Reason 1,254,997

Monday 11 March 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

Entire school systems failing to educate students with even basic math and reading skills. And this is the largest, most well funded school system in the country. CBS New York:

Nearly 80 percent of New York City high school graduates need to relearn basic skills before they can enter the City University’s community college system.

The number of kids behind the 8-ball is the highest in years, CBS 2′s Marcia Kramer reported Thursday.

When they graduated from city high schools, students in a special remedial program at the Borough of Manhattan Community College couldn’t make the grade.

They had to re-learn basic skills — reading, writing and math — first before they could begin college courses.

They are part of a disturbing statistic.

Officials told CBS 2′s Kramer that nearly 80 percent of those who graduate from city high schools arrived at City University’s community college system without having mastered the skills to do college-level work.

First, I’d argue that these students don’t need to re-learn these basic skills, but learn them. You don’t learn basic reading and writing skills and them forget them. These students aren’t being taught these skills and then forgetting them; they aren’t learning them to begin with because the entire school system is an abject failure.

I’ve taught at the college level. I’m not the kind of fool who thinks that college is fit for everyone. It isn’t, nor will everyone get a meaningful benefit from attending college other than personal gratification (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it should be understood that the kind of personal gratification one can get from college is a luxury which comes at an ever increasing cost, not a necessity in order to have a fulfilling life either intellectually or financially). But 80% of your graduating students failing to be able to even START at the community college level because they don’t have basic reading, writing, and math skills is fucking shameful. The entire government school system needs to be destroyed and replaced with a private system where parents and students have the opportunity to flee from failing schools and find one that suits their needs. Government schooling should work like eery other government service; available only to those who can’t afford another option. People with means don’t choose to use food stamps or receive a welfare check. Why should we all acquiesce to the vast majority of children being educated by a system not fit to give them even the most basic skills.

And it can’t be argued that it’s a funding problem. New York City spends more per pupil in their public school system than I spend on my son’s very prestigious private education where 100% of graduating students who have applied (which is virtually all of them) are accepted in to college programs.

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Liberals Shaming Liberals

Saturday 9 March 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

Paul’s filibuster was met with bitter scorn from many liberals. And some of those who didn’t criticize Paul rightly noted that liberals ought to be the ones who should be ashamed. Falguni A. Sheth in Salon:

Yet instead of expressing outrage, Democrats continued to acquiesce to the White House’s radical expansion of executive power. And they turned on Rand Paul, even though his objections should have been shared not just by liberals, but by everyone with even a passing respect for the rule of law.

So where’s the problem for progressives? Apparently, Paul’s question about killing Americans on American soil is deemed such a singular Tea Party-ish position that only two Democrats (Patrick Leahy and Jeff Merkley) and Independent Bernie Sanders joined Republican forces in challenging Brennan’s nomination.

Rather than challenge a Democratic administration in defense of constitutional principles that all citizens should insist be guaranteed, Democrats embraced party tribalism. As Kevin Gosztola pointed out, so-called progressives from Lawrence O’Donnell to Chris Matthews vilified the only politician who was asserting a — limited, mild, patriotic — challenge to the White House’s imperious expansion of unilateral authority. It was a challenge that every single Democrat, conservative, liberal or progressive should have been pushing for the last four years. Even those few, such as Sen. Ron Wyden, who exhibited some backbone, did so tepidly. After all, Wyden clearly stated that he would vote to confirm Brennan.

Many of the criticisms are simply stupid and without any real intellectual merit such as “we can’t possibly support Paul in this because he said he has issues with one provision of the Civil Rights Act (you know, the one that was passed nearly 50 years ago when he was a small child), and that Paul believes that free market principles would have also addressed racism with the use of government force, hence a racist. Sheth argues in reply,

Is Paul a racist? Here’s a better question: Is Paul any more racist in his economic and drug policy endorsements than the White House in its policies of kill lists, targeted killings, drone strikes, TSA no-fly and watch lists, Department of Homeland Security’s Secure Communities program or “See Something, Say Something” policy? Is Rand Paul more of a threat to black and brown populations (American or foreign) than the current administration, which deported more than 1.5 million migrants during its first term and separated tens of thousands of migrant parents from their children? Is Rand Paul more of a threat to our safety than the current administration?

No, Paul is NOT a bigger threat for believing in free market principles than Obama is for prosecuting the War on Drugs which disproportionately affects minority populations, or for violently separating families with draconian deportation policy, or for bombing brown people, most of who are innocent of any wrongdoing, many of them women and children, with death robots from above. Not even close.

Yet Sheth’s final point is a poignant one.

Democrats should have participated in Paul’s filibuster until the answer they received was an unconditional “no” to the question of targeted killings of Americans on American soil. There’s much more to be demanded of this administration, but support for Paul’s filibuster could have been a good place to start. And it should have been a no-brainer. But rather than forming a tactical alliance — no one was asking Democrats to convert to Tea Partyism — Democrats relinquished yet another chance to do their jobs: to question, challenge and push back on the Obama administration’s unceasing quest for power.

