The California Legislature Debates Cow Tails While the Rest of the State Burns
No wonder why California has massive amounts of debt – This has to be the biggest bunch of nit-wits I have seen yet!
Too bad it wasn’t these cow tales – mmmmm….
What Do We Have Here? Bank of America Will Accept California’s IOUs
What a surprise! Bank of America, now owned mostly by taxpayers will be accepting California’s IOUs.
California, one of the most solvent states is of course good for their debts/sarc.
This really should have been expected – a state-run bank accepting an insolvent, soon-to-be-bailed-out-state. Seems like monopoly money to me! This is similar to a false economy, where government interference and regulation make free markets anything but FREE/REAL.
Ponzi scheme has become my favorite catch phrase. It effectively seems as though California is issuing it’s own fake currency called IOUs, although it is already insolvent, to pay back at a later date – of which, will never happen. Bank of America is already suffering and got into trouble the last time it bought a toxic company and toxic assets, as did many others – but here it is doing the same thing again. Insanity = Doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.
Bank of America Corp. says it will accept warrants issued by California’s state government through July 10.
BofA says the state’s budget crisis prompted its decision.
“To support our customers, while giving the state legislature additional time to pass a budget, we will accept California state-registered warrants — or IOUs — from existing customers and clients,” Charlotte-based BofA (NYSE:BAC) says in a written statement.
It is always important to ask “Why” in these very odd and overwhelming times.
Why would Bank of America, who is already in financial trouble and dire straights, accept California IOUs, which it will probably never see? Why does this seem incredibly like the forced situation of Merrill Lynch? Is Bank of America doing this as a favor to the US government? Should I assume that Bank of America will get more bailout dollars if it accepts such a risky investment?
My biggest “beef” with this scenario: who is supporting Bank of America? The government! And where does the government get its money? The taxpayers! It’s not ok by me, that my money is being used to help bailout California due to its liberal/progressive policies that it enacted on the state.
“It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder.” ~ Frédéric Bastiat 1801-1850 “The Law”
Pay Your Children To Go To School
Today is yet another sad day for our public education program, our entitlement mentality in America, and our media. Tom Brokaw, a new member of the White House fellows board, is pushing the idea that paying children to attend school is brilliant.
If I were to take some of the statistics used in Glenn Beck’s latest book “Common Sense” I would see a very stark picture of our education system. Glenn states the following:
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- Only 34.6% of kids in Baltimore city’s public school system received a high school diploma in 2004;
- The Indianapolis public school system handed out diplomas to just 30.5% of students;
- Detroit’s public school system struggled to have 25% of its students qualify for a high school diploma;
- 45.2% of New York City public school kids graduated with a high school diploma.
What about our nation’s capital?
On-time high school graduation rates for the D.C. area are not improving according to an Education Week study released Tuesday.
[In actuality the On-Time High School Graduation Rate is Declining]
Fewer than 50 percent of high school students graduated within four years from D.C.’s public schools in 2006, according to the study. That’s down almost 9 percent from 2005, the Washington Post reported. The figures didn’t include public charter schools.
The true rate wasn’t provided for in the biased NBC article however, it still says a lot if liberal media outlets can’t spin the story to a better statistic of over 50%.
What about our education system as a whole when compared with those of other countries?
In a 2003 study conducted by UNICEF that took the averages from five different international education studies, the researchers ranked the United States No. 18 out of 24 nations in terms of the relative effectiveness of its educational system.
So excuse me if I’m just a tad skeptical about the latest idea coming out of Washington, D.C.; the incentive to pay children to go to school. A couple months ago we were paying young women to avoid pregnancy and now we are planning on paying children to get an education!
A July 1 “NBC Nightly News” segment detailed a new use of tax payer dollars in one of the worst performing, financially struggling school systems in the country – the Washington, D.C. public school system. They are paying school children with taxpayer funds, part of a social experiment to improve school participation at the middle school level.
“Keeping the exuberant sixth graders of Shaw Middle School at Garnet-Patterson in line on a sunny Friday is a challenge for principal Brian Betts,” former “Nightly News” anchor-turned-correspondent Tom Brokaw explained. “But this is not an assembly, it’s payday. It’s called Capital Gains – paying students for good grades, behavior and attendance, part of the massive restructuring of the D.C. schools by a 38-year-old Korean-American woman, who as chancellor, wants to transform what is by many measures the worst-performing public school system in the U.S.”
