GOVERNMENT SCHOOL IDIOCY

A government school in New Orleans has suspended an 8-year-old girl .... 8 years old .... for nine days.  What did she do?  She brought about 30 "Jell-O Shots" to school for her classmates.  She says her mother made them and suggested that she take them to school to pass out to her friends.  Now ... admittedly ... her mother does work in a bar, and her mother does make Jell-O Shots laced with alcohol to sell to bar patrons.  There is no evidence that the Jell-O Shots she made for her daughter contained any alcohol.  It doesn't matter though.  The girl was suspended anyway ... because the Jell-O Shots are a "look-alike" drug.  They're going to test the little goodies to see if there's any booze there.  If there is booze, it's not the girl who should be punished .. it's her bar-maid mother.  Jail time would be appropriate.  The school says it doesn't matter.  Booze or not, the suspension stands.

The issue here is the moronic zero-tolerance policy they're following at this school.  Somewhere along the road of life I got this strange idea that schools should prepare your children for life in the wide wide world.  Part of that preparation would be teaching our children basic reasoning skills.  Most situations don't present themselves in stark blacks or whites.  Most of the times you have shades of gray.  How in the world do you teach our children how to deal with real world situations with artificial zero-tolerance policies?  Can you imagine these zero-tolerance policies being applied to the real outside-of-government schools world?  This girl is being suspended under a policy of zero-tolerance for "look alike" drugs.  Let's apply that to bank robbers.  If you just look like a bank robber you go to jail.  It doesn't matter what you actually are.  It doesn't matter what you actually did or are planning to do.  It only matters what you look like.  Look like a bank robber, look like a drug dealer, look like a gang-banger and you go to jail.  In this type of world who would we have left to play professional basketball?

Perhaps the zero-tolerance policies are an indication of the trust in the judgment and decision-making capabilities of our school administrators.  In that case, I could see your point.

NOW -- IS THIS YOUR OPTION OUT OF GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS?

During dinner with a friend last night we started talking about the sorry state of government schools.  His child is being home schooled ... and has just been offered a full scholarship to an elite private college.  The stigma attached to home schooling is gone.  Now home schooling stands as no obstacle at all to college admission. 

My friend told me that there are several Internet sites that supplement home home schooling.  The home schooling parent can get full curriculum support from the Internet Academy.  Lesson plans, materials and even the testing ... all done over the Internet.  Some of these Internet academies are purely secular, others, like this one, have a religious base.  The left will surely think this is the end of the world.  How in the world can you let people who actually believe in God teach our children?  Won't their minds be forever poisoned?  

We're working supply and demand here ... and the magic of competition.  Look for more Internet academies to spring up, and look for more parents who are disgusted with government education to take advantage of them.  Dare we hope that the Internet could be the doom of our hideous system of government education?

I'll drink to that!

HOLDING OUT PATHETIC HOPE

It's so sad.  Remember back during the days of the Clinton impeachment?  There were quite a few Americans who actually believed in the concept of the rule of law.  There were actually people who believed that the laws in this country applied to everyone; whether you collected garbage or spewed it out from the halls of congress.  You were subject to the law ... period.  These people wanted to nothing more than to hold Bill Clinton, American citizen, responsible for offering perjured testimony (a violation of the law) in order to deny another American citizen access to legal process.  While some Americans were trying to hold Clinton responsible for his criminal conduct, other Americans were saying that we should just get over it and move on.  In fact, they even formed a far-left organization, Moveon.org, to promote their "just let it go" philosophy.

So, just what are these "let's just move on" people doing today?  They're going to therapy sessions in Florida and obsessing over wet dreams of turning the election results around in Ohio.  When it comes to their issue .. installing The Poodle in the White House ... they just can't bring themselves to do what they wanted the rule-of-law crowd to do during the Clinton years.   

Trust me, you leftist losers.  It's over.  You lost.  The Poodle is back in Teresa's lap where he belongs.  Stop whining and start preparing for 2006 and getting Hillary groomed and de-fleaed for 2008.

INTELLIGENCE BILL PASSES

First of all .. how many times have you ever heard of a "reform" plan passed by the congress that actually worked?  I can think of one.  Welfare reform.  If you can come up with another example, let me know.  Don't suggest tax reform either. There have been thousands of changes in our tax laws since the last so-called "reform."

Be that as it may, to the yawns of America the intelligence bill passed the House yesterday by a margin of 336-75. It should sail through the Senate and be signed by President Bush soon. There was much celebration of its passage by the 9/11 families and others who believe it will make America safer.   I doubt seriously that it will.  This was a political effort, not a legislative one.  The un-elected 9/11 Commission was hastily put together, and much of its time was spent in politically rather than fact-based hearings.  As soon as these men and women (remember Jamie Gorelick and Richard Ben-Veniste?) issued their report the Democrats and liberal activist groups started demanding that their findings be codified into law NOW!  Immediately!  Not later.  Not after due deliberation by the elected representatives of the people.  But NOW!   The left bleated to the media, and the media diligently reported concerns that any failure to pass an intelligence reform law immediately would almost certainly lead to another terrible terrorist attack on the United States.

