Republican teachers forced to support Obama in Ohio

"Barack Obama: a leader we can count on to stand up for education, for children and for our rights." OEA (union) "Ohio Schools," June 2012, p. 18. Republicans must join this union if they want to teach in Ohio, but their dues will always support Democrat candidates and issues.

The June issue of Ohio Schools (OEA union publication) declares that Ohio teachers must "take back our voice and vote." Hmm. You can't be a teacher in Ohio without joining the union, and it only supports Obama, despite that fact that many members of this forced membership are Republicans, Libertarians, or no political affiliation at all. So which teachers don't have a voice or vote? This is one step from Jim Crow—which was also a Democrat party plan.  A "member" told me that they are taking $22 from his monthly check to fight the "right to vote" in Ohio, something he believes in!

Stimulus Jr. as campaign fodder

“The president was out there, once again, promoting the American Jobs Act. This bill is basically a huge payoff to Democratic constituent groups – notably organized labor, which would benefit enormously from federal grants to states to keep government workers on the payroll, as well as construction projects to be completed by union job crews.

This bill has no chance of passing through the United States Congress. The Republican party is never going to vote to hike taxes to pay off Democratic client groups. It never has, and it never will. What’s more, the politics of this bill do not play very well with the middle of the country – as Republicans can always point out (correctly), the American Jobs Act is a watered-down version of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (i.e., the stimulus that the country thinks was a failure).”

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/morning-jay-obama-s-problem-his-base_646967.html?nopager=1

What to do with degrees like these?

“In 2010, the New York Times reported on Cortney Munna, then 26, a New York University graduate with almost $100,000 in debt. If her repayments were not then being deferred because she was enrolled in night school, she would have been paying $700 monthly from her $2,300 monthly after-tax income as a photographer’s assistant. She says she is toiling “to pay for an education I got for four years and would happily give back.” Her degree is in religious and women’s studies.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-subprime-college-educations/2012/06/08/gJQA4fGiOV_story.html

But what are all those tuition and fee increases going for?  In part, narcissism.  Bloat. Says George Will.  And I’ve blogged about it when I see it at Ohio State which has an Office of Diversity and Inclusion; Faculty of Color Caucus of the Department of History; the Race, Ethnicity, and Nation Constellation of the Department of History; and DISCO, Diversity and Identity Studies Collective . Courses like “Gender and race in contemporary architecture.”

UCSD found money to create a vice chancellorship for equity, diversity and inclusion. UC Davis has a Diversity Trainers Institute under an administrator of diversity education, who presumably coordinates with the Cross-Cultural Center. It also has: a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Resource Center; a Sexual Harassment Education Program; a diversity program coordinator; an early resolution discrimination coordinator; a Diversity Education Series that awards Understanding Diversity Certificates in “Unpacking Oppression”; and Cross-Cultural Competency Certificates in “Understanding Diversity and Social Justice.” California’s budget crisis has not prevented UC San Francisco from creating a new vice chancellor for diversity and outreach to supplement its Office of Affirmative Action, Equal Opportunity and Diversity, and the Diversity Learning Center (which teaches how to become “a Diversity Change Agent”), and the Center for LGBT Health and Equity, and the Office of Sexual Harassment Prevention & Resolution, and the Chancellor’s Advisory Committees on Diversity, and on Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Issues, and on the Status of Women.

Why does Dept. of Homeland Security want noncitizens on the voter rolls?

You only need one guess.  Because they’ll vote for Democrats or for what they are told.

“MIAMI -- Gov. Rick Scott and the Obama administration traded legal barbs and counter-accusations Monday as each side announced it would sue the other over Florida’s controversial non-citizen voter purge.

Scott’s chief elections official sued first, filing a federal lawsuit in Washington that accused the U.S. Department of Homeland Security of unlawfully refusing Florida access to a federal database that could help the state spot and remove noncitizens from the voter rolls. . . “

I fail to see how this will endanger lawful voters.  You’re either a citizen or you’re not.  The database should show that.

