Tag Archives: science

2012 Primary, Education, Elite Media, True Talking Points, Unions

Gallup: Confidence if Public Schools, TV News, Banks at All Time Low

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Go to the mall at 4pm on a weekday and subject yourself to the product of our public schools… we have all seen this. It is one of those things that everyone knows and few talk about.

I recently finished a new degree and I was shocked at how ignorant and miseducated the public schoolers were. So are many professors.

Gallup:

PRINCETON, NJ — Americans’ confidence in public schools is down five percentage points from last year, with 29% expressing “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in them. That establishes a new low in public school confidence from the 33% measured in Gallup’s 2007 and 2008 Confidence in Institutions polls. The high was 58% the first time Gallup included public schools, in 1973.

In addition to public schools, this year’s Confidence in Institutions survey finds record lows, all by one percentage point, in Americans’ confidence in the church or organized religion (44%), banks (21%), and television news (21%).

Gallup has asked Americans to say how much confidence they have in a variety of U.S. institutions since 1973, including annually since 1993.

None of this comes at a surprise, even the low numbers on organized religion as the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal has taken a very heavy toll the Vatican’s credibility.

Communications Theory, Culture War, Education, School Indoctrination, True Talking Points

Christian Students CENSORED at 160 Public Universities. ADF Defends! (video)

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Most people have no idea what is going on at our public universities.

A hundred million secular Marxists didn’t suddenly become libertarians in 1989 when the wall fell. They had to go to work somewhere and many went to work at public schools and universities and they brought their twisted philosophy with them.

Persecution of Christian, Jewish, conservative, libertarian and traditional students on campus is so common and prevalent that there are multiple legal groups fighting it including the Alliance Defense Fund, The Rutherford Institute, the ACLJ, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), the Student Press Law Center and believe it or not, many of these cases are so egregious that the ACLU has even been stepping up to defend such persecuted students.   These civil rights groups are overwhelmed with requests for help. The problem is that bad. Just because you don’t run into these radical leftists or hear about them in your daily lives does not mean they aren’t there.

[Full Disclosure: FIRE and the ACLU helped in a case I was involved in at Indiana University – Editor.]

Having worked for the campus in a job where I ended up in every office at one time or another I know first hand that about half of the professors in the liberal arts department either have pictures of Karl Marx on their wall and/or have his book prominently displayed. Books by Adam Smith, Frederick Hayek, Milton Friedman…. good luck.

Western Ky. Univ. Turns Blind Eye To Vandalized Pro-Life Display

‘Kids for Christ’ club silenced because they were “religious,” no longer silenced (In Oklahoma of all places).

Honor Student Denied Credit Because Community Service Event Was Religious

Christian Club Told It’s Not Religious; Forced To Have Non-Christian Leaders (In North Carolina)

2012 Primary, Econ, Lies, Obama, True Talking Points

The Four Lies About the Economy That Obama Needs Voters to Believe

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[Note, this column is abridged for length. Follow the link if you wish to see the complete piece.]

By Larry Elder:

President Barack Obama’s re-election turns on his ability to convince voters that

1) Obama inherited a “Great Recession,”

2) every “independent” economist supported the “stimulus,”

3) “bipartisan” economists agree that Obama’s stimulus worked,

4) as actor Morgan Freeman puts it, racist Republicans say, “Screw the country … we’re going to do whatever we can to get this black man outta here” — nothing to do with deeply held policy differences.

(1) Take this “Great Recession” business.

Remember the “misery index”? The term, popularized by former President Jimmy Carter, used to mean inflation plus unemployment. Unfortunately for John Kerry, by the time he ran for president in 2004, the misery index stood at 7.4 midway into the election year, the same as when George W. Bush won the presidency in 2000. What to do? Change the definition. Kerry invented a new misery index, one that included only high-rising costs like college tuition, health care and gas prices.

Similarly, “bad economic times” used to mean, above all, high unemployment. Within a year of Obama’s presidency, unemployment climbed to 10.2 percent. Within three years of Reagan’s presidency, unemployment reached 10.8 percent. Under Obama, inflation has been — at least so far — rather modest. Early in Reagan’s presidency, inflation reached 13.5 percent. Rather than describe this era as the “Great-Recession-turned-around-by-Reagan’s-pro-growth-policies,” many pundits and scribes dismiss this period of extraordinary growth as the “me decade” or the “decade of greed.”

