Saturday, November 29, 2014

Russian submarine test-launches Bulava intercontinental missile






(Reuters) - Russia on Friday successfully tested its new submarine-launched Bulava intercontinental missile, designed to carry nuclear warheads, the defense ministry said in a statement.
It said the nuclear submarine Alexander Nevsky fired the missile from under water in the Barents Sea and it landed on a military training ground in Russia's far eastern peninsula of Kamchatka, as planned.

The 12-metre-long (39.4 feet) weapon is intended to become the cornerstone of Russia's nuclear forces.
The last test was successfully carried out in September after the development of Bulava, or Mace, had been delayed by numerous failed launches.


President Vladimir Putin said after the previous test that Russiamust maintain its nuclear deterrent to counter growing security threats. Ties between Moscow and the West have hit new lows over the crisis in Ukraine.

Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Owner of Las Vegas’ Retro Bakery blasts Common Core math?

Kari Haskell, co-owner of a successful bakery in Las Vegas, is known as the “queen of buttercream.” In addition to running her business, Kari is a parent. Yesterday, she posted a Common Core multiplication problem that made her head hurt:



http://photos-c.ak.instagram.com/hphotos-ak-xap1/10731582_867193879988050_1565008769_n.jpg

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Five Reasons Why Obama Did It, Obama is no Conservative,



To the conservative mind, President Obama's executive order on immigration is unexplainable. For us, the whole point of the modern political experiment is to stick to the rules. Why would anyone think differently, especially after the disasters of lawless communism and fascism?

But President Obama is no conservative, and so we must try to understand his actions by peering into the mind of the “other.” Here are my five attempts to understand the president.

The Need to Do Something. We often like to sneer at the politician's knee-jerk response to every event, the need to be doing something. But when you are a leader, you are expected to be a man of action. Leaders lead, or they get replaced.


The Need to Keep the Progressives Loyal. You all know my model of government. As an army must feed and clothe its soldiers on the march or see its soldiers mutiny and desert, a government must satisfy its supporters. Barack Obama has proven to be a great disappointment to his less-committed supporters. Where's the hope? Where's the change? When the soldiery starts to get restive then the wise general must make certain of the loyalty of his Praetorian Guard, and the “progressives” are the Obamic equivalent of the Roman emperor's Praetorian Guard. Without them the regime comes to an end. Obama must keep the progressives happy.

Liberal Faith in Government by Rational Administration. To readers of the New York Times and other residual legatees of the Progressive Era the idea of congressional legislation is something of an embarrassment. The sight of all those hoggish politicians wheeling and dealing in smoke-filled rooms to come up with an immigration bill offends the refined sensibility. What's needed is a rational plan drawn up by credentialed experts and large-minded people that read The New Yorker. And the original Progressives had a point. A committee of 535 people is completely inadequate to the task of converting a rag-tag organism of social humans into a comprehensive and mandatory national program designed as a rational administrative system, whether the issue is health care or immigration. So an executive order is just the ticket.



The President Just Doesn't Have the Chops to Negotiate with Congress. The information we got from the president's confrontations with Congress after the 2010 midterms suggested that the president wasn't very good at negotiating. Moreover, he infuriated the Republican leaders by reopening issues that had already been agreed to. If you hate negotiating and you aren't very good at it, then you would do anything to avoid the unpleasantness of a full-dress, six-month negotiation with Congress over immigration. Thus the executive order.

The five reasons I've listed to explain the president's action on immigration last Thursday may or may not explain why he did what he did. But they add up to this: the president is acting from weakness rather than from strength. Let's face it, the president's party has gone in a short six years from overwhelming strength in the Congress and the nation to the worst position of the Democratic Party since before the Great Depression. All the heady talk of the Emerging Democratic Majority has collapsed in failure and ruin. All over Washington, Democratic officeholders must be asking themselves how bad things can get. You can say that Republicans can hardly expand the map much further, but that doesn't comfort the Democrat in a swing district that could lose his seat if things do get worse. At some point, perhaps when Republicans start passing bill overwhelmingly supported by the American people, Democrats are going to start running for the exits.


Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/11/five_reasons_why_obama_did_it_.html#ixzz3K7NWh67k
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Monday, November 24, 2014

Obama's Amnesty Built On Lies? Did George H.W. Bush really shield 1.5 million illegal immigrants? Nope.Obama Get Four Pinocchios Again



President George H.W. Bush “expanded the family fairness program to cover more than 1.5 million unauthorized spouses and children. This represented about 40 percent of the undocumented population at the time.”
– White House press secretary Josh Earnest, news briefing, Nov. 19, 2014
“If you look, every president — Democrat and Republican — over decades has done the same thing. George H.W. Bush — about 40 percent of the undocumented persons, at the time, were provided a similar kind of relief as a consequence of executive action.”
– President Obama, interview on ABC News’ “This Week,” Nov. 23, 2014
This column has been updated.
Who knew that an article that appeared on Page 3 of the metro section of the New York Times nearly a quarter-century ago could have such resonance in today’s policy debates?
As part of its justification for President Obama’s executive action on immigration, the White House and its allies have repeatedly stressed that Obama’s action, in impact, is roughly equivalent to a step that George H.W. Bush took in 1990. The United States had about 3.5 million illegal immigrants in 1990, so 1.5 million would be about 40 percent of that number. Given that about 40 percent of the current number of undocumented immigrants would be covered by Obama’s actions, that 1.5 million figure is crucially important to the White House’s defense of the president’s decision.
Much of the news media, including The Washington Post, has repeated the 1.5 million figure as a fact in recent weeks. But it turns out that the number hangs on a rather slim reed.

The Facts

Bush’s action in 1990 was designed to ease family disruptions caused by the landmark 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which allowed nearly 3 million illegal immigrants to gain legal permanent residency.
Under typical immigrant patterns, families do not all arrive together. Thus some family members qualified for residence but others still faced deportation. President Ronald Reagan at first eased the rules for minor children, and then Bush in early 1990 extended it to cover children and spouses, including authorization to work. However, the new rule did not make them legal residents, and they were required to renew their ”voluntary departure” status annually; they also had no legal basis to return to the United States if they left the country.
Here’s how The Post reported the Feb. 2 announcement on the front page at the time:
The Immigration and Naturalization Service yesterday reversed a stance that had drawn strong protests from Hispanic and human-rights groups by announcing a new policy to prevent the deportation of as many as 100,000 illegal aliens who are the children and spouses of newly legalized immigrants.
The new “family fairness” guidelines announced by INS Commissioner Gene McNary represent a potentially significant modification to the amnesty program created by the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. That program has provided amnesty to up to 3 million illegal immigrants who entered the country before Jan. 1, 1982.
Under the new policy, children and spouses of those newly legal immigrants will be granted a temporary status that will permit them to receive work permits and protect them from deportations. However, it will apply only to illegal immigrants who have been residing here since Nov. 6, 1986, when the amnesty program took effect.
Note that the figure given at the time of the announcement was 100,000. This number was broadly cited, in just about every article that appeared on the day after the announcement. “The new policy is likely to benefit more than 100,000 people, INS officials and immigration lawyers said,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
The Times ran a short Associated Press dispatch that said, “Thousands of illegal aliens who are the spouses or children of legal immigrants will be allowed to stay in this country under a new Government policy.”
However, the Philadelphia Inquirer said the number was possibly higher: “McNary and his top aides at the Immigration and Naturalization Service said they could not predict how many dependents would come forward, although they did not dispute estimates from immigrants’ advocacy groups of 500,000 or more. ‘There’s no way to count them. It may run to a million,’ said INS spokesman Duke Austin.”

That’s certainly not billed as a precise estimate. But big round numbers are often catnip for journalists.
That 1 million figure soon turned up in a Los Angeles Times article on Feb. 15: “Although there are no firm figures, the immigration service estimates as many as 1 million aliens could be affected by the new policy.”
On March 5, the Times ran another article on the policy shift that included this sentence: “The Federal Immigration Commissioner, Gene McNary, said recently that as many as 1.5 million illegal aliens could be affected by the new policy, called ‘family fairness,’ and intended to allow close family members of legalized immigrants to remain in the country under certain conditions.”
The Times article suggested that McNary had made a public statement to this effect, but if so, it does not turn up in news databases.
Administration officials noted that a 2012 Congressional Research Service report said, “At the time, McNary stated that an estimated 1.5 million unauthorized aliens would benefit from the policy.” CRS is nonpartisan and respected. But the CRS report provides no source for this comment.
McNary told The Fact Checker that he is fairly certain he never used that figure. “I was surprised it was 1.5 million when I read that” in the recent news reports, he said. “I would take issue with that. I don’t think that’s factual.”
Update: Elise Foley of The Huffington Post dug up a reference to congressional testimony in which a lawmaker notes that McNary had used an estimate of 1.5 million. “Do I have that number right?” the lawmaker asks. “Yes,” McNary responds.

