Union Thuggery

In not-very-Republican Oregon:

A mailer sent to Oregon voters by the AFL-CIO warns that their voting history is a matter of public record, Breitbart.com reported Wednesday.

"Your voting history is a matter of public record," the mailer declares, implying that the union can determine how people vote...

"It's an updated version of a tool that's served them well in the past: 'Nice little place ya got here. Be a real shame if something was to, you know, happen,'" said a post at Max Redline...

Despite the implied threat, voting records do not say how a person voted, only that they did.

A journalism student at my school, with (I'm told) the active assistance of the newspaper faculty advisor, went to a county office and identified the political party registration of as many of our school's teachers as they could find.  Especially considering the story above, can anyone offer a good reason as to why a person's party affiliation should be public knowledge?

Linear Algebra Progress

Since smoking that last test like a cheap cigar, the only way to go was down.  The next section of material has been somewhat difficult for me.  I understand the material as I read it and look through my notes, but the next day it all seems to escape me.  Apparently I have only a surface understanding, and it's not sticking.

More studying required!

Commuter-mobile

Yes, it's very cool looking, but I've read that it's projected at $20K.  My (used) Honda Elite 250 scooter was just over 10% of that.

Ah, but Darren, you say, your scooter doesn't protect you from the elements like the Lit does!  That's true.  I wonder how much this BMW that I saw in Rome costs:

I don't know, but I can't imagine it costs $20K.

And let's have a moment of silence for the late, great Aptera.

I Don't Feel Sorry For Them

Considering how I as a conservative feel living in California, I'm glad they are experiencing some consternation:

In this most unpredictable of campaigns, an emotional role reversal is happening in California. Republicans, who hold no statewide offices and are only 30 percent of registered voters, are more upbeat and enthusiastic.

Liberals, on the other hand, keep checking the polls.

It's unlikely that even Republican Mitt Romney's immediate family members think he'll win California. But a Public Policy Institute of California survey released last week shows that while Obama holds a 12-point lead among likely California voters, 70 percent of Republican voters in the state were more enthusiastic than usual about voting - a greater proportion than the 61 percent of Democrats who were more enthused.

For liberals, part of the problem is that neither of the presidential campaigns is active in California, conceding the state to Obama. That means liberals have little to do other than reinforce each other's fears about the voting predilections of a voting species seldom seen in the Bay Area - non-Democrats.

"We're seeing these polls and reading about all these ads, and hearing about all of these undecided voters that are in other states, but we feel that we can't do anything about it," said Pat Reilly, a longtime press spokeswoman for national and California organizations and politicians who lives in Berkeley. "You feel like you're part of a fight, but you can't see your opponent."

I see my opponent every single day. That's no picnic, either.

Teachers Union Doesn't Represent You?

If you'd like to learn more about leaving the teachers union but don't want to do all the reading, visit the YouTube page of the California Teachers Empowerment Network!  Current videos include:
Agency Fee Payer Status Explained
Agency Fee Payer Status--Pros and Cons
Becoming a Religious Objector to the Teachers Union
School Choice

More videos are forthcoming.

If You Believe In Social Justice You Must Vote Republican In This Election.

From Salon, hardly a conservative outlet:

For those who don’t know me, here is a brief, relevant background:  I have a long history in Democratic and liberal politics. I have worked for several Democratic candidates and affiliated groups, I have personally raised millions of dollars for Democrats online, I was an early advisor to Actblue (which has processed over $300 million to Democratic candidates). I have worked in Congress (mostly on the Dodd-Frank financial reform package), and I was a producer at MSNBC. Furthermore, I aggressively opposed Nader-style challenges until 2008.

So why oppose Obama? Simply, it is the shape of the society Obama is crafting that I oppose, and I intend to hold him responsible, such as I can, for his actions in creating it. Many Democrats are disappointed in Obama. Some feel he’s a good president with a bad Congress. Some feel he’s a good man, trying to do the right thing, but not bold enough. Others think it’s just the system, that anyone would do what he did. I will get to each of these sentiments, and pragmatic questions around the election, but I think it’s important to be grounded in policy outcomes. Not, what did Obama try to do, in his heart of hearts? But what kind of America has he actually delivered? And the chart below answers the question. This chart reflects the progressive case against Obama.

