Feinstein live and uncensored. Its about ALL guns..not just so called assault rifles.



Gun Community.

THIS IS YOUR ENEMY.  Live and uncensored.  Let them win on this and the nose will be under the tent and they'll come back for all weapons.

She said "Mr and Mrs America turn them all in"...

This bitch can go munch on donkey dick.  It ain't happening.  I didn't want this to turn nasty.  I wanted cooler heads to prevail and hoped that this fight could be avoided.

Not now.  Lets just get it started so we can get it done. You can't negotiate with terrorist and the anti-gun people are the enemy.

To End a Good Year

2012 is almost gone! I hope you all have had a wonderful year. Mine's sure been full! I'm not planning any resolutions per say but I do have some goals for myself in 2013!

Edwardain Sewing


I'm so excited to be able to go to Costume College again in 2013 and I need new things to wear! I've opted to start more Edwardian sewing and hopefully I'll be able to create some lovely dresses to wear! Right now I'm currently in love with 1914-1919 with 1916 being my favorite.

Stash Busting

I wish my stash was this organized!

Having my stash catalogued has helped me really get down to stash busting but there is more to do. I've got quite a few exciting projects planned already using stash fabrics. I'm also wanting to "stash bust" my patterns because I have quite a few that haven't been used! I've created a pinterest board of patterns that are on my to do list for next year. I'll be keeping it up dated and hopefully, I'll get some of those moved over to a finished projects board!

What are you planning for 2013?

Kids Pay For Christie's Incompetence

Like so many other denizens of the Garden State, it makes me nuts to watch Governor Chris Christie touted as a fearless leader and maker of tough decisions in the national press. Because the man is really, really bad at his job:
A report submitted this month by the state Department of Education to the Legislature is likely to set the stage for another school-funding debate next year. For many local districts, the outlook is not good. 
The Educational Adequacy Report repeats many of the proposals suggested last year by Education Commissioner Chris Cerf. If accepted by the Legislature, they would reduce extra funding districts receive for low-income, bilingual and special-education students. 
Advocates for those students already are gearing up to lobby the Legislature in January to reject the report. Lawmakers have 90 days to make a decision, or the proposals take effect. 
The report also again recommends eliminating so-called adjustment aid over five years, which would reduce aid to many districts in Atlantic, Cape May, Cumberland and Ocean counties. According to state data, adjustment aid for 2012-13 totaled $36 million in Vineland, almost $15 million in Pleasantville, nearly $14 million in Millville, $8 million in Atlantic City and $6.5 million in Lower Cape May Regional. [emphasis mine]
For the last three years, New Jersey has been on a rollercoaster ride when it comes to school financing. After immediately cutting taxes on the rich (yes, he did, stop trying to blame Corzine), Christie started his term by next promising to limit cuts in school aid to districts; he then proceeded to hack and slash at school budgets all across the state, including the suburban towns where his political base sends their kids to school.

Those suburbanites got in an uproar about cuts to favored programs in their beloved schools. And the courts ruled that cuts to the cities violated New Jersey's legal obligation to provide adequate funding to urban schools. So Christie had no choice but to reverse course and start funding schools again. Where did he get the money?

Give the man credit: he pulled the slickest trick you could possibly imagine. In the name of both "fiscal responsibility" and "bipartisanship," he got together with conservative Democrats and passed a public employee pension and benefits bill that allowed him to delay making a full payment to New Jersey's already woefully underfunded pensions for seven years. He ran around the state claiming he was the governor who was finally telling the truth to greedy public employees; what he really did was put off the state's legal obligations for another day.

The local punditocracy, however, loved it. And not just because Christie's bill also increased pension payments for teacher and cops, and froze benefits for current retirees; no, what gave the local wags a special thrill was the idea that public employee unions had suffered a defeat. Nothing is more important to the local New Jersey op-ed writer than humiliating unions, especially the teachers union. The plan was obviously fiscally irresponsible and a blatant broken promise on Christie's part, but no matter: it was screwing the NJEA, and that's all that counts.

Well, now Christie has to deal with the mess he made:

New Jersey’s pension contribution may consume almost one-fifth of its annual budget by 2018 under a law enacted by Republican Governor Chris Christie, according to a group led by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker and Richard Ravitch, the former New York lieutenant governor.

