Higher Education, Part IV

This is the fourth (final) part of a series related to higher education costs. (See Part I, Part II, Part III, and also check out the president’s speech offering to help that led to this long and emphatic “no thank you.”)

The original government interference in higher education is the refusal to allow businesses to use their own hiring policies. While I think IQ tests are limited in many ways—they fail to measure life experience combined with drive—they are significantly useful in predicting job performance in many fields. This is from 2002:

Cognitive ability tests represent the best single predictor of job performance, but also represent the predictor most likely to have substantial adverse impact on employment opportunities for members of several racial and ethnic minority groups.[1]

What happened was, it became “unconstitutional” for businesses to use an extremely useful colorblind tool in hiring decisions, because the results might end up appearing to be racist. So businesses found another way—they let higher education institutions do the IQ testing, and subsequent weeding out, for them.

As a result, getting an education at a premier university that would provide the same cachet as a high IQ score became the path to career success. And students were willing to pay a premium for that credential.

Costs for the coveted scarce commodity rose. Fewer students could work their way through college. So government stepped in to “help” with guaranteed student loans (which may not be low interest, and cannot be dismissed even in cases of bankruptcy or disability). More students with apparent financial ability to go to college meant greater demand for limited college admittance, which meant ever higher education costs. Current costs for a degree in many mid-range skills far outpace wages. The result is essentially indentured servitude.

Incidentally, schools are rated by the percentage of students they accept compared to how many apply—so they recruit so that they have more to turn away—which makes them more exclusive, literally, so they can then charge higher tuition. [I’ll refer you again to the Uncommon Knowledge discussion I mentioned in Part II.] Some of the ultimate schools, such as Harvard, take in so much money, they have literally billions of dollars in their permanent endowment fund. They could expand easily and offer the education to greater and greater numbers. Or they could provide full-ride scholarships to all their students for the next century—just off interest, without touching principal. But they don’t do that, because being exclusive, more than offering an excellent education for the next generation, is their business.

So now the president, who can do nothing about the third or half of high school students who fail to graduate, offers to step in to make sure everyone (sweepingly including the dropouts) gets a higher education. The premise is that a college education is the passport to a comfortable middle class lifestyle, and that should be available to everyone. It’s hard to argue with the “everybody should have the same opportunity” concept. But logic holds that there will always be a lower 50%; speaking it out of existence isn’t going to work. (I’m thinking of Lake Wobegon, where “all the children are above average,” even though that’s not mathematically possible.)

If you know how to translate the president, you know he doesn’t really care about basic fairness—or else he’d be in favor of the free market. Power mongers grasp opportunities to be the deciders of who gets access to a certain level of lifestyle.

If the government is “helping” to make higher education opportunities, then of course it will have an interest in what is taught and how. So that means greater control over accreditation. Accreditation now is done by private entities, but does indeed have a certain point of view. For example, an accredited law school is required to teach not only that Roe v. Wade is the law of the land but that it was a correct Supreme Court decision—even though hardly anyone believes that, including the liberal members of the current SCOTUS. Accreditation is not a guarantee of education quality; it is a controller of documentation used for granting or denying access to opportunities.

Having more government influence on accreditation and other markers of success can only lead to weeding out dissenting opinions. And that is likely the intent.

Government could also affect choices by limiting use of student loans to those institutions it approves, thus limiting choice.

I am not in favor of encouraging diploma mills. I am in favor of my own children, at this point, getting their degrees from good universities—because right now that is still the gate to certain career advantages.

But, unlike our president, I trust the free market. If businesses were allowed to make hiring decisions their way, and students were free to get their education any way they chose (probably a combination of guided university education and much free online study), then costs would dramatically drop. Then hard work, effort combined with good character would be the gateway to success—rather than agreement with a tyrannical, interfering government.

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[1] Murphy, K.M., “Can Conflicting Perspectives on the Role of g in Personnel Selection Be Resolved?” Human Performance, 15(1&2):173-186 (2002).

Higher Education, Part III

This is the third part of a four-part discussion on higher education (start with Part I and Part II), stemming from a presidential speech assuring us (or threatening us) that the government is there to help.

Before we get right to the point, we’re about to take a diversion into the insurance world. Bear with me; there’s a purpose.

