Too many drivers holdin on to your wheel

So let me get this auto recovery straight. American taxpayers didn't buy GM and Chrysler's products, because they were perceived (rightly or wrongly) as gas-guzzling, less reliable, and not a good value as compared to established Japanese brands. (Then, as the recession deepened, they just stopped buying cars altogether, but that's another chapter of the saga). So the heads of GM and Chrysler, brave champions of the free market that they are, appealed to the big bad Federal Government for some of that sweet sweet socialist bailout money, so that American taxpayers, who didn't care for what they had to sell, could support them anyway, involuntarily. And the companies told congress that one way they would streamline so they could continue existing would be to lay off thousands and thousands of American employees --- those same taxpayers who will be footing their bill to keep existing despite the willfully purblind business practices they've been perpetuating for the last decade at least.

It's socialism, pure and simple. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean it's bad, but it is interesting that the heads of companies and Republican politicians are as socialist as Lenin when it comes to getting a handout, but those same people would rather let Americans starve than share out some of that money for public works projects.

Why doesn't the federal government hire the auto companies to make things it needs, like planes and tanks and other heavy machinery, like it did in WWII? That would actually add jobs instead of cut them, and it would be closer to free enterprise than the socialist handout.

And meanwhile, that smirking man-ape Bush is off basking in the evil glow of his self-satisfaction, having helped his very rich friends get richer, and having destroyed the middle class in America, and having apparently convinced the media that the recession was in no way due to his spend-and-spend, gluttonous, plutocratic economic policies.

***

Lots of violence at school today. One kid punched another in the stomach; this same kid refused to listen to an assistant teacher yesterday when asked to give back a toy he'd taken, and then turned and made his fingers into a gun and mimed shooting her when she insisted. The assistant was so shaken by this, she didn't show up for work today. I can see how it might be creepy, especially for one of the very few black employees at a pretty white school.

Also, another assistant was crouching down near a kid and explaining to him why he was in time-out (for some altercation), and he reached out and lightly slapped her nose with his fingers! That is nuts for a five-year-old to do that to a teacher. Mrs. Hatfield, his teacher, asked him if he would hit his mother like that and he said no. Then she asked him if he would ever hit her, and he shrugged and said, "Sure, if I got mad enough."

***

So I'm going to a reading conference for three days next week. My teaching style is pretty spontaneous, so it was out of the ordinary for me to write the detailed lesson plans I did for the substitute. In fact, making them was more work than going to work would have been.