Backup Data on Education
Author: Ken Coman
•7:49 PM
One of the key areas we, as a Nation, must focus on is Education. Bill Gates makes some great points in this short talk on Education. The first part is on Malaria, the second part is on Education.

I highly recommend you watch it.

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/451

For the long term, we must begin to prize education again as not only a means to an end, but an end to itself. Learning should be an objective because we love it and because it makes us better human beings - more able to love, listen, understand, share, build, play and create. Education today is too much of a rite of passage, an obstacle in a way on the course of life rather than life itself. It is not an obstacle - it is the prize at the end of the course. When we look back on our lives, we should be filled with gratitude for what we learned, that we learned everything we possibly could, and that we loved learning it. Life is more than movies, video games and extra-curricular activities. Life is about learning. We need to change our mindsets and help change others as well.
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More on the Wrong Track for Change
Author: Ken Coman
•10:30 AM
My only point in this is to document for anyone reading (all two of you (my wife and I)), that this is just more of the same. I am certain that the intent is to bring change but the motives and the rhetoric are the same of the past 16 years. Here is the headline from the political sports coverage by Politico:

"At Dem retreat, a partisan love fest"

Here are the first few bits of the article:

"WILLIAMSBURG, Va. — A fired-up Barack Obama ditched his TelePrompter to rally House Democrats and rip Republican opponents of his recovery package Thursday night – at one point openly mocking the GOP for failing to follow through on promises of bipartisanship.

In what was the most pointedly partisan speech of his young presidency, Obama rejected Republican arguments that massive spending in the $819 billion stimulus bill that passed the House should be replaced by a new round of massive tax cuts.

“I welcome this debate, but we are not going to get relief by turning back to the same policies that for the last eight years doubled the national debt and threw our economy into a tailspin,” said President Obama – sounding more like Candidate Obama than at any time since he took the oath of office less than a month ago.

Obama, speaking to about 200 House Democrats at their annual retreat at the Kingsmill Resort and Spa, dismissed Republican attacks against the massive spending in the stimulus.
"What do you think a stimulus is?" Obama asked incredulously. "It’s spending — that's the whole point! Seriously.”

Stabbing hard at Republicans who once aligned themselves with his predecessor, Obama made it clear that the problems he seeks to address with his recovery plan weren’t ones of his making.
“When you start hearing arguments, on the cable chatter, just understand a couple of things,” he said. “No. 1, when they say, ‘Well, why are we spending $800 billion [when] we’ve got this huge deficit?’ – first of all, I found this deficit when I showed up, No. 1.

“I found this national debt, doubled, wrapped in a big bow waiting for me as I stepped into the Oval Office.”

After his remarks, Obama, clearly caught up in the moment, made the party get-together feel even more like a campaign rally with his signature call-and-response chant.
“Fired up?” he asked the Democratic lawmakers. “Ready to go!” a group of them shouted back."


Well, I am not ready to go down that road again. They have to change the tactics and the media has to change the type of coverage if there will be anything more than a political horse race to watch. I am ashamed of this. This has to end or our government will become ever more innefectual and ever more distanced from the people they were elected to serve. We really do want change.


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