(Administration officials also pointed to a 1989 Los Angeles Times article about a Senate vote predating Bush’s action, which quoted an unnamed aide to a senator as saying that such a move would affect 1.5 million immigrants; other news articles on the vote said “hundreds of thousands.” None of the estimates appeared especially well-grounded.)
Meanwhile, there is strong evidence that the 1.5 million estimate was grossly inflated. FactCheck.Org, which exhaustively reviewed previous presidential actions, found an article that appeared on Feb. 26, 1990, in the Interpreter Releases, a weekly newsletter on immigration news, that explained how fuzzy the data was on the number of people who might be affected by the new policy.
First, although 42 percent (1.3 million) of the 3.1 million legalization applicants were married, 704,000 applications were still pending or on appeal, so those family members were unable to apply, the newsletter said. So that reduced the number of potential married applicants to 1 million. The INS also had no reliable data on how many applicants had children, how many spouses had been legalized, how many marriages took place after Nov. 6, 1986 (date of enactment of the Reagan law), how many were divorced, and how many were ineligible for other reasons.
“The INS’s own current ‘guessimate’ is that no more than 250,000 aliens will apply for the family fairness program,” the newsletter said.
In fact, that estimate was even too high. On Oct. 1, 1990, the Miami Herald reported that the program was largely a bust: “In the eight months since McNary announced the family fairness program, INS received more than 250,000 inquiries about the program — but only 46,821 applications have been received nationwide.

In any case, a month later Bush signed the Immigration Act of 1990, which superseded the family fairness program. The new law changed the eligibility date from 1986 to 1988 and raised the eligibility age for children to 21, thus protecting even more people than under Bush’s initial action.
Nevertheless, the numbers still remained relatively small: 52,272 in 1992, 55,344 in 1993, 34,400 (projected) in 1994, according to a 1994 report on the 1990 law by the federal Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy.
In other words, even with the broader criteria, the number of immigrants who took advantage of Bush’s action and the subsequent law was far less than 1.5 million. That’s significant because INS officials had said during the initial news conference that they had no idea how many people would actually come forward.

The Pinocchio Test

The 1.5 million figure is too fishy to be cited by either the White House or the media. As best we can tell, this is a rounded-up estimate of the number of illegal immigrants who were married (1.3 million became 1.5 million.) But that figure was already overstated because it included applications that were pending or on appeal.
With the passage of time, McNary believes he was misquoted, though he actually affirmed the figure in congressional testimony. In any case, it certainly was not a widely reported estimate in 1990. The number was buried in a single news article — and just because it was in the New York Times does not mean it was true.
Let’s recall that even this article indicated this was a high-end estimate — “as many as 1.5 million.” Other news reports were careful to say INS officials had no firm numbers. It’s now hardened in White House statements as “more than 1.5 million.”

ndeed, the 100,000 estimate that the INS gave on the day of the announcement might have been optimistic. Fewer than 50,000 applications had been received before the policy was superseded by a new law. The numbers generated by that law — a little more than 140,000 — further indicate that the universe of potential applicants was much smaller than 1.5 million, especially given that the law eased restrictions even more.
In the end, 200,000 amounts to about 6 percent of the illegal immigrant population at the time, not 40 percent. Small wonder the White House prefers the larger number.
To recap, the White House seized on a single news report, which cited an estimate much higher than any other news organization. Meanwhile, officials ignored other contemporaneous reporting using much lower figures — as well as the actual outcome of the policy. That’s worthy of Four Pinocchios. (Update: in light of the discovery of McNary’s testimony, we will assess whether this should be reduced to Three Pinocchios. In any case, the actual impact was far less than suggested in administration statements.)

