Thursday various & sundry

A WSJ poll shows Americans aren't ready for the entitlement cuts needed to keep us from capsizing. Doug Ross puts it this way: Poll Finds Lack of Support for Arithmetic, Logic and Reason

This is why America needs an eloquent, conservative leader rather than an ideological sibling of Frances Fox Piven. Americans can understand and emphasize with a leader who speaks clearly and honestly about the problem. Failure to do so is simply criminal.

Paging Chris Christie:

And I don’t think there’s anyone else capable of selling the impossible, that is, telling people like it is. We don’t have the money for everyone’s Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc etc sans some serious trimming. Not just shape-shifting. Cuts. Big Axe, not X-acto.

What did you tell that woman last summer, the one who was so indignant that you were cutting her retirement benefits? Oh, that you would rather see her get something instead of nothing? Well, folks, that’s how it has to be. If we want to have anything left to pass to our children and grandchildren, this is it. The buck stops here. That means you’ll get something but it won’t necessarily be what you were promised.

I'm beginning to think he's our only hope, too. In case you missed it, read the NYT's profile of Gov. Christie.


Action item:

Planned Parenthood’s grotesque flouting of mandatory reporting laws regarding statutory rape and the abuse of minors should not go unpunished. Whether you believe they should be defunded entirely or forced to spin off their abortion services and submit to the the same kinds of guidelines that hospitals and clinics do, it’s time to voice your opinion, because PP is in the midst of a massive lobbying push, and time is running out.

Try not to let this ruin your day. Michael Moore wants your their everyone's money:

"They're sitting on the money, they're using it for their own -- they're putting it someplace else with no interest in helping you with your life, with that money. We've allowed them to take that. That's not theirs, that's a national resource, that's ours. We all have this -- we all benefit from this or we all suffer as a result of not having it," Michael Moore told Laura Flanders of GRITtv.

"I think we need to go back to taxing these people at the proper rates. They need to -- we need to see these jobs as something we some, that we collectively own as Americans and you can't just steal our jobs and take them someplace else," Moore concluded.

Unreal.

Wolf Files: Starving children plead to Michael Moore: "Please stop eating our food"


Wesley Smith on savior siblings:

Savior siblings are created specifically as objects, at least to some degree, because they were brought into being for a purely utilitarian purpose.  That being so, why should the practice stop with creating savior siblings who are also wanted children? What will happen when, rather than wanting the child, the parents harvest the stem cells and then put the child up for adoption because their family is big enough already?  How about sending the embryo to India via Federal Express, having it implanted in a rented uterus, as already occurs, and then after you get the stem cells, just not taking the child home?  That already happens, too, if the child doesn’t meet the parents’ expectations. I don’t see any brakes to that.

And what if the family didn’t want the baby to be born at all, but paid a surrogate to gestate and abort after seven months for tissues?   Do we even have the lexicon to condemn such a dehumanization anymore, much less prohibit it? Such things may already be happening in the Ukraine, where the BBC reports babies being killed for stem cells and the Daily Mail reported that women were being paid to get pregnant and abort for fetal stem cells to be used in beauty treatments. Hear the crickets?

Eating our own. For smoother skin.


Iowahawk takes down Paul Krugman, with ease:

So how to compare educational achievement between two states with such dissimilar populations? In data analysis this is usually done by treating ethnicity as a "covariate." A very simple way to do this is by comparing educational achievement between states within the same ethnic group. In other words, do black students perform better in Wisconsin than Texas? Do Hispanic students perform better in Wisconsin or Texas? White students? If Wisconsin's kids consistently beat their Texas counterparts, after controlling for ethnicity, then there's a strong case that maybe Texas schools ought to become a union shop.

Luckily, there is data to answer this question via the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The NAEP is an annual standardized test given to 4th and 8th graders around the country to measure proficiency in math, science, and reading. Participation is fairly universal; if you've had a 4th or 8th grader in the last few years, you're probably familiar with it. Results are compiled on the NAEP website, broken down by grade, state, subject and ethnicity.

So how does brokeass, dumbass, redneck Texas stack up against progressive unionized Wisconsin?

Click and learn. (Hat tip: Instapundit)


Thanks to Michelle Malkin for the Buzzworthy link.

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