Qualifications

Ramirez gives us his take on Dr. Clinton's experience in governing:

RLC

The New Reactionaries

Progressives, like Senator Clinton, are calling for change in November. Progressives are by definition always calling for change. Yet every time a change is proposed it is primarily progressives, oddly enough, who oppose it.

School choice, welfare reform, social security reform, tort reform, tax reform, deposing a tyrant in Iraq, banning partial birth abortion, teaching alternatives to Darwinism in our schools, increasing domestic oil production, using nuclear power rather than coal and oil, and on it goes - at every turn the "progressives" have argued for maintaining the status quo over the proposed change.

Progressives, it turns out, are the new reactionaries.

RLC

Most Electable?

Of all the candidates in the race for president which one seems at this stage to be the most electable? The question isn't asking which one would be the best for the country, or which one we are endorsing, but which one would be likely to garner the most votes.

The answer would be someone who would have appeal among both Republicans and Democrats. In my opinion, right now, that person is Mike Huckabee. Here's why: Huck appeals to a large segment of the Republican party because of his unabashed traditional values and religious views. He also appeals to a lot of liberals among Democrats who like his fiscal populism and concern for the poor. In a race between Huckabee and either Clinton or Obama, Huckabee would get all the Republican votes - the conservatives having nowhere else to go - and a sizable number of "Blue Dog" and liberal Democrat votes. Indeed, Huck seems to be a 1950s liberal in the "Scoop" Jackson mold. If he were around 40-50 years ago he'd have been a standard issue Democrat.

A lot can happen between now and the effective end of the primaries in February and the Huckaboom could easily turn into a Huckabust. There are lots of reasons for being concerned about Huckabee's record, as conservatives like George Will and the good people at National Review Online keep reminding us. But right now he looks like a vote-getter.

Ohio's Governor Ted Strickland serves as an example of Huckabee's cross party appeal.

RLC

Shameless Promises and Incoherent Predictions

During the 2004 campaign vice-presidential candidate John Edwards claimed that if his running mate were elected president people like Christopher Reeves, a quadriplegic, would soon be walking. It was the crassest sort of pandering and Edwards sounded so fatuous one may have been forgiven for thinking that no presidential candidate would ever make such a stupidly shameless promise again.

Well, one should never underestimate a politician's appetite for shamelessness. Now comes a promise from Hillary Clinton that:

...just electing her President will cut the price of oil. When the world hears her commitment at her inauguration about ending American dependence on foreign fuel, Clinton says, oil-pumping countries will lower prices to stifle America's incentive to develop alternative energy.

"I predict to you, the oil-producing countries will drop the price of oil," Clinton said, speaking at the Manchester YWCA. "They will once again assume, once the cost pressure is off, Americans and our political process will recede."

If that last incoherent sentence is an accurate quote then Senator Clinton apparently had too much Christmas eggnog. Perhaps high octane eggnog also explains the absurd promise. In any event, in the chilling event that she actually gets to give the next inaugural speech, the eyes of the world will surely be transfixed on the per barrel price of oil as it plummets like the apple in Times Square on New Years' Eve. Oh, happy day. Vote Democratic and the Millenium will be upon us.

RLC

Judge Jones and the Demarcation Problem

This month marks the two year anniversary of the famous Kitzmiller v. Dover Board of education trial presided over by the distinguished philosopher of science Judge John Jones. We might observe the occasion with a brief reflection on the most salient of the questions the Judge sought to settle.

This is the question of whether ID is or is not "science." This question is a specific instance of the larger question, called by philosophers the "Demarcation Problem," of what distinguishes genuine science from non-science. It's odd that the former chairman of the Pennsylvania liquor control board felt qualified to take this matter up and even odder that the defense did not instruct the court that most philosophers of science believe the problem has no answer. There simply are no characteristics of science which are both necessary, in the sense that any science must possess them, and also sufficient to warrant calling any discipline which does possess them a science.

