SPECTER’S SPECTER: Sen. Arlen Specter (Pa.) is the Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee whose committee vote may doom school choice for the District of Columbia-supported by the city’s mayor, school board president, and city councilman who chairs the council’s education committee. "We think 2,000 kids will benefit" from the pilot program currently being considered in Congress, Nina Rees, deputy undersecretary of Education for innovation and improvement, told HE. She estimated that it would take three to five years after school choice implementation for D.C. education to improve overall. "The competition will lead to better performance," she said. Outside the mark-up on July 17 when D.C. school choice failed to advance, said a Republican staffer, "It was pretty distressing to see parents in the hallways crying. They aren’t lobbyists. They were all African-American parents who just want their kids to have a chance to get a good education. They don’t have money and they don’t have connections. Their kids’ only chance at the American dream is through an education, but their kids are in failing D.C. public schools. It was tough to see their pain." They asked for Specter to come out and speak to them, which he did, but he didn’t change his mind.
CHILD CREDIT LIVES: On July 21, Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D.-Conn.) opened a national campaign to get the new increase in the child tax credit to apply to people who don’t pay income taxes. "Our message to President Bush is strong and simple," Lieberman said. "Don’t treat low-income families like second-class citizens. Don’t leave 12 million children behind." At press time, the House and Senate had yet to agree on a way to extend the credit into a welfare check, though both houses have passed legislation designed to do so. Lieberman’s wife Hadassah said July 22 at a press conference in Tulsa, "This week-both on foot and online at Joe2004.com-Joe is leading the fight to get the 12 million children denied the child tax credit increase the help they deserve. Joe is saying that it’s time for Democrats, Independents, and truly compassionate conservatives to come together and fix this problem so that...these low-income families will get the relief the American people know they deserve."
OUT SWINGING: House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R.-Tex.) has come out swinging against the "swinging seventies" Democrats. "While everyone else got the memo that big-government, blame-America-first liberalism died with disco, the Howard Dean Democrats still want to party like its 1979," he told a group of College Republicans July 25. "Maybe we should thank the Democrats for shedding their moderate clothing to reveal their true swinging-seventies selves. . . . Just look at their presidential candidates: it’s like they’re lost in a time warp. They want to tax like Mondale, spend like Carter, and fight like McGovern." He went on to dismiss their criticisms of President Bush’s foreign policy and use of intelligence information, saying, "The Democrats’ accusations aren’t meant to be taken seriously. I will never call the Democrat Party unpatriotic, but I will call their current leadership unfit to face the serious challenges of the 21st Century."
AMC ACTIVE: "Dr. Yahya Mossa Basha, Chairman of the American Muslim Council, met with President George W. Bush in Michigan on Thursday, July 24," announced the group in a press release. Basha gave Bush a letter about "Muslim issues" and Middle East peace. Then, on July 26, Basha met with new Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmud Abbas in Washington during the latter’s trip to the American capital.
WORTH REMEMBERING: As federal spending continues out of control, a new drug entitlement seems on the verge of becoming established, and same-sex marriage is on the horizon, conservatives would do well to recall what Ronald Reagan told Young Americans for Freedom in 1971: "Perhaps we have all been at fault. We’ve forgotten that a President lives in a liberal community. That the heritage of these four decades is a constant pressure in the Nation’s Capital from the left. We who think of ourselves as conservatives have sat back critically observing, but doing no pressuring in behalf of our own views. Be critical, be vocal, and forceful in urging your views on the President. He needs that input to counter the constant pressure from the opposite side; he needs the arguments you can provide. In all of this, we’ve fallen short."
