MORE MUSH FROM THE WIMPS
More Mush from the Wimps There's plenty to complain about in the "balanced" budget deal, but one thing stands out: welfare. So eager were House speaker Newt Gingrich and Senate majority leader...
...Ross says,] 'Be flexible, take it easy.' Son of a bitch...
...So eager were House speaker Newt Gingrich and Senate majority leader Trent Lott to seal the deal that they capitulated to Clinton-administration demands whose effect will be to undo last year's historic welfare reform...
...I ask God to take him straight to hell...
...So besides truckling to the Eurocrats and, literally, defining deviancy down, Blair continues to steal a march on the Tories, who were thought till now to have a monopoly on mixing politics with kinky sex...
...The Scrapbook's sources insist that this is a volume discount and not an omen...
...A ballot-initiative campaign called "English for the Children" was kicked off last month...
...Advocates for immigrants' rights who would once have reflex-ively backed the bilingual theorists are lining up behind Unz and Tuch-man...
...As he told the Washington Post's Barton Gellman: "You Americans are the worst mediators in history...
...Thompson's Mug Shot_ Last week, a Fred Thompson aide sent an e-mail to the Senate Republican staffers on the fund-raising investigation committee announcing that the Senate gift shop would soon start selling a limited number of $7 coffee mugs emblazoned with the words "Fred Thompson, Chairman" and "Special Investigation Staff...
...In return, Clinton was supposed to release a letter suspending the labor rules for nine months...
...The ballot measure is being jointly promoted by Ron Unz, the maverick Republican who opposed Gov...
...A Center for Equal Opportunity poll last year found that 81 percent of Latino parents prefer that their children's courses be taught in English...
...The latter was in response to an inquiry from the European Court of Human Rights, which was threatening to bring suit under a European Union rule that the age of consent must be uniform for couplings both AC and DC...
...A paltry 17 percent prefer native-language instruction...
...Just how politically potent is about to be put to the test...
...According to Callaghan, "the knee-jerk liberal response is that bilingual education helps children, they learn two languages...
...Chain Letter_ The July 28 letter to the editor titled "Close to Absolute Good" was attributed to Virginia Postrel, the editor of Reason magazine, who did not write it...
...If successful, all instruction in California public schools would be in English (unless parents go out of their way to seek a waiver...
...The letter was written by Jeff A. Taylor of Gaithers-burg, Maryland, who e-mailed it to Postrel, who forwarded it to her Washington editor, who mistakenly forwarded it to The Weekly Standard as a "letter to the editor" from Postrel on Reason stationery...
...The initial run of 40 quickly sold out, and now that orders have been placed for 100 and counting, the price has dropped to $5.45...
...Even in the face of this welshing, Gingrich and Lott opted not to make a fuss...
...Reason regrets the error...
...So Blair cements his reputation as the Euro-Clinton, and English boys have to wait two years for that post-prandial smoke...
...Minister Shaheen is one of those palestinians who we suppose would be described, in the parlance of diplomats like Ross, as a moderate—State Department code for "not yet caught with a bomb...
...But in fact these children are learning only one language: Spanish...
...Our Palestinian Friends Dennis Ross, the State Department's Middle East envoy, canceled a trip to Israel in the wake of the terrorist attack on a Jerusalem market that left 15 dead and hundreds injured...
...Alice Callaghan, an Episcopalian priest and director of Las Familias del Pueblo, a skid-row children's center, told a columnist for the weekly New Times Los Angeles of her support for the ballot initiative: "This is the first politically incorrect thing I have ever done in my life...
...Unz predicted that "bilingual education in California has 11 months of existence left," and polling suggests his prediction is on target...
...I want Mr...
...24, Californians will get to vote on the initiative during special elections next June...
...But these are the troops that have rallied in California to fight bilingual education—one of the many educational fads to begin in that state (like self-esteem mongering) and survive there despite manifest failure, thanks to a politically potent "education" establishment...
...That was okay by Abdel Aziz Shaheen, the supply minister in Yasser Arafat's cabinet...
...Other political winds are favorable, too...
...Only 12 percent prefer Spanish...
...All the world forgets this word, but I do not...
...After all, if these workers were productive enough to get hired at the minimum wage with all the attendant federally mandated benefits, they wouldn't be on welfare to begin with...
...A June Los Angeles Times poll similarly found that 83 percent of Latino parents in Orange County favor English-language instruction as soon as their children begin school...
...Gingrich once argued against this, as did most other Republicans and many Democrats...
...But when Republicans asked about the letter the next day, they were told no such letter would be written...
...White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles told Gingrich that Clinton would veto the entire budget-balancing tax-cutting package unless Republicans removed this one little welfare-related provision that would undo mischief perpetrated by Clinton's labor department...
...No Smoking Please, We're Catamites Tony Blair's government has just voted to raise (to 18) the minimum age at which British subjects are allowed to smoke, within days of lowering (to 16) the age of consent for homosexual sex...
...The End of Bilingual Education It's not every day that inner-city Hispanics, grassroots conservatives, and liberal activists find themselves on the same team...
...We know the Soviets are finished, but you are not the sole governor of the world...
...You are imperialists, even now...
...Pete Wilson in the 1994 primary, and Gloria Matta Tuchman, a famously successful teacher of English to Latino first-graders in Santa Ana...
...So earlier this year, the labor department issued rules that mandate full benefits to welfare recipients in work programs— in effect, outlawing welfare-to-work reforms...
...If you want to ease people off of welfare rolls and into the work force, most reformers agree, it helps to encourage employers to hire them—a sure way being to exempt companies participating in workfare programs from federal regulations like worker's comp and the minimum wage, so that the welfare recipients can be hired and acquire good work habits, without employers' incurring expensive obligations...
...But Clinton's labor department will have none of that—the provision might threaten union workers, you see...
...But faced with the prospect of confrontation, the Republican leaders relented...
...If English for the Children volunteers can collect 433,269 signatures on their petitions by Nov...
...The Republican cave-in took place during budget negotiations on Saturday, July 26...
...Ross to go to hell...
Vol. 2 • August 1997 • No. 47
