Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Obama Symphony of Destruction, Why worry about ‘no boots’ when Obama’s heart isn’t in the battle against radical Islam?






Aside from the Arabs, who would back him 100 percent, Western leaders signing up for the ragtag coalition to take on ISIS, should be asked by their masses why they would send soldiers into a battle led by a pretend general who plays AWOL at 60 percent of his intelligence session?



Barack Obama has blundered into the mideast war with no intel in his strategy arsenal.
He’s skipped through (read golfed, vacationed and partied his way through) daily intelligence briefings for almost 60 percent of the more than two thousand trying days of his presidency through September 29, 2014.

“A new Government Accountability Institute (GAI) report reveals that President Barack Obama has attended only 42.1% of his daily intelligence briefings (known officially as the Presidential Daily Brief, (or PDB) in the 2,079 days of his presidency through September 29, 2014.” (Breitbart, Sept. 30, 2014).

With Obama MIA in almost 60 percent of his PDB, where is he getting his information???
Mainstream media, armchair critics and bloggers can posit their opinions on where Obama gets his intelligence on unfolding events in the Mideast, but western leaders with real soldiers at risk in a war zone, don’t have the same luxury.

The GAI report also included a breakdown of Obama’s PDB attendance record between terms; he attended 42.4% of his PDBs in his first term and 41.3% in his second. (Breitbart)
“The GAI’s alarming findings come on the heels of Obama’s 60 Minutes comments on Sunday, wherein the president laid the blame for the Islamic State’s (ISIS) rapid rise squarely at the feet of his Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

“I think our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that I think they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria,” said Obama.
“According to Daily Beast reporter Eli Lake, members of the Defense establishment were “flabbergasted” by Obama’s attempt to shift blame.

“Either the president doesn’t read the intelligence he’s getting or he’s bullshitting,” a former senior Pentagon official “who worked closely on the threat posed by Sunni jihadists in Syria and Iraq” told the Daily Beast.

“On Monday, others in the intelligence community similarly blasted Obama and said he’s shown longstanding disinterest in receiving live, in-person PDBs that allow the Commander-in-Chief the chance for critical followup, feedback, questions, and the challenging of flawed intelligence assumptions.

“It’s pretty well-known that the president hasn’t taken in-person intelligence briefings with any regularity since the early days of 2009,” an Obama national security staffer told the Daily Mail on Monday. “He gets them in writing.”“
Infamous for his absenteeism as a barely there senator from Illinois, his absentee style followed him to the Oval Office, begging the question, “What is Obama being paid for?”

The Western leaders who jumped so readily into ‘The Coalition of the Phantom Airstrikes’ should not buy into Obama’s political terminology that airstrikes with no boots on the ground is not a war when ISIS is killing off thousands in a visible war that seeks to install a Caliphate on all world citizens.
Leaders of Western civilization: Boots on the ground are not the only thing missing in Iraq and Syria because Obama’s heart so obviously isn’t in it.

Shouldn’t someone be stepping up to the plate to ask: “WHY IS THAT?
Suspicions flew as thick in the air as mosquitoes in a swamp weeks before Obama was caught in the glare of the headlights for ducking his intel briefings.

Has it dawned on any Western leader that Obama and the Arabs is a stranger than strange combo? Or like British Prime Minister David Cameron, are they all drinking from the same Obama water hole?
Did they all swallow the proverbial hook, line and sinker fallacy that Iran had America’s back covered?
There’s a pungent fishy stench coming from the Obama-led airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, and the fish we used to know long died out in the oceans and fresh water lakes of the world.

Are any of the western leaders who signed up for the airstrikes even aware that they are now in league with a president who is openly against his own country?

Do they remember that with no qualifications other than those of a garden variety community organizer, BHO was presented from faux Greek columns at his party’s national convention as a Hollywood-type Messiah?

Commonsense should dictate that Obama is about as much a Messiah as radical Islam is a religion of peace.

It is patently obvious after six long years that Barack Obama is a legend in his own mind; and critically important today that western leaders refuse to let him be one in theirs.
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/66380?utm_source=CFP+Mailout&utm_campaign=55d9668e9c-Call_to_Champions&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d8f503f036-55d9668e9c-297703129

Sunday, September 28, 2014

Un-Common, Not Core.




I became a math teacher by a circuitous route.  My degree is in engineering.  I spent five and a half years refurbishing nuclear submarines, and then I quit work to bear, rear, and eventually homeschool our three children.

As a homeschool mom, I participated in co-ops, taking turns teaching groups of homeschooled children subjects such as nature study and geography. As our children entered their teen years, I began teach to teach algebra, trig, and calculus to small classes of homeschoolers at my kitchen table.  And as our children left home for their four-year universities, two to major in engineering and one in art, I began teaching in small private schools known as classical academies.

This last year, I have also been tutoring public-school students in Common Core math, and this summer I taught a full year of Common Core Algebra 2 compressed into six weeks at an expensive, ambitious private school. 