Four Pinocchios



Barack Obama assumed the role of Supreme Dictator of the United States by creating law without Congress.





He waved his traitorous hand and granted amnesty to millions of illegal aliens. In his speech, like many of his speeches over the past 6 years, there were many lies and misleading facts that were twisted to support his illegal action.

Obama spoke of a campaign promise he made in 2008 of passing an immigration reform bill within a year of being elected. This lie helped him defeat GOP candidate John McCain. But after a year in office, there was no immigration bill, and there wasn’t one after the second year when he still had control of both houses of Congress. Obama was too busy ramming Obamacare down our throats than to work on immigration.

Last week, Obama also said that he committed to securing our borders and has done what he could to make that happen. Yet our borders are more porous than they’ve been in 50 years. Instead of securing the border, Obama has instructed immigration officers to ignore some of the federal immigration laws. He ordered that only illegals that were convicted of felonies be deported, allowing millions of other illegals to remain in the US without fear of deportation. Under Obama’s orders, 60,000 illegals that were convicted felons were not deported, but released to walk the streets of America.

When states like Arizona and Texas took steps to secure their borders, Obama’s administration fought them. In Texas, then Gov. Rick Perry ordered National Guard troops to help secure the border, but the feds refused to fund the action by claiming it wasn’t necessary. In Arizona, then Gov. Jan Brewer repeatedly invited Obama to come tour the border to see the problems for himself and he refused. Then Obama filed lawsuits to block Arizona’s immigration laws that were passed to protect Arizona citizens.

In his speech last week, Obama claimed that illegal border crossings are at the lowest levels since the 1970s. During Obama’s first term, the economy was in recession and offered little incentive for illegals to come to the US. As the economy has been reported to be improving, the number of illegals caught at the border has been steadily increasing since 2011.

Perhaps another reason for lower numbers is that those numbers are based upon the number of illegals captured and detained and may not reflect actual numbers. There are numerous places along the Mexican border where large numbers of illegals are crossing on a regular basis and not being detained. Ranchers in southern Arizona continue to report seeing hundreds of illegals and drug traffickers freely crossing into the US. If Border Patrol has had their ranks and duties reduced, then there are fewer of them to detain illegals, hence lower numbers for Obama to report.

Read more at http://godfatherpolitics.com/18666/obamas-amnesty-speech-riddled-misleading-facts/#fRcQ4az58oEOOI2S.99


Friday, November 21, 2014

NATO Reports 400 Intercepts of Russian Aircraft in 2014

NATO said Thursday there have been around 400 intercepts of Russian military flights near its member countries this year, amid heightened tension between Moscow and the West over the Ukraine crisis.

 

 


"If you look at the number of intercepts around NATO, we can talk about 400 intercepts, 50 percent more than last year," NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters in western Estonia.

"Most of these flights are taking place in an international airspace, but they are close to our airspace, and they are interfering with commercial flights.

"It is a pattern that we haven't seen for many years, back to the time of the Cold War."

He spoke from the Amari air base that hosts the Western defence alliance's air policy mission over the Baltic states, following talks with Estonian Prime Minister Taavi Roivas.

It was his first stop on a tour of the three Baltic states that were once ruled from Moscow and which, like fellow newer NATO member Poland, have been deeply concerned by Russia's actions in Ukraine.

The West believes Russia is pulling the strings in the deadly seven-month conflict between pro-Western government forces and pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine's east -- an accusation the Kremlin denies.

Stoltenberg said NATO had seen "more than 100 intercepts, which is three times more than last year" around the Baltic region alone, but reiterated that the alliance would protect its members.

"It is all for one and one for all," he said.

He later travelled to Latvian capital Riga, where he reacted to Russia's Wednesday call for Ukraine to stay out of the NATO alliance.

Requiring Kiev to give such a guarantee violates "the idea of respecting the independence, the sovereignty of Ukraine," he said after talks with Latvian President Andris Berzins.

"Each and every country has the right to decide its own security arrangements."

