Mission statements of government agencies rarely have such recognizable taglines as does the U.S,. Department of Education’s “No Child Left Behind.” But at what cost?

As an act and as a motto, the 2001 NCLB (or Nicklebee, inviting comparison to both the overearnest but flawed Dickens character Nicholas Nickleby and also to the Canadian VH-1 staple Nickelback) is widely viewed as a failure, underfunded and unsupported by its Bush Administration sponsors, and onerous to teachers, who feel the program teaches to a test and sets unfair expectations.

The Obama Administration seeks to revamp NCLB, even changing its name to reflect the Department of Education’s new “race to the top” strategy.

And what better way to slap the Nikelbackwash from our mouths than with an unlikely combination of The Five Stairsteps, Guns ‘n’ Roses, and Deep Purple?

What better way???

“Ooh Sweet Child o’ Mine Left Behind in Time” will still, Obama said on Saturday, “set a high bar — but we also provide educators the flexibility to reach it.”

The overhaul will shift focus from punishing poor schools to rewarding good ones.

“Under these guidelines, schools that achieve excellence or show real progress will be rewarded, and local districts will be encouraged to commit to change in schools that are clearly letting their students down,” Obama said, adding that the only child left behind in the new plan will be “that horrible Bush baby.”

People of a certain age remember their mothers telling them to finish what was on their plates in deference to “the China babies.”

The understanding being that China babies were starving and that my eating my creamed tuna on toast would mean that my mother would not be forced to add insult to their injury by sending them the uneaten, vomitous sludge.

“Seriously,” the China Babies’ Collective would say, “eating this will make us starve more.”

Anyway, search engine giant ^TM and King of Pop^TM Google appears to be more and more ready to leave China behind, due to its failure to convince that country not to censor Internet searches.

“We’re pulling out of China,” Google said, “and, just in case you were wondering, that does not mean we’re going to push back into it an hour later. We don’t even get that joke, to be honest.”

Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology officer Li Yizhong warned the Mountain View company that it will face consequences if it fails to obey Chinese laws.

Rather than play by China’s rules, Google will likely shutter Google.cn within the next few weeks.

A spokesman for Chinese search engine Baidu, whose stock has risen sharply due to expectations of Google’s imminent departure, said “things are gonna get easier.”

See also: Nickelback, Guns ‘n’ Roses, The Five Stairsteps, Deep Purple, Google, U.S. Department of Education

President Barack Obama is walking a tightrope in his choice to meet with exiled Tibetan leader the Dalai Lama without offending China, those exiling superstars. No matter what the president decides, however, this week’s scheduled meeting or non-meeting is sure to infuriate someone.

“If Obama meets the Lama, we will be infuriated,” said all of China.

“I will be infuriated if Obama does not meet the Dalai Lama,” said Richard Gere.

The solution? Obama and the Lama will meet in private. That way no one will know.

All this anger about such a tranquil, mountain-dwelling man.

I asked the Dalai Lama if he, too, was seething with rage.

“It is for the cosmos to decide if I meet the President or not,” the serene 14th manifestation of the Bodhisattva of Compassion said. “But if I don’t get these sandals off I’m'a stab a bitch.”

The white-hot fury surrounding the Dalai Lama has traveled via underground rivers of electricity and plate tectonics to Vancouver, where warm intermittent rains have postponed several scheduled events of the 2010 Winter Olympics.

“Were Obama to but share a beer in the Rose Garden with His Holiness and (Chinese President) Hu Jintao, the Glorious Snows would again come, and the Celestial Ice Weasel would drag my sleigh in its Cavernous Mouth,” said Tibetan bobsled captain Proprang Bligginterpin.

Over in Greece, the country’s staggering deficit – 12.7 percent of its economy – reminds us that those unwilling to remember history are doomed to repeat it. In this case, the history is that of sacrificed ram-god Poseidon’s tot, the one bearig the Golden Fleece.

Athens is fleecing Greece of its future, in much the same way that Jason fleeced curly Phrixus of the fleece back in, like, 1972. Phrixus, son of Athamas, stepson of the jealous Ino, and brother of the doomed, drowned Helle, for some reason thought that sacrificing the golden ram to Poseidon was a great idea.

Don’t get me wrong: popular lord Jehovah once told Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, to prove his loyalty to the deity, but that was G-d doing the asking. Why Phrixus thought that stabbing the ram and then bringing the limp body to its own dad, Poseidon, as a gift, well, just makes me not understand Greek even more.

