In California, teachers unions and their allies fight to close off educational options even though poor Latino kids attending a charter school in southeast L.A. vastly outperform children in neighborhood public schools. Allysia Finley explains at The Wall Street Journal.

According to L.A. County Board of Education member Doug Boyd, the district arguably acted illegally when it rejected Aspire schools on these grounds. “We were shocked that LAUSD would turn down the charters,” he says. “The pretext that they used was ridiculous.”

Mr. Boyd, who has an autistic son in the first-grade, visited the Aspire schools last week. “I have never seen a better charter school,” he says, adding that Aspire students often come from single-parent homes in some of the most violent areas of Los Angeles.

So why did the board vote to close the schools? “They want the money that the state attaches to each kid,” Mr. Boyd says.

But more fundamentally, teachers unions and their allies on the board are opposed to offering parents educational options, especially if those options expose the failure of public schools. Parents in southeast L.A. must be wondering why poor Latino kids attending Aspire schools vastly out-perform their friends in neighborhood public schools.

While the county board which hears charter appeals has issued a resounding rebuke to L.A. Unified’s school board, Mr. Boyd says district officials have been threatening to close other charters that refuse to sign up with the district’s special-education plan. “How many of the charters will succumb to the blackmail?” he muses.

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Growth in sales at retail chain stores has fallen again according to an ICSC-Goldman Sachs survey. You can see on the chart below that growth has been slowing for nearly two years and is now well below its historical average.

My friend Cato Institute’s Richard Rahn writes that my heading would have resulted in more people reading his vital essay. Richard is correct, so I have borrowed the headline on his behalf. You may be shocked by what you will read here.

“The Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer, and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot. Reports from fishermen, seal hunters, and explorers all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Within a few years it is predicted that due to the ice melt the sea will rise and make most coastal cities uninhabitable.” — from an Associated Press report published in The Washington Post on Nov. 2, 1922.

You may have noticed that the predicted disaster 92 years ago did not happen, nor have other predicted catastrophes from the global-warming crowd.

On July 5, 1989, Noel Brown, then the director of the New York office of the United Nations Environment Program, warned of a “10-year window of opportunity to solve” global warming “entire nations could be wiped off the face of Earth by rising sea levels if the global-warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ‘eco-refugees,’ threatening political chaos.”

The U.N.-forecast disaster never occurred. However, thanks must be given to Mother Nature for the unexpected 17-year pause in global warming rather than the actions of mankind, which have continued to spew out carbon dioxide at record levels. This little error has not stopped the doomsayers at the U.N.

In 2007, the chief of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said, “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.” It is now 2014 and nothing was done before 2012, so, since it is “too late,” why spend any more time and money fighting global warming?

On Jan. 19, 2009, James Hansen, climate expert who until last year was head of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, firmly declared that President Obama “has only four years to save the Earth” which you might have noticed he failed to do. Back in 2006, Al Gore told us that we had only “10 years” to solve the global-warming problem.

Since his recommendations are most unlikely to be accepted and acted on in the next two years, and since there has been no statistically significant warming since the former vice president received his vision, what do you think he will say two years from now?

“The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climate change once the results have become grim reality.” This is from an article in Newsweek on April 28, 1975, warning us of the dangers of global cooling. (You can find most of these and many more quotes on the Climate Depot website, collected by Marc Morano, illustrating how little the experts really know about climate change.)

The Wall Street Journal reports on Vermont becoming the first state to require labeling for foods containing GMOs.

The movement against genetically modified crops scored a signal victory Wednesday, as the Vermont legislature passed a bill that would make it the first state to require food makers to label products made with the technology.

The Vermont House voted 114-30 to adopt a state Senate labeling bill. Gov. Peter Shumlin has said he plans to sign the bill, whose requirements would take effect in July 2016.

While Vermont is one of the smallest U.S. states, the legislation marks a victory for activists who have campaigned for GMO labeling, saying consumers have a right to transparency over the widely used technology. Food and agriculture industry groups, which have lobbied aggressively to block similar measures in other states, blasted the Vermont decision, saying it was driven by faulty science and would hurt consumers.

GMOs are crops whose genes have been engineered to make them resistant to pests, better able to withstand drought, and otherwise hardier. The vast majority of corn and soybeans grown in the U.S. are GMOs, and food companies estimate that about 80% of U.S. packaged-food products contain GMO ingredients in some form.

Rand Paul is visiting a broad group of voters not normally associated with the Republican party. The big question here is will the leadership of the Republican party move away from the War Dogs’ big government policies of the Bush/Cheney/Rove/McCain/Romney era to a libertarian-based, small government, nonintervention-based template intended by our Founders? NPR reports on Paul’s efforts here. 

It was just over a year ago that Paul made a much-ballyhooed appearance at Howard University, one of the nation’s top historically black colleges. His speech included a few stumbles — he drew groans when he asked those in the packed auditorium if they knew that black Republicans founded the NAACP. But Paul also elicited applause when he said that the nation has drug laws and court systems that “disproportionately [punish] the black community.”

