Right Wing Nation

The hickory has burned down. Time to throw on the ribeye!

Penn and Teller are taking on the ADA. They’ll get some hate mail on this one.

I’m assuming you skipped the debate. I was holding my head in my hands through half of it, and not because of anything the candidates said. It was the breathtakingly stupid questions–both from KosKidz (emailed in) and that Idiot of All Idiots, Chris Matthews. Here are a few:

• Asked of Romney, “What do you dislike most about America?”
• For Rudy, “Bradley Winter of New York would like to know if there’s anything you learned, or regret, during your time as Mayor in your dealings with the African-American community?”
• Matthews asked Gilmore, “Is Karl Rove your friend?”
• Matthews asked all the candidates, “Would it be good for America to have Bill Clinton back living in the White House?”

And that’s what happens when you ask a moron to moderate and take idiotic questions from “the public.”

Ja, das ist eine Schnitzelbank!

A week or so ago we had the shocking revelation that education software doesn’t help. Now we learn that giving students laptops doesn’t help, either:

The students at Liverpool High have used their school-issued laptops to exchange answers on tests, download pornography and hack into local businesses. When the school tightened its network security, a 10th grader not only found a way around it but also posted step-by-step instructions on the Web for others to follow (which they did).

Scores of the leased laptops break down each month, and every other morning, when the entire school has study hall, the network inevitably freezes because of the sheer number of students roaming the Internet instead of getting help from teachers.

So the Liverpool Central School District, just outside Syracuse, has decided to phase out laptops starting this fall, joining a handful of other schools around the country that adopted one-to-one computing programs and are now abandoning them as educationally empty — and worse.

Many of these districts had sought to prepare their students for a technology-driven world and close the so-called digital divide between students who had computers at home and those who did not.

“After seven years, there was literally no evidence it had any impact on student achievement — none,” said Mark Lawson, the school board president here in Liverpool, one of the first districts in New York State to experiment with putting technology directly into students’ hands. “The teachers were telling us when there’s a one-to-one relationship between the student and the laptop, the box gets in the way. It’s a distraction to the educational process.”

It’s this part I’d like to focus on:

The students at Liverpool High have used their school-issued laptops to exchange answers on tests, download pornography

You don’t say! Really? And you expected them to do . . . what, exactly, with those laptops? Not to be cliché, but if I had a dollar for every time I caught a student on a porn site in class, I’d own my own island in the Caribbean. Then Ann Althouse says:

I don’t know if laptops make students dumber, but they obviously make adminstrators dumber.

It’s a great line, but it’s not just, or even primarily, administrators. It’s everybody in education (and politics) who apparently lacks the common-sense gene.

Step back, get in touch with your inner grandfather, and ask yourself these questions:

• Why would “educational software” improve learning?
• Why would giving kids laptops improve learning?

And if you did get in touch with your inner grandfather, your answers were:

• No reason at all.
• No reason at all.

And you likely asked yourself:

• What ninny thought “educational software” or giving students laptops would have any effect on learning?
• How do you keep the kids from abusing the laptops?

See? It’s not hard. What’s unacceptable is that we have people stupid enough not to figure it out beforehand in charge of education, and millions of dollars were wasted, not only on the pointless technology, but the studies demonstrating the obvious.

Get in touch with your inner grandfather. It works every time.

One of the advantages of living in what I call a Matalin-Carville household is that you know what the Democrats are doing it when they’re doing it, instead of finding out when it’s too late. Long before the last election, I knew there was likely to be a bloodbath, only because the phone rang off the hook for months before the election, and all of the calls were from Democrats who wanted money for their candidates. In the six months before the last election, we received hundreds of calls, and perhaps five (at the most) were from Republicans.

Guess what? It’s happening again. The phone is ringing off the hook, and every call is from the Democrats. I’ve had one call from the Republicans (our primary is coming up in less than two weeks) for a judicial candidate. That’s it.

The problem, both leading up to the last election and from what I’ve seen so far now, is the Ostrich Syndrome. Nearly everybody in the dextrosphere (and apparently, the GOP) has his head buried in the sand, exactly like everybody did leading up to the last election. Republicans up for re-election didn’t take it seriously until it was too late. Ed Rendell started campaigning months before Lynn Swann, and the Democrats were working their butts off to elect Casey long before Santorum started campaigning. And it has started all over again.

