Boston, MA – Tonight, Governor Mitt Romney delivered remarks at the Family Research Council’s “Washington Briefing: Values Voter Summit.” In his address, Governor Romney proposed a 12-point conservative plan to strengthen families in America. Below is the full text of Governor Romney’s remarks as prepared for delivery. More »
Mitt vs. the Hill |
Mitt Romney has said: “The defeat of this radical and violent faction of Islam must be achieved through a combination of American resolve, international effort, and the rejection of violence by moderate, modern, mainstream Muslims. An effective strategy will involve both military and diplomatic actions to support modern Muslim nations. America must help lead a broad-based international coalition that promotes secular education, modern financial and economic policies, international trade, and human rights.”
Lets contrast that with Hillary Clinton. Hillary believes that America can not preach secular education in the Muslim world and promote vouchers at home. Here is the video:
Here is what she said:
First parent who comes says, ‘I want to send my daughter to St. Peter’s Roman Catholic School’ and you say ‘Great, wonderful school, here’s your voucher.’
Next parent who comes says, ‘I want to send you know my child to the Jewish Day-school’. ‘Great here’s your voucher.’
Next parent says, ‘I want to send my child to the private school that I have always dreamed of sending my child to’. ‘Fine here’s your voucher.’
Next parent says, ‘I want to send my child to I want to send my child to the school of the Church of the White Supremacist.’ You say, ‘wait a minute. You can’t send, we are not giving you a voucher for that.’ And the parent says, ‘Well the way that I read Genesis, Cain was marked, therefore I believe in white supremacy. And therefore you gave it to a Catholic parent, you gave it to a Jewish parent, you gave it to a secular private school parent, under the Constitution, you can’t discriminate against me.’
Suppose the next parent comes and says, ‘I want to send my child to the school of jihad.’ ‘Wait a minute. We are not going to send a child with tax payers dollars to the school of Jihad.’ ‘Well you gave it to a Catholics, you gave it to a Jews, you gave it to the private secular people. You going to tell me I can’t. I’m a tax payer. Under the constitution.’
Now tell me how we are going to make those choices.
It’s not difficult. All you need is Common Sense.
Speaking of Common Sense, Philip K. Howard wrote a book called, The Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America. This book outlines how New York City laws forbidding Mother Theresa from opening a two-story homeless shelter unless she installs an elevator. The project was scraped.
According to Hillary Clinton you can’t have vouchers because people could teach bad things with those vouchers. Using that same logic, we shouldn’t have ropes, because people could do bad things with them.
The media acts like democrats are sophisticated, just because they seek to be counterintuitive. Just because you are counterintuitive does not mean you are smart.
3rd graders understand the stupidity the idea that “you can’t have vouchers because people could teach bad things with those vouchers.” But these are the kind of unsophisticated, stupid things that democrats believe, when even a 3rd grader can find the solution: DON”T GIVE VOUCHERS TO THOSE WHO PREACH HATE! But that would force someone to make a value judgments, and democrats have to tell themselves that they are better that republicans, because they don’t impose their values on others. And so they can’t “judge” jihadist schools or white supremacist schools are bad, they have to outlaw all vouchers!
Do you agree with Mitt Romney that “America must help lead a broad-based international coalition that promotes secular education, modern financial and economic policies, international trade, and human rights.”
Do you think that American tax payer funded schools should promote a secular education in the Islamic world? In America? Do you agree with Hillary Clinton that we should not have vouchers?
Do you agree with Romney’s education policy?
http://myclob.pbwiki.com/Education
Do you agree with Romney’s support of Charter Schools?
http://myclob.pbwiki.com/Charter-Schools
Do you agree with me that democrats oversimplify things more than Republicans, and that Hillary’s logic shows has some major problems?
Appreciate any feedback.
~ Mike
UPDATE:
Mitt Romney says: “America must help lead a broad-based international coalition that promotes secular education, modern financial and economic policies, international trade, and human rights.”
My assertion was the democrats would just look at the surface and you know how democrats are. They say that Evangelicals are America’s taliban. They are unable to see that Evangelicals are not blowing themselves up. They are unable to see shades of gray. Everything is black and white for them, and so because they see everything as black and white, they might say that it is hypocritical of Mitt Romney to call for secular schools in Islamic countries.
