politicalpartypoop.com

Found this clip on Betsy’s Page 

Republican Congressman Eric Cantor’s team has put out this video to look back on the first year of the Democratic Congress.

From Sister Toldjah

David Paul Kuhn at The Politico reports this morning that liberal Democrats still remain hesitant about describing themselves as “liberals”:

Hillary Rodham Clinton was asked this summer if she would describe herself as a “liberal.”The Democratic front-runner shied away, saying the “word” — noticeably not using the word — has taken on a connotation that “describes big government.

“I prefer the word ‘progressive,’” she said. It has a “real American meaning.”

Then she expanded the term to “modern progressive,” and, finally, clarified that she was a “modern American progressive.”

Hmmm. “Modern American progressive” must be fancy-speak for “Socialist.”

Read the rest here

Deception is perfectly ok if it helps the children.
From Michelle Malkin

The most buzzworthy story on the right side of the blogosphere this weekend concerned young Graeme Frost, the 12-year-old child severely injured in a terrible car accident that also left his sister with permanent disabilities.

Graeme Frost was propped up by Democrats desperate to avert the president’s veto of S-CHIP legislation, which would have massively expanded the government health care entitlement. The Dems are trying to muster up enough votes to override President Bush’s veto. They’ve scheduled a vote for Oct. 18.

The boy gave the Democratic radio address last week, written for him by Senate Democrat staffers, and made several Beltway lobbying appearances with top Dem leaders. (Listen to Graeme’s address here.) The accident was horrible. The children deserve much sympathy and compassion. But legislation-by-anecdote is a tricky thing, and should only be done when the anecdotes actually hold some water.It turns out–as it does with so many health care stories pimped by the Democrats and the MSM–that there is much more to the Frosts’ story than meets the eye.

The family is not as destitute as the MSM has made them out to be. FreeRepublic member icwhatudo asks the tough questions the mainstream media won’t ask. Like why a “working family” in need of government-subsidized health care can afford to send two children to a $20,000-a-year-private school. And more (go to the post for more embedded links)

Read the rest here

More at Wizbang; The Not So Poor Voice of SCHIP

And at Flopping Aces: The “Poor” SCHIP Kid

By Thomas Sowell - on Townhall

A recent news story about a teacher who assigned her students to write anti-war letters may have seemed like just an isolated episode, but teachers using students for their own little ego trips is by no means uncommon. Perhaps the worst recent example was a teacher who unleashed her venom on the children of military personnel who had gone off to fight in Iraq.Just last week I received a bundle of letters from students who have apparently been given an assignment to write to me by a teacher in an English class in Flat Rock High School in Flat Rock, Michigan. This was occasioned by a column of mine that said some things that were not politically correct.

The first of these letters was from a girl who informed me, from her vast store of teenage wisdom, of things that I knew 30 years ago, and closed by telling me that I needed to find out about poverty. Since I spent more years in poverty than she has spent in the world, this would be funny if it were not so sad.

With American students consistently scoring at or near the bottom on international tests, you would think that our schools would have better things to do than tell kids to write letters to strangers, spouting off about things they know little or nothing about.

Flat Rock High School’s envelopes, in which the students wrote their assigned letters, have the motto: “Where Tomorrow’s Leaders Learn!” Sadly, they are learning not to be leaders but to be sheep-like followers, repeating politically correct notions and reacting with snotty remarks to anyone who contradicts them.

It is bad enough when someone takes the position that he has made up his mind and doesn’t want to be confused by the facts. It is worse when someone else makes up his mind for him and then he dismisses any facts to the contrary by attributing bad motives to those who present those facts.

Creating mindless followers is one of the most dangerous things that our public schools are doing. Young people who know only how to vent their emotions, and not how to weigh opposing arguments through logic and evidence, are sitting ducks for the next talented demagogue who comes along in some cult or movement, including movements like those that put the Nazis in power in Germany.

At one time, the educator’s creed was: “We are here to teach you how to think, not what to think.” Today, schools across the country are teaching students what to think — whether about the environment, the war, social policy, or whatever.

Even if what they teach were true, that would be of little use to these young people in later life. Issues and conditions change so much over time that even the truth about today’s issues becomes irrelevant when confronted with the future’s new challenges.

If students haven’t been taught to think, then they are at the mercy of events, as well as being at the mercy of those who know how to take advantage of their ignorance and their emotions.
Classroom brainwashing is not new. I wrote about it a decade ago in my book “Inside American Education.” Hearings at the Department of Education brought out the same things a decade before that.

When will the voting public get the message? Where are the parents of these children? Do parents in Flat Rock, Michigan, want their children’s time in school wasted on their teachers’ ideological hobby horses, instead of being used to prepare an intellectual foundation for their further education?

