The American Spectator

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Another great "innovative'' idea was to lower standards to protect the egos of children. If a child couldn't pass a test, well then, just lower the passing grade! This saved the delicate egos of, primarily, parents and assured a nation that can't read, write, add, subtract and multiply. (Or as one the graduates of the successful and "innovative" era might write: redd, rit, ad, suhtrac, mupeye.)

The next really good idea was to do away with standards almost entirely for minority students. This served two important functions for Democratic Party visionaries. First, it created the illusion that their innovative, and experimental ideas were working because suddenly all minority students were being promoted grade by grade. Second, it insured that many more minorities would be unable to function in any meaningful way in a competitive job market because they had virtually no education (See the video: "I don't have to worry about my mortgage, my food , my car or my gas...") This catastrophe called success guarantees there will be plenty of welfare recipients going forward and they vote in lockstep so they don't have to worry about the above stated items the few, the tired, the taxpayers, among us work so hard to get and maintain.

Surely we will be coming into the Golden Age of American Education where a student can start kindergarten as a blank slate and leave the public education system 12 years later exactly the way he or she entered: uneducated, incurious and ignorant, that blank slate entirely undisturbed.
-- Jay Molyneaux
North Carolina

MORE PRESENTS FOR CAROL
Re: The Prowler's Merry Christmas, Carol:

Coleman-Adebayo v. Carol Browner is the only pertinent part of the story you should have covered.

Look up the No FEAR Act of 2002 and see how it mandates that all Federal employees receive training in No FEAR law, because of the miserable record Ms. Browner left at EPA. The American public needs to know that a woman who publicly defended racism, retaliation, and denial of her employee's civil rights is now the official choice for Energy Czar.

See: Time magazine reported that Carol M. Browner's nomination Monday for the newly-created Energy Czar position raises embarrassing questions in the Environmental Protection Agency's employee relations history due to Ms. Browner's conviction in Coleman-Adebayo v. Carol Browner on charges of discriminating against employees based on sex and race, as well retaliating against whistleblowers and denying them their civil rights. The announcement was particularly ill-timed, as only 2 weeks ago the successful plaintiff in the case, Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo was illegally fired by one of Ms. Browner's holdovers at EPA.

Time quotes Coleman-Adebayo as saying Administrator Browner "...wasn't at all sympathetic to complaints about civil rights abuses. We were treated like Negroes, to use a polite term. We were put in our place." -- Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, a former EPA employee whose complaints of a "racially toxic" environment there led to the signing of the Notification and Federal Employee Anti-Discrimination and Retaliation Act of 2001. (Time, February 23, 2001)
-- Kevin

QUALIFY THIS
Re: James Gavin's letter (under "Lingering Feelings") in Reader Mail's Look for the Union Label:

James Gavin wonders how Sarah Palin could possibly think she was qualified to be vice president. Just what does Mr.Gavin think the job entails? According to the Constitution (remember that?), the vice president presides over the Senate and casts tie-breaking votes in that body; he is also first in line of succession should the president die or become incapacitated. Period. End of Discussion.

By tradition, he also represents the president at state functions the president chooses not to attend (e.g. funerals, dedications of new bridges, etc.). The president can choose to give more authority to the vice president (he cannot cede his constitutional powers, however), but most presidents have chosen not to do this. Barack Obama seems to view the vice presidency more traditionally than George Bush, and so soon the loquacious Joe Biden will discover what James Nance Garner meant when he said "The Vice Presidency is not worth a bucket of warm piss."

Could Sarah Palin do the job of vice president? She can fog a mirror, she can do the job. As compared to dozens of VPs whose names are lost to history, she is vastly over -- qualified, certainly more so than the hair-plugged gas bag who will hold that office as of 20 January.

To compare Sarah Palin to Rod Blagojevich is the mark of an undisciplined mind unable to discriminate between legitimate and honorable ambition on the one hand, and unbridled megalomania on the other. If Mr. Gavin gives some thought to the matter, he would have to concede that George Washington (a colonel of the Virginia Militia with no formal military training) was totally unqualified to be Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army. So by what right did he ware his militia uniform to every session of the Continental Congress and not-so-subtly lobby for the job? Then there is Abraham Lincoln: how could a one-term state legislator and country lawyer possibly be qualified for the Presidency? And unlike Barack Obama, he couldn't even win a seat in the U.S. Senate.

Mr. Gavin strikes me as the type of person overly impressed by credentials. The Founders were not so interested in ephemeral like that. Rather, they looked to the character of a man, and they would certainly have seen right through a charlatan like Rod Blagojevich -- or Joe Biden and Barack Obama, for that matter. That would how they judged "qualification for office," and by that standard, how would Sarah Palin rate? Mr. Gavin seems uninterested, or at least, not to care.
-- Stuart Koehl
Falls Church, Virginia

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