Sarah Palin and her tea party movement need to learn the painful lessons being experienced in the U.K.
While being frugal and cutting wasteful spending is a great goal we need to be very careful of not going too far as austerity can have painful affects upon a economy.
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NOTE: chessNwine Commentary:
While Moammar Gadhafi is indeed a scumbag and likely behind the Pan Am flight 103 bombing that killed many Americans, the West could at the very least say that he is a known quantity, and a KNOWN evil. The headline on the DrudgeReport.com at the time of this writing is a link to THIS STORY detailing how rebel forces and armed civilians in Libya have rounded up and jailed black Africans, accusing them of supporting Gadhafi. There is no telling how ugly this will get, precisely because we are now dealing with an UNKNOWN enemy, not unlike the situation we saw earlier this year in Egypt. The coverage on CNN and other idealistic news networks has been misguided at best, and blindly ideological at worst. To imply that democracy loving, college educated, “OMG social media” using kids have overthrown these dictators should be called a Mickey Mouse operation of yellow journalism, but then again that would be an insult to Mickey Mouse. I have see few people consider the possibility that the events in Egypt and Libya, and throughout the Middle East during Arab Spring, could actually lead to even worse regimes.
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SOURCE: THE NEW YORK POST. ARTICLE BY ROBERT SHIBLEY
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Parents sending children off to college for the first time, beware: Their “freshman orientation” is all too likely to include being herded through a “tunnel of oppression” to learn about the evils of “white privilege,” being lectured about how they’re part of a “rape culture” or being forced to discuss their sexual identities with complete strangers — before they even meet their first professor.
That’s right: For all we hear about faculty ideological or political bias, campus administrators are often worse when it comes to brainwashing students.
Consider the shocking account from a student trained to be a dorm supervisor — a resident adviser, or RA — at DePauw University in Indiana. One of her first duties last fall was to lead her new students through a house decorated as a “Tunnel of Oppression,” where supposedly “realistic” demonstrations in each room taught lessons such as how religious parents hate their gay children, Muslims would find no friends on a predominantly non-Muslim campus and overweight women suffer from eating disorders.
Indeed, in her training to become an RA, “We were told that ‘human’ was not a suitable identity, but that instead we were first ‘black,’ ‘white,’ or ‘Asian’; ‘male’ or ‘female’; … ‘heterosexual’ or ‘queer.’ We were forced to act like bigots and spout off stereotypes while being told that that was what we were really thinking deep down.” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. must be spinning in his grave.
Unsurprisingly, she turned down the school’s offer to be an RA this year — she’d rather find another job.
DePauw is no rare case. At least 96 colleges across the country have run similar “tunnel of oppression” programs in the last few years.
Perhaps the most infamous re-education program was the University of Delaware’s: Every single student in the dorms endured an Orwellian “treatment” (the school’s word) program to expunge supposedly incorrect beliefs. Delaware demanded that its RAs ask intrusive questions about students’ sexual identity and write reports about their responses while lecturing students on environmentalism and telling them that “citizenship” required them to recognize that “systemic oppression exists in our society.”
The “treatment” was shut down a few years back after a faculty whistle-blower turned materials for the program over to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (where I now work), which publicized the outrage. But a series of “Residential Curriculum Institutes” started by those in charge of the Delaware program continues to this day.
And the same spirit infects much of American higher education. In New York, Hamilton College last fall ordered all first-year men to attend a “She Fears You” presentation, designed to get them to acknowledge their personal complicity (after just a month on campus!) in Hamilton’s “rape culture” and to change their “rape-supportive” beliefs and attitudes. Not coincidentally, the program’s presenter is a speaker at this year’s Residential Curriculum Institute.
Did Hamilton warn incoming female students of the campus “rape culture” before it took their tuition? I doubt it. But publicity did force administrators to make the seminar optional — just minutes before it started.
How many other schools host similar events that no one off campus ever hears about?
