Your Government at Work
It's
been a pretty sobering week, or at least it should have been a pretty
sobering week, for those who believe that government is both honest and
effective and that therefore Obamacare is going to be a boon to the
American public.
We have the "voluntary" admission
by the IRS that it targeted Tea Party and Patriot organizations, at
least in Ohio, before the last election. Hmmmmm....why Ohio? Could it
have something to do with Ohio's pivotal role in Electoral College
calculations?
Once
Obamacare is imposed on the country, how long will it be before we
discover that some Tea Party members, some Republicans, some people
known for favoring lower taxes, were denied critical operations? Not
long. Obamacare is not there to provide us with health care. We already have that. It is there to deny us health care under the guise that we cannot afford it.
Our
embassy in Benghazi was in a desperate situation for hours. What did
our "leaders" in Washington do? Go to bed. Now we know what happens to
the 3:00 AM phone call - it just rings on.
Anybody
who has been in a hospital will have experienced the dedication, even
the enthusiasm, of the medical staff. Of course they get paid for what
they are doing; we live in a commercial society. But they are also
called to it. Otherwise we would not see the dedication that
characterizes all levels of the profession. But once government bureaucrats interpose themselves on our health care,
what is going to happen? All of us are going to be in the position of
Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods on the top of that CIA annex, waiting for
back-up that is never sent.
So,
this week, we have a flash image of Obamacare a couple of years out.
In emergencies, nobody answers the phone. And when it really counts,
you better be a registered Democrat or some "low level" person will decide "by mistake" that you are not worthy.
Obama’s IRS
Six times the IRS has been accused of punishing President Obama's political opponents
“President [Michael] Crowe and the Board of Regents will soon learn all about being audited by the IRS,”
—President Obama jokes during his commencement speech at Arizona State University in 2009.Under President Obama the Internal Revenue Service has repeatedly been accused of using its enforcement powers to punish the White House’s political opponents. Here are six of the most egregious examples.
1. The IRS Targeted Conservative Political Organizations for Investigation
On Friday, the IRS admitted that career employees had specifically targeted organizations that had “Tea Party” or “Patriot” in their name.
The harassment of these conservative groups included intrusive and inappropriate questionnaires and a threat to make all the confidential information public. The targeting included explicitly asking for donor lists from conservative organizations as part of their application process.
“We made some mistakes, some people didn’t use good judgment. For that, we’re apologetic,” acknowledged the director of the IRS division overseeing tax-exempt groups, Lois Lerner.
Last year, before a hearing at the House of Representatives, then IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman said, “there’s absolutely no targeting. This is the kind of back and forth that happens to people.” And still the IRS claims that the targeting of conservative groups was “in no way due to any political or partisan rationale.”
2. ProPublica Published Confidential IRS Filings on Six Conservative Organizations
From December 2012 to January 2013, ProPublica published the confidential pending IRS applications for tax-exempt status of six conservative organizations.
ProPublica acknowledged that the IRS was not supposed to release information on pending claims for tax-exempt status after publishing Crossroad GPS’s application.
“[IRS spokeswoman Michelle Eldridge] cited a law saying that publishing unauthorized returns or return information was a felony punishable by a fine of up to $5,000 and imprisonment of up to five years, or both,” according to ProPublica.
Despite being informed of the illegality, confidential applications from the five other organizations were discussed in January.
3. Austan Goolsbee, Then Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, Divulged on a Conference Call Confidential IRS Information on How Koch Industries Was Organized
In a background call with reporters, a “senior administration official” used Koch Industries as an example of how large corporations used corporate structures to avoid taxes.
In the course of attacking Koch Industries, which employs over 50,000 people and is owned by prominent conservative philanthropists Charles and David Koch, the official divulged confidential tax information about the company. The official was later outed as Austan Goolsbee, the former director of the president’s Economic Recovery Board and then chair of the Council Of Economic Advisers.
“Neither the Koch website nor Forbes’ list of private companies has information regarding Koch’s tax filling status. This is confidential information,” according to Koch Industries lawyer Mark Holden.
In 2010 an investigation led by the Treasury inspector general for tax administration, Russell George, was opened after Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee requested it. The results of the investigation have not been publicly communicated, and will not be released unless Senate Democrats permit it.
4. Donors to Nonprofit Advocacy Groups Were Told that Past Donations Could Be Taxed as Gifts
After not levying a gift tax for decades, the IRS investigated five donors to political advocacy nonprofits.
Among those to receive letters threatening additional levies and taxes was conservative philanthropist Foster Friess, and the move was widely seen as an attempt to intimidate conservative organizations and donors on the eve of the 2010 midterm elections.