[Political Arena Editor Chuck Norton comments: Excuse me Larry, but under Clinton the Consumer Price Index was changed so that government would never have to face the misery index and a proper measure of inflation again. They removed “Food & Fuel” from the index, you know, because nobody ever buys that stuff anyways, and they weighted the formula towards housing….. that’s right folks, housing.

When the economy turns south or hits a bump new housing starts talk and housing prices fall, thus showing negative inflation. So when the economy is in trouble and inflation is going up, the government reads it as zero inflation. If we still measured inflation like we used to it would be about 9.3% every year for three years. Of course, every shopper knows this as they see the prices for themselves.] 

(2) “There is no disagreement,” said then-President-elect Barack Obama, “that we need action by our government, a recovery plan that will help to jump-start the economy.”

What?! More than 200 economists, including several Nobel laureates, signed on to a full-page ad placed in major newspapers by the libertarian Cato Institute. Eventually, over 130 more economists became signatories to the ad.

It read: “With all due respect, Mr. President, that is not true. Notwithstanding reports that all economists are now Keynesians and that we all support a big increase in the burden of government, we the undersigned do not believe that more government spending is a way to improve economic performance.

“More government spending by Hoover and Roosevelt did not pull the United States economy out of the Great Depression in the 1930s. More government spending did not solve Japan’s ‘lost decade’ in the 1990s. As such, it is a triumph of hope over experience to believe that more government spending will help the U.S. today.

“To improve the economy, policymakers should focus on reforms that remove impediments to work, saving, investment and production. Lower tax rates and a reduction in the burden of government are the best ways of using fiscal policy to boost growth.”

(3) Obama surrogate Steve Rattner recently said that Obama’s stimulus worked — as confirmed by “bipartisan” economists. As proof, Rattner offered the findings of “bipartisan economists Mark Zandi and Alan Blinder,” who “agree that … we would have had unemployment substantially higher than what we’ve had over the last two years.”

“Bipartisan”?

Blinder, a Democrat, served as a member of the Clinton administration and later advised presidential candidates Al Gore and John Kerry. As for Zandi, he did serve as a presidential campaign advisor to John McCain. Like Blinder, Zandi is a self-described Democrat.

As to the alleged unanimous expert opinion on the effectiveness of Obama’s stimulus, Stanford economist John Taylor debated this on NPR with Zandi. Taylor’s analysis, shared by many other economists: “I just don’t think there’s any evidence. When you look at the numbers, when you see what happened, when people reacted to the stimulus, it did very little good.”

(4) Democrats never tire of trotting out Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who said his “single most important political goal” was to make Obama “a one-term president.” Horrors! Why, doesn’t this just make McConnell the very personification of sinister! Republican opposition for the sole purpose of bringing down Obama, the first black president, yada, blah, etc.

Apparently, it is outside the brain capacity of people like Morgan Freeman to understand something: One way to defeat bad, leftist Democrats’ policies is to defeat bad, leftist Democrats, who seek to implement those bad, leftist policies. It’s not complicated.

Nothing personal.

[Political Arena Editor Chuck Norton comments:  On September 11th, 2001 famed Democrat Strategist James Carville said that he hopes President Bush fails.] 

Communications Theory, Elite Media, School Indoctrination, Soros, True Talking Points

George Soros Funds His Own “Open Society” (read oligarchy) University and Spends $400 Million Influencing American Universities; Elite Media Silent…

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..but if the Koch Brothers make a donation it is evil vulture capitalists buying the system and wrecking democracy in the “elite media”.

CNS News:

School is letting out around the United States, but for George Soros, education never stops. Soros has given more than $400 million to colleges and universities, including money to most prominent institutions in the United States. He also helped establish Central European University (CEU) which, in turn, uses its resources to promote his personal goal of an “open society.”

Imagine that, a whole university funded by one of the most controversial figures in the world. Soros has used that $400 million worldwide to indoctrinate students and teach them to promote liberal, and in some cases extremist, causes. But don’t expect the American news media to make it a big issue, even though they have done so for the Koch brothers.