It’s TEAM politics all the way down.

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Perfect

Saturday 9 March 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

“You’re my best friend.”

“You’re the only one that gets me, the only one I trust. It’s just you and me from here on out, old pal. You’re my best friend in the whole world.”

Perfect.

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Respect for Decorum

Saturday 9 March 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

When even the slimy Harry Reid publicly acknowledges that what you, a republican senator hated by those on both sides of the aisle, have done is important, and that what you’ve done was done in exactly the way it’s designed to be done, yo know you scored a victory.

My Republican colleagues love to extol the virtues of regular order. If only we could get back to regular order, they say, and the Senate would function again. Yesterday we saw both sides of that. On the one hand, my colleagues did practice regular order. On the other, they didn’t. Let’s take the one they didn’t. They demanded a 60-vote threshold for confirmation of a very qualified nominee, Caitlin Halligan. The Republicans once again hid behind a cloture vote, a filibuster by another term, to prevent a simple up-or-down vote on this important nomination. They took the easy way out. On the other hand, one Republican senator did return to regular order and as his right he spoke for as long as he was able to speak. And, Mr. President, that is a filibuster. After 12 hours standing and talking, this is how Senator Paul ended his filibuster, and I quote, “I would go for another 12 hours to try to break Strom Thurmond’s record, but I have discovered there are some limits to filibustering, and I am going to have to take care of one of those in a few moments here.” I have been involved in a few filibusters, as Rand Paul did yesterday. And what I have learned from my experiences in talking filibusters is this: To succeed, you need strong convictions but also a strong bladder. It’s obvious Senator Paul has both. Mr. President, we should all reflect on what happened yesterday as we proceed with other nominations, including a lot of judicial nominations. This can be a Senate where ideas are debating in full public view and obstruction happens in full public view as well, or it can be a Senate where a couple senators, obstruction from behind closed doors without ever coming to the Senate floor.

Well done, Senator Paul. You invited open debate on a matter that many Americans never even knew existed, and you did it in the way such things should be done.

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Excuses Excuses

Saturday 9 March 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

Democrats finding excuses for sitting out Paul’s filibuster, then proclaiming support for his cause.

After just one Democrat participated in Rand Paul’s filibuster Wednesday — a thirteen-hour stand against the nomination of John Brennan over administration drone strikes — Senate liberals defended their absence from the floor, calling the filibuster a “distraction” that wouldn’t “move this issue forward.”

Spokesmen for two Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, including Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, referred BuzzFeed to Wednesday’s hearing with Attorney General Eric Holder, where members of the committee from both parties condemned the secrecy around the president’s drone program.

“Senator Coons has publicly called for a rethinking of the United States strategy on drones and remains committed to being an active part of that discussion,” said Ian Koski, his communications director, “but in his two years in the Senate, he’s seen dozens and dozens of filibusters and didn’t believe another filibuster would help move this issue forward.”

Yeah. Public debate amongst our nation’s lawmakers, the supposed “most deliberative body in the world” isn’t a good enough forum to discuss drones and the administration’s stance on their use on American citizens.

So if debating in public, on the record, isn’t the right time, when the fuck is? If you supported his cause, you would have et the American public know it. Instead you collectively decide that private meetings in back rooms is better.

Unprincipled senators gonna unprinciple.

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Better Watch Out

Wednesday 6 March 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

You’d better watch out for those anti-government grandmother death squads hell bent on knitting their way towards a revolution against the feds.

Also, the center’s definition of hate groups has changed in the past year, kicking up a controversy. Critics accused the group of unfairly bundling together organizations with vastly different points of view — and painting them all as potentially violent.

For example a North Carolina-based group calling itself “Granny Warriors” appears on the SPLC list of active “patriots.”
But founder Linda Hunnicutt says her organization is harmless.

“I am deadly!” she joked. “I’m 74 years old. I have COPD. I have congestive heart failure. I’m sewing a quilt.”
Hunnicutt acknowledges she’s no friend of the federal government, but, she wishes no harm on anyone.

“All these people that want to bomb places and kill children, come on,” she said. “Who would be in sympathy with them?”

If part of your mission is to single out elderly knitters as domestic terror threats, you probably need to reconsider the entirety of your mission.

But if trying to induce pants shitting because some grandmothers don’t particularly like the federal government isn’t bad enough for you to make you scoff at the SPLC, how about their mischaracterization of government violence perpetrated by the government against its citizens as anti-government violence on behalf of gun-loving right wingers against their government.

The rise in such groups echoes a period almost 20 years ago, around the time when Congress passed the 1993 Brady Bill and the 1994 ban on assault weapons, the SPLC said. That legislation came near a period of infamous and deadly anti-government violence in Waco, Texas; Ruby Ridge, Idaho; and Oklahoma City, “and led to the first wave of the patriot movement,” the report said.

