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Teacher, Why Dost Thou Lie?

California teachers have been going berserk crying loud and long about budget cuts and layoffs.  They are bound and determined that you Must pay greater taxes so they can save our schools.

They have been running ads highlighting the 20 Billion in budget cuts to our schools over the last three years and the 30,000 teachers that have been laid off this year.

Just one problem:

They're Lying.

20 Billion in budget cuts?

Here is a graphical representation of the budget trend for K-16 provided by the state controller's office...

See that red line?

See it going up rather than down?

That's pretty much the opposite of a budget cut, don't you think?


Let's move on to the 30,000 lay offs the teachers claim have been made.

It didn't happen.  Every one of those teachers is still on the job.  (If you can call standing in front of legislator's offices screaming epithets teaching)

What actually happened was that, by law, school districts are required to send out "pink slips" to teachers for Next Year that warn them about potential budget problems for Next Year.

Last year, Lisa Snell at Reason.org issued a good summary of the process and the problems generated by it:

March 17, 2010, 2:08pm

As the AP reports this week, California's budget crisis could cost nearly 22,000 teachers their jobs this year.

State school districts had issued 21,905 pink slips to teachers and other school employees by Monday, the legal deadline for districts to send preliminary layoff notices.

While these numbers are exaggerated because California law mandates that districts can only issue pink slips before March 15th (so districts overstate layoffs and then rescind them later), it is clear that thousands of teachers will be let go in 2010. Therefore, it is critical that we continue to examine how these layoffs effect both teacher quality and cost savings for school districts.

Teachers unions could negotiate less extreme budget saving measures such as wage freezes or pay cuts rather than large layoffs. However, unions have negotiated automatic "step" salary increases years in advance and have been reluctant to freeze these policies even if it means thousands of teachers losing their jobs. In light of this behavior, it is likely that most districts in California will move forward with some teacher layoffs.

In California state law and local collective bargaining agreements dictate that teachers are layed-off on a "last-hired, first fired" system based on seniority. This seniority-based system means that a much larger number of teachers are fired because it takes a larger number of "new" teachers to fill budget gaps than more strategically looking at the entire teacher workforce and laying off teachers based on performance. It also means that students will lose many high-quality teachers that rank lower on the seniority scale.

As education researcher Marguerite argues in  ”Seniority-Based Layoffs will Exacerbate Job Loss in Public Education,” to reduce salary expenditures by 10 percent, a district must cut 14.3 percent of the workforce when time served in the district is the driving factor. In this scenario, seniority-based layoffs result in 262,367 more job losses nationwide than seniority-neutral policies. And since teachers make up 51.2 percent of the school workforce, nearly 134,000 of those extra losses would be teachers.

California needs a quality-based layoff system.

While, for good reasons, political ads are not required to be factual, it is disgusting that Teachers, of all people, are willing to engage in such extreme obfuscations and outright lies to protect and grow their power and jumbo sized pay and benefit packages.

You might be a Conservative...

If, instead of tearing down the rich to make sure everybody is miserable, you'd rather make sure that everybody has unlimited opportunities to make themselves rich...

You might be a Conservative.



If you understand it's self evident human life begins at conception and it's an illogical abomination for a mother to terminate an unborn child for her convenience...

You might be a Conservative.



If you know that America is a sovereign nation and has every right and the inherent duty to protect her citizens from illegal aliens, drug smugglers, human smugglers, criminality and third world diseases by securing her borders and enforcing her laws...

You might be a Conservative.



If you think that Americans have the right to choose their own doctors and health coverage without interference from the government...

You might be a Conservative.



If you think parents should be allowed to make the nutrition decisions for their own children without schools and other government agencies telling them what to feed their kids...

You might be a Conservative.



If you understand that "democracy" means "one man one vote" and that everyone has equality of opportunity and that it does Not mean equality of outcome...

You might be a Conservative.



If you know that a strong military makes America safer and that her veterans are heroes...

You might be a Conservative.



If you know that our founding fathers were on the right track in specifically limiting the powers of government to control your commerce, your religion, your speech, and your guns...

You might be a Conservative.



If you're proud of America and Love her with all your heart...

You might be a Conservative.

True Progressive Hero

The democrats have begun their "California Democratic State Convention 2011".

They're bragging about providing "live, streaming video of the General Session, including a speech by Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, Attorney General Kamala Harris, and a keynote address by a true progressive hero, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont."

Didja catch that?

They just called Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders a "true progressive hero".

Hero?

Bernie Sanders is as anti-Capitalist, anti-Liberty, anti-American as it gets without wearing an "I Heart Che Guevara" t-shirt.

From Wikipedia:

"" Sanders is a self-described democratic socialist, and has praised European social democracy. He is the first person elected to the U.S. Senate to identify as a socialist. Sanders caucuses with the Democratic Party and is counted as a Democrat for the purposes of committee assignments, but because he does not belong to a formal political party, he appears as an independent on the ballot.

His speeches are laced with anti-business, anti-wealth rhetoric, and cries for social justice that are utterly antithetical to Liberty and the American way of life.

If the democrats consider this fellow a hero, they need a moral, ethical, political, and intellectual enema.

America fought for many decades to defeat the evils of socialism around the globe.  Now we must fight these socialist statists and expunge them from our own shores.

Elections Matter

democrat Euphemology

In no particular order...

Democracy = Equality of Outcome for all citizens.


Living Constitution = democrats get to change the rules as they wish.


Tax Reform = Soak the Rich.


Welfare = The systematic government tool used to make men irrelevant and destroy the nuclear family causing more people to depend on government money and entitlements / democrat voter recruiting tool.


Welfare Reform = Getting more people on Welfare.


