That’s Right Nate

I read an article in the Independent Collegian today about a group of students at the University of Toledo who have gotten sick and tired of putting up with liberal professors picking on them and correcting their mistakes.   I had many experiences during college with liberal professors who marked me down for my political biases, particularly in math classes.  White males are already in a very difficult position in most universities in this country.   This sort of bias only makes life harder.

Even in English literature classes, professorial bias reared its ugly head.  One time, I had gone down to Atlanta to visit a girl over Spring Break.   By a weird coincidence, my sister had taken the same class with the same professor 5 years earlier.   She had been kind enough to give me her old papers and while the professor changed the assignments, this one remained the same.   My sister had received a 95 on her paper on Paradise Lost.  I retyped it and made only the changes that the professor had indicated in grading my sister’s paper.   My sister with her overabundance of college partying had turned in her paper “late as usual” according to the cover page.   I turned mine in on time.  The result?  She got a 95 and I got an 83.

That sort of bias and more exists on today’s campuses.   Try explaining to a geology professor that you know the planet is 6,000 years old because the Bible tells you so and don’t even get me into history or political science classes.   I once had a South American History professor try to tell me that the United States was responsible for many of South America’s problems.

We need colleges to show respect for all points of view.  Many of the supposed facts they teach have a liberal bias.  They even use Arabic numerals.  To me, that’s extremely unamerican.  We need the colleges to show the same kind of sensitivity that the town of Sedalia, Missouri had when the School Board banned the Smith-Cotton High School from wearing shirts which seemed to promote the idea of evolution and just as disturbingly the idea that apes could play brass instruments.   “I was disappointed with the image on the shirt.” said band parent and district teacher Sherry Melby,  “I don’t think evolution should be associated with our school.”

With the school year just starting, it’s time we stop the political correctness and start being supportive of students with all political viewpoints or at the very least those that are right of center.  There is room in this country for moderates, neo cons, traditional conservatives, and libertarians.

Eric Clapton’s song Layla is a very key piece of rock and roll history.   Clapton had written that song to George Harrison’s wife Patty.   In fact, Eric Clapton was eventually successful in getting her to leave the Beatle guitarist for him.  It was a tribute to the two guitarists’ friendship, the  free love of the 1960s, or heavy drug use that the 2 men remained very good friends.   I would have hated to be in Eric Clapton’s position.   When you convince somebody to leave their happily married life you now have a ton of responsibility you wouldn’t normally have in a relationship.   When you tell somebody that you have a once in a life time love and that even the bonds of matrimony shouldn’t hold you apart, it makes it tough to leave her alone the following Saturday to go drinking with your buddies.

There was a big rally in Austin of nearly 200 Texas secessionists yesterday.   These secessionists are sometimes called tenthers because they  believe that everything from Social Security to Medicare to the federal highway system violates the Tenth Amendment. According to the petition, Texas officials must either “immediately move for the restoration of the complete and unadulterated Sovereignty of Texas, explicitly adhering to the 10th Amendment wording of the U.S. Constitution,” or “move immediately for complete Secession from the United States of America.”

I hate to see Texas go, but like all conservatives I am very concerned with following the original intent of our founding fathers regardless of how contradictory it can be at times.   This brings us back to that Eric Claption, George, and Patty Harrison love triangle.

When Thomas Jefferson made the Louisiana Purchase, he had actually sent Robert Livingston and James Monroe to buy New Orleans and West Florida from Napoleon for up to $10 million.   At first, the French weren’t interested, but after losing Haiti and needing money to pay for costly European wars, the French agreed to sell the entirety of the Louisiana Purchase to the Americans for $15 million.  The problem is, this is not what Thomas Jefferson had wanted.   In fact, he was pretty sure he couldn’t do it constitutionally because the Constitution said nothing about a President having the power to buy new land.   In the end, he tried to make the deal as a treaty to get around the Constitution.

