And I am proud to say that the United States has done more to promote clean energy and reduce carbon pollution in the last eight months than at any other time in our history. – B. Obama
The problem is that this statement is just not true.
In the first place, we succeeded through partnership with the private sector where Europe and Kyoto did not in 2006, when we grew our economy and reduced our carbon emissions by 1.3%:
U.S. carbon dioxide emissions dropped slightly last year even as the economy grew, according to an initial estimate released yesterday by the Energy Information Administration.
The 1.3 percent drop in CO{-2} emissions marks the first time that U.S. pollution linked to global warming has declined in absolute terms since 2001 and the first time it has gone down since 1990 while the economy was thriving. Carbon dioxide emissions declined in both 2001 and 1991, in large part because of economic slowdowns during those years.
In 2006 the U.S. economy grew 3.3 percent, a fact President Bush touted yesterday as he hailed the government’s “flash estimate” that the country’s carbon dioxide emissions dropped by 78 million metric tons last year.
In a surprise move that caught Europe’s smug moralists and the environmental movement’s noisy extremists flatfooted, the United States announced in Vientiane, Laos, last week that it was joining five other nations – China, India, Japan, South Korea and Australia — in a new pact that offers a refreshing and effective alternative route to tackling the problem of climate change.
While given short shrift by the puzzled media, this is a big deal, in many ways.
First, it breaks the climate-change deadlock. This is the agreement that responsible scientists and public officials have been seeking since the failure of the Kyoto Protocol became evident at the global warming conclave in Delhi two years ago. Call it “Beyond Kyoto” – Way Beyond Kyoto.
Second, the new deal was negotiated and settled without the involvement of the United Nations or the European Union – a clear message from the United States that multilateralism does not have a single definition. In fact, according to The Guardian newspaper, the agreement – called the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate — was kept secret by President Bush from British Prime Minister Tony Blair, an uncompromising champion of Kyoto, during last month’s G8 meeting” in Scotland.
The net result of these policies? Instead of imposing a $1700 cost burden per American household and costing the US 3.5% of its GDP by 2050, Bush grew the economy — and increased tax revenues as a result:
An unexpectedly steep rise in tax revenues from corporations and the wealthy is driving down the projected budget deficit this year, even though spending has climbed sharply because of the war in Iraq and the cost of hurricane relief.
On Tuesday, White House officials are expected to announce that the tax receipts will be about $250 billion above last year’s levels and that the deficit will be about $100 billion less than what they projected six months ago. The rising tide in tax payments has been building for months, but the increased scale is surprising even seasoned budget analysts and making it easier for both the administration and Congress to finesse the big run-up in spending over the past year.
Tax revenues are climbing twice as fast as the administration predicted in February, so fast that the budget deficit could actually decline this year.
Tax cuts and pro-growth policies actually increased the economy while reducing carbon emissions, something that Europe has yet to match. Perhaps that success should be the model of future programs for curbing emissions, although the need for it becomes less and less certain every year.
Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) received a handwritten note Thursday from Joint Committee on Taxation Chief of Staff Tom Barthold confirming the penalty for failing to pay the up to $1,900 fee for not buying health insurance.
Violators could be charged with a misdemeanor and could face up to a year in jail or a $25,000 penalty, Barthold wrote on JCT letterhead. He signed it “Sincerely, Thomas A. Barthold.”
The note was a follow-up to Ensign’s questioning at the markup.
Yet another “capitalism & America is evil” video shown to students.
There has also been concern about school teachers doing things like taking songs about Jesus and replacing Jesus with Obama and teaching the kids to sing them in public schools and other outrageous acts of propaganda as has been done HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE.
UPDATE: Lou Dobbs on this indoctrination video called “The Story of Stuff”
“How The World Works” Took this video apart piece by piece.
Indeed, that is what he told George Stephanopoulos LINK . After what happened (LINK) maybe we can’t blame a politician for lying.
Update – Hotair.com reports that ACORN is trying to hide its ties with teachers unions like NEA and AFT (LINK). Brietbart News has even more detail and documents HERE.
So Glenn Beck introduces us to the ACORN Advisory Board and it ends up being a who’s who of Obama’s life and administration. Why do these politicians keep lying to us so brazenly. …Hmm maybe it is because the elite media has abandoned its responsibility to the public.
This video is priceless. Steven Crowder is conducting the interview.
By the way for those of you who didn’t get it. The assault weapon ban had nothing to do with machine guns and never did and semi-automatics he refers to aren’t machine guns either. They shoot one bullet with each pull of the trigger like most guns built since 1900.
If you think that this is not typical or was rigged, there is empirical evidence to support this right HERE.
The elite media calls the people at tea parties violent and racist (LINK), yet at every known event of violence has been committed by ACORN/SEIU thugs. There was violence at several anti-war protests, at the GOP convention and at this event, the G20 summit in Pittsburgh with 60 arrested, 6 hospitalized and businesses vandalized.
Why is CNN not featuring the nuttiest sign they can find at this protest like they do at a Tea Party, why are their reporters not getting in the face of a protestor to challenge, harass, name call and mock them like they do at Tea Parties (LINK) ….where is Susan Roesgen now? [By the way, here is how Roesgen and CNN portrayed left wing protestors wielding Hitler/Bush signs - LINK]
The National Park Service confirmed that the 9/12 protest called by Glenn Beck was the largest event in DC history and there was not one arrest…not one.
For Example.
CNN reporting on Left Wing protestors:
Notice how they do not zoom in on the nuttiest sign and present it as typical. They do not get in a protestors face to challenge them, mock them, ask them a question and don’t let them answer it, they don’t call them sexual names like “tea baggers”. It’s all just hunky dory… but…
CNN reporting on Tea Parties:
So let us take a close look at the signs at the anti-war protests and ask the protestors a few questions. Since NO ONE in the elite media would do this with any fair, we rely on film maker Evan Coyne Maloney:
Yet it is the Tea Party people who are nutty, violent, racists…. yea right.
UPDATE – The B-Cast TV program does a special on CNN’s insulting coverage of the Tea Party protests and how they spun the Fox News ad – LINK.
This is a documentary about how sing alongs, peer pressure, the want of recognition, feeling of importance, and fear of humiliation was used to indoctrinate children into the Hitler Youth.
There has also been concern about school teachers doing things like taking songs about Jesus and replacing Jesus with Obama and teaching the kids to sing them in public schools and other outrageous acts of propaganda as has been done HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE.
On a completely different note:
“We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we’ve set,” he said Wednesday. “We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well funded.” – B. Obama
[Editor's Note - So what the Democrats and this professor is saying is that if Joe Biden were president the Tea Parties would not be protesting the wasteful spending, the corrupt pork earmarks for corporate lobbying clients, the porkulus bills, the broken promises, the government take over of health care and the banks etc? So I ask, was it racist when they opposed HillaryCare in 1994?
By that standard anyone who criticizes Michael Steele (a black American) the head of the Republican Party a racist. So by his own standard is the entire DNC racist and the professor below a race traitor? Yup thats it, anyone who criticizes any Republican is a racist because they just can't take it that the leader of the Republican Party is a black man. What is good for the goose is good for the gander.]
This man is a professor of law. He speaks in these brad brush strokes and avoids specifics on policy.
I would LOVE to debate this guy Lincoln/Douglas style. I also like how he says that he is not a leftist and then spouts every far left talking point right down the line including these baseless attacks on Glenn Beck. This guy was so transparent and phony that most thinking Americans could see right through this guy. Unfortunately this guy is representative of a great deal of college professors and administrators.
I also found it interesting how he portrayed what the National Park Service has called the largest DC event in US history; the 9/12 protest called by Glenn Beck. About 1.7 million people participated and he focussed in on the few nuts that showed up to attempt to mainstream themselves with any political movement. We also reported how plants from ACORN have been showing up to some Tea Party events with racist signs of high production value to attempt to get in front of a camera (LINK). No one who did any genuine reporting of the event said that those types of signs were even close to representative to the crowd.
So while the elite media and this professor show contempt (more contempt) for tea party protesters, I wonder where all these people were when left wing nuts took to the streets in droves with plenty of hate to spread around ….and yet they got glowing coverage from the elite media…. well as a reminder I have the video…. Watch each in total…especially the endings.
Or maybe they think the constant antisemitism that is so common at far left protests isn’t racist at all…..
