There’s nothing wrong with the fact Debra Blessman kept secret from her students the name of the film she would require them to watch and analyze during finals week at Francis Howell High School. Today, however, the teacher might be wishing she had not kept her superiors in the St. Charles, Mo., school district in the dark about it. She planned to base final exams on the Michael Moore film, “Sicko“.

Judging by the unedited plot summary below which Blessman distributed to students in her Senior Literature and Composition class, one might assume Blessman kept school district administrators in the dark about the controversial 2007 documentary on health care because she knew they might find the film objectionable:

In this documentary, the director/writer Michael Moore exposes the dysfunctional North American health care system, oriented to huge profits and not for their mission of saving lives. Further, he shows the corruption in the political system, with members of government and congress “bought” by the corporations and the situation of the average American citizens, including those that volunteered to work in the rescue mission of the September 11th. Then he travels to Canada, Great Britain and France to compare their systems showing their hospital, doctors, staffs and patients. Last but not least, he shows that the prisoners in Guantanamo have better medical treatment than the common people in USA, and he ends getting free treatment to the Americans that participate along the documentary in Cuba.

Apparently, however, Blessman did not expect any of her students to raise objections about the film. But one did.

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This political ad is, in a word, awesome. We can’t believe there is an actual “Agriculture Commissioner” position in state government, but we’re really comfortable with the idea if this guy wins the position. Maybe he’ll even work to abolish the office.

Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it. Don’t try to attack abstract corporations or bureaucracies. Identify a responsible individual. -Saul Alinsky, Rule 11

While it’s a foregone conclusion the GOP will make big strides to take back the house this November, the Democratic Party and affiliate groups are consolidating resources to target high profile Republicans who have earned the grandest title the media can offer: controversial.  In typical Alinsky fashion, conservatives most easily labeled “polarizing” who don’t occupy the safest of seats will be isolated for attack by the Democrats and their compatriots in the MSM.

Michele Bachmann, a warrior for Judeo-Christian and American values is anathema to the left and will be one of their highest priority targets come November:

Let’s defend her early and defend her often.

Join me in supporting Congresswoman Bachmann and visit her campaign website.

As of yesterday, the first 100,000 of my We the People pamphlets have been requested and read throughout all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

The origins of the We the People pamphlets are admittedly humble.  I simply straggled into my garage and booted up a beat up lap top to honor the numerous requests to put my extemporaneous speeches on paper.  I typed, tossed in some pictures, designed the artwork and – voila! – the pamphlets were born (and my “Honey Do” list grew to Rita’s annoyance).  The pamphlets weren’t polled, because they don’t pander to prevailing opinions; and no focus group was used, because my garage isn’t big enough to hold one.

With no Washington “roll out” and scant notice from the pundits and political class, the intense grassroots reception of the We the People pamphlets is inspiring.  People are eager for the GOP to reaffirm its enduring goals and permanent principles; and, most importantly, to implement them and transcend the great, generational challenges facing America.

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It takes a special ad to get a candidate for Senate so upset they hire lawyers to censor it. But that is what is happening in Illinois as the Alexi Giannoulias campaign has unleashed its lawyers on television stations who have been carrying this ad:

The facts of the ad are indisputable but not to Alexi Giannoulias and his trial lawyer buddies. They sent this letter to the stations demanding censorship because they claim the FDIC bailout of the Giannoulias family owned bank was not a “bailout.”

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Rebecca Mead on Breitbart’s “Empire of Bluster.” Read the whole thing and make up your own mind. An excerpt:

Conflict also has the useful function of driving traffic to his sites. Breitbart.com is currently looked at by an average of 2.4 million people a month, according to Quantcast.com.

Breitbart considers himself an accidental cultural warrior. “I am not as partisan as people think I am,” he told me, calling himself eighty-five per cent conservative and fifteen per cent libertarian. His conservatism fails him on issues such as the legalization of prostitution, and he sometimes tilts toward favoring gay marriage. “But, when the entire media is structured to attack conservatives and Republicans, there is a huge business model to come in and counterbalance that,” he said.

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Even if Congress does move decisively to cut off funding from the self-described network of community organizers who previously called themselves ACORN, the renamed entities are likely to remain potent and well-funded into the foreseeable future, former insiders say.

