Do You Really Want A Government That Does This?

We already pay taxes for police, fire, and similar emergency services. In some places, though, if you need those services, you get hit with an additional, steep, charge:

Strapped for cash, a growing number of municipalities have begun charging for responding to accidents -- services that have long been covered by taxpayers. Sometimes, the victim's insurer will pick up the tab for these new fees -- but sometimes the insurers will refuse to pay.

This past week, New York City joined the growing debate over what some are calling a "crash tax."

Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the city wants to begin charging accident victims hundreds of dollars each as one way to help plug the city's multimillion-dollar budget deficit.

Crash taxes are just some of the extreme measures states and cities are taking around the country to counter billions of dollars in budget deficits.

Maybe, when the costs of Obamacare are too large for even liberals to ignore, you'll be taxed for health care--and then charged when you need to use it.

SundayTrivia

The answer to yesterday's question is:
Chubby Checker.

Today's question is:
What airline recently merged with/purchased Continental?

What Drugs Have Wrought

From Juarez, just across the river from El Paso, Texas:

At least once or twice a day, sirens blare here as firefighters in this violent border city speed to the latest store or restaurant that gangsters have firebombed for ignoring extortion demands.

Boarded up businesses and abandoned restaurants give parts of the city a ghostly look as organized crime strangles economic activity.

Now as Christmas approaches, mobsters have chosen a new target, turning their sights on humble schoolteachers.

Painted threats scrawled outside numerous public schools demand that teachers hand over their Christmas bonuses or face the possibility of an armed attack on the teachers — and even the children.

Wow. Threatening schoolkids and teachers.

Worst Music Video of All Time

While surfing and blogging this morning, I keep hitting YouTube for some background music. When I stumbled on this video, I thought to myself: Consider the music and then the video; could there possibly be a bigger discrepancy between the two?



That gap could conceivably make this video the worst music video of all time.

Want to nominate your choice for "worst music video of all time"? Do so in the comments.

Same Song, Two Styles

Here's what 31 years can do to a song.

2nd video seen here.
Running On Empty.
A little slower, a little mellower, a little retrospective--but just as good.

The President Is Bombing Lately

She we conservatives gloat about it? Roger L. Simon says no:

It’s easy enough for conservatives, libertarians, et al, to gloat about Barack Obama’s recent petulant, child-like performances — at first unable to be even slightly gracious in compromise with Republicans on the tax bill and then, only a few days later, fleeing in panic when Clinton acted the real president, fielding questions with a relaxed authority so surpassing Obama’s it was almost comical.

But there is a bigger reason not to gloat. We are stuck with this odd duck for another two years at minimum and now everyone, the entire world really, knows what he is like. They also know, if they have been paying the slightest attention, the etiology of his behavior: the man never had to face serious adversity until he was elected POTUS. And now he can’t deal with it. He’s the very model of Harry Truman’s famous advice about getting out of the kitchen if you can’t stand the heat. Obama was out of the White House briefing room the second he realized he was being outclassed by Clinton. And, boy, was he ever!

We need a leader and don’t have one. This is extremely bad news for our country, especially now.

As commenter Delia put it:

Being right about someone never hurt so bad.

Saturday Trivia

The answer to yesterday's question is:
Charlie Sheen.

Today's question, the last in Stage Names Week, is:
What was the stage name for singer Ernest Evans?

Interesting Reason To Arrest A Teacher

From CNN:

Police in Indian administered Kashmir Friday arrested a teacher of a local college on charges of writing an exam "with anti-India content."

"We have arrested Noor Mohammad Bhat under (the ) Unlawful Activities Act," Srinagar district police chief, Ashiq Bukhari said Friday evening.

He said the teacher who teaches English in a college here had written an exam for graduate level examinees with questions attempting "to glorify the Kashmiri stone pelters and to project separatist views."

What's The Biggest Problem With American Education?

The results of one poll suggest it's parents:

Blaming teachers for low test scores, poor graduation rates and the other ills of American schools has been popular lately, but a new survey wags a finger closer to home.

An Associated Press-Stanford University Poll on education found that 68 percent of adults believe parents deserve heavy blame for what's wrong with the U.S. education system — more than teachers, school administrators, the government or teachers unions.