This exercise, of course, was to show the nation that George Bush and the Republican congress really wasn't all-that-much in charge of things.  The left could ramrod legislation through if necessary.

OK ... so what does this hasty legislation do?

Basically it does to intelligence gathering what the Department of Homeland Security did for national defense. It would put the budgets and assets of 15 different agencies under a new position of "National Intelligence Director." But how is simply reshuffling the bureaucracy going to really make this country safer? It probably won't. What has to be changed are the laws, and the enforcement of those laws.

Leading the opposition against the bill was House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner. He wanted a provision put in the bill to deny illegal immigrants driver's licenses and to limit the appeals of those facing deportation. The reason? The 19 hijackers on 9/11 had 60 driver's licenses among them....identification that made it very easy to do what they needed to do to carry out the attacks. So what happened to the provisions in the intelligence bill?  They didn't make it.  They were cut out during House-Senate negotiations. The reason was simple: Hispandering. (Pandering for the Hispanic vote.) Neither party wants to offend this increasingly powerful group of voter. Even when it comes to protecting Americans from terrorists who may cross the borders.  What did I say about a politically inspired bill?  And so it goes.

So this legislation will make a lot of people feel good, and will create a new government agency, but past that, not much is new here.

CIA SAYS IRAQ SITUATION BLEAK

The New York Times published a classified memo from the CIA saying that the situation in Iraq was deteriorating and likely to get worse. This doom and gloom scenario is making the rounds in the media without any mention of the agendas involved.

It should be noted that the CIA establishment does not support the Bush administration. The CIA supported John Kerry. It was leaking memos during the campaign designed to defeat the president. Bad news is good news to that group over there. President Bush appointed Porter Goss as the head of the CIA to go over there and clean house.  The housecleaning is currently underway and CIA personnel are howling like stuck pigs.  

So a Bush-hater at the CIA leaked a classified memo to the Bush-hating New York Times. So what. The media has been predicting the failure of Iraq for over a year, just as they predicted failure in Afghanistan.  As soon as Iraq holds successful elections the left will start hammering some other aspect of Bush's foreign policy and war on terror.  

MORE PRISONER ABUSE?

The ACLU is at it again, this time ganging up on U.S. Special Forces troops in Iraq. It's not exactly known why the American Civil Liberties Union is now concerning itself with the civil liberties of terrorists. Who knows.

The ACLU has their panties in a knot over some special forces guys that threatened some DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) personnel and told them not to report "prisoner abuse." So what sort of abuse are we talking about?

These are the same old complaints: sleep deprivation, humiliation and forced nudity. Abuse? I think not. It's called interrogating prisoners to get information; information that will save the lives of men and women fighting on the front lines of the war on terror.

If we have to make people uncomfortable in order to get them to tell us what we want to know, then so be it.  Lives might actually be saved.   By the way, will the ACLU be investigating Al-Qaeda for the heads of prisoners they sawed off with a hunting knife? Will they be as concerned about Nick Berg?

READING ASSIGNMENTS

We always suspected it, but now we have physical proof that listening to the Neal Boortz Show is dangerous. I wonder how long before they outlaw driving & listening to Boortz?

Well what do you know!  Euro-weenies are starting to understand the danger of radical Islam

That AWOL US soldier in Canada that's getting the red carpet treatment from the leftists up there is a disgrace, and Michelle Malkin calls everybody out on it in her latest column.

The greedy AARP is doing its best to screw the younger generation as hard as it can, and Rich Lowry says the organization has already started the fear-mongering.

Michael Moore actually has one thing right: he says The Poodle lost the election because he wasn't the best candidate.  Just about anybody could have told him that months ago.

How many times have we had to listen to politicians talk about the "digital divide?"  Well guess what...it turns out students who use computers at school are dumber than those that don't.

Not exactly a big supporter of democracy himself, Vladimir Putin has decided that an election won't work in Iraq.  Of course not, his preferred candidate is sitting in jail.

Speaking of Putin, somebody poisoned Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yuschenko.  Russia was pushing for the other guy.  Coincidence?  Probably not.

Even though people are calling for his resignation over the Oil-For-Food program, Kofi Annan is not the main problem - the entire United Nations is, says Pat Buchanan.

Charles Krauthammer says the idea that if the Sunni Muslims don't participate in the Iraqi election, the whole process is doomed is ridiculous.  He makes some points about other famous elections where not everyone voted.  Don't miss this one.

Democrats and the media can't quite figure out George Bush, but John Podhoretz has some tips about the president, starting with the purge of cabinet secretaries.

The media has decided that the United States is to blame for the UN Oil-For-Food scandal.  The Media Research Center reports this and other nonsense.

Why is the cost of college going up so much while the quality of the education has gone down?  Walter Williams says it has to do with leftist professors indoctrinating people while teaching them very little.

Pee-wee hockey mom flashes opposing team.

Genius teen tries to hide $800 worth of electronics in cereal boxes at a Costco and just pay for the cereal. He now faces felony theft charges.

It looks like Ukraine opposition leader Viktor Yuschinko was poisoned before last month's election. See the before and after pictures.

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