I'll take any liberal argument against the man I can get :-)

Why Do They Hate Us? (asked in whiniest voice possible)

It doesn't matter why--their reasons are their reasons, not ours, and when their reasons don't make any sense at all, it makes no sense to try to respond to them. What some will call dismissive, I call common sense:

Like gawky teenagers, Americans are far too obsessed with what people thousands of miles away think of them. The first reaction of the ordinary man in the street on December 7, 1941, was not to wonder why the Japanese hated him. It was not even his tenth reaction because at that point he was much too busy hating the Japanese to care why they hated him.

That attitude might not be pretty, but it was a practical response to the exigencies of wartime, and that war, like most wars, was not fueled by emotion, but by territorial aggression. FDR was unconcerned with Japanese emotions, let alone their hearts, minds and livers; because he knew that the conflict did not come down to emotions but to a power struggle between a Japanese empire in the Pacific and the only Western country with a view of the Pacific capable of standing up to the land of the rising sun.

The study of Muslim rage, its wellsprings and tides, is as worthless as the study of Japanese rage in the dying days of the 1930s. Despite the showy displays of violence in the last week by inflamed Chinese mobs attacking Japanese properties and Muslim mobs attacking American properties, the conflicts do not revolve around the axis of emotion, but of power and territory.

The following was sent to an email list of which I am a member and I received permission from the author to post it here.  Its logic and truth are, to me, self-evident:

There's a certain world view that assumes all conflict is based on misunderstandings. And that if someone is attacking me it is just as much my fault because I didn't fully understand their grievances or their attack was a reasonable response to something I did.

The end-result of this world view is to first look at our own culpability in any conflict and when there is conflict not do anything that may escalate the violence.

(snip comments specifically related to the Benghazi fiasco)

The problem here isn't the inconsistencies or the existence of a supposed "cover-up". The problem is the misguided notion that there wouldn't be conflict if we just tried harder or were nicer or weren't as belligerent or understood our enemies better. It's a world view shared by most everyone in the administration and a cornerstone of liberal Foreign Policy.

But it tends to get people killed.

I'm not saying that it is impossible for a people or a nation to have a grievance against the United States. I am saying that trying to understand why people will fly airplanes into buildings, or massacre civilians, is a fool's errand. Back to the link posted above:

The appeaser consensus obstinately refuses to understand that Muslim violence is not blowback or the uncontrollable reflex of a knee being jerked in response to our foreign policy. It is not a reaction that can be soothed by applying aloe and appeasement, but an aggressive action intended to expand their power and influence. That refusal to see Muslims as actors rather than reactors is rooted in a colonialist view of Third World peoples as the balls in our pinball foreign policy machine, rather than civilizations looking to step into a power vacuum that we have left open for them...

If Muslims only hated us, then we could live with that. But like Japan on December 1941, they do not just hate us in the abstract fashion that countries and peoples hate one another. We are not just hated. We are in their way.

That is all we need to remember and all we need to focus on, and it should form the basis for how we respond.

What Child Gets Priority?

Reader EllenK pointed me to this story:

A California boy has been ordered to transfer to another middle school because he carries the gene for cystic fibrosis, even though he doesn't actually have the incurable, life-threatening and non-infectious disease. His parents have gone to court to fight the move.

Their son, 11-year-old Colman Chadam, was told last week that he’d have to transfer from Jordan Middle School in Palo Alto, Calif., to a school three miles away because he posed a risk to another student at school who does have the disease, according to TODAY.

“I was sad but at the same time I was mad because I understood that I hadn’t done anything wrong,” Colman told TODAY. He added: “It feels like I’m being bullied in a way that is not right.”

An inherited condition, cystic fibrosis causes the body to create a thick mucus that clogs the lungs and can lead to life-threatening lung infections. About 30,000 American adults and children have the disease and patients have an average life expectancy in the late 30s.

