The Road To Success!

Follow your dreams, remain dedicated to your desires, and don't listen to anybody or anything but your dreams.

Massachusetts Government Corporate Ethics?

The left has a bizarre notion of "corporate ethics." The Acting Governor of Massachusetts Jane Swift, a Republican but a Republican from that socialist state, is begging the state's three largest drugstore chains to "reconsider their decision to withdraw from the state's Medicaid program." Yes, she wants them to stay in business even though the companies can no longer keep filling Medicaid prescriptions without losing money.

The big government solution? Why, they'll just force CVS, Walgreens and Brooks Pharmacy to fill the prescriptions by passing a law! Does this sound like the United States of America? There's no profit in these Medicaid prescriptions, and the companies don't want the hassle and potential lawsuits. Oh, and before you think "profit" is a dirty word, ask if you want to get a pay cut or fired or work for free because your company can't turn a profit.

I told you this was coming. I told you that all of this was going to be used by the left as an attack on capitalism, and now it's come full circle. We always thought corporate responsibility meant doing the right thing, being honest with your accounting, stock options, stock price and not trying to manipulate the truth a'la Bill Clinton. No, no, no, no. Corporate responsibility means keeping your doors open even if you lose money and can't pay your employees or stockholders.

This is like everything else the left comes up with. It's not a solution; it's only the beginning of a new problem. They don't live in reality.

SMART PEOPLE LIVE IN FLORIDA!

There's a reason people flee taxes. It's because they're too high and too punitive. Let me ask you people a question and I will use myself as an example:

I live in Florida. There's no state income tax here. If I were to decide tomorrow to move to California or New York or back to Massachusetts and pay higher taxes, would I be a better person, or would I be an idiot? I would be an idiot. If I wanted to live there, I'd be there, except why do you think I don't? I don't want to be a slave to the governments of those states. I'll give my money when and where and to whom I wish, without having a bunch of socialists redistribute it so they can buy votes.

Re-Election

Is there anything more dangerous to the cause of liberty than a politician fixated on re-election?

Buying Trouble

Could your grocery list open you up to a terrorism investigation?  This is why I don’t carry one of those grocery store preferred customer cards.  This customer prefers to keep his purchases private.

They thought they were making routine purchases—the innocent, everyday pickups of charcoal and hummus, bleach and sandwich bags, that keep the modern household running. Regulars at a national grocery chain, these thousands and thousands of shoppers used the store's preferred-customer cards, in the process putting years of their lives on file. Perhaps they expected their records would be used by marketers trying to better target consumers. Instead, says the company's privacy consultant, the data was used by government agents hunting for potential terrorists.

The saga began with a misguided fit of patriotism mere weeks after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, when a corporate employee handed over the records—almost literally, the grocery lists—to federal investigators from three agencies that had never even requested them. In a flash, the most quotidian of exchanges became fodder for the Patriot Act.

When the company's legal counsel discovered the breach, she turned for advice to Larry Ponemon, CEO of the consulting firm Privacy Council and a former business ethics professor at Babson College and SUNY. "I told her it's better to be transparent," Ponemon recalls. "Send a notice to loyalty cardholders telling them what happened. She agreed and presented that to the board but they said, 'No, we don't want to hand a smoking gun to litigators.' " The attorney, who has since resigned from the grocery chain, declined through Ponemon to be interviewed or to identify herself or her former employer. To this day, the customers haven't been informed.

"It wasn't a case of law enforcement being egregiously intrusive or an evil agency planting a bug or wiretap. It was a marketing person saying, 'Maybe this will help you catch a bad guy,' " Ponemon says.

As John Ashcroft's Citizens Corps spy program prepares for its debut next month, it seems scores of American companies have already become willing snitches. A few months ago, the Privacy Council surveyed executives from 22 companies in the travel industry—not just airlines but hotels, car rental services, and travel agencies—and found that 64 percent of respondents had turned over information to investigators and 59 percent had lowered their resistance to such demands. In that sampling, conducted with The Boston Globe, half of the businesses said they hadn't decided if they'd inform customers of the change, and more than a third said outright that they wouldn't. Only three said they would go public about the level of their cooperation with law enforcement.

