How come I didn't know that Clark Griswold was running for President?

Oh I'm sorry it is not Clark Griswold, it's Rick Santorum!  But you do see how easy it is to get them confused, right?

I know what you are thinking. "Oh Gryphen, you are messing with us. That MUST be a parody."

Nope, it's not.

It is the desperate attempt by Rick Santorum to mimic Sarah Palin's "highly successful" political bus tour/family vacation in order to get some national attention.  Because dammit, Rick Santorum recognizes a good idea when he sees one!

Gee I wonder if Santorum will "ride a hog" like Sister Sarah did?

By the way I also stumbled across some footage of the Santorum road trip that was not used in the political ad. (If you are at work you might want to skip this video until later, as it contains some quite a lot of adult language.)



But don't worry kids, it will not JUST be about Rick "The frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex" Santorum taking his children around and lying to them about American History, he will also be sharing that ignorance with the American people he meets along the way.

Santorum said he’s been criticized for saying earlier this week, “Schools indoctrinate our children.” He added, “I said ‘indoctrination’ and I meant it.”

Rick Santorum speaks earlier Thursday at a restaurant in Rock Rapids.


As an example, he said: “Sixty-two percent of incoming freshmen come into college with a faith conviction and leave without it. … I suspect if you took a control group of kids who don’t go to college, that doesn’t happen.”

“We see this humanism and secularism being pushed on our children,” said Santorum, who, with his wife, Karen, has been home-schooling their seven children through about eighth grade.

That's right folks!  Rick Santorum's message to America is "Don't allow your children to become educated. It just makes them too intelligent to buy into your Theocratic bullshit! And THAT is just bad for America!"


(H/T to the Huffington Post.)

Lawrence O'Donnell and Matt Damon take a courageous stand to defend our teachers against the unrelenting attacks coming from the Right Wing.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I am not ashamed to admit that I literally had tears streaming down my face as I watched this segment.

Lawrence O'Donnell's passion in bringing this, and other important, stories to our attention should earn him this country's undying gratitude, and Matt Damon? Well in my humble opinion from this day forward Matt Damon should be considered a national treasure.

He did his mother, his teachers, and his country proud.

Teabaggers let the cat out of the bag concerning ultimate goal for our public schools.

Courtesy of Think Progress:

In a series of e-mails and interviews, Teri Adams, the president of the Idependence Hall Tea Party Association, explains that her organization is involved in its voucher advocacy because it believes “public schools should go away.” Adams said that their ultimate goal is to “shut down public schools and have private schools only“:

“We think public schools should go away,’’ says Teri Adams, the head of the Independence Hall Tea Party and a leading advocate — both in New Jersey and Pennsylvania — of passage of school voucher bills. The tea party operates in those two states and Delaware. They should “go away,” she says, because “they are hurting our children.’’ [...] Adams says the current voucher program “discriminates” against wealthier students by providing public subsidies only to inner-city children in allegedly failing schools. Her group’s e-mails pushing vouchers caught the attention of James Kovalcin of South Brunswick, a retired public school teacher who asked Adams for clarification. She responded via email: “Our ultimate goal is to shut down public schools and have private schools only, eventually returning responsibility for payment to parents and private charities. It’s going to happen piecemeal and not overnight. It took us years to get into this mess and it’s going to take years to get out of it.”

Well there you go, any questions about the motives of the radical right wing now?


These people are willing to completely dismantle the American public school system, which has leveled the playing field to allow those who come from humble beginnings to rise to the top through hard work and access to a good education, in exchange for ONLY providing an adequate education for those that can afford it.

Essentially they are trying to gut the very foundation of the American dream, and attempting to impose a class system in this country, where only those who are born with means can achieve success. That is certainly NOT what the founders envisioned for this country:

After the Declaration of Independence, 14 states had their own constitutions by 1791, and out of the 14, 7 states had specific provisions for education. Jefferson believed that education should be under the control of the government, free from religious biases, and available to all people irrespective of their status in society. Others who vouched for public education around the same time were Benjamin Rush, Noah Webster, Robert Coram and George Washington.

And these Teabaggers dare to call themselves "patriots?"

