Red light cameras are a mixed bag across the USA. Big cities love them, small cities increasingly less. But one thing is universal where ever they are tried. The whole thing is about revenue generation, not public safety. Most city administrations try desperately to hide their greed behind hoary claims of safeguarding the public, but at least Toledo, Ohio has dispensed with some of that subterfuge and is admitting straight out that making money is a main goal.

Last month Toledo’s finance director told the city council that they were installing 11 new red light cameras with the expectation that the project would “raise” $320,000. What did the city need that new revenue for? More government spending, of course.

Oh, and it’s for the children, too. Toledo Councilman Steve Steel was excited to get the new revenue. “It does restore the biggest thing we were looking for, which was giving kids something constructive to do in a positive atmosphere,” he crowed.

So, now officials will berate you if you stand against these useless devices that are just a means to give government more money to spend on pet projects because, darn it, it’s for the children! WHY do you hate kids, taxpayers?

Unfortunately for Toledo’s city fathers, red light cameras are increasingly failing at both revenue generation and public safety. Many cities that once had them have pulled them out because revenues dropped over time while maintenance costs continued to rise not to mention that some cities have found that the red light cameras actually cause more accidents instead of improving driver safety.

Worse, some cities have played games with the cameras in order to keep revenues flowing into their profligate hands. At least six cities were caught shortening yellow light times in order to catch more drivers running red lights.

But we don’t even have to stray from Toledo to show that new red light cameras won’t bring in a never ending stream of spending cash. Ohio native Maggie Thurber notes that Toledo has already seen revenues fall from other red light camera installations.

The problem, as I’ve detailed previously, is that the more people get used to red light and speed cameras, the less the revenue there is from violations. Since 2009 when the city added speed cameras and negotiated a higher percentage of the fines, the revenue has steadily decreased. This means that the city, in order to continue to collect their targeted budget amounts, must constantly expand the big-brother-type surveillance.

Yet, here they are trying for more red light cameras. Why? Because they imagine a pot o’ gold under every red light in the city. When politicians get dollar signs in their eyes its hard to shake them from the dreamy dream of more cash to spend on their pet projects. If it’s all about bringing in money they can spend. It has zip to do with safety.

Recently the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation announced that it was no longer going to be offering funds and grants to Planned Parenthood, the nation’s leading abortion mill operator. This decision has sent Planned Parenthood over the edge of both sanity and civility with a new fundraising letter that dispenses with its past staid talk about women’s healthcare and goes straight for thuggish threats of retaliation, finger pointing, and attacks on other women.

The Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation, a well known breast cancer-fighting charity, decided to withhold further donations to the abortion provider for several reasons, one of which is that Planned Parenthood is under investigation by Congress for violating various state abortion laws.

Last month the Associated Press reported Komen’s new criteria and why it is excluding PP. “Komen spokeswoman Leslie Aun said the cutoff results from the charity’s newly adopted criteria barring grants to organizations that are under investigation by local, state or federal authorities,” the report said. “According to Komen, this applies to Planned Parenthood because it’s the focus of an inquiry launched by Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., seeking to determine whether public money was improperly spent on abortions.”

The foundation gave more than $569,000 to Planned Parenthood in 2010.

As to the charges against Planned Parenthood that are pending in the congressional investigation, you might recall the stellar work of Lila Rose whose videos brought to our attention that Planned Parenthood was violating state laws by ignoring requirements to report child abuse and rape while pushing abortions on minors.

But Planned Parenthood apparently isn’t taking this lying down. They aren’t just lamenting Komen’s decision, they are getting mad.

In a fundraising letter emailed to supporters, the abortion provider proved themselves to be less a “healthcare” organization, and more the ideologically driven advocacy group that detractors say they are. The email is blunt and asks supporters to sign onto the extremist rhetoric and send it on to others. Most interesting, the letter doesn’t just attack opponents in general but specifically attacks women that oppose Planned Parenthood.

Here is the text of that shockingly harsh letter: (CLICK HERE for a screen shot of the letter)

This is for all the anti-choice, anti-women people out there.

Listen up.