The final destination of all that data scares Ponemon and other civil libertarians, defenders of the Fourth Amendment prohibition on unreasonable search and seizure. Ponemon, for one, suggests federal authorities are plugging the information into algorithms, using the complex formulas to create a picture of general-population trends that can be contrasted with the lifestyles of known terrorists. If your habits match, expect further scrutiny at the least.

"I can't reveal my source, but a federal agency involved in espionage actually did a rating system of almost every citizen in this country," Ponemon claims. "It was based on all sorts of information—public sources, private sources. If people are not opted in"—meaning they haven't chosen to participate—"one can generally assume that information was gathered through an illegal system."

After crunching those numbers through the algorithm, he says, its creators fed in the files of the 9-11 terrorists as a test. "The model showed 89.7 percent accuracy 'predicting' these people from rest of population," Ponemon reports.

Oddly enough, "one of the factors was if you were a person who frequently ordered pizza and paid with a credit card," Ponemon says, describing the buying habits of a nation of college students. "Sometimes data leads to an empirical inference when you add it to other variables. Whether this one is relevant or completely spurious remains to be seen, but those kinds of weird things happen with data."

Adding to this vision of technological dystopia, companies are already developing cameras and other scanners that can seamlessly trace individuals as they wander through stores, going so far as to zoom in on their faces should they linger over an item, to provide retailers with ever more data.

The problem is that, as with the link between take-out pizza and terrorism, statistics don't always prove cause and effect. Mathematician Karen Kafadar of the University of Colorado at Denver explains that such a finding is "a proxy. It just happened to have something that correlated. There's actually something else going on but it's an indicator, like drinking beer and lung cancer might be. Beer doesn't cause lung cancer, but people drinking a lot of beer might also be smoking."

Ponemon is more concerned about process than the data itself. "Total privacy does shelter bad guys, there's no question about that. But transparency is also good," he argues. "There should be some labeling or notice." In theory, consumers and investors could punish offending companies by channeling their money elsewhere. Without honest managers, though, the free market's self-correcting mechanism never gets a chance to kick in.

Librarians have filled their listservs with e-mails sharing strategies for resisting law enforcement attempts to grab hold of their users' book lists. But the corporate world doesn't foster that kind of purist culture. When the Federal Bureau of Investigation came knocking for the names of scuba divers this spring, the Professional Association of Diving Instructors forked over a roll of more than 2 million certified divers without so much as being served a subpoena.

The feds were acting on no specific threat, just a hunch that someone might attack that way. And again, these data dumps are just attempts to do good. Would Attorney General John Ashcroft's new TIPS campaign—the Terrorism Information and Prevention System—encourage people like the mole at the grocery store chain to spill info into the tanks of unethical investigators?

The Department of Justice, which seeks informants in utility, cable, and other such industries operating in communities, denies that it will cultivate sources placed in data-mining operations. "This makes TIPS sound so much more sophisticated than it's going to be," says spokesperson Charles Miller. "This is still in development but it's nothing more than something to make people more aware of what's going on around them, and most people do that now anyway."

Likewise, both the Federal Bureau of Investigations and the Central Intelligence Agency denied roles in any sweeping algorithm to measure citizens' potential terrorist leanings. If anything, the FBI has recently been taken to task for being a tin-cans-and-string Luddite organization. But the FBI is a client of the consumer data aggregator ChoicePoint. And a U.S. official tells the Voice, "Can I categorically deny anybody in government is doing it? No."

An admission that the government is combing through purchase records certainly would help explain why, according to the Naples Daily News, federal agents reviewed the shopper-card transactions of hijacker Mohammed Atta's crew to create a profile of ethnic tastes and terrorist supermarket-shopping preferences.

But there's a truly slippery slope here. We live in a nation that for months has held at least 700 people—and possibly hundreds more—incommunicado, with no more solid connection to terrorism than that they were born in Middle Eastern countries.

Privacy may seem like a luxury in a nation at war, but that moral concept lies at the heart of constitutionally guaranteed liberties. That's why so many people are willing to fight for it. A lawsuit filed by John Gilmore, an early employee of Sun Microsystems, aims to restore the anonymity central to the freedom to travel in America. He names Ashcroft, FBI director Robert Mueller, and security czar Tom Ridge as defendants, among other officials, along with two airlines. Gilmore wants to prevent security at airports from demanding identification from him, or subjecting him to arduous and invasive searches when he refuses to provide a photo ID. The emphasis, he says, should be on strengthening cockpits and developing "fly by wire" systems to automatically land planes under threat. But our terrorism fears extend well past airlines to water-tainting, dirty bombs, suicide bombers, conventional bombing, or even simply opening fire with an assault weapon in Grand Central Station—the kinds of attacks that are difficult to prevent in an open society.

For now, we rely on tools like algorithms, and algorithms make mistakes. Albrecht notes that in a three-month test period, the Department of Defense investigated 345 employees after a program falsely fingered them for abusing shopping privileges. In another case, an elderly woman was repeatedly stopped and questioned in airports because her name matched that of a young man already in prison for murder—a glitch that may indicate CAPPS or another algorithm is using data illegally, for basic criminal investigation and not anti-terrorism. Further, supermarket records have been seized by Drug Enforcement Agency investigators looking for purchases of small plastic baggies, often used in the drug trade, Albrecht observes.

"I am not a number!" shouted Patrick McGoohan, star of the British TV show The Prisoner, when he rejected life in an idyllic village where he was held and constantly monitored. "I am a free man." Now that this nation is at war with terror, perhaps you'll remain free as long as your "Potential Terrorist Quotient" remains low enough.

CAPITALISM, SOCIALISM and FASCISM

You might call this Economics 101.

There are Capital Goods and Consumable Goods. Consumable Goods are anything we use that needs to be constantly manufactured or made. This includes most everything you might find in a supermarket; food, personal hygiene supplies, medicine, and the like. A Capital Good is anything that is used to produce Consumable Goods, such as factories or processing plants that produces the food or medicine. In many cases a Consumable Goods become a Capital Goods, such as automobiles. A factory (a Capital Good) produces Cars (Consumable Goods), and consumers buy them, then use them as Capital Goods to drive to work to produce income (Capital Goods) to buy more Consumable Goods.  

Now, here is how you determine what kind of government you live in: 

If private citizens are allowed to own and control both the Capital Goods and Consumable Goods, you live in a Capitalist society. 

If the Government owns and controls both the Capital Goods and Consumable Goods, you live in a Socialist society. 

If private citizens are allowed to own the Capital Goods, but the Government controls the production of Consumable Goods, you live in a fascist society. 

What kind of Government do we have based on this reasoning? 

Forest Service orders removal of poles flying American flag

If you lease land from the U.S. Forest Service for your vacation home, it might not be such a good idea to fly an American Flag.  The Forest Service seems to have some sort of a problem with that.

The Forest Service has told California vacationers to remove poles flying the U.S. flag from property the service has leased to them.
The order has angered one lawmaker, who has written the government, demanding that it "rescind this silly order."
David Knickerbocker, an Army veteran and retired police officer, has been ordered to remove his flagpole, which has flown the American flag for more than two decades outside his summer cabin in the Eldorado National Forest.
"I feel it is at times like these our country needs to be showing our unity and patriotism, not promoting ill-thought decisions, which prohibit flagpoles on United States soil," Mr. Knickerbocker said in a letter to Rep. Richard W. Pombo, California Republican.
The "no-flagpole order" came from Debbie Gaynor, recreation forester, who said in a letter to Mr. Knickerbocker that "flagpoles are not authorized for recreation residences and must be removed" for him to continue leasing the land.
"My flagpole has been up for more than 23 years, and like many in our cabin tract I am a patriotic American who has a flagpole," Mr. Knickerbocker said.
The Forest Service directive "outraged" Mr. Pombo, who wants Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth to overturn the decision.
"At a time when wildfires are burning up much of the West, and Americans throughout the country face terrorist threats, it would seem to me that USDA Forest Service employees would have better things to do than to tell our citizens not to use flagpoles," Mr. Pombo said in a letter to Mr. Bosworth.
"Are flagpoles more dangerous than forest fires? I urge you to rescind this silly order to remove flagpoles that fly our American flag and urge our field offices to return to more important matters," Mr. Pombo said.
Adding a postscript, Mr. Pombo asked whether Mr. Knickerbocker would "be arrested for saying the Pledge of Allegiance on federal land," referring to the California court decision, later stayed, that declared that the words "under God" made public-school recitation of the Pledge unconstitutional.
A Forest Service spokesman said Mr. Bosworth was out of town Friday and was unable to comment.
The National Interagency Fire Center that day reported that more than 49,000 fires have scorched 3.5 million acres of land this summer. In California, more than 4,000 fires have burned 142,000 acres.
Fire restrictions were placed on the Eldorado National Forest on July 12 through the end of the fire season, meaning that no campfires or charcoal barbecues are permitted outside designated campgrounds.
The forest is located in the central Sierra Nevada, about an hour's drive from Sacramento.
The recreational use of Forest Service land began in the early 20th century, when ¼-acre to ½-acre lots were offered to the public upon which they could build small cabins. Permits are regularly issued, and cabin owners are charged an annual fee.
In addition to general cleanup and clearing fire fuels from the area, Mr. Knickerbocker was ordered to take down a clothesline tied to a tree and to paint his aluminum door a dark color to better match the cabin.
Mr. Knickerbocker also was informed that his hot tub had not been approved by the agency.
"Saunas, spas and hot tubs may be approved if incorporated into the main structure or deck, are not visible by neighbors or from public vantage points, and do not cause negative environmental impacts," according to the regional directives for recreation residences that Miss Gaynor cited in her letter.

L is for lawsuit
Angry that little Johnny flunked, increasing numbers of parents are suing teachers.

Yet another reason why we need a “loser pays” system.  Here’s an article about angry parents suing teachers when the precious little children fail in school.

One of the students in Elizabeth Joice's senior English class at Sunrise Mountain High School in Peoria, Ariz., was flirting with failure. In fact, it was much more than a dalliance -- she was flunking. The student, whose name Joice wishes to keep private, had plagiarized a test, skipped classes, failed assignments and even missed a make-up session that might have allowed her to raise her grade. Joice had been sending notices to the girl's parents since April, warning them about the failing grade; and both the girl and her parents had met with assorted district administrators, counselors and Joice herself. But it was all to no avail: It was almost graduation, the girl had blown too many tests, and she wasn't going to walk.

Imagine Joice's surprise then, when on May 22, just one day before senior graduation, she received a letter from a lawyer representing the girl's family. The family felt that the teacher had graded unfairly, the letter said; they believed that their daughter hadn't been given enough of a chance, and unless Joice took "whatever action is necessary to correct this situation" they were going to file a lawsuit.

The girl graduated with her class the next day, igniting a local battle that has yet to be settled. Parents and students are furious that the girl (whose name has been withheld from the media) was given what they believe to be an unfair boost. Teachers are livid at the school district, which forced Joice to retest the student at the last minute. The Arizona state bar is investigating the ethics of the girl's lawyer. And the Peoria school district is defending its decision by claiming that the teacher hadn't applied appropriate grading procedures.

Welcome to high school in America, 2002, where grades are a niggling annoyance that can be swept aside by a well-placed threat, and where teachers and administrators only have authority as long as they don't displease parents. Bad grades, discipline problems, shocking attendance records: Offenses that in the past warranted school action as strong as suspension, dismissal from school or refusal to grant a diploma are easily blocked or reversed -- as long as Dad's got a good lawyer.