How the Republicans are destroying our public school system, right before our eyes.

This amazing article comes to us from Cassandra Vert, writing for Politicususa:

The conservative argument hinges on convincing us that private education is somehow better than aggregated public education. It’s not. The best students in the world come from state-run schools. When we had the best students in the world, it was because we made a philosophical and financial commitment that every student deserved access to the best education that we as a nation could provide. That is what has changed, and that is what we must reclaim.

I simply cannot urge you enough to read what Cassandra has written.


I have tried multiple times to write how important I find this issue, but have never distilled it down to its main points, nor defined the importance of doing something to stop the privatization of our education system, anywhere near as well as was accomplished in this article.

The picture you see above is my alma mater, A.J. Dimond High School. It is no exaggeration to say that THAT public school changed my life forever and taught me valuable lessons which STILL inform the way I conduct myself to this very day.

Another reminder of why the GOP hates teachers and their unions so much.

From CNN:

A year earlier than usual, the nation's largest teachers union on Monday endorsed President Barack Obama for re-election in 2012.

The National Education Association, which represents 3.2 million teachers and administrators, approved the recommendation from its political action committee at its annual meeting in Chicago.
Obama "shares our vision for a stronger America," NEA President Dennis Van Roekel said in a statement issued by the group. "He has never wavered from talking about the importance of education or his dedication to a vibrant middle class."

Since taking office in 2009, Obama has championed education reform and used stimulus money to help keep teachers employed. Now he is calling for maintaining or increasing spending on education despite negotiating federal budget cuts.

However, not all of the Obama administration's education policies have pleased the union, particularly its support for charter schools and continued reliance on standardized testing to assess performance.

The NEA statement said the organization usually waits until the summer of an election year to endorse a candidate. This year, it did so earlier than normal "in order to provide early and strong support to help ensure the election of a candidate who is on the side of students and working families."

Of course it stands to reason that a union made up of educators would decide to throw their weight behind the candidate with the brains. Doesn't it?

I also have to add that I agree with the NEA's frustration over the fact that Obama supports charter schools and standardized testing as well, but I also know that he is our best hope for dumping NCLB, and getting our education system back to where it was before George Bush took a big steaming crap on it.

Stephen Colbert gives the 2011 commencement speech at Northwestern University.

It is twenty minutes long, but VERY funny and worth it!

Reason #70 not to vote for Sarah Palin for anything

She can only write at the 8th grade level.

From AOL Weird News

The huge cache of Sarah Palin's emails released Friday offered not only a chance to see what she was writing about during her uncompleted term as Alaska's governor, but also an opportunity to see how well she writes.

AOL Weird News brought samples to two writing analysts who independently evaluated 24,000 pages of the former governor's emails. They came back in agreement that Palin composed her messages at an eighth-grade level, an excellent score for a chief executive, they said.

"I'm a centrist Democrat, and would have loved to support my hunch that Ms. Palin is illiterate," said 2tor Chief Executive Officer John Katzman.  "However, the emails say something else. Ms. Palin writes emails on her Blackberry at a grade level of 8.5.

"If she were a student and showing me her work, I'd say 'It's fine, clear writing,'" he said, admitting that emails he wrote scored lower than Palin's on the widely used Flesch-Kincaid readability test.

"She came in as a solid communicator," said Paul J.J. Payack, president of the Global Language Monitor. The emails registered as an 8.2 on his version of the test. "That's typical for a corporate executive."

An example of Palin's strongest writing came on Jul. 17, 2007 in an email to Lieutenant Governor Sean Parnell about the controversial Gravina Island Bridge, infamously called the "Bridge to Nowhere."

"We cant afford it, the Feds won't pay for it, the general populace isn't placing it as a high priority … can you diplomatically express that?! Of course we want infrastructure -- and this is NOT a "bridge to nowhere" (that is so offensive), but as it stands today with the highest-cost bridge design selected by the Ketchikan community, we need to find a lower-cost alternative [if] a bridge will be built."

"She's very concise. She gives clear orders. Her sentences and punctuations are logical," Payack said. "She has much more of a disciplined mind than she's given credit for."

