Republicans. They are past the stage of no return.
Since President Obama took office, Republicans have been on a rampage trying to prove the impossible, that President Obama was born somewhere else, any where else than right here in the good ole US of A!. They even created a name for themselves – The Birthers! And although the President has provided both his short form and long form United States birth certificate – an apparent requirement now that this particular president is in office – these Republicans are still convinced that the birth of the President in the state of Hawaii did not happen.
So on goes the clown car.
One of the brains in the party has taken it upon himself to start a petition to deport the president, my guess is they want to deport him back to the land of his birth – Hawaii!
The 20 page petition was started by Larry Klayman, founder of the conservative group Judicial Watch, the same man who now heads Freedom Watch. Klayman submitted his deportation petition to the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement because, they obviously have nothing better to do with their time than to cater to the willfully ignorant.
Without any proof whatsoever, the Republican brain Klayman argues in his petition that the Birth Certificate the president produced from Hawaii was fake. He also contends that the President’s Social Security number is also fake. Again, no proof necessary, just a petition based on nothing but his words, his hate and his emotional state of mind, (and you thought Republicans had no emotions).
Barack Hussein Obama has relied upon a birth certificate from the State of Hawaii which is clearly a forgery — that is, not a valid birth certificate — and indeed also a rather sloppy forgery with easily-detected, unmistakable errors and defects.
It is a fair inference that Barack Hussein Obama would not have relied throughout his life upon a forged birth certificate if a genuine birth certificate showing a live birth in U.S. territory existed. No one would present a birth certificate that document analysis exposes to be a forgery if they could just as easily present their actual, genuine birth certificate. As a result, claims that an undisclosed birth certificate exists and a more recent document must face serious credibility questions as to why a forgery was being used — a crime and document fraud under the Immigration and Naturalization Act (INA) — unnecessarily…
The irony is, these Birther folks calling for the President’s deportation, are the same ones who will happily cast their vote for Ted Cruz. Cruz, a potential Republican presidential candidate for the 2016 election, was actually born in Calgary Canada. That is another country, and is listed on his birth certificate as his place of birth. But Republicans consider Cruz okay because, he’s a Republican and although he is of minority descent, he looks the part. His color is passable.
Yep! These Republicans have passed the point of no return indeed!
After two weeks of student protests and a fierce backlash across Colorado and beyond, the Jefferson County School Board backed away from a proposal to teach students the “benefits of the free enterprise system, respect for authority and respect for individual rights,” while avoiding lessons that condoned “civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law.”
So far, so good. The students and staff did a masterful job leading a peaceful protest against the proposed alterations and even shut two high schools down with a sickout last week. This paragraph ends, however, with a rather chilling sentence:
But the board did vote 3-to-2 to reorganize its curriculum-review committee to include students, teachers and board-appointed community members.
Which is then followed by the hammer blow:
The Jefferson County schools superintendent, Dan McMinimee, who suggested the compromise, said it represented the “middle ground” in a fevered debate that pitted the board’s three conservative members against students, parents, the teachers’ union and other critics who opposed the effort to steer lessons toward the “positive aspects of the United States and its heritage.”
You see, the dispute has not been solved. The Superintendent and the conservatives have merely made their viewpoint a position that needs to be debated and taken seriously as an opening gambit in a larger attack on public school curricula. The other side, which includes students, educators and parents, now has to come up with a counter-argument for a discussion that doesn’t have a counter-argument. Cutting out events you don’t like or that don’t satisfy your agenda is not how history should be taught. There is no “middle ground” when it comes to school boards injecting politics into what’s taught in the classroom.
Even worse, the school board made this decision originally without the input of teachers, who should be the first ones consulted on any change to the curriculum, and the larger community, which clearly opposes the board’s agenda.
There is a larger issue at work here that’s operating under the radar of many citizens. There has been a heady debate over the past 10 to 15 years in education about whether the curriculum should focus more on teaching students skills or academic content. The Common Core Curriculum Standards and the Advanced Placement curriculum that’s the basis of the Colorado argument, have sided demonstrably on the side of skills. The reasoning is that if students are taught how to conduct research, write coherent essays, solve equations and theorems, and apply experimental designs to scientific problems, then they will be able to use those skills for any educational endeavor. After all, the argument goes, middle and high school teachers are not training historians or mathematicians or research scientists.
