Dems vote to send poor kids to inferior schools
Dionysus
HEAD: Duplicitous and Shameful
SUB-HEAD: Democrats vote to send poor kids to inferior schools
The waiting is finally over for some of the District of Columbia's most
ambitious school children and their parents. Democrats in Congress voted to
kill the District's Opportunity Scholarship Program, which provides 1,700
disadvantaged kids with vouchers worth up to $7,500 per year to attend a
private school.
On Sunday the Senate approved a spending bill that phases out funding for
the five-year-old program. Several prominent Senators this week sent a
letter to Majority Leader Harry Reid pleading for a reconsideration. Signed
by Independent-Democrat Joe Lieberman, Democrats Robert Byrd and Dianne
Feinstein, and Republicans Susan Collins and John Ensign, it asked to save a
program that has "provided a lifeline to many low-income students in the
District of Columbia." President Obama signed the bill Thursday.
The program's popularity has generated long waiting lists. A federal
evaluation earlier this year said the mostly black and Hispanic participants
are making significant academic gains and narrowing the achievement gap. But
for the teachers unions, this just can't happen. The National Education
Association instructed Democratic lawmakers to kill it.
"Opposition to vouchers is a top priority for NEA," declared the union in a
letter sent to every Democrat in the House and Senate in March. "We expect
that Members of Congress who support public education, and whom we have
supported, will stand firm against any proposal to extend the pilot program.
Actions associated with these issues WILL be included in the NEA Legislative
Report Card for the 111th Congress."
Senator Dick Durbin, who heads the subcommittee that oversees funding, has
been saying for the better part of a year that he's open to supporting the
program's continuation if certain conditions were met. In retrospect, this
looks like bad faith.
Earlier this year, Mr. Durbin said the local D.C. Council needed to sign off
on the program before Congress could reauthorize it. The council did exactly
that, sending Congress a letter expressing solid support for the
scholarships. Senator Durbin then said he wants participating schools to
administer the same exams to voucher students that D.C. public school
students take. Done, said proponents.
The program's supporters now feel they've been had. "Durbin has engaged in
that classic game of moving the goal posts," says Kevin Chavous, a former
D.C. council member and one of many local Democratic leaders who back school
vouchers. "He's just been less than honest. He's made promises to colleagues
and school leaders�like Michelle Rhee, our schools Chancellor�saying, 'All I
need is this.' But the reality is that they've been finding reasons not to
support the program."
The voucher program is closed to new students. "It's duplicitous and
shameful," says Mr. Chavous. Strong language. But if you're a kid in D.C.
trying to escape its awful schools, maybe not strong enough.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
SOME COMMENTS FROM THE SITE
Keeping your base uneducated, ignorant and dependent is a key underpinning
of the Democrat voter retention strategy--this voucher program is a dire
threat...must be eliminated...
```````````````````````
Sadly, too many of these students drop out of school or never go on to
college. But when they get factory work they can proudly wear the Union
label. "Workers of the world unite." Andy Stern SEIU
`````````````````````````````
Some few of these students may luck into a factory job. Many more will find
work as household help (legal minimum wage even less than that of Samoa, so
you know who they'll hire on with). Others will hustle tourists in the DC
area. But far too many will die young, creating social problems until their
rendezvous with an unnatural end. A mind is a terrible thing to waste, but
for the NEA a student's mind is irrelevant because its owner doesn't pay
dues.
```````````````````````
And since the minimum wage has increased, these undereducated youths won't
find jobs either.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203440104574402820278669840.html?mod=relevancy
````````````````
We need to get those kids back on the plantation.
`````````````````````
They are already on the plantation. The Left only wants to expand the
population by importing from Mexico because the Color Blind society is
heavily invested in assuring minority majority status in this century.
``````````````````````
You mean the "Democratic plantation" of government care and government knows
best?
******************
Merry Christmas.
No Surrender!
