So-Called Leaving No Child Behind...Your Congressman, Once Again, Acts as a Bush Leftist Lap Dog

I think that of all the non-Southern states, Utah would have to be just about the most conservative Republican state of the bunch, without doubt. Given Mormon theology, it's also the state I'd assume cares the most about kids. It's a part of Mormon theology that you and your spouse go to heaven, become gods, and create spirit children who inhabit bodies in other worlds, hence the big emphasis in Mormonism on family life, large families, etc. Yet Utah has dropped following the unfunded mandate Leaving No Child Behind which makes you wonder, how horrible a program could it be if a largely Red State place like Utah drops a Federally mandated program? Well, Leaving No Child Behind aka No Child Left Behind is costing about $60 billion a year but since it's an unfunded mandate, the full costs are even higher. Moreover, if at first a school doesn't succeed in fulfilling Federal standards, they're not allowed to offer extra tutuoring. This has been reported several times in the DMN in the last half of 2005, as has the fact more recently that a study proves that Leaving No Child Behind simply doesn't work, and not surprisingly. This is also not surprising, since if a program were REALLY HELPING little black children, you probably wouldn't have to pay Armstrong Williams secretly for him to pump it on his radio broadcasts. If I had been told in 1995, exuberant with the success of the Contract with America, that not even a decade later an alleged Conservative alleged Republican President would be trying to micromanage elementary schools from the Federal government, I would have laughed in their face. Today, if I claimed that Bush - or my Congressman Sam Johnson - were Conservative Republicans, I'd expect everyone to laugh in MY face. Imagine your family of four ponying up $800 a year - not including the unfunded mandate part that costs your STATE AND LOCALITY a lot of money - because the Federal government wants to manage YOUR schools. You'd expect that this program was proposed by Democrats. You'd be wrong.

Sadly, one of many reasons that Bush proposed this program of greater Federal intervention was to get lists of high school graduates to make sure that each and every one of them that is of military service age is registered for the draft - oh, just in case we NEED one for Syria.

The fact that Sam Johnson is Bush's lap dog instead of having the intellectual courage to support positions he's supported in the past is not only obvious here (since he's previously supported ABOLISHING the Department of Education as recently as December 2000) but also in his vote for the Prescription Drug Benefit (even Rush Limbaugh criticized this) and his vote for the War in Iraq, despite having a previously flawlessly isolationist stance until Bush was elected.