AFT President Randi Weingarten may have inadvertantly put her finger on one of the major problems with public education today.

During an Oct. 28  forum at the Center for American Progress, Weingarten told the assembled panel that teachers unions, along with the general labor movement and the nation’s public schools, should be agents for social justice. She said “we have to do more than simply instruct children seven hours a day” and that “community schools should be the hub of the community.”

We suppose she means that our public schools, and the people who teach in them, should be actively engaged in political issues that have little or nothing to do with education –  like abortion, gay marriage and the sort.  That’s all fine and good, to a point. We live in a free society, where labor unions and their members can spout off about anything, just like the rest of us.

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Many of you have been following the dispute between a 90 year old Medal of Honor recipient and his homeowners association about flying the American flag.  If you haven’t, you can read about it in the Richmond Times Dispatch here.

Col. Van T. Barfoot, a resident of Richmond, Virginia, is a veteran of World War II, Korea, and Vietnam who begins his day by raising the flag in his front yard.  This seems simple enough, a man who has sacrificed so much raising the flag he risked his life to defend around the world, yet the dispute continued.

In response, Congressman Buck McKeon (CA-25) of the Armed Services Committee and I introduced a resolution to ensure that ANY of the 72 Congressional Medal of Honor winners can fly the American flag outside their homes at any time.  Interestingly, minutes later the homeowners association announced that they would let him proceed.

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Today, President Barack Obama makes a pit-stop in Oslo, Norway to pick up the Nobel Peace Prize.

We really don’t have anything else to say on this surreal event.  Sure, we could list all the heroes who never received such an accolade or point out the strikingly thin justifications for Obama’s award, but that would assume the prize carries any value at all anymore. Perhaps, long ago, it was a serious achievement. No longer.

This week, diplomats from around the world are gathering in Copenhagen for the global climate change summit—an event that has been marked by controversy in the wake of the “climate-gate” scandal that has recently and rightly gained significant international media attention.

This scandal has provoked many questions that I believe deserve answers.  Among other things, it would seem that information relating to climate change research may have been held back from the public— and key decision-makers, too.  This could of course impact the appropriateness and effectiveness of policy that the US, and indeed world leaders, might pursue.  Before moving forward, given the potentially significant economic consequences associated with some of the steps under consideration, I personally think it is important to get a handle on all the facts, whether they be good, bad or ugly.

Unfortunately, Barbara Boxer and her colleagues in Congress who seek to pass major cap and trade legislation that analysis shows is a job killer take a different view—and have different questions they want answered.

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Today, the Obama White House announced the nomination of Mari Del Carmen Aponte as U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador. It is not Ms. Aponte’s first brush with an ambassadorship. In 1998, President Clinton nominated her to be Ambassador to the Dominican Republic. She was forced to withdraw her name from consideration over allegations of ties to the Cuban spy agency.

From Washington Times, January 25, 1999:

Miss Aponte’s withdrawal from consideration for the Dominican Republic post came after she was questioned by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about her contacts with Cuban government employees or agents.

She told the panel that her experience with Mr. Tamayo and Cuban agents had sensitized her to future contacts that might involve Cuban influence.

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Only in the Obama White House can a man with a history of handing out bar guides to teens be promoted to Safe Schools Czar.

Earlier today it was reported that Kevin Jennings’ Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) organization was distributing gay bar directories to high school students at the 2005 Massachusetts GLSEN conference.

This wasn’t an isolated incident.

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Alaska’s $680 million bridge to nowhere still a state priority

17,000 Medicaid patients put on waiting lists for medical services in Maryland as the state misspends $98 million including paying for services for dead people

Medicare loses $60 billion to fraud every year

Democrat political consultants receive millions of dollars in federal stimulus funds; Millions more spent to heat a near-empty shopping mall, to search for fossils in Argentina, for socially conscious puppet shows, and to study the genetic makeup of ants

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From FoxNews:

Any fan of Cookie Monster on Sesame Street knows that “C” is for cookie.

But at the Obama White House, “A” may be for acorn — as in acorn cookies served at Monday’s annual Christmas party.

The chocolate cookies shaped like an acorn were quite a hit with Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa.

“I didn’t expect to see such stark symbolism,” King said in an e-mail.

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President Obama, in his speech on the economy, given at the Bookings Institute, once again, tried to be all things to all people.  Most of the speech was aimed at the dwindling number of devotees who were anxious to hear that additional taxpayer revenues would continue to flow to favored, pet projects.

Nor were these fans disappointed, for, despite running $1.2 trillion in annual deficits, President Obama has once again promised to borrow from the future to fund yet another round of pork and dodgy projects disguised as infrastructure and green investments.

