1.  First, the Israeli army has expanded its efforts to cripple Hamaz in the Gaza Strip, launching a ground invasion there this past Saturday.  Will Israel succeed in its efforts to eliminate the Hamas threat?  Is this different from Israel’s Lebanon incursion against Hezbollah two years ago?  These are the main questions right now.  And, just now, it appears–appears–as if Israel may be able to do it politically, there seems to be less international and elite criticism–not that there is none, just that there is less.

1.  The year comes to a close today, and really not a moment too soon.  This was the year we lost the White House, we lost more seats in the House and Senate.  Israel is at war again.  Iran is ever stronger.  As ABC News put it, "in the recession-hit United States, people from Wall Street to Main Street were all suffering what William Shakespeare might have called the slings and arrows of an outrageous lost fortune."  Unemployment reached ever-new heights.

In the blink of an eye, we put an end to free markets and non-government intervention as the default positions for economic recovery and surety. Colin Powell effectively became a Democrat, Joe Lieberman apologized for his campaign statements and recaucused with the Democrats.  The Clintons became more prominent and are poised to become ever-more-so.  Al Franken moved ever closer to taking a seat in the US Senate.

India suffered a massive and grotesque terrorist attack.  Russia grew stronger and more militaristic; so too Iran.  Pakistan may very well have become less stable, Afghanistan’s situation did not improve.  We lost a strong American ally in Australia.  Piracy became new again off the Horn of Africa.  China won a public relations coup even as it flexed its suppressing muscles in Myanmar.  Darfur saw no improvement in its humanitarian crisis.

2.  And yesterday gave us even more signs that the year just needs to end.  Let’s start with the state of Illinois.  We thought New York and MN were having an interesting go of it in filling their Senate seats yesterday morning.  We underestimated Illinois’ Rod Blagojovech.  Maybe this is counter to a lot of conventional wisdom but I think the Governor–embattled as he is, short termer though he may be–had every right to nominate a non-scandal-tainted person to fill the seat of Barack Obama.  The state legislature had not stripped him of that power, they have not impeached him.  And, frankly, I don’t have any reason to think his nominee Roland Burris will be any worse than any other nominee sent up by a Democratic governor of Illinois. 

As much as we may think Harry Reid and the Senate Democrats–including, now, President-elect Barack Obama–may have taken a great place on the moral highground stating Blagojovech should not name a Senator and that the Senate was ill-inclined to seat such a Senator, I think their legal footing for such a case is not in their favor.  Eugene Volokh of the UCLA School of Law and Matt Franck of Radford and Princeton make a very good case that the Supreme Court precedent on Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution does not allow the Senate to exclude a Senator from taking his seat so long as he meets standard qualifications such as age and citizenship.

Now it’s been said fools rush in where angels fear to tread and Illinois Congressman Bobby Rush was such the fool yesterday , adding his voice to the surreal press conference Blagojovech convened.  Rush made Burris’ nomination qualification a race-based calculation and threw down a race-based gauntlet saying "he challenged any pol to try to block Burris, who would become the only ‘black senator’" several times.  Here’s how he so crudely put it, no Senator, he said will "want to go on record to deny one African-American from being seated in the U.S. Senate."  He went on to raise the stakes by saying:  "I would ask you not to hang or lynch the appointee as you try to casitgate the appointor."  Well, Obama, Reid, and the Senate Democrats are now in high political drama.  But, again, I think legally, they are wrong and Blagojovech is right.

3.  Yesterday, I gave you my thoughts on Bristol Palin’s childbirth news.  I also reposted some of my comments about the way our movement has handled the situation as I delivered them in a speech to the Family Research Council back in September.

Yesterday, MSNBC and other outlets reported that Bristol and Levi were selling their baby pictures to People Magazine for several hundred thousand dollars.  A spokesman for People magazine said today, however, "the magazine has had ‘conversations’ about photos with a Palin representative, but no deal has been made and no money has been given to the Palins."

Good.  You don’t want to turn an unwed and teen childbirth into a sacrament, something to celebrate, or mimic. We used to teach three things to children: 1.  graduate from high school, 2.  wait until getting married to have children, and 3. wait until age 20 to have children.  That lesson is at a discount in this whole story and we don’t want to make it worse.

4.  Okay, this year we have wandered many a weary foot and we’ll now take a cup of kindness for auld lang syne.  What are you most looking forward to next year, what are you most glad is behind us?

1.  First, in the Middle East, Israel’s defense minister said the nation was in an "all-out war" with Hamas, which rules Gaza yesterday–according to CNN .  "’We have stretched our hand in peace many times to the Palestinian people. We have nothing against the people of Gaza,’" Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Israel’s parliament. ‘But this is an all-out war against Hamas and its branches.’"

CNN continues: "The airstrikes, which Israel says are aimed at stopping the firing of rockets from Gaza into southern Israel, have killed more than 375 Palestinians, most of them Hamas militants, Palestinian medical sources said Tuesday.  Israel bombed a Hamas government compound early Tuesday, leveling at least three structures, including the foreign ministry building, eyewitnesses and Hamas security sources told CNN."

CNN continues: "The airstrikes, which Israel says are aimed at stopping the firing of rockets from Gaza into southern Israel, have killed more than 375 Palestinians, most of them Hamas militants, Palestinian medical sources said Tuesday.  Israel bombed a Hamas government compound early Tuesday, leveling at least three structures, including the foreign ministry building."

The good news is this effort does not seem like 2006 when Israel went into Lebanon; Gaza is a much smaller land mass and hopefully Israel will not need to go in with a land war.  That said, let’s reiterate the short history here as the WSJ gave it yesterday: "Israel withdrew both its soldiers and all of its settlers from Gaza in August 2005. Hamas won its internal power struggle with Mr. Abbas’s Fatah organization to control Gaza in 2007. Since 2005 Hamas has fired some 6,300 rockets at Israeli civilians from Gaza, killing 10 and wounding more than 780."

I said on CNN yesterday that the Middle East is a very unhappy place.  If you want just one example of what causes and incites such unhappiness see this quote by Palestinian cleric Muhsen Abu ‘Ita in a televised interview two months ago: "The annihilation of the Jews here in Palestine," he said, "is one of the most splendid blessings for Palestine."

You will not hear rabbis on Israeli television speaking like that in reverse. 

Remember please, the claim Israel faced for years was that Palestinians would cease their violence once they were given lands such as Gaza and the West Bank.  The Palestinian Authority now runs the West Bank, and Gaza was completely handed over to the Palestinians in 2005.  Yet rockets continue to be launched from Gaza into Israel-proper.  It was never about Gaza and the West Bank.  It’s about Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa and the rest of Israel.  This is why Benjamin Netanyahu once said the Palestinian claim for land is not one of hunger but appetite.  Keep this in mind, and ask yourself, if it’s about Gaza and the West Bank, why was the PLO founded in 1964 when Israel did not posses Gaza or the West Bank, and ask yourself why is it that since they have Gaza they are launching missiles into Israel itself.