The struggle for classroom control comes in an increasingly intimidating school environment where teachers are commanded -- by parents, administrators and the government -- to usher students through a gantlet of tests to graduation without displeasing litigious families or failing to meet performance standards that bring schools added funding or, at the very least, ensure their survival for another year.

Says John Mitchell, deputy director of the American Federation of Teachers, "Teachers are under incredible pressure right now from two places: from policymakers to raise standards and teach to those higher standards. Then on the other side you have parents giving pressure to teachers not to hold kids up to the high standards. Teachers are between a rock and a hard place ... It's an area ripe for lawsuits."

Indeed, the number of threats and lawsuits against teachers and schools -- many of which fail to grab the attention of national media -- has risen dramatically over the last decade, forcing schools to spend limited funds on lawyers and insurance, and teachers to spend more time protecting themselves from potential litigation; and, in the process, instituting defense strategies that are changing education in the country's public schools -- and not for the better. As classroom creativity is curbed by the fear of lawsuits, kids lose the benefits of their teachers' inspiration and replace it with a different kind of lesson: that anything is possible if you have money or a capacity to complain.

Up until the moment when Elizabeth Joice received the letter from lawyer Stan Massad, her struggle with the failing senior was fairly typical. The warnings, the second chances -- it was standard fare until May 22, the day before graduation and the day after a final meeting with the student's parents.

The letter that Massad sent Joice represented the nadir in her long history of parent-teacher relations. The girl had been "scarred for life" by the flunking grade, the letter claimed. "Since hearing this devastating news, the student has been very sick, unable to sleep or eat and she has been forced to seek medical attention." The letter went on to threaten Joice with a lawsuit and its attendant personal discomforts: "Of course, all information regarding your background, your employment records, all of your class records, past and present, dealings with this and other students become relevant, should litigation be necessary," it said.

After she received the letter, Joice immediately sent it to the Sunshine Mountain High School principal and the school district. She also composed her own defiant response: "The student would be a very capable student if she would apply herself, study and get her assignments in on time," she wrote. "Instead of being scarred for life, perhaps she will learn these lessons now, rather than when she is in college or in the work force. I think your clients would be better off investing their money in summer school tuition for the student rather than wasting their money on attorney fees, litigating a case with little likelihood of success."

On the morning of May 23, however, Joice was informed by the school district that she needed to give the student a second chance. "I was told 'You better decide what you are going to do, because that girl is going to walk tonight,'" Joice recalls. Just hours before graduation, Joice was instructed to give the student a second shot at a multiple-choice test she had already flunked once. The girl squeaked by, and was allowed to graduate.

Jack Erb, superintendent of the Peoria School District, swears that the district's decision had nothing to do with the threat of a lawsuit, and claims that he didn't see the lawyer's letter until after they had decided to retest the student. "It isn't an issue; people threaten us all the time and most the time they don't follow through with it," he says. He posits that the decision to retest the student was based on a quirk in Joice's curriculum and grading system.

But after outraged parents and teachers from across the state sent furious letters to the local papers, complaining that the student shouldn't have been granted special privileges, the district finally offered a general apology for its "lack of clear and appropriately enforced internal guidelines regarding grading and curriculum standards." It said nothing about the legal threats, however. (The lawyer, in turn, is now being investigated by the state board of Arizona as to whether his veiled threats to Joice were ethical.)

Regardless of whether the district ultimately caved because it feared a lawsuit, the entire affair draws into relief the conflict currently taking place in classrooms across the country. Higher standards linked to higher stakes for schools have caused educators to be more rigorous. Concerned parents, facing tougher college entrance requirements for their kids, panic when their children falter, often blaming the teachers and schools for their children's failures. The result, of late, is lawsuits, or, most often, threats of lawsuits.

An astounding 25 percent of all secondary schools were involved with lawsuits of all sorts -- from accidental injuries to discipline squabbles -- between 1997 and 1999, according to a 1999 survey by the American Tort Reform Association -- a huge increase over the decade before. While some of these lawsuits were no doubt justifiable, there is no shortage of egregious litigation: Legal expert Walter Olson's site Overlawyered.com, which chronicles legal ugliness in schools in order to point out the frivolous nature of American litigiousness, lists dozens of overzealous-parent lawsuits similar to threats in Peoria.

