at local Hillary supporters. Today’s QOTD:
They said they believe Clinton is the more experienced candidate and that Obama usurped her.
“If Obama had chosen wisely, we wouldn’t be in this position,” Groll said.
I guess Obama was supposed to wait at the back of the bus line?
Just click on the FreeState Project’s ad. Probably not the best way to handle things.
Yech!
The Kingwood teenager’s story of decapitating a corpse and using the head to smoke marijuana was so outlandish that at first Houston Police Department senior police officer Jim Adkins did not believe it.
According to the paper, they’re all HEKs.
QOTD: “Hey, there’s hail in my spaghetti sauce!” We were at the extreme edge of a really nasty storm system that tore through the state on Sunday. No wind but a torrential downpour and tons of pea-size hail. Fortunately, the grapefruit-size (yes, you read that right) hail missed us. We were warned by the park rangers that the storm was coming. If it had hit us directly, we were ready to make a dash for the cars. Not that being in a car with huge hail pounding down on us would have been safe, just safer than a tent.
Since I doubt he’ll mention it himself, I will. Today is Daryl’s birthday. Feel free to speculate about his age in the comments.
Because there are “teachers” like this guy in the g-schools:
School discipline needed as last resort
As a teacher, I very seldom use corporal punishment, but I am glad it is there. It is needed as a last resort. I am glad that my board of education and the state legislature have the guts to support the teachers.The Fayetteville Observer had an article concerning why teachers leave the profession (of course, the paper never talked to any teachers).
They leave mostly for bad working conditions. This is mostly unruly students, and then not being backed up by the administration. For instance, the female teacher in Baltimore who was attacked and beaten up in her classroom and the principal not backing her up. I see that many school administrators around the country suffer from “no gutsitis.”
I do not know about the group Action for Children, but I bet its members do not work in public or private education. Who is giving them money? If corporal punishment was banned, they would then use their silly arguments to complain about other forms of school discipline.
Paul F. Brand
Lumberton
Couldn’t resist posting this one as a LOTD. Apparently we all need to abstain from alcohol and meat and get high on God, instead.
Consumption of alcohol destroys lives
How disturbing that, on April 22, The Fayetteville Observer devoted front-page coverage to a story reporting the soaring sale of liquor in Cumberland County (“Raise a glass to profits”).The following day in the Business section, another article appeared promoting the sale of beer and wine. Must so much attention be drawn to these drugs that have ruined countless lives and caused untold misery in our world?
I understand billions of dollars are made through the alcohol industry. However, what price can you place on a life that has been snuffed out or sustained permanent injuries because of an alcohol-related accident? Our society is rife with addictions, and alcohol is a major cause of chemical and substance abuse.
I’m sure that many would argue that to drink alcohol or not to drink is an individual choice. I would argue that no man is an island. What I do affects my family, friends and many others whose lives I might influence.
Through the centuries, mankind has sought to become high on something. I would like to suggest the best high is the most high God.
The apostle Paul wrote, “Do not get drunk with wine which will only ruin you, instead be filled with the Spirit.” (Ephesians 5:18) In Romans 14:21, he wrote, “The right thing to do is to keep from eating meat, drinking wine or doing anything else that will make other believers fall.”
Kathryn K. Walton
Chadbourn
No, the guv’mint helicopters haven’t come for me (yet). We’ve gone camping. Back Tuesday night.
I’ve hesitated to write this one, for fear of the black helicopters. If this blog suddenly goes dark, you’ll know that the TSA got me.
I flew back into the country from Korea last Thursday (May 1, 2008). I had to clear customs at what must be the worst airport in the history of the world, Dulles. This is the gateway to the country. The gateway to our nation’s capital. And the first thing foreign visitors see is a piece of crap with construction and repairs not happening everywhere. Then they get to Passport Control. It made the lines at Disney World during Spring Break look tiny. So, we get through Passport Control after dealing with the surly ICE agents only to be immediately faced with another ungodly line at security. This is where it gets ridiculous.
