Wow… I really thought that getting smacked with such a big Clue Stick would make a difference.
Guess not.
Yeah, well, I think most people would put the blame for this one on Mayor Murphy where it belongs.
Oh, don’t get me started on Murphy. The only thing that’s kept me from Pitting him is most people here would wonder, “Who’s he?” Only one of the stupidest, most illogical politicians in the country. :rolleyes:
CJ
I’m a dead, atheist soldier who joined up to fight in a war based on a lie because I couldn’t find any other job in the U.S. and I desperately needed affordable healthcare. The child I left behind (who is alive because my reproductive rights were trampled on) is saddled with a huge deficit. And I’m pissed. And I vote.
:rolleyes:
Tell me about it. I go out there at least twice a year, and I try to make it out there more often if possible. Every time I do, I read the Post-Gazette and every time I read it I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. I usually laugh because the people are getting exactly what they asked for, but I’m secretly crying because my family lives under the direction of that crank.
Nixon never actively attempted to push through legislation to curtail the freedom of American citizens, nor did he ever attempt to end-run or alter the Constitution to do so.
“My wife and I don’t break the law so I could care less what the gov’t wants to know.” Pffft. If the Prez gets his way, he’ll be able to lock you both away as long as he likes, for any reason or no reason, whether you broke the law or not.
But I seem to recall there was a topic here – how has the Bush Administration changed my life, personally?
Well… I teach.
(This is a risky admission – I can already hear certain gears turning out there, “Oh, he’s a bleeding heart liberal educator, and can safely be jeered and ignored!” Well, bullshit. I am a conservative, in that I believe in good fiscal sense and keeping the government out of everyone’s goddamn face, Iraqis included. My politics are exactly what I say they are. I’m still trying to figure Bush’s out. He’s not a conservative, whatever he is.)
I teach.
Bush started his run for the White House by getting elected Governor of Texas. He began screwing things up as soon as he got in, because one of his campaign planks involved education reform. Gonna fix all those broken things about public education.
Exactly what was broken about public education is unclear. Based on what I’ve seen of his political tactics, he planned on using this particular scarecrow all the way through his first term, until 9/11 called for a change of plans.
He wasn’t the first to use this, either – Texas governor Mark White made an absolute circus of his campaign in 1982 with the “no pass, no play” legislation he introduced. He was so wild about that that in several press conferences, when reporters asked him about other aspects of his campaign, he replied as if the question had been “Gee, Mark, tell us more about No Pass, No Play.” I was there, you see. It was the beginning of my education into politics.
If you don’t feel like tackling real issues, make one up. Education is a peachy target. I’ve often wondered what would happen if politicians chose some other branch of the government to be their whipping boy… “Bad, bad IRS! We must punish the IRS! We must cut their funding and legislate rules forcing them to do their jobs better! Naughty, lazy IRS agents must increase their workload, without a corresponding loss of efficiency!”
This has led to a web of government regulation that teachers must navigate in order to get their credentials, and must continue to navigate yearly in order to KEEP those credentials – certification is no longer permanent. I get to spend my summers attending workshops, often at my own expense, in order to prove I’ve continued my education and kept up with all the new forms of mathematics and history that have developed since I graduated college.
Naturally, it burns my ass a bit every time someone who knows nothing about education simply assumes I get a three-month paid vacation. I don’t. It ain’t paid, and it ain’t a vacation.
But Bush added to this. He came up with this peachy sound-bite of a program called No Child Left Behind.
This amazing legislation is designed to make sure that all children in America meet a given academic standard by a certain point in our future.
The President has made it illegal for your children to be stupid.
Or lazy.
Or noncompliant.
And if your children violate those laws, best of all, YOU don’t pay the price. Nor do your children.
The public education system does. If a given school fails to meet the criteria set in place by this program, they pay a variety of penalties, ranging from having their funding cut to actually having the state take the school over, fire anyone or everyone, and rebuild from the ground up.
“But what’s wrong with that?” some meathead will ask. “It gives the schools incentive to excel.”
Well, there are two reasons. One, some of the standards range from “unrealistic” to “insane.” One criteria demands that during testing, attendance must be greater than 95%. If this doesn’t happen, the school is out of compliance.
This has led to some inner-city schools offering movie tickets, boomboxes, CDs, and other prizes to children to get them to SHOW THE HELL UP during the dates in question! Yeah, I’m sure that’s what public education is all about…
What else? Oh, yeah, no more than five percent of your kids can be labeled “Special Ed.” This means that if more than five percent of your kids couldn’t pass the test if you held them at gunpoint… well… tough bananas, folks. You’re out of compliance, despite the fact you are required by law to accept these children and try to teach them something, regardless of any disabilities or learning problems they may have.
