Daniel J. Summers » Charter Member of the VRWC

The above is paraphrased from 2 Corinthians 12:9. It’s also the title of a song written in 1988 by Steven Curtis Chapman, a young up-and-coming Christian music artist. Over the past twenty years, many Christians have been comforted and encouraged by this song. Now, it’s his turn to be comforted. Yesterday, Steven Curtis Chapman’s 5-year-old daughter was struck and killed by one of her teenage brothers, who was driving an SUV and didn’t see her. From the response posted on his site and his radio interview following it, it sounds like he is handling this very well. However, it’s got to be difficult to go through something like this. Let’s pray that the Lord will comfort he and his family.

His strength is perfect when our strength is gone;
He’ll carry us when we can’t carry on.
Raised in His power, the weak become strong;
His strength is perfect, His strength is perfect.

“His Strength is Perfect” © 1998 Sparrow Song / BMG

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin has a very informative, touching post about this (and lots more).

But, it’s the UN, so what do we expect?  Via Signal 94, we learn of the UN Population Fund’s response to the cyclone in Myanmar.

So far, the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) said it had sent 72,800 condoms to survivors struggling to maintain their family planning after the storm hit in early May.

Struggling to maintain their family planning?  If they’re needing these types of donations, I think they’re past the struggling phase.

“Not every single woman is using contraceptives in Myanmar. We’re basing this on regular habits,” [UNFPA aid advisor Chaiyos Kunanusont] said.

Couldn’t the same be said about pretty much any geographic area larger than a single house?

Of course, which is worse - the fact that the UN is sending them, or the fact that the rulers of Myanmar have allowed that aid to come in, but not the other aid.  You know, food, water, that kind of stuff.  Sig94 summed it up perfectly.

Are we surprised that these lunkheads in the UN equate access to condoms on the same level as access to food, water and shelter?

Our family had been toying with homeschooling for a while, and our move last year to an area where schools are either abysmal or exorbitantly expensive pushed us over the edge. Up to that point, we were able to send our children to classical Christian schools like Emerald Mountain Christian School and Cornerstone Christian Academy, where they were taught strong academics from a biblical worldview. These schools viewed their education as a ministry and involved parents in their children’s education, which enabled them to keep their tuition rates affordable. Not that a school like that doesn’t exist here, but we haven’t found it, and I imagine if it did, their waiting list would be a mile long.

Exhibit A is something I remember hearing about a while back, and I thought I had blogged about it then. However, I can’t find that post, so I guess I didn’t. How many of you remember turning in your paper or test, and getting it back looking like the teacher’s pen leaked all over it? I got a few of those, and I didn’t like it. So, what I did was apply myself to make sure it didn’t happen again. I much preferred the number 100 written at the top and circled - that was all the red I wanted to see on a paper or test.

But now, teachers are using purple pens to grade, not because they’re all Prince fans, but for the sole reason that red is too harsh. Too harsh? Check this out - the third paragraph in the story.

“I never use red to grade papers because it stands out like, ‘Oh, here’s what you did wrong.’ ” said Melanie Irvine, a third-grade teacher at Pacific Rim Elementary in Carlsbad. “Purple is a more approachable color.”

Approachable? When I was in school, we had a different kind of approachability. You could approach the teacher’s desk and respectfully ask her for help. However, once you turned something in, it got graded, a process by which the teach goes through and marks portions that do not meet the standards. Isn’t the point of grading a paper to show what you did wrong? But, I guess esteem is more important that education these days. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t just not care about kid’s feelings, but if a kid’s not getting the material, they need to buckle down and work until they do, a process historically inspired by getting a bloodied-up paper back.

Besides, how is that preparing them for setbacks in higher grades? A third-grade report on frogs is a lot easier than an eleventh-grade report on the circulatory system. If they’re not made to get it right in third grade, what happens when they’re juniors? And jump past school - I have yet to hear of a company giving it employees a “purple slip.” (Of course, who knows what we’ll have when this generation gets to be in charge…)

Exhibit B is the genesis for this post. In several school systems across the fruited plain, they now have a minimum score of 50 on their grading scale. Another hand-picked paragraph to illustrate the idiocy of this…

“It’s a classic mathematical dilemma: that the students have a six times greater chance of getting an F,” says Douglas Reeves, founder of The Leadership and Learning Center, a Colorado-based educational think tank who has written on the topic. “The statistical tweak of saying the F is now 50 instead of zero is a tiny part of how we can have better grading practices to encourage student performance.”

