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Thought the New York Times 1943 Headline might resonate. This was sent to me by a dear and long standing friend and fellow memo reader who is a retired Criminologist Professor who enjoys an international reputation.
The New York Times has become an appeasing apologist and yet claims it prints "all the news fit to print."
I would substitute the word "slants" for "prints."
The New York Times was founded by intellectual German Jews who were shunned by New York Society. The founders have struggled with this rejection for years and seem to have compensated by turning against their own in the mistaken belief they will then become accepted.
The New York Times Editorial Board bends over backward to avoid being accused of favoritism and in doing so now cannot justify their biased reporting which has made a once great paper not much more than a fish wrapper.
And a subtle slght from our president? You decide. (See 1 below.)
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Take the global warming test: www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/
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I have no problem with measured standards. What I do have is a problem with allowing government to gets its head in the tent because it will eventually take over. I am not concerned about Jeb Bush, it is the presidents that will come after him. Because of his commitment to Common Core I have strong misgivings about his candidacy.
What has government touched that it has improved and at what cost?(See 2 below.)
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Kerry defends! (See 3 below.)
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Press and media bias and insanity revealed by their attacks on Walker. (See 4 below.)
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Dick
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1) The President's First Insult
President of the United States of America Barack Obama had not been president for more than ten minutes when he slapped American Jews in the face (and by extension Israel and all Jews). Though he did it so subtly -- in plain sight and in front of the whole world -- no one noticed.
On January 21, 2009, about three-quarters of the way through his first inaugural address, after paragraphs of bromides about American greatness, he alluded to the menace of militant Islam:
For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth…
It has become customary in our time to speak of America as a Judeo-Christian civilization because the facts of history show that, so “a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus” as a new formulation of the melting pot meme was a major departure.
In fact, although the settling of the original Thirteen Colonies was almost exclusively the handiwork of Christians from northern Europe, by the time of the American Revolution there were already six Jewish communities, one in each of the major colonial cities. Jews fought and died in the Revolution, and in 1802, when the military academy at West Point opened its doors, one of the first two volunteer cadets was a Jew.
Jews have been part of American culture ever since in the Military, Medicine, Science, Technology, Literature, Theater, Music, Movies, Television, Academe, Law, Journalism and Business.
Jews invented the nuclear submarine providing the United States its greatest line of defense in the Cold War. A German Jew invented jeans, the quintessential American garment. Although always a tiny percentage of the population, they have always punched above their weight in contributions to America.
Christians and therefore Jews too built the country. In American cities every December, merchants decorate their shop windows with “Merry Christmas” & “Happy Hanukah” signs. The country has most definitely been a Judeo-Christian enterprise.
Muslims, by contrast, played no role in the making of America. There is no evidence of a Muslim presence before the 20th century. Yet here on that January day was the brand new American President orating that the U.S. was “a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus…”
In this formulation, the Jews have been bumped back to third place, elbowed, so to speak, aside by Muslims who take their place. This recalls what happened in the 7th century when their Prophet Muhammad told his followers that they had replaced the Jews as Allah’s Chosen People.
Barack Obama during his campaign had vowed to “fundamentally change this country,” and, in retrospect, this formulation was part of that effort. The fundamental change would include the dispossession of the Jews of their second place in American culture and even downgrade them to the ranks of Hindus, whose tradition, like Islam, played no role in formrative United States history.
Indeed, Obama’s next sentence continued, “To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect,” and this new formulation was surely part of that “new way forward” in the matter of Islam’s role in American life.
Another feature of Obama’s desired transformation was on display two and one-half months later -- on April Fool’s Day no less -- when he was videotaped obsequiously bowing down before the king of Saudi Arabia whose official title includes Guardian of the Two Mosques (alluding to the ones in Mecca and Medina). This was a gesture one cannot imagine Obama ever executing before any other national leader -- let alone the prime minister of Israel.
And that bow was an offense against protocol and custom -- the Revolution had been not only a war of national liberation but a rejection of the very institution of monarchy. American presidents do not bow down to kings and thus it was doubly an insult, for this was no ordinary monarch but the potentate of the country where fifteen of the nineteen skyjackers on September 11, 2001 were raised and shaped by this king’s religion, including 9-11’s evil mastermind Osama bin Laden.
What Obama might have done was demand that the king show “mutual respect” by bowing down to him to beg forgiveness that some of his subjects had engineered that eruption of Muslim Hell on earth perpetrated against his fellow Americans. In Israel in 1997, after a Jordanian soldier had murdered seven little Jewish girls, the king of Jordan crossed over the River to visit the grieving mothers and literally went down on his knees to express his sorrow and shame. Obama should have asked the Guardian of the Two Mosques to do that too. Instead, there on view for posterity on YouTube is the President’s protruding posterior.