You can spend every minute of every day trying to force the rest of us to live by your ideology. You can go after federal funds for health care and pressure private organizations like the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation to stop funding breast cancer screenings for poor women. You can try to make it impossible to get birth control.

But you know what you can’t do? You can’t win. You can’t break us. Planned Parenthood isn’t just a family of organizations. It’s a movement. It’s women and men of all ages who believe that health care — including reproductive health care — is a basic human right. We are millions strong. We are everywhere. We act, we give, and we do whatever it takes to make sure that Planned Parenthood is there for the women, men, and teens who rely on them.

Know this: When you go after Planned Parenthood and the people they serve, you go after ME. I stand with Planned Parenthood. I stand with them against anyone who wants to stop women from receiving the health care they need. I stand with them today, tomorrow, and for as long as I need to.

I don’t now about you but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a fundrasing letter like this supposedly emanating from a “health care” organization. Imagine if a hospital or other medical organization sent such a letter as this to its customers.

Also amazing is the bald attack on women who don’t agree with PP. This also proves that they aren’t an organization interested in women, but one only interested in women that agree with their ideologically extreme position on abortion.

In any case, what we seem to be seeing here is the last bit of a veneer of legitimacy ripped from Planned Parenthood. It is now fully embracing its ideological drive toward infanticide and has cast away any pretext that it is at all interested in mere healthcare. With this letter Planned Parenthood is admitting that it is a “movement,” not a healthcare provider.

Superintendent Todd Carlson of Shawano High School in Shawano, Wisconsin is sorry a student observed his First Amendment rights and had his article published in the school newspaper that denounces homosexuals adopting children. And so Superintendent Carlson is making amends by punishing this Christian kid for being so darn Christian. Superintendent Carlson has also decided in his infinite wisdom to censure this article by having it sent down the memory hole so that no one else will be confronted with this evil Christian’s views.

That’ll show that darn Christian kid, won’t it?

The article, “Should Homosexual Partners Be Bale to Adopt?,” was written by Brandon Wegner who was assigned the task of writing a counter-point to another student’s pro-homosexual adoption article. The piece was then published as an insert in the school newspaper, the Shawano Leader.

Shortly after the newspapers containing the insert were distributed, Superintendent Carlson issued a formal apology to the school and parents, removed the insert from surplus issues of the paper, and censured young Mr. Wegner claiming his article violated the school’s “anti-bullying” policy.

Wegner says that Carlson grabbed him up out of class and began to brow beat him in an attempt to get the kid to disavow his religious-based beliefs. According to Liberty Counsel, a First Amendment law firm, Wegner was quixotically bullied by Superintendent Carlson in an attempt to deter bullying.

Brandon was hauled before the superintendent on charges that he had violated the school’s bullying policy. Superintendent Todd Carlson told him that the column “went against the bullying policy,” and asked him if he “regretted” writing it. When Mr. Wegner stated that he did not regret writing it, and that he stood behind his beliefs, Superintendent Carlson told him that he “had got to be one of the most ignorant kids to try to argue with him about this topic,” that “we have the power to suspend you if we want to” and that the column had “personally offended me, so I know you offended other people!”

Carlson’s action is itself “ignorant.” Ignorant of our American laws, ignorant of tenets of tolerance, ignorant of public comportment, ignorant for abuse of his position as an authority figure, and just plain ignorant in a moral fashion.

Carlson’s bullying also makes the lie to the claim that our schools are meant to teach our children. The truth seems to be that Mr. Carlson simply wants to indoctrinate, not help students come to their own conclusions when offered all sides of the issues.

In fact, the school newspaper deserves kudos for having handled the issue properly. It gave room to advocates of both sides to air their views so that readers could make up their own minds. But Carlson doesn’t want any of this horrid teaching going on. He wants to tell kids what to think based on his own warped, left-wing ideology. None of this freedom of choice nonsense in HIS school, I’ll tell you what.

Superintendent Carlson should be fired. Not because he’s an extremist liberal, but because he has violated this kid’s rights at worst and violated the principals of actual teaching at best. He is no educator. He is an indoctrinator and that is just un-American.

