Vocal Minority

Listen & Learn: El Rushbo Says the Era of Reagan Will—And Must—Never Be Over

After playing a couple clips from Ronald Reagan’s aforementioned 1964 speech, Rush explains that Reagan’s message is timeless and necessary because it is the message of our founding. In the second half of the clip Rush explains how prophetic Reagan was. While doing so he reads Thomas Sowell's latest article, "Dismantling America," which reads in part:

Just one year ago, would you have believed that an unelected government official, not even a Cabinet member confirmed by the Senate but simply one of the many “czars” appointed by the President, could arbitrarily cut the pay of executives in private businesses by 50 percent or 90 percent?

Did you think that another “czar” would be talking about restricting talk radio? That there would be plans afloat to subsidize newspapers — that is, to create a situation where some newspapers’ survival would depend on the government liking what they publish?

Did you imagine that anyone would even be talking about having a panel of so-called “experts” deciding who could and could not get life-saving medical treatments?

Scary as that is from a medical standpoint, it is also chilling from the standpoint of freedom. If you have a mother who needs a heart operation or a child with some dire medical condition, how free would you feel to speak out against an administration that has the power to make life and death decisions about your loved ones?

Does any of this sound like America?

How about a federal agency giving school children material to enlist them on the side of the president? Merely being assigned to sing his praises in class is apparently not enough.

How much of America would be left if the federal government continued on this path? President Obama has already floated the idea of a national police force, something we have done without for more than two centuries.

Among the people appointed as czars by President Obama have been people who have praised enemy dictators like Mao, who have seen the public schools as places to promote sexual practices contrary to the values of most Americans, to a captive audience of children.

Those who say that the Obama administration should have investigated those people more thoroughly before appointing them are missing the point completely. Why should we assume that Barack Obama didn’t know what such people were like, when he has been associating with precisely these kinds of people for decades before he reached the White House?

Nothing is more consistent with his lifelong patterns than putting such people in government — people who reject American values, resent Americans in general and successful Americans in particular, as well as resenting America’s influence in the world.

Any miscalculation on his part would be in not thinking that others would discover what these stealth appointees were like. Had it not been for the Fox News Channel, these stealth appointees might have remained unexposed for what they are. Fox News is now high on the administration’s enemies list.

Nothing so epitomizes President Obama’s own contempt for American values and traditions like trying to ram two bills through Congress in his first year — each bill more than a thousand pages long — too fast for either of them to be read, much less discussed. That he succeeded only the first time says that some people are starting to wake up. Whether enough people will wake up in time to keep America from being dismantled, piece by piece, is another question — and the biggest question for this generation.

Like I said yesterday, how prescient Reagan was, even during his presidency in the 80’s.

Rush2009-10-28

End the Occupation: Chicago H.S. Has 115 Pregnant Girls (Obama Must Be Proud)

Here’s the feel-good story of the day (NOT) [h/t Drudge]:

Oct 15, 2009
Why Are 1 Of 8 Girls Pregnant At Robeson High?
Officials Say A Mix Of Factors Are To Blame, As They Try To Help The Young Women

It is a Chicago public school full of energy and spirit. It has about 800 girls, and 115 of them have something in common – something you might find disturbing.

“Might”? “Might”?????

CBS 2’s Kristyn Hartman reports.

All those young ladies are moms or moms-to-be at Paul Robeson High School. It’s not a school for young mothers, it’s a neighborhood school. And all of the pregnancies have happened, despite prevention talk.

If you want to know why, the people closest to the situation say there’s no simple explanation.

You have got to be kidding me.

Chicago Public Schools says it does not track the overall number of teen moms in the district. But Robeson Principal Gerald Morrow knows the count at his school in Englewood: 115 young ladies who are expecting.

To put it in perspective, their school pictures would fill roughly six pages of their high school year book.

Why is it happening at Robeson?

“It can be a lot of things that are happening in the home or not happening in the home, if you will,” Morrow said. Absentee fathers are another factor, he said.

LaDonna Denson and two other Robeson students say parents not talking to teens and, in some cases, the pursuit of public assistance also factor into the pregnancies. None of them thought they’d be moms at such a young age.

The pursuit of public assistance? What does that mean? That the girls were getting pregnant deliberately in order to get welfare checks? The article doesn’t specify.

They said they have support at home. But not all girls do, they said. In fact, some girls get thrown out of the home.

Not on Morrow’s turf. “We’re not looking at them like ‘Ooh you made a mistake,’” he said. “We’re looking at how we can get them to the next phase, how can we still get them thinking about graduation?”

This is a false choice; they’re not mutually exclusive. You can still deal with “thinking about graduation” but still get the message across that someone made a big freaking mistake. One hundred and fifteen of them. I’m not saying the babies are a mistake, like a certain president did, but the getting pregnant was.

So there’s help in a teen parent program. And coming soon, right across from Robeson, developers are turning a one-time crack house into a day care for student use. “We have to provide some type of environment for them and some form of support for them,” Van Vincent, CEO of VLV Development, said.

And let me guess: It’s gonna all paid for by taxpayers—those who actually strived to make the right choices in their lives.

It’s all made an impression.

“Just cause you have a baby, that doesn’t mean your life is over,” one student said.

I get the feeling you don’t need a government-run program to instill that mentality. It seems to be well-ingrained already.

One thing they might not know about their principal: His mom had him when she was 15. That’s why accepting the problem—and working through it—is so important to him.

Then shouldn’t Morrow of all people should know how hard it is being raised by an unwed teen mother? This pathetic excuse for a role model should have been fostering an environment in which girls getting themselves into that same situation is to be avoided at all costs! Especially given that many of these teens’ parents don’t talk to them as stated above. And he should have let the schoolboys (if any of them are the fathers) that if they’re going to get a girl pregnant, they better be ready to take responsibility, which his own biological father presumably did not?

I’m sorry, but 115 pregnant girls at a single high school isn’t a “problem” to “work through”. It’s a freaking epidemic, a peer-accepted party that anyone who spreads their legs without caution can join. It’s a shameful travesty, and an absolute failure of responsible parenting and responsible educating. In other words, it’s the fruits of modern-day morally corrupt liberalism in all its glory.

Even the author of the article Ms. Hartman so blatantly avoids being moralistic. There's no one to be held responsible for these mistakes; there are simply “factors” and “problems” to work through.

How do the people who cackle like hyenas that “Abstinence doesn’t work!” reckon with this situation. These girls weren’t taught abstinence education. They were taught liberal government school sanctioned we’re-not-here-to-judge-you, condoms-on-bananas sex education. The type of education Chicagoan “educator” William Ayres would most certainly heartily endorse.

Call me an old fuddy duddy prude, but the reason this happened is not hard to explain. It’s is the consequence of liberal ideology of no responsibility, no judgment, no moral abolutes, no consequences, coupled with the Democrat policy of “Government’s your daddy now.” It’s the the big fat elephant in the room.

Did you notice most, if not all, of the students are minorities? Forty, fifty, sixty years ago the black and Hispanic communities would not have accepted such boosts in unwed pregnancy rates. This isn’t a minority issue. This is a liberal/Democrat issue.

Paul Robeson would have been so proud. Dr. Chicago, a.k.a. President Barack Obama, should be proud too.

I know, I know. We’re supposed to be compassionate and caring and tolerant. Yeah, while responsible human beings with an inkling of moral character and personal responsibility fork over hard-earned money to subsidize the behavior of irresponsible Democrat-brainwashed people who squeeze out irresponsible Democrat-brainwashed babies, who in 15 years will squeeze out more irresponsible Democrat-brainwashed babies.

Sorry, call me an intolerant closed-minded conservative. When I hear stories like this, I start to get pretty damn low on compassion and open-mindedness.

In fact, one can argue that “compassion” and “open-mindedness” is what created this cesspool to begin with.

P.S. All right, I guess I can give these girls props for at least not aborting their babies. (But then again, it makes one wonder how many girls in addition to the 115 were once pregnant and did get abortions ...)

End the occupation! Liberals out of the schools NOW!

End the Occupation! At St. Louis U., Radical Leftist Speakers OK, But Not Conservative Horowitz

Here we have yet another example of how our universities have become bastions of closed-mindedness that suppresses all speech that doesn’t espouse politically correct left-wing ideology. Although St. Louis University has had no problem bringing in speakers like radical anti-Israel self-hating Jew Norman Finkelstein in the past, SLU was forced to cancel an appearance by lefty-turned-conservative David Horowitz because he has the audacity to address uncomfortable questions about Islam. Robert Cravatts at Front Page Mag has this story:

As yet more evidence that American campuses have become, in Abigail Thernstrom’s apt description, “islands of repression in a sea of freedom,” St. Louis University has demonstrated that that free speech on campuses begins and ends according to how well that speech conforms to existing political orthodoxies. The University’s College Republicans and Young America’s Foundation had invited conservative author David Horowitz to deliver a speech entitled, “An Evening with David Horowitz: Islamo-Fascism Awareness and Civil Rights,” and university administrators, once again choosing to avoid a close examination of radical Islam, cancelled Horowitz’s planned appearance.

What St. Louis University’s administration has done here is essentially to exercise the “heckler’s veto,” shutting down speech with which it does not agree, or which is feels is too controversial for certain protected minorities on campus; but ominously, and in seeming contradiction to the school’s own stated policy “to promote the free and open exchange of ideas and viewpoints, even if that exchange proves to be offensive, distasteful, disturbing or denigrating to some,” this particular speech was suppressed in advance of the event, based on a belief that the speaker’s words would possibly insult Muslim students and inflame their sensibilities.

And we certainly wouldn’t want to do that, would we—inflame the sensibilities of adherents to the “religion of peace.” Only in the topsy-turvy world of PC-poisoned liberalism could this make sense.

But remember: It’s the right that’s intolerant and closed-minded. Whatever.

End the occupation! Liberals out of the schools NOW!

Liberal Hypocrisy: Paul Krugman Accuses GOP of Unprincipled Spiteful Opposition to Obama

Rarely does such an example appear that so brilliantly illustrates why Projection is one of the two official defense mechanisms of the Democrat Party (the other is Denial). The other day, NY Times editorialist (and, somehow, Economics Nobel Prize laureate) penned a piece accusing Republicans of automatically opposing any policy, action, or statement made by President Obama simply out of spite. He even suggested they do so even at the expense of the good of the country. The piece starts:

The Politics of Spite
October 5, 2009

If Republicans think something might be good for the president, they’re against it whether or not it’s good for America.

I almost fell out of my chair. Is this rich or is this rich?

First, let’s tackle the problem that exists in the present tense: Barack Obama’s policies—economic and otherwise—are disastrous for this republic on every historical and empirical scale. Only in the liberal bubble in which knee-jerk Marxist-socialists like Paul Krugman reside could such a blatant fact be so elusive. And only in such a liberal bubble could Krugman see Republicans’ opposition to Obama’s policy as playing politics. If Krugman sees nothing principled in Republican opposition to Obama’s economic plans, maybe he should return that Nobel Prize in economics.

But now let’s leave the present tense and analyze Krugman fourth-dimensionally. Here’s a liberal Democrat New York Times writer accusing Republicans of opposing the president simply because he’s from the other party. Only someone who has lived on a deserted island from 2000 to the present would not be aware that this is exactly what Democrats did to George W. Bush.

Legitimacy of Bush’s election: Liberals/Democrats rejected just because it was Bush.

Tax cuts: Liberals/Democrats opposed just because it was Bush.

Social Security reform: Liberals/Democrats opposed just because it was Bush.

Initial response to 9/11: When they weren’t milking the My Pet Goat angle, Liberals/Democrats supported Bush for about a week, when the country was united and he was getting like a 90% approval rating. But the second it became politically expedient, Liberals/Democrats opposed just because it was Bush.

War in Afghanistan: Liberals/Democrats opposed just because it was Bush. Yes, there were those who claimed to support Afghanistan, insisting it was necessary and legitimate but Iraq distracted us from it have now been exposed as liars. This includes Obama himself, who has shown virtually no interest in Afghanistan, even as troops are being killed at a rate higher than any time since the U.S. went in there in 2001. The lib media? Couldn’t care less about Iraq, Afghanistan, or dead troops.

War in Iraq: Need I even say it?

Patriot Act: Liberals/Democrats opposed just because it was Bush.

No Child Left Behind: Liberals/Democrats opposed just because it was Bush, except for Ted Kennedy who worked with him on it. On all other issues, Kennedy was front and center in bashing Bush. (Even righties were against NCLB; it was just a bad, albeit well-intentioned, piece of legislation.)

Spiteful opposition of Bush at the expense of the security and prosperity of the country: Hmm, let’s see …

• leaking classified information on the front page of the NY Times on several occasions
• propping up anyone who would undermine the war effort, from Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame to Cindy Sheehan and Michael Moore to every author (even former administration members) who penned an anti-Bush book
• focusing on every military setback and “scandal” (e.g., Abu Ghraib, Club G’tmo, Haditha) and ignoring/dismissing/mocking every advancement (e.g., capture and ultimate execution of Saddam Hussein, several Iraqi elections)
• calling Bush (and Cheney) a liar who either planned or allowed 9/11 to happen in order to invade Iraq for a number of nefarious reasons
• bashing the troops, calling them stupid, uneducated, and even cold-blooded murderers

And so forth and so on.

Maybe someone can make the case Paul Krugman just wasn’t following what was going on during the Bush years and simply didn’t know that if George W. Bush said it, libs/Dems refuted it; if Bush proposed it, libs/Dems opposed it; if Bush believed it, libs/Dems rejected it.

