I have been invited to the contributors at The Left-Right Debate. Some of the all-stars include but are not limited to: Jane from Armies of Liberation, Tim Kelly from Crack The Bell, Doug from Loose Coin, Gordon from Cranky Neocon and a few other heavy hitters. If you haven't been there it's a site to remember and put into your links. You won't be sorry. Here's the link.
I'll try to include original work on both sites around once a day but my first post will be a cross-post.
Here's the article in response to this post:
Four More Years of The Same
Today is November 3rd. Enough of the votes have been counted to make the determination that Bush is the clear winner. America has chosen. It is over. Now we are in for four more years of the same. So what does more of the same come down to? What will happen in the next four years? Will there be a draft? Will there be another attack on America? Will George Clooney turn into a puppet and start killing terrorists lead by a puppet version of Kim Jong Il? Will more of the same really be that much of a bad thing?
To see the future we must revisit the past. What has happened in the past four years that would continue as more of the same?:
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Everyone’s focus has been on what we are doing in the Middle East. It is right to be focused on this area of the world. There are many things that need to be done there and we already have an indication of more of the same. Today, as a matter of fact, Afghanistan officially chose as a free democratic voting country Hamid Karzai as their new president. If this is what more off the same means I can’t wait for the elections in Iraq. Sure, some may say that we keep having to push it back, some areas will not be able to vote, it won’t be a true election. I need only remind you that John Forbes Kerry could have stretched our own elections out by weeks in only one state but had the foresight to concede his inevitable defeat. We could have had something even nastier than the Florida recounts. No elections are perfect and I could do with more of the same.
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A couple of weeks ago I was speaking with a teacher friend of mine. Fittingly, she was a French teacher working on her masters degree in that field. For some reason I made the mistake of wanting to hear from the horse’s mouth how the no child left behind act was going. She replied that it was horrible. She had to do all this extra paperwork and testing and it wasn’t fully funded. So I asked where the funding was being stopped at. She said hat it was Bush that only put up half the money. I then asked if she knew that the states had not requested the funds that were made available. She could not respond. She did no know. She only knew what whe had been told. The gossip that floats around the teacher’s lounge. I have yet to hear of one instance where anyone with the proper paperwork has been turned down for funding about the no child left behind act. As for the paperwork and the testing, I thought that was the point; to make a stucured educational system that would test our children at an early age to get them on a track that would eventually make them a more educated, more productive member of American society.
On saturday, the results from Virginia’s SOL (Standards of Learning) testing came out for the Hampton Roads area. Every year since the inception of the no child left behind act we have continually improved. Thechnical data for varification can be found here. Par particular close attention to the jump in 2001. If this is any indication of more to come I say bring it on.
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Are you afraid of losing your job in the Bush economy? I’m not. Why should I be? Bush inherited a 5.4 unemployment rate at the end of Bill Clinton’s internet boom, that Gore invented. George Bush did have a rocky time in the first two years of his election with reference to jobs but has somehow brought the unemployment rate back down to 5.4% and is still getting better. If the holiday season is even a fraction of what it’s like in any other year he will not even have lost jobs like people portend. Rusty has more on the reworking of numbers here. If Bush actually did lose jobs in total, he still would not be the first to do so. Carter, bay all rights was abysmal and Reagan’s first term wasn’t that great either. Every month though we are showing a new gain of at least 100,000 jobs per month. If this is what we have to look forward to under four more years, I’ll have a heaping plate of “more of the same” please.
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Something that people rarely if ever take into consideration when calculating how badly Bush has screwed up this or that is the catastrophic effects terrorism has played in this country. 9/11 caused the stock market to plummmet, the job market to drop and government investments to evaporate. We have always bounced back to become even stronger in trying times like these. Peal Harbor was a completely devastating blow to America that we bounced back from with such effect that we are now Japan’s military security force. Normandy held the death of thousands upon thousands of Americans but held with it the promise of a Europe free from Hitler the great dictator. It is historical that with most every great stumbling block we have had even greater success. We have already had our stumbling block. Now it’s time for more of the same.
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