We have known for many many years that the left has infiltrated our schools, especially at the university level, and have made life difficult for kids…or for that matter teachers…who have a conservative bent. But this is just creepy. It’s a letter from the Secretary of Education Arne Duncan letting our K6 and under kids know that Obama will be speaking to them on September 8th:
The President will challenge students to work hard, set educational goals, and take responsibility for their learning. He will also call for a shared responsibility and commitment on the part of students, parents and educators to ensure that every child in every school receives the best education possible so they can compete in the global economy for good jobs and live rewarding and productive lives as American citizens.
Millions of kids will be stopping their day to sit down and listen to this speech.
Now that, in itself, is not THAT creepy, well kinda…but this is:
Things get downright disconcerting when one eyeballs the federally approved lesson plans that the Department of Education has cooked up to support the president’s speech. The preK-6 lesson plans, which were developed with federal funds, devised on taxpayer time, and made available on the Department of Education’s website, exhort teachers to extend the impact of the president’s speech by having students “write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president.” This clumsy bit of cheerleading shows no awareness that ”help[ing] the president” might be construed as an invitation to engage in advocacy rather than instruction or that it might worry those who are not Obama partisans. What’s truly remarkable, however, given recent concerns about intrusive federal government this past month, is the lesson plan’s directive that “these [letters] would be collected and redistributed at an appropriate later date by the teacher to make students accountable to their goals.”Read the rest of this entry »
“You can’t avoid these questions,” Dr. Emanuel said in an Aug. 16 Washington Post interview. “We had a big controversy in the United States when there was a limited number of dialysis machines. In Seattle, they appointed what they called a ‘God committee’ to choose who should get it, and that committee was eventually abandoned. Society ended up paying the whole bill for dialysis instead of having people make those decisions.”
Dr. Emanuel argues that to make such decisions, the focus cannot be only on the worth of the individual. He proposes adding the communitarian perspective to ensure that medical resources will be allocated in a way that keeps society going: “Substantively, it suggests services that promote the continuation of the polity—those that ensure healthy future generations, ensure development of practical reasoning skills, and ensure full and active participation by citizens in public deliberations—are to be socially guaranteed as basic. Covering services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic, and should not be guaranteed. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.” (Hastings Center Report, November-December, 1996)
Gotta love Ben Stein. He didn’t hold back on the all too common calls to deny the opposing views of someone they don’t agree with to be aired in a University setting. Always the same with this crowd:
Ben Stein described the brouhaha over his selection as commencement speaker at the University of Vermont as “laughable” on Tuesday called the whole episode “pathetic.”…
“I am far more pro-science than the Darwinists,” Stein said later in an e-mail. “I want all scientific inquiry to happen — not just what the ruling clique calls science.”
Stein’s comments came a day after UVM President Dan Fogel announced that Stein, whom Fogel had invited to address UVM’s commencement in May, would not be coming after all. Fogel said that his selection of Stein generated an intense protest, that he received hundreds of angry e-mails over the weekend, and that after he shared these “profound concerns” with Stein, Stein “immediately and most graciously declined our commencement invitation.”… Read the rest of this entry »
“On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics. “-President Barack Obama 1/20/09
HOUSTON (KTRK) — Houston police are looking for a vandal who defaced a monument in honor of former President George Bush. Shortly before 2pm, Houston police got a call of criminal mischief in progress at the George Bush monument on Bagby at Preston in downtown Houston. Witnesses say a man who appeared to be homeless was using paint to vandalize the monument. The man was described as having long blond hair, possibly in a ponytail, and wearing a plaid shirt. He may still have some yellow paint on him.
FOUR YEARS after declaring that there should be no red states or blue states because we are all red white and blue states… it appears that Obama’s message still hasn’t been answered.
It’s funny how for lefties, “blowback” is only something that happens when we take violent actions; never: “Hamas is experiencing blowback for launching thousands of rockets into Israel”; not “al-Qaeda is incurring blowback for pissing off the United States”.
Juan Cole is one of those academics poisoning the young minds of college students and gullible left-leaning minds.
