Chronicle Political Cartoons Imbalanced

I couldn't help but comment on the skewed nature of the editorial cartoons retrospective the Chronicle did in the Sunday Outlook section. The selection was representative of the past year, greatly skewed towards criticizing conservatives and Republicans, whilst letting the Democrat Party and liberals mostly off the hook.
 

On the first page, the first cartoon ridiculed Mitt Romney as a cultural and foreign policy lightweight, the second portrayed Texas Republicans as folks who didn't care about the poor, the third portrayed Fox News as not only lacking objectivity but deranged to boot, the fourth portrayed conservative Christians as culturally illiterate, the fifth singled out a conservative candidate for having said something stupid, and the sixth again ridiculed conservative Christians, comparing them to the Taliban.

 

The second page was a bit lighter on lampooning conservatives, but mostly complimentary to liberal points of view. Still, number two was implicitly critical of most conservative supreme court justices, number eight blamed Republicans for the fiscal cliff, and number nine portrayed small government proponents as being hypocrites. It's interesting to note that the closest the Chron cartoons came to criticizing President Obama or Democrats was to zing Obama on security for our Benghazi consulate, but even this criticism was mild. 

 

The first cartoon on page two, though, takes the cake. The cartoon portrays the residents of a supposedly well to do neighborhood as Elitists, living behind their walled community and criticizing President Obama for "dividing America". In all fairness, has there been anybody in American politics that has lived a more insulated, elitist life than our current president? He is the guy, after all, who not only abandoned the Fiscal Cliff negotiations so he could take his vacation in Hawaii, but expected Congress to stay in D.C. and continue working while he frolicked in paradise.

 

I look forward to the Chronicle injecting a little more balance into their humor in 2013. With a target rich environment including the likes of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Attorney General Eric Holder, the Big Three networks, Occupy Wall Street, our academic Elites and scores of whacky advocacy groups, there's laughs aplenty to be had at the expense of the liberal community.

Pete Smith

Cypress

LTE: The Job Market Got Better?

Happy talk

The lead article in the Friday Business section of the Chronicle proclaimed, "Job market ends year in better place" (Page D1). As proof, the article claimed that the number of people applying for unemployment benefits each week has dropped by 10 percent since January to 375,000, the lowest level since June 2008.

This is just happy talk. The real reason for the decrease in applications is very simple. In the past four years, everybody that can be laid off has been laid off. Tens of millions of jobs have been lost and are not coming back, and companies across America are down to a bare-bones staff. In this terrible economy, it was inevitable that unemployment applications would fall.

I wait with bated breath for the next proof that the economy is improving: the falling number of people who collect unemployment, as hundreds of thousands of workers exhaust their eligibility for benefits.

The Obama administration will no doubt portray this as great news.

Pathetic.

- Pete Smith, Cypress

http://www.chron.com/opinion/letters/article/Letters-Jobs-judges-boomers-2433604.php

Doin' The French Mistake

There’s a certain irony - and one might say boldness – to producing a movie named “Les Miserables”, given the distinct possibility that this description would apply to your audience, particularly since the umpteen prior cinematic versions all went down ingloriously, and completely, in flames.  This is ever more so likely when the movie in question requires Hollywood stars of no known musical ability to sing their way through most of the movie.  Oh but to be a fly on the wall at the pre-production meetings when this was pitched: “no, I swear Manny, we can pull this off.  Hugh Jackman is going to be great; Russell Crowe will kill it; Anne Hathaway will bring us to tears”.

Hugh was not great; Russell didn't just kill it, but mutilated the corpse; and Anne did in fact bring us to tears – of raucous unintentional laughter.

And so another infamous “Movie Review Without Seeing The Movie” is born.  When they announced last year that this version would be a musical, I initially struck it from my list of prospects.  There was no way the movie would be anything other than a crushing bore, I thought, and lamented that the Money Men had not had the benefit of my wise counsel.  They didn’t, and I was wrong.  After seeing the Trailer, I changed my mind – for all the wrong reasons.  This was going to be a train wreck of epic proportions, and I wanted in on the action.  Now, Schadenfreude is not a sign of good character, but the hell with it.  Earnest Hollywood megastars took a shot and spectacularly screwed the pooch.  There’s no way I was not going to leave this one alone.  

