Local Call to Meeting of Legislative Action Committee of Hopkins School District

Call to Hopkins school district’s Legislative Action Committee Meeting, January 27, 2011, 7 PM

 

 Brian Grogan writes:   ” Minnesota is facing a $6.2 billion deficit.  Minnesota’s economy is not growing fast enough to catch up with the structural deficits we face as a state today.  Yet the Hopkins School board wants the state to enact the ‘New Minnesota Miracle’ bill which under some assumptions is a $4.5 billion spending bill. 

Beyond the spending aspects, this bill continues the trend in Minnesota to shift the responsibility of school funding away from local to state control of school financing.  This appears to be in direct conflict to their stated ‘belief,’ preference on the platform.  Furthermore, the bill does not establish accountability standards within our schools.  It fails to address the unfunded pension obligation problems, the collective bargain problems and the ballooning, inadequate health care funding problems facing many school districts.  How can our state afford to enact this bill?  When you consider the soft economy and the large budget deficit facing our state, why would the Hopkins School board advocate such a position?

The LAC action plans further advocate massive spending increases to support their position for inflation indexing, all-day kindergarten, early childhood learning as well as its contention that all mandates should be fully funded.  Is this a responsible platform?  Does it reflect a balance approach to the economic reality we are facing today in our state?  Does it truly represent the majority of the Hopkins Schools constituents’ viewpoint and approach to dealing with the financial challenges facing our schools?

            Lastly, what do you think about the Hopkins LAC-School Board advocating the position that ALL future operating referendums be extended and/or renewed by a simple majority vote of the school board and without ballot box, voter approval! 

            If you have issues with these action plans, then you need to attend tomorrow’s school board council meeting where the LAC platform will be formally presented and you will have an opportunity to express your thoughts to the school board.  The meeting is being held at the:

Eisenhower Community Center Board Room

Thursday January 27, 11 at 7:00 PM.

Located off Hwy 7 in Hopkins, MN “

             

Another Tiresome Obama Address “Signifying Nothing” but Words

I rely on others for review.   Scott Johnson at PowerLine is younger than I am, and he withstood poorly, but wrote the following helpful suggestions for those interested in the Obamaspeech of this  evening:

“If you’re looking for commentary on the president’s State of the Union address tonight, I’m afraid I have to send you elsewhere. My pain threshold limits me to a few notes. Ann Althouse has a higher threshold than I do; check out her comments here. National Journal has posted the text of the speech here.

Obama’s domestic policy is big on “investments” — not yours, the government’s. That is, spending. It’s a throwback to the vocabulary of the Clinton era. “The kids” must not be far behind. And there they are. They need more of your dough for their education.

“We do big things,” Obama says. I think when he says “we,” he means big government. The speech is long on domestic policy cloaked in the characteristically disingenuous rhetoric designed to conceal the substance. Obama advocates some kind of a freeze in federal spending. I’m not sure how that squares with the call for more “investments.”

Obama acknowledges the tumult in Tunisia thusly: “We saw that same desire to be free in Tunisia, where the will of the people proved more powerful than the writ of a dictator. And tonight, let us be clear: the United States of America stands with the people of Tunisia, and supports the democratic aspirations of all people.” Where does the United States of America stand tonight with respect to the people of Iran? We’re still waiting to hear from Obama on that one, but I guess we can infer he supports their aspirations as well. The people of Iran are included in “all people.”

The speech does have several good lines. Here is one of them: “I call on all of our college campuses to open their doors to our military recruiters and the ROTC.” It’s a pity that Obama has to gild it with the usual gay rights boilerplate. This line also deserves a nod: “I know there isn’t a person here who would trade places with any other nation on Earth.” Unlike most of the rest of the speech, it has the advantage, as Henry Kissinger might say, of being true.

Obama’s advent gets the usual iteration tonight, but he adds an uncharacteristically gracious salute to Speaker Boehner along with it: That [American] dream is why I can stand here before you tonight. That dream is why a working class kid from Scranton can stand behind me. That dream is why someone who began by sweeping the floors of his father’s Cincinnati bar can preside as Speaker of the House in the greatest nation on Earth.”

