The Press-Dispatch
Issue link: https://www.ifoldsflip.com/i/619413
C-4 Wednesday, December 23, 2015 The Press-Dispatch OPINION Submit Letters to the Editor: Letters must be signed and received by noon on Mondays. Email: editor@pressdispatch.net or bring in a hard copy: 820 E. Poplar Street, Petersburg ºFifty years have passed since A Charlie Brown Christmas pre- miered on CBS Television on De- cember 8, 1965. It has become a classic and has been broadcast every Christmas season since. It tells the story of Christmas that even a child can grasp; there have been a lot of T V Christmas specials since, but none captures the essence of the story in such simplicity. But that was 1965. In 2015, the culture war continues between the sacred and the secular. As usual, the headlines read of universities, public schools, and re- tailers removing "Christmas" as the center of the holiday [as official poli- cy] and demanding compliance. The politically correct and God haters now brazenly attack anything remotely connected to Christianity and the Christ child. Due out Christmas Eve is the movie The Night Before, which is Hollywierd's newest assault on Christmas. But in 1965 just as the culture war was heating up, this classic was born. Charles Schultz was approached by Coca- Cola and CBS Televi- sion to use his charac- ters for a Christmas spe- cial. He agreed but insist- ed that the program have the religious meaning that he had ex- perienced growing up in the Midwest. The network executives and sponsor did not like the idea, but the popularity of the Peanut strip gave Schultz the leverage to make the special center upon Christ in Christmas. A Charlie Brown Christmas is about a hapless young boy, Char- lie Brown, who is trying to find the true meaning of Christmas in a ma- terial world. He accepts the position of direc- tor of the school play about Christ- mas and becomes frustrated when his attempt to restore the spirit of Christmas with a pitiful little fir Christmas tree fails. In his frustration, Charlie Brown ex- claims: "Isn't there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about? " Fast forward to 2015 and don't we wonder aloud the same? Don't we ask one anoth- er, "When did Christ leave our Christmas celebration? " Long before 1965, Christmas had become a secular holiday. Did I mention A Charlie Brown Christmas has become a classic? Forty years later [December 2005], ABC Television gave A Char- lie Brown Christmas an hour slot and added never-before-seen Char- lie Brown Christmas Tales, which are vignettes of several of the Pea- nuts gang. This is noteworthy that CBS in 1965 didn't like the show before Continued on page 5 Continued on page 4 Continued on page 5 Continued on page 4 Observations by Thomas Sowell Heritage Viewpoint by Edwin J. Feulner A climate deal worth a small degree of success Attacking the truth Continued on page 5 Points to Ponder by Rev. Ford Bond A Charlie Brown Christmas nailed it! Festival of smugness Groom and gloom A woman's perspective by Mona Charen The Weekly by Alden Heuring Among the many sad signs of our time are the current political and media attacks on Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, for speaking the plain truth on a sub- ject where lies have been the norm for years. The case before the High Court is whether the use of race as a basis for admitting students to the Uni- versity of Texas at Austin is a vio- lation of the 14th Amendment's re- quirement for government institu- tions to provide "equal protection of the laws" to all. A ffirmative action is supposed to be a benefit to black and other mi- nority students admitted with low- er academic qualifications than some white students who are re- jected. But Justice Scalia ques- tioned whether being admitted to an institution geared to students with higher-powered academic re- cords was a real benefit. Despite much media spin, the is- sue is not whether blacks in gen- eral should be admitted to high- er ranked or lower ranked institu- tions. The issue is whether a given black student, with given academic qualifications, should be admitted to a college or university where he would not be admitted if he were white. Much empirical research over the years has confirmed Justice Scalia's concern that admitting black students to institutions for which their academic preparation is not sufficient can be making them worse off instead of better off. I became painfully aware of this problem more than 40 years ago, when I was teaching at Cornell Uni- versity, and discovered that half the black students there were on some form of academic probation. These students were not stu- pid or uneducable. On the con- trary, the average black student at Cornell at that time scored at the 75th percentile on scholastic tests. Their academic qualifications were better than those of three-quarters of all American students who took those tests. Why were they in trouble at Cor- nell, then? Because the average Cornell student in the liberal arts college at that time scored at the 99th percentile. The classes taught there – including mine – moved at a speed geared to the verbal and mathematical level of the top one percent of American students. The average white student would have been