“Retroactive enforcement of the gift tax in this highly politicized environment raises legitimate concerns and demands further explanation,” six Republican senators, lead by Sen. Orrin Hatch, said in a letter to the IRS.
The agency was forced to abandon its efforts to enforce the rarely used gift tax on donations, acknowledging that, “This is a difficult area… with respect to which we have little enforcement history.” Again, the agency blamed “career civil servants.”
5. After Being Singled Out by an Obama Campaign Website, a Romney Supporter Was Investigated by The IRS and the Department of Labor
During President Obama’s reelection campaign, Frank VanderSloot, a contributor to pro-Romney campaign organizations, was said by the Obama campaign to have a “less-than-reputable record” and to be a “bitter foe of the gay rights movement.”
A few months later, VanderSloot and his wife were told by the IRS they were being audited for the first time, looking over two years of past fillings.
Two weeks later, the Department of Labor informed VanderSloot that he was being investigated to ensure the three foreign workers he employs on his ranch received “the full scope of protections.”
6. The IRS Claims It Can Read Your Emails without a Warrant
According to documents released last month under the Freedom of Information Act, the IRS “has long taken the position that the IRS can read your emails without a warrant—a practice that one appeals court has said violates the Fourth Amendment.” That news came last month from the ACLU, which which had filed the FOIA request.
IRS lawyers asserted that Americans are entitled to “generally no privacy” in their online communications—including email.
CNET reported that “the IRS continued to take the same position, the documents indicate, even after a federal appeals court ruled in the 2010 case U.S. v. Warshak that Americans have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their e-mail.”
Bonus: Under Obamacare, the IRS Will Become the Key Enforcer on Health Care
Once Obamacare is fully implemented in 2014, the IRS will enforce 47 new tax provisions along with distributing subsidies to 18 million people and tax credits to small businesses.
The Treasury Department expects the cost of enforcement from 2010 to 2013 to total $881 million. Former IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman informed Congress last year the agency would need an additional $13.1 billion in 2014.
http://freebeacon.com/obamas-irs/
Why Obama released embarrassing IRS bombshell
Michele Bachmann explains White House's willingness to take heat
The Internal Revenue Service under the Obama administration – described by Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., as the “most feared government agency” – admitted Friday it targeted conservative and tea-party groups during last year’s election because of their politics.Bachmann, a former tax attorney, told WND in an interview the IRS admission means the credibility of the 2012 election is in doubt Americans, she said, should be wondering whether Obamacare, which is to be enforced by the IRS, will target conservative voices opposed to President Obama with delays or denials of medical care.
But why would an administration ever confess to such a flagrant misuse of politics and power? Bachmann, who chairs the House Tea Party caucus, said it’s the Benghazi scandal. “There’s no doubt this was not a coincidence that they dumped this story today, a Friday dump day,” Bachmann told WND. “This is when they put their negative stories out.”
But she said the looming storm cloud called Benghazi is the “soft underbelly” of the Obama administration and likely will keep Hillary Clinton from fulfilling her dream of occupying the Oval Office. That would make it logical to release an IRS story that, while embarrassing, also could be cubbyholed as another “conservative” dispute with the White House.
...
Bachmann said the IRS announcement of misbehavior was intended to provoke conservatives and draw their anger and attention. “I was in that Benghazi hearing,” she told WND. “I think the Obama administration is desperate to spin Benghazi, and they can’t. I think they saved this story up for a day like today so that conservatives would focus on this admission.”
It won’t work, she insisted. "Conservatives can handle two shocking stories at the same time,” she said. “Both are equally unconstitutional and call into question the very president.”
The Benghazi investigation has been getting worse for Obama, with witnesses testifying to a House panel Wednesday that military troops were prepared to come to Benghazi but were told to stand down. Today, the White House was grilled about the elimination of references to terrorism in the talking points officials used in the aftermath of the attack.
The IRS confirmation that it misbehaved came from Lois Lerner, chief of the unit that oversees tax-exempt organizations. She confirmed the claim of people dismissed as “conspiracy nuts” that groups that include the words “tea party” or “patriot” in their applications were put in a political bull’s-eye.
The American Center for Law and Justice under Jay Sekulow’s leadership already has been fighting the battle.
“We knew from the very start that this intimidation tactic was coordinated and focused directly on specific organizations,” said Sekulow, chief counsel of the ACLJ. “This admission by the IRS represents a significant victory for free speech and freedom of association. There was never any doubt that these organizations complied with the law and applied for tax exempt status for their activities as Americans have done for decades. And for the many tax-exempt groups we represent, this is an important day – and underscores the need to stand-up and defend your constitutional freedoms.”