CEU, which is essentially Soros’s own university, has received $250 million from the liberal billionaire. The Founder and Chairman of the Board is none other than Soros. More than half of CEU’s 20 member board are closely tied to the liberal financier. President of the Soros-funded Bard College Leon Botstein is Chairman of the Board.

While the Left shrivels at the thought of the Koch brother’s donations to universities, Soros gave more than 50 times as much. Bard College was the American institution that received the most from Soros (more than $75 million). Grants to Bard for “community service and social action” included a Palestinian youth group and an initiative to educate prisoners across the country.

All of the Ivy League universities, along with a variety of state schools, private institutions, and even religiously-affiliated institutions, were also funded by Soros.

The Koch brothers were vilified by the American political left for donating almost $7 million to universities while their beloved Soros gave more than 50 times that amount to the same type of groups.

Soros’s Center for American Progress, which received $7.3 million from his foundations, posted a report on their Think Progress blog titled “Koch Fueling Far Right Academic Centers at Universities across the Country.”  In the article, the Koch-hating leftist Lee Fang lists universities that received money from the Kochs to include George Mason University, Utah State, and Brown. Totaling nearly $7 million, grants as small as $100,000 were criticized. A donation of $1.5 million to Florida State University supposedly gave the Kochs “a free hand in selecting professors and approving publications.”

Alternet, funded by Soros complained about a “shady deal” that helped the Kochs fund Florida State University. Colorlines, also funded by Soros, said of the same donation: “FSU Trades Academic Freedom for Billionaire Charles Koch’s Money.”

This information is all part of an extensive new Special Report on Soros by the Business and Media Institute (a sister organization of CNSNews.com). The report, “George Soros: Godfather of the Left,”also detailed Soros’s many controversial dealings around the world.

Gangsta Govt, Global Security, True Talking Points

Judge estimates 30K secret spying orders approved yearly

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Creepy. The camera in the nose costs $2.3 million and has infrared and ultraviolet capabilities that allow it to see into structures as well as tell if you have narcotics in your pocket from nine miles away. Coming to a city near you….

USA Today:

Federal judges approve about 30,000 secret warrants to spy on people in the USA every year, and the innocent probably will never know they were watched, says a U.S. jurist involved in issuing the orders.

Magistrate Judge Stephen Smith writes in a new paper, highlighted by Ars Technica, that the 2006 total outstripped the entire output of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courtsince it was created in 1979, and the number is probably growing.

The secret orders are authorized by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, known as ECPA. Smith writes that the volume of such cases “is greater than the combined yearly total of all antitrust, employment discrimination, environmental, copyright, patent, trademark and securities cases filed in federal court.”

The warrants and the court’s proceedings are not open to public scrutiny. A three-judge panel reviews denials of applications for the warrants, but the court is not adversarial or open, and many orders are never unsealed.

 

Academic Misconduct, Education, School Indoctrination

UPenn Professor: Cops are pigs, conservatives are schmucks, America is a perverse place, we need useful Marxist concepts….

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And you think this is unusual? This is what a majority of college professors either fully endorse or are very sympathetic to.

When The Wall fell in 1989 a few hundred million communists did not suddenly become libertarians. They had to go somewhere.

The Blaze:

There has been no shortage of partisan teaching in the news lately, but Professor Philippe Bourgois of The University of Pennsylvania may have just brought proselytizing from the lectern to a new low.

Bourgois, a Professor of Anthropology at Penn, gave a public lecture recently slandering police officers, conservatives, doctors and America itself, all while encouraging and complimenting the teachings of Karl Marx. The rant took place in front of students on the campus of Bryn Mawr College, located west of Philadelphia. The talk was a panel discussion entitled ‘The Transformation of Poverty Governance’ and revolved around how America is handling it’s welfare state.

See the video HERE.

Culture War, Treason, True Talking Points

Chillingly Accurate: The Political Predictions of Robert Welch 1958 (video)

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No matter what you may think of the John Birch Society, credit based on merit should be given when it is due and in this case Robert Welch was beyond prophetic. You may agree or disagree with the solutions Welch offers, but it cannot be denied that what he predicted happened.

I have mixed views on JBS myself. Some of them are wonderful people, some of them are nuts.

