America’s public education system is a lot like the Chicago Cubs: both have become so accustomed to failure that it has become an accepted way-of-life.

While there might be something loveable and comical about a continuously lousy baseball team, there is not a single redeeming thing to be said about perpetually bad public schools.

A nation that tolerates bad public schools is a nation with a bleak future.

That is why during the week of January 23 -29, school choice advocates from around the country are joining together to wake Americans out of their complacent stupor.

It’s called “National School Choice Week.”  The goal of these seven days is to raise awareness among our fellow citizens about the need for school choice.  We believe that the only way all American school children are going to receive a quality education is if all families are allowed to choose the school option that best meets their needs.

“National School Choice Week” is not about elevating one school option above any others.  Instead, we want parents to be free to choose from all schooling options: charter schools, religious schools, private schools, virtual schools, traditional public schools. . .whatever works best for the children, that’s what we’re for.

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There have been reports – here, here, and here– that Barack Obama has approached William M. Daley about becoming the White House Chief of Staff.  If true, these reports are very interesting, indeed.

You see: Bill Daley has a history. On Christmas Eve, 2009 – a few hours after the Democrats in the US Senate shoved through a version of Obamacare adorned with colorful provisions nicknamed the Cornhusker Kickback, the Louisiana Purchase, the Connecticut Compromise, and Gatorade (sometimes called the Florida Flim-Flam) – the gentleman in question published an op-ed in The Washington Post, warning his fellow Democrats that they were in danger of bringing about a realignment in favor of the Republicans.

After alluding to the announced retirements of four centrist Democrats in the House and to Parker Griffith’s switch to the Republican side, Daley argued that “the Democratic Party — my lifelong political home — has a critical decision to make: Either we plot a more moderate, centrist course or risk electoral disaster not just in the upcoming midterms but in many elections to come.”

The political dangers of this situation could not be clearer.

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Former presidential advisor and best-selling author Dick Morris believes that newly elected Republican legislators in Michigan, Indiana, Pennsylvania and other states will explore school choice options to help remedy huge budget deficits.

In an interview with EAGtv, Morris said the failures of the nation’s public education system are obvious, and are tied to a lack of competition and choice inherent in the capitalistic system America was founded on. The reality of enormous state budget deficits will force newly elected lawmakers to return to those principles, Morris said.

“They are going to say ‘Well, do I want to spend $13,000 per student in a public school, or a better education at $8,000 in a charter school,’” Morris told EAGtv. “I think they are going to see the value of the $8,000.”

National School Choice Week, which runs January 23 – 29, will be a key factor in highlighting education options available. (more…)

Dick Morris has picked up on a theme Education Action Group has been trumpeting for months: public employee union contracts, including school employee contracts, are unsustainable and have several states on the verge of fiscal collapse.

Recently on Fox News, Morris suggested California, Michigan, Illinois, New York, and Connecticut are the top five most likely to default, given the severity of their situation and the unlikelihood of the Feds or bond holders coming to the rescue.

“Education Action Group has been way ahead of the curve on this,” Morris told me.  “EAG has been showing the major spending problems, stemming from outrageous contracts, for quite some time.”

Buffalo Public Schools revealed recently that it spent $9 million last year alone on elective surgery for employees.  Coverage for such an extravagance, by its very nature taking funds away from the education of children, was due to the collective bargaining agreement.

In Milwaukee, the school district pays nearly $24,000 per employee for health insurance because such lavish benefits are demanded by the union. (more…)

No matter what happens on November 2^nd, 2010 will be the year that conservatives won.  Patriotic conservatives of all flavors, have risen up in extraordinary ways, in every corner of the country.  It appears all but certain that Speaker Nancy Pelosi will be dethroned. Dick Morris even predicts as many as 100 new Republican Congressmen giving many people really high expectations for the new Congress.

Others fear that for all their trouble from organizing, holding rallies and knocking on doors, they will only replace the leftist Democrats with RINO Republicans who will squander the victory.  Will we get Speaker Boehner, or a fresh new conservative leader who will truly take a big stick to big government.   A closer look at the numbers should give conservatives reason to be really excited and also a cause for continued resolve.

If you want a conservative Congress, you have to ask yourself just what kind of conservative are you after.  Drew Kurlowski, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Missouri who studies voting behavior and partisanship, referred me to a dataset popular with political science academics called DW-Nominate.  It is a tremendous resource that meticulously compiles the voting records of the Congress going back to the 1st Congress.  If you want to know who George Washington’s favorite conservative was, this is your site.  Moreover, they settled on a definition of “conservative” that is tremendously useful.  Move over “fiscal conservative” and “social conservative” and make room for (limited) “government intervention in the economy”.  Let’s call it L’GIE.  So who are the liggies?

