The Press-Dispatch
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Opinion C-2 Wednesday, January 8, 2014 The Press-Dispatch Observations by Thomas Sowell Hit piece journalism Front-page editorials, disguised as news stories, have become such familiar features of the New York Times that it should have been no surprise to discover in the December 28th issue a front-page story about a professor of finance at the University of Houston who has been a paid consultant to financial enterprises. Since professors of all sorts have been paid consultants to organizations of all sorts, it is questionable why this was a story at all, much less one that covered an entire inside page, in addition to a central front-page opening, under the headline "Academics Who Defend Wall St. Reap Reward." Do academics who attack Wall Street, as consultants to government agencies or Alarming growth of government By Ed Feulner No matter how we label ourselves — conservative, liberal, moderate or none of the above — we all must grapple with the ever-expanding size and scope of government. America has reached a tipping point. The federal government has grown exponentially, not just in spending, but in its reach. Government intrudes into virtually every aspect of our daily lives, from the type of toilet we can buy, to the mix of fuel we put in our cars, to the kind of light bulb we can use. Government policies have stifled domestic energy production while pouring billions of tax dollars into alternative-energy subsidies, reflecting the elitist, "progressive" faith that bureaucrats can pick winners and losers better than individuals making voluntary decisions in their own interests can. Unelected bureaucrats have been empowered to stipulate what health services we will purchase, and how and from whom we will receive them. Excessive government intervention not only limits individual freedoms, it stifles entrepreneurial creativity and job creation. It locks the poor into a lifetime of dependency and poverty. And it limits the ability of hardworking Americans to enjoy upward mobility. The federal government also dominates in spheres of activity traditionally reserved to the states. This leaves little or no room for state-level innovation in areas such as education, transportation, health care, welfare and even law enforcement. The pace of expansion has been breathtaking. The rapid growth of federal grasp and reach is unsettling, leading Americans to question whether their children will inherit a better future — and even whether it's still possible to achieve the American Dream. That's why it's more important than ever for us, as we begin a new year, to recommit ourselves to the principles that led to the founding of our great nation. At the heart of these principles is the belief that people are free by nature and possess inherent rights. The use each of us makes of these rights will naturally differ, and the outcomes of those choices will naturally differ, too. The choice remains ours. Freedom is thus inextricably bound up with living our lives as we see fit. This is self-government in the truest sense of the term. We the people need not slavishly defer to experts. We can be trusted to govern ourselves. That is why government must remain limited. The people have given it only limited powers, as described in the Constitution. When government takes more than we have given it, it renders our choices meaningless. At worst, unlimited government is tyrannical; at best, it imposes a dull uniformity that crushes true diversiContinued on page 3 Katiedid vs... by Katiedid Langrock New Sleep Eve This year, I planned to host the New Year's party. The nursery was set up with playpens for babes to sleep in so their parents have a good time. The hors d'oeuvres were bought and the New Year's tiara was sufficiently broken in. Alas, a last-minute bout of flu caused a last-minute cancellation mere Suckers! hours before friends were intended to For the first time since my ear- show up in their silly hats, kazoos in ly childhood, I did not watch the ball tow. By 7 p.m., my baby was in bed — a drop or see Times Square explode into a confetti firebomb. I did not party true indicator that my little man was until the wee hours. feeling under the weather, as I rareI did not make poor decisions. I did ly can get him in bed before the mornnot light illegal fireworks. I did not ing news begins. At 7:15, the husband count down the last 10 seconds of the was knocked out by NyQuil. I was left year, kiss friends or sing the single awake, all alone in my messy home, verse to "Auld Lang Syne" that I have with no one to celebrate with. I considmemorized. This year, I rang in the ered cleaning but then decided, screw new year under the covers, securely it. No one was coming over. Whom was in dream land. I trying to impress? I considered takIt. Was. Awesome. ing a bath until I remembered my raWhy had no one told me the sheer zor was lost in one of the still-packed joy of staying home and going to bed suitcases from the trip I had returned early on New Year's Eve? How am I just from just two days before. Instead of now learning of this life-changing