It's sad that the Republicans chose Archie Bunker as their role model.

Who can take this seriously?

98% of FOX News viewers, a plurality of Republican voters, and enough "independent" voters to get Mr. get govmint outta my Medicare and into my neighbor's bedroom elected to the United States Senate.

The Feds started getting involved in education in a big way in the 1940s, when they found that huge numbers of draftees in WWII were getting marginal educations, could barely read and write, and might not be able to read a map or operate modern combat equipment.

Buck makes perfect sense. You just have to listen with Teabag ears.

Everything was better in the 1950s. He knows this just as everyone knows this because he has watched Leave it to Beaver, Ozzie and Harriet, I Love Lucy, Sid Ceasar's Show of Shows, and dozens of other similar documentaries on the period. (Yes, to the TeaTards, those shows are not comedies--they are documentaries).

Speed, can you provide a reference or link?

The Feds also "got involved" in education with the launch of Sputnik by the Russians. The whole space race was also an eduction race. How much more than just encouragement the Feds put into the K-12 level (which is usually where the complaints about Gov't interference are directed) I don't know, but I grew up in that period and I remember lots pro-education patriotism.

How that possibly could be considered screwing up education is beyond me, unless he's making the usual brainwashing claims, along the lines of Beck's history lessons.

Buck probably wants to go back to the "good old days" when teaching was the most prestigious career available to women.

The percentage of students who finish high school is but one way to measure the effectiveness of public education. It is hardly the only thing that matters.

There are too many accounts of uneducated graduates -- from high school and from college -- to discount the anecdotal and subjective impression that schools were doing some important things right back then that are not being done now. When we devote an entire system to improving dropout rates, we inevitably devote more of that system's resources to the students at risk, and deprive others of the instruction, materials, and most importantly, the framework, they need to excel.

After all, Sarah Palin is a college graduate.

Nowhere does this emphasis on the "least among us" show more clearly than in the case of federal regulations that govern special eduation. The unintended results of those good intentions are evident to anyone who examines the disparity between the handling of those with special needs and those whose needs are special, but don't fit into the bureaucratic framework that limits a local system's ability to allocate resources according to local knowledge.

Some things to remember about Ken Buck. He was the district attorney for Weld County, which could stand in for all the places in the US that haven't fared well in this economy and the previous ones. Greeley, its county seat, is the only city in the county and isn't very big at all. Its biggest employers are a meat packing plant and a state university, formerly the state's biggest teacher's college. The county is huge, mainly rural with a Denver area suburban fringe at the southern end. The houses in that area are at the epicenter of the housing crisis. They are the result of the forces that brought us the foreclosure crisis: cheap houses sold with bad mortgages on the far suburban fringes in a county that will allow any kind of building anywhere. They line I-25 and mask the fact that most of the county is ranch and farm country. There are also a large number of immigrant farmworkers and meat packers who find themselves in increasingly tenuous situations because of immigration crackdowns. Farming is marginal as more and more of the water rights are sold off to urban and suburban cities. Crime is not huge, but large enough to scare a lot of voters. The schools are overwhelmed with children who aren't native English speakers. This is not Boulder or Fort Collins, high tech and affluent, but more like parts of the Midwest that are shells of their former selves.

For more liberal and more educated folks (even Republican ones), Buck comes across as a right-wing nut case, but to others--struggling, conservative, religious--he comes across as an antidote to that higher tech, more affluent more sophisticated state that Michael Bennet is so clearly representative of. He also seems to get a pass with his foot in the mouth statements and comes across as having a certain genial spin to his extreme conservatism. In addition, the most liberal voters have spent a lot of time demonizing Bennet against his primary opponent and may have an enthusiasm gap.

He's right tho. The Republicans have screwed it all up and Medicare is a good example. The only ones that benefited from part D were the pharmaceutical companies. No child left behind? They should be left behind until they learn the 3 R's. Let's hope they don't get back in to make it worse.

This sounds like one of those rants where the opposition just throws out buzzwords that his party likes. Government bad so education is bad. and oh yeah, we don't like the health care "stuff" so that is bad.

I am shocked he didn't throw in something about religion or socialism.

What is incredibly sad is like Brewer in Arizona, Miller in Alaska, Angle in Nevada, these unintelligent people have a chance of winning important positions in our government.

It absolutely amazes me. But as Steve said, apparently the drunk guy at the end of the bar, and most of american voters right now, do not care to listen to reason. Our country will then get what it elected and therefore deserves. Even though it is not what is best for our country.

Unfortunately, more and more people are believing this. It's easier to claim that the Democratic Party are anti-Christ or not righteous or UnAmerican than it is to actually tackle our very real problems and work towards mutually beneficial solutions.

Dating the beginning of Federal involvement in education to 1980 when the Dept of Education was formed is an error of fact.

According to Wikipedia, Pres Harding (R) proposed a Dept of Education and Welfare in 1923. Pres Eisenhower (R) created the Dept of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1953. It was created by executive order through the president's authority to reorganization the executive branch, an authority that was removed by Congress in 1962.

The education programs were consolidated into the Dept of Education in 1980 under Pres Carter to raise the profile of education and to recognize the extent of federal involvement in education.

