Aloha America...Suckers

 

 

Breitbart...

President Barack Obama is headed to Hawaii for a posh 20-day vacation costing some $4 million to the taxpayers. The First Family will head to Kailua, where they’ll erect barricades to prevent the commoners from interacting with them. But it’s not the cost and inconvenience that Americans should wonder about – it’s the timing. President Obama heads out of town from December 17 to January 6. The fiscal cliff is slated to hit on January 2.

And there’s no sign that President Obama is anywhere close to a deal with Congressional Republicans on averting the fiscal cliff. Which means that as he sips Mai Tais and lounges in the sun, Americans everywhere will be skimping on their Christmas shopping, just in case their taxes skyrocket on January 2.

Is there better use for the vacation money? Sure – one Maryland man has suggested that the Obama family donate that $4 million to victims of Hurricane Sandy. But far more important is that as Obama wastes days gallivanting around the countryside talking to people who are not Speaker John Boehner, his vacation grows ever closer. Once we hit December 17, it will be that much more difficult to distract Obama from his fun in the sun to help regular Americans avoid an enormous economic hit...Via ACGR

The Architect Of PAIN

If we go over the fiscal cliff, the country will unfortunately suffer. But so, politically, will Barack Obama, the architect of the pain...More at Commentary

 

 

 

 

President Barack Obama says he won’t come out of his room to negotiate his government’s allowance until Congress gives him a credit card with no spending limit.

More at The Daily Caller

 

 

 

Detroit Councilwoman to Obama: We Voted For You, Time to Pay Up

For Detroit City Councilwoman JoAnn Watson, it’s all about the quid pro quo: Detroit voters supported President Obama in his re-election bid, now the president needs to deliver.

As you may expect...Detroit city council is 100% black. Where is the diversity people?

Democrats have run Detroit for decades, with the predictable result that the city is now so strapped for cash that auditors think it may run out of money before the year is up.

“Our people in an overwhelming way supported the re-election of this president and there ought to be a quid pro quo and you ought to exercise leadership on that,” said Watson. “Of course, not just that, but why not?”

Many conservatives have complained that people voted for Obama because he was giving them handouts. Apparently, Watson is a big fan of government bacon. And she definitely has her hand out.

“After the election of Jimmy Carter, the honorable (former Mayor) Coleman Alexander Young, he went to Washington, D.C. He came home with some bacon,” said Watson. “That’s what you do.”

After the election, Mitt Romney pointed out that many Hispanic voters cast their ballots for Obama because he gave them the Dream Act and free health care.

Radio host Rush Limbaugh said essentially the same thing about Obama supporters, dubbing the president “Baracka Claus.”

Liberal critics were beside themselves that anyone would suggest that Obama supporters were so shallow and easily led about. But people like Watson make it seem like Romney and Limbaugh were right on the money. Recall the now-infamous “Obamaphone” lady.

White House officials report that there are no plans to bailout Detroit or any other city, so for now, it looks like Watson will just have to stand in the line with the rest of Obama’s supporters.

Watson, being a proud product of the Detroit public school system, where 75% of graduates are illiterate...certainly sounds a lot like Obamaphone lady.

Read More at Godfather Politics via ACGR

I Will Gladly Pay You Tuesday For A Pork Sandwich Today

 

A grant program administered by the Department of Homeland Security has morphed from a fund designed to fight terror into a pork-barrel program that pads local governments’ budgets, according to a report to be released Wednesday by Sen. Tom Coburn (R., Okla.).

The report, titled “Safety at Any Price: Assessing the Impact of Homeland Security Spending in U.S. Cities,” focuses on Homeland Security’s Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI).

“Since 2003, DHS has spent $35 billion on grant programs that were intended to make Americans safer from terrorist attacks,” a spokesman for Sen. Coburn wrote in an email. “But DHS failed to establish goals or metrics to ensure that funds were used to make Americans safe and cannot say how much safer we are today after spending $35 billion.”

The report says the UASI grant program has ballooned beyond its original intent and lacks the oversight and rigorous measurements needed to determine its effectiveness.

The report also points out numerous examples of wasteful and inappropriate spending by grant recipients.

One example of wasteful spending highlighted by the report is a security conference for which the grant money paid the $1,000 entrance fee.