There may be an even earlier starting point, but for our purposes, let’s look at the rise of employer-paid health insurance. We have to journey back to the 1930s—during the Depression. FDR wanted to experiment with some form of government-provided universal health care, while he was fiddling around with retirement insurance (Social Security). But there was huge opposition from the AMA as well as the existing insurance industry, so he abandoned that.

Nevertheless, Roosevelt did have an effect on insurance. During that decade, not only did the federal government set minimum wage laws, locking out lower skilled workers from the workforce, thus increasing and lengthening unemployment, but the feds also set upper wage limits. This meant that government interference prevented businesses from competing for the best employees.

So businesses did what they do in a natural free market: they found other forms of exchange. The government said they couldn’t pay a higher wage, so they paid additional benefits that didn’t come under the letter of the wage limit law. They paid for their employees’ health insurance.

Early on, insurance meant what it had always meant—a hedge against unexpected catastrophic costs. No one expected insurance to pay for regular doctor visits, medicines, and other health maintenance costs. Those were neither unexpected nor exorbitantly priced. But as time passed, the benefits needed in order to attract the best workers expanded, becoming more comprehensive, and separating the patient from the costs of the care. That separation means the market doesn’t respond as it naturally would to adjust prices. So prices spiral upward—a direction that still continues.

Meanwhile, the federal government continued incremental inching toward government medical care. Truman suggested universal government medicine in the 1950s, but again the AMA accurately denounced it as socialism.

In 1961, Reagan gave a famous speech against socialized medicine, which was being pushed at that time. It's about 10 minutes long--well worth listening to the whole thing:

 

 

One thing you can count on from power mongers is that they will be relentless. If they can’t get all they want at once, they will aim to get it incrementally over time. So it has been with socialized medicine:

·         Help the uninsured elderly with Medicare.

·         Help the uninsured disabled with Medicaid.

·         Help the children of poor parents with State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).

·         Regulate insurance companies providing benefits for employees.

·         Require insurance companies to provide coverage for pre-existing conditions (violating the free market risk taking of the insurance industry).

·         Require all Americans to purchase health insurance with full coverage as outlined by the federal government—including contraceptives even when against religious beliefs, and including denying healthy individuals the freedom to pay their own way rather than purchase full coverage….

In other words, power mongers start with an interference that leads to a problem, to which they can respond with another interference, which will lead to additional problems, to which more government interference will be the natural—and intended—response, until tyrants have control over the lives of the people.

So that is the pattern. Now let’s look again at the rising cost of higher education.

If we look very early on at education, we find government interference based on the need to educate poor immigrants (many from Ireland at that point), rather than let them become rabble on the streets. Government assumed, of course, that the vast majority of parents would continue to see to the education of their own children as they always had, while additionally being taxed to pay for the education of the identified poor—and government anticipated no resentment over the double cost for families.

By the last few decades of the 1800s, “free” public (government institution) education moved mainstream. By the mid-1950s, “free” public education became the norm for 1-12. Later, it became K-12. Now it is commonly preK-12.

Before government interference, nearly all US adult citizens could read (well enough to understand the Federalist Papers as editorials in their newspapers) and do basic math, as well as whatever other skill they needed to make a living. Today’s young people are skilled at user-friendly technology (but with decreasing programming skills), but know ever less history, literature, and basic math.

This is what you expect when you separate the parent and student from the responsibility of the learning.

Government schools fail to guarantee an education to those who graduate, but worse than that, high percentages fail to even graduate. Who is most likely to fail? Poor children—children of immigrants, children of single parents. So the initial purpose got the foot in the door. Then what had been working was decayed. And the final result is an exacerbated problem for the initial targeted group with the addition of an ever-growing population of undereducated needy.

For someone trying to “rule,” an undereducated needy populace is ideal. Thinking people can be so troublesome. So it is arguable that the failure was intentional (just like the failure of forced-employer-provided healthcare and exchanges are meant to fail so universal single-payer socialized medicine will be the logical next step).

In the next post we'll deal with the original government interference that led to rising higher education costs.

Proud Parent Moment

We interrupt this three-part post on higher education for a personal proud parent moment, somewhat related to higher education.

We’ve been traveling the past week. I tried to get two of the higher education posts ready before leaving town, and thought I had set Part I for Wednesday and Part II for Friday—but, no doubt because of a technical error on my part, Friday’s post didn’t get the date set and showed up late Tuesday evening, before Part I the following morning. So sorry about the confusion. It may still take me a couple of days after getting home before I can complete Part III.