Six times greater chance of getting an F? When did grades get equated with the spinning of a roulette wheel? And this is just a “statistical tweak”? Incredulous doesn’t even begin to express how I feel about this. Isn’t the point of testing in school to ensure that the students have absorbed a minimum level of the material they were presented? If there are 100 questions, and you miss 16, you get an 84. If you miss 27, you get a 73. If you miss 62, you get a 38. It’s simple math. However, is it? Once this is in there, how long is it until someone says “Well, if the minimum is 50, why don’t we just do our percentages based on that?” Then, if you miss 16, you get a 92; if you miss 27, you get an 87; and, if you miss 62, you get a 69. Hey, a D! That’s even more esteem-boosting than a 50-point minimum F!

I realize that the 10-point splits for grades has been standard for a while, with an 11-point range for A and a 59-point range for F. However, the school I attended through 9th grade had the following scale:

• A - 100-94
• B - 93-87
• C - 86-80
• D - 79-75
• F - 74-0

Straight-A’s was something I always worked toward, and most of the time, I succeeded. I wasn’t the coolest person in school, or the most athletic, and depending on how one measures success, I haven’t been the most successful since then. However, in learning how to do what it took to make the grade, I gained an understanding of how to meet the expectations that had been set for me. I’m sure some of that is my personality - to this day, if I get a 98% on a 50-question test, my first thought is “What did I miss?”

Good grades are something that should be earned, not given, and they’re worth hard work to get them. That is what teachers should be teaching, instead of worrying about Johnny or Kathy’s self-esteem. I remember crying over grades I got that weren’t as high as I thought they should have been. That’s part of the process - we can’t eliminate everything bad about childhood. (Don’t even get me wound up about dodge-ball or sports with no scorekeeping…)

It’s not generous to give someone a grade they did not earn - it does a disservice to the student, the teacher, and any other teachers that may have that student in the future. Failing a class or a grade doesn’t mean you’re no good - that’s why there are provisions for retaking classes and years. I failed Calculus I the first two times I took it - but on the third try, I got a C. My professor didn’t give me the C, I earned the C. If my professor had given me a D on the first class, I would have moved on to Calculus II, and been completely lost. If that trend had continued through graduation, my employer would not have gotten what he thought he was getting.

So, my kids are homeschooled. There are expectations placed on them, and consequences if they don’t meet them. And you know what? For the most part, they meet them; if they don’t, we work on it until they do. They love it - they tell people they go to the best school ever! And, hey, I can’t help it if I’m in love with their teacher…

I don’t think I’ve done a NASCAR post yet this season, and last night’s All-Star Race gives me a perfect opportunity.

Before the big race, there was a 40-lap, 2-segment All-Star Challenge, where the top two finishers get to race their way into the big race.  For the most part, it was a clean race, although pole-sitter Elliott Sadler got taken out by eventual race winner A. J. Allmendinger, who won his first-ever Cup series race (albeit a non-point event).  Open-wheel veteran Sam Hornish, Jr. came in second, and showed a lot of progress since the first of the year.  After the race, it was revealed that Kasey Kahne, who had finished 5th in the challenge race, had received the fan vote-in position for the big show.

The 100-lap, 4-segment All-Star Race was caution-free (the ones they throw at the end of each segment don’t count), and was one of the fastest ones I had seen.  Each segment was dominated by different drivers.  Segment 1 was led (in its entirety) by Kyle Busch, currently the driver at the top of the standings.  Halfway through segment 2, his engine dropped a cylinder, and Carl Edwards blew everyone away for the rest of that segment.  During the third segment, Carl’s car went away, and Dale Earnhardt, Jr. led part of the segment until Greg Biffle caught and passed him.  In the final segment, it was Kasey Kahne who took the lead a few laps in, and held off Greg Biffle to become the first-ever fan vote to win the $1M prize.