The centerpiece of the conference was a “zombie apocalypse” demonstration where a “tactical training firm” staged a live simulated response to a zombie attack. “Conference attendees were invited to watch the shows as part of their education in emergency response training,” the report says.

“The administration is seeking $1.5 billion for its state and local grant programs—a nearly 40 percent increase over its FY2011 funding level” this year despite problems with the grant allocation process, according to the report.

The “agency characterized the grants as a stimulus package, which it argued was needed given the ‘current economic situation and the need for further fiscal stimulus,’” earlier this year.

 Read More: Free Beacon

Closing of the American Mind

 

One of today's top students...

 

In the Harvard Munch Club

 

 

 

George Will at The Washington Post

In 2007, Keith John Sampson, a middle-aged student working his way through Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis as a janitor, was declared guilty of racial harassment. Without granting Sampson a hearing, the university administration — acting as prosecutor, judge and jury — convicted him of “openly reading (a) book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject.”

“Openly.” “Related to.” Good grief.

This non sequitur reflects the right never to be annoyed, a new campus entitlement. Legions of administrators, who now outnumber full-time faculty, are kept busy making students mind their manners, with good manners understood as conformity to liberal politics.

The book, “Notre Dame vs. the Klan,” celebrated the 1924 defeat of the Ku Klux Klan in a fight with Notre Dame students. But some of Sampson’s co-workers disliked the book’s cover, which featured a black-and-white photograph of a Klan rally. Someone was offended, therefore someone else must be guilty of harassment.

Liberals are most concentrated and untrammeled on campuses, so look there for evidence of what, given the opportunity, they would do to America. Ample evidence is in “Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate” by Greg Lukianoff, 38, a graduate of Stanford Law School who describes himself as a liberal, pro-choice, pro-gay rights, lifelong Democrat who belongs to “the notoriously politically correct Park Slope Food Co-Op in Brooklyn” and has never voted for a Republican “nor do I plan to.” But as president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) he knows that the most common justifications for liberal censorship are “sensitivity” about “diversity” and “multiculturalism,” as academic liberals understand those things.

In recent years, a University of Oklahoma vice president has declared that no university resources, including email, could be used for “the forwarding of political humor/commentary.” The College at Brockport in New York banned using the Internet to “annoy or otherwise inconvenience” anyone.

Rhode Island College prohibited, among many other things, certain “attitudes.” Texas Southern University’s comprehensive proscriptions included “verbal harm” from damaging “assumptions” or “implications.” Texas A&M promised “freedom from indignity of any type.” Davidson banned “patronizing remarks.” Drexel University forbade “inappropriately directed laughter.” Western Michigan University banned “sexism,” including “the perception” of a person “not as an individual, but as a member of a category based on sex.” Banning “perceptions” must provide full employment for the burgeoning ranks of academic administrators.

Many campuses congratulate themselves on their broad-mindedness when they establish small “free speech zones” where political advocacy can be scheduled. At one point Texas Tech’s 28,000 students had a “free speech gazebo” that was 20 feet wide. And you thought the First Amendment made America a free speech zone.

At Tufts, a conservative newspaper committed “harassment” by printing accurate quotations from the Quran and a verified fact about the status of women in Saudi Arabia. Lukianoff says Tufts may have been the first American institution “to find someone guilty of harassment for stating verifiable facts directed at no one in particular.”

He documents how “orientation” programs for freshmen become propaganda to (in the words of one orthodoxy enforcer) “leave a mental footprint on their consciousness.” Faculty, too, can face mandatory consciousness-raising.

In 2007, Donald Hindley, a politics professor at Brandeis, was found guilty of harassment because when teaching Latin American politics he explained the origin of the word “wetbacks,” which refers to immigrants crossing the Rio Grande. Without a hearing, the university provost sent Hindley a letter stating that the university “will not tolerate inappropriate, racial and discriminatory conduct.” The assistant provost was assigned to monitor Hindley’s classes “to ensure that you do not engage in further violations of the nondiscrimination and harassment policy.” Hindley was required to attend “anti-discrimination training.”

Such coercion is a natural augmentation of censorship. Next comes mob rule. Last year, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the vice provost for diversity and climate — really; you can’t make this stuff up — encouraged students to disrupt a news conference by a speaker opposed to racial preferences. They did, which the vice provost called “awesome.” This is the climate on an especially liberal campus that celebrates “diversity” in everything but thought.

