“A Tale of Two Missions” – a film by Juan Williams and Kyle Olson (and directed by Chicago-based Andrew Marcus) – tells the story of competing cultures in American education through examples from Chicago.

See the internet-only abridged version here:

While the fight for school choice rages across the nation, perhaps no better example exists than that of the Windy City.  Traditional alliances are breaking down.  Both political parties are pushing for education reform and expanded school choice.  The status quo is under attack, because most reasonable people understand that thousands of Chicago students are trapped in failing schools.

But the education establishment, led by the radical Chicago Teachers Union, is not willing to give an inch to allow better choices for underserved students. And the union still has enough money, influence and legal standing to make reform efforts difficult to implement.

The film features the Noble Street College Prep charter school and the amazing results its teachers and leaders are delivering for students and parents of Chicago.  It also exposes the entrenched educational establishment bent on stifling school choice options and preserving its monopoly on state education dollars.

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Attention, Juan Williams – don’t presume that you speak for Eddie Slaughter when you accuse Newt Gingrich of dog whistle racism for his statements on food stamps and America’s work ethic. Readers of BigGovernment will remember Eddie Slaughter as the South Georgia farmer was gone on record talking about Pigford fraud and how his Congressman, representative Sanford Bishop tried to cover up that fraud. Mr. Slaughter had personal and political dealings with Newt Gingrich years ago that run very counter to the narrative that Juan Williams was trying to push during the recent presidential debate on Fox, as revealed in an interview I did with  Mr. Slaughter this morning.

Mr. Slaughter originally told me about his positive dealings with Gingrich about a year ago, when he both spoke at a press conference at CPAC about the Pigford settlement. Before Pigford became a vast fraud scheme benefiting attorneys and the political class, it began as a legitimate effort by a small group of black farmers to fight discrimination at the hands of the federal government. The issue for the farmers was that the statute of limitations was very short and because the civil rights office of the USDA had been shut down, there had been no real way to report any discrimination for close to 15 years. In order for the bona fide black farmers like Mr. Slaughter to file suit, they would need an extension of the statute limitations.

The black farmers approachedNewt Gingrich to get support. Now, according to the Juan Williams school of thought, Speaker Gingrich was Republican and therefore a presumed racist. Mr. Slaughter told a very different story however. When asked directly about in my interview he said, “I feel that he was more sincere than most in Washington DC.” And “I think he was more fair than most people running for office, from what know about him personally.”

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A funny thing happened in the GOP debate in South Carolina last night.  FOX NEWS’ Juan Williams implied racism in Speaker Newt Gingrich’s defense of capitalism, and Gingrich did not back down:

Williams: Speaker Gingrich, you recently said, “Black Americans should demand jobs, not food stamps.” You also said, “Poor kids lack a strong work ethic,” and proposed having them work as janitors in their schools. Can’t you see that this is viewed, at a minimum, as insulting to all Americans, but particularly to black Americans?

After Williams asked this question, about three people applauded somewhat timidly, but there was mostly silence in anticipation of how Gingrich might dig himself out of this one.  He had been put on the spot in front of the world by a media spokesperson who not only opposed Gingrich’s position, but who himself was black, and who views almost everything through the lenses of race.

But Gingrich did not fold. Instead he looked at Williams and responded: “No, I don’t see that.” In other words, Gingrich was saying “No, I don’t see how capitalism is racist nor do I see how a defense of capitalism is racist.” The venue exploded with applause and cheers.

Gingrich then continued by telling the audience his daughter’s first job had been as a janitor in a Baptist church in Georgia when she was thirteen. Said Gingrich: “She liked earning the money, she liked learning that if you worked you got paid, she liked being in charge of her own money, and she thought it was a good start.”

Amid applause, Gingrich continued

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech discuss last night’s testy debate in South Carolina, Newt’s battle with Juan Williams, and the millions of Americans on government hand out programs.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

Rivals attack Romney in testy debate
Video: Newt Gingrich vs. Juan Williams
Ben: Be it resolved …
Over 46 Million Americans On Foodstamps For The First Time Ever

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New photographs obtained exclusively by BigGovernment.com reveal that Barack Obama appeared and marched with members of the New Black Panther Party as he campaigned for president in Selma, Alabama in March 2007.

The photographs, captured from a Flickr photo-sharing account before it was scrubbed, are the latest evidence of the mainstream media’s failure to examine Obama’s extremist ties and radical roots.

In addition, the new images raise questions about the possible motives of the Obama administration in its infamous decision to drop the prosecution of the Panthers for voter intimidation.

The images, presented below, also renew doubts about the transparency of the White House’s guest logs–in particular, whether Panther National Chief Malik Zulu Shabazz is the same “Malik Shabazz” listed among the Obama administration’s early visitors.

Tomorrow, J. Christian Adams, the Department of Justice whistleblower in the New Black Panther Party case, will release his new book, Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department (Regnery).