Politically, keep in mind that Mr. Buck's opponent, Sen Bennet, was supt of the Denver Public Schools before his appointment to the Senate. When Mr. Buck comments on public education, he is attacking Sen Bennet.

He is also appealing to an older voter demographic who sent their kids to school in the 1950s "and they turned out okay." Finally, nostalgia for the 1950s is nostalgia for segregated schools and legal school prayer. There is an underlying racial and religious message.

Drunk at the end of the bar is a good analogy.

It seems that 2010 will go down in history as the "Mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore!" year.

Real Americans don't do nuance.

Once again your just wrong on the facts about Ken Busk. You say:

"Take Colorado's Ken Buck, the Republican Senate candidate this year. He's already known for being one of 2010's nuttiest candidates -- he wants to eliminate Social Security, scrap student loans, ban forms of birth control, eliminate all abortions under all circumstances, etc. -- and this week, Buck showed off his policy depth by trying to talk about education."

Channel 7 news did a fact check on these false allegations here:

http://www.thedenverchannel.com/call7investigators/24860138/detail.html

I know this may be surprising but the stuff in campaign commercials is mostly false and misleading. You have to do the research and not let the boob tube tell you what to think.

Maybe manapp99 hasn't seen the Bennet commercials where Buck is captured in his own voice saying these things. I don't think it was a ventriloquist's dummy saying them. Of course, he's now pretending he didn't say them but it's a little hard to take back the things you actually said. But what I think is especially dangerous about Buck is that he has a way of laughing off or changing his mind in a way that appears self deprecating--for example his "no high heels" comment and his later response to it.

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I know this may be surprising but the stuff in campaign commercials is mostly false and misleading. You have to do the research and not let the boob tube tell you what to think. -Posted by: manapp99

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I gotta say reading channel 7's report was like reading a poor attempt at apologetics from a campaign office.

They defend Buck's views by putting his remarks into wider context. Fine, but......

1. On privatizing SS they give the example of Buck saying SS will be bankrupt in 10-25yrs and he "doesn't know that the fed should be involved in retirement planning."

WTF????

Sounds like he's pro privatizing to me.

2.On ending the Dept of Ed they give the example of Buck saying no we shouldn't just wholesale end it on day one but rather "wean the American public off" and bring education back to the local communities where it belongs.

WTF????

Sounds like ending U.S. Dept of Ed to me.

3. On ending student loans they give the example of Buck saying he still believes in gov student loans, he just wants to return to the system where banks can suck off the government tit.

I'll give you that one, but is his actual position really any better?

4. On ending bc and abortion they don't even bother arguing Buck's viewpoint. They just agree that's fact.

Funny I lived in Colorado for years and I don't remember Channel 7 being a proxy for FOX. Apparently things have changed.

The other pster had it right. When a Republican pines for the 1950s, you bet your ass they're talking about segregation and civil rights, and how "we wouldn't have all these problems" if the colored boys just knew their place like they useta.

jpeckjr briefly mentioned it, and then Daddy Love nailed it.

Not sure why Steve doesn't understand the code of racism. Not really difficult. When you talk about schools being better in the 50s, it isn't about statistics or facts. Graduation rates don't matter. Schools were better in the 50s because The Scary Dark People weren't allowed to get a decent education in the same schools as white people. You know, segregation. The way The Judeo-Christian god meant it to be.

The desire to return to the ideal of the 50s is, depending on context, about a return to a time before either (1) desegration/civil rights, (2) contraception/sexual revolution, and/or (3) women as independent agents/feminisism.

Martin has it right. The one word response to how wonderful and "best in the world" our schools were back then is "Sputnik." After that the Federal Government got involved in national education and within a generation we had overtaken the Soviets and landed several men on the moon. You have to be a fool to think that things were so good then.

Yeah.. "Government" is so BAD,big Buck is spending thousands of little bucks to be a part of it's Legislative branch..HMMM.

@Bucky . . . your list needs a number (4) government endorsed religion (prayer in schools) and a number (5) all of the above.

Of course no one wants to talk about the Senate candidate in Alaska who in an interview with Real Clear Politics when asked about specific issues, his favorite answer was "Uh" and "I don't know" and his main strategy against Joe Miller is he is an evillll "corporate lawyer" (Of course ambulance chasing lawyers are cool in his world).

You gotta remember that well-educated intelligent people like most commenters on this blog are not his target audience.

His target audience is pissed off ignorant people, and for them, his argument is right on the money.

The Federal governement got involved with math instruction in the 1950's, shifting the focus away from real world math to calculation. Americans ended up being able to do a wide variety of different types of math but most did not understand what they were doing.

The rest of the world continued to teach real world math and now the United States has fallen behind every other developed country. During the past few years schools have been trying to get back to the original way of teaching math but the damage is profound. Most Americans do not have the skills to enter fields in science, engineering, etc. because they don't understand the math.

Of course...that was just the beginning of the Federal governments intrusion on something that was meant to be a state and local issue. I read somewhere that the top four-year degree in the United States is Sports Education. We've become a country of P.E. teachers. Thanks, Department of Education.