Year: 2011
Bernie Sanders and the Made in America Label
A Couple of Changes for the Readers to Note
I have added some PAGES to the top right of the blog. Pictured below is a screen shot with an arrow pointing to one of the changed page’s position as well as three new pages that deal with a few topics coming up in conversation, as they see to do always — Good Grief! I moved my Conspiracy Debunker page over (take note of the arrow pointing to it below), and to the right of that are pages dealing with debunking conspiracies surrounding 9/11 and Iraq. I may add a few more Mantra Debunking pages later. but I figured I would let you know the changes as of today. Enjoy.
Dennis Prager and Thomas Sowell Discuss Misconceptions About Corporate Taxes
Dennis Prager and Thomas Sowell discuss a callers query about how he hears about corporations paying no taxes at all… but also hearing we have the highest corporate tax compared to other nations.
Serious Saturday~Alvin Plantinga
Heard About This charter School on Hugh Hewitt Yesterday
The following charter school is the kind talked about in WAITING FOR SUPERMAN
(Wiki) As a charter school Veritas Prep offers a Great Books education centering around fundamental texts in the Western pantheon. Veritas Prep’s philosophy includes small class size (no classroom has more than 22 students) and education using the Socratic method.
As a public school in the state of Arizona, Veritas Preparatory Academy has no entrance requirements. Interested families must apply for the school’s annual admissions lottery, which takes place in the spring of each school year. However, if a family has one child enrolled, any other children automatically receive a spot. Software designed by alumnus Joseph Irvine is used to perform these lotteries randomly. Because the academy is a charter school, it has the right to cap its enrollment. An addition in the 2010-2011 school year is one class of sixth grade.
Veritas Preparatory Academy offers few choices in its academic curriculum. 9-12th grade students may choose to study Latin/Greek, French, or Spanish. The rest of the curriculum is fixed. Students at Veritas Prep exceed all requirements for students graduating from the state of Arizona.
Veritas Preparatory Academy has recently added a 6th grade to their school.
- 7th grade:
- English Literature and Composition (readings include Shane, A Wind in the Willows, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Tales of the Greek Heroes, The Miracle Worker, stories by Edgar Allan Poe, and A Christmas Carol)
- Pre-Algebra
- Life Science (plants & fungi, single-cell & multi-cell animals)
- Ancient History (Mesopotamia, Egypt, Israel, Greece, and Rome)
- Music (including an introduction to theory, note-reading, and soprano recorder performance)
- Latin I
- Studio Art I (basic composition and drawing techniques)
- 8th grade:
- English Literature and Composition (Readings include Beowulf, The Chosen, The Lord of the Flies, The Hobbit, To Kill a Mockingbird, selections from Canterbury Tales, Legends of King Arthur, and selections from American poetry)
- Algebra I
- Earth Science (geology, geography, meteorology, astronomy)
- Medieval History (England, France, the Holy Roman Empire, Islamic Civilization, the Byzantine Empire, the Crusades, the Christian Church; The Song of Roland is read)
- Music (including more music theory and recorder ensemble performance involving soprano, alto, and tenor instruments)
- Latin II
- Studio Art II (including color theory and painting)
- 9th grade:
- Humane Letters: The American Tradition (Readings include the US Constitution and The Federalist Papers, Democracy in America, Thoreau, Frederick Douglass’s autobiography, Huckleberry Finn, My Antonia, The Old Man and the Sea, and The Great Gatsby)
- Geometry
- Biology
- Music (including composition and choral performance)
- Poetry Composition
- Modern Language I or Latin III
- 10th grade:
- Humane Letters: The Rise of Modern Europe (Readings include Locke’s Second Treatise, Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, Shakespeare’s Henry V, Marx’s The Communist Manifesto, Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch)
- Algebra II
- Physics I : Mechanics
- Music
- Poetry Composition
- Modern Language II or Latin IV
- 11th grade:
- Humane Letters: Ancient Greece (Readings include the Iliad and Odyssey, Sophocles, Thucydides, Plato’s Republic and selected dialogues, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and selections from the Hebrew Bible)
- Pre-Calculus/Calculus A
- Physics II: Electromagnetism, Thermodynamics, Wave Motion
- Drama
- Art
- Modern Language II or Ancient Greek I
- 12th grade:
- Humane Letters: Western Thought from the Middle Ages to Modernity (Readings include the Aeneid, Augustine’s Confessions, selections from the New Testament, Macbeth and King Lear, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, Machiavelli, Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy, and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov)
- Calculus B,C
- Chemistry
- Drama
- Art
- Modern Language IV or Ancient Greek II
- Senior Thesis
Bigger Fish To Fry-2012
The following is from the guest filler to the Michael Medved Show from the afternoon before the averted shutdown who took the reigns of the show due to Medved running late because of travel delays. He made a point with a caller that was very, very forceful:
This from FoxNews Election Headquarters:
While Republicans wanted to cut more spending in Saturday’s early morning compromise to keep the government open, they think they got the better of the deal.
Here’s why: HR1 was originally to seek spending cuts of $32 billion until Tea Party conservatives insisted on more than $ 60 billion. House Speaker John Boehner won more cuts than he originally sought and got the Senate to agree to votes to defund the health care reform law and groups like the nation’s largest abortion provider Planned Parenthood – once votes Senate Majority leader Harry Reid said he’d never allow to come to the floor.Back on February 3, Reid called $32 billion in cuts “extreme” and “draconian.”
At a news conference New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., agreed, “I happen to think some of their cuts are extreme and go overboard. But every week they keep upping the ante and proposing extreme cuts.”
Over the next decade the cuts are expected to save hundreds of billions of dollars.
The deal mandates a host of studies and audits of Obama administration policies. It also blocks additional funds for the IRS sought by the Obama administration and bans federal funding of abortion in Washington, D.C.
The history of offers on this bill goes something like this. Democrats first offered no cuts, then $4 billion, then $6.5 billion, then $33 billion, then settled at $38.5 billion.
Boehner made numerous adjustments to his offer in recent days too, but started at $32 billion, then with a Tea Party push went to $62 billion, then dropped to $40 billion, then $38.5 billion.
Democrats claimed they met Republicans halfway after the $10 billion in cuts that already passed this year were approved. They settled late Friday night at three and a half times more.
Boehner came in $8.5 billion higher than the halfway point between his high offer of $61 billion in cuts and the Democrats opening bid of zero cuts.
It was not a totally lopsided bargain. Dems have some silver linings. There were no votes on defunding the EPA or PBS and NPR. Democrats fought for and won a $2 billion cut from the Department of Defense, knocking the military appropriation for the rest of the year down to $513 billion.
But the GOP had to be able to see this as a win in the end, because it is puny compared to what they want to do next.
But the resolution is a non-binding roadmap for the committees to use as they approve tax and spending bills for next year, the resolution will never be signed into law by the president.
The next battle with consequences begins in a matter of two short weeks when the accumulated U.S. debt will be nearing it’s $14 trillion legal limit. So Congress will have to vote to raise the ceiling so Uncle Sam can borrow still more money.
The administration has said it will need to be raised between April 15 and May 31 or the U.S. could default and create a new fiscal crisis of unknowable magnitude. Fiscal hawks plan to demand strict, enforceable spending caps, triggers for across the board cuts, and austerity measures in exchange for raising the debt limit.
This short-term agreement was just a beginning.
Hopefully this is the micro of the macro to come.