It’s a pity that Obama hasn’t found previous occasions to articulate American exceptionalism. Indeed, he has essentially denied it. Maybe he didn’t think it was true before the advent of the Age of Obama, or maybe he chooses not to share his innermost thoughts on the subject with his fellow citizens tonight.”

---

Shifty Obama Moving to Center or Shiftying for 2012?

The vast majority of conservative writers I have read do realize how shifty of speech (more truthfully, how dishonest of speech) he is, but they are too conservative to use such terms.   Charles Krauthammer regularly calls the president, “the most disingenuous guy I have ever seen.”

Here at Pajamas Media, Dan Miller reviews  the president’s machinations and dancings:

“Has President Obama had a miraculous Paul of Tarsus like conversion while traveling his own road to Damascus? A true Obama moment? According to Rasmussen, his favorable vs. unfavorable ratings have been in the positive range. The country is broke and getting broker by the minute, but so what? There were some leg tingles when he announced a forty-five billion dollar trade deal with China during President Hu’s visit. However, very little was actually new business: “It’s largely an amalgamation of agreements that had already been inked, including Boeing’s $19 billion airplane deal.” Oh well. He has also “appointed GE Chairman Jeffrey Immelt to head his newly created Council on Jobs and Competitiveness,” the successor to Paul Volcker’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. Oh well again; Immelt may be a crony capitalist and the poster child for corporate welfare but it’s still awesome; the country desperately needs councils and czars and the more the merrier.

The world looks forward anxiously to President Obama’s State of the Union message when ambience will trump substance and there will be at least some attempts to show unity. It won’t be like this event at the opening of the Scottish Parliament in 2004 where the members all joined hands and sang Auld Lang Syne; they seemed to be enjoying it. The show of unity at the State of the Union address should be spectacular in any event. It will also provide a great comedy routine to amuse our enemies abroad, and a welcome respite from harsh partisan rhetoric for those in the United States. Can President Obama really speak out of both sides of his mouth unaided, or will his ventriloquist be required? How about a split-screen teleprompter?

President Obama recently announced in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece that there are too many stupid old (as distinguished from stupid new) anti-business regulations and that he is going to fix them. Will there by any deregulatory impact on climate initiatives, ObamaCare, and Dodd-Frank? No, only the bad old regulations are up for consideration:

The Clean Air Act … embraced common sense rules of the road that strengthen our country without unduly interfering with the pursuit of progress and the growth of our economy.

Besides, agencies must be held accountable! Of course; but for what and to whom? The people? The Congress? The president? It would be at least a minor miracle if he would or could somehow fix the current mess he worked so hard to make. He won’t:

We have, from time to time, embraced common sense rules of the road that strengthen our country without unduly interfering with the pursuit of progress and the growth of our economy.

Sometimes, those rules have gotten out of balance, placing unreasonable burdens on business — burdens that have stifled innovation and have had a chilling effect on growth and jobs. At other times, we have failed to meet our basic responsibility to protect the public interest, leading to disastrous consequences. Such was the case in the run-up to the financial crisis from which we are still recovering. There, a lack of proper oversight and transparency nearly led to the collapse of the financial markets and a full-scale Depression.

Over the past two years, the goal of my administration has been to strike the left right balance. And today, I am signing an executive order that makes clear that this is the operating principle of our government.

This order requires that federal agencies ensure that regulations protect our safety, health and environment while promoting economic growth. And it orders a government-wide review of the rules already on the books to remove outdated regulations that stifle job creation and make our economy less competitive. It’s a review that will help bring order to regulations that have become a patchwork of overlapping rules, the result of tinkering by administrations and legislators of both parties and the influence of special interests in Washington over decades. [emphasis added]

He should know about the ways in which agency rules can damage the economy because he has been the catalyst for many such rules in the recent past. His signature legislation, ObamaCare, has numerous statements such as “the Secretary shall determine” with little or no statutory guidance as the bases upon which the Secretary is to make his determinations. Such nonsense continues; he claims that the goal of his “administration has been to strike the right balance.” If what has happened thus far reflects his administration’s notion of the “right balance,” then keeping that same balance means more of the same. Is he serious? Of course he is, about getting reelected next year, and the best way to do that is to make noises he hopes will please business while permitting him to continue to boldly go precisely where he has gone before. Drill, baby, drill? Let’s change the subject and talk about something less oily; ObamaCare? That’s off limits too.

