| From: LindyBill | 9/16/2007 8:39:36 AM | | | | | | 'History' Teacher Asks 14-Year-Olds to Renounce U.S. Citizenship
NEWSBUSTERS
By Warner Todd Huston | September 16, 2007 - 06:39 ET
Keep your eye out for this story. It has the potential to go big… IF the MSM will report it wider than just by the local paper that broke the story. But, since it is a story that once again reveals the anti-American propaganda so prevalent in our government funded schools, will it get the coverage it deserves?
One often hears that government schools in totalitarian nations brainwash their children to love the government. People in free nations decry that as oppressing the free will of innocent children, and rightly so. In American schools, however, just the opposite is true as with the case of an anti-American teacher in a public school in Chico, California who hates this country so much that he sent a letter home to his student's parents urging them to renounce their citizenship in the U.S. as he announced he was so doing.
Since the troubling work of the so-called progressives led by John Dewey that has resulted in the near destruction of our institutes of higher learning, American schools have been steadily undermining this country. For a long time, at least, it was isolated mostly in the Universities safely removed from our youngest and most vulnerable students. Now, this pernicious and self-loathing force is commonly seen in even our elementary and high schools all too often. Supposed "teachers" who so hate the United States, its culture, history and ideals that they are willing to cast aside any pretense of teaching and are going straight for political indoctrination of their own hate filled ideology appear everywhere you turn.
This is the case of yet another American hater, another Ward Churchillesque propagandist infesting an American public school, one paid for by public funds, who is advocating the destruction of the United States by teaching things antithetical to our nation.
"Teacher" Mike Brooks is teaching his 14-year-old, middle school children that the U.S. tortures people and that it is better to be a member of "the global community" than to be an American. He is so filled with hate against the U.S.A. that he even sent a letter home to his student's parents asking them to renounce their citizenship in the U.S.
Worse than this, the school's principal is so mindless that she is sticking up for this enemy to our country by saying she is sure Brooks "has no political agenda to advance." Clearly he does with his advocacy that his students turn against their own country.
Parent Michael Hill of Chico tells reporters, "The lesson being taught in class was that the U.S. kidnaps innocent people and takes them to Cuba, where they are kept indefinitely and tortured."
Hill went on to say that his daughter, "broke into tears when she talked about Brooks mentioning illegal wiretaps and other surveillance directed against innocent people."
The letter this propagandist for unAmerican ideologies sent out re-imagined the Declaration of Independence in "modern language" and ended with the teacher's postscript renouncing his citizenship in the U.S.
"After careful consideration of the facts of our current situation, I have decided to announce to everyone that I am no longer a citizen of the United States, but a free and independent member of the global community," it read.
Then he insisted that parents sign this letter so that his children may return it to his classroom. Many of the children felt pressured into having their parents sign it, though this purported teacher claims he meant only to start a "discussion."
I would suggest to the Chico, California schools system that they allow this "independent member of the global community" to go find a job in a Madrassa somewhere where his hate-America ideology will be welcomed with open arms and where he will not have his truly wasted salary paid for by the tax payers of the country he so hates.
This story can be added to another recent and outrageous one from Sampson County, North Carolina. There a local High School banned the U.S. flag from being displayed on articles of clothing. In true, mindless "zero tolerance" style, the U.S. flag was banned along with that of any other nation because too many Mexican kids were wearing Mexican flag items to school.
Not only are schools anti-American, but they are filled with gutless and stupid administrators, as well. Here the U.S. flag was banned so that administrators who "didn't want to be forced to pick and choose which flags should be permissible," could get away from having to make a decision.
That one would have been easy for a true American. Ban ALL but the U.S. flag. This IS America, after all. Fortunately, the ban was later rescinded but the only thing that changed the minds of the weak spined administrators in North Carolina was the monumentally bad publicity the story raised for them. If no one had reported on this one, the ban would still be in place and our own children would not be able to show their love for the flag of the very country in which they live.
Sadly, stories like this are not isolated and few. They happen every day throughout the country. Our government schools are failures through and through and should be dismantled. Instead of places of learning, they have become dens of the unAmerican left skulking around and undermining the very nature of these United States by teaching our children to hate their country. Parents should make themselves very aware of the indoctrination being foisted upon our children and stories like this sound a clarion call for change.
Vouchers are a start, but the elimination of the teacher's unions is about the only thing that will begin to fix this problem. Add to that the elimination of Federal funding and a return to local control and we may yet refashion our schools into places to which we would no longer be afraid to send our children.