In fact, donors may find it easier to channel funds in the direction of liberal activists who describe themselves as community organizers now that the sullied name has been dropped, they suggest.

Shortly after ACORN’s leadership announced that it was dissolving on April 1, national and state affiliates repackaged themselves under generic sounding descriptions. ACORN Housing, for example, became known as the Affordable Housing Centers of America.

“Anyone who celebrates the demise of ACORN has celebrated prematurely because they are not going away,” Anita MonCrief, a former Project Vote/ACORN employee, said in an interview. “The network is repositioning itself so it can receive new donations.”

ACORN, which stands for the Association of Community Activists for Reform Now, has received over $53 million in federal funds since 1994, federal records show. Although the U.S. Supreme Court turned away a legal challenge to last year’s congressional ban on public funding, there does not appear to be any concerted effort on the part of lawmakers to have it reimposed.

Moreover, it is worth noting that only four Democrats joined with Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) to oppose an amendment that would allow organizations with a criminal history to receive funding. The amendment was submitted as part of a mortgage bill several months before the videotape scandals broke.

“There’s a real boldness on the part of Democrats who want to keep funding ACORN,” Rep. Bachmann said. “They are incredulous about the possibility of losing their majority and they know which side their bread gets buttered on and ACORN is their friend.”

Even so, only a small-percentage of ACORN’s overall financial support comes from the government, MonCrief, explains. “The rest of the money comes from left-leaning foundations and there is no indication these funding sources will dry up,” she said. “There are also individual donors and you also have to include organized labor.”

MonCrief indentified Wellspring Advisors, Vanguard Charitable Endowment, the Rockefeller Fund and the Tides Foundation as the major conduits for facilitating anonymous donations.

“If someone wanted to contribute directly to ACORN without having their name attached to it they could give a  check to Wellspring Advisors, they can give to Vanguard Charitable Endowment, they can give to Tides Foundation,” she said. “There are so many ways ACORN can obtain money through these anonymous donors  and some are connected to the Rockefeller  Fund.  So long as there is an agenda they are going to make sure that money is funneled to them anyway they can.”

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In 1989, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a major environmentalist group, launched a nationwide panic over the presence on apples of alar, a chemical growth agent. On TV shows such as “60 Minutes” and “Donahue,” and in major women’s magazines, NRDC (with the aid of its expert consulting toxicologist, actress Meryl Streep) claimed that alar “might” eventually cause thousands of lifetime cancer cases due to apple consumption by preschoolers.

This carefully choreographed publicity stunt terrified parents, cost alar’s manufacturer millions, caused over $100 million in losses to apple growers—all while creating a fundraising bonanza for the NRDC.

The scare campaign was based on junk science—on experiments on laboratory rodents in which dose levels were so absurdly high that the animals were dying of simple poisoning. These tests were so shoddy that an independent panel of scientists convened by the EPA—called a Scientific Advisory Panel (SAP)—dismissed the findings as scientifically worthless. (more…)

Certain conspiracies have been winding their way through the more desperate and hungry parts of the blogosphere; various liberals have alleged that I, Andrew Breitbart, and others “lied” about Patricia Redington’s handling of Kenneth Gladney (who still hasn’t received justice) and Kelly Owens’ cases.

This is the problem when one is driven not by intellectual curiosity, but by a pronounced obsessive bitterness, when bloggers’ content is based upon fruits from scavenge and bias, as opposed to actual investigation which requires more skill, demonstrated by 24thState, in a post which requires full reading. This lack of attention to facts was exhibited last week in a hastily-written piece – too hasty to bother confirming the identity of the intended target – on Crooks and Liars. The cogs in the machine each provided cover , a crack in any flank, according to their rulebook, is invalidation of their own. But as for the matter of Gladney and Redington:

They’re wrong, as usual, but then the Soros and SEIU funded Media Matters has never been interested in the truth.  I speak to this because starting that night, August 6th, I’ve been collecting the information on the Gladney case, from public statements to health records to statements from public officials, and just last week, I delivered much of that information to the prosecutor overseeing the case.

