Tenure, Temerity and the Truth

Los Angeles Times op-ed and teachers union defense of educational status quo are packed with malarkey.

Now in its third week, the Students Matter trial still has a ways to go. Initially scheduled to last four weeks, the proceedings are set to run longer. On Friday, Prosecutor Marcellus McRae told Judge Rolf Treu that the plaintiffs need another week and a half or so to conclude their case before the defense takes over. The coverage of the trial has been thorough, with the Students Matter website providing daily updates, as has the always reliable LA School Report.

The media have generally been either neutral or supportive of the case, which claims that the tenure, seniority and dismissal statutes enshrined in the state Ed Code hurt the education process in the Golden State, especially for minority and poor kids. The defendants are the state of California and the two state teachers unions – the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers.

Having studied and written about the case extensively, I am of the opinion that the defense has no defense and that the best that they can do is to muddy the waters to gain favor with judge. In an effort to learn what the defense will come up with, I have tried to read everything I can by folks who think the lawsuit is misguided. I have written before about California Teachers Association president Dean Vogel’s rather inept argument presented in the December issue of CTA’s magazine.

The CTA website has been posting more about the case as the trial has progressed, and it would appear that desperation has set in. The union’s old bromides hold about as much water as a ratty sponge.

The problems we face with layoffs are not because of Education Code provisions or local collective bargaining agreements, but lack of funding.

No, the problem is who is getting laid off; we are losing some of the best and the brightest, includingteachers-of-the-year due to ridiculous seniority laws.

The lawsuit ignores all research that shows teaching experience contributes to student learning.

Not true. Studies have shown that after 3-5 years, the majority of teachers don’t improve over time.

The backers of this lawsuit include a “who’s who” of the billionaire boys club and their front groups whose real agendas have nothing to do with protecting students, but are really about privatizing public schools.

Oh please – the evil rich and the privatization bogeyman! Really! Zzzzz.

Via: California Political Review

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OBAMACARE INSURERS REJECT LOUISIANA AIDS PATIENTS

HIV-AIDS advocacy groups say the three insurance companies in Louisiana that offer healthcare plans under ObamaCare are rejecting payments from a federal program that was meant to assist low-income HIV patients.

According to Reuters, the Louisiana Health Cooperative and Vantage Health Plan--two smaller insurers--followed the decision of the state’s largest insurer, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana, at the end of last year to reject the payments for the HIV patients.

In response, Lambda Legal, a nonprofit group, filed a civil rights complaint with the Obama administration about the two smaller insurers’ action on Thursday, following their complaint against Louisiana Blue last week, in which they argued that the insurer’s refusal to accept Ryan White payments flouted a key provision of ObamaCare, namely its requirement that insurers must accept customers with pre-existing conditions.

“Additional carriers are jumping on the discrimination bandwagon,” Susan Sommer, director of constitutional litigation for Lambda Legal, said.

The legal nonprofit works to protect the civil rights of lesbians, gay men, and people with HIV.

“The worst nightmare for people with HIV-AIDS is coming true in Louisiana: they’re being turned away in what’s become a race to the bottom by insurers,” Sommer said.

At issue is the federal Ryan White HIV/AIDS program that, for 23 years, has made grants to states, cities, and nonprofit groups to assist low-income people with HIV in the purchase of health insurance.

The advocacy organizations assumed the federal funds could be used to purchase premiums for Ryan White beneficiaries who bought private insurance on the ObamaCare exchanges, in the same way the funds had been used to pay insurance premiums prior to President Obama’s signature healthcare reform law.

Recently, however, both Louisiana Blue and Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Dakota began rejecting Ryan White payments made on behalf of poor HIV-AIDS patients who had enrolled in a plan on the ObamaCare exchanges.