Thus the Judge presumed to stroll where almost every contemporary philosopher of science fears to tread and boldly proclaims to have discerned what none of them has been able to discern after spending entire careers studying the matter. Judge Jones ruled that ID is indeed not science, implying that he, from the vantage of his lofty perch, can see clearly the distinguishing characteristics of science that no one else who studies these things has been able to espy.

The classic paper on the futility of doing precisely what Judge Jones nevertheless deigned to do was written in 1983 by Larry Laudan. I wonder if the Judge ever read it.

RLC

A Christmas Story

The following is a parable we've run previously, but its message is important enough that it's worth repeating:

A man named Michael, a father of a teenage daughter named Jennifer, had been a member of a top-secret anti-terrorism task force in the military and his duties drew him away from home much of the time Jen was growing up. He was serving his country in a critically important, very dangerous capacity that required his absence and a great deal of personal sacrifice. As a result, his daughter grew from childhood to young adulthood pretty much without him. Indeed, his wife Judy had left him a couple of years previous and took the girl with her. But there was not a day that went by when he did not think of them and wish that he could be with them.

Finally, after several years abroad, Mike was able to return home. He longed to hold his princess in his arms and to spend every possible moment with her to try to make up for lost time, but when he knocked on the door of his ex-wife's house the girl who greeted him was almost unrecognizable. Jen had grown up physically and along the way she had rejected everything Michael valued. Her appearance shocked him and her words cut him like a razor. She told him coldly and bluntly that she really didn't want to see him, that he wasn't a father as far as she was concerned, that he had not been a part of her life before and wouldn't be in the future.

Michael, a man who had faced numerous hazards and threats in the course of his work and had been secretly cited for great heroism by the government, was staggered by her words. The loathing in her voice and in her eyes crushed his heart. He started to speak but the door was slammed in his face. Heartbroken and devastated he wandered the streets of the city wondering how, or if, he could ever regain the love his little girl once had for him.

Weeks went by during which he tried to contact both his ex-wife and his daughter, but they refused to return his calls. Then one night his cell phone rang. It was Judith and from her voice Mike could tell something was very wrong. Apparently, Jennifer had run off with some unsavory characters several days before and hadn't been heard from since. Judy had called the police, but she felt Mike should know, too. She told him that she thought the guys Jen had gone out with that night were heavily into drugs and she was worried sick about her.

She had good reason to be. Jen thought when she left the house that she was just going for a joy ride, but that's not what her "friends" had in mind. Once they had Jen back at their apartment they tied her to a bed, abused her, filmed the whole thing, and when she resisted they beat her until she submitted. She overheard them debating whether they should sell her to a man whom they knew sold girls into slavery in South America or whether they should just kill her now and dump her body in the bay. For three days her life was a living hell. She cried herself to sleep late every night after being forced to submit to almost unimaginable degradation.

Finally, her abductors sold her to a street gang in exchange for drugs. Bound and gagged, she was raped repeatedly and beaten savagely. For the first time in her life she prayed that God would help her, and for the first time in her life she missed her father. But as the days wore on she began to think she'd rather be dead than be forced to endure what she was being put through.

Mike knew some of the officers in the police force and was able to get a couple of leads from them as to who the guys who she originally left with might be. He set out not knowing Jennifer's peril, but determined to find her no matter what the cost. His search led him to another city and took days - days in which he scarcely ate or slept. Each day that passed Jennifer's condition grew worse and her danger more severe. She was by now in a cocaine-induced haze in which she hardly knew what was happening to her.

Somehow, Michael, weary and weak from his lack of sleep and food, managed to find the seedy, run down tenement building where Jennifer was imprisoned. Breaking through a flimsy door he saw his daughter lying on the filthy bed surrounded by three startled kidnappers. Enraged by the scene before his eyes he launched himself at them with a terrible, vengeful fury. Two of the thugs went down quickly, but the third escaped. With tears flowing down his cheeks, Mike unfastened the bonds that held Jen's wrists to the bed posts. She was alert enough to comprehend what was happening and as Michael helped her to her feet and led her to the doorway she realized that her father really had come for her.

