GOP: Obama Budget Would Increase Debt to $25.4 Trillion

...41% Increase in Income Taxes...

Government Plays Favorites

By John Stossel

People say government must "help the little guy, promote equality, level the playing field."
People often go into government to do that. But even when people mean well, it's natural for them to help out their cronies.

David Stockman, who ran the Office of Management and Budget under Ronald Reagan, was criticized for saying the government's budget numbers didn't add up. But he was right.

Now, in his book "The Great Deformation," he says both major political parties failed ordinary Americans when the housing bubble burst, and they rushed to bail out cronies at big banks. Government continues to threaten our future by printing gobs of money and guaranteeing trillions in loans to banks, homeowners, students and other politically connected groups.

The political class claims the economy would have been destroyed in 2008 without a bailout of the big banks. Stockman says that's a myth: "The Main Street banks were not going to go into a huge retail bank run ... and (Fed chairman Ben) Bernanke is totally wrong when he says we were on the verge of Depression 2.0. We weren't close. We would have worked our way through it. We've done it many times in history."

Worked our way through it? Without the bailouts, there might have been a bigger stock market drop, and more businesses would have closed! But Stockman says, so what? It would have been worth it. And I agree with him.

Today, taxpayers would be $1 trillion richer and not on the hook for trillions in loan guarantees. Prices would now have found a natural floor, business would be eagerly hiring again, and America would be free of moral hazards like "too big to fail" banks.

What do I mean by "moral hazard"? I once built a beach house on the edge of the ocean -- a very risky place to build -- but I did so because federal flood insurance guaranteed my investment. Eventually, a storm swept away my house, but I didn't lose a penny. Government "insurance" covered my loss. Thanks, taxpayers!

Now that I'm wiser -- and more libertarian -- I'm ashamed that I took your money and understand that the whole program is a mistake. The same government that worries about global warming causing flooding spends billions to compensate risk-takers who live next to oceans. That's moral hazard.

But beachfront property owners have political connections. They make desperate calls to legislators. Politicians respond to whoever screams loudest.

When the housing bubble burst, politicians got panicked calls from their friends on Wall Street -- in many cases former colleagues. Instead of letting their old friends take big losses and trusting smaller banks to expand and take their customers, the political class propped up risk-takers who made bad bets.

It's not that those who move back and forth between Wall Street and government are evil. But when you are close to a problem, you are quicker to panic. A few years back, brilliant scientists who studied SARS or bird flu sincerely thought a mass epidemic was coming, and therefore government had to "do something." (It didn't hurt that "doing something" meant spending more on their area of research.)

In 1999, computer techs really believed computers would freeze when the calendar turned to 2000, causing planes to fall from the sky. Killer-bee researchers were convinced bees would sting us to death.

Anti-pesticide environmentalists, flesh-eating bacteria researchers and today's global warming fanatics are all sincere in their fear.

But unlike Wall Street bankers, none could confiscate a trillion of your dollars and give them to their cronies. Believe me: If Al Gore could have done that, he would have.

Politicians accuse those of us who advocate limited government of being heartless when we say that government should not protect us against loss. But government efforts to "protect" us create a moral hazard that just makes our problems bigger over time.

Politicians say, "Yes, we can!" But don't be fooled: "No, They Can't."

http://townhall.com/columnists/johnstossel/2013/04/10/government-plays-favorites-n1562642/page/full/

College Professor: Hey, Let's Make Anti-Gun Posters

What does a professor do after launching a personal anti-gun campaign? Forces students paying tuition at a public university to make anti-gun posters for her as part of a class assignment, obviously. More from Campus Reform:

A professor at a public university in Texas is under investigation from school administrators for allegedly forcing students in her graphic design class to create anti-gun posters for a personal anti-gun campaign she had launched.
Midwestern State University Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs Betty Stewart confirmed to Campus Reform Friday the school has launched an investigation into professor Jennifer Yucus’ conduct after a student filed an official complaint on Thursday.
According to the complaint, obtained by Campus Reform, the professor compelled students in her graphic design class to create artwork opposing firearms on campus and opposing pro-gun legislation currently pending before the Texas state legislature.
The professor then used the artwork students created online to publicize an anti-gun petition entitled “MSU is anti-Concealed Carry on Campus” and on a now deleted Facebook page opposing firearms, says the complaint.
“On Monday, April 1, around 7 PM (class was 5:30 – 8:20), Jennifer Yucus, Assistant Professor of Graphic Art/Design, compelled students from her Computers For Artists class to advocate in favor of a political petition opposing firearms on campus, in opposition to a pair of bills currently before the Texas legislature, using personal art materials and MSU resources,” reads the complaint.

Makes you contemplate what the definition of being "educated" is these days.

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2013/04/10/college-professor-hey-lets-make-antigun-posters-n1563217

How 1960s Radicals Ended up Teaching Your Kids

On the same day ESPN broadcast the Rutgers tape, The New York Post reported that Kathy Boudin, a professor at Columbia University, was named the 2013 Sheinberg Scholar-in-Residence at NYU Law School. In 1984, Boudin, a member of the Weather Underground, a violent, oafish association of upper-class “revolutionaries,” pled guilty to second degree murder in association with the infamous 1981 Brinks armored car robbery in Nyack, New York. Babbling in the language of anti-racism and anti-imperialism, Boudin assisted in ending the life of three people, including Waverly Brown, the first black police officer on the Nyack police force, and left nine children fatherless. She was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison. In 2003, Boudin was released; by 2008 she had landed a coveted teaching position at an Ivy League university.

Indeed, Boudin’s Columbia University biography doesn’t mention her violent past, describing her simply as “an educator and counselor with experience in program development since 1964, working within communities with limited resources to solve social problems.” Neither does an official NYU press release announcing her new gig, instead explaining that Boudin “has been dedicated to community involvement in social change since the 1960’s.” Well, that’s one way of putting it. (Boudin didn’t respond to an interview request.)