The book exposes Obama administration corruption far beyond the Panther dismissal, and reveals how the institutional Left has turned the power of the DOJ into an ideological weapon.

Adams’s book also describes, in detail, the Selma march at which then-Senator Obama was joined by a group of Panthers who had come to support his candidacy.

Among those appearing with Obama was Shabazz, the Panther leader who was one of the defendants in the voter intimidation case that Attorney General Eric Holder dismissed. Also present was the Panthers’ “Minister of War,” Najee Muhammed, who had called for murdering Dekalb County, Georgia, police officers with AK-47’s and then mocking their widows in this video (7:20 – 8:29).

Injustice includes a disturbing photo of Shabazz and the Panthers marching behind Obama with raised fists in the “Black Power” salute.

There are even more photographs.

I have learned that Regnery initially received approval from a person who took pictures of the events in Selma to publish these additional photographs in Injustice.

After the photographer wrote Regnery reversing his permission to include the photographs in Injustice, the images were removed from the photographer’s Flickr account.  Yet we were able to capture them before they disappeared.

The photographs show Obama sharing the same podium at the event with the Panthers.

In the first image, Shabazz stands at the podium, surrounded by uniformed Panthers, including Muhammed. In the second photograph, Obama commands the same podium.

Here are the images:

—

The First Amendment allows photographs of such enormous public importance to see the light of day. (more…)

At FreedomFest 2011, Reason’s Matt Welch spoke with Fox News’ Juan Williams about his passion for school choice reform, which Williams describes as the “civil rights issue of our time.”

Williams is the author of the new book Muzzled: The Assault on Honest Debate, which recounts in part his controversial firing from National Public Radio. He’s also the author of the critically acclaimed 1988 history of the civil rights movement, Eyes on the Prize.

Williams says he first came to the issue of education reform in the 1990s, when he was astonished by the level of dropout rates in inner-city schools, which disproportionately affects low-income and minority students. He credits George W. Bush for coining the phrase “the soft bigotry of low expectations” to describe the educational status quo and remains surprised by the lack of widespread outrage from parents whose children are stuck in such failing schools. Still, he believes that the forces of school choice are making huge headway in breaking up a public school monopoly that fails to serve students and parents.

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WASHINGTON (AP) – A National Public Radio executive was captured on hidden camera calling the tea party movement racist and xenophobic and said NPR would be better off without federal funding, in an embarrassment likely to fuel the latest round of conservative attacks on public broadcasting.

The video was posted Tuesday by James O’Keefe, the same activist whose undercover videos have targeted other groups opposed by conservatives, like the community organizing group ACORN and Planned Parenthood.

It drew swift reaction from Republicans in Congress, who are renewing efforts to cut funding to public broadcasters. NPR and PBS have long been targets of conservatives who claim their programming has a left-wing bias. Similar efforts in the 1990s and 2005 were not successful, although public broadcasters take the threat seriously.

National Public Radio said in a statement that it was “appalled” by the comments from Ron Schiller, the president of NPR’s fundraising arm and a senior vice president for development.

Schiller informed NPR that he was resigning from his position before the video was shot, NPR spokeswoman Dana Davis Rehm said Tuesday. He was expected to depart in May, but has now been placed on administrative leave. (more…)

According to a Poll Position survey conducted in late October, 45 percent of Americans said “No” when asked whether the U.S. government should stop helping to fund NPR; 39 percent said “Yes.” Only those respondents identifying themselves as Republicans favored, by a 54 percent to 28 percent margin, ending taxpayer support for NPR.

Given that the federal budget is more than $1 trillion in the red and that deficits extend into the future as far as the eye can see, federal subsidies to public broadcasting understandably are on the table.

The just-released report of President Obama’s deficit-reduction commission recommends diverse measures to put Washington’s fiscal house in order, including a $100 billion reduction in defense spending, a substantial increase in the federal excise tax on gasoline, ending of the tax deductibility of home mortgage interest payments and eliminating all funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Federal funding of public radio and television seems to be comparatively small potatoes in the larger budget picture.

This year, for example, congressional appropriations for CPB, the primary channel through which tax dollars are funneled to PBS television and NPR, amounted to $422 million.

At a time when economic stimulus programs, financed primarily by borrowing and the Federal Reserve’s recently announced second round of “quantitative easing,” total in the trillions, who could object to spending a mere few hundred million dollars to support the production and distribution of public programming? Well, I do!

