That’s Right Nate

In 2005, with the liberal and homosexual agendas making huge inroads in Texas, the state found itself in increasing danger of a referendum making gay marriage legal and ending life as they know it in the lone star state forever.   Now Texans, don’t cotton to those kind of changes and they sure don’t take them lying down.   A referendum was overwhelmingly passed that not only banned gay marriage, but also declared, “This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage.”

The state of Texas had spoken.  In order to prevent homosexuals from getting married, the state would no longer recognize marriage of any kind.  This was the ultimate act of self-sacrifice for many longtime married couples in the state.  It must have been quite a shock for a lot of children in the state to learn that not only were their parents not married, but neither were their grandparents.  When asked for comment,  Jerry Strickland, a representative for the Texas Attorney General said, “The Texas Constitution and the marriage statute are entirely constitutional. We will continue to defend both in court.”

Kelly Shackelford, president of the Liberty Legal Institute in Plano explained the language was designed to be broad enough to prevent the creation of domestic partnerships, civil unions or other arrangements that would give same-sex couples many of the benefits of marriage.  In fact, it prevents two lesbians and two gay men from engaging in heterosexual marriages and then simply swapping partners to get around legal restrictions.

As a non-Texan I can only admire this kind of bravery.  It reminds me of the scorched Earth techniques used to frustrate Napoleon and later Hitler.   By sacrificing their own marriages Texas has struck a blow to defend the sanctity of those very marriages that they can no longer have.   I believe there is a lesson here for the rest of us.

I am so proud of my fellow gun owners for their united opposition to Obama’s health care proposals.   The Gun Owners of America group recently warned it’s 300,000 members that if the health care bill passes, the government could declare citizens medically unfit to carry a gun.   This is the same thing Hitler and the communists did, when we take away the rights of the mentally unbalanced to own firearms simply because they may have issues with rage or paranoia or may pose a threat to themselves or others, we lose our second amendment rights.   Executive Director of the group Larry Pratt called for resistance saying, “you end up having a gazillion people lose their gun rights because of some medical record that someone doesn’t like, where they say, ‘Oh, that might be a danger to their self or others.”

I cannot abide having these hard earned rights taken away from my fellow countrymen simply because they’re mentally unbalanced.   President James A. Garfield gave his life protecting the rights of the mentally unhinged to own firearms.   He was fatally shot by Charles Guiteau on July 2, 1881 when his assassin decided that God had commanded him to kill the ungrateful president who refused to hire him.   There are hundreds of thousands of people like me inspired by Garfield’s sacrifice who will not let it be in vain by taking away gun rights for the criminally insane.

The other reason that gun owners like myself oppose any kind of health care reform is because as private citizens we have to pay for not only a gun, but also for ammunition for that gun.  If we shoot somebody, it hardly seems fair that our tax dollars also pay to treat them for that gun shot wound.  In fact, since the reason you shoot somebody is to do harm to them, many of us would just as soon that the person we shoot not be able to get medical care in the first place.

Unfortunately, since the days of the Old West, medicine has improved greatly.   In those days, a belly shot was almost a sure death sentence.  Today, doctor’s are able to do a remarkable number of things to treat gun shot wounds and unfortunately, gun manufacturers have simply not kept up, especially in the area of causing infection.   This is definitely a call for both gun and ammunition manufacturers to step up their games.   If all gun shot wounds can be easily treated, do we really have the right to bear arms.

If Thanksgiving is a celebration of the Europeans and the Indians getting together for a party, what better way to celebrate than with Tommy Seebach’s Apache.

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holiday. It’s a wonderful time to have the whole family together and follow our own particular traditions. I always like to think of the Pilgrims celebrating that first Thanksgiving nearly 300 years ago at Plymouth Rock. Because Christians were being persecuted in Europe, they had to come to America where they could be free to worship.

Times were very hard for the Pilgrims. They arrived in the winter and they didn’t have a lot of food on their ship to eat. However, somehow they made it through the winter in this strange land called The United States of America. When Fall came, they invited over the strange red men they had met called Indians to partake with them in a feast. At this time there were still too few to conquer the Indians, but that would come eventually. Instead, they used the holiday to look for any weakness in the savages.

Those brave pilgrims and their ancestors would soon go on to conquer not only those Indians, but all the Indians from sea to shining seas. I see that same can do spirit in America today. I hope you and your family have a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday and enjoy good food and togetherness. The economy is in a slump now and if your Thanksgiving table seems a bit more sparse this year, please remember all of those who have nothing. It’ll make you remember just how delicious your turkey truly is.

