May quotes of the month

If you haven’t been audited by the IRS during the Obama administration, can you even call yourself a conservative? – David French

DOJ had more surveillance of @JamesRosenFNC than Tsarnaev brothers. – tweeted by Greg Pollowitz

But officials and his family still don’t know where Tsarnaev, an ethnic Chechen who turned to conservative Islam, will be buried. –Los Angeles Times. – Conservative Islam? Must be bad.

Inside every liberal is a totalitarian screaming to get out. – N. A. Halkides

In a visit to a school in Baltimore, Obama consoled a struggling math student with these words: “Subtraction is tougher than addition.” – No wonder he failed sequestration.

If you want to have a government that should be in the position of picking winners and losers, well then, they will pick winners and losers. And so it’s not a story just about incompetence. It’s about overreach. You know, big government is bad in theory, but it’s much worse in practice. And effective government, that is good government that’s limited, focuses in on our core duties. – Paul Ryan

The Ph.D. system is the real root of evil of academic snobbery. People who have Ph.D.s consider themselves a priesthood. – The physicist Freeman Dyson.

Thatcherism of the month: Standing in the middle of the road is very dangerous; you get knocked down by the traffic from both sides.    

Troglo

The Common-Core standards: a clear and present danger

The Common-Core Standards were developed a few years ago from an initiative to create national standards governing K-12 curricula. The standards would dictate, for example, at what grade algebra should first be taught. The Obama administration quickly jumped in to promote the initiative among the states, using the bait of one-time stimulus money along with dispensations from the penalties called for by the No Child Left Behind Act. The catch: the state had to adopt the Common-Core standards. So far 45 states have indicated they are on board.

This all may sound harmless enough. But at the present moment, with distrust of the Federal government at a high mark, we should all be very, very cautious about anything resembling central control from Washington, D.C. Long experience shows how innocuous programs can get hijacked and transformed far beyond original intentions, usually in very bad ways. Because this deals with our children, our vigilance should be at its highest. The more centralized the control, the greater should be our vigilance.

“He alone, who owns the youth, gains the Future! ” –A. Hitler, 1935

In Missouri the program was adopted without assent or input by the legislature. It is now being promoted statewide by The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE.) DESE does not take kindly to criticism.

Bob Dole, the left, and the future of the Republican Party

Fox News Sunday for Memorial Day this year featured an interview with the war hero and former Senator from Kansas, Bob Dole. The Republican nominee for President in 1996 walked right into the trap set by the leftwing ‘narrative’ of growing extremism from the radical right and Tea party groups. The suspicion peddled by this army of Iagos whispering into gullible ears is that even President Reagan, the subject of unprecedentedly virulent attacks while in office, but now suddenly a good President in the view of the Left, could not succeed in the radical environment of the Tea party and assorted conservative extremists.

The aged Dole, taking the bait, said this of the Republican Party:

I think they ought to put a sign on the national committee doors that says closed for repairs until New Year’s Day next year and spend that time going over ideas and positive agendas.

Marco Rubio: the smoking gun

We all remember Marco Rubio’s story: his parents’ escape from communism to freedom, his complete embrace of the American Way, his election to the Senate thanks to strong support from then Senator DeMint. It’s a great story. But alas only a story.

Paul Mirengoff of the indispensable Powerlineblog, citing a report from the Daily Caller,  provides the proof that Senator Rubio has been duplicitous regarding his support for enforcement of our immigration laws. Since his successful Senate campaign he has called for enforcement of immigration laws, leading to puzzlement as to how he could be a member of the Senate’s Gang of Eight. The Gang’s proposed ‘comprehensive solution’ is so soft on border enforcement that those provisions might as well have been omitted.

But when he was Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives Rubio blocked all attempts to tighten enforcement of Florida law. As Mirengoff states:

He even opposed, and thwarted, bipartisan legislation to deport 5,000 illegal immigrant prisoners in Florida jails.

An unnamed Florida politician characterized Rubio’s position on immigration thus: ‘Marco is Jeb’s boy on immigration.’ Marco Rubio is not just a squish, like former Florida governor Jeb Bush, and his fellow Gang members, the unreliably conservative Senators McCain and Graham. it is clear he has hidden – in Clintonesque triangulation, no doubt – his true agenda about immigration for political gain. Let’s hope that this gain is temporary as the truth about his record becomes more widely known.

Troglo

April Quotes of the Month

As we’ve seen in countless contexts (abortion becomes “choice,” marriage becomes “[hyphenated-]marriage,” tax becomes “revenue,” spending becomes “investment,” etc.), the Left is simply better at the language game than we are.  – Newt Gingrich

Perhaps tens of millions could be diverted from progressive gestures to academic purposes by abolishing on every American campus every administrative position whose title contains the words “diversity,” “equity,” “race,” “ethnicity,” “sustainability,” “green,” “gender,” “inclusion,” “identity,” “interconnectivity,” “globalization,” “climate,” “campus climate,” “cross-cultural” or “multiculturalism.” – George Will

A rough rule of thumb to discover modern-day racism is to search a college’s website to see whether it has vice presidents or deans of diversity and diversity programs. If so, keep your money. – Walter Williams

Such distractions from the study of calculus and literature are encouraged by CREATE Wisconsin (the acronym stands for Culturally Responsive Education for All: Training and Enhancement), which is funded with federal tax dollars from IDEA, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. The disability being rectified here is, presumably, the handicap of insufficient guilt — arising from false consciousness — about white privilege. – George Will from same column.

It reminds me of something Leon Wieseltier observed in The New Republic back during the Clinton years that applies just as well to Obamaworld: “There is a certain sensibility, for which Mrs. Clinton’s generation is famous, and which she perfectly exemplifies, that hates being preceded. Everything it experiences it experiences for the first time. When it sees, there is light; and when it fails to see, the whole world is covered in darkness.” – quoted by Steve Hayward in Powerline blog.

But Democrats often speak as if the Right’s skepticism of the government’s problem-solving ability is driven by some sort of abstract ideological theory. It’s not. It’s usually built upon hard experiences. Human behavior isn’t predictable, particularly their interactions with the government. Unintended consequences pile up like a car crash. ­  – Jim Geraghty

Cartoon of the Month

 

Troglo