Comment Archives: stories: News & Opinion
Re: “Lovely Warren says city schools would be her first priority as mayor”
This is going to be an awesome campaign season. Cover it all, City! Cover it all.
Re: “Self-serving Senate's failed gun control legislation”
MJN - My sarcasm meter jumped into the red zone with your post.
Your point is understood, well-made even.
However, even with the element of common-sense you bring, I can't get worked up in favor of any additional restriction - no matter how practical, reasonable or common-sensical - to any of our freedoms.
We have lost too many in the last few decades. Freedoms of communication (Patriot Act), against unreasonable search and seizure (TSA), loss of property to eminent domain (Kelo), federal minimum sentences and others... all these and more have led America away from being the beacon of liberty she used to be, and into the "modern" world of limited freedoms (in a macro sense) we live in today.
We may have plenty of day-to-day freedoms left (thank God for the 1st Amendment), but in a full understanding of where we've been and what we've done, we're less free today than we've been in a long, long time.
Until we regain some freedoms for Americans who aren't bankers, politicians or lobbyists, giving up ANY freedoms is a sacrifice no one should be willing to make.
Re: “Self-serving Senate's failed gun control legislation”
Even commentators sympathetic to Prof. Obama are pointing out his incompetence on this one. A smarter politician would have focused on getting background checks done before the Newtown hysteria dissipated, rather than getting wrapped around the axle over bans that would never pass. Instead, thanks to his ivory tower cluelessness, the professor loses juice with nothing to show for it.
Of course, that analysis assumes he actually wanted to get something done. The fact is Obama said nothing about gun control either time he ran for president. His histrionics on the subject now is nothing but theater. And it is a particularly execrable example of victim porn, cynically calculated to agitate his lunatic fringe base for the midterms while shaking down his Hollywood sugar daddies.
Re: “Lovely Warren says city schools would be her first priority as mayor”
So Mrs. Warren, after her dis-honest fumbling of the issue of gay marriage (the only thing on her twitter feed other than self promottion are quotes from Rick Warren, champion against gay marriage in california), now has sided with Jeb Bush and the so called education "reformers" who believe that privatization , union busting and more endless testing are the solutions to urban education. The identity politics alarm system at City newspaper must be shooting sparks! By the way, if Ms. Warren's full time job is working for David Gantt, does anyone think she is working full time in his office only in that capacity? Isn't she then basically running for Mayor full time while being paid by Gantt? So isn't David Gantt essentially paying her to run for mayor right now? I'm not accusing her of running for mayor for monetary reasons, but isn't kind of weird that David Gantt is paying her salary while she runs? Alex White is running his own business whilst running for Mayor and Richards spends about 100 hrs a week being Mayor. Weird. And no one will ever ask about it.
Re: “Self-serving Senate's failed gun control legislation”
Yugoboy - Good news! Despite the propaganda, misrepresentations and out right lies spewing from the NRA and their right wing accomplices, your freedom to purchase a firearm is not, and never was, in danger. The Constitution, including the Second Amendment is alive and well. Only those with a fevered imagination view it as being in the slightest shredded.
Neither Obama, nor Congress nor any state government has proposed or will propose that all firearms be banned or that those in private hands be confiscated. Your right to be shot by a friend or family member remains intact, as does the right of any citizen, law-abiding or not, to buy as much firepower as they can afford ij order to be able to and take out their wrath on innocent bystanders in schools, movie theaters and college campuses.
Re: “Lovely Warren says city schools would be her first priority as mayor”
Mrs. Lovely ought to be running for RCSD board President with those visions.
Re: “Lovely Warren says city schools would be her first priority as mayor”
I applaud the focus of Lovely! Rather than telling us what we cannot afford and what we cannot do, she, is rolling out a plan with a solution to the most pressing problem we have! I do not know enough about school issues to say this will work...but, you never find answers without trying to find solutions. I, for one, will support someone with vision, not someone who tells us what we cannot do...we have that now!
Re: “Self-serving Senate's failed gun control legislation”
Kathryn Quinn Thomas - that's not democracy... it's freedom.