The contribution must rise by about $4.5 billion over the next five years, from $1.03 billion in 2013, to comply with the 2010 law, the State Budget Crisis Task Force said in a report. A $5.5 billion payment equals two-thirds of the school aid in Christie’s spending plan for the year that began July 1. [emphasis mine]
Forget 2018; how's Christie going to get enough money to make the payment in 2014? The payments are based on a ridiculous rate of return on current investments of 8.25%; there's no way that's going to happen. Worse, Christie has a bad habit of way overestimating tax revenue, and then calling more conservative projections "blatantly political."

So he's painted himself into a corner: revenues are down, pension payments are looming, he's promised not to raise taxes on the wealthy, growth in the state is anemic, his political base doesn't want him touching their schools, he's said conservative revenue projections are politically motivated, and he's already screwed over public employees once. What choices are left?

Well, the first thing to remember is this: Chris Christie studied at the feet of the master:



Whenever George W. Bush had to confront his horrible economic and fiscal record, he pulled out 9-11, the Iraq War, or Katrina as his excuse. Luckily for Christie, he had a big natural disaster plop right down in his lap this past fall:

Governor Chris Christie said he’s evaluating whether to cut New Jersey’s budget for the current fiscal year, while the state reported revenue trailed targets by 11 percent last month, citing the effect of Superstorm Sandy.

Receipts fell short of projections by $183.7 million in November, as Sandy’s floods and coastal destruction deterred shoppers and gamblers. Income-tax collections missed targets by 11 percent, the Treasury Department said in a statement. By Nov. 30, fiscal 2013 revenue was $451.2 million, or 5.6 percent, lower than estimated in the $31.7 billion budget.

Before the November revenue report, Christie, a 50-year-old Republican in his first term, said tax collections may rebound in a few months as Sandy rebuilding continues. Such an increase may offset the need for spending cuts, he told reporters in Newark, the state’s biggest city.

“After Sandy, we very well may need to; we’re evaluating” possible budget cuts, Christie said. “If we need to, we will. Our state was essentially closed for the month of November.”
What a load of crap. First of all, Christie had an obligation to prepare for a natural disaster like Sandy and the fiscal chaos that would ensue - he didn't:
The state’s economic activity ground to a halt in the storm’s aftermath. As a result, revenue streams like sales, income, gas and casino taxes are expected to dip, placing additional stress on an already strained budget. Revenue grew modestly in the first three months of the fiscal year that began in July, but is still $175 million, or 4 percent, less than Christie projected. Revenue would have to grow more than 10 percent in the remaining months for the governor to hit his target.
Making matters more difficult, the budget allowed for a safety net of less than $500 million.
[emphasis mine] 
Nice work, Guv; way to plan ahead.

Second, it's all of his Republican buddies in Congress who are holding up federal aid that would help NJ with the financial mess. But what's really galling here is that Christie had already created a fiscal disaster long before Sandy hit the state. The revenue before Sandy was less than Christie was projecting. But like his mentor, don't expect Christie to acknowledge this sad fact; instead, expect him to flounder around with contradictory economic claims that betray his ignorance, all while using disaster as a political excuse:
“My view is that before the disaster, we had plenty of room to do a tax cut and that we should because it would be a stimulant to the economy and helpful to middle-class families in this state who need more money in their pocket,” Christie said at a briefing held at a new Federal Emergency Management Agency joint operations center in a vacant office building in Lincroft. “I don’t think that’s reduced the need for that. The question is what will the revenue picture be. I’ll wait to see the numbers as they come in.”  
[...]
“Unfortunately, I think we should have done it already,” Christie said. “If we had, people would have money in their pockets right now and be able to spend it. It would help the economy as well but the Legislature chose not to do it.” 
The tax cuts, however, were not scheduled to go into effect until Jan.1, which means residents would not have said [sic] any money yet.
So the tax cuts would have been good to have now, except we can't afford them now, so they wouldn't be good to have now. And they would have helped the economy, except we wouldn't have had them yet anyway.

That's logic worthy of Sarah Palin.



In any case, Christie never talks about raising taxes on the wealthiest people in this state, even though we have the second-highest income gap in the nation. And there's no way he's going to raise taxes on or cut school spending for his political base in the 'burbs. What to do, what to do...