And where is the media to highlight these stories? Why are they only reported by small, unnoticed, local papers? Where are the national rags, the cable channels and the TV newsers?
Seemingly more interested in O.J. Simpson and Britney Spears sad to say.
newsbusters.org |
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| From: LindyBill | 9/16/2007 8:45:50 AM | | | | | | The Disappearing Jihadi
September 16th, 2007 Posted By Pat Dollard.
WAPO:
The number of foreign fighters entering Iraq from Syria has decreased noticeably in recent months, corresponding to a similar decrease in suicide bombings and other attacks by the group al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to U.S. military and intelligence officials.
"There is an early indication of a trend," said Gen. David H. Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq, in an interview. Border crossings from Syria that averaged 80 to 90 a month have fallen to "half or two-thirds of that over the last two or three months," Petraeus said.
An intelligence official said that "the Syrians do appear to be mounting a crackdown on some of the most hardened terrorists transiting through the country, particularly al-Qaeda-affiliated foreign fighters." The official, who was not authorized to speak on the record, said there is also evidence that the Syrians have been stopping return crossings by foreign fighters leaving Iraq.
Other administration officials, while confirming the decrease in border crossings, said they are not yet prepared to attribute it to Syrian action, instead citing increased U.S. operations against al-Qaeda inside Iraq and stepped-up cooperation by terrorist "source" countries, such as Saudi Arabia, in prohibiting travel to Damascus. U.S. intelligence has said Saudis form the biggest group of foreigners fighting with al-Qaeda in Iraq. Petraeus also said his command is uncertain of the reason for the decrease, adding that "we're watching it on the ground."
A National Intelligence Estimate last month attributed an apparent crackdown in Syria to that government's concern about the threat al-Qaeda posed to its own stability. The NIE also assessed that Syria had stepped up its support to non-al-Qaeda groups to bolster their influence — and that of Damascus — in Iraq. Several Iraqi Sunni extremist groups opposed to the United States and al-Qaeda in Iraq are present in Damascus.
The Bush administration has said that interference from Iran and Syria helped spark and continues to fuel much of the sectarian violence in Iraq. Iran is charged with training, arming and funding Shiite militias. The al-Qaeda in Iraq organization, which largely consists of Iraqi Sunnis, is said to be led by foreigners whose primary route into Iraq is through Syria. Syria is also believed by U.S. officials to be the primary route for foreign terrorists moving out of Iraq to return to their home countries in Arab countries, Europe and North Africa.
Nascent U.S. diplomatic dialogues with Damascus and Tehran, begun last spring after demands by war critics and the Iraqi government, have been judged unproductive by the White House.
Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem met in May with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the highest level contact between the two governments in more than three years. The meeting, held in Egypt, took place in the context of a conference between Iraq and its regional neighbors and was also attended by the European Union and the permanent five members of the U.N. Security Council.
Although Rice did not sit down with her Iranian counterpart, the conference led to two meetings this summer between the U.S. and Iranian ambassadors to Baghdad. But there has been no similar high-profile follow-through between Washington and Damascus. Last month, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who spent years of exile in Syria during the Iraqi governance of Saddam Hussein, visited Damascus for several days. U.S. officials also participated last month in a meeting in Damascus of a regional committee formed to address Iraqi refugee and border issues. An estimated 1 million Iraqis have fled to Syria to escape violence.
Rice plans to attend a second neighbors conference at the end of October in Istanbul, but U.S. policymakers have made no decision on whether they would seek or agree to another high-level meeting with Syria. "We haven't ruled it out yet," an administration official said. "I could speculate that if the end of October came and the numbers of suicide bombers had really dropped significantly and people . . . came to the conclusion there really had been a change in [Syrian] policy, that would give us every reason to have a meeting."
Just as it does with Iran, which the United States alleges is working toward production of a nuclear weapon, U.S. policy toward Syria is to separate Iraq-related issues from other points of contention.
The United States has labeled Syria a state sponsor of terrorism because of its support for Lebanese Hezbollah and other groups designated as terrorists. Washington and others have accused Syria of direct involvement in the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri in Beirut, a charge Damascus denies.
The U.N. Security Council voted last May to establish an international tribunal to prosecute suspects in the Hariri bombing, which also killed 22 others. Early this month, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said he will appoint the tribunal judges as soon as U.N. member nations allocate $35 million to fund the tribunal's operations for the first year and pledge an additional $85 million for the following two years.