The ACLJ has been representing nearly 30 tea party organizations that had been the target of intimidation tactics by the IRS under the Obama administration. The federal government demanded information that was outside the scope of legitimate inquiry and violated the First Amendment, the ACLJ explained.
The Obama IRS demanded that groups reveal the internal workings of their organizations, he said,”including the identification of members, how they are selected, who they associate with, and even what they discuss.”
The agency also demanded the names and contact information of relatives.
Sekulow said it took the threat of legal action from his organization “to get the IRS to make this admission.”
“And while many of the organizations we represent have finally been granted tax-exempt status, we demand the IRS immediately approve the pending applications for the remainder of our clients,” he said.
Sekulow, who served as a trial lawyer with the office of the chief counsel for the IRS earlier in his career, said many questions were inappropriate and well outside the scope of legitimate IRS inquiry.
For example, IRS agents demanded:
- “Have you attempted or will you attempt to influence the outcome of specific legislation? If so, provide the following … all communications, pamphlets, advertisements, and other materials.”
- “Have you conducted or will you conduct candidate forums? If so, provide the following details… The issues that were discussed. Copies of all handouts provided.”
- “The names of persons from your organization and the amount of time they will spend on the event. Indicate the name and amount of compensation that will be paid to each person.”
- “All copies of your corporate minutes from inception.”
- “Please identify your volunteers.”
- “The names of donors, contributors, and grantors.”
- “Do you encourage eligible voters to educate themselves, register to vote, and vote? Explain in detail how you do this.”
- “You were formed 12/28/10. Provide actual financial information for 2010 & 2011, and a budget for 2012. Provide details regarding each item listed.”
Bachmann told WND it’s stunning that the Obama administration used “the federal agency feared most by Americans to intimidate conservative and tea party organizations during an election year.”
Since the IRS also is the chief enforcer of Obamacare requirements, she asked whether the IRS’s admission means it “will deny or delay access to health care” for conservatives. At this point, she said, that “is a reasonable question to ask.”
She said her proposal to repeal Obamacare in its entirety will be introduced in the House next week. She said given the circumstances of the IRS admission, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., a longtime advocate for the Obamacare plan, should hold a Senate vote on the same repeal plan.
And she said Obama should sign the law to repeal Obamacare.
Bachman said, as a former tax attorney, the government’s explanation that some “low-level” workers in the IRS targeted for invasive questioning conservative groups is unreal. “A low-level functionary in Ohio would have zero jurisdictional authority to intimidate an applicant from New Mexico, or California or Georgia,” Bachmann told WND.
The move, she said, had to come from the highest levels of the government. “We learned to our horror in Benghazi it appears that every move that was made was based on politics,” she said. “Now it appears the president was willing to use the most feared agency in the U.S. for his own political purposes.”
Regarding the 2012 election, she wondered, if Obama is willing to use the IRS for political purposes, what agency would he not use? “We learned that during an election, [Obama] interfered with the First Amendment rights of conservatives and tea party members by intimidating and harassing these organizations,” she said.
That not only is shocking, it will require congressional hearings to determine the exact level of rot, she said. “The Obama administration wants us to believe low-level functionaries are the ones responsible for making this decision,” she said. “That is impossible, laughable. I can tell you within the IRS, the agency is very sensitive of jurisdictional authority.
“Once again, it appears the Obama administration is blatantly lying to the American people,” she said. “People can right ask questions [about[ the credibility of the elections."
And regarding Obamacare, should Americans fear their government may try to harm them if they are conservative? "It now is an entirely reasonable question for the American people to ask," she said. "Will Obamacare be so politicized and misused?"
Richard Nixon threatened to send the IRS after his political opponents, and Bill Clinton actually did.
Among Clinton's targets was WND founder and CEO Joseph Farah.
"As someone whose organization was a victim of this kind of illegal harassment and intimidation and political retribution during the Clinton administration – and who blew the whistle on it – my question is, 'Who is going to be fired and prosecuted as a result of this admission?'" he said.
"Apologies are nice. But they don't excuse people of crimes. When government officials abuse their power and break laws, they need to be punished as certainly and severely as ordinary citizens. In fact, to maintain trust in government, we need to ensure they are held to a higher standard. So what happens now? Who's going to take the rap? Which law-enforcement agency is going to investigate? It would seem that an independent prosecutor is necessary unless the Congress is willing to take the lead."
U.S. Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, said: "Although I am happy that it has finally admitted to placing politics over policy, the IRS owes conservative groups far more than a mere apology for their unfair treatment. It is crystal clear that additional safeguards are in order to prevent this obtrusive behavior in the future. This overt and excessive harassment of groups targeted for their political beliefs is despicable, and many questions remain. How were 'low-level workers in Cincinnati' able to initiate practices that completely undermine the IRS's promise to treat all groups with an even hand? Even more, what were they hoping to do with the copious personal information they obtained from these groups?"
