What I Learned On Summer Vacation

                It was pretty hard to miss the walk outs and marches by teachers across the country on Friday. Even if you only get your news on Facebook it would be pretty difficult not to have heard the pleas of teachers for resources and reasonable classroom sizes to allow them to do their jobs the past several years.

                There is no doubt that teachers are underpaid. There is no doubt that teachers do not have the resources or support to do everything they need to do in the classroom. And there is absolutely no doubt that classroom sizes are too large for students needing individual help to receive it or for good teachers to be effective teachers.

                I support this country’s teachers 100% and want to see things get better for them as soon as possible if not immediately.

                Like so many issues this country faces our school system is being smothered and overburdened with too much government help.

It isn’t the money. There is plenty of money. It is what the money is being spent on. Or more specifically whom.

It ain’t your kids or their teachers.

According to a CNSNews.com article from 8/18/14, the number of nonteaching public education employees has increased 130% from 1970 to 2014 while the number of students in the system only increased 8.6%.

Nonteachers on public education payrolls now outnumber teachers in at least 21 states and are over 50% of the number of public education employees nationally.

In 2013, Virginia had 60,737 fewer teachers than nonteachers. Charles Pyle, a spokesperson for the Virginia Department of Education said simply, “That can’t be.” But the National Center For Educational Statistics for the Federal Department of Education said in many more words, “Yup, it really is.”

                From 1992 to 2009 the state of Texas experienced a 37% growth in student enrollment while during the same period experiencing a staggering 172% growth in nonteachers resulting in an annual increase in education spending for people not involved in educating anybody of $6 billion.

                Nationally this country could have redirected $24 billion ANNUALLY from 1992 to 2009, according to The Friedman Foundation, to teachers and classrooms if nonteaching positions had only grown at the same rate as student enrollment!!!!!!!

                Virginia, Vermont and Wyoming have 104 nonteaching personnel per 1000 students. (Wyoming?) That’s one administrator or service person per 10 kids roughly. Nevada and South Carolina do the best with the least budgetary fat at 26 and 28 nonteaching personnel per 1000 students. That’s one adminbot per 37 students, which is the teacher-student classroom ratio in many communities across this country…possibly the ones with one to 10 administrator-student ratios.

                So who are all these extra employees we didn’t need in the 70’s that are now so critical to the educational experience of kids in school today? I am certain there is an official breakdown somewhere but I couldn’t find it. Maybe a real journalist ought to look for it quick before pigs learn to fly. But as near as I can tell we are talking about nutritionists, psychologists, directors of this or that, compliance officers for various state and federal requirements, support assistants, surrogate parents, outreach officers, and more.

                On a site boasting “The 20 Best NonTeaching Jobs In Public Education,” I found opportunities for a Family Educator, a Content Specialist (after reading the job description I still don’t know what they do but it pays $78K per year, and can be done remotely from home in any city in California near a major airport), Operations Program Director (looked like an IT job at $150K/year), Zoo On The Move Program Instructor (Awww), Non-Teaching Adjunct for College Advancement ($53/hour), Director For Diversity and Inclusive Excellence (!), Curriculum Developer, College and Career Readiness Director, Family Services Coordinator (really?), and my favorite: Virtual Instructional Coach ($45/hour).

                There were others but the above were what I felt were representative of things my parents would have considered tax dollar lunacy when I was in school.

                The Fordham Institute reported in 2008 than one of the biggest nonteaching jobs added over the years in most school districts were “teacher’s aides.” That seems so odd to me since the point of teacher’s aides would seem to be to free teachers up to spend more productive time with students who need it, which is precisely one of the things we know teachers don’t have enough time to do.

                A little digging reveals that teacher’s aides are not necessarily the hands on classroom help you may think of when you think of the job title. Teachers aides is a broader job category now that includes assistants and professionals that deal with special nonclassroom functions like drug issues, health issues, pregnancy, homelessness, discipline and family issues.

