The Great Depression and the New Deal

Roosevelt campaigned against Hoover's meddling in the economy, and once elected he became Hoover On Steroids.  His actions extended the Great Depression seven years.  That's not my opinion, it's the opinion of two UCLA economists.

What did Uncle Milton have to say about the Great Depression?


Here's some more information on the subject.  Lefties might call this information "alternative facts".  It's certainly an alternative to their mythology--but the rest of us just call this information "fact".

What To Do About California

The last time Democrats didn't like a Republican president and seceded from the US, things didn't go very well for them.  That's not stopping a bunch of liberals in California from showing their "I hate Trump (and any other Republican)" bona fides and talking about secession.  The author of this article doesn't think that's a good idea for progressivism:

Imagine if President Trump announced that he wanted to oust California from the United States. If it weren't for us, after all, Trump would have won the popular vote he so lusts after by 1.4 million. Blue America would lose its biggest source of electoral votes in all future elections. The Senate would have two fewer Democrats. The House of Representatives would lose 38 Democrats and just 14 Republicans. The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, among the most liberal in the nation, would be changed irrevocably. And the U.S. as a whole would suddenly be a lot less ethnically diverse than it is today...

For decades California has exerted more influence on American politics and culture than vice versa. Secession would not improve our values. But it would practically ensure that the rest of the U.S. would drift farther away from our laid-back tolerance and easygoing diversity. And they'd still be our neighbors, geographic reality unchanged by political independence.

His thesis:  California as the savior of the United States.  I can't be the only person who finds that ludicrous, on any number of levels.  Perhaps, if California were to take over the US, we could have a bullet train from Stockton,CA, to Ottumwa, IA, instead of wherever our currently-designed route from nowhere to nowhere is.

I've long said that California's natural division is between Coastal California and Inland California, and the author of this article agrees:

Efforts to divide California into more manageable and homogeneous parts are as old as the Bear Flag that was raised over the state capitol at statehood in 1850. When I was a legislative staffer in Sacramento in 1980, a state assemblyman named Stan Statham had a serious proposal that attracted bipartisan support. He recognized that California’s people (now 40 million) would be better served if its competing constituencies had more in common.

Lots of people have their favorite maps for new states. For decades, the natural dividing line ran due east from the coast, just north of Bakersfield; it emphasized the differences between northern and southern California. My favorite design was for three states: one centered on Los Angeles, one centered on San Francisco, and everyone else in a third state. More recently, in 2009, then GOP assemblyman Bill Maze proposed creating two states: a Coastal California state and an Inland California state. The big population centers of San Francisco and Los Angeles would be in the first, but the inland state would include some large coastal counties such as Orange (home of Disneyland) and San Diego.

Instead we'll just bumble along, latching on to every crazy liberal talking point and policy, completely disregarding common sense, history, or human nature, pretending that unicorn farts smell like roses.

California Teachers Pensions

Recently I wrote about CalSTRS, the California State Teachers Retirement System, and its plans to build yet another building with my retirement money despite being underfunded.  Well let's see what the major Sacramento newspaper has to say about STRS:

CalSTRS will consider lowering its official investment forecast in a move expected to require higher contributions from state taxpayers once again for the teachers’ pension fund. The cost to the state could be an additional $153 million starting with the next fiscal year.

The board of the $196 billion California State Teachers’ Retirement System will consider the change to its “discount rate” at a meeting next week in San Diego.

A staff recommendation released late Wednesday, citing economic conditions and other factors, calls for lowering the rate from 7.5 percent to 7.25 percent. Keeping the rate at 7.5 percent “is not recommended since the probability of achieving this return is less than 50%,” the report said...

Public pension funds have been lowering their investment forecasts in recent years to reflect expectations of reduced returns. But the moves have come slowly and somewhat reluctantly because of political concerns: The less money they make from investments, the more the pension funds need from taxpayers and employees. That could intensify calls for pension reforms that could result in lower retirement benefits.

Three years ago, the Legislature agreed to raise contributions to CalSTRS by billions of dollars a year. Assembly Bill 1469 affected the state, local school districts and teachers themselves. For example, the annual contributions from school districts is growing from $2 billion to $6 billion, although the increases are being phased in over several years.

