Mr. Parker,

Thank you very much for your kind words above. We at TexasHuntFish.com enjoy the opportunity to provide technical, creative and marketing assistance to organizations like RFA that support the hunting and fishing industry in Texas.

The TexasHuntFish.com Team

What the people you want running this country are really doing.

Source:
Diatribune and Daily Kos, March, 30, 2007
Title: “Bush Profiteers Collect Billions From NCLB”
Author: Mandevilla

Researchers: Alan Scher and Sam Burchard

Faculty Evaluator: Karen Grady, PhD

The architect of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), President Bush’s first senior education advisor, Sandy Kress, has turned the program, which has consistently proven disastrous in the realm of education, into a huge success in the realm of corporate profiteering. After ushering NCLB through the US House of Representatives in 2001 with no public hearings, Kress went from lawmaker—turning on spigots of federal funds—to lobbyist, tapping into those billions of dollars in federal funds for private investors well connected to the Bush administration.

A statute that once promised equal access to public education to millions of American children now instead promises billions of dollars in profits to corporate clients through dubious processes of testing and assessment and “supplemental educational services.” NCLB—the Business Roundtable’s revision of Lyndon Johnson’s Education and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)—created a “high stakes testing” system through which the private sector could siphon federal education funds. The result has been windfall corporate profit. What was once a cottage industry has become a corporate giant. “Millions of dollars are being spent,” says Jack Jennings, director of the Center on Education Policy, “and nobody knows what’s happening.”

The wedding of big business and education benefits not only the interests of the Business Roundtable, a consortium of over 300 CEOs, but countless Bush family loyalists. Sandy Kress, chief architect of NCLB; Harold McGraw III, textbook publisher; Bill Bennett, former Reagan education secretary; and Neil Bush, the president’s youngest brother, have all cashed in on the Roundtable’s successful national implementation of “outcome-based education.” NCLB’s mandated system of state standards, state tests, and school sanctions has together transformed our public school system into a for-profit frenzy.

Kress, former president of the Dallas School Board, began “A Draft Position for George W. Bush on K-12 Education” as early as 1999. Working successfully with then-Governor Bush in Texas for years, the Democrat bolstered bipartisan support behind the compassionate marketing promise to “leave no child behind” through the adoption of high state standards measuring school performance. Signed into law in early 2002, NCLB dramatically extended the federal role in public education, mandating annual testing of children in Grades 3 to 8, providing tutoring for children in persistently failing schools, and setting a twelve-year timetable for closing chronic gaps in student achievement. Having then crafted the legislation, Kress transitioned from public servant to corporate lobbyist, guiding clients to the troth of federal funds. By 2005 he had made upwards of $4 million from lobbying contracts.

While the Business Roundtable maintains that the high-stakes tests administered nationwide hold schools accountable to “Adequate Yearly Progress,” NCLB has instead benefited the testing industry in the amount of between $1.9 and $5.3 billion a year. NCLB requires states to produce “interpretive, descriptive, and diagnostic reports,” all of which are provided at a price by members of the industry. Among these are the top four or five players in the textbook market, including the Big Three—McGraw-Hill, Houghton-Mifflin, and Harcourt General—who have, since the passage of NCLB, come to dominate the testing market. Identified by Wall Street analysts in the wake of the 2000 election as “Bush stocks,” all three represent owners like Harold McGraw III, who has longstanding ties to the Bush administration and the lobbying efforts of Sandy Kress.

Other Kress clients, including Ignite! Learning, a company headed by Neil Bush, and K12 Inc., a for-profit enterprise owned by Bill Bennett, tailored themselves to vie for NCLB dollars.

Under NCLB, as school districts receive federal funding they are required by law to hold 20 percent of those funds aside, anticipating that its schools will fail to meet its Annual Yearly Progress formula. When that “failure” is certified by test scores, the district is required to use those set-aside federal funds to pay supplemental education service (SES) providers. Ignite! has placed products in forty US school districts, and K12 offers a menu of services “as an option to traditional brick-and-mortar schools,” including computer-based “virtual academies,” that have qualified for over $4 million in federal grants. Under NCLB, supplemental educational services, whose results are being increasingly challenged, reap $2 billion annually.

