Garmmur Nazis Can Jump off A Clift
October 12, 2008 | Filed Under Democrats/Leftists, Education, News, Publius Contributor, Society/Culture, Warner Todd Huston | No Comments
-By Warner Todd Huston
The Internet suffers from both extreme ends of the same problem: grammar. Specifically, bad grammar. At the top I will absolutely admit that I am no king of grammar, no Grammy winning grammarian, so sometimes I misspell a word, or misplace a comma. Consequently, I am not coming to this argument as a grammar Nazi. On the other hand, I am not arguing the case of laze faire writing, either. I firmly believe that grammar is very important and every writer should strive to observe those rules and that those who lack adherence to them harm their credibility.
The web and electronic communications — such as email and texting — has had a baleful influence on grammar. Specifically, this annoying cell phone texting business, for instance, is a travesty for the English language. Far from being the next evolution, it is a monumental step backwards. Purposeful misspelling, awful shorthand, and a penchant for completely dispensing with punctuation characterizes this bastardization of the language. This sort of pigeon English finds its way onto the web in a myriad of ways. From blog postings and comments sections to the MySpace and FaceBook pages, the mangled idioms abound. Add the fact that our schools are universally failing to teach students how to write clearly and we get a veritable doomsday for the written language.
Coming upon a webpage with multiple misspellings, incorrect usage, nonexistent punctuation, and other grammatical errors makes one imagine right off the top that the person responsible for the webpage is a complete moron. And, if they aren’t, it sure makes dismissing what they are trying to communicate awfully easy to do.
Long Depression was FDR’s Fault
October 7, 2008 | Filed Under Communism, Democrats/Leftists, Economy/Finances, Education, Foreign Policy, Media Bias, News, President, Publius Contributor, Socialism, Society/Culture, Taxes, Warner Todd Huston | 4 Comments
-By Warner Todd Huston
I have for years been saying that Franklin D. Roosevelt prolonged the Great Depression with his anti-capitalist, anti-American New Deal polices. Looks like some professors at UCLA agree with me.
“President Roosevelt believed that excessive competition was responsible for the Depression by reducing prices and wages, and by extension reducing employment and demand for goods and services,” said Cole, also a UCLA professor of economics. “So he came up with a recovery package that would be unimaginable today, allowing businesses in every industry to collude without the threat of antitrust prosecution and workers to demand salaries about 25 percent above where they ought to have been, given market forces. The economy was poised for a beautiful recovery, but that recovery was stalled by these misguided policies.”
Many people have been fooled by left-wing hortatory (or maybe whore-atory is closer) biographies for years. FDR was our savior, they claim. In truth, FDR was a failure in everything but the prosecution of the war. If there was no WWII FDR would have gone down in history as an utter failure.
FDR was the closest thing we’ve ever had to a socialist in the White House and has an utterly undeserved reputation. In any case his reputation for saving the economy is pure bunk.
“The fact that the Depression dragged on for years convinced generations of economists and policy-makers that capitalism could not be trusted to recover from depressions and that significant government intervention was required to achieve good outcomes,” Cole said. “Ironically, our work shows that the recovery would have been very rapid had the government not intervened.”
I’m glad the university set are finally coming to the side of reality and truth on this at long last.
Newsweek: Obama Just like Lincoln?
October 7, 2008 | Filed Under Constitution, Democrats/Leftists, Education, History, Media Bias, President, Publius Contributor, Society/Culture, Warner Todd Huston | No Comments
-By Warner Todd Huston
Howard Fineman has no knowledge of history. In fact, it would not surprise me if we should find out some day that, in his original draft of this absurd comparison of Lincoln to Obama, he even spelled Lincoln’s name wrong. It is just that obvious that Fineman knows nothing of what he speaks. You see, Howard Fineman has decided that Barack Obama is somehow just like Abraham Lincoln. This is hero worship at its worst without being weighed down by any facts. It’s so bad that one wonders if Fineman had a Matthewsian “thrill up his leg” when writing this sycophantic slop?