2.  There are always going to be signs of good and ill in the Middle East.  One good sign out of Iraq that went unmentioned by most of the media was this:  Although there is not yet peace in the manger of the first Arab democracy–Iraq–did you note what the government of Iraq did there last week?  It declared Christmas a national holiday to show what it said was solidarity with the non-Muslim community.  That’s a first for the country.  There’s still a lot of work to do in Iraq, God Bless our soldiers for doing it.

2b.  2b.  In Afghanistan, things are less felicitous.  The NYT reports that a day after a suicide bomber killed at least 16 people, including 13 schoolchildren, in a region bordering Pakistan, a new rash of bombings shook different areas of Afghanistan on Monday, killing two civilians north of Kabul and two more in Kandahar Province.

On the Sunday attack, the AP reported that "A single-file line of school children walked past a military checkpoint Sunday as a bomb-loaded truck veered toward them and exploded, ending the lives of 14 young Afghans in a heartbreaking flash captured by a U.S. military security camera.  The video shows an SUV slowly weaving through sandbag barriers at a military checkpoint just as a line of school children, most wearing white caps, comes into view."  "Photos of the bombing’s aftermath showed bloodied text books lying on the ground beside small pairs of shoes. Afghan officials said the kids were attending a final day of class for the year to find out whether they would move up to the next grade … Dr. Abdul Rahman, a doctor at a hospital near the blast, said the children were aged 8 to 10."

–If you need a reminder of the barbarism we still face around the world, the same barbarism that attacked us on 9/11, that Israel faces daily, and that exists–still–wherever radical Islam thinks it has a foothold, this is it.  Civilization abuse is no more evident than when it focuses its efforts on young school children.

3.  On the domestic front, if I had to guess what the big political news story will be in 2009, I would say it will be the issue of spending and further government intervention in the economy.  Republicans on the Hill have been too compliant with the runaway spending train of the last eight or so years but as the Bush administration’s days are now numbered, the GOP on the Hill seems to be refocusing on its ideological roots, something I think you’ll see even more of next year and beyond.  As the Obama administration is working on the Hill to craft a spending stimulus plan that could reach as much as 1 trillion dollars, already Senate and House GOP leaders are trying to put the brakes on it.  The Washington Post reports  today that "Congressional Republicans objected yesterday to hurried consideration of President-elect Barack Obama’s emerging stimulus proposal, questioning the economic value of many of the projects being floated for inclusion and voicing support for a more methodical process that might delay the legislation’s passage well into February.

"Concerned by Democrats’ push to enact the massive bill into law within days of Obama’s Jan. 20 inauguration, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R.-Ohio) issued calls for a lengthy vetting of the stimulus proposal, whose price tag could top $850 billion when it is completed next month."

Here is some of what has raised the eyebrows on our team in the Obama proposal:  $4.8 million for a polar bear exhibit in Rhode Island, $100 million to redevelop land for a casino in Philadelphia, and $6 million for snow-making and maintenance facilities at Spirit Mountain, Minn.  All these things may or may not be positive goods–I don’t know why they are or need to be government-sponsored positive goods.  You want to study polar bears in Rhode Island?  Alabama shouldn’t have to pay for it.  You want to develop land for a casino in Pennsylvania, that’s not Arizona’s problem.  Anyone think maybe these should be the jobs and costs of charitable donations in the first place and private enterprise from those who will profit in the second?

I will be looking for not just a vetting process in the stimulus proposals, but a debate about spending our way out of a recession generally.  As Rich Lowry pointed out on the Meet the Press Sunday, there’s something fundamentally wrong with a concept that at once says "too much debt" was the cause of our recession and the solution should then be more government debt.

4.  Another story that I think will loom larger in 2009 is the forgotten drug war.  It is not forgotten where it is taking place, just in the national headlines and focus.  The LAT reports "The narco war rages on in Tijuana, Rosarito Beach and Ensenada, along with areas in mainland Mexico, and though the fatalities generally involve rivaling drug dealers, informants or policemen, among the innocent victims are families whose livelihoods rely on tourism." 

Tijuana, Rosarito, and Ensenada are places American college students go for fall and spring break.  Tijuana is, of course, 15 or so miles from San Diego and a popular destination for Southern Californians.  Eleven people were killed there this weekend in drug-related shooting sprees.
 
4b.  And here at home, the problem of drug addiction and abuse seems to know no cordon.  We’ve read about the arrest of Sherry Johnston for her illegal selling of OxyContin.  Sherry Johnston is, of course, the new grandmother to Bristol Palin’s daughter who gave birth Sunday.

A word on this since we track these things with teens be they the unfamous or the famous.  The birth of any child is a blessing.  It’s also a challenge as every parent knows.  And the challenges increase where there is only one parent.  To date, Bristol and Levi remain unmarried, which is unfortunate  This is what I said at the Values Voter Summit at FRC back in September :

I will not criticize the Palin family, or any family, for having a child that wanders off the reservation here and again. We all have seen variations of that wandering in our own homes—and often enough with far fewer than five children. What I do want to critique is part of our response, our defense. Because some of us overshot.

It was this: I cannot tell you how often I heard variations of this defense in St. Paul last week: "Well, at least she is keeping the baby," "This is a teachable moment about life and doing the right thing," "What a blessing this teen mother is showing us her miracle of creation being allowed to come into the world."

Sure. All true. But is that the only thing to be said? No, it is not. In saluting a young woman’s moral clarity and courage, and the strong, steadfast support of her family in bringing this baby to term, did we (perhaps unwittingly) signal that we were abandoning the field of teenage sex and pregnancy? I hope not. Ladies and gentlemen, I believe we applaud the right decision made by the Palin family, while we still regret the facts, actions, and circumstances that led to this decision.

In our honoring the moral clarity of the Palins, we do not, and should not, abandon our longstanding commitment to discourage out of wedlock teen sex and pregnancy. So we can do both; praise the Palins for their actions in this difficult circumstance, and at the same time, continue to promote the policies of teenage sexual abstinence, the sanctity of marriage and the need for responsible fatherhood—policies that all of us—including Sarah Palin and John McCain— have so long championed.
 

This is all, still, unfortunately, true.  These issues will also loom large in the upcoming year I believe.

1.  First, on the international front: War has broken out in the Gaza Strip and Israel.  Let me refine that: Israel has joined the war that has been launched against them by Hamas launching missiles into Israel proper and is responding by firing back.  On Wednesday and Thursday of last week, Hamas fired some 100 missiles into Israel and on Saturday, Israel responded with bombing raids in a campaign that will try to eliminate the Hamas threat on Israel and Egypt’s border.  This is the Gaza strip, recall, that Israel withdrew from in toto in 2005 because international promises were made that it would be one giant step for peace for Israel.