When Texas first joined the Union, we made the kind of promises to Texas that Eric Clapton had made to Patty Harrison.   We told Texas that they should be with us and we wouldn’t free their slaves or make them convert to Catholicism like the Mexicans would.   Now at first the United States refused to allow Texas into the Union, but Texas was crafty.  Sam Houston threatened to ally itself with England and the US didn’t think they had a choice.  In many ways, this is analogous to a woman pretending to be pregnant to get you to marry her.   Frankly, our whole relationship with Texas has been based on that kind of deception.   It is clearly time to let Texas go and in fact the really infuriating thing is you know Texas is the type of state that will eventually start calling us and bothering us to take it back when as a country we are ready to move on with our own lives.

Like Eric Claption, we made promises to Texas, but at the time we didn’t reallize we were being played.   Texas has always been a playa and Texas will continue to be one.  The moral of the story is that when you see how a state or territory treats the country its with, it is a very good indication of how it will treat you.   We can still buy our oil from Texas and as they’re trying to replace science with the Bible I am pretty sure there are a lot of things they’ll need to buy from us.   In fact, for every 88 cents that Texas sends to the United States government, it gets $1 worth of services back.  In the end we will be money ahead by letting them go.  Maybe they’ll go back to Mexico.  This was never going to be a long term relationship and unfortunately, it’s gone on way too long.

I have been searching for some time for a way to get in touch with my roots as a white person by finding a musical form that is purely white and not influenced by African music and especially soul. Now, this is not racist.   In fact, African-American influence has done so much for music that it’s very difficult to find a musical art form that remains exclusively white and not influenced by other African culture.  Now, it isn’t true that white people do not have soul.  Somebody like say, Van Morrison has a lot of soul.  Here is Jon Cleary, a piano player giving an example of a white guy with soul:

He’s not making fun of black musicians or trying to sound black.  He simply is somebody with a lot of soul.  Unfortunately, the African-American influence is very clear in his piano playing and his singing.   My quest to find a whiter more Caucasian musical style brought me far away from the Creole influence of Jon Cleary’s New Orleans to America’s heartland.    It is here that Celebration Iowa takes incredibly talented high school students and shows them how to sing and perform while removing all remnants of distracting soul from their music.   I believe I have found my cultural heritage with Celebration Iowa 2007′s performance of We Built this City:

An ungrateful community resident complains about UNO

I hate to write about local stories because I know that I am shrinking my audience.   Why would anybody care about what’s going on in Chicago if they lived in New Jersey.   I’m happy to say that with Arne Duncan as our Secretary of Education, this Chicago miracle may well be exported to a school district near you.   I’ve talked about charter schools before and raved about them.  They’re a great way to crush the teacher unions and at the same time use the free market to make some good money educating children.

The UNO Charter School Network has been around Chicago since the early 90s and  now has 9 schools in the Chicago area named after important Hispanic figures like Bartolome de las Casas who was an important figuring in bringing African slaves to the Americas.  The United Neighborhood Organization began as a grassroots movement on the Southside of Chicago, but has since moved way beyond that.   Their charter schools are now nationwide and they are very close allies with Chicago’s Mayor Daley.   In fact, they had a back to school celebration this week that doubled as a rally for Mayor Daley’s pet project bringing the 2016 Olympics to Chicago.   They just took $100,000,000 in stimulus money to build new charter schools, but now let’s get to the educational miracle.

Up until June, De la Cruz middle school was a top performer.  It had won the Spotlight Award from the state board of education for 2008 and despite being in a neighborhood with a lot of students still learning English and a serious gang problem, De la Cruz had managed to be a rare educational success story in the city of Chicago.   Unfortunately, when the city cut bus service to the school attendance dropped and while small classes are a selling point for charter schools, in public schools it is called “under utilization.” At an emotional meeting last year in front of Arne Duncan it was announced that the school would be closed and the building demolished.

At that point, most urban school districts would have given up the building for dead as it closed out the year, but Chicago is the city of broad shoulders.  A new phone system was put in, a perpetually leaking basement was plugged, installing new windows, and  repair and renovation was taking place all the way up until the last day of school.  Yesterday, at the Chicago Board of Education meeting all that repair paid off.  It seems that UNO needed a building for its Octavio Paz school and now with all the repairs the former De La Cruz building is now inhabitable.   The city was able to lease that building to UNO for $1.  Now everybody’s happy, right?