Academic Misconduct, Culture War, School Indoctrination, True Talking Points

The Chronicle of Higher Education = Authoritarians on Campus

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When black studies PhD candidates put out marxist nonsense and label it race studies, it is as disingenuous as it gets. When black studies “scholars” trash black people for not being marxist such as Dr. Thomas Sowell and Dr Walter Williams and others why is this allowed to be passed of a great civil rights historical scholarship? It is nonsense to anyone with a residue of common sense, but to thousands of radical leftists with a stalinist bent, speaking such obvious truths results in a call for censorship.

If people want to know what more and more people think of American education as the national joke, this is a great example of why.

Bernard Goldberg:

The “higher education community,” as they like to be known, worships at the altar of diversity – unless, of course, we’re talking about diversity of opinion.  Then these supposedly smart academics show us how dumb they can be.

The Chronicle of Higher Education, which publishes articles for that community, just fired a woman named Naomi Schaefer Riley. Why? Because she expressed an opinion many of those scholars in the “higher education community” didn’t like.

Academics, liberals who brag about being open-minded, read something they disagreed with and then, like a mob, hunted down the offender and made her pay. Ms. Riley was hired to provide conservative commentary and then was canned because she provided it.

Here’s what happened:

The Chronicle published a cover story recently called “Black Studies: Swaggering Into the Future” which said in part that “young black studies scholars … are less consumed than their predecessors with the need to validate the field or explain why they are pursuing doctorates in their discipline.”  There was also a companion piece about five Ph.D. candidates who, we’re told, “are rewriting the history of race.”  Nowhere in the articles is anyone quoted who is skeptical of black studies as an academic discipline.

Enter Naomi Schaefer Riley, who wrote a piece for the Chronicle’s Web site – (that was her job) — that said that the dissertation topics the graduate students mentioned were obscure at best and “a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap” at worst.

What happened next, sadly, is no surprise.  After those oh so tolerant academics read what she wrote they bombarded her messages calling her – wait for it – a racist.

Ok, I’m not shocked, either. But that was only the beginning.  Then 6,500 academics signed an on line petition demanding that she be fired.

For a few days, the Chronicle sort of stood its ground saying, Ms. Riley’s blog was an “invitation to debate.”  But after about 72 hours, the pressure had become too much for the Chronicle’s editor, Liz McMillen.  She issued a statement that Ms. Riley says reads like “a confession at a re-education camp.”

“We’ve heard you,” Ms. McMillen wrote to the mob.  “And we have taken to heart what you said.  We now agree that Ms. Riley’s blog posting did not meet The Chronicle’s basic editorial standards for reporting and fairness in opinion articles.”

This, of course, was nonsense. Naomi Schaefer Riley – a white woman who, if it matters is married to a black man – was fired because she said things about race that are unacceptable in liberal academic circles.  She was fired because she had an unpopular opinion, which is a crime against humanity on many college campuses.  And she was smeared with the word “racist” because that’s the word liberals use to describe anybody with views on race they don’t agree with.

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about the mob that got her fired, Ms. Riley tells us that “If you want to know why almost all of the responses to my original post consist of personal attack on me, along with irrelevant mentions of Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and George Zimmerman, it is because black studies is a cause, not a course of study.  By doubting the academic worthiness of black studies, my critics conclude, I am opposed to racial justice – and therefore a racist.”

Liberals like to howl about the chilling effect when supposed enemies of free speech try to getthem fired for something they said.  In academia, these enemies, of course, are always conservatives.  Liberals are always the victims of the mob.  All of this proves a point: They’re not only dumb, these academic authoritarians – they’re also breathtakingly clueless.

 

More on this story can be seen at  The Weekly Standard HERE.

Academic Misconduct

Half of Florida high school students fail reading test

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Teach the test and don’t really educate…. it doesn’t work.

And in Indiana, the basic skills tests have gotten easier since I was in grade school, not harder. I have a hard time believing that other states really behaved differently considering how powerful teacher’s unions are.

Reuters/Yahoo News:

MIAMI (Reuters) – Nearly half of Florida high school students failed the reading portion of the state’s new toughened standardized test, education officials said on Friday.

Results this year from the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test showed 52 percent of freshman students and 50 percent of sophomores scored at their grade levels.