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With less than a month to go before Democrats across the country face their fate, one would hope that they are reflective enough to ask themselves where they went wrong and how their out-of-touch liberal policies have failed the American people. According to a recent poll by Gallup, Congress has an 18 percent approval rating, and CNN/Time has President Obama’s disapproval rating at 54 percent. It seems the tide has changed since the 2008 election. At the end of September, Congress left Washington without passing a budget and failed to even address the largest tax increases ever to hit the American people that will come in January.

Citizens United Production’s latest documentary, “Battle for America” with Dick Morris, examines why Americans have such disdain for President Obama and his imperial Congress. The American people are angry. With an unemployment rate hovering around 9.6 percent and our national debt exceeding $13 trillion, Americans want real change… not the kind of change they were duped into believing two years ago. In 2008, the American people voted for what was sold as moderate and pragmatic leadership. Americans were in desperate need of a government that would focus on jobs and our troubled economy. Unfortunately, the Obama-Pelosi-Reid machine decided to pass the rest of Lyndon Johnson’s social welfare program instead.

During the 2006 election, Nancy Pelosi proclaimed that the Democrats would “drain the swamp” that is Washington, D.C. However, it looks as if her “swamp” is as polluted and infected as ever as evidenced by the backroom deals made during the health care debate and the ethics troubles facing former Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel (D-NY) and other House Democrats. The truth is that Nancy Pelosi’s swamp can’t be drained because it is the bloated and (nearly) bankrupt government created by her and her colleagues that keeps it filled. Our country is drowning and suffocating in an out-of-control bureaucracy.

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In his 2007 book, Outrage, Dick Morris said it best: “There’s nothing wrong with America’s schools that breaking the power of the teachers unions wouldn’t cure.”

Few have had the courage to put it that directly.  Our organization’s similarly blunt language puts a target on our back, but when you deal with organized labor, you know that comes with the territory.  Expecting unions to act like professional organizations is like expecting the government to be frugal.  It’s not in their DNA.

As Education Action Group Foundation chronicles daily on NEAexposed.com and AFTexposed.com, the national teachers unions and their state affiliates bully and punish school boards and administrators during contract negotiations and school elections.  They work aggressively to elect union sympathizers to local school boards, then up end up negotiating friendly contracts with the candidates they just helped to elect.  It’s a corrupt system that works to  the detriment of children, parents and taxpayers.

And the teachers unions’ answer for school financial problems is always “more taxes,” rather than offering a few concessions that would save schools a ton of money.

When I was invited to speak to the Americans for Prosperity Tax Day rally at the state capitol in Lansing, Michigan last week, it was a first for me.  I had never spoken at such an event.  It was probably one of the few speeches around the country that zeroed in on the pirates of public education: the teachers unions.

The understanding that teachers unions are the problem, not the cure for our public schools, is finally starting to sink in with the public. Even President Obama, whose campaign collected millions from the teachers unions, has come out in favor of school reforms that the unions violently object to.

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I just made a donation in Michelle Malkin’s honor to the GOP.

Let me say right up front, I’m not a religious guy.  I support Republicans because they are the party of Small Business, they are the party of Liberty.

On the moral stuff, the personal stuff, the family stuff, I’m a State’s Rights guy.  The Federal government isn’t meant to concern itself with social policy.   You don’t like something, you can vote with your feet.

Also, I like strippers.  Not so much strippers themselves, or even strip clubs anymore (I’m getting old), but I like living in a country unafraid of pole dancing.   And in my youth, I was certainly comfy with two drink minimums and single moms working their way through college.  In 1996, I picked up a truck load of surfers in Newport Beach, drove them to go vote for Bob Dole, and then we high tailed it to Mermaids next to the John Wayne Airport.

Life isn’t all debauchery.  Character still counts.   Everyone doesn’t have to be me.  So unless they are knocking on my door, or trying to teach my kid evolution is a lie, Christians don’t bother me in the slightest.   I know many Christians are my brother in the land of live and let live.

Growing up, my favorite Republicans were Roger Stone and Dick Morris…  this is my Republican party.

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Census 2010: overreaching and out of bounds. Intrusive. Harassing. I have now received two Census forms and thirteen or fourteen notices from the Census Bureau, and they are still coming.

