Ted Cruz's Father Gives Epic Speech

This speech provides some valuable context for the role Ted Cruz is playing in the defund Obamacare effort in the US Senate.  Ted is obviously very close to his father and appears to have the same dedication to freedom as an inviolable right of Americans.  Somehow the immigrants who come from repressive states have a better understanding of the need to defend all the freedoms most American bred citizens take for granted.

SIGNIFICANCE OF THE BURQA:  Understand, the Muslim faith is uniquely anti-America  As long as followers of the Muslim faith, no matter that it's a small percent of the faith, continue to want to blow up apostates,  wearing  a Burqa should be banned as a threat to human life.

HISTORY OF TV PROGRAMS: Jonah Goldberg recalls the evolution of television shows

Thursday, September 26, 2013

BLUE STATE DREAMING: Media spin provides alternate universe view of California

CHANGING OF THE GUARD:  Let's hope so No matter if Cruz and co. flame out and prove to be not up to the challenge, the old guar Republicans need to go.  We've had too much caving on principles, too much go along-get along compromising for far too long.  Much as the Bushes were admirable as people, they never really fought on principles.  Ditto Dole, McCain and all the other "establishment" Republicans.  The state of the union is such we need a much more aggressive, pro-active leadership for those who believe creeping socialism has brought our country to near ruin.

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

THEY ALWAYS KNOW BEST:  Nesx they'll be reaching in the shower to control the temperature

ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES:  This is what an interventionist, corrupt Senator gets you

THE PROBLEM: NO REPUBLICAN BUY-IN: Transformative legislation must be somewhat bi-partisan

GETTING DOWN TO THE NITTY-GRITTY: It's all in the details, as they say!

ONCE AGAIN NOW, WHY OBAMACARE?  Hard to believe,but, here are some of the problems

SOVIET UNION REVISITED IN U.S.:  The problem with this story is the re-election of Obama and what that tells us about the millions of people who voted for him twice.  This federal program is the end result of Obama's campaign promise to transform American society and life.  It is pure socialism a la the Soviet Union before its collapse in 1989.  'Common Core' is a people control mechanism by which the state can better decide what is in the best interests of society.  If that doesn't put the fear of God into someone then they voted for Obama twice and think the State knows best about every thing and what's best for everyone.  Next to Obamacare, this program is the single most dangerous infringement on the liberty of the individual since WWII rationing, curfews and price and wages controls.  1984 has arrived.

Challenge ‘Common Core’ at Your Own Peril

Charges dropped against jailed parent Robert Small — but the chilling message has been sent.

Last Thursday in Towson, Maryland, concerned parent Robert Small was physically removed from a public forum for daring to interrupt Baltimore County Schools Superintendent Dallas Dance during the so-called “question-and-answer” portion of a school board meeting. Dance was only answering questions from parents previously submitted in writing. When Small stood up to tell the audience that he believed the introduction of the new Common Core curriculum would compromise education standards, he was approached by an off-duty police officer working as a security guard and forcibly removed from the auditorium. He was subsequently handcuffed, and charged with second-degree assault of a police officer. Though the charges have reportedly been dropped, the incident remains a shocking reminder of the oppressive nature of Common Core and the liberal educational establishment charged with enforcing it.

Here is a video of the incident. It clearly shows the security guard taking out a pair of handcuffs and flashing his badge before grabbing Small’s arm and dragging him towards the back of the room. As he is being taken out, Small says, “Don’t stand for this. You are sitting here like cattle. You have questions. [The panel members] don’t want to [answer questions] informally.”

Just before being removed from the room he asks far more important question. “Is this America?” he wonders.

It’s certainly what passes for America when those in authority want to control the flow of information. Examiner.com writer Ann Miller, who was present at the meeting, described the process as one in which Superintendent Dance “added insult to injury by screening, omitting, and editing parents’ questions,” further noting that those he chose to answer were “softball questions.”

Another parent in attendance sent columnist Michelle Malkin an email corroborating that assessment, insisting the meeting was little more than a rah-rah session touting the greatness of Common Core, followed by the pre-selected questions. “They were mostly softball questions of course and you could feel everyone’s frustration that no hard-hitting questions were being asked,” the writer explained. The description of Small and the incident? “He was just a dad trying to get some information about his children’s education and ended up in jail for not sitting down and shutting up. I was there and it was absolutely chilling to watch this man silenced.”

Chilling might be an understatement. Small was held until 3 a.m. after being charged. He faced a fine of $2,500 and up to 10 years in prison for the alleged assault, as well as a fine of $2,500 and up to six months in jail for disturbing a school operation. The police report contended Small attempted to push the officer away when he was first confronted.

