DebateGate

...parents don't have any right to opt their children out of the pro-gay marriage curriculum.

sirs, that's exactly what bothers me.  I don't have any problems with same-sex relationships, but I do have a problem with any group that thinks they should decide what my children need to learn beyond the basic subjects; i.e., math, reading, grammar, spelling, writing, history, and geography.

In our district, sex ed classes have always contained an 'opt out' choice.  Each school has a Health Curriculum Advisory Board comprised of both teachers and parents who review and choose the course materials for the upcoming year.  Parents are invited to view the materials before the unit is presented, usually during the regular "Back To School" night.  Then the permission slips are sent home for the parents to either agree or opt out of the class. 

As far as I'm concerned, this is the best way to handle the issue of sex ed in public school.  The school satisfies what they see as their duty to educate students about a subject that may or may not be taught in the home, and parents retain their right to decide whether or not the subject matter and manner of presentation are appropriate for their own child.  When government - in the form of the school board - decides that it can and should override a parent's judgment regarding what their child is taught, the government has gone too far.

Now...if you think having your child's school take over your right to teach them about sex, same-sex relationships, or birth control in the way that's best for your family, how would you like to have to deal with this issue?

Stunned Parents Protest
Uproar over teacher's gender change
By Ryan Chalk

When Angela Weinzinger's children returned home at the start of the new school year, she was surprised to learn from them that one of their music teachers, formerly a "Miss," was now to be addressed as "Mister."

The startling revelation sent Weinzinger scrambling for answers to questions of how this happened, and why she had to hear about it from her children who attend Foxboro Elementary School. Weinzinger has two daughters, ages 6 and 9, along with an 11-year-old son who attend the school.

A growing number of parents feel the school could have done more to inform them of the teacher's gender change. They also charge that there was no support for the students who had questions about their teacher. Last Friday, a handful of concerned parents spent time before and after school handing out fliers notifying others of the change.

"They told them (students) to go home and ask your parents about it," Weinzinger said. "But how can we answer when we don't even know about it."

Principal Lisa Eckhoff said she was not at liberty to speak on the matter, citing confidentiality issues. The teacher did not respond to e-mail inquiries from The Reporter.

Weinzinger said that more than 30 parents have contacted the school requesting to have their kids removed from music class. On days when her children would attend music, they are attending activities with other instructors, according to Weinzinger.

Jim Dorigatti, whose daughter attends sixth grade at Foxboro, said that, like many parents, he respects what people do in their private lives.

"But this isn't a private issue," Dorigatti said. "This is something the kids can't not know about. It's hard to call the issue private when it's right there in your face."

Dorigatti has gone as far as removing his daughter from band class as well, enrolling her in private music lessons to keep her prepared for middle school band.

The parents say they would have liked some advance notice about the instructor's decision to identify with the opposite gender.

Travis Unified School District Superintendent Kate Wren Gavlak, issued a statement saying, "We want to assure the community that staff will not be discussing private or personal matters with students, parents or the community."

Dorigatti and Weinzinger said they would be keeping their kids out of the teacher's class as long as the teacher remains there.

"I know the school is frustrated because parents are pulling their kids out of class," Weinzinger said. "I would hate to think the school could lose funding because parents are pulling their kids out of those classes."

Travis Unified Governing Board Trustee Edwin Sanderson said he did not have all of the facts yet but that the board may consider addressing the matter in closed session during its next regularly scheduled board meeting on Tuesday.

"This is not a matter for amusement, this is a matter for careful deliberation," Sanderson said. "It is my understanding that the administration is working very diligently to preserve the rights of both the parents and the teachers."

For the most part, parents just want to feel like they have some level of control over what their children are exposed to in school.

"As a family, we have our values, and we don't push them on anybody," Weinzinger said. "But we don't feel it's fair that someone pushed their values on us."

Jennifer Mikolajcik has also taken steps to keep her children out of the music class. The parent of second- and fourth-grade boys said that the matter has become a distraction.