As she passed into the hall a step ahead of Michael the third abductor appeared in front of her with a gun. Michael quickly stepped between them and told Jennifer to run back into the apartment and out the fire escape. The assailant tried to shoot her as she stumbled through the room, but Michael shielded her from the bullet, taking the round in his side. The thug fired twice more into Michael's body, but Mike was able to seize the gun and turn it on the shooter.

Finally, it was all over, finished.

Slumped against the wall, her father lay bleeding and bruised, the life draining out of him. Jennifer saw from the fire escape landing what had happened and ran back to her father. Cradling him in her arms she wept and told him over and over that she loved him and that she was so sorry for what she had said to him and for what she had done.

With the last bit of life left in him he gazed up at her, pursed his lips in a kiss, smiled and died. Jennifer wept hysterically. How could she ever forgive herself for how she had acted? How could she ever overcome the guilt and the loss she felt? How could she ever repay the tremendous love and sacrifice of her father?

Years passed. Jennifer eventually had a family of her own. She raised her children to revere the memory of Michael even though they had never known him. She resolved to live her own life in such a way that Michael, if he knew, would be enormously proud of her. Everything she did, she did out of gratitude to him for what he had done for her, and every year on the anniversary of his birthday she went to the cemetery alone and sat for a couple of hours at his graveside, talking to him and sharing her love and her life with him. Her father had given everything for her despite the cruel way she had treated him. He had given his life to save hers. His love for her, his sacrifice, had changed her life.

And that's why Christians celebrate Christmas.

Bill and I wish all our readers at Viewpoint a wonderful and meaningful Christmas.

RLC

The Most Important Thing

This story has created a bit of a stir and even had Rush Limbaugh in a dither the other day, but it's hard to see what Dr. Williams says about the Christmas narrative that's obviously wrong or unorthodox:

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, dismissed the Christmas story of the Three Wise Men yesterday as nothing but "legend".

There was scant evidence for the Magi, and none at all that there were three of them, or that they were kings, he said. All the evidence that existed was in Matthew's Gospel. The Archbishop said: "Matthew's Gospel doesn't tell us there were three of them, doesn't tell us they were kings, doesn't tell us where they came from. It says they are astrologers, wise men, priests from somewhere outside the Roman Empire, that's all we're really told." Anything else was legend. "It works quite well as legend," the Archbishop said.

Further, there was no evidence that there were any oxen or asses in the stable. The chances of any snow falling around the stable in Bethlehem were "very unlikely". And as for the star rising and then standing still: the Archbishop pointed out that stars just don't behave like that.

Although he believed in it himself, he advised that new Christians need not fear that they had to leap over the "hurdle" of belief in the Virgin Birth before they could be "signed up". For good measure, he added, Jesus was probably not born in December at all. "Christmas was when it was because it fitted well with the winter festival."

None of this is news to anyone who has spent any time studying the accounts of Jesus' birth, of course. Much of our traditional picture of the first Christmas is a result of later accretions. The only thing the prelate says that might be controversial among Christians is that people shouldn't be deterred from accepting the lordship of Christ because they have doubts about the possibility of the virgin birth.

Nevertheless, I think he's right about this. To paraphrase Kierkegaard, it's far more important that we enter into a proper relationship with God now than that we wait until all our doubts are resolved and all our questions are answered. There's nothing unChristian in reciting the words of Thomas as we submit our lives to God: "Lord, I believe. Help thou my unbelief."

This is not to minimize the theological importance of the virgin birth, but merely to say that the Archbishop is correct not to make that doctrine the sine qua non of being reconciled to Christ. It's important for our understanding of who Christ actually was that theologians get the matter right, but for the average Christian layman paramount importance rests simply in one's surrender to Christ. I think that reading the Archbishop's words in context makes it clear that this is what he was trying to say, and Rush can relax.