Kick a student on the basketball court and you’ll lose your university job. Spend two decades in prison on radical chic murder rap and you’ll get one.

Let’s be clear: Private colleges can hire whomever they like, though one suspects that a Pinochet loyalist, a propagandist for Franco, or a far-right bomber—where academic jobs are scarce—wouldn’t make the shortlist of candidates at Columbia or NYU. In fact, there is a rather ignoble tradition within academia of welcoming those with fringe views and violent backgrounds, provided their politics were “misguided” in the appropriate direction.

130409-weather-underground-moynihan-embed — This is the front page of a Chicago Police Department Daily Bulletin issued April 9, 1970, showing eight members of the Weathermen faction of the SDS who are being sought on warrants charging aggravated battery on police officers. (Chicago Police Dept/AP)

The most famous Weather Underground bombers-cum-professors are, of course, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn (also a former Sheinberg Scholar-in-Residence at NYU, which must consider bomb-making skills when making its selection), whose infantile politics and tenure on the FBI’s Most Wanted List never dented the confidence of the University of Illinois or Northwestern University.

Ayers and Dohrn have long maintained that their bombing campaigns never deliberately targeted people, a claim that elides a rather important event: the famous 1970 explosion at a Weather bomb factory in New York City that killed three people, all of whom were constructing nail-packed pipe bombs for deployment at an army dance in Fort Dix, New Jersey. The goal was to blind, maim, and kill. Boudin was present, but escaped the explosion and evaded capture. She insisted during her 2003 parole hearing, against logic and and all available evidence, that she was unaware the house was being used to construct bombs.

In a fair-minded piece for LA Weekly, journalist Peter Jamison reported that investigators also believed an unsolved 1970 bombing of a San Francisco police station, which killed one officer and blinded another, could be tied back to Ayers and Dohrn. According to Jamison, “two credible eyewitnesses—both former left-wing radicals tied to the Weathermen—gave detailed statements to investigators in the 1970s alleging that Dohrn and Howard Machtinger, another member of the group, were personally involved in organizing the deadly attack.”

Ayers, Dohrn, and Machtiger spent most of the 1970s “underground,” attempting to avoid prosecution on a variety of charges (including a foiled attempt to bomb the Detroit Police Officers Association Building) and Jamison says that the three “were all targets of a secret federal grand jury investigation in 2003” into the police station bombing. It might not surprise you that, before retiring, Machtinger was a professor at North Carolina Central University and Teaching Fellows Director at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill’s School of Education. According to Jamison, Ayers, Dohrn, and Machtiger all refused repeated requests to comment on the case.

Or take former Black Panther party grandee Ericka Huggins, who is now a professor of women’s studies at California State University, a professor of sociology at Laney and Berkeley City College, and, according to one official biography, a “human rights activist.” In 2011, students at the University of Kentucky could receive extra credit for attending a lecture by Huggins, described as a “political prisoner and human rights activist.” It does not seem to bother these universities that in 1970 Huggins was brought to trial on charges of “aiding and abetting” the murder of Alex Rackley, a fellow Panther they wrongly believed to be a police informant. She was acquitted.

But a few salient facts aren’t disputed: After days of “interrogation,” Rackley was brutally tortured—beaten mercilessly, boiling water poured on his naked body—and left to marinate in his own blood, urine, and feces. As a warning to other “traitors,” one torture session was audiotaped. In the scratchy recording recovered by police, Huggins can be heard recalling when she “began to realize how phony [Rackley] was and that he was either an extreme fool or a pig, so we began to ask questions with a little force and the answers came out after a few buckets of hot water.” During the session, Rackley was tied to his chair with a gun pointed at him. As he shifted nervously, Huggins snapped, “Sit down motherfucker. Keep still.” (A copy of the tape was recently discovered in a Connecticut house and can be listened to here).

After 16 years in prison, her sentence was commuted by President Bill Clinton and, not long after, the self-identified “human rights activist” took a position teaching at John Jay College.

In their book Murder in the Model City, authors Paul Bass and Douglas W. Rae describe a broken Rackley being led out of the house two days after the taped session, to be driven to his execution site in a nearby marsh: “From her perch by the kitchen counter, Ericka Huggins, the highest- ranking female Panther in town, watched [Panthers George] Sams and Warren [Kimbro] walk Rackley out the door. Sam brandished the .45 automatic as he held Rackley’s arms, which were tied together with ropes.” Warren Kimbro shot Alex Rackley in the head. He later confessed to the murder and was sentenced to life in prison, but only served four years. By 1975, he was an assistant dean at Eastern Connecticut State University.

After years on the run, having been indicted for her involvement in the Brinks robbery and murder in Nyack, Weather Underground member Susan Rosenberg was caught in 1985 moving “740 pounds of dynamite and weapons, including a submachine gun,” according to the New York Times, from her car into a storage locker. After 16 years in prison, her sentence was commuted by President Bill Clinton and, not long after, the self-identified “human rights activist” took a position teaching at John Jay College. After her contract wasn’t renewed, she found a perch at Hamilton College, though furious opposition by some faculty members forced the administration to withdraw the offer. But no hard feelings from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice Interdisciplinary Studies Program, which in 2011 invited students “to a celebration of Susan Rosenberg” upon the release of her memoir.

Former Weather Underground member Eleanor Raskin, who fled after being indicted for bomb making in the 1970s, is an associate professor at Albany Law School. In 1981, Raskin and her husband were arrested in connection with an explosives cache uncovered two years earlier by New Jersey police (her husband was placed on probation; the charges against Raskin were dropped). After years in hiding, Mark Rudd, a Weather leader who also fled indictment and went “underground,” turned himself in 1977 and was sentenced to two years’ probation. He later taught at Central New Mexico Community College.

And on it goes. Perhaps you detect a pattern developing here?

They might have been violent charlatans, but they were violent charlatans in search of a better society. They might resist providing a full and proper accounting of their crimes, but most will concede that their tactics might have been misguided and offer qualified repentance, but insist that their instincts were correct.

