† What It's Like To Be Sheriff Joe: The New York Times smears “America’s Sheriff” Joe Arpaio as a “rogue” and “off-the-rails” in an editorial calling upon new homeland security chief Janet Napolitano to “rein in” Arpaio and the federal immigration enforcement agencies:

The burden of action is particularly high on Ms. Napolitano, who as Arizona’s governor handled Sheriff Arpaio with a gingerly caution that looked to some of his critics and victims as calculated and timid.

Ms. Napolitano, who is known as a serious and moderate voice on immigration, recently directed her agency to review its enforcement efforts, including looking at ways to expand the 287(g) program. Sheriff Arpaio is a powerful argument for doing just the opposite.

Now that she has left Arizona politics behind, Ms. Napolitano is free to prove this is not Arpaio’s America, where the mob rules and immigrants are subject to ritual humiliation. The country should expect no less.

Unlike NYC, AZ is not the New York Times' America, and the citizens of the state love Arpaio and keep sending him back to continue enforcing the laws of the United States of America. This past November, Arpaio beat Dem challenger Dan Saban by a 13-point margin (55 percent to 42 percent), and raised an unprecedented $600K for his campaign.

† Updates To Previous Posts (fourth item, Say It Aint So Roger, Andy, Jason …): Sports Illustrated reports that four sources are alleging that Alex Rodriguez tested positive for the anabolic steroids testosterone and methenolone in a 2003 “survey” test conducted by Major League Baseball to determine if performance-enhancing drug use was pervasive enough to warrant imposing mandatory random drug testing. Rodriguez, who was playing as a shortstop for the Texas Rangers at the time, was one of 104 players who tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs. That year he won the American League home run title and the AL Most Valuable Player award. MLB Players Association issued a statement on Saturday explaining that the 2003 test “was intended to be non-disciplinary and anonymous.” Former LA Dodgers EVP and GM Fred Claire is calling upon Rodriguez to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about his involvement with steroid use, and Newsday’s Wallace Matthews is  adamant that A-Rod and all the other cheaters should be banned from the Hall of Fame: “Now, nobody is saying these cheaters should go to jail. … But if we can't lock them up and we can't recoup the money they were paid for bogus accomplishments, at least we can strip these cheaters of the only thing they have left. Their legacy.”

Editorial Note: Of the dozen-or-so articles The Stiletto read on this developing story over the weekend, CBC of Canada had the best headline:  A-Rod Became A-Roid By Sunday Morning.

† Garbage In, Garbage Out: Part II: Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union argues that “As President Barack Obama has said, education means "more to our economic future than anything … [t]hat’s why a cornerstone of any long-term economic plan must be an investment in quality public schools and colleges”:

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, a two-year, $819 billion federal package, includes almost a $150 billion investment aimed at injecting much needed funds into the nation's schools, preschool programs, and colleges. To put this in context, the current budget of the Department of Education is $60 billion.

Such an infusion of federal aid would be the largest since World War II which will go a long way toward helping schools avoid devastating budget cuts and layoffs that would move our country away from our goal of great public schools for every student. In addition, targeted funds will help rebuild and modernize America's aging public schools, provide needed services to students with disabilities and educationally disadvantaged students, and make college more affordable by increasing the Pell grant award.

Van Roekel points out that modernizing aging schools “would also create tens of thousands of new jobs, from lumber mills to electricians to new energy-saving technologies,” but The Wall Street Journal notes that “much of this cash would go to public-school systems that don't even need the money for its earmarked purposes,” with one example being the Milwaukee Public School system, which “would receive $88.6 million over two years for new construction projects under the House version of the stimulus - even though the district currently has 15 vacant school buildings and declining enrollment.” Both the House and Senate versions of the bill include provisions that are favorable to teachers’ unions (a core Dem support group) and adverse to private and charter schools.   

Citing a different Obama quote about the “stimulus” package ("we will invest in what works"), the libertarian Cato Institute’s Neal McCluskey and Adam Schaeffer, Ph.D. counter that “if that's true, every piece of education spending - totaling a whopping $150 billion - in the mammoth stimulus bill should fall by the wayside”:

No. More and better education may indeed be a good thing, but government spending doesn't give us that. What it gives us is more waste.

Consider elementary and secondary education, which receives the biggest share of the bill's education stimulation.

The average, inflation-adjusted, per-pupil expenditure in the United States was $5,393 in 1970 according to the U.S. Department of Education's Digest of Education Statistics. By 2004 it had more than doubled to $11,470.

And what did we get in return? Almost nothing.

Between 1973 and 2004 mathematics scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress rose just one percent for 17-year-olds. And math achievement was the good news. Between 1971 and 2004, their reading scores were completely flat.

McCluskey and Schaeffer explain that public funds spent on elementary and secondary, higher, and pre-K education is “pour[ing] good money after bad” because “politicians spend money so they appear to ‘care’ and to be ‘doing something’ about problems. And that’s how they get re-elected.

† Updates To Previous Posts (second item, Gays Do Not Tolerate Dissent: Part II): The New York Times is wondering whether there should be limits to transparency in politics, after Web site eightmaps.com (“the names and ZIP codes of people who donated to the ballot measure - information that California collects and makes public under state campaign finance disclosure laws - and overlays the data on a Google map”) enabled gay marriage activists to send death threats to Prop. 8 supporters, as well as to boycott their businesses:

Visitors can see markers indicating a contributor’s name, approximate location, amount donated and, if the donor listed it, employer. That is often enough information for interested parties to find the rest - like an e-mail or home address. The identity of the site’s creators, meanwhile, is unknown; they have maintained their anonymity.

Eightmaps.com is the latest, most striking example of how information collected through disclosure laws intended to increase the transparency of the political process, magnified by the powerful lens of the Web, may be undermining the same democratic values that the regulations were to promote.

With tools like eightmaps - and there are bound to be more of them - strident political partisans can challenge their opponents directly, one voter at a time. The results, some activists fear, could discourage people from participating in the political process altogether.

That is why the soundtrack to eightmaps.com is a loud gnashing of teeth among civil libertarians, privacy advocates and people supporting open government. The site pits their cherished values against each other: political transparency and untarnished democracy versus privacy and freedom of speech.

† Updates To Previous Posts (last item, Hunting Hokies): The New York Times accuses VA state legislators of “callously” voting down a bill to require background checks for private sales at gun shows proposed by Gov. Tim Kaine (D) “as a memorial to the 32 students slain in the Virginia Tech massacre” just a day after repealing a law forbidding concealed weapons in a club or restaurant where alcohol is served – or as The Times puts it, “people swaggering into bars with concealed weapons and make-my-day fantasies.” Not two weeks earlier Hiayang Zhu, a Chinese graduate student at Virginia Tech decapitated another Chinese graduate student, Xin Yang, with a large kitchen knife as horrified spectators in the Au Bon Pain cafe inside the Graduate Life Center helplessly looked on. The FBI’s first “Crime in Schools and Colleges” study in 2007 found that in 558,000 offenses reported between 2000 and 2004, a knife was three times more likely to be used as a weapon than a firearm – and the vast majority of violent assaults involved fists and feet. Clearly, the most effective way to reduce violence-related injuries and fatalities on college campuses is to amputate the hands and feet of all incoming freshmen. A less drastic measure would be to allow properly trained and licensed students, professors and campus security to carry concealed firearms on campus.