Yes. Bush IS to Blame!!!!

The replacement for Rush on Monday made a great point: The reason we have Barack Obama is because of George Bush.

Had not President Push and the Republicans in the House and Senate not ABSOLUTELY blow their chances for re-election by spending more like Democrats than traditional Republicans, their candidate might have stood a better chance.

But almost all elections when the President is unpopular is a repudiation of the unpopular President. In this case it was “Anyone but Bush” and this is what we got.

It’s not that candidate Obama didn’t tell everyone within earshot who he was and what he believed. He wrote a book. He attended a certain church for 20 years, and that minister baptized his children. He was ranked as the most liberal Senator, which some argue about but no one denies he was at least one of the top three.

People voted for Obama as president for many reasons – he was not Bush, he was “post racial,” he promised “change” (unspecified), he was bright and articulate following a president who appeared to be dull and inarticulate…there were many reasons people voted the way they did.

Now there is a great deal of “Buyers Remorse” – but they CAN’T say they were fooled. My guess is that 20% support anything short of Communism (20% self-identify themselves as “liberal”), and the other 30+ percent he got were never the leftists of the first 20% but were simply not sufficiently paying attention.

But President Bush and the sitting Republicans were the root cause. The damage done was done because they blew it.

We can only hope that they have learned their lesson – but I doubt it. They are politicians.

They Are Presumed Innocent…

…and I assume they are Christians, because I don’t wish to be declared “Islamophobic”

“Ahmed Mohamed Nasser al Soofi, left, and Hezem al Murisi, were taken off a United Airlines flight in the Netherlands and have been charged by Dutch police with “preparation of a terrorist attack,” according to a U.S. law enforcement official.”

(ABC News)

Evaluating Teachers

Both the LA Times and the Sunday ABC News morning talk show discussed teacher evaluation yesterday.

I think we can start with the premise that people who have never been evaluated, fear evaluation. Particularly, when that evaluation will be made public.

Add to that the absolute fact that NO ONE who is evaluated thinks the process by which they are evaluated is “fair.”

This is particularly poignant when you realize that these same people who fear evaluation, evaluate their students, daily, and whatever process they use, they believe is “fair.”

Now of course no process of evaluation is perfectly fair – there are so many human traits that we can’t measure – and humans are not uniform performers. (The run-away first place Padres just lost four straight games!).

But to teachers, NO process is fair that is designed to evaluate THEM, AND they will not concede that they should be evaluated UNTIL the process IS “fair” – and that leads to the conclusion, (in their minds and supported by their powerful union) that they should never be evaluated.

QED

Government Outrage (number 458,973)

Heard an interesting story on KFI-LA this afternoon: A listener in Truckee, California (The John and Ken show is re-broadcast on a San Francisco station) wrote the show about an incident in her small furniture store and was interviewed about it.

It seems a representative from the California Consumer Affairs came into her store and “seized” a $1,400 chair which the CA Representative believed may have been in violation of the flammability code – despite the factory sticker saying the chair complied.

When asked what she was going to do with the seized chair, the representative replied, “Burn if.” When asked who was to pay for the chair, the representative said, “Your insurance company.” When the store owner called to confirm that the representative was actually from a government agency, the government confirmed that she was. When the owner then called the manufacturer to confirm that the chair net California standards, the government agent handed her a highlighted statute saying that “interfering with an agent” is a violation…

No solution to who pays for the chair.

A Great School Resource

The LA Times publishes a database of information about California schools that is easy to read and simple to determine the condition of each prospective school.

It is called the California School Guide.

http://projects.latimes.com/schools/

Wherever you are you can put in your zip code, and it will tell you the schools nearby – and just about everything you want to know about the schools: Their teacher/pupil ratio, their immunization rate, their API relative scores (or SAT scores), their ethnic makeup, etc. etc. etc.

Having poured over Excel spreadsheets for years, this is a much easier way for localities to determine how the most local schools are doing. It won’t help me in my analysis of large geographic areas or school districts, but for parents who have a limited geographic availability of schools, this is near perfect.

The nearest school to Hidden Meadows, for example is Reidy Creek Elementary on North Broadway in Escondido. It has 798 students, only 23% of students get free or reduced-priced lunch, there are only 16.8% who are “English language learners,” and the student body is 54.1% there are 39 teachers and the student-teacher ratio is 18 to one.  Eight of the 99 kindergartners were exempt from vaccination (for the record this is NOT GOOD!). The API score is 850 (this IS good – but not great.)

Damn Yankees!

The natural tendency for liberals to support the underdog has caused them to reflexively support some dead-bang losers.

While rooting for the underdog may be self-satisfying, it often places one in a position of rooting against the Home Team!

That is not a comfortable position in Qualcomm Stadium, or PetCo Park, and the Obama administration is finding out that it is not a comfortable position in Washington, either because people like the Home Team.

Pick the subject, the Obama administration chooses the opposing team. Now if you are a Raider fan (not that I can identify with ANY Raider fan), you could go to your season seats at the Chargers and root for the Raiders.