But that case would not hold water. Because obviously Krugman knew about the Bash Bush at Any Cost contingent; he was part it. Consider these editorials:

Reckonings; Jerking The Other Knee   January 21, 2001
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column sees incoming Bush administration reflecting knee-jerk conservatism …

Reckonings; Et Tu, Alan?   January 28, 2001
Op-Ed column by Paul Krugman says Alan Greenspan’s most recent testimony before Senate Budget Committee was evasive and often inconsistent; says Greenspan was out of bounds when he voiced his favor for tax cuts over spending increases; says it is not Federal Reserve’s business to support tax cut over spending for government program; says it is disburbing that man who is usually clear thinker tied himself in intellectual knots to find way to say exactly what Pres Bush wants to hear.

Reckonings; Smog and Mirrors   January 31, 2001
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column contends that Pres Bush is trying to dispel doubts about his legitimacy when he blames pollution controls for California energy crisis and uses crisis to argue for opening Arctic tundra to oil drilling; asserts that that by winning series of striking victories against moderates Bush hopes he can create an ‘illusion of a mandate’ that the election did not give him.

Reckonings; Guns And Bitterness   February 4, 2001
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column says Pres Bush is betraying campaign promises on Medicare and military spending in name of tax cuts; recalls that military personnel overwhelmingly supported Bush, believing they had understanding that he would quickly expand defense spending; adds that Bush administration refuses to rule out raiding Medicare funds to support tax cut

Reckonings; Bums and Rushes   February 7, 2001
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column on Pres Bush’s call for immediate, even retroactive, tax cuts as ‘bum’s rush’ that would run skeptics out of town before they can make their case; warns of tactic that Bush’s people clearly like, as when they use California’s electricity crisis to ‘hustle through’ weakening of environmental protections

Reckonings; Slicing The Salami   February 11, 2001
Paul Krugman column explains that selling of Pres Bush’s tax cut relies heavily on ‘salami’ tactic of slicing away opposition bit at a time; analyzes ‘whole salami’ of three basic federal taxes on individuals

Reckonings; Doing the Wrong Thing   February 14, 2001
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column scores Federal Reserve Chmn Alan Greenspan’s failure to try to curb tax-cutting frenzy he helped inspire

Reckonings; Fowl Play   February 21, 2001
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column suggests that George W Bush, who likes to bestow nicknames, call himself Chicken Little, for running around saying ‘The sky is falling! Hurry up and pass my tax cut!’; points out that economic data do not support such gloomy views, except for consumer confidence, which seems to be plunging in direct relation to dire headlines

Reckonings; Debt and Taxes   February 28, 2001
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column says Pres George W Bush’s tax cut is irresponsible; says federal government is running large budget surpluses right now, but most of that comes from Social Security and Medicare, which must run surpluses now, while baby boomers are still paying into them, if we are to avoid either sharp tax increase or sharp benefits cuts when boomers retire; says Bush’s proposal to divert part of Social Security taxes into new personal acccounts for younger workers would further reduc...

Reckonings; Bashing the Boomers   March 7, 2001
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column says middle-income baby boomers will be among victims of Pres George W Bush’s budget and tax plan since he intends to ‘raid’ the funds that were supposed to support boomers’ retirement; says Social Security and Medicare were expected to accumulate almost $3 trillion in reserves over next decade, and Bush proposes to divert about $1 trillion into other uses; holds that without those reserves, Medicare will be in trouble in next decade and Social Security a bit later, bu...

Reckonings; The Money Pit   March 18, 2001
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column warns that Pres Bush’s so-called trillion-dollar tax cut is more likely to cost a lot more, and is likely to become a $2.5 trillion tax cut; holds estimates have exploded because original estimates were dishonest

Reckonings; The Hostage Economy   March 28, 2001
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column says George W Bush’s tax cut plan is virtually useless as short-run economic stimulus; says plan delays big tax cut far into future, putting hardly any money into hands of consumers this year and not much next year; says better approach is to implement one of short-term stimulus plans proposed by Democrats, and hope that Bush’s strategy of using slowdown to press Congress into passing tax cut mainly benefiting the rich will miss its window of opportunity

Reckonings; The Levitating Dollar   April 1, 2001
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column discusses why United States dollar is still rising, even as everthing else about American economy is down lately: manufacturing, production, overall growth, and stocks

Reckonings; The Class Warrior   April 4, 2001
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column scores Pres Bush’s push to pass his tax cut quickly with minimal discussion; holds plan is even more tilted toward rich than previously thought because estate tax repeal would make it easier for rich to avoid income taxes

Reckonings; Two Untrue Things   April 8, 2001
Paul Krugman column says it is not enough to scale down Pres Bush’s tax plan because it is contrary to interests of great majority of Americans and has been sold under utterly false pretenses; rejects claim that there is enough money for cuts, and that cut is for ordinary families

Reckonings; Muddled in the Middle   April 11, 2001
Paul W Krugman Op-Ed column wonders what the heartland was thinking when it voted for George W Bush, who failed to tell them that promises to cut taxes and spending meant tax cuts for the urban elite and less money for farmers; points out that Bush’s budget punishes very people whose votes, as opposed to campaign contributions, put him in power; cites Montana, which is bigger recipient of federal money than New Jersey, and notes that nobody has found example of ‘family farm’ that actually has t...

Reckonings; The Farce Is With Us   May 6, 2001
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column says two pages missing from House budget resolution only begin to suggest full dishonesty of Republican leadership as it pushes through huge tax cut before anyone has chance to look at details

Reckonings; The Unrefined Truth   May 9, 2001
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column disputes Vice Pres Dick Cheney’s intimation that high gas prices are result of shortage for which environmentalists are largely responsible; says conservation should be major element in our energy strategy, and that lack of conservation is large part of what we have been doing wrong; holds this year’s gasoline price spike has nothing to do with a shortage of crude oil and binding constraint right now is nation’s limited capacity to refine crude oil into gasoline; says ...

Reckonings; The Universal Elixir   May 16, 2001
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column examines campaign by Bush administration to sell huge tax-cut package; provides facetious schedule of progress of tax cut legislation in next few months

Reckonings; Burn, Baby, Burn   May 20, 2001
Who knew that Dick Cheney had such a sense of humor? He had us rolling in the aisles after the famous put-down in which he dismissed energy conservation as nothing more than a ‘‘sign of personal virtue.’’ But the joke got much better Thursday, with the release of the administration’s energy plan. Just for laughs, Mr. Cheney threw in a few mock conservation measures. Topping the list was a tax credit for -- get this -- people who purchase hybrid gas-electric cars.

Reckonings; The Big Lie   May 27, 2001
Paul Krugman column wonders whether new Democratic control of Senate will really make difference in efforts to fend off Pres Bush’s huge tax cut

Reckonings; Bad Heir Day   May 30, 2001
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column says tax legislation passed by Congress and signed by Pres Bush is absurd, noting that one provision on estate taxes would create great temptation to kill off one’s parents before Jan 1, 2011, to save half one’s inheritance; says there are other ‘weird’ and ‘bizarre’ elements in tax plan, especially some provisions that are deferred well into the future; says that someday, responsible politicians will have to ‘untangle this mess’

Reckonings; Red Tide Rising   July 6, 2001
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column says Senate moderates who voted for Bush administration tax cut were snookered into thinking that budget surpluses would continue; says nation will spend years paying for consequences of their gullibility; notes that only after Bush signed tax cut into law did White House officials admit that budget outlook is not rosy after all; says Congressional Budget Office’s projections next month will certainly mark revenues down; says from now on, prospect is for chronic budget...

Reckonings; Outside the Box   July 11, 2001
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column recalls Pres Bush’s solemn pledge that tax cuts would not be at expense of Social Security money, which would be kept in ‘lockbox’; reports that Bush takes some of his promises more seriously than others, pushing through big tax cuts for the rich and then discovering that lockbox is silly idea; quotes Mitch Daniels, director of Office of Management and Budget, saying, ‘box has nothing but promissory notes in it’

Reckonings; 2016 And All That   July 22, 2001
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column on draft report by commission on Social Security reform, appointed by Pres Bush; holds report is ‘sheer, mean-spirited nonsense’; deplores commission’s attempt to sow panic

Reckonings; Sins of Commission   July 25, 2001
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column scorns Pres Bush’s hand-picked commission for its ‘doublethink’ proposals on Social Security and for trying to have it both ways on how Social Security contribution dollars are used, or not used, by general treasury; debunks commission’s reasoning on trust fund

Reckonings; Rebate and Switch   July 29, 2001
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column mocks White House economist Lawrence Lindsey’s defense of Bush administration’s tax rebates

Reckonings; Feeling OPEC’s Pain   August 5, 2001
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column on Pres Bush’s expressions of sympathy for OPEC’s cause; suggests that his heart belongs to people, of whatever nationality, who sell oil

Reckonings; Nothing For Something   August 8, 2001
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column contends that Bush administration is not interested in realistic proposal for privatizing Social Security but intends to promote private accounts with false advertising and promise of something for nothing; says administration is equally uninterested in realistic assessment of current Social Security system, and instead will attempt to convince people that huge surpluses of today somehow make no contribution to system’s future solvency

Reckonings; Delusions of Prosperity   August 14, 2001
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column on outlook for US economy; says excessive confidence may be part of problem causing current economic slowdown; says instead of being victims of self-fulfilling pessimism, we may be suffering from self-defeating optimism; says driving force in slowdown is plunge in business investment and that recovery will take more than simply trying to restore confidence

Reckonings; Enron Goes Overboard   August 17, 2001
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column on Enron Corp’s failed effort to become broker for wholesale electricity as deregulation spreadsd across United States; says state and local governments, alerted by what happened in California, are now wary of electricity deregulation, leaving fewer oportunities for Enron; notes that Bush administration’s faith in absolutely unregulated markets is unshaken in spite of debacle in California when it deregulated its electricity market

Reckonings; Fabricating A Crisis   August 21, 2001
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column accuses Bush administration of fabricating crisis over Social Security reform by building on notion that system must be destroyed in order to save it; says only serious threat to Social Security comes from those want to panic Americans into junking system, when all it needs are minor repairs

Reckonings; Pants On Fire   August 24, 2001
Op-Ed column by Paul Krugman, in form of open letter to Mitch Daniels of Office of Management and Budget; says Daniels’ claim that budget surplus has vanished because of Congressional big spending is bogus; notes that International Monetary Fund’s recent report points out that Pres Bush’s $1.35 trillion tax cut will actually cost at least $2.5 trillion; says fact is that money that was supposed to be accumulated to pay retirement benefits will be used instead to provide big tax cuts to very, ve...

Reckonings; That Sinking Feeling   August 26, 2001
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column scores likelihood that Bush administration will raid Social Security surplus; fears any temporary raid on surplus would become permanent

Reckonings; Truth And Lies   August 28, 2001
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column says Pres Bush broke promise not to raid Social Security surplus to finance government programs; charges that Bush continues to lie about effect of ‘ill-advised’ $1.6 billion tax cut in negating budget surplus

Reckonings; Hold Him To It   September 9, 2001
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column says Pres Bush must be held to his promises to protect Social Security surplus

Reckonings; Paying the Price   September 16, 2001
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column says terrorist attacks on New York and Washington are partly self-inflicted because nation has not been willing to pay price of protecting itself, particularly at its airports; says spirit of the times was against anything that looked like increase in government spending unless it was explicitly military

Reckonings; What to Do   September 19, 2001
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column says best way to help US economy survive terrorist attacks is not with tax cut, but with large, temporary increase in government spending

Reckonings; A Bad Week   September 23, 2001
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column assesses economic consequences of terrorist attacks on America; holds it up to government to ensure that America’s sorrow and nervousness do not turn into economic disaster; urges acceleration of flow of government spending into economy

Reckonings; Not a Fuels Errand   September 26, 2001
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column reports that as Sept 11 shock fades some old refrains are being heard, from left and right, about ‘war for oil’; explains that oil is part of background to terrorist attacks, via Osama bin Laden’s hatred of US forces in Saudi Arabia; says there is no way for now to escape awkward realitiy that Mideast oil reserves are crucial to world economy

Reckonings; The Hitchhiker Syndrome   September 30, 2001
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column on political phenomenon of the ‘hitchhikers,’ people who want to use patriotic bandwagon spurred by terrorist attacks as vehicle to promote their favorite economic and tax policy proposals; contends most vocal hitchhikers are conservative pundits; finds that Bush administration has been pretty good at rejecting hitchhiker strategy

Reckonings; The Public Interest   October 10, 2001
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column scorns conservative resistance to federalizing airport security to protect Americans from terrorists; observes that Bush administration, after flirting with moderation in weeks following Sept 11 attack, seems to have returned to its conviction that hard right, which is relentless and bears grudges, must be deferred to even in times of national crisis

Reckonings; Ban the Bonds   October 24, 2001
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column opposes creation of new class of war bonds to support nation’s war on terrorism as well as corporate tax cuts being pushed by House Republicans with blessing of Pres Bush

Reckonings; The One-Eyed Man   October 31, 2001
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column notes House-approved bill to repeal alternative minimum tax would give big refunds to medium-sized companies in energy and mining businesses that tend to be based in or near Texas; cites overlap between these companies and companies that would have gotten large subsidies under Vice Pres Dick Cheney’s energy plan; notes most made large, one-sided donations to Republican Party in last election; cites error in his Oct 24 column on war bonds

Reckonings; Making Windows Transparent   November 4, 2001
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column cites difficulty of finding good solutions to Microsoft Corp’s antitrust violations; holds proposed settlement with Justice Department might do some good

Reckonings; A Cross of Dollars   November 7, 2001
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column on Argentina’s looming economic catastrophe blames old-time economic religion, with narrow-minded insistence on monetary rectitude at expense of every other consideration; explains that since last spring conservative economists have urged Argentina to preserve its dollar peg and default on old debt instead, which is what is happening now; hopes Argentina will not sacrifice economy and credit rating on altar of discredited monetary theology

Reckonings; Another Useful Crisis   November 11, 2001
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column assesses Senate Republicans’ economic stimulus package, backed by Bush administration; holds bill offers little stimulus, and is mainly designed to lock in permament tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy

Reckonings; Other People’s Money   November 14, 2001
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column says budgetary cost of war on terrorism, abroad and at home, is relatively small change, probably less than $200 billion; says much of projected $2.7 trillion Social Security surplus was gone before Sept 11, swallowed by Pres Bush’s tax cut last spring, and administration’s allies in Congress are now striving energetically to give away the rest in tax breaks for big corporations and wealthy individuals, thinking they can get away with it by blaming terrorism for future...