Two months later, in June 2009, Mr. Obama made his first trip to the Middle East but snubbed Israel, America’s long-time and most faithful ally. He flew instead to Egypt where he delivered a speech at Al-Azhar, Sunni Islam’s oldest seminary, where Osama bin Ladin, Haj Amin al-Husseini, Sheik Ahmad Yassin and many other Muslim priests who preach the virtue of terror studied Islam and wallowed in its classical, Muslim-style Jew-hatred.
In his speech, Obama praised this religion beyond the boundaries of historical truth:
As a student of history, I also know civilization's debt to Islam. It was Islam at places like Al-Azhar that carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe's Renaissance and Enlightenment…And throughout history, Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality. I also know that Islam has always been a part of America's story. The first nation to recognize my country was Morocco. In signing the Treaty of Tripoli in 1796, our second President John Adams wrote, "The United States has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Muslims." And since our founding, American Muslims have enriched the United States. They have fought in our wars, they have served in government, they have stood for civil rights, they have started businesses, they have taught at our Universities, they’ve excelled in our sports arenas, they've won Nobel Prizes, built our tallest building, and lit the Olympic Torch. And when the first Muslim-American was recently elected to Congress, he took the oath to defend our Constitution using the same Holy Koran that one of our Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson, kept in his personal library.
This was the vandalizing of history. In no way is it true that “…since our [America’s] founding, Muslims have enriched the United States…” As noted, their presence came quite late, and what enrichment could he have had in mind?
And as for the early treaty with Tripoli (Libya): John Adams’s statement was made after the repeated hijacking of American merchant ships and the cruel enslavement of their passengers and crews by the misnamed “Barbary Pirates.” That was a colloquial nickname for them; in reality, they were not pirates but the official navies of recognized Muslim powers. Adams’s statement had been an attempt to appease them in the hope they would honor the treaty they had just signed and thenceforth cease and desist from attacking American merchant ships (which they did not).
Likewise, Obama’s reference to Thomas Jefferson was false. The principle author of the Declaration of Independence and first Secretary of State purchased his Koran when in Paris in order to study the intolerable aggression being perpetrated against fellow Americans by these so-called “pirates” who Jefferson learned were in reality observant Muslims who justified their hijacking and enslaving of infidels with the jihad.
Jefferson spent five years in France after the Revolution as a trade commissioner, then ambassador. That is when he bought his Koran, because almost every day of these years there were American hostages enslaved in North Africa that he struggled to but failed to liberate. In this period, he even met in London with an ambassador from the Bashaw (pasha) of Tripoli, a predecessor of Muammar Gaddafi who demanded $100,000 not to begin hijacking American ships and enslaving all the people aboard. Jefferson listened as the ambassador cited the jihad as the justification for this behavior. That was in 1786.
Fifteen years later, as America’s third president and still the country’s No. 1 hawk for war with Islam, Jefferson went to war against Tripoli because he had no doubt that these “pirates” were not independent freebooters but self-described holy warriors/mujahideen who could only be subdued via military force majeure. They were beyond reason.
Then in November of his first year in office, on the Ft. Hood, Texas army base, a Muslim shouting “Allahu Akbar!” massacred thirteen fellow soldiers, which carnage Obama insisted had nothing to do with Islam.
And we have not even touched on his other, serial insults to Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and by extension the people of the democratic State of Israel that elected him.
Barack Obama’s affection for Islam and his Islamic habit of trashing historical truth have been right there from his first inaugural speech when he misdescribed American society by demoting the place of the Jews in it.
Finally, for any who doubt this critical portrait: remember, too, that the day after his first inaugural speech and that evening’s series of inaugural balls and festivities, when he entered the Oval Office the next morning to begin work as president -- with the U.S. economy in a crisis not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s -- he asked that his first phone call as president be put through not to some expert on economics but Mahmoud Abbas, the Holocaust Denier and international Muslim terrorist criminal.
President Obama has been aggressing against the Jews in America and Israel since his first minutes on the job. No wonder, then, in January 2015, he did not attend the mass demonstration in Paris after the massacres by Muslims of the Charlie Hebdo staff and four Jews buying food for the Holy Sabbath.
