Sunday, June 1, 2014

THIS IS EDUCATION REFORM??  We have here an excellent job of reporting.  It remains the case that no matter how much money is thrown at public education, the unions are going to prevent any serious reform to a horribly broken system and institutions presumably there to educate citizens at public expense.  We still have the issue of single parent families (not discussed in this article) and the total absence of a home environment conducive to furthering students' learning.  In the absence of this all important aspect of educating a child, the school administration attempts to fill this void with counselors, advisors, consultants all of whom provide their assistance during normal school hours alone, the time when students are meant to be learning in the classroom.  There is also the issue of unqualified and even corrupt teachers protected by the unions.  In all likelihood the majority of inner school teachers are unqualified and should be fired as their "work" is more likely counterproductive.  Yet they are protected by the unions and continue to add to the problem.  Regrettably no amount of money can produce results in this environment, as Zuckerman has found out the hard way to the tune of 100,000,000 dollars.  The answer here is pass a law restricting unions to a very minor role in the process,  fire all incompetent teachers, rid schools of the gangs and bad actors by putting them in reform schools, impose rigid discipline on the rest of the students including wearing uniforms and privatize the entire process.  Won't ever happen, of course.  The rot will continue and the underclass will grow, the individuals involved will be shortchanged and the country will continue to fund this existing mess because it honors local control by citizens of their children's' education.  Works as long as the citizens are responsible and educated themselves.

Saturday, May 31, 2014

BENGHAZI WILL NOT GO AWAY:  The big question is will Hillary be able to survive the incriminating evidence in this article.  One is hard-pressed to see how since the timeline and evidence from multiple sources is overwhelming.  There is absolutely no doubt but that the video excuse was a simple coverup of an embarrassing incident that cast grave doubt on Obama's pre-election claim that Al Queda was defeated and on the run.  One has to remember that these events occurred a mere three weeks before the election of November 2011 and at the time the two candidates were in a dead heat.  Hillary is truly Houdini if she is able to avoid the consequences of this fiasco.

Fact Check: Clinton’s Benghazi chapter has holes

By Catherine Herridge

Published May 31, 2014

FoxNews.com

1.5K

Excerpts of Hillary Clinton's forthcoming memoir obtained by Politico conflict with the factual record about what happened during and after the 2012 Benghazi terror attack.

Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kan., who sits on the newly formed Benghazi select committee and the House Intelligence Committee, told Fox News before the excerpts were released that he is concerned the administration has not fully grasped the impact of the terrorist assault.

"We know that intelligence analysts on the ground knew instantaneously that this was Al Qaeda and its affiliates who had led this attack. And yet it took an awfully long time -- indeed today, it's still not clear this administration has acknowledged the depth and the risks associated with what it means to have an Al Qaeda affiliate actually take down an American [consulate]," he said.

In the limited excerpts published Friday from Clinton’s Benghazi chapter, the former secretary of State continued to defend the administration from what she termed a “political slugfest.”

Specifically, she defended the flawed explanation -- used by then-U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice five days after the attack -- that an obscure anti-Islam video fueled a protest gone awry in Benghazi.

"There were scores of attackers that night, almost certainly with differing motives," Clinton wrote, according to Politico. "It is inaccurate to state that every single one of them was influenced by this hateful video.It is equally inaccurate to state that none of them were. Both assertions deny not only the evidence but logic as well."

Further, she reportedly wrote that Rice relied on existing intelligence in making her statements.

But former CIA deputy director Mike Morell, who now works for Clinton's principal gatekeeper Philippe Reines at the D.C. consulting firm Beacon Global Strategies, testified in April that it was Rice who linked the video to the Benghazi attack. Morrell, who still faces allegations he misled Congress over the so-called talking points, said the video was not part of the CIA analysis as Clinton seems to suggest.

Morell told members of the House Intelligence Committee that Rice’s claims about the attacks evolving from a protest were “exactly what the talking points said, and it was exactly what the intelligence community analysts believed.”

However, he said: “When she talked about the video, my reaction was, that's not something that the analysts have attributed this attack to."