He said he expects Russia to "respect" the decision of Ukraine were it to apply for NATO membership "later on".
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2014/11/21/NATO-reports-400-intercepts-of-Russian-aircraft-in-2014

Obama Never Learns Obama stands alone, alas

There’s a lesson from  Obama’s first term that he should have learned long ago. It’s simple: On an issue that affects many millions of Americans, it’s best—even necessary—to have bipartisan support in Congress. Going forward in a purely partisan fashion is bound to cause national discord, increase polarization, and heighten distrust in Washington. Worse still, it means the issue will be controversial for years to come.

 he enduring unpopularity of Obamacare—indeed, the Republican commitment to repeal it—is an example of what can happen when bipartisanship is spurned. In this case, Obama and congressional Democrats made no effort to attract Republicans. They declined to compromise, offering Republicans zilch. They were mesmerized by their huge majorities in the Senate and House.
Now they own Obamacare, including all its troubles. Republicans own none. And the health care law lacks full legitimacy. Four years after it was enacted, Democrats are still suffering politically. For them, Obamacare is a drag.

The same is likely to occur with Obama’s executive amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants. It is doubly doomed to be regarded as illegitimate—first, because it stretches presidential authority beyond the breaking point, and second, because it has no bipartisan backing. Obama’s action is supported by many (but not all) Democrats in Congress but zero Republicans.
The president should have known better. In 2009 and 2010, Democrats dominated the Senate and House. To pass Obamacare, legislative maneuvering was required, but not Republican votes. So they didn’t recruit any. The upshot: Opposition to Obamacare is a thorn in the side of Democrats and will continue to be.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/he-never-learns_819716.html

Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Is What Obama Doing on Immigration So Different From Reagan and Bush? Yes- VERY Different!

For decades, the political realities surrounding immigration reform have been undeniably daunting. From our earliest moments as a nation, we have had a complicated history with immigrants. Whether discussing our history as a nation of immigrants or addressing those immigrants that were captured and enslaved to the anti-immigrant sentiment during the heydays of Ellis Island, we have had difficulty with this topic.
 Still, we face a much more clear-cut issue today: do we have a right to enforce immigration laws? The answer for citizens of every other country on the planet is a most-decided and unequivocal “yes!”
However, politicians have augmented the problem considerably over the last few decades. Democrats have increasingly relied on illegal immigrants to boost Democrat votes and Republicans have tried to remain out of the fray and appear centrist on the issue of illegal immigration. Now, we have a full-scale crisis on our hands and we are days away from a dictator issuing amnesty on his own.
To defend the imminent despotic edict from Emperor Obama, Democrats have attempted to shift the focus and have claimed that Obama is just following the path trodden by George H.W. Bush and conservative icon President Ronald Reagan.
But is this really the same thing?
Not even close…
Stephanie Kane of Fox News recently wrote of the imminent lawlessness to come via Obama’s trusty “pen and phone. She stated, 
“[A] review of steps taken by former Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush — whose executive actions Democrats have cited as precedent — shows they only used their power to expand laws recently passed by Congress, not to impose new laws.
By contrast, what Obama is expected to do would go far beyond his predecessors’ actions. And Obama’s expected executive actions would not be rooted in any recently passed law. 
In 1986, Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) which allowed illegal immigrants to stay in the country on a temporary basis if they had been here since 1 before 1982 and had demonstrated “good moral character” and paid a fee for their crime. However, the provision excluded children and spouses of these illegal immigrants if they did not meet the aforementioned criteria.
In 1987, Congress tried to pass legislation that would legalize these families who had not met the criteria. It did not pass.
However, President Reagan did grant a deportation reprieve for children under 18 years of age who were living in a household where the parents received amnesty. Obviously, this was designed so as to not send tons of unaccompanied children back across the border without their parents.
Kane reminds, “This, too, was limited, as a child living in a two-parent household where one parent was not eligible also was not eligible. Spouses were not eligible either. Reagan’s executive action expanded the number of eligible people only nominally.”
The issue did not go away and President George H.W. Bush relented and granted amnesty to those who had applied and received the legalization under the IRCA. This was later upheld by Congress who passed a law codifying the same measure and raising the age of “children” affected by this policy to 21.
What Obama intends to do, however, is not even remotely related to these comparatively-humble presidential actions. Obama has already offered a deportation reprieve for millions of illegals and his executive edict is expected to grant amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants who came to this country in violation of our laws- including those who came to this country illegally as children and their parents.
Obama has maintained that this step is necessary since Congress has not passed immigration reform legislation. However, Obama’s apparent dissatisfaction with the legislative bodies does not mean he may rule as a king when Congress does not legislate to his liking.
President Obama does have an option; he may resign and at the next available opportunity, attempt to reclaim his position as Senator and then his opinion on legislative gridlock will be warranted. Until such a time, however, he should stand by and only use his pen to sign bills passed into law by the legitimate governing body.
Further, even if we accept that both Reagan and Bush the elder overstepped their bounds in adjusting the enforcement of immigration statutes, this does not grant Obama authority to step even further beyond the confines of the Constitution.
So, no; sorry, Democrats, there is no legal precedent for Obama’s tyranny. 
http://www.tpnn.com/2014/11/19/is-what-obama-doing-on-immigration-so-different-from-reagan-and-bush-yes-very-different/?utm_source=Newsletter+11%2F19%2F14+4pm+&utm_campaign=Newsletter+11%2F19%2F14+4pm&utm_medium=email