I've taught and tutored the gamut of textbooks and curricula: Miquon and Saxon to my own kids and whenever the choice of curriculum was mine to make; Foerster, Saxon, Jacobs, or Holt when hired to teach at a school.  I've tutored out of the California state adopted texts: CPM, Everyday Math, Mathland, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw Hill, Addison Wesley, and Holt.  I've had students come to me from all of the above plus Teaching Textbooks, Singapore, and Math U See.



This last year was my first experience first tutoring, then teaching Common Core, and I was curious.  I had read the reports of elementary-school children crying over their homework and staying up past midnight to complete it, so I expected Common Core to be like Everyday Math, Mathland, and CPM: poorly explained, abstruse, confusing.  I was correct on those counts.

What surprised me was that Common Core was also hard.
Now, I like rigor.  I have high standards.  My goal for my students is that they will become competent and confident mathematicians.  But I was stunned to see that my tutoring student's pre-algebra work incorporated about a third of a year of algebra 1.  The algebra 2 text incorporated about a third of the topics I would expect to find in a precalculus course.  And so forth.

This did not mesh with the reports from Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Utah, or New York, where Common Core is alleged to lower standards – in one case, specifically, to move multiplication tables from third grade to fifth grade.  It appears that Common Core is not being implemented in a consistent (or common) way across the United States.  But I can only address pre-algebra through calculus in texts claiming to be Common Core in California.  These texts are shoveling about a third of the subsequent year's topics into the current year.
This problem is exacerbated by the recent fad for accelerating students through their math classes.  Fifty years ago, algebra 1 was a ninth-grade course for fourteen-year-olds.  Now it is routinely taught in eighth grade, sometimes in seventh.  Algebra 1 in seventh grade means that pre-algebra is taught in sixth grade to eleven-year-olds, and few eleven-year-olds have achieved the cognitive development necessary to master the abstract logic of one third of a year of algebra.

Cognitive development proceeds not in a smooth curve, but in jumps and plateaus.  Just as most babies learn to walk at twelve months, so most adolescents become capable of logical operations such as algebra at twelve years.  And just as whether a baby walks at nine months or fifteen months has no bearing on whether he plays football in college, so whether a student learns algebra in 7th or 9thgrade has no bearing on whether she becomes a National Merit Scholar...save that a child who is pushed and flounders and fails is unlikely to love an activity.

That is what I am seeing with my tutoring students: the math-bright ones are being encouraged to take honors pre-algebra at age eleven.  In prior years, this would have meant that they first had a thorough, final review of arithmetic: adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing whole numbers, decimals, and fractions; long division; changing fractions to decimals to percents and back.  Then for a treat, they would be introduced to the glories of algebra, the fun stuff: Rene Descartes' brilliant invention, with plenty of lists of points that, if properly executed, form an outline of a fish or a dinosaur. 

 They would be taught signed numbers, order of operations, distributive property, and how to solve for x, and that would be about it.  They would finish the year happily aware that math is fun and that they are good at it.  If they were fortunate enough to be taught from Jacobs's Mathematics: a Human Endeavor, they would learn about sequences and mosaics and logarithms and even networks, but all with a very concrete development, suited to the emergent logical thinker.

The reform mathematicians who put together Common Core are ignoring cognitive development.  My Common Core pre-algebra students are hurried through the arithmetic review and taught the coordinate system.  They graph lines and parabolas.  They do transformations, exponents (including zero and negative exponents), and a truly horrendous percentage of percentage problems.  The homework can be finished in an hour if the student's parents can afford to hire a BS mechanical engineer to sit at his elbow and remind him when he takes a wrong turn.  Otherwise, he is up 'til midnight.  Students work hard at tasks beyond their strength; they flounder; they fail; they learn that math is no fun.

This isn't education. This is child abuse.
Another aspect of Common Core that surprised me was the emphasis given to parent functions and transformations. People over forty years of age, even techies such as physicists, chemists, engineers, and mathematicians, won't know what parent functions are.  People under thirty-five who have been educated in reform mathematics textbooks will be surprised that is possible to learn mathematics without learning about transformations.

Fifty years ago, transformations were not taught, although math-bright students would figure them out for themselves in analytic geometry (second-semester pre-calculus).  Today, they are taught systematically beginning in elementary school.

The treatment of transformations reminds me of the New Math debacle of the 1960s.  The reform mathematicians of the day decided that they were going to improve mathematical education by teaching all students what the math-bright children figured out for themselves.

In exactly the same way, the current crop of reform math educators has decided that transformations are an essential underlying principle, and are teaching them: laboriously, painfully, and unnecessarily.  They are tormenting and confusing the average student, and depriving the math-bright student of the delight of discovering underlying principles for herself.

One aspect of Common Core that did not surprise me was a heavy reliance on calculators.

The main problem I see with my algebra students is that they have poor number sense.  They can't tell whether the answer their calculator shows is reasonable or not.  They cling to the notion that 1.41 is somehow more precise than square root of two.  They also can't add fractions or do long division, which puts them at a severe disadvantage when they must add rational expressions or divide polynomials.