So go ahead and commit a crime, “expropriate” a bank. Just make sure you leave an incoherent manifesto at the scene, claiming that you’re shooting your guns and filling your pockets with loot for the people. When caught, you won’t be a convicted murderer, but a “political prisoner.” And when released, you can be a college professor.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/04/10/how-1960s-radicals-ended-up-teaching-your-kids.html

EPA acknowledges releasing personal details on farmers, senator slams agency

The Environmental Protection Agency acknowledged Tuesday that it released personal information on potentially thousands of farmers and ranchers to environmental groups, following concerns from congressional Republicans and agriculture groups that the release could endanger their safety.

According to a document obtained by FoxNews.com, the EPA said “some of the personal information that could have been protected … was released." Though the EPA has already sent out the documents, the agency now says it has since redacted sensitive details and asked the environmental groups to “return the information.”

But Sen. John Thune, who originally complained about the release, slammed the EPA for trying to retroactively recover the sensitive data.

"It is inexcusable for the EPA to release the personal information of American families and then call for it back, knowing full well that the erroneously released information will never be fully returned," he said in a statement to FoxNews.com. "While EPA acknowledging that it erred is a first step, more must be done to protect the personal information of our farmers and ranchers now and in the future. I will continue to demand answers from the EPA on how this information was collected and why it is still being distributed to extreme environmental groups to the detriment of our farm and ranch families."

The information on livestock and produce farmers was sought through a Freedom of Information Act request by the groups Earth Justice, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Pew Charitable Trust. The groups, which have not commented on whether they plan to return the documents, were originally given information on roughly 80,000 farmers and ranchers.

The agency acknowledged the information included individual names, email addresses, phone numbers and personal addresses.

Thune, of South Dakota, where 500 farmers and ranchers had their information made public, sent a letter Monday to the EPA requesting the agency answer a list of questions -- including whether agency officials reviewed the information to see whether the release complied with the federal Privacy Act of 1974.

“The EPA has threatened the health and safety of agriculture producers and their families and has damaged the security of our food system,” Thune said. “There is a growing gap of trust between America’s farm and ranch families and the EPA. Much of this lack of trust is due to EPA’s aggressive regulatory agenda.”

Other concerns expressed by Thune, farm bureaus and others include whether the EPA first consulted with the departments of Agriculture and Homeland Security, which had already advised against compiling a public database with similar information and whether the EPA still intends to create such a record.

“Does the EPA intend to gather any more personal information on livestock producers?” Thune asked in his letter to agency Acting Administrator Bob Perciasepe.

The EPA said the data was related to farms in 29 states with “concentrated animal feeding operations” and that the released information was part of the agency’s commitment to “ensure clean water and public-health protection.”

The groups wanted the information, they say, because such large-scale operations are a major source of water pollution and they want to hold the EPA accountable for enforcing the Clean Water Act.

Critics have characterized Earth Justice and the organizations as being “extremist groups” and say the released information included data on family farmers who feed fewer than 1,000 animals, which excludes them from having to comply with the Act.

“This information details my family’s home address,” J.D. Alexander, a Nebraska cattle farmer and former president of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, told FarmFuture.com. “The only thing it doesn’t do is chauffeur these extremists to my house.”

In response, Jon Devine, an attorney, wrote in a blog for the Natural Resources Defense Council: "The most irresponsible charge made by NCBA is that providing this information to public interest groups somehow may facilitate criminal acts against facilities. That accusation is entirely unwarranted. NRDC and Pew condemn such illegal activities."

The EPA said the majority of the data was already publicly available through state databases, web sites and federal and state permits, or is required to be released under federal or state law.

However, in response to privacy concerns raised by agricultural groups, the agency redacted sections of information from 10 of the 29 states that contained some personal data, the release said.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/04/09/epa-acknowledges-giving-out-personal-info-in-request-that-included-data-on/?test=latestnews#ixzz2Q4UMDMv4

Take My Child...Please.

A few years ago, Hillary wrote a book titled "It Takes a Village." That was a palatable notion. The family had the primary responsibility, but there was also community environmental impact as well. Hillary's observation was mostly reasonable, acceptable, and very politically correct.

But the gradual morphing of the Liberal Progressive message is suddenly obvious.

MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry said...

"...break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities."

Where in the world would parents get the "private idea" that that child was actually theirs? How old fashioned and backward thinking.

What is more bothersome is that the notion, the "private idea", is easily dismissed by the single parent, especially when they are encouraged to do so by the likes of Melissa Harris-Perry. The child is of the community they are told, and hence becomes the community's responsibility. The notion is welcomed. Maybe the mother and the child are both somehow victims too. We await Melissa Harris-Perry to tell us.

From the New York Times..

"73 percent of black children are born outside marriage, compared with 53 percent of Latinos and 29 percent of whites."

And when the unwed woman gets pregnant, we are led to believe that it was due to a shortfall in women's healthcare, i.e. the availability of contraceptive products, that is the real culprit. So the community is responsible for providing "women's healthcare", i.e. contraception....but the community is also responsible for the child born out of wedlock.

Right Sandra Fluke?

There is also the troubling disconnect between the "pro choice" camp and the "communal child" camp. "It is my body", but it will be "your child". The choice is mine alone, but the child "belong(s) to the whole community". Asking a liberal to logically square these positions is futile.

As the child grows, the notion that "how they do in school is solely up to the teacher" is a natural extrapolation of the communal concept. And what else? Where they are and what they do in their spare time is also more of a community issue then a familial one.

If the child ends up in a "flash mob" certainly this is not poor decision making or an underperformance of parenting but a failure of the community.

Is there a clearer depiction of the liberal left's attitude on individual responsibility?

How convenient and how easily received and embraced is this notion that your mistake is now 'our' mistake. Spread the wealth and spread the responsibilities, or more appropriately the irresponsibilities.

