United Liberty

Tom Hanks has caught a great deal of controversy for comments he made regarding World War II:

“Back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as ‘yellow, slant-eyed dogs’ that believed in different gods,” he said. “They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different.”

In both interviews, he made the same conclusion:

“Does that sound familiar to what’s going on today?” he said on MSNBC, comparing the 60-year-old conflict to the modern war on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This, of course, raised the ire of some very high-profile conservatives, including the immensely distinguished Victor Davis Hanson:

“Hanks’ comments were sadly infantile pop philosophizing offered by, well, an ignoramus,” wrote Victor Davis Hanson of Pajamas Media.

From Michael Medved’s most recent column comes a statistic that made me take a double-take:

The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, which has surveyed 1,000 adults almost every day for more than two years, shows that even in the midst of high unemployment and bitter political turmoil, people are pleased with their private progress. From 2008 through 2009, participants’ “life evaluations” of their current situation and future expectations rose by more than 5 percentage points. Without exception, every racial group, income level and age cohort showed brightening attitudes, with particularly big improvements among blacks, young adults (18-29) and people of modest means ($24,000 to $48,000 in annual income).

In other words, blacks, young people and the middle class are doing well. When’s the last time you heard that? Additionally came a striking poll regarding health care:

It’s often said by critics of Barack Obama that the president seeks to turn the United States into Europe. In Europe, everyone is taken care off from cradle to grave with welfare, leaving no incentive to have children, work or do much of anything necessary to keep their society on a productive self-replicating path.

There are partial truths there, but there’s also another phenomenon. Europe, and most of the Anglosphere aside from the United States, have been drifting rightward after years of socialism. The Conservative Party in the United Kingdom is enjoying high hopes, Canadian Conservative PM Stephen Harper is in his second term and France and Germany now have their most center-right leadership in recent memory.

What have been the fruits of European center right policy? You’d be surprised.

School choice - Just as the Washington D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program has been dismantled by Democrats, Sweden has enjoyed a successful program. From the Washington Times:

No, I don’t make these things up. All children throughout Sweden get education vouchers. It seems that the citadel of socialism can teach our Congress and teachers unions quite a bit about education choice.

Sweden introduced school vouchers throughout the country in 1992 to deal with exactly the same quality problems we face in our public schools.

Under the program, enacted by a center-right coalition government, children can use a voucher to go to either public schools or one of the growing number of private schools.

Private schools include religious schools and even for-profit schools. One of the largest for-profits - Kunskapsskolan (or “Knowledge School”) - runs 32 schools with about 10,000 students ages 12-18.

A heartbreaking story is told over at CNN, where a twelve year old girl found herself in handcuffs and in a police station after showing her affection for her friends:

There was no profanity, no hate. Just the words, “I love my friends Abby and Faith. Lex was here 2/1/10 :)” scrawled on the classroom desk with a green marker.

Alexa Gonzalez, an outgoing 12-year-old who likes to dance and draw, expected a lecture or maybe detention for her doodles earlier this month. Instead, the principal of the Junior High School in Forest Hills, New York, called police, and the seventh-grader was taken across the street to the police precinct.

Alexa’s hands were cuffed behind her back, and tears gushed as she was escorted from school in front of teachers and — the worst audience of all for a preadolescent girl — her classmates.

If you’ve noticed more and more cases like this, you’re not hallucinating:

We are arresting them at younger and younger ages [in cases] that used to be covered with a trip to the principal’s office, not sending children to jail,” said Emma Jordan-Simpson, executive director of the Children’s Defense Fund, a national children’s advocacy group.

This all comes as a result of post-Columbine school policies, in which zero tolerance has been placed on disciplinary acts in school. This policy is extremely short-sighted, as it creates a traumatic episode in a very vulnerable period of a child’s life - puberty. I’m not a child psychologist, but I strongly doubt that that sort of trauma is going to make anyone less inclined to violence or aggression in the future.

From Politico comes an overview of First Lady Michelle Obama’s counter-obesity plan:

The first lady is undeterred and describes childhood obesity as an “imminently solvable” problem. Her ambitious plan is designed to improve the nutritional quality of school meals, get children to exercise more, provide healthier, affordable food to rural areas and the inner city and help people make healthier choices.

While there’s alot of good-intention government intervention going on here, of the sort that creates new problems for each one it “solves,” there’s one aspect here that is a common sense proposal.

I went to public schools for the duration of my upbringing. I can say from personal experience that the choice of food is deplorable. It never made any sense why the Seattle Public School District’s exclusive contract with Coca-Cola Corp. resulted in an abundance of soda machines with the closest “healthy” option being the sport drink Powerade. Pressure on companies to put healthier options (which a trip to their corporate website will show are available) in public schools is not unreasonable intrusion. After all, those companies are there with the consent of a public institution.

In this bizarre clip, MSNBC host Chris Matthews illustrates well how inefficient government is. In the capital of the most powerful country in the world, snow can’t be plowed and citizens (including myself) are finding themselves ripping through mounds of snow on their own to get where we need to be.

I can tell you from experience that Washington D.C. is a living testament to how inefficient government is. Do not let the glamorous photos of the president in front of the White House fool you - Washington is a depressing town, filled with depressingly unkept federal buildings that look like they haven’t been cleaned in decades and a bureaucracy that is comically inefficient. Getting books from the Library of Congress made dealing with public school administrators look like a trip to the grocery store.

Unfortunately, the logical conclusion doesn’t follow for Chris Matthews. He says instead that he “believes in government” and says the D.C. government should catch the sort of heat that Bush got for his timid response to Hurricane Katrina. Oh well.