Liberty is for me…

I called it back in Feb., Obama will never be “open to the idea” of school vouchers. He needs teachers vote and unions campaign contributions.

Well, now he has plans to join Congresswoman Holmes (D-DC) to kill the DC voucher program.

How could both of them, whom are black, deny black and brown families in struggling public schools the option to attend a better school?

Why support the status quo?

The same status quo that unfortunately slaved thousands of blacks.

Obama isn’t the change we need NOW or in education.

He is not the hope for this country, if he can’t stand up against special interest.

A motivational speech to bloggers.

From my friend Nicole Sauce:

So I was sitting in a session at the PDF Conference with mostly liberals and progressives that was supposed to focus on local blogging.

The classical liberal crowd, commonly called libertarians with a small l, was in the minority. One asked a question and mentioned that he felt the problem cited in the presentation where the locals had to fight to force the city council to not change zoning in favor of a builder was less a problem of corrupt builders and politicians on city council and more a problem of the city council having too much power to choose winners and losers.

….

After he made the comment, a spectator spouted “He must be a Republican.”

It illustrated to me the problem with trying to have a reasonable conversation on the merits of an issue with folks who are more worried about their labels than the issues: They resort to name calling when they can’t find a reasoned retort.

I couldn’t agree more; having a conversation with an extreme statist is as painful as a urinary tract infection.

After you read this, you will want to barf on a liberal.

The state’s largest school employee union hired a Washington, D.C., consulting firm to craft a public relations strategy for limiting the expansion of charter schools in Delaware.

The firm represents some of the most extremist statist groups: Open Society Institute, National League of Cities, and LULAC - just to name a few.

The 38-page report makes seven recommendations, including not to “attack charters directly,” make funding the main reason for restricting the number of charters and “use teachers to carry the message.

This is a jihad against charter schools,” said Greg Meece, president of the Delaware Charter School Network. “DSEA is trying to smear and tear down charter schools. It’s an all-out furor against charter schools.”

Barf. It gets worse.

“Our interest is overall good public education for Delaware,” Grogg [union operative] said. “We have a right and a responsibility to look at the policies and develop one that is as strong as possible to ensure that schools will go forward in the future.”

Union tools say they favor overall public education but they oppose charter schools, which are part of public schools too!

You know what also drives me up-the-wall unions claiming they have rights. Rights to what.

Legally no one has ever recognized that a union has any jurisdiction in deciding what happens to kids education.

However, parents and taxpayers have rights!

The right to have the best schools around, whether charter or not. The point, taxpayer money should be used to educate kids not to create slush funds for teachers.

Finally, the last interesting point…

Unlike district teachers, charter school teachers aren’t required to be union members. Consequently, the union has few charter members because they don’t see the advantage of being unionized, said Meece, who also is the school director at Newark Charter School.”

This isn’t about the quality of education or public school funding, but unions collecting more membership dues.

As I surf the web reading fellow PDF attendee blogs, this one caught my eye…The Cauldron.

He writes a very witty post:

As a member of the other side, we have a lot to learn from them. I’ve heard more mention of new media and social networking in two hours here than I had heard all last week. In addition, I’ve got a few friends by my side to keep me sane. That said, I plan on sitting quietly, listening intently, and blending in as much as possible. The only way anyone could possibly identify me is by the tightly held barf bag in my left hand.”

So, I am attending a conference to learn more about technology and how it’s changing politics.

That’s right folks; technology is changing the way we do advocacy and lobbying online.

The theme of this year’s conference is “Rebooting the System.”

Sounds great, right?

Well, if you are a free-marketer like me, I’d say it’s awesome to see people using technology to change minds and influence politics.

However, it’s all for the wrong cause.

Most of the people at the conference are socialist, so they are using technology to crush our economic and individual liberties.

What’s the answer to government abuse? Rallying the grassroots? Suing the state?

That’s the basic outline for the libertarian Institute for Justice, which has been met with great success. It also seems to be the approach of the ANSWER Coalition, an initiative created just after the September 11th attacks when the communist U.S. Workers World Party teamed up with former U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clark in an effort to stop the US from going to war.

Less than three weeks after 9/11, the newly-crafted ANSWER Coalition rallied an impressive 8000 people in downtown DC for an anti-war protest. Anyone living in DC since then has become well acquainted with their posters — wheat-pasted all over town — as well as their activism projects.

Last week the group’s legal wing — the Partnership for Civil Justice (PCJ) — jumped into the limelight by filing a federal suit to stop the controversial DC Trinidad checkpoint program. PCJ, whose website looks like it was created by a middle schooler back in 1993, is representing four DC residents in the suit, including Sarah Sloan:

Sarah Sloan, 27, a volunteer for the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition, an antiwar and social advocacy group, reported that she was turned away June 11. In an interview, she said she was prevented from entering Trinidad when she refused to give officers details about who she was planning to meet.

“They asked me what I was doing, and I said I was going to a political meeting,” Sloan said. “They asked me to give them more information about that meeting, but I didn’t feel like I had to give them more details.”

Not everyone opposes the Trinidad checkpoints. The Washington Post editorial board gave the program a fairly laudable review on June 19, in a logic-twisting piece:

Her words reminded us what all of the Washington area felt during the three weeks in 2002 when two snipers stalked the region. We don’t recall anyone complaining about the inconvenience or constitutionality of police stops then.

Their basic argument here is that if only the residents of DC would live in constant terror there would be no, as a buddy put it, “namby-pamby carping about civil liberties anymore. If the city government has utterly failed in its duty to protect the citizenry, the fault must lie with the Constitution, rather than with, say, policy failures.”

He goes on:

I also love the structuring of the argument around the non sequitur of “the real outrage.” I’m always persuaded by that. You know, this policy is unconstitutional, but what’s really wrong is murder. Or stealing. Or picking one’s nose. Because, just like there are only two philosophies, there can be (at any given point in time) only one wrong thing.

Cheers to the ANSWER Coalition. I wish them the best in their efforts.

The mayor of New York, Mike Bloomberg, attended former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s education summit.

While Bloomberg supports charter schools and more public choice he opposes vouchers.

Why?

I’ve never been a big believer in vouchers,” Bloomberg added. He said that’s because “what invariably will happen with vouchers is those who are sending their kids to private schools already will take up most of the vouchers.

Bloomberg’s statement is simply false and wrong!

School voucher programs are designed for low-income families, families with disabled kids or kids attending failing public schools.

School voucher laws have nothing to do with kids already enrolled in private schools. Actually, kids who are enrolled in private schools couldn’t even be eligible for vouchers because students have to be enrolled in public schools.

Finally, I hate how the AP never does any homework on their stories and place quotes that mislead readers.