A reward for evil

Sometimes it's a shiftless loser that likes to rape and murder little girls with some enablement by his airbrain pals. Sometimes it's a sleazy husband who denies his wife medical care and rehabilitation therapy after her suspicious accident, while he spends the money won in a lawsuit that was earmarked for that purpose. And sometimes it's a representative of a huge untaxed foundation that wants to brag about how he conspired to steal the American people's free speech rights.

I'm sure the toasting forks are ready in Hell for these folks, but sometimes you can't help wishing they would get an appropriate earthly reward too. If we're really lucky, the child killer will actually get one.

They still can't do the three R's

And that's just the teachers. But they are rather sneaky:

It's no secret that the public education establishment hates the No Child Left Behind Act. It calls for all of the things educrats resist: standards, testing, accountability for performance and a requirement that teachers be "highly qualified" in the subject field they're teaching.

Sadly, that last element has already been undermined by teachers' lobbies at the state level. A loophole in the original federal legislation left it to individual states to establish their own criteria for "high, objective, uniform state standards of evaluation" of teachers. As education expert Terry Moe of the Hoover Institute reports, rather than requiring competency testing or specific subject-matter degrees, states like Arkansas simply regard five years of experience as sufficient to satisfy the "highly qualified" standard. In New Hampshire, a teacher can meet the requirements by merely conducting a "self-assessment" with a supervisor and "partner," demonstrating once again that there's no education reform that educrats can't find a way to circumvent.

I don't know about you, but my self-assessment says I'm darn swell.

In addition to frontal assaults on No Child Left Behind by the teachers unions, there have been numerous, petty guerrilla attacks on the act. One recent example was in a school district in Lincoln, R.I., where assistant superintendent of schools Linda Newman and the district's elementary school principals decided to cancel the annual spelling bee, sponsored by Scripps Howard newspapers, for students in the fourth through eighth grades. According to these spoilsports, with only one child able to emerge as the ultimate winner, the spelling bee would violate the spirit of No Child Left Behind, since the rest of the contestants would necessarily be "left behind." Newman explained that the current fashion in public education circles emphasizes self-esteem, which is why activities that produce winners and losers, such as sports teams, are to be avoided.

You can see why a loser like ole Linda would feel that way.

More hilarity by following the link, but it's this kind of thing that leaves me less than troubled when I read an article in the local paper that the schools in our state were near the bottom of the list in per capita spendng per pupil. I figure it's less money for the "professional educators" to blow on worthless drivel as an excuse for not teaching the basics. Number 1 on the spending list was Washington D.C. which merely confirmed the impression. And don't get me started on "computers in the classroom."

What a pair!

Ward Churchill pretends to be an Indian-scholar-artist and the Associated Press pretends to report news.

Blogger continues misbehaving. Ignore the duplicates below - I will clean it up when I can.

Ruh Roh!

The Weekly Standard Scrapbook has some fun with The New York Times:

A January 1, 1995, Times editorial on proposals to restrict the use of Senate filibusters:

In the last session of Congress, the Republican minority invoked an endless string of filibusters to frustrate the will of the majority. This relentless abuse of a time-honored Senate tradition so disgusted Senator Tom Harkin, a Democrat from Iowa, that he is now willing to forgo easy retribution and drastically limit the filibuster. Hooray for him. . . . Once a rarely used tactic reserved for issues on which senators held passionate views, the filibuster has become the tool of the sore loser, . . . an archaic rule that frustrates democracy and serves no useful purpose.

A March 6, 2005, Times editorial on the same subject:

The Republicans are claiming that 51 votes should be enough to win confirmation of the White House's judicial nominees. This flies in the face of Senate history. . . . To block the nominees, the Democrats' weapon of choice has been the filibuster, a time-honored Senate procedure that prevents a bare majority of senators from running roughshod. . . . The Bush administration likes to call itself "conservative," but there is nothing conservative about endangering one of the great institutions of American democracy, the United States Senate, for the sake of an ideological crusade.

Smooth, real smooth.

And while you're there, click back to page 1 of the column for the skinny on a deal between Clear Channel Communications and the Chinese Communists to bring Monster Truck Ralles to China!

Or, as Reuters put it: "House sized trucks that shoot fire" while "crushing everything in their path" may "soon have the Chinese gaping in awe."

Heh, heh, heh, heh, heh.

Incidentally, anybody know where we can get our hands on a couple billion Confederate flag decals?

Yeeehawww!

Who needs cash, he's got a whole country

The aging thug has his whine on - Castro Rebukes Forbes 'Infamy' on His Fortune.

Your United Nations at work

WHISTLEBLOWER READY TO TESTIFY:

A former U.N. official who was fired after warning his superiors of "flagrant mishandling" of the U.N. oil-for-food program will be the star witness at a congressional hearing this week.
Dr. Rehan Mullick, a Pakistani national who worked as a U.N. research officer in Baghdad from 2000 to 2002, is expected to be the first U.N. insider to publicly detail mass corruption in the program when he testifies before the House International Relations Committee tomorrow.

A spokesman for the committee said in a statement yesterday that Mullick "repeatedly warned his superiors in Baghdad and later in New York" that Saddam Hussein's regime was diverting humanitarian goods to his military and that Iraqi intelligence agents had penetrated the U.N. offices in Iraq.

"Despite his impassioned pleas, he was repeatedly demoted until his job was finally terminated by the United Nations in 2002," the committee statement said.

Stay tuned for the usual suspects to come out of the woodwork to attack this guy.

"This pair beats two thugs and a jackass burning something any day"

Here. And here:

I can look through the galleries and instantly guess with very nearly 100 percent accuracy whether a given image was from a pro- or anti-Syrian rally.

I suspect the principle has universal application.

How Chris Heinz thinks of himself.

How everyone else thinks of Chris Heinz