Although it's like comparing apples to oranges, Payack said that famous speeches like Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was a 9.1 and Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" oration rated a 8.8 on the scale.

The Palin emails offer a rare opportunity to see the digital internal communication of a public official. One of the few comparable scenarios was the release of the relatively slim 928-page assortment of former FEMA chief Michael Brown's emails from the days around the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe.

Payack and Katzman restricted their analysis to 60 randomly chosen messages that were at least one paragraph long. They were just 60 among the avalanche of documents released in response to freedom of information requests lodged when Palin was the relatively unknown running mate of Sen. John McCain in the 2008 presidential campaign.

Incoming messages to Palin's gov.sarah@yahoo.com account made up the bulk of the correspondence between December 2006 and September 2008, while the majority of notes Palin penned were too brief to use in the grade-level tests, the analysts said.

Many messages were conjured on her Blackberry, where Palin shortened words in a manner familiar to people who conduct business with their thumbs on a minuscule keypad.

"I'll ck w/Nizich on letter and fwd your ideas," she wrote to Parnell in September 2008 about a conversation he had with Mike Nizich, a former chief of staff to Palin.

Her characteristic down-home manner as the self-proclaimed "Mama Grizzly" that has endeared her to her base and been the subject of ridicule by her opponents shined through in an email from Jan. 2, 2007, soon after she moved into the governor's mansion.

"I am a hunter. I grew up hunting - some of my best memories growing up are of hunting with my dad to help feel [sic] our freezer," she wrote to aides on a bear hunting issue under debate.

But this was a rare example where Palin's writing style matched with the public persona of the rugged frontierswoman that Americans recognize from her recurring appearances on television.

"Given her portrayal of herself as very much an Alaskan I had expected to find a lot of 'Alaskanisms' in her emails," said University of Alaska, Anchorage English Professor David Bowie. "But there were actually very few."

The one regionalism Bowie noticed that popped up was Palin's use of the word "outside" for things beyond Alaska's borders.

[Editor's Note: In the interest of fairness, the writer submitted his own work for scrutiny. His recent piece, on a New York man trying to row across the Atlantic Ocean is on the 8.8 grade level, Payack said.]

While 8th grade level maybe fine for some people, I expect better.  She was a journalism major in college so her writing and communicating skills should be at least the college level.  The Palinbots think 8th grade level is great.  Not surprising considering they can only read and write at the 2nd grade level.  Wasilla High and the University of Idaho should ask for their diplomas back.

Will Texas be the first state to eliminate public education?

Texas Legislature doing what it does best... removing tax dollars from public education.

Slightly more than 10 years ago, Texas provided up to 70 percent of the total budget for public education. Local government, mostly via home property taxes, provided the remaining 30 percent. Currently, those percentages are reversed and now the state is looking to provide even less to public schools in the Special Legislative Session under proposed Senate Bill 1 that seeks to cut public education financing down another 6 percent.

During the past decade legislators and various members of the elite business sector have given lip service to finding financing for Texas public education, but every year or two committees failed and fewer tax dollars were provided. The Texas Constitution outlines the state's responsibility to provide our children with a quality education; however, every year the Governor and Legislators have taken chunks of tax dollars slated for public education and have diverted them instead to various other special interests.

Few Texans should be surprised that their state wants to remove more financing from public education, since it has been doing so almost every year for the past decade. However, it is a sad commentary of a state that is almost last on the list of states providing quality public education.

Currently, it is quite clear that there has been an active push by Texas legislators to develop private education and to eliminate its responsibility for public education. In fact, many legislators already sit on the boards of private, charter and religious schools. Special interests continue to push for a voucher program to enable parents to take their children out of public schools and use the vouchers for private enrollment.

Viewing the education issue completely, we may see that the state of Texas wishes to maintain educational objectives for the wealthy elite rather than for the majority of Texans. Furthermore, by crying budget poverty Texas sees the opportunity to remove most or all tax dollars that finance public education and to divert those tax dollars to other special interests.