UPDATE- Gary Bauer speaks on the issue (Via The Anchoress):
Bauer noted that when Obama was inaugurated, he had an approval rating of 75 percent. Yet, today, his approval rating is in the neighborhood of 50 percent. If racism is the explanation, Bauer wondered aloud, are we to believe that the quarter of the electorate that seems to have abandoned President Obama just discovered that he is black?
As Bauer made his argument, it was obvious that he was speaking directly to the reporters present. He went further by asking the crowd the question (and this is from memory so it may not be exact), “If a party were to run a candidate who was black, Asian, or hispanic and who was pro-life, in favor of free markets, traditional morality, and strong national defense, would you support that candidate?” The crowd erupted in massive, enthusiastic applause. Bauer joked with the crowd and the reporters present, “I can’t wait to run home and see that positive reaction from the crowd toward racial diversity played on CBS, NBC, and ABC!” Of course, the enthusiastic reaction in favor of a candidate of color who is also a conservative doesn’t fit the press narrative and the audience reaction would never be played on the news. Bauer knew that. The crowd knew that. And so did the press.
Andrew Brietbart is a the head of a new media empire. When it comes to online news it is almost guaranteed that you have ran across one of his many news and information web sites.
Brietbart News played an important role in exposing the corruption at ACORN.
His main news site is http://www.breitbart.com/ and it contains links to news from all over the world.
Much of his news and links are imbedded in other web sites, so if you have not been to these sites yourself, it is almost guaranteed that you have seen Brietbart News content imbedded in another web site.
Of course the “in the tank” elite media will cover Obama on this one. Most of them didn’t cover the scandal or just reported it once so they can say that they reported it.
Now before the far left starts to object in comments let me remind you that the left and the elite media covered the Jack Abramoff story constantly. Abromoff was a corrupt lobbyist who donated money to politicians, most of whom were Republican. Most of these politicians had nothing to so with Abramoff save for just accepting political donations like most politicians do.
So let me see. Barack Obama was a community organizer for ACORN. Then he took a job training their people how to organize others. Obama came back and acted as a Lawyer and worked with ACORN to file CRA lawsuits against banks to get them to lower mortgage loan standards and make more high risk loans. Obama’s campaign than pays ACORN $800,000. The Obama Administration tells ACORN that they will be in the White House with him. ACORN and SEIU share offices and SEIU people are at the top levels of the Obama Administration. ACORN is invited to work the census and other federal tasks.
UPDATE – In this video Glenn Beck plays clips of President Obama telling how he has a long history with ACORN/SEIU and knows them well. Even if you don’t care for Beck you can still hear Obama’s own words to see for yourself.
George Stephanopoulos
Is it just me or are the ties between Obama and ACORN much closer than Abramoff and the Republicans he donated campaign funds to?
The one who at least asked a question about ACORN was George Stephanopoulos. Obama said that he didn’t know much about the scandal, which George didn’t seem to believe and is hardly believable since ACORN has always been so near and dear to Obama’s heart and life.
Only one of the five television networks that interviewed President Obama for their Sunday shows bothered to ask him about Acorn, the left-wing community organizing group whose federal funding was cut off last week by an overwhelming vote in Congress.
“Frankly, it’s not something I’ve followed closely,” Mr. Obama claimed, adding he wasn’t even aware the group had been the recipient of significant federal funding. “This is not the biggest issue facing the country. It’s not something I’m paying a lot of attention to,” he said.
Mr. Obama added that an investigation of Acorn was appropriate after an amateur hidden-camera investigation had found Acorn offices willing to abet prostitution, but he carefully declined to say whether he would approve a federal cutoff of funds to the group.
Mr. Obama took great pains to act as if he barely knew about Acorn. In fact, his association goes back almost 20 years. In 1991, he took time off from his law firm to run a voter-registration drive for Project Vote, an Acorn partner that was soon fully absorbed under the Acorn umbrella. The drive registered 135,000 voters and was considered a major factor in the upset victory of Democrat Carol Moseley Braun over incumbent Democratic Senator Alan Dixon in the 1992 Democratic Senate primary.
Mr. Obama’s success made him a hot commodity on the community organizing circuit. He became a top trainer at Acorn’s Chicago conferences. In 1995, he became Acorn’s attorney, participating in a landmark case to force the state of Illinois to implement the federal Motor Voter Law. That law’s loose voter registration requirements would later be exploited by Acorn employees in an effort to flood voter rolls with fake names.
In 1996, Mr. Obama filled out a questionnaire listing key supporters for his campaign for the Illinois Senate. He put Acorn first (it was not an alphabetical list). In the U.S. Senate, Mr. Obama became the leading critic of Voter ID laws, whose overturn was a top Acorn priority. In 2007, in a speech to Acorn’s leaders prior to their political arm’s endorsement of his presidential campaign, Mr. Obama was effusive: “I’ve been fighting alongside of Acorn on issues you care about my entire career. Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote in Illinois, Acorn was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work.”
But the Obama campaign didn’t appear eager to discuss the candidate’s ties to Acorn. Its press operation vividly denied Mr. Obama had been an Acorn trainer until the New York Times uncovered records demonstrating that he had been. The Obama campaign also gave Citizens Consulting, Inc., an Acorn subsidiary, $832,000 for get-out-the-vote activities in key primary states. In filings with the Federal Election Commission, the Obama campaign listed the payments as “staging, sound, lighting,” only correcting the filings after the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review revealed their true nature.
Given his longstanding ties with Acorn, President Obama’s protestations of ignorance or disinterest in the group’s latest scandal seem preposterous. Here’s hoping White House reporters will press the president to clarify just how much he really knows about Acorn and when he knew it.
UPDATE II – Obama doesn’t know much about ACORN any more he says…. hmm than why are so many members of the ACORN Advisory Board all over his White House LINK ?
Yes, so I imagined. While Glenn Greenwald, for example, was accusing those on the right of being “chickenhawks” for not serving in Iraq, he was never quite able to explain why he wasn’t accumulating Congressional Medals of Honor and Taliban tooth-necklaces in the war he supposedly supported, Afghanistan.
And no, this isn’t just about some seedy, nasty liberal bloggers.
It’s about our lying POS POTUS, too.
Escalation is a bad idea. The Democrats backed themselves into defending the idea of Afghanistan being The Good War because they felt they needed to prove their macho bonafides they called for withdrawal from Iraq. Nobody asked too many questions sat the time, including me. But none of us should forget that it was a political strategy, not a serious foreign policy. There have been many campaign promises “adjusted” since the election. There is no reason that the administration should feel any more bound to what they said about this than all the other committments [sic] it has blithely turned aside in the interest of “pragmatism.”
But none of us should forget that it was a political strategy, not a serious foreign policy.
You claimed to support a war in which American soldiers were fighting and dying, leaving friends and limbs on the battlefield, as a cynical political strategy?
You… um… voiced support of a real serious-as-death war to cadge votes out of a duped public?
We won’t forget, champ. And we won’t let you forget, either.
Again we see a leftist projecting his pathological darkness on to others. They accused Bush of fighting wars for this very reason. And now, when it’s safe to say so (they think), they concede: We supported a war for the reason we accused Bush of doing so for 8 years.
UPDATE – Michelle Malkin finds the teacher who did this to these students and the school. One has to melt with respect at Malkin’s ability to track down the details of a story.
The school is B. Bernice Young Elementary School in Burlington Township, New Jersey and the teacher is Charisse Carney-Nunes. Follow the link above to see more details!
UPDATE II – UH OH! Megyn Kelley at Fox News is now on the story. Administrators at B. Bernice Young Elementary School are hiding under their desks now. I bet they have stopped answering the phones there as this story is going viral. You heard her, its on Drudge Report so the world has seen it now.
UPDATE III – Malkin found a response from the school from a fellow blogger Exurban League HERE:
Dear Burlington Township Families:
Today we became aware of a video that was placed on the internet which has been reported in the media. The video is of a class of students singing a song about President Obama. The activity took place during Black History Month in 2009, which is recognized each February to honor the contributions of African Americans to our country. Our curriculum studies, honors and recognizes those who serve our country. The recording and distribution of the class activity were unauthorized.
If you have any further questions regarding this matter, please do not hesitate to contact me or Dr. King, Principal of B. Bernice Young School, directly.
Sincerely,
Dr. Christopher M. Manno,
Superintendent of Schools
So, a public school had an official lesson using impressionable children to praise Barack Obama. The song they used even co-opted lyrics from “Jesus Loves the Little Children” with Obama’s name inserted in place of God.
