† Factory Workers: Hell, No, We Won’t Go: Republic Windows & Doors, union leaders and Bank of America reached an agreement that gives each laid off employee two month’ salary and paid healthcare, and all accrued vacation pay, reports The Associated Press. The settlement, which comes to roughly $7,000 per employee, will be paid out of an escrow account funded by a $1.75 million loan to the bankrupt company from Bank of America and a $400,000 pledge from JPMorgan Chase & Co. In a statement, Bank of America made it a point to emphasize that the bank was under no obligation to kick in the money: “Although we are a lender with no obligation to pay Republic's employees or make additional loans to Republic, we agreed to extend an additional loan to be used exclusively to pay its employees.”

Editorial Note: As far as The Stiletto can tell, aside from making a few sympathetic noises about the workers’ rights, Barack Obama took no action to help them. But here is AP’s lede; “With cheers and chants that echoed President-elect Barack Obama's campaign of change, jubilant workers agreed to a $1.75 million settlement that ends their six-day occupation of a shuttered Chicago factory.” So that’s the media’s game: Blame everything bad on Bush, attribute everything good to Obama.

† The Right To Bear Arms Belongs To Us All: Part II: Earlier this month, the Department of the Interior issued a proposed rule overturning a Reagan regulation (gee, it feels strange  typing “Reagan” and “regulation” together like that) that required firearms brought into national parks and wildlife refuges be kept unloaded and stowed out of reach. With the new rule, if state law allows loaded firearms in a park or refuge, someone with a concealed weapons permit will be able to keep a loaded gun at hand in such wilderness areas.

In response, The New York Times published an editorial titled, “We Don’t Feel Safer”:

Anticipating what Barack Obama has called “common-sense gun safety laws,” the Bush administration has rushed through a last-minute gun rule that is the antithesis of common sense. The Interior Department published a rule last week that will allow loaded, concealed weapons in nearly all of this country’s national parks. …

We hope that one of the incoming Obama administration’s first steps in bringing common sense to bear will be the reversal of this absurd and dangerous rule.

The Times doesn’t have the common sense to discern between absurd and dangerous. The sad fact is that national parks and wildlife refuges are no longer the idyllic and bucolic parcels of paradise that city slickers imagine them to be (if they ever were):

‡ Illegal immigrants connected to Mexico's drug cartels are growing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of marijuana in CA’s Sequoia National Forest, reports CNN. In August, “a federal, state and county law enforcement initiative called Operation LOCCUST has eradicated 420,000 marijuana plants here worth more than $1 billion on the street. …  Authorities have arrested 38 people and seized 29 automatic weapons, high-powered rifles and other guns.”

‡ The Christian Science Monitor reported on a Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility analysis that concluded, “National Park Service officers are 12 times more likely to be killed or injured as a result of an assault than FBI agents. National Park Service commissioned law-enforcement officers were victims of assaults 111 times in 2004, nearly a third of which resulted in injury. This figure tops the 2003 total of 106 assaults and the 2002 total of 98.” Some of the occupational hazards they face arise from drug cartels running hidden meth labs and marijuana farms, as well as from illegal aliens crossing through parklands near our border with Mexico.

‡ In 2006 - the year that Seattle mother and daughter Mary Cooper, 56, and Susanna Stodden, 27, were murdered on a trail in the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest – there was just one forest service law-enforcement officers per every 291,000 acres of U.S. forest service land and for every 733,000 visitors (the force totaled 660 officers nationwide), reports The Christian Science Monitor.

Need more proof of The Times’ wrongheadedness? Check out this Web site that tracks criminal activity and wild animal attacks in national parks (“Remember: When seconds count, the Park Rangers are just minutes or hours away”); these videos from the National Park Service documenting wild animal attacks; and this Wikipedia list of fatal bear attacks in North America. 