It is sad enough that Texas Governor Rick Perry and legislators have no problem shirking their responsibility to the majority of children in Texas by cutting the financing for public education, but, it is callous, irresponsible and un-American to remove educational opportunities for the majority of our children and their parents under the veil of secrecy and cries of state fiscal poverty.

Our legislators are trying to eliminate public education behind closed legislative doors. SB 1 is the largest attempt of any previous bill to eliminate the financing of public education for our children and it is a symptom of special interest politics permeating throughout Texas.

If the majority of voters sit back and do nothing, Texas may succeed as the first state in the US to eliminate public education.

(Courtesy of Buzzflash, written by Peter Stern is a former Director of Information Services in private industry and government, a University Professor, Public School Administrator and Teacher. He is a disabled Vietnam Veteran and holds three post-graduate degrees.)

I cannot tell you how MUCH this shit pisses me off!

The Republicans have been actively trying to destroy the public school system since back when Reagan was in office and NOBODY seems to be calling them out on it.

School vouchers, Charter schools, No Child Left Behind, these all sound like good ideas, but when you REALLY examine the agenda behind them  you quickly realize that their entire purpose is to make the public school system look ineffective, and essentially broken, in order to justify taking away their funding.

Look it is no exaggeration on my part to say that I had some of the BEST public school teachers you can imagine, who spent long hours working to inspire me to channel my hyperactivity toward sports and my over active mind toward writing. Nor is it much of an exaggeration to suggest that my life was literally saved by an Assistant Principal who called me down to his office halfway through my Junior year, closed the door behind me, and proceeded to read me the riot act about getting into so many fistfights.  He told me, using language I had never heard an educator use before, to straighten up and get my act together before I found myself being the smartest guy on cell block 15. He also challenged me to stop taking from the school, and to "use that ridiculous IQ of yours" to give something back.

Do you know how they say that kids never listen?  Well I DID listen to him, and afterward had the best, most productive Senior year of high school anybody could ever hope to have.  And if I had stubbornly refused to listen chances are I would have been expelled, and would therefore never had that very first taste of success that let me know what I could achieve when I really set my mind to it.

THAT is what my public school education did for me. And I resent the hell out of those who are trying to take that educational opportunity away from our children and grandchildren.

If you are financially capable of paying for a private school education for your child, or you prefer a charter school, more power to you, but these options should not come at the expense of a well funded public education system. Not in America.

It looks like the biggest challenges to Michele Bachmann's plans to run for President are all coming from high school students.

First Bachmann was challenged to a debate by Amy Myers, a sophomore at Cherry Hill High School East in Camden County. (A challenge that she ignored by the way.) And now she finds herself facing another challenge from seventeen year old Zack Kopplin:

I’m a 17 year old from Louisiana, and I’m calling Congresswoman Michele Bachmann’s bluff when it comes to creationism and Nobel Laureate scientists.

In 2004, while she was in the Minnesota State Senate, Congresswoman Bachmann tried to pass SF 1714, a bill similar to my state’s creationism law, the Louisiana Science Education Act (LSEA), which I’m fighting to repeal. This misnamed and misguided law creates a way to sneak the teaching of creationism into Louisiana public school science classrooms.

The LSEA is hurting my state and the students in it. And now, as the congresswoman is laying the groundwork to run for President, she is upping the ante for the rest of the country by bringing an anti-science, creationist stance to the national stage. Why is this a junk hand for students? Just look at the lessons from Louisiana. Colleges both at home and across the country may question our science education and withhold admission because of our dubious science background. In addition, Louisiana students may lose out on cutting edge science jobs to kids from countries like China and Britain where they teach accurate science and the theory of evolution.

This law gives Louisiana an anti-science reputation, which hinders the state’s ability to attract scientists who can help find innovative solutions to rescue the Louisiana seafood industry from disasters such as the BP oil spill and stop our coast from disappearing. The LSEA also handicaps our bio-tech start ups and efforts to attract investment in companies that do scientific research.

According to the 2009 survey of 8th grade students’ science education by the National Center for Education Statistics, Louisiana was at the bottom of the list, ranked lower than all but one state. Do not let Michele Bachmann drag the rest of the country down to Louisiana’s level.