While this is not a free pass allowing schools to give up trying to improve, it certainly is a result with which I concur. I'm certain that there are significantly more requirements on my than there were on my teachers--and checking with people who taught at that time, I'm told this is so. That's not necessarily a bad thing, that teachers today do more than teachers in the past did, but it's important to recognize. Yes, we choose some stupid curricula or fads sometimes (whole language, fuzzy math), but even those stupid curricula don't matter when your kid doesn't do his work or come to school or gets in trouble all the time.

Years ago I read a comment on a blog that went something like this: "I think every child should be homeschooled. At home they should learn to be polite, not to interrupt others when speaking, and to keep their hands to themselves. They should learn appropriate language and appropriate manners. They should learn to sit still for a short time and to follow simple directions. When they've learned these things at home, then send them to me at school."

Schools are a microcosm of the families and communities from which their students are drawn. Some schools are able to overcome genuine deficits created by dysfunctional families and communities, but most are not. We in the education field should keep trying to improve our craft and educate all children--that's what we get paid to do--but it would be wonderful if it weren't such an uphill climb sometimes.

Friday Trivia

The answer to yesterday's question is:
Destiny Hope Cyrus.

Today's question is:
What is the stage name of Carlos Irwin Estevez?

Los Angeles Teachers Union Is A Roadblock To Reform

Who says so? LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, himself a former teachers union member.

During the last five years, the mayor said, union leaders have stood as "one unwavering roadblock to reform." He called for change in contentious areas such as tenure, teacher evaluations and seniority — all volatile arenas in which teachers unions have balked at proposals for reform as eroding their rights.


"At every step of the way, when Los Angeles was coming together to effect real change in our public schools, UTLA was there to fight against the change and slow the pace of reform," Villaraigosa declared at a forum of the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonpartisan think tank.

I've written about Villaraigosa before, most notably here and here.

Banning Water

These are the people that world governments send to a conference about global freakin' warming:

Some people will sign anything that includes phrases like, ”global effort,” “international community,” and “planetary.” Such was the case at COP 16, this year’s United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Cancun, Mexico.

This year, CFACT students created two mock-petitions to test U.N. Delegates. The first asked participants to help destabilize the United States economy, the second to ban water.

The first project, entitled “Petition to Set a Global Standard” sought to isolate and punish the United States of America for defying the international community, by refusing to bite, hook, line and sinker on the bait that is the Kyoto Protocol. The petition went so far as to encourage the United Nations to impose tariffs and trade restrictions on the U.S. in a scheme to destabilize the nation’s economy. Specifically, the scheme seeks to lower the U.S. GDP by 6% over a ten year period, unless the U.S. signs a U.N. treaty on global warming.

This would be an extremely radical move by the United Nations. Even so, radical left-wing environmentalists from around the world scrambled eagerly to sign.

The second project was as successful as the first. It was euphemistically entitled “Petition to Ban the Use of Dihydrogen Monoxide (DHMO)” (translation water). It was designed to show that if official U.N. delegates could be duped by college students into banning water, that they could essentially fall for anything, including pseudo-scientific studies which claim to show that global warming is man-caused.

Do you trust these idiots to look out for anyone's best interest other than their own? I don't.

P.S. This has got to "frost" their hides.
(Do you get it? Sometimes I slay myself.)

Expelled For Having A Rifle In The Car?

On the morning of Dec.1, Demari DeReu drove to Columbia Falls High School in Montana and parked her blue-green Honda Accord in the lot, just as she does every morning. The 16-year-old honor roll student, class treasurer and varsity cheerleader walked in to school, forgetting entirely about the unloaded hunting rifle locked in the trunk of her car.

Later that day, there was an announcement telling students contraband sniffing dogs were scouting the parking lot, sparking her memory. She immediately told administrators that she’d forgotten to remove her scoped hunting rifle from the trunk following a Thanksgiving family hunting excursion.

She was suspended from school for violating federal and state gun laws.

On Monday, the school board will convene for a hearing to decide the fate and academic future of the high school junior, who recently was voted most dedicated cheerleader by her teammates and coach.

link

This was an accident. She had no mens rea to commit a crime, and no one thinks she's dangerous. This is just another example of zero tolerance run amok.

To be expelled, someone should have to do (or plan) something--not forget to do something. Just my opinion.

The Appropriate Way To Act?

I get it. You're angry. You feel entitled to have your higher education paid for by others, and you resent it when you have to pay a little more for your own education. I get it.