Thursday, October 3^rd, our middle son, Economic Sphere, graduated from the Defense Language Institute, the military’s language training center in Monterey, California. Technically I’m not supposed to announce the language he’s been studying. But I can say that it is the hardest language taught at the DLI. It is rated a level 4 language, but there is some discussion about making it a level 5 so they can spend more time on it. The graduation ceremony included two classes of his language and one class of Persian Farsi, which is a level 3 language, and therefore a shorter program. (There are graduation ceremonies just about every week at the DLI; and ours was the first of two last Thursday.)

Economic Sphere’s program was 64 intense weeks. Our son has spent that time arising at 4:45 AM, studying vocabulary on the bus, getting to formation at 7:00 AM, doing classroom study for 8 hours or so, doing PT (physical training, because this is the Army—although the DLI includes students from all branches of the armed forces), and after dinner studying until 10:00 PM, so he gets a few hours of sleep before doing it again the next day. And there were weekend assignments as well.

Monterey is a beautiful place where you want to spend your time outdoors, but these students didn’t get to do much of that.

Economic Sphere says he kind of rolled his eyes at students of other languages, who complained how hard they had it. I pointed out that only those with the highest aptitude got to study his language, so maybe those students were working as hard as they could on their languages. But he had seen that they clearly had more free time than he did. That’s why taking even more than 64 weeks is a consideration.

In each of the two classes, of trainees who lasted to take the final exams a couple of weeks ago, 3-5 failed. They still got to walk for the graduation, because they completed the course, but their next assignment is to take the following several weeks to study more and try the exams again. The military spends about $1M on training each of these language experts, so they’re not going to wash them out without significant cause. We were relieved Economic Sphere passed, beyond requirements. Whew!

Back in college I earned a minor in Spanish, and nearly completed another minor in Portuguese, but he probably surpassed my years of study within the first half year. In Spanish I got to probably a level 1+ in reading comprehension and maybe speaking, less in aural comprehension—never good enough for simultaneous translation. I may have reached a level 1 in some areas of Portuguese. Economic Sphere got to 1+ in speaking, his toughest area, and considerably higher in reading and comprehension, similar to people who’ve lived in country for several years. (For comparison, Mormon missionaries, who spend two years in country, typically get to about a 1+ in speaking and comprehension. There were a couple of them starting with that advantage in the class.)

We got to meet some of the teachers afterward. They said Economic Sphere was very smart—he taught them economics in class, in their language. They often went over current events, and he was aware of what was happening in the news, and could explain what it meant. He’s kind of encyclopedic that way—no matter the language.

I enjoyed the short ceremony, which talked about the value of these linguists to the military, and to our nation's peace. In their creed it says a US Linguist is dedicated to the Defense of our Nation: “By providing intelligence through translation to my country’s leaders, my global knowledge ensures peace and defends freedom.” The graduation speaker pointed out that understanding the culture along with the language gives a much more complete understanding—and understanding is the best way to maintain peace. What these men and women do cannot be done by machines; it’s a human challenge.

I know of the strength and integrity of my son. I could see much of the same resolve and honor in his classmates as well. These are fine young people, prepared to serve in a way that not every willing person can. I am grateful for the hard work and concentrated effort they have added to their innate talent.

A word about the DLI crest: The upper right is a portion of the Rosetta Stone (ancient artifact in Egyptian and Greek that led to translations of other ancient writings). The cap in the lower left represents the Spanish soldiers during the expedition of Father Junipero Serra, who built a fort in 1770 to protect the mission on the current Presidio site. The red and blue colors represent the wartime and peacetime missions of the DLI. The green olive branch reflects the mission of promoting peace through understanding. The gold torch at the top symbolizes learning and knowledge. At the Post Exchange (which was open on base, despite the government shutdown), I was able to get a souvenir throw with the crest on it. I was pleased to get something with so much meaning attached.

Economic Sphere didn’t want me to publicly post his photo, which I would have liked to do because I’m so proud of him. But I am respecting his online privacy wishes. So you’ll have to take my word for it that he looked very handsome and impressive in his dress uniform, and I am enjoying the photos for myself.

