Oct 31 2010

History Repeating Itself?

Category: Democrat,election 2010,government,Jerry Brownamuzikman @ 8:18 pm

It is a privilege to welcome this particular guest blogger to Harmonicminer.  That is because she is my daughter.  I vividly remember the day she became politically aware.  It was the day she received her first paycheck.  She was shocked at the amount of taxes withheld and the difference between what she earned and what she got to keep.  This created an opportunity for a teachable moment, needless to say.

My daughter is a journalism major in college and this blog is the result of a class assignment  – write something in the style of Ann Coulter.  I will leave it to you to judge how well she did.

History Repeating Itself – by Embowlee

“I didn’t have a plan,” said Jerry Brown, former Governor of California, in a 1992 CNN interview responding to the question of what went wrong while he was in office.

What’s that you say? Why yes, yes that is the man running for Governor for this upcoming 2010 election.

Flash back to before Jerry Brown tried his hand at being Governor the first time. What do we see?

For starters, California still deserved the title “The Golden State.” We had the best higher education, the best freeways, and affordable and abundant living communities. State and government taxes were low, and the word “inflation” was virtually non-existent.

Flash forward.  The state has stopped building new freeways, and halted new power plants. Taxes are the highest in the nation, and unemployment is higher. Millions of hard-working Californians are leaving for opportunities elsewhere in neighboring states, and for the people who do stay; the livin’ definitely ain’t easy.

We can thank the 1974 election of a radical, new age leftist Jerry Brown as playing a huge part in this rapid downfall.

In the same interview with CNN, Mr. Brown was asked a follow up question after he stated that he didn’t have to lie anymore, now that he’s no longer a politician. As if he thought he could say that and not expect a follow up question.

What did you lie about, asked the CNN representative?

“It’s all a lie. You run for office, and the assumption is that you know what to do, and I don’t. I didn’t have a plan for California, Clinton doesn’t have a plan, and Bush doesn’t have a plan. You say you’re going to lower taxes, put people to work, you’re going to improve the schools; you’re going to stop crime. But crime is up; schools are worse, taxes are higher. I mean, be real!”

Be real California, our state is hopeless! Thanks Mr. Negativity, but what I think you really meant to say was that you just couldn’t step up and get the job done yourself.

So now-nearly twenty years later, Jerry Brown wants to give being Governor of the state of California another shot.

The recent polls show Jerry Brown leading over opposing candidate, Meg Whitman.

What’s going on California residents? Is suffering through a four year term something you like doing? ‘Cause that’s what we can expect if Jerry no-plan Brown is elected again.

What makes anyone think, after all these years, that this time, he actually does have a plan?

In one of his most recent ad campaigns, Jerry Brown says it’s time to get California working again, and that we have to “work with what we have.” He’s also talked about how he wants to focus primarily on “green-centered” jobs-jobs that are more expensive to fund, and are scarce.

What about the jobs we’ve had around for hundreds of years, Jerry? The ones that are quickly dying off and people are becoming unemployed over, because there’s no money to sustain them and no money to afford workers.

Jerry Brown claiming to have a solid plan the second time around is almost as crazy as the thought of Barbara Boxer running for office again. Oh wait…


Oct 28 2010

Obama a socialist? Simply shocking….

Category: Uncategorizedharmonicminer @ 12:44 pm

Remember during the 2008 election, the big-brain Republicans told us we shouldn’t say Obama is a socialist, because that might discredit us? Because since everyone knew he wasn’t REALLY a socialist, calling him one was just giving ammo to the left to call us crazy? I distinctly recall many of us saying that if it walks like a duck, looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck….. but the brilliant Republican elite just couldn’t quite get there, somehow.  Apparently, things have changed:

The Stanley Kurtz Interview

during the election campaign, I was certainly a critic of President Obama. I looked into the radical connections in his past. I wasn’t shy about saying that, but the socialism charge seemed to me to be a bridge too far. I mean, how do you define socialism? That’s a big problem right there. So my inclination when I started this research was to just bracket the whole thing, set it aside, and focus on the fact that Obama is ultra-liberal, much further to the left than he claims to be. But for example, I started to change my mind when I ran across the programs of the Socialist Scholars Conferences that Obama clearly attended when he lived in New York City between 1983 and 1985. And those programs really shocked me, because they included a number of people from Obama’s current political world. And they even included James Cone, who is the theological mentor of Jeremiah Wright. And when I saw that, I really had to rethink my attitude toward the socialism issue. And the more I followed it out, the more I saw that Obama at minimum lived deeply in the midst of a world of socialist community organizers. You know, people can read my book and they can agree or disagree with the idea that Obama himself was a socialist community organizer. But one thing is certain. There are a lot of socialist community organizers. They intentionally keep their socialism secret. And they were Obama’s mentors and colleagues.

