Public Schools: Part Two

In a previous post, I said that the public schools are controlled by the ultra-leftists in the NEA and the universities.

Here, in an article by Sol Stern, is just one bit of evidence for that claim:

As I have shown elsewhere in City Journal, [William] Ayers’s politics have hardly changed since his Weatherman days. He still boasts about working full-time to bring down American capitalism and imperialism. This time, however, he does it from his tenured perch as Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Instead of planting bombs in public buildings, Ayers now works to indoctrinate America’s future teachers in the revolutionary cause, urging them to pass on the lessons to their public school students.

[snip]

Ayers’s influence on what is taught in the nation’s public schools is likely to grow in the future. Last month, he was elected vice president for curriculum of the 25,000-member American Educational Research Association (AERA), the nation’s largest organization of education-school professors and researchers. Ayers won the election handily, and there is no doubt that his fellow education professors knew whom they were voting for. In the short biographical statement distributed to prospective voters beforehand, Ayers listed among his scholarly books Fugitive Days, an unapologetic memoir about his ten years in the Weather Underground. The book includes dramatic accounts of how he bombed the Pentagon and other public buildings. (emphasis added)

More to come.

Sharia law in our banking system?

To me, this is terrifying.

The U.S. Treasury Department is submitting to Shariah - the seditious religio-political-legal code authoritative Islam seeks to impose worldwide under a global theocracy.

As reported in this space last week, Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Robert Kimmitt set the stage with his recent visit to Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich Persian Gulf states. His stated purpose was to promote the recycling of petrodollars in the form of foreign investment here.

Evidently, the price demanded by his hosts is that the U.S. government get with the Islamist financial program. While in Riyadh, Mr. Kimmitt announced: "The U.S. government is currently studying the salient features of Islamic banking to ascertain how far it could be useful in fighting the ongoing world economic crisis."

Read the whole thing. And remember, if this is what's happening under the Bush administration, just imagine what we'll get under the Barack Obama administration.

Today

So last night I wasn't ashamed to admit I cried. Well, today, of course, I'm embarrassed that I admitted it! Oh well. Chalk it up to the 1/4 Irish in my blood, along with a glass of red wine which helped drown my sorrows.

I still believe what I said, however: America is lost. We've lost our understanding of freedom and what it means to be an American. We've lost our moral bearings completely (well, not completely, as gay "marriage" bans passed in California and Florida). We've lost our economic freedom because we're indebted to the tune of trillions of dollars.

Today, it's time to figure out what we're doing next.

Michele Malkin says "gird your loins, conservatives".

Feminine-Genius says "God's will in all things", and also encourages us to:

• Pray and work to defend the marriage bond;
• Pray and work to defend the sanctity of all human life;
• Pray and work to restore life-giving collaboration between men and women;
• Pray and work to restore cherished devotions and a Catholic culture.
• Stay close to the sacraments and allow God to use use you as He will.

The Anchoress has a huge round-up of reactions.

My thoughts:

• I'm thankful that we had a peaceful election (though I can't say I'm sure it would have been that way had the outcome been reversed, based on the attacks, bullying, and intimidation that happened during the campaign).
  

• Since we might not always have talk radio or conservative blogs, we should start planning other ways for conservatives to stay connected to each other.

• If you still have your kids in public school, take them out immediately. We simply cannot have any more children brainwashed by the leftists in charge of government schools and textbooks. Send them to private schools, or better yet, homeschool them. You can do it, trust me. You certainly won't do any worse than most of the public schools, and you'll probably do much better at teaching your children the truths of faith and freedom. More about this later.

• Figure out what you personally can do to build a culture of love and life. More about this later, too.
  

Back to work here ... a house to clean, kids to take to various things, and supper to cook... the beauty of quotidian activities.

Election Day, at last

A gorgeous day here in Wisconsin: warm, sunny, with brilliant red, orange and yellow still on the trees and bushes.