Dionysus
Jerry Okamura
"My China Blue Heaven" <chine...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:chine.bleu-74CC1...@news.eternal-september.org...
> In article <8-KdncVL3JBkIrLW...@giganews.com>,
> "Dionysus" <no.sur...@never.net> wrote:
>
>> The program's popularity has generated long waiting lists. A federal
>
>
Why should tax money be spent at all? Shouldn't the parents assume the
responsibility for the education of their own children? What is next, using
federal jobs to feed them?
ray
"Jerry Okamura" <okamu...@hawaii.rr.com> wrote:
Why should parents be responsible for their own children when we have
government? Government babysits the kids when you are at work.
Government feeds the kids while at school. Government lays down the
regulations on how you can discipline your kids. And government teaches
your children about sex. Who needs parents anymore?
--
Barock Insane Obama: The greatest joke America ever played on itself.
Jerry Okamura
"ray" <xxxr...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:hh7t6...@news7.newsguy.com...
free and independent you want your children to be.
Jerry Okamura
> In article <SILZm.404$yy2...@newsfe01.iad>,
>
You want them to be slaves?
ray
<chine.bleu-49D2F...@news.eternal-september.org>,
My China Blue Heaven <chine...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> In article <SILZm.404$yy2...@newsfe01.iad>,
> And you want them to be as stupid as you.
Please........ your public school is showing again.
Tim Crowley
> In article <SILZm.404$yy2....@newsfe01.iad>,
> "Jerry Okamura" <okamuraj...@hawaii.rr.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > "ray" <xxxray...@aol.com> wrote in message
> >news:hh7t6...@news7.newsguy.com...
> > > In article <AewZm.62918$DC2.24...@newsfe02.iad>,
> > > "Jerry Okamura" <okamuraj...@hawaii.rr.com> wrote:
>
> > >> "My China Blue Heaven" <chine.b...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
> > >>news:chine.bleu-74CC1...@news.eternal-september.org...
> > >> > In article <8-KdncVL3JBkIrLWnZ2dnUVZ_rydn...@giganews.com>,
> > >> > "Dionysus" <no.surren...@never.net> wrote:
>
> > >> >> The program's popularity has generated long waiting lists. A federal
>
> > >> > Too bad tax money can't be spent to help all the students.
>
> > >> Why should tax money be spent at all? Shouldn't the parents assume the
> > >> responsibility for the education of their own children? What is next,
> > >> using
> > >> federal jobs to feed them?
>
> > > Why should parents be responsible for their own children when we have
> > > government? Government babysits the kids when you are at work.
> > > Government feeds the kids while at school. Government lays down the
> > > regulations on how you can discipline your kids. And government teaches
> > > your children about sex. Who needs parents anymore?
>
> > Depends on the question, how free and independent do you want to be, and how
> > free and independent you want your children to be.
>
And you can bet his children will be.
Tim Crowley
> "My China Blue Heaven" <chine.b...@yahoo.com> wrote in messagenews:chine.bleu-49D2F...@news.eternal-september.org...
>
>
>
> > In article <SILZm.404$yy2....@newsfe01.iad>,
> > "Jerry Okamura" <okamuraj...@hawaii.rr.com> wrote:
>
> >>news:hh7t6...@news7.newsguy.com...
> >> > In article <AewZm.62918$DC2.24...@newsfe02.iad>,
> >> > "Jerry Okamura" <okamuraj...@hawaii.rr.com> wrote:
>
> >> >> "My China Blue Heaven" <chine.b...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
> >> >>news:chine.bleu-74CC1...@news.eternal-september.org...
> >> >> > In article <8-KdncVL3JBkIrLWnZ2dnUVZ_rydn...@giganews.com>,
> >> >> > "Dionysus" <no.surren...@never.net> wrote:
>
> >> >> >> The program's popularity has generated long waiting lists. A
> >> >> >> federal
>
> >> >> > Too bad tax money can't be spent to help all the students.