Notice the precise word selection. The "private idea" is a bad idea...kind of like "private industry". "Private" is suggested a bad word. "Communal" and "collective" are offered as good words. Communal...communism. Collective responsibility....collectives. These terms are right out of the Marx-Engels dictionary.

These ideas, these concepts of shedding and then spreading responsibility are easily sold to a certain strata of our population. It is born, pardon the analogy, in the same womb as "victimhood".

But the grand subliminal suggestion is that because the child is of the community, and the community is reliant upon the Federal Government, we can now read, "It takes a government" to raise a child. That is the actual mantra. Forward.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/04/take_my_childplease.html#ixzz2Q4iA8C8S

DC joins several states classifying smoking as a “pre-existing medical condition” under ObamaCare

Under ObamaCare, insurers have the option of charging smokers up to 50 percent more to cover the associated higher costs of providing them with health care — but the District of Columbia, along with several other states, have decided that any plans being sold within their exchange are prohibited from adding tobacco surcharges. That simply wouldn’t be fair, you see:

On Monday, the D.C. exchange’s executive board voted to prevent insurers from charging higher premiums to smokers than to nonsmokers — meaning nonsmokers are likely to pay modestly higher rates than if smoking surcharges were permitted. The District joins three states — Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Vermont — that have banned tobacco surcharges on their own exchanges. …

The surcharge ban applies to health plans sold within the exchange, which is set to open Oct. 1 and must be used by individuals and, if the D.C. Council endorses a previous board recommendation, employers covering up to 50 people. Larger employers purchasing outside the exchange would be able to choose plans that charge smokers more. …

In a statement, Akhter referred to tobacco use as a “pre-existing medical condition” and added that charging smokers more would be “in direct conflict with our efforts to help people quit smoking.”

Ah, the myriad joys of socialized medicine: No one person is really responsible for the costs and consequences of their decisions, while the Faceless Taxpaying Everyman (i.e., you) takes on an ever-increasing burden.

That’s pretty much the point of ObamaCare, though, isn’t it? The legislation completely corrupts the basic idea of health insurance — i.e., pricing out risk — by forbidding insurers from doing so accurately and charging accordingly, and the states nixing smoking surcharges from their exchanges are just hurrying that along. As Kevin Williamson puts it at NRO:

As expected, the definition of “preexisting condition” is proving infinitely malleable, with behaviors born again as conditions. If smoking is a condition, then drug addiction is a condition, self-mutilation is a condition, a penchant for BASE jumping is a condition, juggling ampules of penicillin-resistant syphilis — practically anything qualifies as a condition under such a plastic understanding. …

Obamacare is designed to destroy the insurance market. Markets do not function without prices, and Obamacare ensures that prices will not be allowed to emerge. There is a medical price associated with smoking, but the District of Columbia has decided to suppress that price by law. Pretending that smoking has no relationship with health-care costs does not make it so — it is only a way to push costs around in a way that is agreeable to the likes of Barack Obama, converting a system that prices risk into a system of entitlements.

http://hotair.com/archives/2013/04/10/dc-joins-several-states-classifying-smoking-as-a-pre-existing-medical-condition-under-obamacare/

Why the United States is a Dying Country

Recently Rush Limbaugh opined that the United States is a dying country.   For many years that reality has been painfully obvious to those of us who immigrated to the United States having experienced first-hand the suffering inherent in the near total destruction of a nation which inevitably occurs as the end-product of immorality, despotism and radical ideology.

This nation is repeating the disastrous evolutionary process that has plagued so many failed nations throughout mankind's history. This process begins with a society willing to reject the fundamental concept that is necessary for any nation to thrive and prosper: respect for the uniqueness of each individual and self-determination.

On January 22, 1973 the Supreme Court validated abortion on demand (up to the point of so-called viability) regardless of circumstances. Many of my acquaintances celebrated this decision as a monumental advancement in women's and societal rights. I, on the other hand, was overcome with a sense of foreboding. I was appalled and openly stated that this nation had embarked on the road of demeaning and devaluing life which would lead to a society devoid of morality and integrity with the ultimate ascension into power those who would destroy this nation as founded. My warnings fell on deaf ears as I was ridiculed and accused of being an anachronism as these things could never happen in the United States.

As there were few that shared my premonition, I could only watch over the past 40 years as the American people have sanctioned, through legal abortions, the death of over 54.5 million children. Once this disregard of human life took hold, the citizens of this nation were susceptible to wholesale changes within society. Far too many of the American people, flush with prosperity, willfully ignored the infiltration of the education, media and entertainment establishments by the 1960's radicals, the most narcissistic and radical legion of socialist true-believers on the face of the earth. Through the control of these media of indoctrination, an ever increasing percentage of the population has been conditioned to believe there are no moral absolutes and there is a limitless list of rights as granted by the government.

Since 1973 there has been the open promotion of euthanasia, the abandonment of traditional behavioral guidelines and the active denigration of organized religion together with the successful inculcation of the entitlement mentality. The concurrent belief in an all powerful government has unalterably frayed the ties that bind all Americans and greatly eroded the ability of the society as a whole to successfully weather an overwhelmingly severe financial or societal crisis without looking to the government as the savior. Thus the populace was pre-conditioned, when the right circumstances occurred, to elect a charismatic demagogue and radical as President of the United States.

However, as long as no national leader in the mold of the charismatic despots of the twentieth century emerged to seize the reins of government, I maintained some degree of optimism that the innate good sense and character of the American people would eventually prevail and the United States could reverse course and continue its unique place in the annals of mankind.

That hope was dashed upon the rocks when I first saw and listened to Barack Obama. Here was the man that represented the sum of all my fears and the catalyst that would make certain the United States would become a dying country.   In the charismatic manner of the twentieth century despots, he was someone who was a stranger to the truth, devoid of any integrity and hell-bent on imposing a radical ideology on the nation. When the financial crisis of 2008 descended on the nation, the ideal circumstance occurred that would propel him into office.