ex- taking care of what I should have been perience? Not that I would have ever taking care of, I decided to enjoy my willingly acquiesced to such a crazy New Year's Eve, to embrace my night in and all facets of the lame factor that notion. To all of you who stayed awake until midnight to ring in the new year, I have just one thing to say: comes with being a first-time parent. While we were away on vacation, a neighbor had brought over a homemade chocolate pudding pie as a thankyou gift for our helping out when her husband had fallen and couldn't get up. I had intended on serving the pie to our friends at the party. Instead, I served myself. There is little in life more satisfying than gliding your index finger through the thick decadence of chocolate, coating your finger in a mountain of sinful goodness and licking off every last calorie. And that is how I devoured a pie in one evening. Fingers crisscrossing the top layer, making trails that were widened as the night ran on, marking the dessert as my territory. After watching some bad television and gaining some impressive points on "Words With Friends," I was ready for bed. It was 8:52 p.m. PST. Just eight minutes to go before I could watch the ball drop in Times Square. I considered staying up, but you know what? It just wasn't worth it. The best part of a New Year's Eve night in? Not having sleep deprivaContinued on page 3 Points to ponder—by Rev. Ford Bond Legacy Of A Cultural Terrorist Al Goldstein is dead. He was an unabashed pornographer, a cultural terrorist. I wish I could say Americans can rest easier, but I can't. He is just one artistic insurgent from a long line of sexual deviants. Those before him wrapped themselves in sophistication [Hugh Heffner] or fraudulent academic detachment [Alfred Kinsey], but the effect is the same-to encourage others to throw off the shackles of self-restraint and embrace sexual hedonism. His manifesto of life can be summarized in a few lines from Luke Ford's book XXXCommunicated: A Rebel without a Shul. Luke asked Goldstein why the porn industry contained so many Jews. Goldstein responded, "The only reason that Jews are in pornography is that we think that Christ xxxx. Catholicism xxxx. We don't believe in authoritarianism." Ford then asked, "What does it mean to you to A woman's perspective—by Mona Charen Impervious to evidence, liberals ride again "We will restore science to its rightful place … " So intoned a "dismissive and derisive" President Barack Obama in his first inaugural. It's been oft quoted in the five years since (frequently by me, I'll confess) for its arrogance and condescension, which has continuing relevance, but before turning to the left's latest departure from scientific rigor, I cannot resist a fuller quotation. The second part of this sentence from Obama's first inaugural reads " … and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost." Hmm. In his second inaugural (compared to Abraham Lincoln's second by Chris Matthews), Obama proposed a vast new program ($150 billion in combined federal and state funds) for universal preschool serving 4-year-olds. "Every dollar we invest in high-quality early childhood education can save more than $7 later on — by boosting graduation rates, reducing teen pregnancy, even reducing violent crime… We know this works." Universal preschool is universally popular with Democrats. Nancy Pelosi has hailed Head Start as "one of our most effective investments," while the newly minted progressive heartthrob New York mayor, Bill de Blasio, proclaims, "We will ask the very wealthy to pay a little more in taxes so that we can offer full-day universal pre-K and after-school programs for every middle school student." Before getting to science, let's talk politics. The federal government already runs a preschool program called Head Start. Democrats love it because they can claim to be doing something beneficial for poor children. Republicans decline to oppose it because they fear ads saying "Rep. X wants to deny education to poor children…" other organizations, not get paid? Like the corrupt French official in the movie classic "Casablanca," the New York Times is "shocked, shocked" to discover that consultants get paid defending the kinds of people that the New York Times attacks. Where has the New York Times been all these years, as government agencies of all sorts spend the taxpayers' money not only to hire consultants but also to hand out research grants to professors, institutions and programs that promote the kinds of policies that serve the institutional interContinued on page 3 Now, let's talk science. Head Start, a product of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, has been carefully evaluated by the Administration for Children and Families within the Department of Health and Human Services. The study examined 4,667 3- and 4-year-olds across 23 states. It compared children who had applied for but not been accepted into Head Start to those who had participated in it. The children were evaluated by their teachers, parents and outside examiners both before and after. As David Armor and Sonia Sousa relate in the winter issue of