                Aren’t those the kinds of things that used to be dealt with at home? Or perhaps not, but they weren’t under the schools purview unless you had a counselor or two that did their job well and cared about the kids (and God bless those folks) but they weren’t extra jobs or “programs” eating up tax dollars that are needed for teachers and their classrooms.

                Yet when you hear The American Federation of Teachers or CNN talk about there not being enough money for education and parading underpaid teachers and doomed students across TV screens to try and guilt the nation into coughing up more money, you never seem to hear about Content Specialists or Virtual Instructional Coaches that may have been added to your school district’s payroll and who contribute absolutely nothing to your child’s classroom experience.

                I found out why! The AFT represents them too! And most of us know why CNN won’t talk about them.

                The statistics on dollars spent in this country on education will make your head spin and then some. I’m not going to get into specifics because I’m already close to 1000 words and just describing the data would take 2000. The website for the National Center For Educational Statistics has pages of charts and graphs documenting what we spend on education, plus it varies greatly by state and it is more data than I care to wade through for free but I can tell you this: All the arrows and bars are going up.

                As a nation we spend more money per child in school now than we ever have. And this narrative that the problem is simply a lack of funds is bull crap, plain and simple. It is a lack of funds being spent in the proper place—on teachers and in the classroom.

                Denmark is the only nation on the planet that spends more money per capita than we do on nonteaching and administrative public education staff. And what do we have to show for it?

There are several dozen graphs on that NCES website that will show you that too. Nothing. No improvement in test scores or graduation rates in over 40 years.

Absolutely start paying our teachers what they are worth. Absolutely start spending every nickel we need to on improving the classroom experience. And take every last dollar of it from existing budgets and tax revenue by getting rid of as many noncritical, ridiculous, made up admin and nonteaching jobs as it takes.

Enough already. Just freaking enough.

Oh shucks, and I’m out of room to start a lively discussion about Voucher Virtue.

 

Mission Accomplished. Sort of.

                So, I hate when this happens. I spent all week documenting how President Trump’s private-business negotiation tactics are working as an international economic strategy between governments: China is making concessions on U.S. auto tariffs and other things; Mexico, in spite of their feigned upset over us not wanting Hondurans traipsing through their living room to enter our country, is very anxious to preserve some version of NAFTA even if it is more favorable to us; as is that odd little fellow they’re letting run Canada right now.

                And then stupid Syria has to have another unspeakably horrible chemical weapons attack on its own people prompting us to do the only thing we could do: retaliate as you would do for any spoiled, unruly misbehaving child unless you live on Planet Snowflake.

                I guess retaliation would be unnecessary if you didn’t think that sort of atrocity needed to be punished just on the basis that it is an atrocity that humanity should not tolerate, but I think even the Trump-hating Team Blue would have to admit they’d like to not see chemical weapon use be exported from Syria into the hands of terrorists around the globe, specifically to a New York subway or some other U.S. target.

                What got me going this morning were a couple of Associated Press stories citing a lack of evidence for the missile attacks Friday by the U.S., Great Britain and France and referring to the attack as hasty and ill-conceived. In typical fashion the AP attributed such solid sources as, “critics,” “some,” “their,” and “many,” accusing, denying, criticizing and being upset.

                The stellar (NOT) journalistic integrity of the left continues.

                One of the AP articles said Theresa May, UK Prime Minister, could face “serious backlash” for not seeking approval from Parliament for participating in the action, “reminding many of the tainted legacy of former PM Tony Blair’s rush to back George W. Bush in Iraq.”

                Later in the article the AP, perhaps accidentally, did reveal that May wasn’t legally required to seek lawmaker’s approval for her decision. “Opposition leaders,” (no names at all) were really mad about it though. Isn’t that kind of like Schumer and Pelosi being upset because Donald Trump said “Yay, America?” In other words, so what?