A commentor at Michelle Malkin states, “Thank goodness somebody recorded it lest this school have more clandestine political brain washing sessions for the children.”
UPDATE V – Principal of elementary school praises Obama and says that she would do it again – details HERE.
This isn’t the only one folks… we also have THESE.. HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE … Glenn Beck finds yet another video HERE.
MINI-UPDATE – Pat Dollard finds yet another school indoctrination video singing to the ‘Dear Leader’ -LINK.
MINI-UPDATE II – 9-28-2009 Yup another new indoctrination video LINK !
UPDATE IV – Hotair.com posts the following video for comparison –
UPDATE VI – Ed Morrissey from Hotair.com has a GREAT NEW POST on this issue with an update from Fox News:
Ed Morrissey:
Parents angry over Obama song at NJ elementary school in which the school and the district double down on stupid.
“There was no intention to indoctrinate children. There was no political agenda underlying the activity.”
Uh, sure, pal. Those kids wrote the lyrics about equal pay all by themselves? I know that’s a big issue among the playground set. They also just happened to replace God with “Barack Hussein Obama” in saying that people are “equal in his sight,” because that’s exactly the phraseology one would expect from a roomful of kids of the “London Bridge is falling down” age.
The administration in this community may need to go back to school themselves to learn a little common sense and strategy. The teacher who led this group retired before the video hit the Internet. How much difficulty could it cause to admit the obvious and apologize for stepping over a line with these children? They’re certainly not learning a lesson about accountability, although they do seem to have adopted the ACORN strategy of blaming people for the video’s release to the Internet rather than the fact that one of their teachers was indoctrinating kids into Obama-worship, quite literally considering the song, its lyrics, and its origins.
Talk about taking the words out of my mouth and every other parent who has a historical perspective that goes beyond breakfast. Well stated Ed.
UPDATE VII- Parents appear on FNC with Gov. Mike Huckabee and Sean Hannity:
UPDATE VIII – Factreal.com posts a history of “sing-along indoctrination” and here is a sample:
This is very disturbing. And by the way, what is it with the far left and their hostility towards freedom of speech and conscience? Well the far left is statist and absolutely convinced of their own moral and intellectual superiority…perhaps that has something to do with it.
Senator McConnell protests from the Senate Floor. Here is the entire clip – WATCH IT:
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s decision to go to the Senate floor on Tuesday to call out the Obama administration for using the full power of a federal regulatory agency to suppress free speech — specifically, to silence Humana’s predictions about the impact of proposed ObamaCare cuts to the Medicare Advantage program — led ABC, but not CBS or NBC, to air a story on the “gag order.”
ABC’s story began with a McConnell soundbite (“’Shut up,’ the government says, ‘don’t communicate with your customers. Be quiet and get in line,’”), before reporter Jonathan Karl explained McConnell was referring to the “Department of Health and Human Services, telling insurance companies who serve Medicare recipients, to stop ‘misleading’ and ‘confusing’ mailings, saying, quote: ‘We are instructing you to immediately discontinue all such mailings, and remove any related materials from your Web sites.’”
Karl continued: “The extraordinary order comes in response to a mailing the Humana insurance company sent to customers in the Medicare Advantage program. The Humana mailing warned that because of Medicare cuts in the health care reform bills, quote, ‘millions of seniors and disabled individuals could lose many important benefits and services.’”
ABC News actually does a story on this…wow:
On Monday, HHS offered “guidance” to silence criticism: “MEDICARE ISSUES NEW GUIDANCE TO INSURANCE COMPANIES ON MEDICARE MAILINGS.”
So far, the government’s power play has succeeded. “Humana backed down, stopping the mailing and announcing that it would cooperate with the investigation,” James Taranto noted in his Monday “Best of the Web,” lamenting: “Corporations may provide lots of useful goods and services, but never count on them to take a stand for freedom.”
Now the question is, will the media champion free speech and be outraged by the abuse of power to suppress it, or will most journalists not mind the government hushing voices which go against Obama?
The story on the Tuesday, September 22 World News on ABC (transcript provided by the MRC’s Brad Wilmouth):
CHARLES GIBSON: In Washington, the Senate Finance Committee today began voting on amendments to the health care reform bill, and the bill that comes out of that committee will become the centerpiece for the health care debate. But even before the amendment process began, a war of words broke out over what one of the nation’s largest health insurance companies is saying about the bill. Here’s Jonathan Karl.
JONATHAN KARL: It’s not often you hear language like this on the Senate floor.
MITCH MCCONNELL, SENATE MINORITY LEADER: “Shut up,” the government says, “don’t communicate with your customers. Be quiet and get in line.”
KARL: He’s talking about this order issued last night by the Department of Health and Human Services, telling insurance companies who serve Medicare recipients to stop “misleading” and “confusing” mailings, saying, quote, “We are instructing you to immediately discontinue all such mailings, and remove any related materials from your Web sites.” The extraordinary order comes in response to a mailing the Humana insurance company sent to customers in the Medicare Advantage program.
The Humana mailing warned that because of Medicare cuts in the health care reform bills, quote, “millions of seniors and disabled individuals could lose many important benefits and services.” But Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus says it is misleading to say his bill cuts Medicare benefits and ordered the HHS to investigate, prompting the gag order. Some legal experts say the order is unconstitutional. Senator McConnell agrees.
MCCONNELL: We cannot allow government officials to target individuals or companies because they do not like what they say.
KARL: And even some Democratic Senators are concerned that the bill now before the Senate Finance Committee reduces spending on Medicare Advantage by $123 billion.
SENATOR BILL NELSON (D-FL): I think it would be intolerable to ask the senior citizens on Medicare who have it to give up substantial health benefits that they’re enjoying under Medicare.
KARL: HHS declined a request for an on-camera interview, but told us that they are investigating whether the mailings illegally give the impression that they are official communications from Medicare. While that investigation goes forward, Charlie, the gag order remains in place.
First of all lets answer some common objections/myths.
They say the USA spends too much on health care.
There are four reasons for this.
1. Our system has a primary focus on saving lives and improving their quality, whereas some other systems focus is on saving money and preserving the “system”.
2. Americans are wealthier and we just have more money to spend on it. It is important not to underestimate this reason. As always the more money you have the more you spend.
3. We have lots of injured military veterans who need care, more than most other countries.
4. The United States has an aging baby boom problem that is worse than most other countries, so it is understandable that the expense of end of life care is higher for us.
So comparing our expenses with most other countries is NOT an apples to apples comparison.
They say that the WHO does not put the United States high on its health care list. I put the details (with links) of those WHO reports on this web site in detail. Come to find out that the WHO weighs heavily in its ranking where the health care dollars come from. Since in the USA much of it does not come from government the WHO penalizes us in the ratings. So in essence they lower our score for the simple reason that we don’t have nationalized health care.
The WHO Report does say that the USA is number 1 in patient responsiveness and level of care and as far as I am concerned that is the stat that really counts.
The WHO divides their report into sections – Here is the section on patient responsiveness and level of care – the United States is ranked number 1 http://www.who.int/whr/2000/en/annex06_en.pdf
The WHO ranks the United States overall as 37 because we don’t have socialized health care so that doesn’t meet socialist standard of “fairness”. http://www.who.int/whr/2000/en/whr00_en.pdf – look here and do a search for the words “fairness in contributions” to see for yourself.
As far as life expectancy. Our life expectancy numbers include how many people we lose in wars, drug gangsters who shoot each other etc so that number is not an honest assessment of the level of care we get in the United States.
We do not have a health care crisis here in the United States as most doctors and hospitals will treat you and worry about the bill later. Also the vast majority of people do have health insurance.
The main problem here in the USA is the way the bills are paid takes the market forces out all together, so people think to themselves, “Heck with it the government or the insurance company will pay for it so who cares”. So the rate of health care inflation is too high but this is not difficult to fix, but since neither party wants to give the other a legislative victory simple fixes like this don’t get done. Medical savings accounts is one way to help solve that problem.
As for the 20 million who are uninsured who cant afford their own insurance the government could just give them a voucher that covers 80% of the cost of their health care premium. That would cost about 50 billion a year which is much cheaper than a multi trillion dollar take over of the system or the current plan offered in our Congress.
Another smart thing that government can do is to allow doctors and hospitals to write off 90% of all free health care expenses they give to the poor off their taxes. Since our corporate income tax rate is an outrageous 35% there is lots of room to do that.
