Morning Bell: Do You Wish You Could Choose Your Child’s Teacher?

Parents in Los Angeles are getting some new transparency about their children’s schools this week. The Los Angeles Times recently released the names of 6,000 elementary teachers and data showing how much each teacher’s students improved on standardized tests.


The strong message is that public schools and their teachers should be accountable to parents and other taxpayers. That’s a stark contrast to the status quo, in which education policy is most responsive to decisions of those who hold the government purse strings and the power of union collective bargaining.

The L.A. Times’ release of the evaluation data has education unions fuming. Their ostensible criticism is that the method used to compare the scores is questionable. But their historical reluctance to embrace accountability to parents belies other motives.

Measures like those in L.A. that increase transparency and accountability to parents are positive developments and welcome alternatives to initiatives like the national standards that the Obama administration is promoting. With hardly any public debate, states are signing on to the plan that will make schools more accountable to bureaucrats in Washington, and decrease their responsiveness to the parents whose children they teach.
http://blog.heritage.org/2010/09/02/morning-bell-do-you-wish-you-could-choose-your-childs-teacher/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Morning%2BBell

Yes, On the Way Back, Common Sense Gains Ground

Their era shaped the Democratic platorm, but that era is now over.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/245400/big-government-big-business-and-big-labor-michael-barone

Cantor: Beware of the Obama tax increases

By Eric Cantor


Listening to the Democrats this summer, you're unlikely to hear about an impending tax increase. In an effort to sanitize their historically irresponsible decision to raise tax rates in the midst of a struggling economy, President Obama and the congressional majority say they are merely "allowing the Bush tax cuts" to expire.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/forum/2010-09-02-cantor01_ST_N.htm

NAACP, Left-Leaning Media Groups Form Tea Party Tracking Site

From FOXNEWS
The site, sponsored by the NAACP, Think Progress, New Left Media and Media Matters for America, will monitor "racism and other forms of extremism within the Tea Party movement. We call on the Tea Party to repudiate extremists among their ranks and join in civil dialogue with all Americans."
http://www.teapartytracker.org/
Perhaps we should identify to their sponsors (NAACP) that their organization's very foundation is RACIST!

Go Joe Go!!!!!!

In a major upset, Sen. Lisa Murkowski conceded her GOP Senate primary race Tuesday night to Tea Party Express favorite Joe Miller.
Miller, who had the backing of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, is now the immediate front-runner in the heavily Republican state.
"Now is the time for all Alaskans to come together and reach out with our core message of taking power from the federal government and bringing it back home to the people. If we continue to allow the federal government to live beyond its means, we will all soon have to live below ours," he said in a statement.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/08/31/murkowski-concedes-alaska-primary-race-tea-party-candidate/

An Important new documentary film coming out soon!

There's an important new documentary film coming out soon that we had to tell you about.
Called I Want Your Money, it's a no-holds-barred critique of the over-reaching nature of the federal government under the Obama Administration and the current Congress.
Combining in-depth interviews (there's one with Newt), fiery criticism and politically-charged animated sequences, it tells the story in the plainest terms of the choice between the Obama and Reagan views of the role of the federal government in our society. It also examines how big government programs have been tried in the past at great moral and financial cost to the nation.

http://iwantyourmoney.net/

Surprise, Surprise...Obama appoints radical

If you don't read Investor's Business Daily, you probably missed this. It is reprinted from IBD's Issues and Insights page Monday August 23.
Barack Obama hit a new low in using a recess appointment to name Maria del Carmen Aponte as U.S. envoy to El Salvador. Dismissing three congressional holds on Aponte's confirmation, Obama used his vacation to slip Aponte through without a vote in Congress which is in recess.
Aponte's past is one big red flag. From 1982 to 1994 she lived with a man who worked closely with the Cuban Mission to the U.N. and was allegedly a spy. The FBI spotted this problem in Aponte's resume in 1994 when she made conflicting statements to investigators. As a result, she withdrew her nomination as ambassador to the Dominican Republic during the Clinton administration.
One thing is likely: Obama wants her there for something important, or he wouldn't have rammed through the appointment. With El Salvador the second-biggest source of illegal immigrants to the U.S., she may be there to help facilitate Obama's amnesty plans and create a Democrat voting bloc there. If so, U.S. voters won't know because she slipped scrutiny.
As with Van Jones, Obama shoved her through on a recess appointment because she probably wouldn't have been confirmed otherwise. That's how an activist with questionable ties became U.S. envoy to a key nation.