In pondering if he should write a story about Obama’s connections to Chicago, Illinois, Fineman found his mind wandering to Abraham Lincoln — “the only president ‘from’ that city,” as Fineman says.
And right there we have the first stretch of reality to fit Fineman’s gauzy feelings. Lincoln was neither from nor “from” Chicago. Lincoln certainly visited the city during his lifetime but he never lived in Chicago and was never considered “from” there. His political machine was also not “from” there. His was very much a down state machine centered in Springfield, the State Capitol. So right off the top we have a tenuous connection between Lincoln and Obama whipped up to absurd proportions in Fineman’s mind.
Obama Nazi Youth Corps Leader/Teacher Suspended
October 7, 2008 | Filed Under Democrats/Leftists, Education, Elections, Media Bias, News, President, Publius Contributor, Race, Security/Safety, Society/Culture, Warner Todd Huston | No Comments
-By Warner Todd Huston
Ooopsie. Looks like the public school teacher that is responsible for turning a group of young black teens into an Obama Nazi Youth Corps has been suspended pending an investigation for posting the video of his mindnumbed paramilitary Obama youth drill team’s little soirée.
Joyce McGautha, superintendent of the Urban Community Leadership Academy, a charter school for students in fifth through ninth grades in Kansas City, Mo., said that the video was probably taken last May during the Junior Fraternity’s morning meeting at the school.
It turns out that this teacher was previously warned by the school’s administration not to pass the video around. But he did anyway.
Teachers Union Using The Classroom to Push Barack Obama
October 3, 2008 | Filed Under Democrats/Leftists, Education, Elections, Media Bias, News, President, Publius Contributor, Society/Culture, Unions, Warner Todd Huston | No Comments
-By Warner Todd Huston
A teachers union in Virginia sponsored an “Obama blue day” in schools throughout the state for teachers to show their support for Obama in the classroom. The plan was for teachers to come to work with a blue shirt to show solidarity with Obama.
Naturally — and properly — the Virginia GOP is crying foul and denouncing the effort to indoctrinate children with Obama’s message.
The Virginia Education Association sponsored “Obama Blue Day” on Tuesday. In an e-mail sent last week, it urged teachers to participate by dressing in blue.
“Let’s make Obama Blue Day a day of Action!” the e-mail continues. “Barack the vote!”
Of course, it is outrageous that our nation’s most impressionable, our children, are being indoctrinated by teacher’s unions to support a specific candidate in a contemporary election. It only goes to show how low unions will go to force their views on the voting, and non-voting, public.
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About School Choice
October 1, 2008 | Filed Under Congress, Democrats/Leftists, Education, GOP, Government, Corruption, News, Society/Culture, Taxes | No Comments
-By Adam B. Schaeffer, Ph.D.
This year’s K-12 Education Reform Summit conference delivered yet another line-up of great information and hard questions. I’d like to follow up on one of the most important questions raised during the conference; are education tax credits more viable than vouchers?
If we hope to succeed against the power of the teachers unions and entrenched political interests, we need to approach this issue in the most careful, systematic, productive way we can. With that in mind, I’d like to pose a few follow-up questions that might shed some light on the debate . . .
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Another Non-Obama Voters are Racists Story
September 25, 2008 | Filed Under Democrats/Leftists, Education, Media Bias, News, President, Publius Contributor, Race, Society/Culture, Warner Todd Huston | 1 Comment
-By Warner Todd Huston
The single most common current explanation for a possible Obama loss posited today by the left is that America is filled with racists. The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review uses this charge to the hilt in a September 21 piece on union members voting McCain. Naturally, the only reason the Trib-Review can come up with for this phenomenon is because these McCain supporting union members are wild-eyed racists. Yet, there are no statistics, no interviews with racists, no proof presented in this story other than the claims of professors and Obama supporters that it’s a true assessment.
This is an entirely common occurrence with these sorts of stories, too. We get all sorts of tongue clucking “experts” assuring us that anyone who votes for John McCain is a racist yet no proof other than the bald faced claims of those who merely assert the point as fact