At the same time the President was busy adding more spending programs to our bloated budget, he insisted, once again, that he was committed to fiscal discipline.  Obama said “We’ve combed the budget, cutting waste and excess wherever we could.”  Really?

What programs have been cut and what sorts of excess were eliminated?  For the curious….here goes.  After several months, Obama’s OMB has released a list of the top four programs that have been identified after an exhaustive search and combing of the federal budget.

The Administration reviewed over 38,000 different ideas, to aggressively root out wasteful practices, many of them submitted by government employees.   After much work, synthesis,and review, OMB announced the four cost-cutting idea finalists:

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Is the Associated Press distributing a doctored photo that news organizations are now running in their Copenhagen coverage?

Founding Bloggers’ very own, Allan Sluis, is calling attention to an image that just might be the latest example of what has come to be know as “Fauxtography” – or – passing doctored images off as good faith representations of reality.

Below is a detailed examination of the image, beginning with the shot as it was displayed Monday, December 7th, on Foxnews.com (Fox link via SPQA.org):

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Before left-wing activist Bob Creamer escorted his wife, Illinois Democratic Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky to the Obama state dinner, before he penned his blue print for the socialist agenda from his federal prison cell, before he committed felony bank fraud and was indicted on 34 counts involving misuse of $2.4 million, this Saul Alinsky disciple reaped hundreds of thousands of dollars from a campaign finance scam that illegally funneled money from deep-pocket Democrat donors  and labor unions to targeted congressional campaigns.

Creamer left his position as head of the ACORN-affiliated Citizen Action/Illinois in 1997 after financial irregularities at the activist organization garnered the attention of federal investigators.  Despite the ongoing federal investigation, Creamer turned to political consulting, bringing his bare-knuckle ACORN tactics to bear on behalf of numerous Democratic candidates like indicted former Governor Rod Blagojevich.  In the 2002 election cycle, Creamer’s Strategic Consulting Group was paid over half a million dollars by the Blagojevich campaign.  Strategic Consulting also did campaign work for Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and others, all while the feds pursued their criminal investigation.

During the period when Creamer was running Strategic Consulting Group the firm served as the primary vendor for several identically-structured campaign committees formed for the express purpose of supporting Democrat candidacies in circumvention of federal campaign laws.

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There have been numerous ostentatiously pathetic efforts to distract from what ClimateGate has not “revealed”, but affirmed, in the principals’ own words, and this mewling is getting more pathetic by the attempt.

Sitting in the chair waiting to participate in a CNN program Monday night largely dedicated to the issue — or, rather, what proved to be an embarrassingly slanted effort at to diminishing it, in its language and approach though to the channel’s credit they at least let me and Steve McIntyre on — I listened to the program’s lead-in. It entailed childish language like that the program will have “scientists and skeptics” (good grief), but also a remarkably insistent emphasis — with nothing whatsoever to back the claim up — on the exposed material being “hacked emails” (with no mention of computer code, annotations, other documentation and the like contained in the exposed trove; now that’s some serious bias).

There also is nothing in the record to suggest a hacking. Indeed,  there is tremendous reason to suspect a whistleblower, tracing back the evolution of the demands for the information, the denials, and the information’s path into the public realm. Yet whichever it was changes nothing about the substance, all of which is found in documents subject to the UK’s freedom of information act.

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Last night, defying the will of a bipartisan majority of the House and Senate, Democrats voted to allow the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) to receive federal taxpayer dollars.

In September, large Congressional majorities in both houses voted to sever all ties between the federal government and ACORN.  The Senate vote was 85-11; the House vote was 345-75.  You’d think that those votes, which USA Today described as prohibiting “any federal funding for the community organizing group,” would have settled the matter.  You’d be wrong.

Months later, with the country’s focus on jobs, healthcare, and the Global War on Terror, Democrats are moving to restore funding to ACORN.  Last night, Rep. Tom Latham (R-IA) offered an amendment during deliberations on the Democrats’ massive year-end appropriations bill to clarify the prohibition on federal funds going to ACORN or its subsidiaries.  That amendment was shot down on a 5-9 party line vote as Republicans sided with taxpayers while Democrats stood with ACORN.

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There are reports that the administration is essentially holding our economy hostage as it threatens to regulate carbon dioxide — what we breathe out — as a dangerous substance* because it could lead to global warming. If the Congress doesn’t pass economically crippling cap and trade, the Environmental Protection Agency will regulate carbon.

Be sure to keep an eye on this issue as it develops. It is a massive government power grab and threatens to regulate every breath you take and every move you make.