I've had a beautiful day enjoying my rights as a free American. I went to Mass with the kids to pray for the country, as is my First Amendment right.

We came home and had a great morning homeschooling, as is my God-given right and duty as a parent, using my own choice of curriculum without state interference, as I may lawfully do in my Wisconsin.

After lunch with the kids, I went to pick up our college daughter her Catholic University to go to a doctor's appointment in our state-of-the art, envy-of-the-world, non-socialized health care system.

Then we went to vote, as is our right as women under the Nineteenth Amendment. Breeze in, breeze out; there were people voting, but nobody in line. It was peaceful and orderly, as it always should be in America, and as I pray it always will be, today and forever.

Now, I'm sitting here for a few minutes blogging, once again exercising my First Amendment rights.

I'm staying very calm today: not too much coffee this morning, no Fox news AT ALL, just occasionally checking Drudge for any flashing red and blue lights (nothing yet, but a big red headline saying exit polls show Obama big... well, surprise, surprise, but I don't trust the exit polls, I'll wait for the actual poll results, thank you), and mostly just waiting till this evening when I'll break my fast from wine and spirits and indulge in a nice glass of something or other, either to celebrate, or to drown my sorrows.

And I'm still praying! I hope you are, too. If McCain wins, it truly will be a miracle. If he doesn't, well, that means that our prayers will be answered in other ways, but never for one minute do I believe that our prayers went unanswered or that they were in vain.

Keep praying, everyone. "Oh Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee!"

More evidence of Obama's Marxist bent

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." Karl Marx.

Obama says he wants to "spread the wealth around"; he told a plumber, "I don't want to punish your success; I just want to make sure everybody who gets behind you, that they have a chance of success, too".

Wealth
Uploaded by luvnews

Apparently Obama believes not in equal opportunity but equal results, and he thinks the best way to do that is to take from the rich and give to the poor.

The Wikipedia article linked above says that the inspiration for Marx's line is the example of the early Christians. The difference, of course, is that in one case it's forced by the government (which never works out well), and in the other case, it's voluntary and done out of love for the sake of Christ.

I'm going to start a thread called "the death of capitalism". This is Exhibit One.

You MUST watch this video.

h/t Anchoress. (Note: Keep your mouse on the "pause" button because it goes pretty fast and you don't want to miss a good look at the graphs and charts. Seriously.)

I love this guy!

[NOTE: I'm liveblogging the debate, though I'm a bit behind as I had it paused. The guy I'm referring to above is, of course, McCain.]

He had me at "Didja think I couldn't hear him?"

Great line! Self-deprecating humor gets me every time. (That's one of the many reasons I married my husband.)

Another great line: "I didn't win Miss Congeniality in the Senate."

Funny thing. I never was that crazy about McCain. He was always "too liberal" for me. But you know what? I am 100% impressed with what I'm hearing from him so far tonight. I think he's a bulldog on cost cutting. The story about cutting $6.8 billion (billion?) on a Boeing contract, and throwing some of the culprits in jail for it, was fantastic.

He also got some great stuff in there about Obama's $1 in earmarks for every day he's been in the Senate, and about his liberal voting record. That last comment wasn't really germane to the question, but who cares?

Obama sounds pompous. My daughter said he always sounds arrogant. He seems to have no sense of humor; he's trying too hard to look presidential.

I heard the first half hour while waiting for my daughter to get out of work. Now I'm going to quick take a peek around the blogosphere. I'll bet anything Vodkapundit is drunkblogging it (just checked: yep) and maybe Althouse (yep).

I'll be right back!

UPDATE: I'm back.

Ooooh, I hate when Obama says "pahk-ee-stahn". I HATE that. Talk like an American, for crying out loud! It's PACK-IH-STAN. Criminy.

UPDATE again. Obama has said, several times, "When I'm president." Arrogant. McCain seems to say "if" I'm president. Humble. And real.