I’m an adjunct English professor. When the subject of adjunct faculty comes up, the predictable calls for unionization and “social justice” are often voiced by my tenured colleagues enjoying light teaching loads and by administrators enjoying comfortable salaries overseeing “multicultural” programs. But I know that I would not be among their intended beneficiaries were they made aware of my political views.
It’s not that I sought to be political when I returned to school in the 1990s to earn my Ph.D. I soon discovered, however, that political neutrality—even in literary studies—is suspect. In the academic world, the belief that great literature conveys universal, timeless themes is generally taken as evidence of an imperialistic outlook. The same holds for history, where the reliance on factual evidence and focus on major events are deemed offensive to women and those from non-Western cultures.
My fellow graduate students tailored their programs for the job market: studying African-American and gay writers, and applying the trendy postmodern, deconstructivist literary theories. Since 2002, when I earned my Ph.D. in English, the field has gotten even stranger, with such additions to the ideological postcolonial, African-American, and critical theory courses as “fat studies” and “trauma studies.” An upperclassman can enroll in “Introduction to Visual Rhetoric”—and then presumably in “Advanced Visual Rhetoric.” But how does my study of Plato and Cicero prepare me to teach these classes?
I am considered qualified to teach freshman composition, though. My experience of being called at 4:50 p.m. on a Friday and asked to be on campus at 8:30 a.m. on Monday to fill out the application and teach two classes that morning is not that unusual. At least it’s one way to avoid the scrutiny of mycurriculum vitae.
Some of my teaching is done at a community college. Even there, however, one must accept the prevailing ideology, as I discovered during a job interview.
After my teaching demonstration on a nuts-and-bolts aspect of freshman composition (semicolons), the committee chair (a black female who chaired a committee that was all-female, except for one openly gay man), asked how I addressed the multicultural needs of the student body. I mentioned Zora Neale Hurston, the black and decidedly non-political author of Their Eyes Were Watching God, as someone I like to have students read. Apparently, it wasn’t a good enough response.
Although I did not get the position, I was encouraged to apply again. To put my cv over the edge, I suppose I should attend the recommended online and Saturday teacher development workshops and publish papers on multicultural pedagogy.
I certainly could not, however, tout my writing in publications like the Weekly Standard, Pajamas Media, and Townhall, even though they might inspire student writers. Some of my colleagues openly brag about being published in the leftist magazine The Nation or having worked on Al Gore’s presidential campaign. That’s perfectly safe, but I no longer list my academic affiliations under my byline. Once I was told that I was no longer “needed” at a school after readers of my columns wrote laudatory letters to the department chair.
Here’s another illustrative case. A colleague who started at a small college as an adjunct was eventually hired on a one-year basis and told he’d be the first in line when a full-time position opened. Then he was asked to submit his application, but was later told that the position now required a “gender historian.” He was not even interviewed, despite having published a book and having received glowing student evaluations. History major “groupies” circulated petitions when they learned that his contract was not being renewed—to no avail. He just didn’t have the right political orientation. Excellent teaching and research didn’t matter.
The sad fact is that history majors, after taking the mandatory gender history class, will be taught from that same radical perspective in their other history classes. These kinds of students probably will seek other majors. I doubt I would have continued my graduate studies had I not been able to select the traditional classes of older professors, who have since retired or died.
And even at the community college level where we have to explain the difference between a noun and a verb, we have no choice in textbooks. One I currently use includes a story by Richard Wright from his communist period (which Zora Neale Hurston called “communist propaganda,” I tell my students). The introduction does not mention Wright’s repudiation of communism later. The grammar handbook uses Alice Walker’s prose as examples of elegant sentences, and the words of George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld as logical fallacies. At another low-tier state university we were ordered to put on our syllabi that the course had the objective of gaining “an understanding of race, class, and gender.”
I think what happened a generation ago was that conservative humanities professors failed in challenging the ideology of the radicals—especially the females—who demanded entrance. During my one-year stint as a full-time faculty member I watched a tenured Shakespeare professor voice no objection to the suggestion that a course include Tupac Shakur’s lyrics as poetry.
Or, more generously, the conservative gatekeepers assumed that the radicals demanding entrance would apply the same rules of open-mindedness, objective inquiry, and fair play they did. We now know otherwise.
The colonization of American higher education by the left is remarkably thorough. From the elite universities to the lowest-ranked schools, the deck is stacked in favor of those who want to turn everything from semicolons to Shakespeare into an ideological exercise. On occasion, dissidents like myself can sneak in the back door, but we are in a precarious position.
UPDATE – The B-Cast intervied the Professor Thomas Thibeault HERE.
A professor points out that a policy has a critical flaw and he finds himself charged under that policy, fired, given no due process or any chance to answer any charges. In fact the charges themselves were kept secret from him.
This kind aof behavior and violation of due process is not uncommon at all on todays colleges including IUSB and other universities in the IU system. The Alliance Defsnee Fund and the Foundation for Indivisual Rights in Education (FIRE) have documented more of these cases than I can count with more and more piling on every week.
ATLANTA, September 15, 2009—The abuse of campus sexual harassment policies to punish dissenting professors has hit a new low at East Georgia College (EGC) in Swainsboro. Professor Thomas Thibeault made the mistake of pointing out—at a sexual harassment training seminar—that the school’s sexual harassment policy contained no protection for the falsely accused. Two days later, in a Kafkaesque irony, Thibeault was fired by the college president for sexual harassment without notice, without knowing his accuser or the charges against him, and without a hearing. Thibeault turned to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) for help.
“If you were to write a novel about the abuse of sexual harassment regulations to get rid of a dissenter, you couldn’t do better than the real-life story of Thomas Thibeault,” FIRE President Greg Lukianoff said. “Anyone with a modicum of respect for freedom of speech or simple fairness should be aghast at this blatant abuse of power by East Georgia College.”
Thibeault’s ordeal started shortly after August 5, 2009 when, during a faculty training session regarding the college’s sexual harassment policy, he presented a scenario regarding a different professor and asked, “what provision is there in the Sexual Harassment policy to protect the accused against complaints which are malicious or, in this case, ridiculous?” Vice President for Legal Affairs Mary Smith, who was conducting the session, replied that there was no such provision to protect the accused, so Thibeault responded that “the policy itself is flawed.”
Two days later, Thibeault was summoned to EGC President John Bryant Black’s office. According to Thibeault’s written account of the meeting, which was sent to Black and which Black has not disputed, Thibeault met with Black and Smith. Black told Thibeault that he “was a divisive force in the college at a time when the college needed unity” and that Thibeault must resign by 11:30 a.m. or be fired and have his “long history of sexual harassment … made public.” This unsubstantiated allegation took Thibeault by surprise. Black added that Thibeault would be escorted off campus by Police Chief Drew Durden and that Black had notified the local police that he was prepared to have Thibeault arrested for trespassing if he returned to campus. At no point was Thibeault presented with the charges against him or given any chance to present a defense. Refusing to resign, Thibeault understood that he was fired.
Most likely realizing that he had fired Thibeault without any of the due process mandated by Georgia’s Board of Regents, Black then began attempting to justify Thibeault’s firing after the fact. On August 11,Black wrote Thibeaultto say that since Thibeault had failed to resign by the deadline, “EGC has begun dismissal proceedings. … [A] faculty committee has been appointed to conduct an informal inquiry.” He then paradoxically wrote, “Their charge is to advise me whether or not dismissal proceedings shall be undertaken.” Meanwhile, Thibeault still had not been provided with any charges, he was still banned from campus, and he still appeared to be fired-with the “dismissal proceedings” occurring after the fact.
Then, on August 25, Black wrote Thibeault again, claiming for the first time that Thibeault had actually been suspended, not fired: “the committee’s finding was that there is sufficient evidence to support your suspension.” Black added that Thibeault was about to be terminated for sexual harassment, that the charges finally would be sent upon request, and that Thibeault finally could request a hearing. Thibeault requested the charges on August 28 but has received no response. His lawyer also has inquired for weeks with no response.
“How can a public college professor in the United States be fired and kicked off campus by the president and police but, more than a month later, still have no idea why?” asked Adam Kissel, Director of FIRE’s Individual Rights Defense Program. “Do Georgia’s taxpayers know this is how their colleges are treating their professors?”