                French President Emmanuel Macron showed surprising common sense and grit for a Frenchman and said, “We cannot tolerate the normalization of the use of chemical weapons,” and then sent French warplanes into the strike. I didn’t even know the French had warplanes, let alone missiles, but I read online that they are actually the third largest military force in NATO.  Hmmm.

                And following his quote (proving that AP reporters do know how to attribute information when they want to or it serves their op-ed narrative) the news service labored so hard to also say Macron was in big trouble for doing anything Donald Trump thought was a good idea. 

                The AP quoted another real person—far right leader Marine Le Pen—as tweeting that Macron had exposed France to “unpredictable and potentially dramatic consequences,” by participating in the strike.

                Not real specific but Le Pen does get points for scary drama. Le Pen is also the person who called for labor strikes in France that have halted two-thirds of their train system so far. It seems socializing capitalism isn’t working out all that well.

                Anyway, Macron has his own hate club and issues to deal with in France and it sounds like he faces the same issues Trump does in that if he came out in favor of oxygen his opposition would begin holding their breath until they passed out.

                USA Today, The Telegraph, The Guardian, even Reuters and The Washington Post all cite intelligence reports and eyewitness accounts of the chlorine and sarin gas attack in Duomo, Syria, on April 7, killing at leas 40 people many of whom were children. The withdrawal of ground troops from the area immediately before the attack seems to be pretty strong evidence the Syrian government knew a little something about what was coming.

                I found two accounts that also document several other uses of chemical agents by the Syrian government with far fewer casualties but the same nasty results since the April 4^th chemical attack last year that left 80 dead. A pretty strong indicator Bassir Assad didn’t get the hint after our last missile strike.

                Even German President Angela Merkel endorsed the strike and she’s one of the world leaders whose criticism of and disdain for Trump is so very embarrassing for U. S. citizens on the left who give a damn what she thinks.

                And yet CBS, the NBC conglomeration and CNN continue to lead the cry that we have “acted without evidence.” Their sources (and I am not making this up): Russian military experts who have visited the site and said that the use of chemical weapons is not conclusive.

                Russian military experts.

The leftist media is so anxious to defy and criticize President Trump that they are now taking the word of Russian military experts over U.S., French, British and German intelligence reports as well as video and pictures showing dead bodies with foam coagulated in their mouths and throats and eyewitness accounts of the distinct smell of chlorine at the site.

                The Russian military experts in the employ of the very same Russia that Pretty Boy Bobby Mueller is trying so hard to prove colluded with Donald Trump to swing the election in his favor because Putin fairly trembled in his boots over the prospect of Hillary Rodham Clinton in the White House and her promise of at least four more years of the dreaded Obama Doctrine of drawing useless and meaningless lines in the sand.

                After all, it was that sainted, international powerhouse negotiator Obama who forced Putin to agree to keep Syria in check and make sure that all those chemical weapons and the technology to manufacture them were destroyed. Or else.

                Whew! Thanks Barack. That really worked.

                Maybe not as well as 105 heavy ordinance missiles destroying three chemical weapon manufacturing facilities Friday night, but good try!

                Anyway, bravo again Mr. President, although I have to agree with that guy Many On The Left who says “Mission accomplished,” may be a little premature. I understand what the president meant—the mission was a retaliatory strike to punish Assad for using chemical agents and that was accomplished emphatically—but I think it is pretty undeniable that the little conflict in that region is far from over.

                What may—I hope—prove interesting is if a superior private business negotiation skill set translates as well in global politics as I believe it is in global economics. Maybe this will prove to have more to do with Putin’s need to support Syria because he needs a bootleg option to sell Russian oil with so many sanctions in place against Russia over the Ukraine and other annoying Russian politics than it will with bombs and bullets.

                Though I can already hear the wailing about relieving economic pressure on Russia to minimize their need for a relationship with Syria as a trade partner as “conclusive proof” that the Trump-Russia collusion the left has been fantasizing about for going on two years is real, damnit, and Hillary should be president. Waaah.

