"I'm certain a Liberal Jesus wouldn't have anything to say about two homosexual men coming together in marriage"

Summer homework has increasingly become a popular tool used by teachers to bridge the gap between the end of one school year and the start of another. But some parents worry that the workload is making summer fun slip away.

"I don't know what good this really does," said Sheryl Preiss, a Baltimore, Maryland, mother parent of twin 13-year-old girls entering high school this year. "Life isn't always about a test. I think it's important for children to be children, to be well-rounded.

Some education experts say the "lazy, hazy, crazy" days of summer are over as schools feel increased pressure on accountability for student achievement under the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

"It's really going to focus attention on this period of time when kids aren't engaged," said Ron Fairchild, executive director of the Center for Summer Learning at Johns Hopkins University.

But parents from Prince George's County in Maryland to Salt Lake City, Utah, are fighting back, questioning the usefulness and legality of teachers piling on summer reading and math problems.

"...despite the liberal lads you've been dating, there is hope out there."

"The 2004 Republican National Convention and MTV's "Choose or Lose: 20 Million LOUD!" campaign today announced Princella Smith of Wynne, AR, as the winner of the "Stand Up and Holla!" essay contest. Princella was announced as the winner on MTV's Total Request Live (TRL) this evening and will join Republicans from across the nation as they convene at Madison Square Garden this month to re-nominate President George W. Bush. Princella will take the stage as an official program participant and address the nation on Tuesday, August 31. Convention officials also announced that each of the top ten finalists for the contest have been invited to attend the convention. MTV's "Choose or Lose: 20 Million LOUD!" aims to get 20 million young voters, aged 18-30, to the polls in November."

"We have the privilege of uniting under a leader, President George W. Bush, who calls us to a higher purpose. Instead of Generation X, he inspires us to be what I call Generations X-ample...our generation of 18-year-old soldiers can take a stand against the horrors of terrorism in order to bring peace and democracy to those who have no hope...The president has called on our generation to move out into the world and adhere to the share of service: to volunteer in school tutoring programs through the No Child Left Behind Act; to get involved with after-school programs; to volunteer with church-sponsored events that aid the shut-ins and assist the needy; and to engage in charity..."

"My parents gave it all they had, but I didn't."

Craig Kingsbury writes:

"I thought your piece on 'graduating slaves' made some interesting points that deserve a lot more attention these days. It's possible that I'm not a great person to get involved in this debate; I'm a 28yo WM whose father put the money away to pay all my bills, so "it's easy for me to say" a lot of things, some of which may even be true. That being said...

1. There is no question in my mind that there is too much college going around these days. This could perhaps be corrected by raising standards; I went to Tufts, which is ostensibly an elite school, but even there the most substantial thing a large (30%?) portion of the kids did was to get in. All downhill from there.

2. Interesting new alternatives are emerging (c.f. University of Phoenix) which change some aspects of the equation by eliminating the full-time-residential aspect of college, which forces people to shoulder the massive opportunity cost of not working fulltime. Which coincidentally guarantees that students graduate with no work experience and thus suffer from huge disadvantages particularly in a down market.

3. If I were President of Harvard (ha!) I'd be inclined to announce that, beginning five years from now, we will not accept any student directly out of high school. You must be out a minimum of one year before you can apply. In practice this would mean a lot more kids going on backpacking trips through Europe and Thailand for a year, but even this would be an improvement. Kids at that age need to blow off a certain amount of steam. I think this worked very well with the baby boomers' parents because they were largely people who had been involved in WWII/Korea, where by your early twenties you'd had enough excitement and were ready to settle down.

4. Working in technology in Boston, I have been at the forefront of some of the changes (e.g. off shoring) that are causing many to question (rightly) long-held maxims of how one can obtain the Good Life. I mentioned to a friend, who was desperately unemployed as a low-level computer programmer of the kind now routinely shipped off to South Asia, that he ought to consider becoming an auto mechanic. I knew from consulting for a GM unit that one of the biggest problems all carmakers were facing was that service technicians were becoming largely unable to cope with the complexity for newer cars which had more computers than greasy parts. The result was that diagnosing and fixing problems could take many hours, all of which was being done under warranty at cost to the manufacturer. Now, this fellow absolutely loved high-performance European cars, talked of them day and night, and fantasized about maybe one day being able to afford one. S'truth, he could as a service tech make upwards of $50/hour, with many managers earning well into the 100k range around here, at least a third more than he was likely to make in IT, and besides, you can't have a guy in India fixing a car sitting in Worcester, so your job's more secure to boot. Similar arguments could be made for plenty of other trades, electricians and plumbers in particular.

But! Those are grubby-hands jobs with dirt under your fingernails. and what college-edumacated parent would be proud to say their son was an *auto mechanic*, even if he's got a nicer house than Bob's son the engineer because he didn't have 50k in loans to pay off?"

"Sidestepping parents and school authorities, PETA lures young and impressionable children into radical activism with a coordinated effort including the use of graphic comic books, grotesque toys, schoolyard demonstrations, e-mail alerts sent directly to 65,000 children, and even a classroom lecturer with a felony rap sheet."

"Our campaigns are always geared towards children and always will be." - PETA VP Dan Matthews, Fox News channel, (December 19, 2003)

"Alan Keyes doesn't talk white, he talks GREEN! Am I the only one who hears Kermit the d*** frog when he speaks?"

"Threatened with a sexual harassment lawsuit by his alleged male lover, having appointed him, a thoroughly unqualified man, as homeland security advisor at a time when America, in particular, the New York metropolitan area, is threatened with horrific terror and with any number of other instances of corruption already revealed and more likely to come out, Governor McGreevey saw the future and realized he had to resign from office.

But the way he did it was a masterstroke. He turned opprobrium into compassion.

He did it with one sentence. "I am a gay American."

On the face of it, it is irrelevant to whatever wrongs he may have committed against his state, his wife or his religion. But he did so because he knew that it would immediately deflect attention from his actions to his sexual orientation.

And then he would receive at least as much understanding and compassion as condemnation.
Why?

Because the moment he announced he was gay, people assumed that he did what he did because a homophobic society forced him, a homosexual, to live a fraudulent heterosexual life."