Now, it appears the campaign by Hamas will be a prolonged war unless Israel decisively finishes it before it goes much further.  Echoes of the Israeli war with Hezbollah in Lebanon from two years ago, however, are worrisome: the international community condemned Israel, Hezbollah was not weakened, and things went back pretty much to a status quo ante except the Israeli soldiers who were kidnapped by Hezbollah (the casus belli of the war) were murdered.

Hamas is obviously looking for international military and international support, and yesterday it received some.  Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khameni issued a decree this weekend saying, "Whoever is killed in this legitimate defence, is considered a martyr."

What do you need to know about Hamas?  Let’s boil it down to two things, one from their origination 20 years ago that defines their essence and the other from last week.  Hamas is a Palestinian movement, created in the late 1980s as an alternative, a radical and more religious alternative to the PLO, the PLO not being radical (or representative enough) for (and of) enough Palestinians.  

i.  Their charter states:  "Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it." and "There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors."

ii.  The most recent news out of Gaza , news that didn’t make most of the wires:
 

Hamas legislators marked the Christmas season by passing a Shari’a criminal code for the Palestinian Authority. Among other things, it legalizes crucifixion.

Hamas’s endorsement of nailing enemies of Islam to crosses came at the same time it renewed its jihad. Here, too, Hamas wanted to make sure that Christians didn’t feel neglected as its fighters launched missiles at Jewish day care centers and schools. So on Wednesday, Hamas lobbed a mortar shell at the Erez crossing point into Israel just as a group of Gazan Christians were standing on line waiting to travel to Bethlehem for Christmas.

That’s Hamas.  That’s Gaza.

2.  On the home-front, many of us are thinking about the year in review, in the news, in the culture.  Let me sketch out the stories I think we’re most important and invite you to call in with yours.

A.  The most important news stories of 2008 from where I sit are the election; the success of the surge in Iraq; and the economic collapse, which also includes the Bernard Madoff scandal as an after-shock.

B.  Culturally, the four most important stories from where I sit are the fury and furor over Sarah Palin’s nomination and candidacy for Vice President; the end of the consensus on free market capitalism and non-intervention; the reemergence between ethics and money; and, finally, something we haven’t spoken much about but something I’ve been tracking: the balkanization in America.

3.  What do I mean by the balkanization in America? 

A.  Princeton’s Danielle Allen wrote a piece in the Washington Post earlier this month on just the military aspect.  Get this:  "Since 1970, the population of the United States has grown by about 50 percent, from roughly 200 million to 300 million. Over the same period, the number of active-duty armed forces has fallen approximately 50 percent, from 3 million to 1.4 million."  And where do they come from?
 

In 1969, the 10 states with the highest percentage of veterans were, in order: Wyoming, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, California, Oregon, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Ohio, Connecticut and Illinois.

In 2007, the 10 states with the highest percentage of post-Vietnam-era veterans were, in order: Alaska, Virginia, Hawaii, Washington, Wyoming, Maine, South Carolina, Montana, Maryland and Georgia.

Over the past four decades, which states have disappeared from the top 10? California, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Illinois, all big blue states that have voted Democratic in the past five presidential elections. These states and another blue state, New York, which ranked 12th in 1969, are among the 10 states with the lowest number of post-Vietnam vets per capita.

Danielle Allen looks at all this and concludes: "The issue now is not racial integration but cultural separation. If young people from different regions and social backgrounds either enter or steer clear of the armed forces, military service will become, over time, an experience that doesn’t ease but exacerbates pre-existing cultural differences."

B.  David Broder had a column yesterday that speaks to the political balkanization.  I can’t and don’t agree with his adjectives or ultimate political judgments here, but his facts go to a worrisome trend:  the strongest Congressional Republicans, the loyal ideological opposition in this country is now almost entirely Southern.  No problem with the South.  I live a lot of my time in a Southern state, love the food, the people, the music, the culture.  But why are other parts of America not represented by strong, smart, ideologically conservative Republicans as well?  Broder concludes on this trend: "The Southern domination of the congressional Republican Party has become more complete with each and every election. This year, Republicans suffered a net loss of two Senate and three House seats in the South, but they lost five Senate seats and 18 House seats in other sections. No Republican House members are left in New England, and they have become ever scarcer in New York and Pennsylvania and across the Midwest."

C.  Finally, if we had a fascination and deference to and with experts and what Tom Wolfe called "masters of the universe," that is, financial geniuses and millionaires (and billionaires) who seemed to know how to keep the economic course of this country on an upward, vertical trend, all the while raising the expectations and profit margins to new levels and new levels of wealth for all who would join them, that is now over.  Not only did the trees not raise to the sky, they’ve been felled.

4.  Not all is lost, however, on the cultural-political front and I urge you all to read Bill Kristol in the NYT this morning.  You can see the negatives, the obvious negatives, in the upcoming Obama administration.  But look at some of the marginalia that is taking place: from defiantly keeping Rick Warren as the inaugural invocation prayer-giver to the poet who will be speaking at the inaugural to the use of Abraham Lincoln’s imagery and Bible to, finally, the silliness about Obama’s nicotine habit.  Bill Kristol summarizes his piece this way:
 

Those of us who dislike finger-wagging nanny-state-nagging liberalism relish the prospect of President Barack Obama sneaking a cigarette on the second floor of the White House while rereading Harry V. Jaffa’s great work on Lincoln, "Crisis of the House Divided," then taking a break to stroll over to take a look at the White House’s copy of Emanuel Leutze’s painting "Washington Crossing the Delaware," then going back to the family quarters to tell his kids to get back to memorizing some patriotic poetry, all of this interrupted occasionally by calls from Gen. David Petraeus and Gen. Ray Odierno — his Ulysses Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman — to discuss progress in the wars we’re fighting, or from Rick Warren to discuss their joint efforts to fight AIDS in Africa and to reduce the number of abortions in the U.S.

Now that’s a presidency I can believe in.

1.  You’ve heard me say several times that Plato instructs us that the two most important questions that determine the course of a civilization–and civilization–are who teaches the children and what are they taught.  The cultural left has succeeded in establishing the 1980s as "the decade of greed."  I worry about how the past few years will be defined, our team had better pull up it socks and establish the record.  Yesterday, in the NYPost , Noam Neusner began the telling of the story, writing that "Senator Dodd and Barney Frank managed to beat back Bush administration reforms starting in 2002. Dodd and Frank repeatedly declined to consider the president’s proposals, which would have probably cut down the housing froth by forcing Fannie and Freddie to stop buying risky mortgage-based investments and subjecting them to full SEC oversight.  In 2003, Frank said the administration was exaggerating the risk. Last summer, Dodd still called these ideas "ill-advised" while Frank called them inane."