Unfortunately, we still have the ungrateful parents of the neighborhood aren’t thrilled to have a UNO moving into the building.   They can’t understand why their school was too small, but UNO would be able to cap their enrollment at 480 students for the year.   UNO continues to build an amazing power base.  Big-time national players have taken notice. Former President Bill Clinton once courted UNO. The group has promoted the interests of North America’s largest waste hauler, Waste Management Inc., utility giant ComEd and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.  However, it was yesterday’s educational miracle that makes me think they have friends in even higher places.  They are truly blessed.

The news is naturally wall to wall Kennedy coverage today.   The conservative blogosphere has a very different take on things.  Sarah Palin’s Facebook page has comments like “good riddens”, “Ted Kennedy dying has made my day….”, and “this country is now much better off, one less socialist, anti freedom senator.” When Robert Nowack died recently, I read some fairly harsh comments from the left as well.

I always find it interesting when a political party claims to be true to the intents of the founding fathers.   This is to assume that our founding fathers spoke in unanimity.  One of the ugliest political feuds ever was between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.  The personal attacks that these men and their followers attacked with would have made Karl Rove blush.   Eventually, a very odd thing happened.  They didn’t begin to think the same way, but they began to get through the acrimony and became friends.  Their letters are a national treasure that show us very different perspectives on our government.   They both died on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.  On his death bed, John Adams spoke the ironic words, “Jefferson still lives.”

In recent years, Lyndon Johnson would not have been able to pass the Civil Rights bill without the help of Republicans like Everett Dirksen.  Ronald Reagan was good friends with Tip O’Neill who was a leading opponent of his administration.   This brings us back to Kennedy who managed to have friendships with some of the most conservative members of congress like Orin Hatch.  If we are serious about accomplishing anything as a country we need to bring civility back to politics.  There is a way to criticize a person’s policies and to not abandon your own principles without making personal or hateful attacks against the people who oppose you.  I think Kennedy got this.

Senator Kennedy will be buried on this coming Saturday.   I am a bit worried that this will take all the air out of the room so to speak in regards to other news stories.   This is a shame because August 29th is also the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina breaking through the levee and putting 80% of New Orleans under water.   Now, I am sure that the cut in funding to the levees and the policy of turning over wetlands to developers had nothing to do with the hurricane and Michael Brown did a heckuva job in coordinating the recovery efforts in New Orleans, but somehow George W. Bush still gets blamed.  The city is coming back, but there’s still a lot of work to do in New Orleans and we need to do it to protect President Bush’s legacy.

On my time on Twitter, I’ve met some amazing people, but one that stands out is Karen Dalton Beninato.  She’s married to bass player Jeff Beninato from the  band the Dbs and she’s a great writer in her own regard.   After getting displaced from New Orleans Jeff and Karen founded the New Orleans Musicians Relief Fund.   The fund exists to help those still struggling to repair their lives after Katrina and there are many many people.   I’m a bit worried that their Jackson Squared efforts to raise awareness and support for those still in need will be drowned out by the Kennedy funeral and Michael Jackson’s birthday.   If you’re a music fan they’ve got some great downloads and they have a variety of posters, apparel, and other merchandise to bring you joy while helping those in need.

Now, I know what you’re thinking–”Nate this doesn’t sound like you at all. What do you care about New Orleans?”  You got me.   Yesterday, Neal Boortz mocked Obama for his pledge to rebuild New Orleans.   Boortz said, “Obama wants to rebuild New Orleans?  Build it and they will come.  They? The debris that Katrina washed out.”  He then went on to suggest that those who left New Orleans should work in prostitution.

Now all of this sounded good to me and then it occurred to me.   If they are washed out of New Orleans, where will these people go?  They’ll go to Main Street, USA.   This is where Boortz is wrong.   We need to get those people moved back to Louisiana as quick as we can before New Orleans spreads.  Imagine what it’ll be like to be stuck in traffic because a band starts processing down the street playing jazz music.   I’m just terrified at the thought of having my doughnuts replaced by beignets or seeing KFC replaced by something approaching Willie Mae’s Scotch House.   Let’s repatriate these people before the Survivor cover band that plays at our local bar on Tuesday is replaced by Jon Cleary or Dr. John or worse yet that TGI Fridays you drink at becomes a Snake and Jake’s.   The quicker we get this debris back to New Orleans the easier it is for us to stay protected from a creeping creole epidemic.