Barack Obama, as did Mussolini, Lenin, Mao and Hitler before him, has the ability to visibly remain above the fray, appear as the champion of the people and manipulate the emotions of an ill-educated populace. In the case of Obama he has the further benefit of being able to exploit the racial guilt embedded in the American society.

In keeping with many of the tactics employed in Italy and Germany in the 1920's and 30's -- and many other nations since, Barack Obama and his fellow travelers in the Democratic Party have, over the past five years, followed in the footsteps of these despotic regimes -- all of which have ended up on the ash heap of history.

Through new legislation, government regulations, tax policy, and direct investment, Obama is in the process of creating a fascist economy whereby major corporations, financial institutions and small businesses will be, on a de facto basis, controlled and manipulated by the government. It is immaterial that this will make American businesses overwhelmingly uncompetitive or be unable to expand and thus create wealth and jobs. The economy that has created the highest standard of living in history will thus stagnate and decline drastically altering the nation's ability to defend itself.

Through ObamaCare, which was never about health care per se, the government will eventually control not only access to health care but the behavior of all Americans. There will be, in due course, no right to privacy.

By means of the current push for gun control Obama intends to initiate the first step to registration and eventual confiscation of guns from those the government deems to be unfit to own a firearm.

All autocratic regimes require a scapegoat in order to keep the populace in turmoil while they go about seizing all the levers of power; this regime has done the same utilizing the so-called wealthy, conservatives, evangelical Christians, and a clueless Republican Party as their focus of evil.

In order to ensure that the people will have no recourse but to accept the mandates of the government, the process of implanting their fellow radicals in the judiciary and throughout the bureaucracy has been accelerated.

The Obama cabal is intent on keeping the border unguarded and allowing millions of illegal aliens to become citizens as further assurance of maintaining control of the government. Their unrelenting effort to fight all legislation requiring voter identification confirms this determination.

Rush is right, the United States is a dying country. Until the American people and the only viable political opposition, the Republican Party, begin to understand that reality, there is no hope of recovery.   Will the citizenry evict the Obama radicals from government and begin the process of recovery or will the nation eventually fragment into two or three independent nations or will there be in due course a violent societal upheaval?

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/04/why_the_united_states_is_a_dying_country.html#ixzz2Q4pb63nr

Professionally Clever (I Don’t Want Your Waiter’s Money)

You may be alarmed to discover that sequestration not only affects our nation’s battleships, but also its art galleries and strategic folk dancing troupes.

As sequestration leads to the involuntary fiscal liposuction of our federal budget, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) will tighten its belt by $7.3 million. That reduction will leave the NEA with an anemic $139.7 million to distribute grants among creative people like me who, apparently, are unable to persuade people to pay them for their services.

Public funding of the arts is contentious. You may recall that in the last presidential election Mitt Romney caught a lot of flak when he told Jim Lehrer that he intended to line up Big Bird and the rest of Sesame Street against a wall and have them summarily executed. Of course he didn't actually say that; he made the crazy claim that he himself liked PBS programs but didn't feel other people should be taxed to finance them.

This statement alarmed many folks who enjoy watching PBS but apparently do not want to pay for it themselves. If we privatized Sesame Street, wouldn’t all of the fuzzy educational puppets become homeless and live in garbage cans? (Oscar the Grouch has yet to recover from the Reagan administration.) And what about NPR? Will Melissa Block be on the chopping block?

Presumably there are enough NPR listeners (myself included) who would shekel out a fiver to keep the organization afloat. The idea’s worked before with other outlets, like the Weather Channel.

The NEA doesn’t bother with a model where people give their own money for things they actually enjoy. Instead, it gets a share of what the government takes from everyone else and forks it over to artists, dancers, opera singers, and writers who can’t sell any books. Usually it has about $150 million to dish out.

I’m a standup comedian. I’ve written novels for ten years, and am only now getting something published (coming this summer). So I sympathize with other unknown creative geniuses eating cat food. We’re doing what we love—wasn’t the money supposed to follow? Why should we have to wait tables or convince rich people to marry us? Many artsy types fancy the notion that society has an obligation to support folks like me.

It’s an intriguing thought: I do not wish to wait tables, but I’m okay with taxing waiters to support my novel writing so that I don’t have to wait tables. Because said waiters, thus far, haven’t wanted to buy my books voluntarily.

No doubt the NEA funds some real gems. It also supports some more questionable uses of tax dollars. The most controversial, you may recall, is Piss Christ, a photograph by Andres Serrano depicting a crucifix plopped into a jar of his own urine. Not surprisingly, this objet d’art offended many Christians (even otherwise laid-back Episcopalians). They felt Andres Serrano ought to finance the exhibit himself, or at least through patrons, rather than through public coffers. Personally, I’m not so much offended by his iconoclasm as curious as to why pickling religious artifacts in pee should be a federally funded activity. (And if it is, shouldn’t the EPA handle it?)

A more elevated use of our money is awarding grants to opera companies or folk dancers. The problem the NEA must tackle is that only rich people like to go to operas, because operas are boring and rarely feature William Shatner or swimsuit models. Folk dancing, likewise, has a humbler consumer base as compared to Pixar movies and Cirque du Soleil. Limited patronage networks can only support a handful of companies, which can afford to hire only a handful of portly singers, spritely dancers, and so forth.

To solve the problem, we tax everyone to support forms of art most people do not actually want. This works out very well for rich people, because it means they do not have to pay as much to sit in a balcony while sleeping through a Wagner performance. It works out well for endowment recipients of all stripes, because they receive more goodies. Obtaining grants is always easier than appealing to people who like monster truck rallies.