"This is not an issue of the teacher's choice. It's an issue that our kids know about it and are seeing it."

Like many parents, Mikolajcik doesn't know what to do next, realizing that her children may not be able to be kept out of the music class forever.

She says the next step may be to get a group of concerned parents to rally at Tuesday's board meeting.

"It's very frustrating for parents because you want to do what's best for your children," Mikolajcik said. "We just feel respect has to go both ways. The rights were looked out for the teacher and not our children."

http://www.thereporter.com/news/ci_10697147

These comments at The Corner say it better than I could:

Getting a lot of emails along these lines:

I don't know why I'm e-mailing you, except that I just need to vent to someone on The Corner. Pass this around to the others if you like ? I bet I'm not the only one.

I really don't like McCain. I'll probably vote for him just as a vote for divided government. I'm far too libertarian in my leanings to be comfortable with McCain (or Obama, for that matter).

That said, the way the pro-Obama media and bloggers, and Obama himself, have responded to Joe has got me nearly shaking with rage. They are attempting to destroy a man ? a private citizen ? who had the audacity to ask The One a question. Mind you, Joe was on his front lawn playing football with his son when Obama strolled up to give him his hopenchange spiel. Obama approached Joe, not the other way around. And Joe asked Obama an honest question. And Obama gave him an honest ? and very, very revealing ? answer. Again, mind you, the embarassment was on Obama's end, not Joe's. It wasn't a gotcha question.

And yet, for that Joe is being pilloried, every aspect of his private and professional life being sorted through and exposed. To prove ... what? What does that have to do with Obama's answer? What does Joe's situation have to do with Obama's philosophical answer ? that he wants to "spread the wealth"? Obama's answer goes down the memory hole while the nation concentrates its fire on obliterating Joe the Plumber.

It's sickening, it's maddening and it's downright chilling.

Sorry for the length. But I am just SEETHING.

And:

I was at LSAT class tonight and the instructor had the audacity to state that Joe the Plumber is a "lunatic" fit to be paralized because he allegedly questioned the merits of social security. The instructor then went on to construct a sample question in which Joe the Plumber is confined to a wheel chair because he has been run down by McCain's 'straight talk express' bus.

Mind you, this professional "educator" graduated from Georgetown, Harvard Law, and Harvard Business. And I'm supposed to be worried about Sarah Palin's lack of an "elite" education?

And:

I could care less about Joe's background, whether he's legit, or whether he is a McCain operative. What I do care about is that I could be attacked like a public figure simply for asking a question, like Joe. I am chilled. No longer undecided either.

I'm not seeing #3DHS listed under channels.  The chat room here works great if you want to try it.

Come on in

Turns out that ?Doodad Pro? and ?Good Will? are not the only phony contributors to Barack Obama?s presidential campaign. The New York Times finally bestirred itself to apply some basic investigative journalism attention to the Democratic presidential nominee?s donor list. The Times found nearly 3,000 other questionable donors like ?Jgtj Jfggjjfgj? and ?Dirty West? after what the paper admitted was just a cursory look at the Illinois senator?s September financial filings. But then Times reporters Michael Luc and Griff Palmer revealed an incredible level of naivety by stating ?it is unclear why someone making a political donation would want to enter a false name.?

Unclear? What other motive could there be for using a phony name and a nonexistent address to make multiple small donations using a single credit card than to evade U.S. election laws? Such journalistic gullibility may explain why bloggers have been on this story for months and the Times is only now noticing. The Atlas Shrugged blog first broke the story of such suspicious donors behind Obama back in July after noticing little gems like this in the Illinois senator?s official FEC filings:

Name:  Hbkjb, jkbkj
City: Jkbjnj
Works for:  Kuman Bank
Occupation:  Balanon Jalalan
Amount:  $1,077.23

In case you are wondering, there is no such thing as the Kuman Bank. It is difficult to see how the Obama campaign could have mistakenly accepted such an obviously duplicitous donation - and thousands more like it - in good faith. Yet the campaign is now claiming to be the victim of ?Internet fraud.?