Let’s face it, the war on terror has been Hell.   We’ve had to get pretty rough in our interrogations and as a result we’ve broken international laws and we’ve done some of the very same things that we have tried others for after wars in the past.   When the Japanese water boarded our brave soldiers in World War II we were outraged.  It’s now difficult to claim the moral high ground when we condemn torture inflicted by other countries.  For those of you who have never done it before, I can tell you the moral high ground is extremely overrated.  Yeah,  we tortured some terrorists and yes some of the people at Gitmo weren’t even terrorists just anti-US or available for an Afghan warlord who wanted to collect a bounty.

Still, one must remember what the world was like in the days, weeks, and well years after the attacks on the World Trade Center that we had know way to know was a terrorist target.   Dick Cheney told us back in April that there were 2 memos that the Obama administration was covering up that would show that the Bush torture doctrine may have cost us our international reputation and created a new generation of terrorists, but it saved lives.

It is very clear from the reports that Dick Cheney was right.   While much of the useful information was gained from conventional methods, from torture we learned some very important pieces of information:

1. al-qaeda is made up of Muslims who wish to strike at the United States.
2. What traits al-qaeda was looking for in Western operatives.
3. That KSM had been in jail in the United States for not paying his bills before 9/11, which was part of the reason he so hated the US.
4. That many detainees dislike water boarding.

To me, a little moral high ground and national reputation is a very small price to pay for quality information like the above that could potentially disrupt an attack on American interests, possibly on American soil.    I know, we were able to defeat the Soviets and the Nazis without resorting to this kind of tactic, but al-qaeda are fanatics.  Times have changed.   Unfortunately, the CIA remains technologically backwards.  They continue to use dark highlighters that appear solid black when run through their cheap copy machines.  This makes it very difficult to tell what they’re talking about sometimes.  In the end though, it remains clear we would not have won the war on terror without people like Dick Cheney who were willing to take risks.

As today is the the first day of school for many children in this country, I thought I’d address the charter school movement.  It is an area that I feel very strongly about and one that I hope we can all agree upon.   The support that these schools get from both the left and the right makes me believe that like the landmark No Child Left Behind legislation, this is something we can all get behind.  Education in this country is in a very sorry state.  If we are going to be able to compete with the top education countries in the world like Finland despite having higher childhood poverty than any industrialized country, but Mexico and an extremely high child mortality rate, we need to get our lazy teachers to do something. Charter Schools get public money, but are freed from the strict controls placed on public schools.  In this way they are like the brave folks of Blackwater or as they are now called Xe.

Charter Schools began for four noble reasons:

1. To replace the ineffective public education system with a profit-based system.
2. To give wealthy, involved, and politically connected parents a chance to separate their children from the less desirable children in their community.
3. To create an island of educational utopia because fixing the public schools would be way too much work.
4. To crush teacher’s unions.

Charter Schools have not been very successful in raising student achievement on standardized tests, but aren’t schools supposed to be about more than test scores?  KIPP for instance has managed to open 82 schools in 19 states in a relatively short amount of time.   The profit motive is a great incentive  to keep expanding.   The public schools don’t have this kind of incentive.

Teachers unions are crippling education.   Let’s face it.   Where else can you make 30K a year or more for watching a couple dozen adolescents for 6 or 7 hours, still get a 20 minute lunch, and take your work home with you instead of staying in a depressing cubicle until you’re finished.   Worst of all, like cops and firemen teachers have ridiculous due process rights that require a school district to prove that they’re incompetent in order to fire them.   In a charter school, they can fire you that day if your shoes and belt don’t match.  That’s the way corporate America is and that’s the way our schools should be.  Public schools also require teachers that work for them to be licensed and certified.   Charter schools are freed from this bureaucratic monopoly of the education process.

