These are the things I learned:

• Share everything (including your status as the world’s only super power).
• Play fair (allow your enemies to catch their breath before launching an attack against you or civilians).
• Don’t hit people (even if they are using tanks, snipers and artillery against innocent civilians).
• Put things back where you found them (as they were the end of the Carter administration).
• Clean up your own mess (but blame it on your predecessor.  Constantly).
• Don’t take things that aren’t yours (Not valid for Nobel peace prize, credit for Iraq surge).
• Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody (but be sure to give yourself a solid B+ for effort).
• Wash your hands before you eat (and don’t allow your subjects to eat anything that tastes good).
• Flush (your country’s prestige down the toilet).
• Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you (but only if they are flaxseed and prune cookies and soy milk).
• Live a balanced life – learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some (except on the days that end in y–on those, play golf and talk to Oprah).
• Take a nap every afternoon (just like your air traffic controllers).
• When you go out in the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together, (and be sure to build a consensus coalition and mobilize the international community before considering the possibility of potentially, in the future, at a later date, considering crossing the street.  Maybe.)
• Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: the roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that (Actually, some people know why and how, they’re called “rational, educated people.”  Silence them at all costs).
• Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup – they all die. So do we.  (And it’s all Exxon’s fault.)
• And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned – the biggest word of all – LOOK. (Actually, Dick & Jane start at the first grade, so you never actually read them. Facts are for the bourgeois.)
  

As for competing with foreign students, here Obama resorts to his favorite campaign tactic: lying.

The Founding Fathers understood that the nearer a governing body was to its constituents, the better it would govern.  They had experience with a King who ruled over millions of distant (in both the physical and numerical sense) subjects, and wanted to avoid repeating that mistake.  They structured our system to put in place a weakened federal government whose purpose was limited to protecting us from outside attack and regulating internal disputes.  All other matters were left to the states and local governments.

Think about Mr. Obama’s mind-numbing campaign slogan of Change™.  If you disagree with the President, you have to convince roughly 63 million people that you’re right to vote him out.  If you disagree with your school board, even in a large town, in a contentious election–10,000, maybe 20,000 people?

In the gaffetastic words of Gray Davis, “other than students, they’re the most important people in the classroom:” teachers.

Moreover, Obama’s proposed changes to the school system are not minor.  He suggests longer school hours (up to 3 hours more per school day); schools open on weekends (so kids will have a “safe place”) and longer school years to compete with foreign countries who are beating us in science and math.  A safer place?  Really?  Where have most violent deaths occurred–in the home on weekends or at school?  As for competing with foreign students, here Obama resorts to his favorite campaign tactic: lying.  Most of the countries that beat the U.S. spend less time per year in school.

So what is really behind this push to increase the school day and the school year?  Well, what do you need if you keep the schools open longer? In the gaffetastic words of Gray Davis, “other than students, they’re the most important people in the classroom:” teachers.

Increasing the school day and the school year would be an enormous boost to teacher’s income–and more importantly for his handlers, their unions’ coffers.  Of course, towns and cities could not possibly afford to pay more for education without raising taxes, but–hey, it’s for the children.  And if Obama gets his way, unions will get another hand out, government will dig deeper into your pocket and he will still be able to claim he never raised your taxes, it was your local government (and that pesky unfunded mandate he pushed through Congress).

In American cities large and small, the Democratic party has controlled the board of education uninterrupted for nearly a century.  In the words of Dr. Phil, “How’s that workin’ out for ya?”  Stuck on stupid, isn’t just a witty retort, it’s the American Federation of Teacher’s official motto.  Perhaps it is time Americans stopped listening to their dumbass ideas and started doing what is actually best for the children, not what’s best for the children’s teacher’s union’s bosess.