Re: “Lovely Warren says city schools would be her first priority as mayor”
So Ms. Warren does not want mayoral control, but besides spending $119 million dollars for education that is administered by the Superintendent, with oversight by the School Board, she now wants to have the main focus of the mayors office also being education. If education is Ms. Warren's prime focus, she should run for Commisioner for the Board of Education rather than for mayor. If we don't have mayoral control, then the mayors office has other priorities that should take precedence.
Re: “From our cold, dead minds”
Thank you for your article. The Gun Lobby collective has been extremely cynical and manipulative. Speaking with those in my family that hunt and treat weapons with respect and caution, it is astounding how the leaderships of these organizations have been able to cloak their actions from their members. I guess it is the old 'mother and apple pie' strategy. It seems to have worked to obscure the areas in which all of us are pretty much in agreement: good record keeping, penalties for gun trafficking, better mental health services, safer gun engineering and a host of other items. The answer is to turn over the rocks and expose the underside. That is why modern data collection system are so feared. They fear the light.
Re: “Self-serving Senate's failed gun control legislation”
Yikes! So if 90 percent of the country is in favor of background checks for gun and ammo purchases at conventions and on the Internet, which ARE NOT checked currently, meaning crazy people can purchase such weapons and show a up at a movie theater and kill people that could be my friends and family and that's democracy???
Re: “Self-serving Senate's failed gun control legislation”
The Senate took a stand for freedom yesterday. Liberals have a lot of nerve trying to "shame" Americans into voting for laws that restrict our rights and do NOTHING to prevent gun violence. These opportunistic big government socialists got a taste of what they deserve.
Obama wants to turn American into one giant Chicago, and many Americans don't want that. Despite the nauseating propaganda shoved down our throats by the liberal media. So cheers to the Senate for taking a stand against this tyranny. It may have not been a good day for Obama, but it was a good day for freedom.
Re: “Self-serving Senate's failed gun control legislation”
I don't understand why the day was "shameful" or why people are all upset with Congress. I, for one, was a little worried that they might actually shave some more of our rights in the name of "safety."
For the first time since the sequester, I'm pretty happy with the fact that Congress worked as it was supposed to: protecting the rights of Americans. Congress isn't always supposed to bow to the will of the majority. Sometimes Congress' role is to maintain the rights of a minority.
First: when was the last time Congress worked to INCREASE our rights in any way?
The history of America in the last few decades has been one of reducing the freedoms of individuals and groups who are not in the majority or in power.
Almost every decision of the Congress since at least 9/11 has been to reduce and restrict freedoms of Americans and other global citizens (Patriot Act to name only 1)
Second: why write new laws when older laws could have a significant impact on the problem IF enforcement is implemented. Writing new laws isn't the same as enforcing them.
I don't own a handgun. Maybe I will in the future, maybe not. That decision isn't on my mind, BUT, the freedom to make that decision is. The Bill of Rights isn't an a la carte menu. It exists to protect our rights and freedoms.
We have become a nation of simpering cowards responding with panic and hyperbole at every rare, outlier event that has a negative result. Why? I have no idea except that we have also become a nation that worships its children. The "safety" of the children trumps the rights of free Americans everywhere.
Not if I can help it. Hurrah for the Constitution. It's not completely shredded yet.
Re: “PETA bringing campus tour to UR”
It said it was supposed to there today 10-3. I went at 2 and didn't see anything. Has the date been changed??
Re: “A surge of charters to Rochester?”
I think Mr. Klein is "supportive" of public schools in the same way Jean Claude Brizard was. Specifically, Brizard introduced a strategic plan in which the Parthenon Group (a capital investment firm specializing in opening up opportunities to generate investor profits in the public pK-12 "market." ) was the primary citation and basis for his discredited branding-style , charter-expanding portfolio approach to school choice. The article below demonstrates how Parthenon profers advice to investors that has nothing to do with improving education and everything to do with profits. The solutions to the crisis in education involve more democracy and less privatization, not the reverse. Democratization and powerful movements for local control of public education would minimize the perversions of profiteering "investors," but more importantly we would finally see learning focused on meeting our children's needs according to high community standards. Parthenon Group analysis of potential profit centers based on state funding (more is better) and anticipated test performance (lower is better): http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/marketplace…
Re: “From our cold, dead minds”
We can't support every study that those in academia want. Find a cure for cancer, yes. Forget about those other ridiculous studies we gear about all the time, even if they sound "scientific" in nature. The most recent was a grant of our tax dollars to study male duck appendages:
(CNSNews.com) - The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a $384,949 grant to Yale University for a study on “Sexual Conflict, Social Behavior and the Evolution of Waterfowl Genitalia”, according to the recovery.gov website.