Then there were the housing industry’s political donations, primarily to Democrats.

I’m of the belief a lot of people, through neglect, nonfeasance, malfeasance, and misfeasance had a hand in bringing us to where we are.  My purpose in raising all this again and again is that I don’t want to be alone in that belief and the major media is trying to hang it on the Bush administration almost exclusively when, in fact, they look to be the least responsible party; they are a party to the problem to be sure, but they are not the most responsible party.  Noam’s piece is linked at BennettMornings.com, I urge you to read it yourself.

2.  Speaking of greed, a Roman poet of old put it this way: poverty wants much but avarice wants everything.  Greed (or avaritia) is one of the Seven Deadly Sins and during this season when we celebrate–especially–the birth of a child in the most humble of circumstances, it’s a good time to refresh our minds about the dangers of undue and overwrought quests for accumulation that lead to greed.

In this case I’m thinking of the Bernard Madoff scandal which keeps unraveling before our eyes, day by day, taking more and more people and investments down with it.  Yesterday, the news came that an investment manager who lost over one billion dollars because of Mr. Madoff, Thierry Magon de La Villehuchet, was found dead due to an apparent suicide.  Our immediate thoughts of course reeled back to the stories of the 1929 crash.  It’s mostly folklore that there were a flurry of suicides after the great crash of 1929, but, again, the historical image of huge financial losses destroying everything and everyone in their wake is the image we all have and yesterday, the tragedy of Mr. Villehuchet brought us the all-too-human costs of the price of greed and financial crime that Bernard Madoff has inflicted on our economy and too many people’s investments.

If this holy season reminds us of anything, might I ask it remind us of the fundamentals and basics of humanity, honesty, and humility.
  
Just a final word on our system of government and free enterprise:  Ours is an economic system that requires virtues and character.  Adam Smith said as much; Pope John Paul II eloquently put it this way:  "Of itself, an economic system does not possess criteria for correctly distinguishing new and higher forms of satisfying human needs from artificial new needs which hinder the formation of a mature personality. Thus a great deal of education and cultural work is urgently needed, including the education of consumers in responsible use of their power of choice [and] the formation of a strong sense of responsibility among producers."

Perhaps a good resolution for all of us in 2009 is to begin anew the moral education of responsibility and the responsible use of economic power that the greatest nation in the world provides us.

3.  Okay, on to political greed and corruption.  Yesterday, as promised, the Obama transition team released their internal investigation on themselves regarding the Blagojovich scandal.  As the Politico reports:  "President-elect Barack Obama’s internal review found that Rahm Emanuel spoke several times to Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and his staff but did nothing wrong — pitching a number of Obama-backed candidates for his Senate seat but engaging in no improper deal-making."

We’ve been asking if the Blagojovich scandal would engulf anyone close to the nascent Obama administration or Obama himself–was there fire, or just smoke.  The answer appears to be just smoke.  There is always more that can come out but as Charles Krauthammer put it last night, I think rightly: "This scandal is over. This is a dead scandal. This is an ex-scandal. This scandal is deceased. At least the part relating to Barack Obama….And in part, scandals have to have — there has to be a popular appetite. Right now, I think, like all incoming presidents, Obama is riding goodwill. Nobody really wants to see him enter office weakened, particularly in the crisis that every — that the country is in. It happens all the time. One exception was George Bush, who didn’t enjoy that national goodwill, but I think Obama does. There is no appetite, and there’s no story."

That’s a good reminder: we want our presidents to come to office with goodwill.  George W. Bush was not afforded that, we are affording that to Barack Obama and for now, it appears Team Obama is clean of Blagojovich.  Consider just a moment if this report were to turn into a whitewash: it would taint Greg Craig who wrote it, the incoming White House Counsel, it would taint the president’s chief of staff, it would taint other senior advisors and you’d have a pretty self-destructive scandal in the White House akin to Watergate.  Because of such personal and professional stakes, I’m led to believe this report would have a lot riding on its honesty and leaves us back where we were a few weeks ago: This is a Blagojevich scandal and not an Obama scandal.

4.  But let us now move to great and happy things, things of great joy.  That’s what today, tonight, and tomorrow is about.  Here is some audio to get us started–trust me, you’ll want to listen, it’s just under two minutes.  Click Here.

1.  First, in the news:  When the arrests were reported last year, we covered it live.  Yesterday they were convicted.  As Andy McCarthy  put it at the Corner: "Not that you’ll hear much about this, but President Bush will be going out on a high note as far as his oft-maligned Justice Department is concerned.  The convictions today of five jihadists who were plotting to kill American soldiers at the Fort Dix military base (a sixth man pled guilty earlier to supplying weapons to the conspirators) comes on the heels of last month’s convictions in the retrial of the Holy Land Foundation terror-funding case."

The men, all Muslim immigrants who lived in South Jersey or Philadelphia, face a maximum term of life in prison, the NYT reports .  As usual, I find their ages interesting:    all of them are 30 or younger.  The WSJ op-ed page has it best: 
 

The jury’s verdict is notable because media coverage of the plotters’ arrest and trial traveled a familiar arc: After a round of stories noting that a terrorist plot had been rolled up, the media followed up with skepticism and suggestions that the suspects were small-timers or just messing around….The implication…is always the same: The Bush Administration was advertising phantom threats to justify the trampling of civil liberties and to create a "climate of fear."

Lest we forget, the Fort Dix plotters were finally arrested last year after they moved to buy AK-47s and fully automatic M-16s — not exactly the stuff of innocent imaginings and idle chatter. Every plotter is an amateur until he pulls off a spectacular attack. This has created a permanent PR problem for the fight against domestic terror plots: If you move too soon, the conventional wisdom comes to doubt that anything serious was averted. But of course, waiting too long means running the risk of another attack on American soil, something we have avoided since 9/11."

A great effort by the FBI and the US Attorney’s office, i.e., the Department of Justice.  Again, when the final histories are written on the Bush administration, I think the odds are about even that the three main stories will be: a) We helped create the first democracy in the Arab world; b) He kept us safe when all said that was impossible; and c) An inflated economy collapsed.  As for (b) today–well done sir, and well done Department of Justice.  On behalf of the residents of Fort Dix, men and women in uniform, and the rest of the country, thank you.

