The drive to impose uniform curriculum standards on the nation’s schools has been one of stealth, and at times, seemingly intentional deception. Most egregious has been the mantra of Common Core proponents that the effort has been “state-led and voluntary,” despite Washington coercing state adoption through the Race to the Top program and No Child Left Behind waivers; standards creators encouraging just such federal “incentives”; and Washington selecting and funding the two groups creating the tests to go with the standards. And now, more than a week after the U.S. Department of Education announced the creation of a “technical review” panel to assess the assessments, it seems increasingly certain that the panel’s work will be done behind closed doors.

At least one report asserts that the meetings will, indeed, be closed to the public. Education Week’s initial reporton the review says that the panel’s “feedback” will eventually be made public in “a yet-to-be-determined form,” but says nothing about the meetings themselves. Cato Center for Educational Freedom efforts to confirm the meeting status with the U.S. Department of Education have come up empty, with calls over two days either resulting in no information or simply going unanswered. At best, then, the meetings will be open to the public but ED has a terrible communications system. At worst the panel’s work will be completely under wraps save for some kind of final — and perhaps heavily filtered — report.

Either scenario is unacceptable. These tests are being funded by taxpayers, and the goal is ultimately to use them to assess the math and reading mastery of the nation’s children. Funders and families deserve to see what this review panel is doing, and shouldn’t have to pull telecommunications teeth to find out if and how they can do that. In addition, Common Core supporters have taken to painting opponents as paranoid, while at the same time denying or downplaying the federal government’s major role in pushing the Common Core. It would not be surprising were they to use the same tactics should Common Core opponents raise questions about the degree to which the Feds are influencing what is on the tests. The panel may well leave test content alone, but given the track record so far it is rational to fear the worst, especially when it seems the review panel is purposely being kept out of real sunlight.

Americans deserve to see all that the Feds are doing with this supposedly non-federal effort.

The Obama administration $640.5 billion fiscal year 2014 request for military spending authority is predictably unrealistic and excessive. Still, political circumstance continues to drag the Pentagon toward fiscal restraint. 

That $640.5 billion includes $88.5 billion for war (a.k.a. overseas contingency operations), $526.6 for non-war spending in the Department of Defense, and another $25.4 billion spending outside DoD, mostly for nuclear weapons in the Department of Energy, which officially counts as “national defense” or budget function 050 spending. 

Those spending levels ignore the budgetary cap set by law and the political reality it reflects. The $552 billion requested in 2014 for non-war “national defense” spending exceeds by $55 billion the spending cap set by the 2011 Budget Control Act, as amended by the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012. Were Congress to enact the president’s budget and leave the cap in place, that total would be sequestered equally across “defense” spending categories, including the war. 

Even if Congress agrees to a grand bargain altering the caps, military spending will likely face additional cuts. Republican resistance to tax hikes and Democratic protection of entitlements mean that any deal they cut will likely again target discretionary spending, more than half of which goes to the military. Of course, Congress’ failure thus far to undo this year’s more onerous sequestration suggests that no deal is likely. An over-under on where the non-war Pentagon budget winds up for 2014 would be closer to $500 billion than $550 billion. 

In a certain light, there is some sacrifice here. The non-war DoD request of $526.6 billion is just $1.2 billion more than last year’s request. Factoring in inflation, it’s about a 1.5 percent cut. This budget would bring the portion of GDP going to the military to 4 percent, versus. 4.3 percent this year, according to the administration. And as Russell Rumbaugh points out, DoD’s projected spending over ten years is down $114 billion from a year ago. 

On the other hand, the request would be a substantial increase over the $493 billion that the Pentagon actually got from Congress this year, after sequestration (see page 10 here). Economic growth is the main reason that a declining portion of national wealth is going to the military. And the cuts scheduled over the decade would arrive mostly in its second half, when someone else is president, meaning that the cuts are basically imaginary. 

Additionally, the “placeholder” request of $88.5 billion in Pentagon funds for war—the same as last year—is suspiciously high. The administration says they will revise the request once they determine force levels in Afghanistan. But the president already announced plans to halve total U.S. troops there from 68,000 to 34,000 by next February. Even with the increased cost from exiting, the total cost should be far lower. The Pentagon is likely continuing to use the war budget to dodge caps and fund personnel and other non-war functions. Meanwhile, the administration still claims to support a ten-year cap on war spending. As Charles Knight and I explain here, that is a feckless gesture at a good idea. 

