Leftist Hypocrisy

Does Sex Ed Undermine Parental Rights?

by Robert P. George and Melissa Moschella –
Imagine you have a 10- or 11-year-old child, just entering a public middle school. How would you feel if, as part of a class ostensibly about the risk of sexually transmitted diseases, he and his classmates were given “risk cards” that graphically named a variety of solitary and mutual sex acts? Or if, in another lesson, he was encouraged to disregard what you told him about sex, and to rely instead on teachers and health clinic staff members?

That prospect would horrify most parents. But such lessons are part of a middle-school curriculum that Dennis M. Walcott, the New York City schools chancellor, has recommended for his system’s newly mandated sex-education classes. There is a parental “opt out,” but it is very limited, covering classes on contraception and birth control. [Read more…]

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The Austerity Myth: Federal Spending Up 5% This Year

Government Spending 2000-2011by John Merline –
When Republicans took control of the House in January, they pledged to make deep cuts in federal spending, and in April they succeeded in passing a bill advertised as cutting $38 billion from fiscal 2011’s budget. Then in August, they pushed for a deal to cut an additional $2.4 trillion over the next decade.

Some analysts have blamed these spending cuts for this year’s economic slowdown.

But data released by the Treasury Department on Friday show that, so far, there haven’t been any spending cuts at all.

Higher Spending, Deficits
In fact, in the first nine months of this year, federal spending was $120 billion higher than in the same period in 2010, the data show. That’s an increase of almost 5%. And deficits during this time were $23.5 billion higher. [Read more…]

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Wall Street Occupiers Urged to Target Churches

Frank Schaeffer leftist by Mark Tooley –
Franky Schaeffer is the son of the late, highly influential evangelical thinker Francis Schaeffer​ , who helped shape the modern conservative evangelical movement. The son boasts he was himself a co-founder of the Religious Right. But he since has denounced Christianity as “stupid,” writes bitter tell-all books about his parents, and ferociously attacks conservative religionists as the virtual root cause of all American evils.

A blogger for The Huffington Post, young Schaeffer is now faulting religious conservatives for facilitating Wall Street greed. He’s imploring the Wall Street Occupiers to “protest the root source of America’s tilt to the far unregulated corporate right.” For Schaeffer, the next logical step is to demonstrate “outside mega churches, Evangelical publishing houses, [and] religious organizations that lead the ‘moral’ crusades against women and gays and all the rest.”

Will the Wall Street Occupiers heed Schaeffer’s frenzied call and next park their tents, blankets and anti-capitalist placards in the parking lots of suburban mega churches? It seems unlikely. But Schaeffer’s demand fits with the crazy Left’s sometime fixation on demonizing opponents based on class and religion. [Read more…]

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New York’s Marxist Epicenter

Occupy Wall Street communists socialists marxists by Charles Gasparino –
The standard portrayal of the Wall Street protesters goes something like this: Ragtag group of unemployed young adults, venting often incoherent but overall legitimate populist outrage about economic inequality. But go down to the movement’s headquarters, as I did this past weekend, and you see something far different.

It’s not just that knowledge of their “oppressors” — the evil bankers — is pretty thin, or that many of them are clearly college kids with nothing better to do than embrace the radical chic of “a cause.” I found a unifying and increasingly coherent ideology emerging among the protesters, which at its core has less to do with the evils of the banking business and more about the evils of capitalism — and the need for a socialist revolution.

It’s not an overstatement to describe Zuccotti Park as New York’s Marxist epicenter. Flags with the iconic face of the Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara are everywhere; the only American flag I saw was hanging upside down. The “occupiers” openly refer to each other as “comrade,” and just about every piece of literature on offer (free or for sale) advocated socialism in the Marxist tradition as a cure-all for the inequalities of the American economic system. [Read more…]

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The ‘Hunger’ Hoax

Thomas Sowell
Thomas Sowell
by Thomas Sowell –
Twenty years ago, hysteria swept through the media over “hunger in America.”

Dan Rather opened a CBS Evening News broadcast in 1991 declaring, “one in eight American children is going hungry tonight.” Newsweek, the Associated Press and the Boston Globe repeated this statistic, and many others joined the media chorus, with or without that unsubstantiated statistic.

When the Centers for Disease Control and the Department of Agriculture examined people from a variety of income levels, however, they found no evidence of malnutrition among those in the lowest income brackets. Nor was there any significant difference in the intake of vitamins, minerals and other nutrients from one income level to another.