And so we get back to school aid. The plan is to cut aid to schools, but to put the majority of the cuts on the backs of the poorest children in New Jersey - children whose parents weren't going to vote for Christie anyway. Thus, we trot out the old argument designed to salve the guilty consciences of conservatives everywhere: when it comes to schools, money doesn't matter:
Cerf’s report focuses on funding, saying the state’s efforts at education-finance reform have not generated academic results, and that the academic achievement gap between low-income students and those who are not economically disadvantaged is still wide. 
“New Jersey cannot spend its way to educational success,” Cerf states as the thesis of the report. He adds that the state has spent billions of dollars in the former (urban) Abbott districts only to see large portions of those districts’ students continue to fail. Cerf states that how well money is spent matters as much as, if not more, than how much is spent. 
The report has been criticized by Rutgers Graduate School of Education professor Bruce Baker, author of the schoolfinance101 blog, who notes that New Jersey’s achievement gap is in line with its income gap. In a lengthy blog post, complete with charts, he shows that New Jersey has the second-widest income gap in the nation, after Connecticut, and says it is reflected in student performance. He adds that while money is not everything, nothing can be achieved without it. [emphasis mine]
This is the last argument Christie wants to hear - and yet hear it he must. Baker's post makes clear that New Jersey's commitment to equitable school spending has substantially improved the educational outcomes of the state's poorest children. And he's not alone:
David Sciarra, executive director of the Education Law Center, which has represented children in the state’s poorest districts, said the organization’s first goal will be to convince the Legislature to reject the report.
The Legislature did reject the proposals last year, but the state aid proposed by the governor included the changes, and the final state budget did reflect a loss of aid to some districts.
Sciarra also disputed Cerf’s efforts to make the debate about money, saying the Abbott v. Burke Supreme Court decisions did not just allocate more money to urban districts, but required that they use it to develop specific programs, such as preschool. He said some achievement gaps have narrowed, and New Jersey schools overall do well.
To say simply that all we’ve done is spend money is absurd,” Sciarra said. “And the court was very clear that the state had the responsibility to make sure districts are using the money effectively.” [emphasis mine]
It is absurd - but we live in absurd times. Commissioner Cerf has been running around the state all year trying to make the case that New Jersey spends too much on its poorest students. He thinks focusing on "teacher effectiveness" and "turn around strategies" and "charter expansion" is the key to improving urban education.

I actually think Cerf believes this idiocy. But his real goal is to justify Christie's fiscal strategy of cutting school aid to the poor.

Make no mistake: this is yet another example of how corporate education "reform" is nothing more than a distraction. Promoting these failed policies is they way conservatives can justify our extreme income inequity and historically low taxes on the wealthy. Chris Christie may have learned at George W's feet, but he is hardly alone.

The Selling Out of Newark's Schools: Part II

Let's talk some more about Cory Booker's Christmas Eve email dump.

In Part I of this series, I detailed how Booker's secret emails reveal that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million donation to Newark's schools quickly became a vehicle for both pushing anti-teacher, anti-union "reforms," and for disenfranchising the local community from controlling their own schools. Both Team Booker and Zuckerberg's folks were very concerned with the optics of the donation, even as they hatched plans to use it to force merit pay on to Newark's teachers and expand charter schools against the will of the duly elected school board.

Let's get into a few more of the particulars, starting with this question: Who is Sheryl Sandberg?
In the days leading up to the announcement of a $100 million gift to Newark schools Facebook's COO Sheryl Sandberg and Newark officials identified three areas that could be hurdles to a smooth implementation: building community support, attracting other donors and hiring a new superintendent, according to newly released emails.

In fact, those three areas proved problematic in the months–and years–after Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said he would give money to New Jersey’s largest city, provided an equal amount of matching funds were raised.

[...]

A week before the September 2010 donation was public, Sandberg asked Booker in an email about spending plans for the first 100 days and details of how the mayor planned to obtain support from residents.

Booker wrote: “This is one of our biggest concerns right now as we must be ahead of the game on community organizing by next week.” A mayoral adviser outlined a rough plan to spend $315,000 on efforts such as polling, focus groups, mailing and consultants. The foundation has spent at least $2 million on such efforts since.

It was also clear early on that Zuckerberg’s donation largely would be invisible to parents, students and teachers. State officials have said they always envisioned that a bulk of the money would help pay for a new teachers contract.

“MZ’s money is not going in to classrooms,” Booker aide Sharon Macklin wrote on Sept. 19, 2010. Instead, aides discussed how to allow small donors to fund individual projects, and Macklin suggested they would “get a lot of local props” for that.

Newark residents who are critical of Booker at school board meetings often say they are wary of outsiders and would rather have a superintendent who has some connection to the city. Sandberg appears to have been concerned about how the gift would be viewed. In an email to Booker and other Newark officials, she wrote that a draft of a press release about the donation used “too much ‘national’ language.”