Portman last year, along with Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, urge the IRS to stop politics from interfering in its activities.
"It is critical that the public have confidence that federal tax compliance efforts are pursued in a fair, even-handed, and transparent manner – without regard to politics of any kind," the senators said at the time.
"It is imperative that organizations applying for tax-exempt status are able to rely on a consistent and foreseeable review structure from the IRS. Any significant changes to the IRS review process should be implemented only after appropriate notice and opportunity for comment from the public and affected parties."
Hatch said: "While I’m glad to see the IRS apologize for unfairly targeting conservative groups, this frankly isn't enough. We need to have ironclad guarantees from the IRS that it will adopt significant protocols to ensure this kind of harassment of groups that have a constitutional right to express their own views never happens again. "
He continued: "There can be no tolerance for the IRS being turned into a political weapon; it has a chilling and, frankly, Nixonian effect on those who wish to speak their mind. I will be discussing this further with the head of the IRS and expect a full briefing and report as to how this happened. The American people deserve to know who at the IRS learned about this unlawful activity, when they learned about it, and what they did, or did not, do when they did learned about it."
One year ago, as WND reported, the ACLJ represented tea party organizations when the IRS was making "unconstitutional" demands of tea party organizations.
Stephanie Scruggs, who works with The912Project and United in Action, said, for example the IRS demanded copies of every single post to every single organization website page, Twitter feed and Facebook feed.
The IRS also requested contact information for family members of each board member. And yet another demand was for the name and contact for every person who ever had attended one of the group's meetings. The ACLJ said the intimidating letters violated both free speech and free association rights.
IRS officials earlier defended their demands, telling Fox News: "When determining whether an organization is eligible for tax-exempt status, including 501(c)4 social welfare organizations, all the facts and circumstances of that specific organization must be considered to determine whether it is eligible. … To be tax-exempt … they must be primarily engaged in the promotion of social welfare."
The spokesman continued, "Career civil servants make all decisions on exemption applications in a fair, impartial manner and do so without regard to political party affiliation or ideology."
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and Subcommittee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio., had cited the possibility of political retaliation against conservatives last summer.
"The fact that Americans were targeted by the IRS because of their political beliefs is unconscionable," he said.
The IRS said it singled out groups that referenced "tea party" or "patriot."
The IRS did not explain how "low-level workers" were able to single out and target 300 groups the IRS admitted were involved.
Jenny Beth Martin, of Tea Party Patriots, didn't buy the government's latest story. "It is suspicious that the activity of these 'low-level workers' was unknown to IRS leadership at the time it occurred," she told AP. "President Obama must also apologize for his administration ignoring repeated complaints by these broad grassroots organizations of harassment by the IRS in 2012, and make concrete and transparent steps today to ensure this never happens again."
http://www.wnd.com/2013/05/why-obama-released-embarrassing-irs-bombshell/?cat_orig=us
Two Moms vs. Common Core
How an eight-year-old’s homework assignment led to a political upheaval
Indiana has become the first state to retreat from the Common Core standards, as Governor Mike Pence has just signed a bill suspending their implementation.A great deal has been written and spoken about Common Core, but it is worth rehearsing the outlines again. Common Core is a set of math and English standards developed largely with Gates Foundation money and pushed by the Obama administration and the National Governors Association. The standards define what every schoolchild should learn each year, from first grade through twelfth, and the package includes teacher evaluations tied to federally funded tests designed to ensure that schools teach to Common Core.
Over 40 states hurriedly adopted Common Core, some before the standards were even written, in response to the Obama administration’s making more than $4 billion in federal grants conditional on their doing so. Only Texas, Alaska, Virginia, and Nebraska declined. (Minnesota adopted the English but not the math standards.)
Here is my prediction: Indiana is the start of something big.
Just a year ago Common Core was untouchable in Indiana, as in most other places. Common Core had been promoted by conservative governor Mitch Daniels, and the state superintendent of public schools, Tony Bennett, was a rising GOP education star.
How did the bipartisan Common Core “consensus” collapse?
It collapsed because some parents saw that Common Core was actually lowering standards in their children’s schools. And because advocates for Common Core could not answer the questions these parents raised.
In Indiana, the story starts with two Indianapolis moms, Heather Crossin and her friend Erin Tuttle.
In September 2011, Heather suddenly noticed a sharp decline in the math homework her eight-year-old daughter was bringing home from Catholic school.
“Instead of many arithmetic problems, the homework would contain only three or four questions, and two of those would be ‘explain your answer,’” Heather told me. “Like, ‘One bridge is 412 feet long and the other bridge is 206 feet long. Which bridge is longer? How do you know?’”