Besides its musical pretentions, the problem is mostly a story that has just not aged well: Les Miserables is the Charlie Brown of movie concepts.  For the sake of this metaphor, the culturally attuned movie fans who love the story of Les Miserables - nearly as much as they love avante garde floral arrangements and invitations to the one time only performance art of Sean Penn as he channels Rigoberto Menchu - are Charlie Brown, eager for the opportunity to finally kick the football.  The Lucy Van Pelt character ready to jerk the ball away - causing Charlie Brown to predictably and ignominiously flop onto his back - is the movie itself.  See, the movie version of Les Miserable will always fail for the same reason the printed version always fails: the story sucks.  What’s different this time is that everybody knows it.

But, onto the plot: In a nutshell, Jean Valjean – a poor soul who occasionally means good - steals a loaf of bread, goes to prison, gets out, and thus attracts the undying attention of Javert, the policeman who devotes his life to making Valjean’s a living hell on Earth.   Valjean atones for the stolen bread even though there was no sensible reason to do so.  He was hungry after all, and he did share.  Into the picture comes Hathaway’s character Fantine, to whose daughter Cosette Valjean becomes a protector and father figure.  This is significant because he is a middle aged man and she a young girl, giving Valjean a creepy pedophilic quality, but then you remember that this story originated in France, the country that not only offers safe haven to many of the world’s most notorious pedophiles - including Woody Allen and Roman Polanski – but showers them with awards and acclaim particularly because they are Pedophiles.  And you are even more highly esteemed if you engage in Sodomy (Polanski) or Incest (Allen).

And how much of a kick would it have been if either Allen or Polanski had directed this movie?  “I need a rewrite”, Woody would say.  “Add a half dozen more scenes of Valjean and Cosette in slightly more, um, romantic surroundings, after the filming of which Allen would be required to retire to his trailer for 15 minutes, coming out afterwards looking refreshed, and much more at peace with the world.  Later, Allen would cause it all to make sense by pointing out that this was post-revolutionary France, see, and Frenchmen were still working some kinks out of the new social contract, all done in his trademark conversational voice-over.

But, I digress.

Another reason this movie fails is that there are too many modern-day variations that immediately come to mind that would cause you – as you sit there squirming in your seat – to question the credibility of the plot, the characters and eventually the flesh and blood actors themselves.  With that in mind, was I producing this movie, I would keep most everything but the setting: same plot, same script, same actors, and same costumes.  The actors would all sing; oh my, how they would sing.  Anne Hathaway would cry: there would be a veritable flood of tears, particularly at completely inappropriate times.  Crowe and Jack man would cry too, along with several lesser characters, regardless of how little sense their crying made.  And not only would Hathaway keep her Big Scene where she gets shorn of her lovely mane, but all of the abuse at the hands of the sadistic Thenardieres as well.  In fact, I would stretch the hair cutting scene out to at least 15 minutes, during which time she would deliver several side-monologues stylistically indistinguishable from Brad Pitt’s incoherent ramblings in the Chanel perfume commercials. 

And, one of the male characters would have a man-purse.

What I would change in its entirety would be the setting.  Pre-Revolutionary France would become modern day America; Valjean would be a simple tourist boarding a plane to fly from New Jersey to Miami, Florida; Javert would be a TSB drudge at the beautiful Camden International Airport; the loaf of bread would be a pocket knife; Fantine would be the Chick who inadvertently brought oranges into Florida; Valjean’s persecution of Javert would cease to be the relentless attentions of a petty authority figure convinced of the righteousness of his cause, and become instead an endless series of TSB pat-downs at security checkpoints, each one more invasive and embarrassing than the last, and with the ever-increasing prospect of injuries that would require Valjean to use laxatives for the rest of his life in order to poop.  Don’t worry sir, I’m a professional.