“I wonder if we should basically make this focused on Newark with just a touch of ‘and this will be a national model,’” she wrote.
[emphasis mine]
Now I find that curious for several reasons. First: why was Sandberg so intimately involved in a donation Mark Zuckerberg - not Facebook, but Zuckerberg - was making? Obviously, she felt that the optics of the donation were going to reflect on Facebook somehow; she was particularly concerned with making sure that Zuckerberg did not look like he was coming into Newark and usurping the will of the common folk.

Any COO wants her company to look good - but Sandberg had a special motivation. Remember: the donation was in September of 2010. Less than two years later, Facebook went public in the highest-profile IPO that Wall Street had seen since Google. And there was a lot of money on the table:
 3. Facebook left nothing for the common investor. The insider pig pile of PE firms and celebrity Silicon Valley angels took it all. This is a rather new, post-Sarbanes-Oxley fact and it should make Americans very, very angry. When Microsoft when public in 1986, its market value was $780 million. Microsoft’s market value would rise more than 700 times in the next 13 years.Bill Gates made millionaires of thousands of ordinary public investors. When Google went public in 2004 at a $23 billion valuation, it left less on the table for you and me. Still, if you had invested in Google then and held your stock, you would be sitting atop a 9x return. Zuckerberg and his Facebook friends took it all. [emphasis mine]
Time for my first caveat: I know less about high finance than probably anyone on the planet. Maybe the guy above from Forbes is full of beans; I wouldn't know. However, even I can see that an IPO must have been on the minds of Sandberg and Zuckerberg in 2010. And, given the Occupy-style populism that was sweeping the country at the time, it's hardly a stretch of the imagination to think that Sandberg was more than a little interested in making sure Zuck's bucks were not perceived as yet another attempt by the 1% to disenfranchise the unwashed masses.

After all, there was quite a bit at stake, and this was the first big post-recession IPO. Bad publicity surrounding the offer itself was always a danger; how much worse would it be if the Newark gift made it look like Zuckerberg was creating a national model for the privatization of public education?

So it's clear that Sandberg was concerned about the publicity the donation might garner if Facebook moved toward its eventual IPO. But still: why education? Did Sandberg have a concurrent interest in school "reform"?

You bet she did:
What do Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Skype CFO Jonathan Chadwick, Benchmark Capital general partner Bill Gurley and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings have in common, besides the filthy rich tech rockstar thing?
They’re among a dozen or so Silicon Valley personalities who’ve put money into Rocketship Education this year. Rocketship is a network of “hybrid” charter schools that put kids in front of computers for a large amount of the school day. Many in the education industry hope Rocketship’s model will prove Silicon Valley can disrupt (and make money in) the k-12 school system.
That’s a tall order, given more than a decade of poor returns in k-12 ventures. In fact, in 2009, Bill Gurley told me he wouldn’t invest in education anymore because there’s no market for it in the U.S.  That hasn’t yet changed. Regarding the Rocketship money, he clarifies that “this is a donation—not a VC investment.”
But Rocketship CEO John Danner is hoping he can convince investors to make bets, and not just gifts. “K-12 technology in particular has been one of the worst outcomes for venture capital,” Danner admits. “It’s really been miserable for startups to get any traction. One thing we need to do is learn how to make the distribution system a lot more frictionless. You can imagine a Netflix-like app store. I have a fair amount of hope that the distribution systems will decrease friction and make it easy.”
Danner hopes to demonstrate that the evolution of technology is transforming education into an industry where venture capitalists “can both do good and do well. Once we get there we will unleash an enormous amount of capital on the problem.”
Danner, who has roots in venture-backed tech as the founder of NetGravity, says that about half of the Silicon Valley personalities that put money into Rocketship were connections he made prior to starting the school. Netflix CEO Reed Hoffman, Benchmark managing partner Bill Gurley, and Skype CFO Jonathan Chadwick all fall into that category. Others, like Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, came later.
“She had a friend who had a child at a school, and it just wasn’t working out well for them. She found out about Rocketship … and was impressed.” Danner says there were openings for the grade-level and location of the child in question. Sheryl’s friend won a placement, “and from there, it was just an ask. Sheryl and her husband Dave are extremely generous people.”
“We need more models like Rocketship to demonstrate that current public funding can close the achievement gap nationwide for all students,” she said in a statement. “At the end of the day, all that matters is that all children can go to great schools — regardless of whether they are charters or district schools.”
Danner says the donations come with a lot of pressure. “It’s up to us to convert that… Otherwise, Silicon Valley will kind of say ‘yeah, well Rocketship didn’t really work out.’ They’re going to be looking at this long-term. Does it work or doesn’t it?” [emphasis mine]
This article from VentureBeat highlights a strange trend I've noticed in stories about Rocketship: even though they are a non-profit, they often refer to their donors as "investors" (see here, here, and here for examples). In this case, Danner is pretty clearly saying that he sees the current non-profit Rocketship as a potential for-profit enterprise. That, of course, doesn't mean that Sandberg sees her "investment" as anything more than a donation; she may well have no financial interest whatsoever in seeing the Rocketship model come to New Jersey. And I don't know the exact timeline of events: did the Facebook donation come before or after Sandberg's "investment" in Rocketship?