wiped out at Cornell. But the average white student was un- likely to be admitted to Cornell, in the first place. Nor was a white stu- dent who scored at the 75th per- centile. That was a "favor" reserved for black students. This "favor" turned black students who would have been successful at most American colleges and universities into fail- ures at Cornell. None of this was peculiar to Cor- nell. Black students who scored at the 90th percentile in math had se- rious academic problems trying to keep up at M.I.T., where other stu- dents scored somewhere within the top 99th percentile. Nearly one-fourth of these black students with stellar qualifications in math failed to graduate from M.I.T., and those who did gradu- ate were concentrated in the bot- tom tenth of the class. There were other fine engineer- ing schools around the country where those same students could have learned more, when taught at a normal pace, rather than at a breakneck speed geared to stu- dents with extremely rare abilities in math. Justice Scalia was not talking about sending black students to substandard colleges and uni- versities to get an inferior educa- tion. You may in fact get a much better education at an institution that teaches at a pace that you can handle and master. In later life, no one is going to care how fast you learned something, so long as you know it. Mismatching students with edu- cational institutions is a formula for needless failures. The book "Mis- match," by Sander and Taylor is a first-rate study of the hard facts. It shows, for example, that the aca- demic performances of black and Hispanic students rose substan- tially after affirmative action ad- missions policies were banned in Figuring out what to make of the climate change talks recently held in Paris isn't as easy as you might think. Talk about a confusing atmo- sphere. There was the positive: The Paris deal "establishes the endur- ing framework the world needs to solve the climate crisis," Pres- ident Obama said. "I believe this moment can be a turning point for the world." U.N. Secretary-Gener- al Ban Ki-moon called it "a monu- mental success for the planet and its people." There was the negative: "In the hot, sodden mess that is our plan- et as 2015 drags to a close, the pact reached in Paris feels, in a lot of ways, like an ambitious agreement designed for about 1995, when the first conference of parties to the United Nations Framework Conven- tion on Climate Change took place in Berlin," The New York Times ed- itorialized. It's too modest and un- enforceable for them. Others were cautiously optimistic. One common refrain, however, was that this is just a start. We're told we need to do more. How much more? What can we do to parlay this "monumental success" into the so- lution the president spoke of? U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said this in Paris: "Even if every American citizen biked to work, carpooled to school, used only solar panels to power their homes, if we each planted a dozen trees, if we somehow elim- inated all of our domestic green- house gas emissions, guess what? That still wouldn't be enough to offset the carbon pollution coming from the rest of the world. If all the industrial nations went down to ze- ro emissions it wouldn't be enough, not when more than 65 percent of the world's carbon pollution comes from the developing world." Ahem. I think Mr. Kerry might have gone off-script with those re- marks, but I'm glad he did. It was a refreshing bit of honesty – because the United States could indeed cut its emissions by 100 percent and make virtually no dent in global- warming levels. According to cli- mate experts Paul Knappenberger and Patrick Michaels, the climate regulations the Obama adminis- tration are imposing on the energy sector will reduce warming by 2100 by 0.018 degrees Celsius. That's right. A tiny fraction of one degree. Over an 85 -year period. Ah, but you won't have to wait nearly as long for the higher cost of energy to be passed on to all Amer- icans. And not just in the form of higher utility bills (which are al- ready bad enough), but in the cost of nearly everything. A fter all, the businesses that you use will be fac- ing higher bills, too. That increase will be paid by you as well. More than 80 percent of Ameri- ca and the world's energy needs are met through carbon-emitting con- ventional fuels such as natural gas and coal. Setting up a "Green Cli- mate Fund" and promising billions to subsidize green energy isn't go- ing to make the transition even re- motely easy or affordable. And remember, according to those who are cheering the Paris deal, the goals are a starting point, remember? They fully expect (in- deed, are demanding) that this is a floor, not a ceiling – that nations will come back in the years ahead and commit to more draconian cuts to bring their emissions down further. Yet this remains a hard sell to a public more concerned about ter- rorism than about climate change. So the administration has gone so far as to try and link the two issues, making the absurd claim that cli- mate change is a matter of nation- al security. "What we know is that, as human beings are placed under strain, then bad things happen," Mr. Obama told