FIRE outlined many of these shocking violations of due process and freedom of speech in a letter to University System of Georgia Chancellor Erroll B. Davis Jr. on August 27, with copies to Black and Smith. None of them has responded. Neither Black nor Smith has even bothered to comment on the discrepancies between Thibeault’s account and Black’s erratic letters.
“It is hard to imagine a worse failure of due process in this case,” Kissel said. “Nobody knows what the actual allegations are because they are being kept secret, even from Thibeault himself. In the stunning absence of any charges, evidence, or hearings, it is clear that EGC has punished Professor Thibeault for speaking out against a flawed harassment policy.”
FIRE is a nonprofit educational foundation that unites civil rights and civil liberties leaders, scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals from across the political and ideological spectrum on behalf of individual rights, due process, freedom of expression, academic freedom, and rights of conscience at our nation’s colleges and universities. FIRE’s efforts to preserve liberty on campuses across America are described atthefire.org.
Tell EGC to restore the rights guaranteed by the Constitution and the Georgia Board of Regents. Write a letter to EGC and the Board of Regentshere.
CONTACT: Adam Kissel, Director, Individual Rights Defense Program, FIRE: 215-717-3473, adam@thefire.org
John Bryant Black, President, East Georgia College: 478-289-2027, jblack@ega.edu
Erroll B. Davis Jr., Chancellor, University System of Georgia: 404-656-2202, chancellor@usg.edu
OKLAHOMA CITY — Only one in four Oklahoma public high school students can name the first President of the United States, according to a survey released today.
The survey was commissioned by the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs in observance of Constitution Day on Thursday.
The Oklahoma City-based group enlisted national research firm, Strategic Vision, to access students’ basic civic knowledge.
Brandon Dutcher is with the conservative think tank and said the organization wanted to find out how much civic knowledge Oklahoma high school students know.
“They’re questions taken from the actual exam that you have to take to become a U.S. citizen,” Dutcher said.
A thousand students were surveyed by telephone and given 10 questions drawn from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services item bank. Candidates for U.S. citizenship must answer six questions correctly in order to become citizens.
About 92 percent of the people who take the citizenship test pass on their first try, according to immigration service data. However, Oklahoma students did not fare as well. Only about 3 percent of the students surveyed would have passed the citizenship test.
Dutcher said this is not just a problem in Oklahoma. He said Arizona had similar results, which left him concerned for the entire country.
“Jefferson later said that a nation can’t expect to be ignorant and free,” Dutcher said. “It points to a real serious problem. We’re not going to remain ignorant and free.”
Question
% of Students
Who Answered Correctly
What is the supreme law of the land?
28
What do we call the first ten amendments to the Constitution?
26
What are the two parts of the U.S. Congress?
27
How many justices are there on the Supreme Court?
10
Who wrote the Declaration of Independence?
14
What ocean is on the east coast of the United States?
61
What are the two major political parities in the United States?
Every Administration has this problem, the onligitory kiss & tell book. Usually they are written by those with slightly disfunctional personalities who make everything about them and are filled with high school level drama.
The Paul O’Neil book was filled with inaccuracies that have been well covered or were disputed by many others who were in the White House. The Richard Clarke Bush bashing book ended up having key points that contradicted Clarke’s own on the record previous statements and testimony. I wrote about many of the contradictions myself and spelled them out in detail. Former Press Secretery Scott McLellend wrote his kiss & tell bookwhich was also shown to have its share of inaccuracies by documents and people in the White House.
While these books are the latest examples, kiss & tell books from both parties tend to be nearly equally incredible. An exception was the book written by former CIA Bin Laden Unit Commander Dr. Michael Scheuer who was hard on both the Clinton and Bush administrations with time showing the book to be at least directionally accurate.
The latest book is By Matt Latimer is quickly showing to be nothing new. Notes and testimony of those around him are showing an all too familiar pattern.
Here is Dana Perino debunking Latimer’s claim that President Bush did not even know Sarah Palin. Considering how tight Bush always was with the Republican Governor’s Association the idea that Bush didn’t even know Palin is next to impossible to believe.
When Speechwriters Kiss and Tell A man I hired was not the star he thought he was.
By WILLIAM MCGURN
When the sun rises over our capital city this morning, its denizens will awake to a truly novel tale: The aggrieved ex-staffer—wait for it!—disillusioned by Washington. The tome out today is by former Bush speechwriter Matt Latimer, who describes the White House as “less like Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing and more like The Office.” In Mr. Latimer’s hands, it reads more like “The Princess Diaries,” full of hurt feelings and high-schoolish drama.
Like all kiss and tells, “Speechless: Tales of a White House Survivor” is thick with atmospherics intended to suggest the author’s importance: a West Wing office, meetings in the Oval, rides on Air Force One, etc. Like most kiss and tells too, it’s divided between heroes (Mr. Latimer and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld) and idiots (pretty much everyone else). And like so many kiss and tells, the tale of failure, foolishness and vanity it reveals is not necessarily the one the author intends.
As the senior staffer who brought Matt to the White House, let me start by adding some perspective. In a memoir that takes us from Matt’s childhood in Michigan through all the morons and phonies he worked for in Washington, only Mr. Rumsfeld gets the full gush. Left unmentioned is that Matt is on Mr. Rumsfeld’s payroll, working on the former Defense Secretary’s memoirs. Not that Mr. Rumsfeld need fear. If this book is any guide, an employer will read how stupid Matt really thought he was only after he’s no longer being paid.
In the same way, Matt neglects to mention that personnel took away his West Wing cubby when they needed space for someone more important. Or that he spent the next few weeks knocking on every door in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, looking for a room sufficiently grand to display his large and ever-expanding collection of framed testimonials to himself.
Ditto for Air Force One. Yes, he was on it, but not because he was important. To the contrary, I put him on it because he was failing. At one point in the book, he admits that he “never felt the connection” he was supposed to feel with the president. Bringing him into the Oval and getting him on Air Force One was a (losing) attempt on my part to get the president to warm up to him. These are distasteful things to have to say publicly about someone who once worked for you. And I would have taken them to the grave had Matt not used these props and the snippets of conversation he picked up to paint a highly distorted view of some very good people during some very tough times.
Nowhere is this clearer than in his account of putting together the address to the nation the president delivered last September during the financial crisis. Matt does capture the chaotic feel that surrounds any last-minute, high-stakes, prime-time speech. In his version most everyone—the president, economics adviser Keith Hennessey, counselor Ed Gillespie, etc.—comes across as a bumbling idiot.
I was gone by then, and had my own doubts about some of the solutions proposed. But I also knew Ed and Keith to be solid free-marketeers. And I had a better appreciation for the difficulties involved when I called Ed and he recounted a Roosevelt Room meeting that had led to the president’s speech.
In that meeting, the Fed chairman and the Treasury secretary warned the president that if he didn’t intervene, the global financial system was in danger of collapsing and America of plunging into another Great Depression. Certainly the decisions should be debated. But, Matt takes the cheap route, snarking about people struggling with those decisions while never explaining what he would have done differently.
As for how conservative President Bush was, this too is a legitimate argument that will continue for years. As conservatives debate, however, surely the hurt feelings of a speechwriter ought to be weighed against a record that includes turning around the war in Iraq, standing up for our intelligence officers, supporting our allies in Eastern Europe with missile defense, cutting taxes, concluding trade agreements, appointing good judges up and down the federal bench, and standing firm on the preciousness of human life—positions that brought down the derision and mockery of elites across our country.
In fairness, it’s not all yucks. On the day Mr. Rumsfeld resigns, Matt recounts a scene in the Defense secretary’s office. “You were my star,” (emphasis in the original) he tells Matt. “And, uh, I probably never told you that.” Right there in the secretary’s office, Matt reports, “I started to cry.’”
Right there too we see Mr. Bush’s greatest failing: Never did he look into young Matthew’s moist eyes and tell him, “You are my star.” If he only had we would have a very different book.
They are calling it the Community Reinvestment Modernization Act (CMRA). The Old Community Reinvestment Act played an important role in lowering mortgage standards and creating so many of these high risk loans that broke the system. While the CRA was just one layer of a multi layered problem created by government that culminated in the largest economic collapse since the Great Depression, it was still an important layer, so naturally the far left wants to do it AGAIN.
As we have reported before and have taken a lead in reporting on, the original CRA was intended to make it illegal to stop “redlining”; the practice of not giving loans to people based on race. But CRA was used by the Clinton Justice Department to make it an affirmative action program for loans, forcing banks to give mortgages to people who had no business getting a home loan simply because it was very unlikely that they could pay the loan back. They say it was about giving loans to poor minorities, when it fact it was about getting loans to Democrat constituent groups.