An independent review of more than 4,000 social media postings, conducted by a leading social media monitoring firm in December 2012, also found the YouTube video was a non-event in Benghazi.

“From the data we have, it’s hard for us to reach the conclusion that the consulate attack was motivated by the movie. Nothing in the immediate picture -- surrounding the attack in Libya -- suggests that,” Jeff Chapman, chief executive with Agincourt Solutions (now Babel Street), told Fox News.

Chapman said his analysts reviewed postings in Libya, including those from Benghazi, over a three-day period beginning on Sept. 11, and saw “no traffic in Benghazi in the immediate lead-up to the attack related to the anti-Islam film.”

The first reference to the anti-Islam film appears to be a retweet of a Russia Today story that was not posted until Sept. 12 at 9:12 a.m. local time. The translation reads, “U.S. ambassador killed in Libya during his country's consulate in Benghazi - Russia Today http://t.co/SvAV0o7T response to the film abuser.”

In addition, the video was also described as a non-event by Greg Hicks – deputy to Ambassador Chris Stevens, who was killed in the attack -- in his May 2013 congressional testimony before the House oversight committee.

Clinton went on to write: "Every step of the way, whenever something new was learned, it was quickly shared with Congress and the American people.There is a difference between getting something wrong, and committing wrong.A big difference that some have blurred to the point of casting those who made a mistake as intentionally deceitful."

But the written testimony of Morell shows the administration continued to stick with the “hateful video” explanation long after physical evidence and other intelligence showed there was no demonstration. Morell told the House Intelligence Committee that by Sept. 18, 2012, consulate security video reviewed by the Libyans showed it was a direct assault.

Yet, a week later, before the United Nations on Sept. 25, 2012, President Obama was still relying on the flawed explanation.

“There is no speech that justifies mindless violence. There are no words that excuse the killing of innocents.There's no video that justifies an attack on an embassy,” he said.

As part of its ongoing reporting, Fox News was first to report on Sept. 17, 2012, based on an intelligence source on the ground in Libya, that there was no protest.

Separate from the talking points, Clinton's defense of Rice could also be problematic because Rice inaccurately stated on three network Sunday shows -- ABC’s “This Week,” NBC’s “Meet the Press” and “Fox News Sunday” -- that security was "strong" or "significant" at the consulate on the day of the attack.

She told “Fox News Sunday” that former Navy SEALs Ty Woods and Glen Doherty, who died in the attack, were there to “provide security,” incorrectly linking them to consulate security.

At a press conference earlier this month, Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., said the administration should explain who briefed Rice on the talking points as well as the consulate's security status, and the individual or individuals should be fired. And if nobody briefed her on that, Graham said, Rice should resign.

"They're completely incompetent, or they were misleading her about the level of security because we were six weeks before an election, or she made it up on her own,” Graham said.

On requests for additional security, Clinton continued to insist that she never saw those cables, and the fact that they were addressed to her as secretary of State was a “procedural quirk.”

Fox News was first to report on an August 2012 State Department classified cable that said the U.S. Mission in Benghazi convened an "emergency meeting" less than a month before the assault and concluded Al Qaeda had training camps in Benghazi and the consulate could not defend against a "coordinated attack."

The authenticity of the classified cable, addressed to the office of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, has never been challenged. It was significant enough that then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey told lawmakers during congressional hearings that they were briefed on the cable’s warnings. Clinton, though, claimed it was not brought to her attention.

The cable marked "SECRET" summarized an Aug. 15, 2012 emergency meeting convened by the U.S. Mission in Benghazi. It states that the State Department’s senior security officer, also known as the RSO, did not believe the consulate could be protected.

According to a review of the cable, the Emergency Action Committee was also briefed "on the location of approximately ten Islamist militias and AQ training camps within Benghazi … these groups ran the spectrum from Islamist militias, such as the QRF Brigade and Ansar al-Sharia, to 'Takfirist thugs.'"

In addition to describing the security situation in Benghazi as "trending negatively," the cable said explicitly that the mission would ask for more help. The details in the cable foreshadowed the deadly attack on the U.S. compound.