Via: Breitbart

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The Stimulus That Wasn’t: Five Years Later, It’s Clear Obama’s Stimulus Was A Waste Of Taxpayer Dollars

On February 17, 2009, Obama Signed The Stimulus Into Law, Promising It Marked “The Beginning Of The End” Of America’s “Economic Troubles.”“President Obama on Tuesday signed the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act into law… ‘Today does not mark the end of our economic troubles,’ Obama said before signing the bill at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. ‘But it does mark the beginning of the end – the beginning of what we need to do to create jobs for Americans scrambling in the wake of layoffs; to provide relief for families worried they won’t be able to pay next month’s bills; and to set our economy on a firmer foundation.’” (Jeanne Sahadi, “Stimulus: Now For The Hard Part,” CNN’s Money, 2/17/09)

FOR EVERYONE – INCLUDING OBAMA – THE STIMULUS FAILED TO LIVE UP TO EXPECTATIONS

In 2010, Obama “Admitted That The Enormous Sums Of Money” In The Stimulus “Had Fallen Short.” “Yet he also admitted that the enormous sums of money had fallen short. ‘If we’re honest, part of the controversy also is that despite the extraordinary work that has been done through the Recovery Act, millions of Americans are still without jobs. Millions more are struggling to make ends meet. So it doesn’t yet feel like much of a recovery. And I understand that. It’s why we’re going to continue to do everything in our power to turn this economy around.’” (Richard Wolffe, Revival: The Struggle For Survival Inside The Obama White House, 2010, p. 155)

According To Obama’s Former Chief Of Staff Bill Daley, The Obama Administration Gave Up Defending The Stimulus Program Two Years After It Was Passed. ” Then, early in 2011, with unemployment hovering above 9 percent, Obama’s aides made a calculated decision to stop expending the president’s political capital to defend the program, either by its name or the generic term stimulus, said Bill Daley, Obama’s chief of staff at the time.” (Hans Nichols, “Stimulus Back In Obama’s Vocabulary After Year On Don’t-Say List,” Bloomberg, 10/26/12)

• Daley: “You Could See The Investments, But You Couldn’t See The Returns On Those Investments.” “‘It was pretty obvious that people didn’t see a difference in the economy yet,’ Daley said. ‘You could see the investments, but you couldn’t see the returns on those investments.’” (Hans Nichols, “Stimulus Back In Obama’s Vocabulary After Year On Don’t-Say List,” Bloomberg, 10/26/12)

FactCheck.org: “It’s Accurate To Say The Stimulus Has Failed To Live Up To Initial Expectations.” “CBO’s high estimate is still short of the 3.5 million jobs that Obama had said would be created by the end of 2010, so it’s accurate to say the stimulus has failed to live up to initial expectations.” (Lori Robertson, “Dueling Economic Ads,” Fact Check, 6/30/11)

Via: GOP.com

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A Destructive President

President Barack Obama never admits to a mistake. Instead, egregious lawlessness is fluffed away as "not a smidgen of scandal" in relation to the IRS targeting of Tea Party and other conservative groups. Instead of being a great leader, Obama distances himself and lets his appointees hide behind the law or simply exempt themselves from total disclosure. Thus, Lois Lerner can refuse to answer any questions or testify when she is brought before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and Cindy Thomas, who was in charge of the IRS's Exempt Organization office and who illegally released confidential information about nine conservative organizations, can be promoted.

How else does Obama evade taking responsibility for his actions? Even though the president claimed he had no knowledge of the gun running program known as Fast and Furious, he claimed executive privilege. But one cannot assert executive privilege over documents that one has allegedly never seen. This is just one in the litany of obfuscations by Obama. And instead of taking responsibility for Fast and Furious, Obama falsely attributes the program to President Bush. Operation Fast and Furious began in October 2009, nine months after Obama took office. In fact, under President Bush there was a program known as Operation Wide Receiver, an "entirely separate program that implemented tactics in a profoundly different way;" furthermore, Operation Wide Receiver ended in 2007.

Via: American Thinker
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[VIDEO] Obama: Growing up means grossly overpaying for health insurance, or something

Growing up can certainly be a tough proposition, even without the government forcing young adults to buy comprehensive health insurance that they’ll never use. Paying thousands in premiums while having deductibles that all but guarantee they won’t see any benefits at all from those plans is just part of the maturation process, Barack Obama explained to Charles Barkley in an interview for the cable channel TNT. After all, we older folk have lots of aches and pains — and you can’t expect us to cover the cost of our own risk, can you?