CBS. "And, you know, if you look at world history, whenever peo- ple are desperate, when people start lacking food, when people are not able to make a living or take care of their families, that's when ideolo- gies arise that are dangerous." We need less hot air, all right. Too bad this deal won't reduce the polit- ical kind. Ed Feulner is founder of the Heri- tage Foundation (heritage.org). There are few more repugnant spectacles among the liberal elites of this country than the festival of smugness that follows any comment by a conservative public figure that can be twisted into a racial slight. This week it is Justice Antonin Scalia's turn. In an oral argument over affirmative action, Scalia said: "There are those who contend that it does not benefit A frican- Americans to – to get them in the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less advanced school, a less – a slower track school where they do well." Sure, maybe Scalia should have said "some" A frican-American stu- dents, but frankly, he shouldn't have to. A fter a career in public life, he doesn't need to prove his bona fides to anyone. Everyone is, in effect, on notice that this brilliant jurist is the farthest thing from a racist. But you know this game works. A conservative says something that can be misinterpreted, and the self- righteous, bad-faith denunciations pour out like sewage in a flood. On "Meet the Press," Ted Koppel compared Sca- lia to the hapless Al Campanis, and said: "I was thinking both of them have the same problem. It's genera- tional. He really doesn't think he is saying un- toward. This is the kind of thing that someone of Antonin Scalia's gen- eration has been saying all his life. Al Campanis did the same thing. But the key thing is being a Supreme Court justice means never having to say you're sorry." The rest of the crew on MTP chimed in with similar head shak- ing and invocations of bad popular fiction. Now, leaving Campanis aside (I have my doubts that he was a rac- ist either; he got caught up in one of America's fits of righteous indig- nation), who does Koppel think he is? First of all, he's almost exactly four years younger than Scalia, so spare us the genera- tional snobbery. Sec- ond, he (like the oth- er panelists) is clearly unfamiliar with the ar- gument Scalia was ref- erencing. Molly Ball of The Atlantic, Gerald Seib of The Wall Street Journal, Helene Coo- per of The New York Times and, of course, Chuck Todd himself all expressed regret that Scalia can "get away with it" and noted that this ex- plains why he opposes cameras in the Supreme Court. Who pays these people for their commentary? This is risible. Su- preme Court oral arguments are ful- ly available to the public in print and audio form. Is Scalia trying to hide his racism by having it only unavail- For about a year now, our fat cat Diamond's had the run of the house. But with a baby on the way literal- ly any time now, things are about to change for our pwecious widdle spoiled kitty. One thing's already changed—we got her claws trimmed last week. Please don't misunderstand. I don't ever want to declaw the cat. She was spayed before we got her, and that's humiliating enough. Plus, every now and then when she's bored, she catches mice, and that's handy. But we don't want Diamond to accidentally gash the baby dur- ing play dates, so we figured a lit- tle trim would be appropriate. Little did we know... The trip to the groomer's was mostly uneventful, but we should have taken the gray skies as an omen of things to come. A fter the second wrong turn, we finally found the place, and just in time. Diamond hates car rides, and letting her out of her box to lay on my lap while I drove (it's not as reckless as it sounds! Re- ally!) wasn't enough to satisfy her discontent. Our groomer spe- cializes in dogs, so the doggy smell of the place immediately got Diamond's hackles up. She paced around the grooming table and hissed while we went over our requests—a little trim for her claws, and maybe brush some hair out of her coat too? The hissing intensified when the trimmers came out. Now, the reason I wanted to take her to the groomer is, I really know very little about cats. I've only had the pleasure of knowing Diamond, but she hasn't ever sat me down to talk about proper grooming tech- niques. I know there's something you're supposed to avoid when you trim their claws, something about not cutting the quick or whatever, but what does a cat's quick look like? Do you use nail clippers or scissors or what? I didn't know. As it turns out, there are special trimmers you can use for kitty claws, but Di- amond didn't seem too pleased with her spa experience. She made some angry, throaty noises I've never heard before and jumped off the table at least three times. The brushing went slightly better, but it certainly didn't improve her mood any. The whole thing only lasted about five min- utes, and thank goodness for that. Diamond and I both were bawling wrecks on the way home. I didn't hack up a hairball in the car like she did, but I probably could have. The groomer told us you don't ac- tually ever have to trim cat claws, and she gave us the trim and brush free. I'm torn between going back to her occasionally since she gave