What you could not do is to root for the Giants, the Broncos, the Seahawks, the …in effect rooting for the opposing team at every game, and still expect your fellow season ticket holders to be happy with you.

That is what liberals do – always support the opposing team even when the opposing team is awful. Liberals are the Yankee haters (double entandre intended) who always want the Yankees to lose, because the Yankees win so often.

Personally, I love winners.

Supporting losers has never been high on my priority list.

Benign Neglect. Please?

My economic experience, having survived one Depression and a number of recessions, tells me that this recession has not been handled well.

First, recessions – not just here but in every nation – eventually cure themselves much like our personal illnesses do. What politicians, and in the personal analogous situation Doctors, do is to either make the nation comfortable or exacerbate the situation.

When I had an illness a few years ago that my doctors could not diagnose, the gave me a large bottle of Vicodin and a large bottle of Skelaxin and told me to go home, make myself as comfortable as possible and let nature sort itself out.

That was wise council, because it did. The body has its own healing qualities, and like plants of all types it wants to live. It will if the surrounding circumstances are supportive.

Economies are much the same, but in this economy at this time and under control of this President we have exacerbated the problem. The natural cycle of economic downturns is 18 months to two years, but badly-timed and poor solutions have both caused and extended the problem.

Make no mistake, there were legislative actions that caused people who could not afford high-ticket homes to buy them anyway, and when that market tanked many other markets followed. We can argue as to whom the blame lies, but I fault both political parties – yes, Democrats in Congress put into place the laws but even President Bush bragged that home ownership was highest in his administration.

When the recession came, Bush placed into effect the TARP, which I opposed and still oppose BUT – part of it worked, the part of bailing out the banks. Most of that money has been repaid. Then the following administration used the money for a purpose not envisioned in the enabling legislation to bail out the car companies which will never pay it back.

Since TARP, this administration has made many promises and kept none in the economic sense. None of the spending has done any good, and it can be argued that it has exacerbated the problem.

This recession may well get worse before it gets better – but it will get better. Even left to its own devices, this recession will end but in an effort to ease pain this administration has caused greater pain.

I argue that the administration was doing what the Hawthorne experiments of the 1920s showed, that visibly doing something (anything) gave the production workers an incentive to increase production – because the production workers thought that someone cared for their well-being. Raise the light level, output increased. Lower the light level, production increased.

It wasn’t the light. It was that the workers believed someone cared.

The Obama administration has overspent to the point where the production workers believe that the administration cares about hurting them and their future!

Benign neglect would have had a better result, and the people understand that.

The State of Politics

I just love the irony of Chris Matthews complaining about the “Right” not understanding that there is a right for the mosque to be built regardless of the sensibilities of the 911 victim families, while complaining that Glen Beck has the right to hold his rally at the Lincoln Memorial on Martin Luther King’s Day but not understanding the sensitivities of Blacks.

Such tortuous reasoning is usually something that Matthews attacks others for doing, but he cannot see, or will not acknowledge the mote in his eye.

This mosque issue has pitted the Establishment against the people and demonstrates the distance between the elite – particularly the academic elite who currently hold power, and the “rest of us.” When 70% of the people believe one thing and 30% another that is opposite – and the 30% are in political power – their power is tenuous.

That divide has existed in many, many instances – from GITMO, to Khaled Sheikh Mohammed being tried in new York, to Obamacare, to Card Check, to Cap and Trade to … (By the way, where DOES that Khaled Sheikh Mohammed trial stand?)

In an effort to get our society beyond the continuing racial divide, the American population voted for Barack Obama, looking for “Hope and Change.” The change he brought was not the change almost everyone sought – simply the absence of President Bush.

The American public is quick to replace a failing president, and they will replace this current one as well. He and his advisors see the inevitable, which will be preceded by such a loss of Democratic seats in the November election that President Obama is already a lame duck insofar as his agenda is concerned – so he might just as well vacation.

iPHONE Blues

If you are considering an iPHONE4, also consider waiting until it is carried by someone other than AT&T. The iPHONE is terrific, but the coverage from AT&T is awful. I have to go deep into my yard to use the phone, which makes it unusable in the current heat wave, or during the winter.

BUT, for only another $150 I can buy a booster from AT&T that will let me use my iPHONE in one room of my house, according to Mossberg in the Wall Street Journal — so long as I put it near a window, but not near my router, and hold my left arm behind….

Wonderful! I pay $130 a month to AT&T for a signal I can’t use in my home, and they want another $150 to give me a signal I can actually use only in my home office?

Here is a better idea. Get a Droid x from Verizon. I don’t know that Verizon has a better signal in my house, but it could not be worse. In theory I can take the iPHONE back but I am still stuck with the AT&T service for two years and it is not the iPHONE I hate, it is the signal from AT&T.

Grrrrr…..

When Does The Good News Start?

It seems California still has a substantial number of high school students who can’t pass their “Exit Exams” – even though the exams are aimed at 8^th grade math and 10^th grade English.

I wonder what the failure rate would be if the exams were designed for 12^th grade knowledge?

(No, I don’t really want to know. I think I really have enough bad news on my plate right now.)