State Senator Dan Gelber

June 21, 2009

State Senator Dan Gelber
1920 Meridian Avenue
Miami Beach, Florida 33139-1818

RE: The accursed FCATs, dollars spent on education, you can’t choose your relatives, and why hypocrisy smells so bad particularly when it comes from people suffering from terminal “non-malodorous fecal matter syndrome”. Questions about that? SASE. A different take on your Op-Ed piece in this morning’s Miami Herald.

Senator Gelber,

What a marvelous column!

You begin by saying that you are “a parent with 3 kids in public school”. You should have included that you are an elected official. Further, you are a modern American Liberal. Elected Democrats have an additional burden – cognitive dissonance may be apropos – of cheerleading for public schools, for teachers’ unions, for multicultural education, for diversity training, and always, always for more, more, and yet more money, for all the claptrap about self esteem, while the majority of them send their kids to private schools. I’ll get back to that later.

You mention your “friend, Janet Reno”. Your citing of her quote about under nourished dogs is typical in that it requires neither thought nor reflection. Speaking of things canine I prefer Samuel Johnson’s quote about women preaching and dogs walking on their hind legs. “It’s not a matter of how well they do it but, rather, why do they do it all.”

Janet Reno was at the state and Federal level a terrible prosecutor. Beyond terrible she was fatally incompetent in that some good guys, guys with badges and guns, died because of it. Her incompetence at the local level was legendary. Ask the thin blue line; ask the men who regularly saw the elephant how she was then. The only reason she got to the Federal level – Recall that she was choice #3 – was that she had, on close examination, the only thing that Czarina Hillary demanded of any candidate. She had a uterus.

She began her illustrious Federal career by charbroiling some 7 dozen of her fellow citizens. That was the high point of her time in Washington. It fell to former Vice President Alpha Gump to put an exclamation point on her career when he yammered on and on and on and on about “There is no controlling legal authority”. That after she decided that fine line between law and justice would not be breached on her watch. The world wonders when she will comment on the pardons for sale at the White House as the new President was sworn in.

But enough about her.


My favorite memory of the New York States Regents Exam is 11th grade Latin. The only time Caesar’s 10th Legion ever lost was at the end of my junior year. Damn that Aeneas!

You end by saying that we must “stop drinking the Kool-Aid”. Your definition of Kool-Aid is that Florida doesn’t spend enough per pupil on education. If that is the case why isn’t Washington, D.C. graduating Nobel Prize winners? At the very least there should be a dozen Pulitzers each year at Eastern High School and at Anacostia High School. No place in the universe spends more per pupil than Washington, D.C. The amount of Federal dollars that they extort from the Congress is on par with the amount, per capita, that the farmers get for not growing food. The public school system in Washington, D.C. gets money for not teaching students. And we thought Bernie Madoff ruined a lot of lives.

Is that why Lord Barack the Ben chose not to send his daughters to the very richly endowed public school system in Washington, D.C.? If you send your 3 kids to public schools in Miami Beach why can’t he send his kids to public school in Washington?

If we scrap the FCATs how about scrapping the Florida Bar Exam? If empathy is to be a deciding factor in confirming candidates for the Supreme Court why should it count for less on the state level? Certainly life experiences should, particularly those gained in less than ideal circumstances, should at least as much as knowledge of torts, of property, of contracts, of bills of attainder, of letters of marque and reprisal, of material misrepresentation by omission or commission --- things like that. Would not the criminal Bar and a sense of Rawlsian justice be better served if a number of slots be reserved for criminals representing alleged criminals?

I think I may have found a job for “your friend, Janet Reno”. Put her in charge of disemboweling the FCATs and making the Florida Bar exam fairer, nicer, and more empathetic.