Security at Dulles is right up against the big x-ray machines they use for luggage. There is no barrier, no curtain, nothing between everyone waiting to deal with the surly TSA security people and the TSA “baggage handlers.” While I was standing in line we all witnessed them tossing bags at least 15 feet from one area to another. Anything even slightly breakable in those bags was surely destroyed. The foreign visitors I happen to be standing in line with definitely noticed. Then, a little further up the never-ending security line, we were witness to TSA breaking into someone’s bag. This poor sap, not knowing the fascistic rules of traveling in the US, had locked her bag. The TSA agents beat on the lock and clasp with a variety of tools, finally prying the whole thing apart with a hammer and prybar. The bag, of course, was destroyed. So, after the TSA agent finally gets in the bag, he pulls one item from the top of it. A paperback book. He flipped through the pages for a couple of seconds, tossed the book back on top of the clothes, sealed the bag with a piece of yellow tape, and tossed it across the floor. The German visitor beside me leaned over and suggested sotto voce that he must have been hoping to grab some free porn.
Welcome to Amerika!
America’s favorite homeschoolers are expecting their 18th child. All the kids’ names start with “J.” Since they already have a John and a Jacob, my girls proposed that they name this one Jingleheimerschmidt.
Home education during high school can allow teens to follow their normal circadian rhythms– up ’til 1 a.m. and sleep ’til 10. G-schoolers, of course, can’t do that. Joanne Jacobs notes that for lots of g-schoolers, first period is literally slept through.
Welcome to my blog. This blog is dedicated to homeschooling and other education articles that I find interesting. It may also include some Delaware-specific “edustuff”. Forewarned and all that.
Of course, when that post was published comments were an only to-be-wished-for feature at blogspot. Perma-links hadn’t even been invented. Yeah, we’re older than dirt.
Over the years the blog “theme” has certainly drifted away from being a strictly homeschool edublog. That’s partially because I started blogging around the same time we started homeschooling, so I was still a newbie and very much radicalized. But also, I think, homeschooling itself in the last six years has become so mainstream and we’ve won all of the legal battles that this blog was designed to chronicle. That’s a good thing.
So the blog has morphed from being a somewhat DE-centric edu-blog to whatever it is today. Along the way the name has changed twice. The original thoroughly boring name that I literally came up with during the blogspot registration, Homeschool & Other Education Stuff, was pretty accurate. During the cyber charter wars (CCANHS!) I got frustrated with the continual misuse of the word “homeschool” and changed it to Home Education & Other Stuff. The tagline was still “A libertarian leaning edu-blog.” Sometime a couple of years ago, I switched the “official” name to HE&OS and put “Home Education & Other Stuff” in front of the tagline. Finally, in response to a flaming email that my support for universal health coverage was anti-libertarian, the tagline was changed to what it is today.
The stats from those early days are funny, too. There are more than a few days with zero page views.
And, finally, a shout out to the longest-time participant here at Homeschool & Other Education Stuff Home Education & Other Stuff HE&OS. Traci’s been here since before the start, when this was an email distribution list of a dozen homeschoolers in DE. Hi, Traci! Thanks for hanging with me.
And thanks to the rest of you HE&OSers. Without your comments and participation, this blog would have died an uncommented-upon death long ago.
UPDATE: Based on Don’s comment, I’ve changed the name and tagline once again.
Here. It’ll help (a bit) if you read Spanish.
The AP has utterly lost it. Check out this article about how the high cost of fuel is affecting NASCAR. No, they don’t pay for it. It’s provided by one of the sponsors. Instead, we get sob stories about how the drivers aren’t jetting down to the Bahamas as often for spontaneous getaways.
Now, let’s beat McCain.
I feel sorry for the folks who have to drive around in a vehicle that gets crappy gas mileage. Not so much, though, for those who thought that being a man meant driving a big truck.
Last week my tiny 2001 Hyundai Accent got 50.0 mpg round trip to the airport.