The 2014 law does give CalSTRS some latitude to impose higher rates on state taxpayers without going back to the Legislature for permission. According to the staff report, Gov. Jerry Brown’s budget proposal for the new fiscal year includes an additional $153 million for CalSTRS, bringing the annual contribution to $2.8 billion.

California teachers: how confident are you that you'll get the retirement you've been promised, the one that you've paid into on the expectation that you'll get what you've been promised? I would suggest that we should all be a little less confident today than we were last week.

When All You Have Is A Hammer, Every Problem Looks Like A Nail.

When you're a liberal, every problem is caused by sexist males:

A Democratic state senator said that the sexism of union workers is to blame for Missouri’s passage of right to work.

The Republican-controlled state Senate voted 21-12 on Thursday to ban coercive unionism. Missouri is on the verge of becoming the 28th right-to-work state, as newly elected GOP Gov. Eric Greitens has pledged to sign the legislation, which prohibits businesses from making union membership a condition for employment.

The swiftness of the bill’s passage in the statehouse angered state Sen. Jamilah Nasheed (D.), who took to the Senate floor to blame union workers for giving Republicans control of the state. Nasheed said that the GOP sweep of in the gubernatorial, U.S. Senate, and presidential races reflected that male union members “don’t like a woman ruling the world.”

Nothing else explains it, eh, Jamilah?

Republicans have been, are, and hopefully always will be the party of individual freedom.  The choice not to join or financially support a union, currently a right in a majority of states, will hopefully some day be a right all Americans--men and women, Jamilah--can enjoy.

Training People To Hate

If you want to build a team, if you want cooperation, if you want people to get along, you focus on what they have in common, not what makes them different.  Perhaps this explains why the left wants to divide Americans along race, gender, and any other lines they come across.  This certainly explains why leftist university administrators have turned their schools into cauldrons of boiling hate:

A freshman at Princeton University, an Ivy League school in New Jersey, penned an article in Quillette​ discussing the hostile climate that the university fosters in 21st century America. Titled "Diversity for the Sake of Democracy," Carrie Pritt started the article with the following words: “Stand up if you identify as Caucasian.” Pritt follows this hook by explaining how the leaders of an orientation event deliberately divided people into various demographics.

Pritt follows that this was part of a "diversity" event:

This mandatory orientation event was designed to help us appreciate our diversity as a student body during the first week of classes. But what did it really accomplish? In compressing us into isolated communities based on our race, religion or gender, the minister belittled every other piece of our identities. He faced a crowd of singular young adults and essentially told them that their heritage outweighed their humanity.  The message was clear: know your kind and stick to it. Don’t risk offending people from other backgrounds by trying to understand their worldviews.

She continues by explaining how Princeton has become "disturbingly homogenous" in its political leanings from faculty and students, citing political correctness and walk-outs from non-progressive speakers on campus. In addition, she mentions how professors and students openly referred to Donald Trump supporters as "uneducated bigots" and said anyone who opposed Hillary Clinton is sexist. Pritt further explains that this is not only dangerous for college campuses, but also the United States as a whole.

Cool Currency

I remember exchanging dollars for this 2000 lire note on Elba when I visited Italy in 1976.

click to enlarge

Imagine, celebrating science on your currency!  The 1000 lire note celebrated opera, having Giuseppe Verdi on the obverse and the Teatro Alla Scala on the reverse.

Who Could Have Seen This Coming?

Anyone who's passed Economics 101, that's who:

Restaurants are rapidly going out of business in the Bay Area, after San Francisco passed a $15 minimum wage law in 2014 and the State of California followed suit in 2016. Yet the media are struggling to make the connection between high minimum wages and restaurant closures.

The East Bay Times, for example, asked Tuesday: “What’s behind the spate of recent Bay Area restaurant closures?” It barely mentioned new minimum wage laws, brushing them aside as if they were largely insignificant.

It is true, of course, that merely because one thing follows another does not prove that the second was caused by the first. The “post hoc, ergo propter hoc” fallacy that is familiar to first-year economics students would apply to this case as well. Yet that does not mean the prior factor should be excluded as a cause. But that is largely what the Times seems to have done, even though the closure of businesses and the loss of restaurant jobs is exactly what critics of the minimum wage hikes predicted.

Fewer restaurants, fewer jobs.

Die? Really?

It shouldn't come as any surprise to my regular readers that I was not President Obama's biggest fan.  I've been quite clear that I consider him an abject failure as a president.  That being said, though, I never wished him death.  That would be a bit, uh, over the top, no?  Wishing death on a president?