I beg, humbly, to differ.
I’m a content guy. I can teach anyone how to structure an essay or to read a historical document and apply step-by-step analyses that will render a deeper understanding of its message, and the over 3,000 students, now adults, who have been in my classroom over the past 30 years can attest to my abilities and their growth. But if you don’t have the knowledge, the “conceptual capital,” as my former Rutgers University Graduate School Professor Wayne Hoy used to say at every turn, then you got…nothing. I am training budding historians because students need to see how history is written and debated and for that they need a detailed body of evidence, facts, conjecture and sources that will allow them to debate, judge, interpret and synthesize what they’ve learned. THEN, they can write an essay with a specific and relevant thesis and support their assertions with solid historical evidence. The same goes for every academic discipline. Unfortunately, the trend is towards skills at the expense of content.
A colleague and I wrote the new Advanced Placement United States History curriculum this past summer and I am now teaching my school’s two section of that AP class. The College Board, which administers the AP program, has done a fine job re-imagining much of the new course. It’s broken down into historical themes and focuses on the requisites skills that historians need to use to decipher the meaning of the past. There are content outlines that divide U.S. History into nine historical periods and tests that use documents and sources as the basis for evaluation and assessment.
At an AP seminar my colleague attended last spring, though, the leader could not adequately answer the question of what content knowledge the students would need to master in order to score well on the AP test. The best he could say was that students would need to know the usual facts. I think if you put 20 history educators in a room they could give you a rough outline of what the usual facts are, but this is the AP. They should be more specific. And the reason they can’t be more specific is that the skills have won.
So how does that relate back to Jefferson County, Colorado, or any other mischief-making school board that wants to create more patriotic children who avoid conflicts and always respect authority (remember, we’re talking teenagers here)? According to the article above, the AP has warned Jefferson County not to alter the curriculum because if they did then they can’t call it Advanced Placement, but in the end, that won’t matter. Why? Because now the content can be subtly manipulated to reflect anyone’s agenda. When content and facts matter less, what people are actually taught can be chopped, rearranged or simply dropped while skills are used to fill the void. That’s the danger, and as a nation, we have embarked on a new educational paradigm that will result in the striking contradiction of students practicing more, but learning less.
The Common Core makes the same skills-based assumption, and for me, that’s a far more dangerous problem than the time lost for testing or the fear of the federal government injecting itself into state education standards. I cannot abide the thought of a generation schooled on how to perform tasks, but taught less content with which to provide context or relevance. We need to create analytical thinkers who know a specific body of knowledge. Then we can teach skills.
Coming off another positive economic report for the month of September that resulted in the unemployment rate falling yet again to 5.9 percent, President Obama continued the message of a prosperous middle class in his weekly address.
Mitt Romney, whose name keeps popping up as a possible three-time presidential candidate, would be wise to read legally binding documents before signing them, as demonstrated by a Utah voter-registration gaffe that appeared to have him shunning his Republican Party for independent status and using a home address he couldn’t legally claim since 2009.
The suspect voter-registration form popped up in Summit County, where County Clerk Kent Jones provided it Thursday to The Salt Lake Tribune in response to a public-records request.
A copy of the form shows Romney’s signature with his old address listed in two places beside warnings that providing false information on the registration document is a misdemeanor violation of Utah law.
It turns out Romney, who is moving to Utah as a full-time resident, strolled into a driver license office in late August to obtain his Utah license and filled out paperwork to register to vote at his under-construction home in Holladay, a suburb of Salt Lake City. But, apparently because of outdated information in the agency’s database, the pre-printed form listed Romney’s former Park City address on Rising Star Lane and with no party affiliation. Romney signed it.
A man posing as a member of Congress made his way backstage at an event the president attended.
According to Bloomberg, the unidentified man said he was a congressmen and was allowed in a secured area where other members of Congress got their pictures taken with the president. The incident happened at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation awards dinner in Washington Sept. 27, according to a White House official.
The unidentified man said he was Representative Donald Payne Jr., a Democrat from New Jersey, the official said. One member of the White House staff determined that the man wasn’t Payne, and another asked him to leave, the official said. He did so without incident and wasn’t detained.
Watch Republicans find a way to somehow say this is bad for the economy.