                But for now: Mission Accomplished.

Half Full or Half Empty?

                Last time I bothered to check (I know, that sounds so CNN) somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of the American people didn’t trust the American Media. Those on the right don’t trust those crack reporters like Wolf Blitzer, Juan Williams, Anderson Cooper, Stephen Colbert, Rachel Maddow, or Whoopi Goldberg. Those on the left just hate all those lying bastards on Fox News but especially that Hannity guy.

                So it’s hard to tell what to make of the Rasmussen Daily Tracking Poll last week that had Trump’s approval rating at an all-time high of 50% and then later in the week, 51%, while during the same week Real Clear (?) Politics and The Hill had him at an “all-time low” of 41%, apparently forgetting the 37% they had him at after he had just won a Presidential election but before he was even sworn into office.

                Trump himself, of course, licked his finger, stuck it in the air and declared he was seven or eight points higher than The Hill Poll.

                I do know Rasmussen prides themselves on polling daily and that they only count answers from likely voters, which makes sense to me because if someone is so apathetic (or illegally here and not in illegal-friendly California) that they aren’t even going to bother to vote I don’t know that their opinion carries a lot of weight with regard to the outcome of anything.

Remember, most of these pollsters are the same ones who told you Hillary was going to win in an unprecedented landslide.

                I do not know but it is emotionally satisfying to believe (a favorite reporting technique of the Associated Press) that Real Unclear Politics, MSNBC and The Hill will accept the answers of anyone who answers the phone as long as they’re old enough to answer yes or no to the leading questions and as long as they hate President Trump.

                It is unclear whether Presidential saliva on a finger in the wind has any scientific credibility or not.

                My own anecdotal contribution comes from call-ins I hear to the Rush Limbaugh Show from people who allegedly voted for Hillary who have since come over from the dark side and been impressed and influenced by the avalanche of positive results from the President’s policies. In no way is this a scientific poll on my part and I’m not pretending it is solid evidence which is one way I’m different from CNN.

                But the fact that anybody that used to be on the democratic left has changed their view of Trump and the wonderfully positive direction the country is going has got to be a seven-alarm heart attack for a group that continues to seethe hatred and contempt for Trump and all of us deplorable, child-killing, woman-hating, Russian-loving, racist a-holes on the right.

                Hard to tell who to believe. Half full or half empty? I don’t know but there is darn sure a skip in my step that was lacking during the “America’s best days are behind her. We need to accept and get used to the New Normal,” years that were the reign of terror of Obama.

As Thomas Sowell wrote, “If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting the news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference and chooses their news sources accordingly.”

Which sounds a lot like, “believe whatever makes sense to you ‘cuz you can’t trust anything you are being told.” You may quote me.

Whichever side you are on, I think it is clear the media (especially the lamestream part) doesn’t understand Trump at all. I appreciate Dr. Charles Krauthammer’s recent observation that Trump is a pragmatist above all else and fits into neither liberal nor conservative pigeonholes conveniently.

                Neither the media nor Washington knows how to deal with the guy, which is exactly why we voted him in.

Upset that he only got $1.6 billion for a wall along the Mexican border that sly dog managed to trade a bunch of pork fat for $650 billion in military funding and now he’s doing an end run around Congress by sending the military down to help secure the border.

                When he says the military what Trump actually means is the National Guard. And when he says he’s sending them, so far all he’s doing is asking the border states to send them and so far Arizona and Texas have responded enthusiastically while New Mexico and predictably California have remained silent.

                Some hack on MSNBC gleefully pointed out that the National Guard cannot enforce domestic law so it won’t be very effective. He’d be right if he knew what he was talking about. Under Title 10, the Federal Government can order and control the actions of the National Guard in a national emergency but they are not empowered to enforce domestic law.

                That’s not what Trump did. He invoked Title 32, which leaves activation and control of the Guard in the hands of the states and does allow for the enforcement of local laws as necessary to achieve the desired results.