“Moments after the state filed suit, Assistant U.S. Attorney General Thomas E. Perez roared back in a sharply worded five-page letter from the U.S. Department of Justice, which ordered the state two weeks ago to stop the purge because it could violate two federal voting laws.

The state’s program is too “faulty” ” and comes too close to election time to not endanger the voting rights of thousands of lawful U.S. citizens, Perez wrote. He said Florida has repeatedly ignored Homeland Security’s warning that the department’s database, known as SAVE, isn’t designed for the noncitizen hunt on which Florida embarked.”

http://www.kansascity.com/2012/06/12/3653743/floridas-voter-purge-sparks-lawsuits.html#storylink=cpy

http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/florida-purge-illegal-voters/2012/06/11/id/441946?s=al&promo_code=F274-1

News on the War on Women

Live Action released undercover footage June 6 showing two National Abortion Federation (NAF) clinics in Arizona agreeing to break state law and perform an illegal sex-selective abortion. The video is the third release in Live Action’s “Gendercide” project, documenting Planned Parenthood and NAF’s support for sex-selective abortion in America. But you probably haven't heard the President speak out on this particular War against Women, or even seen it on ABC, CBS, NBC or the cable networks, who feel they need to protect the President, and Planned Parenthood which has endorsed him. The same Planned Parenthood that slapped down and cowed the Susan G. Komen Foundation into submission when it dared to step out of line.

http://liveaction.org/blog/az-abortion-clinics-break-law-to-abort-baby-girls-in-new-undercover-video/

The "right to free contraception" which was invented from thin air in 2012, is now more important to Obama supporters than all our First Amendment Rights, the roots of which are in the Bible and many centuries of Western thought and philosophy. Obama (a lapsed UCC-an whose former pastor says he didn’t attend church much) and Pelosi (a cafeteria Catholic who supports abortion and gay marriage) support this new creation, but not our guarantee of religious freedom found in our Bill of Rights.

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2012/03/lib-hero-sandra-fluke-free-birth-control-is-a-natural-human-right-i-wont-be-silenced/

Our freedoms are God given

A graduate of James Madison University, Dr. Forbes speaks out on behalf of religious liberty.  “If we remove the foundation of religious freedom, the rest of the republic will fall!”

The HHS Mandate is about religious liberty

Rabbi Cary Kozberg at the Columbus Stand Up for  Religious  Freedom Rally, June 8, 2012

Obama meets with historians. . .

I don’t know if this happened.  Ed Klein says it did.  Doris Kearns Goodwin, Michael Beschloss, Robert Caro, Robert Dallek, Douglas Brinkley, H.W. “Billam” Brands, David Kennedy, Kenneth Mack, and Garry Wills met with Obama and staffers.  He wanted to know his place in history. It sounds like the Obama we’ve come to know through the news media—the ones that support him with unflinching loyalty.

“When one of the historians brought up the difficulties that Lyndon Johnson, another wartime president, faced trying to wage a foreign military venture while implementing an ambitious domestic agenda, Mr. Obama grew testy. He implied that he was different, because he could prevail by the force of his personality.

He could solve the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, put millions of people back to work, redistribute wealth, withdraw from Iraq, and reconcile the United States to a less dominant role in the world.

It was, by any measure, a breathtaking display of grandiosity by a man whose entire political curriculum vitae consisted of seven undistinguished years in the Illinois senate and two mostly absent years in the United States Senate.

That evening he revealed the characteristics — arrogance, conceit, egotism, vanity, hubris and, above all, rank amateurism — that would mark his presidency and doom it to frustration and failure.”
 Obama Will Be Presidential Failure Like Carter, Historian Says

Supplements for pregnant women

In the United States medical researchers probably can’t put poor black or brown women into three groups, give them different pre-natal supplements (MMS, multiple micronutrient supplementation vs iron-folic acid using  either 60-mg or 30-mg iron formulations), and then wait to see what would happen to the babies in a few years.  But it can still be done in Bangladesh.

I was given pre-natal vitamins (huge horse pills) as soon as I knew I was pregnant in 1961.  I knew without being told just from my upbringing that I needed to eat healthy; I stopped drinking coffee (made me sick).  I went back to drinking milk every day.  I gained very little weight.   However, in poor countries it is harder to eat better.

