From The Citizen Link

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ADF asks judge to reconsider her over-reaching decision.

The Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) has asked a New Hampshire court to reconsider its decision to order a 10-year-old home-schooled girl into public school.

“Parents have a fundamental right to make educational choices for their children,” said ADF-allied attorney John Anthony Simmons. “In this case, the court is illegitimately altering a method of education that the court itself admits is working.”

The parents of the girl are divorced, and the mother has been home-schooling her. In the process of renegotiating the terms of a parenting plan for the girl, the guardian ad litem concluded that the girl “appeared to reflect her mother’s rigidity on questions of faith” and that the girl’s interests “would be best served by exposure to a public school setting.”

Judge Lucinda V. Sadler approved the recommendation and issued the order July 14.

“The New Hampshire Supreme Court itself has specifically declared, ‘Home education is an enduring American tradition and right,’ ” said ADF Senior Legal Counsel Mike Johnson. “There is clearly and without question no legitimate legal basis for the court’s decision, and we trust it will reconsider its conclusions.”

Mike Donnelly, staff attorney at the Home School Legal Defense Association, agreed this is “not the place for the courts to be inserting themselves.”

A letter to the editor of the Dallas Morning News

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Re: "We have a way to fix Congress," by Bob Kirby, Wednesday Letters.

Kirby spoke against term limits for Congress, saying that we already have voting as a method to fix Congress. I have to take exception with his conclusion.

I can only vote for the person running in my district. The other congressional representatives have as much or more influence on things that affect me — but I can’t vote them out. They vote their party line or the desires of lobbyists rather than considering their constituents. Only term limits ensure that members of Congress will be replaced on a regular basis. We desperately need representatives who are not professional office holders.

Almost all of the various districts have been gerrymandered to ensure that one party or the other will win that seat. It is well known that once someone gets voted into office, he most likely will continue to be re-elected.

Ronald Parker Plano, Tx.

From BusinessWeek.com

President Barack Obama wants a climate change bill that addresses his top priorities: energy independence, job creation and preventing pollution, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said Thursday.

Salazar joined Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter, Democratic Rep. Betsy Markey and Nancy Sutley, chairwoman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, at a forum to talk about President Barack Obama’s clean-energy policies.

The Clean Energy Economy Forum in Fort Collins was one of the first to promote Obama’s vision for a comprehensive energy plan to jump-start the American clean energy sector.

“President Obama’s vision is that we need to address all of these issues. How we do that is the art of what’s possible in Congress. This is an issue where the very future of our children and planet are hanging in peril. Our goal is to get energy and climate change legislation that is workable,” Salazar said.

He said the administration doesn’t want to pick and choose over issues like carbon pollution.

The climate change bill, which narrowly passed the House earlier this summer, imposes the first limits on greenhouse gases. It eventually would lead to an 80 percent reduction by putting a price on each ton of climate-altering pollution.

However, the Democratic-controlled House approved the bill by a slim margin, and Senate Democrats say changes will be necessary to clear that chamber.

Salazar didn’t say exactly what administration officials want to see kept or changed in the House bill. But the former Democratic senator said the president is committed to getting it done.

Boulder County Commissioner Will Toor said the federal government needs to eliminate some of the barriers to developing renewable energy. He said the federal government needs to approve bonding that would allow lower interest rates and set up a federal loan program.

Toor said better financing would help move renewable energy from pilot projects “to a tool that is potentially a game changer.”

Sutley said climate change is “one of the big issues of our time” and renewable energy is a major part of the solution. She said the United States is now spending billions of dollars on research and development.

“The next step is to make sure America leads,” she said.

from DC Charter Schools Examiner

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When D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty took over DCPS a couple of years ago he promised to move his two sons from private to public school. Turns out he stuck to his word although it proved difficult for the press to obtain this information. The reason? Mr. Fenty did what all arrogant politicians do and put his children not in the neighborhood school, West Elementary, at 14th and Farragut Streets that has failed to make AYP for a couple of years, but instead enrolled them at a much better institution, Lafayette Elementary, which is located in Chevy Chase, and whose students score over 90 percent proficient or above in both reading and math.