(H/T Moonbattery.com)

(Green Answers) Cambodia, an exotic land filled with bright colors, city lights and ancient temples is a popular vacation spot. A remarkable country with exquisite culture holds one of the darkest secrets alive today. Very much a real and disturbing reality; we come to unfold this problem and discuss the problems of the sex trade in this area. In fact, children as young as 5 are being sold as slaves in exchange for sex. A problem that has been around for a while is being made worse by the problems caused by climate change.

Sexual slavery/trade has been around for pretty much all of human history. It is a serious concern, I don’t think there is a need to explain why. Yet, rather than taking on the problem, Warmists subsume it into their cult’s beliefs, and you know you just rolled your eyes and head and said “give me a break” when you read the last line of that excerpt, which takes away for dire need to do something about this serious issue, something the liberal extremists just don’t get.

The sex trade in Cambodia has been around since 1999. The sex trade is happening due to thousands of victims in need of natural resources like food, water and trees. Human trafficking affects 2-3 thousand children and young teens each year. Families are deceived by con artists telling them that their daughters will work for hotels, restaurants, hair salons or complete clerical work in order for them to bring money for their families. Truth is, con artists actually take their daughters into sex industries and force them to have intercourse with older men.

The climate has always changed, and can always cause problems. Does anyone think life would be better during a cool period such as the Little Ice Age? Life on Earth has to take the good with the bad as climate changes according to the whims of the natural world, but, then, if Warmists fessed up and said a changing climate was primarily natural, as history and science shows, they wouldn’t be able to push their far left redistributionist and fascist agendas. They believe that if YOU (not themselves, though, they need their Suburbans to get the kids to soccer practice, drive to work, and pick up wine and cheese for their Organizing for America parties) can be made to drive a Chevy Volt and use CFLs, the Cambodian sex trade would simply disappear. So, they waste time and other people’s money instead of dealing with the actual issue, because the actual issue won’t give lefties the control over people and economies they want.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

It’s heartening, but not entirely surprising that the Catholic Church overturned the decision of the Sacred Heart Primary School in Broken Hill to reject the enrolment of a young girl whose at-home parents, two women, are in a lesbian relationship.

Heartening for the little girl, even though the mums have wisely decided to spare her the inevitable unpleasantness of attending a school where she’s not wanted. But not entirely surprising, because if the Church had allowed this story to spin out of control it risked having to answer some very awkward questions about just how much money it sucks off the public tit, when it’s unwilling to comply with public standards as expressed in legislation such as the Anti-Discrimination Act.

The Catholic Church and its fellow travelers in the other denominations are pretty much out on their own when it comes to punishing kids for the sexuality of their parents. And be assured, that’s what was at stake here, and what Bishop Kevin Manning has avoided airing in public with his order to Sacred Heart to enrol the child.

All religious schools in this country, not just Catholic ones, enjoy the benefits of a grotesque double standard, where they put their hands out for a hand out, and a massive one at that, draining off billions of dollars from the education budget, while not having to measure up to the same standards demanded of public schools, most of which are woefully underfunded because of subsidies to the private sector.

Surely if the private religious schools are to trouser billions of dollars in taxpayer funds, at the expense of taxpayers who can’t afford to send their own children to those privileged institutions, more might be demanded of them when it comes to, say, not behaving like ignorant, medieval bigots. There’s no reason they can’t hang onto their vile opinions, but there’s no reason the rest of us should have to pay for them.

As long as they enjoy a free pass from the Act, however, we will continue to subsidise their ignorance, stupidity and hatred.

They know it too. Or at least the smart ones do. That’s why they moved so quickly to shut down debate on this most recent outrage.

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here

(The Politico) Was there science, and not just politics, behind the Obama administration’s decision to stop young teens from getting the morning-after pill without a prescription? Probably not.

Will it work as a political decision? That’s trickier — because for every independent voter who is reassured that President Barack Obama doesn’t want 12-year-old girls buying emergency contraception, there may be another one who thinks he ignores science for political gain.

It wasn’t just Democrats and abortion rights groups that howled when HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius overruled the FDA on Wednesday and declared that Plan B shouldn’t be available over the counter to girls under age 17. It was medical groups, too — because in their view, the evidence is already settled that the emergency contraception is safe and effective, regardless of age.