On Friday, Small spoke with the Baltimore Sun. “Look, I am being manhandled and shut down because I asked inconvenient questions,” Small told the paper on Friday. “Why won’t they allow an open forum where there can be a debate? We are told to sit there and be lectured to about how great Common Core is.”

The “greatness” of Common Core deserves to be questioned at length, and those questions go far beyond Small’s characterization that the curriculum was lowering school standards and preparing students for junior college. Other critics of the program, currently being rolled out in 45 states and the District of Columbia, rightly say that the implementation of federal standards amounts to a federal attempt to seize control of public school education.

Common Core was created—and copyrighted—by two Washington, DC lobbying organizations. They received input from the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), which are DC-based trade associations.  Most of the creative work was implemented by ACHIEVE, Inc., a progressive non-profit group largely underwritten by uber leftist Bill Gates, via the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The series of educational standards was put together without any input from state legislators, teachers, local school boards or parents. The program was sold to individual states coercively, with governors promised large sums of stimulus money to sign on and enticed by waivers relieving them of the requirements demanded by No Child Left Behind or threatened with a withholding of funds for resisting.

Even then, the federal government will only be paying for approximately half of the huge costs associated with implementing the program. Those costs include providing a computer to every child, and introducing another level of bureaucracy known as “master teachers.” The master teachers will be tasked with coaching, monitoring and assessing classroom teachers. Much of that effort is aimed at making sure teachers “teach the test,” because their jobs depend on it. After implementation, states and local school boards will bear the lion’s share of funding the program’s continuation.

The standards themselves are equally dubious. Cursive will no longer be taught. Euclidian geometry, emphasizing logic, will be replaced by a geometry “standard” so dubious, it was jettisoned by the Soviet Union 50 years ago. Rote memorization will be greatly reduced. Great literature will be eliminated in favor technical material, such as manuals, that enhance the computer-centric method stressed by Common Core. Moreover, an integral part of the progressive agenda with be served. Social justice will be stressed, along with redistributionist economic theories and radical environmentalism.

Yet the most disturbing aspect of the program by far is the reality that it paves the way for the acquisition of an unprecedented level of personal information by schools. The federal government is aiming to sell that info to interested third parties using a loophole in the 2009 stimulus bill as its vehicle. While the feds can’t create a national database of student information, the bill allows individual states to develop State Longitudinal Database Systems (SLDS), cataloguing data generated by Common Core testing. Moreover, in 2011 the federal Department of Education concluded that the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act was to be “reinterpreted” to allow the dissemination of that student data to virtually anyone without written parental consent. According to the conservative think tank the American Principles Project, this “data mining” is nothing less than “one part of a much broader plan by the federal government to track individuals from birth through their participation in the workforce.”

The extent of the data collection is highly disturbing. On page 44 of its February 2013 report, the U.S. Department of Education displayed photographs of “four parallel streams of affective sensors.” Once the program is fully implemented, those sensors will be used to “provide constant, parallel streams of data…used with data mining techniques and self-report measures to examine frustration, motivation/flow, confidence, boredom, and fatigue” of children. In short, they will become de facto lab rats.

It gets worse. Last year, 24 states and territories reached a deal to proceed with data mining in exchange for grants. “Personally Identifiable Information” will be collected from each student. that data includes: parents’ names, address, Social Security Number, date of birth, place of birth, mother’s maiden name, etc.

Almost unbelievably, the intrusion doesn’t stop there. A November 2010 reportreleased by the Institute of Education Sciences as guidance for the aforementioned State Longitudinal Database Systems revealed that “Sensitive Information” will also be acquired from children. It is listed in the report as follows:

1. Political affiliations or beliefs of the student or parent;
2. Mental and psychological problems of the student or the student’s family;
3. Sex behavior or attitudes;
4. Illegal, anti-social, self-incriminating, and demeaning behavior;
5. Critical appraisals of other individuals with whom respondents have close family relationships;
6. Legally recognized privileged or analogous relationships, such as those of lawyers, physicians, and ministers;
7. Religious practices, affiliations, or beliefs of the student or the student’s parent; or
8. Income (other than that required by law to determine eligibility for participation in a program or for receiving financial assistance under such program).

The data mining of Sensitive Information ostensibly requires written parental consent. But as Mary Black, curriculum director for Freedom Project Educationexplains, that requirement can be circumvented. “I think they would get around parental consent through testing,” Black said, warning that academic exams could be tailored in such a manner as to extract the relevant data without parents’ knowledge. Black further contends that even if parents are successful in keeping their children away from such invasive questions, they could be “branded” and placed in a special category a result.