In the long run, the greatest weapon of mass destruction is stupidity. In an age of artificial intelligence, too many of our schools are producing artificial stupidity, in the sense of ideas and attitudes far more foolish than young people would have arrived at on their own. I doubt whether the youngsters in Flat Rock, Michigan, were brought up by their parents to say and do the silly things their teachers have assigned them to do.

Weapons of mass destruction in the hands of an avowed enemy can destroy many Americans, but they cannot destroy America, because we are too strong and too capable of counterattack. Only Americans can destroy America. But too many of our schools have for years been quietly undermining the values and abilities that are needed to preserve any society — and especially a free society.

Found on Michelle Malkin 

Jason at Shock and Blog took a closer look at the flag-burning and US soldier effigy-burning party in Portland. He writes: “I haven’t seen anyone pointing this out yet. They’re brainwashing the next generation of troop-haters:”

***
I’m sorry for repeating myself, but as I have been scanning many of the right and left leaning blogs I have been catching the moonbat protests around the country and I am see more and more retarded shit from the left.

Do you crazy fucks on the left not get that the more you do this idiot shit, the more your nonsense gets circulated around the blogsphere?

The more of these pictures that get circulated, more and more people will see just how retarded you people are.

Protests are meant to change people’s minds and hopefully hearts to get then to think differently about an issue.

Dragging the American flag on the ground and having US soldier effigy-burning parties will certainly not help you influence any folks to your warped way of thinking.

Are you people on the left smoking more crack or doing more meth? Seriously, parents are obviously raising some fucked up children to have them growing up and thinking that doing this stupid shit is somehow logical.
I swear I don’t get it.

 Not posting for any particular reason, just an interesting article.

By Rinku Sen - In These Times

Rather than saving democracy or liberating the working class, the argument goes, progressives have been forced by narrow-minded people of color to obsess about whether they have one of each kind on their conference panels or college faculties. In this narrative, identity politics is to blame for the inability of progressives to stick together, thereby making room for the rise of conservatism. Michaels says as much, barely acknowledging any other factors, including the right wing’s brilliant (and highly racialized) campaigns to establish its ideas in the American consciousness.

For 20 years, I have worked as an organizer and journalist in racial justice organizations owned and operated by people of color, hoping to contribute to a vibrant larger movement. My current employer, the Applied Research Center, holds that it’s important to be “explicit about race but not exclusive.” That’s not diversity; it’s a sensible analysis for a complicated world.

Analysts like Michaels repeatedly harp on “diversity” as if that’s the only measure of racial progress. That reflects their deep lack of connection with actual communities and their cluelessness about the role that race plays in economics and democracy. They want to write off racism as a distraction from universal solutions, or as a divide-and-conquer tactic to split the working class.

Universal solutions, however, have to deal with discrimination if they’re to be truly universal. Policies designed without racial justice goals can actually deepen the divide, while creating the illusion that they’ve taken care of everyone.

I also often hear that rather than highlighting racial disparities in healthcare, rampant though they are, we should fight for universal healthcare. But if public healthcare were enough to prevent discrimination, then Canada and the United Kingdom wouldn’t have any health disparities. But they do. A study published in July’s American Journal of Public Health reported that nearly twice as many non-white Canadians needed medicines but could not afford them as their white counterparts, and that 18.6 percent of non-whites had unmet healthcare needs as opposed to 11.1 percent of whites.

Racism leads Americans to make political decisions that undermine their own interests. The current attack on our civil liberties was tested on non-citizens, not after 9/11 but as early as 1996 with hardly a peep out of anybody. That year’s Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act allowed the president to label organizations “terrorist” without any appeal or review, lifted a restriction against the FBI on investigations based on speech or beliefs, and let the Federal government deport or jail immigrants indefinitely for their affiliations or political activity. This is not divide and conquer; it’s about getting white folk used to the practice of shrinking rights for others—so that they will eventually tolerate it for themselves.

In 2003, when Howard Dean said he wanted to reach out to southern men who had Confederate flags on their pickups, he was forced by both southerners and blacks to apologize. Dean was on the right track but unable (perhaps from lack of practice?) to articulate what needed to be said—that white southerners had allowed racism to lead them to vote against their own self-interest. White people who absorb racist ideas always think they’ll be exempt from the loss.

If [tag]racism[/tag] dilutes progressive solutions, racial justice can improve life for everyone. Racial justice activists have learned all we could from identity-based movements. First, identity is key—we all start with what is in front of us, as true for white men as for anyone else. But identity doesn’t replace ideas, hence, the difference between “diversity” and justice. Racial justice is about changing the rules of society according to a set of standards: resisting discrimination and violence, not abiding huge disparities, and expanding the role of government to protect economic, social and political rights.

It is white [tag]progressives[/tag] who are stuck on identity politics; progressives of color have long since moved on. The resulting agenda requires far more from the nation, and from our movement, than representation. The failure to incorporate racial justice into a progressive program has deprived progressivism of its true potential—to build a better world for all of us.