Military Recruiters and Fourteen Year Old Students

    We have all heard the stories about military recruiters showing up on college campus's and in high school all across America. It would seem that many parents are finally getting fed up with the recruiters gathering information about high school students who are as young as fourteen years of age.

    Because of a little noticed provision in the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, all school districts have been ordered/directed to give the names, addresses, and phone numbers of students to the military recruiters unless the students parents expressly ask that their child's information be kept private. What you have here is the Bush Crime Family being sneaky once again.

      But this little provision may be changed thanks to legislation which was introduced on March 6 by Rep. Mike Honda called The Student Privacy Protection Act  which would make the school systems have to get written permission from the students parents before they could release the information to the recruiters.     Source

The measure will next be referred to the House Education and Labor Committee sometime during this session, said a spokesperson for Honda. That committee’s chairman, Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), is a co-sponsor of the bill.

   As is par for the course, many schools simply forget to tell the parents about the option to keep their children's info private, according to Rep. Honda.
     

 “My constituents brought this matter to my attention, expressing frustration that their children were being persistently being contacted at home by military recruiters,” Honda said. “They wanted to know how the military gained access to their personal information without their consent.”
Military recruiting efforts must respect the privacy rights of children and their families, Honda said.

   The Defense Department had no comment when asked about the legislation.

    This would be another Bush reason for calling it the No Child Left Behind Act since there would be data on every student in a school unless otherwise ordered by the child's parents.

    The government nor the damned recruiters have no business going out into a school and asking for info on some 14 year old kid who isn't even close to thinking about a military career in most cases.

    The government has enough info on these kids as it is, stored in some database, as they do with all of the citizens in this country.

    This legislation needs to be passed and the NCLB Act needs to be abolished because it doesn't work in the first place and it cost to much to operate in the second place for the minor return on the investment.

   One recruiting experience can be read about right here from Marblehead High School.

 

Technorati tags: NCLB, recruitment, Michael Honda, No Child Left Behind, California, military

 

John McCain And The " Tar Baby " Remark

   Not that the Republicans had much of a chance of getting the black vote in 2008, but John McCain made damned sure on Friday that he was not going to get to many black voters in his corner when he used the term " tar baby " at a town hall meeting in Cedar Falls, Iowa.

   I will let you be the judge of whether it sounds as if he was using the phrase in a racial way. McCain was speaking on federal involvement in custody cases when he said,

"For me to stand here and ... say I'm going to declare divorces invalid because of someone who feels they weren't treated fairly in court, we are getting into a tar baby of enormous proportions and I don't know how you get out of that."      Source

   McCain did tell reporters that he shouldn't have used the word and that it was wrong to do so, but the press will still have more to write about the incident, such as it was.

   I do not see any sort of racial meaning from the way that he spoke but I am sure that some group somewhere will make more out of this than is necessary. This is America after all.

The term dates to the 19th century Uncle Remus stories, referring to a doll made of tar that traps Br'er Rabbit. It has become known as a way of describing a sticky mess and has been used as a derogatory term for a black person.

 

Technorati tags: John McCain, federal government