Kyle Busch has been blowing away the competition in all three major series this year, but a couple of weeks ago, he and Dale Earnhardt, Jr. were racing very hard and got into each other.  “Junior Nation” seems to feel that Busch wrecked Junior on purpose; an unbiased viewing of the replay tapes shows otherwise.  However, now Busch gets booed whenever he’s announced, or even when he wins a race, as he did last week.  But, I thought one of the poorest examples of sportmanship was the cheering of the crowd as Busch’s disabled car was being pushed from pit road to the garage.  Maybe it’s just my upbringing, but cheering at other’s misfortune just seems petty.  Carl Edwards had it right - I can’t find a quote, but it was something like “Man, I hate that he lost his engine.  I wanted to beat him straight-up on the racetrack.”

We have Junior fans in our house - he’s #1 on my middle son’s list, and he’s pretty high on mine as well.  This hearkens back to last year, when Jeff Gordon was getting pelted with things for passing (and saluting) Dale Earnhardt, Sr.’s career win total.  This is the sort of poor sportsmanship that reflects badly on NASCAR as a sport, and poorly on the South as a region of the country.

In the words of Ron Burgundy, “Stay classy, Junior Nation…”

Lost amid the race vs. gender war that is the Democrat primary season and the focus on the next administration is the pure genius in the current administration.  Sure, they say Bush is still the mindless dolt that somehow managed to outsmart them twice; and yes, he’s certainly given them enough anguished English ammunition to come up with quite a rotation for their “Bushism of the Day” quote machines.  However, Bush has flashes of political genius, and one of them cam during his speech to the Knesset, the Israeli governing body, celebrating 60 years of Israeli independence.  (The below quote is found about half-way down the page.)

Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: “Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.” We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.

There are no names in this.  Really, it could apply to a host of people who call for diplomacy even once diplomacy has failed, or those who call for diplomacy with terrorist organizations or terrorist-supporting nations.  However, as Jeff Foxworthy once said, “There’s no sense confessing to something she don’t know about yet.”  (This is in response to an upset wife - do you start saying “sorry” for everything she might be mad about, or do you simply ask “What’s wrong?”)

Being all sophisticated and everything, the Democrats must not be aware of this technique, and through their responses showed us that President Bush struck a nerve.  Barack Obama (D-IL) was livid, blaming the current administration for strengthening Iran.  Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said that such words were “beneath the dignity of the office of the president.”  Joe Biden (D-DE) threw the BS flag (literally), and Harry Reid (D-NV) said that Bush should explain the “inconsistency between his administration’s actions and his words today.”

So, basically, here’s how it went down:

Bush: “Appeasers are dangerous.”
Obama, Pelosi, Biden, and Reid (in unison): “No we’re not!”

Priceless…

I know, that really surprises you regulars…  But, via Hugh Hewitt, we have a perfect illustration with what I believe is wrong with Barack Obama.  It is a mindset that permeates everything he is and does, and is brought to us courtesy of his wife Michelle, speaking on Friday ahead of this past week’s North Carolina primary election.

(Throughout these quotes, the emphasis is mine.)

But we’ve also learned something else this year, something that we’ve all sort of felt at some point in our life, that we’re still living in a nation, and in a time when the bar is set, I talk about this all the time, they set the bar. They say look, if you do these things, you can get to this bar, right? And then you work and you struggle, you do everything that they say, and you think you’re getting close to the bar and you’re working hard, and you’re sacrificing, and then you get to the bar, you’re right there, you’re reaching out for the bar, you think you have it, and then what happens? They move the bar. They raise it up. They shift it to the left and to the right. It’s always just quite out of reach.

This is a diatribe on victimhood.  Look how many times the work “they” is used to refer to some external entity.  The person she’s describing does not believe that they are responsible for their own happiness - this person is too busy being held down by “them” (what previous generations would call “the man”).  Ironically, though, this is pretty much real life she’s disparaging here.  How many people have saved up to buy something, only to find that they forgot the tax, or it’s suddenly more expensive.  I experience this in my line of work all the time.  “Build it to these requirements.”  So I build it.  “Oh, why did you do it that way?”  Because that’s what the requirements said.  “Oh, yeah - but what I meant was something else.”