The surprising thing about “Effects of prenatal micronutrient and early food supplementation” research published in the May 16, 2012 JAMA is that although by age 5, the children in one group of the multiple micronutrient study were healthier, fewer of them actually made it to term. The special supplements (of any of the 3 types) had few or no benefits on birth length, weight or reducing still birth.

Mortality rates for offspring were highest among the women randomized to MMS combined with the usual invitation to food supplementation, mainly caused by asphyxia. Furthermore, this treatment group had significantly higher incidence of spontaneous abortions. The late pregnancy losses were lower in the usual invitation with MMS group, resulting in no difference in RR of total fetal loss across treatment groups.

http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1157489

http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1157470

Monday Memories—Our First Apartment 1960

        

We were in Indianapolis over the week-end to attend an Arsenal Technical High School class reunion at the Riverwalk Restaurant in Broad Ripple, and all class gathering on the campus (70+ acres).  On our way to the Tech campus we drove by our first home at 1311 North Rural (apt. 2).  My.  The neighborhood has certainly changed.  This was a very tidy 4-unit, probably originally built to be a duplex, then the upstairs 3 bedrooms were changed to a 1 bedroom, kitchen and living room apartment with a side entrance (not visible here).  It’s hard to say, but it may be back to a duplex.  We couldn’t see the side entrance. 

We were about 3 houses from a lovely park, and 3 blocks from 10th avenue which had a number of small stores.  I still have a few kitchen items I bought from a hardware store on 10th.  We can’t remember where we parked our car—there was an alley and garage behind the house, and the stairs to the street were extremely steep.  Every day I drove to my job at General Mold and Engineering, and Bob caught the bus to work downtown at Ayrshire Collieries on South Meridian (11th largest coal company controlled by Pierre Goodrich at that time). 

When we lived on Rural it was a working class white neighborhood, now it is mostly black with some Hispanic.  The condition of the homes is really awful, with many boarded up.  And as you can see, a couch on the porch is not a good sign in any neighborhood, even on college campuses studies show this is a serious indication of decay and trouble.

We never thought to take any photos when we lived there, but I’m pretty sure it was painted white and the owners, who lived down stairs, were careful with the property.

Our first Christmas in that apartment

                                

A few months later, my college graduation photo from 1961, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana

Who will own and control your genome information?

It cost roughly a billion dollars to generate the first reference human genome in 2003; last year a company would charge $10,000 for this service.  This year it costs a few thousand dollars. And in a few years we should be able to get our genomes sequenced for a few hundred dollars.  Then what? To whom does the information belong? 

http://healthaffairs.org/blog/2012/06/08/your-genome-belongs-to-you/

The Commonwealth Fund

One of the big supporters of Obamacare (aka ACA) is the Commonwealth Fund.  If not directly, then through sponsored research and the preaching and writing and advising of Dr. David Blumenthal, the  Chairman of  The Commonwealth Fund Commission on a High Performance Health System, and other employees.  David Blumenthal, M.D., M.P.P.,  is the Samuel O. Their Professor of Medicine and Professor of Health Care Policy at Massachusetts General Hospital/Partners HealthCare System and Harvard Medical School. In opinion and editorial pieces in medical journals supporting ACA, you’ll see his name, or the Commonwealth Fund research cited.

The Commonwealth Fund is behind those studies that end up in sound bites on the news that says we’re at the bottom in the industrialized world for health care (despite the money we spend) and that people are going bankrupt trying to pay medical bills.

Like most foundations, Commonwealth Fund is the outcome of a hard working, savvy capitalist—or in this case, his second wife.  According to Wikipedia, Anna M. Richardson (25 October 1837-27 March 1926)  married Stephen Vanderburgh Harkness, a harnessmaker who had lived in Bellevue and Monroeville, Ohio, of Cleveland, in 1851, who invested with  John D. Rockefeller and became the second-largest shareholder in Standard Oil.

