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News/Politics 12-14-12

Here’s the Open News Thread for today.

What have you got?

Here’s my contribution.

The debt discussion continues behind the scenes. I gotta tell you though, I find it obscene the amount of money charities waste to lobby Congress and the President. What a waste of resources.

From TheWashingtonPost

“The White House and the nation’s most prominent charities are embroiled in a tense behind-the-scenes debate over President Obama’s push to scale back the nearly century-old tax deduction on donations that the charities say is crucial for their financial health.”

“But the White House is also looking to limit the charitable deduction for high-income earners, and that has prompted frustration and resistance, with leaders of major nonprofit organizations, such as the United Way, the American Red Cross and Lutheran Services in America, closing ranks in opposing any change to the deduction.”

And this from CNSNews

““Students of color, students with disabilities and male students” are suspended at a disproportionate rate to their peers, in “potential violation of civil rights laws,” an official from the U.S. Department of Education said at a congressional hearing Wednesday on the so-called school-to-prison pipeline.

“We are alarmed by the disparities in disciplinary sanctions, particularly for students of color, students with disabilities, and male students,” said Deborah Delisle, assistant secretary for the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education at the Education Department.”

““When African-American students are more than 3 ½ times as likely to be suspended or expelled as their white peers, or students with disabilities are more than twice as likely to receive out-of-school suspensions as their non-disabled peers, as they are today–it raises substantial concerns,” Delisle told the Senate Judiciary Committee.”

32 thoughts on “News/Politics 12-14-12”

  1. The suspensions of students with “disabilities” is interesting. The explanation is clear and many of us have heard stories about this. When parents do a terrible job of raising children and the children are poorly behaved, we now call them “disabled”.

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  2. They wouldn’t lobby if it didn’t help with the ultimate bottom line. I am totally against getting rid of the charitable deduction. All this will do is move the same money from the Southern Baptist Church to ACORN. And having been pressured into contributing on the job I don’t like Untied Way.

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  3. Ricky, I was thinking the same thing, that the “disabilities” were most likely things like ADHD. Also, anyone who had ever been around kids for more that two minutes can tell you why boys get in trouble more than girls. They are just naturally more aggressive and restless. As my Husband put it, “there is something a little wrong about a little boy who doesn’t get in trouble once in a while.”

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  4. KBells, You are right about boys being more aggressive and restless.

    Concerning the “disabilities”, our neighbors did not discipline their son who was always in trouble at school. We rode in a car with them to a ball game for an hour listening to the mother tell stories of how she had told coaches, teachers and principals that her son should not be disciplined because he had ADD, OCD, PMS, etc. Finally, my wife had enough and told them that from birth my son had been afflicted with MMM: Mean Mexican Mama.

    The story had a happy ending. After flunking out of college due largely to drug use, the boy turned to God and is now working and going to nursing school.

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  5. Once you conclude that the US overall has a negative impact on the world, it becomes hilarious to see the ways that God is allowing the US to destroy itself. We are paying Ms Delisle and her co-workers at the DOE billions so they can work to destroy what remains of public school discipline.

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  6. My son is far from perfect, but one thing I have always tried to avoid is taking his side over another authority figure. He has been told that, yes, sometimes a teacher or a coach can seem unfair but they are in charge and you deal with it until the school year or season is over and treat them with respect in the meantime. With him, I have discovered that usually when he feels like he is being picked it is because he let himself get on their radar by acting up. I have told him that when that happens you just have to be on extra good behavior until the teacher feels like she can trust him again.

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  8. I expect the trouble with boys’ behavior will get worse as the culture is feminized more. I used to take turns keeping the toddler nursery in church. I noticed one Sunday, that no boys showed up.
    During that hour, not a single fort was made.
    Nobody piled blocks up and ran into them to make them tumble.
    etc.
    A little girl did go around dusting things and saying ,”This place is a mess.”
    🙂

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  11. From Drudge. As the report shows, you can’t do anything secretly with 3000 troops.

    According to our correspondent, the US troops have secretly entered Iraq in multiple stages and are mostly stationed at Balad military garrison in Salahuddin province and al-Asad air base in al-Anbar province.

    Reports say the troops include US Army officers and almost 17,000 more are set to secretly return to Iraq via the same route.

    http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2012/12/09/277127/3000-us-troops-secretly-return-to-iraq/

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  12. Ricky Weaver, #4, your “ADD, OCD, PMS, etc.” story reminded me of the time when I was a school teacher and had to put a student on detention for his behavior in my class one day. I called the boy’s mother, and she explained to me that he had ADD, and therefore would not be able to remember anything he was told, and I should research ADD more, and so on.

    She didn’t seem to comprehend that if he couldn’t remember anything that had happened minutes before, how could he go home and accurately tell what had happened in the classroom hours before.

    Yeah.

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  13. I also wonder if the high percentage of minority boy getting in trouble has anything to do with the fact that a disproportional number of these boys are being raised by single mothers who know about as much about little boys as the teachers.

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  14. KBells,

    I read your post from yesterday will catching up this AM. If you and your husband do start your own blog, I’d recommend WordPress to ya’s. It’s free, really easy to set up, and easy to use. If you decide you like it, you can upgrade, as I’ll be doing here after the New Year. You should try it. If you do, let me know when it’s up and we can link to it in the Blogs I Follow section on the left. Also, you can get to WordPress to get started thru the link on the left as well, under Meta. Since you are already a WordPress user and are registered, it’s even easier. Good luck.

    Allen

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  16. Oh look,

    Here’s some more of that expert foreign policy Team Barry is so well known for. But he’ll get a pass from the press, as always.

