Wow... what is wrong with you? This has nothing to do with you being right or not, just how you're going about your argument. You sound like a very angry person, and taking it out on people online isn't going to help you feel better about yourself in the long run. In the meantime you're being rather awful to a bunch of people. Does that make you happy? If so, why?
At least here in California, just about all the teachers that I've met who are active in the union grumble about how reluctant administrators are to fire incompetent teachers. It seems like principals, though, are more often willing to backhandedly try to get rid of someone for political reasons than they are to openly challenge a teacher's competence. The only people that in the current system have the authority to judge whether a teacher is good or not are the school administrators, and there's little to no oversight to ensure that they don't play favorites (not too different from a lot of other jobs, I don't think). Of course, unlike many other jobs, teachers can still be highly effective even if they act completely against their boss's ideology.
Unions aren't interested in making it any more difficult to fire teachers. But you can't really blame them for being supportive of certain aspects of the status quo when they know that if the requirements for termination were more lax, a lot of those pesky pro-union teachers would be the first against the wall, regardless of how good they are at their jobs.
Some of us don't feel it's right to criminalize too many things outright, but have no problem with voting to allow government to raise revenue from activities we find undesirable for our nation... what's wrong with keeping that stuff legal, exactly? Especially if it's more practical to not get ban-happy? You don't have a problem with the notion that we have to make certain activities illegal, even some that are ostensibly victimless, do you?
Is this supposed to be sarcastic...?
Powerful movie stars, rappers, and musicians. Riiight. When people dream of being movie stars, do they desire the power that comes with that position? Or is it that if you care about having actual power you go into, oh, I don't know, business or politics?
One major difference there is that there's no reason to believe Oscar Grant was innocent. He didn't need to be shot, but there was a good reason for him to be arrested.
What a strange and imaginative world you live in
Ah, more sour grapes from another liberal, whose leadership has pretty much been nothing but a century of failure. Failure with Wilson, failure with Roosevelt, failure with Kennedy, Johnson, Carter and pretty soon Obama...
Nice red herring you have there. Next time try addressing his points, for instance his objections about who "won" the cold war, and how much Reagan supported other nations' freedom.
As much as I don't agree with your points of view, I've got no desire to go on thinking you're not as intellectually honest as you're making yourself out to be here, and you owe it to the people on your side to cast your views in a better light.
And with fewer options this time: http://idle.slashdot.org/pollBooth.pl?qid=1595&aid=-1
Still missing insurance, too. You'd think they'd learn over the course of a year.
A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable. -- Thomas Jefferson