2.  As for (c), there will be a lot to consider as to how the administration monitored, regulated, and tried to avert the economic collapse we are now in.  Yesterday, tracking what we said on the show and wrote here, Nina Easton of Fortune Magazine (and, by her own admission, not a right winger or conservative) said this on Fox News about the NYT screed against the Bush administration printed Sunday:  "I have to say that I was flabbergasted when I read this story, flabbergasted.  There are three sectors to blame for this crisis we’re in. You can blame Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve easy money supply. You can blame this whole risky slice, dice, and passing mortgage packages up the food chain so no one has responsibility for it. And, frankly, regulators should have been looking at. You can blame that.  And you can blame affordable housing policies. You cannot write a story about affordable housing policies and blame it on George Bush instead of the Democrats. It’s outrageous."

Flabbergasted and outrageous is about right so far as I can tell.  And if you missed the oral history, go to bennettmornings.com and listen to Noam Neusner’s relating of the history in our archives.

But something is now amiss.  Never mind the causes for the moment–how has the TARP program, the bailout, been working out?  We don’t really know because the recipient banks will not tell us.  Steve Moore and Robert Reich agreed on this on CNN last night.  You may recall, Hank Paulson’s plan changed  from initially buying up toxic mortgage assets to "unlocking the frozen consumer credit market" and "specifically to help consumers instead of banks, savings and loans and Wall Street firms."

Well, has it?  CNN put it this way last night: 
 

It was supposed to jump-start the economy by encouraging banks to start lending money again. But now some of the banks can’t even tell you what they did with it. What’s worse, some won’t tell you. And get this: Banks admit they’re still trying to figure out what to do with all those bailout bucks. Twenty-one banks that got at least $1 billion from the federal government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program simply did not have specifics when the Associated Press asked them to account for the money.  One bank pretty much summed it up, saying — quote — "We’re not providing dollar-in/dollar–out tracking."

The AP put it this way : 
 

"We’ve lent some of it. We’ve not lent some of it. We’ve not given any accounting of, ‘Here’s how we’re doing it,’" said Thomas Kelly, a spokesman for JPMorgan Chase, which received $25 billion in emergency bailout money. "We have not disclosed that to the public. We’re declining to."

The Associated Press contacted 21 banks that received at least $1 billion in government money and asked four questions: How much has been spent? What was it spent on? How much is being held in savings, and what’s the plan for the rest?

None of the banks provided specific answers.

Then, finally, insult to injury:  "Some banks said they simply didn’t know where the money was going."

2b.  Okay, one of Congress’ best uses of time and authority is holding hearings.  The banks wanted or needed the money, I understand that.  The banks also had culpability in creating this mess, I hope they understand that.  Congress should bring the bank executives in, swear them in, and hold hearings on what they are doing with the money–it is public money used to shore up private and public concerns after all.  We can continue to throw good money after bad or we can stop and retool this thing before then next tranch is allocated.  Maybe we can even take another look at Congressman Louis Gohmert’s plan to not spend the next 350 billion dollars and, instead, instill a two-month tax holiday.

Just to reiterate, Gohmert’s plan is a two-month tax holiday that would provide immediate relief to taxpayers. As he puts it, "whether Americans save, spend or invest it, a two month tax cut will boost an economy that needs immediate relief….how about letting workers keep ALL of their federal income tax and FICA withholding for two straight months, use that to catch up on their mortgages [or other deficits] so they truly are no longer failing?"

Whichever way we go, I think we can agree the TARP plan needs some serious revisiting, reshoring, or retrenching.

3.  Some new census figures are out.  The Washington Post reports
 

Utah has become the nation’s fastest-growing state, pushing Nevada out of the top spot.  The Beehive state’s population rose 2.5 percent from July 2007 to July 2008. Arizona ranked No. 2, followed by Texas, North Carolina and Colorado.  Nevada, last year’s fastest-growing state, fell to eighth. Nevada had been among the four fastest-growing states in each of the past 23 years.  Two states, Michigan and Rhode Island, lost population from 2007 to 2008.

A few questioners from our listeners and emailers in these states: I’m not surprised about Utah’s growth, we had Gov. Huntsman on talking about it a couple of week’s ago, continued lower taxes was one reason; a business friendly environment another.  But why are you guys called the Beehive state?  And if you are in Michigan or Rhode Island, call in and tell me what you’re government and state policies are doing wrong.

4.  The Obama choice of Rick Warren to give the inaugural invocation is still rankling.  It was a top story on Google News earlier this morning and Richard Cohen at the Washington Post writes today on how his gay sister has cancelled some kind of inauguration party–even though she was an Obama supporter.
Cohen concludes his column this way:  "[W]e need moral leadership, which, on this occasion, Obama has failed to provide. For some people, that’s nothing to celebrate.  The party’s off."

Can we all get real for a few moments?  If Rick Warren is now out of the mainstream of religious leadership, I fear for what religious leadership in this country will be.  Rick Warren will not be using the inaugural to talk about controversial social and religious issues and the left is making a pretty big mistake by going after a pastor’s views to try to censor or censure him from a national, public, prayer or invocation.  I’m sure over 90% of traditional pastors, priests, and orthodox rabbis share his views on abortion and gay marriage; if there is going to be a censoring of inaugural invocations, the list of "approved" prayer leaders is going to get pretty small pretty quickly. 

Is this what we’ve really come to on the left:  A tolerance for religious leaders only so long as they tailor their views of the Bible to match contemporary political and social political correctness?  Once upon a time, actually, we held respect for religious authorities who disregarded political currents and popularity; that’s what religious leaders are for: to preach and speak the gospel regardless of sacred political and social cows.  I’m not even going to get into what a great humanitarian Rick Warren is, there’s been enough written on that, but it is a remarkable record.  To go after Warren, it seems to me, is to say something pretty bad about his opponents and not Warren.

Pete Wehner at the Ethics and Public Policy Center summed it all up this way yesterday:  "The outrage directed at Warren is an effort by some to intimidate those who oppose same-sex marriage into silence and de-legitimize their arguments….This effort needs to be resisted, especially by those who claim to care so much about "tolerance" and the free and open exchange of ideas. It would be nice if, from time to time, those who claim to represent modern liberalism would reacquaint themselves with the classical version."

My only last thought on this:  Some years ago I said that, in light of some of our cultural decline, we had become the kind of place to which civilized countries used to send missionaries. If we’ve now come to a point in our age where we need to defend Rick Warren and his legitimacy to lead a prayer at an inauguration we’re going to be needing more missionaries than I think the world has to offer.  And, most of them won’t be accepted by the left in America today.

1.  For the past several months, I’ve argued we need a good, comprehensive history of our current economic melt-down: it’s causes and its centers of blame.  We’ve looked at different parts, from leaders at financial houses like Merrill to those in charge of oversight in the government.  And every week we seem to find other actors, like Bernard Madoff.  Yesterday, the New York Times weighed in and laid it almost exclusively at the feet of the Bush administration.  Their headline:  "White House Philosophy Stoked Mortgage Bonfire."