I have decided that the time has finally come to spin off a separate education blog.  I seem to be able to write satirically on every other topic that is important to me, but I am either too close to education or I am simply not that skillful a writer.   I am going to move the Michelle Rhee and Imagination Charter stories to the other site.  I hope that some of you will move with me.   Have no fear, this blog will continue to not only be regularly updated, but it will continue to be my main blog.  After all, the atheists begin their war against Thanksgiving in earnest tomorrow.    I’m sure I’ll have something new up tomorrow that is more my usual style.  The new blog is located at:

www.edumacationarchive.com

Yes, it’s one of those Michelle Rhee articles and I’m trying to figure out where to begin as we catch up with the single most destructive force in education today.   Michelle recently got engaged to former NBA star, Sacramento Mayor, and accused sexual predator Kevin Johnson.   This is rather big news as there is a scandal brewing in Washington involving Rhee, Johnson, and Johnson’s Charter School Saint Hope.

During the Summer of 1995, a 16 year old girl went to the police claiming that Johnson had fondled her.   During a phone conversation recorded by the Phoenix police, Johnson apologized to the girl.   The Sacramento Bee stated that they had received a copy of a proposed settlement agreement, under which Johnson would have paid the girl’s family $230,000.   After conducting an investigation, the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office declined to prosecute, on the grounds that there was not a reasonable likelihood of conviction.  This sort of thing would have stopped Kevin Johnson from being hired as a principal.  Fortunately, for Mister Johnson it didn’t stop him from running a very large charter school.

With Michelle Rhee on the board, In 2003, Johnson  formed St. HOPE Public Schools, a pre-K-12 independent charter school system that provides education to nearly 2,000 students in seven small schools.  The allegations soon followed.   In 2007 another police report was filed by a student who also claimed that Johnson fondled her.   After allegations of intimidation, those charges were dropped when the student recanted her testimony.

Gerald Walpin, Inspector General of Americorps began an investigation of Johnson after he was charged by 3 young women employees of making inappropriate sexual advances towards them and it became known that Johnson had misused some of the $800,000 in federal Americorps money given to St. Hope.   Johnson had used the money to pay volunteers to engage in school-board political activities, run personal errands for Johnson and even wash his car.  He even offered one teacher $1,000 a month in hush money secretly transferred to her bank account.

So what was Michelle Rhee’s role in this scandal.   First, she was described as complainants as being the one in charge of damage control at St. Hope.  She approached the Inspector General to try to intervene for Johnson.  “The basic point of her meeting with me was to tell me what a great guy he was,” Walpin recalls, “and what wonderful work he has done, and that maybe he had made mistakes administratively, but that she thought I should give as much consideration as possible to his good work in deciding what to do.”

This is the same Michelle Rhee who has shown no such patience for the teachers who she has shown the door.   I wonder how she balanced the good that they had done.  The end result of the investigation was the Johnson agreed to pay back half the money from Americorps and to pay back the rest of it within the next 10 years.   Meanwhile, Inspector General Walpin was fired.

While parroting right wing talking points in my own satirical blog, I’ve learned that among the keys to a successful blog, nothing is more important than not backing down from your own opinion no matter how hard it slams into the windshield of fact.  Andrew Wolk has learned that lesson well.   In his blog posting on Michelle Rhee, he holds her up as an example of a public innovator while completely leaving any specifics out of his glowing report.   I had a brief chuckle at reading it, but when I read E Favorite’s response, I found something interesting—the growing number of public figures who have quoted Michelle Rhee, who have had to issue apologies.  E Favorite found three, “Specifically, they are John Merrow of PBS http://learningmatters.tv/blog/on-the-newshour/mi… , Jay Mathews of the Washington Post http://voices.washingtonpost.com/class-struggle/2… and Michael Petrilli of Education Next and the Fordham Foundation http://educationnext.org/the-one-winner-in-todays…”

Mayor Fenty is not doing well in opinion polls and it looks like he may be on his way out as DC’s mayor.   Michelle Rhee has clearly hurt him.   Unfortunately, when she goes off to save somebody else she will have left a lot of destruction in her wake.   If you’re coming in late, please check out my 4 part report on Michelle Rhee from last month here http://thatsrightnate.com/2009/10/21/michelle-rhee-and-the-washington-education-miracle-part-i/ .