In addition to his op-ed, President Obama issued an executive order to implement his plans. It looks remarkably like an executive order issued by President Clinton back in 1993, with a principal difference that the 1993 order didn’t exempt silly new regulations and it did recognize that we and “our” regulators must recognize that “the private sector and private markets are the best engine for economic growth.” President Obama’s 2011 executive order begins:

Our regulatory system must protect public health, welfare, safety, and our environment while promoting economic growth, innovation, competitiveness, and job creation. It must be based on the best available science [climate change?]. It must allow for public participation and an open exchange of ideas. It must promote predictability and reduce uncertainty. It must identify and use the best, most innovative, and least burdensome tools for achieving regulatory ends. It must take into account benefits and costs, both quantitative and qualitative. It must ensure that regulations are accessible, consistent, written in plain language [he’s joking?], and easy to understand. It must measure, and seek to improve, the actual results of regulatory requirements.

According to the San Francisco Examiner:

As wonderful as that sounds, we suspect it is motivated less by a desire to ease regulation than by the need of a stridently anti-business administration to mollify corporate interests and business donors in a difficult election cycle. In Obama’s first two years in office, he showed no signs of concern about the number of costly regulations being issued by federal regulators. He set new records for both the number of major regulations issued (43) and their added annual net burden on the economy (conservatively estimated by the regulators themselves at $26.5 billion). None of these will be revisited or revised by Obama’s initiative. James Gattuso and Diane Katz of the Heritage Foundation, who analyzed the new regulations in detail, predict that the real costs of Obama’s regulations so far are probably much higher than the government estimates.

On the other hand, according to an article at the Huffington Post:

Here we go again. When Bill Clinton suffered an electoral reversal after his first two years in office, he abruptly embraced the corporate money guys who had financed his congressional opposition in an effort to purchase a second term. On Tuesday in his Wall Street Journal Op-Ed piece, Barack Obama veered sharply down that same course, trumpeting his executive order: “to remove outdated regulations that stifle job creation and make our economy less competitive. …”

He employed the same “creating a 21st-century regulatory system” rationalization used by Clinton when he signed off on the sweeping deregulation legislation that unleashed the Wall Street greed that ended up being the biggest job-killer since the Great Depression. “Over the (past) seven years, we have tried to modernize the economy,” Clinton enthused as he signed the Financial Services Modernization Act that repealed key New Deal legislation, adding, “And today what we are doing is modernizing the financial services industry, tearing down those antiquated laws and granting banks significant new authority.” Modernizing was the propaganda constant, as in the Commodity Futures Modernization Act that Clinton signed, thus shielding financial derivatives from any government regulation.

I’m generally for most anything HuffPo opposes, but its opposition has some merit, albeit for the wrong reasons. President Obama’s scheme involves for business merely empty calories of the sort rejected by Ms. Obama. It looks nutritious but won’t stave off hunger longer than a box of Chinese carryout. Back in 1993, I was busy practicing administrative law in Washington; I didn’t notice much impact of the Clinton executive order and I anticipate even less from President Obama’s.

More than an executive order saying “Hey, guys! Let’s do something good” is needed to get rid of administrative agency regulations, no matter how stupid. To modify a rule, and few are likely to be repealed outright, an agency can’t just say: “The president spoke and we must obey. Now!” The Administrative Procedure Act requires more and for a long time has. Under Section 533 even the most compliant agency has to initiate a rule-making proceeding by publishing a notice in the Federal Register. The notice must state (a) the time, place, and nature of the proceeding, (b) the legal authority under which the rule is proposed, and (c) the terms or substance of the proposed rule or a description generally of the subjects and issues involved. After Federal Register publication, at least thirty days must be given for public comment. President Obama’s executive order of January 18 extends the thirty day period to at least sixty days. Following the initial comment period, another similar period is often allowed for responsive comments. The comments are, of course, studied with great diligence by agency staff for however long it may take before new rules are promulgated for additional public comment (as required by the executive order). Eventually the new rules as likely changed in response to public comment and possibly further public comment must be published in the Federal Register and can eventually come into effect no sooner than thirty days after their publication there. I have participated on behalf of clients in enough rule-making proceedings to know that they usually take a long time.