But is this really going to achieve your goals?

Furious student protesters attacked a car carrying Prince Charles and his wife, Camilla, vandalized buildings and battled riot police Thursday as a controversial hike in university fees triggered Britain's worst political violence in years.

In a major security breach, demonstrators set upon the heir to the throne's Rolls Royce as it drove through London's busy West End on its way to a theater. A group of up to 20 struck it with fists, sticks and bottles, breaking a window and splattering the gleaming black vehicle with paint.

Clearly the taxpayer isn't getting his/her money's worth out of you anyway, so they may as well cut you off.

Thursday Trivia

The answer to yesterday's question is:
Jon Stewart.

Today's question is:
Miley Ray Cyrus was born with what name?

The "Parent Trigger"

From the major Sacramento newspaper:

Chanting "yes we can!" and "si se puede!", a busload of parents on Tuesday became the first in California to try to force reforms at their children's failing school using a new law empowering parents to demand change.

The group of Latino and African-American parents delivered a petition signed by 62 percent of parents at McKinley Elementary School to Compton Unified Acting Superintendent Karen Frison.

The campus ranks in the bottom 10 percent of California's elementary schools. With the petition, the so-called "parent trigger" law mandates the campus be converted to a charter school next September...

The action was a landmark in the school reform movement. California was the first state in the nation to adopt a parent-trigger law, which stipulates that a district must make radical changes at a school that has failed to meet progress benchmarks for four years when at least 51 percent of parents sign a petition for reform.

Parents choose the reform they want - conversion to a charter school, replacing the principal and staff, rebudgeting, or even closure.

California's law was adopted in January and inspired a similar law in Connecticut. Six other states, including New Jersey and Michigan, are now considering parent-triggers.

While I'm all about parental influence and options, I wonder what the unintended consequences of this law will be.

College Students Doing Something Right

Tea Party Students!

El Gordo No Mas

This morning I fit nicely into a pair of pants that I haven't been able to wear for a couple of years now. I've kept a half dozen or so pairs in the closet, taunting me, and now they taunt no more. My weight now fluctuates between 22 and 25 pounds lost since the end of July. Progress has slowed significantly since those heady days of August and September, but I will. not. yield. My weight loss motto is now "el gordo no mas".

Wednesday Trivia

The answer to yesterday's question is:
Barbara Billingsley.

Today's question is:
What is the stage name of comedian Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz?

Holding Graduation In A Church

I've not put a lot of thought into this issue because, to be honest, the thought of holding graduation in a church never really occurred to me. I find my self agreeing with the author of this piece, though, but for somewhat different reasons:

I read this weekend of an attempt by the Americans United for the Separation of Church and State to induce the Cherokee County Board of Education to forgo holding high school graduation ceremonies in a local church. This apparently is not the first time the organization has contacted the Cherokee board. Should the Board not give in to this pressure, a lawsuit could be in the offing...

For the past few election cycles, I have cast my vote in a church, in which no effort has been made to conceal the nature of the building that houses the voting booths. To be sure, I’ve never had to go into the sanctuary to vote; it’s usually the fellowship hall or gym, but I do recall a time or two when election officials have set up shop in the narthex. Had I chosen to, I would have a full view of all the imagery of the sanctuary.

Should Americans United (or the ACLU) have filed suit on my behalf? Should they have sought to force the county to absorb higher costs or greater inconvenience by conducting all voting in public buildings like schools?

Without having spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about it, here's the conclusion I've jumped to: a building is a building. If the owners of the building don't put religious or "outside of reasonable community standards" requirements on the users, what's the problem? For example, if the church insisted that everyone remove their headgear upon entering the building, that would seem not "outside of reasonable community standards" to me; on the other hand, if they asked that men and women remain separated, or asked that people remove their shoes upon entering, or asked that people wear specific types of clothing before entering, such requests would be so far outside the mainstream that the use of the building would be contingent on acknowledging and practicing the religious requirements of the owners, and would be out of bounds.

If the big crucifix behind the altar is too much for some people to stand, put a big curtain up. Same with the iconography in any other religious building. I'm not saying that every little thing must be covered, but major pieces--especially ones that are in the field of view while watching the ceremony at hand--could be a "distraction" and should just be blocked.

The problem, of course, is that all the words I've used above are subject to interpretation. I guess the devil is in the details.

Get the joke? Sometimes I slay myself.