Stephen Harkness died in 1888. In 1917 Anna M. Harkness gave $3 million to Yale University for the construction of Memorial Quadrangle in memory of her son Charles, who had died in 1916.  Anna Harkness donated another $3 million to Yale in 1920 to increase faculty salaries.

In 1918 Anna Harkness established the Commonwealth Fund with an initial gift of $10 million, and made her son Edward Harkness  its president.  His home, The Harkness House, is now the home of the Commonwealth Fund.  From this fund the Harkness Fellowships were established, and St. Salvator's Hall at the University of St Andrews, the Butler Library at Columbia University and many of the undergraduate dorms at Harvard University and Yale University were built.  Other charities and funds were established through Edward Harkness who died in 1940.

In any case, it was Standard Oil money through the widow and her descendants to fund all these “good works,” some antithetical to capitalism.

http://www.commonwealthfund.org/Blog/2012/Jan/Affordable-Care-Act-Safety-Net.aspx

http://www.commonwealthfund.org/Newsletters/Washington-Health-Policy-in-Review/2012/Jun/June-4-2012.aspx

Today’s lecture tools

When I went to college in the 1950s and 1960s, and even later when I returned to make up a math class I didn’t have as an undergrad, or a refresher in reference titles so I could ease back into my career in the 1970s, we had face to face interaction with the instructors/professors.  Even in very large lectures, there was a human being.  Overwhelming, most of my classes were small, both in foreign languages (my undergrad major), and in library science (my master’s degree).

Today I saw an advertisement at OSUToday for LectureTools:

“LectureTools student iPad app allows students to relay feedback to their instructor in real-time during lecture. With larger screens than smartphones and smaller footprints than laptops, many students are beginning to tote iPads to class and many institutions are experimenting with iPad initiatives.”

Don’t even need raise your hand.  If you’re shy or autistic, no problem.  Be as silent as you want.

The Walker Recall—Important or not?

Three lessons from the Wisconsin recall

“There are three important lessons from the Wisconsin collective bargaining battles over the past eighteen months:

1. The power of the government-sector unions and their impact on elections is greatly overestimated. With a victory for Gov. Walker, Wisconsin Government employee union will have suffered their fifth major defeat since March 2011.

2. When given a choice, government employees will quit their union in large numbers.

3. Government employees' salaries and benefits, particularly pensions, are financially unsustainable in most states and collective bargaining reform is needed.”

Read more: http://www.statebudgetsolutions.org/publications/detail/why-government-employee-collective-bargaining-laws-must-be-reformed-now#ixzz1x9ezwKiI

Voter fraud hurts all of us

Whether it’s in Ohio, Wisconsin or Florida, fraud hurts us all because these people make it to Washington.

I wrote to the Governor of Florida

The state of Florida is under attack by the U.S. Department of Justice because it is trying to clean up the voter rolls and limit voting to citizens who are legal residents of Florida.  Oh. The. Horror!  It’s a Democrat’s nightmare, and our Attorney General Eric Holder is on top of it fast and furiously.  I just wrote a few encouraging sentences, because we’re fighting voter fraud here in Ohio, too, and I’ve signed on to help stop it.  Like Madison, Wisconsin, we have more people voting in some counties than there are adults. 

Here’s what I received from Chris Cate, Communications Director, Florida Department of State, which now that I have a paper/digital trail, the media can’t bamboozle me:

· A letter from Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner to the U.S. Department of Justice regarding Florida’s continuing commitment to protecting citizen’s voting rights.

· An excerpt from a U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) publication documenting the legal basis for accessing the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database. The document can be found online at http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/privacy/privacy_pia_uscis_save.pdf

· An email chain, dating back to September 2011, between the Florida Department of State (DOS) and DHS regarding access DHS information on non-citizens.

· Frequently asked questions about Florida’s continuing commitment to protecting citizen’s voting rights.

· Secretary of State Ken Detzner’s letter sent on May 31, 2012, to DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano regarding access to the citizenship information in DHS’s SAVE database.

· Florida Congressman Jeff Miller’s letter sent on May 9, 2012, to U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano regarding access to the citizenship information in DHS’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database.