It's pretty clear that not every teacher agrees with me:

When you send your child off to school in the morning, especially on a historic Inauguration Day, is there ever a moment when you imagine something like this could happen in front of the class? At W.H. Adamson High School in Dallas, Texas, art students were treated to an epic meltdown by their teacher, Payal Modi, who screamed "DIE!" and shot President Trump's image with a water gun while students watched his inauguration by video. Someone filmed it and Modi posted it to her Instagram account. She has since removed the video, but it is traveling around Twitter.

Initially she wasn't ashamed of her behavior, as she posted the video to her own Instagram account.  But since it took place during school, I wonder what, if anything, will happen:

The school released a statement saying, “The teacher has been placed on administrative leave and the district has opened an investigation. This is a personnel matter and, as such, we cannot comment."

Of course they can't.

I don't think she should be fired.  No one got hurt, no one could have gotten hurt.  It was poor judgement, nothing more, and should be treated that way.  Hopefully the shame of having everyone know she acted like an immature idiot will be part of the punishment.  Hopefully that shame was at least partly responsible for her having removed the video from her account.

One Reason Why So Many People Don't Trust Public Education

From the National Council on Teacher Quality:

Since 2009, the number of states requiring school districts to incorporate evidence of student learning as at least a significant part of teacher evaluations has grown to 30 states. Despite clear legislative intent, rules or guidance in 28 of these 30 states allow a teacher to earn an overall rating of effective or higher, even if a teacher scores poorly on student learning.

The report, Running in Place: How New Teacher Evaluations Fail to Live Up to Promises, released today by the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), shows how regulations and guidance from state educational agencies allow schools to continue to rate nearly all teachers effective.

Even if teachers receive the lowest possible score on their ability to increase student learning, they can still earn a rating of effective in 16 states. Two more states allow teachers who receive the second lowest score on the student growth component of their evaluation to earn an overall rating of effective or higher. Another 10 states leave scoring up to districts to determine.

“State legislators made a big deal about their changes to teacher evaluations. They claimed new laws ensure that only teachers who proved their ability to raise student achievement would be rated effective or better,” said Kate Walsh, President and Founder of NCTQ. “Unfortunately, state education agencies preserved the status quo by creating giant loopholes in the criteria for how teachers can earn an effective rating.”

Of the 30 states that require student growth to be at least a significant factor in evaluations, only two —Indiana and Kentucky—have clear policies that require teachers to meet specific goals on student learning in order to be rated effective.

In the remaining 28 states, a teacher who earns a poor score on student growth measures may be rated as effective, as long as that teacher has high scores on observations and other non-growth factors. This essentially negates any real influence of the student growth component.

“As a result, the percentage of teachers rated effective or higher has been relatively consistent,” said Elizabeth Ross, Managing Director of State Policy at NCTQ. “Despite state efforts, nearly all teachers continue to earn ratings of effective or higher, despite student test scores and research which indicates that these ratings are unlikely to accurately reflect teachers’ performance.”

“Retaining the status quo prevents schools, districts, and states from reliably basing key personnel decisions on evaluation ratings,” said Ross. “States should not, as a matter of policy, strive to give more teachers poor ratings; however, if all teachers are labeled effective, then schools, districts, and states cannot use evaluation results to intervene to support teachers who would benefit from more help.”

An emphasis on student growth is important because evidence shows that teachers who increase students’ learning positively influence students’ immediate and long-term outcomes.

The report calls on states to strengthen their current evaluation policies. NCTQ suggests that states prevent teachers from earning an effective rating if they are ineffective at increasing student learning. At the very least, states should ensure that teachers cannot be rated effective if they receive the lowest possible rating on the student growth component of their evaluation.

NCTQ’s report, Running in Place, also suggests that states have an opportunity under ESSA, the new federal education law, to carefully consider the impact of student growth in their teacher evaluation systems. As states continue their work to improve teacher quality, teacher evaluation must evolve from an exercise of compliance to a process that identifies an individual teacher’s strengths and weaknesses in an effort to support continual development.

NCTQ also recommends that states track the results of the components within the evaluation framework and offer districts technical assistance where student learning measures and observation measures are significantly misaligned. Tennessee is a strong example of a state that tracks this misalignment and publishes the results.