Common Core exacerbates this problem.  At every level, the problems are designed to be too hard to solve by hand.  A calculator is necessary even in elementary school – unless a child is to spend 5 hours a night on homework.  A graphing calculator is necessary for algebra – calculating correlation coefficients by hand is not a viable option.  My students are whizzes with their calculators.  But they reach for them to square 1/3...then write it as 0.11.
Common Core advocates claim that they are avoiding that boring, rote drill in favor of higher-order thinking skills.  Nowhere is this more demonstrably false than in their treatment of formulas.  An old-style text would have the student memorize a few formulas and be able to derive the rest.  Common Core loads the student down with more formulas than can possibly be memorized.  There is no instruction on derivation; the formulas are handed down as though an archangel brought them down from heaven.  Since it is impossible to memorize all the various formulas, students are permitted – nay, encouraged – to develop cheat sheets to use on the tests.

The second-biggest problem with Common Core is the problem of Big Mistakes.  Pretend for a moment that a homeschool family did something as asinine as giving their eight-year-old a calculator instead of teaching him his times tables.  That child would be a calculator cripple.

But that would be a small mistake, affecting one child.  Now consider what happens when a state made such a mistake.  We don't even have to pretend.  In 1986, California adopted Whole Language Arts, which proved to be a disaster.  Within a decade, California plunged to 49th out of 50 in reading performance.  Millions of children were affected.  Big mistake.

If different states have different curricula, we can observe what works and what does not, and improve thereby.  But Common Core is being pushed nationwide.  This could be the Biggest of all possible Mistakes.
But the worst problem with Common Core is its likely effect on the educational gap between rich and poor in this country.  The students I tutor have parents who would describe themselves as "comfortable."  No one likes to admit to being rich.  But the middle class and poor cannot afford to pay a tutoring company $50 to $100 per hour so that someone will sit with their children and explain trig identities.

The oft-repeated goal of Common Core is that every child will be "college or career ready."  Couple that slogan with the oft-expressed admiration for the European system of education – in European countries, students are slotted for university or a dead-end job at age fourteen, based ostensibly on their performance on high-stakes tests, but that performance almost inevitably matches the student's socioeconomic class.  Do we really want to destroy upward mobility and implement a rigid class structure in the United States of America?

To recapitulate: Common Core teaches about a third of algebra 1 in pre-algebra, a third of pre-calculus in algebra 2, et cetera.  Common Core teaches unnecessary abstractions as essential principles.  Common Core creates calculator cripples.  Common Core fails to derive mathematical expressions, instead presenting them as Holy Writ.
I predict that if we continue implementing Common Core, average students will drop out of math as early as they are allowed.  Even math-bright students will hate math.  Tutoring companies will proliferate to serve wealthy families.  The educational gap between rich and poor will widen.  If we want to destroy math and science education in this country, keep Common Core.


Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/09/uncommon_not_core.html#ixzz3EeLQJsS7
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Thursday, September 25, 2014

Eric Fast and Furious Holder Out, Special Prosecutor to Follow?





 Eric Holder is resigning at long last. Good riddance.

(If President Obama wants to stay the course, I would suggest Al Sharpton as a replacement.  Nobody can frustrate legal process like Big Al.  Sharpton effortlessly dodges lawsuits and tax collectors. He’s got the kind of legal experience that makes him a perfect fit at the Justice Department.)

Holder is the legal ringleader for today’s Democrats and their noxious culture of corruption. After being held in criminal contempt of Congress in June 2012 -- the first such citation against a sitting attorney general in American history -- for a while he has been just a few steps away from being impeached in the House of Representatives. Now it appears he will never be tried in the Senate for the high crimes and misdemeanors he has committed against the American people.

If there is any justice, after the Obama era mercifully draws to a close, Holder will be prosecuted for a litany of abuses that have been ably documented by J. Christian Adams in Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department and by John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky in Obama’s Enforcer: Eric Holder’s Justice Department.

But don’t hold your breath waiting for justice to be done.
Like President Barack Hussein Obama, Holder knows he is immune from criticism because he is black. Holder possesses an ugly combination of creepy self-righteousness, cockiness, hatred of country, and racist contempt for white Americans that make him the darling of the activist Left and the mainstream media which refuses to report on his many, many misdeeds.


Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/09/eric_holder_out_special_prosecutor_to_follow.html#ixzz3ELotxbLl
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Sunday, September 21, 2014

Common Core isn’t our only problem–Consider the College Board

Who wrote the Declaration of Independence? The Second Continental Congress assigned that responsibility to a committee that included Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston. After discussing the general outline the document should follow, the committee decided Jefferson would be the best person to write the document. So Jefferson receives the honor of being the author of America’s Declaration of Independence. The Second Continental Congress could have listed Franklin, Adams, Sherman, and Livingston under the heading, “Acknowledgements.”
Now here’s a second question. Who actually wrote the College Board’s Advanced Placement (AP) U.S. History Framework? Since this Framework will govern how American history is taught to about 500,000 students in more than 8,000 high schools every year, we asked College Board to reveal its authors. This is the biased, poorly written, and ineptly organized document that has raised alarms from state and national leaders.  After repeated requests, the College Board finally responded by posting this statement on its AP Central website: “The professors and teachers [are] listed by name and institution on page v of the AP US History Framework.”