You might enjoy folk art, or experimental photography, or musical theater. Hopefully you like standup comedy and science fiction novels as well, because someday I hope to earn a full-time living off of both.
Until I reach my goal of being professionally clever, I may well resort to jobs less grandiose than those envisioned in my high school graduation’s commencement speech. But don’t tax your waiter on my behalf. I really don’t want to subsidize my career choices at his expense.

http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/professionally-clever-i-dont-want-your-waiters-money#ixzz2Q59Rbfm5

When Radical Teachers Occupy the Department of Education

Did you happen to catch “Occupy the D.O.E. 2.0” at the Department of Education over the weekend? If you missed it, you’re not alone. It didn’t receive quite the attention some of the other Occupy events have received and it was only an “Occupy” event if by “Occupy” you mean people congregating in soccer-mom chairs from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. (with an hour break for lunch) and evening entertainment at Busboys & Poets at 5th and K Street. And hotels at night.

The Thursday-Sunday event was sponsored by United Opt Out, a group whose main mission is to convince teachers and families to opt out of high-stakes testing and to “resist all market-based reforms that seek to privatize and destroy public education.” The lineup of speakers included a collection of academic elites, union leaders, community organizers, teachers, and students. They only managed to attract a few dozen activists, which is why you probably didn’t see much about it on the news. But it’s important to hear what they had to say because these leaders in the education movement will have an important voice in shaping the schools many of our children and grandchildren will attend in the future.

While the speakers who were associated with United Opt Out were on-message, documenting their complaints about standardized testing and the corporate interests pushing the Common Core, other speakers attempted to work this message into their standard stump speeches and this is where it seemed to merge with your typical Occupy rally: There were dozens of different complaints and few (if any) solutions proposed.

As you might expect at a faculty lounge Occupation, there was plenty of radical rhetoric and Utopian vision-casting (Most of the livestreamed videos are archived here and you can read the speaker bios here.)

Shaun Johnson is a former public school teacher and online radio show host at the Chalk Face. He thinks teachers are too “meek” and need to get angry:

“It’s finally about time that we start getting pissed off and angry…Nothing’s going to change unless people start cracking some skulls. I’m sorry, so, if you don’t get angry and go out there and start speaking out and not be so afraid, then nothing’s going to change. Because there’s a lot of money out there working against us. And we don’t have that kind of money. We don’t have that kind of political power. So we’ve gotta do something. Throw our bodies on the machine. But something’s gotta change. Something’s gotta give. And like I said, we’ve gotta start cracking some skulls.”

It might be a good time to point out that they actually do have “that kind of money.” The NEA was the top contributor to state and federal races in 2008, with $45 million, more than 90% going to Democrats. And that doesn’t include tens of millions the teachers unions spend on political activity that is reported to the Department of Labor and doesn’t show up on campaign finance reports.

Johnson also led the crowd in a profanity-laced guessing game about the names of charter schools. He implied that kids using at-home charter schools are spending their days engaged in cybersex. “What are you doing with your hands?”

Ceresta Smith, a Miami-Dade teacher and “committed unionist” spat out a profanity-laced, racist rant, calling Cory Booker and John Legend sell-out Uncle Toms and Sallys who have undermined education in black and brown communities because of their support for charter schools. Marco Rubio was called out for his “crimes against humanity.” She reserved her nastiest vitriol for Michelle Rhee, former Chancellor of the D.C. schools:

“When I think about thirty-five African…probably African American women indicted and maybe facing forty-five years because they erased tests and you have an Asian b**tch who did the same d**n thing and nobody said a word? OK? That’s ridiculous. Things need to change.” [Cheers from the crowd.]

(An investigation by the Dept. of Education found no evidence of widespread cheating in the D.C. schools and no evidence that Rhee was involved).

What parents wouldn’t want Ms. Smith teaching their kids?

Mark Naison, Professor of History and African American Studies at Fordham University, said that Race to the Top is the “single worst policy initiated by a Democrat since the Vietnam war.” (There’s a lot of competition for that first spot!) Naison was a student at Columbia during the war and spent the war years doing important things like shutting down construction on a gym in Morningside Park. He relived his glory days for the Occupation attendees:

“With six Columbia students and seven neighborhood residents…we went down and pulled down the fence and got arrested….a month later, there was a rally and demonstration bringing black students and the SDS at Columbia together…500 people pulled down the fence and occupied five buildings and the gym did not go up..

“It’s time to put our bodies in front of the machine. We are building a movement that is gradually going to get hundreds of thousands and millions of people, so do not be discouraged by our small numbers now because we are going to bring this machine to halt. There will be great damage before this is done. I’m not going to lie to you. It took ten years ten years to stop the Vietnam war and it may take ten years to bring this to a halt. But we will do it.”

He didn’t say what he meant by “There will be great damage,” but we should never underestimate someone who had ties to the terrorist SDS.

Jim Horn, Professor of Educational Leadership at Cambridge College in Massachusetts, compared the battle to end testing to the fight to end slavery. He says they are the modern day abolitionists and should never partner with the enemies of public education:

“They did not accept into their thin ranks those who advocated for slavery when it was convenient or profitable to do so, nor did they ally themselves with groups who did. They did not craft their message so as not to upset those who supported slavery directly, or those who did so by assuming the neutrality on the subject. They voted for no one who did not oppose slavery by deed or word. The did not mute or obfuscate their message in order to attract financial support for their cause from collaborators or enablers from slavery. Maybe there is something to learn from the abolitionist’s example as we struggle to abolish high-stakes testing that keeps our children and teachers captive and working to make others rich.”

But he didn’t just reach back to the Civil War, he also likened their fight to guerrilla warfare:

“Rather than sitting in your warm homes this weekend, hoping that someone will do something to end high stakes testing, your presence here shows that you have made a conscience decision to defy the tyranny of testing’s corporate profiteers. To stand against the billionaires fixated on social control and to expose the ridicule of the high-paid school overseers. So thank you, thank you, and thank you again for when you go back home where this guerrilla war and this war for publicly controlled, humane schools without high-stakes tests will continue.”

