McHenry County Blog

A press release from Joe Walsh:

Congressman Walsh Issues Statement on House Passage of D.C. Opportunities Scholarship Program

“Once again, D.C. parents will have the power and means necessary to emancipate their children from failing public schools”

Washington, D.C. — Today, the US House of Representatives passed H.R. 471, the SOAR Act, a bill which Congressman Walsh co-sponsored, by 225-195 votes.

The bill reauthorizes the D.C. Opportunities Scholarship Program – a program that provides low-income students scholarships to higher performing schools in the District of Columbia.

Since its 2004 inception, the D.C. OSP has been a huge success. Providing more than 3,300 kids with the opportunity to attend higher performing schools, the program touts a 91 percent graduation rate, versus the overall high school graduation rate of 55 percent found in the District.

“Today Congress stood up for our kids,” said Congressman Walsh.

A pleased Joe Walsh is joined byt Congressman Don Manzullo at an MCC forum.

“They stood up to the teachers unions who were so scared of seeing our kids have the opportunity to break-free from their failing educational systems, that they spent millions of dollars trying to maintain the status quo.

“They stood up for the parents who desperately want their kids to have the chance to receive a high-quality education.

“Today Congress made the decision to put kids before politics, and once again, D.C. parents will have the power and means necessary to emancipate their children from failing public schools.”

“Educators and parents across the country should wake up and pay attention.

“The D.C. OSP is a program that should be modeled in Illinois and all over America.

“Its proven results are undeniable and through it, we’ve seen thousands of students receive an education that has prepared them to compete in a society where education is the keystone of success.”

“As a lifelong educator, the passage of this bill means so much to me. It was about our kids, about giving future generations the education they will need to lead our great country into the future.”

Rep. Joe Walsh ran the Daniel Murphy Scholarship Fund, a Chicago-based privately funded school voucher program which gives high school scholarships to low-income Chicago eighth grader, from 1997-2001.

They are both 48 years old, but one is at the beginning of a Congressional term and the other near the beginning of the end.

While liberal Democrat Melissa Bean has not conceded her narrow loss to conservative Republican Joe Walsh, Walsh got top billing in a Chicago Tribune article Tuesday.

He and his wife Helene are featured in a page wide photo in front of the national’s Capitol.

Bean is seen below sitting behind her huge desk looking at papers.

Reporter Katherine Skiba started the article telling of how Walsh stuck out his tongue at a lawyer and a news reporter.

She characterized it as “comedy—or a case of nerves.”

Joe Walsh expressing exuberance at McHenry's Fiesta Days Parade.

My guess is that Walsh has not left the “wearing of his feelings on his sleeve” in Illinois.

The article is basically about freshman orientation.

As usual, Bean refused to talk to the reporter.

Nine more years of data in this third edition of “More Guns, Less Crime.”

When I read the second edition eight years ago, I was pleased that John Lott’s hypothesis of the mid-1990′s had up held.

After all, it’s just common sense that if a potential rapist thought a woman might be able to protect herself with a gun that he would be less likely to attack, being the cowards rapists are.

But the leap from common sense to policy formation sometimes takes facts.

Fortunately, this book is packed with them.

Besides showing that no state that has adopted right-to-carry legislation has seen any of the parade of horribles that opponents trot out occur, the data presented show that crime actually does decrease when people are allowed to carry firearms.

In my own state of Illinois, there was a member of the Armed Forces killed while sitting in the front row of the Northern Illinois University lecture hall when the shooter entered the stage from an outside door and started firing. Lott points out that campus security arrived in six minutes—faster than in any other mass shooting at an institution of higher learning—but that was still not good enough.

Maybe, had NIU not been a protection free zone, she and others would be alive today.

Perhaps the mayor of Washington, D.C., Adrian M. Fenty, whom I understand is a fellow graduate of Oberlin College, will read the book and figure out that he could lower his city’s crime rate by advocating something no good little Oberlin liberal would ever think would work…unless he or she actually was willing to follow data to their logical policy conclusions.

Not that I think my former legislative colleague Richard Daley, now mayor of Chicago, could make that leap, but, maybe, just maybe, the mayor of Washington can.

The rest of us who read this book will be armed with information to promote a logical “we can protect ourselves when the police aren’t around, if policy makers will let us” policy.

Incidentally, lower hurdles to get a license (in training and dollars) tend to result in larger drops in crime rate.

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The above was published as a book review on Amazon.com.

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You know when I would schedule it?

Inauguration Day.

There will be hundreds of thousands of African-Americans in Washington that day to celebrate the swearing in of President-Elect Barack Obama.

If I were an ambitious black leader, I would be preparing for a demonstration to support continuation of one black United States Senator—Roland Burris.

And, if I were Barack Obama, I would ever so quietly pass the word to those white Democratic Party U.S. Senators to make sure than Burris was sworn in before my day in the international sun.

The alternative would be the danger of Burris being too large a story on January 20, 2009.

Can you think of a better end game for the racist pitch made by Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich and Congressman Bobby Rush?

You know when I would schedule it?

Inauguration Day.

There will be hundreds of thousands of African-Americans in Washington that day to celebrate the swearing in of President-Elect Barack Obama.

If I were an ambitious black leader, I would be preparing for a demonstration to support continuation of one black United States Senator—Roland Burris.

And, if I were Barack Obama, I would ever so quietly pass the word to those white Democratic Party U.S. Senators to make sure than Burris was sworn in before my day in the international sun.

The alternative would be the danger of Burris being too large a story on January 20, 2009.

Can you think of a better end game for the racist pitch made by Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich and Congressman Bobby Rush?