And a bloodthirsty one it is:
Death row punishment should be immediate
This letter is to the heads of our justice system and all the shyster lawyers who circumvent the system to keep murderers and rapists on death row for years, keeping them from receiving their just desserts for the crimes they were convicted of.
The Supreme Court has opened the gate so we can start the gas chamber back in operation. Let’s reduce the population on death row as quickly as we can roll the gurneys in and out of the chamber.
Get rid of these people and pass a new law that makes it mandatory to execute a person within 30 days of his conviction. I think you would see a drop in violent crime. Let the state quit paying these lawyers who use technicalities to keep perpetrators alive for years. Let’s do it now!
John W. Britt
Hope Mills
And in a rather impressive bit of juxtapositioning, it appears on the same page as this editorial.
Levon “Bo” Jones is the third in four months. He is the third man in four months to walk off of North Carolina’s Death Row and into freedom. The third man in four months who will be spared execution after charges against him were dropped… Jones spent 13 years in prison after being convicted of the 1987 murder of Leamon Grady. Then in 2006, federal judge Terrence Boyle vacated Jones’ conviction and death sentence after finding that Jones’ trial attorneys “utterly failed” to investigate the crime.
At first, Duplin County District Attorney Dewey Hudson, who tried Jones in 1993, vowed to retry him. Then last week, the prosecutor said he had no evidence against Jones and asked the court to release him.
If John Britt had had his way, an innocent man would have been executed 13 years ago.
The death penalty is immoral. The State should not have the power to kill people.
This one is just outrageous. Ignore the fact that the kid was convicted of felony sexual assault and the school is considering allowing him to march with his class at graduation. Look at what they’ve done to the poor girl:
The charge stemmed from a Nov. 2 incident when Lemaster engaged in sexual intercourse with a 16-year-old sophomore who had passed out at a party after consuming alcohol and Xanax.
The girl woke up with her pants undone and abdominal pain, according to police reports. She later learned male students were circulating photos of her undressed on their cell phones. She went to a school guidance counselor Nov. 5, saying she thought she’d been raped…
Birtle said she could not give any information on the girl’s status with the district because she’s under 18. Montgomery County Common Pleas Judge Dennis Langer indicated at Lemaster’s sentencing that she was being home-schooled due to harassment by other students.
Raped, humiliated, and forced to leave school. And the school district’s concerned about him?
Do I even have to pull out that quote?
Then they came for the atheists.
from this week’s Korean excursion. The hill behind the crape myrtle(?) is a Silla burial mound.
It seems that FoxSnooze personnel earned their moniker by sleeping through the class on the historic Frederick Douglas- Abraham Lincoln debates. Via Joanne Jacobs.
Early voting in NC ended 37 minutes ago. Some 350,000 Tarheels have already voted. That’s about 6 percent of the registered voters in the state. If the turnout on Tuesday is as high as expected, it could be a very busy day.
I can’t wait. 
Jetlag sucks.
Another pretty pic from NASA.
QOTD
McCain wants to stay in Iraq until no more Americans are getting killed, no matter how long it takes and how many Americans get killed achieving that goal—that is, the goal of not getting any more Americans killed. And once that goal is achieved, we’ll stay.
And now also the most unpopular.
WASHINGTON DC (CNN) — A new poll suggests that President Bush is the most unpopular president in modern American history.
A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll shows 71 percent disapprove of President Bush’s job performance.
A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released Thursday indicates that 71 percent of the American public disapprove of how Bush is handling his job as president.
“No president has ever had a higher disapproval rating in any CNN or Gallup Poll; in fact, this is the first time that any president’s disapproval rating has cracked the 70 percent mark,” said Keating Holland, CNN’s polling director.
Being more unpopular than Nixon in ‘74 is quite an accomplishment.
and just in time to come across (via Pandagon) an awful story of an educrat gone mad. The homophobic principal outed two gay students on the premise that she needed to watch them to make sure they weren’t committing any public displays of affection. Right. As if two kids who were doing their best to keep their orientation private (as is their right) would suddenly start making out in the hallways.
