Escalante Stood and Delivered. It's Our Turn. | Andrew J. Coulson | Cato Institute: Commentary

Escalante Stood and Delivered. It's Our Turn. | Andrew J. Coulson | Cato Institute: Commentary: "Jaime Escalante, the brilliant public school teacher immortalized in the 1988 film, Stand and Deliver, died this week at the age of 79. With the help of a few dedicated colleagues at Garfield High in East Los Angeles, he shattered the myth that poor inner-city kids couldn't handle advanced math. At the peak of its success, Garfield produced more students who passed Advanced Placement calculus than Beverly Hills High.

In any other field, his methods would have been widely copied. Instead, Escalante's success was resented. And while the teachers union contract limited class sizes to 35, Escalante could not bring himself to turn students away, packing 50 or more into a room and still helping them to excel. This weakened the union's bargaining position, so it complained.

By 1990, Escalante was stripped of his chairmanship of the math department he'd painstakingly built up over a decade. Exasperated, he left in 1991, eventually returning to his native Bolivia. Garfield's math program went into a decline from which it has never recovered. The best tribute America can offer Jaime Escalante is to understand why our education system destroyed rather than amplified his success — and then fix it."

"Despite a century-and-a-half of expansion and centralization, this approach, too, has failed. Without systematic incentives rewarding officials for wise decisions and penalizing them for bad ones, public schooling became a ferris wheel of faddism rather than a propagator of excellence."

"Thanks to profit sharing and Web broadcasting of their lectures, top teachers in Korea's tutoring sector earn big salaries and have virtual class sizes in the scores of thousands. The combination of high technology and market incentives not only allows but compels tutoring firms to recognize and make the most of their top teachers."

"Unleash the freedoms and incentives of the marketplace, so teachers like Escalante become the Steve jobs or Bill Gates of education, profiting from their exceptional ability to serve our children."

McCain Channeling Dick Cheney | Nat Hentoff | Cato Institute: Commentary

McCain Channeling Dick Cheney | Nat Hentoff | Cato Institute: Commentary: "Obama hasn't quite gone that far, but he has seriously proposed permanent detention for terrorism suspects who can't be tried because alleged evidence against them has been obtained by torture."

How much "change" is that? I don't think it is much compared to what people expected of him.

China Trade and American Jobs | Daniel J. Ikenson | Cato Institute: Commentary

China Trade and American Jobs | Daniel J. Ikenson | Cato Institute: Commentary: "according to the results from a growing field of research, only a fraction of the value of U.S. imports from China represents the cost of Chinese labor, materials and overhead. Most of the value of those imports comes from components and raw materials produced in other countries, including the U.S.

In a 2006 paper, Stanford University economist Lawrence Lau found that Chinese value-added accounted for about 37% of the total value of U.S. imports from China. In 2008, using a different methodology, U.S. International Trade Commission economist Robert Koopman, along with economists Zhi Wang and Shang-jin Wei, found the figure to be closer to 50%. In other words, despite all the hand-wringing about the value of imports from China, one-half to nearly two thirds of that value is not even Chinese. Instead, it reflects the efforts of workers and capital in other countries, including the U.S. In overstating Chinese value by 100% to 200%, the official U.S. import statistics are a poor proxy for job loss."

"According to a widely cited 2007 study by Greg Linden, Kenneth L. Kraemer and Jason Dedrick of the University of California, Irvine, each Apple iPod costs $150 to produce. But only about $4 of that cost is Chinese value-added. Most of the value comes from components made in other countries, including the U.S. Yet when those iPods are imported from China, where they are snapped together, the full $150 is counted as an import from China, adding to the trade deficit and inflating EPI's job-loss figures.

In reality, those imported iPods support thousands of U.S. jobs up the value chain — in engineering, design, finance, manufacturing, marketing, distribution, retail and elsewhere. A 25% tariff on imports from China would penalize the non-Chinese companies and workers who create most of the iPod's value."

