He's lost it

In his appraisal of the immigration reform debate in America, Brad Warthen opines that it all boils down to a tasty tomato-and-cheese pie. Really:

But I know that as long as the pizza is this good in this country, they’re going to keep coming.

Read the whole thing. In the history of logical coherence, this has to be the absolute bottom. It just has to be.

Warren Bolton Doesn't Care About Black People

The headline is a take-off of a Kanye West's famous Post-Katrina appraisal of George W. Bush. (For all of those lacking a sense of humor: this is funny because Warren Bolton is African-American himself and, as a Black man in Americ--oh, just forget it.)

Anyway, Bolton writes an odd and not-terribly-useful article that insinuates that Black supporters of school choice are somehow suspect because they...wait for it... are willing to work with conservatives! Oh, someone catch me, I'm about to faint.

Note to Warren Bolton: Some people would rather work with Republicans than lose another generation of kids to low achievement, high dropout rates and the continual cycle of grinding poverty. Just sayin'.

Cindi Scoppe is Out to Lunch

When the supposedly "conservative" South Carolina legislature elected ultra-liberal Don Beatty to the state Supreme Court, the citizens' group Conservatives in Action, uh, went into action.

As with all effort for citizen education, participation, and redress, this outraged State columnist Cindi Scoppe. She simply couldn't stand to see that voters with South Carolina values would come together to express their opposition to the election of a judge who legislates his very different values from the bench. So Cindi wrote this column.

Notice that the column focuses not at all on the claim that this justice is radically left-wing, unresponsive to the people, and not terribly qualified—Scoppe ignores what is the substance of the objection—and focuses instead on the idea that perhaps the opposition tp Beatty includes some people Cindi doesn't like. Boo-hoo.

In the meantime, in today's State we are given an awful object lesson in what happens when liberal judges ascend to the bench: public school child molesters are given ridiculously short sentences.

Some day soon, you may be able to get more years for cockfighting.

Also: Why is the sky blue?

Can someone please explain to me why Lee Bandy, who is nominally retired according to his own byline, is still filing columns that do not have even one scintilla of news in them?

I mean, I understand if you write meaning columns when you're under deadline—hey, we all have to mail it in sometimes—but why now, when you have nothing to say and no editor breathing down your neck?

Saying nothing is actually an improvement on the lies, petty and grand, I read day after day in The State every day.

Brad Warthen Claims to Speak for Jesus

Brad Warthen thinks Jesus Christ is against parental choice in education. Spake Brad:

Of course, I oppose even the more limited funding of Catholic schools with public money.[...]Jesus didn’t fund his ministry with the money St. Matthew had squeezed from the public as a tax collector. He didn’t take from the world; he gave. He told us to do likewise. We Catholics are far too stingy when the collection basket comes around, and that should change. We shouldn’t force Baptists, Jews, agnostics or anyone else to make up for our failing.

First of all, I do not have the words to express how offensive this is. Advocates for parental choice don't go around and pretend that Jesus, if he were alive and in the South Carolina legislature, would co-sponsor Put Parents in Charge. The supposedly theocratic religious right never says that Jesus would have wanted top marginal tax rates at Bill Clinton's 39% rather than George Bush's 35%. Likewise, this obviously falls under the "render unto Caesar" clause.

Second of all, there is no public money going to Catholic schools, Methodist schools, or Hindu Schools etc. There is money going to parents. That's it. How many times do we have to go over this? Parents can send their children to religious schools, secular schools, or schools that teach comparative religion. It's called a choice.

Finally, there is one way in which religion bears on this debate. Currently, public schools practice a fairly hardcore form of secularism. People of faith often say that "they kicked God out of school" and not without reason: a 30-second prayer at the beginning of school would be illegal under the current interpretation of the 1st Amendment. (This is the problem of choosing one default rule for everyone: someone's rights are going to be violated.)

Whether or not the interpretation of the 1st Amendment is correct, religious parents are surely getting the short end of the stick. They are not being allowed to educate their children in their own way. "But they can always send their kid to private school," a naif like Brad might protest.

Now if you're paying thousands of dollars a year in school taxes, you might not have the money left over to also pay for private school.

If the government is going to respect the rights of all kids, it's going to have to allow every parent to have an effective choice—either by giving them vouchers or tax credits. Either way, the resources are parent-controlled, not bureaucracy-controlled.

Every parent must have the right to choose the best education for their child.

Okay, that was a tangent. The original point of this that I wish Brad Warthen would quit his filthy blasphemy and go back to simply acting like an idiot.

Hey Look

Unlike La Socialista, this new blog doesn't suck.

Freedom vs. The State

I thought it would be a cold day in Hell before I saw some dude named Brad sticking up for political free speech on The State's Op-Ed page. I was wrong.

A Moron, That's What!

Brad Warthen wants to tax gasoline to make it $4 per gallon. He also thinks that President Bush's surge plan is a good idea.

Now we know what Warthen really thinks we are. [See the title.]

Separated at Birth?

Roger Federer consistently turns in unbelievable performances on the tennis court, pitilessly punishing his opponents and leaving them depressed and defeated. Brad Warthen proves that he can be just as ruthless in his war against logical consistency and the English language.

Evidence:

This governor showed virtually no interest in our schools in his first term, beyond leading an all-out campaign to undermine taxpayer confidence in the very idea of public education, and pay parents to desert it.

You can argue that Put Parents in Charge was a bad bill. You can argue that it had good intentions but wouldn't have worked. You can argue that it was the other way around.

But unless you are deaf and blind, you cannot argue that Gov. Sanford ignored schools. Moreover, even the most skilled writer usually takes at least two sentences—and indeed often many paragraphs—to contradict himself. And yet Brad Warthen manages to contradict himself in the same sentence.

I would say that Brad's blundering is magnificent but that doesn't do it justice. The guy is damn near superhuman.