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2) The Common Core: Something to Like and Loathe
There’s a lot of hyperbole surrounding the Common Core, whether it’s teachers unions bellyaching about tests, or those on the right warning of subterfuge socialist agendas. And then there are more establishment types like Jeb Bush and former Secretary of Education Bill Bennett who defend it, seemingly with little information about the practical implications of the standards. I have always approached the issue with an open mind, similar to Shakespeare’s Juliet: “I’ll look to like, if looking liking move.” And yet I find something to like and loath.
The Common Core doesn’t care about a student’s opinion. Perhaps that sounds provocative. But there is an emphasis in the Common Core on the “text itself,” rather than the annoying progressive education doctrine of having students relate everything to their own lives. This progressive belief presupposes that students only can take an active interest in matters which touch upon their immediate (and limited) experience. Nonsense. It’s much better to challenge one to forget about their ego for a moment and engage with the content at hand.
The practice material from PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers), the Common Core test made by behemoth educational publishing company Pearson, suggests that students should not even offer an opinion on the ideas expressed in a text. At any rate, on the practice tests I note that they aren’t asked for their opinion. Instead, they have to show that they understand what they read.
Here is a touch of authoritarianism, and I dare say that it is welcome. It is in itself a reaction to the uberliberalism of public schools.Heretofore K-12 schools tended to focus exclusively on the subjective experience of the precious student. Instead, it’s just the facts, ma’am. No one cares if your mom is your hero, or any other irrelevant personal anecdote.
Also on the positive side, the founding fathers are back in the curriculum, and they make this reappearance uncompromised. The Common Core has a celebratory stance towards the founding of the country and the men who were the brains behind it. This means reading the Declaration of Independence in depth, in English class, mind you. Needless to say, the founding documents and other classic literature are juxtaposed with copious multicultural filler. But this a teacher with any level of autonomy can blithely skip over.
How teachers will treat the revolutionary texts remains an open question. Doubtless there will be myriad approaches, ranging from reverence to mockery. Will the teachers harp on the Declaration of Independence’s hypocritical call for equality? Will they blush at Thomas Jefferson referring to the Native Americans as “savages”? Surely many will. But there is nothing in the standards themselves or in any PARCC material publicly available to suggest that the Common Core advocates a critical stance towards our country’s founding.
At any rate, the Common Core has established the importance of the founding documents. It’s almost as though we have said as a country that our founding matters and its citizens should actually know about it. Isn’t that an amazing gesture of self-confidence from our politically correct elites? This is an unqualified check in the benefits column of the Common Core ledger.
Then there are things to loathe: fuzzy math. How can Bill Bennett ignore all these hysterically funny, and actually kind of scary, examples of simple addition problems being turned into trigonometry? Check out 26 +17 the hard way. “Make a ten” seems to be the mantra. Strange and pointless. To be fair, Bennett denied these new “innovations,” shall we say, have anything to do with the Common Core, as they are not to be found in the standards themselves. But isn’t it a little suspicious that we find these ridiculous teaching methods manifest in concert with the establishment of the Common Core? Can that be a coincidence?
There is a reason behind this madness: progressives hate memorization. The Common Core approach to math is to find “holistic” ways of basic arithmetic. It’s the kind of thing which is so dumb that you have to have gone to a fancy school to believe in it. Just be glad you’re not being subjected to this, and that you learned math the traditional way.
Also on the negative side of the Common Core ledger: teacher “accountability.” I’m against “holding teachers accountable.” That is to say that I oppose what that phrase connotes, rather than the principle of accountability per se. Common Core is associated with a testing regime that will ultimately be used to evaluate teachers. Teach in the ghetto? Then this is bad news for you, sir. Unless you pull a Michelle Rhee and join a conspiracy to change students’ bubble answers, that is. Of course, another Erasuregate will be more difficult with computer-based tests.
Teacher “accountability” implies a utopian belief in the ability of teachers to affect their students’ test scores to an extent that no study has shown to be possible, despite the free market gospel on this matter. Granted, it can be very motivating to think that your job is on the line based on your students’ test scores. Perhaps you will feel a fire in the belly that was not there before; this I am willing to concede. But ultimately your efforts will be in vain, because the student is who he is, with the brain that he entered class with, at the end of the day.The scores will hardly budge.
The Common Core “raises standards.” Unfortunately, this doesn’t make anyone smarter. Raising standards actually just makes more people fail (see New York’s 70 percent failure rate on the PARCC). Diane Ravitch has opined rather bluntly that most students will fail the Common Core test.
It’s lovely to have high standards, but a lack of high standards or high expectations is not what ails American education. In fact, I am willing to bet that most teachers err towards having expectations that are too high. The result is students who are confused. This confusion caused by reading relatively sophisticated literature cannot be addressed, I would contend, by making test questions more ponderous.