FOXNews.com - Obama, Medvedev Sign Treaty to Cut Nuclear Arms

FOXNews.com - Obama, Medvedev Sign Treaty to Cut Nuclear Arms: "The new treaty will shrink the limit of nuclear warheads to 1,550 per country over seven years. That still allows for mutual destruction several times over. But it is intended to send a strong signal that Russia and the U.S. -- which between them own more than 90 percent of the world's nuclear weapons -- are serious about disarmament."

Does it really matter if you can completely destroy the enemy several times or 100 times? I don't see how this is significant or shows seriousness about disarmament.

Sheriff wants inmates to pedal for TV rights | Green Tech - CNET News

Sheriff wants inmates to pedal for TV rights | Green Tech - CNET News: "Arpaio installed an energy-generating stationary bike (PDF) attached to a TV when he found that 50 percent of the inmates were overweight, many morbidly so. As long as an inmate is pedaling, the bike will produce 12 volts of energy--just enough to power a 19-inch tube TV. But if an inmate stops pedaling at a moderate speed, the TV shuts off."

Court: FCC has no power to regulate Net neutrality | Politics and Law - CNET News

Court: FCC has no power to regulate Net neutrality | Politics and Law - CNET News: "The Federal Communications Commission does not have the legal authority to slap Net neutrality regulations on Internet providers, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday."

This is a win for the Internet. Federal regulation of the Internet might look good at first but it will almost certainly morph into something bad.

FOXNews.com - Federal Government Jobs Far Outpace Private Sector Counterparts in Pay, Benefits

FOXNews.com - Federal Government Jobs Far Outpace Private Sector Counterparts in Pay, Benefits: "According to information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, federal jobs outpay their private sector counterparts 83 percent of the time."

Learning from What Works | Richard W. Rahn | Cato Institute: Commentary

Learning from What Works | Richard W. Rahn | Cato Institute: Commentary: "Economists, political scientists, reporters and pundits spend too much of their time looking at dysfunctional societies and trying to explain why there are poverty, joblessness and hopelessness. In many ways, Haiti is easy to explain - no rule of law and 200 years of corrupt and incompetent governments. Switzerland is the polar opposite. It has almost no corruption and has the rule of law with honest, competent judges and government administrators. The question should be, 'What can we learn from the Switzerlands of the world about how to do things right' rather than, 'What is wrong with the Haitis of the world?' Switzerland manages to run a smaller government as a share of gross domestic product than the United States and most other countries while providing a higher level of service, security, prosperity and freedom. How does it do that?"

"Health care insurance is subsidized, and everyone has access regardless of income, but there is no 'public option.'"

"In the U.S., roughly two-thirds of government is at the federal level, and one third is at the state and local level. Switzerland is just the opposite, with roughly two-thirds of government being at the state (canton) and local level."

Get Rid of Vague Laws | Timothy Sandefur | Cato Institute: Commentary

Get Rid of Vague Laws | Timothy Sandefur | Cato Institute: Commentary: "There's probably nothing more dangerous to individual rights than vaguely written laws. They give prosecutors and judges undue power to decide whether or not to punish conduct that people did not know was illegal at the time. Vagueness turns the law into a sword dangling over citizens' heads — and because government officials can choose when and how to enforce their own interpretations of the law, vagueness gives them power to make their decisions from unfair or discriminatory motives."

"Last year Justice Antonin Scalia pointed out that if taken literally the honest services law would make it a crime to call in sick to work and go to a ball game instead. Other federal courts have tried to improvise: In 2003 a team of seven judges wrote a long decision patching together a complicated test for determining whether a person is in violation. But six judges on that same court dissented. How can average Americans be expected to understand the law if even federal appellate judges are divided on its meaning?"

FOXNews.com - GOP: End Public Lifeline for Large Financial Institutions

FOXNews.com - GOP: End Public Lifeline for Large Financial Institutions: "End the public lifeline for large financial institutions, Republicans are demanding as they push back against Democratic efforts to set new rules for the financial industry."

Maybe the Republicans shouldn't have started the bailouts if they didn't what the Democrats to continue them.