Should parents be prosecuted for their kids being habitually truant?

If my memory serves me correctly, back in the 1960s there was an ordinance or other legal requirement that parents send their children to school, the only problem back them was that it was only enforced in the white areas of Memphis.

The reality is that the only way to turn the Memphis public school population around is to have all the known tools needed to get the job done in the toolbox. We can fund the schools to the maximum, keep the schools open 12 months a year, reduce classroom teacher ratios to 10:1, and even put qualified teachers in every classroom – but if the parents don’t care, and the kids don’t show up, then it all for nothing.

Parents should be prosecuted, using the same logic that allows the police to prosecute a negligent parent that would leave their child in a car in the summer. Wouldn’t a parent be arrested if a child was found to be malnourished from neglect? A child that isn’t in school and learning a peer level is malnourished intellectually, and that parent is guilty of neglect.

How else are we to motivate the parents of the children at risk other than punitive action? I find it hard to believe that any parents of school age children would have any problem with such a public policy, and I would suspect that anyone against it probably wants the status quo to remain for a reason: They don’t want to get up in the morning, fix lunch for their kid, take him to school, help them with their homework – in other words, act like a parent should act.

What about Uptown Memphis?

In reference to the 11/25/09 CA article entitled “Fight awaits CCC on beer, panhandling”, I find the debate lacking a comprehensive perspective from our newly elected Memphis political leadership. Any honest debate has to discuss the inescapable issues of the homeless and the mentally ill from a political perspective. Policing is a short-term answer; public policy is a long-term attempt to deal with the issue.

I love downtown, and I appreciate the function that the Center City Commission serves in promoting the development of downtown, but who is lobbying on the behalf of my immediate neighborhood – East Memphis? In recent years, it seems that every corner on Poplar between White Station and Kirby are occupied by panhandlers or the mentally ill. It’s not a fluke that they don’t occupy the street corners in on Poplar throughout Germantown. Panhandling is not tolerated in Germantown or any other outlying suburb. I know it’s not politically correct to say it, but it does not reflect well on Memphis to have panhandlers on every corner of what is …for lack of a better description … Memphis’s “uptown” – Poplar between 240 and Kirby.

With that said, the city of Memphis has scattered the panhandlers all over Memphis with HUD Section 8 housing subsidies and the net effect is that there are no social services (mental health, job counseling, etc.) readily available to them. They are on the streets with no means to avail themselves of the services that are currently available. This is COMMUNITY issue first, a housing problem second, a health issue third.

Obama’s 10 month foreign policy journey

President Obama came into the office 10 months ago with virtually zero foreign policy experience, but with an expectation that he could staff his administration with smart people who specialized in the field. In a moment of supreme over-confidence, he announced in a Cairo speech that he was going to “re-engage the Muslim world in a way that would respect their “culture”, while at the same time “ work to solve the Israeli/Arab conflict” once and for all. This was his stated foreign policy priority during his first term. While it’s only been 10 months, let’s take an inventory of his accomplishments so far:

1) He set a September 30th deadline for Iran to end their nuclear efforts “or else” the US would use harsh measures. We are in November and Iran is still thumbing their nose at the world and Obama still making empty threats. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton, trying to assure Israeli’s fears, said “if Iran bombed Israel the US would retaliate” – which only served to make Israelis less secure with her inference that the US would allow Iran to have the bomb and that containment was now the goal.

2) Obama, true to his campaign promise, has pulled most US troops out of harm’s way in Iraq, and the predicted massacre of the Iraqi forces began immediately. This didn’t help US credibility in the eyes of many of our dwindling allies in the Middle East.

3) During the campaign President Obama described Afghanistan as “the good war” because that is where Al Quada is based. Eight weeks ago, our military commander in the field asked for 40,000 more troops, and Obama is still trying to decide whether to add more troops - despite the fact that this month our troops are dying there at a record pace. President Obama’s “alternative strategy” is to reduce the US forces in Afghanistan and bribe the Taliban into working with the weak Afghanistan army. Analysts on the other side of this argument suggest that the money will end up financing the Taliban war against US forces in Afghanistan because there is no evidence that you can bribe someone who is fighting for a religious ideology. Plus, what happens when you stop paying them, or someone pays them more?

4) President Obama demanded that the Israeli government stop ALL expansion of existing Israeli cities around Jerusalem that are in the disputed territories, even though previous negotiations between previous US governments, as well as with Palestinian negotiators have always allowed for natural growth in these areas. This reversal of US policy not only served to alienate and create a sense of betrayal among the Israeli public towards the US and Obama, but also served to cause the Palestinians to backtrack on previous concessions and harden their positions regarding any further negotiations. Quite predictably, the Israelis have hardened their positions in retaliation for what they see as both an American and Palestinian conspiracy to change the terms of the negotiations. Recent Israeli polls indicate that 80% of Israelis don’t trust President Obama.

5) In March, 2009 the Obama administration suggested to Russia that the US would pull its missile-defense plan in Europe in exchange for Russia more aggressively joining an international effort to stop Iran’s nuclear program and isolate Iran. In September 2009, Obama went ahead and scraped the missile plan and go nothing in return from Russia on Iran, which was interpreted by the international community as a complete US capitulation to Russian demands.

The net result of 10 months of US backtracking, backstabbing and withdrawals is that Muslim extremists all over the Middle East are emboldened and motivated like they have never been since Ayatollah Khomeini took over in Iran in 1979. All of a sudden they are now focusing on taking on the government of nuclear armed Afghanistan
I will be the first to say that the former Bush administration made some pretty big mistakes, but at the rate Obama’s “foreign policy experts” are “recalibrating US foreign policy” around the world, they are looking more like rank amateurs who have no concept of the consequences of their meddling in foreign policy.

200 tons of Iranian arms seized:Where is the moral outrage?

The Israeli seizer of a cargo ship 100 miles off the coast of Israel, loaded with HUNDREDS of TONS of Iranian arms bound for Israel’s enemies – Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon - has predictably produced a lack of global outrage that will only serve to further discredit those who profess to own the moral high ground in judging Israel’s defensive wars on her borders.

Among the cargo aboard the seized ship were over 3,000 Katyusha rockets, which were used to kill over 1200 Israelis citizens during the most recent Israeli/Lebanon war. The containers on the ship were tracked from the moment they left Iran until they were seized by the Israelis, and the containers were clearly marked as originating from the “Iranian Shipping Lines Group”. Iranian fingerprints are not new to the armed conflicts surrounding Israel’s borders, and this is not the first time that and Iranian arms shipment has been intercepted.

My hope is that the Israeli government, led by PM Netanyahu, will put an end to the Iranian ruse of “plausible deniability” - allowing Iranian surrogates Hamas and Hezbollah to conduct Iran’s dirty business on Israel’s borders, while claiming they have nothing to do with it.

Israel has a score to settle with the extremist Iranian regime and their revolutionary guards that is not just about their ambitions to produce nuclear weapons. It is about the past 30 years of Iranian instigated terrorism on Israel’s borders. It must be noted that the recent riots and pitched battles led by the innocent Iranian people in the streets of Iran have shown that they don’t support the Ahmadinejad government and that they are victims too. The question is whether the self-appointed global leadership of the moral high ground (and President Obama) are going to align with Israel against Iran - and capitalize on the huge opportunity presented by this seized ship, or will they continue to disregard this vagrant violation of international law?