“What happens on campus,” Lukianoff says, “doesn’t stay on campus” because censorship has “downstream effects.” He quotes a sociologist whose data he says demonstrate that “those with the highest levels of education have the lowest exposure to people with conflicting points of view.” This encourages “the human tendency to live within our own echo chambers.” Parents’ tuition dollars and student indebtedness are paying for this. Good grief.

 

Hillary Clinton is a Nutcracker!

I Hittin' The Trail Fellers

 

It's time for that annual escape from the man cave to become one with the wilderness and discover that inner caveman in all male members of our species. So look out all you critters...Along with the rest of us, there will be many untrained and unprepared rookies out there on the hunting trail this month. Be prepared to duck!

 

 

 

 

 

Imagry H/T to Mark Scott

 

 

 

 

The Battle For Our Future Starts Here

 

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson are deleted from the textbooks, while the creation of the Sierra Club and the National Organization of Womyn is celebrated in earnest. George Washington's farewell address is deleted. All references to Thomas Edison, the Wright brothers, other American entrepreneurs , and examples of exceptionalism / individualism have been eliminated from the classroom. The Soviet Union is praised to no end for their space program, while the US moon landings are not even mentioned. Convicted traitors to our nation are given a pardon in mock trials conducted in our classrooms.

The Communists rewrite history all the time, with grand flourishes and straight faces. And many American liberals do too.

First it was California, which recently mandated public schools to inflate -- incorporate, they say -- the contributions of homosexuals to California state history and United States history. This indoctrination begins as young as kindergarten and, according to Tim Donnelly, a Republican state lawmaker, essentially forbids the educational system to portray homosexuals "in anything other than a positive light."

And in L.A., the school board is pushing its schools to go even further, including direct efforts to "promote" homosexuality, portraying it as a normal variant of family life ("family diversity," they say). The role of homosexuals will be exaggerated in every subject across the curriculum.

New York will follow suit, no doubt, as their new homosexual 'marriage' law has generated a push by gay advocates for a similarly "inclusive" curriculum. It's nothing more than sexual indoctrination dressed up as history. Bringing the homosexual message into the curriculum aims, in the words of gay City Council member Daniel Dromm, to prevent society from "putting LGBT people in the closet."

In Massachusetts, however, it's real history that's being shoved into the closet.

A Somerville, Massachusetts public school principal, for instance, has banned the celebration of Columbus Day and Thanksgiving, calling them American "atrocities" parading under the guise of historical holidays. Her decision, motivated by a desire to spare students and school personnel the pain of feeling insulted by the celebrations, further distorts history at the expense of ever-growing victim groups...

Read More at The Patriot Post

"We are fighting for our children's education and our nation's future," Cynthia Dunbar said. "In Texas we have certain statutory obligations to promote patriotism and to promote the free enterprise system. There seems to have been a move away from a patriotic ideology. There seems to be a denial that this was a nation founded under God. We had to go back and make some corrections."...Read More at The Guardian

It’s all a matter of perception. Fortunately, homeschooling is legal in all 50 states. Yet, since education is regulated by the states, requirements vary dramatically from state to state for homeschoolers. The difference ranges from complete freedom with no requirements to forced curriculum and achievement tests.

• States requiring no notice: No state requirement for parents to initiate any contact
• States with low regulation: State requires parental notification only.
• States with moderate regulation: State requires parents to send notification, test scores, and/or professional evaluation of student progress.
• State with high regulation: State requires parents to send notification or achievement test scores and/or professional evaluation, plus other requirements (e.g. curriculum approval by the state, teacher qualification of parents, or home visits by state officials). (Source: HSLDA).

The 10 freest states for homeschooling are in green and listed below:

1. Alaska
2. Connecticut
3. Idaho
4. Illinois
5. Indiana
6. Michigan
7. Missouri
8. New Jersey
9. Oklahoma
10. Texas

People homeschool their children for many different reasons and they should have the right to opt out of any standardized curriculum. Unfortunately this is not the case in most states. But for those who are interested in homeschooling with the ultimate freedom to unschool if they choose, the ten states above are your best locations...Read More at Activist Post

H/T to ACGR

This is for you Texans out there who have a huge effect on what is put in, or taken out, of our textbooks.