Higher Education, Part I

There’s yet another free course available online from Hillsdale College: Economics101: The Principles of Free Market Economics. This is in addition to a growing assortment of online courses I’ve been enjoying the last couple of years:

·         Introduction to the Constitution

·         Constitution 101: The Meaning and History of the Constitution

·         Constitution 201: The Progressive Rejection of the Founding and the Rise of Bureaucratic Despotism

·         History 101—Western Heritage: From the Book of Genesis to John Locke

·         History 102—American Heritage: From Colonial Settlement to the Reagan Revolution

Hillsdale College

You could additionally enjoy the weekly radio series, Hillsdale Dialogues: A Survey of Great Books, Great Men, and Great Ideas, which is an hour-long discussion between Hillsdale President Larry Arnn and radio host Hugh Hewitt. All are archived, in case you miss them live.

Hillsdale online also provides the Kirby Center Lecture Series Archive. And there’s a Hillsdale College YouTube channel.

All of the above are free.  The courses are essentially the same courses, including readings, lectures, and discussions, as for students on campus. You can attend as given, keeping up with the coursework. Or you can do whatever part you want, at your convenience. Even if you do nothing more than listen to the lectures, you’ll be getting a lot. But the reading is also very worthwhile. And if you do it as given, you can participate in the Q&A followup to the lecture.

The Econ 101 class started a last week, September 23^rd, with a new lecture once a week, and the Q&A a few days later. So if you sign up right away, you can keep current. In the first week’s Q&A, there was some discussion of Scottish author Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Its publication coincided with the Declaration of Independence, 1776. That means the ideas were out there by our nation’s founding, but the book couldn’t have been widely read yet. However, by the 1790s the book showed up in 28% of libraries in this country. It was one of the pieces of common literature our founders were familiar with by the time they wrote the Constitution.

You can of course make a donation any time, although none is ever required. For a $50 donation, in conjunction with the Econ101 course, you can receive a copy of The Capitalist Manifesto. (If $50 is too much, you can get that book at Amazon for much less, but without the good feeling of supporting the Hillsdale educating-the-world mission.)

If you’re one of those people who have just started to awake to the need to pay attention to politics and current events—because of the tragedies of our times—and you want to educate yourself, these Hillsdale courses are an excellent starting place.

If you’re homeschooling teens, and you want to give them challenging work—something you’re willing to study along with them—these courses are a great resource. And they have the benefit of preparing your student for the kind of thinking required of them at a good college.

I don’t mean for this to be simply an ad for Hillsdale. I have been thinking specifically about higher education, and higher education costs, since the president’s speech on the subject in late August.

There is more I have to say on the president’s plans, which have slipped into obscurity during discussions of Syria, Obamacare funding, and debt ceilings.

In these posts I’ll cover the increasing free/low cost resources online for higher education. Then we’ll look at these questions:

·         What is the connection between higher learning and higher debt?

·         Is government best suited for taking on the rising cost of college education?

Higher Education Part II

Some years ago I was staying with my mother for a visit and happened across an AARP newsletter that actually interested me. The article was called “How to Learn Just about Anything Online for Free.” I’m all for learning, and even more so for free or very low cost.

It was a pretty good list. Some of it included major universities that have put lectures online—MIT (MIT OpenCourseware), Harvard (Harvard@home), and Berkeley (webcastBerkeley) among them. It listed a couple of sources for downloading textbooks and other books for as low as a dollar: AbeBooks.com and Alibris.com. This was before practically everything became available for e-readers through Amazon or Barnes & Noble, but I think these sources are supposed to be even less expensive.

OpenCulture.com was another recommended site being updated with new content. And for the even more tech savvy senior, ITunes U with over 100,000 educational video and audio files. Add to that AcademicEarth.org and of course YouTube EDU, which offers lectures from some of the top universities. Then there’s VideoLectures.Net and TedTalks (one of my favorites). There’s also WebMD and BBC video language learning courses. The list isn’t quite endless (although it might be nearly endless, now several years hence), but let’s just say there are a great many low-cost ways to get yourself educated from your computer. It’s not unheard of to imagine homeschooling through college on a shoestring budget.

For a little more cost, there’s GreatCourses.com, at about $100 per college level course.

Getting the information you want to learn—for little or no cost—is not the problem with higher education. So maybe it’s about getting a degree.

Options for that are growing online as well. BYU-Idaho, for example, has a growing program called Pathways, to help people get their college degrees through distance learning combined with local class groups. This can be ideal for homemakers who dropped out to support a spouse, or people who made it partway through college, took a job, and eventually had a career stall. The program is real college, accredited, with more support than traditional distant learning classes. (Mrs. Political Sphere and her sister are both in their first month of this program, and feeling great about getting back into progress toward a degree.)