The rub is, that giving out high risk loans did not do them any favors. Many thousands of people in high risk loans defaulted, they lost their homes, their credit was destroyed and mortgage securities based on those loans brought down AIG, Lehman Brothers and dozens of banks.
Of course ACORN was at the heart of this problems as they filed CRA lawsuits to force banks to make high risk loans, under the faux guise of “fighting racism”.
We reported on this activity extensively HERE and HERE.
ACORN and SEIU have already created an atroturf support group to help get it passed – LINK.
The CRMA takes the old CRA one step further and mandates that loans be given to minorities regardless of income. Is giving a home loan to anyone regardless of income a wise move?
Dems push expanded Community Reinvestment Act; deny Act’s role in mortgage meltdown; GOP cites ACORN connection
By: BYRON YORK
Chief Political Correspondent
09/16/09 4:13 PM EDT
A number of experts believe that aggressive enforcement of the 1970s-era Community Reinvestment Act contributed to the mortgage meltdown, and thus to the greater financial crisis, by requiring financial institutions to lend to unqualified borrowers. Now, the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives is responding to that situation by proposing to expand the scope and power of the Community Reinvestment Act.
This morning House Financial Services Committee chairman Rep. Barney Frank held a hearing on H.R. 1479, the “Community Reinvestment Modernization Act of 2009.” The bill’s purpose is “to close the wealth gap in the United States” by increasing “home ownership and small business ownership for low- and moderate-income borrowers and persons of color.” It would extend CRA’s strict lending requirements to non-bank institutions like credit unions, insurance companies, and mortgage lenders. It would also make CRA more explicitly race-based by requiring CRA standards to be applied to minorities, regardless of income, going beyond earlier requirements that applied solely to low- and moderate-income areas.
Republicans on the committee strongly oppose the plan. “Instead of looking to expand the number of institutions that must abide by Community Investment Act regulations,” California Rep. Ed Royce said in prepared opening remarks at today’s hearing, “I think we should reassess the role this and other government mandates played in the financial collapse and consider scaling it back.”
In private conversation, other Republicans were more emphatic. “There is clearly arguable evidence that the CRA is at the root of this financial meltdown,” says one GOP committee member. “So what do they do? They try to expand CRA.”
But Democrats, led by H.R. 1479 sponsor Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, claimed that expansion of CRA is much-needed. “Congress has passed a number of laws designed to combat redlining and eliminate housing discrimination,” Johnson said at the hearing. “Unfortunately, we all know that redlining still occurs.”
Then there is the ACORN angle. Republican critics point out that the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now has used the CRA to pressure banks to pour money into ACORN and its affiliates, allowing ACORN to facilitate loans to clearly unqualified borrowers. Now, with ACORN under fire after a series of undercover videos showing ACORN workers in Baltimore, Washington DC, New York, and California openly encouraging prostitution, tax evasion, and other crimes, Republicans on the committee are citing the CRA-ACORN connection as yet another reason the Act should not be expanded.
Johnson’s bill has 51 co-sponsors, including some of the most liberal members of the House, like Reps. Dennis Kucinich, John Conyers, Bobby Rush, Steve Cohen, and Barbara Lee. Given the Democrats’ tremendous numerical superiority in the House, if the majority wants to expand CRA, Republicans will be unable to stop it.
UPDATE – Byrom York gives an analysis of the CRA that is spot on and tells the same story we told when the collapse took place. Well done Byron.
Democrats on path to repeat housing disaster
By: Byron York
Chief Political Correspondent
September 22, 2009
With all the attention paid to the health care battle, ACORN, and the president’s “Full Ginsburg” appearances on five Sunday talk shows, few people noticed a hearing with an exceedingly boring title — “Proposals to Enhance the Community Reinvestment Act” — held last week in the House Financial Services Committee. But the session marked a key moment in the ongoing battle between Republicans and Democrats over what caused our current financial woes — and how we might best avoid getting into the same trouble again.
At the hearing, and in others across Capitol Hill, Democratic majorities are pressing hard to expand some of the very policies that led to the reckless home lending that in turn helped lead to the great financial meltdown. If Chairman Barney Frank and his fellow Democrats have their way, we’ll do it all again — and more.
At issue last week was H.R. 1479, the Community Reinvestment Modernization Act of 2009, sponsored by Democratic Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson. It would expand and strengthen the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act, which required banks to make loans in low-income areas that many lenders had traditionally shunned.
After the meltdown, some conservatives blamed the CRA for almost solely causing the crisis by requiring banks to make risky loans to unqualified borrowers. It was an unfair charge. “CRA had at best an incremental role in the U.S. housing debacle,” says J.D. Foster, an economist at the Heritage Foundation. But CRA did help create the conditions in which disaster could occur.
The problems began in the 1990s, when Congress made it harder for lenders to do business if they had not passed the CRA “exam” — that is, if they had not met the government-imposed standards for loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers.
“From 1995 on, there was an incredible push by the Clinton and Bush administrations in every way they could — CRA, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and other ways — to increase the homeownership rate,” says Russell Roberts, a professor of economics at George Mason University. “What that did was to push up the price of housing, and that made it imaginable to lend money to people you never would have lent money to, on terms you wouldn’t have done before.”
In particular, Fannie Mae began to aggressively promote homeownership using the Community Reinvestment Act to give loans to people who couldn’t afford them. Fannie went to bankers and said, make as many CRA loans as you can; we’ll buy them and take them off your hands. “Our approach to our lenders is ‘CRA Your Way,’ ” top Fannie executive Jamie Gorelick told the Mortgage Bankers Association in 2001. “Fannie Mae will buy CRA loans from lenders’ portfolios; we’ll package them into securities; we’ll purchase CRA mortgages at the point of origination. …”
Fannie promised to buy billions and billions of dollars worth of CRA loans because it was under pressure to do so from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which in turn was under pressure from Congress, which set ambitious quotas for low- and moderate-income loans.
The policy ended in a lot of people losing their homes. Now, Johnson’s bill would ensure more of that by applying CRA’s lending requirements not just to banks but to non-bank institutions like credit unions, insurance companies, and mortgage lenders. It would also make CRA explicitly race-based by, in Johnson’s words, “requiring CRA exams to explicitly consider lending and services to minorities in addition to low- and moderate-income communities.”
Republicans on the Financial Services Committee strongly oppose the plan. “Instead of looking to expand the number of institutions that must abide by CRA regulations, I think we should reassess the role this and other government mandates played in the financial collapse and consider scaling it back,” California Rep. Ed Royce said at the hearing.
In private conversation, other Republicans were more emphatic. “There is clearly arguable evidence that the CRA is at the root of this financial meltdown,” said one GOP committee member. “So what do they do? They try to expand CRA.”
That’s an overstatement of CRA’s role in the housing mess, but it’s right about the Democratic plan. Denying that CRA, Fannie and other institutions played any role in setting the stage for disaster, they’re proposing more of what helped get us into trouble in the first place. It’s no way to fix the problem.
Did the administration threaten its own student newspaper to censor it? BUCC has a lawyer and I hope he is a good one.
FIRE’s Adam Kissel:
Red Alert: Bucknell University Hardens Policy Used to Shut Down Student Protests; Student Newspaper Rejects FIRE Ad
A culture of fear appears to be chilling expression at Bucknell University, where even the student newspaper fears a libel lawsuit from Associate Dean of Students Gerald W. Commerford if it were to print a critical advertisement from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). After Bucknell administrators misapplied and abused Bucknell’s Sales and Solicitation and nondiscrimination policies last semester to shut down the Bucknell University Conservatives Club’s (BUCC’s) protests of affirmative action and President Obama’s economic stimulus, the group turned to FIRE for help. Bucknell has expanded and hardened the language in its policies affecting such protests and still insists that “affirmative action bake sales” have no place in the public areas of the campus. FIRE now lists Bucknell as a Red Alert school, one of only six “worst of the worst” schools in America when it comes to student rights on campus.