Reckonings; The 55-Cent Solution   November 21, 2001
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column scores Pres Bush for backing plan that would give New York only $11 billion of $20 billion in aid promised after Sept 11 terrorist attacks; questions why planned aid cut has gotten little attention; urges New Yorkers to express outrage

Reckonings; An Alternate Reality   November 25, 2001
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column says television news always shows Americans behaving well in wake of terrorist attacks, but some Web sites and business sections of quality newspapers reveal a different picture: Congress voting billions in ‘lump-sum transfers’ to airlines but not a penny for laid-off airline workers, House ‘stimulus’ package that contains almost nothing for the unemployed but $25 billion in retroactive corporate tax cuts and Bush administration pressing for opening of public lands to ...

Hitting The Trifecta   December 7, 2001
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column likens Pres Bush’s tax and budget plans to Enron, company that used cooked numbers to justify big giveaways at top and then let ordinary workers pay the price; recalls how Bush used projections of vast budget surpluses to push through huge tax cut earlier in year, and now tells us, through budget director Mitch Daniels, that entire budget, not just portion outside Social Security, will be in deficit through 2004

Eleven And Counting   December 14, 2001
Paul Krugman Op-Ed article says Federal Reserve has cut interest rates 11 times this year, and has yet to see results; says Fed chairman Alan Greenspan is partly to blame for this; says sudden return of federal deficits have had impact on long-term interest rates, and it was Greenspan who testified before Congress in January on behalf of large tax cuts; says Greenspan should concede that he gave Congress bad advice

A No-Win Outcome   December 21, 2001
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column on why economic stimulus package failed in Congress; compares original version of bill with later one to prove that Republicans did not ‘give a lot’ to get bill passed, as they claim; says question American people should ask is why Bush administration, given deadlock in Congress, did not push for minimalist package that would have been better than no deal at all; says such a package would not have lived up to hopes of administration strategists, who thought they could ...

The Scrooge Syndrome   December 25, 2001
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column says United States has become Scrooge of Western world, least generous rich nation on planet; notes that Americans typically come up with 10 percent as appropriate amount of federal budget that should be devoted to foreign aid, about 20 times what US currently spends; says government should put its weight, and its dollars, behind World Health Organization proposal to provide basic services and medicines to world’s poor, plan that would save millions of lives each year ...

Could’ve Been Worse   December 28, 2001
Paul Krugman column reviewing economic policy in United States and abroad holds 2001 could have been worse; notes United States economy, while falling into recession, did not fall off cliff; hails farcial end to commission that was supposed to offer detailed plan to privatize Social Security

America The Polarized   January 4, 2002
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column says economic polarization--the sharply widening inequality of income and wealth--is most likely source of political polarization, prompting Republicans, but not Democrats, to move to right; says response to rising inequality has been drive to reduce taxes on rich, thanks to campaign finance, lobbying, and general power of money to shape political debate; disagrees with commentators who expect that current partisanship is temporary aberration

The Quiet Man   January 8, 2002
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column says Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who gave Bush administration aid in its push for large tax cut year ago, is strangely silent now, as analysts agree that federal budget will be in deficit for at least next several years; says sudden plunge back into deficit undoes Greenspan’s own handiwork, but if Greenspan says anything now against tax cut he would have to admit, at least tacitly, that he was wrong last year; says if he worries about his reputation, he sh...

Our Wretched States   January 11, 2002
Op-Ed column by Paul Krugman says current condition of states is shape of national things to come; notes National Governors Assn reports its members face combined budget shortfall of at least $40 billion; attributes this to mostly Republican governors who used questionable budget forecasts to justify tax cuts for affluent; notes Bush administration used same strategy at national level in 2001; says selective tax cuts in states were cleared with forecasts that made no allowance for contingencies...

Crony Capitalism, U.S.A.   January 15, 2002
Paul Krugman Op-Ed column says Bush administration fears, and press suspects, that latest revelations in Enron affair will raise lid on crony capitalism, American style; says administration, with its sense of entitlement, seems unconcerned by even most blatant conflicts of interest; says real questions about Enron’s relationship with administration involve what happened before energy trader went bankrupt; says that is when Kenneth Lay, Enron’s chief executive, allegedly told head of Federal Ene...

Listed above is every editorial Krugman wrote in the first year of Bush’s presidency in which Bush (or Cheney) is mentioned. In every one Krugman opposes Bush. Note the main themes:

Tax cuts: Both the 2001 and later 2003 tax cuts helped the economy and boosted tax revenue a lot, yet Krugman adamantly opposed them. All you get is the incessant typical Marxist-socialist "Bush favors the rich at the expense of the poor" claptrap. Notice too how Krugman criticizes Bush for trying to rush the legislation through Congress without adequate discussion or consideration. Sound familiar?

Social Security: Eight years after Krugman bashed Bush for proposing reform, Social Security is still in serious danger of going bankrupt. Krugman adamantly opposed it.

9/11: Krugman blames the Bush administration for what they didn’t do to protect us from the terrorist attacks. Those who know the rest of story know Krugman then spent the next seven years bashing the administration for what they were doing to prevent future terrorist attacks.

Here are some more highlights: Notice the small post-9/11 stimulus package Bush approved in November, 2001. Guess what? Krugman opposed it! Then he accused Bush and the Republicans of concocting a fake crisis in order to get it passed. You can’t make up more hypocritcal stuff than this!

I find it interesting that in Krugman’s May 30, 2001 piece he claimed repealing the estate tax would "create great temptation to kill off one’s parents before Jan 1, 2011." This is the same guy who in 2009 mocks conservatives/Republicans for arguing ObamaCare will lead to death panels and pulling the plug on grandma.

So, just from the first year of the Bush presidency—before Iraq, when libs/Dems really had stuff to bash Bush about—you were hard-pressed to find one editorial in which Paul Krugman did not oppose George W. Bush, even at the detriment of the nation’s prosperity and security. 

If that’s not unprincipled, politically-motivated, spiteful opposition, I don’t know what is.

Paul Krugman, you’re a class-A hypocrite. A Democrat hack with a word processor. And your constantly rebuked Marxist-socialist approach to economics sucks.

Listen & Learn: El Rushbo Gets the Best Phone Call of His Career (9/30/09)

Listening to Rush’s show yesterday (September 30) was like a nightmare. With every infuriating story, I felt like a frog in slowly boiling water (with apologies to Glenn Beck). For two hours I listened just stunned at all the ways the Democrats nationwide were screwing this country up beyond recognition, throwing this Constitution of ours out the window, and stealing your freedom with every minute they meet.

The fascist Left is on the march, people. From state capitals to the U.S. Capitol and White House, the Democrat Party is in full-speed mode to steal your freedom in order to empower themselves and steal your money to enrich themselves.

Think I’m being hyperbolic? OK, for those of you who get your news from the miserably pathetic New York Times or one of the alphabet news channels, here’s what’s really been going on in this country:

First, Rush cites a WSJ report that the Bill Clinton library (and massage parlor) in Little Rock, Arkansas is getting $2.5 million in stimulus money. What the $&*#? This is not what stimulus money was supposed to be meant for! Clinton got who knows how many millions of dollars in donations, including from the Communist Chinese. What a waste of the American people’s tax dollars.

And if that’s not enough of a waste, consider this exclusive story from the Washington Times: The National Science Foundation, which has 1200 employees and gets $6 billion in tax-payer funding in 2008, is being investigated because its staff, including senior staff, have been spending their work hours surfing internet porn:

One foundation employee paid an unspecified sum last year after investigators found that during a three-week period in June 2008, the worker perused hundreds of pornographic Web sites during work hours. That employee received a 10-day suspension.

In an official notice of the decision, the foundation called the conduct “unprofessional and unacceptable,” but also noted the employee’s work history and lack of any previous disciplinary actions.

As for the unnamed “senior executive” who spent at least 331 days looking at pornography at work, investigators said his proclivity for pornography was common knowledge among several co-workers.

“At the same time, employees were generally reluctant to make any official report or complaint because the misconduct involved a senior staff member and employees feared that they would suffer in some form of complaining,” the investigators later wrote in a summary of the case.

Another employee in a different case was caught with hundreds of pictures, videos and even PowerPoint slide shows containing pornography. Asked by an investigator whether he had completed any government work on a day when a significant amount of pornography was downloaded, the employee responded, “Um, I can’t remember,” according to records.

The employee also said that friends sent him the pornographic files, that he never planned on viewing them and that he never got around to deleting the files, a claim one official later called “simply not believable.”

Suspended for 10 days, the employee unsuccessfully appealed the decision after arguing that it was too harsh. Other employees were terminated.

Another employee who stored nude images of herself on her computer told investigators she mistakenly had downloaded the pictures. She received counseling and was told to adhere to the foundation’s policies on computer use.

By the way, the NSF has gotten stimulus money too! And, being that one of its main jobs is to allocate college grant money, it has been reported that it gave an Oklahoma State University professor $1.1 million in stimulus money to “study Alaskan grandparents.”

But this is the government that keeps telling us they know how to spend your money better than you do.

Next, check out this blatant example of liberal/Democrat fascism run amok in Michigan:

RUSH: We’re all going to become slaves to the government in every aspect of our lives, and I want to give you an example. Irving Township, Michigan. The state of Michigan has told a Michigan mother that she’s running illegal day care by watching her neighbor’s kids before school. 

“Each day before the school bus comes to pick up the neighborhood’s children, Lisa Snyder did a favor for three of her fellow moms, welcoming their children into her home for about an hour before they left for school. Regulators who oversee child care, however, don’t see it as charity. 

Days after the start of the new school year, Snyder received a letter from the Michigan Department of Human Services warning her that if she continued, she’d be violating a law aimed at the operators of unlicensed day care centers.

“‘I was freaked out. I was blown away,’ she said. ‘I got on the phone immediately, called my husband, then I called all the girls’—that is, the mothers whose kids she watches—‘every one of them.’” 

What do you bet this woman voted for Obama? Wild guess here. What do you bet she voted for Obama? 

“Snyder’s predicament has led to a debate in Michigan about whether a law that says no one may care for unrelated children in their home for more than four weeks each calendar year unless they are licensed day-care providers needs to be changed. It also has irked parents who say they depend on such friendly offers to help them balance work and family.” 

How do these people in Michigan think this thing ever got done in the first place? I don’t know about you growing up, but my mom and dad would park me at the friend’s house for sometimes a day and a half while they had to go do something. And vice-versa. And there was no thought anywhere that somebody was violating the stupid law about day care centers.

Can you believe the chutzpah of these power-hungry busy-body liberal Democrat bureaucrats? (How do I know they’re liberal Democrats?Two easy ways: One, this is Michigan and two: no conservative Republican office-holder would pull something so completely authoritarian.) When I was in grade school, my mother left me and my brother at a friend’s house for hours, and paid her, every weekday afternoon until she left work. And there were other kids over at the house too. If these liberal fascists were around then, our family friend would’ve been threatened by the state too.

But it only gets better. Yet another of President Hope&Change’s czars has been caught with a very sordid past. In a past job, Kevin Jennings not only had failed to report a sexual relationship between a 15-year-old boy and an adult male, but he helped encourage the affair!

Where was the mainstream media during all this? As of Rush’s broadcast yesterday, they were hardly anywhere. This Washington Times editorial nails it perfectly:

Sex scandal double standard: What if Kevin Jennings were a Republican?

When Republican Rep. Mark Foley was caught chasing congressional pages, he got exactly what was coming to him. In a blizzard of coverage (1,400 stories, according to Google news), Mr. Foley’s creepy behavior was examined from every possible angle. Nobody wanted to hear that the congressman’s stupid and objectionable behavior was confined to e-mails and text messages. His immediate resignation didn’t quiet the furor. When two years of investigations found no crime, the results got barely a peep.

Whether the press feeding frenzy around Mr. Foley’s disgrace was justified or not, the explosion of coverage was certainly understandable, even predictable. That reality is what makes coverage of Kevin Jennings, President Obama’s “safe school czar” something of a mystery.

Mr. Jennings brings all the sleaze of Mr. Foley. Sex and the underaged? Check. An older man? Check. Potential misbehavior by a government official? Check.

And the Jennings case brings a lot more: A “safe schools czar” who failed to report a statutory rape? An education leader who encouraged a 15-year-old student to be comfortable with sexual abuse? A federal official who ignored a law requiring him to report even the possibility of a crime? […]

All those facts aside, from the media’s perspective, the stories aren’t even remotely similar. Mr. Jennings hasn’t been hit with 1,400 stories or 140 or even 14. With the exception of Fox News, which discovered new audio-taped evidence in the case, Mr. Jennings’ story has been ignored. […]

There’s more on Jennings I’ll bet you didn’t know about. He’s a radical homosexual (not that there’s anything wrong with that) activist who founded the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, which “makes schools safe for all students, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.” Sounds reasonable, right? Sure, until you see what this description really entails. From World Net Daily:

According to the Americans for Truth website run by Peter LaBarbera, the incident involving the 15-year-old was just one among a series of egregious behaviors by Jennings.

Another incident was the “fistgate” scandal in which he led discussions at a seminar where “young teens were guided on how to perform dangerous homosexual perversions including ‘fisting,’“ the website said.