That like “walk/look/quack like a duck” logic to me. At the end of the day, arguing about whether Obama IS a socialist is stupid. It is indisputable, and was in 2008, that he had always supported socialist perspectives and policies, and surrounded himself with self-described socialists. Who cares if he had the word stenciled on his t-shirt under his suit?  What was obvious then, and has been proved since, is that he would govern like a socialist.

It’s nice to hear the Republican intelligentsia coming around….  finally.


Oct 26 2010

Sharpton supporters walking away from the hard truth about race and abortion

Category: Uncategorizedharmonicminer @ 8:50 am

This lady is absolutely right. Abortion IS the civil rights issue of our time, and the most helpless among us are those whose civil rights have been taken away.


Oct 25 2010

Watch this. Then tell your friends to watch it.

Category: abortion,family,God,justice,politics,religion,societyharmonicminer @ 11:07 am

Making the Case for Life: Pro-Life Apologetics from Mark Harrington on Vimeo.

Hat tip:  Larry O


Oct 25 2010

The Big Lie begins to come to light

Category: Uncategorizedharmonicminer @ 11:02 am

During the runup to the health-care jam-down, Obama said repeatedly that, “If you like the coverage you have now, you can keep it.”  He said it loudly, everywhere, to everyone.

 

We knew it was a lie.  The media is finally starting to admit it.


Oct 23 2010

Diversity being displaced by sustainability?

Category: appeasementharmonicminer @ 12:38 pm

Peter Wood, to whom I have referred elsewhere on this blog, has an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education called From Diversity to Sustainability: How Campus Ideology Is Born

 

Diversity is a story of a once-fresh ideology that swept through higher education in a spirit of triumph but that quickly seems to be losing its status as the sexiest ideology on campus. Diversiphiles would like to keep the adrenaline flowing, but it is hard. Freshmen now arrive on campus already having sucked on multicultural milkshakes from kindergarten to senior prom. Diversity for them is just the same ol’ same ol’.

That doesn’t stop the diversicrat establishment from trying to pump new excitement into the project. California State University at Chico, for example, recently circulated a new “action plan” titled “To Form a More Inclusive Learning Community,” in which the university president sets his sights on placing “diversity at the core of our mission, vision, and priorities.” The practical goal is to get Chico State listed as an official “Hispanic-Serving Institution” by 2015, which requires substantially increasing Hispanic enrollment past the university’s current 13.5 percent. (Chico State serves mostly a local population in a part of the state with relatively few Hispanics. Hispanics are already “overrepresented” at Chico from a purely demographic standpoint.) The federal designation “Hispanic-Serving Institution” would bring access to additional federal support. But the diversity game is never about just numbers and dollars. It is also about ideology and intimidation, and Chico State is actively pursuing those, too. As part of the new campaign, it invited the “Diversity Guru” Lee Mun Wah to provide workshops including “Unlearning Racism in the Classroom.” Faculty members get the message: Openly expressed doubts about the diversity program will be treated as racist conduct.

 

Prof. Wood’s commentary is largely about how “sustainability” is gradually displacing some of the oxygen once reserved for “diversity” in the modern higher education establishment.  It is a great read (read it all here), and sets the table nicely for discussion about the true nature of both initiatives.  He calls them both “second wave” phenomena, in that “diversity” grew out of “affirmative action” (when official quotas fell out of public and legal favor, so some folks decided to sneak them in the back door under the name “diversity”) and “sustainability” grew out of “environmentalism” (when public skepticism about Earth Firsters, PETA, and EPA protection of exotic flies led to a need for a new label for the same agenda).

I wish this kind of thing was only going on at state or secular schools.  That is not the case, however.   At least one Christian university is giving a seminar for faculty about “mistakes white professors make in the classroom” or words to that effect.  And extremist videos are being shown in class on sustainability, full of unsupported and self-contradictory assertions.