I'd like for someone to go back and ask Danner and Sandberg about all this; wouldn't you?

In any case, it's telling that Danner speaks of Rocketship as if it were an eventual profit-making scheme for investors. It's also telling the Sandberg's husband, even though he lives in California, has involved himself in local, urban school-board politics in New Jersey:
Why would California multi-millionaires be interested in a school board race in the small city of Perth Amboy, NJ?

It seems absurd, and yet it's true: four wealthy Californians and one wealthy Coloradan - heavy hitters in the tech, financial, and health care sectors - have contributed tens of thousands of dollars to a slate of candidates running for the school board in Perth Amboy, a city of 50,000 with a majority Hispanic population.

[...] 
A look at the contributors provides us with clues:


- Greg Penner, Atherton CA; $8,000 donation. Penner is the Founder of Madrone Capital Partners and a well-known conservative activist. Married to Walton fortune heiress Carrie Walton Penner, Greg Penner sits on the boards of Teach For America and The Charter School Growth FundCSGF invests in charter management organizations around the country, including the KIPP network and Nobel charter schools. As I've written previously, both KIPP and Nobel have reputations for managing schools that serve substantially different student populations than their neighboring public schools.

CSGF is also an investor in Rocketship Education; see below.

Arthur Rock, San Francisco CA; $8,000 donation. Rock is a well-known venture capitalist who also serves on the board of TFA and is an active funder of KIPP. Rock has invested in the Rocketship Education, a "hybrid" school that features extensive use of computerized instruction and, consequently, has a smaller faculty than regular public schools. Larry Miller found that Rocketship had large student attrition rates and smaller percentages of special needs students than its neighboring public schools (Rocketship responds to Miller here).

- David Goldberg, Atherton, CA; $8,000 donation. Goldberg is CEO of SurveyMonkey; his wife is Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook. Both are partners, along with Rock, in Rocketship Education.
So three Rocketshippers gave money in a school board race in Perth Amboy, and one was married to Sandberg, another Rocketshipper. Remember, the district had (and maybe still has - I'll look into it) a large contract up for approval with School of One, a provider of on-line instruction. Regular readers will also remember that K-12, another on-line provider, was chaired by Andrew Tisch, one of Mayor Cory Booker's biggest supporters, and is expanding into the city this year.

Is it possible that we're seeing a turf war going on between folks who want to get in on the ground floor for providing on-line instruction to New Jersey's students? Right across the Delaware, Pennsylvania has seen a proliferation of these educational, fiscal, and legal disasters posing as schools. But the money's been good: are all these corporate titans simply staking their claims in the cyber charter gold rush?

Or is this really all about the children? As NJDOE Commissioner Chris Cerf says, is it "palpable, ridiculous nonsense" to even address this subject?

You tell me.

Dave, I can't wait to get to Newark...


ADDING: A little more about how Zuckerberg came up with the big bucks to fund his excellent adventure into Newark.



ADDING MORE: Jim Horn has some special insight into Rocketship. More in a bit.