This is exactly what Hillary says. Hillary says that we can not have vouchers because vouchers could possibly go to bad people.
I think Mitt Romney is right. “America must help lead a broad-based international coalition that promotes secular education, modern financial and economic policies, international trade, and human rights.” However, I am not going to go as far as Hillary, and say that we can not have any vouchers. Hillary is so afraid of non-secular education, that she wants to destroy vouchers. Mitt Romney is not.
http://myclob.pbwiki.com/06-28-2005
re: “It sounds like Mr Romney is promoting secular education in the Islamic world _outside_ the US, whereas Mrs Clinton is talking about promoting secular education here _in_ the US. Either they are talking about two different subjects or they sound like they actually agree that secular nonreligious education should be promoted.”
Mitt Romney is saying the Islamic countries need to be more secular. This is common sense. Hillary Clinton is trying to be counter-intuitive (so she can tell herself how GOOD she is) and say that we need to be more secular. This might make Hillary feel good about herself, when she looks beyond the mark, and says that we are the bad guys. We need to be less secular. This is the liberal counter-intuitive way of looking at things, so they can tell each other how smart they are. But Mitt Romney knows we are not blowing each other up, we are not trying to impose our views on others threw violence, we are not the ones who need to change. They are. They need to be more secular.
re: “Not to defend Mrs Clinton, but I have some concern about your advocacy of “common sense” with deciding who gets vouchers … whose common sense are you talking about? The government’s? Even if Mr Romney is elected, as brilliant as he is, I wouldn’t trust the government ever to exercise much common sense.”
That is the whole point of the book, “The Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America”. We used to trust each other. We used to be able to shake, and know the deal was good. Then (this is an over simplification but I don’t have the energy to do it justice, you are going to have to read the book) lawyers got involved, and to the degree that their outlook pervaded, our society doesn’t trust each other, but tries to write laws or come up with rules that make it so that we don’t have to trust each other… I think this way of looking at the world is the prime problem with liberals… They come up with rules, so that no one has to take responsibility for making a good decision…
“The nuns of the Missionaries of Charity believed two abandoned buildings in New York City would make ideal homeless shelters. The city agreed and offered to sell the building for one dollar each. Yet the shelter project faltered: the city’s bureaucracy imposed such expensive remodeling requirements on the buildings that the shelter plans were scrapped. To Howard, an attorney practicing in New York City, this is but one of many examples of the law’s suffocating Americans by extensive decrees on what may and may not be done. His book is truly a catalog of horror stories, actually quite engrossing and adding to the story of public inefficiencies chronicled by David Osborne’s Reinventing Government (Addison-Wesley, 1992).”
Philip Howard’s insights help us understand why government appears arbitrary, almost never able to deal with real-life problems in a way which reflects an understanding of the situation. Peppered with pointed anecdotes about absurd regulatory inflexibility and the lack of the use of judgement, Howard’s book reveals that we have concocted a system of regulation that “goes too far while it does too little.”
In the decades since WWII, specific legal mandates designed to keep government in check have proliferated. The result is not better government, but more and poorer government. In a free society, we are supposed to be free to do what we want unless it is prohibited. But highly detailed regulations proscribing exactly what to do turn us toward centralized uniformity, Howard says, where law has replaced humanity. Detailed rules and uniform procedures have nonuniform effects when applied to specific situations.
Our old system of common law recognized the particular situation and invited the application of common sense. Common law evolved with the changing times and its truth was relative, Howard tells us, not absolute. But in this century statutes have largely replaced common law, and in recent decades regulations have come to dominate the legal landscape. Howard observes that the Interstate Highway System (still the nation’s largest public works program) was authorized in 1956 with a 28-page statute. Now, we attempt to cover every situation explicitly. He cites one contract lawyer who received a proposed definition of the words and/or that was over three hundred words in length. (Let alone the more recent and prominent lawyer who parsed carefully over the definition of what the word “is” is.)
Howard traces the growth of this regulatory “rationalism” from Max Weber - the German sociologist at the turn of the century who said that “Bureaucracy develops the more perfectly, the more it is `dehumanized’” - to Theodore Lowi - who in The End of Liberalism in 1979 saw greater regulatory specificity to be the antidote to special interest groups. But in truth, Howard shows us, the more precise we try to make the law, the more loopholes are created.
