John Edwards: A Bobby Kennedy Retread

John Edwards seems to be lifting a page from the campaign book of Bobby Kennedy. The politics of forty years ago are similar to those of today. The circumstances of war certainly do not mirror those of 1967. While this article in the New York Post highlights Hilary Clinton’s reaction to John Edward’s statement, the statement itself and its’ brazen duplication of the Kennedy anit-war message is the boldest color of the story.

January 15, 2007 — Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton last night ripped into 2008 White House contender John Edwards – her first direct assault on any of her potential Democratic presidential rivals.

Clinton’s surprising broadside came just hours after Edwards, in Harlem, delivered a sharp condemnation – clearly aimed at Clinton, although he didn’t mention her by name – against those who fail to “speak out” against the war in Iraq.

“Silence is betrayal, and I believe it is a betrayal not to speak out against the escalation of the war in Iraq,” Edwards told a crowd at Manhattan’s Riverside Church, where Martin Luther King had declared his opposition to the Vietnam War.

“If you’re in Congress and you know that this war is going in the wrong direction . . . it is no longer OK to study your options and keep your own private counsel,” he said.

“Silence is betrayal. Speak out and stop this escalation now.”

Read all about the worship service political rally held at Riverside Church on Sunday Night. Riverside Church has become a political arm of the democrat party.

Dance Interlude: Rich Man’s Frug

You’ll enjoy this dance designed by Tyree Sanders will music by Cy Coleman from the 1966 Broadway musical, “Sweet Charity.”

Politics Trumps National Security

Freedom Zone has a great essay on the current state of politics and the War on Terror.

To paraphrase William Shakespeare’s famous observation in his Romeo and Juliet: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet” likewise those who would have us lose in Iraq and be defeated at any cost, though they may claim themselves “patriots” and call themselves euphemistically “patriotic dissenters,” “conscientious objectors,” et al, by any other name would be as seditious and treasonous; and God only knows the Democratic aisle of Congress abounds with “Roses” – though their treachery smells as foul as that of any other traitor.

This, pathetically, mostly for petty, partisan, political reasons, in this time of war, and at a time when we face as a nation one of the greatest threats to our very existence – ever!

In their sick, rabid, obsession to get back at their nemeses, President Bush and the Republicans, out of embitterment, resentment, and vengeance for their political defeats in 2000 and 2004, in order to defeat and humiliate them, who for so long wrested political power from their godless, liberal, secularist hands, and turned the country away for 12 years from the ‘Juggernaut’ of the leftist, socialist, godless secularist agenda they wish to continue shoving down the throat of the American people, these leftist Democratic so called “dissenting patriots” have embarked, since the beginning of the war in Iraq, in an unrelenting campaign of naysaying and obstructionism unprecedented in our nation’s history.

Squandering Valuable Instructional Time

We just finished the first semester with final exams last week. It’s about this time of year when everything gets crazy, and the integrity of instructional time takes a beating. Some teachers did not even bother to give an exam. To be fair, most teachers did. With the government forcing more and more assessments upon us, semester exams have taken on a new urgency. It is a time when teacher can assist students in preparing for the exam, and teach exam preparation skills and test taking skills. Rather than pursue this route of professional integrity, many teachers gave scan-tron tests full of multiple choice questions. The elaborate scheme of performance exams with rubrics and peer scoring was highly successful in my choral music and theater courses.

At our high school, instruction time should equal about 1,260 hours in the course of a year. We have 180 days of scheduled instruction, with approximately seven hours dedicated to instruction per day. Recently, the semester exam schedule designed by our administration caused several faculty members to question the amount of lost instructional time due to the exam schedule. We easily forfeited more than six hours of teaching time in one 35 hour week. When a professional considers that this is more than a fifteen percent reduction of instruction for just one week, we decided to make a rough calculation of lost instructional time for the year.

Here is a coarse summary of lost instruction time for this year: