Jackin4Beats Magazine

President Obama has vowed to improve our nation’s education system, which is in a crisis. Given the public education system’s responsibility in educating over 50 million children, the severity of this crisis cannot be overstated. A broken education is not only a serious threat to our nation’s economy, but also a threat to our freedom; after all, “Education Is Freedom.” Although the problems with our public education system are vast, there are certain areas that President Obama must focus on first.

President Obama first needs to improve upon the No Child Left Behind Act, a law that has great potential in theory, but up until this point, has been failing in practice as well as funding. Today, there are more and more children who are left behind in the current educational system; a system which seems to be driven by passing standardized tests instead of teaching kids a broader range of curriculum geared towards preparing students for the workforce and college.

There is also the issue of the academic achievement gap which continues to persist. The President’s own academic success gives us a great example of what is possible in the lives of minority and disadvantaged children if this gap is eliminated. In order to address the academic achievement gap, however, both academic and neighborhood conditions must be simultaneously addressed, especially since the current economic crisis may have the potential to disproportionately impact poor neighborhoods. Creating a supportive atmosphere — both in school and at home — that promotes learning and education is what needs to be done to help close the gap.

The high school drop-out crisis is another problem the President must confront head-on. Many high schools across America are experiencing drop-out rates that are 50% or higher. President Obama has already promised funding for intervention strategies, including personal academic plans, increased instruction and learning time, and mentoring. Those promises must be carried out as well as President Obama being able to create common vision in young people that their education is important, not only to themselves, but to the overall health of the nation.

In addition to finding creative ways to address the high school drop-out crisis, President Obama must also focus on enhancing the public education system’s ability to perform a better job in adequately preparing more students for college — a process that must begin as early as middle school, given the academic deficits so many students in the public school system face. Students who arrive at high school already behind academically find it harder to catch up in time to be prepared for the academic rigors of college. Some studies suggest that over 50% of all freshmen entering college will need to take remedial courses. Appropriate remediation before students head to college is not only more effective, but also less costly to the students themselves, who need remediation, and to our nation, which often shares in the cost of paying for the remediation work once these students enter college.

Finally, a lesser-discussed problem is the nation’s inability to produce more students who are graduating in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields. To stay competitive in a global economy, protect our nation’s infrastructure, as well as be in effective in our national security efforts, we must begin to significantly increase the number of students who are graduating in STEM areas.

The president’s 75 billion dollar Housing Fix-it Plan has arrived and because people are asking if there are loan modification benefits in it for them, here is my expert analysis. In a nutshell, the plan offers to make house payments more affordable for hard-pressed homeowners and contains five major benefits. Here they are:

1. The main benefit is that it provides assistance to homeowners who wish to stay in their homes. The sour economy has made it tough for many homeowners to refinance because for most, their equity has dried up and they are unable to do so. This plan also helps those who may have lost income due to the current recession.

2. The Initiative Offers No Aid for Speculators: This initiative will go solely to helping homeowners who commit to make payments to stay in their home ” it will not aid speculators or house flippers.

3. The Initiative Aids Neighborhoods. Because a foreclosed home often attracts vagrants, vandals and graffiti, not to mention being an eyesore with the dried grass landscaping and yellowed newspapers piled up on the stoop, stopping a home from becoming a foreclosure benefits the entire neighborhood. Not to mention the rock-bottom values that the foreclosed home will get from the new purchaser.

4. Supports Homeowners at Eminent Risk of Foreclosure. Usually a homeowner does not qualify for loan modification unless he can show that he is behind by several payments. This new plan provides support for households at risk ” even though the homeowner may not yet be late on his mortgage payments.

5. The Plan helps to restructure total Debt. The financial stability part of the plan is to create payment plans that can be kept by the homeowner ” not pipe dream payments. By working in conjunction with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to standardize loan modifications, the Treasury Department hopes to do just that.

The Financial Stability Plan’s goal is to bring back a sense of security to the struggling real estate market. The plan has been designed to discourage lenders from opting to foreclose on mortgages that could be viable now out of fear that home prices will fall even further later on. Plunging house prices, for example, make it harder for purchasers to obtain new loans ” even with good credit, because lenders concerned about the true value of homes, simply refuse to extend credit for fear that they may be in the same situation five years down the road.