I’d call this one unfreakin’believable, but…let’s face it, it’s not. This is no more shocking than the typical silent response from CAIR, ANSWER, MOVEON, DNC, KOS, Huffpo, and the Arab Street. Draw a bad cartoon, and it’s time to run to the streets with the molotov cocktails while looking for a Western Embassy/target. Blow up some little girls? Well, if pressed the above groups might say that’s awful, but in practice they accept it silently rather than with the same faux outage that a bad cartoon or a false story about a flushed Koran might generate. The Taliban have been doing this kinda thing (and far worse) since they took power in 1996. The political left has given them a free pass, and barely even gives lip service to these atrocities when pressed. Why? Where is the liberal outrage and demand for human rights? Too tired from ranting about global warming to complain for a moment about a death cult out mass-murdering little girls? If so, please, consider re-prioritizing.
ht Hot Air
President-elect Obama had this to say in response:
In a recent article for TIME magazine, perpetual whiner, Joe Klein asks, ‘Why Are We In Afghanistan?” He calls it, “The Aimless War.” People should be shocked-absolutely shocked to see a veteran writer go all the way to Afghanistan, talk to troops, civilians, leaders, etc., and still not understand why NATO and the United States are in Afghanistan. Of course, it is Joe Klein, and when it comes to military matters he has all the tactical and strategic understanding of a doorknob. It’s like looking to a comedian or a sportscaster for political or military insight (though it is amazing how many people go to Keith Olberman and Jon Stewart for their information).
Klein returns from his useless adventure with little more than a pimp-punditry paper on excusing isolationist policies rather than engagement of genuinely bad guys; suicidal members of death cults bent on hunting down and killing Americans by any and all means. His article whines about how hard things are over there as if the very word “Afghanistan” isn’t a historical synonym for “ass end of the world,” “land of the nearly impossible,” or at least “graveyard of empires.” Of course it’s hard over there. It’s a war zone in the worst place on the planet. It’s a place that has known little more than war going back almost 10,000 years. The people are not the sharpest knives in the drawer by western standards because building schools has never been as useful to them as building bunkers, trenches, and dugouts. Their ideas about women, human rights, etc are not western, because the west has always asked the two connecting questions: “Why are we there”+”Why not just leave?” …and then left! Read the rest of this entry »
Geoffrey R. Stone, currently a Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law, and the author of “Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism” once wrote an article on what it means to be a liberal. The number one meaning was this:
Liberals believe individuals should doubt their own truths and consider fairly and open-mindedly the truths of others. This is at the very heart of liberalism. Liberals understand, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once observed, that “time has upset many fighting faiths.” Liberals are skeptical of censorship and celebrate free and open debate.
Should there be boycotts, blacklists, firings or de facto shunning of those who supported Proposition 8?
That’s the issue consuming many in liberal Hollywood who fought to defeat the initiative banning same-sex marriage and are now reeling with recrimination and dismay. Meanwhile, activists continue to comb donor lists and employ the Internet to expose those who donated money to support the ban.
Yes indeed….should there be firings and blackballing of individuals who supported Prop 8? Read the rest of this entry »
In the weeks before the election, I noticed a growing number of my fellow citizens wearing Obama’s face on their t-shirts, usually in the spirit of socialist realism art. There’s not a politician alive who I admire enough to the point of worshipful adoration that I’d sport his likeness on my clothing or plaster it all over the wordsmobile (I do, however, wear my FA t-shirtswith pride and enthusiastically tell people it’s a right-wing website when asked).
Recently Celebrity funnyman and half assed political pundit, Jon Stewart of The Daily Show, took it personally and was offended when Gov Sarah Palin remarked that she was happy to be in a small town where REAL AMERICANS can be found. Stewart and other liberals were offended because they saw that as a claim that they are less patriotic, that big city dwellers are less patriotic, and that they as individuals were less patriotic. Turns out, statistics back of Gov Palin’s claim (though I doubt we’ll see an apology from Stewart, Biden, Obama, or other faux liberals).
Naturally, how to measure patriotism is a matter of argument. One way is to look at differences in military involvement: Rural and small-town families are more likely to see their children go off into combat, and return in body bags. Or, we can turn to one of the few recent non-partisan surveys on the matter, the American National Election Study from the University of Michigan. It’s produced every election year, and the most recent data is from 2004.