                What the left is also fairly quiet about is the fact that Trump has also revoked Obama’s “Catch and Release” policy with regard to illegal immigrant detention, instead they point out that Obama, his own bad self, had deployed 6,000 Guardsmen to the border at one point whereas Trump has only asked for 4,000.  The MSNBC guy got that right, but Trump intends to have illegals detained and then sent back as opposed to detaining them and then releasing them into the United States which seems like it was a horrible waste of resources and 6,000 National Guardsmen.

                I’m not sure what New Mexico will do but I think its fairly safe to bet that Governor Sanctuary Man Brown will defy Trump in front of as many television cameras as he can arrange. And that’s actually ok if you think about it.

                No matter how you cut it, California has 55 electoral votes no matter how many illegals they allow to participate in U.S. elections. We may as well funnel all the MS-13 members into CA and give them rides to the voting booths. California still only gets 55 electoral votes in 2020. Did anyone harbor any illusions that California might become a red state under any imaginable set of circumstances?

                Rest easy though, folks. The governors of Oregon and Montana have declared that they will NOT activate their National Guardsman to stem the ever slowing tide of illegals into the U.S. (not making that up--they had press conferences and everything).  I guess that means all the Hondurans trying to sneak across the Mexican border into Oregon and Montana should have a fairly easy time of it.

                If you aren’t chuckling, you need to look at a map.

Stormy Weather

                I really wanted to avoid doing a blog on the alleged Donald Trump-Stormy Daniels affair but when my wife caught me doing research on Stormy Daniels this week, well, I had little choice.

                Relax, that was a joke—she didn’t catch me.

                There is enough smoke around their alleged relationship that I would be surprised if there had not been an encounter between the porn star and the then billionaire playboy before he became the leader of the free world. And that’s disappointing.

                Not because a billionaire playboy isn’t free to rent a hooker or sleep with whomever he pleases but Trump was married to Melania at the time of the alleged affair and that does make it adultery and it’s hard to find much virtue in that. We’d probably all like to think we can hold our leaders and heroes to a higher standard than we might expect of the guy three cubicles down at the office but it doesn’t take a lot of internet research to trace a long tradition of presidential indiscretions in this nation’s history.

                Which doesn’t make it right. Not even a little bit. But somehow it seems to be something we accept.

                Most recently Bill Clinton set the bar extremely low, leaving semen stains on an intern in the Oval Office who was the same age as his daughter. Gross.

                Trust me, I am not holding him up as a reason to not look on Trump cheating on Melania as being wrong. Two wrongs do not make a right. Not ever. It is a favorite argument of the left’s but I’m not trying to use it here.

                What is as astounding, however, as it is frustrating to me is the blatant hypocrisy of the left screaming for Trump’s head (what else is new) over this when we were told of Clinton, “Hey, so the guy had sex with a young lady on the desk of the Oval Office, it’s the 90’s. Grow up.”

                Clinton lied about it. He obstructed justice. He was impeached. And the left laughed it off at worst and shrugged it off at best and we all went down the road. So take a deep breath liberals, if Clinton could get away with that then I’m pretty sure this isn’t going to be your silver bullet.

                I haven’t heard one mention of the $800,000 in hush money in the past two weeks that Clinton paid Paula Jones (a different conquest than the reference to Monica Lewinsky above) but have heard many discussions of the “legality” of the $130,000 a Trump representative paid Daniels to shut up and go away…which she had agreed to do. (Man, if you can’t trust a prostitute…)

                As it turns out, Daniels failed to report the $130,000 payment to the IRS who have a sudden interest in collecting part of that which would be more hilarious if Daniels were not suddenly making more money in the first quarter of this year than she did in the last three years according to one report. (Sorry to sound like CNN but I don’t feel like taking the time to source for you what I heard on the radio this week.)