But, as always, we must remember that “schools are the safest place for children to be.” Even if the principal is a homophobic jerk who doesn’t seem to care if her actions might endanger said children.
Heading out on a bizness trip to S. Korea. The hotel claims to have internet access, but I seem to recall that there was some problem with it the one other time I was there.
An anti-NCLB ad. I might’ve run this one for free.
“Rebate” update. Checks start to go out next week, based on the last two digits of your SSN. Mine are 01.
I met a senior citizen today yesterday who was only vaguely aware of homeschooling. She asked where my kids attended school, so I gave the standard answer. What followed was a brief exchange that obviously upset her. She asked if we had to follow the state guidelines and if we had to get approval from the local school board and about them inspecting us and testing the kids. I explained that none of that was required. She then branched off into Lydia’s qualifications. Is she a professional teacher? Finally, she got around to the “S” word, concerned that the kids were bing locked away from society.
She was very nice about all of this and obviously concerned about the kids. I just found it a bit interesting that it seemed so dated. We’ve only been home educating for seven years, but these kinds of questions were old news then.
The GOP successfully filibustered a bill that would have provided that women who discover that their employers are illegally discriminating against them in terms of equal pay for equal work would have 180 days to file suit from the time they discover the discrimination. A recent (stupid) SCOTUS decision held that they can only sue during the first 180 days of being discriminated against, even if the pay discrimination remains undiscovered during that time. A stupid, stupid decision that any rational government would fix in a heartbeat.
Apparently the only thing that rationality and Republicanism have in common is that they both start with “R.”
A home educator is planning on how to spend his “rebate” check. As for me and mine, ours is going straight into savings. Last time the “rebate” merely ended up being subtracted from that year’s taxes withheld. So you get your tax refund this year instead of next Spring. Or, if you usually end up sending a small check to the IRS each April 15th, you’ll have to send a much larger one next year.
Just to prove that I’m an equal opportunity asshole, I’ll call this pro-Democratic Op/Ed among the worst of this political season. I’ve met Marena a couple of times. Nice lady. But this is really bad:
On this campaign trail, the political workplace is no better. The Democratic Party realized too late that many women see it as epitomizing the injustice of a less qualified, less experienced man trying to take the job promotion from the more qualified, more experienced woman who survived years of the good-old-boys’ club to earn the status of best candidate for the job.
They see Obama supporters heckling the press over Obama’s own abysmal performance in the Philly debate, playing the “angriest voting block” card to take her job. They see his big-money marketing him as an inspirational movement to take her job. But can Obama win the general election if he takes her job opportunity? There is an ominous rumbling in the ranks. From the national political blog “Talking Points Memo” in April: “I don’t see this as any different from any other case where a less-qualified male gets a job over a more-qualified woman. She said she found the Democratic Party doing this more repulsive than a McCain presidency … It was clear in her voice that where I was equivocating, she was not.”
First a bit of a fact check. The quote is not from Talking Points Memo. It’s from some pseudonymous blogger who is a reader at TPM. Saying that this quote is from TPM would be like pulling a quote from one of my rants at DailyKos and attributing it to kos.
As for the substance, total bullshit! We don’t choose a nominee based solely on resume. If we did we wouldn’t need primaries. Just program some computer to find the person in the country with the most impressive CV and Bingo! We have a winner! We choose a nominee (and president) based on a whole lot of factors, including experience. No one is entitled to the job. That’s been Hillary’s problem since before Iowa. Her campaign has been run entirely on that premise. It doesn’t work that way.
I’ll also strongly disagree that he is less qualified. A big part of running for President is being able to raise the money to do so. Obama routinely pulls in 3X what Hillary does. Her campaign is literally broke, while Obama has some $40M on hand to spend on the rest of the primaries. So how is Hillary the better candidate?