There must also be compliance with Paperwork Reduction Act requirements mandating efforts to minimize redundant and unnecessary public information collection burdens along with estimates of the amount of time the relevant agency decides the information “request” will entail. Then there must be time for appropriate public comment under Section 3507 of the Act. Then there must be certifications to the Office of Management and Budget. Want to see a typical Paperwork Reduction Act statement? Look at any handy IRS form. The burden estimates for complying with such information “requests” are often risible.

The most effective way to get stupid old and also new regulations out of the way would be through selective and specific defunding: no money, no enforcement.

If dragged out, President Obama’s “deregulatory” process could conceivably take until after the 2012 elections; it need not but will if that’s desired by the agencies. There is no certainty that even if they become effective the new rules will be less destructive of economic activity than the old rules and they may even be more destructive; agencies are normally reluctant to curb their own power whether for good or ill. Curbs produce less rather than more bureaucratic power and since hiring more rather than fewer subordinates to carry out agency functions is the easiest path to advancement, curbs are taboo.

So what’s the point? This is a great time for President Obama, in a spirit of bipartisan cooperation, mature reflection, and overpowering gravitas, to polish his new happy face, smiling upon friend and foe alike but mainly upon those whom he needs for reelection next year. He needs the left and with a compliant press they can be counted upon to get in line pretty quickly. He also needs the middle and he needs them to get in line now if the rest of his term is to be deemed “successful” and therefore worthy of re-election. Hosannas in the highest from all would be appreciated. Anybody want to become a czar? More will certainly be needed and I understand the pay and perks are pretty good.

Dan Miller graduated from Yale University in 1963 and from the University of Virginia School of Law in 1966. He lives in a rural area in Panama.

Roger Kimball has State of the Union “Blues”……

……and wrote about it at Pajamas Media:

“Like Justice Scalia I am planning to give tonight’s State of the Union Address a pass.  I am not quite ready for the 2012 campaign yet, and clearly President Obama is dusting off his clichés and contradictions for a big blow out tonight. “The economy’s in trouble, folks, but we need to spend more on EDUCATION. The United States must be more competitive, but we need to commit ourselves to green (i.e., economically ruinous) technology.” Etc. My personal stash of Dramamine just isn’t large enough. Besides, I think George Will is right: what the State of the Union is all about is the president, regardless of party, endeavoring to “stroke every erogenous zone in the electorate.” It’s a big country and the spectacle is bound to be unseemly.

No, instead of the State of the Union (which I already know to be bad), I might just hole up with Johnny Mercer. Glenn Reynolds has recently made it a habit to flag various links with the phrase: “the country’s in the very best of hands.” I always snickered at that because, well, just look at Washington or your state capital. Pathetic isn’t it?

I am chagrined to admit that it was only this morning that I learned the origin of that delicious phrase “the country’s in the very best of hands.” It’s from the great song writer Johnny Mercer. I should have known this but, hey, I had a provincial upbringing and was deprived of many such cultural benefactions. (Can I apply for a victim grant of some sort?)

I am happy to know the source of the phrase.  It says a lot on its own, but really to appreciate it you need some of the surrounding lyrics:

The treasury says the national debt

Is climbing to the sky

And government expenditures

Have never been so high

It makes a fellow get a

Gleam of pride when they decide

To see how our economy expands

The country’s in the very best of hands

Johnny Mercer died in 1976, by the way, just about in time to see President Obama’s great predecessor, James Earl Carter, muck things up.

The building boom, they say

Is getting bigger every day

And when I asked a feller

How could everybody pay

He come up with an answer

That made everything okay

Supplies are getting greater than demands

The country’s in the very best of hands

Prescient, eh?”

Obama Lied… Remained Unavailable Both to GOP and 6 Cabinet Members

Rhetoric is one thing, lying is another.   Mr. Obama is good at both.   Despite his speeches about how welcoming he has been to work with ‘the minority’, facts suggest otherwise.   Here is a piece from HotAir:

“Maybe Mitch McConnell shouldn’t feel left out after all. Before the midterm election, the New York Times reported that it took 18 months for Barack Obama to get around to meeting with the Senate Minority Leader, despite Obama’s promises to work across the aisle and to become a post-partisan President. This week, John Heileman reports for New York Magazine that McConnell fared better than some Democrats did, including a half-dozen appointed by Obama to his Cabinet. During the first two years of his presidency, Obama didn’t bother to confer with them at all — not even so much as a phone call:”

http://hotair.com/archives/2011/01/25/video-obama-didnt-meet-with-half-dozen-cabinet-members-in-first-two-years/