One reason why the Pentagon request is unrealistically and unnecessarily large is that it’s part of a struggle with Republicans over the shape of deficit reduction. The White House may be holding military spending cuts in reserve to offer as an alternative to tax increases that Republicans will refuse. Another, more fundamental, reason is that the administration remains wedded to the liberal internationalist species of the militarist consensus that sees U.S. military power as the linchpin to global stability, trade, and liberalization. Here are some newer arguments against that bipartisan consensus. Hopefully the new secretary of defense, Chuck Hagel, shares some of that skepticism and will demonstrate it once he has time to guide the budget. 

Given our safety, we should stop spending on the military as we did at the height of the Cold War. The Pentagon budget should comply with the spending cap by making choices among missions and goals, rather than clinging to existing alliances and ambitions. The cuts on offer are mostly efficiencies—they require doing the same things more cheaply. Some reforms of this kind, like the administration’s proposal to increase TRICARE fees and start another Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) round, can save big bucks, though Congress will probably ignore them. Bigger cuts require larger choices. If, for example, we shed allies and the pretension that stability everywhere depends on our military presence, far deeper cuts to each service, especially the ground forces, are possible. We could cut a leg or two of the nuclear delivery-vehicle triad without sacrificing deterrence. One virtue of austerity is to encourage these sorts of overdue choices.

Among politically active social conservatives, there’s a remarkably durable myth that Republicans can make inroads with black voters if only they hold fast to hard-line positions on issues like same-sex marriage. That notion cropped up again this week as part of a widely publicized letter to Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus in which thirteen officials with social-conservative groups threatened that their followers will leave the GOP or stay home in future elections unless the party pledges to continue its staunch line against gay marriage, a stance now widely unpopular in public opinion polls and among many Republican demographics such as those under 50. 

The letter, which you can read here, portrays the issue as vital in GOP minority outreach, which they said should “focus on issues where there is mutual agreement like traditional marriage.” (It does not mention that black opinion, once lopsidedly opposed to same-sex marriage, has swung closer in polls to an even split on the issue). To support this claim, it cites real-world examples from three states: Illinois, Ohio, and my own state of Maryland. 

On Ohio, the letter repeats longstanding claims that President George W. Bush’s campaign stance on marriage made the difference in his narrow Buckeye State win in 2004. My colleague David Boaz has already examined those claims in this space, and found the evidence surprisingly thin. The Illinois example, for its part, is self-evidently beside the point: the letter correctly notes that some minority elected officials in that state oppose same-sex marriage, but that does nothing to show that any Illinois blacks are ready to stop voting Democratic because of their concern for the issue. 

That leaves Maryland. And in the course of analyzing last November’s Maryland vote in some detail, and writing a series of articles on the results of my research, I feel some confidence in saying that no one has been able to offer evidence that the ballot fight over same-sex marriage did the Maryland Republican Party any overall good with black voters in the state.

As I noted in this December article in The Blaze, Prince George’s County in suburban Washington, which has a substantial black majority among registered voters and has won national attention as a microcosm of black political trends, was hard fought territory in Maryland’s Question 6 fight. In the end, the county split about evenly, Question 6 trailing by just 1 point; the measure was carried to a 5‑point statewide win by a strong showing elsewhere in the Baltimore-DC corridor, notably including many Republican suburbs. 

Because P.G. is so large and has so many overwhelmingly black precincts, it afforded an opportunity to investigate whether black voters with socially conservative views are any more likely to vote Republican than those with more socially liberal inclinations. Toward that end, I identified those black-dominated precincts with the strongest social-conservative leanings, as measured by the size of the margins by which they disapproved Question 6. If the “GOP minority inroads” thesis was correctly identifying a genuine trend, you would expect to see signs of a healthy black crossover vote for GOP candidates in those precincts. Instead, the black precincts that most strongly opposed Question 6 were also among those where the GOP got buried most completely, with Mitt Romney getting only (in typical showings) 3, 5, or 6 percent of the overall vote. The down-ticket Maryland GOP candidates, who all happened to be strong social conservatives, were getting beaten just as decisively, including in Senate and House races where all the relevant candidates were white. The GOP’s social-conservative senate hopeful, for example — who ran well enough to carry 13 of 23 counties statewide against lackluster white liberal Sen. Ben Cardin — did even worse in P.G. than Romney, winning only 6 1/2 percent of the vote county-wide and a good bit less than that — as little as 2 percent in one precinct — in the most socially conservative black P.G. neighborhoods. 