National Affairs, the Head Start Impact Study found almost no positive effects of the program. While children in the program showed some positive results on measures of cognitive skills and social/behavioral ratings while in the program, those results lasted only so long as the children were enrolled and did not carry through to kindergarten or early elementary school. The principle positive effect noted in the HSIS was in social skills for 3-yearolds, but these results were reported only by parents and not replicated by outside examiners. Teachers, by contrast, noted a negative effect on social/emotional skills for the 4-year-old cohort. The point of Head Start is the promise that it offers poor children a leg up and prepares them for school. It would be nice if it worked, but it doesn't. It does provide jobs for teachers and federally subsidized day care. But taxpayers have spent $180 billion since 1965 for a program that fails to achieve its objectives. Other studies have examined the effect of preschool more generally on school performance and have found effects ranging from very small to none. What then was Obama referring to when he insisted that "high-quality" preschool "boosts graduation rates," "reduces teen pregnancy" and so forth? In a post titled "Obama's Preschool Proposal Is Not Based on Sound Research" on the center/left Brookings Institution website, Russ Whitehurst explains that the studies the president and other advocates of universal pre-K rely on are flawed. They do not involve randomized controls (as the HSIS did) but instead employ something called "age-cutoff regression discontinuity." Due to state-mandated birthdates for enrollment in preschool, the studies wind up comparing kids who are actually enrolled in play-based programs for 3-year-olds with those enrolled in academically oriented preschool for 4-year-olds. These regression discontinuity studies also fail to account for dropouts from the program. The Brookings post, to which Armor also contributed, concludes: "Because 'gold standard' randomized studies fail to show major impacts of present day pre-K programs, there are reasons to doubt that we yet know how to design … a government funded preK program that produces sufficiently large benefits … " Armor and Souza suggest in National Affairs that those truly respectful of science would propose: "A national demonstration project for pre-K in a selected number of cities and states, accompanied by a rigorous randomized evaluation that would follow participants at least into the third grade. This demonstration project should also examine whether 'preschool for all' closes achievement gaps between rich and poor, since it is possible that middle-class children will benefit more than disadvantaged children." This would put science in its "rightful place," but don't hold your breath. Many liberal nostrums are impervious to evidence. be a Jew?" To which Goldstein responded, "It doesn't mean xxxx. It means that I'm called a xxxx." Luke also asked, "Do you believe in God?" Goldstein said, "I believe in me. I'm God. Xxxx God. God is your need to believe in some super being. I am the super being. I am your God, admit it. We're random." A person's life is summarized by his/her admirers and critics which for Al are one in the same; he was dirty, smutty, and offensive. Mike Edison, a former writer for Al's magazine, says of him "We need a free society, and freedom is not won by literary tea parties and wellmeaning, virtuous publishers, it is won by disreputable people like Al Goldstein." The world salutes its own. Joshua Furst in The Jewish Daily Forward said this about Goldstein's influence, "So Al Goldstein is dead. It's been a long time since I've thought about him, but I have to believe that our culture will be poorer without him… Goldstein took the old stereotype of the 'dirty Jew,' and embraced it, exalted it, reveled in it…He made everything he encountered uglier than it had been before it fell into his grubby hands, and in doing so, he forced us to confront and live with the ugliness in our own existence. Better this than the soporifics and platitudes that have been wallpapered over our culture. Al saw himself as a defender of free speech, expression, and rebelled against all forms of authority. He said of his magazine (called Screw) that it "grew from a combination of many factors, chief of which was my own dissatisfaction with the sex literature of 1968 and my yearning for a publication that reflected my sexual appetites; I may be making a lot of money, but I really believe I'm doing some good by demythologizing a lot about sexuality" Though not a household name, Al was by his own admission the epitome of the decadent and nihilistic movement that has Christianity in its crosshairs. His climb to infamy came through his pornographic magazine and several high profile court battles over free speech. How does one eulogize a man who felt contempt for the culture that gave him a home and outlet for expresContinued on page 3 The P Dispatch ress- MR. AND MRS. FRANK HEURING, PUBLISHERS ANDREW G. HEURING, EDITOR JOHN B. 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