From chumps to chimps

Various news items, all bad.

Via Gateway Pundit, news from the WSJ on the culture of the Pelosi-Reid Congress:

Spending by lawmakers on taxpayer-financed trips abroad has risen sharply in recent years, a Wall Street Journal analysis of travel records shows, involving everything from war-zone visits to trips to exotic spots such as the Galápagos Islands.

The spending on overseas travel is up almost tenfold since 1995, and has nearly tripled since 2001, according to the Journal analysis of 60,000 travel records. Hundreds of lawmakers traveled overseas in 2008 at a cost of about $13 million. That's a 50% jump since Democrats took control of Congress two years ago.

The cost of so-called congressional delegations, known among lawmakers as "codels," has risen nearly 70% since 2005, when an influence-peddling scandal led to a ban on travel funded by lobbyists, according to the data.

And we are paying for all of it. So much for draining the swamp.


Maybe our hope lies in the children. Or maybe not. From Jay Nordlinger, this Arizona education survey:

Goldwater Institute survey, conducted by a private survey firm, gave each student 10 items from the USCIS item bank. We grouped results according to the type of school students attend — public, charter, or private. Questions included (1) Who was the first president of the United States? (2) Who wrote the Declaration of Independence? and (3) What ocean is located on the East Coast of the United States?

All three groups of Arizona high school students scored alarmingly low on the test. Only 3.5 percent of Arizona high school students attending public schools passed the citizenship test. The passing rate for charter school students was about twice as high as for public school students. Private school students passed at a rate almost four times higher than public school students.

Note the decimal point (for AZ students, it's that little dot thingy between the three and the five) -- that's not 35 per cent. It's 3.5 per cent. An exhaustive analysis of the survey can be found at the Goldwater Institute site (pdf link under title).

Here are the questions:

1. What is the supreme law of the land?

2. What do we call the first ten amendments to the Constitution?

3. What are the two parts of the U.S. Congress?

4. How many Justices are on the Supreme Court?

5. Who wrote the Declaration of Independence?

6. What ocean is on the East Coast of the United States?

7. What are the two major political parties in the United States?

8. We elect a U.S. Senator for how many years?

9. Who was the first President?

10. Who is in charge of the executive branch?

My kids think someone made this up:

Overall, only 26.5 percent of students identified the first President of the United States. Some respondents gave some rather interesting answers, many missing by centuries.

1.6% guessed Barack Obama.


From Newsbusters: Meredith Vieira, Obama apologist

Later, when [Dick] Morris pointed out the problems with the Canadian health care system, the Today host retorted, "But, the President clearly has said that's not the road he's headed down."

After Vieira read aloud the lengthy subtitle of Morris' book, which accuses Obama of making the recession worse, the journalist fretted, "What an indictment of the administration. Where do you come up with that?" She responded to a litany of the author's complaints about economic policy by insisting, "But, then why, Dick, do you think a majority of Americans, 56 percent by our latest poll, think he is doing a good job?"

Then she got out the pom poms and started shouting, "Barack, Barack, he's our man! If he can't do it nobody can!" (Not really. But she wanted to.)


Mark Steyn on the C&T assault on property rights:

. . . speaking as a foreigner, I confess I'm finding it harder and harder to see why you fellows bothered holding a revolution. Under this bill, it will be illegal for me to sell my property to a willing buyer without first bringing it into line with some twerp bureaucrat's arbitrary and ever shifting "environmental" regulations originally designed for California, and which have helped the Golden State into the foldin' state, but which are nevertheless now to be applied from Maine to Alaska. . . . This is an assault on property rights, and, more fundamentally, like so much of the Obama program, an assault on citizenship. It seems an odd way to mark "Independence" Day.

Odd indeed. Do any countries celebrate Dependence Day?


But cheer up. All is not lost. Bubbles the Chimp is alive and well. I confess I wrote about Bubbles yesterday. I hate to let a good chimp story pass me by. But I thought twice about posting it, even after reading this in today's paper:

"Are you kidding me? He bit a hole in my daughter's hand! Rashida's hand. Rashida Jones -- did you see 'I Love You, Man'? That's my daughter. She was a little girl. And Bubbles bit her hand." -- Quincy Jones, when asked by Details magazine if he ever met Michael Jackson's chimp Bubbles.

Did you know that Bubbles has his own Wikipedia page? Maybe you'll enjoy this little bit as much as I did:

[Animal trainer Bob] Dunn added that he hoped Jackson's children would keep in touch with their "stepbrother", following their father's death.

Sigh.

Comments welcome.

Linked by Michelle Malkin (buzzworthy)

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