links for 2009-01-13

Labour has finally admitted that married parents are better for children than parents in live-in partnerships, and that they stick together more than twice as long.

Broken families and missing parents are bad for children and for the country, ministers said, in a Government paper on the state of family life that marks a U-turn on previous party thinking.

The document accepts that 'some family forms face greater challenges than others'.

Seven out of ten young criminals come from single parent homes that make up only a quarter of all families, it says, adding that stepfamilies can also be difficult for children. But the report still falls short of declaring that marriage is a good thing.

The 'evidence paper' – produced by Children's Secretary Ed Balls and Cabinet Office minister Liam Byrne – rejects the idea of any state support
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Oh really?

Amid that wrangling, CTA has filed a new ballot measure that would increase sales taxes by a penny, raising more than $5 billion a year for schools over Proposition 98's guarantee. CTA President David Sanchez, writing in the union's magazine, declares that "the current budget process for funding public education in California is failing our schools," which is triply ironic.

First, the CTA enacted that process in the first place via Proposition 98; second, one of its CTA-written provisions allows school aid to drop when state revenue declines; third, when the CTA campaigned for Proposition 98, it told voters that it would adequately finance schools without new taxes.

While RedState’s endorsement in the race for Chairman of the Republican National Committee does not set us apart from many of our colleagues in the online right movement, our second choice does. Nonetheless, we absolutely are committed to this fact: if the 168 members of the RNC cannot agree to choose Ken Blackwell for RNC Chairman, they should then keep Mike Duncan in place.
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Stupid.
Ken Blackwell is OK but Mike Duncan needs to be replaced.

Biden voted for the 2003 invasion of Iraq but later become a critic of the war and the way President George W. Bush executed it.

He is best known in Iraq as the author of a 2006 plan to divide the country into self-governing Sunni, Shi'ite and Kurdish enclaves — an idea that offended many Iraqi politicians and was quietly put on the back burner as violence ebbed.
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Biden continues to be a blowhard moron.