That should have been the end of that hysteria. But the same “hunger in America” theme reappeared years later, when Senator John Edwards was running for Vice President. And others have resurrected that same claim, right up to the present day. [Read more…]

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Obama’s Contempt Bordering on Treachery

Obama radical marxist hates America by Steve McCann –
The United States, faced with its worst crisis in 65 years, has at the helm a radical political class, as personified by Barack Obama, who have chosen a path trod by so many despots in mankind’s recent history. Barack Obama and his fellow-travelers are exploiting the fear and desperation of a growing number of citizens amid gaping fissures in American society in order to retain and expand their control over the populace.

Human societies are held together by the most fragile of cords. Whenever unrelenting internal or external challenges abound, thereby placing excessive stress on the foundation of any society, the key determination as to whether chaos ensues is most often in the hands of the society’s leaders. They can choose to exploit the circumstances in order to satisfy their lust for power, or they can embrace a course of action and policies to rally the citizenry into collectively overcoming the crisis at hand, regardless of the fractures in that society.

American society is no longer the cohesive and determined entity that accomplished so much over the past centuries; it is extraordinarily susceptible to manipulation by unscrupulous ideologues. [Read more…]

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Half Baked: UC Berkeley’s Diversity Machine Loses Its Mind

Cupcakes diversity half-baked by Heather Mac Donald –

Tuesday’s now infamous affirmative-action bake sale at the University of California at Berkeley is unlikely to dissuade Governor Jerry Brown from signing a bill that would reintroduce race and gender preferences into the state’s public universities. It has nevertheless served one useful function: it has clarified just what Berkeley’s vice chancellor for equity and diversity does for his whopping $194,000 annual salary.

Berkeley’s College Republicans wanted their “Increase Diversity Bake Sale” to serve as a counterweight to a phone bank erected on the campus’s main thoroughfare, where students could call Brown and urge him to sign the preference-reinstating legislation, Senate Bill 185. Like other anti-affirmative-action bake sales on college campuses over the last decade, the College Republicans’ sale priced items according to the race and gender of the customer: whites paid $2 for a pastry, with Latinos paying $1 and blacks 75 cents, while women got a 25-cent discount on all items. [Read more…]

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Mugged by Mythology, Liberals Believe the Darnedest Things

Liberal Myths Obama by Jeff Bergner –
Sometimes talking with liberals is perplexing. You never know what claim they will make next or what name they will call you. Take David Axelrod’s response to Standard & Poor’s recent credit action: He calls it the “Tea Party downgrade.” Amazingly, he blames the United States’ loss of its AAA bond rating on the one group that has sounded the alarm about our fiscal crisis. How did the president’s leading adviser come up with a label so detached from reality?

Comforting as it would be to dismiss this as a one-off comment, Axelrod’s words spring from the mental universe of liberalism. It is a vast sphere of assumptions that are found nowhere else. In an effort to promote the civility of debate that is so much in demand these days, here is a compendium of the myths underlying some of the strange things liberals say.

Myth #1: Conservatives are outside the American mainstream. Conservatives can’t be mainstream because it is liberals who speak for the American people. [Read more…]

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This is Your Brain on Atheism

Why We Believe in God(s): A Concise Guide to the Science of Faith by Matthew Cullinan Hoffman –
The ranks of celebrity atheists lionized by the major media is now being joined by a psychiatrist and journalist who have jointly written the book “Why We Believe in God(s): A Concise Guide to the Science of Faith.” The two authors claim, in short, that God is nothing more than a figment of our biologically-determined imaginations.

In a recent article about the book, J. Anderson Thomson, a University of Virginia psychiatrist, and “medical writer” Clare Aukofer repeat stale clichés from the repertoire of 19th century German atheism, dressed up as modern “science.” They begin by citing the inane lyrics of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” in which he claims that the socialist paradise he envisions will bring “peace” with “no heaven…no hell below us…and no religion too.”

“No religion,” the authors rhapsodize. “What was Lennon summoning? For starters, a world without ‘divine’ messengers, like Osama bin Laden, sparking violence. A world where mistakes, like the avoidable loss of life in Hurricane Katrina, would be rectified rather than chalked up to ‘God’s will.’ Where politicians no longer compete to prove who believes more strongly in the irrational and untenable. Where critical thinking is an ideal. In short, a world that makes sense.” [Read more…]

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Taxi Cab Conservatism

Taxi Conservatismby Michael Bayewitch –
I was just recently in Washington D.C. and had an amazing conversation with a taxi driver on the way to the airport. After pointing out some of the many historical sites on the way out of town, the conversation took a surprising turn. She started to complain about people that do not work and live off of welfare and other government assistance programs; virtually all their lives.

To paraphrase, she made the following assertion: “It is a shame. I know many people, even my own family members, that have never held a job. I have one relative that is 31 years old and only held a job temporarily once. They do not feel a need to work because the government takes care of them.”

“Even worse” she explained, “it is becoming a generational thing. [Read more…]

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