>
> >> >> Why should tax money be spent at all? Shouldn't the parents assume
> >> >> the
> >> >> responsibility for the education of their own children? What is next,
> >> >> using
> >> >> federal jobs to feed them?
>
> >> > Why should parents be responsible for their own children when we have
> >> > government? Government babysits the kids when you are at work.
> >> > Government feeds the kids while at school. Government lays down the
> >> > regulations on how you can discipline your kids. And government
> >> > teaches
> >> > your children about sex. Who needs parents anymore?
>
> >> Depends on the question, how free and independent do you want to be, and
> >> how
> >> free and independent you want your children to be.
>
> > And you want them to be as stupid as you.
>
> You want them to be slaves?
We want them to be, unlike you, educated.
Tim Crowley
> In article
> <chine.bleu-49D2F6.08375027122...@news.eternal-september.org>,
> My China Blue Heaven <chine.b...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > In article <SILZm.404$yy2....@newsfe01.iad>,
> > "Jerry Okamura" <okamuraj...@hawaii.rr.com> wrote:
>
> > >news:hh7t6...@news7.newsguy.com...
> > > > In article <AewZm.62918$DC2.24...@newsfe02.iad>,
> > > > "Jerry Okamura" <okamuraj...@hawaii.rr.com> wrote:
>
> > > >> "My China Blue Heaven" <chine.b...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
> > > >>news:chine.bleu-74CC1...@news.eternal-september.org...
> > > >> > In article <8-KdncVL3JBkIrLWnZ2dnUVZ_rydn...@giganews.com>,
> > > >> > "Dionysus" <no.surren...@never.net> wrote:
>
> > > >> >> The program's popularity has generated long waiting lists. A federal
>
> > > >> > Too bad tax money can't be spent to help all the students.
>
> > > >> Why should tax money be spent at all? Shouldn't the parents assume the
> > > >> responsibility for the education of their own children? What is next,
> > > >> using
> > > >> federal jobs to feed them?
>
> > > > Why should parents be responsible for their own children when we have
> > > > government? Government babysits the kids when you are at work.
> > > > Government feeds the kids while at school. Government lays down the
> > > > regulations on how you can discipline your kids. And government teaches
> > > > your children about sex. Who needs parents anymore?
>
> > > Depends on the question, how free and independent do you want to be, and
> > > how
> > > free and independent you want your children to be.
>
> > And you want them to be as stupid as you.
>
> Please........ your public school is showing again.
Your lack of any education is showing.
Jerry Okamura
"Tim Crowley" <timmyt...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1b7a809e-8c14-48db...@j4g2000yqe.googlegroups.com...
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.
Jerry Okamura
Yep, one makes around $200K a year and the other is making a little less.
zzbu...@netscape.net
> FROM WSJ
>
> HEAD: Duplicitous and Shameful
>
> SUB-HEAD: Democrats vote to send poor kids to inferior schools
>
> The waiting is finally over for some of the District of Columbia's most
> ambitious school children and their parents. Democrats in Congress voted to
> kill the District's Opportunity Scholarship Program, which provides 1,700
> disadvantaged kids with vouchers worth up to $7,500 per year to attend a
> private school.
Well, idiot DC is why the people who know how economics works
invented Holograms, rather than credit cards, invented On-Line
Publishing
rather than idiot GM, invented Rapid Prototyping rather than The Air
Force,
invented XML rather than GE, invented Home Broadband and Digital
Books
rather than X-windows, and invented Blue Ray, rather than MGM.
So the Washington Post uneducables can send their kids anywhere in
the confines of the Washington Stew.
> find jobs either.http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020344010457440282027866...