There was the lawsuit, for example, filed by 15-year-old Elizabeth Smith in Bath Township, Ohio, who sued her school district and 11 teachers in 2000 for $6 million, claiming that her grades were unfair. The school had lowered her grades because of frequent absences and tardiness, which the Smith family blamed on "chronic tonsillitis" and the fact that she stayed home to put her siblings on the school bus. Meanwhile, in Riverside, Calif., a football player sued his former high school teachers at Murrieta Valley High School for giving him grades that were too high: He claimed that his education suffered because they cut him too much slack so that he could play football.

School discipline is another area where teachers and parents struggle for the upper hand. Lacey Renfro, a high school student in Tennessee, sued the cheerleading coach after she was suspended from a game for disciplinary reasons; Justin Swindler in Pennsylvania sued because he was expelled for soliciting a hit man via his Web site to kill his English teacher; and a father in Tennessee sued two teachers after they confiscated his son's yo-yo on a school trip where toys had been expressly forbidden.

Olson, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, explains that, in the past, most schoolyard litigation grew out of incidents in which kids were barred from sports teams, or fell on the playground, or felt that they were discriminated against under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. It is rare that a simple grading squabble, such as the one in Peoria, will make it all the way to a court case -- in part because of a 1978 Supreme Court ruling that held that courts shouldn't second-guess a school on academic decisions (those grading squabbles that do make it all the way to lawsuits are usually under the purview of the Disabilities Act -- i.e.: "My kid was disabled and deserved special treatment.")

This doesn't mean that parents still don't threaten lawsuits over grades, however. Olson increasingly hears from school administrators who have received legal threats because of grading complaints and discipline issues. Few of these cases, he says, emerge in the media. "My guess is that the sort of strong-arming seen in the [Peoria] case is not in fact all that rare, but that the great majority of disputes never result in formal court filings and never result in publicity because neither side seeks it," he explains.

Pressure exerted behind the scenes tends to be more insidious than the interaction involved in public lawsuits, which, because they are argued in the open, lack some of the more vicious personal threats and allegations. In Washington D.C., for example, a teacher at the competitive Wilson Senior High School recently discovered that in at least 11 cases, student grades had been raised without the teacher's knowledge, apparently by an administrator who had felt pressured to help the students graduate (although no one has confessed to the act). Teachers who had flunked their students were appalled to see those same students walking across the stage at graduation.

One of those students had been in the Spanish class of teacher Anexora Skvirsky, who had given her a generous D -- and was promptly threatened by the student's father. Although she held her ground against the parent at the time, a year later someone in the administration apparently did not. Although Svirsky has been teaching for 19 years, she says it's only been in the last few years that she's witnessed such "an incredible advocacy" on the part of parents. Although she's never received a legal threat, parents regularly try to get her fired by complaining to the principal.

"It is hellish," she says. "So many times I've had stomachaches, headaches, insomnia, because a parent would call and try to intimidate me or complain about me to the principal with a letter."

Skvirsky places the guilt for the 11 anonymous grade changes squarely on the shoulders of the school's administrators, who she says regularly cave to powerful parents who "move mountains by just complaining." This, say teacher advocacy groups, is becoming a common occurrence, particularly in schools with rigorous academics and demanding parents.

"I'm afraid Peoria is not an anomaly; it's not commonplace but it's not unusual for teachers to be told to change grades," says Mitchell of the American Federation of Teachers. "In most cases the teacher refuses to do it and the administrator does it over their protestations."

But this is not a totally new phenomenon, either. According to Kathleen Lyons, spokesperson for the National Education Foundation, the occasional case in which unhappy parents threatened teachers with lawsuits and retribution if grades weren't raised has always existed. The difference now is that behavior of the last resort has become almost routine.

