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Breakfast Scramble (Wednesday)

DavidL's Breakfast Scramble
Why the War on Barbour? From Alex Pareene, Slate [1]:

Corpulent unreconstructed good ol’ boy Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour apparently has a “state plane” that he uses to fly to football games with corporate executives, Politco reports today. Barbour, a former tobacco lobbyist and deluded would-be presidential candidate, has taken the plane “to at least one boxing match,” according to Ben Smith and Byron Tau.

Mississippi has the highest poverty rate in the nation. According to a 2009 study, “a black male born in Mississippi today can expect a shorter life span than the average American in 1960

And from Matt DeLong, Washington Post [2]:

Just a week after coming under fire for saying he didn’t remember the civil-rights era being that bad, Politico reports that Mississippi governor and potential 2012 presidential candidate Haley Barbour (R) has been flying lavishly on the taxpayer’s dime. According to records, Mississippi has spent $500,000 over the past three years on Barbour’s air travel in a private Cessna jet. He has used the plane “to go to fundraisers for himself and other Republican candidates and committees, to football games and to at least one boxing match,” Politico reports.

So Haley Barbour has has access to a state plane.  Barack Obama has access to serveral and 747 uses more fuel in an hour t hat Barbour has in three years.

Republican let the democrats pick their nominee last year and got stuck with the RINO John McCain.  Don’t let the liberal pick the next republican nominee

[3]

Hat tips photo, Michelle Malkin; photo shop, Doug Ross.

J-Nap’s Clown Posse,  from Politic [4]:

National Intelligence Director James Clapper’s obliviousness to a string of terrorism arrests in Britain last week was primarily a public relations gaffe on his part, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said in an interview aired Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Does it seem to you, as it does me, that every Obami failure is attributed to a messaging problem?

That damn racial gap,  Patrick J. Buchanan lauds the American education system, from, World Net Daily [5]:

Asian-Americans outperform all Asian students except for Shanghai-Chinese. White Americans outperform students from all 37 predominantly white nations except Finns, and U.S. Hispanics outperformed the students of all eight Latin American countries that participated in the tests.

African-American kids would have outscored the students of any sub-Saharan African country that took the test (none did) and did outperform the only black country to participate, Trinidad and Tobago, by 25 points.

America’s public schools, then, are not abject failures.

They are educating immigrants and their descendants to outperform the kinfolk their parents or ancestors left behind when they came to America. America’s schools are improving the academic performance of all Americans above what it would have been had they not come to America.

For his good deed of lauding the American education system and the tax payers who foot the bill, Buchanan gets called a racist.

First up Brian, Right Wing Watch [6]:

‘Buchanan Cites Racist Group in Education” Column

Brian is very generous with his use of labels,  ala white, conservative, until Brian gets to the Southern Poverty Law Center, when all of sudden he drops all use of labels.    Ironic that Brian is an anagram of brain, which appears to the only connection between the former and the latter.

Next up Alan Colmes, Liberaland [7]:

Buchanan cites Robert Weissberg, who writes [8] about how “unprepared black students…owe their diplomas to…deception.Weissberg, a former professor at the University of Illinois promotes the theory [9] that blacks and Hispanics have lower IQ’s than whites and Asians.

Weissberg contends that 80 percent of a school’s success depends on two factors: the cognitive ability of the child and the disposition he brings to class – not on texts, teachers or classroom size.

If the brains and the will to learn are absent, no amount of spending on schools, teacher salaries, educational consultants or new texts will matter.

These statements, in a vacuum, are true; however, the pretext by Buchanan is that it’s blacks and Hispanics who lack the cognitive ability and disposition to do well.

It is not that Colmes, can or attempts,  to refute Buchanan, rather Colmes is offended.   Well ev have tried the offended and more spending approach for what fifty years.   To what end?

Cognitive ability and disposition might well be called dare I say,  nature and nurture.

Yet the racial achievement gap is not racist, per se.    It is perfectly politically correct to blame  black students failure to achieve on white society not delivering it to the blacks, from Sarah West, Daily Princetonian [10]:

Education reform must consider the student perspective in order to be successful, panelists agreed in a discussion on quality education, “We the People,” held in McCormick 101 on Tuesday afternoon. Robert Moses and African American studies professor Imani Perry, authors of the book “Quality of Education as a Constitutional Right,” were joined by Lauren Veasey of the Young People’s Project, an education reform organization.

Moses, a former civil rights activist, highlighted the importance of closing the racial gap in education. The civil rights movement removed Jim Crow laws from many facets of American life, “but we didn’t get [Jim Crow] out of education,” Moses said.

It only when it is suggested, with some considerable evidence, that blacks and Hispanics have contributed to their lack of proportional academic success to libtards like Colmes have a cow, throw a hissy fit,and scream racism.

I suggest, if you pick any two demographic groups and any metric, than the chances that the two groups will be statistically equal as measured is near to zero.

Golden Snow Ball,  a record forty-six inches of snowfall in Rochester, fromJeffrey Blackwell and Meaghan McDermott, RocNow [11]:

The snow this month has been slow but steady, boosting Rochester’s December snowfall total to a new high.

According to the National Weather Service in Buffalo, two-tenths of an inch fell at the Greater Rochester International Airport Sunday and set the record for the month at 46.4 inches of snow. The old record of 46.2 was set in 2008

Forty-six inches of snow this month, and I am skiing on an inch of  snow.