It has been more than two weeks, and my comments still don’t appear on the Federal Election Commission Rulemakings we site.
Perhaps they didn’t like what I had to say.
April 21, 2005
Texas Trifles
Pattie had a blogging friend from the Great Northwest visit her to see what Texas was all about. As one of the characters in Streets of Laredo
Should have checked for stickers first, cause my knee became a human pincushion. Spent a few minutes sopping up the blood and transfering the stickers from my knee to my fingers to my thumbs and back to my knee, all the while trying to keep my camera from banging into the ground and balancing on one foot. They don’t call ’em “stickers” for nothin’, hun.
Nice tale.
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Give me your money
Here we go again. The NEA is using member dues to sue the new Secretary of Education.
Leading the fight is the National Education Association, a union of 2.7 million members and a political adversary of the administration. The union mobilized its forces for Democrat John Kerry in the 2004 presidential race, and its objections to Bush’s law prompted former Education Secretary Rod Paige to call the NEA a “terrorist organization.”
What has their collective panties in a wad?
The lawsuit accuses the government of shortchanging schools by at least $27 billion, the difference between the amount Congress authorized and what it has spent.
You knew it had to be money.
I don’t think the Federal Government has any authority to be involved in education. That sentence will draw cheers from NEA activists. What won’t, though, is that the Federal Government has no authority to disburse taxpayer money to schools. What the NEA want, as do administrators across the country, is the money without the requirements. They want the Feds involved in education, but only want them involved to give schools money, not to set standards. And if Congress approves money to be portioned out, they expect the Department of Education to spend every single penny–and ask for more.
Ah, but don’t set any standards or levy any requirements in exchange for that money. They don’t like standards. Like all unions, their primary purpose is to protect the incompetent members of that union. Never mind that they fail to recognize those who do well. In fact, those who excel are looked upon as troublemakers–they show up the bad ones and make it more difficult for them to hide.
Money, money, money. What have our schools done with the money we’ve given them? They’ve gotten worse. Money is not the solution.
There is a way for the schools to not have to comply with Federal standards, and it is a simple thing to do. It requires no law suit. Simply refuse to accept Federal money, and you don’t have to comply with Federal mandate.
Right. Like that would happen.
April 20, 2005
Spitting
Not the most mature of responses, but perhaps appropriate in this case.
Years ago someone spat on me in San Francisco’s airport. I was in uniform. My immediate thoughts were, “If I nail this guy, I’ll end up in jail in his town.” I simply wiped it off and went on about my business.
All I can say is, “Wow.”
At PowerLine Scott has a lengthy excerpt from an article written by Phil Boas, a managing editor in MSM. Phil gets it:
To many of you, bloggers are a presumptuous rabble – amateurs elbowing their way into the publishing world. You may not know them, but they know you – your face, your manners, your prejudices, your conceits.
They’re your readers. And, God help us, they’ve become the one thing we’ve always begged them to become…Engaged.
And he believes, as do many of us, that this is a positive thing. As he mentions, we don’t have the resources to hit the streets and come up with news items on a daily basis. I know from trying to run my own local news site that I cannot hold down my own job, run this blog, and attempt to keep up with everything happening in my city. I tend to focus on our local Congressman and education. That takes plenty of time.
What we can do is dig deeper. We have access to expertise through a post or email. We provide a forum for all to comment. Ours is the editorial page, with op-ed pieces and letters to the editor via comments. On occasion, we collectively do the investigative work MSM are ill-equipped for or uninterested in doing. Phil also talks about this:
They’ll be our competitors and our colleagues and they’ll force us to dig deeper into issues, think harder about them. They’ll show us how to coalesce expertise on a breaking story and drill deeper for the more complete truth. They’re already teaching us today how to own up to our mistakes.
Mistakes. We all make them. The problem MSM have is that they have been viewed for so long as the Keepers of the Truth that they began believing it. Now they have been shamed by that conceit. Some recognize the symptoms, and some don’t.
Phil Boas is warning his contemporaries that they risk becoming irrelevant if they don’t.
Republicans
The Republican Party has seldom voted en masse the way the Democratic Party does. Whether that has more to do with a lack of unity or a sincere belief in doing what is right regardless of Party leadership desires is for you to decide on your own. But this has me scratching my head:
Unexpected cracks in Republican support threw into limbo President Bush’s high-profile nomination of John R. Bolton to be the country’s representative at the United Nations.
Pure politics. I’ve not seen anything that discounts Bolton’s ability to do the job. Democrats don’t want to approve any Bush appointees. They gave Condi Rice grief. But why are the Republicans wavering on any of these nominations? I don’t expect them to simply bow and scrape to the President, but they seem to be afraid of supporting his nominations.
If they can’t muster enough political courage to deal with something like this (and how much courage could voting for Bolton take?), how can we possible expect them to make tough decisions?
I guess they aren’t interested in remaining the majority party. They’ll certainly not get my vote acting like this.
Standards
The Catholic Church now has a new Pope. Some people aren’t happy about the selection. Benedict XVI has a reputation as someone who believes the Church has standards which must be upheld.
Why is that bad? Because some people in this world don’t want to have to live up to standards. They want the standards changed to suit their own sense of how things should be done. That is true in just about every area of our lives. It is why we have so many problems in our public education system. It is why criminals thrive in certain areas. Just about any problem you name can be traced to someone unwilling to maintain a standard.
The new Pope wants his Church to maintain standards.
I don’t think that’s too much to ask. If you don’t like the standards, you shouldn’t be part of an organization. In matters of Christianity, those standards are absolutes, not suggestions. They have a history and are founded on the words and deeds of the Man the entire religion is based upon.
And those standards aren’t too hard to follow, they are simply inconvenient to some. Rather than follow their faith, they would prefer to pick and choose the tenets they agree with. It has more to do with ego and the need for acceptance than anything else. Engaging in activities condemned by the Church brings a stigma. Rather than abstain from the activity that causes it, some would have the Church accept it so the stigma no longer exists.
Sorry. I don’t buy that. I’m not Catholic, but if you are and continue to be, you should embrace the Church’s standards as your own. Otherwise, you are not really part of that community and are simply delusional.
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