Pro-abortion ‘firewall’ gone in the Senate.

NARAL has posted this interesting graphic:
Image
NARAL is referring to the abortion lobby’s ability to block pro-life bills and amendments by Senate filibusters (i.e., by requiring pro-life proponents to muster 60 votes to “invoke cloture”).
Word to the wise: NARAL enjoys torturing numbers for its own devices.
When discussing public opinion, NARAL counts everybody as “pro-choice” except those who want abortion to be flat-out illegal, and thus NARAL claims to speak for 70% of the population.
Yet when NARAL is counting lawmakers for purposes of whipping up donations, it counts as “pro-choice” only those legislators who unblinkingly follow NARAL’s party line.
Also, NARAL’s dire predictions don’t mention their veto firewall – Barack Obama.
So, the premise on which NARAL claims it lacks a cloture “firewall” in the Senate is that there are fewer than 41 “pro-choice” senators, a figure NARAL can only arrive at by adopting a very strict definition of “pro-choice” – those senators NARAL can bank on to vote how it tells them to vote 100% of the time.
If NARAL counted as “pro-choice” another group of senators who in the past have voted NARAL’s way on nearly every issue (the grey dots), then NARAL could no longer plausibly claim to be in jeopardy in the Senate, even setting aside the sure presidential veto.
Click "like" if you are PRO-LIFE
For fundraising purposes (see chart above) NARAL skews the numbers in the Senate, painting the worst possible outlook for donors, hoping those donors forget that sustaining a veto requires only 1/3 plus 1 in one House.
All that being said, NARAL may indeed have need to worry about a few senators who reassess how far out on a limb they want to go in defense of the extreme pro-abortion agenda, given the recent election results and various polls, but we’ll see.
Those senators are also watching Mary Landrieu and know they could be next, bringing to mind a cartoon I didn’t have room for in the Sunday funnies…
Image
There is also the possibility that deft maneuvering by the Republican majority will compel those grey-dot pro-abortion senators to drop resistance if pro-life bills are tacked on as amendments to other bills they feel they have to support.
So, while NARAL’s vanished firewall should be viewed with skepticism, pro-aborts do indeed have a potentially out-of-control fire on their hands.
https://www.lifesitenews.com/pulse/pro-abortion-firewall-gone-in-the-senate

COMMON CORE'S GLOBAL MANAGEMENT SYSTEM?

Necessary for the shift from academics to limited learning for lifelong labor
"It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country." — Justice Louis Brandeis, 1932

In 1972, Florida's Associate Commissioner of Education, Cecil Golden, said:
“What we’re doing should soon become very visible.” However, he estimates it will take seven to ten years before the program is completely operational....

“Golden says it may sound like a lot of gibberish at this point, but “when we bring it all together” it should produce a more flexible and relevant educational system.... “He said many people in the State Department of Education are working independently on various facets and aspects of the program and, like those assembling the atom bomb, “very few of them understand exactly what they are building, and won’t until we put all the parts together.” “Schools to Try New Program,” The Ledger (Tallahassee), 7/27/72 [bold added]

Was Florida "one single courageous state" (a pilot) or were there many others? And did the citizens of Florida vote on this monumental change which would affect education forever? Commissioner Golden was talking about the use in education of the computerized Planning, Programming, Budgeting System (PPBS), being implemented nationwide today.However, Golden was too optimistic about anyone figuring it out "until we put all the parts together."