When you turn to page v, you will find the names of 19 different college professors and teachers who served on two College Board Committees. Significantly, the College Board does not identify these people as “authors.” Instead, they are simply listed under, “Acknowledgements.”
Attending workshops, exchanging emails, and posting comments on the College Board’s electronic discussion boards are not the same thing as being credited as an author. According to the Journal of American History, the title of author is reserved for people who actually write a document.
So once again, who actually wrote the College Board Framework? We still don’t know, but we now know whodidn’t write it: the 19 people listed under the title “Acknowledgements”! We know this because Dr. Fred Anderson, one of those 19 educators, admitted in a letter to the Colorado State Board of Education that “[n]either I nor Christine Heyrman (the other early Americanist on the Commission) had any hand in drafting this Part, so I can only guess at why the examples that appear were chosen.” The “Part” Anderson refers to includes the actual course content on pages 28 to 77.
So if Anderson doesn’t know who chose to include the Black Panthers and exclude Martin Luther King Jr, then who did make this choice? In The Daily Caller, Blake Neff writes, “The Board’s refusal has fueled speculation that the standards may have been authored by very left-wing college professors, or possibly by ordinary grad students working as freelancers rather than by full professors.” What is the College Board hiding?
The identity of the Framework’s authors is not a trivial matter that can be left unexamined. It would be irresponsible and contrary to academic integrity for an elected state or local board of education to adopt a controversial curriculum written by anonymous authors. America’s high school students deserve far better instruction in their nation’s history.
http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2014/08/15/why-wont-college-board-reveal-its-ap-us-history-authors

Liberty Beats "Common Core, Uncommon Conformity"

Published on Sep 18, 2014
Liberty Beats Episode 3: "Common Core, Uncommon Conformity"
Freesong of the Political Observer.
Written, performed, produced and edited by Sam Martin. 

Thursday, September 18, 2014

Common Core Social Engineering Now At The Center Of All Educational Reform












We see social engineering now at the center of all educational reform.  Whether at the local level or, as is now more and more the case, at the federal level (Race to the Top moneys to support Common Core), the meta-purpose is a new social engineering whereby the individual teacher, the individual student, or even the individual principal is moved away from center stage. 

Systemic reorganization of educational institutions pretends to have as its highest goal "efficiency," where students move smoothly toward their goals without setbacks, failures, or unnerving attacks on their self-esteem.  A new meta-control by the master puppeteers of management infrastructure working alongside software curriculum creators is the basis for a new partnership.  The roles of individual actors within the schools – student, counselor, teacher, or even principal – become supporting cast, so to speak, for the overarching goals set by this partnership.
Even the widespread use of technology to provide the students with computers and new software to facilitate learning, while useful, merely creates an appearance of structure over a dumbing down and settling into mediocrity or worse: total contempt for and disintegration of learning and mental process for the vast majority of people.  The individual student does not have to think; rather, the program he or she is using takes him or her step-by-step, inexorably to the correct answer.  This serves the agenda of the master puppeteers mentioned above.  They will tighten their controls and the dependence of others who are struggling in the schools. 




Controversy over implementation is superficial and tends to obscure the totalitarian impulse behind their machinations.  For example, Michael Bloomberg and William “Bill” de Blasio are successive mayors of New York City.  Both are statists.  Both believe that the government should organize most facets of human experience and suppress individualism in the schools and other segments of society.  Both want to dumb down the schools in the context of a gung-ho spirit of reform.  There is to be an illusion of progress and success despite an ongoing downgrading and dilution of educational achievement and motivation.

The weaknesses, failures, and ultimately the path of doom that we find in education has not been and cannot be remediated by the measures of so-called reform taken during the past twenty-five to forty years, of which Common Core(CCSS) is only the most recent.  Before Common Core, we had No Child Left Behind (NCLB).  Before that, we had outcomes-based programs combined with school-to-work paradigms.  All these schemes resulted in an unprecedented influx of federal money into state education systems.

Under Common Core, state and local control is compromised as never before.  Standardized testing across the curricula is establishing new standardized goals and norms for curricular content.  New teacher evaluation frameworks Ă  la Danielson and others are being implemented nationwide, with an unsurprising similarity of criteria for determining teacher effectiveness.  Extending the length of the school day or the number of years the youth spend in school is standard in the national mantra of “reform.” 

Common Core State Standards has followed No Child Left Behind as the central federal initiative in education.  But unlike NCLB, Common Core was not instated by legislation to be reviewed by our representatives with a response from the public, but as a fait accompli imposed on the public by a vast strategy implemented by government bureaucrats concentrated in the U.S. Dept. of Education, NGOs (that have a stake in consulting, providing curricula, and analyzing test composition and results), software developers of educational software, and educational book publishers (often participating in corporate conglomerates with the software developers). 