The Common Core is a muddle. It’s not quite a socialist plot a la Mark Levin (I’m just guessing that he’s said something like that). But it’s certainly not all positive either. You’ve got some nice traditional notions in the Common Core, mixed in with some nauseating progressive education ideas, and some utopian thinking as a spice. This is perhaps an inevitable product of our “hodgepodge” culture, totally lacking in any unifying idea of what or who we should be.
Malcolm Unwell is an English teacher under the Common Core regime.
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3) Kerry Defends Iran Nuclear Talks as Dissidents Claim Proof of Tehran Deception
By Guy Taylor with permission from The Washington Times
Secretary of State John F. Kerry defended the Obama administration's pursuit of a nuclear deal with Iran in the face of mounting bipartisan scrutiny from lawmakers Tuesday - even as an Iranian dissident group claimed to have fresh proof that Tehran has lied to world powers about its drive to obtain a nuclear weapon.
With Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu heading to Capitol Hill next week to argue against the deal, Mr. Kerry told lawmakers not to judge the deal until it is completed.
"I caution people to wait and see what these negotiations produce," Mr. Kerry said in response to news reports suggesting that the administration is close to a deal in which Iran would be allowed to increase its nuclear activities after a 10-year period of restrictions and inspection from outside powers.
"Anybody running around right now, jumping in to say, 'Well, we don't like the deal' doesn't know what the deal is. There is no deal yet," Mr. Kerry told a Senate Appropriations subcommittee Tuesday morning during the first of two State Department budget hearings.
He told a subsequent Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing that the administration's policy is still to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon but to do so diplomatically, in a way that avoids a military confrontation.
Mr. Kerry's plea seemed to have little effect on critics, including some Democrats.
Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, told Mr. Kerry that he was concerned about news "leaking from the negotiations" that Iran will be left with "a vast majority of its nuclear infrastructure" under the proposed deal.
Any deal that relieves Iran of Western sanctions while allowing it to "go from being a threshold to an actual nuclear weapons state is no deal at all," Mr. Menendez said.
Noting that the Obama administration suggested a 20-year pact with Tehran, Mr. Menendez said, "Now we're talking about a 10-year time frame - if it's true - and with relief in the five latter years of the 10 years. That's problematic."
Mr. Kerry insisted that the administration and its negotiating partners - Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China - want a long-term deal under which Iran's pathways to a bomb are "closed off." Specifically, he said, inspections would prevent any weapons development activity at Iran's Natanz, Arak and Fordow nuclear facilities.
"Covert, of course, is the hardest," Mr. Kerry said. "You need to have verification and intrusive inspection to be able to find covert" facilities.
Cheating accusations
While Mr. Kerry spoke, an Iranian dissident group that exposed past Iranian nuclear deceptions was arguing that the problems with inspection and verification would remain - that Tehran hasn't come clean about its nuclear programs.
Claiming that Iran's government has been lying for years to United Nations nuclear inspectors, the National Coalition of Resistance of Iran asserted that scientists in the Islamic Republic have been running a secret uranium enrichment operation at a facility buried deep beneath the ground in the northeastern suburbs of Tehran since 2008.
The facility, known as "Lavizan-3," has been used for clandestine nuclear program research and development, as well as for enrichment with advanced IR-2m and IR-4 centrifuge machines, according to the resistance coalition.
Its claim was not immediately verifiable, and the dissident group has a controversial history in Washington. However, the group is thought to have deep sources inside Iran's nuclear community, and its members are credited with making game-changing revelations about Tehran's activities in the past.
The group said its latest claims were the result of a 10-year "detailed, risky and complex" intelligence gathering effort by members of the Mujahedin-e Khalq. The "MEK" is a main component of the coalition of resistance but has long drawn scrutiny in Washington because the State Department had listed it as a terrorist organization until 2012.
Although the MEK appears to be virulently opposed to the regime in Tehran, U.S. officials have said the group's terrorist listing was related to attacks its members carried out against U.S. interests in the Middle East decades ago.
The National Coalition of Resistance of Iran said Tuesday that MEK operatives have "highly placed sources within the Iranian regime as well as those involved in the nuclear weapons projects."
Iranian officials have long argued that their nuclear program is for purely peaceful and civilian purposes. The U.S. and its allies say Tehran has secretly tried to build a bomb in violation of orders from the U.N. Security Council, and Western powers for years have leveled economic sanctions and pursued a global embargo on Iranian oil.
The resistance coalition's accusations did not come up at either of Mr. Kerry's congressional hearings Tuesday.