"There have always been some parents who want a special deal for their child," Lyons says. "There's nothing new there, except that a higher-stakes educational environment and the high stakes of standardized testing has led to high stress. Parents now know it does make a difference how your kids do in school.

"I think there's a lot more riding on it," she adds, "and that does tend to bring out the worst in people: When the stakes are high, you find transgressions."

One solution is to completely standardize education -- testing, grading and discipline -- so that there is no wiggle room in the system for outraged parents and their lawyers. But that resolution already has prompted other kinds of parent lawsuits -- in California and Texas -- that claim that the system is too rigid, and discriminates against their children's special needs.

Worse, total standardization can extinguish all creativity from the classroom. In Peoria, where the school district has reacted to the controversy by writing a new series of standardized rules for the classroom, Joice worries that teachers are ultimately going to become automatons. "We may not be able to be as creative with the units we use, which will be a travesty because every teacher has a specialty and if we can't share that with our students, if it's all black and white, then that's sad," she says. "If that's the case, why they don't just put computers out in the classroom as teachers?"

Even in districts that haven't bowed to pressure with standardized grading, the fear of lawsuits and parental retribution has undermined school programs and teachers' daily routines. Twenty percent of the respondents to the American Tort Reform Association survey, for example, reported spending five to 10 hours a week in meetings or documenting every little action they took with a student, in case of future litigation.

"It takes a lot of time to document everything: You have to document conversations, what you did, what the kids said in class," says Joice. "It will take more effort on the part of teachers if they want to stand up and say what happened."

Besides the simple question of time, lawsuits also come at a high cost for school districts and teachers: even a frivolous lawsuit over a grading dispute, which might be thrown out after just one hearing, can cost $10,000 in lawyers fees. School districts do have liability insurance, of course, as do teachers (some professional teachers organizations, such as the Texas State Teacher's Association, lure members with the promise of $6 million in liability insurance for those moments when "people are reacting with emotion rather than reason"). But that costs money, too.

"Lawsuits have become a great cost for school districts," says Julie Underwood, general counsel for the National School Boards Association. "The entire sub-specialty of education law didn't exist 25 years ago, and now it's a big, recognized sub-specialty. You can't keep track of the number of times that someone comes in to a principal's office and says, 'If you don't do this, I'll sue you.' It's just so commonplace." In fact, she says, all principals now have to undergo education-law classes before they can receive certification.

Finally, the students risk both the quality of their education and their faith in the system. Kids with lackluster achievement records who nevertheless head off to college with satisfactory grades thanks to Mom's strong-arm tactics are probably not going to make it far in higher education. Their classmates, who actually worked hard for their grades, will probably be demoralized too.

"It undermines the hard work of other kids in the classroom, when they see standards change for one student. It erodes the standards, when we really want students to know that standards are meaningful. And for students involved, it really cheats them of a meaningful experience," says Mitchell. "Sometimes failure is the best teacher a student could have."

Small repair shops fight automakers

Now this is pretty tacky.  Major automakers won’t tell small auto repair shops how to fix their newer cars.