Additionally, schools have become one-stop social agencies in many cases, with clinics to deal with mental and physical health problems, pregnancy and abortion counseling centers, and social and emotional learning (SEL) programs to teach more primitive personalities the meaning of the Golden Rule.  Thus, in loco parentis has given way to the reverse formula, where families are called upon to support the mission of the schools instead of schools supporting the mission of the family.

Disruptive behavior in the schools has increased exponentially during the past 30 years.  Testing is often an alternative to education rather than simply a part of the educational process – questions are created and scored in order to assure certain outcomes (i.e., percentages who will pass).  The teachers’ grade books have become publicly available (typically, all grades have to be published on the internet using programs like Skedula or Pupil Path), thereby undermining some of the teachers' authority and control.  Teachers have been reduced to being “facilitators.”  This is the new “f-word” to describe the essence of the teacher’s role.

The teacher as authority and the student knowing his or her place in the universe have been partially invalidated.  The teacher as friend, mentor, and big brother or sister is increasingly perceived as the most desirable interpersonal model.  A more reserved relatedness of teacher to student has given way to the “new informality" (a "give me five" mentality).  Grade inflation to gratify the endless demand for self-esteem-building is seen as encouragement rather than self-seeking deception.  Goals like making a living or rising to new standards of excellence are downgraded in favor of an enhanced "sense of self."

These many “meta-changes” are being embraced by the entire spectrum of political positions; both red and blue states have accepted the premises and goals of NCLB and CCSS, with only a few exceptions.  Yet I would propose that these reforms or “irreversible changes” are exercises in futility, and could possibly lead to the mental and physical enslavement of the population instead of leading to, as Alexis de Tocqueville envisioned, a thoughtful and responsible democratic citizenry.  Ultimately, the changes taking place in education have evolved from a leftist/statist/fascistic worldview – a totalitarian impulse.  The pre-eminence of systemic thinking as opposed to focus upon the individual student and teacher – i.e., the classroom – for reform and improvement tends in the direction of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.  It seems a barren vision of a vast army of clones and drones satisfied with their ignorance and lockstep conformity.  Further, it betrays the federalism enshrined in the Tenth Amendment of our Constitution.  And it attempts to replace an ideal of individual freedom before a just God with the ideal of collective rights before an all-knowing government.
The public schools are making guinea pigs of our children.  It is amazing to this writer that the outcomes are not even worse than they are.  But the definite lines of hope for education are fading fast; an era of extreme educational decline is coming upon us unless we begin to retrench four decades of reform and get back to some basic ideas, principles, information, and goals that we have lost sight of.  Knowledge, rationality, and compassion based on Judeo-Christian values must be reaffirmed as the determinative values of education going forward.
Jeff Ludwig has taught at Harvard, Penn State, Juniata College, CUNY, and for 21 years in the New York Public High Schools.  His latest book, The Catastrophic Decline of America’s High Schools:  New York City Schools, A Case Study, will be out later this year or early 2015.






Obama's Classmates At Columbia Didn’t Just Hate Capitalism. Obama's Classmates Were Also Atheists Who Openly Despised Judeo-Christian Values… Obama's Classmates Spent There Days Learning, Discussing And Debating A Plan To Destroy America from Within, Obama's Real Crime, His Out of Comtrol Gangster Government.







Obama is indeed the anti-American.



Everything in his background screams it! His mother hated American capitalism. She despised her white middle class background so much she got impregnated by the first black communist she met. Despite being dumped by Barack Sr. she somehow taught Barack Jr. his father was a man to be admired and emulated.




Barack was mentored in his teen years by Frank Marshall Davis a communist whose whole existence revolved around the idea of a capitalistic America enslaving blacks and the underclass.


Obama's college and university education was grounded in "hanging with the radicals and communists". He then spent 20 years in the pews of Rev. Jeremiah Wright who preached "Black Liberation Theology" which taught that Jesus was a black man and American whites are the enemy.


Any proper vetting of Obama would have resulted Barack being completely unelectable.






Obama's Real Crime


Yes, this book is about how Obama hates the country as founded and hates the middle class, but Root also outlines what has been happening to our country with a full list of Obama’s accomplices, and even writes an eye-opening chapter on the unindicted co-conspirators. He provides motive and opportunity, and of course he cites ample evidence of the crime. The magic of the book is how he uses the crime analogy established by his title and connects the dots from Obama to the unions to the education establishment to Warren Buffet to the Democrat Party to the media and so on. The book is not just a well-organized case against Barack Obama -- it is an indictment of the entire liberal media political crony business education complex that produced Obama in the first place.


The most salient part of the book takes us back to Columbia University, where Root himself was a political science and pre-law major while Obama was ostensibly in the same major at the same school at the same time. This is the part of the book where Root unveils his counter-intuitive and astonishing “reverse birther” theory. In the name of avoiding spoiler alerts, will leave the readers to unpack this themselves.


The bigger point about Columbia is that Root outs this Ivy university as being ground zero for the planning and hatching of the murder plot. As he says, “it all started at Columbia.”  He buttresses his argument with the fact that Cloward and Piven hatched their evil scheme in the 60’s -- as professors at Columbia.