I think you see where I’m going with this.  We would play the entire movie for laughs.  We would take the most pretentious story of all time, put it on steroids, feature cameos of Richard Simmons and Lindsay Lohan, and then segue into a real musical, Blazing Saddles, specifically where the movie spills out of the Old West and onto the set with Dom DeLuise and his All-Gay revue doing their Big Number: “Throw out your hands, stick out your Tush, hands on your hips, given them a push; you’ll be surprised you’re doing The French Mistake….Voila!”.  And of course, Slim Pickens would still fall in love with one of the Dancers, and Hedley Lamarr would still catch a cab exclaiming with no small amount of justification “get me out of this movie”.  Hell, tweak Helena Bonham Carter’s hair a bit, and she could jump right into the Madelyn Kahn role as Lilly Von Schtup.

Let’s face it: there’s no way anybody associated with Les Miserables comes out of this one unscathed.  I fully expect whole websites will be devoted to defame the movie, Hathaway, Jackman & Crowe, and these sites will be successful for the same reasons that the Flying Spaghetti Monster lives on, a thorn in the side of Organized Religion: regular folks just love deflating the Establishment, especially when they are taking themselves the most seriously.

And that, my friends, is a notion worthy of a revolution.

The Borking Of Republicans

Regarding "Bork nomination altered judicial selection" (Thursday Page A4, Nation), Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan in 1987 was a watershed moment for Democrats, as they realized that they could demagogue their opposition without restraint and without consequence. As the article documents, Teddy Kennedy set the standard when he infamously proclaimed that “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, [and] writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the government......".
 

The reaction of the Media was largely to report the demagoguery as fact. The reaction of Republicans was to squawk for a minute or two, then give up. The result has been a quarter century of a Democrat Party unrestrained by decency or decorum.

 

For one recent illustration, Democrats waited not a minute after the Sandy Hook massacre to politicize the tragedy and demonize anybody who protested their incoherent demands for more gun control. For another, in a speech about the fiscal cliff on Wednesday, President Obama conflated the Sandy Hook massacre and the Fiscal Cliff negotiations, insisting that Republicans' should gain some "perspective" from the tragedy and concede to his agenda on tax increases, as well as "focus on issues like energy and immigration reform".

 

Both incidents were shameful, but inexplicably, our major media outlets generally passed them on without comment, as they have in hundreds of other instances since Bork was vilified in 1987. If we want to understand the "lack of bipartisanship" that the pundits squawk about constantly, unrestrained Democrat calumny is as good a place to start as any.

Democrats And Gun Lust

Not surprisingly, on the heels of the terrible tragedy at Sandy Hook school, the newspapers are awash with articles and commentary from all the Usual Suspects that the time has come to control access to guns.  OffHisMeds is more bemused than amused by the reaction, since gun-related violence of a particular magnitude predictably results in such a "call to action".  Why this is so is not clear.  It's as if Liberals suffer some mass amnesia mere weeks after the most recently publicized shooting, whether it's Columbine or Gabby Giffords, acting like their tragic countenances and rendered loin clothes are something new that we have never seen before.  Why exactly do they need a fresh instance of gun violence to make their point?  Is it that they think we as a nation have forgotten the prior instances?

 

OffHisMeds has not.  In fact, he can cite you rote statistics on such events that happened even before he was conscious of the phenomenon, such as Charles Whitman slaughtering dozens from the tower at the University of Texas in 1966.  And it is not that OHM obsesses on such things, it is rather that these crimes are so enormous that right-minded people should have them on their minds, never to forget.

 

Not Democrats, though.  My entire life, they have used the Incident Du Jour - regardless of its nature - to start banging their drums, dusting off their milk crates, working themselves into a high dudgeon and demanding that SOMEBODY DO SOMETHING.  Gays harassed = hate crime.  Check.  Kids picked on in school = Bullying.  Check.  Failing schools = Inadequate funding.  Check.  Mass shooting = Gun control.  Check.

Crank up the Policy Machine boys; there's regulations to enact, people to control, and money to be spent.  Oh yes, and let's not forget: blame the Republicans.