In their nearly 5,000 word piece, three reporters couldn’t find four words: "Barney Frank" or "Chris Dodd."  To read the piece is to understand why during the presidential campaign, the New York Times was described as a 527 for the Democratic party.  While the piece admits "there are plenty of culprits, like lenders who peddled easy credit, consumers who took on mortgages they could not afford and Wall Street chieftains who loaded up on mortgage-backed securities without regard to the risk," the rest argues that the administration ignored warnings from regulators and did little to arrest the bubble, all the while pushing to "expand homeownership, especially among minorities, an initiative that dovetailed with his ambition to expand the Republican tent — and with the business interests of some of his biggest donors. But his housing policies and hands-off approach to regulation encouraged lax lending standards."

Never mind what a few google searches could have turned up, namely: a) Home ownership grew even faster under the Clinton administration; b) the Clinton National Home Ownership Strategy "went to ridiculous lengths to increase the national homeownership rate. It promoted paper-thin downpayments and pushed for ways to get lenders to give mortgage loans to first-time buyers with shaky financing and incomes. It’s clear now that the erosion of lending standards pushed prices up by increasing demand, and later led to waves of defaults by people who never should have bought a home in the first place;" and c) a lot of this was due to the Clinton administration’s "breath[ing] real life into enforcement of the Community Reinvestment Act" according to a 1999 LA Times article that also reports that the Democratic congress of 1992 "mandated that Fannie and Freddie increase their purchases of mortgages for low-income and medium-income borrowers."

Meanwhile, while much of this was surely not discontinued under the Bush administration, as Noam Neusner reported in the Washington Post, as early as 2002, the White House and Treasury began trying to reform this runaway train, especially at Fannie & Freddie.  Who tried to thwart these reforms?  Chris Dodd, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama, "the top four recipients of Fannie and Freddie campaign contributions from 1988 to 2008."

Meanwhile, Barney Frank was saying things like this about Frannie and Freddie as the White House was trying to reform them: "We see entities that are fundamentally sound financially. . . . And even if there were a problem, the federal government doesn’t bail them out."

Noam Neusner will join us in the third hour of the show to discuss more of this.  But let me just say this in the interim: The NYT op-ed page is excruciatingly exquisite in paring down op-ed submissions to a minimum of words.  Evidently, this simply doesn’t apply when it’s their own reporters on the front pages.

2.  On the culture front, Barney Frank is in the news for another reason, something I haven’t had a chance to speak on yet, and that’s the selection of Rick Warren to give the inaugural invocation next month.

Almost every liberal organization from the Human Rights Campaign to People for the American Way have weighed in to condemn President Elect Obama’s choice of Rick Warren.  And yesterday on CNN, Barney Frank was no exception, saying: "Giving that kind of mark of approval and honor to someone who has frankly spoken in ways I and many others have found personally very offensive, I thought that was a mistake for the president-elect to do."

Warren’s offense is his opposition to abortion and gay marriage.  Ramesh Ponnuru at National Review was on to the problem when he wrote last week: "By giving Warren a platform, Obama is not endorsing his views—but he is saying that those views are a legitimate part of the national conversation."

There has been, as we’ve documented, a near-guerilla war against Mormons today and other religious organizations that have taken stands against gay marriage–and the choice of Warren, about as mainstream an evangelical choice one can make, flies right into the face of the left-wing attempt to delegitimize religious objections to cultural norms.  If you need an exhibit of the campaign on the street, go to Maggie Gallagher’s site abovethehate.com.  To see the air campaign, simply see the cover of the December 15 issue of Newsweek, the title: "The Religious Case for Gay Marriage."  The entire cover is a Bible with a rainbow bookmark in the middle.

When Rick Warren is deemed beyond the pale, you know there is a a culture war afoot and I salute Barack Obama for treating it with benign neglect.  You can fight this stupidity in the courts and at the ballot box as many of you have done and do.  Or you can treat its tenets as, themselves, ridiculous and beyond the pale as Barack Obama is doing.  Good for him.

3.  There are a lot of challenges facing the incoming Obama administration and the advice he is getting in the op-ed pages from various quarters is interesting to follow.  One piece of advice the mainstream media loves, is a joint op-ed in the NYT by former Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense Madeline Albright and William Cohen.  It is titled "Never again, for real," and it’s about how the US needs to be more aggressive in preventing and fighting genocide.  I agree with the thesis–we need to do more.  They write that genocide fuels instability, that mass atrocities have long lasting consequences that spread across state lines, and that American credibility is eroded when we are seen as bystanders to slaughter.  Again, I agree. I have to be skeptical about the messengers who for the past eight years have been missing in action at best, and condemnatory at worst when it came to arresting one of the worst human rights abusing regimes in the world: Iraq. 

Let us simply recall that Albright said of Iraq’s liberation that it would turn out to be a "worse" "foreign policy disaster" than "Vietnam."

If a country that uses plastic shredders on dissidents, chemical weapons against religious and ethnic minorities, and engages in mass slaughters filling mass graves is not a just cause for our liberation (even as it sponsors international terrorism), I don’t know how we can summon the internal moral combustion to save innocents elsewhere.

This has all come up before and will come up again: just what will the left allow this country to do about Darfur?  Is the military an option or is it not?  Secretaries, answer this question please.

4.  Forty years ago yesterday, the greatest gamble in space history occurred with the decision to launch Apollo 8 which orbited the Moon on December 24th.  Here’s Jeff Jacoby writing about it yesterday:

For their Christmas Eve broadcast from lunar orbit, NASA had instructed the astronauts simply: "Say something appropriate." And so, as half a billion people watched and listened 40 years ago this week, they did. Anders began:

In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth; and the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.

Lovell took up the reading after Anders, and then Borman brought the broadcast to an end.

And God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering-together of the waters called He seas. And God saw that it was good.

"And from the crew of Apollo 8," Borman finished, "we close with, Good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you - all of you on the good Earth."

I’ll be back to regular blogging Monday.  In the interim, my co-author John Cribb and I are very happy with the success and feedback of the American Patriot’s Almanac (Number 5 this week on the NYT). It does make a great Christmas and Hanukah gift–for all ages. Here’s today’s entry, which I thought I’d post going into the weekend:

A Revolution Begins

Few people realized it at the time, but the issue of Popular Electronics magazine that hit the newsstands in late December 1974 marked the beginning of a modern revolution. On the cover, beneath the headline “World’s First Minicomputer Kit,” sat a photo of a plain-looking box covered with rows of switches and lights. The machine was the Altair 8800, and for about $400, anyone could buy the kit and assemble it themselves. It was the first truly personal computer to come to market, and thousands of hobbyists rushed to place orders.