Miller, the NAACP chief, and other African-American leaders refer to the issue as “mass incarceration,” and its prominence as an issue in the black community can’t be understated.

“I’ve been traveling and talking to audiences about the effect of mass incarceration,” Miller says. “There is hardly a person who hasn’t been affected by it; what we do about it is the question.”

“It is such a pervasive issue in our community, and, quite honestly, if we can get the ear of someone like Rand Paul, that helps us in trying to find solutions that make sense,” she says.

Since that speech, Paul has — along with Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont — led legislative efforts on Capitol Hill to revamp mandatory sentencing laws.

Paul has likened the effects of such laws on black Americans to the racist policies of the nation’s Jim Crow era, and has said that laws preventing felons from voting is tantamount to voter suppression.

In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last year, Paul said this: “If I told you that 1 out of 3 African-American males is forbidden by law from voting, you might think I was talking about Jim Crow 50 years ago. Yet today, a third of African-American males are still prevented from voting because of the war on drugs.”

“The majority of illegal drug users and dealers nationwide are white,” he said, “but three-fourths of all people in prison for drug offenses are African-American or Latino.”

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The WSJ explains the impact of Obama’s signature achievement on small business hiring. As James Freeman points out, O’Care’s broken incentives almost ensure that low-wage workers will have a harder time raising their incomes.

A new survey demonstrates the Affordable Care Act’s negative impact on employment. According to the Journal, “nearly half of small-business owners with at least five employees, or 45% of those polled, said they had had to curb their hiring plans because of the health law, and almost a third—29%—said they had been forced to make staff cuts, according to a U.S. Bancorp survey of 3,173 owners with less than $10 million in annual revenue that will be released Thursday.”

Given how much the President talks about income inequality, it is perhaps ironic that his signature achievement is preventing people from earning incomes. Even though many businesses won’t have to provide health insurance until next year or later, the Journal reports that “the law is already having a lasting impact on how lots of owners choose to run their companies.”

Businesses with fewer than 50 employees will remain exempt from many of ObamaCare’s most onerous provisions—and from many other costly federal mandates. This has created the phenomenon of “49ers”—companies that grow to 49 employees and then cap their workforces to avoid expensive federal requirements. Needless to say, this is not supportive of job creation.

And we’ve previously described the new ObamaCare-induced phenomenon of “29ers”—employees held below 30 hours of work per week to avoid counting as full-time workers eligible for employer-provided health insurance. As a Journal editorial explained last year, “The savings from restricting hours worked can be enormous. If a company with 50 employees hires a new worker for $12 an hour for 29 hours a week, there is no health insurance requirement. But suppose that worker moves to 30 hours a week. This triggers the $2,000 federal penalty. So to get 50 more hours of work a year from that employee, the extra cost to the employer rises to about $52 an hour—the $12 salary and the  ObamaCare  tax of what works out to be $40 an hour.”

The broken incentives in ObamaCare seem almost designed to ensure that low-wage workers have a harder time raising their incomes. But we’re betting the President will find someone else to blame for inequality.

If you have been prescribed a statin drug, you will benefit greatly by reading the research presented here, here and here. The concept of NNT, or number needed to treat, offers compelling insight for every patient regardless of the prescribed drug or disease in question.

The harms of statins are less publicized than benefits, but are well documented. A recent narrative review of statin myopathy suggests that 10% is a relatively conservative estimate for this side effect,[...]" data-original-title="Footnote 1">1 which may be a primary contributor to high rates of drug discontinuation.[...]" data-original-title="Footnote 2">2 An additional, more concerning side effect is statin-induced diabetes, as noted in the JUPITER study and a large Women’s Health Initiative cohort, studies that best represent primary prevention cohorts.[...]" data-original-title="Footnote 3">3 We use an absolute risk estimate for statin-induced diabetes with the understanding that this may underestimate risk for many. Baseline risk of diabetes is likely the greatest driver of risk for statin-induced diabetes, and the JUPITER trial enrolled patients at lower risk (2.4%) than many, perhaps most, patients who take statins. Our calculation presumes this low baseline risk and that the aggregate chance of diabetes is time-dependent and linear. We have thus extrapolated from the 1.9-year trial data to a 5-year endpoint, the same time endpoint and calculation used for benefits. These data are relevant to new onset diabetes only, and do not address the equally concerning possibility that some diabetic patients may experience statin-induced worsening of their disease, or inability to manage or cure their disease using lifestyle changes. We look forward to data addressing these issues.

Our sense, based on factors noted above, is that the benefits of these drugs are likely exaggerated partly by an unconscious ‘hope bias’ on the part of readers and authors. This is common in the early literature on therapeutic innovations, and is often attenuated as further literature emerges. In addition, post-marketing surveillance data is in its early stages with this class of drugs and preliminary reports suggest that cognitive decline, tendonopathies, and other side effects may emerge in future literature. Finally, the source of the great majority of these data is industry, which has a spotty history of integrity in trial data reporting, suggesting these data to be a best-case scenario.

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