While the administration’s public statements have suggested that the attack came without warning, the Aug. 16 cable undercuts those claims – as it warned the Benghazi consulate was vulnerable to attack and indicates the presence of anti-U.S. militias and Al Qaeda was well-known to the U.S. intelligence community.

The Clinton book excerpts published Friday represent a fraction of the entire Benghazi chapter, which reportedly is 34 pages long.

AND HERE'S THE MSM APPROACH TO THE TRUTH.   Wonder why we elect fools like Obama?  Here's some of the answer:

Charlie Rose´s Hourlong PBS Interview of

Susan Rice NEVER MENTIONS BENGHAZI

Newsbusters, by Paul Bremmer

YET ANOTHER MSM HELPFUL COVERAGE OF HILLARY'S BENGHAZI EXPLANATION:  Noteworthy in this coverage of H's explanation is the lack of any discussion of timelines and repeated public discussion by Obama and his representatives of the lame excuse of the video.  Also no questions about the phony arrest and incarceration of the innocent filmmaker.

Friday, May 30, 2012

HERE'S AN INTERESTING MAP A PROPOS OF NOTHING:

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PERHAPS THOSE WHO SUPPORT AND PROMOTE UNIONS CAN EXPLAIN:  This is clearly the bottom line on the value of unions under any circumstances.

May302014

Big Government, Big Unions, and the VA Debacle

It is tempting to say that the Veterans Administration crisis — which has taken the lives of at least 40 veterans in Phoenix alone — is the inevitable consequence of socializing medicine. But more than the federal bureaucracy was required to make the VA the catastrophic debacle it is today; it took the combination of two of the most pernicious elements in our society: Big Government and Big Unions. Kimberley Strassel reports for the Wall Street Journal:

The VA battle is only just starting, but any real reform inevitably ends with a fight over organized labor. Think of it as the federal version of Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan and other states where elected officials have attempted to rein in the public-sector unions that have hijacked government agencies for their own purpose. Fixing the VA requires first breaking labor’s grip, and the unions are already girding for that fight.

The battle will be epic.

The VA boasts one of the largest federal workforces and VA Secretary Eric Shinseki bragged in 2010 that two-thirds of it is unionized. That’s a whopping 200,000 union members, represented by the likes of the American Federation of Government Employees and the Service Employees International Union.

Uncoincidentally, Obama was elected in part due to massive support from hard left labor unions — conspicuously including the aforementioned SEIU, which is essentially the same entity as ACORN, his political alma mater.

The situation was bad enough before Obama. Here’s why it is now worse:

The Bush administration worked to keep federal union excesses in check; Obama administration officials have viewed contract “negotiations” as a way to rewardunion allies.

This cronyism allows union goons to fill their faces at the taxpayer trough:

Manhattan Institute scholar Diana Furchtgott-Roth recently detailed Office of Personnel Management numbers obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by Rep. Phil Gingrey (R., Ga.). On May 25, Ms. Furchtgott-Roth reported on MarketWatch that the VA in 2012 paid 258 employees to be 100% “full-time,” receiving full pay and benefits to do only union work. Seventeen had six-figure salaries, up to $132,000. According to the Office of Personnel Management, the VA paid for 988,000 hours of “official” time in fiscal 2011, a 23% increase from 2010.

Moreover, as Sens. Rob Portman (R., Ohio) and Tom Coburn (R., Okla.) noted in a 2013 letter to Mr. Shinseki, the vast majority of these “official” timers were nurses, instrument technicians pharmacists, dental assistants and therapists, who were being paid to do union work even as the VA tried to fill hundreds of jobs and paid overtime to other staff.

Here’s how the union hogs literally kill the veterans who have been languishing on secret waiting lists until they die of treatable diseases:

As for patient-case backlogs, the unions have helped in their creation. Contract-negotiated work rules over job classifications and duties and seniorities are central to the “bureaucracy” that fails veterans. More damaging has been the union hostility to any VA attempt to give veterans access to alternative sources of care—which the unions consider a direct job threat. The American Federation of Government Employees puts out regular press releases blasting any “outsourcing” of VA work to non-VA-union members.

