Could This Lawsuit Really Kill ‘Obamacare’?
Although it’s widely believed that
“Obamacare” is here to stay, one lawsuit is threatening to undo
President Obama’s landmark health care bill.
“A challenge filed by the Pacific Legal Foundation contends
that the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional because the bill
originated in the Senate, not the House. Under the Origination Clause of
the Constitution, all bills raising revenue must begin in the House,”
the Washington Times notes.
You may recall in June 2012
when the Supreme Court ruled on “Obamacare” that Chief Justice John
Roberts defined the bill as a tax, not a mandate. This, according to the
Times, is where PFL attorneys saw their opening.
“The court there quite explicitly says,
‘This is not a law passed under the Commerce Clause; this is just a
tax,’” foundation attorney Timothy Sandefur said recently. “Well, then
the Origination Clause ought to apply. The courts should not be out
there carving in new exceptions to the Origination Clause.”
The Times explains the details:
The Justice Department filed a motion to dismiss the challenge in November, arguing that the high court has considered only eight Origination Clause cases in its history and “has never invalidated an act of Congress on that basis.”The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia is expected to rule on the Justice Department’s motion “any day now,” said Pacific Legal Foundation attorney Paul J. Beard.The challenge citing the Origination Clause isn’t the only lawsuit against Obamacare, but it is the only one that has the potential to wipe out the entire act in one fell swoop. Other claims, notably the freedom-of-religion cases dealing with the birth control requirement, nibble at the fringes but would leave the law largely intact.In their brief, attorneys for the Justice Department argue that the bill originated as House Resolution 3590, which was then called the Service Members Home Ownership Act. After passing the House, the bill was stripped in a process known as “gut and amend” and replaced entirely with the contents of what became the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
Though unorthodox, the government motion argues that using H.R. 3590 as a “shell bill” is not unconstitutional.
“This commonplace procedure satisfied
the Origination Clause,” said the brief. “It makes no difference that
the Senate amendments to H.R. 3590 were expansive. The Senate may amend a
House bill in any way it deems advisable, even by amending it with a
total substitute, without running afoul of the Origination Clause.”
The brief notes several cases where shell bills have been upheld by courts.
“[B]ut foundation attorneys counter that those rulings involved the Senate substitution of one revenue-raising bill for another,” the Times notes.
The DOJ also points out that the court
has allowed revenue bills to originate in the Senate provided
“the money raised was incidental to the bill’s mission.”
“Here, by contrast, it is undisputed
that H.R. 3590 was not originally a bill for raising revenue,” said
the Pacific Legal Foundation lawsuit. “Unlike in the prior cases,
the Senate’s gut-and-amend procedure made H.R. 3590 for the first time
into a bill for raising revenue. The precedents the government cites are
therefore inapplicable.”
The point of “Obamacare” is to
“improve the nation’s health care system,” and it does that “through a
series of interrelated provisions, many, if not most, of which have
nothing to do with raising revenue,” said the government brief.
But Sandefur disagrees.
“What kinds of taxes are not for raising revenue?” he asked.
Although it’s unclear whether PFL’s
lawsuit will scuttle the president’s health care law, one thing is
certain: “Obamacare” has at least one more hurdle to clear before final
implementation.
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/04/01/could-this-lawsuit-really-kill-obamacare/
A New York Democrat is working to reduce the number of Americans legally owning firearms by mandating they obtain expensive insurance.
In March, New York Rep. Carolyn Maloney boasted her proposed measure would be “the first bill to require liability insurance of gun buyers nationwide.”
H.R. 1369, the Firearm Risk Protection Act, mandates that all gun owners obtain liability insurance prior to buying a firearm.
“It shall be unlawful for a person who owns a firearm purchased on or after the effective date of this subsection not to be covered by a qualified liability insurance policy,” Maloney’s bill states.
The legislation calls for the federal government to impose a fine of $10,000 on firearms owners who do not have insurance after the bill becomes law.