Adam Kissel, Director, Individual Rights Defense Program
Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE)
601 Walnut Street, Suite 510
Philadelphia, PA 19106
Phone: 215-717-3473; Fax: 215-717-3440
————————
Red Alert: Bucknell University Hardens Policy Used to Shut Down Student Protests; Student Newspaper Rejects FIRE Ad
LEWISBURG, Pa., September 21, 2009—A culture of fear appears to be chilling expression at Bucknell University, where even the student newspaper fears a libel lawsuit from Associate Dean of Students Gerald W. Commerford if it were to print a critical advertisement from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). After Bucknell administrators misapplied and abused Bucknell’s Sales and Solicitation and nondiscrimination policies last semester to shut down the Bucknell University Conservatives Club’s (BUCC’s) protests of affirmative action and President Obama’s economic stimulus, the group turned to FIRE for help. Bucknell has expanded and hardened the language in its policies affecting such protests and still insists that “affirmative action bake sales” have no place in the public areas of the campus. FIRE now lists Bucknell as a Red Alert school, one of only six “worst of the worst” schools in America when it comes to student rights on campus.
“Consider this: Bucknell has created a campus culture such that an independent student newspaper, The Bucknellian, won’t even print an outside advertisement critical of the university,” FIRE President Greg Lukianoff said. “Along with the college’s ban on handbills criticizing the stimulus plan and on affirmative action bake sale protests, it has become clear that Bucknell is teaching students to fear authority and keep quiet or face punishment.”
Bucknell’s most recent forays into censorship began on March 17, 2009, when BUCC members stood at Bucknell’s student center and passed out fake dollar bills with President Obama’s face on the front and the sentence “Obama’s stimulus plan makes your money as worthless as monopoly money” on the back. One hour into the protest, Bucknell administrator Judith L. Mickanis approached the students and told them that they were “busted,” that they were “soliciting” without prior approval, and that their activity was equivalent to handing out Bibles.
The students protested, but despite the fact that Bucknell’s solicitation policy explicitly covered only sales and fundraising materials, Mickanis insisted via e-mail that prior permission was needed to distribute any materials “out in the open”—“anything from Bibles to other matter.”
Then, on April 7, administrators shut down BUCC’s “affirmative action bake sale” protest, a satirical protest of race-conscious policies commonly held on campuses across the country. A video recording shows that an hour into BUCC’s protest, Commerford informed the students that he had the “opportunity” to shut down the sale because they were charging lower prices than promised for baked goods. BUCC members quickly filed an application to hold the same event two weeks later, but in a recorded conversation, Commerford said that such a bake sale would violate Bucknell’s nondiscrimination policy—even with satirical, optional pricing. He added that affirmative action “needs to be debated in its proper forum, ok, and not on the public property of the campus.”
As part of its response to these acts of censorship, FIRE attempted to place an advertisement in the first fall issue of The Bucknellian, the supposedly independent student newspaper, to alert students that Bucknell’s own promises of free speech cannot be counted on. Bucknellian Editor-in-Chief Lenore Flower refused to run the ad, however, telling FIRE on September 1 that the ad “might be construed as libel” and “could lead to legality issues for the Bucknellian.” (The ad only reflects FIRE’s opinion and therefore is not libelous by any definition.)
“First, Dean Commerford silenced the conservative club’s expression. Now, even the student newspaper is afraid to print a perfectly lawful third-party ad about it,” said Adam Kissel, Director of FIRE’s Individual Rights Defense Program. “Bucknell richly deserves its place on our Red Alert list of schools where students should think twice before jeopardizing their rights by enrolling.”
FIRE’s rejected ad in The Bucknellian was FIRE’s latest effort to convince the private university to honor its own promises to its students. After the three instances of censorship this spring, FIRE wrote Bucknell President Brian C. Mitchell, reminding him that the university’s handbook “instructs students not only that they have freedom of speech but that ‘deliberate interference’ with this freedom is prohibited.” In June, after FIRE publicized the case, Bucknell responded with false and misleading information about what actually happened, flatly contradicting the documentary evidence. FIRE wrote Bucknell a second time on June 30 to correct the record, but Bucknell refused to accept that the documentation soundly contradicted Bucknell’s position. A third letteron August 6, to Bucknell’s trustees, has gone unanswered.
As of August 25, Bucknell thus joined five other schools on FIRE’s Red Alert list of campus censors. The other schools on the list, highlighted in a full-page ad in the “ America’s Best Colleges” issue of U.S. News & World Report, are Brandeis University, Colorado College, Johns Hopkins University, Michigan State University, and Tufts University.
Over the summer, Bucknell silently expanded and renamed its Sales and Solicitation policy as “Sales and Promotions.” It now ambiguously covers promotions that “promote … causes” and does not clarify whether distributing protest literature, an American free-speech tradition which includes Thomas Paine’s pivotal Common Sense and The Crisis, still requires prior permission. “In response to national criticism about its stifling of protest on campus, the university actually made its policies more restrictive and more clearly applicable to the BUCC. Bucknell’s retrenchment against student speech in the face of criticism should concern all students and faculty at Bucknell,” Kissel said. “The new ‘promotions’ policy remains utterly inconsistent with Bucknell’s existing commitments to freedom of speech.”
Tell Bucknell administrators to stop inventing excuses and to allow its students to enjoy the free speech rights that Bucknell has promised. Write to them here.
CONTACT:
Adam Kissel, Director, Individual Rights Defense Program, FIRE: 215-717-3473; adam@thefire.org
If we just make ourselves more defenseless, Putin will see that we care and turn into a nice guy…..
This is the same nonsense that we have gotten from the far left and leftist academics for years. The left and leftist academics freaked when Reagan called out the USSR as an evil empire and freaked even more when Reagan used the arms race and space based missile defense to bring them to their knees. I was there and saw this first hand.
The policy of appeasement that the far left has repeatedly championed since the end of the Korean War has proved to be foolish time and time again, but as usual elitist leftists believe that the most brilliant leftists (themselves) have not tried it yet. Sean Hannity’s book “Deliver Us From Evil” explains these policies and how wrong-headed they proved to be.
The left has consistently misread the “good intentions” of our “former enemies”. Jimmy Carter and the leftists in Congress were shocked when Russia invaded Afghanistan. They were also shocked when they discovered the true nature of the radical Islamic regime in Iran that the Carter Administration actively helped come to power.
Today, when it comes to the brutality of Hugo Chavez, Castro and Daniel Ortega in the 80′s, the left was well aware that these leftist leaders were killers and thugs and they just don’t care. President Obama’s support of the former President of Honduras who tried to make himself dictator like Hugo Chavez is a prime example and so is his abandonment of US agreements to help provide missile defense for our allies in Eastern Europe to appease Russia…and Obama did this with nothing to show for it in exchange (LINK).
Putin had an agreement about his Georgia invasion that was negotiated by France. Putin stands in gross violation of that agreement to this day.
To put it in Trek terms, Putin like other militant leftist leaders is a Romulan. This means that he exploits weakness, creeps slowly and deliberately, and is predictably treacherous. He was the former head of the KGB after all.
Appeasement reflects the hope that the crocodile will eat you last – Winston Churchill.
Barack Obama has demanded the Pentagon conduct a radical review of US nuclear weapons doctrine to prepare the way for deep cuts in the country’s arsenal, the Guardian can reveal.
Obama has rejected the Pentagon’s first draft of the “nuclear posture review” as being too timid, and has called for a range of more far-reaching options consistent with his goal of eventually abolishing nuclear weapons altogether, [except for Russia's - Editor] according to European officials.
Those options include:
• Reconfiguring the US nuclear force to allow for an arsenal measured in hundreds rather than thousands of deployed strategic warheads. [Making it much easier to take them out with a first strike - Editor]
• Redrafting nuclear doctrine to narrow the range of conditions under which the US would use nuclear weapons.
• Exploring ways of guaranteeing the future reliability of nuclear weapons without testing or producing a new generation of warheads. [Guarantee without a test..I thought this administration opposed junk science - Editor]
The review is due to be completed by the end of this year, and European officials say the outcome is not yet clear. But one official said: “Obama is now driving this process. He is saying these are the president’s weapons, and he wants to look again at the doctrine and their role.”
The move comes as Obama prepares to take the rare step of chairing a watershed session of the UN security council on Thursday. It is aimed at winning consensus on a new grand bargain: exchanging more radical disarmament by nuclear powers in return for wider global efforts to prevent further proliferation.
That bargain is at the heart of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, which is up for review next year amid signs it is unravelling in the face of Iranian and North Korean nuclear ambitions.
