling the Dems' bluff, sending a letter requesting that the process be deliberated in an open forum and televised. Mrs. Pelosi responded with the outrageous claim that "There has never been a more open process for any legislation."
Patients First has launched a website called www.LetTheCamerasIn.com. Check it out, sign the petition, and tell congress that a massive government overhaul of the nation's health care system isn't a game.
A New American Tea Party
BigGovernment.com Posts
- Real Health Care Solutions – Letting O Know
- The Leftist Bullies
- Obamanomics: An Advanced Course in Big Government in the Age of Obama
- Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: Terror Trials in the Big Apple
- Ratner Family Ties: ACORN and Justice Department Plot Thickens
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Brooks’ Strange Brew
New York Times token conservative David Brooks always has an interesting take on the tea party movement (See his previous piece on the movement where he contrasts tea partiers with the "educated class.")
Mr. Brooks' most recent reading of the tea leaves is equally...intriguing.
Take Brooks' summary of the tea party movement which he contorts to fit his cute narrative comparing tea partiers to the 60's radicals of the New Left:
Brooks goes on to characterization of the tea party movement as preoccupied with black helicopter theories:
I'm curious to know how many tea parties Brooks has gone to and how many tea partiers he's interviewed in order to form the opinion that informs his commentary. Based on my experience organizing, participating in, and documenting the tea party movement, Brooks' generalizations of the tea party movement bears no correlation with reality. The tea party movement is in fact a mainstream, grassroots coalition of Americans concerned with the direction of this nation. Brooks would likely draw a different conclusion were he to look beyond the pages of his own paper. Sadly, Mr. Brooks appears to suffer from the same delusion as many of his colleagues: that the reporting on the pages of the Times truly is an accurate portrayal of "all the news that's fit to print."