Michelle Strater Gunderson talked about how union organizers pulled off the Chicago teachers strike last year. She said an early step was to get reluctant teachers on board. She said it wasn’t fair to ask young, non-tenured teachers to join the movement, so they started with simple “actions” like wearing their red CTU shirts to school on a Friday. Any teachers who didn’t wear their red shirts received a visit from union reps. Gunderson insists these were not thuggish actions.

In a moment of self-important bravado, Gundersaon said, “I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say these are the most courageous people in our country.”

I know some parents of American soldiers who would disagree with these red-shirted union bullies.

In a lighter moment, someone named Lori Thomas came up during a “mic check” and ranted about social media and people not connecting face-to-face anymore. She lamented how people are glued to their phones when they’re in a crowd and it isolates them. She said all this with ear buds stuffed in her ears. Then she added, “There is a Constitutional right to an education. It’s not a state’s right.”

Which of course, is not true, and I hope Ms. Thomas is not teaching government. You will not find anything about education in the U.S. Constitution, which is the problem with federal programs like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. Most (all?) State Constitutions guarantee a right to an education, but the federal Constitution is silent on the matter.

This is emblematic of the misinformation proffered at the event. In some cases, the total disrespect for our form of government was stunning. Education activist Diane Ravitch, while unloading about the evils of school vouchers, said, “[T]here is not a single state in this country that has ever voted for vouchers. Not one. These are all legislatively imposed.”

If you read that statement quickly or were only half-listening to her speech, you may have missed her point. She’s not saying that an executive order by a governor or president created the voucher programs.

“Legislatively imposed” means that the laws were passed by a legislature elected by the people of their states. It appears that Ravitch doesn’t have much use for such laws.

One of the words heard most often throughout the weekend was “democracy.” It’s a loaded word in union circles because many of their victories throughout the years have been won in state referendums where legislative actions are replaced (more or less) by direct democracy. In recent years, the unions have won significant battles in states like Ohio, where they drove back public union reforms with millions of dollars in emotional ad buys and a compliant media at their side. They took their issue to a vote of people they spent many months and millions of dollars misinforming.

There were also plenty of Utopian visions for recreating America in the “neo-liberal” image.

Professor Henry Louis Taylor, Jr., a historian/urban planner, is a professor at the University at Buffalo. His research focuses on the Cuban Studies, anchor institutions, distressed urban neighborhoods and urban education. He believes that income inequality is the problem and that high-stakes testing pushes students of color into low-wage jobs. His solution is to build full-service educational infrastructures in distressed neighborhoods:

“In neo-liberal America, the only way we will be able to transform the trajectory of people’s lives is to recreate and rebuild the neighborhoods in which they live. Our starting point must be to build a strong educational infrastructure inside of every distressed neighborhood…So we must build this type of structure in the neighborhoods so that every child is able to access institutions, programs and activities that will provide them with the skills, and [unintelligible] by the time they enter kindergarten and first grade…We have to that end build out this structure in every neighborhood so that the children have the kind of supervision, assistance, and help that will nurture and grow and develop them.”

Tom Poetter, Professor of Curriculum Studies at Miami University (Paul Ryan’s alma mater), shared his thoughts on the purpose of teaching:

“Teaching isn’t about meeting incentives. It isn’t about content delivery or performance objectives or standards. Instead, great teaching is about creating meaning. It’s about connecting with children, building relationships, passing on the intellectual, emotional, and practical dimensions, the lessons of democracy to fit for life and…drawing students out , not filling them up.”

Oh, I don’t know. How about teaching the children math content and objectives instead of nebulous concepts like “creating meaning?” But Poetter’s teaching dreams go beyond passing on his “emotional dimensions.”

“It’s about a life focused on the public good, not the private good. What Philip Phenix said in the 60’s he would call the democracy of worth, not the democracy of desire. The democracy of worth is about cultivating the life in the mind of schools that privileges experience, mutual regard, respect, tolerance, social action for the good of all—not just the relative few—not just for ourselves, but for everyone. The common good, the public good is about everyone and we all have to make sacrifices for it.”

What kinds of sacrifices will our tiny children have to make for the public good? Poetter doesn’t specify, but he seems confident that he knows what’s best for our little ones and for the good of society and to preserve “democracy.”

The keynote speaker for the weekend was Deborah Meier, a senior scholar at NYU’s Steinhardt School, and Board member of the Coalition of Essential Schools, FairTest, SOS and on the editorial board of Dissent and The Nation magazines. She said the battle for public education is a battle for democracy.

“The crisis we are going through is one about democracy—about whether the very idea of democracy is worth holding onto. There isn’t an institution in our country that isn’t under attack — that isn’t being reshaped by a frontal assault on the idea of democracy.”

She asserted that we could lose our democracy because the voting system is so unfair. She gave several examples:
** The Electoral college – North Dakota has a more powerful vote than New York.
** All the people who are immigrants who live in this country and are affected by this country but cannot vote.
** All the primarily black and Latino men who are permanently barred from voting in this society because we jailed them. We took two things away from them at once — their freedom and their political voice.
** People that we’re busy trying to keep from voting by sending them to the wrong polling place, or expecting them to submit a photograph of themselves.

She then made an outrageous statement:

“At this particular moment, we have more inequality [in this country] than we have ever had—ever. And I’m going back to 1492.”

Ever! The only thing I can surmise is that the history books at NYU are missing the chapters covering the period before the Civil War and during the Jim Crow era.

Meier complained,

“How can we possibly pretend, if we all have one vote—even if we did have one vote—that would be fair? Part of the vote is the discussion that takes place before you vote. And in the absence of that discussion being a fair and equal one, there is no way…The only thing equal to the power of money is the power of collective action.”

And so ended four long days of complaining, whining, and foot stomping. Though they didn’t camp and defecate in the streets, and though most of them have fancy credentials after their names and comfortable jobs in academia, this group had a lot in common with the Occupy movement. Full of complaints, demands, and blame without taking responsibility or offering solutions other than “We shall take to the streets!”

http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2013/04/08/when-radical-teachers-occupy-the-department-of-education/?singlepage=true

PK'S NOTE: Warning. This is so disturbing but the truth must heard. The mainstream media is not covering this.