Meanwhile, the White House and State Department have declined to confirm or deny recent reports that North Korea may be assisting Syria with a possible nuclear program. Although one State Department official said Friday that Washington has concerns in that direction, other officials expressed skepticism that North Korea would be conducting nuclear trade with Syria.
patdollard.com |
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| From: LindyBill | 9/16/2007 8:47:23 AM | | | | | | One Mean and Nasty War
Massachusetts tough talk.
By Mark Steyn
This year I marked the anniversary of September 11th by driving through Massachusetts. It wasn’t exactly planned that way, just the way things panned out. So, heading toward Boston, I tuned to Bay State radio colossus Howie Carr and heard him reading out portions from the official address to the 9/11 commemoration ceremony by Deval Patrick, who is apparently the governor of Massachusetts. 9/11, said Governor Patrick, “was a mean and nasty and bitter attack on the United States.”
“Mean and nasty”? He sounds like an over-sensitive waiter complaining that John Kerry’s sent back the aubergine coulis again. But evidently that’s what passes for tough talk in Massachusetts these days — the shot heard around the world and so forth. Anyway, Governor Patrick didn’t want to leave the crowd with all that macho cowboy rhetoric ringing in their ears, so he moved on to the nub of his speech: 9/11, he continued, “was also a failure of human beings to understand each other, to learn to love each other.”
I was laughing so much I lost control of the wheel and the guy in the next lane had to swerve rather dramatically. He flipped me the Universal Symbol of Human Understanding. I certainly understood him, though I’m not sure I could learn to love him. Anyway I drove on to Boston and pondered the governor’s remarks. He had made them, after all, before an audience of 9/11 families: Six years ago, two of the four planes took off from Logan Airport, and so citizens of Massachusetts ranked very high among the toll of victims. Whether or not any of the family members present last Tuesday were offended by Governor Patrick, no-one cried “Shame!” or walked out on the ceremony. Americans are generally respectful of their political eminences, no matter how little they deserve it.
We should beware anyone who seeks to explain 9/11 by using the words “each other”: They posit a grubby equivalence between the perpetrator and the victim — that the “failure to understand” derives from the culpability of both parties. The 9/11 killers were treated very well in the United States: They were ushered into the country on the high-speed visa express program the State Department felt was appropriate for young Saudi males. They were treated cordially everywhere they went. The lapdancers at the clubs they frequented in the weeks before the Big Day gave them a good time — or good enough, considering what lousy tippers they were. September 11th didn’t happen because we were insufficient in our love to Mohammed Atta.
This isn’t a theoretical proposition. At some point in the future, some of us will find ourselves on a flight with a chap like Richard Reid, the thwarted shoebomber. On that day we’d better hope the guy sitting next to him isn’t Governor Patrick, who sees him bending down to light his sock and responds with a chorus of “All You Need Is Love,” but a fellow who “understands” enough to wallop the bejasus out of him before he can strike the match. It was the failure of one group of human beings to understand that the second group of human beings was determined to kill them that led to the crew and passengers of those Boston flights sticking with the obsolescent 1970s hijack procedures until it was too late.
Unfortunately the obsolescent 1970s multiculti love-groove inclinations of society at large are harder to dislodge. If you’ll forgive such judgmental categorizations, this isn’t about “them,” it’s about “us.” The long-term survival of any society depends on what proportion of its citizens thinks as Governor Patrick does. Islamism is an opportunist enemy but you can’t blame them for seeing the opportunity: in that sense, they understand us far more clearly than Governor Patrick understands them. The other day, you may recall, some larky lads were arrested in Germany. Another terrorist plot. Would have killed more people than Madrid and London combined but it was nipped in the bud so it’s just another yawneroo: Nobody cares. Who were the terrorists? Mohammed? Muhammad? Mahmoud? No. Their names were “Fritz” and “Daniel,” “Fritz,” huh? That’s a pretty unusual way to spell Mohammed.
Indeed. Fritz Gelowicz is as German as lederhosen. He’s from Ulm, Einstein’s birthplace, on the blue Danube, which, last time I was in Ulm, was actually a murky shade of green. And, in an excellent jest on western illusions, Fritz was converted to Islam while attending the Multi-Kultur-Haus – the Multicultural House. It was, in fact, avowedly unicultural – an Islamic center run by a jihadist imam. At least three of its alumni – including another native German convert – have been killed fighting the Russians in Chechnya. Fritz was hoping to kill Americans. But that’s one of the benefits of a multicultural world: There are so many fascinating diverse cultures and most of them look best reduced to rubble strewn with body parts. Fritz and a pal, Atilla Selek, had previously been arrested in 2004 with a car full of pro-Osama propaganda praising the 9/11 attacks. Which sounds like a pilot for a wacky jihadist sitcom: Atilla And The Hun.
