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Republican Congressman Confronted by Extreme Anti-Immigrant Protesters, Threatens to Punch Them Out

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lostlakehiker4/21/2015 4:55:12 pm PDT

Support for Prop. 8 wasn’t unusual. It did, after all, get a majority of the votes cast on the issue. The best evidence that someone is extreme whatever-wing is that he supports something so far out that it has next to no support at the national level. [At the time the vote was taken.]

Bilingual education isn’t a RW-LW issue. It’s a technical issue. Do kids fare better in the long run if they spend a while intensively learning English and then take their other courses in English, or do they fare better if their English education is gradual and in the meantime they take their other courses in the language spoken at home?

The answer might depend on how old they are when they start. It might depend on how gradual gradual is, and on whether the bilingual education ever actually gets around to where they can go mainstream. There will inevitably be instances where what has been called “bilingual” education turns out badly for most of the students in a school system, and who wouldn’t oppose that?

As to the answer to this technical question, my hunch is that immersion is best. That’s how the army works it, after all. And Berlitz.

The minimum wage is another technical issue. It should be clear to one and all that at some point, a minimum wage law can set wages so high that businesses despair of breaking even, give up, and close rather than go broke paying more than they can afford.

In Sweden, people do a lot more of their own work than in the US for just this reason. You may not be much good at putting furniture together, but you don’t have to pay yourself minimum wage and you don’t have to pay taxes on that wage you don’t pay yourself. This has an egalitarian upside but it has the downside that there’s little formal employment to be had in assembling furniture and a lot of people who could get more done working at something they’re actually good at end up slogging through the furniture assembly.

Minimum wage laws are just one way, and probably not even second best among the choices, for raising the living standard of the working poor. The Earned Income Tax Credit, which should be liberalized and phased out slower, would do a better job of it, by me.

And then we come to the Confederate Flag. That’s a horse of a different color. I won’t even bother to try to construct an excuse or an explanation for that one.