Then there?s the question of whether foreign nationals are contributing to the Obama campaign. There is more than enough evidence to warrant a full-scale investigation by the Federal Election Commission, including the $32,332.19 that appears to have come from two brothers living in a Hamas-controlled Palestinian refugee camp in Rafah, GA (that?s Gaza, not Georgia). The brothers? cash is part of a flood of illegal foreign contributions accepted by the Obama campaign. Potentially at issue, according to a complaint filed last week by the Republican National Committee, is as much as half of the $427 million he?s already collected. In any case, a complete FEC audit became an even more urgent matter after MSNBC reported that Obama?s Muslim outreach director quietly met with top Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) officials in an uncharacteristically unpublicized event in Springfield, Virginia on September l5th. The FEC?s primary job is to protect the integrity of our federal election process. With this many red flags flying and barely three week left before election day, there?s no time to lose if voters are to have all the information at hand before casting their ballots.

http://www.dcexaminer.com/opinion/FEC_Should_Begin_Obama_Audit_Now.html

Mark Hyman
Sunday, October 12, 2008

COMMENTARY:

About 50 parishioners were locked into the Assemblies of God church before it was set ablaze. They were mostly women and children. Those who tried to flee were hacked to death by machete-wielding members of a mob numbering 2,000.

The 2008 New Year Day atrocity in the Kenyan village Eldoret, about 185 miles northwest of Nairobi, had all the markings of the Rwanda genocide of a decade earlier.

By mid-February 2008, more than 1,500 Kenyans were killed. Many were slain by machete-armed attackers. More than 500,000 were displaced by the religious strife. Villages lay in ruin. Many of the atrocities were perpetrated by Muslims against Christians.

The violence was led by supporters of Raila Odinga, the opposition leader who lost the Dec. 27, 2007, presidential election by more than 230,000 votes. Odinga supporters began the genocide hours after the final election results were announced Dec. 30. Mr. Odinga was a member of Parliament representing an area in western Kenya, heavily populated by the Luo tribe, and the birthplace of Barack Obama's father.

Mr. Odinga had the backing of Kenya's Muslim community heading into the election. For months he denied any ties to Muslim leaders, but fell silent when Sheik Abdullahi Abdi, chairman of the National Muslim Leaders Forum, appeared on Kenya television displaying a memorandum of understanding signed on Aug. 29, 2007, by Mr. Odinga and the Muslim leader. Mr. Odinga then denied his denials.

The details of the MOU were shocking. In return for Muslim backing, Mr. Odinga promised to impose a number of measures favored by Muslims if he were elected president. Among these were recognition of "Islam as the only true religion," Islamic leaders would have an "oversight role to monitor activities of ALL other religions [emphasis in original]," installation of Shariah courts in every jurisdiction, a ban on Christian preaching, replacement of the police commissioner who "allowed himself to be used by heathens and Zionists," adoption of a women's dress code, and bans on alcohol and pork.

This was not Mr. Odinga's first brush with notoriety. Like his father, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, the main opposition leader in the 1960s and 1970s, Raila Odinga is a Marxist He graduated from East Germany's Magdeburg University in 1970 on a scholarship provided by the East German government. He named his oldest son after Fidel Castro.

Raila Odinga was implicated in the bloody coup attempt in 1982 against then-President Daniel Arap Moi, a close ally of the United States. Kenya has been one of the most stable democracies in Africa since the 1960s. The ethnic cleansing earlier this year was the worst violence in Kenya since that 1982 coup attempt.

Mr. Odinga spent eight years in prison. At the time, he denied guilt but later detailed he was a coup leader in his 2006 biography. Statue of limitations precluded further prosecution when the biography appeared.