The Obama Housing Fix-it Plan has much more to it. Parts of it involve granting incentives to lenders who postpone foreclosures, paying down principal for owners who stay in their property for five years, and even giving incentives to people who successfully modify loans.

By helping to modify the loans of millions of hard-pressed homeowners and thus lower their monthly payments, the administration may also be jolting the economy at the same time. The word on the street is to look for June 2009 to be the time for that to start to happen. Who knows? Purchasing a real estate bargain now and holding it as a rental property may prove to be a smarter move than parking the money in an IRA or in the wild and crazy stock market!

The recent economic downturn demands a complete overhaul of healthcare policies. U.S. President Barack Obama seemingly cannot disentangle his administrations health policies from the economic mesh. He began with a White House forum targeting cost-cutting measures for high-priced health care costs. This may be a distant goal to achieve as his predecessors have proven but theres not other way out for the fledgling administration: draw a solution now or suffer major drawbacks in the future.

“Our healthcare costs are exploding our economy,” said Melody Barnes, Obama’s senior domestic policy adviser. “When he talks about getting spending under control … one of the primary things he is focusing on is bringing our healthcare costs under control.”

Tempering healthcare costs, along with other segments receiving a sizeable chunk of budget, seems to be an indispensable tool in cushioning the impact of the global recession. Not that Obama seems to realize this. Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius, who was recently appointed by Obama as health secretary, launched a White House forum with a group of about 120 people comprising doctors, patients, health insurers, and lawmakers to fix U.S. health care. Despite spending about $2.5 trillion each year on healthcare, the government still has to expand its coverage on some 46 million uninsured. Actually they don’t have to, but apparently they want to. Matters are growing even worse as the country is lagging behind other Western countries on indicators such as infant mortality rates and gigantic fatness.

The president earlier promised (he did that a lot) to expand insurance coverage and impose more efficient cost-cutting measures though he has yet to pass a proposal detailing his health care plan to Congress, shockingly enough. Obama is more cautious to avoid what the Clinton administration dealt with in the 1990s when it submitted a detailed healthcare plan to lawmakers. Instead, Obama’s taking the more politically savvy route of saying “change” over and over.

Barnes could not deny the fact that he isnt sending a bill up to the Hill. But this does not end the argument, as he remains optimistic about the administrations handling of the issue. “He’s articulated some of the principles that are important to him, but I think he also strongly believes that to get this done he’s going to have to … be open, pragmatic and listen and engage with Congress to get a bill done,” said Barnes.

To locate the starting point of the healthcare reform, Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease director Kenneth Thorpe hinted at the proposal issued last year by Senate Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus. “That really is the starting point,” he said. “It largely reflects candidate Obama’s healthcare reform proposals.”

Both Obama and Baucus outlined similar principles in their proposals such as better management of life-threatening diseases, effective ways to encourage preventive care, health insurance reform and improvement of healthcare delivery. The Baucus plan, however, took a step further than that of Obamas in terms of its health care expansion. Nevertheless, Baucus still backs up Obamas measures saying that the presidents 2010 budget revealed his very strong commitment” (to bankrupting the United States). He also promised to do all I can to make meaningful comprehensive health reform pass this year just this week.

Not everyone in the White House is pleased with Obamas stillborn healthcare plan. Or with Obama in general, which might have to do with his trillion-dollar shopping spree. Along with some members of the GOP, Edmund Haislmaier, a health care policy expert from Heritage Foundation, claims that the presidents decision to spend $634 billion for healthcare overhaul was a mistake. “He just told every interest group that ‘I’m not really going to reform, I’m just going to expand,’” Haislmaier said.

This is way to crazy… Every other day it is a new racial controversy about President Obama. Just as the dust was beginning to settle on the Daily News controversy here we go again with what is being dubbed “The Obama Watermelon Controversy.”

My question to you the reader is this… Is this just a joke and shouldn’t be taken to lightly? Or is this flat out racism and needs to be dealt with?

Watch the video then you decide.