I'm thinking that Obama may lose this thing on pure arrogance. "I reserve the right as President to sit down with anyone I choose at the time and place of my choosing." Oh do you now. Whatever.

McCain keeps saying that there are things Obama doesn't understand. He's "naive", "dangerous". Wow, those are some hard jabs. But not uncalled for.

UPDATE: Teen daughter (16 yo) says "McCain sounds like he means what he's saying." Obama looks really ticked off. Furious, even. This while McCain is ripping him about his stand on meeting with Ahmadinejad. McCain seems to be enjoying himself; he's loose, sharp, has a sense of humor. He also knows a heckuva lot of stuff about foreign affairs.

Stephen Green says:

This debate still has ten minutes or so to go. But it’s not too soon to give you a wrap. McCain is no debater. He wouldn’t last a second during Question Hour in the British Parliament. And yet Obama is coming off in third place in a two-man session.

Great line!

UPDATE: Obama has a plan for energy! A secret plan!

More Stephen Green:

OK, I’ll give you a real close now. Obama strikes me as a modern Chamberlain, praising his (oh-so-transient) “peace with honor.” McCain, however, comes across as “peace when we’re done kicking you ass and not one moment sooner.” And since this was ostensibly a foreign policy debate, I give the win to McCain. Oh, and one other thing — Obama is still talking as I write this. But he’s spending his last answer angling for the European vote, which does nothing but reinforce my point.

I have to agree. I give this one to McCain. He cleaned Obama's clock.

Most important, on a personal level: He made the sale to me. The title of this post was obviously a little over-enthusiastic, but it really just means that now, when I pull the lever for McCain/Palin, it won't be half-heartedly.

Another media falsehood about Cedarburg?

I came across this Washington Times article yesterday and was highly skeptical.

CEDARBURG, Wisc. -- Hundreds of angry people in this small town outside Milwaukee taunted reporters and TV crews traveling with Sen. John McCain on Friday, chanting "Be fair!" and pointing fingers at a pack of journalists as they booed loudly.

This just didn't ring true. I was in a crowd of people on the sidewalk as the motorcade went by, and last of all came the press bus. Far as I could tell, there was no reaction in the people around me: no booing, no shouting, nothing. As I said in a previous post, the crowd was happy and pumped up but peaceful.

Still, I thought, maybe things were different on the other side of the rally. And who wouldn't understand the anti-press sentiment, given how completely they're in the tank for Obama and how badly they've treated Sarah Palin? Could happen, right?

However, I'm now convinced that once again the press is trying to make Republicans look bad: boorish at best, dangerous mobs at worst. As evidence, here's a comment I ran across on Just One Minute:

---I happened to be in this crowd and heard the interview. The reporter exagerates [sic] a little. The number of chanters in the crowd was in the tens, not hundreds (I did give a couple of shouts). Our crowd was very large perhaps three-four hundred of a couple thousand that couldn't get into the main venue of 8 thousand. [My comment: The main venue crowd was officially reported as 12,500, though they were expecting 8000.]

We weren't really booing either. It wasn't all anger either, it was mostly more of a taunt. They were mainly women in their fifties making schoolmarmish admonishm ents 'Be Fair (children)' to the press.

What the WaTimes reporter didn't catch was one of the reporters mocking us by prissily (hope that's a word) half bowing to us and mouthing 'I Promise'. The rest of our honored information bearers ignored us.

I am sure that his is one of the DriveByMedia outlets that is not in financial free fall, so he can continue to condescend to us.

Posted by: red | September 06, 2008 at 02:02 PM

Read the full article by Joe Curl and check off the insults. He refers to the group as a "pack" (of wild dogs, maybe?) and uses the rather provincial term "townspeople" (though a minute's checking would have found people from cities such as Madison and New Berlin, as well as people who drove up from Illinois).

In describing a moment at the RNC he calls the delegates "red-meat Republicans" (fits with the wild dog imagery) and says, "the crowd turned ugly" (What did they do? Riot? Rush the stage, as some Code Pink protesters tried to do? No, they chanted and pointed. Oh, horrors.)