Of course all parents want to do what’s best for their children. But what is driving me mad is that he and President Obama are so dead set against giving this chance to everyone else. Mr. Fenty is silently watchings as Congress moves to kill the Opportunity Scholarship Program and he refused to stand up to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and the President when they pulled back from 216 kids their admission to private schools under the voucher plan.

This country is beginning to look a lot like the old Soviet Union when regular citizens were starving on the streets but the dictators were living the lives of kings. This attitude is reflected in the health care debate. At the town hall meetings politicians have been repeatedly asked whether if there is a public option they will have to join the plan. Their response, "Congress has its own insurance coverage."

You think I’m exaggerating? Well today the editors of the Washington Post again call on the President to renew the Opportunity Scholarship Program, not only due to a recent study that concluded that "the D.C. voucher program has proven to be the most effective education policy evaluated by the federal government’s official education research arm so far," but because sending kids to public schools may result in their death.

The editors quote a new study by the Heritage and Lexington Institutes which shows that for the 2007 – 2008 term in the 70 public schools that the 216 students who were denied scholarships are assigned to there were 2,379 crime related incidents, with 666 of these categorized as violent and one classified as a homicide.

In a situation like this a parent must do whenever they can to move their child from the neighborhood school. But for Mr. Obama and Fenty what is good or them is not O.K. for everyone else.

From Our Town Online

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JOHNSTOWN — The debate on health care reform brought out more than 110 people on Thursday, many of them participating in a question-and-answer session hosted by a Republican challenger to U.S. Rep. John Murtha.

Tim Burns, a Washington County businessman who grew up in Johnstown, recorded the session and promised to send the video to Murtha.

“We want to hear from you on what your concerns are and what your ideas are in terms of health care reform, which I think is a key topic,” said Burns’ spokesman, Kent Gates to the crowd before the forum.

The crowd, which was civil despite some obvious strong feelings, spent much of the hour voicing concerns about not only health care reform but about the government in general.

“They’re supposed to be working for and they’ve forgotten that,” Tammy Hockycko of Davidsville said of elected officials.

Burns told the crowd that if elected, he would focus on changing the current system to better suit the needs of the insured. “There are no doubt problems with the health care system” he said.

Making insurance companies more competitive by relaxing controls that keep them from operating in multiple states would be one way. “Right now they have regional monopolies,” he said.

It was clear that many in the crowd wanted sweeping changes that included term limits and actions to limit illegal immigration. Some thought the government should tackle tort reform before health care reform.

Terry Anderson of Indiana asked Burns if he supported closing the border, enacting tort reform and setting term limits as part of his candidacy for the 12th Congressional District seat.

His questions — to which Burns said yes to all three — were met with a large round of applause from the crowd.

While the forum, held in the Masonic Temple, served mainly as a political rally, several people in the crowd came forward as medical experts or small business owners with knowledge of the current health care system.

“From my standpoint, we are dealing with one-sixth of the American economy,” said Dr. J. Michael Moses. “We need to move slowly on this.”

The Johnstown surgeon did say change was necessary. “I believe that we need to have health care reform. But not at this time. We need to fix the economy first.”

Vickie Long, a Cambria County jury commissioner, urged the crowd to stay active in the political process as a way of having their voices heard. “Talk to people you know, just get people to vote,” she told the group.

Although he was invited expressly by Burns, Murtha did not attend the meeting. Representatives of the congressman said a telephone town hall on health care reform will be held on Sept. 3 for concerned constituents.

They said two previous telephonic town halls have reached over 15,000 people in the district.

(Dan DiPaolo can be contacted at dand@dailyamerican.com. Comment on the story at dailyamerican.com)