Once again, Iceland shows us the fire and ice. There seems to be an awful lot of geothermal activity lately. New Zealand, Japan, and Indonesia all seem to been very active the past year or so. Does all of this mean something?
Perhaps Iceland is just having a soil-renewal event. Grimsvotn volcano errupted for the first time since 2004. The plume goes 12 miles into the atmosphere.
Well, we are all still here, I think. Anyone missing? Anyone poofed up in the sky?
No triple crown winner again this year. Animal Kingdom was beated by 3/4ths length by a horse named Shackleford a fine looking chestnut stallion.
And then there was Joplin, Missouri. Wolverine broke the story here. Mrs. W. has relatives and the Wolverine family got a frightening phone call Sunday night. An entire city was wiped off the face of the earth. Over 100 killed and 1500 missing.
The President has called for NCLB to be replaced. He says reform just can’t wait.
Reform is critical only if NCLB is repealed. Killed off. Done away with. The federal government needs to stay out of education. Leave education up to local government and states. No more unfunded mandates. No more absurd hoops to jump through.
NCLB has almost ruined national education. President Obama calls for reform from the bottom up, not the top down. This is a good direction. Congress needs to start on this endeavor, yesterday. Education is a local issue.
The heavy metal evangelist Bradlee Dean, whose opening prayer Friday at the Minnesota House of Representatives has sparked a firestorm, does not much like Islam, a religion he believes is at war with the United States.
Dean has long believed that President Obama is a Muslim, and he often insists that Obama has declared America a Muslim nation. So it wasn’t terribly surprising when he snuck a slur against the president into his prayer. The Minnesota House of Representatives, he acknowledged, is a nondenominational chamber, which he takes to mean that all kinds of Christians are welcome. “[I]t’s not about the Baptists and it’s not about the Catholics alone or the Lutherans or the Wesleyans, or the Presbyterians the evangelicals or any other denomination,” he said. The only head of the denomination—i.e., of the government —“is Jesus, as every president up until 2008 has acknowledged.”
Rep. Terry Morrow was so angry he shook. He responded:
“Mr. Speaker, I do trust and I do hope that every member of this chamber understands the gravity and the severity of the offense that had been given to many people within this chamber and out,” he said. “It has been my understanding that part of the justification, part of the explanation for starting our sessions with a prayer was that those prayers would never exclude, never marginalize a Minnesotan on the basis of their faith, on the basis of their beliefs, on the basis of who they are, and those expectations have been crushed today.”