And such it was with dozens of articles, opinion pieces and talk show appearances across the nation.  In virtually every case, Democrat gun control advocates predictably call for a ban on "assault weapons", as they do after every mass shooting, but as in the past, their rhetoric on the matter is driven either by ignorance or a desire to confuse the public. To cite but a few examples:

 

- They routinely overstate the danger of features such as a folding stock, pistol grip or a threaded barrel that can mount a bayonet. While I will grant you that these features have little use for most gun owners, they are cosmetic, not lethal.   It has, however, allowed Democrats, through sheer repetition, to misrepresent these types of features as constituting an "assault weapon".  That's a gross misnomer based on the simple facts available.  For instance, there's not a single instance of a mass shooting - or any crime for that matter - where these features enabled the death of more people.  And I'll go so far as to submit that there was not a single bayonet death in America last year.

 

- They predictably call for limiting the size of the magazine that holds the bullets, but this is a bogus argument as well. A motivated serial killer can swap an endless number of ten round clips, and it takes less than two seconds to do so. Also, larger capacity clips and drums are cumbersome and  notorious for jamming, and in fact this has happened repeatedly in recent mass killings, arguably saving lives.  

 

- For years they have conflated automatic weapons with semi-automatic weapons, incorrectly referring to the latter as "machine guns".  They've also conflated the term "assault weapons" with semi-automatics.  Neither is correct.  Semi-automatics are simply guns that cause another round to be chambered by the kinetic energy of the previous round. The desire of Democrats  to confuse this point is no accident. For but one example, virtually ALL modern handguns are semi-automatic. If they can successfully control semi-automatics by mis-defining them as "assault weapons", they will control virtually 90% of all arms owned or sold in America.

 

There's little doubt that the intention of the Liberal gun control lobby is to deprive citizens of the capacity to control their own destinies. They look at Europe and see what they hope is our future, a thoroughly emasculated public, powerless because they have no guns, and completely dependent on government for their economic security as well. It's no coincidence that President Obama and the Democrats pursue policies designed to promote both.

 

It is also no coincidence that they prefer not to have a conversation about the real meaning, the  constitutional meaning, of an armed public: As George Mason, Co-author of the Second Amendment so eloquently put it: "To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them."  The Founding Fathers understood that an armed populace was a check against not just the King of England, but any like him who came later, including King Barack, Prince Harry and Princess Nancy.

Meanwhile, I wait in vain for a conversation on the real cause of the Sandy Hook killings: a young man deranged by some combination of upbringing, surroundings and culture.  Days after the incident we learn that Adam Lanza was the product of a broken home whose father was not part of the kid's life and a mother who was a barfly.  The mother was also a profligate and irresponsible owner of guns and related paraphernalia, leaving all the weapons and ammo accessible to her son, whom she knew to be a nutjob. 

As a student Lanza was a loner and so anti-social as to attract the attention of school authorities at the time.  It will inevitably come to light that he was dosed with Adderall, Ritalin or even a nefarious cocktail of mood-altering drugs to deal with so-called Attention Deficit Disorder or something similar, as an alarming number of the nation's boys are so treated.  

 

In conclusion, the Liberal tendency to exploit national tragedies will never go away.  They react as they do to these things, not because they have forgotten prior and similar instances, but because they have intuited that all such incidents provide an opening of an essentially political nature that can be freshly exploited.  If there is a victim, any victim, there must be a pathology that can be identified with which to flog an evermore weary citizenry, and earnest Democrats must use each and every such event to milk the taxpayer, form commissions, expand the bureaucracy and yet further control the movements of the public.

It is also worth noting that Democrats - or at least the people that speak for them - don't even have the decency to wait until the bodies are in the graves before they start assigning blame.  The real irony is that most of the pathologies that plague society were authored by Liberalism, putting them in the enviable position of profiting not only from the efforts to control these pathologies, but from their proliferation.  But expanding on that theme will have to be the subject of a future post.

Plenty Of Upside For Repubs On The Pot Vote

Regarding "Tweet declares pot OK" (Tuesday Nation Page A3), Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper Tweeted his approval of the state referendum rather than address it in a more official capacity so as to avoid controversy, but I say, let the Establishment embrace a nationwide initiative to legalize pot.  On the one hand, you will please pot smokers, the overwhelming number of which are Democrats.  You will also please Republicans who have already realized that, once pot is legalized, an overwhelming number of Democrats will never bother to vote again.

Pete Smith
Cypress

The Toll Road Shuffle

Regarding "Wider road means big headaches" (Tuesday Front Page), I was disturbed to read that once the Highway 290 project is completed, the existing four inbound and four outbound lanes will be improved to: four inbound and four outbound lanes. 
 