Yet another was Jennings’ address in a New York City church on March 20, 2000. He said:

“Twenty percent of people are hard-core fair-minded [pro-homosexual] people. Twenty percent are hard-core [anti-homosexual] bigots. We need to ignore the hard-core bigots, get more of the hard-core fair-minded people to speak up, and we’ll pull that 60 percent [of people in the middle] over to our side. That’s really what I think our strategy has to be. We have to quit being afraid of the religious right. We also have to quit — I’m trying to find a way to say this. I’m trying not to say, ‘[F—] ‘em!’ which is what I want to say, because I don’t care what they think! [audience laughter] Drop dead!”

Seriously, where the heck does Barack Obama find these cretins???

Now for not one, but two pièces de resistence. First, during Rush’s broadcast, the Hill’s Briefing Room blog reported that:

Senate Finance Committee Democrats rejected a proposed a requirement that immigrants prove their identity with photo identification when signing up for federal healthcare programs.

Finance Committee ranking member Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said that current law and the healthcare bill under consideration are too lax and leave the door open to illegal immigrants defrauding the government using false or stolen identities to obtain benefits.

Grassley’s amendment was beaten back 10-13 on a party-line vote.

The bill, authored by committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.), would require applicants to verify their names, places of birth and Social Security numbers. In addition, legal immigrants would have to wait five years, as under current law, after obtaining citizenship or legal residency to access federal healthcare benefits such as Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program or receive tax credits or purchase insurance through the exchange created by the legislation.

But the would not require them to show a photo ID, such as a drivers license. Without that requirement, the bill “remains dearly lacking when it comes to identification,” Grassley said. “Frankly, I’m very perplexed as to why anyone would oppose this amendment,” he said.

In other words, Joe Wilson Was Right. There is absolutely no logical reason Democrats would have blocked this provision if they’re not planning for illegal aliens to sneak through the system and get government-run health care, paid for by us the taxpayers and benefiting the Democrat Party by buying illegal alien votes. (Illegal aliens can vote? Of course they can. What’s to stop them? Democrats have blocked photo I.D. requirements to vote also.)

Secondly, Rush cites a Human Events article spelling out how Democrats are going to sneak their fascist government-run health care on us by next week, namely, by sticking it in as an addendum to the also fascist bill H.R. 1586, which imposes taxes on people’s bonuses.

The following four-step scenario describes one way liberals plan to work the rules in their favor to get Obamacare through the Senate:

Step 1: The Senate Finance Committee must first approve the marked-up version of Sen. Max Baucus’ (D.-Mont.) conceptual framework. Then Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D.-Nev.) can say that two Senate Committees have passed a health care bill, which will allow him to take extraordinary steps to get the bill on the Senate floor.

During the mark-up last week, members had difficulty offering amendments and trying to make constructive changed because they lacked actual legislative text and Baucus made unilateral last minute changes. For example, the AP reported that “under pressure from fellow Democrats, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee decided to commit an additional $50 billion over a decade toward making insurance more affordable for working-class families.”

Step 2: Sen. Reid will take the final product of the Senate Finance Committee and merge it with the product of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, which passed on a party-line vote in July.

Usually, a bill is voted out of committee, and then the Senate takes up the final product of the committee so that all 100 senators can have a hand in the process. With some help from the Obama administration, Reid will decide what aspects of the HELP and Finance Committee bills to keep.

Step 3: Now, Obamacare will be ready to hitch a ride on an unrelated bill from the House. Sen. Reid will move to proceed to H.R. 1586, a bill to impose a tax on bonuses received by certain TARP recipients. This bill was passed by the House in the wake of the AIG bonus controversy and is currently sitting on the Senate Legislative Calendar.

The move to proceed needs 60 votes to start debate. After the motion is approved, Sen. Reid will offer Obamacare as a complete substitute to the unrelated House-passed bill. This means that the entire healthcare reform effort will be included as an amendment to a TARP bill that has been collecting dust in the Senate for months.

Step 4: For this strategy to work, the proponents would need to hold together the liberal caucus of 58 Democrats (including Paul Kirk who was named last Thursday to replace Sen. Kennedy), and the two Independent senators (Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Bernie Sanders of Vermont). These members will have to all hold hands and vote against any filibuster. Once the Senate takes up the bill, only a simple majority of members will be needed for passage. It’s possible one of the endangered moderate Democrats, such as Sen. Blanche Lincoln (Ark.), could vote to stop a filibuster then vote against Obamacare so as not to offend angry constituents.

Once the Senate passes a bill and sends it to the House, all the House would have to do is pass the bill without changes and President Obama will be presented with his health care reform measure. If this plan does not work, the Senate and House leadership may go back to considering using reconciliation to pass the legislation.

Adopting this secret plan will not strike most Americans as a transparent, bipartisan, effective way to change how millions of Americans get their health care.

After these two hours, I was boiling mad: Inexcusably misspent stimulus money, yet another Obama czar exposes as a radical leftist hell-bend on crushing traditional American values and traditions, moralistic busybody bureaucrats telling people what they can do in their own house, and megalomaniacal Congresspeople imposing draconian and unconstitutional laws on the American people against their will. Plus an Obama-worshiping mainstream media that ignores all of it. I could not bear listening to Rush’s next hour.

Then Twitter, Facebook, and Free Republic began to light up with news of a woman who had just called in to Rush’s show. It seems this woman—Susan from Glendale, California—was voicing the anger and frustration I and millions of listeners were experiencing. The result was one of the best phone calls Rush has ever received:

 

Rush2009-09-30_Part1

Rush2009-09-30_Part2

Thank you, Susan from Glendale. You are a ray of sunshine in the pitch-black abyss that is Obama-Reid-Pelosi’s America. 

Around the Web in 80 Minutes (9/22/09)

A little over a month ago, I posted an important and informative Listen & Learn of Steve Malzberg discussing the aptly labelled death panels, which was stealthily slipped into the Stimulus bill back in the spring.

Here’s a Reflections magazine article by Malzberg following up on that story.

Obama’s Death Panels
September 2009 Vol. I, No. 8

When Mr. Obama is then asked how we should deal with it, more of Mr. Obama the radical is exposed. “Well I think there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists.” (Can you say death panel?) “And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place,” he says. In sum, who is worth treating? Who is worth saving? Who shall live and who shall die?

“It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels,” says Mr. Obama. (We can’t let the people have a say in this, they will be too emotional and want to help their parents and grandparents and spouses as much as possible.) “And that’s part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance.” Can you say death panel?

Speaking of health (s)care, here’s Dick Morris and Eileen McGann at NewsMax discuss the latest:

Young, Uninsured Turning Against Obamacare
Monday, September 21, 2009

The elderly were the first group to turn against President Barack Obama’s healthcare proposals, alienated by the plans to cut $500 billion cut from Medicare. The young and the uninsured may be the next to jump ship — out of worry over the huge premiums they’d have to pay.

Requiring everyone to buy insurance will impose a massive tax on all who now are uninsured. The Congressional Budget Office projects that it would force the middle-income uninsured to pay on average more than 15 percent of their income.

The poor will still have Medicaid. But for those earning more, the required premiums will be worse than any tax increase. For example, CBO estimates that when the program is fully implemented — by 2016 — an individual earning $32,400 a year would have to pay $4,100 in premiums before getting any subsidy. With deductibles and co-payments, he’d have to shell out $5,600 a year, or 17.3 percent of his income. A family of four, making $80,000 a year, would have to pay about $10,500 in premiums alone — with deductibles and co-payments, up to $15,000 or just under 20 percent of income.

Next, at American Spectator, author Dan Flynn takes on cryin’ lyin’ Nancy Pelosi, who had the chutzpah to compare Joe Wilson’s “You lie!” comment to President Hope&Change. Flynn argues, correctly, that the violence Wilson’s “rhetoric” reminded her of in the 1970’s was the violence of the left, who, as her reliable base, Pelosi has ignored and dismissed for three decades.

Still Lying 9.22.09

… The Bay Area was indeed a mecca of political violence during the 1970s. But the violence exclusively came from people whose outlook more closely resembled Nancy Pelosi’s, not Joe Wilson’s. In almost every case, the bombings and murders came from people or groups explicitly committed to violence, and not from peaceful protesters or from the right, à la the tea party or town meeting participants. […]

Compounding the outrageousness of Pelosi’s insinuation is that she projects the “frightening” rhetoric that fueled “a climate in which violence took place” in the Bay Area during the 1970s upon the very people at whom that rhetoric was initially targeted. Rather than condemn the violence of such groups as Weatherman and the Black Panthers, liberal Democrats instead assimilated them into their ranks.

Next, Andrew Klavan at Pajamas Media discusses these week’s biggest story essentially ignored by the mainstream media (last week it was ACORN, the week before the 9-12 D.C. Tea Party, and the week before that Van Jones):

September 21st, 2009
All Your Art Are Belong To Us

There is so very much to be disgusted by here that it’s hard to know what to gag on first. The NEA is the largest single funder of art in the country. They give away tens of millions of bucks in grants to artists and art organizations. Although the NEA wasn’t actually offering to give money to artists in return for their services to the all-powerful state, their very presence on the line creates the implied offer of access and favor. This in and of itself is deeply corrupt and potentially corrupting to artists in a difficult economy desperate for any means of support.

Oh, but that’s not the half of it. Go here and take a look at the legislation that authorized and created the NEA in the first place, its founding document as it were. Read its original principles and mission: how the arts are for all Americans, how the NEA is there to nurture freedom of thought, imagination and inquiry. In fact, just for fun, see if you can find a single proposition in this document that the NEA did not violate, corrupt and/or betray in the course of this phone call.

Then there’s the arrogance. Michael Skolnick, political director for hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons, says he’s speaking at the behest of the White House and the NEA when he tells the assembled artists, “You are the thought leaders. You are the ones that, if you create a piece of art or promote a piece of art, or create a campaign for a company, and tell our country and our young people sort of what to do and what to be into; and what’s cool and what’s not cool.”

Finally, here’s the latest at Real Clear Politics from the always thought-provoking and inspiring Thomas Sowell:

September 22, 2009
The Underdogs

… [N]obody told me that I couldn’t make it because I was poor and black, or that I ought to hate white people today because of what some other white people did to my ancestors in some other time.

Nobody sugar-coated the facts of racial discrimination. But Professor Sterling Brown of Howard University, who wrote with eloquent bitterness about racism, nevertheless said to me when I prepared to transfer to Harvard: “Don’t come back here and tell me you didn’t make it ‘cause white folks were mean.”

He burned my bridges behind me, the way they used to do with armies going into battle, so that they had no place to retreat to, and so had to fight to win.

One of the problems with trying to help underdogs, especially with government programs, is that they and everyone else start to think of them as underdogs, focusing on their problems rather than their opportunities. Thinking of themselves as underdogs can also dissipate their energies in resentments of others, rather than spending that energy making the most of their own possibilities.

Have a blessed day!

Around the Web in 80 Minutes (9/8/09)

First, this piece by Brian T. Schwartz at Pajamas Media is sure to rustle some liberal feathers:

Health Care Is Not a Privilege … Nor Is It a Right
September 8, 2009

… Health care is not a right. Rights are freedoms of action, not entitlements to what others produce. A “right” to health care violates the rights of those who produce it.

“Health care” consists of diagnoses and treatments by highly-trained medical professionals. It involves sophisticated products, instruments, and tests designed and developed at great investment, effort, and cost by scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs. That is, people produce health care.

Nor is medical care a privilege. A privilege is something authority figures permit us to do at their discretion. No one considers auto repair to be a right, but it’s absurd to consider it “a privilege.” No one grants you the “privilege” of having money to repair your car. Rather, if you want to own a functioning car, you must take responsibility to finance its repair by earning wealth. The same goes for medical treatment. As Mark Twain said, “the world owes you nothing” — adults must take responsibility to finance medical treatment they want. People who choose to become parents are also responsible for paying for their children’s medical treatment.

There’s no right to health care, just as there’s no right to happiness. But the pursuit of happiness is a right. Similarly, everyone has the right to pursue medical treatment through voluntary exchange with those who produce it. We also have the right to protect ourselves against medical expenses as we see fit. Low-premium catastrophic insurance is just one option. Others include more costly comprehensive health plans, paying a retainer at a cash-only clinic, or obtaining membership in a health care co-op or health care sharing ministry. Yet when politicians seek to guarantee health care as a right, they decide what qualifies as appropriate medical treatment. Whether you get the treatment you want depends on the discretion of authorities. That is, health care becomes a privilege. […]

Second, on the theme of the president addressing the nation’s schoolchildren, Byron York at the Washington Examiner reminds us [h/t Malkin]:

When Bush spoke to students, Democrats investigated, held hearings
09/08/09

The controversy over President Obama’s speech to the nation’s schoolchildren will likely be over shortly after Obama speaks today at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia. But when President George H.W. Bush delivered a similar speech on October 1, 1991, from Alice Deal Junior High School in Washington DC, the controversy was just beginning. Democrats, then the majority party in Congress, not only denounced Bush’s speech—they also ordered the General Accounting Office to investigate its production and later summoned top Bush administration officials to Capitol Hill for an extensive hearing on the issue.

Unlike the Obama speech, in 1991 most of the controversy came after, not before, the president’s school appearance. The day after Bush spoke, the Washington Post published a front-page story suggesting the speech was carefully staged for the president’s political benefit. “The White House turned a Northwest Washington junior high classroom into a television studio and its students into props,” the Post reported.

With the Post article in hand, Democrats pounced. “The Department of Education should not be producing paid political advertising for the president, it should be helping us to produce smarter students,” said Richard Gephardt, then the House Majority Leader. “And the president should be doing more about education than saying, ‘Lights, camera, action.’”

Democrats did not stop with words. Rep. William Ford, then chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, ordered the General Accounting Office to investigate the cost and legality of Bush’s appearance. […]

Next, the brilliant Thomas Sowell at Real Clear Politics expresses his thoughts on Obama umpteenth speech on government-run health (s)care, which takes place tomorrow:

What Obama Says vs. What He Does
September 8, 2009

… No doubt millions of people will be listening to the words of President Barack Obama Wednesday night when he makes a televised address to a joint session of Congress on his medical care plans. But, if they think that the words he says are what matters, they can be led into something much worse than being swindled out of their money.