Initially, Mr. Odinga was not the favored opposition candidate to stand in the 2007 election against President Mwai Kibaki, who was seeking his second term. However, he received a tremendous boost when Sen. Barack Obama arrived in Kenya in August 2006 to campaign on his behalf. Mr. Obama denies that supporting Mr. Odinga was the intention of his trip, but his actions and local media reports tell otherwise.

Mr. Odinga and Mr. Obama were nearly inseparable throughout Mr. Obama's six-day stay. The two traveled together throughout Kenya and Mr. Obama spoke on behalf of Mr. Odinga at numerous rallies. In contrast, Mr. Obama had only criticism for Kibaki. He lashed out against the Kenyan government shortly after meeting with the president on Aug. 25. "The [Kenyan] people have to suffer over corruption perpetrated by government officials," Mr. Obama announced.

"Kenyans are now yearning for change," he declared. The intent of Mr. Obama's remarks and actions was transparent to Kenyans - he was firmly behind Mr. Odinga.

Mr. Odinga and Mr. Obama had met several times before the 2006 trip. Reports indicate Mr. Odinga visited Mr. Obama during trips to the U.S. in 2004, 2005 and 2006. Mr. Obama sent his foreign policy adviser Mark Lippert to Kenya in early 2006 to coordinate his summer visit. Mr. Obama's August trip coincided with strategizing by Orange Democratic Movement leaders to defeat Mr. Kibaki in the upcoming elections. Mr. Odinga represented the ODM ticket in the presidential race.

Mr. Odinga and Mr. Obama's father were both from the Luo community, the second-largest tribe in Kenya, but their ties run much deeper. Mr. Odinga told a stunned BBC Radio interviewer the reason why he and Mr. Obama were staying in near daily telephone contact was because they were cousins. In a Jan. 8, 2008, interview, Mr. Odinga said Mr. Obama had called him twice the day before while campaigning in the New Hampshire primary before adding, "Barack Obama's father is my maternal uncle."

President Kibaki requested a meeting of all opposition leaders in early January in an effort to quell the violence. All agreed to attend except Mr. Odinga. A month later, Mr. Kibaki offered Mr. Odinga the role of prime minister, the de facto No. 2 in the Kenyan government, in return for an end to the attacks. Mr. Odinga was sworn in on April 17, 2008.

Mr. Obama's judgment is seriously called into question when he backs an official with troubling ties to Muslim extremists and whose supporters practice ethnic cleansing and genocide. It was Islamic extremists in Kenya who bombed the U.S. Embassy in 1998, killing more than 200 and injuring thousands. None of this has dissuaded Mr. Obama from maintaining disturbing loyalties.

http://www.washtimes.com/news/2008/oct/12/obamas-kenya-ghosts/

Dissecting the health care proposals of Obama and McCain.
by Yuval Levin
10/20/2008, Volume 014, Issue 06

Over the past few weeks, in a series of television ads, in stump speeches, and in the presidential and vice presidential debates, the Obama campaign has sought mightily to attack John McCain's proposal for health care reform. It's vehemence and tenacity have been striking, especially given how little McCain himself has actually had to say about his plan. Ironically, their misleading critiques actually hint at the strengths of McCain's proposal, and point to the serious vulnerabilities in Obama's own approach to health care politics.

At the core of the McCain health care agenda is the most important conservative policy innovation since welfare reform: the transformation of the benefit now given to employer-provided health coverage into a health insurance tax credit made available to all. For almost 70 years now, the federal government has given a significant tax preference to employer-provided health insurance. When your employer takes money out of your wages to purchase coverage on your behalf, the money is not counted as part of your gross income, so you don't pay any taxes on it. But if you purchase insurance yourself, not through an employer, the money you use to do so gets taxed.