For the past month I have been called, harassed and visited numerous times by a Pamela Childs of the Census Bureau, who was pursuing me for an interview. Knowing my rights under the law, even under the current Obama coup, I did not respond. I filled out my form — that which is required by law — but still received calls, visits, and notes. Daily.

At one point, I left a message saying I would not speak to her. Period. Mind you, I already filled out and sent in my form the day after I got it.

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The retirement of Evan Bayh is the latest heralding of difficult 2010 election year for the Democrats.  It is also a symptom of Obama’s mid 40s approval rating.  Smart Democrats know that the average midterm election year losses for the President’s party, when his approval rating is below 50%, is 41 seats in the House.  Three Presidents in the modern era suffered such a fate – Johnson, Ford and Bill Clinton.  Of those three, only Clinton went on to win a second term.  While it is likely Obama will suffer huge mid-term losses, it is more than unlikely that he will enjoy Clinton’s revival.

Clinton suffered the loss of 54 House seats in his first midterm election, despite a growing economy, because he broke his middle class tax cut promise – and the Republicans were smart enough to unanimously oppose that and run on the Contract With America.  Despite the loss of the House for the first time in 40 years, Clinton won reelection.

Clinton was able to win reelection in part because Bob Dole was not an effective candidate for the Republicans on the tax issue.  Clinton also famously triangulated in 1995 and 1996 with the help of longtime strategist Dick Morris.  Dropping ideology for practicality, in 1995 and 1996, Clinton pushed a national campaign to prevent teen pregnancy, issued an order clarifying the rights of religious expression in schools,  supported uniforms for public schools, banned human cloning, signed Megan’s law and welfare reform to name a few less than ideological triangulations.  Even before that, Clinton incurred the wrath of unions by pushing the ratification of NAFTA.

Of course, as the Governor of a swing state, Bill Clinton leaned an early lesson in pragmatism after he was defeated in his bid for a second term.  After apologizing for the policies that led to his reelection defeat, he regained the governorship and went on to enact mandatory competency testing for teachers and granted tax breaks to businesses – again with triangulating guru Dick Morris by his side.

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It is evening. Dinner is over, and I can see Bill Clinton sitting back at a table. In my fantasy, he has a mischievous smile on his face and a cigar in his right hand; his left hand lies on the knee of a scantily-clad lass less than half his age; and he is waiting in vain for the President to call.

Republicans, when on the spot, are apt to ask themselves, “What would Reagan do?” Democrats would be well advised, when in similar straits, to ponder what Bill Clinton would do. For whatever one might think of him — and in the last couple of years Democrats have been as likely to badmouth the man as Republicans — Slick Willie is a survivor who knows how to stage a comeback when nearly everyone thinks him not only down but permanently out. It was with such a figure in mind that H. L. Mencken wrote these immortal words: “The smarter the politician, the more things he believes and the less he believes any of them.”

I have no doubt what advice Clinton would give Barack Obama if the latter were to make that call. He would tell him to jettison Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod; to hire a David Gergen, and a Dick Morris; to leave Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and their minions twisting in the wind; and to announce in his State of the Union Address that the era of big government is once again at an end.

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Last week, Dick Morris became the first pundit to predict a Republican sweep of both houses of Congress next year. Looking at Obama’s sliding poll numbers, and increasing voter frustration, Morris said, “This erosion of support makes the elections of 2010 look more and more like a rerun of 1994.”

Yeah, yeah, I know — it’s Dick Morris saying this, take it with a silo of salt and all that. But Mort Kondracke is one of the more level-headed pundits in DC, and he noted Pew’s study saying that “voters’ anti-incumbent mood is approaching 1994 and 2006 levels,” when Congress changed hands. Kondracke added that he thinks that “there’s reason to believe that the public’s anger is even deeper than Pew’s estimate because voters believe – correctly – that ‘the way things are going’ is not getting better.”

Kondracke was saying all this in the context of seeing “an opening” for a third party to make it big in 2010. But don’t be too certain.

Usually, third parties coalesce around a single candidate (like Ross Perot) or a single issue (like the Greens [no relation]). America’s current funk isn’t really about a single issue, but about a whole host of issues — and Washington’s inability (Democrat and Republican alike) to deal with them. If that seems like fertile ground for a third party, in this case it isn’t. Because what the country really needs is a second party.

Please, let me explain. You might want to pour yourself a lovely adult beverage, because I’d had one or two when this occurred to me.

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