A Lesson to Be Taught

From Bill Markin, over at American Thinker:

"Our educational system has become a money pit where funding levels bear no relationship to results. No, the simple truth is that they've earned this exalted status not as a reward for excellence but through extortion, by coercive collective bargaining, a monopoly status that fosters inefficiency, waste and mediocrity, and making generous contributions of time and money to a political party that has become little more than an operating arm of the teacher and other public employee unions."

Read the whole article, it is excellent!

http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/02/doin_the_madison_misstep.html

Quote of the Day

"We're a nation with global responsibilities. We're not somewhere else in the world protecting someone else's interests; we're there protecting our own." --Ronald Reagan

Quote of the Day

"Hillary Clinton urged Egypt's street protesters to remain calm Monday and she told the Egyptian Army to use restraint. Rioting and burning and looting followed. Nothing calms down a million observant Muslims like a Methodist woman telling them what to do." --comedian Argus Hamilton

Quote of the Day

"Beware the temptation to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil." --Ronald Reagan

Paraphrased, but accurate...

I'm still surprised at how many people cannot distinguish between the American economy and the American stock market.

The American economy is the sum of all the goods and services that are produced in this economy every day. Electronics, vehicles, chickens, cross country shipments. That's the American economy, and it's independently strong or weak from the stock market.

The stock market is something very different. There is no economy and no production of goods and services. There are only fantasies in which people from one hour to the next decide that this or that company is worth so many billions, more or less. It doesn't have a thing to do with reality or with the American economy.

It does not matter at all whether the stock market drops or rises. It only means that a bunch of heavy speculators are now moving their shareholdings from one place to another. In order to protect their clients' profit interests, they systematically and deliberately damage the American economy.

--Paraphrased from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson

Quote of the Day

"Ain't it funny how many hundreds of thousands of soldiers we can recruit with nerve. But we just can't find one politician in a million with backbone." --American humorist Will Rogers (1879-1935)

Quote of the Day

"Since there are many more conservatives than liberals, and conservatives have so many guns, people often wonder why conservatives don't just round up all the liberals and ship them to Antarctica to be forced to mine for jewels and gold. Well, there is a very good reason for that: by a strict constructionist interpretation of the American Constitution, there is no support for being able to deport liberals to a mining camp. Now, if conservatives were a bit more flexible with their view of the Constitution, they would say things like, 'Well, we have to remember it's a living document, and the Founding Fathers hadn't even thought of the threat of hippies running around free when they wrote it.' And then they'd look to the Commerce Clause and say, 'Well, keeping liberals from meddling in America and forcing them do something useful like mining sure would help the economy, so it's within the government's power.' And then it'd just be a manner of scheduling all the boats to get liberals to Antarctica. But that would violate the spirit of the Constitution since, by plain English interpretations of the government's powers, we can't forcefully ship liberals to Antarctica no matter how much people may think that would help the country. And that's the point of the Constitution: people are constantly changing their ideas of what is good and bad, but the Constitution is much harder to change. It puts limits on what the government can do, and those limits can only be changed when huge majorities agree to it through the amendment process. And even after ObamaCare, there inexplicably isn't enough support for a 'Liberals Are to Be Sent to Mines in Antarctica' amendment." --humor columnist Frank J. Fleming