Common Core Instructs Students To Learn About Gettysburg Address Without Mentioning Civil War

Is it possible to teach students the meaning behind President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address without mentioning the Civil War?

According to the government’s new Common Core education standards, the Gettysburg Address must be taught without mentioning the Civil War and explaining why President Lincoln was in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

The Student Achievement Partners instructions tell teachers to, “Refrain from giving background context or substantial instructional guidance at the outset…This close reading approach forces students to rely exclusively on the text…and levels the playing field for all students as the seek to comprehend Lincoln’s address.”

Via: Fox News Insider

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Hard Sell - Going door-to-door for Obamacare

Hollywood, Fla. 

Standing here on the streets of Hollywood with two comely Obamacare cheerleaders by my side, I’m feeling fired up and ready to go. I’m feeling like the change I’ve been waiting for. I’m feeling like whatever Obama cliché you can think of. And all I want to say, like the late Todd Beamer before me, is, “Let’s roll.” Or more like, “Let’s enroll.” Because much as Beamer, God rest his soul, took on the terrorists who tried to take down America, we are now in a similar cataclysmic fight: the fight to guarantee that every American has the right to buy overpriced health insurance on a glitchy website, under threat of punitive tax penalties. 

GARY LOCKE

I’ve come to Florida to go door-to-door with the foot soldiers of Get Covered America, the boots-on-the-ground division of Enroll America, which bills itself as a “nonpartisan 501(c)(3) organization whose mission is to maximize the number of uninsured Americans who enroll in health coverage made available by the Affordable Care Act.” These Obamacare evangelists are very serious about the “nonpartisan” nature of their business. Nearly every Enroll America staffer I speak to emphasizes it, often repeatedly. And while it might strain credulity that an organization is nonpartisan which seeks to make sure people are Obamacared for by setting $100 million fundraising goals for itself, and conducting $5 million ad campaigns, and targeting 10 different states, 9 of which are coincidentally run by Republican governors, I choose to take them at their word. 

Via: Weekly Standard

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Obama Laughs Off Negative Poll Numbers to Barbara Walters: ‘Nowhere to Go But Up’

President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama sat down with Barbara Walters for a wide-ranging interview that aired Friday night, and the first issue Walters brought up was the president’s record low approval numbers. But Obama just shrugged them aside as the hazards of the job, joking, “The good thing about when you’re down is that usually, you’ve got nowhere to go but up.”

Walters brought up Obama getting booed at a basketball game. The First Lady said, “It’s part of the job,” and said she’s gotten booed as well, though Walters did point out her numbers have always been a bit better than her husband’s.

Obama is at roughly the same popularity level that George W. Bush was at at this poing in his presidency, but the current officeholder dismissed the poll showing people no longer consider him trustworthy. When Walters brought up his comment from years ago about preferring to be a good one-term president than a mediocre two-term one, Obama joked that he’d love to be a good two-termer if he had his druthers.

Via: Mediaite.com

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MSNBC Guest: If Walmart paid workers more, taxpayers wouldn’t have to subsidize Walmart’s growth…

MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry has been pounding on Walmart all morning, suggesting they Walmart employees aren’t paid enough and emphasizing these ‘grass roots’ protests at Walmarts on Black Friday. Problem is these protests are made up mostly of activists who simply want to unionize Walmart.

But what caught my attention was when former CNBC host Carmen Wong Ulrich argued that taxpayers are subsidizing Walmart’s growth because so many of their employees are on public assistance. In other words, if Walmart would stop being selfish with their bounty and simply pay their employees a living wage, taxpayers would save money:

One of the biggest ideas I hope that people can understand is that we are all subsidizing Walmart’s growth and income and money and we are supporting it because so many Walmart employees are on public assistance. How does America feel about the fact that we are paying or co-paying Walmart employees? I think we would like to not do that.

Look I’m going to bottom line this for you. When you accept a job at Walmart (or anywhere else for that matter), you agree to the salary that goes along with that job. If you don’t like the salary then don’t take the job. Find something else that pays better. It’s that simple.

As to the ridiculous claim by Ulrich that we are subsidizing Walmart (don’t you love how liberals think?), I’ll just say that if Walmart were forced to start paying this $25k/year ‘living wage’ to all their entry-level employees, there would be less entry-level employees and probably less Walmarts. Thus taxpayers would be paying more for people to live on public assistance.

Seriously, can’t we learn anything from Detroit?

Via: The Right Scoop
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AT THANKSGIVING, BIG GROCERY & BIG LABOR ATTACK COMPETITOR WAL-MART

If you’re one of the millions of Americans who will visit a Wal-Mart on the biggest shopping weekend of the year, don’t be surprised if you encounter protestors agitating for “workers’ rights.”