RLC

Hillary Claus

Friday we talked about Huckabee's Christmas greeting. Hillary's effort below offers an interesting contrast. In her's there's no mention of the reason for Christmas, no hint of the spiritual significance of the season, only the implied promise of something for everyone, a chicken in every pot, free gifts from Santa Clinton. Her ad follows the standard liberal trends toward secularization and desacralization of Christmas:

No wonder there's a "Huckaboom" among those who want Christmas to mean something more than just crass commercialism and cynical, tawdry attempts to bribe voters with promises of plunder from the public purse.

Jonah Goldberg writes about the two ads at NRO and recalls a nugget from a book by P.J. O'Roarke:

It's a profound commentary on the state of our political culture that Huckabee's ad is the controversial one. Huckabee promises nothing, Hillary everything.

The contrast between the Candidate of God and the Candidate of Goodies should remind everyone of P. J. O'Rourke's timeless book Parliament of Whores.

"I have only one firm belief about the American political system, and that is this: God is a Republican and Santa Claus is a Democrat," wrote the indispensable O'Rourke.

"God" he explained, is "a stern fellow, patriarchal rather than paternal and a great believer in rules and regulations. He holds men strictly accountable for their actions. He has little apparent concern for the material well being of the disadvantaged. ... God is unsentimental. It is very hard to get into God's heavenly country club."

P. J. continues: "Santa Claus is another matter. ... He's nonthreatening. He's always cheerful. And he loves animals. He may know who's been naughty and who's been nice, but he never does anything about it. He gives everyone everything they want without the thought of a quid pro quo."

"Santa Claus is preferable to God in every way but one," O'Rourke concluded. "There is no such thing as Santa Claus."

P.S. Fred Thompson serves up a greeting that is unassuming, poignant, and, unlike Hillary's, focusses on the sacrifice others are making rather than on what others will get if they vote for him:

RLC

No Credibility

On The Drudge Report:

'...this war is lost and...the surge is not accomplishing anything' --- Sen. Harry Reid, 4/19/07

'...the surge certainly hasn't hurt. It's helped. I recognize that' --- Sen. Harry Reid, 12/21/07

Anyone can change his mind in the face of new evidence. The problem with Sen. Reid is that he was in such a hurry to pronounce the surge a failure that he made the above claim in April, at least a month before the surge was fully implemented. Why was he so eager to pronounce the war lost? Why was he in such a rush to declare the surge a failure before it was even really begun? Either the man is reckless or he's dishonest. In either case he doesn't belong at the head of the U.S. Senate.

RLC

Nuclear Facility Attack

This is scary:

An underreported attack on a South African nuclear facility last month demonstrates the high risk of theft of nuclear materials by terrorists or criminals. Such a crime could have grave national security implications for the United States or any of the dozens of countries where nuclear materials are held in various states of security.

Shortly after midnight on Nov. 8, four armed men broke into the Pelindaba nuclear facility 18 miles west of Pretoria, a site where hundreds of kilograms of weapons-grade uranium are stored. According to the South African Nuclear Energy Corp., the state-owned entity that runs the Pelindaba facility, these four "technically sophisticated criminals" deactivated several layers of security, including a 10,000-volt electrical fence, suggesting insider knowledge of the system. Though their images were captured on closed-circuit television, they were not detected by security officers because nobody was monitoring the cameras at the time.

There's more to the story at the link including a bit of heroics on the part of one of the plant's employees.

If this attack occured in South Africa one wonders how many succesful attacks have occured elsewhere in countries like Pakistan where word of the breach might never surface in the outside world.

RLC

Tanc Picks Mitt

Tom Tancredo has endorsed Mitt Romney for the Republican nomination for President. There was no one in the presidential race more committed to stopping illegal immigration than Tom Tancredo, who withdrew his candidacy Thursday. That he has passed the torch to Romney (instead of Duncan Hunter?!) will certainly go a long way to allay fears that Romney is not really serious about closing the border. Mitt did, after all, countenance sanctuary cities in Massachusetts when he was governor so there's reason to be dubious about his commitment to the cause.