Few perceptions were more widely shared or loudly voiced around Washington than that the Obamans were huffing their own fumes. “You know the cliché about our strengths being our weaknesses? It’s true for them as well,” says a top political strategist in a previous White House. “I think they felt like if they had listened to conventional wisdom in 2007, they never would have run. When they hear criticism, they say, ‘Been there, done that, we’re gonna stay the course.’ There’s almost a Zen-like quality about how they’ve been in their own universe and their own bubble.”

The more pointed variant of this critique was directed specifically at Obama. Unlike 42—who loved to stay up late, jabbing at the speed dial, spending countless hours gabbing with local pols and businesspeople around the country to gauge the political wind and weather—44 not only eschewed reaching out to governors, mayors, or CEOs, but he rarely consulted outside the tiny charmed circle surrounding him in the White House. “What you had was really three or four people running the entire government,” says the former White House strategist. “I thought they put a pretty good Cabinet together, but most of those guys might as well be in the witness-protection program.”

A funny line, no doubt, but an overstatement, surely? Well, maybe not. “I happen to know most of the Cabinet pretty well, and I get together with them individually for lunch,” says one of the most respected Democratic bigwigs in Washington. “I’ve had half a dozen Cabinet members say that in the first two years, they never had one call—not one call—from the president.”

The Public Union Wars and the Public Debt…..Fred Siegel, “WSJ”

This article, “How Public Unions Took Taxpayers Hostage” was written by Fred Siegel at the Wall Street Journal:

The turbulent years of the 1960s and ’70s are best known by the headline-grabbing civil rights and women’s rights movements. But there was another “rights” movement, largely overlooked, that has also had a profound effect on American life. The looming public-pension crisis that threatens to bankrupt city, county and state governments had its origins in those same years when public employees, already protected by civil-service rules, gained the right to bargain collectively.

Liberals were once skeptical of public-sector unionism. In the 1930s, New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia warned against it as an infringement on democratic freedoms that threatened the ability of government to represent the broad needs of the citizenry. And in a 1937 letter to the head of an organization of federal workers, FDR noted that “a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable.”

Private-sector union leaders were also divided. George Meany, the president of the AFL-CIO from 1955-1979 who came out of the building trades, argued that it was “impossible to bargain collectively with the government.” Private unionists more generally worried that rather than winning a greater share of profits, public-sector labor would be extracting taxes from a public that included their own workers. But in the late 1950s, with the failure of the labor movement’s organizing campaign in the South, Meany’s own executive council insisted on the necessity of winning the right to organize public employees.

The first to seize on the political potential of government workers was New York City Mayor Robert F. Wagner. The mayor’s father, a prominent New Deal senator, had authored the landmark 1935 Wagner Act, which imposed on private employers the legal duty to bargain collectively with the properly elected union representatives of their employees. Mayor Wagner, prodded by Jerry Wurf of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (Afscme), gave city workers the right to bargain collectively in 1958.

Running for re-election in 1961, Mayor Wagner was opposed by the old-line party bosses of all five boroughs. He turned to a new force, the public-sector unions, as his political machine. His re-election resonated at the Kennedy White House, which had won office by only the narrowest of margins in 1960.

Ten weeks after Wagner’s victory, Kennedy looked to mobilize public-sector workers as a new source of Democratic Party political support. In mid-January 1962, he issued Executive Order 10988, which gave federal workers the right to organize in unions.

Two young and militant public-sector unionists, Al Shanker of the American Federation of Teachers and Wurf of Afscme, both strong supporters of the still nascent civil rights movement, seized the opportunity. Shanker saw both teachers and African-Americans as second-class citizens fighting the old-line political bosses. He’d also called a brief teachers strike in 1960. Shanker called another strike in 1962 that shifted the balance of power from principals to teachers, where it has remained down to the present.

In 1958, there had been but 15 public-employee strikes nationwide, involving a handful of workers. By 1968, after the old guard in Afscme had been deposed by the so-called young Turks led by Wurf, more than 200,000 union members, mostly in local and state government, were involved in 254 strikes.