But you may be surprised how those protestors got there. They are not union organizers, per se, although many represent unions and other community organizing groups. They are associated with calls for wage increases and improved working conditions – even though 23,000 people just turned up for 600 positions at a Wal-Mart under construction in Washington, D.C. As Business Insider notes, it’s harder to get a job at this one Wal-Mart – only 2.6 percent of applicants are accepted – than it is to get into Harvard, where 6.1 percent get in.

The protestors are the Baptists in a Baptists-and-Bootleggers arrangement assembled by an outfit, Saint Consulting, where the goal, according to one company executive, “is always to kill Wal-Mart.”

And the reason the goal remains the same is because the bootlegger is not the labor movement but Wal-Mart’s competitors, who are spending millions of dollars to use these activists to throw sand into Wal-Mart’s corporate gears.

As The Wall Street Journal’s Ann Zimmerman reported, “Local activists and union groups have been the public face of much of the resistance. But in scores of cases, large supermarket chains including Supervalu Inc., Safeway, and Ahold NV have retained Saint Consulting to block Wal-Mart.”

Via: Human Events

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In God we trust, maybe, but not each other

WASHINGTON (AP) - You can take our word for it. Americans don't trust each other anymore.

We're not talking about the loss of faith in big institutions such as the government, the church or Wall Street, which fluctuates with events. For four decades, a gut-level ingredient of democracy - trust in the other fellow - has been quietly draining away.

These days, only one-third of Americans say most people can be trusted. Half felt that way in 1972, when the General Social Survey first asked the question.

Forty years later, a record high of nearly two-thirds say "you can't be too careful" in dealing with people.

(AP) Bart Murawski, 27 poses at a coffee shop Tuesday, Nov. 26, 2013, in Troy, N.Y. You can take our... Full Image

An AP-GfK poll conducted last month found that Americans are suspicious of each other in everyday encounters. Less than one-third expressed a lot of trust in clerks who swipe their credit cards, drivers on the road, or people they meet when traveling.

"I'm leery of everybody," said Bart Murawski, 27, of Albany, N.Y. "Caution is always a factor."

Does it matter that Americans are suspicious of one another? Yes, say worried political and social scientists.

What's known as "social trust" brings good things.

Via: My Way

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Surrender in Geneva by Mark Steyn

‘Iran, U.S. Set to Establish Joint Chamber of Commerce within Month,” reports Agence-France Presse. Government official Abolfazi Hejazi tells the English-language newspaper Iran Daily that the Islamic Republic will shortly commence direct flights to America. Passenger jets, not ICBMs, one assumes — although, as with everything else, the details have yet to be worked out. Still, the historic U.S.–Iranian rapprochement seems to be galloping along, and any moment now the cultural-exchange program will be announced and you’ll have to book early for the Tehran Ballet’s season at the Kennedy Center (“Death to America” in repertory with “Death to the Great Satan”).

In Geneva, the participants came to the talks with different goals: The Americans and Europeans wanted an agreement; the Iranians wanted nukes. Each party got what it came for. Before the deal, the mullahs’ existing facilities were said to be within four to seven weeks of nuclear “breakout”; under the new constraints, they’ll be eight to nine weeks from breakout. In return, they get formal international recognition of their enrichment program, and the gutting of sanctions — and everything they already have is, as they say over at Obamacare, grandfathered in.

Many pundits reached for the obvious appeasement analogies, but Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal argued that Geneva is actually worse than Munich. In 1938, facing a German seizure of the Sudetenland, the French and British prime ministers were negotiating with Berlin from a position of profound military weakness: It’s easy to despise Chamberlain with the benefit of hindsight, less easy to give an honest answer as to what one would have done differently playing a weak hand across the table from Hitler 75 years ago. This time round, a superpower and its allies accounting for over 50 percent of the planet’s military spending was facing a militarily insignificant country with a ruined economy and no more than two to three months’ worth of hard currency — and they gave it everything it wanted.  

Via: NRO

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Getting Back on The Right Path

“As an individual you incarnate American ideals at many levels. As the final responsible authority, in any hour of great challenge, we depend on you.”

 — William F. Buckley Jr., to President Reagan, 1985

“Let us be sure that those who come after will say of us in our time, that in our time we did everything that could be done. We finished the race; we kept them free; we kept the faith.”

 — Ronald Reagan, 1984 State of the Union address

You could not then — or now — buy the kind of coverage Time magazine gave Ronald Reagan in midsummer 1986. The cover featured a portrait of Reagan with the question, “Why Is This Man So Popular?” Inside, beneath the headline “Yankee Doodle Magic,” Lance Morrow wrote:

Ronald Reagan has found the American sweet spot. The white ball sails into the sparkling air in a high parabola and vanishes over the fence, again. The 75-year-old man is hitting home runs. Winning a lopsided vote on a tax-reform plan that others had airily dismissed. Turning Congress around on the contras. Preparing to stand with a revitalized Miss Liberty on the Fourth of July. He grins his boyish grin and bobs his head in the way he has and trots around the bases.

Via: NRO
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