How to fight this indoctrination? First, warn your children or grandchildren about it — and remind them that every public college (and most private colleges) must leave students free to make up their own minds on such controversial ideas as “all white people are racists” or “all men are responsible for rape.” College is supposed to teach you how to think, not what you must think.
And, for the many students who do go through a creepy orientation program, please save any documents you’re given on the program and tell us about it at FIRE (thefire.org).
Justice Louis Brandeis famously opined that sunlight is the best disinfectant. If students go into orientation with their eyes open and a willingness to alert outsiders, we can hope to purge the infection of thought reform on America’s campuses.
Robert Shibley is senior vice president at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education..
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This week the left-wing press has been attacking House Majority Leader Eric Cantor for holding disaster relief funding “hostage.” A more accurate way to put this is that Senate Democrats won’t approve new funding for disasters unless they get the funding they want for corporations that make electric cars.
Here’s the story: In June, House Republicans passed the 2012 Homeland Security appropriations bill, which included an amendment adding $1 billion to the Disaster Relief Fund of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). In a sensible move for taxpayers, the amendment offsets this new disaster funding by cutting spending on the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program. This may ring a bell with readers as the funding conduit for one of Washington’s adventures in crony capitalism.
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One reason the House bill has less funding for Democratic priorities is because, even before the hurricane, Republicans had decided that the President’s budget didn’t have enough money for the Disaster Relief Fund. So they funded it at $850 million above the President’s request. Then as they realized that the damage in places like Joplin, Missouri would put additional strain on the fund, the GOP added the amendment that provided still more disaster assistance and cut funding for Mr. Biden’s beloved electric cars.
The White House hasn’t asked for more funding, though White House budget director Jacob Lew wrote to lawmakers Thursday suggesting it could be well north of $5 billion. But so far Mr. Cantor is being blamed for opposing disaster relief because he has been trying to spend more than the President, and to place that above other spending priorities.
Read the whole story here.
Comments »Wednesday September 7th, is an important day for equity markets and bank stocks specifically. The German high court has a chance to rule on continued bailouts for the Euro zone. It is expected that they will rule in favor of the German government to continue bailing out bankrupt countries in the zone.
Comments »“Allowing this bill to expire would be a disaster for our infrastructure and our economy,”…..”If it’s delayed for just 10 days, we will lose nearly $1 billion in highway funding that we can never get back. And if we wait even longer, almost 1 million workers could be in danger of losing their jobs over the next year,”
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As Lawrence Solomon has reported, with little fanfare—certainly none from pseudo-scientific, apocalyptic, anthropogenic warmists and their uncritical (if witless) media and political champions—Jasper Kirkby et al. have just published a seminal paper in Nature (“Role of sulphuric acid, ammonia and galactic cosmic rays in atmospheric aerosol nucleation.” Nature Volume: 476, Pages: 429–433 (25 August 2011) DOI: doi:10.1038/nature10343).
Solomon’s pellucid lay description summarizes the key study findings and their devastating impact upon the so-called “settled science” of greenhouse gas- mediated, “anthropogenic warming”:
The research…comes from über-prestigious CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, one of the world’s largest centres for scientific research involving 60 countries and 8,000 scientists at more than 600 universities and national laboratories. CERN is the organization that invented the World Wide Web, that built the multi-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider, and that has now built a pristinely clean stainless steel chamber that precisely recreated the Earth’s atmosphere. In this chamber, 63 CERN scientists from 17 European and American institutes have done what global warming doomsayers said could never be done — demonstrate that cosmic rays promote the formation of molecules that in Earth’s atmosphere can grow and seed clouds, the cloudier and thus cooler it will be. Because the sun’s magnetic field controls how many cosmic rays reach Earth’s atmosphere (the stronger the sun’s magnetic field, the more it shields Earth from incoming cosmic rays from space), the sun determines the temperature on Earth.
Read the rest here.
Comments »The Old Dominion Freight Line trucking company, based in North Carolina but with 211 service centers across the country, found itself with a personnel problem back in June 2009. An employee with an otherwise clean record approached management and confessed he had a drinking problem. Following U.S. Department of Transportation regulations, the company suspended this employee from his driving position, and referred him for substance abuse counseling.