In 2006, Congresswoman Bachmann claimed “there is a controversy among scientists about whether evolution is a fact… hundreds and hundreds of scientists, many of them holding Nobel prizes, believe in intelligent design.”

Intelligent design is another name for creationism. Teaching these exchangeable theories in public school science classrooms was found unconstitutional in the 2005 Dover vs. Kitzmiller case because they are not science.

Bachmann’s ongoing misrepresentation of science and scientists at a national level adds fuel and false authority to the lobbyists and politicians in my state who have an agenda to undermine evidence-based science.

Does Congresswoman Bachmann really think the public will fall for her sleight of hand and believe she has Nobel Laureate scientists who support these unscientific theories?

Congresswoman Bachmann, I see your “hundreds” of scientists, and raise you millions of scientists.

For the next hand, I raise you 43 Nobel Laureate scientists. That’s right: 43 Nobel Laureate scientists have endorsed our effort to repeal Louisiana’s creationism law.

Major science organizations, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which represents over 10 million scientists, have publicly endorsed the repeal.

Congresswoman Bachmann, you claim that Nobel Laureates support creationism. Show me your hand. If you want to be taken seriously by voters while you run for President, back up your claims with facts. Can you match 43 Nobel Laureates, or do you fold?

Have I mentioned before how much I LOVE the young people in this country?

If the model for No Child Left behind were used to fight cancer.

Courtesy of the Holland Sentinel:

Imagine Congress, in an effort to fight cancer, legislates the following:

Each year, all oncologists must report the status of their patients. Patients in remission are successes. Patients with active cancers are not. The percentage of patients in remission determines the doctor’s success rate.

Each year, an oncologist must bring into remission a higher percentage of patients than the year before. If he does, all is well and he may continue his practice. If he doesn’t, the government warns him. After three years of warnings, the state may take over his practice or place it under new management.

The goal, of course, is to eventually cure every patient. No patient will be left behind. If a doctor cannot meet this goal, he will lose his practice. It doesn’t matter that the doctor has done everything he could for the patient. It doesn’t matter that the doctor has followed every medical protocol. The only thing that matters is the patients’ remission rate.

Now mind you, a patient’s behavior cannot be considered by the government. A doctor is accountable to cure a patient with lung cancer even if the patient smoked for decades and smokes during treatment. If the patient doesn’t follow the doctor’s prescribed treatment, the doctor is still responsible.

Likewise, a patient’s condition at the onset of treatment is not considered. The doctor must cure a patient with an aggressive stage four cancer as readily as a patient whose cancer is in stage one. They all count the same.

Furthermore, the government is not concerned with the improvement of any one patient or group of patients. Instead, it tracks the remission rates by calendar year. Remission rates in 2010 define a period. An entirely new set of individuals in 2011 makes up another period. Although all the patients are different, the remission rate must increase.

As stated, a doctor must continually increase his remission rate. Increase is the measure of effectiveness. If Dr. Jones cures 30 percent of her patients one year and 33 percent the next, the government is satisfied. If Dr. Smith cures 90 percent one year but only 89 percent the next, a warning is issued.

This constant improvement is called adequate yearly progress, or AYP. Four years without improvement means government takeover of the failing practice, even if the doctor cures 98 percent of her patients every year.

Are you puzzled? If you’re a doctor, you’d be incensed, and rightfully so!

Now, substitute “schools” for “doctors,” “satisfactory achievement scores” for “remission,” and “students” for “patients.” Congratulations. You now understand America’s No Child Left Behind Act.

Not really much more to add to that, now is there?

The President's Weekly Address. The replacement of NCLB.

Everybody has the one issue they are desperate for this President to take on.

Whether it be ending the war, ending discrimination against the LGBT community, fixing the job crisis, or any number of other  potential crises facing this country, there are millions of people clamoring to have it addressed. But for me that issue is the repeal of No Child Left Behind.

Don''t get me wrong, I totally want to end the wars, fix the economy, get equal rights for everybody, etc., etc., etc..  But in my opinion getting rid of this deeply flawed approach to education in this country should be one of this President's top priorities.  And I am very glad  to see that it is finally going to be addressed.