To read the study, click here.

Those of you who were so happy when the Every Child Succeeds Act replaced the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, note that the new law allows for teacher evaluations based on student tests.

Leftie View of Dissent

A New Procedure

The current master's course I'm taking--my last one ever!--doesn't have abstract algebra as a prerequisite, but it should.  Terms and ideas are tossed around so casually with the obvious assumption that the students understand. 

I was an applied math major.  Until this master's program I'd never taken a math history course or an abstract algebra course.  I'm feeling a bit behind the 8 ball.

My alarm goes off at 5:00 each morning, but I don't really need to be out of bed until 6.  I set the alarm so early so I have plenty of time to wake up and to get on my elliptical trainer.  I can't help being old, I can help being fat.

But I don't.  I just lie in bed till 6 am and then get up.

I try to spend 90 min a day on my master's course--but then I also have to study for the cumulative final exam which covers 6 of the 10 courses I've taken over the past 5 years.  That's a lot of time per day.  It just is.

This morning, though, I hit upon the idea of getting up before 6 and putting in some studying for the cumulative exam.  Even at just 15-20 min per day, I should have an excellent review completed by the time the exam rolls around in April!  While I'm a fat lazy slug and can't motivate myself to get out of bed to exercise, I should be quite able to motivate myself to get out of bed to study.

So that's my new plan.

Blogiversary

Twelve years and over 10,700 posts ago, I started this blog.

Holy crap!

The Sky, Part 2

If there was any rain today it fell before I woke up.  The weather is supposed to be clear through next weekend.

As I drove home today, the sky to the west was starting to clear.  Blue was visible, and actual sunlight!  To the east, though, the sky appeared not only ominous but vicious.

That last storm isn't done with the mountains just yet.

The Sky

A friend came over yesterday morning to help me with my abstract algebra class.  I might almost possess the conceit that I'm beginning to understand something.

As he was leaving, I looked into the sky above the houses across the street--and it looked ominous.  The storm that was supposed to hit Saturday night looked like it was already brewing.  I don't know about the mountains, but last night's rain didn't seem to be much.

This morning there was actual blue sky and sun!  By afternoon it began to give way, and it's already looking kind of dark outside with a few raindrops falling.  Accuweather says rain tonight and tomorrow, and then clear for the rest of the week.

I guess we'll see.  I myself am not done with rain yet, whether or not the reservoirs are full.  Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow in the mountains, as that is our spring and summer water.

I'm tired of living in a drought.  At least I should be able to water my lawn more than 2 or 3 days a week this summer.

A Tale of Two States

Here's Wisconsin, run pretty much by Republicans the last several years:

Wisconsin's biennial budget picture got $714 million brighter Wednesday, with a projected deficit turning into a small surplus, according to the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau.

Fiscal bureau director Bob Lang reported tax revenues are expected to be $455 million higher than what the Department of Administration projected in November. Also, spending in the current fiscal year that ends June 30 is expected to be $226 million lower — largely due to lower-than-expected Medicaid enrollment — and other revenues are expected to be $33 million higher.

Here's California, run overwhelmingly by Democrats the last several years:

Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration miscalculated costs for the state Medi-Cal program by $1.9 billion last year, an oversight that contributed to Brown’s projection of a deficit in the upcoming budget, officials acknowledged this week.

The administration discovered accounting mistakes last fall, but it did not notify lawmakers until the administration included adjustments to make up for the errors in Brown’s budget proposal last week. The Democratic governor called for more than $3 billion in cuts because of a projected deficit he pegged at $1.6 billion...

Brown’s deficit projection was driven by more than just the accounting error, Palmer said, noting that California tax collections came in below expectations for most of the first half of the fiscal year.

The massive hole in the Medi-Cal budget surprised state lawmakers.

Are there any states that are run by Democrats that are in good financial shape, even in the short term?

Teaching Math

I was a big fan of Liping Ma's Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics.  She asserted that Chinese elementary teachers had PUFM (profound understanding of fundamental mathematics) and too many American elementary teachers did not. (I've written several posts mentioning Liping Ma.)

There is a big difference between Shanghai teacher training and US/UK teacher training, just as there is a big difference between Shanghai elementary student math expectations and US/UK elementary student math expectations.  I was reminded of this after reading a BBC article:

When the Chinese city of Shanghai took part in the three-yearly Pisa test of 15-year-olds' academic ability in 2009 and 2012 it topped the table in maths, leaving countries such as Germany the UK and the US - and even Singapore and Japan - trailing in its wake. What is its secret?