In Boston, a young computer programmer named Paul Allen picked up the magazine and ran to find his friend Bill Gates, a student at Harvard. The two had been computer enthusiasts since junior high school, and had dreamed of making their mark in the computer revolution. “Look, it’s going to happen!” Allen said, waving the article. “I told you this was going to happen! And we’re going to miss it!” Gates decided to leave Harvard and start a software company with Allen.* They wrote a program for the Altair, and Microsoft Corporation was born.

Meanwhile, in California, 20-year-old Steve Jobs and his friend Stephen Wozniak wanted to build their own small computers. Jobs sold his Volkswagen van and Wozniak sold his scientific calculator to raise funds to start Apple Computer, Inc. They assembled their prototypes in the Jobs family’s garage. In 1977, the Apple II became one of the first widely used home computers.

In 1981, industry giant IBM introduced its own personal computer, the IBM PC, run by Microsoft software. Other companies followed suit. By the mid-1980s, the American-bred personal computer revolution was poised to change the world.

*Several people advised Gates not to leave Harvard before completing his degree, including author W.J. Bennett. Gates’s proctor, John Curnutte, asked Bennett to help convince the undergraduate not to drop out. “I think it’s a mistake,” Bennett told young Gates – an opinion that, fortunately, the latter did not share.

American History Parade – December 19

1732            In Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin begins publishing Poor Richard’s Almanac.

1777            George Washington’s army enters winter camp at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.

1871            Mark Twain receives the first of three patents for improved suspenders.

1958            The first radio broadcast using an orbiting satellite features a recorded Christmas greeting from President Eisenhower.

1974            The Altair 8800 kit is first put on sale, an event regarded by many as the beginning of the personal computer revolution.

1998            The U.S. House impeaches President Bill Clinton for perjury and obstruction of justice. (Andrew Johnson was the only other president to be impeached.)

I’m taking a couple days off, but if you’d like to continue reading and learning about education reform based on my post from yesterday, the two best sites to navigate and study are these:

The Center for Education Reform

And

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute

1.  First, it’s been an open question how the press corps would treat President Barack Obama after January, having been so in the tank for him during the campaign season, as so many media ombudsmen have now gone on record to admit.  My best guess was the media, notwithstanding Chris Matthews’ comments that it was his role to help the President succeed, would, in fact be more aggressive and independent once Obama became president, that their usual role of gadfly and investigation (rather than campaign mouthpiece) would come close to being restored.  It may have started yesterday.

Chicago Tribune reporter John McCormick asked, or started to ask, the President Elect for his comments about Rahm Emanuel and his possible connections and conversations with Rod Blagojevich when Obama cut him off, saying, quote: "Let me just cut you off right there because I don’t want you to waste your question."  Obama continued on to say he was not going to say anything more at this time but would release more information next week.

I don’t know why next week is particularly important except that there will be  lot of distractions due to Christmas.  And I don’t know why any comments know–once the criminal complaint has been made public–would affect the investigation of the Governor.  That said, the questions surrounding Rahm Emanuel are beginning to stack up.  Chicago-Sun Times’ Michael Sneed wrote the following in her column yesterday: I "hears rumbles President-elect Barack Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, is reportedly on 21 different taped conversations by the feds — dealing with his boss’ vacant Senate seat."

That’s all she reports.  There could be more to it, there could be less to it.  There could be nothing to it.  And as for Jesse Jackson, Jr’s role, that is still unfolding, but the Washington Post this morning reports that he may very well be one of the people that initially tipped off federal investigators.  More needs to be seen there too.  But as Scott Rasmussen summarizes in his recent poll where 45% of voters believe it is "likely that Obama or one of his top campaign aides was involved in the unfolding Blagojevich scandal in Illinois," "The Chicago Tribune on Saturday reported that Obama’s White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel had conversations with Blagojevich’s staff about candidates who were acceptable to the president-elect to fill his vacant Senate seat." 

This is why now, more than any other time, I think I am right about my roof-tops test:  If you are implicated in something and you are innocent, you usually are begging for a megaphone to scream from the rooftops your innocence.  I’ll say it again: this could become Whitewater or it could become nothing–but every day we hear less and less from those we have questions about makes it look worse and worse.  One of the things many in the media and the old establishment did not like about the Clintons was they brought Arkansas-ethics to Washington.  The bar has been set pretty low in Washington over the past several years for ethical behavior, a lot of that is because of the Clintons I believe.  But the fix is not to bring Chicago-ethics to Washington.  The breath of fresh air a lot of us liked about Obama needs to be, well, refreshed, just about now.

2.  That question from John McCormick came during a press conference when Barack Obama was taking question having announced his new Education Secretary, Arne Duncan of the Chicago Public Schools.  There have been a lot of stories about this call over the past 30 hours or so, more than almost any other cabinet choice save Secretaries of State, Defense, and Treasury–all over a Department that is not nearly as big as many of the others.  Why?  Because almost every American has a relationship and interest in education policy, because they have an interest in education, they are products of our education systems and have investments in it, with their children and families.

So, let’s speak about it now some more.  First, on Arne Duncan, I blogged and spoke yesterday about him as Mr. Obama’s choice.  As I said, he could have done a lot worse.  We did not elect a Republican so we were not going to get a Lisa Graham Keegan or Checker Finn, we weren’t going to get someone who was going to engage in the radical reform necessary to truly shake up the sclerotic education system in America that needs  some strong shaking.  That said, there are an awful lot of dumb ideas in education reform, there are an awful lot of status-quo defenders, and there are an awful lot of education specialists who can and would like to turn back the clock on education reform.  Arne Duncan does not fit into those categories or descriptions.  He’s a moderate pick, something akin to Obama’s choice of Hillary Clinton to run State or Bob Gates to run Defense: not your standard left-wing department head.  And he’s probably an even more moderate choice than Clinton frankly.

We’ve read a lot about how Mr. Duncan has bridged some fights between reformers and unions.  That he has.  But the WSJ editorial page nails it in their conclusion today:  "We know from experience, though, that any genuine school reformer eventually arrives at crunch time with these unions, and either confronts them or gives up."

So let’s look at where we are:  The news article on Duncan in today’s WSJ is also right:  "The Obama administration’s selection of Chicago schools chief Arne Duncan as education secretary signals an intent to maintain a rigorous system of standardized tests in public schools, while experimenting with reforms disliked by unions, such as teacher merit pay."

Chicago has long-been a very troubled place for public education.  When I was Secretary it was one of the worst cities in America when it came to public education.  It’s improved some under Arne Duncan.  As the WSJ also points out this morning:   For the 2007-2008 school year, 65.2% of students met or exceeded state standards, compared with 38.3% in 2000-2001.