Oh, and let’s not forget that No Child Left Behind offered much in the way of requirements… and not one red cent to help MEET these requirements. Guess what, folks? Your tax dollars are not being spent on educating your children. They are being spent on complying with federal regulations, some of which may benefit your children, and some of which don’t. Many schools don’t even bother teaching math, science, English, and so on. They teach what’s going to be on the tests. Gee, hope those tests are actually efficient barometers of the skills they’re going to need in real life… because if those tests aren’t, your children are getting screwed royally. And you’re paying for it.
It’s reached a point in Texas where more than half the teachers entering the field quit and find a new career within five years of graduating college. “Those who can’t do, teach?” Yeah, well, maybe so. Therefore, only the desperate and wildly unqualified to do much of anything are now teaching your children. Anyone else who could do so is in the process of getting the hell out of a violently screwed up, underpaid, and utterly thankless line of work.
Except, of course, those dedicated professionals who really feel that the education of the young is a matter of importance… who persevere, despite the ever-increasing governmental crapola, because of their dedication to the profession, and to your children.
But, of course, these people don’t exist. If they did, we wouldn’t need No Child Left Behind laws, now, would we?
I am a public school teacher, and I’ve definitely seen major changes in my daily life that are the result of Bush. My students are spending more time testing than ever before, and between the actual time giving the various tests and the time spent preparing for them, I’m losing enormous amounts of classroom time that should be used to … you know… teach them stuff.
The funding situation is also getting pretty serious. Those tests- and lots of other requirements that the students and parents don’t see much of- cost a lot of money. The chairs in my classroom are falling apart, I don’t have an eraser for my whiteboard, and my school is laying off the school nurse and cutting the librarian to half a day.
So, yes, while Bush may not be Satan, he has made my life, and the lives of my colleagues, worse. Enormous numbers of teachers give up, quit, and go to other fields. At least it helps my job security- people don’t want to be teachers, so even if I mess up they can’t really afford to fire me for fear of getting someone worse.
You know, I gotta say, I am really surprised. When I saw the title of this, I thought “Well, here’s a natural-born shitstorm, the fur will fly, I’m really above this sort of thing, but I’ll just have a little peek…”
To find cogent, rational statements reflecting different aspects of the same dilemma.
I fear for myself, of course, I don’t want to spend my last minute on this Earth face down in the soup at the Salvation Army. I fear for my beloved country, of course. But worse, what hope can we offer our children? “Go into computers, lad, and you’ll make a dandy living.” Nope. “Be a teacher, its a worthy occupation, not enriching, but stable and respected.” Nope. I want to give good advice, and there isn’t any. What should I suggest next? Typewriter repair?
It seems likely that soldiering will be the only “growth industry”. Dear God, what does that say about us?
Funny how you like what you’re reading, elucidator, yet you steadfastly refuse to acknowledge that this board is left-leaning. This thread is a who’s who of your compatriots.
Other than a few meek protests like mine that consider such a comparison absurd, not only have the respondents to this thread toed the Bush=Nazi/Fascist/Psycho line, but they’ve refused to answer the question as posed and berated the OP for only thinking about himself.
This board not liberal leaning? Indeed. :rolleyes:
so we’re getting lambasted for not pointing out the obvious now?
Say what?
You’re not being lambasted at all. There was no vitriol. I’m simply pointing out something that you are unwilling to recognize and do everything you can to deny.
At worst it was a rebuke, and a mild one at that.
Waaah Waaah. This board is right wing as fuck from my perspective.
Poor little put upon GOP’ers. All these nasty people hating your lying war mongering public scaring wanker of a leader and his admin. Awwww.
Where’s Ilsa_lund’s fountain of :rolleyes: when you need it?
Are you seriously telling us that all you care about is yourself? You don’t care about how Dubya has affected the lives of the people in Choie’s post? You don’t care that many families spent Christmas without their sons and daughters and many more will never see their sons and daughters again because Bush sent them to die in an illegal war? You don’t care that the lives of those working in the WTC, not to mention the many police and firemen who died trying to save them, could have been spared if Bush hadn’t ignored the Clinton administration’s warnings?
Bush may not have affected you directly, but if you don’t feel even one iota of grief and sorrow for the people that this pathetic excuse for a leader’s actions have affected, you are cold, greedy and selfish, not to mention unpatriotic.