The law would effectively reduce the number of legal firearms owners in the country and create a new class of criminals. Many Americans would either not choose to follow the law or would be unable to afford the required insurance and would be forced to forfeit their firearms under fear of prosecution by the federal government.
“For too long, gun victims and society at large have borne the brunt of the costs of gun violence,” Maloney said when she introduced the bill in the House. “My bill would change that by shifting some of that cost back onto those who own the weapons.”
In other words, according to the New York Democrat and the sponsors of her legislation, legal gun owners are responsible for violence committed by others. Anti-Second Amendment Democrats have adopted this irrational argument as they move to strip Americans of their firearms following the Sandy Hook massacre.
The proposed law is “ridiculous on its face, as it presumes law-abiding gun owners are guilty for merely exercising a fundamental, constitutional right,” Chris Cox, the executive director of the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action, told The Daily Caller on Tuesday.
http://www.infowars.com/next-assault-on-2nd-amendment-mandatory-liability-insurance/print/
Stimulus funds fed minority businesses that served as middlemen
WB Construction
& Sons Inc. is a 10-employee, minority-owned firm that received
$7.5 million in five stimulus contracts from the federal government, but
it did not do close to that much work.Every one of the stimulus contracts it received followed a pattern: Win a contract roped off for minority-owned businesses, where only one other company put in a bid. Then pay Apeck Construction Inc., a non-minority business, to do the vast majority of the work, while keeping a 10 percent cut for itself.
One might expect that nearly $8 million in construction projects would create jobs at WB. Instead, in keeping with its role seemingly as a pass-through that fills out paperwork rather than building, WB simply hired a new “office clerk.”
While there’s a rule to prevent the pass-though contracting practice, which is commonly used on projects reserved for small businesses, it is not rigorously enforced, leaving open to abuse federal programs designed to grow jobs and bolster both small businesses and businesses in minority communities.
National Black Chamber of Commerce CEO Harry Alfred said the program has a great intent and has played an instrumental role in “the majority of successful black businesses in the U.S.” But he said it is being abused.
“There are some shrewd big businesses that would front with the [disadvantaged business] guy and the [disadvantaged business] guy gets a nice gratuity,” Mr. Alfred said.
An analysis by The Washington Times of contracting data
found that large numbers of contracts awarded under President Obama’s
$785 billion stimulus package were reserved for small businesses and
minority-owned firms that merely took cuts as middlemen. Seventeen
percent of contracts where bidding was restricted to minority-owned
firms subcontracted the majority of the work to someone else, compared
with 2 percent of companies that won small-business contracts and 6
percent that won bids open to anyone, The Times analysis found.Despite the disparity, several federal agencies — including Veterans Affairs and the U.S. Forest Service — were not alarmed by the practice or its impact on the goal of such programs.
“Subcontracting work has nothing to do with eligibility,” Veterans Affairs spokeswoman Jo Schuda said when asked about pass-through contracts.
But even some of the participants question the practice, its potential strain on tax dollars and lack of oversight. They say federal agencies are just trying to meet quotas.Provideo Management Inc., a minority-owned business with two employees, received a $3.48 million contract to buy Cisco Systems Inc. hardware for the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Provideo paid $3.45 million to World Wide Technology Inc., a black-owned Missouri
business with annual revenues of $2.1 billion, to buy the materials, in
turn, from Cisco. How did Provideo earn its share? According to
stimulus disclosures, a significant portion of its work consisted of
filling out those very forms.Thirty-two thousand dollars is a good cut for a middleman who merely called another middleman, Provideo head Guillermo Calvo acknowledged. “The nature of the contract itself is hardware reseller. There are no services, per se. At the same time, how much work did Worldwide do?”
What was the purpose of routing a purchase order for hardware from Cisco through two intermediaries
, paying for the corresponding markup as well as for contracting officers to oversee a bidding process?“Frankly, I’ve asked those questions myself as a taxpayer and I don’t know the answer,” other than helping agencies meet their legislatively mandated quotas, Mr. Calvo said. He said he was merely competing in a system under rules defined by the federal government and uses his status as a small business more than his status as a Hispanic.