Meanwhile, a typical college education is currently costing in the range of a starter home—often without the promise of salary commensurate with paying back student loans. 

Andy Kessler and Peter Thiel on Uncommon Knowledge

While I was thinking about higher education and gathering this list, I happened to spend an evening listening to the latest Uncommon Knowledge discussion, this one from September 20^th, with PayPal founder/venture capitalist Peter Thiel and author Andy Kessler talking with host Peter Robinson about the progress of technology, including the disappointment that it hasn’t gone further. Twenty-one minutes in, they switch gears and started discussing higher education.

I got down part of the conversation (from notes, so not necessarily direct or full quotes):

Peter Thiel: The top universities serve as a sort of tournament credential….  These colleges never want to expand the number of people they let in.

Peter Robinson: So they are in the business of exclusivity?

Peter Thiel: In that sense education is not a positive sum game about learning and education, but a zero sum game.

Andy Kessler: Universities are a sorting mechanism…. If corporations were allowed to give aptitude tests, universities would wither.

Peter Thiel: Yeah, 15-minutes aptitude tests would not cost you a quarter million dollars a semester…

Andy Kessler: And four years of your life….

Peter Robinson: So, top universities are in the best shape, not because they do a better job of educating, but because they’re in a better position to do the sorting.

Peter Theil: They [graduates] want to have the credentials of a top university, because it is an IQ test in disguise, yes.”

Andy Kessler [about online education affecting K-12 education]: We have the same problem we have with energy and pharmaceuticals. It’s a regulatory issue.

Peter Theil: Large sectors of our economy are government run—quasi-government run. And so, if you define technology as doing more with less—more computing power with less cost—education is the opposite. We’re doing less with more. We’re spending more and more money. The quality of the public school teachers has steadily gone down. So you’re getting less for more. So it’s actually moved in the opposite of a technological—it’s an anti-technological direction.

 

To summarize, what we have is a burst of availability of information and education sources for lower costs—just like you’d expect from a free market technology economy. But simultaneously we have ever more expensive and limited sources for the credentials necessary for upper-middle-class-and-higher success.

And it is at this point that the president steps in to “solve the problem of the cost of higher education.” Recall what Reagan once said: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'”

Part III to come.

Books Worth Reading

This past week was Banned Book Week. Often an interesting list—often with the specific purpose of ridiculing the very idea of limiting books for children. I agree that banning Huckleberry Finn is pretty ridiculous (because it contains the “N” word, along with a whole lot of anti-racist perspective, beautifully told). But that doesn’t mean that every book should therefore be available and recommended.

One of the well used shelves in the home library

I’ve been thinking about youth literature again. Some weeks ago I read Hillsdale College’s Imprimis newsletter, which featured a piece by Meghan Cox Gurdon, the children’s book reviewer for the Wall Street Journal. The piece was called “The Case for Good Taste in Children’s Books,” which was adapted from a speech given at Hillsdale in March. Here is some of her introduction:

[There’s an] increasingly dark current that runs through books classified as YA, for Young Adult—books aimed at readers between 12 and 18 years of age—a subset that has, in the four decades since Young Adult became a distinct category in fiction, become increasingly lurid, grotesque, profane, sexual, and ugly.

Books show us the world, and in that sense, too many books for adolescents act like funhouse mirrors, reflecting hideously distorted portrayals of life. Those of us who have grown up understand that the teen years can be fraught and turbulent—and for some kids, very unhappy—but at the same time we know that in the arc of human life, these years are brief. Today, too many novels for teenagers are long on the turbulence and short on a sense of perspective. Nor does it help that the narrative style that dominates Young Adult books is the first person present tense—“I, I, I,” and “now, now, now.” Writers use this device to create a feeling of urgency, to show solidarity with the reader and to make the reader feel that he or she is occupying the persona of the narrator. The trouble is that the first person present tense also erects a kind of verbal prison, keeping young readers in the turmoil of the moment just as their hormones tend to do. This narrative style reinforces the blinkers teenagers often seem to be wearing, rather than drawing them out and into the open.

If there is one thing teenagers do not need, it is encouragement to be more emotional and less cerebral. “Follow your passions” is about the worst advice in the world for someone who doesn’t yet know how to temper that with a wise, considered decision.