If this is the kind of nonsense we are funding as "science", we certainly shouldn't be spending any taxpayer dollars on "political science".
Re: “From our cold, dead minds”
the problem is our culture, partisan in the university as well as congress. we live in ny yet i have never heard a mention of what happened here during the revolutionary war. how many people loyal to the english crown were burned out, pushed out and emigrated to canada. how about the civil war atrocities in shermans march to the sea. any research on these topics, no. why, because of the partisanship and subsequent cowardice in academia.
research in these areas would lead to discussion about what a well regulated militia could have done to stop the destruction of lives and property. our country is in trouble because those we rely on for research pick and choose what is politically expedient. i might do the same if my career depended on it.
so we are left with uninformed people taking sides, lacking information that would make a decent discussion possible. never mind what history has to say or statistics, nobody trusts them. just manipulate people to get enough votes for whatever side you choose. not a good way to get the consent of the governed
Re: “What did Rhee know about cheating in DC schools?”
Any employee who whines about being held accountable for his or her job performance should be terminated. Only in the dysfunctional alternate universe of government-run "education" could such an ironclad principle qualify as either "reform" or a matter of controversy.
Re: “Could charters chew up the Rochester school district?”
Thank you RochesterParent for making the case more clearly and cogently than I generally do.
It doesn't matter if the students are picked by lottery. Simply entering the lottery indicates a higher level of "give a crap" than those who don't. Taking 3.000 of those kids out of the public schools basically reduces the percentage of students in the district whose parents do care enough (or are knowledgeable enough) to perform this advocacy for their children.
I suppose that eventually there will be 80 charter schools and what's left will be a few public schools where the students who are the worst problem children, or whose parents don't/can't advocate effectively will rot until they are 16, when they drop out to live on society's margins.
If public schools could expel problem children the way charter schools can, if public schools could claim hardship to prevent having to have a major special ed program, if public schools had the parent involvement that charter schools do, they'd be doing as well as charter schools.
I know that in some areas the charter school experiment has been a failure due to a variety of reasons, but here, the conditions I just outlined have helped charter schools to become successful enough. God knows our school has about 10 middle schoolers we would love to expel. Our school would run far better and the scores would improve immediately if we could. We can't, so we will be judged a failure for making an effort to educate some seriously difficult children who have arrived in middle school without the skills to do 5th grade work.
Let us not forget that my evaluation is tied to some extent to these children's ability to do middle school level work. I've spent my year trying to get them to that level.
Analogy: try to get a high school baseball player to be able to play in the major leagues. The kid's the right size, the kid's at his physical prime, but the kid does not have the experience or skills to do that. Is it the coach's fault the kid can't cut it in the major leagues? Or is it the decision of the person who foisted that kid on the hapless coach?
Carry the Analogy: Take a mid-level baseball team. Ship all the best players to other teams. Now try to make the playoffs. That is what charter schools are doing to the RCSD.
Re: “A surge of charters to Rochester?”
Indeed Joe Klein helped bring former RCSD Superintendent Jean-Claude Brizard to Rochester. Joe had a plan then. He has one now (although in my humble, but informed view, it's a very, very bad plan, and even dangerous in some ways), at least he has a one, which raises the critically important question: WHAT IS THE ROCHESTER BOARD OF EDUCATION AND THE CURRENT SUPERINTENDENT'S PLAN? They don't appear to have one, which is a big part of the reason why people like Joe Klein can so easily implement theirs. Bold, courageous, unbought, unbossed, committed leadership is clearly a big part of what's missing in the Rochester City School District.
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