“This was a poster child of an issue of science being trumped,” said Wood, now the executive director of the Jacobs Institute of Women’s Health at the George Washington University. “It’s very distressing.”

So, how is this related to “science”?

In her letter Wednesday to FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, Sebelius said she blocked the FDA’s recommendation for over-the-counter sales to young teens because the studies submitted to the agency “do not include data on all ages” and because “it is commonly understood that there are significant cognitive and behavioral differences between older adolescent girls and the youngest girls of reproductive age.”

Ah. Because there isn’t enough data. But, the liberals who are slamming Sebelius and Obama think it is anti-science to restrict the use of the morning after pill for kids under 17 without parental consent. Is it science? Is it politics? No, it’s neither, it’s simply basic common sense, the same way that parents should be notified when their underage daughter wants to get an abortion, a measure that freaks out liberals. Unless the child in question is their own. Then THEY want notification. In Liberal World, it’s always about Someone Else. And, give Sebelius some credit, she did say that “that allowing girls under 17 to purchase this hormonal drug over the counter without the supervision of an adult or doctor is” a bad idea.

Abortion on demand is the holy grail of Democrat issues, and you know that any interference means that the legislation/measure and the people who propose them are “anti-women” or something.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

Kids’ obsession with President Obama fades

At Barack Obama Elementary School in Upper Marlboro, Md., a giant mural of Obama and a glass case in the main entry filled with Obama books and photos greet students as they enter and exit.

But Tanya Moreland’s daughter Brea, in fifth grade, goes in and out every day and rarely brings up the president.

“To be honest, all the ‘hoorah’ is gone,” Moreland said while waiting outside the school in her car to pick up Brea on a recent Tuesday afternoon.

Kids are such pains in the butt: how dare they lose interest in displays and banners that the teachers and administrators surely put up and made the kids get involved.

The president’s galvanizing appeal to young people in 2008 has become the stuff of political legend, and while the polls stopped recording data at the voting age of 18, the trend by all accounts didn’t. Obama, at the height of his cultural ubiquity in his magical election run, exerted a particular charm on children. His big smile, big ears and bouncy personality made toddlers his unofficial base. In Iowa in 2007, children carved Obama pumpkins, phone-banked for Obama and pitched the candidate to their parents. The Kids for Obama blog on the campaign website linked a page describing “10 ways kids for Obama can get involved,” including holding an Obama sleepover party.

Again, how much of this was forced on the kids by teachers and parents?

Back then, conservatives fulminated that Obama was “brainwashing” the youth. Liberals speculated warmly on what it would be like to grow up under the first black president. But in interviews with kids and their parents around the country this fall, hopes have been disappointed, and concerns about brainwashing can probably be put to rest. The kids, as kids do, have moved on.

The kids probably learned that Obama has not much more experience and capability at running the executive branch than they do. That said, if you read the second page of Politico article, you see that some of the ObamaLuv and excitement is still there. They think of Obama as a rock star, and idol to worship. This begs the question, should any politician be treated in this manner? My answer is “hell no!” By placing politicians on such high pedestals, we forget that they are supposed to be there for the People, and not visa versa. If you want to worship a politician after they are gone from office, holding them in high regards, well, that would be more appropriate. While they are in office, their feet should be held to the fire, regardless of party affiliation.

Matt Yglesias of Think Progress apparently feels it’s a good idea for kids to vote in U.S. elections. No, not just 18-year-old kids. All kids regardless of age. It is ideas impossible to take seriously like this that makes one wonder why liberals are ever listened to about anything by anyone.

I have to say, though, that it’s funny that Matt brought up this let-kids-vote idea because I was just talking about repealing the 26th Amendment and making the voting age start at 21 again. Funny we were both thinking about kids voting, eh?

Now, despite their undeserved reputation as peacemongers, liberals love a good fight. At least, they love to cause others to fight, anyway. They love to see the non-religious fight the religious, they love to see the relativists attacking patriots, but most especially they love to see the young hating their elders. They do all this by breaking people into balkanized enclaves where their politics of personal destruction can be most effective. And one of their chief weapons is to attempt to destroy social norms and substitute their own, cockeyed view of how things should be.