Both Ruby Ridge and Waco were intensely violent incidents that were started by government stormtroopers against citizens without provocation other than contempt of their rule, yet somehow the SPLC has redefined hostile government aggression as anti-government violence taken by crazy members of militias. The fear mongering is fucking pathetic.

Comments Off on Better Watch Out  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2013-03-06  ::  madlibertarianguy

Media Bias

Wednesday 6 March 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

How DARE anyone suggest that there is a leftward bias in the media? There is no way that they would conspire to blame “The Tea Party” for inciting the murder of a federal census worker without a single shred of evidence, then fail to retract their claims when it’s learned that it was a suicide.

When it comes to media bias, I try not to get too worked up. It’s bound to happen in an industry so monolithically dominated by Democrats and liberals. But I couldn’t help but feel the rage boil up as I read Schapiro’s (excellent*) piece this morning. Just remember: If you ask to see a cabinet nominee’s speeches or financial records, you’re a McCarthyite. But if you accuse a political movement of inspiring murder based on no evidence whatsoever, well, no big deal.

I try not to get worked up either. The media is a leftist pit of authority worship where having “access” to the King is more important than performing their societal function as a journalist. But shit like this shows that anyone other than Team BLUE will have a very difficult time overcoming their bias in American politics.

The legacy media cannot die quickly enough.

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Sound the Alarm

Wednesday 6 March 2013 - Filed under Economy + Government + POTUS + Sequestration

Thomas Sowell on the politics of enacting budget cuts:

Back in my teaching days, many years ago, one of the things I liked to ask the class to consider was this: Imagine a government agency with only two tasks: (1) building statues of Benedict Arnold and (2) providing life-saving medications to children. If this agency’s budget were cut, what would it do?
The answer, of course, is that it would cut back on the medications for children. Why? Because that would be what was most likely to get the budget cuts restored. If they cut back on building statues of Benedict Arnold, people might ask why they were building statues of Benedict Arnold in the first place.

The example was deliberately extreme as an illustration. But, in the real world, the same general pattern can be seen in local, state and national government responses to budget cuts.

At the local level, the first response to budget cuts is often to cut the police department and the fire department. There may be all sorts of wasteful boondoggles that could have been cut instead, but that would not produce the public alarm that reducing police protection and fire protection can produce. And public alarm is what can get budget cuts restored.

The Obama administration is following the same pattern. The Department of Homeland Security, for example, released thousands of illegal aliens from prisons to save money — and create alarm.

Rather than scale back on some the many lavish, completely unneeded government projects that we are currently undertaking along with their many employees living on the public’s dime, officials seek to cut programs in the most visible way possible in a way that will cause the most inconvenience to the public. For example, rather than question the need for multiple official White House Calligraphers who make a combined $277k per annum, they choose to cut back on air traffic controllers so as to purposefully cause airport delays. Voters fly on planes, they don’t read hand written invitations to White House soirees. Not a single person in America is benefitted by having multiple calligraphers employed by the federal government (besides the calligraphers themselves); millions benefit from having air traffic controllers doing their jobs (though whether having them be federal employees on government payrolls paid for by taxpayers – rather than private employees paid by those who fly on planes – is a question unto itself). So naturally the government decides, in the face of unavoidable cuts growth in spending increases, to cut air traffic controllers in the hopes that the public will cry for the government to continue unabated.

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Bad News

Tuesday 5 March 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

And the pols keep telling us that sequestration is nothing but bad news. USNI News:

U.S. Navy frigates will stop patrolling for drug runners by April because of forced sequestration budget cuts, a Navy spokesman told USNI News on Monday.

On Saturday, U.S. 4th Fleet was informed by Navy leadership it would suspend deployments of two ships—part of the Joint Interagency Task Force South’s Operation Martillo—by April because of the 1 March sequestration cuts, said the 4th Fleet’s Cmdr. Cory Barker.

I though that Obama told me the War on Drugs was over?

Comments Off on Bad News  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2013-03-05  ::  madlibertarianguy

Reason 1,254,996

Monday 4 March 2013 - Filed under Authoritarianism + Education + Firearms

Schools suspending students for “being involved with an incident” including a firearm. When said student was “guilty” of wrestling away a gun from a student who had it pointed at the head of another. The Blaze:

A Florida high school student wrestled a loaded gun away from another teen on the bus ride home this week and was slapped with a suspension in return.

The 16-year-old Cypress Lake High student in Fort Myers, Fla. told WFTX-TV there was “no doubt” he saved a life after grappling for the loaded .22 caliber revolver being aimed point-blank at another student on Tuesday.

“I think he was really going to shoot him right then and there,” said the suspended student, not identified by WFTX because of safety concerns. “Not taking no pity.”

The student said the suspect, a football player, threatened to shoot a teammate because he had been arguing with his friend.

Punishing a student for saving the life of another? That’s fucked up.

Comments Off on Reason 1,254,996  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2013-03-04  ::  madlibertarianguy