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Has John Kerry Morphed into Al Gore? The British author and critic, Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) said that a phony kind of patriotism was the last refuge of a scoundrel. These days it’s environmentalism. When a candidate for president really doesn’t have any good ideas on how to keep the economy going strong, deal with America’s enemies, or any of the other practical necessities to insure our future, they always rely on the "environment" as their pitch for votes.
Al Gore is running around promoting his End-Of-The-World movie about global warming, spewing forth more lies and hot air than all the industrialized nations combined. Sen. Kerry continues to represent Massachusetts. He is a Democrat who ran for the presidency in 2004 and was defeated by a margin of some three million popular votes. Kerry lost votes every time he tried thinking on his feet. It was always a mistake. As if the war in Vietnam was the only seminal event in the lives of Americans, Kerry depicted himself as a hero "reporting for duty" and tried very hard to play down his testimony before a congressional committee that accused his fellow soldiers of being war criminals who committed atrocities. Ever the two-faced hypocrite, Kerry still envies against the Iraq invasion while mouthing support for our troops. In January an Associated Press story began by noting that, "It’s almost as if Sen. John Kerry never stopped running for president. He still jets across the country, raising millions of dollars and rallying Democrats. He still stalks the TV news show circuit, scolding President Bush at every turn." These days Kerry has morphed into the clone of Al Gore. In his quest for the presidency, he has created a committee called Keeping America’s Promise in order to have another shot at the party’s nomination. In the process, he is opposing "so-called energy policies written by Big Oil" and is against "sacrificing clean water, clean air, and our national parks so that the special interests can make more money." Making more money is why America has an eleven trillion dollar economy. For reasons unknown to rational people, our current energy policies, promulgated in part by the U.S. Senate, involve a ban on drilling for copious amounts of oil in Alaska’s ANWR or anywhere off-shore of America. Soon enough Red China will be sucking oil just off the coast of Cuba, which is just off the coast of Florida! According to Kerry, Republicans are "anti-environment", "threatening the Arctic Refuge", "selling off our national forests", "weakening environmental standards" and, if we all vote for him, he will put America "on the path to genuine energy independence." He proposes to do this by "requiring utilities to gradually increase the portion of electricity produced from renewable sources such as wind, biomass, geothermal, and solar energy." This is complete and utter blather. If they were viable, efficient sources of energy, they would be in use right now. If Kerry wants to win votes in New Jersey, he should be advised that its largest daily recently ran an editorial titled, "Don’t make Jersey a wind power guinea pig." Even the senior Senator from Massachusetts, Teddy Kennedy, doesn’t want a vast wall of wind machines spoiling the view from his ancestral home in Hyannis Port. It gets worse. He wants "a mandate that agriculture will provide 20% of the total energy consumed in the United States by 2020." He wants Congress to enact "energy efficiency measures to decrease energy use by 20% in 2020." He wants "twenty percent of all passenger cars and trucks on the road" to be "high-efficiency, low emissions hybrids by 2020." And, finally, "Congress should act to eliminate America’s oil imports from the Middle East by 2020." But please do not drill for any oil anywhere in America! These draconian and largely insane proposals constitute the bulk of Kerry’s known campaign platform. He may yet include the Osama bin Laden plank advocating the nation’s complete surrender and retreat from the Middle East When will Americans be rid of Sen. Kerry? As the Boston Herald columnist, Howie Carr, noted in January, "Everyone in Massachusetts, including his ostensible supporters, knows what a complete fraud Kerry is and always has been." His current efforts to campaign for the presidency once more were, said Carr, "delusional." These words, of course, could just as easily be applied to Al Gore. Do not, however, discount the totally bereft Democrat Party’s capacity for self-delusion. It is too soon to say who will emerge as the Party’s choice, but consider yourself sufficiently warned that John F. Kerry still wants to be your next Commander-in-Chief. The Destruction of Education in America Journalists read newspapers differently from regular readers. We are interested, not just in what the editors think is news, but where they position that news, and how various stories on a particular topic link to one another. This is the case with an April news story I noticed that was headlined, "N.J. asks to adjust school reform rules." The story involved a request from the Acting Education Commissioner to amend the "No Child Left Behind" federal law "to loosen some requirements and tighten others." The requests reportedly were "consistent with those already approved in many other states." What this story is really about is the fact that the federal government’s one-size-fits-all approach to education doesn’t work.
