Obama and his handlers have released 10 states from the No Child Left Behind requirements that have been in place for 10 years. Those states are: Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oklahoma, and Tennessee. At least 28 more states as well as Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico are expected to seek and receive similar dispensation by the end of February, 2012.

Why are these waivers being asked for and granted? Because these states’ “school systems” can’t meet the 2014 requiring that all students be proficient in reading and math even though they had 12 years to raise themselves to that basic standard.

Obama, faced with having to apply the sanctions that NCLB requires and having failed to coerce Congress to lower the standards, has simply decided to waive the law as if it didn’t exist in the first place.

After waiting far too long for Congress to reform No Child Left Behind, my administration is giving states the opportunity to set higher, more honest standards in exchange for more flexibility.

– Barack Obama

Obama, his reelection bid always held firmly in his mind, can blame President Bush and Congress all that he wants. Doing so doesn’t change the fact that, even with over a decade to work with, the public school system has failed to meet basic objective measurement of their capability to teach math and reading proficiency.

Admitting failure is the first step towards fixing the problem. Sadly, Obama’s second step of removing the standard and allowing those who have failed to redefine they’re own standards and metrics is not in any way shape or form a step forward.

It’s easy to blame technology. After all, why should teachers actual teach what students can use modern technology to do for them instead?

But They Didn’t Teach Us That In Ethnomathematics!

I don’t think it’s fair to blame technology though since the average child in America could recite chapter and verse of the Liberals’ politically correct versions of history and sociology how America was wrong and how the country was based upon the evils of: racism, xenophobia, homophobia, religion, nationalism, and capitalism.

Oh yes! Religion (except for Islam post 9/11), nationalism, and capitalism are taught as “evils” in the modern (re)education camps the Liberals demand we call schools.

That same child could also likely parrot his “teachers’” chimera that teaching math and science and testing on those subjects is racist because it can’t take into account the differences in cultural backgrounds of non-White students. He or she could also offer strikingly similar rationalizations as why all the “teaching” was done to the lowest common denominators in his or her class.

No. Technology may be an enabler in this educational failure but it’s not the cause. The cause is the Liberals’ desire to indoctrinate children into their anti-American ideology.

Just A Short Subway Trip Uptown From OWS…

With millions of both Americans and Liberals out of work the narcissistic little boy decides to extend his Billion Dollar Campaign to NYC’s fashion district with a celebrity laden fashion show featuring high-end designer Obama merchandise.

I imagine Obama and his handlers are glad that Bloomberg finally cleared the OWS rabble out. He’d be a little hard pressed to shuck and jive his way out of that confrontation.

I’m Sorry. I Won’t Do It Again, I Promise

Yeah, that sounds hauntingly familiar. Abused women having hearing that sort of thing for generations. But time and time again, as soon as the abuser suffers another perceived setback or loss of power and control, the beatings start again.

Let’s just hope that the American people show more sense and self-preservation than the majority of those abused women and that they kick Obama to the curb in November.

Race Is Always A Trigger In Politics

This is an odd attitude for a man who lost his job for speaking honestly when that honesty didn’t align with his previous Liberal masters’ anti-American agenda.

It’s an even odder attitude for the man who authored Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America–and What We Can Do About It

In Enough he wrote that too many black Americans are in crisis – caught in a twisted hip-hop culture, dropping out of school, ending up in jail, having babies when they are not ready to be parents, and falling to the bottom in twenty-first-century global economic competition.

Yet, despite his previous run in with political correctness and his previous written work, Williams’ response to Americans’ indignation at how he misconducted the Fox News/Wall Street Journal GOP Primary debate in Myrtle Beach, SC was:

Race is always a trigger in politics, but now a third of the nation are people of color — and their numbers are growing. With those minorities solidly in the Democratic camp and behind the first black president, the scene is set for a bonanza of racial politics.

The language of GOP racial politics is heavy on euphemisms that allow the speaker to deny any responsibility for the racial content of his message. The code words in this game are “entitlement society” — as used by Mitt Romney — and “poor work ethic” and “food stamp president” — as used by Newt Gingrich. References to a lack of respect for the “Founding Fathers” and the “Constitution” also make certain ears perk up by demonizing anyone supposedly threatening core “old-fashioned American values.”

– Juan Williams

This from a man who spent 233 pages in Enough bluntly and forthrightly – not a dog-whistle to be heard – lambasting and execrating Black Leaders and the entirety of the “Black Community” as being perversions and debasements of Black Culture and as having squandered every civil rights gain since the Civil War?

Then again, perhaps Williams’ attitude isn’t odd at all. Williams is one of those “people of color” and, if he’s also one of the majority of them who is “behind the first black president,” what  better way to undermine the entire opposition to his boy, Obama getting handed a second term as POTUS than to decry anything and everything they say as somehow being “code words” or “dog-whistles” for racist sentiments.

Or maybe Williams is just trying to get his old job at NPR back, who knows?

One the brighter side, approx. 1500 poor women per year will be able to be referred by Planned Parenthood to breast cancer screaming service providers.

For those Americans who understand that abortion is the murder of the most helpless and only guaranteed innocents in the world – and who are actually against it even if childbearing inconveniences some females, Komen’s rapid capitulation to the abortionists in painful and maddening. There are, however, other points to consider in this matter.

Do Not Act As They Do

Komen For The Cure’s mission is stated as the eradication of breast cancer, not the ending of on-demand abortions in America.  The two things are not related beyond the simple fact that both are “women’s issues.” It just doesn’t make sense for Komen not to reverse their decision in the wake of the Feminists’ shrill and strident objections because not doing so could jeopardize the success of their mission.