I agree with her about the ugliness of youth literature. I like reading a lot of YA fiction. Some of the better things being written are aimed at the YA audience. But she’s right that a lot of it is too intense, and too ugly for young people without a better, clearer world view.

She makes a very good point further into the piece, about decisions of taste:

Books tell children what to expect, what life is, what culture is, how we are expected to behave—what the spectrum is. Books don’t just cater to tastes. They form tastes. They create norms—and as the examples above show, the norms young people take aware are not necessarily the norms adults intend. This is why I am skeptical of the social utility of so-called “problem novels”—books that have a troubled main character, such as a girl with a father who started raping her when she was a toddler and anonymously provides her with knives when she is a teenager hoping that she will cut herself to death. (This scenario is from Cheryl Rainfield’s 2010 Young Adult novel, Scars, which School Library Journal hailed as “one heck of a good book.”) The argument in favor of such books is that they validate the real and terrible experiences of teenagers who have been abused, addicted, or raped—among other things. The problem is that the very act of detailing these pathologies, not just in one book but in many, normalizes them. And teenagers are all about identifying norms and adhering to them.

Suppose you have some young people (and there are many) who grow up in broken homes, with some chaos and ugliness in the home. Not enough expectation of honesty, or hard work. Not enough hope for things to get better. Nothing like an example of good fathering and mothering working in tandem to successfully raise children to fully launched adults.  There is a dearth of literature that tells children what a healthy household looks like. The stereotype now is broken and troubled homes. How do young people get the idea of a healthy norm if they get it neither from their real-life culture nor from their literature?

Mr. Spherical Model thinks I would be using my time well to write such children’s literature. That’s an appealing idea. I have gone so far as to invent some characters, and some of the surrounding milieu and action. I haven’t yet envisioned the story that will take over my life until I get it written. So, we’ll see. But I’d like to see more of that kind of story.

This past Thursday I came across an article that furthers Gurdon’s point, “Common Core-Approved Child Pornography.” Often when I find articles that make important points, I save a copy; however, while I recommend this one, some of the content in it is so graphic that I don’t want it permanently in my home. This PolitiChicks piece provides examples (with warnings about graphic content—these are in italics, if you must skip them) from a recommended youth novel, so you know there’s no exaggeration. It’s from the point of view of a child rapist, without judgment, so the reader can identify with the point of view of the perpetrator—including graphic descriptions of the violent sex acts, using words like “friendly,” “innocent,” and “tender.” If you are not nauseated, then ask yourself what you’ve been numbing yourself with.

The article itself asks the logical question about why anyone would think this was appropriate reading for children.

Using just the smallest amount of common sense we can deduce that if the book cannot be read aloud in the class, could not be viewable if it was a movie and couldn’t be played on the stereo if it was a CD, then why is it okay for it to be read and discussed; in school of all places! In fact, according to one lawyer, if the incidents in this book were a movie or a picture there would be a very clear cut case for prosecution for child pornography.

A library, not to mention the money needed to stock a library, is a scarce resource. Why use scarce resources on things that defile the mind—of anyone? If there are any parents out there that disagree and think this graphic portrayal of sex and violence is necessary to the education of their child, can’t they just buy it themselves and expose their child to it, without requiring the purchase of it by the rest of us taxpayers, and the subsequent exposure of it to our children, against our will?

When we’re talking about school bookshelves, there are plenty of books that ought not to be allotted real estate there. But rather than concentrating on what gets banned, I suggest we spend more energy and resources hunting for the literature that feeds and civilizes a growing mind, something that normalizes and exemplifies civilization. Let the searchers and selectors be parents and maybe trusted teachers—never some distant so-called expert.

Nice Day for a Filibuster

Senator Ted Cruz
Senate TV/AP Photo

It was a good 21 hours 19 minutes. It deserves comment. I like a good, real filibuster—as opposed to the virtual kind the Senate has done over the years where they say, “You don’t have a supermajority of votes to end a filibuster, so let’s say we’re filibustering and call it a day,” without actually doing the long talking part.

This wasn’t officially a filibuster, technically. It was a long—very long—speech, calling attention to the issue and actually talking about it.

I listened in here and there, and always Senator Ted Cruz was making cogent arguments against Obamacare—except for the break he took to read Green Eggs and Ham to his children for their bedtime. I also heard Senator Mike Lee of Utah, taking a turn, well into the night (about quarter till 3:00 AM EDT) before I turned off my computer for the night.