The company took one other action: they told the alcoholic that they would never let him drive trucks for them again, even after he finished his counseling program. They have apparently told other alcoholic drivers the same thing in the past.
Unfortunately for the Old Dominion Freight Line, other trucking companies, and everyone who finds themselves driving in the shadow of an 18-wheeler with a drunk driver:
Alcoholism is a recognized disability under the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA), and disability discrimination violates this federal law. The EEOC said that the company violated both the ADA and the Americans With Disabilities Act Amendment Act of 2008 (ADAAA) by conditioning reassignment to non-driving positions on the enrollment in an alcohol treatment program. In addition, the EEOC argued that Old Dominion’s policy that bans any driver who self-reports alcohol abuse from ever driving again also violates the ADA.
The EEOC filed suit after first attempting to reach a voluntary settlement. The suit seeks monetary relief in the form of reinstatement to a driving position, back pay and compensatory and punitive damages, compensation for lost benefits for two drivers, and an injunction against future discrimination.
“The ADA mandates that persons with disabilities have an equal opportunity to achieve in the workplace. Old Dominion’s policy and practice of never returning an employee who self-reports an alcohol problem to a driving position violates that law,” said Katharine Kores, director of the EEOC’s Memphis District Office, whose jurisdiction includes Arkansas. “While the EEOC agrees that an employer’s concern regarding safety on our highways is a legitimate issue, an employer can both ensure safety and comply with the ADA.”
Read the rest here.
Comments »I’m sure there’s an environmentalist somewhere angry because rampant unemployment and suffering is a small price to pay to have air that is .0002% more pure oxygen.
Comments »WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama on Friday sacked a controversial proposed regulation tightening health-based standards for smog, bowing to the demands of congressional Republicans and some business leaders.
Obama overruled the Environmental Protection Agency and directed administrator Lisa Jackson to withdraw the proposal, in part because of the importance of reducing regulatory burdens and uncertainty for businesses at a time of rampant uncertainty about an unsteady economy.
The announcement came shortly after a new government report on private sector employment showed that businesses essentially added no new jobs last month — and that the jobless rate remained stuck at a historically high 9.1 percent.
The withdrawal of the proposed regulation marks the latest in a string of retreats by Obama in the face of Republican opposition. Last December, he shelved, at least until the end of 2012, his insistence that Bush-era tax cuts should no longer apply to the wealthy. Earlier this year he avoided a government shutdown by agreeing to Republican demands for budget cuts. And this summer he acceded to more than a $1 trillion in spending reductions, with more to come, as the price for an agreement to raise the nation’s debt ceiling.
A spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, had muted praise for the White House, saying that withdrawal of the smog regulation was a good first step toward removing obstacles that are blocking business growth.
“But it is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to stopping Washington Democrats’ agenda of tax hikes, more government `stimulus’ spending, and increased regulations, which are all making it harder to create more American jobs,” Boehner spokesman Michael Steel said.
At the risk of angering some of you greatly, let me say Turkey would have never dared been so brazen while George Bush was president.
Comments »ANKARA, Turkey — Turkey expelled Israel’s ambassador and said Friday it is cutting military ties with the country over its refusal to apologize for last year’s raid on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla that killed nine people.
Turkey’s move came before the anticipated publication Friday of a U.N. report on violence aboard a Gaza-bound protest flotilla. The fatalities included eight Turkish nationals and one Turkish-American activist.
The report, obtained by The New York Times and posted on its website, said Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza is a “legitimate security measure.” But it also said Israel’s use of force against the flotilla was “excessive and unreasonable,” according to the newspaper.
An Israeli official said the report showed Israel’s naval blockade was in keeping with international law. He spoke on condition of anonymity because the report had yet to be officially released. He said Israel expected it to be made public by the U.N. later Friday.
Turkey has made an Israeli apology a condition of improving diplomatic ties. Israeli officials say the report does not demand an Israeli apology, establishing instead that Israel should express regret and pay reparations.