Chicago is currently in the middle of an educational renaissance.   In fact, the program Chicago has established is called Renaissance 2010.  I hope that former Chicago Superintendent Arne Duncan will bring this program national.   Every year, the city opens up 10-20 new charter schools and closes some public schools.  Conceivably, this educational miracle will be completed by next year and I can’t wait.   The Heritage Foundation and some other conservative think tanks have no trouble being for charter schools and being against a public option for health care because they don’t want to see public and private insurance competing.   On the other hand, I think the two issues are one and the same.   Public schools don’t work for the same reason public health care wouldn’t work.   More charters mean more profits and more profits mean more learning.

*The following article would not be possible without the help of two terrific blogs Jesus’s General and Free Republic.

It seems there is a smoking gun in the whole Obama birth certificate saga and that smoking gun is located in Barack Obama’s pants.  Some of the extremely intelligent posters on Free Republic have uncovered yet another contradiction in Obama’s birth certificate:

hoosiermama:
The only other thing that hit me was that Sinclair said BO was not circumcised. When my son was born in a hospital that was done as a matter of routine without even consulting us. Would the same be for Hawaii? OTOH People born at home or in some other cultures are not circumcised.

thecodont:
A relative of mine was born (in a hospital) a couple of years after BO’s alleged birth date. He was circumcised also (as a matter of routine, not according to any family request).

afraidfortherepublic:
My son was born in June of 1961 in a hospital in CA, and the nurses released us because of miscommunication in a day and a half before the circumcision was done. We had to go back to the doctor’s office to have it done a week later, and the doctor was NOT HAPPY. My second son was born in the same hospital 4 years later. I don’t remember them asking me about it. Routine procedure for little boys.

The bone of contention is this.   If Obama was born in the United States as he claims, he would have been circumcised.  Being born in Kenya, Obama was not circumcised.   It seems to me that the ball is now in Mr. Obama’s court.   He can end this controversy quite easily by simply dropping his pants for the American people.   The fact he has not done this before now is quite suspicious.   I believe that all Americans want this controversy put to rest and the easiest way to do it is for President Obama to call a news conference and settle this once and for all. Unfortunately, it appears even the Presidential privates are part of this cover up.   We will never get the answers we deserve until we all step forward as Americans and demand that the President show us himself.

One of the conditions of my trip with Emily to visit self storage places in the West was that I’d allow her to give her opinion on the health care debate.   As I have Emily this weekend, this seemed like the ideal time to have her give her opinion.  However, my blog has a reputation for hard hitting conservative commentary and while my daughter is quite intelligent for a girl, she’s only 13 years old.   Therefore, I thought I’d let her give her opinion in the form of a debate, which I thought would be educational for both her and my readers.

Nate: Welcome Emily.   Why do you want socialist health care that would kill your grandmother?

Emily: Dad, it’s not socialist.   That’s just a talking point you Republicans use.  We pay more for health care then anybody else in the world yet the World Health Organization ranks us 37^th right after Costa Rica.   Don’t you think that as Americans we can do better?

Nate: Emily, the World Health Organization is a biased liberal organization.  They have a bunch of scientists working for them of course they’re going to be on the socialists’ side.

Emily: Knowing stuff doesn’t make you a liberal dad…Hmm, maybe it does.

Nate: Getting back to health care.  I don’t want my tax dollars paying for some illegal immigrant’s medical care.

Emily: You are already dad.

Nate: How do you figure?

Emily: When an illegal immigrant is injured they go to the emergency room.   In fact, that World Net Daily link you sent me last year said that ¼ of all emergency room patients in Florida were illegals.  The government spent $40 billion covering the medical costs of the uninsured last year, so figure we spent $10 billion or so on the medical care for illegal aliens.

Nate: That’s ridiculous.  If it’s life threatening sure, but if they’re going to the emergency room for the flu or something then throw the bums out.

Emily: The flu? You mean like swine flu dad?  Have you ever heard the word pandemic?

Nate: That’s like a disease striking pandas right?

Emily: Yeah, sure dad.   Anyway,  if we don’t treat people with the flu it can spread.