Centralized rules have caused us to cast away our common sense. Furthermore, “Coercion by government, the main fear of our founding fathers, is now its common attribute. But it was not imposed to advance some group’s selfish purpose; we just thought it would work better this way. The idea of a rule detailing everything has had the effect of reversing the rule of law. We now have a government of laws against men.”
The second section of Howard’s book explains how the ritualization of bureaucratic process has brought us to the point where people argue, not about right and wrong, but about whether something was done the right way. He sees the agency as mainly a referee to the process, not a decision maker. He beautifully describes how the bureaucracy surges and falls, en masse, onto a decision. Even Sherlock Holmes wouldn’t be able to identify an actual decision maker! The process decided.
In this maze of centralized, detailed regulation - a system designed to discourage individual responsibility - many have lost sight of what government is supposed to be doing. Howard argues that process is a defensive device; the more procedures, the less government can do. The paradox is that we demand an activist government while also demanding elaborate procedural protections against government. “The route to a public goal cannot be diverted through endless switchbacks of other public goals, for example, without losing sight of the original destination.” He tells us that responsibility, not process, is the key ingredient to action. If responsibility is shared widely, then like the extreme where property is shared widely, it is like there being no responsibility at all.
Effective government, Howard suggests, is one which attracts the best people and gives them leadership responsibility. But we have created the opposite system, based on defensive formalisms, driving away good people who cannot abide the negativity of the process.
The last section of Howard’s book explores the “rights revolution,” where government has become “like your rich uncle under your personal control” and everyone now gets to be a part of a legally-mandated, discriminated-against minority. As rights weaken the lines of authority in our society, the walls of responsibility - such as how a teacher manages a classroom - have begun to crumble. We want government to solve social ills, but distrust it to do so. Congress has resolved this dilemma by using rights to transfer governmental powers to special interest groups. The result has not been bringing excluded groups into society, but rather has become the means of getting ahead in society. Howard makes the distinction that, “The rights that are the foundation of this country are rights against law. In James Madison’s words, the Constitution provides for `protection of individual rights against all government encroachments, particularly by the legislature.’ Rights - freedom of speech, property rights, freedom of association - were to be the antidote against any new law that impinged on those freedoms.”
In this way, Howard finds that we have confused power with freedom. These new legislative rights aren’t rights at all, no matter how righteous they sound. “They are blunt powers masquerading under the name of rights.” He says we need to consider how these new rights impinge on what others consider to be their own freedoms. The flip side of the coinage of the new rights regime is called coercion.
Howard suggests that our loathing of government is not caused by its goals, but by its techniques. “How law works, not what it aims to do, is what is driving us crazy.” Decision making must be transferred “from words on a page to people on the spot.”
His book brings us closer to a place where what is right and reasonable, not the parsing of legal language, dominates the discussion. His thoughts shine needed light on the path to common sense and responsibility in government.
I’m not saying that we should trust Mitt to decide which schools should get vouchers. I am saying that Hillary is stupid, to pretend like our society would allow white supremacists or jihadist to get vouchers, or that this would be a big enough of a problem to say, no, we can not do this, this white supremacist or jihadist argument is valid enough to applie… Liberals let the acception decide the rule… they think they can come up with a utopia by creating a rule where nothing bad can happen… I think conservatives live in the real world, of cost benefit analysis where we decide by figuring out if something causes more good than it causes bad…
We have a system designed by lawyers, that every building that was more than two stories tall had to have an elevator, even though Mother Teresa could not afford to re-do the entire building. The building was abandoned, and was not being used, but because New York didn’t trust people to make good decisions, they created a system that made decisions for them… if it didn’t have an elevator, it couldn’t get a permit, and so people went homeless…
Hillary thinks no one should get vouchers, because someone bad COULD get them. She doesn’t trust Americans enough to determine who is bad or who is good, so she would rather say no one gets them.
The city of New York doesn’t trust it’s people who give out permits enough to determine when a project would do more good for New York that it was doing bad, so they came up with a rule that applied to everyone. If you do not have an elevator, you can not get a permit…
Romney celebrates charter schools as he adds three, extends eight |
http://www.metrowestdaily…rticleid=129124
In another sign of Mr. Romney’s continued support of education, this piece talks about his desire for all children to have a alternative to traditional public schools with charter schools being one of those choices.