Kitchenette

Hello everyone! Sorry for the lack of updates - was busy stuffing my chicken(s) and stuffing myself :p I've decided not to be so lardy and to update a bit more (I've been having great inertia in typing out my posts even though I have my photos up on blogger already!)
I shall end this year with a nice post on Kitchenette which is one of my best finds this year (too bad it was so late in the year!) Hope that everyone has a great new years celebration! :D 
Went to Kitchenette for brunch again - the menu has changed a bit but they still have their really nice eggs benedict (with a side of either salad or soup, $11.50++), their nicely roasted new potatoes and a cup of tea/coffee. 
 Soup of the day - pumpkin soup $8 with a very tasty garlic bread
Somehow this wasn't as thick as my vegetable roux the last time, but still homely - nice and thick with some rustic spices. I really liked the crispy garlic bread which was adequately buttered and with enough garlic to be called a respectable piece of garlic bread (unlike some places where there's more butter than bread)
 Chicken sandwich - lots of crusty bread and vegetables (I think this was about $15?) as far as crusty sandwiches go, I think it's hard to beat Drip's - partly cos I like the humungous servings of vegetables (roasted and fresh! and watercress too!) so I thought that this paled in comparison. Though to be fair, it's not a bad sandwich - just that I have tasted better.
 My croque madame ($8) with lots of emmental cheese and ham stuffed between 2 thick fluffy pieces of bread, and a runny fried egg. I think I like this more than the eggs ben - and I would get this again the next time I'm at Kitchenette. (I've been having mega cravings for this the past few days! Urghh need to walk over there one day when I'm free to satisfy my cravings)
Berry tart - not as good as Drips' but it comes close with the buttery shortcrust pastry and creamy custard base. Ok I think I just need to go back to drips and eat their nice sandwiches... but the croque madame is fantastic! For $8 it's really a steal! (On another side note - I really like Kitchenette and I hope it won't be too crowded and overpopulated just like everywhere else - that's just the selfish part of me talking...)

Kitchenette
51 Goldhill Plaza
#01-01 Goldhill Plaza
Tel 63527484

You think I'm hardcore about gun rights? Guys are already going operational.

You think I'm a gun nut?

You think I'm hardcore when it comes to gun rights?

Not hardly.

But law makers better be aware and they better pay attention.  There are guys that are already going operational and taking active steps to ensure that their freedoms are protected for not only themselves but for their children's children.  Check out the video below but if you read between the lines (and its not hard to do) then its obvious that certain news items have prompted this activity.

What should be alarming to government officials and gun grabbers is the fact that if you go to YouTube you can find literally hundreds of videos educating people on how to cache their weapons and ammunition...some of the comments in those videos indicates that a certain number of people aren't doing that and are almost welcoming a confrontation.

This gun control issue WILL get messy.  I hope the President took some weight gainer cause the weight of his office at this point isn't going to be enough!

For the Star Trek Fans...

Solemnity of Mary, the Holy Mother of God. New Year's Day

The Virgin Mary, El Greco, painted 1594-1604 (Web Gallery of Art)

Second reading from the Mass of the Solemnity, Mary Mother of God (Galatians 4:4-7, RSV Catholic Edition)

But when the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, "Abba! Father!" So through God you are no longer a slave but a son, and if a son then an heir.


Introit

Salve, sancta Parens, eníxa puérpera Regem, qui caelum terrámque regit in saecula saeculórum.

Entrance Antiphon

Hail, Holy Mother, who gave birth to the King,
who rules heaven and earth for ever.

The recording by the Benedictines of the Abbey of Solesmes, France, is of the fuller version used in the Extraordinary Form of the Mass, the 'Traditional Latin Mass', which includes the Gloria Patri and repeats the antiphon.)


The Church also observes New Year's Day as World Day of Peace, though not liturgically. the theme of Pope Benedict's message for World Day of Peace, 1 January 2013, is Blessed are the Peacemakers. Two paragraphs are of particular relevance in the context of proposed legislation in a number of countries, including the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom, and of recent legislation approved in the Philippines. And our focus during the seasons of Advent and Christmas is on the Birth of a Child.

Those who insufficiently value human life and, in consequence, support among other things the liberalization of abortion, perhaps do not realize that in this way they are proposing the pursuit of a false peace. The flight from responsibility, which degrades human persons, and even more so the killing of a defenceless and innocent being, will never be able to produce happiness or peace. Indeed how could one claim to bring about peace, the integral development of peoples or even the protection of the environment without defending the life of those who are weakest, beginning with the unborn. Every offence against life, especially at its beginning, inevitably causes irreparable damage to development, peace and the environment. Neither is it just to introduce surreptitiously into legislation false rights or freedoms which, on the basis of a reductive and relativistic view of human beings and the clever use of ambiguous expressions aimed at promoting a supposed right to abortion and euthanasia, pose a threat to the fundamental right to life.

There is also a need to acknowledge and promote the natural structure of marriage as the union of a man and a woman in the face of attempts to make it juridically equivalent to radically different types of union; such attempts actually harm and help to destabilize marriage, obscuring its specific nature and its indispensable role in society.



I used the video above recently. It's message is not only the powerful words of the Beatitudes given us by Jesus but the dignity of those who proclaim them here. Some say, in all sincerity, that if it is known before birth that a child has a disability, especially a mental one, better that that child not be born. They are really saying that the persons in this video, whose names appear at the end, were not worthy of being born, or would have been spared a life of suffering had they been aborted. Pope Benedict is speaking to those who see things in this way.