One plain fact should outweigh all the words of Barack Obama and all the impressive trappings of the setting in which he says them: He tried to rush Congress into passing a massive government takeover of the nation’s medical care before the August recess—for a program that would not take effect until 2013!

Whatever President Obama is, he is not stupid. If the urgency to pass the medical care legislation was to deal with a problem immediately, then why postpone the date when the legislation goes into effect for years—more specifically, until the year after the next Presidential election? […]

Gregory Gethard at Front Page discusses the resignation of Van Jones, the “Red” Czar:

The Fall of the Red Czar
Tuesday, September 08, 2009

No thanks to the establishment media and Congressional Democrats, the Obama administration’s “green jobs czar” Van Jones is out of a job.

Jones resigned this weekend in the wake of revelations, initially ignored by the press, that he has a long record as a political radical, a background that includes his association with the so-called “Truther” conspiracy theorists who claim that the September 11 attacks were an inside job by the U.S. government.

Now that Jones has stepped down, the media has rallied to his defense, depicting Jones as the victim of a “vicious smear campaign” by foes of his environmental politics – a charge echoed by the administration’s Democratic allies. The less palatable truth is that Jones is a racial provocateur and opportunist who tried to capitalize on the administration’s sympathy for the “green” agenda to bring his own brand of socialist and black radical politics to national prominence.

Although apparently missed by the Obama administration’s screeners, Jones’ intention to use environmentalism as a way to push his socialist agenda can clearly be seen in his remarks at the “PowerShift ‘09” youth conference in Washington. Described as an attempt to bring together young people united in support of climate change and other green policies, PowerShift ’09 quickly became a forum for Jones to push his radical views on a captive audience. […]

And finally, Jay Nordlinger at NRO is on liberal hypocrisy watch with more on imagined right-wing hate vs. actual left-wing hate:

When protest is uncool, &c.
September 8, 2009

They say that “hate” is rearing its head, and that President Obama and the Democrats are the victims of it. Let me make a couple of predictions: I predict that the chairman of the Republican National Committee will never say, “I hate the Democrats and everything they stand for. This [politics, basically] is a struggle of good and evil. And we’re the good.” Howard Dean said that about the GOP: “I hate the Republicans and everything they stand for. . . .” I predict that an editor of a conservative magazine will never write a piece called “The Case for Obama Hatred,” beginning, “I hate President Barack Obama.” A New Republic editor did this, about Bush. And there is increasing worry about assassination: that someone will take a shot, not just at the president, but at the first black president, which would be extra-catastrophic for the country. A few protesters have carried signs urging violence against Obama, or smacking of violence. Let me make some more predictions: I predict that a network talk-show host will not show a video of President Obama giving a speech and put the following words on the screen: “SNIPERS WANTED.” Craig Kilborn of CBS did that to George W. Bush. […]

For many more examples, see my post from last week here.

Obama's School Speech ... Or Is It? [UPDATED]

Now that the White House has released the speech to be delivered by President Hope&Change today to the millions of American public school children, I must say I’m fine with it. ‘Cuz you were all waiting with bated breath for my approval. 

Here it is in full (with just a couple of snide comments interspersed). Then stay tuned for some analysis:

Prepared Remarks of President Barack Obama
Back to School Event

Arlington, Virginia
September 8, 2009

The President: Hello everyone—how’s everybody doing today? I’m here with students at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia. And we’ve got students tuning in from all across America, kindergarten through twelfth grade. I’m glad you all could join us today.

I know that for many of you, today is the first day of school. And for those of you in kindergarten, or starting middle or high school, it’s your first day in a new school, so it’s understandable if you’re a little nervous. I imagine there are some seniors out there who are feeling pretty good right now, with just one more year to go. And no matter what grade you’re in, some of you are probably wishing it were still summer, and you could’ve stayed in bed just a little longer this morning.

I know that feeling. When I was young, my family lived in Indonesia for a few years, and my mother didn’t have the money to send me where all the American kids went to school. So she decided to teach me extra lessons herself, Monday through Friday—at 4:30 in the morning.

Now I wasn’t too happy about getting up that early. A lot of times, I’d fall asleep right there at the kitchen table. But whenever I’d complain, my mother would just give me one of those looks and say, “This is no picnic for me either, buster.”

So I know some of you are still adjusting to being back at school. But I’m here today because I have something important to discuss with you. I’m here because I want to talk with you about your education and what’s expected of all of you in this new school year.

Now I’ve given a lot of speeches about education. [We know; that's what worried us!]

And I’ve talked a lot about responsibility. [Um no, unless it's pinning responsibility on evil greedy capitalists, or George W. Bush for the failings of your own policies]

I’ve talked about your teachers’ responsibility for inspiring you, and pushing you to learn.

I’ve talked about your parents’ responsibility for making sure you stay on track, and get your homework done, and don’t spend every waking hour in front of the TV or with that Xbox.

I’ve talked a lot about your government’s responsibility for setting high standards, supporting teachers and principals, and turning around schools that aren’t working where students aren’t getting the opportunities they deserve. [Like the public schools right here in Washington, D.C., which get $13,000 in tax dollars per student, but still suck.]

But at the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, and the best schools in the world—and none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities. Unless you show up to those schools; pay attention to those teachers; listen to your parents, grandparents and other adults; and put in the hard work it takes to succeed.

And that’s what I want to focus on today: the responsibility each of you has for your education. I want to start with the responsibility you have to yourself.

Every single one of you has something you’re good at. Every single one of you has something to offer. And you have a responsibility to yourself to discover what that is. That’s the opportunity an education can provide.

Maybe you could be a good writer—maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper—but you might not know it until you write a paper for your English class. Maybe you could be an innovator or an inventor—maybe even good enough to come up with the next iPhone or a new medicine or vaccine—but you might not know it until you do a project for your science class. Maybe you could be a mayor or a Senator or a Supreme Court Justice, but you might not know that until you join student government or the debate team.

And no matter what you want to do with your life—I guarantee that you’ll need an education to do it. You want to be a doctor, or a teacher, or a police officer? You want to be a nurse or an architect, a lawyer or a member of our military? You’re going to need a good education for every single one of those careers. You can’t drop out of school and just drop into a good job. You’ve got to work for it and train for it and learn for it.

And this isn’t just important for your own life and your own future. What you make of your education will decide nothing less than the future of this country. What you’re learning in school today will determine whether we as a nation can meet our greatest challenges in the future.

You’ll need the knowledge and problem-solving skills you learn in science and math to cure diseases like cancer and AIDS, and to develop new energy technologies and protect our environment. You’ll need the insights and critical thinking skills you gain in history and social studies to fight poverty and homelessness, crime and discrimination, and make our nation more fair and more free. You’ll need the creativity and ingenuity you develop in all your classes to build new companies that will create new jobs and boost our economy.

We need every single one of you to develop your talents, skills and intellect so you can help solve our most difficult problems. If you don’t do that—if you quit on school—you’re not just quitting on yourself, you’re quitting on your country.

Now I know it’s not always easy to do well in school. I know a lot of you have challenges in your lives right now that can make it hard to focus on your schoolwork.

I get it. I know what that’s like. My father left my family when I was two years old, and I was raised by a single mother who struggled at times to pay the bills and wasn’t always able to give us things the other kids had. There were times when I missed having a father in my life. There were times when I was lonely and felt like I didn’t fit in.

So I wasn’t always as focused as I should have been. I did some things I’m not proud of, and got in more trouble than I should have. And my life could have easily taken a turn for the worse.

But I was fortunate. I got a lot of second chances and had the opportunity to go to college, and law school, and follow my dreams. My wife, our First Lady Michelle Obama, has a similar story. Neither of her parents had gone to college, and they didn’t have much. But they worked hard, and she worked hard, so that she could go to the best schools in this country. [Oh, and she married me, through whose connections she got a $300,000 no-show job which didn’t exist until they gave it to her and which mysteriously disappeared once we moved into the White House]

Some of you might not have those advantages. Maybe you don’t have adults in your life who give you the support that you need. Maybe someone in your family has lost their job, and there’s not enough money to go around. [Which is George W. Bush’s fault, by the way.] Maybe you live in a neighborhood where you don’t feel safe, or have friends who are pressuring you to do things you know aren’t right.

But at the end of the day, the circumstances of your life—what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you’ve got going on at home—that’s no excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude. That’s no excuse for talking back to your teacher, or cutting class, or dropping out of school. That’s no excuse for not trying.

Where you are right now doesn’t have to determine where you’ll end up. No one’s written your destiny for you. Here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future. [Pretty bold words for someone who has for decades blamed the plight of American non-whites on Whitey, The Man, the unfair capitalist system, and the Constitution (which is “fatally flawed” because it doesn’t guarantee “distributive rights”)—and who has associated with characters who also believe that, as you have expressed in your autobiographies]

That’s what young people like you are doing every day, all across America.

Young people like Jazmin Perez, from Roma, Texas. Jazmin didn’t speak English when she first started school. Hardly anyone in her hometown went to college, and neither of her parents had gone either. But she worked hard, earned good grades, got a scholarship to Brown University, and is now in graduate school, studying public health, on her way to being Dr. Jazmin Perez. [Well if she learned English, that was a waste of time, since liberals/Democrats oppose English as an official language and insist that everything from driver’s tests to welfare applications are in a thousand different languages in the name of “diversity”]

I’m thinking about Andoni Schultz, from Los Altos, California, who’s fought brain cancer since he was three. He’s endured all sorts of treatments and surgeries, one of which affected his memory, so it took him much longer—hundreds of extra hours—to do his schoolwork. But he never fell behind, and he’s headed to college this fall. [But after ObamaCare passes, children like Schultz won’t even live to see college because the death panel Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research will most likely deem him a drain on the System and “health” czar Zeke Emanuel won’t stand for that.]

And then there’s Shantell Steve, from my hometown of Chicago, Illinois. Even when bouncing from foster home to foster home in the toughest neighborhoods, she managed to get a job at a local health center; start a program to keep young people out of gangs [but isn’t being a gang leader just a form of community organizing?]; and she’s on track to graduate high school with honors and go on to college.

Jazmin, Andoni and Shantell aren’t any different from any of you. They faced challenges in their lives just like you do. But they refused to give up. They chose to take responsibility for their education and set goals for themselves. And I expect all of you to do the same.

That’s why today, I’m calling on each of you to set your own goals for your education—and to do everything you can to meet them. Your goal can be something as simple as doing all your homework, paying attention in class, or spending time each day reading a book. Maybe you’ll decide to get involved in an extracurricular activity, or volunteer in your community. Maybe you’ll decide to stand up for kids who are being teased or bullied because of who they are or how they look, because you believe, like I do, that all kids deserve a safe environment to study and learn. Maybe you’ll decide to take better care of yourself so you can be more ready to learn. And along those lines, I hope you’ll all wash your hands a lot, and stay home from school when you don’t feel well, so we can keep people from getting the flu this fall and winter.

Whatever you resolve to do, I want you to commit to it. I want you to really work at it.

I know that sometimes, you get the sense from TV that you can be rich and successful without any hard work -- that your ticket to success is through rapping or basketball or being a reality TV star, when chances are, you’re not going to be any of those things.

But the truth is, being successful is hard. You won’t love every subject you study. You won’t click with every teacher. Not every homework assignment will seem completely relevant to your life right this minute. And you won’t necessarily succeed at everything the first time you try.

That’s OK. Some of the most successful people in the world are the ones who’ve had the most failures. JK Rowling’s first Harry Potter book was rejected twelve times before it was finally published. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, and he lost hundreds of games and missed thousands of shots during his career. But he once said, “I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

These people succeeded because they understand that you can’t let your failures define you—you have to let them teach you. You have to let them show you what to do differently next time. If you get in trouble, that doesn’t mean you’re a troublemaker, it means you need to try harder to behave. If you get a bad grade, that doesn’t mean you’re stupid, it just means you need to spend more time studying.

No one’s born being good at things, you become good at things through hard work. You’re not a varsity athlete the first time you play a new sport. You don’t hit every note the first time you sing a song. You’ve got to practice. It’s the same with your schoolwork. You might have to do a math problem a few times before you get it right, or read something a few times before you understand it, or do a few drafts of a paper before it’s good enough to hand in.

Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Don’t be afraid to ask for help when you need it. I do that every day. Asking for help isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of strength. It shows you have the courage to admit when you don’t know something, and to learn something new. So find an adult you trust—a parent, grandparent or teacher; a coach or counselor—and ask them to help you stay on track to meet your goals.

And even when you’re struggling, even when you’re discouraged, and you feel like other people have given up on you—don’t ever give up on yourself. Because when you give up on yourself, you give up on your country.

The story of America isn’t about people who quit when things got tough [unless there’s a war on Islamofascism going on overseas that makes Republicans look good and Dems look bad]. It’s about people who kept going, who tried harder, who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best.

It’s the story of students who sat where you sit 250 years ago, and went on to wage a revolution and found this nation. Students who sat where you sit 75 years ago who overcame a Depression and won a world war; who fought for civil rights and put a man on the moon. Students who sat where you sit 20 years ago who founded Google, Twitter and Facebook and changed the way we communicate with each other. [And they all did it without handouts, Stimulus Packages, oppressive taxation and government regulation, or government-run health “care”]

So today, I want to ask you, what’s your contribution going to be? What problems are you going to solve? What discoveries will you make? [And how will we be able to punish your success by taxing the crap out of you and sending angry mobs of ACORN activists to your private residence after you’ve earned over $250,000 for your contributions and discoveries?] What will a president who comes here in twenty or fifty or one hundred years say about what all of you did for this country?