“Folks our age, I mean I wouldn’t call us old yet –” Obama started.

“We’re knocking on the door.”

“We are knocking on the door. So once you are 50, you wake up sometimes — does this happen to you, Chuck? — you wake up and something hurts and you don’t know exactly what happened. Right?”

“Everything hurts when I wake up,” said Barkley.

“When you were young, you know, you had to actually have an injury before something hurts. We’d like to encourage more young people to sign up, partly because since they’re healthier, their premiums are actually generally going to be fairly cheap. They can find good options for less than their cable bill, less than their cell phone bill. And it’s just part of growing up — is making sure you’re taking care of your body, your health. If you have a young family, you have to make sure that your family’s protected with health insurance, as well. This allows you to do it,” said Obama.

Via: Hot Air

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[CARTOON] President Obama’s Seal

Via: California Political Review

Wisdom Abandoned: American Children Thrown to the Wolves

American society is badly damaged by a lack of virtue and the rejection of wisdom--Does not Wisdom Call Out? Does not Understanding Raise her Voice?

A society cannot hope to survive without some recognition and preservation of collective wisdom. It is part of each culture’s duty to the coming generation to collect wisdom. We must instruct upon the difference between success and failure, upon character and virtue, and the difference between good and evil.

And yet we live at a time when anything which smacks of tradition is dismissed out of hand. And simple, common sense values which at one time “went without saying” are treated like sewage—only fit for disposal. Now, even the most basic of contrasts, such as that between men and women are dismissed as an unsophisticated joke.

It’s undeniable that American society has turned its back upon the concept of wisdom, allowing its children to drift in society’s open oceans without restraint, like so much flotsam and jetsam. As US society is in the midst of a radial rewrite of the code of cultural mores, the truths of previous generations passed down through centuries are now treated as a laughingstock, a historical fiction, a nonsense of sexist, racist and homophobic myths.

So what is the antidote to the changes now being seen which will certainly destroy the entire society soon—if not challenged and halted? Wisdom! But recovering wisdom is easier said than done. The Old Testament writers personified Wisdom as a female in such books as the Proverbs of Solomon, celebrated as the wisest man of antiquity. King Solomon wrote in Proverbs 4:5-6,

Get wisdom, get understanding;
do not forget my words or turn away from them.
Do not forsake wisdom, and she will protect you;
love her, and she will watch over you.

Via: Canada Free Press

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Exclusive: Kathleen Sebelius Won't Say Whether Still Fundraising To Promote ObamaCare

First in a series of stories on the Obama administration's outside fundraising efforts to promote Obamacare enrollment.

 

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and other department staff may be continuing to solicit private donations to help an outside group promote the president's health care law as the administration works to boost enrollment figures after a troubled fall rollout.

News last May that Sebelius had asked business executives and nonprofit groups to donate toEnroll America, a nonprofit organization formed to help encourage millions of Americans to sign up for the new Obamacare insurance exchanges, provoked an uproar among Republicans on Capitol Hill.

Two GOP-led House committees launched investigations, and several Republican senators called on the Health and Human Services inspector general to investigate Sebelius' fundraising drive, which watchdogs have described as an unethical shakedown for cash.

Eight months after the news broke, Sebelius' spokeswoman last Friday sidestepped questions from the Washington Examiner on whether her boss has continued to solicit funds from outside groups for Enroll America's efforts.

“The secretary has engaged in a sustained, aggressive outreach campaign to reach as many Americans as possible during open enrollment,” HHS spokeswoman Joanne Peters said in an emailed statement Friday afternoon.

“We're [sic] have been working closely with a range of partners groups across the country to reach the uninsured, and to help get them enrolled in quality, affordable health insurance,” Peters continued.

She did not respond to a follow-up question specifically asking whether Sebelius has continued the fundraising.

Via: Washington Examiner

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SEN. MIKE LEE: OBAMACARE DELAYS 'SHAMELESS POWER GRAB'

Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) blasted President Barack Obama on Sunday for his myriad Obamacare delays designed to circumnavigate the looming midterm elections and the Constitution.