Federal agencies are required to give 23 percent of their business to disadvantaged contractors, including small businesses and minority- and veteran-owned firms. Agencies decide when to limit the pool of applicants who can bid on a particular contract, known as “set-asides,” to members of one of those groups.
The Times joined detailed reports filed by stimulus recipients with their closest matches from the federal government’s main contracting database
,
which has more information about disadvantaged statuses and set-asides
but less information about subcontracting, proving a never-before-seen
window into the process.It does not take long for patterns to emerge in contracting data between pairs of companies — one equipped to get contracts based on its disadvantaged status and another to perform the work.
Fidelis Design & Construction LLC is owned by a service-disabled veteran who also is a minority. It received $13.5 million in six stimulus contracts from Veterans Affairs, all reserved for disabled veterans. But each time, it subcontracted virtually all the work to Pride Enterprises, a black-owned firm that would not have been eligible to bid on the contracts directly. Fidelis described its role as “supervisory” in stimulus disclosures.
In all, Fidelis kept $1.4 million, or 11 percent, with the remainder going to Pride.
Pride Enterprises said “there’s no relationship — no relationship at all” between the two companies. But Richard Bennett of Fidelis acknowledged that at the time of the contracts, Pride’s owner was a partner in Fidelis — meaning a non-veteran was repeatedly winning contracts reserved for veterans and routing them to his construction company
.“We were using Pride Enterprises’ resources until the government said that was unacceptable, so I bought them out,” Mr. Bennett said. “He hasn’t been a partner for more than a year — for two years now.”
Our 'We don't give a damm' First Family
The image is horrific: The White House is closed to little kids, the children of taxpayers, but the First Family keeps on traveling paid for by the same taxpayers.
Where
is the editorial about priorities? Where is the question at the
presidential news conference? Better than that, where is the
Democratic US Senator calling on the "First Family" to stop it?
What would the media be saying if "the traveling president" was a Republican from Texas opposed to abortion & same sex marriage?
The point is that President Obama and family don't care because our news media has not forced them to care.
President
Obama is surrounded by a bunch of people who tell him what he wants to
hear and a news media in the business of hero worship rather than
journalism.
How else do you explain their lifestyle at a time when we are releasing
illegal aliens and threatening to cut back on government services
because of the sequester?
This is so "over the top" that every American should stop this week and check out Joseph Curl's article [PK'S NOTE: That article follows this] about their lavish lifestyle.
And these are the guys who ran against "rich guy Romney"?
Nobody
is asking The First Family to stop enjoying life. At the same time, do
they have to spend so much money when they enjoy life? Why can't take
a vacation in Chicago, go to the public beach and maybe do a little 'Habitat for Humanity" on weekends? Or maybe the daughters can spend a semester at the local public high school in DC?
Why
don't they set the example? Why don't they call President & Mrs
Carter and learn a thing or two about humility. I am not fan of
President Carter but he led by example. He may have been the last
Democrat to send his daughter to a public school in DC!
They always told me growing up that people get the government that they deserve.
Well,
you take "low information voters" plus a "in the tank news media"
and the result is a First Family that frankly doesn't give a damn.
The Obamas live the 1 percent life
Being president of the U.S., the most powerful man in the world, is often most about perception. The man (or, one day, woman) in the job takes actions large and small every day, but it is the perception of the man that seeps into the everyday lives of working Americans.That’s why presidential candidates always hit Philadelphia for a cheesesteak during campaigns (Democrats to Pat’s, Republicans to Geno’s). Sure, they’re running billion-dollar operations trying to win the White House, but one picture of them wolfing down a Cheez Whiz-covered glob of meat on a Philly street hits home with millions of voters: “Hey, that guy’s just like me! He loves him a Pat’s [or Geno’s] cheesesteak, too!” (Unless you’re John F. Kerry and order Swiss cheese — then everyone hates you.)