LIBERAL used to mean tolerant, understanding, open-minded, open-armed. Not anymore. In 2008, the Democratic Party has become a party of hate, power, and fear rather than open-mindedness, tolerance, etc., and no one picks up on those sentiments faster than American youths.
Central Florida 7th grader called racist for wearing Palin t-shirt
She’s only 12 years old but Ashleigh Jones is feeling the heat of this election year.
That’s because the seventh grader at New Smyrna Beach Middle School was called a racist by classmates for wearing a pro-Sarah Palin t-shirt.
Jones is volunteering at the Republican Headquarters in New Smyrna Beach. The Palin t-shirt was a gift from her fellow volunteers.
Yeah, it’s from the McCain camp, but let’s not just completely blow off and ignore what 100 economists say…if for no other reason than Obama’s math doesn’t add up (link).
You can’t tax 5% of the American workforce with another $1,200,000,000,000 and expect those same people to INCREASE their spending on investments (especially when they stand to make less on investments as he’s raising the capital gains tax), to increase hiring, and to increase payscales. It doesn’t work.
ARLINGTON, VA — Today, McCain-Palin 2008 released the following statement signed by 100 distinguished and experienced economists at major American universities and research organizations, including five Nobel Prize winners Gary Becker, James Buchanan, Robert Mundell, Edward Prescott, and Vernon Smith. The economists explain why Barack Obama’s proposals, including “misguided tax hikes,” would “decrease the number of jobs in America.” The prospects of such tax rate increases under Barack Obama are already harming the economy. The economists conclude that “Barack Obama’s economic proposals are wrong for the American economy.” The proposals “defy both economic reason and economic experience.”
The full economists’ statement on Barack Obama’s economic proposals and a complete list of economists who support it follows: Read the rest of this entry »
One simply has to marvel at the absolute arrogance of Fareed Zakaria’s latest articles. It’s not surprising…just a perfect example of how an intelligent, educated, over-marketed mind can be rendered utterly stupid by political partisanship.
First he wrote an article complaining about Republicans and people who warn that planet Earth is not a civilized place, but rather it is a very dangerous one where evil exists in men-often powerful men with increasing access to dangerous technologies and equally decreasing reluctance to take action due to a lack of deterrence that stems from denialists like Zakaria.
The World Isn’t So Dark
There is some truth to both visions of the world, but in my view the reality is much closer to Obama’s—more so than most American politicians seem willing to admit. We live in remarkably peaceful times. A University of Maryland study shows that deaths from wars of all kinds have been dropping dramatically for 20 years and are lower now than at any point in the last half century. A study from Simon Fraser University finds that casualties from terrorism have been steadily declining since 9/11. It is increasingly clear—look at their voting from Indonesia to Iraq to Pakistan—that very few Muslims anywhere support Islamic fundamentalists. More countries than ever before now embrace capitalism and democracy.
Ladies and gentlemen,
Boys and girls,
Cats and dogs,
Forget the Olympics…THE REAL GAMES ARE IN DENVER!!!!
I thought of all kinds of ways to make a quick movie snippet or something multimedia, but in my YouTube raw meat search…something caught my eye, flipped my trigger, and just seemed SO PERFECT for the occasion. So please, press play on this 1992 ode to confusion, chaos, and searching rather than accepting. It’s a throw back to a time when Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie, Jessica Simpson, and so many others were still playing with their Barbie girls. A time when Saddam had just had his ass kicked and people believed he was contained (yeah, ’cause dictators learn their lessons and never hold grudges). A time when the Clintons were taking DC, and a generation was realizing those student loans had to be paid some day….and that someday was approaching fast. Read the rest of this entry »
TWO US professional Bigfoot hunters claim to have found a body of the legendary creature and will present evidence of the astounding discovery to the world’s press and scientists tomorrow.
Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer, who run Bigfoot expeditions, say they found a dead Bigfoot in the woods of north Georgia, in the southeast of the US, about two weeks ago and have put the carcass in a freezer.
QUESTION: who gets to protest: PETA, HUMAN RIGHTS Watch, or pro-immigration advocates?
(side note, we’ve got coyotes in our backyard now-driving my dogs nuts, and making me question the rationality of gun control laws every time they walk under my kids’ playset and past the neighbors’ playset).