Fairness Doctrine = Government tool used to silence conservative media voices.


Doctrine of Responsibility to Protect = A country's sovereignty is a privilege, not a right.  Justification used to break ties with Israel and assist radical Islamists attack both Israel and the USA.


Manmade Global Climate Change  = The communist hoax perpetrated to inhibit and destroy economic growth as well as villify capitalism.


Global Warming = See Manmade Global Climate Change.


TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) = Slush fund used to funnel cash to unions and protect them from economic downturns / money laundering operation sending campaign contributions (bribes) to democrats via unions.


Budget Reform = Expansion of government spending for entitlement programs while punishing productive citizens with increased taxes.


Entitlement Program = Government welfare system used to weaken individual drive and responsibility and destigmatize dependency on government largess / systematic democrat voter recruiting program.


Wealthy Person = Thief


Corporation = Gathering of thieves.


Women's Health = Abortion on demand.


Abortion = democrat contraception / family planning tool.


Tax Cut = Stealing money from the Treasury and giving it to rich.


Tax Code Expenditure = Tax Cut.


Tax Code Expenditure Reduction = Tax Hike.


Immigration Reform = Amnesty and Citizenship for Illegal Aliens / democrat voter recruiting tool.

If We're Gone Tomorrow...

Before he died, Charlton Heston called in to the Rush Limbaugh show and read for all of us a bit of Michael Crichton's prologue to Jurassic Park:


"" You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. 


Let me tell you about our planet. Earth is four-and-a-half-billion-years-old. There's been life on it for nearly that long, 3.8 billion years. Bacteria first; later the first multicellular life, then the first complex creatures in the sea, on the land. Then finally the great sweeping ages of animals, the amphibians, the dinosaurs, at last the mammals, each one enduring millions on millions of years, great dynasties of creatures rising, flourishing, dying away -- all this against a background of continuous and violent upheaval. Mountain ranges thrust up, eroded away, cometary impacts, volcano eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving, an endless, constant, violent change, colliding, buckling to make mountains over millions of years. 


Earth has survived everything in its time. It will certainly survive us. 


If all the nuclear weapons in the world went off at once and all the plants, all the animals died and the earth was sizzling hot for a hundred thousand years, life would survive, somewhere: under the soil, frozen in Arctic ice. Sooner or later, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would spread again. The evolutionary process would begin again. It might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety. Of course, it would be very different from what it is now, but the earth would survive our folly, only we would not. 


If the ozone layer gets thinner, ultraviolet radiation sears the earth, so what? 


Ultraviolet radiation is good for life. It's powerful energy. It promotes mutation, change. Many forms of life will thrive with more UV radiation. Many others will die out. Do you think this is the first time that's happened? 


Think about oxygen. Necessary for life now, but oxygen is actually a metabolic poison, a corrosive gas, like fluorine. When oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells some three billion years ago, it created a crisis for all other life on earth. Those plants were polluting the environment, exhaling a lethal gas. Earth eventually had an atmosphere incompatible with life. Nevertheless, life on earth took care of itself. 


In the thinking of the human being a hundred years is a long time. A hundred years ago we didn't have cars, airplanes, computers, or vaccines. It was a whole different world, but to the earth, a hundred years is nothing. 


A million years is nothing. 


This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can't imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven't got the humility to try. We've been residents here for the blink of an eye. 


If we're gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us. ""

"Temporary" Tax "Extensions"?

Jerry Brown is exhorting Californians to vote to additionally tax themselves and help him "solve" California's budget problems.  He and his cronies are attempting to paint those of us that oppose this further destruction of California's ability to attract new business and improve the lives of her citizens by declaring that they are not "allowing" the taxpayers to have their say in a vote on the issue.

How dare anybody stand in the way of the citizens getting a chance to vote!!!

Why should we NOT vote on this absurdity from Jerry Brown and his union bosses?

Nevermind the fact that we already voted on this issue and shot the lefties down two to one.

Nevermind the fact that None of what Gov.Brown is proposing establishes Any fixes for Any of the budget problems we are faced with here in California.

Nevermind the fact that Jerry's "balanced approach" demands Five years of higher taxes (55 billion dollars worth) while offering one 1 year of budget "cuts".  A third of those cuts are only reshuffling monies already collected.  None of the cuts are permanent, structural cuts.

Jerry will be back next year with the same cries of dire peril and demands for more tax money to feed the public employee unions' ravenous maws.

If this gets on the ballot, Jerry's bosses, the public employee unions, will spend untold millions to tug at every heart-string, highlight every fallacious negative, and put the fear of god into the voters that without the higher taxes, all of California will become a hell hole of uncontrolled fires, destruction, and crime waves.

(He's already started with the fear mongering by cutting programs for mentally disabled school children and claiming that without those higher taxes he will have to further defund programs for the neediest among us.)

And, where will all that money Jerry wants go?

Straight out of the wallets of the taxpayers and into the pockets of the public employee unions.

Anybody paying attention knows public employee union members are already over-paid and over-endowed with platinum retirement and benefits packages that Nobody in the private sector can compete with.

Just One example?

The California Correctional Peace Officers Assn. (one of the largest and most politically powerful state-employee unions) gets Both a defined benefit retirement plan And a 401k plan.

How did they get that amazing boon?  Collective bargaining with democrats they pay off to get their say over the objections of informed taxpayers.

Must be nice huh?

The game is fixed and the power hungry public employee unions with their corrupt democrat allies are taking us all to the cleaners.

We do Not need to vote on new taxes as Jerry is trying to scare us into with his lies.

He needs to get a set and tell his bosses in the unions "No" and then guide the democrats into solving California's budget problems without all the bandaids and fake fixes.