Democrats will predictably offer to solve the problem by throwing more of our money at their union cronies.

Like the civil rights movement, unions played a largely positive role in an America that no longer exists. In today’s America, both are thoroughly corrupt and malevolent, serving no constructive purpose.

In electing Obama, the gullible were duped into voting for the personification of the Big Government–Big Union axis. Buyer’s remorse is finally setting in.

VA employees, rallying for the American Federation of Government Employees.

Wednesday, May 28, 2012

BEST EXPLANATION OF THE ONE YET:  For anyone who has ever been curious about Obama's coalition, here's the answer provided by Victor Davis Hanson.

"I leave you with one final paradox. Is one reason that Obama resonates so well with the very wealthy his assurance to them that the muscular successful classes will not be following them into the elite?

Whom does the liberal elite detest? Not the very poor. Not the middle class. Not the conservative wealthy of like class. Mostly it is the Sarah-Palin-type grasping want-to-be’s (thus the vicious David Letterman jokes or Katie Couric animus or Bill Maher venom)."

.The entire article is here.

Saturday, May 24, 2012

A FOOD CHANNEL STAR AT WORK:  Here's someone called Giada whom I saw making a turkey cheese fried panini sandwich on TV.  Looked mighty good.The Giada turkey, cheese, fried panini panini sandwich is here

AMAZON/BOOK PUBLISHERS FIGHT: This is new technology versus old.

A REBUTTAL TO ABOVE:  There's two sides to this story.

A BIT MORE RE AMAZON/HACHETTE:  This adds a bit to the story.

Friday, May 23, 2014

FOR ANYONE WITH SKIN PROBLEMS.  If only the NYTimes would stick to this kind of reporting.

WEIRD BUT REVEALING:

"Why Our Political System's Screwed, in One Very Basic Chart"

Nick Gillespie|May. 23, 2014 8:50 am

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Gawker's Adam Weinstein points to National Journal, which adds more charts to that one above:

That is all.

Wednesday, May 21, 2012

SHOCKINGLY TRUE:  This story must resonate with those in school or in academia during the '60's when the barbarians physically took over administrative offices at elite schools, made their demands for reform, and were rewarded.  Now we have foo-foo courses that even the dumbest of students can earn honors grades (wherever they still exist) and we have graduates entering the workforce without writing or cognitive skills.  No wonder we have a stagnating economy.

The Age of Academic Ruin

By Glenn Fairman

Now that we can see through a glass more clearly, which of us can deny that the American Academy surrendered without a shot to its barbarous and intellectually unwashed, following a rough descent into slavish cultural Deconstruction?  As such, the old guard’s aptitude for disinterested inquiry was seized and corrupted via a balkanized identity politics and a postmodern worldview that has wildly succeeded at dividing society into alienated warring camps.

As a witness to that bloodless capitulation, I found that this new progeniture of professorial triumphalists were markedly inferior in both erudition and gravitas to their predecessors and that the ranks of these Young Turks were generously constituted with perpetually dissatisfied utopians. In fact, these tin-plated revolutionaries were little more than partisan shills with an ax to grind and a seething animus against the gods of the greater culture. Consequently, there should have been little surprise when they denounced their detached search for objective truth and embraced liberalism’s political jihad to remake the world in Humanism’s feeble image.

As the crowning result of the Left’s long march through the academic institutions of the Humanities, the dinosaurs of the ancient regime fled into retirement or were unceremoniously purged as the earth’s ideological poles reversed. With the forces of “reaction” spent, the academy’s once august positions were filled by a more dogmatic, less intellectually tolerant species -- whose ends were no longer the assault of ignorance or in moving from opinion to knowledge, but as a brood of carnal monastics dedicated towards the advocacy of the One True Path.