Just more of the same from legacy media trying to hurt Republicans. I suppose we should be used to it by now.

Barack "Karl" Obama

Much has been made of Obama's middle name, Hussein, and whether it signifies that he is a Muslim.

Much has also been made of the black Christian church he attends.

I'm not sure he's either Muslim or Christian, but there's reason to think that he's a Marxist.

As I'm sure everyone has heard by now, at a private fundraiser Obama claimed that people "cling to their religion" because they're bitter about their economic situation.

Here is what he said April 6, referring to people living in areas hit by job losses: “[I]t’s not surprising, then, that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” (from Politico)

Sounds like he believes that religion is the opiate of the masses.

Apparently Joe Lieberman "hesitates" to call Obama a Marxist.

Based on Obama's left-leaning politics and now his statements about religion, methinks he shouldn't hesitate too much.

A Post in Two Parts: 1) Doing my voting homework, and, 2) "Stop The Insanity!"

Part One: Doing my voting homework.

You know what I really hate? I hate those election days where I walk over to the voting booth with my ballot, only to discover that there are some candidates about whom I know nothing whatsoever. I have to skip over those races, because I can't just vote blindly, so I end up feeling like a total loser in the citizenship category.

But not this time! Oh, no! I'm doing my homework. I little googling turned up this helpful site for all of us Wisconsin voters: The Voter Public Access page. Enter your address and you'll be shown the sample ballot for your particular ward.

Turns out I was already familiar with all the races on my ballot this time, so no surprises there.

Part Two: Stop the insanity of Wisconsin's Frankenstein Veto! Vote "Yes" on this referendum question:

	QUESTION 1: Partial veto
		QUESTION 1: “Partial veto. Shall section 10 (1) (c) of article V of the constitution be amended to prohibit the governor, in exercising his or her partial veto authority, from creating a new sentence by combining parts of two or more sentences of the enrolled bill?”

This would prohibit the governor from crossing out certain key words in a bill to end up with exactly the opposite meaning. For example:

The governor shall not have the authority to crown himself King of the State of Wisconsin.

Currently, Governor Doyle can do exactly that. But, that's crazy, you say? Crazy but true.

Here's a real life example that will take your breath away. See how our governor used the partial veto power to:

increase a transfer from the transportation account to the general fund from $268 million to $427 million. To do so, he crossed out hundreds of words, stringing together individual words from unrelated sentences to write a new sentence. To get the $427 million figure, he took individual digits from five sets of numbers.

So, please vote "yes" on this ballot question and Stop The Insanity!

And more good news today!

This time, it's about that California homeschooling case. From Michele Malkin:

A state appeals court will reconsider last month’s controversial decision that said parents who home-school their children must have a teaching credential.

The 2nd District Court of Appeal in Los Angeles granted a rehearing Tuesday, essentially voiding the 3-0 decision until it rules again. The decision will now allow home-schooling organizations that had blasted the decision to weigh in.

Read the whole article here in the Mercury News.

And you've gotta love this bon mot from one of the links at Michele's post:

When I told one of my sons [who had been homeschooled] about the California ruling, he said, “That’s just stupid! What are they going to do next? Say you can’t cook for your family unless you’re a licensed chef?

Take the Vote-Chooser Test

It was right on the money for me.

Take the Vote Chooser test and see if it works for you, too.

The only frustrating part was that some of the questions should have had additional options. But take it anyway, and just choose the answer that's closest to what you would say.

Oh, and did any of you take that awareness test? How'd you do? Did you get the number of passes correctly?

And ... did you see the moonwalking bear?!?

Come ON somebody post a comment for me here, please! I'm dying to know if you saw it!

Because I didn't, of course.