In September, the economy added another 248,000 jobs, lowering the unemployment rate to 5.9 percent according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and creating even more headaches for Republicans.
BLU stated that the number of unemployed persons decreased by 329,000 to 9.3 million. The White House noted that America’s businesses extended the longest streak of private-sector job gains on record. The data underscore that six years after the Great Recession—thanks to the hard work of the American people and in part to the policies the President has pursued—our economy has bounced back more strongly than most others around the world.
She worked three jobs at three different Dunkin Donuts in New Jersey, trying to survive and pay her $550 a month rent. According to her landlady, Maria’s rent payments were often late.
Working three jobs meant Maria was hardly ever home. She took naps in her car between shifts and at 6am on August 25th, after finishing up one of her shifts, Maria got into her car heading to her next job. She had another shift at another location and during a brief conversation with her boyfriend that morning, Maria told him she was going to pull over for a nap.
She pulled into the parking lot of a Wawa convenience store and reclined her seat. It was the last moments of her life. Maria was found dead in her car, foaming from the mouth.
Maria’s story is detailed in a report by the New York Times, and according to the report, Maria always slept in her car with the engine running. Her biggest fear, the report says, was waking up and realizing that she had no gas left after sleeping with the engine running. So she bought a container, filled it with gas and stored it in her car.
Her boyfriend cautioned her about storing gas in her car, but waking up and realizing that she had no gas was something she had to avoid. No gas meant she couldn’t get to work and not working a shift at one of her three jobs was out if the question.
Surveillance cameras at the Wawa convenience store picked up the images of the 32-year-old woman, dressed in her Dunkin Donuts uniform and driving her 2001 Kia Sportage, pulling into the parking lot at 6:27am.
A Wawa employee, on his way to work, noticed Ms. Fernandes about an hour later. She was lying motionless in her S.U.V., which was parked behind the store, police records show. He said he thought she was sleeping and went inside.
When he finished his shift around 3:30 p.m., the Wawa employee noticed that Ms. Fernandes was still there. This time, though, she was foaming at the mouth. His manager called 911.
Emergency responders found the gas can open and overturned in the cargo hold and the S.U.V. filled with fumes, in what police said appeared to have been an accident. As commuters streamed by her counter in Newark, Ms. Fernandes was pronounced dead at 5:56 p.m. She was still in her uniform.
Maria’s story is unfortunate, but not exclusive. Republicans who are trying to end Obamacare and other social programs designed to help the poor, and those trying to fight any raise in the minimum wage, are all contributors to stories like Maria’s.
If nothing else happens from the murder of Mike Brown by police officer Darren Wilson, at least one thing’s for sure. Ferguson residents are finally realizing where their true power lies, in their vote. And their voter registration drive since the shooting is admirable.
Of the 4,839 people in St. Louis County who have registered to vote since the shooting, 3,287 are residents of Ferguson — a city with a population of 21,203, according to the last census.
The city’s population is predominantly African-American, yet most of its elected representatives and a vast majority of its police force are white.
“It’s a great move when people come out and register in mass like that,” St. Louis 3rd Ward Committeeman Anthony Bell said, according to USA Today. “They are sending a signal that we want a change. It doesn’t give justice to the Michael Brown family but it will in the future give justice to how the administration is run in a local municipality like Ferguson.”
Anthony Gray, an attorney who represents Brown’s family, said citizens of Ferguson could enact real change come the November elections.
“It could completely change the political landscape, the power structure, (and) the decision making,” he told USA Today. “The service to the African American community would almost quadruple because they would be viewed as a credible and legitimate voting block.”
Chris Matthews is a very smart man. That said, why does he have such a hard time understanding the difference between the words “unlikely” and “impossible?”
Over the last few days I’ve watched in amazement as the host of MSNBC’s Hardball blows his lid over and over again trying to grasp the difference between the two words. And so far, no luck.
It’s about the one confirmed case if Ebola in this country. When the CDC held a news conference on Tuesday acknowledging that a man in Dallas was in isolation because he had the disease, Matthews started his show with a clip of President Obama saying it was highly “unlikely” that Ebola would come to our shores. And Matthews has been hung up on that word ever since.