Nevertheless, Tancredo's endorsement will surely boost Romney's stock among conservatives for whom this issue is a major criterion in deciding how to cast their vote. Tanc gives his reasons for selecting Romney here.

In our opinion this is one of the most significant endorsements of the primary campaign. Tancredo has a lot of credibility with conservative Republicans, especially on immigration, and Romney will surely benefit from having his support. It may even be decisive in Iowa where Mitt is in a tight battle with Mike Huckabee.

RLC

Huckabee's Christmas Ad

As everyone knows by now Mike Huckabee has taken a lot of flak from the media for his Christmas commercial in which a bookcase in the background forms a cross. The media thinks this is very devious of the nefarious Huckabites. Ron Paul seems to think that subliminal swastikas will be next.

Here's the commercial if you haven't seen it:

Gary Varvel offers this amusing commentary:

RLC

Off With Their Heads

Casey Luskin at Evolution News and Views writes:

The producers of Expelled are hosting a contest where people submit videos discussing their persecution as a result of challenging Darwin.

Expelled is a forthcoming documentary which makes the case that the Darwinians are conducting an inquisition in the academy to weed out anyone who dissents from the accepted materialist orthodoxy on the matter of the origins of biological diversity.

Luskin posts this video as an example of how heretics are treated by the high priests of materialism:

The materialist clergy in the cathedrals of learning insist that even if alternatives to materialism like intelligent design are science they are nevertheless bad science and those who advocate those alternatives should not be permitted to teach the impressionable acolytes who sit at their feet.

Well. Marxist economics is certainly bad economics and Freudian psychology is bad psychology. Yet no one is excommunicating Marxists and Freudians, are they? Could it be that Marxists and Freudians are safe despite the quaintness of the ideas they teach because they are materialists? Perhaps, despite their adherence to deeply flawed theories of economic and human behavior, they're still on the right side of the only line that counts in the church of Darwinian orthodoxy - the line that separates those who believe that there is more to reality than just material nature from those who believe that material nature is all there is.

It's ironic that scientists are being harrassed and tyrannized, not for their scientific views, but for their metaphysical convictions. One expects this sort of thing in Middle Eastern schools run by the Taliban, but it truly is an outrage that this would be happening in American universities.

RLC

Worth the Cost

One of the current narrative threads concerning the situation in Iraq is that, even if we're winning, it wasn't worth the cost in blood and treasure. But how does one assess what price would be worth paying to accomplish what we have accomplished? Was the Revolutionary war worth the cost? How about the Civil war, or WWII, or Korea? How could anyone answer those questions at the time? They're difficult enough to answer even now. How do we assess how many American lives and how many American dollars are just the right price to:

• Liberate 25 million people
• Remove a bloodthirsty mass killer who was a threat to the entire region and a supporter of terrorism.
• Induce Libya and, if the NIE is to be believed (I'm skeptical), Iran to give up their nuclear weapons ambitions.
• Hand al Qaeda a crucial defeat on a battlefield of their choosing and kill tens of thousands of terrorist torturers and mass murderers.
• Gain an important ally (or quasi-ally) in the region.

The nay-sayers counter with the claim that we've lost prestige around the world, but where's the evidence of that? The left-wing European media despises us, of course, but then they always have. The European people themselves, however, have chosen Gordon Brown, Angela Merkel, and Nicholas Sarkozy to lead their countries, and all of these are pro-American leaders, the latter two even moreso than their predecessors. In South America Hugo Chavez's anti-American rhetoric is not being particularly well-received even by the people who elected him in Venezuela. In Australia staunch ally Prime Minister John Howard was defeated, but his successor, Kevin Rudd, is also pro-American.

In any event, so what if we're not loved? It's a sad fact of human nature that people who envy or who feel indebted to someone tend to resent the one they envy. Machiavelli was right when he said that it's better to be loved than hated, but it's much better to be feared than loved. When people perceive you as strong and willing to use your strength they'll fear and respect you even if they don't love you. If they perceive you to be weak they will despise you, especially if they envy and resent your success, and will work to destroy you.

