Are the bad ideas dead yet? You know, the ones that have been hollowing out the country’s soul for the last 30 years.

In Atlanta, they just indicted 35 teachers, principals and administrators, including a former superintendent, for routinely altering their students’ standardized test results — and in all likelihood this massive fraud is an aberration only because the cheaters got caught.

Everything is at stake in these tests, so perhaps it’s dawning on us that fraud — by adults — is inevitable, but there’s a bigger issue here that continues to escape public outrage: The tests are stupid. They measure virtually nothing that matters, but monopolize the classroom politically. Teachers, under enormous pressure, are forced to teach to the tests rather than, you know, teach critical thinking or creative expression; and education is reduced to something rote, linear and boring.

The Columbus Coalition for Responsive Government today issued a preliminary set of endorsements for candidates to the Columbus City Council. The screening process was performed in conjunction with the Columbus Coalition of Concerned Black Citizens.

The endorsements are currently listed as "preliminary" because the three incumbent city council members have not yet engaged in the screening process. The Coalition has a four-tier rating:

1) Highly Recommended,
2) Recommended,
3) Not Recommended, and
4) Unfit for Public Office

In addition to the ratings, the Coalition has a Special Designation - Champion of Democracy - which is awarded to the candidate whose scaled scores rank highest on the principles of a representative democratic form of government.

The Coalition is pleased to award the "Highly Recommended" rating to candidates Nicholas Schneider and Brian Bainbridge, and the "Recommended" rating to candidates Greg Lawson and John Lively.

April 4 will mark the 45th year since the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. Dr. King, 39, at the time, has now been gone from us longer than he was with us. A monument celebrates his life on the mall in Washington. He is remembered as the man with a dream at the March on Washington.

In 1968, however, Dr. King was far from the favored celebrity he is today. He was under fierce criticism for opposing the war in Vietnam. Former colleagues were scorning his commitment to nonviolence. When he went to Memphis, headlines called him “Chicken a la King.” The St. Louis Globe-Democrat termed him “one of the most menacing men in America today.” The FBI was planning COINTELPRO operations to spread rumors about him and discredit him.

The civil rights movement had succeeded in ending legal segregation. The Voting Rights Act had been passed. But Dr. King knew that his greatest challenges were still ahead as he turned his focus to poverty and equal opportunity. The war on poverty was being lost in the jungles of Vietnam as war consumed the resources needed.

This letter is in response to the articles covering the case before the United States Supreme Court concerning same sex marriage.
A homosexual person is one who is sexually attracted to others of the same sex. Except for a genetic variation of nature, they are virtually identical to their heterosexual counter parts. They feel the very same kind of attraction to the same sex as heterosexuals feel about the opposite sex.

Now, granted, there are those people who freely choose this behavior as a form of "life style" but that accounts for a very small population of homosexuals. In fact, if one is not genetically predispositioned for this behavior then by definition they are not truly homosexual but rather some deviant variation of perverted behavior.

Some would argue that the Bible condemns homosexuality but I believe (through the persistence of science) this behavior will be proven to result from natural genetic variation.

One can draw on the example of the developmentally challenged {no offense intended toward either group} who by no action of their own are born comparatively slow or deficient in mental, physical, or emotional growth.

First, we were desensitized to water-boarding at Gitmo and electrical shocks to the genitalia at Abu Ghraib. Now torture has trickled down to elementary schools in the U.S. with the “body sock” for autistic kids.

Recently, Naqis Cochran, a ten-year-old autistic child, was restrained with a device known as a “body sock” at Columbus’s South Mifflin Elementary School. The Sock served as Naqis’ punishment for laughing during class. This restraining device is made of stretchy, purple lycra material that is zipped to cover a child’s arms, legs and head. While zipped inside the Sock, the autistic boy fell on his face and knocked out a permanent front tooth, requiring two emergency root canal surgeries.

The teacher told WCMH-TV in Columbus that she instructed Naqis not to move with the Sock on. Again, Naqis is autistic and asthmatic, a point stressed repeatedly by his parents Asad Shabazz and Amatullah Shields on my Talktainmentradio.com radio show last Wednesday. Just like with water-boarding, any person would tend to panic when their head, arms, and legs are encased and zipped into a physical restraining device.