I have a close friend whose first child, a son, was born with severe mental and physical disabilities, due to something that happened during the birth. She told me that it has taken her nearly five years to accept this reality. But there is no way that she and her husband regret the birth of their son, whom they have loved to bits from the moment of his birth, indeed from the moment they knew their first child was on his way. And their daughter, now four, loves her older brother to bits in the same way.

How often persons who are pro-life in word and in deed are taunted or dismissed as caring only for the lives of the unborn. My friends are taking care of their son, with professional help, 24/7. There are countless others caring with all their hearts for those in need.

Pope Benedict's words are a message of hope to the many who lovingly care for persons with special needs at whatever stage of life and he is telling them that they are truly peacemakers. He is also quietly challenging those who see things differently.

A Happy New Year!

A Republican in name only...correction. Just another pathetic Democrat Senator.

Not much needs to be said about this walking, talking piece of shit.  Just take 15 minutes out of your day and listen to this guy weasel and lie.

Donate to CAP? Are You Serious?

I'm on the email solicitation list for the Center for American Progress, a "progressive" think-tank in Washington. And, apparently, they want my money - badly:
We need the Center for American Progress.

During my time in Congress, CAP provided the fuel that powered our hard-fought victories on issues like health care, the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, and women’s health. Their side had money, and our side fought back with facts—and those facts came from CAP. Progressive champions at the local, state, and federal levels rely on CAP’s expertise, analysis, and communications reach. Every single day.

We all need CAP. But right now, CAP urgently needs our support.

[Instructions for donating]
We can’t do it without you. 
Thanks for all your support. 
Best,  
Tom Perriello  
Counselor for Policy, Center for American Progress 
President and CEO, Center for American Progress Action Fund 

Dear Tom:

I actually do give to several "progressive" causes. But as a working teacher, I will not give one damn dime to the Center for American Progress. Because you people are as responsible for pushing anti-union, anti-teacher, poorly-researched, reformy nonsense as any right-wing group in Washington.

Why would I, as a working public school teacher and union member, support an organization that:

- Wants to implement test-based teacher evaluations, even as they acknowledge that the statistical models those evaluations are built on have high rates of error?

- Engages, in the words of John Thompson, in the "'Sister Souljah' tactic of demonstrating its independence from Democratic constituencies by beating up on educators"?

- Issues reports with policy recommendations in which "Very little in the way of supporting data is presented to justify [the report’s] claims"?

- Downplays the serious problems with the between-district inequitable distribution of resources?

- Advocates for increased class sizes on the basis of cost without comparing it to the cost of other policies?

It's bad enough we have to deal with education reforminess on the right; we really don't need it from the left as well. If you need money, go ask for more from Bill Gates or Eli Broad; they love the sort of stuff you're selling.

Best,
JJ

CAP? Those are our kind of "progressives"!

BAD JOKE (funny as hell though)...NOT SAFE FOR POLITICALLY CORRECT WORK PLACES or the UK

WORLD WAR III 
IN THE PLANNING STAGES  
 
Former President Bush and VP Cheney are sitting in a bar.
A guy walks in and asks the barman,
 
'Isn't that Bush and Cheney sitting over there?'
The bartender says,
'Yep, that's them.'
So the guy walks over and says,
 
'Wow, this is a real honour!
What are you guys doing in here?'

        Bush says,
 
'We're planning WW III.'
 
The guy says, 'Really?
What's going to happen?'

Cheney says,
 
'Well, we're going to kill 140 million Muslims and one blonde with big tits.'

                       The guy exclaimed,
 
                    'A blonde with big tits?

 

Why kill a blonde with big tits?'


Cheney turns to Bush and says,  'See, I told you, 
no one gives a shit about the 140 million Muslims.
 

Mi-28

Rocketship: Poor Kids Don't Deserve Music & Art!

UPDATE: Apparently, some are vexed at the thought that I used quotes in the title of this post. I thought the hyperbole was fairly clear, and I thought paraphrases are used in quotes in headlines; however, I don't want an argument about journalistic conventions to get in the way of the message here. I'm a citizen-journalist and learning as I go along; I do make mistakes. Maybe I made one here; if I did, I apologize.

So, no, Rocketship doesn't literally say "Poor kids don't deserve music and art"; they just act like poor kids don't. Hence, I'm removing the quotes. I am under no delusion this will satiate the folks who don't want to confront what I'm saying, but it's the best I can do to get people to address my central point.