She found she could not help her daughter answer the latter question: The “right” answer involved heavy quotation from Common Core language. A program designed to encourage thought had ended up encouraging rote memorization not of math but of scripts about math.
Heather was noticing on the ground some of the same things that caused Stanford mathematics professor R. James Milgram to withhold his approval from the Common Core math standards.
Professor Milgram was the only math content expert on the Validation Committee reviewing the standards, and he concluded that the Common Core standards are, as he told the Texas state legislature, “in large measure a political document that . . . is written at a very low level and does not adequately reflect our current understanding of why the math programs in the high-achieving countries give dramatically better results.”
The Common Core math standards deemphasize performing procedures (solving many similar problems) in favor of attempting to push a deeper cognitive understanding — e.g., asking questions like “How do you know?”
In fact, according to a scholarly 2011 content analysis published in Education Researcher by Andrew Porter and colleagues, the Common Core math standards bear little resemblance to the national curriculum standards in countries with high-achieving math students: “Top-achieving countries for which we had content standards,” these scholars note, “put a greater emphasis on [the category] ‘perform procedures’ than do the U.S. Common Core standards.”
So why was this new, unvalidated math approach suddenly appearing in Heather’s little corner of the world, and at a Catholic school?
Heather was not alone in questioning the new approach. So many parents at the school complained that the principal convened a meeting. He brought in the saleswoman from the Pearson textbook company to sell the parents. “She told us we were all so very, very lucky, because our children were using one of the very first Common Core–aligned textbooks in the country,” says Heather.
But the parents weren’t buying what the Pearson lady was selling.
“Eventually,” Heather recalled, “our principal just threw his hands up in the air and said, ‘I know parents don’t like this type of math but we have to teach it that way, because the new state assessment tests are going to use these standards.’”
That’s the first time Heather had heard that Indiana had replaced its well-regarded state tests, ISTEP (Indiana Statewide Testing for Educational Progress–Plus) in favor of a brand-new federally funded set of assessments keyed to Common Core. “I thought I was a fairly informed person, and I was shocked that a big shift in control had happened and I hadn’t the slightest idea,” she says.
Erin Tuttle says she noticed the change in the math homework at about the same time as Heather, and she also noticed that her child was bringing home a lot fewer novels and more “Time magazine for kids” — a reflection of the English standards’ emphasis on “informational texts” rather than literature.
These standards are designed not to produce well-educated citizens but to prepare students to enter community colleges and lower-level jobs. All students, not just non-college-material students, are going to be taught to this lower standard.
I want to pause and highlight the significance of Heather and Erin’s testimony. Heather Crossin and Erin Tuttle did not get involved in opposing Common Core because of anything Michelle Malkin or Glenn Beck said to rile them up, but because of what they saw happening in their own children’s Catholic school. When experts or politicians said that Common Core would not lead to a surrender of local control over curriculum, Heather and Erin knew better. (Ironically, the leverage in Indiana was Tony Bennett’s school-choice program, which made state vouchers available to religious schools, but only if they adopted state tests — which were later quietly switched from ISTEP to the untried Common Core assessments.)
A STEALTH CAMPAIGN TO BYPASS PARENTS
At first Heather thought maybe her ignorance of Common Core was her fault. Maybe, with her kids (as she imagined) safely ensconced in good Catholic schools, she hadn’t paid attention.
That’s when she and Erin started contacting people — “and we found out something more shocking: Nobody had any idea,” Heather told me.
A friend of Heather’s who is a former reporter for a state newspaper and now a teacher didn’t know. Nor did her state senator, Scott Schneider, even though he sat on the state senate’s Education Committee. (In Indiana, as in most states, Common Core was adopted by the Board of Education without consulting the legislature.) Nor, evidently, did the state’s education reporters — Heather could find literally no press coverage of the key moment when Indiana’s Board of Education abandoned its fine state standards and well-regarded state tests in favor of Common Core.
“They brought in David Coleman, the architect of the standards, to give a presentation, they asked a few questions, there was no debate, no cost analysis, just a sales job, and everybody rubber-stamped it,” Heather said.
So began an 18-month journey in which these two mothers probably changed education history.
One reason the media ignored the implementation of Common Core is that the Indiana education debate was dominated by Governor Daniels’s high-profile effort to expand school choice. But as my colleague at the American Principles Project (APP) Emmett McGroarty pointed out to me, nationalizing curriculum standards quietly knifes the school-choice movement in the back. As McGroarty puts it, “What difference does it make if you fund different schools if they all teach the same basic curriculum the same basic way?”