And, who was it that said “Aim for the moon”?  (No, not the “nuke the moon” folks over at IMAO…)  Achievement is great, but it shouldn’t be an end in and of itself.  Once you achieve your goals, you set new ones and begin pushing again.  That’s the premise of the whole “SMART” goal-setting process.  (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely, for those who’ve never heard of that.)  You break your big goal into specific, measurable, realistic goals (ex. “win in North Carolina”).  It’s not moving the bar, it’s moving on to the next small goal.

And that’s a little bit of what Barack has been experiencing. The bar is constantly changing for this man. Raise the money? Not enough. Build an organization? Not enough. Win a whole bunch of states? Not the right states. You got to win certain states. So the bar has been shifting and moving in this race…

Well, raising money means nothing for the presidency - if it did, we’d have wrapped up the second term of President Forbes in 2004.  So no, that’s not enough.  If organization was key, Barack wouldn’t even get to run because President Dean would be going for his second term.  So no, still not enough.  Win a bunch of states?  Well, if you win 3 states for 100 delegates, and your opponent wins 1 state for 150 delgates, then yes, you won the wrong states.  You’re whining that running for President is tough?  What did you expect, that raising enough money for a coronation would be enough?

…but the irony is, the sad irony is that that’s exactly what’s happening to most Americans in this country. The bar is shifting and moving on people all the time. And folks are struggling like never before, working harder than ever, believing that their hard work will lead to some reward, some payoff. But what they find is that they get there and the bar has changed, things are different, wasn’t enough. So you have to work even harder.

No, they’re not.  This view of America is completely flawed.  Yes, people are working hard.  Yes, some are feeling the pinch of bad decisions or bad circumstances.  It’s not that the bar has changed, it’s that real life has hit.  The most important thing to realize in all this, though, is that when life happens, it’s not the job of the government to step in and “fix” it.

And see what happens when you live in a nation where the vast majority of Americans are struggling every day to reach an ever-shifting and moving bar, then what happens in that nation is that people do become isolated. They do live in a level of division, because see, when you’re that busy struggling all the time, which most people that you know and I know are, that you don’t have time to get to know your neighbor. You don’t have time to reach out and have conversations, to share stories. In fact, you feel very alone in your struggle, because you feel that somehow, it must be your fault that you’re struggling so hard. Everybody else must be doing okay. I must be doing something wrong, so you hide. You don’t realize that the struggles of that farmer in rural Iowa are the same as the struggles as a city worker in the south side of Chicago, because we don’t talk to each other.

In the immortal words of Toby Keith, “A little less talk, and a lot more action.”  If you’re busting your butt to get ahead, you’re struggling, you don’t have a lot of time for conversations and story sharing.  If you think that they’re valuable to helping you with your struggle, you make time for them.  If you can attain your goals without touchy-feely stuff, then you probably don’t.

And, there’s a bit of smug self-centeredness in this description as well.  I don’t believe that most people feel that they’re all that different from other people.  Certainly not any of the people I know - in fact, it’s been my experience that the easiest common topic to discuss with people is child rearing.  Everyone has a funny story from that, and most people’s experience is quite similar.  You’re revealing a part of yourself that I don’t think you meant to reveal.

And when you live in a nation with a vast majority of Americans are struggling to reach an ever-shifting and moving bar, then naturally, people become cynical. They don’t believe that politics can do anything for them. So they fold their arms in disgust, and they say you know, I can’t be bothered voting, because it has never done anything for me before. So let me stay home, let me not bother. Naturally, we as a nation get cynical.

Politics can’t do anything for anyone!  What people become cynical about is politicians who say one thing to get elected, then do another once in office.  Why do you think our current President’s approval rating has been in the toilet for some time?  He campaigned as a conservative, then moved to middle once elected.  His base doesn’t like it because he’s betrayed them, and his opponents still don’t like him because he caused the country to get an education in electoral law in 2000.  You don’t find much in the middle of the road other than roadkill.