The important thing is to use one's strength to make the world a more just place and to do it with as much compassion as circumstances allow. If people despise us for our efforts to bring about justice that's unfortunate but it shouldn't dissuade us.

The question concerning Iraq, then, is not whether it was worth the cost. Anyone who gives a yes or no answer to that question at the present moment doesn't know what he's talking about. Only time will give us the answer. What we can ask at this juncture, though, is why, given what we presently know, anyone would be convinced that the answer is no.

Having said that, the most important question we need to ask about Iraq is whether we have increased the amount of justice in the world by doing what we did. If the answer to that is yes, then all the arguments over WMD, etc. are unimportant. What we did was good. Whether the good achieved in this instance was worth the cost only time will tell.

RLC

Tancredo Calls it Quits

Tom Tancredo, the best candidate on immigration issues currently contending for the White House, has decided to bow out of the race. We wonder who'll pick up his support. To see an excellent overview of where each of the Republicans stands on the issue of both legal and illegal immigration go here.

The best choice from among all the remaining candidates is Duncan Hunter with Ron Paul next. The best of the front-runners is Fred Thompson with Mitt Romney coming in a distant second. Rudy Giuliani and John McCain are at the bottom, with Mike Huckabee somewhere in between.

RLC

Graphing the Violence

Bill Roggio at The Long War Journal has some helpful graphs which show the effects of the surge on violence in Iraq. Every measure shows that the violence is declining sharply. Whether it will continue to decline no one knows, but surely now is not the time to be calling for the U.S. to get out of Iraq.

RLC

Miracles and the Laws of Nature

An argument one often hears made against the occurrence of miracles such as those upon which Christian belief is based is that they require an unacceptable intervention and tinkering with the laws of nature, and God wouldn't work that way. This is also one reason why some people have difficulty with some versions of intelligent design theory. They simply have a philosophical problem with violations or overrides of the laws of physics.

Well, perhaps the implied claim that miracles violate or supercede the laws of nature is not necessarily correct. Miracles like those recorded in the Gospels could actually be an expression of the laws of nature and still be miraculous all the same.

Imagine an engineer who designs and builds a computer (the universe). Along the way he programs that computer to produce certain images (living things) on the screen. Suppose that upon some of these images the engineer bestows the gift of consciousness. The software program is information (laws of nature) that governs how everything in the computer functions. When the computer is booted up the software causes the computer to produce screen images which behave in accord with the constraints imposed by the information contained in the software program.

Now suppose that integrated into that program are certain if/then commands which only express themselves under certain highly specific conditions. They might have the form: If P then Q unless R. If R never occurs, P > Q would seem to all observers in the screen to be the algorithm that governs the functioning of the computer. If R never occurs then whenever P happens Q happens.

If, however, R does on one occasion occur then in that instance Q would not follow upon P and everyone who witnessed the "breakdown" would be astonished. It would appear to the conscious screen images that the program had spontaneously been altered or violated even though it was not. It would appear to them that a miracle had occurred.

Suppose that one of the laws that governs our universe is: Whenever a denser object is immersed in a less dense substance the denser object will necessarily sink unless the denser object manifests the Son of God. If that were the law that governs buoyancy we would never see an exception to denser objects sinking in less dense substances unless we were witness to the Son of God standing on water. If we were, it would appear to us that we were witnessing a miracle, but we would not be witnessing a violation of the laws of nature. We would be witnessing instead an instance of those laws expressing themselves in a manner they had not previously had occasion to do.

It could well be that the laws of nature are like information or software that the Cosmic Engineer has designed to run the universe in the fashion described above. If so, it could also be that at least some miracles would not be exceptions to physical laws, but rather expressions of the way the laws manifest themselves in certain very extraordinary circumstances.

The point is that one need not oppose miracles or intelligent design on the basis of a visceral aversion to the notion that God somehow changes or revises the laws of nature as He goes along. It could be that at least some of the miracles recorded in the Gospels, as well as the appearance of biological novelty, are part of the outworking of a seamless creative design planned, engineered and carried out by God from before the creation of the world.