The Stiletto’s message to The Times’ Editorial Board: Her right to bear arms in no way impinges on your choice not to. So can it, and she just may be inclined to whip out her sidearm to save your arses from a bellicose bear or Mexican marijuana farmer.

FYI: According to The Associated Press, “The park rule will be published in the Federal Register … take effect 30 days later, well before Obama takes office Jan. 20. Overturning the rule could take months or even years, since it would require the new administration to restart the lengthy rule-making process.” Hooray for government bureaucracy! (It feels strange typing that, too.)

† Why We Need Gitmo (second item): The New York Times is dumbstruck (which explains the dumb editorial on guns in national parks) that some Americans - in particular, those whose loved ones were slaughtered by terrorists on September 11, 2001 - think the inmates detained at the Guantánamo Bay naval base are evil, not the facility or the military commission system put into place to bring jihadis to justice. The Times reports [emphasis, throughout, The Stiletto]:

After the detainees charged with the plotting of the Sept. 11 attacks discussed confessing this week, something unusual was heard here: a vigorous public defense of Guantánamo. …

The routine here has long included officials making their case for the detentions and trials at the Guantánamo naval base in muted bureaucratese about “fair and open” proceedings. They were outmatched by human rights groups and defense lawyers, with their inflammatory accusations about torture and secret evidence.

This week, the Pentagon brought victims’ families for the first time as observers. The half-dozen family members who spoke to reporters gave the Pentagon the counterpoint it had been lacking. [Editorial Note: Meaning, the rest of us get to hear another viewpoint than the one The Times has been relentlessly pushing.] …

This week, that meant the victims’ families were in the thick of an old debate, suddenly turbocharged. Some of them called for Mr. Obama to keep Guantánamo open. Others said the military tribunal here should be permitted to finish its work.

The unaccustomed rebuttal unsettled the Bush administration’s critics here. Defense lawyers and human rights monitors said the Pentagon was using the victims’ family members and had handpicked those invited. [Editorial Note: Libs will brook no challenge or dissent. That’s why it took seven years to get the other side of the story, and why they – and their fellow travelers in the MSM - handpick minor incidents and magnify them to support bogus claims of human rights abuses.] …

For the victims’ families it was their first chance at that last word. Jim Samuel of Brick, N.J., went to the courtroom here to see the men who proudly said they planned the World Trade Center attack. “My son was on the 92nd floor,” he said.

There were some things this week for which there was no rebuttal.

Americans understand why we need Gitmo, and if one were to craft a ballot initiative on which citizens in every state could vote, it would pass in a landslide. It's only irrelevant ex-presidents (second item) and the elites, particularly in academe and the media, who don't get it.

† Garbage In, Garbage Out: Part II: Results of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) show that the scores of 4^th- and 8^th-graders in the U.S. have essentially stagnated since 1995, while those of Singapore, Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong and other countries continue to improve, reports The Washington Post:

Students in Singapore, Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong outperformed U.S. fourth-graders in science. The U.S. students had an average score of 539 on a 1,000-point scale, higher than their peers in 25 countries.

In eighth grade, Singapore topped the list, with an average score of 567. Students in Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, England, Hungary and Russia were among those earning higher marks than their U.S. counterparts. The average score in the United States was 520. …

The TIMSS tests, administered every four years since 1995, were taken last year by a sampling of students in the United States and more than 50 other countries. In the United States, more than 20,000 students in nearly 500 public and private schools participated.

U.S. students made notable strides in math. Since 1995, the average score among fourth-graders has jumped 11 points, to 529. But students in Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, Russia and England were among those with a higher average. Hong Kong topped the list with an average score of 607.

Eighth-graders also had a higher average score than in 1995 and bested counterparts in 37 countries. But they lagged behind peers in Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan, among other places.

Any small gains in the math scores may be attributable to the 2002 federal No Child Left Behind law, which requires schools to administer annual math tests. All well and good, but what would help even more is public school teachers who actually knew the math they are being paid to teach their students.