Aside from all of this, I’m glad to see, for the first time, real interest in one of the most under-reported hate crimes in America in the past several years. I’m glad that liberals have mustered up enough interest to ask the questions they couldn’t be bothered to ask last fall when they were too busy trying to cover up the crime against a black man. Perhaps they will also ask why it took Redington so long to talk to witnesses, or about this:

The hospital records were not the complete medical records.  Gladney went to his personal doctor, the one paid by coverage through his wife’s insurance (despite a report and non-correction you might have read in the St Louis Post Dispatch).  Pat Redington’s office had no way of knowing this because prior to them bringing charges, they wouldn’t meet with or speak to Kenneth Gladney, or any of the witnesses in the police report.  Thus prior to the charges being brought, Redington’s office couldn’t check the full medical records.  They didn’t know of the existence of the full medical record.

[...]

These medical records were important, because Redington’s failure to press timely charges was excused by the complexity of the case.  And yet, the information the counselor’s office had was no different the day they pressed charges, then it was on August 12th.  In other words, Redington’s claim of dozens of witnesses and multiple arrests was intended to be an excuse.  The truth is there was no, and I repeat this strongly, NO, investigation from the counselor’s office.

Those on the left stated an aversion to name-calling when they decried when conservatives declared certain of the administration’s politics to be socialist, tossing around words like “liar” and “racist” seem to be excepted from their double-standard, even when those against whom they rail have the advantage of possessing information on the story and not just SEIU rhetoric.

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The conservative, grassroots movement has successfully shown that gerrymandered congressional districts and state boundaries no longer limit citizen involvement in any campaign regardless of where you live.  In 2010, all politics are still local, but every campaign in the country is now local, as well. This has never been more evident than in the Pennsylvania 12^th Congressional District this weekend.

My business partner and I received a call on Friday May 14, 2010 providing us an opportunity to spend the weekend in Pennsylvania as part of the ground team of the Tim Burns campaign.  We both have extensive military backgrounds, so the trip could only have been made better if we had been allowed to parachute into PA12, unfortunately Southwest Airlines wouldn’t play along.

We arrived in Washington, PA around 2:00 AM Saturday morning and after a few hours of much needed sleep we made our way to the Burns Campaign headquarters. Within moments of arriving we had our instructions and began loading the GPS with polling places in Fayette County, PA, some of which were fact and some fiction.  We spent the majority of the day searching out these obscure, out of the way polling places and reporting the results back to the Burn’s headquarters.  It would seem someone didn’t want us to know where to go to vote.

It is important to note that we were joined by people from New Jersey, Illinois, Montana, Indiana, and Massachusetts. Does this happen often? We don’t think so.

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In 1989, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a major environmentalist group, launched a nationwide panic over the presence on apples of alar, a chemical growth agent. On TV shows such as “60 Minutes” and “Donahue,” and in major women’s magazines, NRDC (with the aid of its expert consulting toxicologist, actress Meryl Streep) claimed that alar “might” eventually cause thousands of lifetime cancer cases due to apple consumption by preschoolers.

This carefully choreographed publicity stunt terrified parents, cost alar’s manufacturer millions, caused over $100 million in losses to apple growers—all while creating a fundraising bonanza for the NRDC.

The scare campaign was based on junk science—on experiments on laboratory rodents in which dose levels were so absurdly high that the animals were dying of simple poisoning. These tests were so shoddy that an independent panel of scientists convened by the EPA—called a Scientific Advisory Panel (SAP)—dismissed the findings as scientifically worthless.

Under political pressure to find something, however, the EPA ordered new tests on mice at dose levels that, again, were so outrageously high that 80 percent of the animals were poisoned to death. Not surprisingly, this overdosing produced the tumors the agency was looking for, and gave it the excuse to ban all use of the chemical.

I spent six months investigating this scam for a special report that appeared in the October 1990 Reader’s Digest. After its publication, many people—echoing the rock group The Who—concluded that “we won’t be fooled again” by environmentalist fear-mongers.

But now a new pesticide panic is underway. Once again, it is being incited by the NRDC, with additional litigation pressure from trial lawyers. Once again, the scare campaign rests on studies that amount to little more than “junk science.” This time, though, the target is an herbicide that plays a far more significant role in agriculture: atrazine.