Students in the 10th grade must pass the exam in order to eventually graduate but can retake it if they fail.

The results came days after the Florida State Board of Education voted to lower the standards needed to pass the writing part of the test, known as FCAT. The test is administered in public elementary, middle and high schools.

The board took the action in an emergency meeting when preliminary results indicated only about one-third of Florida students would have passed this year.

“We are asking more from our students and teachers than we ever have, and I am proud of their hard work,” Florida Education Commissioner Gerard Robinson said in a statement.

“As Florida transitions to higher standards and higher expectations, we can expect our assessment results to reflect those changes.”

2012 Primary, Budget, Obama, Stuck on Stupid, True Talking Points

NBC: Stimulus Dollars Fund Crazed Sex Studies

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You paid for it…..

NBC:

The NBC Investigative Unit has raised questions about two grants totaling nearly $1.5 million dollars distributed to the University of California San Francisco. The money was part of the federal stimulus program and went to studies into the erectile dysfunction of overweight middle aged men and the accurate reporting of someone’s sexual history.

This is part of our ongoing series of investigations by the NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit into who received federal stimulus dollars, and why some projects did not break ground more than two years after receiving the grant.

The Investigative Unit looked closely at the federal government’s decision to spend nearly $1.5 million dollars of taxpayer money, money that came to California. Grant number 1R01HD056950-01A2 was among the thousands of grants funded, receiving $1.2 million dollars. This grant studied how to improve the accuracy of how people responded to questions about their sexual history.

“If you honestly report on your sexual activity and number of partners?” Scott Amey with asked with a sigh. “That’s a good one.”

2012 Primary, Gangsta Govt, Health Law, Obama, True Talking Points

Catholic university drops student health insurance, cites ObamaCare

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And this is far from the only incident. So much for “you can keep your plan and your doctor”…

Fox News:

A Catholic university in Ohio said Tuesday it is being forced to end a student health insurance program over the Obama administration’s contraception mandate and costs associated with other provisions of the health care overhaul.

Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio, said it has so far excluded contraceptive services and products from its health insurance policy for students and will not participate in a plan that “requires us to violate the consistent teachings of the Catholic Church on the sacredness of human life.”

In its decision to drop coverage, the school cited the contraception mandate, but also a requirement that the maximum coverage amount be increased to $100,000 for policyholders — claiming that would have made premiums skyrocket. A university official told Fox News Radio the students’ basic $600 policy was going to double in cost in the fall and triple next year and that the school’s insurance provider said the increases were the result of the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/05/15/catholic-university-drops-student-health-insurance-cites-obamacare/#ixzz1v63faDCR

2012 Primary, Energy Policy, Obama, True Talking Points

GAO: Recoverable American oil in a single location equal to the entire world oil reserves…

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Via the Ulsterman Report and CNS News:

According to testimony to Congress from Anu K. Mittal, director of the Government Accountability Office’s natural resources and environment office. According to Mittal’s testimony, the United States currently has domestic oil reserves that equal that of all other oil reserves in the world. Let that statement sink in. And also know that Director Mittal is referencing oil reserves for just one location – oil shale in the Green River Formation. She is not even including all the other oil producing regions within the United States. The newly discovered Green River Formation itself has enough potential reserves to equal those of the rest of known reserves throughout the entire world:

“The Green River Formation–an assemblage of over 1,000 feet of sedimentary rocks that lie beneath parts of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming–contains the world’s largest deposits of oil shale,”Anu K. Mittal, the GAO’s director of natural resources and environment said in written testimony submitted to the House Science Subcommittee on Energy and Environment.
“USGS estimates that the Green River Formation contains about 3 trillion barrels of oil, and about half of this may be recoverable, depending on available technology and economic conditions,” Mittal testified.

“The Rand Corporation, a nonprofit research organization, estimates that 30 to 60 percent of the oil shale in the Green River Formation can be recovered,” Mittal told the subcommittee. “At the midpoint of this estimate, almost half of the 3 trillion barrels of oil would be recoverable. This is an amount about equal to the entire world’s proven oil reserves.” – LINK with video

So much for Obama repeatedly saying that we only have 1 or 2% of what we use. He knows better.