Root adds that “my classmates at Columbia didn’t just hate capitalism. They were also atheists who openly despised Judeo-Christian values… we spent our days learning, discussing and debating a plan to destroy America from within.” These memories are seared into Root’s psyche, as he was apparently “THE one and only conservative student” at Columbia. He says “Obama was groomed to be the ringleader” of this conspiracy, and that his “exotic” background -- perhaps fabricated in the first place -- was the perfect back story.


Overall, a little over a third of the book establishes the crime in a well thought out and organized presentation of all of the elements of the crime. The rest is focused on solutions. While the book is by no means a “self-help” work – though there are elements of that in Part Two – there are ideas you can apply to your family, your business, your personal financial situation.


There is also some much-needed advice for the Republican Party. It is important to point out that Root is no GOP automaton -- he actually ran for Vice President on the Libertarian ticket at one time. He has a very good understanding of how the GOP establishment is tone deaf, weak and ineffective. Root’s game plan for saving the country focuses alternately on the macro and the micro -- the political and the financial -- and the personal and the moral. The only way to describe Root is as an American, one who loves the country as founded -- the free enterprise, the opportunity, the charity and the liberty. It is a mistake to try and pigeonhole him into any particular political niche, though his passions are very coincident with Tea Party values.


As a successful entrepreneur, sports gambler and speaker/author -- and the son of a middle class butcher -- Root draws from a wealth of experience and experiences. The book is written in the same high-energy style Root employs as a speaker, panelist or interviewee. That is who Wayne Allyn Root is -- and he is classic Wayne Allyn in this book.


Another testament to Mr. Root himself, and to the book, is the incredible list of diverse endorsers who were willing to put their name on the book. From Ben Carson to Ann Coulter to Allen West -- to D’Souza, DeMint, Faber, Forbes, Schiff, Paul, Viguerie, and Bohannan -- the list of those who recommend this must read is impressively expansive. I believe you will agree with all of the above when you read this book.  I also think you’ll vote “guilty.”



http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/09/obamas_real_crime.html






Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Common Core standards may barely be helping Hispanic students?





If some early reports on the controversial Common Core Standards are an indication, Hispanic students in the U.S. are falling behind on the very curriculum that was intended to help them achieve higher proficiency in school.


SEE ALSO: Common core success touted Florida, but some say not so fast
Even though implementation of Common Core Standards are still being phased in throughout many school systems in the country, a new report regarding the state of New York, which recently completed its fourth year of a 12-year Common Core phase-in shows 23 percent of Latinos are proficient in math, while only 19 percent are proficient in English.
Overall, New York students are 36 percent proficient in math and 31 percent proficient in English.
Kentucky is the other state that is utilizing the Common Core Standards, but results from last year’s school year aren’t yet available. Expectations are the achievement gap between Latinos and whites will remain high.


National Council of La Raza (NCLR) Deputy VP of Education and Workforce Development Peggy McLeod told VOXXI it’s way too early for low marks to color the anticipated long-term effect of the Common Core Standards.
http://voxxi.com/2014/09/14/latino-students-failing-common-core/

Monday, September 15, 2014

Obama’s Betrayal of the Constitution









BERLIN — PRESIDENT OBAMA’s declaration of war against the terrorist group known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria marks a decisive break in the American constitutional tradition. Nothing attempted by his predecessor, George W. Bush, remotely compares in imperial hubris.
Mr. Bush gained explicit congressional consent for his invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. In contrast, the Obama administration has not even published a legal opinion attempting to justify the president’s assertion of unilateral war-making authority. This is because no serious opinion can be written.
This became clear when White House officials briefed reporters before Mr. Obama’s speech to the nation on Wednesday evening. They said a war against ISIS was justified by Congress’s authorization of force against Al Qaeda after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and that no new approval was needed.

Obama plays both sides: Sought repeal of Bush war statute now used to justify Islamic State strikes








White House employs 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force Resolution to evade Congress

President Obama’s first initiated war against an Islamic terrorist group is authorized, the White House says, by George W. Bush-signed legislation that Mr. Obama has criticized and wanted to repeal since last year.
Since beginning airstrikes last month against the Islamic State, also known by the acronyms ISIS and ISIL, the White House has said it does not need congressional approval to carry out such missions.

Last week, on the 13th anniversary of al Qaeda’s attacks on the United States, the administration announced why, saying President Bush’s Authorization for Use of Military Force resolution in 2001 is all the authority Mr. Obama needs.

In a May 2013 speech to a military audience at the National Defense University, Mr. Obama portrayed the law as dated and as a potential blank check to get the U.S. into wars.

“The AUMF is now nearly 12 years old,” he said. “Unless we discipline our thinking, our definitions, our actions, we may be drawn into more wars we don’t need to fight, or continue to grant presidents unbound powers more suited for traditional armed conflicts between nation states.”

Last week, The Washington Times asked a National Security Council spokeswoman whether the president still wants to repeal the authorization, given the rise of the Islamic State terrorist group.