                Daniels said in one of her several paid interviews the past couple of weeks that after the lone sexual encounter she had with Trump he asked her how much he owed her to which she replied, “I’m not that kind of girl.”  So some of the research I did reveals that she is indeed a way worse kind of girl and just because somebody makes a digital recording of it doesn’t make it art nor does it make Stormy an actual actress!

                It is kind of interesting though in that she seems to so naively admit that she and Trump had two altogether different ideas about what exactly was taking place in their alleged encounter.

                At the end of 2017—before the cash cow that 2018 is becoming for Daniels—her net worth was estimated at $2,000,000. Not bad for a gal who began her career as a stripper in Louisiana at the age of 17, near where she attended high school. Her name them was Stephanie Clifford. For the record after high school, Wikipedia lists her education as “unknown.” Huh.

                Her career then morphed into one as a porn “actress” when she was invited to participate in a lesbian scene by a friend who had brought her to a movie set in Los Angeles to watch a filming. A couple million bucks later she has a nice home in Forney, TX, drives an F-150, has a pit bull and is an accomplished equestrian. (See, I did some real research too.)

                A life-long Democrat, Daniels actually ran for a 2010 Louisiana  Republican Senate Seat. She dropped out before the election but some accounts say she had a legitimate shot at unseating the incumbent. She became a Republican when her exploratory commission—Draft Stormy—got the RNC to pay expenses for a fundraiser for her at a lesbian-themed bondage club in Los Angeles. Think about that the next time the RNC asks you to write them a check.

                Daniels said during one campaign speech that “If you don’t know who I am, I suggest you not Google it until you get home from work.”

                I don’t know why she dropped out. Something probably came up.

                I don’t blame the left for being angry and disappointed. Most of us on the right felt the same way about Clinton (the Bill one). Neither guy was right. Neither of them should get a pass and if that’s how they both feel about the institution of marriage and what it should mean then they are both disgusting human beings.

                And yet the exemplary loyalty and dedication to his marriage by Mike Pence is rewarded in the leftwing media with mocking derision on such liberal hard news shows as Jimmy Kimmel Live, The View and Anderson Cooper 360. But the left doesn’t even get what a punchline they have become.

                I do blame the left for being so hypocritical about it. One liberal friend told me that if I were willing to give Trump a pass on sleeping with Stormy Daniels and saying “grabbed her p***y” on a well-publicized video just because his presidency was a success that he wasn’t ever going to be able to speak to me again.

                Wow. Not that good of a friend, I guess.

                I don’t approve of a lot of Trump’s character flaws and idiosyncrasies but what the left didn’t get on November 8, 2016, they seem to still not get. Many of us who voted for Trump weren’t necessarily voting for the man. We were voting for an improved economy, tax cuts, secure borders, an undefeatable military, support of law enforcement, withdrawal from dumbass international agreements (that’s a technical term), a smaller, less intrusive Federal Government, deregulation, energy independence, a nonapologetic international presence, support of Israel and other allies, nonsupport of alleged allies who spit in our face, support for the Second Amendment, and a beginning to the end of corruption in Washington (which may be pure pie in the sky but we wanted it).

                And a lot of what we voted for was simply an outsider’s perspective in government because we have had more than enough of business-as-usual, power-brokering, lobbying Washington Establishment nonsense on both sides of the aisle. I think the whole nation wanted that part.

                If I’m wrong then someone explain to me the left’s fascination with Crazy Bernie Sanders who is an avowed socialist and political train wreck but he is without a doubt NOT business as usual.

                Anyway, good luck to Stormy. As she approaches 40 I’m glad she seems to have found a way to make a living with more of her clothes on. I just hope she remembers to report all that income to the IRS in the future.

                I may have to wait to post this until Monday. Not because it’s Easter Sunday and a discussion of porn stars and infidelity is kind of a bummer. My wife’s not home and it seems she did something to interrupt my internet connection before she left.

                Go figure.