While it is not contagious, doctors say people with cystic fibrosis can pose a danger to each other through bacterial cross-contamination if they are in close contact.

“In general, we would prefer that there not be more than one cystic fibrosis patient in a school,” Dr. Thomas Keens, the head of the cystic fibrosis center at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, told TODAY.

The district’s assistant superintendent, Charles Young, told NBC News that officials relied on medical authorities who said “a literal physical distance must be maintained” between patients and that the "zero risk option" was to transfer Colman.

I'm sorry, I'm dizzy because my head is spinning.

Ok, I'm better now.  So I gots to thinking:  if a child has an IEP that says he/she cannot be near anyone he/she doesn't like (say, because of accompanying anger issues), do you transfer all the other kids out of his/her class?  You know a court case could be made out of that....

Absolutely freakin' ridiculous.

It's Not Easy Being Green

Kermit sang that, and now it appears that the president is singing it, too:

It’s not much of a surprise to see this from Romney, but this is a major shift for Obama. The president’s 2008 campaign was filled with grand statements about how we needed to implement bold new plans to combat climate change, and for the first two years of his administration, it seemed as though he would be likely to follow through. Green jobs programs, subsidies for electric cars, and even pie-in-the-sky carbon-trading schemes were all discussed, and some were eventually passed.

Those days are long gone. The closer we come to the election, the less we hear about green and the more we hear about brown, about oil and gas drilling. Obama wants to win in November, and he’s clearly made the (correct) choice that he can’t do it if he continues to be the green candidate.

This is a testament to the spectacular failures of the environmental movement to articulate any policies that aren’t political suicide for those who support them. When Obama was elected, many Greens felt that their time had come, that one of their own was sitting in the Oval Office. But it only took two years of political defeats and embarrassments to convince the president and many of his party colleagues that the green movement’s polices of choice are political non-starters.

So it this a "pivot" or a "flip-flop"? I can't keep track of the correct terminology in this election cycle.

Why I'm Not A Liberal

It's because I objectively evaluate evidence and make decisions based on it:

Three states form the base of Democratic political power in the United States: California, New York and Illinois. All three states are locked in an accelerating economic, demographic and social decline; all three hope that they can stave off looming disaster at home by exporting the policies that have ruined them to the rest of the country...

Illinois politicians, including the present President of the United States, have wrecked one of the country’s potentially most prosperous and dynamic states, condemned millions of poor children to substandard education, failed to maintain vital infrastructure, choked business development and growth through unsustainable tax and regulatory policies — and still failed to appease the demands of the public sector unions and fee-seeking Wall Street crony capitalists who make billions off the state’s distress.

Blue politicians speak eloquently and often sincerely about their desire to help the poor. They speak beautifully about the need for better education as a ticket to better lives. They speak intelligently about the contributions a well managed, well organized government can make to the common good.

But these beautiful sentiments have less and less to do with the actual policies they pursue...

Liberals are right to feel that social justice matters, that the poor should have greater opportunity and that government in a democratic society cannot remain indifferent to the existence of great social evils.

But where liberals in America have the freest hand—in states like New York, California and Illinois—we see incontrovertible evidence that the policies they choose don’t have the consequences they predict. California by now should surely be an educational, environmental and social utopia. New York should be a wonder of glorious liberal governance. Illinois should be known far and wide as the state that works.

What’s interesting about the governance failures of these states is how comprehensive they are...

Clinging grimly on to failing policies and dying institutions is the Democratic answer by and large, even as Democratic policies accelerate the rate of decline and aggravate the damage done...

Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives need to think much more clearly and much less sentimentally about policy so that voters can have choices that are both clearer and better than the ones we have now.

In the meantime, it is more than troubling that President Obama seems so unwilling to reflect on the rich experience of liberal failure in his home state.

More Evidence I'm Getting Old

My son just got his driving permit today :)

How's That "Smart Diplomacy" Working Out?