“On the 2001 AUMF, we remain committed to engaging with Congress and the American people to refine, and ultimately repeal, the AUMF,” the spokeswoman said. “The president has made clear that he wishes to take America off a permanent war footing.”
Two days later, the White House cited the authorization as Mr. Obama’s go-ahead for airstrikes on the Islamic State.

Said Charles “Cully” Stimson, a national security law analyst at the Heritage Foundation: “There’s not only a disconnect but a failure to clearly articulate in a public forum the legal basis for the strikes.”

White House press secretary Josh Earnest defended the irony of the president’s reliance on a war authorization law that he has wanted to be changed and repealed since at least 2013.
Mr. Earnest did not repeat the call for repeal Thursday as he explained to reporters why the 2001 resolution applies to the Islamic State.

“The president is ready to engage in a conversation with members of Congress as it relates to this specific AUMF,” he said. “And we welcome or would welcome a show of support from the United States Congress for the strategy that the president has laid out.”

Mr. Obama went on national TV Wednesday night to announce a counterterrorism campaign to destroy the Islamic State over time. The U.S. will provide airstrikes, intelligence, training and advice. Iraqis and Syrians will muster their ground forces.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/sep/14/obama-sought-repeal-of-bush-war-statute-now-used-t/

Mr. Obama campaigned for re-election as a president who was put into office to “end wars, not start them.”

The Obama administration has not given a name to the military operation, a departure from past Pentagon practices.

Obama declares war without calling it war, implementing weak military measures that in no way assure us of victory?







We said that we would go after al Qaeda, and they are on the run…” - Barack Obama, September 28, 2012

By the time of the 2012 Presidential election, Barack Obama had lied to us at least 32 times about the defeat of terrorism, code name Al Qaeda (cnsnews.com, November 1, 2012). Of course, there is plenty of blame to go around about how Republicans lost the election.

But if the liberal media had actually reported the news about the failures of the Obama administration during their first term, any faulty strategy by Romney and the Republicans would hardly have mattered, and Obama would have been soundly defeated.

Repeatedly saying Al Qaeda had been decimated and was on the path to defeat, the propaganda machine of the liberal media/Obama campaign also worked to hide any events that would indicate otherwise, such as the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

As it turns out, President Obama is the one who has been on the run, while in the last two years Al Qaeda in Iraq has transformed into an even worse form of terrorism called the Islamic State.

As it turns out, President Obama is the one who has been on the run, while in the last two years Al Qaeda in Iraq has transformed into an even worse form of terrorism called the Islamic State.

Putting off dealing with the Islamic State as they spread their regime of murder, rape, and genocide throughout Iraq, Obama was instead making sure he could get in a month of golfing and vacationing.
But after two Americans had their beheading broadcast over the internet, and with continued reports of the actions of this regime of mass bloodshed, President Obama had to declare…no, not war but counterinsurgency contingency plans, on the eve of the 13th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack and the 2nd anniversary of Obama doing nothing while our Ambassador to Libya was being murdered in Benghazi

Immediately after Obama’s speech, Senator Ted Cruz said the following to Megyn Kelly on Fox News: “What has been missing is a concrete military objective to eliminate ISIS, to take them out, because they have become qualitatively more dangerous. They have seized substantial portions of Iraq, gaining a nation-state with billions of dollars of oil revenue that gives them the ability to project terror…”

Obama’s speech said nothing about how the Islamic State will be destroyed. A few advisors being sent to organize Iraqi soldiers to fight is not a strategy to defeat a threat more entrenched than the Taliban were in Afghanistan.

In the next day’s follow-up by the Obama administration to the President’s Not War speech, Noah Rothman with hotair.com summed it up this way:
“America is not going to ‘war,’ per say, according to Secretary of State John Kerry and White House Press Sec. Josh Earnest. No, what they envision is merely another counter-terror operation. Just like the supposedly model operations ongoing in nearly imploding Yemen, or in Somalia, which has become synonymous for ‘basket case failed state.’
“While traveling in the Middle East to shore up support for what everyone sure thought was going to be a war to ‘degrade and destroy’ ISIS, America’s chief diplomat took the opportunity to clarify the president’s thinking.
“ ‘What we are doing is engaging in a very significant counter-terrorism operation,’ Kerry said. ‘If somebody wants to think about it as being a war with ISIL they can do so, but the fact is it’s a major counter-terrorism operation.’”
This is probably as close as we can get Mr. Obama making a declaration of war. And what is the basis for this declaration of “a very significant counter-terrorism operation?” None other than a piece of legislation he repeatedly said needed to be repealed, the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) that was passed on September 14, 2001:
“the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.”
Ever ready to go beyond the bounds of his Constitutional authority, this change of heart should come as no surprise. It doesn’t seem to matter to the Obama administration that Al Qaeda officially dis-associated themselves from ISIS back in February, nor that the War Powers Resolution of 1973 gives the President only 60 days to authorize military action without Congressional approval. What really matters to his administration is that the President is on the run from polling that shows the American people are increasingly fed up with his inability to lead this country. So he declares war without calling it war, implementing weak military measures that in no way assure us of victory.
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Fundamental Transformation of America is Obama's REAL War?