Nationally, there are over 1,800 approved providers of supplemental educational services, but little in the way of regulation. To the contrary, Michael Petrilli, former member of the Department of Education, purports, “We want as little regulation as possible so the market can be as vibrant as possible.” To that end, Kress is currently lobbying on behalf of another bipartisan coalition to win reauthorization of NCLB for another six years.

"And, if both human scent and skunk spray are at 5 ppm at the deer's nostrils, irrespective of distance or time, will the deer's ability to smell be affected?  I say based on what I know now yes, it will be partially affected".

No it will not be affected as you believe and the industry has lead most hunters to believe.  The deer will smell skunk and will smell you all at the same time and they know you as a threat.  Your odor will not be covered or deadened from the deer’s senses at 5ppm.

I have not stated "again"... That the chemicals in skunk essence will not affect an animal’s sense of odor detection, what I have stated is that for this to take place it must be in close proximity to the animal or directly applied to the animal to do as you have stated. 

To simply apply less than an ounce of skunk essence to the area you hunt and or to you (heaven forbid) will not affect the animal as you believe. It must be in a higher concentration (amount) and or in close proximity to the animal... And for me to offer any of my material or findings in anything other than a instructors setting will not happen.

 You do not have to believe if you so choose to not believe what I have stated, and no I have not supplied a "link" to some chemical break down chart or chemical explanation chart as you have which I have seen numerous times, but yet you continue to ask for "conformation" on a subject you seem to know allot about.

Please continue to use what works for you as I feel you will and I will do the same as I know most on this site will do. But If I find something that works better than anything that I have ever used before in the past I am going to continue to use it until as stated;

"A better mouse trap is made"

Great talking with you on this subject but I do feel strongly you and I will not ever come to an agreement on most but will allow some of each the same. 

JS Bitto..

I definitely remember the Carter years...I was in school and watched his 'administration' attack steel industries, coal industries, and the oil and gas industry.  Especially oil and gas with that insane "windfall profits tax" where the media wouldn't even allow them the air time to campaign against it.  Energy and coal were severely crippled, and the steel industry is about gone now.  Their were scapegoats then just as there are now.

What was it that Solomon said..."there is no new thing under the sun"?  Well, your right William - here we are again. 

The only significant differences I see from the Carter years is that Carter was essentially a puppet, while Obama is definitely driving this bandwagon.  The other is the fact that those leading this country now are much more open about their rabid desire for goverment control.  Its almost like they can't hold themselves back themselves anymore...they see the current mood of the country and are running over each other to ram all this garbage down our throats while they have opportunity.

Here's part of the article....

The sight of deer munching in suburban gardens is a common one across America, particularly in places like Texas' hill country, where at holiday time the ubiquitous roadside deer-warning signs are decorated with round red stickers by an anonymous artist in an homage to Rudolph, the most famous deer of all. So plentiful are the white-tailed deer in Texas that the notion of smuggling deer into the state seems absurd — yet this growing and lucrative illegal trade, with its threat of devastating disease, is challenging federal and state wildlife officers across the country.

There are an estimated 10 million deer hunters in the U.S., and 80% of the annual $20 billion spent in the hunting industry is focused on the pursuit of the fleet-footed creatures, according to a federal census study released two years ago. For Captain Greg Williford, a Texas game warden, deer-hunting is a cultural tradition that has undergone major changes in the past decade; he now finds himself using the same undercover methods employed by federal drug agents to combat deer smugglers, who are lured to the illicit trade by big bucks for, well, big bucks. "It's like everything else in society — people want bigger, better, faster," Williford says.

But the high prices have prompted some reserves to reject Texas-bred deer. And so deer are smuggled in from northern states like Minnesota, where the stock is bigger and smugglers offer cut-rate prices. This way, smugglers skirt Texas laws that have closed the borders to non-Texas-bred deer. It's not chauvinism at work. There is a danger that smuggled deer can carry diseases like chronic wasting disease — which is similar to mad cow disease — and bovine tuberculosis.

Texas is thus far free of the wasting disease and wants to stay that way.

CLICK HERE to read the full article on the Time website.