And besides, isn’t “politician” the charge that got your husband all riled up?  His pastor can say those horrendous things about our country, and he’s just an old man from a different generation - but as soon as he accused Barack of being a politician, that’s when he got disowned.  (That’s the irony - Barack’s response to that essentially proved what Dr. Wright said!)

And when you live in a nation where people are struggling every day to reach an ever-shifting and moving bar, then what happens in that kind of nation is that people are afraid, because when your world’s not right, no matter how hard you work, then you become afraid of everyone and everything, because you don’t know who’s fault it is, why you can’t get a handle on life, why you can’t secure a better future for your kids.

I’m not afraid.  Is it because I’m one of those folks who’s clinging to God and guns?  :)  I’m not too awfully worried about securing a better future for my kids.  What I’m concerned with is teaching my kids how not to become victims; teaching them how to take responsibility for their actions; teaching them that if they want something done, they should do it; teaching them respect for other people; teaching them the difference between respecting the earth (which we learn as Cub Scouts) and worshiping it.  Secure a better future for my kids?  My ultimate goal is to feel that the future is secure because my kids are in it.

And the problem with fear is that it cuts us off. Fear is the worst enemy. It cuts us off from one another and our own families, and our communities, and it has certainly cut us off from the rest of the world. It’s like fear creates this veil of impossibility, and it is hanging over all of our heads, and we spend more time now in this nation talking about what we can’t do, what won’t work, what can’t change.

If people would quit trying to recycle failed socialistic programs and wealth-envy politics, we’d have a lot less to talk about.  Many of us would love to talk about change, but it’s tough to talk with someone who won’t debate like an adult.  An example of what won’t work is the current Social Security ponzi scheme.  But, a few years ago, when an attempt was made to get our government out of the Social Security business, opponents screamed about how they’d be taking food out of grandma’s mouth.  It’s the same with the minimum wage debate - the claim is made that you can’t support a family of four on minimum wage.  First off, it is possible, if you live within your means (a foreign concept these days, I know - see collapse, mortgage, sub-prime); secondly, that’s not what minimum wage is designed for.  On the other side, you’ve got a $7+ minimum wage, and we wonder why there’s a demand for $2/hour illegal labor.  It’s not that there are jobs American’s won’t do, it’s that they, by law, can’t do them!

And one more example of the whole “arguing like adults” thing, blogress Cassy Fiano recently posted two pictures of Barack Obama’s celebration in North Carolina - one from the campaign itself, the other from Mary Katherine Ham, who was there covering it.  The pictures illustrated that, though some creative photography, it appeared that the venue was full when it was, in fact, not.  What was the number one liberal response to this heinous exposure of “politicianing”?  You’re fat.  (Language warning on that link.)

See, and the problem with that kind of thinking is that we passed that on to our children, because see, the thing I know as a mother is our children are watching everything we do and say, every explicit and implicit sign, they are watching us. And our fear is helping us to raise a nation of young doubters, young people who are insular and they’re timid. And they don’t try, because they already heard us tell them why they can’t succeed. See, and I don’t want that for my kids.

Then don’t live in a fear-induced paralysis!  Get out there and take control of your destiny.  Go to school, apply for that better job, update your resume, do what it takes.  That’s the picture you want your kids to see.  I’ll tell you what, you’re into real life here again - that is what’s happening to our kids.  But don’t bemoan it, do something about it!  There’s nothing that the President of the United States can do to tackle that kind of fear, and putting that responsibility on him is a big part of the problem.

You know, jobs like my father had those blue collar jobs where you got pensions, vacation, all that, they’re dwindling. They’re drying up. They’re disappearing, going overseas. And if you’re lucky enough to have a job, nine times out of ten, your salary’s not keeping up with the cost of living. Barack and I met with a family of railroad workers, union folks. They said for eight years, they hadn’t seen a pay increase. For eight years, zero pay increase. Eight years. No increase. Gas prices going up, food going up, rent, insurance, own a home, what’s going with the mortgages? That’s going up. It’s all going up, and salaries are staying stagnant. So no wonder that bar feels like it’s moving.