The life of a teacher in a Shanghai primary school differs quite a bit from that of teachers in most other countries. For one thing each teacher specialises in a particular subject - if you teach maths, you teach only maths.

These specialist teachers are given at least five years of training targeted at specific age groups, during which they gain a deep understanding both of their subject and of how children learn.

After qualifying, primary school teachers will typically take just two lessons per day, spending the rest of their time assisting students who require extra help and discussing teaching techniques with colleagues.

"If you compare that to an English practitioner in a primary school now, they might have five days of training in their initial teacher training year, if they're doing the School Direct route, for example," says Ben McMullen, head teacher of Ashburnham Community School, London...

There are other differences too. School days are longer - from 07:00 until 16:00 or 17:00. Class sizes are larger. And lessons are shorter - each is 35 minutes long, followed by 15 minutes of unstructured play.

There is no streaming according to ability and every student must understand before the teacher moves on. In the early years of school basic arithmetic is covered more slowly than in the UK, says McMullen, who has travelled to Shanghai in one of the groups of British teachers sent every year by the Department of Education to watch and learn.

"They looked at our curriculum and were horrified by how much we were trying to teach," he says.

"They wouldn't teach fractions until year four or five. By that time, they assume that the children were very fluent in multiplication and division.

"This is essentially a 'teaching for mastery' approach: covering less and making smaller incremental movements forward, ensuring the class move together as one and that you go over stuff again and again until it's truly understood."

There's something to be said for this approach.  And if you believe that all children should learn, and you believe that education is the most likely approach to alleviating or eliminating the effects of poverty, then this should make sense.

"Spiraling" and "exposure" don't work as well as mastering it the first time.  On the other hand, I'm entirely against not allowing the brightest students to move forward at a faster pace.  While I want every student to have mastered the basic curriculum, I don't want every student to exit the curriculum at the same exact spot.

Women's March--Let's Start Making Fun Of It Early, Before Everyone Else Chimes In

It was blasted 38 years ago--by Monty Python:

The Women’s March on Washington—ostensibly about feminism, but not-so-subtextually intended as a demonstration against the Trump presidency—has run into issues, if not problems.

Black feminists have turned off white women with calls to check their privilege. The march’s inclusion of a pro-life group as a partner in a march that cites abortion rights as one of its “unity principles” was proven controversial and “horrified” the usual suspects. The march has now disowned the pro-life group. Given the march’s problems with alienating women, it is not surprising that the enterprise has had some difficulty attracting men.

The New York Times helpfully explains that “[t]his brand of feminism — frequently referred to as ‘intersectionality’ — asks white women [and presumably everyone else] to acknowledge that they have had it easier.” Moreover: “[T]hese debates over race also reflect deeper questions about the future of progressivism in the age of Trump. Should the march highlight what divides women, or what unites them? Is there room for women who have never heard of ‘white privilege’?”

In the wake of these stories, Heather Wilhelm and Noah C. Rothman have written about the self-devouring ouroboros of intersectionality. However, it may be up to a British comedy troupe to demonstrate the more basic political problem. In “Monty Python’s Life of Brian,” a man born next door to Jesus Christ endures mistaken identity problems. Along the way, for personal and political reasons, Brian attempts to join the People’s Front of Judea, a group rebelling against the Roman occupation of Judea...

This sketch-within-a-movie did not come out of nowhere. In the video commentary for the film, John Cleese (Reg) explains that the scene was a satire on the proliferation of left-wing revolutionary parties in the United Kingdom during the period when the movie was written and shot.

Incidentally, no one will mistake Cleese for a Tory, let alone an American conservative. He has, for example, cited Fox News as an example of the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is the theory that the incompetent fail to realize their own incompetence or accurately estimate the skills of others. Yet Cleese and his fellow white, male comics (now old and some dead, not just resting) understood that splinter parties of any ideology generally start off as counter-productive and usually end as just plain silly.

