400-408 – Dinesh D'Souza, best-selling author and lecturer, whose best-seller What's So Great About Christianity continues to enrich the lives of many people (dineshdsouza.com), on the Supreme Court and Sonia Sotomayor.
His books include: Illiberal Education (1991), The End of Racism (1995), Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader (1997), The Virtue of Prosperity: Finding Values in an Age of Techno Affluence (2000), What's So Great About America (2002), Letters to a Young Conservative (2003), The Enemy at Home (2006), and What's So Great About Christianity (2008). He's now working on a book about Life After Death: The Evidence that is due out in late 2009 early 2010.
• FRC (5/28/09) Invasion of the Bible Snatchers.
Where two or more are gathered in Christ's name, there San Diego County officials will be also. For a suburban California family, this was the shocking reality during last month's Good Friday holiday. A local pastor and his wife invited a dozen or so people to their house for a Bible study, only to be interrupted by a San Diego employee who threatened to fine the couple for breaking an obscure County land code.
People at Pastor Jones's church are stunned by San Diego's actions, particularly its investigation of the group's activities. According to the family's attorney, Dean Broyles of the Western Center for Law & Policy, the officials asked pointed questions such as, "Do you have a regular meeting in your home?" "Yes." "Do you say amen?" "Yes." "Do you pray?" "Yes." "Do you say, 'Praise the Lord?'" "Yes."
What business is it of the county's how the Joneses' worship? This is not communist China. The Joneses aren't operating an underground church in violation of state law. This is their home! And like every other American, they enjoy the freedoms of religion, assembly, and speech guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. Broyles told reporters, "If the county thinks they can shut down groups of 10 or 15 Christians meeting in a home, what about people who meet regularly... for poker night? What about... Tupperware parties?"
Every citizen in the nation should take this attack seriously. It matters little whether they agree with the Joneses' beliefs. If we allow the government to take their rights away, ours are next. Meanwhile, county officials have not budged on their insistence that a home Bible study of 15 people is a "religious assembly" that requires a "major use permit," which can cost upward of $10,000. Obviously, California is so desperate for income that it's willing to persecute men and women of faith to get a few pieces of silver.
As Christians from other states have learned, the government can use inconsequential rules on parking or zoning to regulate religion. In this instance, the application of those rules is, as Broyles says, "misplaced." Apparently, the size of government has grown so much that bureaucrats, like those in San Diego, are struggling to justify their existence. They have to invent controversies like this one just to keep busy. With California facing a budget shortfall, I know just where officials can start cutting unnecessary spending.
• Fox News (5/28/09) Couple Ordered to Stop Holding Bible Study at Home Without Permit.
• 10 News (5/28/09) Couple: County Trying To Stop Home Bible Studies.
413-423 – Dinesh D'Souza
428-437 – Steve Barr, was the co-founder of Rock The Vote in 1990 and the Motor Voter Bill in 1994, was involved in the founding of Americorp with President Clinton, and he's been involved with several presidential campaign teams and has even been the finance chair of the Democratic Party. But in 1999, he founded Green Dot Public Schools (greendot.org), which transforms large public schools that are failing into smaller cluster schools with amazing graduation rates. Green Dot operates 18 charter schools, and as of Fall 2008, also Alain Leroy Locke High School in Watts. Five Green Dot schools have had graduating classes to date, 80% of entering ninth graders graduate within four years, 76% of graduating seniors are admitted to four-year universities, and almost all the rest have gone on to two-year colleges. LAUSD has a graduation rate of 47%. To make a change, sign up for The Parent Revolution at parentrevolution.org.
• LA Times (5/11/09) Parents are urged to demand more from L.A. schools. Green Dot charter operator Steve Barr wants to organize grass-roots power to improve public education.
Barr calls it "the Parent Revolution," and he wants to form Parents Unions that will force LAUSD to improve schools, or face losing their campuses to charter schools. Barr promises he can turn a failing school into an excellent school in three years – "a proper school is one that is safe, orderly and small, where the principal can personally and rapidly fire ineffective teachers, where nearly all dollars get to the classroom and where every child is progressing toward college." Green Dot Public Schools operates 10 charter schools and Locke High. Marco Petruzzi is Barr's Chief Executive, and attorney Ben Austin oversees the Parents Union.
Risk-taking charter school operator Steve Barr is launching an effort through which parents would wrest political control of the L.A. school system from unions, school bureaucrats and other entrenched interests.
The plan is for parents to form chapters all over town and improve schools, one by one, using the growing leverage of the charter school movement. The goal is to unite a city of overworked and isolated parents with a brash promise:
If more than half of the parents at a school sign up, Barr's organizers say they will guarantee an excellent campus within three years. They call it the Parent Revolution.
With parents, they predict, they'll have the clout to pressure the Los Angeles Unified School District to improve schools. They'll also have petitions, which Barr and his allies will keep at the ready, to start charter schools. If the district doesn't deliver, targeted neighborhoods could be flooded with charters, which aren't run by the school district. L.A. Unified would lose enrollment, and the funding would go to the charters instead of to the district.