Yet getting parents on board may be even simpler than that. The extraction of such information could be heavily sold to unsuspecting parents under the auspices that it constitutes a critical component of their child’s educational development and success.

As of last March, nine states have embraced the data mining component of Common Core. Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New York and North Carolina will be “pilot testing” the effort. Students’ personal information will then be sent to a database managed by inBloom, Inc., a private organization funded largely by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Furthermore, as long as the school districts agree, inBloom, Inc. can disseminate the information to any company with whom they choose to share it.

Perhaps all of the above explains why Superintendent Dance required pre-submitted questions—and why Robert Small was hustled out of the meeting when it became apparent he had the potential to steer it dangerously “off-script.” It is a script largely designed to obscure the reality that the Common Core is not merely a one-size-fits-all effort to federalize education. It is arguably one of the most egregious invasions of personal privacy ever perpetrated by the federal government, in collaboration with duplicitous state officials and profit-hungry businesses.

In answer to Robert Small’s question, yes this is America—until Americans decide they’ve had enough of it.

Comments

Arnold was an op-ed columist with the NY Post for eight years, currently writing for JewishWorldReview.com and FrontPageMag.com. Arnold can be reached at:atahlert@comcast.net

Monday, September 23, 2013

Now here's an interesting take on the various political machinations available to the Republicans in the struggle to defund Obamacare.  Whether they can come together sufficiently to carry this strategy off is the  open question.  Establishment Repubs like Karl Rove, prefer punting on this entire issue, letting Obamacare be fully funded and wait for the inevitable "train wreck" predicted by Sen. Baucus, one of the Democrat authors of this truly misbegotten and destructive law.  Ted Cruz and the young Turks in the Senate and House, all brought to the scene by the combative Tea Partyites who are fed up with creeping socialism and the like, seem to be prepared to hang tough.  This will be a fight worth having and watching, for sure.

SENATE REPUBLICANS CAN STOP REID FROM FUNDING OBAMACARE

When Establishment Republicans and their Democrat comrades claim there is no path to victory in the fight to defund Obamacare, they are intentionally muddying the waters.  Do not confuse blundering political expedience with winning.

There is a clear path to victory and the folks comprising the new Republican leadership emerging in the House and Senate are smart enough and bold enough to take that path.

They’re playing to win and deserve our support.

Understanding the options available to these new leaders requires an understanding of a few of the basics of Senate rules and process.  Otherwise folks like Karl Rove will tell you to “do the math” counting Democrat Senators without telling you that Senate Republicans have the ability to change the formula.

To help simplify an explanation of the Senate process, think of it like a football game where the rules and timing are set, but there are different plays at your disposal.  Winning requires playing the game with a focus on fundamentals.

Let’s go with one possible scenario that could unfold this week.  As early as Monday, the Senate could agree to take up the House bill passed last Friday that funds everything in the government but Obamacare.  The Senate can do this by something called “unanimous consent,” if no one Senator objects, or if one Senator does object, they can put it to a vote requiring 60 votes to pass.  For the purposes of this exercise, let’s say one or the other is successful and the bill goes to the Senate floor for consideration.

What happens next in this process is debate on the Senate floor begins, where each side argues for or against the bill.

During this debate period, Democrat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid could offer an amendment to strip out the language in the House bill that defunds Obamacare.  Reid would also likely choose not to allow any other amendments to the bill.  That is within his power as the leader of the majority party in the Senate. The hard and fast rules, however, require Reid to file his amendment for consideration and reveal for all to see what’s in the amendment before the debate is over.

This is where things can get deceptive.  Establishment Republicans would let you believe the next step in the process is the Senate has a vote on Reid’s amendment.  What these politicians are not telling you is Sen. Reid cannot get a vote on his amendment to put Obamacare funding back in the House bill unless some of the Republicans agree to it.

Here’s how that happens.

We last left the House bill on the Senate floor being debated.  To end that debate period, 60 Senators have to vote to do so. In Capitol Hillspeak, that vote to end debate is called reaching “cloture.” Currently, there are 52 Democrats, two independents (who work with the Democrats) and 46 Republican Senators.  Republicans can win that cloture vote with 41 votes, and debate continues on the Senate floor until Democrats can get 60 votes to stop it.

A vote for cloture is a vote to fund Obamacare. The people understand this, so Senators beware.

Bottom line: Reid cannot get a vote on his amendment that would strip Obamacare defunding out of the House bill unless six Republicans agree to let that vote take place.

