Why didn't I think of this?

Find it at www.catchingfireflies.com (just stumbled upon this website and this fabulous product).

Florida Education is Broken...so just ignore it and build something new

That seems to be the mentality of Charlie Crist and the Florida Republicans. Florida's public education is one of the worst in the country and the best solution the Republican-run legislature can muster is to spend more tax dollars on McKay Scholarships to send some kids to private schools since the public school they're zoned for and previously attending is crap. Under this theory, a small portion of kids are able to go to "better" private schools on the tax payer's dime, while the problems of public schools are ignored and the majority of kids are stuck with mediocre educations. Instead of spending the money to fix the education system which services the majority of Florida children, Crist would rather let a few students attend the private school of their choice...oh yah, and those private schools have no oversight from the State and don't require FCAT testing so who really knows how good of an education they're providing in return for our tax dollars.
The one smart move Crist made this year (aside from getting the hell out of the Republican party) is to veto Senate Bill 6. This lovely bill would have tied half of teacher's pay to student test scores and new teachers would be hired with no chance of tenure. Don't get me wrong, I think ineffective teachers should certainly be given the boot, but more reliance on a ridiculous standardized test is not the way to accomplish that goal. The teachers at schools that currently under perform (almost always those in the low income areas) already have a hard enough time working with students who may not receive 3 meals a day and who have little parental involvement in education. So your pay as a teacher would primarily depend on whether you were lucky enough to get a position at a good school.
It seems like Florida's solution to its education problems is to find scapegoats and avoid the fixing the real problems. I suppose Florida Republicans don't care if Florida's public schools are abysmal because their kids go to private schools, and thanks to Crist and McKay Scholarship funding they may not even have to pay as much for that privilege.

Now how much do you want to drill, baby?

Since Sarah Palin first uttered that ridiculous battle cry, "drill baby drill", Americans have ignored those little things called facts and rallied to put an oil drill off every coast in the country. These ignorant demands had become so loud that even Obama caved and blew off his campaign promises for increased environmental protection and opened waters off the north coast of Alaska, the southeastern Atlantic, and the Gulf. While this move made me see red, the red-state Republicans were begrudgingly saying Obama had come to his senses. All was right in this hypocritical, instant-satisfaction society of ours.....until this past week.

Now, as we all know, millions of gallons of oil are pouring out of the blown up oil well heading swiftly to the Gulf coast. Only now after 11 men are dead and we have an environmental catastrophe with no solution in sight are folks starting to see that 'drill baby drill' might not be our saving grace after all.

Sadly, I am not hopeful for change. Obama is still allowing all of the new offshore drilling and once the memory of this tragedy has faded, the rally cry will begin again. The nonsense of all of this pains me. Even as early as 2004 it was well known that domestic off-shore drilling would do little more than take a few cents off at the gas pump. "But even the additional domestic production would not be enough to overcome increased demand, meaning continued heavy reliance on imports, the EIA said. " Associated Press, March 16, 2004.

Republicans are always focused on the bottom line, so I can't understand how once they consider the cost-benefit analysis of off shore drilling that they are still so adamant for it. The cost: risk of similar explosions (they still don't know what caused this one) with an unknown number of deaths, certain environmental destruction, and huge government cost when things do go wrong. The benefit: a very very tiny percentage of the oil we use every day, not likely to reduce gas cost since the oil companies set those prices and keep making record profits.

And if the human and environmental loss and tragedy of this spill don't touch a nerve, just think about the millions of dollars the government is spending on the clean up. All those Coast Guard planes, boats, helicopters, personnel surprisingly are not free. And BP has yet been asked to foot the bill.