Nate: It’s still socialism Emily and that’s something I won’t put up with in this house?

Emily: You mean like the electricity and the running water?  How about that reduced price lunch I get at school everyday.

Nate: Don’t blame me for that.  I’ve been telling your mother you don’t need to eat lunch until you’re under 110 pounds.

Emily: I know dad and running in the hot Oklahoma sun chasing after the car is good for me.

Nate: It builds character.  Listen, I don’t want a medical system like Canada?

Emily: Canadians love it, but besides that as Americans why would we ever put the Canadians accomplishments as the upper limit of our own potential in anything, but ice hockey.  No offense to Canada, but don’t you love this country?  Don’t you think we’re better than Canada?

Nate: Yes, of course.

Emily: Then why couldn’t our health care be better than theirs if we tried a public option?

Nate: We can’t have a public option competing with private insurance.  The public option doesn’t worry about profits and can undercut the private companies.  The Heritage Foundation says it’s ridiculous for a private company to try to compete with the government when the government sets the rules?

Emily: This is the same Heritage Foundation that’s a huge advocate of charter schools like the one you keep trying to send me to?

Nate: Yeah

Emily: I wonder if they teach irony in charter schools.

Nate: You are so pigheaded young lady.   How can you defend death panels?

Emily: There are no death panels.

Nate: Yes there are.  Sarah Palin and Michelle Malkin say there are.

Emily: So what would a death panel do?

Nate: When I get old, they’ll come and ask me if I get sick if I want them to pull the plug.

Emily: Who makes that decision now?

Nate: You do.

Emily: You know if I had a daughter that I tried to make run after the car in 95 degree weather in Oklahoma or fought with her teachers every year because they were trying to make her a liberal or had her first 11 birthday parties at my self storage business, I might want an impartial panel making that decision instead.

Nate: Go to your room Emily.

Emily: Did I mention having to give my friends unclaimed self storage items for Christmas and birthday presents?

Nate: Emily!

Emily: I’m going.

I apologize for the awkward ending, but hopefully both Emily and my readers have learned exactly why the Obama health care scheme would be horrible for our country and needs to be stopped.

If President Obama has his way, public and private insurance programs will compete against each other in a socialist system not unlike college football’s Bowl Championship Series.   The way that Obama put the public vs. private competition was to compare it to mail delivery, “I think private insurers should be able to compete…I mean. If you think about it, UPS and FedEx are doing just fine. It’s the Post Office that’s always having problems.”

I look at the way that private and public institutions compete and I look at the way that private companies like Aquafina kick tap water’s ass or the way that cabs are better than buses, and while charter schools score considerably lower than traditional public schools on national tests we all know school isn’t just about testing.

To me, the best analogy for comparing the public option is to compare the University of Michigan and public schools of its ilk to private universities like Liberty University or Hampshire College.   Now granted, a student at U of M is going to be spending $40,000 less per year than a Hampshire student, but Hampshire allows its students a chance to design their own educational program while Michigan students get rationed education based on what the administration believes they should have.   If you are not making significant progress towards graduation, the University of Michigan will eventually kick you out just like a death panel.  If you are lucky enough to get a diploma, who is going to hire you with a Michigan diploma?

For the lucky student at Hampshire College, you know you are on your way to future success like PBS commentator Ellen Fitzpatrick or Joe Minton and Robert Eng who created Game Table Online when they discovered a need for nerds to be able to play Risk despite living in their parents’ basement in homes a continent apart.  Hampshire not only gives a first rate college education, but provides a large number of opportunities for it’s students.  It can do that because it’s not burdened down with government bureaucrats like the ones at University of Michigan.

As a safety school, I guess the University of Michigan is OK, but the school fails in all areas.  The academics are suspect at best and their entire course catalogue doesn’t offer a single class in creationist studies.  On top of that, Michigan’s football team was a joke last year.  They brought over Rich Rodriguez to run the spread offense despite that fact that many top recruits don’t want to play in the spread.   How do we know that Obama won’t do the same thing to aspiring doctors who will go to practice in other countries because of Obama’s policies?  We must act now before we wind up with a substandard University of Michigan type health care.