How is it that the long-delayed improvement of 290 will result only in the expansion of the HOV/Toll lanes?  That question is answered almost before it's asked: the disturbing trend in road improvements in Houston has been to expand lanes that generate revenues at the expense of everything else.  And while the spokespeople for the project make all the politically correct noises about engineering the expansion solely around transit lanes because it "encourages greater use of high occupancy vehicles", nobody is fooled.  This is a money-grab, pure and simple, and 100% funded by increasingly put-upon taxpayers and toll road Users.

 

You don't need to take my word for it: the article frankly states that the Hwy 290 expansion was under-engineered because they eventually intend to "create a tollway along Hempstead Highway......as traffic volume warrants."  To the drivers who use the recently improved I-10 West corridor: enjoy the additional free lanes.  It's looking to be the last time that's ever going to happen in Houston.

 

Pete Smith

Cypress

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Road (expansion) weary
Regarding "Wider road means big headaches" (Page A1, Tuesday), I was disturbed to read that once the U.S. 290 project is completed, the existing four inbound and four outbound lanes will be improved to: four inbound and four outbound lanes.

How is it that the long-delayed improvement of 290 will result only in the expansion of the HOV/Toll lanes? That question is answered almost before it's asked: The disturbing trend in road improvements in Houston has been to expand lanes that generate revenues at the expense of everything else.
And while the spokespeople for the project make all the politically correct noises about engineering the expansion solely around transit lanes because it "encourages greater use of high occupancy vehicles," nobody is fooled.

This is a money-grab, pure and simple, and 100 percent funded by increasingly put-upon taxpayers and toll-road users.

Pete Smith, Cypress
 

http://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/letters/article/Letters-Road-weary-being-scammed-Texans-4109754.php
 

What's In A Name?

I've always wondered when and why the Chronicle stopped capitalizing "Tea Party".  So I did a little research and discovered that the Chron and numerous other media outlets stopped capitalizing at the same time the AP did in 2010, from which I assume that most took their cue from the AP.  The AP Stylebook rationalized their decision in 2010 by claiming that the Tea Party is a "movement", not an organization, and that they might consider capitalizing the term if and when the Tea Parties band together and "form a national entity".

 

How nice of them.

 

This rationale deserves some serious scrutiny.  Hundreds of newspapers, news services and magazines do capitalize the term, and the recurring explanation as to why is that the Tea Party is an organization, or at least enough of one to deserve not being confused with the mundane practice of serving tea.  This common sense approach apparently doesn't resonate with the AP, but it is interesting to note that the diminution they exercise is applied to the conservative Tea Party and the Tea Party alone.  It's also interesting to note that virtually all conservative-leaning media organizations - such as the Washington Times - capitalize Tea Party, while the bulk of liberal-leaning ones - such as the Washington Post - do not.  There are also a number of liberal-leaning exceptions that capitalize, such as the New York Times.

 

The AP's decision is a strange one to apply to what is arguably the most significant and newsworthy development in American politics in at least 50 years: a spontaneous grass-roots political movement with a coherent philosophy that actually influences elections.  Agree with the Tea Party or not, there's no denying their legitimacy.

 

Not that the AP isn't going to try.  It's liberal bias is well-documented, with the bulk of their stories about conservative organizations like the Tea Party negative in tone, as are their references to the Tea Party in related stories.  And while it is true that media outlets like the NY Times are as hard on conservatism as the AP, they at least are fair-minded enough to argue their point based on substance, as opposed to "style".

 

I believe the Chronicle should do likewise.

 

Pete Smith

Cypress

Igor Say: Tea Parties, Bad!

OffHisMeds read with interest "GOP making progress in bid to reinvent party" in the Saturday Chronicle.  Therein, NY Times columnist David Brooks touts the efforts of Liberal Repubs to "reclaim" the party by advancing the notion that the Republican Party is on the ropes, allegedly because they are in thrall to groups like the Tea Party.  If you remember David Brooks, you know why his claims are suspect.  Brooks is, of course, the frothing-at-the-mouth Liberal who proclaims himself a conservative - or at least allows other to make that claim on his behalf - so he can have a credibility otherwise unsustained by his journalism.  What he is, is a doctrinaire Lib riding the same Trick Pony that David Gergen did before him.  See, the Times just loooooves folks who have any kind of conservative resume that they can subvert to The Cause, all while not having the decency to at least describe them as "former" conservatives.

