Day: August 25, 2005

Banning the “W” word

Believe it or don’t. The Yelm WA city council had banned speech about Wal-Mart in city council meetings.  Seems council members tired of hearing citizens views (one way or the other) about the possibility of a Wal-Mart being built in their town of around 5,000. The council apparently set a date for a meeting on the issue and has cut off all comment on it in council meetings—by council members or the public—until that date

Whatever. They’d never get away with that sort of high handedness here in America’s Third World Countyâ„¢.
    

Amazing.  No other words.

As far as I’m concerned, LTC Erik Kurilla of the Deuce-Four (Mosul, Iraq) IS Superman. Seriously.

Mosul.

Read The WHOLE Thing.

LTC Kurilla is wounded, but doing well. Pray for his swift recovery.

(Go ahead, make Michael Yon’s blog a regular stop. The stories he relates blow me away.)

(Trying to help Michelle Malkin out by promoting this post/story at Whizbang and Outside the Beltway, too.  *LOL*)

Edited to include the links to Malkin’s flog of the story and the Whizbang and OTB linkfests.

Drive-by posting.

Over at Random Rambling, Richard discovers he’s attending school with royalty. Riiiggghht…

NIF has a typical roundup of News, Interesting, Funny *and weird
:-).

The Weapon by Michael Z. Williamson is available from Baen Books in hardback or ebook. (Also available from Amazon.com.)

Kris has a couple of off-the-wall stories she’s linked to today.

Instapundit dethroned by Michelle Malkin.

Well, that’s all for now. Lots more good stuff on my blogroll.

If you can read this, it’s a miracle

About 1.3 million students nationwide drop out of school between eighth and 12th grades each year. They’re frustrated because they can’t read well enough to keep up, bored by their courses and teachers or just unmotivated to stay in school. The implications for the nation’s economic vitality are “far-reaching and devastating,” according to a Harvard University report. “High school dropouts are far more likely to be unemployed, in prison and living in poverty.”

The same verdict is reached in other recent studies by the Educational Testing Service (ETS) of Princeton, N.J., and the Manhattan Institute of New York City.

“This is a story of losing ground,” researcher Paul E. Barton says in the ETS report.

They can’t read. We know how to teach kids to read. My wife’s program does it using computers, and it works, for ages 4 to 74 and IQ from dull to genius; but the schools can’t teach them to read, because they have a bunch of crazy theories that teachers are required to learn. The theories don’t work, and lots of kids don’t learn to read.

Step #1 to growing a generation of students who can and do read: eliminate a;; the education bureaucrats and administrators. Step #2: eliminate universities’ schools or departments of education. Step#3: return schools to genuinely local control, taking the feds—and even the states!—out of the equation.

But it’ll never happen.

The only other viable alternative? Families who are willing to forgo the economic advantages of a two-income family and choose to teach their own at home. And that’s about as viable as getting families to give up mush-for-brains TV programming.

ACLU—All Criminal Lies Unleashed

Thursday’s Stop the ACLU blogburst almost makes me sick. Contemplating the darling of the Mass Media Podpeople’s Army and the Loony Left Moonbat Brigade, the ACLU, turns my stomach, because there is no truth, no beauty, no just and righteous cause that the ACLU will not twist into a lie.

Freedom of speech? No, no, says the ACLU: freedom of expression. The Founders and Framers had no idea what they were taking about when they intentionally excluded “expression” and intentionally included specific forms of expression (religious speech and activity, political speech and written political commentary). No, according to the ACLU—and the Warren Court, and those following via stare decisis—any old splash of paint (or urine or feces) or grunt or moan or scream is now protected “speech”. Why? Cos they say so.

And to the ACLU a special form of protected speech is advocating the rape of children by homosexual men. Truth.

Freedom of religion? No, no, says the ACLU. Freedom from religion. No public display of religious beliefs are acceptable—oh, unless they be public displays of religious beliefs by m,urdering Islamofascist savages (_1_, _2_), Rastafarians, or Voodoo. Nope, if the ACLU has its way, the only religious beliefs that will be found in the public arena will be “anything but”—anything but dat ole black evil, Christianity.

Government protecting its citizens fromreligiously-excused women-raping (_1_, _2_, _3_) and mutilating, murdering savage slavers? Nope. Can’t have a government that takes sensible steps to isolate members of a religious sect that advocate, plan and carry out acts of unspeakable violence in the name of their moon god. Better to eliminate the evil of school children singing Christmas carols in public.

Get this through your head: the ACLU as an organization hates you, will lie to you and is working toward YOUR destruction.

There, have I said it plainly enough?

Of course, the ACLU will lie about that, too.

This was a production of Stop The ACLU blogburst. Almost 100 blogs already on board. If you want to join us go to our portal and register. Its very simple. We will add you to the mailing list and send you the rest of the info at that point.

“It is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and hang them. Build your funeral pyre and beside it my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your national custom – then we shall follow ours.”–Sir Charles Napier, speaking of the Indian practice of suttee.