In 1968, amid rioting, civil rights and antiwar protests, Martin Luther King Jr. backed an Afscme strike by poorly paid, mostly African-American sanitation men in Memphis, Tenn. After King’s tragic assassination, the city quickly settled with the union.

In the 1970s, government-worker unions became a political venue for New Leftist, feminist and black activists hoping to carry on in the militant spirit of the 1960s. The divisions within organized labor over the Vietnam War allowed Wurf and his allies to take on the declining private unions of the AFL-CIO, whose leader Meany backed the war. Wurf made himself a key player in George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign, and public employees have had a lead role in Democratic Party politics ever since.

Public-employee unionism seemed to be moving from success to success—Afscme was gaining a thousand (mostly female) workers a week—until the summer of 1975. At that point there was a surge in strikes, and the government unions began to threaten Democratic officeholders.

On July 1, 1975, New York sanitation workers walked off the job, allowing garbage to pile up in the streets of a Gotham already in the throes of fiscal crisis. In short order, cops objecting to furloughs imposed by the city’s liberal Democratic Mayor Abe Beame shut down the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge, with marchers carrying signs that read “Cops Out, Crime In” and “Burn City Burn.”

On that same July 1, 76,000 Pennsylvania state workers went on strike against liberal Democratic Gov. Milton Shapp’s austerity measures. Afscme’s leader in Pennsylvania, Gerald MacIntee, told his members “Let’s go out and close down this God-damned state.” And in Seattle, the fireman’s union initiated a recall ballot on July 1 directed against the one-time union favorite, Mayor Wes Uhlman, who held back pay hikes in the midst of rising deficits.

Mr. Uhlman narrowly survived and he, like Beame and Shapp, calmed the situation by largely caving in to the striker’s demands. But a line had been crossed: With New York’s near-bankruptcy a visible marker, the peril posed by public-sector unionism became a problem for Democrats as well as Republicans.

The fiscal burden of public-employee unions briefly became visible again in the early ’80s, when many warned of a looming public-pension crisis. That crisis was averted by the stock market boom that began in 1982-83 and lasted until 2007-08. It is now back with a vengeance.

Restraining the immense clout that government-employee unions have accumulated over the past half-century will be difficult, but not impossible. Civil rights for African-Americans and women was a fulfillment of the universalist American promise as expressed in the Declaration of Independence. Collective bargaining by public employees was not rooted in deep-seated American tradition.

Instead, the decision to grant this privilege was a political decision designed to enhance the power of a pressure group whose interests, even many liberals assumed, would be at odds with those of the general public. Political decisions can be reversed.

Mr. Siegel is a scholar in residence at St. Francis College and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

The War Between Curiosity and Security…..Between Male and Female

 Curiosity deeply interests me.   I believe curiosity, especially curiosity which  drives one to solve problems, is primarily an inherent male trait…..something guys have been programmed to do by nature……to build rather than to nurture.   I know this violates the laws of political correctness in part established by the loony lefties of the feminist movement. They and their Leftwing ‘thinkers’ demand forced-equality over  knowledge.   

Critical observation of children tells the story quite clearly.   In America now days we drug our boys in grade school to control their natural  energy to explore and  examine as they  try to figure out how things work by whatever means possible.  The modern American feminist demands boys  sit and act as girls, sound like girls, play like girls, think like girls.  They  demand girls be aggressive…..to be more like boys used to be.

Girls, by nature are more  drawn to girl dreams and questions, not how to buld…more like how to decorate.   They read fiction and play dolls for pretending and practice.

Boys more often frustrated by reading,  focus more in what they see and touch and how they can use what they see and touch.  They learn to build.   They will prefer the non-fiction.   Boys can get into trouble exploring, but it is the natural response for their drive to satisfy their curiosity……to understand…..to deal with reality rather than fealings and fiction.

Leftist educators  from the American Cultural Revolution of 40 years ago have been programmed to deny inherent  differences between male and female children preferring  to force unisex equality into the social system, feminizing boys determined to make them more incurious, more passive, less challenging, less inventing,  more sweet and unseen.

The human female calculates to find security.   Curiosity endangers security.      