Your families, your teachers, and I are doing everything we can to make sure you have the education you need to answer these questions. I’m working hard to fix up your classrooms and get you the books, equipment and computers you need to learn. But you’ve got to do your part too. So I expect you to get serious this year. I expect you to put your best effort into everything you do. I expect great things from each of you. So don’t let us down—don’t let your family or your country or yourself down. Make us all proud. I know you can do it.

Thank you, God bless you, and God bless America. [Sorry, Rev. Wright, they made him say that last part.]

OK, so it’s a lovely, fairly innocuous speech. So, were conservatives justified in opposing this presentation?

Perhaps not, but I can’t help but wonder—based on all we know about Obama’s past with radical “educators” who have openly expressed their belief that the schoolchildren is where the revolutions are sown—what the speech looked like before the Right started complaining about it.

What am I saying? That there was an original speech that was much different than this one? Well, I don’t have proof, but yes, I do. 

There seems to be a repeating pattern: The Obama administration and/or Democrat Congress goes too far pushing their radical leftist agenda, the Right adamantly objects, and they have to pull things back. Consider the health (s)care bill: The Dems first fill it chock full of nightmarish regulations, unconstitutional governmental overreach, and privacy violations. Then after a summer’s worth of passionate town halls and a few choice words by that supposed idiot Sarah Palin, the Dems have to water it down. 

Another example is this “green” czar Van Jones who just resigned over the weekend under pressure from the Right. Talk show host Glenn Beck, who held the administration’s feet to the fire on that one, is really in the crosshairs of the Obamedia right now!

So, yes, I think Obama’s original speech was filled with socialist rhetoric and indoctrination and that conservatives were perfectly justified in crying foul. We know Obama too well. The current version of the speech is so un-Obama. It doesn’t crap on America, its foundings, or its economic system. It doesn’t apologize on behalf of our country for spreading aggression, misery, and global warming all over the planet. So, considering that this is what Barack Obama has done since he was able to speak, I find it very hard that this was his original speech.

Call me a skeptic.

UPDATE: Looks like I'm not the only one going hmmmmm [h/t Hot Air Pundit].

End the Occupation! Dear Leader to Address Public Schoolchildren Nationwide [UPDATE: Obama Song Video]

This story has been discussed among various Facebook friends. Most of the conservative ones are swearing to keep their children home from school when the Obama address takes place September 8. I responded to one that I would probably send my child, but simple arm them with the knowledge that not everyone agrees with the president, and they don’t need to either.

Nevertheless, this unprecedented presidential address to America’s public schoolchildren is pretty creepy. But don’t take it from me. Take it from D.K. Jamaal, columnist at the Newark Progressive Examiner [bolds in original]:

Big Brother alert: Sorry, but Obama’s planned address to nation’s schoolchildren is creepy
September 1, 2009

… I’m sorry, but the notion of a mational address to schoolchildren creeps me out.

Maybe I’m paranoid, but it sparks within me thoughts of Big Brother’s looming head on a massive television screen, indoctrinating the hapless drones spread out before him.

The companion “Menu of Classroom Activities“ released to pre-kindergarten through sixth graders by the Education Department in advance of what they are billing as “President Obama’s Address to Students Across America” does nothing to assuage my paranoia.

Before the speech, students are instructed to read books about Barack Obama. Teachers are asked to ask students “Why do you think he wants to speak to you?” referring to the President.

During the speech, students should think about the following “What is the President asking me to do?” and “What specific job is he asking me to do?” among other things.

After the speech, the questions that students should ponder include “Are we able to do what President Obama asks up to do?”

I’m sorry, but I don’t want the President of the United States asking or telling the kids of the United States to do anything. This isn’t 1950s China.

And what—exactly and precisely and specifically what—is the President going to be talking about during this address? The war? Healthcare reform? Voting issues?

Nobody knows, which is also scary. [...]

Scary indeed. But not surprising. President Hope&Change has learned from his radical leftist heroes well. Get control of the children and you get control of the future. Remember this Hitleresque display from before the 2008 election:

That was just an appetizer. Consider these gems [h/t Parent Freedom]:

“Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.”—Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

“Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.”—Josef Stalin

“The education of all children, from the moment that they can get along without a mother’s care, shall be in state institutions at state expense.”—Karl Marx

“Having children is not a question that we can afford to let each family, each household, decide for itself. It is a question that should be decided at the national level. … [T]he interests of the individual must be subordinated to the interests of the state. Where there is conflict between the interests of the state in reducing population and the interests of the individual in having children, it must be resolved in favor of the state.”—Chi An

“Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for Socialism, and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of the teachers associations. Put the party line in text books.” — Point #17 in the 45 Communist Goals for America, 1963

“He alone, who owns the youth, gains the Future.”—Adolf Hitler, 1935

“The state will take youth and will give to youth its own education and its own upbringing. Your child already belongs to us… What are you?”—Adolf Hitler

Had enough of this?

End the Occupation! Liberals out of the Schools Now! Especially President Hope&Change.

Related reading: 

Obama’s classroom campaign: No junior lobbyist left behind by Michelle Malkin

Parents rebel against Obama TV speech to schools by Bob Unruh at WND

Abusing School Kids With Pro-Obama Propaganda by Michael Medved at Townhall

UPDATE: Free Republic reader "RushIsMyTeddyBear" (cute) tipped me to this nauseauting video. Whatever happened to Separation of Church and State?

Jenna Bush Hager to Appear Monthly on "Today" Show??

Huh? Politico, via AP, reports this morning:

In the tradition of Meghan McCain, Liz Cheney and other daughters of prominent Republicans who’ve waded into the media waters, former first daughter Jenna Bush Hager will try her luck in broadcast on NBC’s “Today,” AP reports.

The 27-year-old teacher at a Baltimore charter school, who has already penned two books, will serve as a once-a-month contributor on topics such as education, Jim Bell, the show’s executive producer, told the wire.

He said the show decided to give Hager a spin after she’d come off as a “natural presence” in two previous appearances on “Today” to promote her book for young adults, “Ana’s Story,” about a young woman born with HIV/AIDS the former president’s daughter met while working as a UNICEF intern in Latin America.

Her first story for “Today” is expected to air sometime next month.

The cited AP story states:

A first television job on “Today” is, in her father’s world, sort of like a run for president as a first attempt at elective office. Hager said that people on the show “have always made me, whenever I’ve been there, feel very comfortable.”

Bell said Hager won’t be covering politics. He said he didn’t consider the job as a down payment for a future interview with her father, who has been living quietly in Texas since leaving office earlier this year. Attacks on NBC News by conservatives for the liberal bent of MSNBC also had nothing to do with it, he said.

“I hope to focus on what I’m passionate about because I think I’d do them best job on them — education, urban education, women and children’s issues and literacy,” Hager said.

What she doesn’t plan to do is talk about her experiences as the daughter of a president.

“I don’t think it’s that interesting,” she said. “I’m pretty normal.”

I too think that as long as politics is kept out of the equation, Jenna will be OK. The last thing I’d like to see happen is for Jenna to become some punching bag for Bush-hating media liberals at NBC. I actually wonder how she feels about the media, considering what they did to her father for over eight years.

She’s not like Meghan McCain, who, like her father, became such a sell-out to the GOP and its core principles (which is why the MSM loves her so much). On the flip side, she’s definitely not like Liz Cheney either, whose business on TV has been dicussing politics and her father.

What do you think? Good idea or not?

End the Occupation! Homeschoolers Beat Public School Students Scores and Then Some

When Sarah Palin was on the road in 2008 campaigning with John McCain, she was mocked for it. At the Huffington Post, [h/t Homeschooling: A Family’s Journey] always a reliable resource of liberal ignorance, hate, and intolerance, Dan Brown wrote:

She homeschools! A clutch of creationist and homeschooling blogs have joyfully lit up with the idea that Sarah Palin has enrolled her children in the Interior Distance Education of Alaska, a program “created by homeschoolers for homeschoolers.” Actual schools—serving about 98% of America’s students—need clear-eyed presidential attention. I don't care if some members of Palin's family were teachers or if she used to be a member of the PTA. When I think of how Palin would govern—just one heartbeat away from the Oval Office—her radical choice to homeschool her kids terrifies (and fascinates) me.

Homeschooling radical? Actually, yes. It breaks away from the tired old mode of thinking that the only solution to educating our children is via government-run public school system. Brown is shocked that the program Palin enrolled her kids in while campaigning was “created by homeschoolers for homeschoolers.” Because if a school is not run by a far-off taxpayer-funded union-beholden bureaucratic morass, it’s not an “actual school,” as Brown snidely calls them.

In fact, Brown’s frightened reaction to the “radical” idea of homeschooling illustrates quite well that it’s the left that’s terrified of progress, not the right.

Brown is hardly the only one to publicly ridicule homeschooling. Last November former liberal ignoramus public school teacher [h/t Malkin] turned liberal ignoramus comedienne Joy Behar announced on “The View” that:

A lot of [children] are demented when they’re homeschooled. Come on. … They’re afraid of children. They learn to be scared of other children. It’s all about mommy and daddy …”

Joy Behar, the epitome of elitist liberal know-nothing-ism. Where does Behar get her data to back up such allegations. Same place most liberals get their “facts”: from out of her ass.

Probably the most egregious example of the liberal left’s hate for homeschooling is when in the spring of 2008 the State of California took steps to ban it, effectively consigning all of the state’s children in the hands of the government-run system (Chances are the parents of California’s 166,000 homeschooled kids couldn’t afford private school). Naturally, California’s teacher unions cheered the decision. The rational for this ruling, Kami Dalton at Human Events explained, is this:

The court interpreted California’s compulsory education law (saying instructors must hold a “valid state teaching credential”) as meaning that parents have to have state teaching credentials to teach their children at home, even if they’re using independent study programs.

A valid state teaching credential? OK, those of you who attended public school: Raise your hand if quite more than one of the teachers you had suck big hairy moose balls and didn’t manage to teach squat. Those people had “state teaching credentials,” a’ight? Lot of good it did them (or you), huh?

Now comes the ironic punchline. Bob Unruh at World Net Daily has news on a recent study that shows that America’s homeschooled students kick the ever-living crap out of public school students in every subject area!

Study: Homeschoolers score 37 points higher 
Costs also average $500, compared to $10,000 at public school
August 11, 2009

A newly released study from the Home School Legal Defense Association shows that not only do homeschoolers incur expenses only 5 percent of what public schools spend on each student, they score nearly 40 points higher on standardized achievement tests.

“These results validate the dedication of thousands of homeschool parents who are giving their children the best education possible,” said Michael Smith, president of the advocacy organization.

The HSLDA said homeschooling in the United States already includes about 4 percent of the school-aged population and is growing at about 7 percent a year, now involving some two million children.

The report, “Progress Report 2009: Homeschool Academic Achievement and Demographics,” was conducted by Brian Ray of the National Home Education Research Institute.

The survey included 11,739 homeschool students in all 50 states for the 2007-2009 academic year, and the HSLDA said the results were consistent with previous studies on homeschoolers’ achievements.

Drawing on the results from 15 independent testing services, the Progress Report 2009, the most comprehensive homeschool academic study ever completed, showed homeschoolers who participated in the California Achievement Test, Iowa Tests of Basic Skills and Stanford Achievement Test scored 37 percentile points above public school students on standardized tests.

The study also showed that achievement gaps common in public schools and linked to income levels and other factors mostly were absent or minimal in the homeschoolcommunity.

The study showed homeschooled boys scored at the 87th percentile and girls were at the 88th percentile. Students where the household income was under $35,000 scored at the 85th percentile and students in homes with a household income over $70,000 were at the 89th percentile.

There was only slightly more variance linked to parental education, too. Children whose parents did not have college degrees were at the 83rd percentile and children in homes where both parents held college degrees were at the 90th percentile.

“Because of the one-on-one instruction homeschoolers receive, we are prepared academically to be productive and contributing members of today’s society,” Smith said.

“Homeschooling is a rapidly growing, thriving education movement that is challenging the conventional wisdom about the best way to raise and educate the next generation,” said Smith.

Regarding costs, the average public school spends nearly $10,000 per child per year, but the Progress Report said the average homeschool parent spends about $500 per child per year.

Ian Slatter, director of media relations for the HSLDA, cited the 100,000 students graduated each year from homeschools as a reason the activity is getting more and more attention.

“Despite much resistance from outside the homeschool movement, whether from teachers unions, politicians, school administrators, judges, social service workers, or even family members, over the past few decades homeschoolers have slowly but surely won acceptance as a mainstream education alternative. This has been due in part to the commissioning of research which demonstrates the academic success of the average homeschooler,” the HSLDA report said.

Homeschoolers achieved the 89th percentile in reading, 84th in language, 84th in math, 86th in science and 84th in social studies.

The 37-point margin was significantly higher than the 30-point margin reported in a 1998 study on the issue, the HSLDA said.

“This particular study is the most comprehensive ever undertaken. It attempts to build upon and improve on the previous research. One criticism of the Rudner [1998] study was that it only drew students from one large testing service. Although there was no reason to believe that homeschoolers participating with that service were automatically non-representative of the broader homeschool community, HSLDA decided to answer this criticism by using 15 independent testing services for this new study. There can be no doubt that homeschoolers from all walks of life and backgrounds participated in the “Progress Report.”

He reported, “Educational research does not indicate any positive correlation between teacher qualifications and student performance. Many courts have found teacher qualification requirements on homeschoolers to be too excessive or not appropriate. The trend in state legislatures across the country indicates an abandonment of teacher qualification requirements for homeschool teachers. In fact, Americans, in general, are realizing that the necessity of teacher qualifications is a myth. The teachers’ unions and other members of the educational establishment make up the small minority still lobbying for teacher certification in order to protect their disintegrating monopoly on education.” […]

Oooo, how frightening, right Dan Brown? How demented, right Joy Behar? How unqualified, right California state courts?

What a freaking joke.