That said, it is clear that modern Greece’s financial problems are directly related to its ancient inability to choose the right gift for a god, thus Obama must behave prudently in his treatment of His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama, or Athamas’s ousted wife, Nephele, will bring drought to Vancouver.

See also: Vancouver 2010, Jason and the Golden Fleece, Barack Obama to meet Dalai Lama at White House in private , Eurozone tells Greece to ready new cuts, taxes

In school we were told to not be Indian givers. This term is now offensive, in the same way that “cotton-picking,” “Druid-baiting,” and “Krautsploding” are now offensive. But back then, on the rez, we all laughed.

Toyota has recalled more than Ronald Reagan could, and soon will have taken back so many cars that it will demand the 1998-2001 series of Ford Explorers to feed the monkey.

“You get a taste for it,” one Toyota exec didn’t tell me.

At issue is the unintended acceleration or overintended but ultimately fruitless deceleration of Toyota products, including the Prius. Many stateside Toyota dealers are staying open 24 hours to deal with the recalls, which have provided an unintentional acceleration to the sales pitches of Toyota’s competitors.

My favorite: This Dodge Charger crashes when you want it to.

But, unlike that embankment, the moon is not a place Americans will be visiting anytime soon. At least with federal funding.

President Obama’s 2010 budget cuts the cash for NASA’s Ares I booster and its Orion capsule, and scuttles the Constellation program, already $9 billion into its mission to replace the Space Shuttle.

The plan does call for a commercial taxi service to the moon, the International Space Station (ISS), and points beyond, but Boy are people scratching their heads about what happened to the audacity of hope. Who knew that moon was a four-letter word? It’s even a four-letter word in Spanish, but that’s understandable.

Antonio Banderas has never been to the moon.

“We believe that NASA can inspire Americans and lead to scientific advances,” said Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszag, pointing out NASA’s new Try Reaching Laterally for Now program with troubled teens in the Kissimmee/St. Cloud area.

In Washington, we sit in the snowbank, front wheels spinning lazily, and stare at the moon. The tow truck will not be here for a while. Our 2005-2010 Avalon slides in and out of view of three lanes of oncoming traffic here on the inner loop, and we recall the final resting place of King Arthur, that other presence-challenged Avalon. So that’s what happened to the Hyundai Brigadoon.

See also: Toyota Recall info; White House briefing on Constellation program; DC Snowmageddon; Avalon in HTML history

If Obama doesn’t act now, people will say “blackberry” when they mean “phone.” And by the time the tech hysteria has abated, ice will once again cover the Earth.

First there was Timothy Geithner who, as Obama’s nominee for Secretary of the Treasury, hit bumps in the confirmation process when mistakes were found on his income taxes. The problem? Geithner said he didn’t understand Intuit’s TurboTax software. (Geithner was confirmed, but to have let Health And Human Services nominee Tom Daschle and “Chief Performance Officer” designate Nancy Killefer dodge the tax bullet, too, would have been like repeating the same joke at a party.)

Then there was the proposed delay in recovering the nation’s precious analog spectrum. Didn’t you have plans for your share of the spectrum? I did.

But now Obama is in danger of shepherding into the language a term that can only help Research in Motion.

Candidate Obama was rarely scene without his Blackberry smartphone during his 17-month campaign, but the Blackberry’s encryption limitations concerned the Secret Service and NSA, who at first gently requested he give up the phone so 14-year-old Malaysian hackers couldn’t read his e-mail.

“They’re going to pry it out of my hands,” Obama actually said to CNBC, which seemed about as cavalier as Bush’s “Bring it on” remark.

But the Secret Service and National Security Agency have found a way to allow a first smartphone to live in the White House. The issue is that it can’t possibly be a Blackberry.

The Blackberry does not support the type of security that would be required for the president’s top secret correspondence. While it runs its own operating system, the Blackberry is only capable of handling For Official Use Only (FOUO) data, nothing classified, and only uses Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) encryption, which is easily hackable (though I couldn’t do it).

So Mr. Obama will probably use the clunky but secure Sectera Edge from General Dynamics, currently in use by the military and paranoiacs worldwide, and certified by the NSA.

Unfortunately, “Blackberry” has been bandied about so much in the media that the word is in danger of becoming synonymous with “smartphone” and “phone” the way generic flying discs are all brand-name Friebees, colas are “Cokes,” and performing WWW searches has become googling, with a small “g.”

It is up to the Big G himself to not refer to his Sectera Edge as his “blackberry,” if for no other reason that that’s a couple of short hops to “nucular.”