Atrazine is a valuable weed-killer used to protect corn, sugar cane, and other crops. The EPA has estimated that farming without atrazine would cost corn farmers $28 an acre—the difference between getting by and going bankrupt for thousands of farms across the Midwest—and would cause sugar-cane crop losses from 10 to 40 percent. The overall cost to U.S. farmers would top $2 billion dollars annually.

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Top Republican lawmakers last week sent President Barack Obama a letter protesting the Federal Communications Commission’s recent overture at adopting so-called net neutrality rules, asking that he block the agency’s controversial move to reclassify broadband.

House GOP leaders John Boehner and Eric Cantor said the FCC’s proposal to reclassify broadband as a telecommunications service “could hardly come at a worse time for our nation’s economy, which is already struggling against a steady flow of increased government spending and taxation from Washington.”

The plan, announced to much fan fare among liberal special interests groups, calls for broadband to be regulated under a framework developed in the 1930s for traditional telephone services. It was widely seen among Capitol Hill observers as an end-run around a recent appeals court ruling in which the FCC was found to be lacking regulatory authority in the realm of broadband services.

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Not surprisingly, the EPA thinks regulations are good. What is surprising is that they think everyone else thinks they are just as great as they do. So much so that they are holding a contest. No. Seriously, they are. They want you to make a video telling everyone how great regulations are and to get more people involved in the process.

Getting people involved in the process sounds like a good thing on the surface, but the EPA (and all other Administrative Agencies) are not beholden to public opinion. They offer the public a chance to weigh in on the process by letting you weigh in with comments, but they are unelected officials and, thus, have no reason to listen to anyone and make regulations that could kill the economy. Aren’t they great?

Well, thankfully, not everyone thinks regulations are the “bees knees”. The Heritage Foundation submitted  a video to the contest explaining how awful some regulations can be to economy.

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It is not the magnitude of the rapidly collapsing Greek economy that should concern us in America.  It is, rather, that Greece is unquestionably the proverbial canary in the coal mine that should have the American ruling class burning the midnight oil to extract us from the mess they and their predecessors have created for us.  Instead, our government is ignoring the warning.

The left in America, has flirted with the European economic welfare paradigm for years and now we have an Administration that has morphed that flirtation into a full blown love affair.  Greece, which has spent itself into oblivion providing unsustainable benefits (mostly to ever-growing public payrollers) is, we are told, an aberration and the Administration will, no doubt, say the same thing about Portugal and Italy and Ireland too.  But then we have Spain and Great Britain and even France (and let’s not forget Iceland) staggering down the same path toward economic never-never land, all suffering from the same delusional affliction that is now being pursued with gusto by our ruling class…the belief that we can best improve life for all Americans, nearly half of whom pay no taxes, by raising taxes on the declining number of Americans who do.

The left has always believed that prosperity is something that can be bought through government taxation of society’s income, rather than something that is simply a by-product of society’s productivity.  Let us say it again.  Government cannot create sustainable wealth or prosperity.  Only the people, individually and through the commercial and industrial institutions they create, can do that.

Healthy societies are growing societies that earn the means (the capital) for reinvestment in continued health and growth.  In this process of market-driven growth everyone who participates eventually prospers. Healthy societies are not those such as we are witnessing in Europe, whose earnings are sucked dry by government for redistribution to accomplish objectives as dictated by government planners.   Yet it is this withering European model that our current Administration and its congressional majority have embraced, notwithstanding the warnings screaming at us from across the Atlantic and throughout nearly every precinct in America.  President Obama has stated, unambiguously, that he personally believes that at some level of income no one needs to earn any more, presumably the point at which government should take the balance for redistribution. He acknowledged, however, that this view was, “not the American way.”

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Today, in 1792, the New York Stock Exchange was founded.

Ronald Reagan admired him  a lot. In fact, when Reagan was looking over his new house—the White House—shortly after his inaugural in 1981, he entered into the Cabinet Room.

On the wall were portraits of Truman, Jefferson, and Lincoln. The White House curator commented at the time, “If you don’t like Mr. Truman, you can move Mr. Truman out.” Even though Reagan, a former Democrat, had voted for Truman back in 1948, he made his decision: Truman’s portrait was removed and one of Calvin Coolidge was dusted off and put in its place.