This from what used to be our closest ally:

Britain has rebuffed US pleas to use military bases in the UK to support the build-up of forces in the Gulf, citing secret legal advice which states that any pre-emptive strike on Iran could be in breach of international law.

The Guardian has been told that US diplomats have also lobbied for the use of British bases in Cyprus, and for permission to fly from US bases on Ascension Island in the Atlantic and Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, both of which are British territories...

"But I think the US has been surprised that ministers have been reluctant to provide assurances about this kind of upfront assistance," said one source. "They'd expect resistance from senior Liberal Democrats, but it's Tories as well. That has come as a bit of a surprise."

Another obvious success for Barack....

Guess Who Takes The Heat In This Situation

Collin Peterson, the U.S. Representative for Minnesota’s 7th District since 1991, no doubt expected softball questions and happy glad-handing when he visited Evangelical Lutheran-affiliated Concordia College last week for an event sponsored by the Campus Democrats.

Kate Engstrom, a 20-year-old in the school’s College Republicans, had other ideas. With the help of an unidentified collaborator, Engstrom approached Peterson after the event and recorded as he spoke candidly and controversially about losing the endorsement of Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life (MCCL).

Peterson bashed the group, calling MCCL “a bunch of extremists.”

So what is the uproar about? If you think it's about a congressman's intemperate tone and language, you'd be wrong.  It's about Engstrom's filming the encounter and posting the video on YouTube.

Engstrom’s adviser also told her that Concordia’s president had suggested that she could face disciplinary action from the school for her actions...

Concordia Director of Public Safety William MacDonald later called Engstrom to inform her that she wouldn’t face disciplinary action after all. According to Engstrom, though, MacDonald did say he thinks it’s wrong to upload unedited video on YouTube of a member of Congress speaking.

Engstrom alleges that MacDonald told her “It’s on your conscience.”

It's hard to know what to say when you read stories like this, the sadness is so all-encompassing.

Just Look At Our Deficit

Barbie-like, Obama tells Jay Leno that math is hard:

Leno asked the president a viewer’s question about what subjects he struggles with when he helps his daughters with homework.  ”Well, the math stuff I was fine with up until about seventh grade,” explained Obama. “But Malia is now a freshman in high school and — I’m pretty lost.”

Yes, this is the man the Left would have us believe is the smartest man ever to have been president.

I Got Your Flip-Flop Right Here

Ah, the Silly Season, and as the election gets closer, the season gets sillier.

The latest mud the Obama cultists are throwing up on the wall, hoping something will stick, is that Mitt Romney is a "flip-flopper".  This when they support a guy whose position on gay marriage conveniently changed just before control of the House of Representatives did?  I'm not buying it.

Some people euphemistically say that every promise the president makes (every. single. one.) comes with an expiration date.  I calls 'em as I sees 'em; the man lies, telling people whatever they want to hear, and then he does whatever it is that he wants to do anyway.

What are some of these lies, or, to be charitable, these promises with expiration dates?  Here's a list.  It includes such gems as:
-No universal mandate in health care legislation
-Televising the Obamacare negotiations on C-SPAN
-Raising taxes on those making under $250,000/yr
-Recess appointments
-Border security
-Closing Guantanamo Bay
-Trying terrorists in civilian US courts

The list goes on and on....

If you're satisfied with the last four years, if you think the United States is better off now than it was four years ago, if you think we'll be even better off four years from now if we continue the same policies of the past four years, then you should vote (again) for Barack Obama.  If you have more than two operational brain cells, though, you'll cast your vote for Mitt Romney.

Update:  You want to talk flip-flops?  I got a doozy right here:

Since these comments on the sequester represented a complete reversal of the position he took at the debate less than 24 hours earlier, it's easy to understand why the President's campaign initially wanted to keep them off the record.

If you go with the "expiration date" theory, his "will not happen" statement in the debate, referring to the upcoming sequester, lasted less than a day.  Amazing.

Agency Fee Rebate

Today I mailed off my letter to CTA requesting my agency fee rebate.