· Florida Congressman Gus Bilirakis’ letter sent on June 5, 2012, to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Alejandro Mayorkas regarding access to the citizenship information in DHS’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database.

· Florida Congressman Tom Rooney’s letter sent on June 6, 2012, to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder Florida’s efforts to remove non-citizens from the voter rolls.

Interesting marriages

I've been enjoying "Martin Luther had a wife," and "Harriet Beecher Stowe had a husband," a two in one special by William J. Petersen, Tyndale House Publishers, 1983 (Christian Herald Family Bookshelf edition). Petersen, former editor of Eternity Magazine, is an excellent writer, and each marriage is presented in an entertaining and interesting style. The fifth selection in the first book is about William and Catherine Booth, founders of the Salvation Army.

Catherine Booth, who wrote many of her busy husband's sermons, was criticized by a male preacher for speaking from the pulpit. (1858) She responded with a 32 page rebuttal.

History of the Booths here.

I see from browsing Google that Petersen also wrote a 2-fer on C.S. Lewis and his wife and Catherine Marshall and her husband plus one on Johann Sebastian Bach and his wife, which includes John and Polly Newton, Johann Sebastian and Magdalena Bach, George and Mary Muller, Hannah Whitall and Robert Pearsall Smith, and Francis and Edith Schaeffer. Petersen's stories are a wonderful way to learn history and to build faith, because all these people had numerous challenges. Especially John Wesley who must have had the worst marriage on record. Checking the used book sites I see offers for these titles. Well worth the price, although mine came from the free box.

Obama and the “New Party” (aka Socialist)

While the Demedia focus on what Bain Capital did after Romney left, flitting right over the companies he helped succeed with venture capital, like Staples, it could have looked into Obama’s roots in the New Party, which he denied during the last campaign.  Through his parents, grandparents, mentors and associates, Obama is a trained and managed socialist/statist.

“On the evening of January 11, 1996, while Mitt Romney was in the final years of his run as the head of Bain Capital, Barack Obama formally joined the New Party, which was deeply hostile to the mainstream of the Democratic party and even to American capitalism. In 2008, candidate Obama deceived the American public about his potentially damaging tie to this third party. The issue remains as fresh as today’s headlines, as Romney argues that Obama is trying to move the United States toward European-style social democracy, which was precisely the New Party’s goal. . .

New Party co-founder and leader Joel Rogers told Smith, “We didn’t really have members.” But a line in the New Party’s official newsletter explicitly identified Obama as a party member. Rogers dismissed that as mere reference to “the fact that the party had endorsed him.” . . .

the meeting at which Obama joined the party opened with the announcement of a forthcoming event featuring the prominent socialist activist Frances Fox Piven [American Communist]. The Chicago New Party sponsored a luncheon with Michael Moore that same year. ”

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/302031/obamas-third-party-history-stanley-kurtz

From the Jan. 11, 1996 minutes of ACORN

“Barack Obama, candidate for State Senate in the 13th Legislative District, gave a statement to the membership and answered questions. He signed the New Party  “Candidate Contract” and requested an endorsement from the New Party. He also joined the New Party.”

Calling all hip families and wanna-bees

J.C. Penneys is apparently featuring a 2 dad family in an ad for Father's Day.  This has given traditionalists a chance to be upset, and liberals a chance to puff up and point fingers at people who don't agree with them.  Given that gay men are only about 1.5% of the population,  most of whom are not in committed relationships with young children, and they are the wealthiest demographic who are not shopping at Penneys, let's look at Penneys' motivation.

They need a more "with it" image and want to appeal to the younger crowd.  So if the merchandise or traditional ad campaigns don't bring them in, how about offending the families who have been shopping there for years.  They are older and probably won't spend as much as the 20-something and teeny bopper demographic, so who cares about them? 

Millions of children have grown up with 2, 3, or more dads in our society, and it's called divorce and remarriage, or maybe just a baby-daddy who may or may not pay support and drop by occasionally. But that's probably a little more difficult to show in the Father's Day ad.