Certainly not every social norm is a great idea. But not every idea needs changing simply because there is “another way” to do things. The problem with liberals is that they have an absurd bias toward “new” loving it simply for the fact that it’s new. They begin all discussions with the base assumptions both of their own brilliance and their elder’s stupidity. There is no thought put into their positions but if it seems “new” to them, why, it must be better than that tired “old” idea.

This idea of kids voting is one of those exercises in logic-free thinking.

Here is Yglesias’ post:

…ally Kohn writes about a campaign in Lowell, Massachusetts to let seventeen year-olds vote in local elections. More power to them, but I say let any American citizen vote in any American election he or she wants to.

Objections to this usually take the form of imagining a highly disciplined party of seven year-olds reliably delivering bloc votes to whichever candidate credibly promises endless kindergarten. If you think for five minutes about the practical problems of political organizing, and then for five minutes more about the practical problems of getting kids to do anything I think you’ll see quickly that this is a misguided worry. Realistically, voter turnout in the United States is not particularly high to begin with. Older teens and twentysomethings are already disproportionately unlikely to vote. If we extended the vote to more children, my guess is that relatively few of them would exercise it. But those who did would come from an unusually dedicated and informed sub-set of American teenagers. Meanwhile, if seven year-olds somehow do manage to organize themselves into an effective political lobby, I say more power to them.

I am not sure who Yglesias is talking to that thinks preventing kids from voting would stop a “highly disciplined party of seven year-olds” from hijacking an election, but that isn’t the form that objections to kids voting takes. The objections to kids voting is that they don’t have enough information in their heads — and absolutely cannot have — upon which to make an informed vote.

One of the oldest quotes about what we have here in our U.S. system is ascribed to Ben Franklin who was asked what the founders had given us as he was leaving the Constitutional Convention of 1787. He said it was a republic if we could keep it.

He said this meaning that we can only keep our system working properly if we, the people, keep ourselves informed about current events and then make an informed vote grounded in the principles upon which the founders had based our system. That takes maturity and a certain breadth of knowledge. This is something children are not mentally equipped to have gained. Not only does it take maturity to understand these concepts it takes time to have taken all that information in.

I know this will probably make liberal’s head spin right off their shoulders, but as First Corinthians, 13:11 notes, “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.”

Few other quotes are as germane to this issue as that.

Additionally, Yglesias seems to imagine voter turnout should somehow be a deciding factor in why kids should or shouldn’t vote, too. He seems to think that because voter turnout is not all that high, kids voting wouldn’t be a big deal. This is just ridiculous. Should we be designing our system based on low turnout of the very voters that we need to shore up that system? That hardly makes sense.

Further, we should not be allowing an abomination to exist simply because only a few instances of it will take place! That would be like saying we should allow theft because most people don’t do it.

One of the things many of the founders thought about voting was that anyone who is not vested in the system would not cast an informed vote. This is why in the beginning only taxpayers of high station and landowners were given the right to vote. It was thought that if you didn’t have a stake in the system you’d be prone to voting for other’s benefit instead of your own.

In this light, kids are not vested in anything. They don’t have jobs, they pay no taxes, and few votes they’d make would have an impact on them directly. Why should we expect a logical, thought-out vote from someone that has neither the mental capacity nor any direct interest in that vote?

But Yglesias’ biggest mistake is this: “But those [children] who did [bother to vote] would come from an unusually dedicated and informed sub-set of American teenagers.”

What an absurd thing to say. Why does coming out to vote automatically mean said voters are “unusually dedicated and informed”? What if their school just gave them extra credit to go vote and they were instructed how to vote by some left-wing teacher somewhere? How is a fully programmed vote an informed one?

Granted many votes of adults are wholly uninformed. But at least adults have the mental capacity and the years of life in to have learned about and grasped the full importance of their votes whether they bother to apply themselves to that education or not. Kids just don’t have the mental capacity or the time to do this even if they want to.

So I am sorry, Matt, but being “unusually dedicated” to go vote does not mean the voter is necessarily informed well enough about the issues and our system to make a logical, informed vote. Union members are “unusually dedicated” but usually they are only so dedicated because their union bosses told them to or they’ll lose favor with the union and, therefore, lose money or their job. That doesn’t mean the actual votes cast by union members are either informed or good for anyone but greedy union bosses!