That’s right, unpatriotic. The issues are not about YOU. They are not about any one person on this board. They are not about one single voter. They are about everyone living in the United States and what is best for them and the country, and in fact, for the world as a whole. After his four years of driving the country (a) into the hate list of a larger proportion of the world than before, and (b) down the toilet, if you think George W. Bush is what’s best for America and it’s people, you are clearly unaware of what’s happening around you.
duffer,
I’m just curious. Do you make a habit of asking questions and then ignoring all responses that don’t further your own hypothesis?
Your kind of “if it doesn’t affect me directly, it doesn’t matter” logic is not only dangerous to this country, but dangerous to the world.
By your logic, unless someone in your immidiate family (I’m assuming those within your immidiate family count as affecting you, personally) dies in a war you don’t believe in, you’ve got no cause to protest?
Scary logic, that.
Bush has affected my life in a couple of ways; the whole environment issue has been set back, say, five year, maybe longer by the time we get over the ‘disharmony’ and get Kyoto back on track. If we get it on track.
Also, I’m not visiting the US until they stop fingerprinting all visitors – okay, it doesn’t affect me until later this year but I’m not being fingerprinted unless I’ve been convicted of something. By anyone. And least of all by a US Administration trying to sell this particularly gross infringements of my human rights on some anti-terrorism fake pretext - like fingerprinting people would have stopped 9/11 happening.
And I think we all pretty well understand how Bush likes his pretexts.
The irony is, I suppose, I’m thinking of Cuba as so many go there now and love the experience.
The other thing several people around me mention is that they now can’t deal with American accents on the phone, on the radio, on their teevee’s; it’s like Bush and his cronies have associated the accent with a particular kind of bullying/deceit/lying/manipulation . . it’s kind of irrational, but people are mentioning the accent thing more and more . . .
Dammit, I think the hamsters chewed off the last paragraph of my post:
To answer the second part of the OP, I don’t think Bush is comparable to the Nazis. The Nazis were evil and reasonably intelligent (Neutral/Lawful Evil in D&D terms). Bush is paranoid and stupid (Chaotic Neutral). That’s a much more dangerous combination if you ask me.
I can’t vote in your election, but since you asked …
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I never, ever want to go within twenty miles of the US border, because I am frightened (with good reason) of the border guards, who have an exaggerated sense of self-importance, minimal understanding of human sensitivity, and permission to treat people very, very badly. I would be worried that they would not let my husband cross over, or at the very least subject him to hours of intensive and humiliating interrogation. Neither of us particularly wants to be put in such a situation.
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I have an Arabic friend whose life has been fucked up because of said border policies. He couldn’t get a student visa, despite the best efforts of Harvard U who really wanted him there. He went back to the Middle East and disappeared. (Oh, sorry, he’s not duffer so his interests are irrelevant.)
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Their rabid, seething, dishonest pro-life nature offends the soul of my being. I get physically nauseous when I even think about it. I blame them for this discomfort and interruption to my gastric cycle. (Actually, just about anything that they say these days gives me this discomfort.)
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The whole war in Iraq thing was a real-time, full-colour object lesson in how easily electorates are duped by unscrupulous and self-interested leaders. (I kept thinking “Oh, they can’t possibly buy this …,” and each time I was disappointed !) This is knowledge I would much rather have done without.
I am, however, much better off for having read choie’s post, which I may never have done if not for Mr Bush. applause
Airman Doors
I did? I really don’t recall “steadfastly denying” that this Board has become “left leaning”. And I hear that quite often, from friend Scylla, for instance, and I answer it the same way every time.
How did that happen?
How did a discussion forum devoted to facts and cites, with strict protocols on rhetoric, logic, and proof, get to be “left-leaning”? Conspiracy? Treachery? Chicanery?
By what underhanded methods did we “lefties” reach our desired goal? We follow the same rules, do we not? By what mechanism was this end achieved? If, as you seem to imply, any reasonable person, examining the evidence and the record, could not come to the conclusions the poor ol’ dim-witted E. has come to, how is it that I have such illustrious company?
So how’d we do it, Dave? Hmmmm? How?
By definition, this board has to be right leaning because it has more Americans than another nationality - by a very large measure the US is more right-wing than any other democracy/first world country with good Internet access in the English language.
So, how can it possibly be other than right-leaning ?
Maybe someone wants to argue the Internet and/or SDMB demographic is somehow different from general society ?
cowgirl – I know what you mean, it’s also a little weird to go there and see so many people in a uniform of one kind or another . . .
Werewolf of London, old badger-shagger, would you amplify on that? Do you mean from a Yurpeen perspective it seems that there are more uniforms on American streets?