Evidently there were many traditional administrators and teachers who had figured it out and who resisted this total shift from academics to PPBS and its Skinnerian 

outcomes/performance-based education! The parts have been put together since 1985, at least. However... still... nobody, except a handful of academically-oriented teachers and administrators, understands exactly what they are building! Or "wants to understand what they are building?"

How is it possible that since 1972...over a period of 52 years.... nobody, except a few teachers and administrators, has yet figured "it" out? 

Martha Spaulding, researcher of educational and constitutional issues from New Hampshire, has figured "it" out and she hit the jackpot with discovering the Justice Brandeis quote. Martha wrote to me:
“…I wanted to make sure you see the analogy that I made to the concept of “New Federalism” [block grants] and Outcome Based Education and Skinner’s laboratory rats being the people in the States

“I wasn’t aware of the term New Federalism until you mentioned it, Charlotte. Here’s what I found about Nixon’s “New Federalism”:
“’New Federalism is a political philosophy of devolution, or the transfer of certain powers from the United States federal government back to the states. The primary objective of New Federalism, unlike that of the eighteenth-century political philosophy of Federalism, is the restoration to the states of some of the autonomy and power which they lost to the federal government as a consequence of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.’

“’As a policy theme, New Federalism typically involves the federal government providing block grants to the states to resolve a social issue. The federal government then monitors outcomes but provides broad discretion to the states for how the programs are implemented. Advocates of this approach sometimes cite a quotation from a dissent by Louis Brandeis in New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann:’

“’It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.’

“Isn’t it interesting that they seem to be using outcome-based “Federalism” with the states being their laboratories for their experiments on “New Federalism”?
“They are treating states and the people in America like rats in a cage used for experimentation and Justice Brandeis proudly used this analogy in a U.S. Supreme Court decision. Wouldn’t B.F. Skinner be proud?”
I responded to Martha that now she could research PPBS, especially by reading my book the deliberate dumbing down of America where I included much documentation on the Skinnerian outcomes-based system first developed by Russian Wassily Leontief. This system would be implemented by Robert McNamara, when he was President of Ford Motor Company, and shortly thereafter it was used by federal government (U.S. Office of Education and Dept. of Defense during the Vietnam War.) PPBS is related to Management By Objectives (MBO) and Total Quality Management (TQM). It subsequently extended its totalitarian tentacles into all federal, state and local departments/agencies—very useful for current UN Agenda 21 (Regionalism which is Communism). I told Martha to be sure to readMary Thompson's great speech in 1972 regarding PPBS in my book, pages 110-111.
Now, take a look at the following very recent excellent article related to the role of the late Robert McNamara in the installation of "THE INPUT/OUTPUT MANAGEMENT AND CONTROL SYSTEM" we are looking at today. From a report titled “The Dictatorship of Data: Robert McNamara epitomizes the hyper-rational executive led astray by numbers,” by Kenneth Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, May 31, 2013, in Technology Review we can learn:
“Big data is poised to transform society, from how we diagnose illness to how we educate children, even making it possible for a car to drive itself. Information is emerging as a new economic input, a vital resource. Companies, governments, and even individuals will be measuring and optimizing everything possible.
“But there is a dark side. Big data erodes privacy. And when it is used to make predictions about what we are likely to do but haven’t yet done, it threatens freedom as well. Yet big data also exacerbates a very old problem: relying on the numbers when they are far more fallible than we think. Nothing underscores the consequences of data analysis gone awry more than the story of Robert McNamara.

“McNamara was a numbers guy. Appointed the U.S. secretary of defense when tensions in Vietnam rose in the early 1960s, he insisted on getting data on everything he could. Only by applying statistical rigor, he believed, could decision makers understand a complex situation and make the right choices. The world in his view was a mass of unruly information that—if delineated, denoted, demarcated, and quantified—could be tamed by human hand and fall under human will. McNamara sought Truth, and that Truth could be found in data. Among the numbers that came back to him was the “body count.”
My friend Martha Spaulding might have wondered what all of this has to do with Common Core and the restructuring of education into the Soviet PolyTechnical global workforce training system that spins off profits for the global elite. So I told her some important history about how it all came about.