Prof. Wood may be wrong on one point, however, regarding the apparent competition between sustainability and diversity as points of reference for academic/institutional programming and energy.  It is clear that the diversiphiles and sustainophiles are mostly the same people.  They have no trouble simply combining both agendas, with diversity class including sustainability propaganda without a blush.

The floor is open for speculation about what unites “diversity” and “sustainability” as leftist perspectives. 

 


Oct 21 2010

Women who can’t make up their minds: natural Democrat voters?

Category: Uncategorizedharmonicminer @ 8:18 pm

In an unintentionally humorous reference, AP reporters remind us that women really are different from men, as Fearing rout, Obama, Dems reach to female voters

Women could hold the key for Obama and his party as Democrats look to minimize expected widespread losses at all levels of government in a year when, particularly on the Republican side, female candidates top ballots in statewide races in Connecticut, South Carolina, California, New Hampshire, New Mexico and elsewhere.

Hope for the Democrats: A lot of women are undecided, and more than a third who are likely to vote say they could still change their minds before the election.

If that doesn’t underscore the kinds of women voters that the Democrats court, I’m not sure what would. The election is less than two weeks off… nothing new remains to be learned about any candidate… and over a third of “likely women voters” haven’t made up their minds for sure…. and Democrats see that as a hopeful sign.


Oct 18 2010

Seeking truth in higher ed

Category: Uncategorizedharmonicminer @ 8:38 am

Truth, Not Ideological Balance

As the academy grows more stridently left wing, conservatives respond with calls for ideological affirmative action, for schools to hire more right-thinking faculty so students encounter intellectual diversity. This is a seductively alluring scheme, and thanks to wealthy donors, it is proliferating.

It is an ill-advised and ultimately anti-intellectual strategy, even in the unlikely event that it succeeds. The academy can not be, nor should it be, an intellectual version of Noah’s Ark. Sadly, this conservative version of “inclusion” mimics the Left’s subordination of truth to ideology.

The quest should be about insisting that whatever professors teach, content should be truthful, whether this truth is liberal, conservative, reactionary, or Marxist, whether the subject in English or sociology. After all, who wants conservative falsehoods to “balance” radical dishonesty? It is fantasy to insist that if students learn at 9 a.m. that 2+2=3 and at 11 a.m., 2+2=5, they will eat lunch knowing that 2+2=4.

The hunt to hire truth-seekers changes everything. Out with the ideological litmus tests; in with character and temperament. If a Marxist job candidate argues that Africa is poor owing to colonial exploitation, the sharp rejoinder should be, “Can you prove this?” Ditto for the conservative job seeker who insists that only capitalist free markets can solve Africa’s poverty.

Admittedly, abandoning ideological labels complicates life, and may even discourage donors from funding pet projects, but this is what the life of the mind is about.

I admit to having made the argument before that the leftists in higher education (including Christian higher ed) should include conservative, right leaning viewpoints just because they are there, for the sake of balance if nothing else.

But maybe that’s because my sights were set too low.  Of course, if this kind of skeptical search for evidence behind assertion became the norm in higher education of almost any stripe, a great many of the favored programs and initiatives so beloved of administrators and public relations people would have to be reconsidered.    So I’m not holding my breath about some new rebirth in higher education’s ability to be skeptical about itself, and, for now, I’ll settle just for a balance between right and left…  the eventual dialectic may take care of the rest, if that elusive balance is ever achieved.

I suppose the message to us all is this:  be sure you know the difference between what you actually know and what is just your PR.


Oct 17 2010

Inflatable policy

Category: Uncategorizedharmonicminer @ 11:15 pm

During WWII, as the Allies were trying to deceive German intelligence about the D-Day invasion location and timing, they used “inflatable military hardware” to make it look to German air-based photo recon as if the Allies were massing in places that the weren’t on the British coast.

This idea seems to have caught on….  here it is employed in Russia, although I’m not sure whom they’re trying to fool these days.

In any case, I do find myself wondering if this isn’t a great metaphor for Obama’s economic policy.

You know:  make it look like you’re doing something, as long as people don’t look too close.  Talk about stimulus a lot, without actually pointing at something that has been stimulated.

Other than the tea parties, of course.

Harry Reid is busy looking for something he can inflate as a successful policy.

But he only has to look in the mirror to see a balloon that’s about to pop.


Oct 12 2010

Diversity promotion as hate speech

Category: Uncategorizedharmonicminer @ 3:25 pm

I so resonate with this post in diversity in higher education that I’m just going to link to it.  More interesting links there.


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