PRESIDENTIAL SEX AIDE

A noted purveyor of words asked, "What about a president taking advantage of a gargantuan power imbalance with a 22-year-old intern?"

That's an interesting question, Maureen. Does you mean that Presidents may only have sex with each other? Does the law mandate (sexist!) that the sex partner can only be a president, or can they get it on with Kings and Queens too? What if one partner is a Prime Minister? Do they have to lead nuclear armed countries, or is the title and ability to do massive harm all that is needful?

Salon describes this as perfectly natural resting bitch face

Who knew it was so hard to be president?

MY COIN OBSERVATION

Don't you find it interesting that two different people could look at exactly the same coin and give two utterly different descriptions of the coin they see? I was over reading the blog post tonight written by an extremely bitter man. In some ways he was once a peer of mine.

I can see the villainy of people in government, of institutions that knowingly and without a care break the laws of this country but I don't recall ever describing them using hateful, wrathful language and wishing that the would die. I can look at people like George Bush and find in him a man who seriously tried to do good and accomplish things that the country could be proud of. I never saw him as stupid or venal or as a smug elitist. Other hate that man beyond reason. I contrast that with Obama and I find I don't see him or anybody in his cabinet in the same light.

I've kind of given up on the ruling class. Electing a non-conservative republican is the same thing as electing a slightly less venal democrat. I remember the California recall that got rid of Governor Davis because his spending was wildly out of control and so the state  elected Arnold who ended up totally captured by the legislature and actually ended up spending more than Davis had proposed. It was a sham. Now, California doesn't have any republican legislators and so they fall heir to a new $100 billion dollar high speed chain that won't do either of the three things that were promised when they got the seed money from Obama's shovel ready jobs scam. It won't be high speed, it won't run from LA to San Francisco and it will never be finished. California has to find another $97 billion minimum and that's just the latest estimate.

I understand the freeloaders and the grifters voting for crooks and thieves who buy their votes but I don't understand the supposedly smart, educated, hard-working academics and liberals who keep voting money away that does little but buy votes and line the pockets of people like the Clinton's, the Reids, all those lifelong public servants that retire with tens of millions of dollars in the bank and pensions far larger than any private company employee can ever dream of.

I remember running across an interesting article that laid out the pensions being paid to the California public servants. It's shocking. When you live in a major urban area next to what was once the richest city in America and they cannot fix potholes and take months to grade a collapsing road, only to promptly did it back up to fix a water main, its the schools, the parks, the infrastructure that is taking the beating that will only get worse.

How could anyone, an American, vote to shovel trillions of dollars of debt onto their kids, grandkids and great grandkids. Have they no shame?

HOW IRRITATING IS THIS

Ripped from American Enterprise.

Sometimes I give in to an impulse and believe that teachers are actually not doing their jobs. The kids I see going to school across the street every day are filled with enthusiasm and joy of life. I can see it in them every single day. I don't see miserable muppets getting off the busses and heading into the school in the morning and I don't see them coming out of the school in the afternoon. What I see are kids who are glad to be there, with their friends.

Hormones and puberty happen in middle school which is further down the road but still on the same block. Is that where the teachers start to file off the desire for knowledge that the little children have? I think by the time they reach high school it is way too late to engage them again with a desire to learn.

What the hell happens to these kids between 6th and 8th grade just down the road? It does not take Aristotle to teach young children the basic essentials of making a huge success in life by educating themselves with the help of able teachers and rafts of books.

Public education in this country is broken.

ELEGANT TURN OF PHRASE OR DEEP TRUTH

From The American Thinker, the last paragraph.

One result of this K-12 conspiracy is that the least appropriate people, obsessed with the least helpful ideas, educationally speaking, migrated to education.  These were people who valued education not for its own sake, but for social schemes they had in mind.  Whether a kid can read, do arithmetic, or knows very much is not a primary concern for these people.

The people who tinker with education always talk about making changes that will take effect and make things better in a mere five or six years. It's hard to take such people seriously. The process they are messing about with is the oldest respectable profession. Every possible kind of instruction has been tried in the past. Teaching is not rocket science, but it leads to rocket science.  Teaching has moved from clay tablets to slates to paper and computers. Along the way it has incorporated extraneous teaching aids such as film, televisions and even computers.

It was kind of interesting to see that teachers understand that up until third grade the effort is on teaching children to read and after that the effort is to get them to learn by reading.

UNIONS: DETROITING FAST FOOD FOR YOU

I don't eat the stuff anymore but I still don't think that the option should be forever foreclosed by the same idiots and imbeciles that brought us Detroit and most of the cities in doomed California.  Seriously, a basic firefighter in LA makes $188,000 per year and can expect to spend 3.2 years sitting outside an Emergency Room with a buddy, tying up an ambulance that cannot respond to other 911 calls because Union.

Entry Level Jobs are for Kids! Not people raising kids.