Republicans who imagine that catering to the most vehement social conservatives within the party will result in a harvest of new black votes are deluding themselves. 

To a degree almost impossible to imagine just a month ago, North Korea has won international attention, dominated events in Northeast Asia, and embarrassed the United States. Unfortunately, the Obama administration has played into Pyongyang’s hands by responding to the North’s provocations. Now Secretary of State John Kerry is visiting East Asia, beginning Friday, where the so-called Democratic People’s Republic of Korea will dominate the agenda.

Rushing off to the region on a high-profile trip is another mistake. Whatever Secretary Kerry does or says is likely to be seen as enhancing the DPRK’s stature. Better for him to have stayed home, phoning his counterparts as appropriate. 

No doubt the Obama administration hopes to craft a diplomatic answer to what is widely seen as a crisis. However, Washington dare not reward the North for its caterwauling, even if Kim Jong-un suddenly adopts the mien of a serious leader of a serious nation. Rather, Secretary Kerry should hold out the possibility of engagement, even diplomatic relations—but only if Pyongyang chooses to behave like other nations. No more providing benefits in response to threats. 

Moreover, the secretary and other U.S. officials should stop responding to every new North Korean development, big and small. America is a superpower with the ability to vaporize every acre of the DPRK. The North is impoverished; its people are starving; its military is antiquated. Its leaders are evil, not stupid or suicidal, and have neither the ability nor the incentive to attack America. Washington should respond to the next North Korean provocation, whether verbal challenge or missile test, with a collective yawn. 

Hope continues to breed eternal that China will tame or replace the Kim regime. No doubt Beijing is frustrated with its nominal protégé. However, the Chinese government will act only if it believes doing so is in China’s interest. Insisting or demanding will achieve nothing. Secretary Kerry must seek to persuade Beijing, an unusual strategy for Washington, which is used to dictating to other nations. 

North Korea is a human tragedy, but its belligerent behavior is primarily a problem for its neighbors, not the United States. Washington should give Pyongyang the (non) attention that it so richly deserves.

Who says crime doesn’t pay? Just look at academia. The blogosphere was abuzz last week after the New York Post ran a piece about former Weather Underground radical Kathy Boudin, 69, who spent 22 years in prison for an armored-car robbery that killed three people, including the first black police officer on the Nyack police force, and left nine children fatherless. After her parole in 2003, Boudin was awarded a prestigious adjunct professorship at Columbia University (my alma mater) and this year was named the Sheinberg Scholar-in-Residence at NYU Law School.

The context for the story? As the Post puts it, “Boudin’s bounce-back into respectability … comes to light a week before the release of Robert Redford’s movie ‘The Company You Keep,’ loosely based on the $1.6 million heist.”

For a fuller account of the academic/​Hollywood route to respectability, you can turn, of all places, to this afternoon’s “Daily Beast.” There you’ll find former Reason magazine senior editor Michael Moynihan’s “How 1960s Radicals Ended Up Teaching Your Kids,” a catalog of academic “rehabilitation” efforts.

With their Obama connections, former Weather Underground bombers Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, the husband-and-wife team at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and Northwestern Law School, respectively, are well know, of course. (As Moynihan writes, Dohrn was “also a former Sheinberg Scholar-in-Residence at NYU, which must consider bomb-making skills when making its selection.”) But did you know about Howard Machtinger at the University of North Carolina? Or Ericka Huggins at California State University, East Bay? The account of her doings will curdle your blood. Now she lectures on “human rights.”

And how are the universities handling these, well, delicate histories? As Moynihan writes:

Boudin’s Columbia University biography doesn’t mention her violent past, describing her simply as “an educator and counselor with experience in program development since 1964, working within communities with limited resources to solve social problems.” Neither does an official NYU press release announcing her new gig, instead explaining that Boudin “has been dedicated to community involvement in social change since the 1960’s.” Well, that’s one way of putting it.

So it is. But if you thought the Daily Beast has gone soft for running this piece, just look at the comments. They must have wanted simply to tweak their natural audience.

When the previous Bush administration released its fiscal 2006 budget proposal, it included a separate document listing specific spending cuts and other reforms. The idea was too little and too late, and it’s likely that the Bush administration included it as part of a feeble attempt to answer critics of the Republican spending binge. 

The supplement became an annual inclusion and the Obama administration has carried on the tradition. This year, however, the administration skipped the separate document and instead tucked a list of suggested “cuts, consolidations, and savings” in the back of the main budget document. 

