ITEM — Letter grades have disappeared from many elementary schools and they may soon fade from middle and high schools as well. Students are getting report cards with ones, twos and threes instead of A’s, B’s and C’s. It’s called standards-based grading, focusing on which skills a student has mastered, rather than how hard he or she worked to attend class or turn in homework. Grading consultant Ken O’Connor said “instead of providing a single grade for a student, you get a profile of student performance.” read more »

It’s really too bad that we don’t have a mandatory retirement age for members of Congress the way they do for our state supreme court and superior court judges.

Efforts to term limit Congress get nowhere because the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that voters can limit the stay of members every time an election rolls around. Writers of our state constitution, however, apparently feared having old coots on the bench and said flatly that a judge of the supreme or superior court shall retire from judicial office at the end of the calendar year in which he attains the age of 75 years. read more »

Al Rosellini was one of the best governors we ever had.

To this day, I do not remember whether I voted for him or Dan Evans when they ran against each other because I admired and liked them both equally.

He paid me one of my greatest compliments when he told me “Adele, you always stabbed me in the front.”

I first met him when be was a state senator who, said one old time senator, fondly, “was an absolute master at voting for all the programs and none of the taxes.” Oddly enough, his nickname during his governorship was “Taxolini.” read more »

Using the excuse of presenting a long promised jobs plan, President Barack Obama tried recently to launch a political comeback “amid the lowest approval rating of his presidency.”

Plus “a growing sense of economic foreboding here and across the country among voters who are increasingly questioning their president’s skills and priorities.” So says the Wall Street Journal on the basis of a poll it jointly took with NBC News Aug. 27 -31 that found only 44 percent of Americans approve of the job he’s doing, taking the disapproval over half to 51 percent for the first time since his inauguration. read more »

Did you know that under Obamacare as it kicks in over the next few years you may no longer see your own doctor but will be subject to treatment determined by a team?

I learned of this for the first time in an article in USA Today written by Kevin Pho, a primary care physician and member of the newspaper’s board of directors. I haven’t seen it anywhere else although the New York Times is quoted on it. read more »

ITEM — U.S. senators failed, 51-49, to end GOP blockage of a non-binding bill urging that increased tax revenues from millionaires be part of any bill to raise the national debt ceiling and curb the growth of federal debt. A yes was to end a Republican filibuster against SB 1323.

COMMENT — As I understand it, millionaires and the like already pay a healthy share of their income in taxes and provide a heckuva lot more jobs than poor people do. What I would like to see is requiring the 51 percent of the country’s taxpayers who don’t pay any income tax at all and receive subsidy checks to boot pay some portion of income tax geared to their income. Didn’t the president just say “We have to ask everyone to play their part because we are all part of the same country. We are all in this together.” I don’t call it together when half pay income tax and half don’t. read more »

“I read with some incredulity your statements in your recent article about Obama’s reelection,” writes Tim Thompson of Bainbridge Island.

“Foremost amongst them was a quote from Miss (Peggy) Noonan stating that she hadn’t heard a single person say they loved Obama as president.

Now, in fairness, I’d have to say that in eight years, I never heard anyone I know say that they loved George W., but it would have been naive of me to assume that there weren’t a substantial number of people across the U.S. that were sincerely happy that he was leading our country. read more »

I admit that when five of the Republican candidates for president appeared at their lecterns in the first televised debate of the season, I said to myself, oh no. Not another black guy. We’ve already been snookered into electing the first black president who has turned out to be a total flop at managing the country.

I watched the entire debate, however, and by the time it was over, I was convinced we should have waited and made this guy our first black president. We should have withheld the honor until a black candidate appeared whose job application showed him ready, willing and able to take the reins. read more »

So one of the most lauded political writers in the country says that while conventional wisdom deems the reelection of the President, the CW is wrong.

“It’s not true,” writes Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal. “It’s all wrong. Barack Obama can be taken, and his adversaries haven’t even noticed. In fact, he will likely lose.”

I am sorry to say that I disagree. I wish I didn’t have to. God knows, I don’t want to. This first black president from whom we expected and hoped for so much has just about got our country on the ropes in the two years he’s been in office. Six more years of his incompetent management and we’re going to be lumped in with third world nations. read more »