 

Meanwhile, Brooks' latest claim that the Repubs lost not just the presidency but the faith of the American people doesn't pass the smell test, seeing as how Republicans still dominate the House of Representatives by 50 seats, control 26 state legislatures and 29 governorships.

 

Those numbers don't stop Brooks from extrapolating from Obama's narrow victory a repudiation of everything conservatives stand for. According to Brooks the "ideological extremes of the party have begun to self-ghettoize", by which he means the Tea Parties who "have a tendency to migrate from mainstream politics.......to ever more marginal oases of purity". The racialist terms he uses to describe conservatives were hardly accidental, but they were essential to prop up his thesis that America has kicked the Republican Party to the curb.
 

I have a much less nuanced explanation, albeit one that would have deprived Brooks of yet another opportunity to equate the Tea Parties with racism, bigotry and extremism: 1) In Mitt Romney, the Republican Establishment insisted on a candidate indistinguishable from President Obama, not the least because ObamaCare was a virtual twin of Romney's health care plan as governor of Massachusettes; 2) Romney was a relentless triangulator, changing his political positions to suit the audience he was speaking to, a quality that is innately unattractive to folks expecting their candidates to show some personal conviction; 3) Not only did Romney not embrace the Tea Parties, he barely acknowledged their existence.  The result was that Republicans didn't like him, and he lost.  

 

Romney was certainly somebody's candidate.  He trounced Obama amongst Independents, a constiuency that Brooks previously claimed would not embrace Romney unless he presented "moderate" views.  Brooks would thus be stupefied if challenged to explain the contradiction to his premise that Romney lost because he embraced radical conservative causes, not that there was much likelihood of that happening.  His environment at the Times is pretty well insulated from reality, including any reasonable analysis regarding the Tea Party phenomenon.
 

Brooks is not alone in advancing the Bad Tea Parties narrative in the media. In the past two weeks, we've heard the same thing from Jack Krugman, EJ Dionne and various other liberal pundits. I believe the truth is something else entirely: The Tea Parties are a grass-roots reaction to the berserk government spending that threatens our national survival. These folks are decent, patriotic and tolerant. They are also willing to sacrifice short-term political gain for the sake of principle.
 

As to the advice of Brooks et al, the philosopher Virgil famously said "beware Greeks bearing gifts". If the Republican Party wants to "reinvent" itself, instead of listening to Democrat partisans, it should try expanding its base by fielding principled candidates who stand for something, instead of somebody even squishier than Mitt Romney.

Newt Was Solid On The Poor

A few points regarding your Dec 8 editorial "Newt's Proposal", wherein the Chronicle lambastes Newt Gingrich for proposing that poor children as young as nine be allowed to work.  First, what's wrong with that?  I had my first job delivering papers at age nine, and did yard work year-round starting at age six.  I made money, learned how to work and have benefited from that experience my entire life, just as Newt suggests poor children would.

My second point is that the statistics you cite from Charlie Blow of the New York Post to refute Gingrich's claim that our poorest children "have no habits of working and have no one around them who works" defy not just common sense, but readily available government statistics.  Counter to Blow's astonishing claim that "three quarters of poor adults.....work", the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the civilian labor force participation rate currently stands at 64 percent.  It defies common sense that the poor would show greater employment rates than the general population.

Blow further explodes his own credibility when he states that "among children in extreme poverty, nearly one in three lives with at least one working parent".  That reference to "nearly" is too clever by half, since HHS statistics show that ONLY one in three children in extreme poverty lives with a working parent.

The real statistics that Blow manipulates don't prove Gingrich's opinion that a lack of role models leads to a life of unemployment and crime, but they do validate his premise that the vast majority of poor children lack sufficient role models.  The coincidence of the expansion of our welfare state and the destruction of the two-parent family amongst black folk is proof of that.