In an article for the Guardian today, the foreign secretary, David Miliband, argues that failure to win a consensus would be disastrous. “This is one of the most critical issues we face,” the foreign secretary writes. “Get it right, and we will increase global security, pave the way for a world without nuclear weapons, and improve access to affordable, safe and dependable energy – vital to tackle climate change. Get it wrong, and we face the spread of nuclear weapons and the chilling prospect of nuclear material falling into the hands of terrorists.”
According to a final draft of the resolution due to be passed on Thursday, however, the UN security council will not wholeheartedly embrace the US and Britain’s call for eventual abolition of nuclear weapons. Largely on French insistence, the council will endorse the vaguer aim of seeking “to create the conditions for a world without nuclear weapons”. [Even FRANCE says this plan is too dovish - Editor]
Gordon Brown is due to use this week’s UN general assembly meeting to renew a diplomatic offensive on Iran for its failure to comply with security council demands that it suspend enrichment of uranium. The issue has been given greater urgency by an International Atomic Energy Agency document leaked last week which showed inspectors for the agency believed Iran already had “sufficient information” to build a warhead, and had tested an important component of a nuclear device.
Germany is also expected to toughen its position on Iran ahead of a showdown between major powers and the Iranian government on 1 October. But it is not yet clear what position will be taken by Russia, which has hitherto opposed the imposition of further sanctions on Iran.
Moscow’s stance will be closely watched for signs of greater co-operation in return for Obama’s decision last week to abandon a missile defence scheme in eastern Europe, a longstanding source of irritation to Russia. [Unilateral move to make us more defenseless against Russian missiles - Editor]
“I hope the Russians realise they have to do something serious. I don’t think a deal has been done, but there is a great deal of expectation,” said a British official. [Translation: Obama is doing this without an agreement or a committment with any verification from Putin... this is tantamount to unilateral disarmament in the face of evil and what has history taught us about that? - Editor]
Russia has approximately 2,780 deployed strategic warheads, compared with around 2,100 in the US. The abandonment of the US missile defence already appears to have spurred arms control talks currently underway between Washington and Moscow: the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, said today that chances were “quite high” that a deal to reduce arsenals to 1,500 warheads each would be signed by the end of the year.
Ed Morrissey at Hotair.com comments HERE. Ed is a truly brilliant man, but I am not certain that he understands the full measure of the impact of what the Guardian is saying here.
Listen to Limbaugh very carefully. As he reads the NYT article on the ACORN scandal he points out the information and important details that the article leaves out. Then Limbaugh does a brilliant job of expressing the attitude and tone of the article which is filled with buzz words (words that evoke an emotional response or narrative) designed to invoke an attitude in the reader. I did a 40 page paper on this very type of propaganda. it is called “Attitude Change Propaganda Theory”. With this type of propaganda you are given only some of the pertinent information and that information is delivered with an attitude that can include a false narrative.
This type of propaganda is taught in journalism schools so it is unlikely that the NYT isn’t perfectly aware of what this piece is really all about.
CBS News Liberty Blog (amazing that they have a libertarian guy who has a liberty blog):
The Obama administration has privately concluded that a cap and trade law would cost American taxpayers up to $200 billion a year, the equivalent of hiking personal income taxes by about 15 percent.
A previously unreleased analysis prepared by the U.S. Department of Treasury says the total in new taxes would be between $100 billion to $200 billion a year. At the upper end of the administration’s estimate, the cost per American household would be an extra $1,761 a year.
A second memorandum, which was prepared for Obama’s transition team after the November election, says this about climate change policies: “Economic costs will likely be on the order of 1 percent of GDP, making them equal in scale to all existing environmental regulation.”
The documents (PDF) were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute and released on Tuesday.
See the timing of this, they knew in November that this would take a huge chunk of money out of the economy. 1% of GDP is massive (dont sound much but in economic terms its huge). This means that the clips of Democrats and the White House saying that this would not cost much that Glenn played above…. well they were lying and full well knew it.
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, in Cernobbio, Italy
Published: 9:06PM BST 06 Sep 2009
The US Federal Reserve’s policy of printing money to buy Treasury debt threatens to set off a serious decline of the dollar and compel China to redesign its foreign reserve policy, according to a top member of the Communist hierarchy.
Cheng Siwei, former vice-chairman of the Standing Committee and now head of China’s green energy drive, said Beijing was dismayed by the Fed’s recourse to “credit easing”.
“We hope there will be a change in monetary policy as soon as they have positive growth again,” he said at the Ambrosetti Workshop, a policy gathering on Lake Como.
“If they keep printing money to buy bonds it will lead to inflation, and after a year or two the dollar will fall hard. Most of our foreign reserves are in US bonds and this is very difficult to change, so we will diversify incremental reserves into euros, yen, and other currencies,” he said.
China’s reserves are more than – $2 trillion, the world’s largest.
“Gold is definitely an alternative, but when we buy, the price goes up. We have to do it carefully so as not to stimulate the markets,” he added.
The left wing bias at public universities is so extrenched that Marxism is often taught as the only academic truth. While in the standard liberal arts curriculum Aristotle, Socrates, Francis bacon, Edmund Burke, Cicero, Adam Smith, Thomas Aquinas go almost completely uncovered; advocates for Marx like central control of our lives such as Karl Marx, Judith Butler, C.Wright Mills, Max Weber, and Antonio Gramsci get covered over and over again.
The bias is not that subtle either as most lessons and events start out with idea that the far left premise is true. The bias is usually not as bold and in your face as the following video, but this inceident does not surprise me at all.
Politicizing non political subjects is very common, both in the curriculum and in the text books where professors who write them often include their own social and political opinions and present them as academic truth.
I just took the required non-majors biology lab class last semester and on one of the first homework assignments included a question on a politically charged John Holdren like piece on population control from the text. Of course none of the horror stories about what would happen if we did not have global central control over the economy and human reproduction came true, but that does not stop textbooks and professors from pushing the narrative as fact. I wrote a page long essay about how those theories have been debunked by history and I attacked the appropriateness of such a political narrative in a biology class. The instructor, who was a professor candidate looking for full-time work, seemed to learn her lesson and never posed a question like that again in class. Good for her.
Wallace believes that they are working the other media like they are him as well. Wallace says that he believes it is effective with them and it is not with him.
Two of every three practicing physicians oppose the medical overhaul plan under consideration in Washington, and hundreds of thousands would think about shutting down their practices or retiring early if it were adopted, a new IBD/TIPP Poll has found.
The poll contradicts the claims of not only the White House, but also doctors’ own lobby — the powerful American Medical Association — both of which suggest the medical profession is behind the proposed overhaul.
It also calls into question whether an overhaul is even doable; 72% of the doctors polled disagree with the administration’s claim that the government can cover 47 million more people with better-quality care at lower cost.
The IBD/TIPP Poll was conducted by mail the past two weeks, with 1,376 practicing physicians chosen randomly throughout the country taking part. Responses are still coming in, and doctors’ positions on related topics — including the impact of an overhaul on senior care, medical school applications and drug development — will be covered later in this series.
Major findings included:
• Two-thirds, or 65%, of doctors say they oppose the proposed government expansion plan. This contradicts the administration’s claims that doctors are part of an “unprecedented coalition” supporting a medical overhaul.
It also differs with findings of a poll released Monday by National Public Radio that suggests a “majority of physicians want public and private insurance options,” and clashes with media reports such as Tuesday’s front-page story in the Los Angeles Times with the headline “Doctors Go For Obama’s Reform.”
Nowhere in the Times story does it say doctors as a whole back the overhaul. It says only that the AMA — the “association representing the nation’s physicians” and what “many still regard as the country’s premier lobbying force” — is “lobbying and advertising to win public support for President Obama’s sweeping plan.”
The AMA, in fact, represents approximately 18% of physicians and has been hit with a number of defections by members opposed to the AMA’s support of Democrats’ proposed health care overhaul.
•Four of nine doctors, or 45%, said they “would consider leaving their practice or taking an early retirement” if Congress passes the plan the Democratic majority and White House have in mind.
More than 800,000 doctors were practicing in 2006, the government says. Projecting the poll’s finding onto that population, 360,000 doctors would consider quitting.
UPDATE – New England Journal of Medicine reports that 46% of doctors would consider leaving the practice if ObamaCare passed (March 2010).
MITCH MCCONNELL, SENATE MINORITY LEADER: “Shut up,” the government says, “don’t communicate with your customers. Be quiet and get in line.”
KARL: And even some Democratic Senators are concerned that the bill now before the Senate Finance Committee reduces spending on Medicare Advantage by $123 billion.