As a lifelong music educator, this is one of the most despicable education stories I've ever heard:
JEFFREY BROWN: Now we look to a California education experiment called the Rocketship Model that involves teachers, kids and parents and aims to expand one day to serve a million students.
NewsHour's special correspondent for education, John Merrow, has our report.
 
[...] 
JOHN MERROW: For about one hour every day, students practice math and literacy skills. They work independently at their own pace. The computer is able to track and guide the progress of each student. 
It's something educators call differentiated learning. Some students work on basic skills, while others advance to more challenging lessons. 
The learning lab allows a school to hire six fewer teachers, which Rocketship says results in savings of up to half a million dollars. That money is used to pay teachers higher salaries, fund academic deans who help teachers get better, and train principals for future Rocketship schools. 
But one thing the savings are not used for, art and music classes. 
VERONICA BARBOSA: I wish we could have art and music in the school, but at the same time if you want your child to have that in their life, you can make the effort to try and get it, like, after school or on the weekends. [emphasis mine]
Understand that Rocketship explicitly states that its mission is "...to become a national network to eliminate the achievement gap in low-income neighborhoods." They are a school for poor kids - and, according to Rocketship, poor kids don't need art and music education.

Apparently, poor kids also don't need a computerized curriculum that actually works:

JOHN MERROW: A problem we saw is that some students in the lab do not appear to be engaged. They sit at their computers for long periods of time, seemingly just guessing.

JUDY LAVI: That's definitely not the ideal situation. The ideal situation would be that they'd get help from somebody in the learning lab who would explain the concept to them. Then they would go back and practice it.

JOHN MERROW: Rocketship says it's about to make a big change to its model.

ADAM NADEAU: If I had to guess, I would say you come back in a year, you won't see a learning lab.

ANDREW ELLIOTT-CHANDLER: Next year, we're -- we're thinking of bringing the computers back to the classrooms and the kids back to the classrooms.

JOHN MERROW: What this new model might look like and how it may affect the school's bottom line is unknown, but the leaders are not worried.

ANDREW ELLIOTT-CHANDLER: Innovation, I think, is one of the most exciting reasons to be at Rocketship. It's exhausting, but it's also exhilarating. Things change dramatically every year.
Yes, because it's so "exhilarating" to deny poor children the opportunity to have a comprehensive education...

California has well-defined standards in the visual and performing arts. Rocketship, if it wants to be known as a group of "public" schools, has an obligation to follow those standards. That they don't even make an attempt to do so speaks volumes about the low standards they set for themselves in the name of educating poor children.

Because this garbage would never fly in affluent areas. Arts education in California is highly inequitable, as affluent white students are far more likely to get music and art than their poor and/or minority peers. Of course, California isn't alone in this:


One would think a school like Rocketship, which aims to "eliminate the achievement gap in low-income neighborhoods," would care about this achievement gap.

One would be wrong.

There's lots more to say about Rocketship, and I'll try to get to it at some point. Larry Miller has done some preliminary work on the chain's student demographics and attrition rates that ought to give everyone pause. Rocketship has responded to Miller here: one thing I've noticed right away about Rocketship's claims is that they don't disaggregate their data for student poverty as well as they could.

But let's suppose that Rocketship's rebuttal actually holds up under scrutiny. What they would be telling us is that the key to increasing the test scores of poor and minority children is to take away music and art (and maybe some other curricular areas as well) and use the time and money saved to plop the kids in front of a computer screen for hours on end.

This is exactly the sort of thing the Chicago Teachers Union fought against this past year. CTU won concessions from the school board to hire hundreds of arts teachers so that Chicago's children would receive a broad-based education, just like children in the affluent suburbs. It was a unionized teaching force that brought the arts to their deserving students.

Maybe that's why Rocketship doesn't like the idea of their staff becoming unionized:
JOHN MERROW: If the unions came to you and said, John, we'd like to unionize Rocketship, what would you say?
JOHN DANNER: I would say absolutely not. We're a startup. You know, in startups, you basically do something different every day. Any major school district has a 450-page kind of contract that literally says minute by minute what teachers are supposed to do. So the fit between how that's evolved and what Rocketship is like is just a bad fit. 
Yes, it's certainly a "bad fit": a unionized Rocketship staff might start demanding the schools do the right thing for their poor students and give them the same educational opportunities as affluent students.

Can't have that, can we?

Sorry, Mr. Holland, but we're a startup...