Sometimes, that perception cuts to the core. Like when President George W. Bush stopped playing golf in 2003, at the height of the Iraq War.
“I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal,” he said years later. “I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf. I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them.”
That’s also why Mr. Bush did two other things, without fanfare or praise. First, he never headed home to his Texas ranch until after Christmas, instead going to Camp David for a few days. That way, the hundreds of people revolving around him at all times — White House staff, Secret Service agents, reporters, photographers, all the others — could spend the holiday with their families in and around Washington, D.C. No one ever reported that — until this column.
Second, he rarely attended sporting events, although he once owned a baseball team and was a self-confessed stats junkie. His thinking there was the same: If he went to a baseball game (right down the street from the White House), his mere presence would mean hours and hours of extra security for fans. He once stopped off at the Daytona 500 and the metal detectors through which every fan had to pass left thousands outside in line when the green flag fell; he didn’t attend many sporting events after that.
But something remarkable has happened with these occupants of the White House: Neither President Obama nor first lady Michelle appear to give a damn about perception. They won the White House and, by God, they’re going to enjoy their time there, no matter the cost. And who cares what you think, anyway?
How else to explain the nonstop vacations the pair keep taking during what Mr. Obama calls the “worst financial crisis since the Great Depression”? In 2013, the First Family has already enjoyed three vacations — that’s one a month. (Sorry, Joe America, you might have to forget your week at the beach again this year, but make sure you get those taxes in on time!)
The Obamas ended 2012 and kicked off 2013 in an $8 million, 6,000-square-foot house in Hawaii (they left well before Dec. 25, by the way). There, the president played five rounds of golf (breaking the 100-rounds-as-president threshold). Scarcely a month into Term 2, Mrs. Obama headed off for Aspen, taking along the couple’s daughters. Vice President Joseph R. Biden also hit the Colorado slopes. While the girls (and Joe) were gone, Mr. Obama nipped down to Florida for a four-day boys weekend of golf, teeing it up with his buddies — and Tiger Woods. He hit the links again this weekend, then dropped in for an NCAA tournament game in Washington.
Jumpin’ Joe, for his part, spent New Year’s in the Virgin Islands and popped off over the Easter weekend for a golf outing at the glorious Kiawah Island, S.C. (where rounds of golf on the spectacular Ocean Course run $353 — nearly $20 a hole). His third vacation of the year came the same week as reports that he and his entourage spent $460,000 for a single night in London and $585,000 for a night at a five-star hotel in Paris.
Then, last week, reports emerged that the Obama girls were kicking it in the Bahamas for spring break. Days later, a Colorado news station, KMTV, reported that the girls were now skiing in Sun Valley, Idaho. The White House flacks didn’t like that one bit.
“From the beginning of the administration, the White House has asked news outlets not to report on or photograph the Obama children when they are not with their parents and there is no vital news interest,” said Kristina Schake, communications director to the first lady. “We have reminded outlets of this request in order to protect the privacy and security of these girls.”
At their demand, the station scrubbed the report without explanation. What losers.
To be clear, this has nothing to do with the daughters. Never has. They are wonderful girls. The issue is use of taxpayer money, especially since Mr. Obama has shut down the White House to visitors, citing the cost of security. All these trips cost millions for Secret Service protection; couldn’t they just skip a few vacations so taxpayers could visit “America’s House”?
But no, the Obamas don’t care a whit about that, or the perception of them living high on the hog while many hardworking Americans are struggling to get by — and hoping to save enough for just one vacation this year.
And that perception, juxtaposed with reality, more than nearly anything else, tells you an awful lot about this president.
Bringing Down America: A Review
BRINGING DOWN AMERICA: An FBI Informant with the Weathermen, by Larry Grathwohl and Frank Reagan, originally published in 1976, is being reintroduced in 2013. Its introduction is written by Dr. Tina Trent.During a dangerously volatile period of domestic terrorism, young anarchists were plotting the upending of America. In the vanguard stood the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers. Implanted in 1969 in the heart of a revolutionary movement, Larry Grathwohl, a 22-year-old Vietnam vet, found himself acting as an FBI informant. Inserted into the Weather Underground organization under deep cover, he became privy to their terror plots as well as the leadership's "reasoning". It is this facet which still resonates today.