2012 Primary, Alarmism, Econ, Energy Policy, Obama, True Talking Points

EPA Official on Video: We Are “Crucifying” Oil And Gas Companies…

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Via Heritage:

A video surfaced on Wednesday showing a regional administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency comparing his agency’s philosophy with respect to regulation of oil and gas companies to brutal tactics employed by the ancient Roman army to intimidate its foes into submission.

EPA’s “philosophy of enforcement,” said EPA’s Region VI Administrator Al Armendariz, is “kind of like how the Romans used to conquer little villages in the Mediterranean: they’d go into little Turkish towns somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they’d run into, and they’d crucify them.”

Senator James Inhofe is calling for an investigation:

More:

CNS News – LINK.

The Blaze – Hit them hard, make examples of them – LINK.

Academic Misconduct, Alarmism, True Talking Points

49 NASA employees call out NASA for bogus global warming claims…

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Via The Blaze:

Just as Jim Hansen, the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has recently likened man-made global warming to “a great moral issue” like “slavery,” a group of 49 former NASA scientists issued a letter to NASA Administrator Charles Bolton asking for the administration refrain from including “unproven and unsupported remarks” about climate science in its communications.

The letter, sent at the end of March, includes former scientists, astronauts and two former directors of NASA’s Johnson Space Center who believe climate science is “not settled” and wish for NASA to look at all available scientific data before making claims of carbon dioxide’s “catastrophic impact”.

Several blogs that do not consider man-made global warming a done deal, such as Watt’s Up With That, have recently picked up the story and posted the full letter.

Here’s it is:

March 28, 2012
The Honorable Charles Bolden, Jr.
NASA Administrator
NASA Headquarters
Washington, D.C. 20546-0001
Dear Charlie,

We, the undersigned, respectfully request that NASA and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) refrain from including unproven remarks in public releases and websites. We believe the claims by NASA and GISS, that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated, especially when considering thousands of years of empirical data. With hundreds of well-known climate scientists and tens of thousands of other scientists publicly declaring their disbelief in the catastrophic forecasts, coming particularly from the GISS leadership, it is clear that the science is NOT settled.

The unbridled advocacy of CO2 being the major cause of climate change is unbecoming of NASA’s history of making an objective assessment of all available scientific data prior to making decisions or public statements.

As former NASA employees, we feel that NASA’s advocacy of an extreme position, prior to a thorough study of the possible overwhelming impact of natural climate drivers is inappropriate. We request that NASA refrain from including unproven and unsupported remarks in its future releases and websites on this subject. At risk is damage to the exemplary reputation of NASA, NASA’s current or former scientists and employees, and even the reputation of science itself.

For additional information regarding the science behind our concern, we recommend that you contact Harrison Schmitt or Walter Cunningham, or others they can recommend to you.

Thank you for considering this request.

Sincerely,
(Attached signatures)
See a full list of the signatures here.

Academic Misconduct, Culture War, Education, School Indoctrination, True Talking Points

New Study Shows University of California Run by Leftist Radicals

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The National Association of Scholars study can be found here:

http://www.nas.org/images/documents/A_Crisis_of_Competence.pdf

http://www.nas.org/images/documents/Noindoctrinationorg_UC_courses.pdf

Brietbart News:

Think a University of California degree is worth its weight in gold? Think again. According to a new study, you might want to rethink that second mortgage needed to send junior to a UC campus.

The California Association of Scholars, a division of the National Association of Scholars, have just released an incendiary report showing that all nine of the University of California’s campuses have been compromised by too many politicized courses and radical faculty members. CAS members include a number of current or past professors from the UC system who have taught at UC-Berkeley, UCLA, UC-Santa Cruz, and UC-San Diego.

Conservatives have long complained of a strong liberal bias in college classrooms, and this new study shows just how far off track it has gone in one of the most prestigious public university systems in the country. You can read the full CAS 81-page report here.

CAS’s president John Ellis knows very well of what he speaks; he’s a professor emeritus of German Literature from UC Santa Cruz. “The quality of education at the University of California has been jeopardized by political activism,“ Professor Ellis said in a phone interview. “Dogmatism is rapidly displacing open-minded inquiry, especially in the social sciences and humanities, to the severe disadvantage of students.”