It’s kind of funny that so much vitriol has been aimed at Cruz and not at Lee, since they were partners in this. I’m not sure why, except that the liberal media is starting to do a hatchet job on Cruz lest he begin to appear presidential. They’ve tried to portray him as crazed, extremist, and unstable.

But if you watch someone stay calm, reasonable, and cogent for 21 straight hours, without food or rest—and he looks a lot better than Jimmy Stewart at the end of the filibuster in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington—then you lose credibility when you claim he’s unstable and crazed.

One of the highlights came in the last hour. Senator Dick Durbin might have been thinking he was on more equal ground taking on a very tired Senator Cruz. But he got schooled. Durbin wanted Cruz to admit to wanting to deprive 50 million Americans of their ability to have health insurance, while he and his family enjoyed the very full coverage available to Congressman. Cruz said he’d answer the question as soon as Durbin answered the three questions Cruz had asked him and Durbin had sidestepped. And then Durbin, thinking he’d gotten him where he wanted him, insisted he was like a witness refusing to answer the question in a trial.

What Durbin forgot was that you never ask a witness a question you don’t know the answer to. Cruz’s answer: “No, Senator, I’m eligible for the congressional plan—but I’m not enrolled in it.” Ouch! Cruz also got Durbin to admit that the way he planned to handle problems with Obamacare was case-by-case, giving exemptions to his cronies as they are asked for, while the American people without powerful friends will be stuck, as Cruz later described it, not just riding in coach, but in the baggage compartment.

The purpose of the marathon speech was to prevent discussion in favor of funding Obamacare, and Cruz was successful at that. He set up circumstances to separate those voting to shove Obamacare down the throats of Americans and those fighting against that monstrosity.

Cloture on the bill is the vote that matters. It will probably happen around noon Friday (possibly as late as Saturday), probably by the time you read this.

The Senate requires 60 votes to close debate on a bill, or cloture. But it only requires a simple majority of 51 votes on an amendment. So if Harry Reid gets cloture, then he will file one amendment to the continuing resolution bill sent up from the House; the amendment will be to eliminate the exclusion of Obamacare from the continuing resolution funding, so it gets fully funded along with the rest of government. And a simple majority of 51 (all Democrat) votes would be the pre-decided Senate vote.

So a vote for cloture by any Republican is a vote to allow Democrats the power to ruin our lives with Obamacare without any Republican opposition. No Republican who claims to be against Obamacare can make such a vote without their betrayal becoming obvious, and some (John McCain, for example) are furious about being put under that scrutiny.

Any Republican who votes for cloture, thus voting for funding Obamacare, deserves to be replaced in the next election. In my state, I’m totally confident in Senator Cruz, but I’m still watching Senator Cornyn; I've already met a candidate running against Cornyn. Very Texan, a little Quixotic, but I'm willing to take a serious look at him if I need to.

Meanwhile, if, by some unexpected miracle, all the Republicans stand firm against funding Obamacare, it puts the Democrats on the hot seat. Several (I think seven) Democrat senators are up for reelection in states that favored Romney in the last presidential election; the people in those states already lean red. If it becomes crystal clear that those senators are at fault for force-feeding us Obamacare, dragging down our economy and our health care as a result, there’s a good chance they lose their seats. Under those high pressure circumstances, a few Democrats might defect, but not if Republicans aren't standing united.

The more likely scenario is that cloture passes with a handful of GOP votes, Obamacare gets put back in the bill, and it gets returned to the House—with just a couple of days left before the current continuing resolution expires. It’s sort of a hot potato game: whoever gets stuck with the bill when the timer goes off gets the blame for shutting down the government.

Of course, government shutdown is not that big a deal. It has happened many times over the decades, with almost no notice. The world doesn’t end. Essential services continue uninterrupted. Which ought to be a clue—if it’s not essential, just don’t let government do it. And, as I said Monday, the 1995 shutdown is remembered as a PR nightmare, but it was a net plus for Republicans, despite the blame heaped upon them.

Since blame gets heaped on Republicans regardless, what could be the harm in standing firm—especially when standing firm against Obamacare is what the vast majority of Americans want and need?

So it’s time to call/contact your senators, and then your congressmen, and pray for God to guide them, to regain the blessed constitutional republic God granted us, after much sacrifice of blood and treasure, more than two centuries ago.