BRINGING DOWN AMERICA is a gripping tale of plots and subplots, each one aimed at "the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie [and] the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat", as Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, and Jeff Jones exhorted in their 1974 manifesto, "Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism." The subtext of this gripping memoir is brought to the fore in Chapter 14: "The Cover Is Blown:"
Once in the van we drove around the city...
while we were driving Maynard & Green (my FBI handlers) began
telling me about the mystery man waiting for me. He was an Arab
guerrilla. My meeting was to be in strict confidence. They refused to
tell me why he was in the country, how he got in, obviously he was working for the U.S....
Not only that, Ali Baba issued other warnings to Larry: "the Arabs plan to strike at the next Olympic games in 1972 [reviewer's note: and they made good on their threat] and there is talk of doing something at the World's Fair in Spokane in 1974."
For the record, El (Al) Fatah was the referenced Arab guerrilla group. Yes, the very same terror outfit spawned by the godfather of suicide terror, "Chairman" Yasir Arafat, a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. In tandem, the Weathermen conspired with the KGB and attendant communist regimes. The war being waged against the U.S. by the radical left and Islamist jihadis is premised on the U.S. as the Western spear and Israel as its twin "imperialistic" cousin. It has been playing out for decades, in one form or another. Nothing has changed other than the fact that many escaped justice and are entering their senior years. Despite their advancing age, they are as dangerous as ever -- perhaps more so. Bill Ayers, the foremost leader of the Weathermen "is in his third decade as a national leader in the movement to radicalize the educational training of schoolteachers". His wife, Bernardine Dohrn, a top leader too "is a professor of law at Northwestern and a high-ranking officer in the American Bar Association." Eleanor Raskin (ne Stein) "is a law professor at S.U.N.Y Albany and, astonishingly, a NYS administrative law judge". Jeff Jones "currently heads the New York-based Apollo Alliance, a highly influential coalition of labor leaders and environmentalists, and was responsible for drafting President Obama's 2009 Recovery Act."
The list of "respectable" cover, of other "notables" in the Weathermen, is equally impressive. Through a stringently planned operational "stealth jihad", yesteryear's Weathermen have returned, fully primed to carry out their original goal -- the "transformation" of Amerika. Most significantly, they subvert the national interest from a distinctly dangerous vantage point. They are currently ensconced in some of the most powerful positions in academia and political life. The only difference is, this time they are dressed in "capitalist" garb, not only in their clothing choices, but in the wealth they have accumulated, paradoxically, through joining the "establishment". Who said one can't enrich oneself, but at the same time deny the masses/proletariat said wealth potential? Highly dangerous in their bomb-making days, their capacity to cripple America, sans firing actual weaponry is that much greater at this critical juncture in time. Deeply involved in the "transformation" process, as promised by President Obama, many of them working inside the executive branch, while others operate through progressive think tanks, they want nothing more than to distance themselves from their bloody past. Therefore, an omerta has descended from the denizens of the leftist media and their powerful organs.
So the timing of this book release couldn't be more prescient. Although the mainstream media will surely attempt to shield the aforementioned from the facts borne out by the record, they are nothing more than "koshered" domestic terrorists.
Many westerners believe that history is behind them and therefore has no relevance to their lives. Nothing could be further removed from reality, or more deadly. In this regard, stepping back in time to the late 1960s and into the 1970s couldn't be more imperative or instructive.
Making Common Sense of Common Core
If you have kids or grandkids and you’ve looked into their education curriculum at all, you’ve likely seen the term “Common Core”
but do you know what Common Core Standards are? Do you know who
developed them, where and for what purpose? If you’re anything like I
was a few years ago, the answer is probably no. You might have even
asked someone, a friend, relative or even a teacher or administrator at
the school, “What is this Common Core Standards reference?” If you did,
you probably either got a puzzled response or the teacher/administrator
said, “Oh, that’s just how we ensure that kids at our school and kids
at other schools are on the same page, and it allows us to judge how
each student is progressing in their learning course (or some such phraseology).”