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After flying Andrew Breitbart all the way out to Phoenix, Arizona yesterday to participate in an online Townhall election event, after taking him out of his home state, away from his business, and nearly making it impossible for him to vote in today’s crucial midterm election (though he’s on an airplane now in order to cast his ballot), at about as close to the last minute as you can get, Andrew Morse, chief of the ABC News digital division, sent the following email late this afternoon abruptly canceling Breitbart’s appearance:

We have spent the past several days trying to make clear to you your limited role as a participant in our digital town hall to be streamed on ABC News.com and Facebook. The post on your blog last Friday created a widespread impression that you would be analyzing the election on ABC News. We made it as clear as possible as quickly as possible that you had been invited along with numerous others to participate in our digital town hall. Instead of clarifying your role, you posted a blog on Sunday evening in which you continued to claim a bigger role in our coverage. As we are still unable to agree on your role, we feel it best for you not to participate.

This is yet another obvious attempt to build a narrative that puts the blame on Breitbart when the truth is that this is nothing more than ABC News caving in to and attempting to appease the organized left’s outrage machine that went into full astroturf mode after Breitbart’s ABC News appearance was made public.

As a reminder as to who’s exaggerating, here is exactly how Breitbart’s election night townhall event was described by an ABC News producer to him in an email:

This program will broadcast on the ABC Television Network, abcnews.com, ABC News Now, and ABC News Radio. …

The show will be live on the web and ABC News Now as well as on the network from 4:00pm till 11:00pm MST.

With this in mind and in writing, here is how Big Journalism announced Breitbart’s ABC News appearance: (more…)

In response to the announcement that I would provide my analysis on ABC News from Arizona on election night, like-clockwork, from the George Soros-funded Media Matters to Keith Olbermann to Huffington Post to Daily Kos to Talking Points Memo to Twitter (#boycottABCNEWS), the institutional left began on Friday to inundate ABC News with a wave of partisan objections and unfounded allegations against me.

Make no mistake: this is a calculated “astroturf“ intimidation campaign by the well-funded and frightened-for-their-political-lives institutional left to quash dissenting voices. It’s what they do.

What was ABC News’ response?  Not standing up for free speech and the 1^st Amendment.  Not sticking by their original invitation.  Not standing up for diversity of opinion.

Instead, on Saturday, ABC News issued an official statement that was immediately heralded as a victory by the anti-free speech forces on the left:

Since conservative commentator Andrew Breitbart announced on his website that he was going to be a participant in ABC’s Town Hall meeting at Arizona State University, there has been considerable consternation and misinformation regarding my decision to ask him to participate in an election night Town Hall event for ABC News Digital. I want to explain what Mr. Breitbart’s role has always been as one of our guests at our digital town hall event:

Mr. Breitbart is not an ABC News analyst.

He is not an ABC News consultant.

He is not, in any way, affiliated with ABC News.

He is not being paid by ABC News.

He has not been asked to analyze the results of the election for ABC News.

Mr. Breitbart will not be a part of the ABC News broadcast coverage, anchored by Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos. For the broadcast coverage, David Muir and Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg will contribute reaction and response gathered from the students and faculty of Arizona State University at an ABC News/Facebook town hall.

He has been invited as one of several guests, from a variety of different political persuasions, to engage with a live, studio audience that will be closely following the election results and participating in an online-only discussion and debate to be moderated by David Muir and Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg on ABCNews.com and Facebook. We will have other guests, as well as a live studio audience and a large audience on ABCNews.com and Facebook, who can question the guests and the audience’s   opinions.

George Stephanoplous quickly tweeted, “Breitbart NOT on ABC network broadcast http://bit.ly/bgkseJ.” (more…)

Only at National Public Radio would an honest, human opinion get you fired.  The elites at NPR just couldn’t live with a commoner such as Juan Williams…he might be too low brow for their DC cocktail parties.

Despite my various philosophical disagreements with Juan, I have complete respect for him as an individual.

This past August, Williams was a keynote speaker at a school choice conference attended by hundreds of reform-minded individuals.  While most of the so-called civil rights leaders reside in the hip pocket of the teacher unions, Williams bravely bucks the liberal party line and boldly speaks out for school choice, calling it the civil rights issue of our time.  He’s right, of course.

But I suspect such talk only strengthened the resolve of the radical left to silence his voice.  (The Left has never forgiven Williams for providing commentary to Fox News programming.  In their small-minded view, Williams is a sell-out.)  So last week, when Williams violated PC-standards and made some honest comments about radical Islam on Fox News’ “The O’Reilly Factor,” the left seized the moment.  Suddenly, one of the most tolerant, fair-minded liberal voices in the news media was labeled a bigot, and was sacked from his day job at NPR.

During this episode, Williams has proven himself to be a class-act, a serious journalist who is concerned only about pursuing the truth.

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In today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Francis Cianfrocca to discuss what America can learn from the austerity measures and big budget cuts in Europe, as well as discussion on the real unemployment rate and the Juan Williams NPR firing.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. You can find our iTunes feed at CoffeeandMarkets.com. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

After Williams’s firing, NPR fears financial backlash
Early Voter ‘Enthusiasm Gap’ Appears Consistent With Polls
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Shocking Video: 60 Minutes Admits Unemployment is Actually 17%, 22% in California
(more…)