And why is that?  See regulation, government, obscene.  People who don’t understand free-market economics think that they can levy whatever requirement they want on business (usually some sort of wealth-distribution scheme), and that business owners are just going to eat that out of their profits.  That’s not the way the real world works.  This is part of the minimum wage debate too - if I employ 10 people at $5/hour, and I suddenly have to pay them $7/hour, that a $20/hour of overhead I’m going to incur.  To fix that, I will either raise my prices to compensate, or let 3 of the people go.  With the former, the buying power of the $7/hour wage is diminished, and with the latter, three of the folks lose all their buying power (moving the bar, no doubt).  Why are these jobs going overseas?  Because people there will work harder, for less money, and be grateful to have a job in the first place.

And I don’t know how single parents do it. There are millions of them all over this country. Let me tell you, single parents love their kids, too. But it is almost impossible to raise a family of any size on a single salary. So now you’ve got single parents who have to double and triple shift, taking on two, three jobs, working all the time, and feeling like they’re failing because that bar is moving, because how on Earth are you going to work as hard as you need to to pay the bills and be at parent/teacher conferences, and sit down and do homework when a kid has trouble? How are you going to manage all that? Well, folks are not, and they’re doing it suffering in silence, blaming themselves for the fact that they’re not working hard enough. Maybe something’s wrong.

Ooh boy - time for some insensitivity.  I agree, something’s wrong.  People in this country have lost their backbone to stand up and say that single parenthood is not the ideal child-rearing environment!  This isn’t a knock on single parents per se, but most of the single parents I know would agree that it is not the ideal environment.  But since no one will say that, and we’ve elevated our own self-centeredness to such an extent that people just get out of their marriages if they’re not happy instead of working on them, we get this.  The people I feel sorry for in single-parent households are the kids.  Men and women both bring different styles and aspects to the parenting table, and the presence of both has the best opportunity to produce a good result.

This also comes back to the whole “living within your means” thing.  It’s doesn’t take three jobs to support a family - I’ve got three kids and a wife living on one enlisted military salary, and we get by just fine.  No, we don’t have a new Toyota Sienna (much to my wife’s dismay), but we have what we need.

And [Barack] has spent every ounce of his time running over the decisions in his head - do I…when graduating from college, do I work on Wall Street? Make a lot of money, that’d be better for me, or do I go work in a community as an organizer? Well, what did Barack do? He became a community organizer, working in some of the toughest neighborhoods on the south side of Chicago, worked for years in neighborhoods where people had a reason to give up hope, because their jobs had been lost, steel mills shut down, living in brown fields left by those closed steel plants, unsafe streets, schools deteriorating, grandparents raising grandkids. Barack spent years working with churches, busing single mothers down to City Hall to help them find their voice, building the kind of operations on the ground just like he’s doing in this race, block by block, person by person. Now you tell me whether there’s anybody in this race who can claim to have made the same choice with their lives. You tell me, but I think that Barack Obama is the only person that can claim that kind of choice.

And, were he running for Humanitarian of the Year, this might be a good thing.  But he’s not - he’s running for President of the United States of America.  He wants to be the CEO of one of the largest economies on the planet, yet he has no experience in managing anything, even a non-profit.  (If you’re on the ground, house to house and driving buses, you’re not managing.)  People don’t just “get” to be CEO because they’re a nice person.  They start in lower management, working out their inevitable neophyte mistakes and gaining experience as to what does and doesn’t work.  Then they move up and prove their abilities at a higher level.  Even then, things don’t always go smoothly.  Carly Fiorino, the HP exec who “broke the glass ceiling,” was supposed to take HP to heights previously unknown.  As it turns out, her ideas didn’t match up with what the market wanted, and she left a few years later, much more quietly than she arrived.

The job is President of the United States is a tough one, but it’s not the President of the World.  Sometimes, what’s best for the USA is not what’s best for some other countries.  I don’t want my President making decisions for the betterment of other countries to the detriment of this one.  You may think that’s why we should all be opposed to the Iraq war, but that’s why I’m for it.  I believe that instilling a representative form of government in that area of the country will help stabilize that region, which will in turn stabilize our nation.  That way, we can have the time to deal with the people here that need attention.

So, there you have it - several reasons I’m not supporting Barack Obama.