California is a so-called Fair Share state, which means I'm legally required to pay the local, state, and national teachers unions over $1000 a year for the "privilege" of (not) being represented by them.  Since no one is required to be a union member, though, I choose not to be--but I still have to pay them!  I'm entitled to a rebate, though, of that money that they don't spend on collective bargaining, as determined by an arbiter, and that comes out to over $300 each year.  By agreement we "agency fee payers" must request the rebate each year by November 15th; the $300 check is nice to get right before Christmas!

If you'd like to find out how to get such a rebate, please visit the web site of the California Teachers Empowerment Network, specifically this page.

I'm All For Dress Codes In School, But...

Dress codes should serve a reasonable purpose.  What's reasonable about not allowing boys to have ponytail-length hair?

Zachary Aufderheide has run afoul of his Ohio high school's dress code because of his desire to grow his hair long enough to donate it to Locks of Love, an organization that provides wigs to needy children who've lost their hair because of medical problems.

Zachary, 17, of Canton is about an inch away from the 10 inches of hair he needs to donate to the organization. Faced with an ultimatum, the Canton South High School junior decided to accept an in-school suspension rather than cut his ponytail...

According to the dress code in the Canton Local School District's student handbook, "Hair for male students shall be neat and clean and shall not be worn covering the eyes, in a ponytail, or extending beyond the bottom of the regular shirt collar."

If this 1960's rule stands, then girls should be forbidden to wear shorts/pants and be required to wear ankle-length skirts.

Do These People Really Want to Educate Children?

I ask in all seriousness--I just don't see how you can advocate for these policies and be serious about education:

1. Washington Post — French President François Hollande has said he will end homework as part of a series of reforms to overhaul the country’s education system. Reason? He doesn’t think it is fair that some kids get help from their parents at home while children who come from disadvantaged families don’t. It’s an issue that goes well beyond France, and has been part of the reason that some Americans oppose homework too.

2. Maryland Community News — “Elementary students’ honor roll status will soon be a thing of the past in Montgomery County (MD). Reason? Students will no longer see A, B, C, D or E, but rather ES for exceptional, P for proficient, I for in-progress, N for not-yet making progress or making minimal progress, or M for missing data. There will be no more traditional honor roll at schools.”

The mathematical term is least common denominator.

A Long Day At School Today

I was at school by 7:10 this morning, helping to administer the PSAT to a classroom full of (mostly) juniors.  That mission was accomplished before 11:30.

In a couple hours I "get" to go back to chaperone at our Homecoming Dance.  I'll be dismissed from that some time between 11 and 11:30 tonight.

Heckuva way to spend a Saturday!

Not Meeting The Needs of the Student

A friend of mine recently enrolled his 4th grader in his local public school (all identifying characteristics, including names and locations, are intentionally being left out).  The boy had been home-schooled for the last year while participating in a travel adventure that most of us could only dream of having--but my friend and his wife decided "Dustin" needed to socialize more with kids his own age.  They've stopped traveling for a year and enrolled Dustin in school, where he's excelling.

They recently had their first parent conference.  The only "negative" was that "Dustin" always wants to be first.  I had the same response as my friend did, "So?"  But back to the story.

My friend is a certifiable genius, and through his and his wife's tutelage "Dustin" has become quite advanced in math (for a 4th grader).  Their concern is that "Dustin" will not learn anything in math this year!  I told him to ask the teacher what options existed for "Dustin"--could she at least have him go to a different class (say, a 5th grade class?) for math so that he can continue to progress?

Her answer was that she could not.

Huh?  Are you freakin' kidding me?  What kind of school is that?

I'm not suggesting the teacher should prepare separate lessons just for "Dustin" (although I've seen that requested before!); but is it so much to ask that he be taught at his own level?  It's not like he needs to be in 5th grade, but he probably needs to be in 5th grade math.  How could that be impossible???

My friends will continue to work with "Dustin" so that his math improves.  What will happen in 5th grade?  Will the school refuse to put him in 6th grade math?

We in education don't do ourselves any favors when we do absolutely stupid things like this.