John Q Public
Dems want em stupid and entitled, little future votes is how they see
it, and since
dems carry the illiterate vote by a vast majority it pays to keep their
constituents
that way
zzbu...@netscape.net
> On 2009-12-27 19:47:34 -0500, "Jerry Okamura" <okamuraj...@hawaii.rr.com> said:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > "Tim Crowley" <timmyturm...@gmail.com> wrote in message
Dems carry the idiot lliterate vote, which is why they're given
Marxist Candles, and the educable people do on-line publishing
and Post Freudian venture capital.
It's why their given free GM Wax, and the post 1930 people
work on XML and the Fifth Law of Thermodynamics. It's why
they work on satellites and the progessive people do data fusion,
rapid prototyping and the 21st Century.
>
> - Show quoted text -
Dionysus
"John Q Public" <my2c...@me.com> wrote in message
news:2009122721385027544-my2cents@mecom...
This ties in nicely with a radio interview I heard this morning with Dr.
Paul Rahe of Hillsdale College (one of the premier schools in the country).
He is author a book entitled Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift, published by
Yale University Press.
Recall, I gave you all a great comic Christmas gift (US Out Of Yemen, Bring
The Boys Home Now); here is my serious New Year's gift, the news release
from YUP on this important work:
In commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the death of Alexis de
Tocqueville,Yale University Press announces the publication of Paul A. Rahe's
new book: Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift.
In the course of the last century, the administrative state has grown by
leaps and bounds. The foundation was laid in 1913 with the ratification of
the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendments to the Constitution, which
legalized the federal income tax and provided for the direct election of
United States Senators, putting the federal government in a position to
secure for itself unlimited funding, and denying to the state legislatures,
which had once chosen the Senators, the capacity to defend state and local
governments against federal encroachment.
Since that time, without a respite, the defenders of local autonomy and
civic agency have been beating a retreat, and the advocates of centralized
administration have extended their tentacles into nearly every corner of
public and private life. The only real difference between Republicans and
Democrats has been the pace. Even under Ronald Reagan, the only President
who made a concerted attempt to limits its growth, the federal government of
the United States extended its reach.
Of course, the localities and the states still exist, just as they did in
Tocqueville's day. Elections take place. There are school boards; town,
city, county, and state governments; and they still matter-even if, on a
great and growing variety of subjects, they take their orders from a
national government that offers them vast sums in funding in return for
strict compliance with its every whim. Our regime is a hodge-podge, but with
every passing year the burden of regulation becomes more intolerable and the
number of mandates with increasing rapidity grows. Moreover, nearly all of
the regulations imposed are devised by unelected civil servants and
political appointees to whom Congress, undeniably in breach of the
Constitution's separation of powers, has delegated both legislative and
executive responsibilities, and next to nothing with regard to these is
examined and voted on by elected officials who can be held responsible by
the voting public for the consequences of what has been done. Moreover, what
remains undecided within the administrative agencies is generally dealt with
in courts unresponsive to the electorate. We may still take pride in being a
self-governing people, but to an ever-increasing degree that pretense is
unsustainable.
If we are ever to bring this process to a halt, if we are to put a stop to
the advance of the administrative state and even roll it back, if we are to
recover the liberty that once was ours, if we are to refuse to be subjects
and reassert ourselves as citizens, we must first come to understand what it
is that has occasioned centralized administration's inexorable march.
To achieve such an understanding, Paul A. Rahe, argues in his new book-Soft
Despotism, Democracy's Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the
Modern Prospect-we must re-examine the character of modern, commercial
republicanism. We must consider with care Montesquieu's celebrated account
of the English constitution. We must ponder why he thought this "republic
disguised as a monarchy" superior to the republics of classical antiquity
and the monarchies of his own day; we must ruminate on his account of the
political psychology dominant within it; and we must assess his judgment
regarding that polity's fragility.