This makes employer-provided insurance vastly more appealing and places a serious burden on those to whom it is not available or who prefer coverage other than what their company offers. It has prevented the development of a genuine market in individually purchased health insurance and therefore artificially keeps insurance costs high. It has kept consumers from having a clear sense of what their health care costs, and so has inflated the price of care itself as well as the price of coverage. It has severely reduced the options available to families, making it more difficult to find insurance that meets their particular needs. It has tied health insurance to employment, leaving people uncertain about career moves and insecure about the future of their coverage. And it has vastly increased the number of Americans without health insurance, since not every business can afford to provide coverage, and those whose employers don't offer it cannot readily find affordable options on their own.

And yet, for all its troubles, the employer-based system is quite popular with the people it serves. Nearly 90 percent of them, in a recent Kaiser Foundation poll, rated their insurance as good or excellent. They would certainly like to see costs go down and to feel more secure about their coverage, but they do not want their existing coverage taken away from them. This obviously poses an enormous challenge for reformers: How can the problems of the current system be addressed without displacing the millions of Americans who are satisfied with it?

The McCain solution is to change the incentives for consumers, but not for employers, so that people find themselves with more options, but are not forced out of their current insurance arrangement. Rather than exempt from taxation all the money used by employers to buy insurance, he would treat it as income but then provide individual taxpayers (regardless of how they obtain their coverage) with a credit that more than covers the taxes. The effect of this, from the point of view of individuals and families, would be to make employer-provided coverage just one option among many.

All American taxpayers, regardless of whether they now have health insurance or where they get it, would receive a $2,500 health care tax credit ($5,000 per family) under McCain's plan. If you now have health insurance through your employer and would like to keep it, you can do that and the economics of the arrangements would change only slightly, and (for all but the top 5 percent of taxpayers) for the better. The money your employer takes out of your wages for your insurance would be taxed, but the new credit would more than cover the additional taxes, leaving you with the insurance you have now, and with a little more money in your pocket at tax time (between $700 and $1,600, according to the estimates of the Tax Policy Center). Things don't change for your employer, and they get a little better for you.

In last week's town hall debate, Barack Obama attacked this feature of the plan as an example of "one hand giveth and the other hand taketh away." But the giving and the taking occurs only on your income tax form, and in the end you're left with the insurance you want to keep and more of the money you've earned. The point of all the giving and taking, meanwhile, is to make options available for those not satisfied with the current system, or not served by it.

If you now receive insurance coverage from your employer but are unhappy with it or would rather find coverage that stays with you through different jobs or better suits your family's needs on your own, the McCain plan would give you the same tax benefit for insurance you choose as you now get only for insurance your employer chooses. If you decline your employer's insurance, the portion of your wages spent on coverage becomes regular take-home pay, which you can use to buy insurance. The additional wages are taxed, but again the new credit would cover those taxes and even leave you with a little extra. You would have just as much money to spend on insurance as your employer did. In addition, the McCain plan would vastly increase the scope of competition in the individual insurance market by permitting insurers to sell policies across state lines. It would thus create both new buyers and new sellers and start to build a genuine individual insurance market, which would bring down costs.

Finally, if you don't have insurance at all now, the new tax credit would put your family $5,000 closer to affording it. Most of the uninsured are not poor (or else they would qualify for Medicaid), and for many families without coverage an extra $5,000 and a real market to buy in would make the difference and allow them to obtain health insurance. A recent analysis of the McCain plan by noted health care economist Roger Feldman and a team at Health Systems Innovation (HSI) found that it would reduce the number of uninsured Americans by 27 million--well over half of the present total--and all without forcing anyone who now likes their coverage to lose it.

The McCain approach essentially puts employer-purchased and individually purchased health insurance on a level playing field, giving people more options and a better chance to find and afford the coverage they need.