The Democrats in the pre-civil war south were “unusually dedicated” to voting in order to keep slavery and the slavocracy in power. We know what a terrible idea that was, right?

Dedication or motivation to go vote does not ipso facto mean said vote is an informed or good vote. Period.

But, see, to Yglesias, because the idea of kids voting is new, why that makes it good and right.

This man’s total lack of logic is simply stunning. His little idea isn’t just an exercise in theorizing. He displays such a lack of critical thinking that he makes of himself a silly person. It seems to confirm that being part of “Think Progress” means that the “thinking” part is optional.

Earlier this year the State of Illinois moved to force religious-based children’s services to break their religious principles and give children in their charge to homosexual couples. Organizations such as Catholic Charities have been told by the state that they either break their religious principles or face being shut down by the state. So, pursuant to that agenda, the state has determined that all children currently in the hands of religious adoption agencies need to be removed immediately.

Representing Catholic Charities of three Illinois Roman Catholic Dioceses, the Thomas Moore Society filed an emergency motion to prevent the state from removing all the children in its care. Unfortunately, an Illinois appellate court refused to overturn the trial court’s decision to remove the children during the appeal process in which lawyers are now engaged. (Filings here and here.)

Still, other motions made in the emergency motion were granted. Thomas Moore informs that the matter “is now on an expedited schedule for briefing in the Appellate Court.” The fate of the children remains unknown at this point.

So what was so bad that the State of Illinois felt it necessary to take all children away from religious-based organizations? Have there been cases of abuse? Perhaps children’s services from religious-based groups have been rated lowly? Have adopting parents complained?

None of the above. In fact, there is no substantive reason at all for this attack on religious-based children’s services in the Land of Lincoln. Well, no reason except for a left-wing, pro-homosexual political agenda, that is.

You see, the state received precisely one complaint about Catholic Charities. It was from an activist homosexual who complained that the religious-based adoption agencies in the state would not willingly give children up to homosexual couples.

If there has been before such draconian actions taken by government based on a single, hazy, non-substantive complaint — one that did not entail any abuse of children — I’ve never heard tell of it. But here we have such a case. The complaint of one activist pushing the homosexual agenda was enough for the state to decide to force all religious children’s services to either break religious principles and give children to homosexual couples, or face being shut down by the iron fist of the state.

This overt attack on religious-based children’s services hits with interesting timing, too. This month the Illinois Dept. of Children and Family Services gave Catholic Charities its highest rating for children’s services. Catholic Charities received a Level 1 compliance score and was ranked as one of the best foster care providers in the state.

So on one hand, one state agency says that the services Catholic Charities provided to the State’s most vulnerable children is top notch, yet on the other hand another state agency (the Attorney General’s office) says that Catholic Charities is so bad it must be shut down.

It just goes to show that Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan (a Chicago Democrat) has a political agenda and doesn’t really care what’s good for the homeless children of Illinois.

“Students in a Texas public high school were made to stand up and recite the Mexican national anthem and Mexican pledge of allegiance as part of a Spanish class assignment, but the school district maintains there was nothing wrong with the lesson.

It happened last month in an intermediate Spanish class at Achieve Early College High School in McAllen, Texas — a city located about 10 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border.

Wearing red, white and green, students had to memorize the Mexican anthem and pledge and stand up and recite them in individually in front of the class.

That didn’t go over well with sophomore Brenda Brinsdon. The 15-year-old sat down and refused to participate. She also caught it all on video: “I just thought it was out of hand, I didn’t think it was right,” she told The Blaze. “Reciting pledges to Mexico and being loyal to it has nothing to do with learning Spanish.”

When Brenda made clear she would not stand up and recite the pledge, she was given an alternative assignment: an essay on the history of the Mexican revolution.

School district spokesman Mark May defended the presentations, saying it’s a state requirement for upper-level language classes to teach about foreign culture.

According to the state’s Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills standards, students are expected to gain “knowledge and understanding” of other cultures and use the language to demonstrate understanding of different practices and perspectives. There are no specific requirements about learning to recite pledges or anthems.

Source

There are certainly other ways of teaching Western Spanish and Mexican history

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here