The Obama administration just released a memo that flies in the face of all recent scientific evidence. They announced that global warming is even worse than we have imagined. That this report came from the Obama administration is not surprising. Almost all members of the administration have a bias in favor of global warming. The report was put together by 30 members of the administration. There are no reports on whether there is one scientific degree among the 30 people involved in the report. If not, that would be typical of reports supporting global warming for the past four or five years. Scientists have jumped from the global warming ship in huge numbers. About all that are left are journalists, politicians, communists and non-scientists.

The timing of this report was particularly funny. The Northern Great Plains has been setting records for cold for the past three months. Even Chicago has reported the lowest June temperatures that have ever been recorded. England reported the first snowfall in June in over 100 years or since the end of the little ice age. With all the north countries setting records for cold, you have little chance of people agreeing with the premise that the earth is warming at an alarming rate. There has been no evidence that the earth as warmed at all since 1998. My oldest granddaughter is 10 ½. She has never experienced a year where the temperature has been more than the year before. That is starting to be some sort of a trend.

The reason the global warming people want you to believe that the earth is warming is so they can impose regulations to “solve” the crisis. If there is no crisis, you will not allow these rules to be imposed. So, they have to get you to believe that the crisis is imminent and that your action now will solve the problem. The fact that the evidence shows that there is no warming is just an “inconvenient fact”.

The “Cap and Trade” Bill is supposed to come to a vote next week. This bill will increase the average energy bill of every family in America by about $1500. The actual amount will vary by region, but that is supposed to be the average. Since the government never makes any accurate predictions, you can bet that the average will exceed $1500 by a large margin. It will drive up the cost of everything, not just energy. If you like the current recession that we are experiencing, you will really enjoy the big depression that this bill will cause.

The economy is still in the midst of a recession. People are out of work in large numbers. Tax revenues are down. Homes are not selling well because people cannot afford them. Interest rates on home loans are low to encourage home ownership, but homes still are not selling. This is not the time to impose additional taxes. In my estimation, there is never a good time to add taxes. This is an especially bad time to add taxes as the economy has no cushion at all.

The Democrats that support the “Cap and Trade” bill have a plan on what they want to get done. They know that the time to get things done is closing. People are starting to grumble and when that starts, their window of opportunity is shutting. Democrats from vulnerable districts are starting to take notice that these socialist programs are not selling well in their districts. They know that more socialist programs will doom them to defeat in 2010. There may be enough support for the Cap and Trade bill in Democrat circles to pass the bill, but that support will erode with time. The Democrats know they have to pass it now or never see it passed. In fact, it may already be too late. It failed in one try earlier. This is one they are trying to slip through the back door. All Republicans have to do is just highlight the huge tax increase for no reasonable purpose and the idea will die for lack of support. At least, that is what I hope happens.

Barack Obama has picked the head of the Chicago public schools to head the Department of Education. That is a real bad choice. I just read that only 17% of Chicago school kids can read at or above grade level by the 8^th grade. That is a terrible record. With a record like that the person should be fired, not promoted to a higher position.

The person to head the Department of Education should be a person that has promoted excellence in education, not failure. Of course, the Department of Education is an unnecessary federal department that has no usefulness, but that is another story for another day. Whoever heads the department should at least have led a successful education department somewhere in the United States. There must be someone in the United States who has led a successful education department somewhere. I am sure that Obama’s team could find that person if they tried hard enough.

One reason that Obama might have tapped the Chicago schools leader is that Obama and Ayers introduced their Fabian Socialism into the schools through the Chicago/Annenberg Challenge period. That means that the Chicago schools have been teaching socialism in their schools for about 15 years. That is plenty of time to have raised a generation of socialists. Obama probably would like to do the same for the rest of the United States. Unfortunately, there are plenty of teachers that think that socialism is the way the United States should go.

The problem with most of the major inner city schools is that they are failing. This includes: New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, St. Louis, Atlanta & Philadelphia. There are others, but those are the largest and they are all terrible at best. To choose one of the leaders from one of those places is a bad choice. When the schools are falling apart and the students not being taught at grade level, there is a problem. The person in charge should have identified that problem and be working to solve those problems. The problem is that no school administrator, except for Washington, D.C., is trying to actually solve the problems. They are all just going along to get along and Obama selects one of them. That says a lot about the priority that Obama will put on education during the next four years.

To give Obama an opportunity to make amends, I will assume that in making this selection, he was distracted by the Blagojevich situation. If that is the case, I would expect him to pull this selection back in the next few days and replace this bad selection with one that reflects a desire to see excellence in education instead of failure in education that he has endorsed. But, Democrats usually do not want excellence in education. An educated population will never pick socialism. An educated population will never go for the things that Democrats usually want to do. So, that is usually why Democrats are against improving education. They are always for spending more on education. They just do not want to improve what education we have. They just want to spend more to get more of what we already get. I know that makes no sense. But if you are reading this, you are educated and are probably not a Democrat.

As an educator, I try hard to provide my students with an excellent education. I will be the first to admit that I am not perfect. I make mistakes. I sometimes do or say things that in retrospect I wish I had not said or done. But, overall, I try hard to give my students the best education I can provide in the time they are with me. I am a science teacher and concentrate on the science. I sometimes get worried about the poor quality of work that my students turn in for research papers. The English is frequently bad. The sourcing of articles is done poorly. The citations in the back of the paper are done wrong. The citations in the back can be done with a website that will do it in the proper format for you. There is no reason to do it wrong. We have a learning center on campus that will go over their papers with them and almost write it for them when it is all said and done. Yet, I get terribly written papers all the time. That is a product of the poor education that they received before they came to my class.

I can say with satisfaction that students that succeed with me will also succeed in the courses that follow my course. Those that get an A or a B with me will usually get an A or a B all the way through the next three courses. Those courses are much more difficult than my introductory course. But, I think that it is because I prepared them well that the students do so well in the later classes.