The Obama campaign's attacks on the plan have mostly sought to confuse the public about its benefits by speaking about the parts without acknowledging the whole. Senators Obama and Biden both mentioned the taxation of health benefits in recent debates, and their campaign has run ads pointing to it as well, but all have failed to note the tax credit that more than makes up for it. The net tax burden on middle class families declines under the McCain plan, while insurance options improve. If they do mention the tax credit, they suggest it is all that families would have if they left their employer coverage--as Joe Biden put it in his debate with Sarah Palin, you would have to "replace a $12,000 plan with a $5,000 check you just give to the insurance company." But that ignores the simple fact that employer-purchased health care is purchased with employee wages. Right now, employers pay workers less in cash wages because they pay so much in premiums. With McCain's reform, workers who opt out of coverage will get more take home pay and a tax credit to more than make up for lost employer contributions to health care.

But perhaps the most dishonest charge concerns the prospects for the employer-based system itself. The Obama campaign has implied that McCain's plan would unravel the system and cause workers to be dropped from their employers' health plans. "Twenty million of you will be dropped," Joe Biden said in the vice presidential debate. In fact, the McCain plan does not alter the basic financial incentives facing employers. Workers might choose to leave employer coverage, but the McCain plan would not force them out.

Indeed, it is Barack Obama's health care plan that raises the prospect of masses being dropped from the employer-based insurance system, and his vulnerability on this crucial front may explain some of his intense defensiveness on health care. In the second presidential debate, Obama sought to address this concern through a brazenly misleading depiction of his own plan. "If you've got a health care plan that you like, you can keep it," he said. "All I'm going to do is help you to lower the premiums on it." But you can only keep your plan if your employer doesn't eliminate it, and Obama's health care proposal, unlike John McCain's, gives your employer a powerful incentive to do just that.

Where McCain seeks to address the problems of our health insurance system by building a market for private individuals, Obama seeks to do so by building a public-insurance system. His plan would force all but the very smallest businesses to either provide insurance coverage that meets the plan's requirements (which the Obama campaign has not specified, but would surely involve extensive particular coverage mandates like those in the federal employee health plan, which exceed what most popular employee plans provide today), or pay a tax to the government. Many employers would thus face the choice of increasing their insurance costs to comply with the new coverage requirements or dropping their workers' coverage. Obama, meanwhile, would create a new government-run insurance program (funded by the new tax on employers who don't offer coverage) that would compete with private companies to cover people who are not insured by employers.

In effect, the Obama plan creates an incentive to drop employees from existing plans, and then takes private insurers out of the race to cover them by using price controls to make the public option cheaper. The plan's goal is to drive Americans into a public Medicare-like insurance system by default.

The effect would be dramatic. An analysis by the Lewin Group suggests this approach would result in between 32 million and 52 million people moving from employer-provided coverage to the public system (depending on the rate of the "pay or play" tax on employers, which the Obama campaign has yet to specify). A recent analysis by HSI argues that "The offering of a public health plan will practically eliminate the group market medium PPO plan design that has been the most popular [employer-based] plan to date."

The Obama plan would also cost more than $400 billion a year, would impose a new burdensome tax on employment through the pay or play provision at a time of already rising unemployment, and, according to the Tax Policy Center, would increase the health care costs of taxpayers in the top 40 percent of the income range. All of this, HSI estimates, will reduce the number of uninsured Americans by about 25.5 million people, while McCain's plan would reduce it by more than 27 million.

Simply put, Barack Obama's criticisms of the McCain health care plan--that it would raise taxes and decimate employer-based coverage--apply far better to his own proposal.

The case for McCain's plan can be made very plainly: If you like your coverage as it is, the plan will let you keep it and you will pocket a little more money at tax time. If you don't like your coverage now, the plan will give you a lot more options to choose from and let you use the same money your employer now uses to pay for them. And, if you don't have insurance today, the McCain plan will offer you more options, reduce costs in the market for individual insurance, and put you $5,000 closer to having health insurance. Obama's plan would push tens of millions of people out of private insurance they like and into a vast government program. It would, moreover, raise taxes on hiring in hard economic times and break the federal budget.

It is John McCain, not Barack Obama, who should be pushing hard on health care in the next debate..

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/680cwvaz.asp?pg=1