Do I agree with Obama’s positions on all of the issues? Not really. Hillary’s health-care proposal is better. But Edwards’ was better than Hillary’s. So what? Obama is right enough on enough issues and McCain is wrong on all of them.
Obama will win the nomination. There’s just no way that the math works out for Hillary. Not even a blowout in PA today will get her close to parity with Obama in pledged delegates. The Hillary people are going to have to recognize that, although Hillary’s was an historic run for the presidency, she didn’t do what she needed to do to earn the job. And if they don’t want to see McCain’s face on the teevee announcing that we’ve just gone to war with Iran, they’re going to have to bite the bullet and vote for Obama in November.
No “debate” in NC. And you’ll love the reason (via dKos):
Despite pressure from the governor, from the local media, from their own-state campaign, Barack Obama’s advisers refused to accept an invitation to debate in North Carolina because they did not want to give Hillary Clinton any excuse to stay in the race beyond Tuesday, assuming she doesn’t fare that well. The Obama campaign’s gambit paid off: the debate is canceled.
Compare this spin from the Christian Post with a more realistic hed.
‘Expelled’ Explodes into Top 10 Box Office
“Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” the pro-intelligent design documentary featuring actor Ben Stein, made history this weekend as it propelled full speed into the top 10 box office. It opened as the widest and one of the most commercially successful releases for any documentary film.
In an impressive opening weekend, the film debuted at No. 9 at the box office, earning a respectable $3.2 million while only appearing on 1,052 screens.
This is really funny. They apparently didn’t get the memo that ID isn’t religious. Even better is the first of the “Related” links:
Related
* How to Share Your Faith Using Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
* ‘Expelled’ Set to Release Amid Wave of Attacks
* Expelled was Excellent!
* Myths about ‘Expelled’
The NYT understands that torture is bad. Why don’t Bush, Cheney, Rice, Ashcroft, Tenet, and Powell?
I look forward to seeing them all in the Hague.
Katelyn’s in heaven. She auditioned for NCSA again today. The new dean was there. Ethan Stiefel is a phenomenal dancer and the star of Katelyn’s all-time favorite movie, Center Stage. Katelyn got to talk to him and got his and his girlfriend’s (Gillian Murphy) autographs on her pointe shoes. Murphy just happens to be Katelyn’s idol.
And the audition went well, too.
My local paper, today:
Demerit: For the political candidates in important races who are ducking debates. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have jousted over holding a debate here in North Carolina, which may be the battleground that settles the Democratic nomination. Clinton was the first to resist. But when she finally agreed to a date and time, Obama turned it down. Gov. Mike Easley and other top North Carolina Democrats have urged Obama to accept an April 27 debate date. But so far, he’s not budging. He should — North Carolina voters deserve one more good look at the candidates.
My emailed response:
Why should Obama agree to another so-called debate? It’s obvious that the media don’t take them seriously enough to ask substantive questions. The National Enquirization of your profession is complete.
A reality-based blogger on the vaccine issue was served a seriously twisted subpoena about her blogging activities. It seems the anti-science lawyer and/or the plaintiffs take issue with what she wrote.
She pretty effectively destroys the subpoena here. [Tip credit: Toni]
An educrat asks, “What constitutes a homeschooled student?” She apparently has several HEKs enrolled full-time in her g-school. Strange, huh?
Our long national nightmare is over.
Blue Collar Scientist helpfully compiles a nice selection of reviews of Ben Stein’s Expelled, which is apparently a giant load of crap.
Please read this editorial in Fort Bragg’s hometown paper. And then pass on the link.
Hey, Tarheels! Early voting starts today. You can vote even if you’re not registered. So, go vote. Today.
UPDATE: I voted. Number 394 at the main elections office for Cumberland Co. There are three others, so we may have had 1000 people vote on this first day of early voting.
That’s how much the top hedge fund manager earned in 2007. I’m definitely in the wrong line of work.
the most depressing day of the year. At least there’s some interesting reading here.
