Eric.. I was a New Orleans Saint's fan for decades.. but they only recently stopped being called "The Aint's, cuz they aint gonna do shit" Yea.. they finally won a SuperBowl, and proved they can actually play real football... It took DECADES.. people laughing.. etc..

My philosophy is "I dont give a *bleep* what anyone else thinks." and it has been for as long as I can remember.

Not everyone can afford to pay both taxes for the public schools, and tuition for the private schools...

In that sort of case, you just have to roll with the public school, and watch your kids and their teachers like a hawk.

Upshot is, in small towns (like mine) where everyone knows everyone, even the public schools are pretty good, considering...

Plus, a lot of the private schools in this area are either full of obnoxious kids with same parents, who simply pay for their kids to get better grades.

Some of the smaller, grade-school only schools seem to be OK, but as a kid who started out in private school, went to a public school, back to a private, before graduating from a public high school, I can say that, without a doubt, I wish I'd stayed in one or the other.. hard to make friends when you're school-bouncing.

I took AP/Honors classes throughout most of my public highschool "career" and feel that I actually got a pretty decent education.

This is happening in my home state of Alabama, as well.. Drug "Checkpoints" on Interstate 10, between the AL-MS border, and AL exit 10.. For the past few days.. I ranted it about on my FB page, and immediately wound up with a splitting headache as otherwise sane people I've known literally my ENTIRE LIFE said they'd happily give up their rights to "keep drugs off the streets" and even when I pointed out that they were giving up their rights, and drugs WERE STILL ON THE STREETS, they stuck their collective heads in the sand, fingers in the ears, going "la la la la, I can't hear you, la la la la"

In theory, I agree with private companies contracting to manage prisons..

I'm just not sure how to deal with the corruption problem, but I feel that in damn near everything, competition is NEVER a bad thing..

I have a feeling, however, if there were more companies doing the private prison thing, there'd be more competition, and the corruption would, by necessity, work itself out...

The problem is that transition period....

It's anecdotal, but, my wife and I started home shopping for our first home in Spring of 2004, we were looking for a brick 3/2, on a nice sized lot, and found many good possibilities for around 60-65k, but we decided to wait a little bit, let our financial situation settle a little more.

In 2005, we lost our rental home to a hurricane, and the home owner was unable to rebuild, so our home search became.. well.. frenzied.

The same size, style, and general location of 65k homes in 2004, were now, in early 2006, going for 100k.

Just before the housing bubble finally popped, home prices had nearly doubled here from 2004 levels.

Insane. The prices NEED to fall back to sane levels. Pricing in this area -heavily- outpaced any rise in cost-of-living, and wage levels.

Or more afraid, since our own "intelligence" analysts obviously have no clue what's going on over there, and therefore have absolutely NO IDEA how to protect our nation... *sigh*

Southerners are generally hawks when it comes to foreign policy. Which is why, until the last couple of decades, it was a traditionally Democrat stronghold.

Paul is portrayed by the media as anti-military, and southerners are proud of our military heritage. However, don't write us off yet... :)

http://www.change.org/petitions/matthew-owens-jus... --- This happened in my neck o' the woods.. and even in the stories that mention it, no mention of race of any of the people involved.. But it's clear that it was racially-motivated "This is for Trayvon" really? seriously guys? Meh..

The actual story in Georgia, was, the 6yr old was breaking things, and had even attacked the principle with various heavy objects. The school was unable to contact the parents, so called the police. The officers were unable to get the screaming kid to calm down, so had to handcuff her to keep the tantrum from escalating...... http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/17/justice/georgia-stu...

W....T....F.... We didn't learn our lesson with Bin Laden? meh