Here's the clip:

Cool Currency

Who doesn't admire this pre-euro note from Greece?

click to enlarge

Make Math Great Again

Today one of our administrators told me that principals in our district had all been sent an email regarding tomorrow's inauguration.  There were to be no displays of partisanship or anything that might possibly conceivably cause any student not to feel "welcome" or "safe" in our schools.  When a nearby teacher suggested that I put "Make Math Great Again" on the board as a joke, this administrator--who is usually as cool as a cucumber--was pointed in his (we only have men as administrators at my school) response, and it was a big fat NO.  I got the impression from our subsequent conversation that our district was looking to jump on someone even for something so innocuous.

Does anyone think that such an email would have gone out had Clinton won?  Me, either.  In fact, I asked that question of one of our very liberal teachers today, and he stated in very strong terms that he didn't think so, either.

The message being sent out, and it's not a subtle one, is that there's a "right" and a "wrong" outcome to this past election, and the "wrong" outcome is what we got.  Those Americans who support the "wrong" outcome are "bad" people.  The left decries "othering" people, except when it suits them.

Lest Anyone Forget

I've written many times about what an abject failure Barack Obama has been as president.  What's less often identified, however, is how much of a failure he has been by his own standards:

Ten years ago today, then-Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois announced he was taking the first steps to run for president in 2008. In a three-minute video, he explained why — and what he hoped to accomplish.

It's remarkable as a historic artifact — God bless YouTube! — but if you watch the whole thing (it's only 187 seconds long!), you are reminded of the central reason Obama ran for president: to fix  broken politics.

Here's the key passage in Obama's exploratory committee announcement:

America's faced big problems before. But today our leaders in Washington seem incapable of working together in a practical, common-sense way. Politics has become so bitter and partisan, so gummed up by money and influence that we can't tackle the big problems that demand solutions. That's what we have to change first. We have to change our politics and come together around our common interests and concerns as Americans.

The big idea at the heart of Obama's candidacy was that he — because of his background, proven résumé and the historic nature of his candidacy — was uniquely suited to solve the partisan gridlock that had seized our politics under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. That he could bring us all together through an appeal to our better angels and our shared values — and, in so doing, create a government that worked for all of us.

Looking back now, Obama's announcement video feels almost quaint.

Quaint is one word for it.

Given his history there was no reason to believe that Obama would be anything other than what has shown himself to be--arrogant, inflexible, exceedingly partisan, incompetent.  Very early on in the Obama presidency, Instapundit Glenn Reynolds would state that a repeat of the Carter administration would be the best case scenario, and he would repeat that statement periodically--because he turned out to be not only correct, but prescient.

I have a friend who voted for President Obama at least once, certainly in 2008.  He was convinced that Obama was uniquely positioned to help race relations in this country, and on that basis alone voted for him.  Today that friend doesn't have much that's good to say about Obama, and with good reason--he turned most everything he touched into a disaster, especially race relations:

There is little doubt, except to his die-hard supporters (which includes a vast majority of the mainstream media), that his failures are legion.  Perhaps the most telling and egregious of which is the current state of race relations in the United States.  As President and a man of African descent, Barack Obama was in a position to permanently mend fences and end the racial politics bubbling beneath the surface over the past few decades.  However true to his quasi-Marxist upbringing as well as being steeped in racial identity politics, he chose to exploit and exacerbate racial tensions for political objectives.  The end-product of this nihilistic approach is revealed in a poll taken by Washington Post/ABC News in July of 2016 wherein 64% of Americans believe race relations are generally bad as compared to 66% who thought race relations were generally good in April of 2009.

Barack Obama, and virtually all of his fellow travelers, both white and black, on the Left (i.e. the Democratic Party), view the African-American population as both useful pawns in their quest for power and as helpless mascots to be pitied, paraded about and bought off whenever useful to either the overriding political or societal cause...

That the President of the United States would deliberately and with malice be party to this exploitation and extortion is beyond the pale and will forever be a stain on what tattered shreds of his legacy remains.

I'm just going to say it.  This is what you get when you vote for a person solely because of his/her skin color (or sex, or religion).  This is what you get with an Affirmative Action vote, a vote for someone's physical appearance over any reasonable qualifications.

I'm sure some of you are horrified at that, but you shouldn't be.  You know it's true.  If Obama weren't black, would anyone have voted for him, a minor politician and community organizer--especially over the vaunted Dowager Duchess of Chappaqua?  Of course not.  And thus my point.

He was going to disappoint.  He was going to fail.  That he failed so spectacularly--well, I guess that's something to marvel over.