Based on past performance, the school district would be challenged to meet parents' heightened expectations, Barr said. "We're not trying to prove the district is doing things wrong. But our kids are at stake."
• MSNBC (5/11/09) Obama wants to see 5,000 failing schools close–Administration wants to focus on 'dropout factories'.
He's got $5 billion to spend on turning around "dropout factories," that's $1 million per campus. The school districts and the states have the authority to fire the entire staff of a school, or just one or two people, to make the improvement. Or, they may decide to turn the whole school over to a charter school operator. So, teachers, is this the way to fix your school? Why won't the teacher's unions allow bad teachers to lose their jobs?
• LA Times (3/21/09) A Year at Locke – The Advance Path Academy: learning that clicks. An innovative program using computers and self-motivation offers a second chance to potential dropouts.
• The New Yorker Magazine (5/11/09) The Instigator: A crusader's plan to remake failing schools.
443-452 – Steve Barr
458-508 – Alan Jacobs, a professor of English at Wheaton College in Illinois and author of Original Sin: A Cultural History. His previous book, The Narnian, was a biography of C. S. Lewis. Does belief or disbelief in original result in different types of people, communities, and cultures?
512-523 – Alan Jacobs
TH 524 – [2:00] Don Rohde (818) 262-2092. For the past 37 years, Don has been a sales manager at Galpin, the #1 volume Ford dealer in the world for the past 19 consecutive years. Galpin has been family-owned and operated for the past 59 years, and 90% of their business is repeat or referral. Galpin offers Ford, Lincoln-Mercury, Honda, Mazda, Saturn, Volvo, Jaguar, and Aston Martin. Located in the heart of the San Fernando Valley at Roscoe and the 405.
528-538 – Vishal Mangalwadi, is an international lecturer, social reformer, political columnist, and author of thirteen books including his latest Truth And Transformation: A Manifesto For Ailing Nations (vishalmangalwadi.com).
539 – [1:30] Robert Micone/Bill O'Connor aka "The Money Guys" at Applied Financial with 5 offices around the southland, 866-SEEK-COUNSEL, and online at appliedfinancialplanning.com.
544-554 – Vishal Mangalwadi.
558-608 – Robert Epstein, (drepstein.com) [ph. "ep-stine"] teaches at the University of California San Diego (ucsd.edu), former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today, and author 14 books including The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen (thecaseagainstadolescence.com).
Go to howadultareyou.com to take his free Epstein-Dumas Test of Adultness (EDTA) that determines how adult you are. From the homepage, "Being an adult in modern society requires a wide variety of skills and knowledge. No matter what your age, this test will show you how adult you are in 14 important areas of functioning. Designed by Dr. Robert Epstein, one of America's most distinguished psychologists, the test contains 140 yes/no questions and should take you between 10 and 15 minutes to complete. The test has been empirically validated with a sample of roughly 30,000 people between ages 10 and 83."
"Adolescence was invented in the 19th century to enable middle-class families to keep their children out of sweatshops. But it has degenerated into a process of enforced boredom and age segregation that has produced one of the most destructive social arrangements in human history, consigning 13-year-old males to learning from 15-year-old males. It's a social experiment that failed. Dr. Epstein's book traces the history of the problem, demonstrates with unrelenting perseverance that much of the turmoil of our teens is a creation of our culture, and offers a specific and detailed proposal for getting our young people back on track. If you are concerned about America's young -- and about America's future -- this is a must-read." – Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the United States House of Representatives.
Three components played a primary role: 1) compulsory education not based upon competency, 2) child labor laws that prevented competent workers from remaining on the job, and 3) the development of the juvenile justice system that intended to "mother" the kids in institutions, and ended up training criminals.
Brett Harris and his twin brother Alex are the authors of Do Hard Things: A Teenage Rebellion Against Low Expectations, at 16 they launched therebelution.com
with over 20 million so far, an online community where young people encourage one another to do "hard things." The Do Hard Things Tour will be at Calvary Church Santa Ana on Saturday, July 25th. Register at dohardthings.com .612-623 – Robert Epstein
628-638 – What was the last selfless or heroic thing you saw? I saw a couple guys get out of their cars to help a CHP on the 10 freeway clear some wood out of lanes after he had stopped traffic. They just hopped out of their cars and helped clean up the debris. What was the last thing you've seen like this? Maybe you're the one that got out of the car, or helped the little old lady across the street, or protected the kids from the bad guys? What happened? Why'd you do it? What's your Good Samaritan story?
644-652 – Calls
657-700 – Calls
• Fox Business (5/28/09) GM Makes New Bondholder Offer Ahead of Bankruptcy. The offer? Bondholders 10%, Government 72.5%, and UAW 17.5%. Plus, the government will supply another $50 billion in loans on top of $20 billion we've already paid.
• Thomas Sowell (5/27/09) 'Empathy' in Action: A poisonous doctrine for any judge, much less a justice of the Supreme Court.
• Karl Rove (5/28/09) 'Empathy' Is Code for Judicial Activism: What damage did Democrats suffer when they attacked Miguel Estrada?
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