President Reagan, who had run on a platform promising to get rid of the U.S. Dept. of Education, appointed T. H. Bell of Utah as Secretary of Education (even though Bell had in 1978 testified before Congress in favor of the creation of the U.S. Dept. of Education!) Needless to say, the U.S. Dept. of Education still exists and controls the whole show, including Common (Communist) Core, lifelong workforce training, and tax-funded school choice/charters with no elected voter representation on school boards. (See the many articles on my blog abcsofdumbdown.blogspot.com where I’ve written on this topic.)
All of the above nefarious/treasonous activity could not have taken place without the implementation in the nation's schools of McNamara and T.H. Bell's PPBS and its accompanying computer technology to "measure" and "remediate" (based on Skinnerian operant conditioning methods) your children's and their teachers so that they would exhibit the prescribed state-sanctioned thoughts, actions, and beliefs. This is all spelled out in Prof. Benjamin Bloom’s book All Our Children Learning" (see page 180). Each citizen’s potential importance to the corporations would be assessed to determine how useful they would be to the UN "technocrats/change agents" involved in changing America's Capitalist system to a Communist planned economy. (Go to www.americandeception.com and type in the word "Conclusions" in the search box to download the Carnegie landmark book Conclusions and Recommendations for the Social Studies, 1934, which calls for using the schools to change America's Capitalist economic system to a planned economy, and in some instances for the seizing of private property.)

Secretary Bell wrote a book about the need for Educational Systems Management in 1974. According to the head of the Utah Education Association, who was a close associate of Bell’s in the early 1970s, if the Senate Committee that confirmed T.H. Bell as Secretaryof Education had read Bell’s A Performance Accountability System for School Administrators, itis unlikely Bell would have been confirmed. Bell’s book stated:
“The Need for a Management System
Under the pressure of the free-enterprise system and the unremitting demand that large corporationsearn profits and pay dividends to stockholders, management efficiency through orientationto results has led to development of management systems such as the one described inthis book. Most of the successful corporations in the United States now use annually adoptedobjectives as a means of focusing the energies and efforts of managers on the attainment ofgoals that are widely known and broadly accepted. Although the problems of educationalmanagement are obviously quite different from those of the private sector, there is much to be learned from industry’s systems approach in gaining more efficiency in educational management.The outcomes are quite similar…. (p. 21)

“Use of Tests in Needs Assessments
The economic, sociological, psychological and physical aspects of students must be taken intoaccount as we look at their educational needs and accomplishments, and fortunately thereare a number of attitude and inventory scales that can be used to assess these admittedlydifficult to measure outcomes….

“Most of these efforts to manage education try to center in one place an information center that receives reports and makes available to all members of the management teamvarious types of information useful to managers….

“School management by objectives demands more use of educational tests and measures.” (p. 33-35) [emphasis added]
For those who may doubt the legitimacy of longtime education researchers' concerns over this computerized PPBS educational management system, read on…

In 1984 Schooling and Technology, Vol. 3, Planning for the Future: A Collaborative Model, An Interpretive Report on Creative Partnerships in Technology—An Open Forum byDustin H. Heuston, World Institute for Computer-Assisted Teaching (WICAT) was 

published(Southeastern Regional Council for Educational Improvement: Research Triangle Park, NorthCarolina, 1984) under a grant from the U.S. Office of Education, HEW, National Institute ofEducation. An excerpt from “Discussion: Developing the Potential of an Amazing Tool” inSchooling and Technology follows:
“We’ve been absolutely staggered by realizing that the computer has the capability to act asif it were ten of the top psychologists working with one student.... You’ve seen the tip ofthe iceberg. Won’t it be wonderful when the child in the smallest county in the most distantarea or in the most confused urban setting can have the equivalent of the finest school inthe world on that terminal and no one can get between that child and the curriculum? Wehave great moments coming in the history of education.“ [bold added]
So, thank you Martha for your astute observation regarding the changes in our governmental structure partially due to Justice Brandeis's 1932 ruling and to its ramifications (unwanted experimental purposes) from President Nixon to present-day President Obama.

http://www.newswithviews.com/iserbyt/iserbyt130.htm


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