Any student who has had the misfortune of enduring these insufferable Jacobins knows intimately of what I speak.  For the crime of slandering liberal orthodoxy, one could be called out or relegated to the outer darkness by the effortless rolling of eyes, the condescending grin or the boisterous laugh -- followed shortly by the dry expressionless question: designed not towards engaging in dialogue, but to firmly put you in your place. And if shyness or the possession of a nonconfrontational nature did not therein quiet you, one could always count upon the True Believers amongst your brethren who possessed the selfsame pack mentality as the famished coyote. These lockstep drones intuitively understood the court etiquette of ideological tyrants, and knew well that the act of hectoring and humiliating the Master’s cowed and cornered prey could only enhance one’s academic standing.

Being a Conservative in the belly of the Social Science beast is a thing to behold, like a Dante descending into Hell’s circles of torment. Within the orthodox confines of graduate seminars, one could not find more “accommodating” intellects -- apt pupils who would have fit in quite nicely as guardians of Soviet re-education camps. One could not find a duller and less introspective brute, especially in the lairs of any courses involving Identity politics. Within this arena, progressives had by far the lowest possible cumulative GPAs and were constantly speaking in the brogue of justice and emotion. All discourse was tainted with the same illiterate Marxian/Materialist thread of analysis that permeated even the most apolitical of discussions. The pursuit of respect through power seemed to be an obsession with the True Believer. Moreover, this sham of Identity Politics allowed for a maximization of political posturing with a minimum of work and collectively created an ideological echo chamber of closed circular minds fed on a diet of bitterness against a backdrop of grievance. Nevertheless, what could never be fully articulated was the nascent understanding that their Leftist project was purely personal and that these types of courses fundamentally embraced an affirmative action clientele whose talents were near universally shallow and subpar.

Today, the content of these memories, against a backdrop of so many years, have not abated like a bad dream. nor has reason reasserted itself in the Academy. Indeed, students within the humanities are measurably less literate and more propagandized -- although the indoctrination they suffer from has not been so much a function of undergraduate education, but flows from the subtleties of a squalid elementary classroom.  In truth, the contemporary mind has been incrementally inoculated against the foils of God and Reason, and the culprit is not so much the wild-eyed Leninist professor who spewed lies and vitriol to the educationally unbalanced neophyte, but the smiling 3rd grade teachers who exuded “nice” and whose vacant philosophies demanded that the world, by definition, should be a place of puppy dogs, rainbows, and equal outcomes. With such effeminate tools are today’s socialists made Indoctrination no longer requires the blunt cunning of force or fraud: for the 10,000 little subliminal lessons attained from the schoolhouse are enough to ensure that the young human mind is waylaid and bound for its lifetime to the hive. And this parched catechism of ignoble half-truths, along with the gargantuan power of the media, will guarantee that few will ever escape, except by way of the unyielding recitations that accompany the knock-out punch of nature and reality.

How perilous the minefield of public education has become since the days ofMcGuffey’s Reader. Although information has increased exponentially, humanity is all the more stupid in things that truly count, while the conceptions of truth and value have fallen by the wayside -- leaving the entire enterprise of education in doubt.  Knowledge thus becomes an instrumentality to a temporal end and is as divorced from the classical search for the Good Life as it is of moral excellence or Man’s metaphysical ends.  Against all earthly prudence, the pursuit of truth and the First Things of being have been sacrificed in the service to ideology and those sworn to the service of education have becoming little more than the State’s High Priests of Orthodoxy with each passing generation.

Soon, with the benediction of the Common Core, or whatever pedagogical shakedown is offered from our Centralized Masters, a great homogenization will flow across the land. We shall not see an increase in understanding, but a narrow leveling of vision and wisdom that renders the farm boy in the Bible Belt and the bastard child of the ghetto as interchangeable as bolts on a Chevy. As such, America will have finally gotten what the Progressive’s have dreamed of: a substantive equality of result: not only in economics, but of the mind.  Without the impediments of a thousand competing voices pleading for their share of the human soul, the State will finally have the monopoly of hearts and minds it needs for attaining its quest of the Universal Homogenous State.  Having firmly dispensed with Socrates’ “Unexamined Life,” that great tower of Nimrod can once again be attempted:

One ring to rule them all, one ring to bind them…….

Glenn Fairman writes from Highland, Ca.  He welcomes your correspondence at arete5000@dslextreme.com He can be followed atwww.stubbornthings.org