Finally, the Chronicle does its readers no favor by misrepresenting Gingrich's suggestion that children as young nine be encouraged to work.  There was nothing mandatory about his proposal, nor was he proposing that they be underpaid or abused.  You can fault him for some hyperbole, but his argument is essentially sound.  The Chronicle does little to advance the debate by demonizing everything he says on

the matter.

Pete Smith

Our Educrats Get Schooled

Read with interest the article "Online classes not always a money-saver" in the Houston Chronicle this past Sunday.  OffHisMeds has written before, at length, and generally with disdain about our educational Elites, particularly those at the university level.  There exists not a more coddled and insulated group in society, at once cognizant that even a cursory scrutiny would reveal that they rarely earn their keep, whilst simultaneously contemptible of the people who pay for their existence.  This explains, by the way, why the Education Establishment regularly submits a scholarly study that rationalizes their own existence, proclaiming higher education not only an astonishing bargain, but the birthright of every American regardless of their ability to pay, the future indebtedness of as-yet unborn generations be damned.

 

It's been a great run since the end of WWII.  Salaries were high, hours were short, tenure was a religion, accountability was non-existent, and the actual methods by which professors could earn ever more money for ever less work were seemingly exhausted only by one's imagination, or rather lack thereof: Expense accounts, subsidized housing, stipends, performance bonuses, conferences, exchange programs, state grants, federal grants, private grants, COLA, sumptuous benefit and retirement packages, sabbaticals......the list went on and on.

 

And things went on swimmingly until student loan debt started some years back to approach levels greater than that of all consumer debt.  The people writing the checks started asking questions.  No longer could our Professoriate simply demand more money from increasingly cash-strapped state governments or through ever more generous student loan programs, and the usually reliable contributions from the federal government became less so.   The double digit generational rise in the cost of education was soon unsustainable.

 

In this environment it was no surprise that on-line college courses would become so popular.  High quality instruction for a much lower price.  What's not to like?  It was also no surprise that most of the online courses available through Texas' major universities would be as expensive - or even more so - than their more conventional counterparts. As has been illustrated repeatedly in the past generation, our education establishment has shown about as much restraint in controlling the cost of the services they provide as the federal government has, which is to say: none.

 

Texas is by no means unique.  Nationwide, the inflation-adjusted price of a four year university degree has more than doubled in the past 25 years, and for a markedly inferior product. Along comes online education, and the predictable reaction of our Educrats - as reflected in the article attached - is to a) overprice it, and b) talk it down, and c) dither.  But as much as our universities would like to think otherwise, they are no longer the only game in town, and their reluctance to develop cost-effective online programs is not only a slap in the face to families on a budget, but will put these same schools at a distinct competitive disadvantage in the future.
 

Gone are the days when universities could coast along with the status quo, continue to inflate their prices and simply expect state and federal governments to cover the difference with evermore taxpayer dollars and evermore heavily subsidized college loans. High quality, inexpensive online classes are the future, and Texas' schools need to lead, follow, or get out of the way.

 

Best they should lead.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Educators don't get it

Regarding "Online classes not always a money-saver" (Page B2, Sunday), it's not surprising that most of the online courses available through Texas' major universities are as expensive - or even more so - than their more conventional counterparts. As has been illustrated repeatedly in the past generation, our education establishment has shown about as much restraint in controlling the cost of the services they provide as the federal government has, which is to say: very little.

The inflation-adjusted price of a four-year university degree has more than doubled in the past 25 years, and in my eyes at least, for an inferior product. Along comes online education, and the predictable reaction of our educrats is to a) overprice it, and b) talk it down, and c) dither.

But as much as our universities would like to think otherwise, they are no longer the only game in town, and their reluctance to develop cost-effective online programs is not only a slap in the face to students on a budget, but will put these schools at a distinct competitive disadvantage in the future.

Gone are the days when universities could coast along with the status quo, continue to inflate their prices and simply expect state and federal governments to cover the difference with ever more taxpayer dollars and evermore heavily subsidized college loans. High-quality, inexpensive online classes are the future, and Texas' schools need to lead, follow or get out of the way.

Best they should lead.

Pete Smith, Cypress

http://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/letters/article/Letters-Online-classes-George-Will-Hamas-4094642.php