"This is a shameless act, a shameless power grab that is designed to help the president and his political party achieve a particular outcome in a partisan election," Lee said onFox News Sunday.

Lee added, "The solution is for the president to come to Congress and make the case to Congress on the policy merits of this question that Congress needs to act. It is not the president's prerogative to simply make this the law by the stroke of the executive pen."

Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-CA), appearing on the same program, disagreed, saying that if Obama's actions were unconstitutional someone would have sued by now.

"If this were against the Constitution, someone would have sued by now and the president would have to stop," said Becerra.

Via: Breitbart

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Eleanor Roosevelt is top U.S. first lady, survey says

(Reuters) - Eleanor Roosevelt was named the greatest first lady of the United States in a survey of historians released on Saturday, while Michelle Obama, in fifth place, edged out Hillary Clinton in sixth.

Roosevelt, whose husband, Franklin, served as president from 1933 to 1945, has come up No. 1 each of the five times the survey has been conducted by Siena College Research Institute since 1982.

In the top finishers after Roosevelt were Abigail Adams, Jacqueline Kennedy and Dolly Madison.

Least impressive, according to the survey, was Jane Pierce, the wife of 14th U.S. president, Franklin Pierce.

Although historians disagree over exactly when the title of first lady came into common usage, it has traditionally been given to a president's wife and is an unofficial, but potentially powerful, role.

Pollsters asked 242 historians and political scientists to rate 38 presidents' wives in 10 categories such as "courage," "integrity," "value to the country" and "accomplishments."

Current first lady Michelle Obama scored particularly high in the categories of "being her own woman" and "value to the president." Her weakest area was seen to be in her capacity of "being the White House steward."

Rounding out the top 10 after Clinton were Lady Bird Johnson, Betty Ford, Martha Washington and Rosalynn Carter.

Via: Yahoo News

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Your at-a-glance guide to illegal Obamacare revisions

The adjective "historic" has been used to describe Obamacare from the moment it was proposed. Democrats and President Obama himself used the term admiringly, seeing in the 2000+ page bill an "unprecedented" (to use another favorite Obama term) commitment to take care of the health of all Americans. But with more people kicked off their existing health insurance plans than have received new coverage, Obamacare has been a gigantic flow and embarrassment. Even worse for the Democrats, it is an electoral liability going into the next midterm and presidential elections.

But Obamacare has been "historic" and "unprecedented" is another way: never before has a president unilaterally re-written a law passed by Congress and duly signed into law. The entire commitment to the rule of law, fundamental to our system of government, is being undermined.  And all of this is on-th-fly, in response to unanticipated problems shwoign up and causing political problems for the president and his party.

Because of the sheer complexity of Obamcare, it is difficult to get a handle on all these changes. But the RNC, to its credit, has produced an infographic that charts all of the 27 changes (so far)  imposed cuadillo-style by Barack Obama, contrary to the rule of law. Hat tip: Katie Pavlich, Townhall)

Via: American Thinker

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In first, Minnesota poll finds Obama unpopular

Half of the residents of Minnesota now disapprove of President Obama’s performance, according to a new poll.

Results of The Star Tribune survey represent the first time that his approval rating has turned negative in the state since the president took office in 2009.

Obama’s job approval rating in the poll has fallen to 43 percent.

Men had an especially unfavorable opinion of the president. According to the poll, 60 percent of Minnesotan men disapproved of his job performance, compared to 40 percent of women in the state.

People under 34 had the highest approval rating for Obama, with 59 percent saying they thought he was doing a good job in office.  

The statewide poll reflects a broader disapproval of the president that has been swelling across the country. Current national polls show Obama’s approval rating is among the lowest it has been while he has been in the White House.

Gallup’s daily tracking poll has shown that the American public’s approval of the president has waned since a recent peak shortly after the 2012 election. According to that national poll, 53 percent of the nation disapproved of Obama's performance, while just 41 percent approved.

Obama easily won Minnesota in both the 2012 and 2008 elections. He won 53 percent of the vote against former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) in 2012, and got 54 percent in state in 2008, against Republican nominee Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

Via: The Hill

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