Personally I didn’t think that they would do it… BUT they did! The New York Post apologized to those offended by a cartoon that critics said was racist because it likened President Barack Obama to a chimpanzee.

The newspaper acknowledged that the cartoon published had drawn controversy because African Americans (Moors) and others saw it as a depiction of President Obama.

“This most certainly was not its intent; to those who were offended by the image, we apologize,” the paper said in an editorial on its website headlined “That Cartoon.”

“It was meant to mock an ineptly written federal stimulus bill. Period,“ the paper said.

The cartoon of a policeman shooting an ape played on the real shooting of a pet chimpanzee in Connecticut this week. A police officer in the cartoon says, “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.”

The cartoon ran a day after Obama signed into law the $787 billion economic stimulus that he had strongly promoted. Critics interpreted the cartoon’s dead chimp as a reference to Obama, who became the first black (Moorish) president of the United States on January 20.

Demonstrators led by civil rights activist Al Sharpton chanted “End racism now!” outside the skyscraper headquarters of the newspaper’s parent company in midtown Manhattan. They called for the jailing of Rupert Murdoch, whose international media conglomerate News corp owns the Post.

The newspaper initially defended the cartoon as a parody of Washington politics, but Sharpton said it exploited a potent image in the history of racism towards blacks.

“I guess they thought we were chimpanzees,” Sharpton said. “They will find out we are lions.”

Sharpton said in a statement on Thursday right that groups protesting the cartoon would go ahead with a previously scheduled rally outside the Post on Friday afternoon and decide on a response to the Post editorial.

He added that “though we think it is the right thing for them to apologize to those they offended, they seem to want to blame the offense on those of whom raised the issue, rather than take responsibility for what they did.”

The Post said it was not apologizing to all of its critics.

“There are some in the media and in public life who have had differences with The Post in the past — and they see the incident as an opportunity for payback. To them, no apology is due,” the editorial said.

“Sometimes a cartoon is just a cartoon — even as the opportunists seek to make it something else,” it said.

Critics said the racist message was clear.

“You would have to be in a time warp or in a whole other world not to know what that means,” said demonstrator Charles Ashley, 25 a model who did not believe the cartoon was an innocent political joke.

Others said it made light of assassinating President Obama, a possibility they said that worries many Americans.

“Just the fact that they put a monkey with gunshot wounds in his chest, it gives the idea of an assassination,” said Peter Aviles, 48, a building superintendent.

Police in Stamford, Connecticut, shot and killed a 200-pound chimpanzee on Monday after the pet nearly killed its owner’s friend and attacked a police car. The chimp, named Travis, had once starred in television commercials and was taking medication for Lyme disease.

My question to you is this… Is this truly an issue that warrants attention form the community? Or is this simply another chance for the Rev. Al Sharpton to soak up some of the rays of the spotlight?

I have always thought that Black History Month was a little ridiculous to say the least. It should be done away with. Now I’m not one to point out the problem without providing a solution.

I feel that we should educate and inspire our culture every single day. I’m not talking about the history that they teach in school, which is not even close to the truth. Now I’m not saying that this is not a positive thing because it is. It is a stepping-stone that we should use to expand upon.

We need to start getting the truth out their about our culture. We have contributed way more than what the powers that be would have us to believe.

For example…

Christopher Columbus named the people here “Indians” because he thought he had landed in India. Among the things that he took back with him, one particular item leaves a clue that reveals the lie. The item that I am referring to is a rubber ball. When reading that in your history book it seems meaningless. But when looked at closer where did that rubber ball come from? At that time the ONLY place that rubber could have come from was Africa. Which means that their had to be Moorish or African people here when Christopher Columbus got here.

Allow me to give you one more thing to ponder. Look up the Olmec Tribe. These were statues that were built during the B.C. period. Scientist are doing everything that they can to hide the truth. They have said that the statues were made by the Chinese. Other scientist say that the enormous statues were build by some Mexican tribe. I challenge you to look up the images of these statues for yourself and you tell me what you think.

I will end this article by saying this… We are all human beings, and should treat one another accordingly. I do not enjoy being categorized and placed in a little box. I do not enjoy having a little month to celebrate what we should all be aware of each and every day.

I would like to hear your opinion on this opinion.