The placement is different, but the relatively paltry offerings are the same. 

The big picture is that the administration found $25 billion in savings. Overall spending under the president’s proposed budget would increase $93 billion over last year, so the savings would be gross rather than net. And, obviously, $25 billion isn’t much in a $3.8 trillion budget. 

Here’s a chart that puts the “savings” in perspective (you might not even be able to see the red “savings” line):

The sad part is that Congress won’t even agree to a lot of the president’s proposed cuts. 

Protectionism masquerading as regulation in the public interest is the subject of an excellent new paper by my colleagues Bill Watson and Sallie James. As tariffs and other border barriers to trade have declined, rent-seeking domestic interests have turned increasingly to regulations with noble sounding purposes – protecting Flipper from the indiscriminating nets of tuna fishermen, fighting the tobacco industry’s efforts to entice children with grape-flavored cigarettes, keeping U.S. highways safe from recklessly-driven, dilapidated, smoke-emitting Mexican trucks, and so on – in order to reduce competition and secure artificial market advantages over you, the consumer.

The paper documents numerous examples of this “bootleggers and Baptists” phenomenon, where the causes of perhaps well-intentioned advocates of health and safety regulation were infiltrated or commandeered by domestic producer interests with more nefarious, protectionist motives, and advises policymakers to:

be skeptical of regulatory proposals backed by the target domestic industry and of proposals that lack a plausible theory of market failure. These are red flags that the proposal is the product of privilege-seeking special interests disguised as altruistic consumer advocates.

After reading this incisive paper, you might consider whether a new law restricting U.S. government purchases of Chinese-produced information technology systems in the name of cybersecurity fits the profile of regulatory protectionism. A two paragraph section of the 574-page “Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act of 2013,” signed into law last week, prohibits federal agency purchases of IT equipment “produced, manufactured or assembled” by entities “owned, directed, or subsidized by the People’s Republic of China” unless the head of the purchasing agency consults with the FBI and determines that the purchase is “in the national interest of the United States” and then conveys that determination in writing to the House and Senate Appropriations Committees.

Sec. 516. (a) None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available under this Act may be

used by the Departments of Commerce and Justice, the National Aeronautics and Space

Administration, or the National Science Foundation to acquire an information technology system

unless the head of the entity involved, in consultation with the Federal Bureau of Investigation or

other appropriate Federal entity, has made an assessment of any associated risk of cyberespionage

or sabotage associated with the acquisition of such system, including any risk associated

with such system being produced, manufactured or assembled by one or more entities that are

owned, directed or subsidized by the People’s Republic of China.

 

(b) None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available under this Act may be used to

acquire an information technology system described in an assessment required by subsection (a)

and produced, manufactured or assembled by one or more entities that are owned, directed or

subsidized by the People’s Republic of China unless the head of the assessing entity described in

subsection (a) determines, and reports that determination to the Committees on Appropriations

of the House of Representatives and the Senate, that the acquisition of such system is in the

national interest of the United States.

Congress and the administration have already effectively blacklisted Chinese telecom companies Huawei and ZTE by advising U.S. carriers not to purchase their wares and by blocking Huawei’s acquisitions of U.S.-based firms. And none of the evidence that these companies are bad actors posing U.S. national security threats has been made public. We are to trust that Huawei’s and ZTE’s U.S. competitors and their representatives in Washington have no ulterior motives in keeping the Chinese telecoms out of the market.

The new law would seem to ensnare many more Chinese companies, as “IT equipment” is a much broader category than just telecommunications equipment. Notwithstanding any legitimacy to the concern that IT equipment made by Chinese companies fitting the statutory description could pose higher-than-average cyber threats, the law will undoubtedly have the effect of reducing demand for all Chinese-made or assembled IT equipment because the costs in time and money of enduring an FBI approval process, as well as the costs – for U.S. agencies and U.S. companies selling in the federal IT market – of ascertaining every potential Chinese suppliers’ relationship with the Chinese government will prove too daunting. And, of course, among the significant beneficiaries of this diverted demand will be U.S.-based producers of IT equipment.

The fact that included among the restricted group of suppliers are companies “subsidized” by the Chinese government should raise eyebrows about the real motives of this law. Are companies that receive subsidies more likely to be a cyber threat? Or is this more score settling for Chinese industrial policies? If improved cybersecurity – and not protectionism – is the true aim of policy, there are better approaches that carry a much reduced risk of inspiring retaliatory measures from China and a proliferation of unilateral policies around the world.