His unfortunate guests have received the brunt of Matthews criticism of the President as he asked them, no demanded, that they explain why Mr. Obama used the word “unlikely” if there is a confirmed case of Ebola in Texas. And in typical Matthews fashion, his guests rarely ever get the chance to explain because Matthews keeps on talking.
“Why would he say that?” Matthews asked, evidence of confusion branded across his forehead as he impatiently listened for an answer. Then seconds later as a guest ventured to answer, Matthews will continue on his tirade.
“He said this was ‘unlikely’ that Ebola would come to America. Why would this president make such a statement?” Matthews would then cap off his confusion with, “we are now living in the world of the unlikely.”
But on yesterday’s show, one guest came close to explaining the difference to Matthews, that saying something was unlikely doesn’t mean it was impossible. Dr. Anthony Fauci was one of the guests yesterday and he tried to shed some light on the two words.
“How does the president two weeks ago say that something like this was “unlikely” to happen?” Chris asked the Doctor, then he continued, “he said that it would be unlikely. It isn’t unlikely, it happened!”
The doctor tried to explain. “Well, you can be unlikely Chris and still happen. It is unlikely, but in fact, it isn’t impossible. And that’s what happened.”
Chris Matthews continued, still not getting the difference.
“But how can you tell the American people don’t worry, it’s unlikely, and it just happened? You can’t keep saying it’s unlikely if it’s happened, can you?
The doctor tried again, “well again, it depends on what you mean. It’s still an unlikely situation that someone will get through. It’s still unlikely.”
Chris moved on to the next guest.
Again, Chris Matthews is a smart man, but he is tripping himself up on something that is so simple, a two year old would understand.
Unlikely and impossible are two different words Chris. One word means there is a chance, the other means there is no chance. When the president used the word “unlikely,” stop thinking that meant impossible.
The decision to quit was probably the best decision the former director of the Secret Service has made since accepting the job as Secret Service Director. Julia Pierson is finally out!
U.S. Secret Service Director Julia Pierson resigned under fire on Wednesday after a series of security lapses came to light that exposed gaping holes in the protective cocoon around President Barack Obama.
Pierson, in her position for just 18 months, faced mounting calls from lawmakers to step down in the fallout from a Sept. 19 incident in which an Iraq war veteran with a knife scaled the White House fence, sprinted across the lawn and got deep inside the mansion before an off-duty agent stopped him.
Pierson had told a congressional committee on Tuesday she took “full responsibility” for gaps in presidential security. On Wednesday, she offered her resignation in a meeting with Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, who accepted it.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Obama believed Pierson’s resignation was in the best interest of the agency, and that “recent and accumulating” reports of security lapses led the president to conclude new leadership was required at the Secret Service.
If you can’t do the job, then stop wasting everyone’s time and money, and stop putting the lives of the First Family in your incompetent hands. Over the last few years, our once respected Secret Service Agency has plummeted to something that is now the joke of the town in a very scary way. Something has to change, and that change should start at the top!
“The president is not well-served. … I think this lady has to go – Ms. Pierson,” the committee’s top Democrat, Rep. Elijah Cummings, reportedly said during a radio interview on NewsOneNow Wednesday, the day after Pierson testified before the committee. “There has to be drastic changes.”
In another interview on MSNBC, he said that he does not “feel comfortable” with her at the head of the agency.
“I have come to the conclusion that my confidence and my trust in this director, Ms. Pierson, has eroded. And I do not feel comfortable with her in that position,” Cummings said.
An aide to Cummings later said that Cummings and Pierson spoke Wednesday morning and he told her “if she can’t restore the public’s trust in the agency – and in particular address the cultural issues so agents feel comfortable raising security concerns to their higher-ups – then of course she should not be in that position.”
“After yesterday’s hearing, and after new revelations last night, the Congressman’s trust is eroding, and he believes there needs to be an independent review of the agency,” the Cummings aide said.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-California, told reporters Wednesday that she will follow Cummings’ recommendation if he ultimately calls for Pierson’s resignation.
Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, who has been deeply involved in investigating the Secret Service, told Bloomberg News, “The president should fire her or at least she should resign.”
I can understand and accept the first layer of White Hpuse security being breached and maybe on a good day, maybe the second layer as well.
But the third, the fourth and the fifth layers being overcome by one man is not only impossible to even imagine, it shows a negligence by the Secret Service in doing their most basic job – to protect the First Family and the White House.
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