Pertinent, if not downright cheeky question to the leaders of the now dwindling 40 nations blindly following President Barack Obama into the Machiavellian ISIS war he deceptively tags: “a very significant counter-terrorism operation”:

Are you aware of the war that totally consumes Obama, the one he is waging against America?

That’s a question that sorely needs asking when it is so patently obvious that Obama shows far more gusto on the war deceptively called ‘The Fundamental Transformation of America’ than he displays toward the pretend war on ISIS, and one he’s been able to mastermind with no intervention for the past six years.

After all Obama hasn’t done to come to the aid of Israel against ISIS-supporting Hamas, why are you following Obama’s lead on the “very significant counter-operation”, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu?

As so many job-providing businesses operate from Canadian soil, with the day-to-day worry about the Marxist misery Obama inflicts on their friends and family, why is Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper one of the core coalition lemmings following Obama’s ISIS lead with a war that puts advisors rather than boots on the ground?

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel lists possible participants of the ISIS Core Coalition as Britain, France, Australia, Canada, Germany, Turkey, Italy, Poland and Denmark.

And that’s not to mention the columnist David Huntwork-described 10 Arab “frenemy” states that committed on Thursday to the fight against ISIS,  including the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC): Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, or that the new coalition also includes Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan and Iraq.

Harsh reality can always be counted on to shake rhetoric to its wobbly foundation

The duped broad Coalition of the Willing is already unravelling as the Coalition of the Balking Unwilling. Harsh reality can always be counted on to shake rhetoric to its wobbly foundation.
“In less than a day after Obama’s speech, both the UK and Germany (despite their earlier saber-rattling and tough guy talk) announced they have no interest in actually actively participating in any Obama led coalition to go after ISIS’ main bases of power in Syria. France has announced that they will not participate in any land or air actions at all. NATO member Turkey abstained from even pretending to join the anti-ISIS coalition and will not let the US use their airbases to attack ISIS targets in Syria. And now the Saudi’s probably won’t either. (David Huntwork, Sept. 14, 2014)
You don’t have to have the military acumen of a General Douglas MacArthur to know that Obama’s use of the term “very significant counter-terrorism that will have many different moving parts”  parroted zombie-like by his Secretary of State John Kerry, is nothing but a pathetic cop out.
Obama speaks a very different language from those among the 40 nations marching lemming-like off to war against ISIS.  Obama speaks in the language of doublespeak and in the Marxist dialectic.
A perfect example of Obama’s doublespeak Marxist dialectic is his self-coined con phrase, “The Fundamental Transformation of America” (FTOA)

In reality, the FTOA is essentially the absolute destruction of America from within.  Obama knew when he came up with the FTOA term that it would sound far less ominous than the utter destruction of an America much of the rest of the world counts on.

Had Obama honestly enunciated his true intentions for America pre-2008, describing the fundamental transformation of America exactly as it is, he likely never would have been propelled into the Oval Office.

People the mainstream media encouraged to vote for Obama would have thought of him as a despotic mad man.

Mainstream media, true life’s real Coalition of the Willing

But coy and cunning, Obama gave a lofty and deceiving description of his intentions, and did so in full view of a largely unresponsive mainstream media, true life’s real Coalition of the Willing. 
By identifying his so-called attack on ISIS a ‘counter-terrorism operation’, Obama ducks antagonizing the anti-war hysterics, including Code Pink activists who donate generously to his never-ending campaigns.

There’s a method in the madness of his doublespeak.  By watering down the word ‘war’ to ‘counter-terrorism’, he is sending a message that reads he is more than simpatico with the decapitating terrorists of ISIS.

Members of the international coalition who go marching off to fight ISIS should look up to the front of the ISIS attack line to see for themselves that Obama isn’t anywhere in sight.  Obama’s not there because even as Western leaders line up behind him to tackle the terrorists of the Islamic State, insincere President Barack Obama continues to spout meaningless doublespeak from the safety of the rear.

Another example of Obama doublespeak came during the so-called “Arab Spring” for which the mainstream media credits him.  The watching world was left with the false impression that the Arab Spring would be returning enemy nations to democracy.  Instead Arab Spring sprang fully-funded terrorists on an unsuspecting West.

Do nation leaders need to be told that only cowards and liars hide behind the doublespeak of Marxist dialectic?

Obama hides behind his words the same way smarmy carnival hucksters did in past eras.  If plain folk got to realize that the elixir they had paid for was nothing but sugared water that did not cure the ills that prompted them to buy it,  the hucksters always had the same comeback:  “I didn’t promise it would cure you, I only said it was good for you.”

The core coalition marching behind Obama is in the wrong battle because without America there is no free world.

Take stock of what has been happening in the USA for the past six years and this is the only conclusion: if Obama had put the same vigour he spends on his war against America on the Battle Against ISIS, beheading-crazed ISIS would be no more.
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Obama Cashes In on Wall Street Speeches