Common Core advocates continue to insist that Common Core does not usurp local control of curriculum, but in practice high-stakes tests keyed to the Common Core standards ensure that curriculum will follow.
Emmett McGroarty turns out to have been a very important person in the journey that Heather Crossin and Erin Tuttle made to take down Common Core.
Heather and Erin were helped by many people and groups along the way, including the Pioneer Institute’s Jamie Gass, the Hoover Institution’s Bill Evers, and the Heritage Foundation’s Lindsey Burke. Many Indiana organizations played key roles, beginning with the indispensable leadership of the Indiana Tea Party. Other natural allies Heather and Erin contacted and educated in order to build the movement include the state chapter of Americans for Prosperity, the Indiana Family Institute, and the Indiana Association of Home Educators.
But Heather told me that what McGroarty and his colleague Jane Robbins at the American Principles Project did was unique. “I call him the General of this movement,” Heather says. “He strategizes with people in every state. Day or night, Saturday or Sunday, Emmett’s there if you need him.”
The 2012 white paper, co-sponsored by the American Principles Project and the Pioneer Institute, that urged the American Legislative Exchange Council to oppose Common Core became Heather and Erin’s bible. “That white paper is the most important summary; we gave copies to people and said, ‘Read this. If you can’t read the whole thing, read the executive summary.’ Because it covered all the bases, from the quality of the standards to the illegitimate federal data collection to the federal government’s involvement in promoting Common Core,” Heather told me.
But even more influential than its message development was APP’s willingness to give in-depth, hands-on, intensive help whenever Heather and Erin requested it. “Usually you call up a national organization, and they are really nice, they say they are with you, and they send you some helpful research and say, ‘Good luck with that,’” Heather explained. But APP did much more. “All along the way APP has been the greatest source of support mentally, emotionally, and with research that a grassroots organization could have had.”
A big break came in June 2012, when the local tea-party council asked Heather and Erin to develop a flyer that it could use to spread the word to tea-party meetings all across the state; the two women turned to Emmett and Jane to help draft it. The first time Heather and Erin were asked to appear on a local radio show (something they had never done before), they asked Emmett if he would fly in and do the show with them. APP staff would fly out to attend rallies, do local radio shows with Heather and Erin, help them prepare to meet with editorial boards, and act as sounding boards and strategists each step of the way as the grassroots movement grew.
THE FIRST TIME FAILED
In 2012, it looked as if Heather and Erin had failed: Prodded by Governor Daniels, the Indiana legislature voted down a bill to withdraw from Common Core.
Heather was ready to give up. Without hands-on support, she told me, “For sure, I would have given up. But Emmett told me this was just the beginning.”
So Senator Schneider agreed to introduce the bill again, and Heather and Erin went to work crisscrossing the state that summer for rallies and meetings that drew large crowds. The media reluctantly began to take notice.
And then something magical intervened: an election.
Tony Bennett’s reelection as state superintendent of public schools was supposed to be a slam dunk. His opponent, Glenda Ritz, was a Democrat in a deeply Republican state, and she had no name recognition and almost no money; she ended up being outspent by more than 5 to 1 as Bennett’s war chest swelled to $1.5 million with major gifts from Michael Bloomberg’s PAC, Walmart heiress Alice Walton, and other national players.
But Bennett was also the highest-profile public defender of Common Core, while Ritz was raising concerns about it.
When the dust had settled on election day, Bennett had lost, badly. It was the upset of the year.
When Michael Petrilli, executive vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute (which backs Common Core), found out late on election night that Bennett had been unseated by the unknown, underfunded underdog Glenda Ritz, he wasn’t happy: “Tony Bennett! Sh*t sh*t sh*t sh*t sh*t,” Petrilli told Huffington Post writer Joy Resmovits. “You can quote me on that.”
Well, something had clearly hit the fan.
Bennett’s defeat marked a decisive turning point, making every Indiana politician aware how deep voter discontent over Common Core was.
In Indiana, as elsewhere, Common Core proponents have responded to public criticism by accusing the parents of being stupid and uninformed or possibly lying. Common Core, they say, is not a curriculum; it is not being driven by the federal government; it will not interfere with local control of schools.
A few days before Senator Schneider’s anti–Common Core bill passed, the Indiana Chamber of Commerce (which had spent more than $100,000 in ads opposing the bill) lashed out in frustration at the outsized effect Heather and Erin had had on the legislature: “Two moms from Indianapolis, a handful of their friends and a couple dozen small but vocal Tea Party groups. That’s the entire Indiana movement that is advocating for a halt to the Common Core State Standards,” the Chamber of Commerce fumed.