That’s called leverage in anyone’s playbook.  Reid loses his advantage.  He will have to negotiate on the rest of the process—like whether his amendment to fund Obamacare requires 60 votes to pass.  Or not.  That’s up for negotiation, too, if Senate Republicans fight for it.

If Republicans hold together on this, Reid will not be able to change the House bill.  That leaves Harry Reid with some tough choices.  Senate Democrats running for re-election do not want to be forced to vote against the House bill that defunds Obamacare.

Republicans can use this leverage to force Senate Democrats to make concessions.

Americans lucky enough to have a job right now are losing their healthcare plans they liked and wanted to keep. Obamacare is causing full-time jobs to become part-time jobs to get under the 30-hour workweek mandate. Doctors are choosing to retire rather than comply with the Obamacare boondoggle.  We are seeing this every single day in the newspapers.

Even the unions hate Obamacare.

If Republicans will force Senate Democrats to support Obamacare in this vote, some will bolt or they will lose their elections next year. By then, Obamacare will have reached out and touched everyone. The consequences in some instances could be fatal.

When Democrats and Establishment Republicans shriek “government shutdown,” and “the military won’t be paid,” or “law enforcement won’t be paid,” and every other item in the parade of horribles they’ll put forth, remember this: the House can keep sending bills to the Senate to fund anything they want.

Air traffic controllers?  Done! Military?  Done!  Border Patrol?  Done!

Funding the government at this point is this and only this: the Senate must stop holding America hostage and vote to fund the government, in whole or piece by piece, without Obamacare in it.

In life and as in the game of football, you can never win the victory if you choose to punt every time you touch the ball.

THE WOES OF LIFE IN CONNECTICUT: Starting to rival California as #1 Blue State

INTERESTING STORY ABOUT IRANIAN QUODS: The Iranian leadership is NOT to be trusted

Sunday, September 22, 2013

The answer to the question why crony capitalism corrupts free markets.  Less government means less crony capitalism, less rent seeking and a whole host of economic evils.

In government-created market, Wall Street wins

Beltway Confidential

When you drag commerce into the arena of government, it's always a home game for the big guys.
When Congress created an ethanol mandate in 2005 and expanded it in 2007, this was widely, and correctly, derided as a political gift to the ethanol industry. But it's worth noting that big Wall Street players were also pushing for the ethanol mandate.
In fact, Goldman Sachs lobbyist Mark Patterson was lobbying on ethanol within a year of becoming Treasury Department chief of staff in the Obama administration.
When I write about the big guys lobbying for and profiting from big-government, some liberal bloggers yawn and ask "who cares if someone's getting rich?" (See, for instance, Brad Plumer, Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein.)
But figuring out who believes they will profit off of a law can help us detect flaws in the law we may not have previously detected. In other words, we should ask "what are these lobbyists seeing that we're not?"
In the case of the ethanol mandate, that flaw may be the ability of big banks to rig the market in ethanol credits.
Gretchen Morgenson and Robert Gebeloff at the New York Times tell the story:

Traders for big banks and other financial institutions, these people say, amassed millions of the credits just as refiners were looking to buy more of them to meet an expanding federal requirement. Industry executives familiar with JPMorgan Chase’s activities, for example, told The Times that the bank offered to sell them hundreds of millions of the credits earlier this summer. When asked how the bank had amassed such a stake, the executives said they were told by the bank that it had stockpiled the credits.

...

[O]ther market participants, including Thomas D. O’Malley, chairman of PBF Energy in Parsippany, N.J., identified JPMorgan Chase and other financial institutions as being active sellers of the credits this year. He said the institutions had helped transform an environmental program into a profit machine, contributing to the market frenzy this year. “These things were designed to monitor the inclusion of ethanol in the gasoline pool,” Mr. O’Malley said. “They weren’t designed to become a speculative item. For the life of me I can’t see the justification for it.”

Again, following the money and the special-interest lobbying leads us to a dynamic where we see the companies supporting the regulations are profiting off them in a way that doesn't serve the public interest, it seems.
Loren Steffey at Forbes has a good analysis.
footnote: Thomas O'Malley, the refiner quoted above, has an interesting view on regulations, as quoted in the L.A. Times a few years back:
"My view for the industry was: Why in the world would you fight clean fuels? That's what the consumer wants," O'Malley, now the chairman of Connecticut refiner Premcor Inc., said in an interview. Make no mistake about it, the more stringent you make specifications, those become barriers to entry…. Strong companies would have an advantage."

It's hard to  have it both ways.  In this case rigging markets benefits only the big guys to the detriment of everyone else.