Brokaw credited Washington, D.C. Public School Chancellor Michelle Rhee for being instrumental in making this program a reality. He explained the Capital Gains program was the invention of a Harvard think tank that came with a $1.35-million price tag for taxpayers.
I am very disappointed that this idea was hatched by Michelle Rhee who, beforehand was doing an excellent job at changing the DC public school system. She has taken tenure away from teachers, fired others, and has increased salaries among other measures I personally agree with. However, this idea that America should pay children for an education is despicable and will only cause worse standards among our graduating youth.
My thought on paying children is very similar to the concept of the children’s book “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.” When you give the mouse a cookie, he continues to stick around asking for more and more. He got away with the cookie, so why not ask for more goodies and entitlements until the people doling out the cookies and additional perks are broke, tired, and annoyed? This is the enabling concept. If children do not learn maybe we should be looking at the teachers, the parents, or the curriculum! Why should we give incentives for children to just sit in a classroom? What happens when that incentive is gone and a college that admits them does not continue handing out “cookies?” My guess: they will be left with the mentality of a drug addict. Students will now be addicted to money and benefits and will become lazy and complacent if they do not receive their immediate gratification or, in this incident, cash. They will become spoiled and even more uneducated.
What good does paying a child to attend school do, if the curriculum and the teaching is so incredibly horrid? Teachers are not even giving an accurate representation of American history let alone capable of making children smarter via remuneration. What happened to the days when it was fun to go to school? When teachers were interesting and engaging? Where free thought and opinion was allowed and not dissuaded? If we cannot teach our youth and encourage their brains, imagination, dreams, and knowledge to grow – then what good will that really do us in the end?
Meanwhile India, China, Russia, and various other countries are way ahead of us on the learning curve. Their children are engineers, scientists, doctors, and the like. America worries too much about feelings and emotions, and pushing their political agendas on students rather than caring about truth, facts, logic, and wisdom.
I was fortunate to have teachers who believed in free thought and not indoctrination. I was lucky enough to look forward to school, taking electives that fired my synapses, like English Sarcasm 101 (no joke); Graphic Arts, Call of the Wild [an English course where you went camping, dissected poetry/short stories, and studied human nature], etc. I wasn’t stuck in a government mandated curriculum that didn’t engage my brain or hindered my thoughts to the point where I could only think inside a small box. Unfortunately, that same public school that I attended has changed for the worse (and that was since 1999).
As they say when students receive poor grades as a whole – it’s more a sign of the teacher than those being taught. I could say the same regarding graduation and attendance rates – it’s more a sign of the government agenda than those being taught.
Democrat Wives Have Their Hands in the Cookie Jar
William Jefferson, who was found with cash bribes in his freezer and was convicted of 16 counts of corruption on June 4, 2007 by a federal grand jury, is currently awaiting trial in Virginia after losing re-election.
It would come as no surprise that a wife, living with a man hording cash in his freezer and taking bribes left and right, would be in the dark about her husband’s shady activities.
Investigators had the same sentiments and upon further invesigtations found that she did in fact play a part in Jefferson’s scandals.
A firm owned by the wife of former U.S. Rep. William Jefferson, D-La., earned thousands of dollars but incurred no business expenses, an accountant said.
Jack Swetland, a New Orleans accountant who had worked with the Jeffersons since 1982, testified Monday at William Jefferson’s bribery and fraud trial in Alexandria, Va., The (New Orleans) Times-Picayune reported Tuesday.
Prosecutors allege Andrea Jefferson’s ANJ consulting firm was a shell company that accepted payments from companies who had sought William Jefferson’s help in brokering deals in West Africa.
John Conyers, head of the House Judiciary Committee, is having some family troubles. His wife pleaded guilty to corruption and bribery charges last week. We reported on the allegations earlier – here.
Monica Conyers, the wife of the powerful chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., pleaded guilty to one count of bribery in a federal court in Detroit, this morning.
According to court documents, in late 2007, Mrs. Conyers, president pro tem of the Detroit City Council, twice accepted envelopes filled with cash, once in the parking lot of a Detroit McDonalds.
Mrs. Conyers faces up to 5 year in prison, three years supervised release and/or a $250,000 fine. Calls to an attorney for Mrs. Conyers were not immediately returned.
Wouldn’t you think that John Conyers, who recently said he would not investigate the corrupt activities of ACORN, due to the powers that be (which were him), should step down? If a man’s wife is facing the possibility of up to 5 years in prison and has had to resign from the Detroit City Council, I do not believe that he should be anywhere near a Judiciary Committee.
The corruption is just astounding. Big Government truly does breed Big Corruption!