[Update: Is that not pathetic to beg for comments? Oh yes, I know it is. *sigh* But thank you to my friends Love2Learn Mom and Anonymous ... whoever you are... for adding comments about the VoteChooser and the Awareness Test! By the way, Anonymous, I got the number of passes correct, too, but just like you, missed that crazy bear.]

Conservative = rigid, intolerant, deaf, sheeple-like, or stuck in time.

Gotta love this short article in the Chicago Tribune summarizing a recent sociological study. Let's analyze it for examples of liberal bias, shall we?

It's popular wisdom that people become more rigid in their thinking, more politically and socially conservative as they age.

First erroneous liberal assumption: "more rigid in their thinking = more politically and socially conservative".

Could you imagine the writer saying this instead:

It's popular wisdom that people become wiser and clearer in their thinking, more politically and socially conservative as they age.

No, I can't imagine a reporter saying that, either.

OK, let's move on to the next paragraph.

Researchers who examined the attitudes of more than 46,000 Americans over a 32-year period found that their views about such issues as extramarital sex, race relations, childbirth outside marriage and homosexuality did not become less accepting as they grew older—and that a person's attitudes on such topics could not be predicted simply by their age.

The erroneous assumption here, of course, is that "conservative = less accepting", with the implication that "more accepting" (of anything, apparently) is good.

How about "conservative = less accepting of bad behavior and its socially-destructive consequences"?

Do you also notice how "race relations" is lumped in there with "extramarital sex, childbirth outside marriage, and homosexuality"? Now why is that? How did the study define "race relations", exactly? The conservatives I know are very non-bigoted people, so if there's an implication that conservatives are racist, that's yet another erroneous liberal assumption.

So, this study says that people don't get more conservative as they age. But the lead researcher, Nicholas Danigelis (who, by the way, was an instructor at the University of Wisconsin - Madison from 1972 - 1975) said there are three reasons why older people might "appear" to be more conservative than younger ones:

physiological changes such as hearing loss; the process of becoming socialized to believe certain ideas; and the "period effect"—having lived through a signal event such as World War II.

Ah, I see. If older people seem more conservative, they're either deaf (how does that figure in, exactly?), unable to think for themselves because of "socialization" (from which liberals are apparently exempt), and stuck in time (again, liberals -- aging hippies, perhaps? -- are apparently exempt).

Well. That explains everything. Or maybe nothing.

The one thing that this article really does explain is that the media is full of liberal bias.

But we already knew that, didn't we?

McCain just not conservative enough for you?

In case you're still thinking that there's not much difference between the candidates because McCain isn't sufficiently pure as a conservative, here's a little something to think about, from the Weekly Standard:

Justice John Paul Stevens turns 88 in April, and by January 2009 five other justices will be from 69 to 75 years old. If Barack Obama is elected president, he will probably--with the benefit of resignations by liberal justices eager for him to be the president who chooses their successors--have the opportunity to appoint two or three Supreme Court justices in his first term, with another two or three in a potential second term.

So what kind of justices would Obama nominate? Let's start with the fact that he's been ranked as "the most liberal of all 100 senators". The most liberal; further left than Ted Kennedy, Russ Feingold, or John Kerry.

Reflect on that for a minute.

Next, Obama would abandon the traditional standard of nominating dispassionate judges who attempt to balance the scales of justice in accord with the highest law of the land. Instead, his criteria would be emotion, sympathy, and identity politics:

Indeed, in setting forth the sort of judges he would appoint, Obama has explicitly declared: "We need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it's like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old--and that's the criterion by which I'll be selecting my judges." So much for the judicial virtue of dispassion. So much for a craft of judging that is distinct from politics.

The Oprahfication of this country will be complete.

Here's more:

Obama's constitutional activism is particularly evident on the touchstone issue of Roe v. Wade. Obama calls abortion "one of the most fundamental rights we possess" and promises to "make preserving women's rights under Roe v. Wade a priority as president." [emphasis added] He has harshly criticized the Court's 2007 ruling that the federal partial-birth abortion act (which was supported by broad bipartisan majorities in Congress, including abortion supporters like Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy) is constitutionally permissible.