Sign the petition to help protect our children’s education!
At The Liberty Institute

For over a year, Texans have been speaking out against attempts to remove or diminish important historical figures, celebrations, concepts and symbols like:

Neil Armstrong Albert Einstein Christmas

Independence Day The Liberty Bell Religious Heritage

Thank God a majority of the SBOE rightly struck down such misguided versions of history. Without the elected Board, these important figures would have been removed from social studies for the next 10 years.

But the fringe left still wants to destroy the SBOE’s role as a voice on education standards. Why? Because they want unlimited control over what students learn, to radically change the worldview of our next generation by distorting history.

The review process began over a year ago, but now liberal academia, the ACLU and some political candidates want the State Board of Education to delay the final vote on social studies standards from May 21, 2010 until January 2011 -- after the November elections -- and one State Senator wants to abolish the SBOE and take away your vote!

Stand up for Texas education -- sign the petition now:

1. I oppose the attempted takeover of education by the extreme left
2. I support final adoption of social studies standards on May 21, 2010, as scheduled
3. I support a State Board of Education that has members elected by the public

Email the State Board of Education your support at: sboesupport

 

HERE is a class on what free speech means and what the Lefties REALLY think it means.

 

The Curley Effect

 

I presume that most of you have heard of the Cloward-Pivin strategy of wealth destruction and the rise of the Communist state. What I have discovered here is a plan that has been in place in American cities for decades. In yesterday's post I showed how the Chicago style of rule was being installed nationwide. This is an extremely far reaching plan that has been in enacted by Democrats and will definitely "curl your hair". I have reposted this Forbes article here in it's entirety, as I feel this to be of major importance going forward...if it is not too late already.

 

It’s hard to think of anything more perverse in American politics than the Curley effect. The Curley effect historically has been an urban phenomenon, but President Obama seems bent on taking the entire country down this wretched path.

As defined by Harvard scholars Edward L. Glaeser and Andrei Shleifer in a famous 2002 article, the Curley effect (named after its prototype, James Michael Curley, a four-time mayor of Boston in the first half of the 20^th century) is a political strategy of “increasing the relative size of one’s political base through distortionary, wealth-reducing policies.”

 

Translation: A politician or a political party can achieve long-term dominance by tipping the balance of votes in their direction through the implementation of policies that strangle and stifle economic growth. Counterintuitively, making a city poorer leads to political success for the engineers of that impoverishment.

Here’s an example of how the Curley effect works: Let’s say a mayor advocates and adopts policies that redistribute wealth from the prosperous to the not-so-prosperous by bestowing generous tax-financed favors on unions, the public sector in general, and select corporations. These beneficiaries become economically dependent on their political patrons, so they give them their undivided electoral support—e.g., votes, campaign contributions, and get-out-the-vote drives.

 

Meanwhile, the anti-rich rhetoric of these clever demagogues, combined with higher taxes to fund the political favors, triggers a flight of tax refugees from the cities to the suburbs. This reduces the number of political opponents on the city’s voter registration rolls, thereby consolidating an electoral majority for the anti-wealth party. It also shrinks the tax base of the city, even as the city’s budget swells. The inevitable bankruptcy that results from expanding expenditures while diminishing revenues can be postponed for decades with the help of state and federal subsidies (“stimulus” in the Obama vernacular) and creative financing, but eventually you end up with cities like Detroit—called by Glaeser and Shleifer “the first major Third World city in the United States.”

The Curley effect is extensive. Perhaps you have seen the chain e-mail listing the ten poorest U.S. cities with a population of at least 250,000: Detroit, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Miami, St. Louis, El Paso, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Newark. Besides all having poverty rates between 24 percent and 32 percent, these cities share a common political factor: Only two have had a Republican mayor since 1961, and those two (Cincinnati and Cleveland) haven’t had one since the 1980s. Democratic mayors have had a lock on City Hall despite these once-great and prosperous cities stagnating on their watch. This is the Curley effect in action.

Let me comment on the city on that list that I know the best—Detroit. (I grew up a few miles from its city limits.) In the 1920s, Detroit was arguably the richest city in the world. Today it is broke—a shadow of its former self after 51 years of Democratic hegemony and a Curley-like agenda.

I’m going to say something provocative that leftists will surely quote out of context, but it needs to be said: Detroit was a lot better off in the 1950s, when the city funded one of the best zoos in the country but had not yet built today’s gravy train for favored segments of the human population. Detroit’s decline has paralleled a shift toward funding far fewer zoo animals and far more human beings.