Fritz Gelowicz. Richard Reid. The Australian factory worker Jack Roche. The Toronto jihadists plotting to behead the Prime Minister. The son of the British Conservative Party official with the splendidly Wodehousian double-barreled name. All over the world there are young men raised in the “Multi-Kultur Haus” of the west who decide their highest ambition is to convert to Islam, become a jihadist and self-detonate.
Why do radical imams seek to convert young Canadian, British and even American men and women in their late teens and twenties? Because they understand that when you raise a generation in the great wobbling blancmange of Deval Patrick cultural relativism – nothing is any better or any worse than anything else; if people are “mean and nasty” to us, it’s only because we didn’t sing enough Barney the Dinosaur songs at them – in such a world a certain percentage of its youth will have a great gaping hole where their sense of identity should be. And into that hole you can pour something fierce and primal and implacable.
A while back, I had the honor of a meeting with the president, in the course of which someone raised the unpopularity of the war. He shrugged it off, saying that 25 percent of the population is always against the war — any war. In other words, there’s nothing worth fighting for. And I joked afterwards that some of that 25 percent might change their mind if Canadian storm troopers were swarming across the 49th Parallel or Bahamian warships were firing off the coast of Florida. But maybe not. Al Qaeda’s ad hoc air force left a huge crater of Massachusetts corpses in the middle of Manhattan, and Governor Patrick goes looking for love in all the wrong places.
How many people in any society think like Deval Patrick? That’s the calculation to make if you want to figure out its long-term survival prospects.
National Review Online - article.nationalreview.com |
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| To: KLP who wrote (219870) | 9/16/2007 9:07:08 AM | | From: Geoff Altman | | | | It's funded by some of our favorite groups of people, patriotic Americans all, firmly entrenched in our Jacksonian values...<gg>:
ANSWER characterizes itself as anti-imperialist, and its steering committee consists of socialists, Marxists, civil rights advocates, and left-wing progressive organizations from the Muslim, Arab, Palestinian, Filipino, Haitian, and Latin American communities. |
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| From: LindyBill | 9/16/2007 9:09:27 AM | | | | | | No War For Oil?
DAILY PUNDIT
By Bill Quick on Islamofascism
Alan Greenspan claims Iraq war was really for oil - Times Online
"in his long-awaited memoir, to be published tomorrow, Greenspan, a Republican whose 18-year tenure as head of the US Federal Reserve was widely admired, will also deliver a stinging critique of President George W Bush's economic policies.
However, it is his view on the motive for the 2003 Iraq invasion that is likely to provoke the most controversy. "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil," he says.
Greenspan, 81, is understood to believe that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to the security of oil supplies in the Middle East."
i hope he's right. And defending US energy supplies is not the worst reason to go to war I've ever heard. Keep in mind this is a bit different rationale than the leftist antiwarriors offer. It wasn't a matter of "stealing" Saddam's oil - there was no need to do that, since the US could simply have bought it from Saddam on the open market a hell of a lot more cheaply than invading Iraq for it. It was a matter of preventing Saddam from gaining nuclear weapons, and then taking control of Kuwaiti and Saudi oil, and conceivably Iranian oil as well. That would have precipitated an energy crisis for the entire western world, not just the US, although from the craven assumptions of the Euros - that they could deal with the devil Saddam even if he did have them simultaneously by the throat and the balls - made it seem as if they didn't think he was a threat.
That said, I've long assumed that Saudi fear of the Iraqi threat was a, if not the, prime mover behind Bush's decision to make Saddam target number one after Afghanistan. If that is the case, perhaps Saudi fear of a nuclear Iran in control of Iraq will lead them to pressure Bush to take out the Mullahs before he leaves office.
Then the next President can take on the Oilbags and the Wahabbist serpent they nurture in their, um, bosoms. |
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| From: LindyBill | 9/16/2007 9:57:20 AM | | | | | | The Sunday Paper (Repackaged Edition)
DEFENSE TECH BLOG
This is somewhat redundant, and for that I apologize, but here's how The Washington Post covered my meeting with the President in today's edition:
"President Reaches Out to a Friendly Circle in New Media
By Michael Abramowitz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 16, 2007; A07
The day after his prime-time speech on Iraq, President Bush sat down for a round-table interview not with traditional White House reporters but with bloggers who focus on military issues, including two participating by video link from Baghdad.