* Indeed, the words some elected leaders and big-government types breathe out are dangerous to our nation

From todays The Hill:

Nearly $6 million in stimulus money was paid to two firms run by Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s pollster in 2008.

Federal records show that $5.97 million from the $787 billion stimulus helped preserve three jobs at Burson-Marsteller, the global public-relations and communications firm headed by Penn.

Burson-Marsteller won the contract to work on a public-relations campaign to advertise the national switch from analog to digital television. Nearly $2.8 million of the contract was issued to Penn’s polling firm, Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates, according to federal records.Federal records also show that a former adviser to President Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign received nearly $70,000 from that contract to help alert viewers in difficult-to-reach communities that their televisions would soon no longer receive broadcast signals.

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President Obama wants to expand TARP to cover stimulus spending, handing out cash to small businesses to offset the egregious economic policies he’s adopted (and in the case of health care, plans to adopt) damaging their ability to hire anyone. We’ll discuss his Brookings Institution speech on today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, a daily podcast from The New Ledger on politics, policy and the marketplace with Francis Cianfrocca, brought to you by BigGovernment.com.

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You can subscribe to the podcast by following the links above, and if you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

WSJ: Roadblocks in Using TARP Funds
CNN: Throwing TARP Cash at the Problem
Obama’s Remarks at Brookings

In March 2000 the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) organization of Massachusetts held its 10 Year Anniversary GLSEN/Boston conference at Tufts University. This conference was fully supported by the Massachusetts Department of Education, the Safe Schools Program, the Governor’s Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth, and some of the presenters even received federal money. During the 2000 conference, workshop leaders led a “youth only, ages 14-21″ session that offered lessons in “fisting” a dangerous sexual practice. During the same workshop an activist asked 14 year-old students, “Spit or swallow?… Is it rude?” The unbelievable audio clip is posted here. Barack Obama’s “Safe Schools Czar” Kevin Jennings is the founder of GLSEN. He was paid $273,573.96 as its executive director in 2007. Jennings was the keynote speaker at the 2000 GLSEN conference.

Barack Obama’s “Safe Schools Czar” was the keynote speaker at the GLSEN/Boston Conference at Tufts University in 2000. High school students at the conference learned about fisting and watersports from the GLSEN activists. Jennings is seen here holding the conference program. (Via Mass Resistance)

Unfortunately for GLSEN, undercover journalists with Mass Resistance recorded these outrageous sessions at Tufts University. The audio was later leaked to a local radio station. This created such an uproar that GLSEN leaders were forced to apologize for their disgusting behavior.

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The “independent” investigation of ACORN has been completed, and the final report is in.

The verdict? ACORN has done nothing illegal, and most of its problems stem from the subpar leadership of its founder and former “chief organizer,” Wade Rathke. As long as Rathke and his allies are out of the picture, everything should be good to go at ACORN headquarters, according to Scott Harshbarger, former attorney general of Massachusetts.

I get the feeling Mr. Harshbarger produced exactly the type of report (which can be viewed at ACORNcracked.com) that the ACORN board of directors paid him to produce: a rationalization of the group’s behavior, designed to deflect the growing chorus of criticism and breathe new life into the organization.

I doubt that anybody will be fooled by the silly conclusions in Harshbarger’s report. But I fear that ACORN’s friends in the White House and Congress may use it as an excuse to allow the organization back into the federal government’s good graces.

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Last week, Dick Morris became the first pundit to predict a Republican sweep of both houses of Congress next year. Looking at Obama’s sliding poll numbers, and increasing voter frustration, Morris said, “This erosion of support makes the elections of 2010 look more and more like a rerun of 1994.”

Yeah, yeah, I know — it’s Dick Morris saying this, take it with a silo of salt and all that. But Mort Kondracke is one of the more level-headed pundits in DC, and he noted Pew’s study saying that “voters’ anti-incumbent mood is approaching 1994 and 2006 levels,” when Congress changed hands. Kondracke added that he thinks that “there’s reason to believe that the public’s anger is even deeper than Pew’s estimate because voters believe – correctly – that ‘the way things are going’ is not getting better.”

Kondracke was saying all this in the context of seeing “an opening” for a third party to make it big in 2010. But don’t be too certain.

Usually, third parties coalesce around a single candidate (like Ross Perot) or a single issue (like the Greens [no relation]). America’s current funk isn’t really about a single issue, but about a whole host of issues — and Washington’s inability (Democrat and Republican alike) to deal with them. If that seems like fertile ground for a third party, in this case it isn’t. Because what the country really needs is a second party.

Please, let me explain. You might want to pour yourself a lovely adult beverage, because I’d had one or two when this occurred to me.

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