In an effort to maintain dogmatic purity, GOP leaders have begun circulating a 10 point pledge for Republican candidates to show that they are sufficiently pure to be Republicans.   This pledge will be debated at the party’s January meeting in Honolulu.   I tried to contact friend of the blog Congressman Jack Kimble (R-CA) about the purity pledge, but I was unable to contact him.   In an effort to attract diversity, Republicans only have to agree to 8 of the 10 points.

10. We will pronounce nuclear as nuculer when discussing energy or foreign policy.

9.  Every week, we will attempt to see if I can spot any foreign countries from my back porch.  If I can, I will keep tabs on them.

8.  We will not giggle at important conservative phrases like “Tea Bag” and “Going Rogue”.

7. We will talk non-ironically about our God fearing conservative values established by people like Ayn Rand and Thomas Paine.

6. We will keep government out of health care except in cases like Terri Schiavo, we will keep government out of people’s personal lives unless they are gay, and we will follow the Constitution when it serves my party’s interests.

5. We will not bow to foreign heads of state and in fact shaking hands kind of makes us queasy.

4. We oppose using tax payer dollars to support abortion or unjust wars of aggression.

3. We oppose a government option for health care because a private company cannot possibly compete with a government program.

2. We support the expansion  charter schools because private companies can educate our children better than any public program.

1. We believe that every time Glenn Beck cries, an angel gets his wings.

Two things happened last week that I personally failed to note in this blog.   First, the Obama Presidency passed the year mark since his election.   Secondly, my daughter Emily receiver her progress report at school.  I always hate progress reports because the teachers think they can impress me by telling me how smart my daughter is.   Don’t you think I know that?  She’s a Peele.  What I want to know is why haven’t you taken any of the two pages of  suggestions I gave you at the beginning of the year?   I’m telling you, the teachers get more Marxist every year.

I decided to grade Obama in the areas that are most important for an American President.  Sadly, it simply reveals exactly how badly he is failing:

1. Economy: F
2. Military: F
3. Moral Leadership: F
4. Americaness: F
5. Health Care: F
6. Foreign Policy: F

Economy: Let’s face it, President Bush was a genius.  He managed to finance a huge prescription drug benefit for seniors and two wars without having to even put them in the budget. Unfortunately, Obama is no Bush. When President Obama began his election campaign, Wall Street was so panicked by his Marxism that the economy immediately tanked.   I had hoped that given a year, he could fix the mess he made, but sadly it’s gotten worse.   In November and December of last year, Obama passed ridiculous measures bailing out the housing and automobile industries as well as Wall Street despite the fact he wasn’t even President.    Things have only gotten worse since then.

Military: In 2001 when American forces first went into Afghanistan we seemed on the verge of a dramatic victory.  Why is it that Obama has been President for only a year and we’re already in deep trouble in Afghanistan?   We left Iraq too without a decisive victory or a surrender ceremony.

Moral Leadership: I blame this failure on Obama’s secret Muslim faith, which he won’t admit.   However, there’s a reason that Glenn Beck cries nearly nightly.

Americanness: I don’t know.  Obama has just failed to show requisite Americanness.   A Republican President would never bow to the leader of Japan if it wasn’t in the course of vomiting.  It may be because he was born in Kenya, but he just doesn’t feel very American to me.  How many photos have been taken of him even attempting to clear brush.

Health Care: Obama has failed to get a health care bill through Congress largely because he has failed to reach out to Republicans.  Instead of reforming health care, he seems more intent on giving health care to people who don’t have it and haven’t needed it so far.   Poor people don’t need insurance, they have emergency rooms.

Foreign Policy: What else can you call a President who has not been able to to anything about mounting crises in North Korea and Iran except a failure.   I miss the steady hand on the Tiller that was the Bush administration.

Now, please understand that I say Obama is failing not because he is black or because I am a very partisan Republican who is incensed at having lost the election and wants to return to power in 2012.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Instead, I say Obama is failing because by any objective measure he is.  Compare the first year of the Obama administration with the first year of Bush’s term and other than the whole 9/11 thing, it’s clear that Bush was the superior President.   The economy was better, we weren’t fighting these two difficult wars, and America was headed in the right direction.   Like all Americans, I hope that Obama will do better in the coming year.

Let’s face it, the joy of giving is one of the best parts of the Christmas season, but it’s not always easy finding just the perfect gift for everybody on your list.   That’s why I’m happy to provide my second annual list of Amazing Christmas Gifts.