The funny thing is that homeschooling isn’t even practiced exclusively by right-wing “radical” fundamentalist Christians. Many comments at a number of homeschooling blogs I visited are from self-professed liberal Democrats who simply don’t like their district’s public school system and can’t afford private institutions.

It should be clarified I’m not necessarily advocating for homeschooling over public schools. (My own children will most likely attend our town’s public schools, private institutions costing what they do. We are fortunate to live in a municipality whose school system is quite good.) I’m simply exposing the fact that the liberal left elite continues to bash homeschooling as something only backwoods religious fundamentalists freaks do, even though these “freaks” kick the pants off public school students in standardized testing. It shows that either homeschoolers are doing something right, or public schools are doing something wrong.

If you really want to know what I think (and you wouldn’t be reading my blog if you didn’t!), I believe you can boil down liberals’ aversion to homeschooling to these three reasons:

(1) It’s successful—more so than the Democrat Party’s constantly touted government-run public system, the same system President Hope&Change made damn sure to keep his daughters away from when the Obama’s moved to D.C.

(2) It works without the help of big bloated, bureaucratic government. One can argue that homeschooling is the quintessential example of American individualism and self-reliance. The idea of an American citizen educating—or feeding, clothing, or medically treating— their children without the help of some government program or agency is a liberal Democrat’s worst nightmare. Therefore such acts of individualism must be discouraged and the perpetrators of such acts be scorned.

(3) It doesn’t do a damn to increase the power base, electorate, or piggy bank of the Democrat Party.

Liberals bash homeschooling because it’s a threat to the success of the Democrat Party and liberal agenda.

I’m not saying that every single homschool teacher is awesome and every single public school teacher is horrible. But the data clearly illustrates that homeschooling is an American success story: Better education for way, way less money. Public schools, on the other hand, are a yet another example of how big government, with its federally- and state-mandated regulations and inviolable obligation to politically-connected teacher unions, are a big freaking failure. Those are the cold hard facts, and as someone told us recently: Facts Are Stubborn Things.

Ready for them to control your health care?

End the Occupation! Liberals out of the Schools NOW!

End the Occupation! Oregon Student Blasted for Mentioning Lack of Professorate’s Political Diversity

This sad story stemmed from an editorial in the University of Oregon’s campus paper The Daily Emerald at the beginning of June. Its author, journalism grad student Dan Lawton, is a self-described independent who couldn’t help but notice the virtual non-existence of conservative and/or Republican representation in the university’s journalism, law, political science, economics and sociology departments.

Lawton’s column read in part:

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reflect,” Mark Twain once said. I spent my first few months as a graduate student here doing just that. I came back to school to prepare myself for a career in which I would be expected to defend my convictions. I matriculated seeking discourse and found conformity, and as I realized there would be little intellectual challenge going left, I drifted right.

In part, I believe this transformation aided my intellectual and professional development. Liberal journalism is so normative that it’s difficult to stake a claim. But if your politics are independent enough that you can occasionally gravitate across the aisle, there’s an expanse of fertile ground waiting. From this realization I have profited, but, in general, the dearth of conservative viewpoints damages the experiences of University students, regardless if they acknowledge it.

The lifeblood of learning is exposure to a diverse and combative set of viewpoints. This sort of framework allows students to sift through ideologies and compose their own independent belief systems. The concept of “diversity” and the “marketplace of ideas” shouldn’t just act as convenient adages for progressive grandstanding, but as a philosophy that operates at the core of higher education.

There needs to be movement—along with intellectual consistency—on the issue of political diversity by faculty and administrators. If queried, most professors would likely agree that a university with only 2-percent Democrats would be inadequate. However, when the discrepancy is in their favor, they appear uninspired to act.

As a student, I want a campus full of professors not only from different ethnic and racial backgrounds, but different political backgrounds as well. I want Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Marxists, Independents and anyone with a halfway decent idea that doesn’t incorporate hate. That’s what true diversity means to me. I want that more than free football tickets, a new basketball arena or pretty much anything else a University could offer. In exchange for paying $20,000 in tuition a year, I think I deserve it.

Don’t you?

I would imagine that any rational and intellectually honest human being would find this position perfectly reasonable. Which means that the professors and students at the U. of Oregon are neither rational nor intellectually honest. Because what followed Lawton’s column was a firestorm of outrage (read some of the comments and you’ll see what I mean), including insults, rude emails, and screaming outbursts from actual UO professors.

Below is a piece by Lawton on a website called OregonLive.com about his column and its truly disturbing aftermath [h/t Oregon blogger Max Redline]:

Liberalism in academia: Faculties should be ideologically diverse
by Dan Lawton, guest opinion
Saturday July 18, 2009

EUGENE—When I began examining the political affiliation of faculty at the University of Oregon, the lone conservative professor I spoke with cautioned that I would “make a lot of people unhappy.”

Though I mostly brushed off his warning—assuming that academia would be interested in such discourse—I was careful to frame my research for a column for the school newspaper diplomatically.

The University of Oregon, where I study journalism, invested millions annually in a diversity program that explicitly included “political affiliation” as a component. Yet, out of the 111 registered Oregon voters in the departments of journalism, law, political science, economics and sociology, there were only two registered Republicans.

A number of conservative students told me they felt Republican ideas were frequently caricatured and rarely presented fairly. Did the dearth of conservative professors on campus and apparent marginalization of ideas on the right belie the university’s commitment to providing a marketplace of ideas?

In my column, published in the campus newspaper, the Oregon Daily Emerald, on June 1, I suggested that such a disparity hurt the UO. I argued that the lifeblood of higher education was subjecting students to diverse viewpoints and the university needed to work on attracting more conservative professors.

I also suggested that students working on right-leaning ideas may have difficulty finding faculty mentors. I couldn’t imagine, for instance, that journalism that supported the Iraq war or gun rights would be met with much enthusiasm.

What I didn’t realize is that journalism that examined the dominance of liberal ideas on campus would be addressed with hostility.

A professor who confronted me declared that he was “personally offended” by my column. He railed that his political viewpoints never affected his teaching and suggested that if I wanted a faculty with Republicans I should have attended a university in the South. “If you like conservatism you can certainly attend the University of Texas and you can walk past the statue of Jefferson Davis every day on your way to class,” he wrote in an e-mail.

I was shocked by such a comment, which seemed an attempt to link Republicans with racist orthodoxy. When I wrote back expressing my offense, he neither apologized nor clarified his remarks.

Instead, he reiterated them. Was such a brazen expression of partisanship representative of the faculty as a whole? I decided to speak with him in person in the hope of finding common ground.

He was eager to chat, and after five minutes our dialogue bloomed into a lively discussion. As we hammered away at the issue, one of his colleagues with whom he shared an office grew visibly agitated. Then, while I was in mid-sentence, she exploded.

“You think you’re so (expletive) cute with your little column,” she told me. She said she had read my piece and compared me to Bill O’Reilly, accusing me of just wanting to get up on a soapbox and have people look at me.

She quickly grew so emotional that she had to leave the room. But before she departed, she stood over me and screamed.

“You understand that my column was basically a prophesy,” I shot back. I had suggested right-leaning ideas weren’t welcome on campus, and in response the faculty had tied my viewpoints to racism and addressed me with insults.

What’s so remarkable is that I hadn’t actually advocated Republican ideas or conservative ideas. In fact, I’m not a conservative, nor a Republican. I simply believe in the concept of diversity—a primarily liberal idea—and think that we suffer when we don’t include ideas we find unappealing.

After my article on political diversity was published, I received numerous e-mails from students at other schools who spoke of similar experiences. As a result of my research and personal experience, I can now say without reservation that the lack of ideological diversity on college campuses is a dangerous threat to free and open discourse in academia. Sadly, there are few perfect solutions.

One proposal considered by universities is endowing a chair of conservative thought to lure a high-profile conservative scholar to campus. However, this has the potential to exacerbate partisan tensions by sanctioning an explicitly ideological position.

A more draconian option is to enact a political litmus test and mandate that Republicans fill a certain number of positions, but doing so would exclude many qualified professors and be unfairly discriminatory.

The fact is that political diversity, like many diversity efforts, is something that cannot be created through edict, but only by a concerted effort on the behalf of those in power. While hiring on the basis of party affiliation isn’t the answer to reducing political discrimination, denying that political beliefs influence pedagogy is simply naive.

Faculties in ideological departments should examine the body of work of a candidate to see if it fills a shortcoming. In a department of journalism or political science, a professor with a right-leaning perspective would not only provide a balance in curriculum, but a potential mentor to conservative students who feel isolated in their beliefs. At left-leaning universities, such professors should be aggressively pursued.

Above all, deans, provosts and professors must not allow their aversion to conservative ideas to manifest so contemptuously.

Political disagreement is crucial to vibrant discourse, but not in the form of caricatures, slights or mockery.

Students should never come under personal attack from faculty members for straying from the party line. The fact that they do shows how easily political partisanship can corrupt the elements of higher education that should be valued the most.

Oh, the oh-so-tolerant and open-minded Left. Every time I read stories like this, I become more and more proud to no longer be associated with such dangerous and foolish people. Such a crying shame too many of them are paid money—from our tax dollars—to indoctrinate young people to be just as closed-minded as they are.

End the occupation! Liberals out of the schools NOW!

End the Occupation! 700 NYC Teachers Paid Not to Work

Back in May, I posted about an L.A. Times report about hundreds of union-protected L.A. school teachers who sit at home not to work—and even get paid to do it!

Later in the article the L.A. Times talked of similar situations in other large cities, one of them being New York City.

Well, lo and behold, yesterday AP had a story of the NYC situation. And it’s not pretty.

700 NYC Teachers Paid to Do Nothing
Monday, June 22, 2009

NEW YORK -- Hundreds of New York City public school teachers accused of offenses ranging from insubordination to sexual misconduct are being paid their full salaries to sit around all day playing Scrabble, surfing the Internet or just staring at the wall, if that’s what they want to do.

Because their union contract makes it extremely difficult to fire them, the teachers have been banished by the school system to its “rubber rooms” — off-campus office space where they wait months, even years, for their disciplinary hearings.

The 700 or so teachers can practice yoga, work on their novels, paint portraits of their colleagues _ pretty much anything but school work. They have summer vacation just like their classroom colleagues and enjoy weekends and holidays through the school year. […]

Because the teachers collect their full salaries of $70,000 or more, the city Department of Education estimates the practice costs the taxpayers $65 million a year. The department blames union rules.

“It is extremely difficult to fire a tenured teacher because of the protections afforded to them in their contract,” spokeswoman Ann Forte said.

City officials said that they make teachers report to a rubber room instead of sending they home because the union contract requires that they be allowed to continue in their jobs in some fashion while their cases are being heard. The contract does not permit them to be given other work. […]

Indeed, in this article the L.A. public school system is mentioned:

Some other school systems likewise pay teachers to do nothing.

The Los Angeles district, the nation’s second-largest school system with 620,000 students, behind New York’s 1.1 million, said it has 178 teachers and other staff members who are being “housed” while they wait for misconduct charges to be resolved. […]

New York City’s reassignment centers have existed since the late 1990s, Forte said. But the number of employees assigned to them has ballooned since Bloomberg won more control over the schools in 2002. Most of those sent to rubber rooms are teachers; others are assistant principals, social workers, psychologists and secretaries.

Once their hearings are over, they are either sent back to the classroom or fired. But because their cases are heard by 23 arbitrators who work only five days a month, stints of two or three years in a rubber room are common, and some teachers have been there for five or six. […]

David Suker, who has been in a Brooklyn reassignment center for three months, said he has used the time to plan summer trips to Alaska, Cape Cod and Costa Rica. Suker said he was falsely accused of throwing a girl’s test sign-up form in the garbage during an argument.

“It’s sort of peaceful knowing that you’re going to work to do nothing,” he said.

Philip Nobile is a journalist who has written for New York Magazine and the Village Voice and is known for his scathing criticism of public figures. A teacher at Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill School of American Studies, Nobile was assigned to a rubber room in 2007, “supposedly for pushing a boy while I was breaking up a fight.” He contends the school system is retaliating against him for exposing wrongdoing.

He is spending his time working on his case and writing magazine articles and a novel.

“This is what happens to political prisoners throughout history,” he said, alluding to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. “They put us in prison and we write our `Letter From the Birmingham Jail.’“

Awww, isn’t that nice. A union-protected teacher enjoys how peaceful—not shameful or humiliating, peaceful—it is to go to work and get paid to do nothing.

And another one who gets paid to sit on his ass at home writing magazine articles and novels is comparing his “plight” to Martin Luther King, Jr.

Spoken like true liberals/Democrats. Oh, how do I know these are liberals/Democrats? Trust me, I just know.

‘Cause contrary to the sentiment of disgraced DNC Chair Howard Dean, according to whom Republicans don’t work an honest day in their lives, the hundreds of hundreds of union-protected public school teachers—whom I would bet my hard-earned money are mostly Democrats—tell a much different story.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air quips:

When an employee performs poorly in the workplace, normally employers let them go and find better replacements, or sometimes just reduce headcount and save costs to keep prices low. When a union gets involved, and especially when the employer is the government, the dynamic changes — dramatically.

Wait a sec, Aren’t the unions among Barack Obama’s biggest supporters? Why, yes they are. 

And didn’t Obama put the fix in real good on their behalf when he took over … um … what’s that car company’s name? Why, yes he did.

Remember, this is what the Left calls progressive Without the progress.

End the occupation! Liberals out of the schools NOW!

End the Occupation! 60% of 8th Graders Fail at South Side Chicago School [UPDATED]

Last evening CBS News’ Chicago affiliate reported:

Jun 16, 2009 5:24 pm US/Central
Nearly 60% Won't Graduate At South Side School
44 Of 77 Students At Bradwell Elementary Did Not Pass Eighth Grade

It is a debate that gone on for years in poor communities: do you blame the schools for the students’ poor performance or do you blame their parents? [What about the kids? Just a little bit?]