Reforming education - The Romney Model |
http://www.washingtontime…01256-6627r.htm
It’s obvious by reading this, that Mr. Romney is not pulling any punches in any area. Today’s spotlight…Education!
By Mitt Romney
April 10, 2006I was in high school when Sputnik happened. Russia’s lead in space frightened us. It also woke us up. President Kennedy issued a call to boost science and math education, to produce more engineers. His vision: Put a man on the moon. America, as always, rose to the occasion.
One could argue that there have been quite a few Sputniks lately, but that we haven’t noticed. Tom Friedman’s flat world is tilting toward Asia, taking investment and jobs. Of 120 new chemical plants worldwide with over $1 billion in capital, 50 are planned for China, only one for the United States. Bill Gates says Microsoft’s best new ideas are coming from his Asian team. And last year, America bought $160 billion more from China than China bought from us. America is still way ahead, but in the words of Will Rogers: “Even if you’re on the right track, if you don’t move, you’ll get run over.” It’s time we get moving, starting with education. First, close the Excellence Gap. American 15-year-olds rank 24th out of 29 OECD countries in math literacy and 19th in science. Fifteen years ago, the United States and Asia produced about the same number of Ph.D.’s in math and physical science: 4,700 a year. Today, we graduate 4,400; Asia graduates 24,900. Second, close the Achievement Gap. Failing urban schools are a dead end for too many minority children. This is the civil rights issue of our generation.
How to close the education gaps? The teacher’s unions have their answers: simply spend more money and hire more teachers for smaller classroom size. But the data show that those are not the answers at all. Massachusetts tests our kids regularly; when studentproficiencyis matched with classroom size and per-pupil spending, there is absolutely no relationship. In fact, the district with the highest per-pupil spending in our state — almost $19,000 per student — is in the bottom 10 percent of our state in student proficiency.
We found our education prescription by interviewing parents, teachers and principals, studying actual data, mining lessons from successful districts and charter schools, and digesting the recommendations from commissions and experts. Here are some of the real answers:
1) Make teaching a true profession. The 19th-century industrial labor-union model doesn’t make sense for educating children. Teachers aren’t manufacturing widgets. Better teachers should have better pay, advancement opportunities and mentoring responsibilities. Better pay should also accompany the most challenging assignments — needed specialties like math and science, advanced placement skills and extra effort.
2) Let the leaders lead. Superintendents and principals must have authority to hire, deploy resources, assign mentors and training, and remove nonperformers. Seniority cannot trump the needs of our children.
3) Measure up. Over union objections, Massachusetts implemented standardized testing and a mandatory graduation exam. With measurement, we finally see our successes and failures and can take corrective action. Without measurement, we were blind.
4) Let freedom ring. When parents, teachers and kids are free to choose their school, everyone benefits. Charter schools free of union restraints and, yes, even home schools, teach lessons we can apply to improve standard public schools.
5) Pull in the parents. Teachers tell us that the best predictor of student success is parental involvement. For our lowest-performing schools, I’ve proposed mandatory parental preparation courses. Over two days, parents learn about America’s education culture, homework, school discipline, available after-school programs, what TV is harmful or helpful and so on. And for parents who don’t speak English, help them understand why their child’s English immersion in school is a key to a bright future.
6) Raise the bar. Our kids need to be pushed harder. Less about self-esteem; more about learning. I have proposed advanced math and science schools for the very brightest (the one we have is a huge success, but we need more); advanced placement in every high school, more teachers with serious science and math credentials, and laptop computers for every middle- and high-school student. We’ve also added science as a graduation exam requirement, in addition to math and English.
These ideas should sound familiar — they turn up in virtually every unbiased look at education. The opposition comes from some teachers unions. They fight better pay for better teachers, principal authority, testing and standards, school choice and English immersion. With their focus on themselves and their members, they have failed to see how we have failed our children. But that will change as testing produces data and data debunks the myth that more and more spending is the answer.
A continuing failure to close the excellence and achievement gaps would have catastrophic consequences, for individual human lives left short of their potential, and for our nation. Students around the world are racing ahead of ours. If we don’t move, we’ll become the France of the 21st century, starting as a superpower and exiting as something far less. Education must be one of our first priorities, as it was when Sputnik was launched the last time. We succeeded before. We will do it again.Mitt Romney is governor of Massachusetts.
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