Nowadays, in all the “right” circles [to be found primarily among the academic elite], the person of Coolidge is a source of amusement, if not outright derision. Why, he was a do-nothing president, someone who didn’t use the power of the office as he should have. Probably his most grievous sin, in their view, was the way he put the brakes on destiny: he was a foe of the progressive movement that was intended to reshape American government and culture.

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Attorney General Eric Holder testified the other day before the House Judiciary Committee.   Republican congressman Lamar Smith asked him what seemed to be a pretty simple question.

Regarding the perpetrators in the last three terror attacks (two, thank God, unsuccessful) on our homeland (Fort Hood, the Christmas day bomber, and the Times Square bomber), Smith asked our Attorney General “Do you feel these individuals…might have been incited to take the actions they did because of radical Islam?”

Holder feigned to not understand.   “ Because of…?”

Smith:  “Because of radical Islam.”

Holder: “There are a variety of reasons people do these things.”

Smith re-worded the same question and re-asked it six times, with Holder refusing to acknowledge what is as obvious as the fact that I am typing these words and you are reading them.  That every major incident of terror of recent years has been performed by Muslims and that all of them associate their particular theology with their acts of terror.

The real question today is who is governing America and what exactly is the agenda of those who sit in the seat of power of our own country?

It is no wonder that most Americans are squirming around with the most profound sense of uneasiness.  When the chief law enforcement officer of the United States refuses to acknowledge what is clear and true – that those perpetrating terror today are uniformly Muslim and motivated by Islamic theology of one form or another – how in the world can we possibly feel safe?

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One week ago, I shared the text of a message Interior Secretary Ken Salazar sent to all employees of his department two weeks after the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster began in the Gulf of Mexico. It was provided to me by a friend who works for DOI.

Today, I share the text of his most-recent “Secretary’s Priority Message” about the ongoing disaster which includes some decidedly anti-Big Oil rhetoric. See if you can spot it below:

From: Secretary_of_the_Interior@ios.doi.gov [mailto:Secretary_of_the_Interior@ios.doi.gov]
Sent: Tuesday, May 11, 2010 2:16 PM
Subject: Secretary’s Priority Message – Deepwater Horizon

( NOTE TO SUPERVISORS: Please ensure that all employees without e-mail access receive a paper copy of this distribution.)

Dear Team,

I write to thank you for your hard work and service to our Country. Over the last 21 days, many of you have put in long hours, with little sleep, as you help our Nation respond to the Deepwater Horizon tragedy and spill. I extend my heartfelt appreciation.

As we continue to work hard to address and resolve the oil spill in the Gulf, we must not hesitate from making changes and reforms we know are needed. This incident has made it clear that the public servants of the Minerals Management Service deserve more tools at their disposal, more resources, and an organizational structure that fits the missions that you are being asked to carry out. I am proud of the reforms we have already made together – from broadening MMS’s portfolio to include offshore renewable energy production to simplifying royalty collections – but the time has come to make even more fundamental reforms.

Earlier today, I announced to our colleagues in the MMS a set of changes that we as a Department must undertake to strengthen our oversight of the companies that develop energy in our Nation’s waters.

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Much of the animosity we’ve witnessed directed at the Tea Party over the last year has come from political and cultural elites who find regular people disturbing, if not downright disgusting.  The peasants, according to elites, are prone to temper tantrums and just don’t get how things work in the sophisticated political world. That same attitude was on display this weekend following the primary defeat of Sen. Bob Bennett.

On Sunday’s Meet the Press, David Brooks described Bennett’s defeat as a “damn outrage.”  Liberal E.J. Dionne went a step further and called it “a nonviolent coup” because the Utah voters dared “deny the sitting Republican senator even a chance of getting on the primary ballot.”   Why, it’s almost like these voters think they’re allowed to choose their own representatives or something!

Brooks insists that Bennett is a “good senator” just “trying to get things done.” Unfortunately, what he was trying to get done was not what his electorate wanted him to get done.  While he was busy supporting TARP and advocating an individual mandate for health care, the people of Utah wanted spending restraint and less intrusive government.  On the most important votes regarding these issues, Bennett was too often on the wrong side for their taste.

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