Critics may take this to mean that I value animals more than people. On the contrary, it is because I value humans more than animals that I find the policy shift to be morally offensive in addition to being so obviously destructive economically. It is bad enough to see a trapped lion carrying 80 pounds of flab that a lion in the wild would never have, but why would you reduce human beings to a similarly pathetic dependency? The bars that ensnare humans behind the economic and psychological cages of the government dole may not be physical, but it is pathetic to see people reduced to lives of unproductive idleness and despair, all in the name of “compassion” and, of course, for the sake of cementing Democratic mayors in office.

What is most troublesome about the Curley effect is that it is spreading beyond its historical setting of cities. Entire states—most notably our most populous, California—are manifesting all the symptoms of the Curley effect: Democrats enjoying electoral hegemony; businesses and middle-class individuals, more Republican than Democratic, emigrating to states with less oppressive tax regimes; reduced job opportunities; a budget careening toward bankruptcy.

The ultimate political prize for the Democrats, of course, would be to control the national government. (Note: Yes, I know that technically we have a “federal” government, but if Big Government Democrats find a way to forge a permanent majority, you can kiss the last vestiges of federalism goodbye.)

Everything Obama has done has been designed to strengthen Democratic constituencies (e.g., stimulus spending steered predominantly toward unions and strategically allied state and municipal entities; waivers from Obamacare for unions; a hefty 23 percent increase in the Index of Dependence on Government during Obama’s first two years) and to weaken Republican constituencies (e.g., making small business formation more difficult by impeding venture capitalists; refusing to amend Sarbanes-Oxley; using Dodd-Frank regulations to discourage loans; fewer waivers from Obamacare; proposing lower tax rates for large corporations, but not on the “S” corporations that are the preferred choice of small business owners; constant efforts to raise taxes on the “rich”—which means, as we’ve seen in Detroit, California, and other Curley effect victims, higher taxes on the middle class).

Obama’s smash-mouth, Curley-like politics is all about choosing winners and losers. Reread his State of the Union address from January, and you see a parade of proposals to take from A to give to B, to encourage businesses to do C and discourage them from doing D. Indeed, Obama seems incapable of suggesting a single economic policy that does not redistribute wealth from his political opponents to his political allies. The message is clear: He wants Americans to be dependent on the government; consequently, he is hostile to the private sector, because a vibrant private sector enhances economic independence and self-reliance.

If Obama and his fellow progressives succeed in applying the Curley strategy on the national level, Americans will no longer be able to move to a new city or state to escape the withering economic impact of Curley-effect policies; their only option would be to leave the country.
 
However, it appears that Obama has anticipated that response. To close the escape hatch from an Obama-Curley American, the president signed the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act that mandates closer monitoring of Americans’ offshore accounts. apparently approves of policies to impose financial penalties on anyone desiring to give up U.S. citizenship, and periodically calls for “global minimum taxes.”

The Curley effect already has inflicted great economic damage on important American cities and states. It now presents an existential threat to our entire country. That one of our major political parties has based its own success on such a ruthlessly cynical strategy is disgusting, if not diabolical. How we get off this suicidal path is one of the most urgent challenges facing us today.

When will this dependency class of Democrats wake up?...When they have to cook the cat for dinner?

 

Forbes

Dr. Mark W. Hendrickson is an adjunct faculty member, economist, and fellow for economic and social policy with The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College.

Chicago Gangsta Rule For All

 

Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, former Chief of Staff in President Barack Obama’s White House, has written an op-ed in the Washington Post advising America, and Democrats in particular, to follow Chicago’s example in designing their policies, arguing that doing so will help the economy and keep Republicans out of office...More at ACGR

 

If President Obama were to adopt Emanuel’s conservative approach to balancing the budget–and if he were to confront union special interests more aggressively than Emanuel did this fall in the Chicago teachers’ strike–then America would indeed be better off, and the public would be sure to return Democrats to office. But that is not what Obama intends to do, and not what Emanuel recommends, which is little more than a re-hash of Obama’s first-term promises.

Decades of Democratic one-party rule in Chicago have created a nationwide fan base for the Chicago Bears, as people who would have loved to stay in town have chosen, reluctantly, to try their luck elsewhere. The truth is that the nation could use a little less Chicago, and a lot more Wisconsin or Indiana–two Republican-governed neighboring states to which Chicago businesses and residents have been relocating.