This is not accurate, given the opposition by many education experts, including Professor Milgram, Professor Sandra Stotsky of the University of Arkansas, Professor Diane Ravitch of New York University, Professor Chris Tienken of Seton Hall, and former assistant education secretary Williamson Evers at Hoover.
But never underestimate the power of a mother, especially one who is defending her own child’s future.
What started in Indiana is not staying in Indiana.
Legislation opposing Common Core has been introduced in at least seven other states, and large crowds are turning out at public panels and rallies in states from Tennessee to Idaho. Last month the Michigan House of Representatives voted to withhold implementation funding, despite Republican governor Rick Snyder’s support for Common Core; the Missouri Senate this week approved a bill calling for statewide hearings on Common Core.
In April the RNC passed a resolution opposing Common Core as “inappropriate overreach to standardize and control the education of our children.”
On April 20, Representative Blaine Luetkemeyer (R., Mo.) sent a letter — co-signed by 33 other congressmen — to Education Secretary Arne Duncan, asking for a detailed accounting of changes in student-privacy policies associated with the new national database the Obama administration is building as part of its Common Core support. The letter pointed out that the Education Department had already made regulatory changes — without consulting Congress — that appear to circumvent the 1974 law that limits the disclosure to third parties of any data collected on students.
“The Common Core places inappropriate limitations on the influence of states and localities, while burdening them with additional, unfunded expenses,” Representative Luetkemeyer told me via e-mail.
Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa is taking the lead nationally in shining light on the Obama administration’s key role in promoting Common Core. On April 16, Grassley was joined by seven other GOP senators (including major presidential contenders Ted Cruz and Rand Paul), who signed a letter calling on their colleagues to stop funding the implementation of Common Core, which, they point out, appears to violate federal laws that explicitly forbid the Education Department to influence curriculum or assemble a national database. “I voted against the Economic Stimulus Bill that essentially gave the Department of Education a blank check that was used for Race to the Top, and I have been very critical of how the Department of Education used those funds to push a specific education policy agenda from Washington on the states without specific input from Congress,” Senator Grassley told me via e-mail.
The recent announcement by Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, that the AFT wants to delay implementation of the Common Core tests in New York put a bipartisan nail in the coffin of consensus.
And more moms are following the trail Heather Crossin and Erin Tuttle blazed.
One major objection to the Common Core standards is that they are not evidence-based. Their effect on academic achievement is simply unknown, because they have not been field-tested anywhere in the world.
But moms have a more elemental objection: The whole operation is a federal power grab over their children’s education. Once a state adopts Common Core, its curriculum goals and assessments are effectively nationalized. And the national standards are effectively privatized, because they are written, owned, and copyrighted by two private trade organizations.
“Legislators are incredulous when they learn the standards and assessments are written by two private trade organizations — the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and the Council of Chief State School Officers. This creates concern why public education is now controlled by two private organizations,” says Gretchen Logue, a Missouri education activist and one of the co-founders of Truth in American Education, a network of activists and organizations opposing Common Core. “They also don’t like that the standards and assessments are copyrighted and cannot be changed or modified by the states.”
So why are so many good conservatives, from Jeb Bush to Rick Snyder, supporting Common Core? Many conservatives signed on to a clever strategy that asked them to endorse, not the specific standards, but the idea of high “internationally benchmarked” national standards. It is a principle of psychological persuasion that, once you act, in however small a manner, you will feel cognitively compelled to justify your action. Many business leaders with no experience or expertise in education reform have come on board.
This is as good an explanation as any for why so many conservatives are aggressively promoting a set of national standards about which we know, for sure, four things:
a) They are not
internationally benchmarked. In fact, for math in particular, they are
exactly contrary to the kind of national standards used in
high-performing countries.
b) The two
major experts on content who were on the Validation Committee reviewing
the standards backed out and repudiated them when they saw what the
standards actually are.
c) State
legislatures and parents were cut out of the loop in evaluating the
standards themselves or the cost of implementing them.
d) The Common Core standards are owned by private trade organizations, which parents cannot influence.
These
objections, among others, led Diane Ravitch to call on her blog for
backing out of Common Core, as the standards were “flawed by the process
with which they have been foisted upon the nation.”Ravitch went on: “The Common Core standards have been adopted in 46 states and the District of Columbia without any field test. They are being imposed on the children of the nation despite the fact that no one has any idea how they will affect students, teachers or schools. We are a nation of guinea pigs, almost all trying an unknown new program at the same time.”
I asked Heather how she felt on that historic day she saw the very first anti–Common Core bill in the nation pass. “I was elated!” she told me. “We were up against so many powerful groups with so much money. We fought against all odds, tons of money, a slew of paid lobbyists. All we had was the truth, the facts, and a passion to protect the future of our children. Our victory is proof that our American system of government still works.”