In New Jersey, they want to "adjust the number of students in a racial or other category needed for the school to be held accountable" for the results of a standard exam. The State asked for a so-called "confidence interval" to measure overall scores, essentially giving schools a margin of error if they are just one or two children off the required proficiency levels…" This is bureaucratic language intended to address the fact that, in most of the State’s inner city schools, Afro-Americans and other minorities predominate and that the standards set by the federal laws do not conform to the realities of the real world where there are many one-parent families, drugs are sold in the streets, and other social problems abound. "States are grappling with a very difficult and complicated law," said John Jennings, director of the Center on Education Policy, a Washington think tank, "and since they can’t change the law itself, they are tweaking its procedures." Meanwhile, from New Jersey to California, the nation’s schools continue to turn out students who could not find their own State on a map, let alone figure out where our troops are fighting in places like Afghanistan or Iraq. They can’t do math well and they are often barely literate. This is because schools in America are far more concerned with instilling certain attitudes and perceptions than with the teaching of fundamental skills needed to function in a complex world. Moreover, schools are run for the aggrandizement of administrators and filled with the products of education colleges who often lack competence in the subject for which they are hired. Within about two weeks of the first article, a second appeared, but it was on the front page, not buried inside. "Top court orders ‘Abbott freeze’ but lets schools appeal." Here in New Jersey, by some bizarre interpretation of the State constitution, our supreme court had ordered the spending of billions of dollars to somehow make the schools of the State’s cities comparable to those in its wealthier suburbs. Never mind that only the State legislature has the power to determine how public monies are spent. The poorest schools became known as "Abbott districts" and, quite by coincidence, all 31 were in heavily Democrat areas. Billions have been squandered since this ruling. New Jersey is broke. The Attorney General, arguing the case, told the court, "We simply don’t have the money" to increase education funding. Meanwhile, one of the most powerful unions in the nation, the National Education Association, continues to plunder the treasuries of both the State and its many communities. Take, for example, the perks and salaries of the superintendents in New Jersey’s poorest school districts. In cities like Newark, Paterson, and Jersey City, superintendents received a $10,000 deposit in a post-retirement annuity account; pledges to pay up to $175 per day for 493.5 accrued sick days; and a $1,000 a month housing allowance on top of a salary scheduled to rise from $212,000 to $222,000 over two years. A Jersey City superintendent took a trip to London in 2004 that included a five-star hotel, a limousine from the airport, and an $80 steak at an exclusive restaurant. All charged off to the school district. If this strikes you as obscene, it had the same affect on some state legislators. The superintendent, apparently not having enough to do in his school district, was elected to the State Assembly last year. From the Department of Education to your local school, education in America has become so politicized that it ignores the U.S. Constitution and impoverishes home owners and others who must pay the salaries of teachers and administrators who, in turn, are locked into the "No Child Left Behind" law embraced by President Bush and Congress. Meanwhile, the National Education Association gave away $65 million last year to Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH coalition, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, Amnesty International, AIDS Walk Washington, and dozens more advocacy groups whose agendas and values may have no relation to the million of parents worried about some of the things their children are being taught. And what do those teachers and administrators want? More. More money. More perks. More freedom to drug "over-active" or bored children who instinctively know that their school is not teaching them much because it has to meet the demands of a federal law for which constant testing is a relentless drain on whatever time is left to actually learn anything. "No Child Left Behind" should be repealed. It is a horrendous failure. The latest national Assessment of Educational Progress found that only 25% to 35% of eighth grade students passed the reading and math tests, and fourth graders did little better. The federal government should get out of the business of disbursing tax dollars to the States for education programs created in Washington, D.C.
If your co-workers, neighbors, and others with whom you come in contact too often seem ignorant, it is because they have passed through the American school system that has been systematically debased since the 1960s. Unlike Sen. Kerry who married into wealth, the Center depends on the kindness of strangers who donate what they can to its maintenance and upkeep. If you prefer, you can send a check to The Caruba Organization, 28 West Third Street, Suite 1321, South Orange, NJ 07079. Thank you!
©
2006 Alan Caruba. |
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In the past, when a man was defeated in his quest for the presidency, he usually had the good sense and good grace to sink into anonymity, emerging only upon his death to receive the accolades that he hardly deserved in life. But not Al Gore or John F. Kerry.
I have repeatedly told anyone who will listen that the word "education" does not appear anywhere in the U.S. Constitution and this is because the Founding Fathers understood that it was the responsibility of the States and local communities to educate children. Moreover, they saw the inherent danger in a centralized, all-powerful government controlling what was taught in schools. They do that kind of thing in communist and authoritarian nations, but it should not occur here.