And like me, you probably nodded and thought, “Well that’s not so bad,
this school is great (or perhaps, “if we could be like that would really be great”) and why not share
that success with other schools to lift all kids.” Then you probably
went on about carting kids to practice and dance, getting dinner ready
and making sure that your paying job was in order. In other words, you
went back to living life, just like me. Until that is, I heard about “Race to the Top”.
Having 4 kids, 2 of which are in public schools, I was always
interested in their education and so when I heard at a meeting in 2009
that the new administration was going to offer a new program for US
schools called “Race to the Top”
where new nationwide curriculum and testing standards would be adopted,
my Daddy sense tingled. “Nationwide standards”…whose standards? Where
did they come from? When were they created? I didn’t even know where
to start then, suddenly, there was a “Race to the Top” workshop that was
open to the public right here in my Christina School District. So I
grabbed a notebook and a pen, kissed my wife and kids and headed on over
to see what I could find out. I published my findings from the meeting
on the web and you can read them on the Examiner.com website here.
I started, as you will see from reading my post on my meeting findings linked above, with checking out some of the players. Who was Arne Duncan? What was “Vision 2015”? Where did Lillian Lowery come from? What about Jack Markell? Google, became my best friend. What I found was nothing short of shocking. Again, you can read my full list of findings here but I will summarize them for this piece. All of them were connected to one man, Eli Broad. Mr. Broad (rhymes with “road”) is a billionaire who made his money building houses and then parlayed it in life insurance companies. He now collects art and spends much of his time “reforming education”. It turns out that all of the named individuals above, as well as some other well known “educrats” came through Broad’s network of education reform tentacles. In addition, Vision 2015, a Rodel sponsored Delaware initiative to transform our school system, was setup and run by Broad’s own right hand man. Broad, along with Bill and Melinda Gates, Mayor Bloomberg and other high net worth education reformers have been infusing hundreds of millions and collectively potentially billions of dollars into Charter schools, curriculum reforms, teacher training and a myriad of other methods of reforming education as it exists today. Oddly, educators and administrators seem to be at odds with many of their intended reforms which seems weird until you really dig into why. What it comes down to is this, while some will attempt to politicize and polarize the scenario, the truth comes down to the fact that these big money education reformers don’t think the teachers unions are helping kids and they don’t put a whole lot of value into real academic pursuits like reading Shakespeare and “the Classics”, preferring instead to prepare kids for “the jobs of tomorrow”. Both sides SMACK of elitism and the progressive mindset. One simply wants to replace an emphasis on education for the sake of education with education for the means of training for certain skillsets. Both remove/reduce individual choice and condemn future generations to less than child focused education systems in favor of serving the whims of the developers of the system. But the relationship is more than simply a handful of really rich people arguing with a handful of academicians. You’ll see that when we talk about Common Core.
As I said, Delaware’s been planning for this implementation for some time and likewise, Common Core is not exactly “new”. It was developed in 2009, by a group called “Student Achievement” after the National Governors Association approached David Coleman to create standards that could be adopted nationally. So in effect, the NGA engaged one man and his company to create a national standard for education. By 2009, 45 states had adopted Common Core Standards (Texas, Alaska, Minnesota, Nebraska, Virginia and Washington, D.C. did not participate) and Common Core led to new national markets for text book publishers and test developers (something that education reform activists and leftist “cause leaders” detest…capitalism). As of 2012, the number is up to 48 states and territories. Delaware will have full “Common Core” implementation in 2014-2015 when new standardized testing will be rolled into DCAS that specifically tracks Common Core goals. David Coleman, dubbed “The Schoolmaster” by the progressive magazine “The Atlantic” is an old mold “educrat” who was refined in the academic tradition of reading “difficult texts” (like Shakespeare) and who was so upset with America’s lack of attention to such classics that he began the Common Core Standards movement to restart it. His goal with the standards is to create an education system with college as the end goal. “Every child should go to college” is a phrase that speaks to what David believes and HE is going to make sure that we have a college prep educational system to do just that. In fact, he points to studies from the Minnesota College Readiness Center that show that almost 1/3 of college students enrolled in remedial writing courses earned high marks in high school English. The study also found that colleges and high schools valued different kinds of writing, “while high-school teachers rewarded students for the organization and wording of their essays, college professors placed greater value on strong thesis statements backed by evidence from the curriculum”. So in short, high school teachers were still looking at basic fundamentals with regard to writing while colleges were looking for cohesive arguments.