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/347973/two-moms-vs-common-core
Benghazi, Alinsky & Sacrificing Souls For The Unachievable Utopia
Watching the events of the past weeks Benghazi hearings has been a little disturbing, to say the least. By all rights this scandal should lead to impeachment hearings for President Obama and his entire administration as far as I am concerned. It won’t though because there isn’t enough outrage among a population that has been indoctrinated into a worldview that espouses big government. Also, half the country is still blind to the reality that there is something much larger at work here, if they are even aware of it all. As sad as it is we are truly living in an age where the freedoms of the majority has been surrendered by the fears of the minority, and the masses just blindly follow the path laid before them by their socialist masters.For those of us that are paying attention we face an uphill battle against a radical minority who not only controls the opinions of the masses through media but education as well. These radicals have a vested interest in maintaining their power and they are the masters of running campaigns that literally destroy any opposition that stands in the way of their ultimate objective, a world communist paradise otherwise known as a Utopia. It is imperative that this is understood because after all, we have an Alinsky style community organizer in the White House and according to Alinsky-
“Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counter attack ridicule. Also, it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.”This is the fifth rule of tactics in Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals and can be seen on page 128. It essentially explains why the republicans have developed a yellow stripe down their backs and can be regularly seen waving a white flag. They are scared to death because there is nothing the left will not say or do to discredit them. This tactic is employed specifically to put the opposition on the defensive and then make them react to the most ridiculous accusations. Another rule that Alinsky has is that any good tactic is one that your people enjoy. In other words folks these people sink to incredible lows and have a ball destroying peoples reputations while putting them in a reactionary mode trying to prove what was said about them is not true. We have seen that this can become very nasty, yet effective in advancing their agenda. The strategy has bordered on the ridiculous with ads such as the one depicting Paul Ryan throwing granny off the cliff to creating mental associations connecting gun right supporters to mass murderers.
It is difficult for people to understand this mentality because we tend to project ourselves onto others I believe. Most of us try to be decent, honest citizens and would never do to others what the left does to us. We try to do the right thing. The left doesn’t believe in a “right thing” in the same sense that we do folks. They believe in moral relativism which allows them to get away with anything when it comes to reaching their goals of establishing a totalitarian government.
The best way to explain this is to say that the ultimate expression of morality for the left is the sacrifice of their morality for the greater good of mankind. From their warped perspective the greater good of mankind means restructuring society into a one world communist government that can make it fair for everyone. In other words to call republicans racist and homophobes and call gun right supporters terrorists are understood by the left to be deplorable tactics, but if they succeed in destroying the opposition than they have lived to the highest standard of morality by sacrificing their own “salvation” for the salvation of mankind. If they are not willing to corrupt themselves for the greater good than they do not really care. This is the way the left thinks America and we have to understand this if we expect to stand a chance at getting our country back. Let’s ponder this quote a moment-
“To say that corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles. The real arena is corrupt and bloody. Life is a corrupting process from the time a child learns to play mom against dad in the politics of when to go to bed; he who fears corruption fears life.”He goes on to say that a “man of action” does not have the luxury of making decisions consistent with his own conscience and the good of mankind, therefore he must always chose the latter. In other words the radical leftist believes that by sacrificing their own “personal salvation” they are in fact, as stated earlier expressing the highest form of morality because it is being done for their ultimate objective which they believe will create a perfect paradise, world communist government. It must be realized that this objective cannot be reached. What they are really doing is destroying the soul of mankind because they are acting without God. No matter how hard people try to change the truth to suit their agendas truth will always remain the truth. In this case truth tells us that mankind cannot and will never be able to create a perfect paradise without God; that is not our purpose. So the natural consequence is that instead of creating a perfect paradise where everyone is equal and everything is fair, they are creating another hell on Earth because they have failed to look at what happened the last time they tried this. Of course, if you understand the left and the depth of their depravity than you understand to them it may take the slaughter of another 20 million to reach their objective. After all according to Darwin and Hegel a perfect society would evolve out of conflict.
What does all of this have to do with Benghazi? Maybe nothing; however, if it turns out to be true that there was a massive gun running operation at the heart of the scandal it could be argued that it was done for the purpose of removing the Syrian president , Bashar Al-Assad in order to give control of the region to U.N. troops. Knowing that the left is infatuated with Alinksy like tactics, statements like “What difference does it make” from Hillary Clinton and “Death is a part of life” from Eliah Cummings make more sense. They are selling their souls in an attempt to protect their agenda; which they believe will eventually serve the greater good of mankind. I think in reality they are only concerned with serving the greater good for themselves and protecting their lies.
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