Anger should be directed at those Feminists who placed on-demand abortion above women’s health, not at Komen.  Remember always that it was exactly these Feminists who called for Komen’s destruction for not supporting abortion. Americans should not sink to their antisocial level and similarly put the fight against breast cancer in jeopardy.

Market Forces In Action

Utterly irrespective of whether we, as Americans, like Komen’s giving in to the abortionists, this was a direct case of free market forces in full operation. It was empirical proof that, in the absence of governmental intervention and meddling, people can directly impact and change the course of business. Certainly, we don’t have to like this specific occurrence but we must respect it for what it was.

Enough of Komen’s consumers were against the new funding policy to potentially negatively impact Komen’s revenues enough to make a difference. Komen responded as is required by the free market and, unless we’re willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater, we have to understand and accept that.

~*~

Many of us donated to Komen For The Cure when they donated approximately 0.17% of their annual outlays to Planned Parenthood, which funded only 4% the breast cancer screenings Planned Parenthood provided, and I can’t see the point in turning away from them just because they tried to change that and failed due to market pressures.

Our domestic enemies might be comfortable behaving that way, but we should be better and more intelligent than that.

It seems that politics has gotten too raw and real for some people.

This, of course, begs three related questions: who are these people crying for increased civility, what is it that they actually want, and why do they want it so much?

Who’s Crying For Civility

I see two disparate and unrelated general segments of America’s population crying out for an increase in civility in political speech and argument. They are respectively the apolitical drones and the Leftists, the Liberals and Progressives. Each makes similar outcries but for seemingly different reasons and with different real goals.

What Do They Really Want And Why?

The apolitical people just want things to go quietly. They’re uninvolved in politics, fervently wish to stay that way, and are both bothered and scared by the passion that is being shown by many others. Whether from cynicism or self-centeredness, they do not want to pull their heads out the oh-so-comfortable sand and become involved and the fire of current political discourse is preventing them from doing this.

The staid, stuffy, and easily ignored ways are what these drones want to return to because they don’t want to open their eyes and choose a side.

The Leftists, these Liberals and Progressives, are quite different.  They are awake, aware, involved in the political process, and they have a definite direction that they want to take America in. Their cries for civility are really two things: cynical attempts to silent their enemies and cries for validation and acceptance.

The willfully uninvolved will just have to stop their ears better and learn to keep their heads down.

For many of the Left, their cries are just dog-whistles for censoring the American people. They don’t really want civility, as their very cries for it often show, so much as they want to stop any dissent against their foundations of their agenda.

For others on the left it is a matter of crying out for acceptance and validation. They’re looking for some affirmation that, even though their enemies disagree with their core ethos, they are still respected and approved of.

~*~

Sadly for those who’re crying out for increased civility, I don’t see much chance of- or value in its return any time in the near future. The divide in America is not too deep; it’s to fundamental. It doesn’t allow for the luxury of civility anymore. It’s not a political divide; it’s an ethical and moral divide.

We’re not going to be silenced. We’re not going to engage in carefully managed debates over minutiae of methodology when we want to change the goals and systems. And we’re very much not going to respect our enemies when we find the core beliefs that underpin their goals and actions to be utterly abominable and abhorrent.

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

– George Santayana
The Life Of Reason. Vol. I, Reason in Common Sense

To put it simply, those who cannot learn from past mistakes are more than likely going to make them again.

Americans need only look into the past to when we were the invaders who refused to assimilate into the native language, culture, sociopolitical tapestry of America and accept and retain those lessens.

Is It Too Late To Build A Fence?

The Native American tribes could have done things differently and stood a better chance of retaining their nations, cultures, languages…and lives. They, however, failed to recognize the dangers and act accordingly in the early days of the European colonization of America.

…All 300 Million Of Them!

This ended up leaving the debased remnants of the Amerindian peoples in an untenable situation. No amount of Ghost Dances are going to return the land to their tribes now or bring back their languages and cultures.

• Of the 300+ native tribal languages in the US, only 175 remain many without native speakers. This is expected to drop to 20 by 2050
• In the 17th Century Native Americans in the US numbered between 12 – 18 million. By the beginning of the 20th Century they had been reduced to 250 thousand

Now we, as Americans, are on the other side of the equation and we can remember this history or we can forget and face the consequences.

So what, pray tell, was Obama’s problem with SOPA and PIPA bills that the House and Senate were considering?

Was he worried that Congress passing a law on the matter would provide empirical proof that he had once again illegally and unconstitutionally overstepped his law authority as POTUS by unilaterally undermining America’s sovereignty?

Or was this just another case of “crocodile tears” and false angst on the Campaigner-in-Chief’s part since he could “safely” attack SOPA and PIPA to bolster his waning support from the Left?

But if it’s that costly, how can we have this:

Boldly Going Where NASA Can’t Afford To Tread

If a space program is so expensive that the Obama Regime has to curtail NASA’s efforts, how could a small Washington DC metro area restaurant chain, Sticky Rice, with only for restaurants be able to afford to collaborate with RVA TV and Bark Marketing to launch one of their Godzirra rolls into space – and how could they manage to do it in the first place?

OK, for the sake of precision, Sticky Rice didn’t actually put a Godzirra Maki into space. They didn’t breach the Karman Line and only managed to send their sushi into the middle stratosphere.

Sticky Rice should rename their Godzirra roll. They should call it the Fukyu-Obama Maki.

If a small business can, using commercially available equipment and materials send, film, and successfully recover sushi to the edge of space then it’s disgusting to claim and laughable to believe that America needs to curtail space exploration.