The mother of a one student who failed eighth grade says she got no warning her son was struggling. The school says she was notified, and other parents insist she did not do enough.

Tatianna Dennis’ son Tarrell took his eighth grade photo complete with cap and gown, but the day before his grammar school’s graduation, Tarrell learned he would not be marching down the aisle.

“I asked him why but he was so heartbroken, he couldn’t really talk,” said Tarrell’s mother Tatianna Dennis.

Dennis says she had no idea her son was about to fail English; no written notices from Bradwell Elementary, she says, and no warning from his teacher.

Tarrell had failed English two times before, but Dennis thought he was doing better.

“They told me that he was fine. He was starting to come around and his grades were picking up,” Dennis said. “They never gave me any indication that he was going downhill.”

It was a disastrous year for the eighth grade at the south side Bradwell Elementary school in a tough neighborhood with high poverty. More than half the class, 44 of 77 students, did not graduate.

Loetisis Billingsley’s nephew is one of those failing students.

“It’s horrible because these kids were under the impression they were graduating and they let them know at the last minute that they wasn’t,” Billingsley said.

This is a partially misquoted statement. On the video provided on the CBS website, Ms. Billingsley said: “It’s horrible because these kids was under the impression they was graduating and they let them know at the last minute that they wasn’t.” I’m not passing any judgment on Billingsley for her improper English. I’m just making an observation.

The Board of Education insists the Bradwell school did everything possible to keep the students’ grades up, offering extra credit and school on Saturday. And the Board says written notices did go out.

Some parents came to the defense of the school.

“You have to be in your kid’s life, you have to know what’s going on in their world,” said parent Vanessa Ewing. “I’m up at the school. The teachers know me. I stay on them. I stay on my kids.”

“It was something that child must not have been doing right in order for him to stay behind,” said parent Sharon Shavers.

Tatianna Dennis’ son is now in summer school. She works nights as a security guard, leaving her little time with Tarrell to supervise his homework.

“Especially now, when I need the help the most, with situations like this,” Dennis said. “And there’s nobody but me. But I get through it.”

On an encouraging note, Dennis says her son is so upset he failed eighth grade, he is now determined to be a better student, pass his classes this summer and go on to high school.

In that south side neighborhood, another mother said she has all the cell phone numbers of her kids’ teachers and she calls them all the time, and her kids are doing well in school.

Did anyone besides me notice that every adult interviewed or referred to is a female? Mother Tatianna Dennis, aunt Loetisis Billingsley, “parent” Vanessa Ewing, “parent” Sharon Shavers, and “another mother.” All these mothers refer to their role as parents in the first person singular. Ms. Dennis says specifically, “There’s nobody but me.” 

And why is reporter Jim Williams calling these women “parents”? What’s wrong with using the word “mother”? I know why: Perhaps I’m reading to much between the lines here, but do these students have any dads? Where the hell are the fathers?

Did Mr. Williams try to find this out? Probably not: Too politically incorrect. 

But this is one of the hugest elephants in the room. Ann Coulter—I know, libs, she’s such a cold-hearted meanie!—devotes an entire chapter in her latest book about the utter havoc that illegitimacy and single-motherhood have wrought on this nation. If there is currently an appalling 70% illegitimacy rate among blacks nationwide, what are the odds that nearly 100% of the kids in this South Side Chicago school are fatherless? Pretty damn good. (Of course, I’m assuming that this neighboorhood is 100% black, which the CBS video suggests. I also might be painting with too broad a brush about absent fathers. Some could actually be in the home; others might be deceased. Still, you cannot deny the trend.) And that’s a huge factor on a child’s social skills, discipline, and psychological well-being, and devotion to education. These are documentable facts.

Notice I didn’t mention poverty? That was deliberate. I’m sorry, call me a mean, cold-hearted conservative, but I am so sick and tired of hearing the excuse that somehow these students can’t make it because they’re poor. It has been proven millions and millions of times in this country: It doesn’t make a difference how poor you are. If you get off your ass and study, stay away from drugs, crime, and conceiving illegitimate children, you have a pretty good chance of getting out of your situation. Easy? Of course not. But too simplistic? Absolutely not.

Fifty, sixty, a hundred years ago more black Americans were poorer than now. Since the turn of the last century millions of immigrants poored into the United States: Jews, Catholic, from all over Europe, Asia, and Africa, dirt poor. Yet a great many of them managed to rear children to take pride in hard work and education.

Again, where are these kids’ freaking fathers??? Where is the discipline that only a male role-model can offer. Who is teaching these kids to grow up and become responsible adults?

Another thing I noticed from both the article and the video version is there is no flesh-and-blood human being representing the school of the Board of Education. Williams refers to the BOE as an entity, but there were no spokespeople interviewed in this story. Why?

So blame the schools, blame the parents, blame the kids if you want. But you know who deserves the blame most for this predicament? LIBERALISM, which has sowed the seeds of perpetual poverty and illegitimacy and the it’s-society’s-fault mentality since LBJ’s Great Society. One of the hugest failed government programs in U.S. history. 

I feel bad for these people. I really do. For two generations they’ve been dependent on a system that does not work. And what will the system’s solution for this failure be? More of it! That’s how liberal big-government works!

And speaking of failed government programs, the irony should not be lost on anyone that this is Chicago, where President P.O.S. reigned, the guy who one week from today is going to be using ABC News as his own media biatch to dupe the nation into buying into his nationalized health care scheme.

No. Get the government the hell out of my health care!

And for God’s sake, get the failed, liberal lefty Democrat government the hell out of the schools.

End the occupation! Liberals out of our schools NOW!

UPDATE: Janet at Black Political Thought, herself an African-American mom, says:

As a parent, I keep in close contact with my children's teachers. The school as an Internet function that allows me to see my children's grades and their attendance, so anything that doesn't seem right, I can address immediately. Ms. Dennis should be ashamed of pointing a finger at the school's limitations rather than looking at her own failure to monitor her child's progress in school. Stop blaming the schools, start being a better parent! One thing I will concede, that had this been a school in the suburbs, the school would have been a lot more proactive in stemming this trend and the parents would have been much more involved in the lives of their children.

Liberal Fascism: Orwell Comes to Notre Dame

Well, it’s Sunday evening and by now President Hope&Change has delivered his commencement speech at Notre Dame and received his honorary law degree from the Catholic university.

Also by this time, several dozen individuals, including clergy and “Roe” herself, Norma McCorvey, have been arrested for protesting Obama’s invitation.

Does anybody find it the least bit ironic that the same weekend the most radical left-wing president in U.S. history addresses Notre Dame graduates about the need for “vigorous debate,” people are arrested for exercising their patiotic right to peacefully protest?

The NoBamaNation blog notes the double standard between this and the supposed state of fear that was fostered during the Bush administration:

We’d heard for eight years that American’s were losing their rights under the Bush Administration on a daily basis. Yet, I couldn’t find a single example of those claims. (The closest the Bush haters could come is to point to Guantanamo Bay, however not a single American is held there.)

Nowhere in the public record could I find a single instance of a Bush hater being arrested for … protesting. In fact, quite the opposite was true.

Cindy Sheehan camped out at “Camp Casey” with a number of other anti-war protesters directly outside the prairie Chapel Ranch in Crawford Texas, as President Bush vacationed at his Crawford Ranch in 2005.

Not a single arrest was recorded as a result, and in fact a local property owner with closer proximity to the Bush family ranch allowed Sheehan and her merry band of miscreants to move onto his property to conduct their protests in an attempt to disrupt the Bush family’s vacation – on their own property.

Now, we know that not a single protester was ever arrested on a College Campus while Bush gave a commencement address for if there was one, media accounts of the arrests would be readily available on the internet! Considering the ‘mainstream media’ was not exactly friendly to the Bush administration, a single arrest would’ve been subject of media scrutiny for weeks had one happened. Clearly one did not.

Yet, here we have the ‘mainstream media’ once again demonstrating their complicity in not reporting the Obama Administration’s egregious violations of basic Constitutional protections: FREE SPEECH in having civil, non-violent protesters who simply disagree with the current President’s stance on abortion arrested.

This is FASCISM in America, where dissent is no longer tolerated. Apparently when Hillary Clinton declared “dissent is patriotic!” she meant free speech only for thee, and not for ME.

Can’t disagree with that. Unless the protests actually thwarted Obama’s arrival into Notre Dame or disrupted his speech--neither of which apparently is the case--there’s no reason why these protesters should have been arrested. By contrast, protesters who try to disrupt Obama's speech should be apprehended. (Gateway Pundit has video of such an occurrence.) I stated this point yesterday.

The entire text of Obama’s is here, but I want to look particularly at a line about embryonic stem-cell research:

Those who speak out against stem cell research may be rooted in admirable conviction about the sacredness of life, but so are the parents of a child with juvenile diabetes who are convinced that their son’s or daughter’s hardships can be relieved.

Oh, wait a minute. Obama did not include the extremely important qualifier “embryonic.” An innocent omission? Meaningless oversight? Sure, right. As K. Ryan James writes at his blog:

I would submit to the good doctor that, in order to “engage in vigorous debate,” one would do well to use the proper language in description of your point. I am not aware of those who speak out against “stem cell research,” but I do know of many who take issue with the destruction of life that comes with “embryonic stem cell research.”

In a setting where the truthful exchange of ideas, or today’s buzzword of “dialogue,” is to be engaged, it would seem a bit disingenuous for President Obama to omit the word “embryonic” from his teleprompter in order to use liberal talking points instead of the “fair-minded words” he spoke of today.

It gets better. Then President Golden Calf laid out this whopper:

The question, then, is how do we work through these conflicts? Is it possible for us to join hands in common effort? As citizens of a vibrant and varied democracy, how do we engage in vigorous debate? How does each of us remain firm in our principles, and fight for what we consider right, without demonizing those with just as strongly held convictions on the other side?

I find these words extremely offensive and insulting. Obama is a guest on someone else’s “turf” and he’s basically telling them that their point of view is wrong. He is slapping the Catholic ND community in the face for the sin of opposing his anti-Catholic views—while on Catholic turf. It’s no different from Obama delivering an address at Jewish Theological Seminary during which he tells his hosts they are refusing to debate and dialogue about believing in Jesus.

Secondly, I find Obama’s words higly hypocritical and insincere. Because our current president is not looking for debate or dialogue. His answer is the only answer, and whether it’s using embryonic stem-cells or unrestricted abortion or unsustainable national economic engineering. To quote another open-minded liberal, the debate is over. And he’s spending your tax dollars to do it all.

You want to talk demonization, Mr. Obama? It is you who has been doing the demonizing ever since your campaign. Your opponents are either narrow-minded conservatives, narrow-minded religious people, narrow-minded gun-owners, narrow-minded abortion-opponents, narrow-minded believers in free-market capitalism, narrow-minded believers in winning the War on “Terror.” Commentators in the TV and print media might be driving the point home, but don’t be fooled, it’s coming from the top, i.e., the White House itself. Your arrogant, holier-than-thou attitude—which Bush’s detractors said he had, yet with no substantiation—has fostered a culture in which your ideological opponents have been deemed “narrow-minded,” even “extremist” by your own administration.

Rob at the Say Anything blog also sees the canyon-sized gap between Obama’s words and his actions:

[I]t was Obama who suggested that those who opposed his “economic stimulus” spending spree were unpatriotic. It was Obama who called rural Americans as “bitter” people who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Obama wants things to be “fair” as long as they’re “fair” to him.

Bingo. Whenever someone actually wants to have vigorous debate, Mr. Obama, you not-so-kindly remind them, “I won.”

You want to talk about dialogue and debate, Mr. Obama? How about practicing what you preach. You are so narrow-minded on the issue of “torture” of terrorist scum, that you’ve just started releasing them from Guantánamo Bay, even though quite a number of them have rejoined their brethren in the act of killing our brave troops on the battlefield. Even if you are so adamantly against enhanced interrogation techniques, are you so narrow-minded that you can’t consider a single scenario where EIT’s aren’t applicable? If a terrorist knew where a hidden nuke was ticking and your wife and daughters were about to be vaporized along with a few hundred thousand Washingtonians, you still wouldn’t apply EIT’s? No debate. No dialogue.

You are so narrow-minded on the issue of abortion that you are the most pro-abortion president in U.S. history. Are you so narrow-minded that you can’t consider a single scenario where abortion should be wrong? Apparently not, because as a Senator you voted four times to allow the murder of a infant born alive due to a botched abortion. No debate. No dialogue. Regardless of the empty, meaningless lip service you paid to it in your ND speech.

You are so narrow-minded on the economy that you won’t even listen to your own Congressional Budget office about the unsustainability of your socialist overhaul of our economic system. No dialogue. No debate. Are you so narrow-minded that you can’t consider that the hundreds of thousands of Tea Partiers on tax day might have had a legitimate grievance? Of course not. To you, we’re just a bunch of angry, selfish, greedy old white men who don’t want to “sacrifice” for your socialist dystopia. You sic your Department of National Security on American citizens, whom you’ve labelled as “right-wing extremists,” while at the same time responding saying you’d be willing to have a “serious discussion” whenever we were ready.

You are so narrow-minded on issues that you won’t meet with Rush Limbaugh or other conservatives who have not only described why your direction for this country is unsustainable, but who have laid out solutions that you have had your White House announce you are not willing to hear.

It’s not hard to tell why you don’t want dialogue and debate. You’ve proven several times over these 100+ days that your are a totalitarian. You’ve shown it by traveling around the globe bowing to and giving power-handshakes to totalitarians. You’ve shown it by threatening people not to listen to people who oppose your views. You’ve shown it by convincing people that corporate CEO’s and Wall Street executives are enemies of the state, in order that you can overstep your constitutional authority and take their companies over like a mob boss.

Dialogue and debate is the last thing you want, Barack Hussein Obama.

So stop pissing on my leg and telling me it’s raining.

Related reading: At Taki's Magazine today is this interesting analysis.