12. Poopin Santa – Sometimes the hardest people to shop for are people like mailmen and teachers–you know the people that you want to wish a Merry Christmas to, but want to spend more than $5.  I’m happy to announce that I’ve found just the perfect gift and it combines three great things–Santa, chocolate, and taking a crap.  This adorable Santa Claus poops yummy chocolate and is available for $4.99 at Perpetual Kid.com

11. Going Rogue – Sarah Palin’s first novel would have rated higher, but it’s a book.   Amazon.com has these babies listed at $14.50, but I have a feeling if you can wait a few days, you’ll be able to find one under $12 and under $10 if you don’t mind an autographed copy.

10. Christmas Cross – This was on my Christmas list for 2008 and though it’s slipped a bit, you can’t beat this burning cross for showing the love of Christ burning within you.  Things didn’t work out so well for me when I left it on my black neighbor’s lawn as a surprise on Christmas Eve night to let them know there were no hard feelings over the election, but I still think this is a great gift for only an $80 donation to the American Family Association.

9. Fetus Cookie maker – Whether you’re picketing an abortion clinic or celebrating a new pregnancy, there is no better way than with homemade fetus cookies.   Get your cookie mold for only $10 at Hogmalion.

8. Toy Soldier Candle Holder – One of the most universal symbols for peace this holiday is to leave a candle in the window.  What better way to show that your house believes in peace through strength than with a plastic toy soldier candle holder.   Finally, I have a way to feel manly as I burn through my Yankee Candles.  The holders are available for $36 at Kikkerland.com.

7. Warm Whiskers Neck Wraps – Nothing warms up a cold neck on a freezing January evening like a piece of fresh road kill.   Unfortunately, as the animal begins to pass from this world, his warmth also dissipates and a few days of wear, the little fella is really going to start to stink.  These adorable neck wraps from Warm Whiskers.com are rewarmable and free of rotting.  At only$42, they’re a deal.  I really like the Husky myself.

6. Gun Alarm Clock – Bandai makes these in Japan, but you can find them to import if you’re lucky.  When the alarm goes off, the only way to stop it is to blast it with your gun.  There is no better way to wake up refreshed in the morning than to start the day out with some shooting.   You can order here and check out the video–it’s cool yes!

5. A Savior is Born: The Precious Moments Nativity Scne – Long time readers of this blog will recall that I am a big fan of Precious Moments figurines.  Like all their products, their nativity scene is first rate, though it does bother me a little that they bowed to multiculturalism by making one of the Wisemen a brunette.  Still, even at $250 this is sure to be a hit for any holiday season.

4. Journey Through the Creation Museum DVD – Perhaps, Kentucky’s greatest achievements to both science and religion is the Creation Museum located in Petersburg, KY.   This thrilling DVD lets you take a trip back in time to when giant dinosaurs roamed the other before they turned their back on God and were struck down. It’s a bargain for under $20.

3. Seattle Sutton’s Healthy Evening – What better way to show a daughter struggling with a weight problem that you care then by signing her up for a weight loss program.  Seattle Sutton makes eating healthy convenient.

2. Mass We Pray – The greatest game for the Wii ever, from a spiritual sense anyway.  This product gives children all the excitement of mass and Catholic sacraments all from the comfort of their own home.   You know how boring church can be, what better way to liven it up for your kids?  I only hope that they’ll have a Protestant version by next Christmas.   It won’t be available until Easter, but you can preorder it now.

1. Play-Doh Cologne – Made for the 50th anniversary of play-doh, the cologne will make you smell just like the delightful children’s toy.   For only $10, you will truly impress at any board meeting or night out on the town with that special someone.

[From Congressman Kimble's webpage]

As you know, the Senate is voting on Health Care this coming Saturday. It is very urgent that we stand up to the Obama/Pelosi agenda to take over health care in this country, but we can’t do this without your help. The vote will be televised live in prime time and as we saw during our vote in the House, the sight of a member of congress holding a small child to argue against health care is a very powerful image. Unfortunately, we have a shortage of small children. What we are looking for is cute children, preferably between ages 2-4 who are potty trained and not criers. Please, no ugly children–they just won’t be as effective on camera. We will return your baby safe and sound after the vote. If you have a baby please either phone 202 863-8500 or email Leadership@rnc.org. Please put Cute Baby Available in the Subject line.