The Ostrich Syndrome plays out in two major ways right now. First, while we obsess over the Presidential nomination and practically ignore Congressional seats, Democrats aren’t calling and calling and calling for their Presidential candidates. They’re calling for Congressional candidates. And you know why? Because they’ve got sense, and we don’t.

I’m going to say this slowly and clearly. It doesn’t make a damned bit of difference how the Presidential candidate feels about abortion, because the President has no power to make law. All of this arguing over conservative litmus tests is sheer idiocy. That’s right. Idiocy. The President’s stances on national defense, the military, foreign policy, and judicial appointments are crucial, because these are all part of Executive powers, while abortion is not.

Given the candidates who are (so far) running, I don’t give a damn who gets the Presidential nomination. On the relevant issues, all of them are on pretty much the same page. There are candidates I like better than others, but whoever is nominated will get my vote.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t discuss or debate Presidential candidates. I am saying we shouldn’t do so as we ignore Congressional races. If anything, we should place a higher priority on Congressional races, because Congress has a greater potential to affect the nation.

Let me wake you up and tell you what the Democrats have been doing for months now. They’re raising money for Congressional candidates. We got the first of many calls for Al Franken only weeks after the last election. The Democrats have targeted Mitch McConnell, and make no mistake, unless the Republicans start working as hard as the Democrats, he will go down. And not just Mitch. If people don’t take their heads out of the sand, we’re going to get a larger Democrat majority in Congress on top of a Democrat in the White House.

Hillary creeps me out as much as anyone, but given the choice of a razor-thin Democrat majority or a Republican Congress and Hillary on one hand or a larger Democrat majority Congress and Hillary–or even one of the Republicans–on the other, I’ll take the former. Hillary (or Obama or whoever) can’t do much damage without enough Democrats in Congress to render us powerless, and a Republican White House with a Democrat-controlled Congress can’t do much. No matter who is in the White House, a strong Democrat majority in Congress can do a great deal of damage–and they will.

As ironic as it may seem, we’re living in a fantasy land and the Democrats are dealing with reality. While we waste time bickering about which Presidential candidate is the
“true conservative,” the Democrats are getting their Congressional candidates set up to win seats. Sadly, I imagine we’ll continue to piss and moan and whine and fight about Presidential candidates, not to mention issues that were dead when they first came up, like immigration and a gay marriage amendment, and ask ourselves what happened when we end up with a large Democrat majority Congress and a Democrat White House next November.

And I will say I told you so.

I kind of accidentally stumbled upon my high school website (I didn’t know one existed). All of the senior pictures of all alumni from 1958 on are posted online, so I’m not giving out the URL. However, I noticed a couple of things that are interesting. I note that what we called shop is now “Building Trades,” and what we called home ec is now “Family & Consumer Sciences/Science,” so I guess even a very rural, very conservative area isn’t completely immune from trends. The FFA (Future Farmers of America) and FCA (Fellowship of Christian Athletes) are still going strong, but there’s no FHA listed (Future Homemakers of America–is that too politically incorrect, I wonder?)

Speaking of politically incorrect, somebody had better call the ACLU. The FCA site–ON the state server and the SAME domain as the PUBLIC high school site, and linked FROM the PUBLIC high school site says:

For more than 46 years, FCA has been focused on one purpose . . .
“Present to athletes and coaches, and all whom they influence, the challenge and adventure of receiving Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord, serving Him in their relationships and in the fellowship of the church.”

Statement of Faith
FCA -

1. We believe the Bible to be the inspired, the only infallible, authoritative Word of God.
2. We believe that there is only one God, eternally existent in three persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
3. We believe in the deity of Christ, in His virgin birth, in His sinless life, in His miracles, in His vicarious and atoning death through His shed blood, in His bodily resurrection, in His ascension to the right hand of the Father, and in His personal return in power and glory.
4. We believe that for the salvation of lost and sinful men (women) regeneration by the Holy Spirit is absolutely essential.
5. We believe in the present ministry of the Holy Spirit, by whose indwelling the Christian is enabled to live a godly life.
6. We believe in the resurrection of both the saved and the lost, they that are saved unto the resurrection of life and they that are lost unto the resurrection of damnation.
7. We believe in the spiritual unity of believers in our Lord Jesus Christ.

Wow. Don’t they know that’s not culturally sensitive? Don’t they know that things like that are imposing their religious beliefs on others? Don’t they know that schools get sued for things like that? Do you suppose they still put up a creche downtown over Christmas, or that the Ten Commandments and Beatitudes are still on prominent display in the school hallway?

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