    Car manufacturers are not sharing vital information needed by independent repair shops to fix cars, and those shops say it is threatening their businesses.
  Cars are becoming more complex and require sophisticated systems to diagnose and repair them. But independent service stations say manufacturers are not supplying them with the codes needed for diagnosis and repair, thus forcing many consumers to go to the dealerships for fixes.
     Bill Moss, an owner and service director at Auto Advantage in Manassas, said it is a "huge" problem, but so far he has not had to turn customers away.
     "Smaller shops are where they have to tell the customer they don't have the equipment to fix the cars," Mr. Moss said. "The dealers don't have to buy the equipment we do; they lease it. So when that piece of equipment becomes obsolete, they turn it in."
     Bill Haas, vice president of the Automotive Service Association, says the information lockout is putting independent shops at a competitive disadvantage.
     "The technicians are competent and capable, but they are not able to perform. The information has been locked out," he said. "Truth is, the technicians the independents employ are just as well-trained, competent and capable as the technicians the manufacturers employ."
     Car manufacturers counter that they are simply protecting their intellectual property and ensuring that their cars get fixed right.
     "It is in the manufacturer's best interest that the car is repaired properly," said Eron Shosteck, spokesman for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers.
     Mr. Moss, who works at a BMW-only repair facility, said BMW is particularly proprietary and Volvo is "notoriously difficult to get information from." To counteract the lack of information, Mr. Moss talks to other mechanics in the same situation, and they are in contact with BMW USA to try and reach an agreement to help alleviate the situation.
     Most cars are manufactured with onboard diagnostic computers.
     When the car malfunctions, the computer alerts the driver. Mr. Shosteck said problems arise when small repair shops replace malfunctioning parts with those that are not manufacturer authorized, which creates confusion for the computer.
      If the car malfunctions again, the malfunction will be misdiagnosed, the codes will be incorrect to fix the car and more damage will be done.
     Mr. Haas speculates the manufacturers are pressuring the dealerships to offer repair services to help retain business and make money because sales have not been as profitable. He also said the manufacturers might be afraid of being left vulnerable to a lawsuit.
     "Ultimately, the consumer will have no choice but to go to the dealer," Mr. Haas said.
     "We believe consumers should choose."
     One lawmaker agrees that manufacturers should do more to share information about their cars. Sen. Paul Wellstone, Minnesota Democrat, has introduced legislation that would encourage manufacturers to release the information and allow the smaller, independent auto-repair shops to do their jobs.
     "It's a problem for car owners because they don't have the choice," Allison Dobson, spokeswoman for Mr. Wellstone said. "It's a matter of safety. If you take a car trip, and you end up in a small town with no dealership, you could be in trouble. This is an important issue on a lot of different levels."
     Mr. Moss believes the legislation is critical because it addresses an issue that is fairly new. A ripple effect is also possible when word gets out that vehicles from a certain manufacturer are difficult to service and repair outside of the dealership. Once word gets out, Mr. Moss believes, that manufacturer will lose business because people will go to another manufacturer for vehicles that independents are able to service.
     Mr. Wellstone's bill is ready for a hearing in the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, and he is prepared to go through with the legislation, though he would be happy if it did not have to come to that, Miss Dobson said.
     "The last thing we need in this country is another industry where all the little guys are driven out," Miss Dobson said. "It's certainly not good for consumers. It doesn't ensure that we have the safest cars on the road."

Cow Falls on Car, Driver Injured

VIENNA, Austria –– Drivers in farming regions know to be on the lookout for animals that stray onto the road, but even the most cautious seldom scan the heavens for livestock.

A 36-year-old woman should have been doing that Thursday when a cow strayed from a hillside pasture to the top of a tunnel entrance and then fell onto her car.

The woman was hospitalized with minor chest and foot injuries. Her husband, in the passenger seat, was unharmed. The cow died after being hit when it fell 15 feet just as the car was leaving the tunnel.

Pigs Can't Fly?

Big news out of Paw Paw, Michigan - Northwest Airlines won't allow a Vietnamese potbellied pig to fly in the passenger cabin. Never mind the rule making "passengers of stature" buy two seats. This is an issue that's really going to enrage the nation. You know how people love their pets. This is porcine profiling!

They used to let the potbellied pig fly in the cabin with small dogs and cats, but they decided now that the pig, named Pork Chop, must ride with the luggage and other animals in stowage. This, even though Pork Chop fits under the seat. This is a star pig! She's part of Alicia Dacoba of Michigan's ventriloquism act, folks.

The team was scheduled to appear on a Fox Broadcasting Network series called 30 Seconds of Fame in July. Ms. Dacoba says that Pork Chop has never caused problems in flight, fits right under the seat, and that this is discrimination. Just thought you ought to know what's going on out there. Wait a minute, wouldn't a pig on board be the ideal deterrent to a Muslim terrorist?

Few men desire liberty; most men wish only for a just master. – Sallust