So, my fellow conservatives and pro-lifers, maybe you're not too crazy about McCain. Maybe I'm not, either. I said I'd never vote for him. I'm still annoyed about the McCain-Feingold bill. I know he's not as conservative as we'd like.

And to that I say: so what?

The stakes are too high to be nit-picky about it.

The David Mamet article that everybody and his brother is talking about

I think every single page on the entire internet has quoted and linked to this article by David Mamet: Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal'.

So I will pile on, too, and add my own favorite quote, the end of which made me truly laugh out loud:

The Constitution, written by men with some experience of actual government, assumes that the chief executive will work to be king, the Parliament will scheme to sell off the silverware, and the judiciary will consider itself Olympian and do everything it can to much improve (destroy) the work of the other two branches. So the Constitution pits them against each other, in the attempt not to achieve stasis, but rather to allow for the constant corrections necessary to prevent one branch from getting too much power for too long.

Rather brilliant. For, in the abstract, we may envision an Olympian perfection of perfect beings in Washington doing the business of their employers, the people, but any of us who has ever been at a zoning meeting with our property at stake is aware of the urge to cut through all the pernicious bullsh*t and go straight to firearms.

Dang, I wish I could write like that.

Arab-Americans being rounded up? Who? Where?

The American Thinker calls attention to this statement by Obama:

"If there is an Arab-American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney, it threatens my civil liberties."

He says "if", to ostensibly make it hypothetical, but we know that his audience doesn't hear the "if".

What they hear is, "The evil Bush is rounding up innocent Americans and throwing them in jail! The evil Bush is destroying our civil liberties! Bush evil, Obama good!"

He also says Arab American family, to create the picture of an ordinary, law-abiding family, kids, pets, 2-car garage, quietly eating dinner one night when suddenly the goons break down the door.

But this is nonsense. We all know it hasn't happened. As the American Thinker put it,

Even the suggestion it could occur is a profound insult to our nation and our citizenry. It is an image of the gulag, the death camp, the dictatorship, and so inappropriate in any discussion about America, it is beneath our contempt.

Even in those first raw days after 9/11, there was never any rioting against Muslims in this country. There never was any backlash against Arab Americans.

If anything, we've bent over backwards not to make any assumptions about Arabs or Muslims. We all have to endure shoe-removals and pat-downs at the airports, just so we don't appear to be doing any race-profiling.

Once more, we get nothing but demagoguery from Obama, and yet nother smear against America from a far-left candidate.

This just in: Hillary seems angry

Some advice for the Clinton campaign:

If your candidate already has an image problem, with people perceiving her as angry, nagging, shrill, and unlikeable, do not have her say the following in a strident tone:

"Shame on you, Barack Obama. It is time you ran a campaign consistent with your messages in public — that's what I expect from you," Clinton said angrily, waving the mailings in the air.

Shame on him? For what, daring to critizice her opinions? On the issues? Wow.

Here's the scolding.



I don't know who that poor guy is in the background, but I feel sorry for him. He looks kind of scared.

I think most of the real men in this country dislike Hillary because, as P.J. O'Rourke brilliantly put it, she's the "woman who taught the 4th grade class that every man in America wished he were dead in."

Most real women know who she is: she's the woman we're all afraid of becoming on our worst days.

More from the inimitable Mr. O'Rourke:

A man can be a Democrat to the core, going into the voting booth to pull the lever with the donkey label no matter what. Then he sees Hillary's name on the ballot. And it all comes back to him .  .  . the first marriage .  .  . the time he came home a little late, it wasn't even midnight, and he'd only had four or five beers, and she threw his bowling ball down the storm sewer.

Now, if the real Hillary is half as kind and smart and funny as her supporters say, then that's wonderful, and we've all gotten the wrong impression.

But if she's just half of what her detractors say, well, then I feel deeply sorry for her.