Then, we must consider Jean-Jacques Rousseau's searing critique of bourgeois
society, explore its foundations, and do justice to its force. And, finally,
in this light, we must digest the argument advanced in Alexis de Tocqueville's
Democracy in America, assess the effectiveness of his response to the
warnings issued by Montesquieu and Rousseau, examine his fears regarding the
trajectory of France, and reconsider the grounds for his positive assessment
of the role played by local self-government, civic associations, an
unfettered press, Biblical religion, and marital solidarity in Jacksonian
America. Only when we have done this, Rahe argues, only when we have fully
grasped the psychological foundations of modern democracy's seemingly
inexorable drift in the direction of soft despotism, will we be in a
position to devise policies consistent with a genuine reversal of course.
If we do not do something of the sort, Rahe contends, Tocqueville's forecast
of the probable future of France will turn out to be a description of the
United States:
"I would like to imagine with what new traits despotism could be
produced in the world. I see an innumerable multitude of men, alike and
equal, who turn about without repose in order to procure for themselves
petty and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. Each of them,
withdrawn apart, is a virtual stranger, unaware of the fate of the others:
his children and his particular friends form for him the entirety of the
human race; as for his fellow citizens, he is beside them but he sees them
not; he touches them and senses them not; he exists only in himself and for
himself alone, and, if he still has a family, one could say at least that he
no longer has a fatherland.
"Over these is elevated an immense, tutelary power, which takes sole
charge of assuring their enjoyment and of watching over their fate. It is
absolute, attentive to detail, regular, provident, and gentle. It would
resemble the paternal power if, like that power, it had as its object to
prepare men for manhood, but it seeks, to the contrary, to keep them
irrevocably fixed in childhood; it loves the fact that the citizens enjoy
themselves provided that they dream solely of their own enjoyment. It works
willingly for their happiness, but it wishes to be the only agent and the
sole arbiter of that happiness. It provides for their security, foresees and
supplies their needs, guides them in the principal affairs, directs their
industry, regulates their testaments, divides their inheritances. Can it not
relieve them entirely of the trouble of thinking and of the effort
associated with living?
"In this fashion, every day, it renders the employment of free will
less useful and more rare; it confines the action of the will within a
smaller space, and bit by bit it steals from each citizen the use of that
which is his own. Equality has prepared men for all of these things: it has
disposed them to put up with them and often even to regard them as a
benefit.
"After having taken each individual in this fashion by turns into
its powerful hands, and after having kneaded him in accord with its desires,
the sovereign extends its arms about the society as a whole; it covers its
surface with a network of petty regulations-complicated, minute, and
uniform-through which even the most original minds and the most vigorous
souls know not how to make their way past the crowd and emerge into the
light of day. It does not break wills; it softens them, bends them, and
directs them; rarely does it force one to act, but it constantly opposes
itself to one's acting on one's own; it does not destroy; it prevents things
from being born; it does not tyrannize, it gets in the way, it curtails, it
enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally it reduces each nation
to nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals, of which the
government is the shepherd."
In the last century, in Europe and in the United States, soft despotism has
been democracy's drift. But what has been, Rahe argues, and what will be
need not be the same. If we come to a proper understanding of the causes of
the present discontents, we can set a new course.
++++++++++++++++++
Paul A. Rahe is The Charles O. Lee and Louise K. Lee Chair in the Western
Heritage at Hillsdale College and the author of Republics Ancient and
Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution(1992), and of
Against Throne and Altar: Machiavelli and Political Theory under the English
Republic (2008). His book, Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift: Montesquieu,
Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the Modern Prospect, was released on 16 April
2009, the 150th anniversary of Tocqueville's death. His latest work,
Montesquieu and the Logic of Liberty: War, Religion, Commerce, Climate,
Terrain, Technology, Uneasiness of Mind, the Spirit of Political Vigilance,
and the Foundations of the Modern Republic, was released 24 September, 2009.
Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift is available in book stores and on
Amazon.com
*********************
"We have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites
living on the labor of the industrious." --Thomas Jefferson
"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it
can bribe the public with the public's money." --Alexis de Tocqueville
Happy New Year.
No Surrender!
Dionysus
>