Judging from some of the accounts of the Friday meeting, the president offered up little news. Here is what one of the 10 bloggers, Ward Carroll of Military.com, described from his notes as some of Bush's most notable comments:
• "This strategy is my strategy."
• "I'm defining a horizon of peace."
• "I don't mind people attacking me. . . . That's politics . . . but I do mind people impugning the integrity of our generals."
Still, the hour-long meeting in the Roosevelt Room offered Bush another opportunity to break through what he sees as the filter of the traditional news media, while also reaching out to the providers of a new source of information for soldiers, their families and others who follow the conflict in Iraq closely.
"More and more we are engaging in the new-media world, and these are influential people who have a big following," said Kevin F. Sullivan, the White House communications chief.
Bush told the group that, to his knowledge, it was the first time a president had met with bloggers for a chat at the White House, one of the participants wrote. The blogs represented at the meeting are generally pro-Bush and pro-military, and the ensuing reports were highly sympathetic to the president.
"At this meeting President Bush came off as more comfortable with the message than I've seen him appear on TV or in speeches," wrote Carroll, a journalist and former Navy pilot. "No deer-in-the-headlights stuff here. Truly unwavering and passionate. Facts on the ground notwithstanding, he believes the United States can win the Iraq War. And to be honest, being around him made me believe it at that moment too."
Matthew Burden, a former Army officer who blogs under the name Blackfive, raved about how Bush slapped his hand and called him "brutha."
"The President was very intelligent, razor sharp, warm, focused, emotional (especially about his dad), and genuine," Blackfive wrote. "Even more so than this cynical Chicago Boy expected. I was overwhelmed by the sincerity -- it wasn't staged."
Bill Ardolino, who participated from Baghdad, wrote on indcjournal.com that he asked Bush about progress in Anbar province and Fallujah and that Bush's answer "honestly surprised me in its length, level of detail and grasp of events on the ground."
Bush told Ardolino: "The military can only do so much. There has to be follow-up with jobs and hope. We recognize that the man on the street needs to feel like his government cares about him."
Bush talked about the difficulty of setting up workable bureaucratic processes in Iraq, according to Ardolino's post, and the growing pains "that this society needs to go through" to achieve stability. "We shouldn't expect instant results with a society that was brutalized by Saddam Hussein," Bush told the group.
When it was all over, the bloggers seemed wowed. "All in all, it was an amazing day for Military.com and one I'll never forget," Carroll wrote. "In fact, I'd rank the event a close second to the time I sat in with Cheap Trick. It was that good."
-- Ward
defensetech.org |
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| To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (219878) | 9/16/2007 10:43:01 AM | | From: Geoff Altman | | | | The Israelis figured out how to jam it?
My forte was ASW not ECM so I'd have to talk to Hawkmoon my military advisor....<g> I do know that the travelling wave tube was a huge boon to ECM and the general tactics used to jam radar.
To tell you the truth Nadine, I must have read the chapter on TWTs 15 times and never really grasped it, just never clicked, Thank God they never asked me any theory questions about it on my rating exams...<g>:
sdphca.ucsd.edu
I've yet to hear of a radar that can't be jammed if you can deduce what type of radar it is.... I wouldn't doubt that Israel has an exact road map of radars in Syria. Those to avoid on the entrance and egress and those to jam at the target. |
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| From: Mr. Palau | 9/16/2007 10:55:59 AM | | | | | | "You have an unpopular President going onto prime time television, interrupting Americans' TV programs, to remind them of why they don't like him."
-- A "frustrated Capitol Hill Republican strategist with ties to the G.O.P. leadership," quoted by Time magazine, on President Bush's recent address on Iraq.
politicalwire.com |
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| To: Snowshoe who wrote (219877) | 9/16/2007 11:02:30 AM | | From: ManyMoose | | | | Charlie Russell knew the west. His art depicts action as though he were able to clip a single frame out of a movie.
Other artists, Frederick Remington for example, did almost as well, but I think Russell is incomparable.
Some artists, like Karl Bodmer, painted Native Americans in their actual dress and habitat. His paintings are faithful to detail but lack the power of Russell's, in my opinion. However, we owe a lot to him for capturing an ephemeral moment in history with paintings such as this one.
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