Common Core reforms are evident today in Delaware schools. Heard of STEM? Have you wondered why your children only take DCAS focused on Math and English (until middle school when Science and Social Studies are introduced)? That’s because Common Core is intended to focus on the two things that elite colleges really look for, Liberal Arts (English, Reading, etc.) and Math. Perhaps the most telling line in David Coleman’s interview with the Atlantic (the setting by the way is at an educators forum right here in Delaware) is this “Coleman was frustrated by the fact that “30 years after the civil-rights movement, none of these students were close—not even close—to being ready for Yale. They’d had so little practice with commanding difficult text.”” So let’s recap the process of how Common Core went from one man’s passion to a national standard. David Coleman is raised by intellectual elites in NYC, attends Harvard and goes to Oxford, looking back (and down) on the poor, unfortunate masses who are barely capable of understanding the beauty of Frost or the genius of Shakespeare and being the progressive intellectual elitist that he is, he tries to make a difference. First, he tries to get a job as a teacher after finishing his Liberal Arts degree and he is rejected. He then turns around and decides that he will make it his mission to change education and being enlightenment and the wonders of Liberal Arts to “the little people”. He even creates a company designed to promote his beliefs. He and that company go forth to lobby local education and government leaders to fix their education system by simply coming up with a plan to provide a core curriculum that can ensure that children in NYC are as prepared for college as children in Loudoun County, VA (America’s “richest county”). Simultaneously, he reaches out to education reformers with deep pockets like Bill and Melinda Gates and Eli Broad. He leverages the technical connections of Gates (and the billions of dollars he has) and education connections of Eli Broad (and again, his billions) to ensure that upcoming educators, administrators and government leaders are on board. Finally, he convinces the National Governors Association and State Education Leaders that he’s the guy to develop their Common Core Curriculum Platform. So they hire him and his company to develop the standards. Meanwhile, Eli Broad’s education connections rise to power in states (Lillian Lowery is Broad Superintendents Academy graduate and Jack Markell has attended Broad workshops) and even in the federal government (Arne Duncan is a Broad Academy graduate and often a feature speaker for new Academy classes) and “Race to the Top” is born using the exact educational process that Broad has taught based on Coleman’s platform. Suddenly, thanks to the Stimulus Package and this new Race to the Top program, billions of taxpayer dollars now join the hundreds of millions of dollars from the progressive elites, corporations and education reformers in implementing Common Core Standards. Race to the Top, developed based on Broad guidelines, includes direct provisions for testing standards (data collection), curriculum standards, Charter School support, teacher evaluations and improvement of Title 1 schools first.
So there you have it, Common Sense made of Common Core, one man’s dream becomes a national standard. If you, like me, are concerned about what this all means in the end and how it manifests itself, stay tuned. In future articles, I will continue to name names and show you who is doing what with your child’s data, what they’re teaching our kids and who is behind it all. If, like me, you are sufficiently fed up with this treatment of our children and are ready to take action, contact your local school board (repeatedly) and call your State Senator, State Representative and even your Governor and demand that they get your state OUT of Common Core. You’re going to be called names and labeled crazy but it’s YOUR KIDS. They’re worth some ridicule.
http://www.examiner.com/article/making-common-sense-of-common-core
No comments:
Post a Comment