Marty Peretz of the New Republic is usually a thoughtful liberal.  I enjoy the New Republic.  That’s why I was rather stunned by this article.

Some parents don’t like the idea of the President beeming his image into every school in the country on Tuesday.  I think a lot of people have gotten carried away with criticizing the president on this, but I’ll admit that I dislike it, too.  I dislike it not because the President’s speech is too political, but because it is not political.  As I note here, the President really has  nothing to say about government policy.  Here’s the speech in a nutshell:  “Welcome back to school.  Stay in school, work hard.”  

My kids don’t need to hear that from the President.  This is a President who once again shows that he has no idea of the proper role of government.  If the President wants to talk about governmental affairs, great.  I’d love for him to stop by our school to do so.  That would be a great experience for the kids.  But I do not want the President trying to raise my children.  When people ask, “how can you object to the President urging kids to stay in school,” I ask them what they’d think if I stopped by their house one night, uninvited, to tell their kids how to behave.

But Marty Peretz takes the cake.  You know what Peretz thinks?  He writes, ”it is almost disloyal to refuse any children the right to hear him.  Disloyal and nutty.”  Well gee, Martin, thanks for the “almost,” at least on the first try.  

Where’s Hillary when you need her?

Last Friday the Wall Street Journal once again excoriated the president and his henchmen in that mis-educational system so larded with self-interested union thugs (and other Democrats) by pointing out how these ne’er-do-wells are attempting to kill the D.C. school voucher program that has done so much good for so many minority, inner city kids in the Nation’s capitol.

But the end of the editorial also pointed to the fact that Obama wants to perpetrate the same misdeeds against the educational opportunities of our soldier’s kids. It turns out that because the D.C. voucher program is such a success, military families are asking for a similar program. Democrats and Obama are desperate to head this idea off and kill it before it is fairly born — and Democrats have a lot of experience killing things before they are born, we all know.

As far as parents and kids that have had the benefit of the soon to end voucher program, the whole thing is one they don’t want to lose.

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Most people imagine that our schools are to be institutes of higher learning. Apparently the ACLU has a little different conception of what “higher learning” means because it is demanding that public schools in Nashville, Tennessee allow gay advocacy sites to go unblocked at library Internet stations throughout the Metro Nashville District.

The porn peddlers of the ACLU have given the Metro schools a “deadline” of April 29 to reverse its Internet policies or they take the issue before the courts.

The ACLU, of course, pretends that it is “helping” kids “understand” gay issues, but that would presuppose that homosexual issues are to be taught in schools, naturally. The central issue is just that: what should we be teaching in our schools?

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No one wants to see a beautiful 18-year-old girl commit suicide. No one wants to make any worse the pain that surviving family members feel. No one wants to make light of the situation that causes a child or young person to chose suicide, either. But high emotion makes for bad laws and this is no exception.

Last year, Jessica Logan imagined that she was sending a nude cell-phone photo of herself only to her new boyfriend. But he was not as circumspect as she might have hoped passing the salacious picture to his friends, and they to theirs, until it surged through some seven Cincinnati high schools.

It wasn’t long before Jessica was the butt of jokes and the target of epithets like “slut” and “porn queen.” The ribbing shook her so hard that she hanged herself in her bedroom last July.

And now, parents Albert and Cynthia Logan want new laws passed to somehow stop “sexting” of nude or half nude photos from one teen’s cell-phone to another. Unfortunately, such laws are just a bad idea. They will do nothing to stop the low-born practice while only piling more strangling regulations on the business community as well as giving government and police officials even more intrusive powers into our individual lives.

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Our institutes of “higher” learning are all about being inclusive. They are stridently for freedom of speech and stand 100% behind the concept of open political debate. Well, unless you’re a Christian, that is. Christians, you see, are the only group that our fetid colleges and universities have agreed to discriminate against.

Last week, another example of that well known “tolerance” our schools are so concerned with promulgating was seen in Pomona College in Claremont, California. There two Christian, pro-life students were banned from the Pamona campus. Their crime? Video taping a question-and-answer session with a Planned Parenthood representative invited to speak there.

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