Archive for November, 2010

Dan Calabrese

Everyone knows a fat kid or two. And when I was a kid, everyone knew a fat kid or two. Some people are fat, just as some people are dumb, some people are obnoxious and some people always seem to have food in their teeth.

I don’t mean to suggest that this is a good thing, but it’s the way life is. Now, public schools seem to feel the necessity – since it’s not like they can teach anyone anything – to prevent kids from being fat.

Teach him math. If you can.

Of course, they can’t do that either. But in the determined course of trying, they’ll ruin birthday parties if they have to.

At Vandenberg Elementary School in Redford Township, Michigan, principal Syndee Malek has decided that kids can no longer have cupcakes as part of birthday celebrations. Instead, she wants them to eat “healthy foods” and, get this, have an extra half hour of gym.

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Bob Maistros

Today’s must reading is an article forwarded me a few days back by my lovely and talented daughter – a power player in her own right at the Republican Party of Virginia (and I’m not biased or anything) who is well aware of my feelings about our way of doing school in America.  (Like I exactly keep my thoughts and feelings to myself.)

Appearing in USA Today, the op-ed by psychotherapist and consultant Ruth Bettelheim is a complete undressing of our sorry educational system.  Here are just few of the thoughts shared by Dr. Bettelheim at the outset of her piece:

All that's missing is the shackles.

“Our public schools are turning millions of normal children into dropouts and failures. This isn’t because of a few bad teachers or principals, but because the natural learning behaviors of children are routinely penalized instead of praised … Our classrooms are outdated, functioning like mid-20th century factories. Each child is offered an identical curriculum, like a car on an assembly line. But children aren’t units of production, and this approach is failing.”

Gracious, Doc B.  Stop pulling your punches and tell us how you really feel.

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Herman Cain

President Obama’s defeats did not just start with the 2010 midterm election results. They started in December 2008, when President-elect Obama said “deficits don’t matter”. Well, he discovered that deficits do matter, because the American people were paying attention. They overwhelmingly rejected the runaway spending of this administration and this Democrat-controlled Congress.

Two more years.

President Obama suffered another loss when the nearly $1 trillion stimulus spending bill did not stimulate anything but more government jobs, while the unemployment rate went up and stayed up. The American people knew we could not spend our way to prosperity, but the president ignored that fact.

President Obama also discovered reluctantly that the American people do not like unpopular legislation shoved down their throats. Many of the members of Congress who walked the plank for Obama to pass health care deform legislation were sent into early retirement, which resulted in Republican control of the House of Representatives.

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Dan Calabrese

The political class has never been closely associated with frankness and honesty, but it almost strains belief that so many people are treating the recommendations of the deficit commission chairs – Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson – as if they had called for the mass incineration of everyone over 50.

Shriek.

Whether it’s Jeff Madrick in the Huffington Post, Paul Krugman in the New York Times, Dean Baker in the New Republic or Nancy Pelosi just shooting her mouth off, you’d think these guys had suggested we rip the federal government up from its foundations and bring back the Articles of Confederation.

All this for a report that is certainly bold by the standards of modern political discourse, but nonetheless contains nothing in the way of truly radical thinking.

Is there nothing more to the resulting hysteria than the political class’s reflexive opposition to anything resembling fiscal sanity?

Consider: In recent generations, federal spending has typically been a hair below 21 percent of GDP. During the Bush 43 presidency, it was 19.9 percent. Federal revenues have typically been around 18 percent, which is why we’ve usually had a deficit, but most of the time, not a gargantuan one.

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Dacia Nichol

If the military isn’t literally in my blood, it is certainly in my spirit.  I was born in a U.S. Naval Hospital in Naples, Italy to a beautiful young naval E-3 who, because of the mysterious ways that God works, after two days of age I would not meet again for another seventeen years.

I then was adopted into a family of two U.S. Air Force officers to begin a life that took me places many my age have only dreamed of, and gave me unique experiences that have shaped my character today.

Thank you Dad, and Mom . . . and Mom

Growing up as a military brat, I saw life both from inside the walls of the various installations at which my parents were stationed and as the newcomer in established neighborhoods of the “civilian” world.  I was raised with an understanding of the “chain of command”, what first impressions meant, and most importantly, why I was so damned lucky to have been born an American.  The Pledge of Allegiance wasn’t just a routine classroom happenstance.  It was what my family’s life was dedicated to, and the reason for everything we did.

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Bob Maistros

My friend and editor Dan Calabrese is a nice and smart man, but he’s also clearly delusional.

He thinks that Jhonny Peralta at $11 mill and change for two years is a good signing for the Detroit Tigers.

Yes. He. Can. (Photo by Keith Allison, licensed under the terms of the cc-by-sa-2.0)

He also maintains that the 81-81 Tigers, treading water in baseball’s sorriest division, are a “good team.”

But his most delusional belief, offered in response to a recent posting of mine, is that the Congressional Republican leadership has any likelihood of achieving meaningful reductions in spending.

Dan says that “(t)he stakes have changed … if Bob is right (PS – I always am), and those courageous enough to stand up and do what needs to be done can lead America for a generation (and I for one think he is), then he can’t possibly be the only person in Washington who can see it.”

They may well see it.  They just can’t and won’t do anything about it.  Because, as I pointed out, they outright refused to prepare the American electorate by laying out a philosophical foundation for deficit reduction.

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Brett Noel

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Large version for newspaper publication.

Greyscale version for newspaper publication.

Dan Calabrese

One of the most common criticisms of the federal government is that it can be paternalistic – treating the citizenry like we are its children and it is our parent. We saw yesterday that this criticism is nonsense.

Parents, at least good ones, teach their children that they can’t always have everything they want – that resources are limited, and that it’s necessary to prioritize and to put a lot of effort into earning something you really want.

Can we handle the truth?

The people who run the federal government are willing to say nothing of the sort, as evidenced by their reaction yesterday to the recommendations of White House fiscal commission chairs Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson.

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David Karki

A Republican House opposite an evenly divided Senate nominally, though perhaps not operationally, in Democrat hands and a weakened President Obama still in the White House. It doesn’t sound like a recipe for anything of substance or consequence getting done until after the 2012 elections, a full two years from now.  And in all honesty, it’s likely not.

If Nancy Pelosi somehow stays on as House minority leader over a group of nothing but old liberal bulls – since all the supposed blue-dog moderates got replaced by Republicans – there won’t be an ounce of compromise in that body. The Senate may see some, in that Democrats running in red states in 2012 won’t want to hew to a hard liberal line, but Harry Reid still controls the schedule. And, of course, Obama doesn’t appear to have learned a single thing from the drubbing he just took.

So what can Republicans do with these two years of stalemate to best position themselves for 2012, so they can win the White House and enough Senate seats to start fully repealing all that Obama has done? Read the rest of this entry »

Dan Calabrese

My friend Bob Maistros doesn’t think the incoming Republican majority in the House is serious about cutting federal spending. Why? Largely because they’ve never been serious about it before. The inevitable shrieks of torment from those would lose their federal largess have always been enough to cow our Republican heroes into quick submission, and there is sure to be no shortage of shrieking this time.

Believe, Bob!

Bob is also convinced that they will quickly fail the crucial test of whether they are willing to cut ethanol subsidies – the definitive indicator of budget-cutting seriousness. Of course, this was declared to be the definitive indicator by Bob himself, so it’s entirely possible that the GOP might enact serious cuts in a broad sense while still falling on their faces with respect to ethanol.

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