State of the Union address

[Carrie]

I kept hearing "child" and "children" so much I was tempted to grab my wallet and my copy of the Constitution and Dec. of Independence and lock myself in the bathroom.

All of these "freebies" for prisoners pisses me off. They're supposed to be the ones paying their debt to society, yet society is going into debt giving these criminals things that law-abiding citizens have to pay for. And there are no "freebies", someone has to pay for it - that "someone" is us.
The law-abiding citizens that the prisoners committed crimes against.

The "double the funding" talk amused me. Double the funding of the Nat'l Endowment for Democracy... double the funding for abstinence programs... what exactly are the payouts for these programs now so we can figure out what "double" means? What exactly do these programs do? Is there any proof that the abstinence program in existence already is working whatsoever?

The 'Jobs for the 21st Century' literally made me laugh out loud. We're going to give high-tech job training to MIDDLE school students? Why? They can't work. And to high school students? How about teaching them how to READ and WRITE first? The results of the Virginia SOLs (standards of learning tests) just came out here and it's fucking appalling. Up to 3rd grade, kids are doing good with language arts (basic reading and writing). Past that, forget it. By the time they get in high school, you're lucky if a whopping 10% of the students taking the test score a passing grade in language arts. Most of them were 3-5%.
And then we're going to take these failures who can't even read and we're going to give them MORE "free" money to attend college... and we're going to give the colleges MORE "free" money to take them and teach them. Wonderful. They'll waste the entire first year on remedial english and math that they should've learned in lower school.
Of course, "free" is false - we're paying for it.

And it just keeps going. Ugh.