The single human female as she ages will sacrifice nearly any freedom to gain security.   Unfortunately the female  becomes  more comfortable living in totalitarian societies where they can depend upon the government to make  decisions which don’t have to do with raising children.    The male will attempt to adjust to this regimen for the sake of survival.  The more masculine-driven will find lives guarding the dictatorship. 

There always will be rebels……almost always male and male led.  

What do you think?

What Drew Shelby Steele and Thomas Sowell From Marxism to American Conservatism?

 Disciples of Modern American Conservatism describe their conversions from the Left.

SHELBY STEELE;

“ What drew me to conservatism years ago was the fact that it gave discipline a slightly higher status than virtue.  This  meant it could not be subverted by passing notions of the good.  It could be above moral vanity.  And so it made no special promises to me as a minority.  It neglected me in every way except  as a human being who wanted freedom. 

Until my encounter with conservatism, I had only known the  racial determinism of segregation on the one hand and of white liberalism on the other;   two varieties of white supremacy in which I could only be dependent and inferior.
The appeal of conservatism is the mutuality it asserts between individual and political freedom, its beautiful idea of a free man in a free society.  And it offers minorities the one thing they can never get from liberalism; human rather than racial dignity.

“Conservatism “seeks the discipline of ordinary people rather than the virtuousness of extraordinary people.  The challenge for conservatives today is simply self-acceptance, and even a little pride in the way we flail away at problems with an invisible hand.”

(The above article was a writing by Mr. Steele printed in the Wall Street Journal.)

THOMAS SOWELL;
 “I was a Marxist I guess for a decade from about the time I was 20 to 30 roughly. What changed my mind was not anything I had read. I was a Marxist when I went into Milton Friedman’s course at [the University of] Chicago and I was a Marxist when I came out of it.

What changed me was working as an economic intern in the government in 1960 and discovering what the government bureaucracies were like in terms of their motivations and how they do their job. I immediately realized government is not the answer. Life taught me. I think that is true for most people.

Most of the leading conservatives were not conservatives when they were young. Milton Friedman was a liberal, he even described himself in his autobiography as Keynesian in his thinking. Friedrich Hayek was a socialist. Ronald Reagan was so far left that the FBI was keeping an eye on him. So you run through the list — of course the whole neoconservative movement was on the left initially. And the same thing happened in Europe and elsewhere. A lot of the indoctrination that takes place in educational institutions begin to erode when people get into the real world and start thinking for themselves.”

(The above  comment of Thomas Sowell was part of an interview by Caroline May at the Daily Caller in response to her question:   “I read that you identified yourself as a Marxist in your college days.   What prompted your change in ideology?)

Marxist Professor, Frances Fox Piven, Snears at Tea Party….Endears Violence

 On Tea Party:  

In a tone of soft ridicule City University of New York  Marxist Professor, Frances Fox Piven, summarizes the Tea Party…..”The are 65 years old, or more….driven by discontent….they aren’t white, they ARE white…All white!”, she demands with that racist tone and emphasis these Leftists are fixed to use to certify evil…..They are against change.   

“An African -American is in the White House!”  …….”There’s a darkening of the population.”    “They are from the time of a steeple in every town, when a man was a man; a woman a woman.”…….”and SEX is very important!”

“They want to take the country back!”    She assures the audience that the surge at the pollis is a mere swelling of old, soon to die, whities.    (For the most part she paints an accurate picture except the painting of president,  Barack Hussein Obama, for if this Marxist were white, he probably would be disliked more.

Sorry, Lefties…..It’s not the color of his skin (which always seems to be a racist issue with you lefties) it is Obama Marxism why  Tea Party people  are stirred up!

View the video for yourselves:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVwMMmhstQs&feature=youtube_gdata

On Violence:

“There’s been some talk recently criticizing Glenn Beck for speaking out against Frances Fox Piven and her calls for “angry” revolution. For example, the New York Times ran a story over the weekend saying Beck‘s expose of Piven’s strategy to overwhelm the government welfare rolls and have people rise up (and the stories about that on The Blaze) has incited violence. Piven’s favorite soap box The Nation ran a similar story on Thursday. Both stories references a few errant comments left on this website.