There’s still too large a gap between racial minorities and non-minority students in Chicago.  And, as Major Garrett reported last night, Mr. Duncan has shut down some failing schools and reopened them only after reorganizing them.  And yet it’s not anywhere near a turnaround or miracle city.  The drop out rate in Chicago is still higher than the state average–almost half of all Chicago high school freshman dropout of high school before graduation.  And Chicago is just under the median in performance compared to other urban city education systems.  This, despite spending some $10,500 per student, about $1,000 more than the national average.

While Mr. Duncan is friendly to merit pay for teachers and public charter schools which often have a better record than standard public schools, there’s still a lot of work to do in Chicago–and the rest of the country.  It is telling, for as close as Obama is to Duncan, he did not want his children in Chicago public schools.  And he had the money to put them in private schools, a decision more parents should be able to make.  In fact, it’s also telling that some 40% of Chicago public school teachers put their children in private schools.

3.  As for the rest of the country, here’s where we are:  We spend almost 600 billion dollars, nationally, in elementary and secondary education.  Don’t tell me the problem is money.  When I was Secretary of Education, my budget was about 17 billion dollars, today it’s about 60 billion dollars–and it’s gone up dramatically every year under President Bush.  In fact the increases under President Bush, alone, are greater than my whole budget was.  When he entered office the Department of Education was funded at about 40 billion dollars–it’s gone up 20 billion.

What do we get right now for this kind of investment?  About one-third of our nation’s fourth graders are functionally illiterate, reading below a basic level on the Nation’s Report Card (also known as NAEP).  At the eighth grade level about a quarter of our students read below basic, and at the twelfth grade level we’re approaching thirty percent.

About twenty percent of our fourth graders perform below basic in math, thirty percent of our eighth graders perform below basic in math, and nearly forty percent of our twelfth graders perform below basic in math.  The longer one stays in school in America, the worse one does in mathematics.

And, as the recent TIMSS report shows, our science scores are even worse–especially compared to other countries.  This isn’t even the worst of it though.  Over fifty percent of our nation’s high school seniors score below basic in their knowledge of American history–it’s our worst subject.  We are creating natural born aliens in our own country with out students and the education we deliver to them about it.  I continually ask: how can we ask our nation’s 18-year-olds to serve, vote in, and fight (and maybe even die) for a country they simply do not know?

4.  The federal fix:  It’s become trendy to blame No Child Left Behind.  NCLB is hardly the problem.  First, keep in mind it’s little more than the name of the act that delivers federal funding to the states under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that began under Lyndon Johnson.  What it did do, and why I supported it, is it asked–for the first time–for accountability, if a state was going to take federal dollars it needed to show some results for those dollars.  Keep in mind, far from a mandate, no state is compelled to operate under NCLB and can refuse the regulations…and the dollars.  For all the whining, then, keep this in mind: no state has turned down NCLB dollars.

Can and should NCLB be reformed?  Sure, sure.  But keep in mind, the federal role in education is only about 10%–that is not where the real reform or change will come from.  Where would I reform NCLB?  First, nothing that will happen under an Obama administration, but the first thing I’d want–and the first thing I argued for when it was being crafted, and the first thing that was negotiated away to get it passed–is private school choice.  Currently, if your child is in a failing school year after year, he or she has the option of going to another school, another public school.  That’s not enough–there aren’t enough, they aren’t close enough, and not a lot of them are better in too many cases.Second, unless and until we have national standards we may never see the best results possible because we will never truly know how to compare apples to apples. 

As Jeanne Allen put it in the Washington Post the other day, "Tests should be bench-marked against NAEP (a test known as "the nation’s report card"). If you say that in fourth grade you expect kids to know quadratic equations, you need to show in your state plan that that’s what you’re measuring in fourth grade."  Or, as Checker has put it, identifying the basic problem and the horns of the dilemma:
 

NCLB trusts every state to set its own standards, but micromanages measurement systems and sets rigid sequences for school and district interventions. It would be far better to promulgate a single national standard and assessment system, and then to trust states, districts, and educators to devise their own means of getting there on their own timetables. But half of Congress will recoil in horror from the freedom and flexibility implied therein while the other half will be put off by uniform standards.

Jeanne summed it up pretty well when it comes to what NCLB could do, writing that "good principals and teachers are really smart people. We need to be firm on the outcome and allow the flexibility locally to figure out how to get there.  We should measure how well schools do from year to year on top of how well we want the ideal fifth-grader to achieve. We need to reward progress in the interim while we work to hit the proficiency standards."

We know what works.  That’s the tragedy of American education–we know what works and we don’t do enough of it, not nearly.  Look at the KIPP schools.  That’s the model.  You want to know more about KIPP, read the end of Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Outliers.  Or listen to Jay Mathews in our third hour today, or read his book coming out next month.  Hard work, more discipline, more hours, better teachers, better principles, better teaching, less nonsense.  It’s available, and it’s doable–the theoretical has been proven by the actual with KIPP, and sometimes for even less than the cost of the rest of the per-pupil expenditure for public school students (as in NYC for example).

But here’s the most important job of the Education Secretary: the bully pulpit.  When you control, and you never really control, only about ten percent of the public dollars in our education system you can turn things only a little with your actual constitutional lever.  What you can do is use the microphone, the bully pulpit.  Speak up about what’s right and what’s wrong.  Speak up about what works and what fails, where the success is and where it is not.  Highlight the good, and highlight the bad.  Shame and reward.  Make a public issue of how we treat, and educate, "the living messages we are sending to a time we will not see," as the sociologist Neil Postman once described our nation’s children.  That’s what they are: living messages.  Remember what Plato said, the two most important questions in a society: who gets to teach the children and what will they be taught.

5.  Finally, on the international scene, an interesting bookmark after a year of preaching American decline, from Robert Kaplan in today’s Washington Post.  After summarizing where our military is right now, he makes a moral point I’ve been making for a while:  "Declinism of the sort being preached will go immediately out of fashion at the world’s next humanitarian catastrophe, when the very people enraged at the U.S. military because of Iraq will demand that it lead a coalition to save lives."  He continues: "We might have intervened in Darfur had we not been bogged down in Iraq…The American military remains a force for good, a fact that will become self-evident in the crises to come."

He’s right about all of that–except for Darfur.  I’m a big proponent of doing more there.  But it wasn’t Iraq that kept us from Darfur.  What, just what, would the left say about a military incursion into the Sudan when you look at what it’s said about the incursion into a country that sponsored terrorists, paid suicide bombers, shredded it’s own people, started two wars, shot missiles into Israel, and tried to assassinate a U.S. president?

I’ve spoken to a lot of liberals about what they would have us do in Darfur.  When I raise the military option, they usually respond with something like, "The UN should act first."  Or "That won’t go down well with the government of the Sudan."  Or any number of other pacifist solutions which, as history has proven again and again, are not solutions but excuses for continued tyranny and genocide.