“It jumped, the arm”; Update: Media score – Rutgers 41, Gosnell 0

Allahpundit posted yesterday on the trial of Kermit Gosnell and the testimony of the other monsters who worked in his charnel house — excuse me, family-planning clinic. With Gosnell on trial for eight counts of murder thanks to the deliberate execution of newborns that managed to survive the savagery of Gosnell’s late-term abortions, the trial yesterday included another horrific tidbit, and an excuse that sounds very, very familiar:

A second Delaware woman, who worked at Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s West Philadelphia abortion clinic, testified today that it was “standard procedure” to snip the necks of any babies that were delivered by patients before the abortion due to labor-inducing drugs.

And Lynda Williams, 44, of Wilmington, said Gosnell taught her how to flip the body of the baby over and snip its neck with a pair of scissors to ensure “fetal demise.”

Williams also testified that she followed Gosnell’s orders one time, when Gosnell was away either running, swimming or working at a clinic in Delaware, and took a baby that was delivered in a toilet and snipped its neck.

“It jumped, the arm,” she said, showing the jury by raising her arm.

Williams told investigators she only snipped a neck the one time, “because it gave me the creeps.”

So why did she agree to do it at all?

“I only do what I’m told to do,” she told the jury. “What I was told to do was snip their neck… I never knew it was murder.”

I’m sorry, but that excuse wasn’t good enough at Nuremberg for people in a military organization. It’s certainly not good enough for people taking jobs in abortion mills. What exactly did she think fetal demise meant? For that matter, what exactly did she think Gosnell was doing in all of these abortions?

Oh, right — Gosnell told her the babies were already dead:

Williams said she asked Gosnell about the baby that moved, and said Gosnell told her it was just an “involuntary response” and a “last breath” because it was “already dead” due to drugs that had been administered earlier.

So why bother to stab the babies in the neck to “ensure fetal demise”? After Williams got creeped out, did she report the issue to authorities, who might have been interested in investigating this practice? Apparently not; she still worked for Gosnell at the time one of his patients died allegedly through malicious neglect, which is why she was also arrested.

While we’re asking questions, let’s ask again why the crime-obsessed media hasn’t taken an interest in this case. It has nearly everything that the media usually wants — horrific tales, serial killings, grotesque deliberation, even a villain who liked to make and keep trophies of his victims. We even have living victims willing to go on camera to talk about their experiences with Gosnell. So why has no national media outlet taken advantage of this target-rich environment?

Let’s go back to the grand-jury report on Gosnell, which delivered a powerful indictment against the government health agencies that were supposed to protect women from butchers like Gosnell:

We discovered that Pennsylvania’s Department of Health has deliberately chosen not to enforce laws that should afford patients at abortion clinics the same safeguards and assurances of quality health care as patients of other medical service providers. Even nail salons in Pennsylvania are monitored more closely for client safety.

The State Legislature has charged the Department of Health (DOH) with responsibility for writing and enforcing regulations to protect health and safety in abortion clinics as well as in hospitals and other health care facilities. Yet a significant difference exists between how DOH monitors abortion clinics and how it monitors facilities where other medical procedures are performed.

Indeed, the department has shown an utter disregard both for the safety of women who seek treatment at abortion clinics and for the health of fetuses after they have become viable. State health officials have also shown a disregard for the laws the department is supposed to enforce. Most appalling of all, the Department of Health’s neglect of abortion patients’ safety and of Pennsylvania laws is clearly not inadvertent: It is by design. …

State health officials knew that Gosnell and his clinic were offering unacceptable medical care to women and girls, yet DOH failed to take any action to stop the atrocities documented by this Grand Jury. These officials were far more protective of themselves when they testified before the Grand Jury. Even DOH lawyers, including the chief counsel, brought private attorneys with them – presumably at government expense.

The national media is just as complicit as these government agencies in keeping the Gosnell story under wraps. They want to bury it because of what it says about abortionists, abortion itself, and the cheapening of human life. They don’t want to find out how many Gosnells are out there butchering women to this day, but it’s more than that. To hear stories of expedited “fetal demise” is to question why we suck babies out of wombs in the first place. Clearly, that’s a conversation the national media doesn’t want. They want us to talk about only what they tell us to talk about, and if that means turning a blind eye to the women and babies victimized by this industry, well, so be it.

Update: LifeNews reports MRC’s Matthew Philbin’s fascinating analysis of media priorities over the last week:

The Rutgers basketball story continues to transfix the media, and why shouldn’t it? Mike Rice, the disgraced former Rutgers basketball coach allegedly killed a woman and at least seven viable, born-alive babies “by plunging scissors into their spinal cords” in his filthy, macabre “house of horrors” abortion clinic.

Oh wait, my mistake.

Rice was fired last week from Rutgers over video of him shoving, kicking and yelling at his players, throwing basketballs at them and – most damning – using “homophobic slurs.” That’s made Rice the most notorious villain in America. And in one week it earned him 36 network news stories clocking in at 41 minutes, 26 seconds of air time on ABC, CBS and NBC.
Now, had Rice been accused of killing a woman and eight babies, he’d be enjoying the same anonymity as Kermit Gosnell– provided the killings were carried out in an abortion clinic. Gosnell is the West Philadelphia abortionist who ran an unimaginable charnel house of a “clinic,” for 30 years. Witnesses testified that he may have murdered over 100 babies outside the womb. Gosnell’s trial, underway for weeks, has featured wrenching testimony and horrific details. And it has received exactly zero seconds of airtime on the broadcast networks.

Incredible — which describes the mainstream media pretty well.

Update: This is a few months old, but the 3801 Lancaster Project made this documentary of the case that’s worth a watch. There may be more coming, too.

http://hotair.com/archives/2013/04/10/it-jumped-the-arm/