RLC

Congress Defunds the Fence

Last year Congress approved spending to build 700 miles of double-tiered fencing along our southern border. Monday night they passed a spending bill which gutted last year's bill. Meanwhile, the bill they passed allocates $10 million for attorneys for illegal immigrants.

Citizens of this country must make it clear that they will refuse to vote for any congressperson or presidential candidate who refuses to secure our border or whose record on illegal immigration is weak. This encompasses all the Democratic candidates for president and most of the Republicans except Fred Thompson, Tom Tancredo, Ron Paul and Duncan Hunter.

The Democrats pander to Hispanics to get their votes and Republicans curry favor with businesses which rely on cheap labor. Between them they're selling out America for a mess of pottage.

See here for an explanation of why illegal immigration is a problem and here for what we should do about it.

Simply put, no candidate who goes squishy on the border fence without offering something better in its place will receive our vote.

RLC

Dumbing Down Education

It seems that the tension between faculty and administration over academic standards is close to universal. Teacjhers almost always want to make their courses more challenging than what their principals would prefer. It's unusual, though, for the administrator to be this blatant about wanting his teachers to moderate their standards and expectations:

Have teachers at an East Harlem school been ordered to lower their standards because many students there are poor? That's the impression some got from their principal's memo.

Last month, Principal Bennett Lieberman sent off a stern memo to teachers.

"If you are not passing more than 65 percent of your students in a class, then you are not designing your expectations to meet their abilities, and you are setting your students up for failure, which, in turn, limits your success as a professional."

Was he ordering teachers to dumb down their classes?

The memo continued:

"Most of our students come from the lowest third percentile in academic achievement, have difficult home lives, and struggle with life in general. They DO NOT have a similar upbringing nor a similar school experience to our experiences growing up."

Some students took offense.

"That's not the way to pass," 12th grader Richard Palacios said. "That's not the way to get your education, so you're basically cheating yourself."

Lieberman told a newspaper Thursday he "confidently stands by" his words.

But late Thursday, the Department of Education weighed in. It sent him a letter demanding he clarify his views and state that he is not ordering his teachers to lower their standards.

Teachers at the school stand to receive $3,000 bonuses if their school improves.

During my career teaching in a public high school I heard lots of stories from colleagues in other districts, and some even in my own, who felt that they were pressured to be less demanding of their students, to lower their academic expectations, to fail fewer kids. Administrators don't like it when teachers set high standards (though they say they want them to) because when students don't do well parents complain and principals and superintendents get tired of taking angry phone calls and meeting with irate parents. It's easier to just make good grades a little easier to achieve. In one school of my acquaintance no student, no matter how poorly he or she did, could be given a grade of less than 50%. This is ridiculous, but it reflects the fear of administrators that if we demand too much of students too many of them will fail, and that makes the school and its leadership look bad.

This is what's wrong, by the way, with requiring that a state-wide test be passed in order to graduate. If the test is rigorous many minority students will not be able to pass it, and there will be immense political pressure to water down the standards. But if the test is diluted it'll be so easy as to be a meaningless joke for most of the state's students. It'll be interesting to see how many states are still requiring such tests ten years from now and how rigorous those tests will be by then.

My guess is that if they're still around they'll be so simple that a fifth grader could pass them.

RLC

Today's Inspiration

Bill Dembski at Uncommon Descent writes about Paul Potts:

Watch the faces of the judges as this fellow walks on the stage. Based on his looks and the fact that he is a cell phone salesman, they initially misjudge him. Sometimes you have to stop believing what everyone is telling you and start listening to your passion.

Great talent, like great ideas, sometimes comes in very humble and ordinary packages.

Click here and watch the video to see what I'm talking about. It'll bring tears to your eyes. Be sure to scroll down to read about Potts' background.

Paul Potts is an ambassador for every ugly duckling who holds within himself wonderful beauty and a lesson for all of us to not judge people by what they look like.

He's currently enjoying a successful career traveling the world singing opera.

RLC