98.6 it's good to have you back

I am finally starting to feel moderately healthy again after this nasty bug I caught. I am not a big fan of the 103 degree fever. It's just too hot for comfort and those fever dreams/hallucinations aren't really the fun kind. I still have a deep dry cough though, so there is that. Nothing like sounding like you have TB.

I heard on the radio this morning that over 400 schools in Texas (the model for the no child left behind educational system built while Bush was guvna) are being investigated for cheating on standardized tests. Apparently the schools felt so much pressure to perform or lose their funding that they have been cheating on the tests. The schemes ranged from putting all of the answers on the blackboard to teachers altering the tests after they were completed. Once again a Bush policy that only works with fraud.

Oh yeah and I love that old Gonzalez the coward doesn't see any problem with his being involved in the investigation into the occurrence of torture in Iraq and Afghanistan. He only wrote a memo justifying the use of torture right? I guess it is difficult to see how that might be a conflict of interest when your head is firmly lodged in your rectum.

I recently read for the first time Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo. This is one of the books that the McCarthy'ites vilified in the 50's as communist. In fact it is not even really all that anti-war other than the fact that the central characters continuing nightmare is the result of war. There is a 10-12 page rant towards the end about how wars kill people for no reason, except for political causes that don't really mean anything. That may have been what got people bristles up. I have been wondering a lot lately about what could possibly make somebody voluteer to go to war, and there certainly weren't any answers in there.