Politics and other nightmares

If you're not worried yet about the implications of trying terror suspects in a civil criminal court, maybe this will help:

The greatest danger posed in the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) isn't that he will go free. The greatest danger is that he will be convicted and that during his appeals the courts will ratify all of the extraordinary measures used to capture and convict him. The great danger is that the courts will ratify the rough, inaccurate and ambiguous norms of martial law as applying to all civil criminal trials.

I like some of the things mentioned by State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett that have been done to help the state better compete for a share of the federal Department of Education's $4 billion "Race to the Top" education grant program -- not putting a cap on charter schools, for example, and removing a roadblock that prevented teachers from being judged on student achievement.

President George W. Bush seems to regert the $700 billion Wall Street bailout:

I went against my free-market instincts and approved a temporary government intervention to unfreeze the credit markets so that we could avoid a major global depression.

Damage done, apology too little and too late. And without mentioning Barack Obama by name, Bush rails against the big government he was only too happy to participate in himself:

I'm going to stick my fingers in my ears and go na-na-na-na until you're done talking, 'cause I just don't want to hear it. That seems to be the attitude of some at Purdue University about library prof. Bert Chapman's provocative blog post on "the economic arguments against homosexuality."

Shame on the residents of Fishers for voting to spend more money on education, complicating things for everbody else in the state. So says the Richmond Palladium-Item:

Officials in Fishers say the referendum approval will spare them having to cut at least 60 teachers in the faces of property tax caps and a worsening economy's slowdown of tax revenues.

If I tried to rank the worst Supreme Court decisions in my lifefime, Kelo v. City of New London, which more or less put the last nail in the coffin of private property, would be right up there. And what came of it? Nothing:

Getting beyond the "political correctness" argument for what happened at Fort Hood:

The most-heard reason for the possible failure is political correctness. No doubt. But Sen. Lieberman's committee should avoid making this its main line of inquiry, because that is a problem without a policy fix. It minimizes the real problem.

Hoosiers are just a bunch of anti-tax yahoos. We dare not give them the power of a referenum and actually let them vote on scool building projects or big tax increases -- nothing would ever be approved again!

Voters in Indiana's fastest-growing community have overwhelmingly approved a referendum giving its school district an extra $5.5 million a year in property tax revenue for the next seven years.

So, the government's stimulus plan has created or saved how many jobs?

"Stimulus" is in the process of turning a nasty recession into a genuine depression. The evidence is in the "Employment Situation" report released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on November 6th. The "headline" unemployment rate shot up to 10.2%, the highest in more than 26 years. But the report was much worse than most people realize.

[. . .]

From Rand Simberg, who says the problem isn't that Obama doesn't spend enough time on the economy, it's that his philosophy isn't capable of stimulating growth, this sounds about right:

But something he could have done — that would have cost nothing at all — would have been to not scare the bejesus out of business in the first place during his campaign.