Columbia Public Schools and diversity training: part two

The Columbia Daily Tribune recently published a story about the CPS’s continuing two-year-long effort to promote diversity and equity. Please refer to our earlier post on this subject. CPS has now contracted for training services with the National Conference for Community and Justice of Metropolitan St Louis, a self-proclaimed “recognized leader” fighting against “bias, bigotry, and discrimination.” So far 340 district employees have been trained. The stated goal is to instill “culturally competent practices and beliefs.” Clearly the CPS must believe that something is terribly wrong with its staff.

What is wrong, in our opinion, is the destructive politically correct agenda behind this effort. The desire to control beliefs should give us all pause.

2013 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,100 times in 2013. If it were a cable car, it would take about 18 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Young Democrats, the future of our country

81: Percentage of young Democrats who approve of the Affordable Care Act, according to December poll by Harvard’s Institute of Politics.

58: Percentage of young Democrats who approve of “Obamacare,” which is the same thing.

Source: Associated Press

Troglo

The next Messiah and constitutional government

In an interview with Piers Morgan the television journalist and personality Barbara Walters recently stated this about President Barack Hussein Obama:

We thought he was going to be — I shouldn’t say this at Christmas time — but the next Messiah.

This is an astonishing admission and not just because of the use of the term ‘messiah’ to a political figure. The telltale pronoun ‘we’ reveals that the great majority of the journalistic fraternity failed to see through Mr Obama’s false promises and lies. Groupthink and naivete gripped those on the left who longed for a fundamental transformation of American society and government, not to speak of healing the planet wounded by the misdeeds of the Great Satan.

Evan Thomas, an editor of the once important magazine Newsweek, made a similar comment in 2009 on the television program Hardball during a discussion of President Obama’s celebrated Cairo speech, ‘A new beginning:’

I mean in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above – above the world, he’s sort of God.

Clearly Mr Obama is above it all, no mere mortal, at least a demiurge.

Christmas blessings to one and all

No love that in a family dwells,
No carolling in frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single Truth compare –
That God was man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine.

These lines are from the poem, Christmas, by Sir John Betjeman, former poet laureate of the British Isles. Our thanks to Dr Gene Veith for posting the poem. For his post and the full poem, click here.

Troglo

Governor Nixon and corporate welfare: the case of Boeing

To induce the Boeing Corporation to build the new 777X airliners in Missouri, the Governor has convened a special session of the legislature to consider his plan to give the aerospace manufacturer millions in tax credits and other incentives. An Associated Press story reports that one of the Governor’s scenarios predicts the creation of 8,000 jobs at a cost of $ 1.74 billion in incentives over several decades. This works out to $ 217,500 per job created. All the Governor’s scenarions predict that new taxes collected will exceed the cost in tax expenditures.

We note the following:

Government analyses such as those from the Governors office are usually based on faulty assumptions and rarely pan out as predicted. Among other problems, they fail to account for the opportunity cost of the tax credits. The analyses we have seen usually show that a lower general level of taxation is more stimulative and creates more new jobs than do targeted tax credits. The tax breaks for one huge corporation will likely come from increased levies on Missouri citizens and businesses. Do the governor’s analyses account for the jobs lost from excess taxation? It could well be the case that the net jobs created would be negative. Rushed analyses controlled by a political governor’s office do not inspire confidence.