But lacking from those stories, and from the stories of the other outlets that have picked them up, is not only Beck’s numerous calls for non-violence, but also any legitimate look at what Piven has said. Stanley Kurtz on National Review Online today noticed as much:

An article by Brian Stelter in Saturday’s New York Times is a thinly disguised gesture of support for The Nation’s campaign. The piece downplays Piven’s radicalism, noting that her widely criticized call for intentionally creating a political and economic crisis in America’s welfare system was made 45 long years ago. Although Piven has freely described her own strategy as an effort to set off “fiscal and political crises in the cities,” Stelter delicately avoids the word “crises,” writing instead of “fiscal and political stress.”

Kurtz points out, however, that violence is an integral part of the Cloward-Piven strategy:

  http://www.theblaze.com/stories/frances-fox-piven-rings-in-the-new-year-by-calling-for-violent-revolution/

Calls for the escalation and manipulation of violent rioting have long been central to Piven’s strategy. Her 1977 book with Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail, detailed the rationale behind the infamous crisis strategy of a decade before. The core argument is that the poor and unemployed are so isolated from the levers of power in America that their greatest potential impact is to withhold “quiescence in civil life: they can riot.”

At the heart of the book, Cloward and Piven luxuriously describe instances of “mob looting,” “rent riots,” and similar disruptions, egged on especially by Communist-party organizers in the 1930s. Many of those violent protests resulted in injuries. A few led to deaths. The central argument of Poor People’s Movements is that it was not formal democratic activity but violent disruptions inspired by leftist organizers that forced the first great expansion of the welfare state.

Toward the end of the book, when Cloward and Piven describe their own work with the National Welfare Rights Organization, they treat the violent urban rioting of the Sixties as a positive force behind that era’s expansion of the welfare state.

So what has Piven been talking about? Below is a montage of quotes and clips of her explaining her strategy, which includes violence:

Violence is okay as long as it’s part of a bigger strategy:

In  a piece from The Nation in December, Piven says the unemployed must get angry, and explains that an effective jobless movement will look like the violent riots in Greece and England:

“So where are the angry crowds, the demonstrations, sit-ins and unruly mobs?” she writes. “After all, the injustice is apparent. Working people are losing their homes and their pensions while robber-baron CEOs report renewed profits and windfall bonuses. Shouldn’t the unemployed be on the march? Why aren’t they demanding enhanced safety net protections and big initiatives to generate jobs?” […]

An effective movement of the unemployed will have to look something like the strikes and riots that have spread across Greece in response to the austerity measures forced on the Greek government by the European Union, or like the student protests that recently spread with lightning speed across England in response to the prospect of greatly increased school fees. [Emphasis added]

Here Piven says there needs to be “tumult disorder pressure” in order to force Barack Obama to “make choices”…

(The video and article are from The Blaze.)

Marxist Obama: This Ice Man Cometh to Conneth the American People This Evening

From which mouth will the  voice of American Marxism speak this evening at his State of the Union ceremony?

The state of the union stinks. 

We have a president who hasn’t a forensic hair of Americana under his well pressed clothes…..no feel, no humor, no touch for the America  beyond his Marxist dreams.    The greatest insult to date thrust upon Ronald Reagan came this week from an article in USA Today comparing Mr. Obama favorably with that  president who radiated love for his country in his heart and mind.

Love for America is not radiating from Mr. Obama’s heart or mind.   He memorizes what needs to be memorized to keep enough of his tribes voting to keep him in office to do his Marxist work.  By his words within his speeches, Mr. Obama is typical of the new university American……He knows nothing of his country’s past except for some scars.

In this evening’s conning of his flock, president Obama will sweet talk Big Business.   Democrats outspent Republicans this past November but the margin of financial victory  was narrow.   Big Government  paid heavily for the Obama election in 2008 but turned stingy last November.   Marxist Obamatalk this evening will be sweet and the suit will be pressed.   

Most  Obamafans  don’t  care how many zeros there are attached to the  soon-to-be  $15,000.000,000,000 debt.

They proudly wallow in self esteem……..How cleansed they are to worship a president who has campaigned in all 57 states and attended  Jeremiah (Goddamn America) Wright’s Chicago parish for 22 years.

The cold and calculating  Obama needs the votes of the victimhood plantation population  and money from Big Business to secure reelection in 2012. 

This  Iceman Cometh to Conneth!

http://hotair.com/archives/2011/01/24/bounce-obamas-approval-rating-now-above-50-overall-and-among-investors/