Apart from Iran, the hearings covered a range of issues facing the Obama administration's foreign policy, including the Islamic State, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Cuba and the president's $50.3 billion budget request for the State Department and USAID through next year.
One key difference from the last fiscal year budget request is a $3.5 billion line item for State Department efforts - separate from those of the Pentagon - to counter the Islamic State.
Mr. Kerry took issue Tuesday with lawmakers who raised questions about the seriousness of the Obama administration's commitment to defeating the extremist group. "The president's goal is to degrade and destroy" the Islamic State forces, he said.
He defended comments from department spokeswoman Marie Harf citing the need for economic development and jobs for young people in the Middle East as part of the effort to combat terrorism.
"She never set out to say the solution is give them jobs," Mr. Kerry said. "She talked about a much broader array of things we have to do. And if we can't have a serious conversation about this, without politicizing it on cable TV and making it a scoring point for one day, we're in trouble."
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4) Scott Walker drives media to madness
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
As a member of the political press, I have to say, the media’s recent attempts at exposing Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker as an unsuitable presidential candidate have been nothing short of embarrassing.
If you were dropped into America from Mars — nay, Canada! — you’d have the distinct impression that we only elected amateur psychologists, who were required to peer into the soul of some guy named Barack Obama, who is not running for President in 2016. Let’s stop the madness.
Does Scott Walker believe that President Obama loves this country? Does he believe Obama is a Christian?
To the first, which was asked because another person who is not running for President said he does not, Walker answered, “the mayor can speak for himself.”
To the second he replied, “I don’t know,” which is apparently sacrilege, unless you are one of the many Democrats who have suggested outright that the President is not a Christian.
Walker went on to rightly and articulately condemn this question as absurd: “To me this is a classic example of why people hate Washington and increasingly they dislike the press. The things they care about don’t even remotely come close to what you’re asking about.”
Absolutely right.
Yet, the media is insisting, quite earnestly, that Walker’s answers to these questions that have nothing to do with policy or legislation ought to disqualify him from running for President.
No, really.
Dana Milbank, in the Washington Post: “What Scott Walker did ought to disqualify him as a serious presidential contender.”
Also, Walker’s answers to these insane questions somehow prove he’s lacking leadership.
MSNBC.com: “Scott Walker Faces Leadership Test, Fails.”
Democratic National Committee spokeswoman Holly Shulman: “Today, Walker has proven himself once again to be unfit to lead.”
Forget that Democrats for years suggested that George W. Bush was unpatriotic, racist, a religious zealot, a Nazi even! Forget that the Vice President has made numerous racially insensitive remarks for which no one (including Joe Biden) has been held accountable.
That these folks can say and write this stuff of a guy who is, for one thing, 18 months away from the 2016 elections, and for another a Governor who won three elections in four years, is something to marvel at. If only hyperventilating and hyperbole won Pulitzers.
But inexplicably, it’s not just the left that’s pushing the argument that Walker’s refusal to answer categorically absurd questions about the President’s inner psyche was somehow a mistake.
My friend and colleague Matt Lewis at the Daily Beast admitted the questions were “stupid,” but still insisted that “campaigns are crucibles, and if the last couple of days are a harbinger of things to come, he’s in trouble.”
With whom? Only the media care what Scott Walker thinks Obama thinks. Voters care about what Walker will do.
Joe Scarborough in Politico also agreed these questions were “inane,” but still offered advice to others to avoid Walker’s “unforced errors”:
“Don’t take the bait and do not appear to be questioning the president’s patriotism or faith.” Agreed! So how did Walker fail either of these tests, exactly?
And Republican strategist Dan Senor also warned the GOP field to avoid getting caught up in these strange discussions:
“The last thing we want is to be drawn into a psychoanalytical debate about what is in the president’s heart.” Exactly, so why should Walker have answered any differently?
What all these folks are actually suggesting is that Walker should have, in fact, not only psychoanalyzed the President but defended him as well, if only to quell the angry mob press.
Lewis thinks Walker should have said, “Yes the president is a Christian. His policies are bad.”
Scarborough wants Walker to have said, “I believe this president loves his country even if his policies are dangerously misguided.”
Senor wants Walker to have said, “I don’t challenge President Obama’s love for America; I challenge his agenda for America.”
There are good arguments that winning elections means playing the game, and I’m the first to admit that sometimes that means putting politics before principles.
But answering questions that have nothing to do with policy or legislation isn’t just playing the game — it concedes that these are appropriate things to discuss.
And when the questions are this far afield, this cartoonish, this ridiculous, Republicans and Democrats alike should commend a politician whose response is, like most of ours would be, “Huh?”
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