Your Tax Dollars at Work - these $$ could have been used for

[I Will Deny You]

I doubt that any of you have walked by federal Department of Education headquarters lately, so I'll just tell you what it looks like.

They have fake little school houses around each of the main entrances, and above them they have signs that say "No Child Left Behind."

And right now, according to Mother Jones and The Nation, they're spending lord-knows-how-much to get the names of schoolchildren to the military, often without the children and parents' permission or even notification.

Now, I happen to know how badly schools need help. And this money could have been used for a lot, just in the area around the DOE. I have a friend who teaches near Cap (right by Union Station, for the tourism-minded) and they often don't have enough money to copy worksheets for their students. She calculated that, if each fake schoolhouse at the DOE cost $3,000 to make, the money used for three of them could fund a classroom for an entire year.

Another thing that's pissing me off is that they're building another memorial in Memorialville (official motto: "The much at the bottom of the reflecting pool isn't disgusting enough, so we've started another construction site!"). It's a memorial for World War II. So don't get me wrong. I'm glad that American fought in World War II and I'm glad America won. I think that the people who fought in World War II were heroes. But, as an uncle of mine (one of the guys who volunteered to serve in those shitty all-black units) said during the Rwandan genocide, "Innocent people are dying left and right and the most powerful country in the history of the world decides to carve the name of my alcoholic friend into a piece of granite?" Memorials are nice, but so are well-educated, well-nourished children. It's time that we prioritize here. How many flower pots do we really need in front of the Congress office buildings? Wouldn't it be nice if they packed up everything they had in the Botanical Gardens and shipped it off to various inner cities or poor countrysides so local kids would have nice, safe places to hang out?

Hey, I just got back here. I should be allowed to vent.

Lindsay

[Stormin Norman]

This dastardly WWII memorial that you are *****ing about was largely funded by private donations. Remember Tom Hank's asking, "isn't it about time we said thanks?" What the hell is wrong with you? If it weren't for these same men and women, whose VA lifetime healthcare has recently been pulled by the federal government', you wouldn't have the right to sit thier and *****. I think they deserve some recognition before the survivors die of old age. Don't you. God help us if we to count on the likes of the members of this bulletin board to fight for the freedoms we enjoy.

Besides the Department of education needs a good audit, not more money flushed down the toilet. They get more than enough money. The liberal bureaucrats that run the school system need to do a better job of managing it. Perhaps if they quit stealing it funding would no longer be an issue, and we could pay all our teachers better salaries. The federal funding accounts for only about 6% of the total funding of the schools. If schools are going bankrupt, its because of management on the state level.