    🙄

    Imagine the reaction if this was the Bush Asia Team.

    http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/12/13/obama_s_asia_team_caught_off_guard_partying_when_rocket_launched

    “The Obama administration’s Asia team was caught so off guard by North Korea’s Dec. 11 rocket launch, several of them actually had to put down their drinks and suddenly leave a holiday party being held in honor of the Japanese emperor’s birthday.

    Several top U.S. officials dealing with Asia and North Korea from the State Department, the Pentagon, and the National Security Council were relaxing Tuesday night at the Japanese ambassador’s Nebraska Avenue residence in Washington when the news came over their blackberries that North Korea had launched another Unha-3 rocket with a “satellite” attached, this time with much more success than a previous attempt in April.

    Just minutes before the launch news became known, several officials were overheard remarking how nice it was that North Korea was apparently delaying the launch, giving U.S. North Korea watchers hope that their holiday festivities would not be interrupted.

    “Nobody in the U.S. government thought this would happen when it did,” said one top Asia expert who attended the party. “A lot of the guys who do the Korea stuff both on the policy and intelligence side were at this thing. They were saying ‘We bought ourselves some time.’ People were hoping it didn’t happen before Christmas because they wanted to take time off.””

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  18. KBell’s husband is right. Few outstanding men of the highest character were far from perfectly or even well behaved during childhood and youth. She is, also, quite right to make clear to her son that teachers, coaches, and other legitimate authorities are to be respected and obeyed, though not necessarily liked. My father and mother would not hear any criticism of legitimate authorities.

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  22. kbells — we seldom agree so I had to write a note. We give our children the same advice. You may disagree with a referee, coach, teacher etc but stay respectful and remember they’re still in charge. Sometimes we need to be quiet rather than speak out mind. A girl on my daughter’s soccer team was suspended by the league for swearing at the ref — behavior learned by parents on the sidelines.

    6 arrows — parents seldom stop to think an elementary student who can barely remember to bring a lunch to school and to take their gym clothes home to wash yet has an almost perfect memory when recalling an incident which happened in school that day. There are days when I’m sure a student and I must live on different planets given the stories he or she will tell their parents.

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  23. Ricky (21): You and I both. And you know, now that you say it, it seems to me quite a number of years ago I heard about a school (or district, maybe?) where parents would have to come and sit the detention with their kids. That may have been a “repeat offender”-type situation, I don’t remember, but maybe it taught some of those parents to teach their kids to respect all their authority figures.

    HRW (22): There are days when I’m sure a student and I must live on different planets given the stories he or she will tell their parents.

    You know it. I felt the same way sometimes. And when the parents automatically take the kids’ side, no questions asked…well, let’s just say I don’t miss that aspect of school teaching at all. I have a huge amount of respect for those of you still in the trenches; I can’t imagine the situation is any better now than 20 years ago when I was last in the classroom.

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  26. HRW, I was a music teacher, certified in grades K-12. I found it interesting that when I was a student teacher, the middle school kids were much better behaved than the high school students (and the elementary kids were best), but in my first hired position, it was the middle school kids who were the worst. (I was at a small rural school with all the K-12 students from the district attending one school, so I knew every student there, even if some of them weren’t in my classes.)

    The 7th and 8th graders there my first year had been notoriously ill-behaved (well, most of them) for years before I came on the scene, and some of the parents were a huge part of the problem. One mother came to the school and told me that if I ever put her kid on detention again, she would take me to the school board. I told my other music-teaching colleague there about that, and he said I should say to the woman, “Go right ahead.” Well, before any more detentions occurred, the kid dropped out of my class (he shouldn’t have been in it in the first place if he wasn’t going to do the work), so I guess it was he who finally gave up.

    He and his classmates are probably right around 40 years old now, and I often wonder if some of them ever grew up, or if they’re the kind of excuse-making parents that their parents were.

    The good news is that, in the next school district in which I worked, my K-6 job had much better students and supportive parents (with the exception of the parent I mentioned at #12), which was a real breath of fresh air after that first job.

    And then I came home to be with my kids (two at the time), and that’s been the best job I’ve ever had. 🙂

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  29. KBells, I don’t remember how old your son is, but I’ve noticed with my kids that the two most difficult times to parent them have been right after they weaned 🙂 and then again about the time they were getting to “double digits” and for a few years after. Ten, eleven was usually when some challenging issues started to come up, if I remember right, and we felt like we were in over our heads at times, too. However, usually by sometime in the year they were 14 (for the three that have gotten to that age) we saw a lot of improvement. Much less volatility and such.

    Take heart! You’re doing well, establishing boundaries and being intentional parents rather than “Well, whatever happens, happens”, shrug-your-shoulders-and-do-nothing kinds of folks. He’ll come around when he matures enough to understand that your holding him accountable to your standards is a sign of your love for him.

    Praying for you KBells. Blessings.

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  30. KBells (#3): “Also, anyone who had ever been around kids for more that two minutes can tell you why boys get in trouble more than girls. They are just naturally more aggressive and restless.”

    My friend, an elementary teacher in L.A. city public schools, can always predict what kind of year she’ll have by the # of boys vs. girls in her classroom.

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  32. I wonder about my school, Charles Drew Middle School. I once saw a report about the suspensions for the Los Angeles Unified School District. It was divided into Areas. Each High School and all its feeder schools, Middle Schools and Elementary schools, were in its own Area. My Area had the highest number of suspensions in the entire LAUSD, 3,000+ for the previous year. The next highest Area had 900 for the entire K-12 Area. As a matter of fact, my school alone had 1,000 suspensions, higher than any other Area.

    My school was all minority, Black and Mexican. All the Administrators, Counselors and Deans of Discipline, except one, were Black or Mexican. How could they be prejudiced?

    Yes it was a tough school. We had 2 murders on campus, no other MS had any. The Crips gang started there.

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