A Crisis in Competence: The Corrupting Influence of Political Activism in the University of California isn’t trying to purge the system of differing left of center opinions. The well-documented study just hopes to even the playing field so students get a quality education – an education that has standards and teaches students to look at all sides of the issues. The CAS report emphasizes common sense observations that seem to be beyond the grasp of the assumed intelligent members of the UC Board of Regents.

One observation points out that “a political science department with one half of the spectrum of political thought missing cannot be considered a competent department.” It seems only a Marxist professor with an agenda and no common sense would disagree with that idea from this new study. Unfortunately, as the study shows, there are a lot more Marxists now teaching in the University of California system than you would think.

The CAS report took the time to carefully vet the studies it cites from various institutions, including George Mason University, the Center for the Study of Popular culture, and many others. They even scoured carefully scrutinized and recorded students complaints on the subject, many of which you can read here.

Here a just a few of the conclusions about the University of California system that CAS came to:
There has been a sharp increase in faculty members who self-identify as radicals. This has led to “one party” academic departments, such as at Berkeley, where left-of-center faculty members outnumber their right-of-center colleagues in Political Science by a ratio of 28:2, in English 29:1 and in History 31:1. A number of these professors are openly avowed Marxists! (Has Van Jones applied for one of these positions?)

Many curricula promote political activism, in violation of UC regulations. Critical Race Studies at UCLA’s School of Law, for example, aims to be a “training ground” for advocates committed to racial justice theory and practice (sounds like Harvard during the Professor Derrick Bell/Obama years).

Several departments attempt to erase the study of Western tradition. History majors are now not required to take a survey course in Western civilization on any of the nine University of California campuses. Four more UC campuses have dropped their American History requirements (many UC students cannot even answer basic questions about American or World History).

Suppression of free speech is commonplace. Speakers at UC Berkeley who have been shouted down by protesters include Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Secretary of State Madeline Albright, and Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Conner (but Columbia welcomes Iran’s Ahmadinejad to speak with open arms).

Radical and left-of-center UC professors favor hiring like-minded new academics and block the hiring of new professors who don’t “think the right way.” (Why would a conservative incur the enormous debt and hassles pursuing a Ph. D. if the possibility of a professor’s job is little or nil?)

The advancement of “social justice” is now the open aim of a number of UC faculty members and even whole departments in the system (if a student asks questions or writes answers or papers that challenge these professors and their radical assumptions they can expect a poor grade).

The UC curriculum has been gutted because too many professors now show an open preference for promoting a partisan political agenda. These are just a few of the important issues confronting the UC system that the CAS study raises and documents in very credible fashion.

2012 Primary, Health Law, Obama, True Talking Points

60% of Doctors say ObamaCare will have a negative impact on overall patient care

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Heritage:

The American public doesn’t support Obamacare, and a new survey shows that doctors have an even worse opinion. No one has a better grasp on the state of the health care system than physicians, and according to the Doctors Company survey, 60 percent of them believe that Obamacare will have a negative impact on overall patient care. This survey is consistent with the findings of another doctor survey taken in October 2010, which also showed doctors’ lack of confidence in Obamacare.

The survey was conducted to unveil physicians’ concerns about health care reform. The Doctors Company, which is the largest insurer of physician and surgeon medical liability in the nation, received more than 5,000 surveys, including all specialties and every region in the country. The results weren’t good for the President’s signature piece of legislation.

Not only do doctors believe that Obamacare will not improve the health care system, they also anticipate that it will worsen the current condition. According to the survey, nine out of 10 physicians are unwilling to recommend health care as a profession to a family member, and one primary care physician even commented, “I would not recommend becoming an M.D. to anyone.”

Obamacare doesn’t just discourage entrance into the medical profession; it encourages those who are already practicing to leave it. The survey states that “health care reform is motivating doctors to change their retirement timeline.” In fact, 43 percent of respondents said they are considering retiring within the next five years as a result of the law. A surgeon from Michigan wrote that under Obamacare, “We will be moving further away from humanity-based health care and more towards the patient as a commodity. This was not the way my father practiced—nor will I. Winding down to retire early.”

Currently, the United States is on the brink of a severe physician shortage. According to the American Association of Medical Colleges, by 2020, the nation will need an additional 91,500 doctors to meet medical demand. Dr. Donald J. Palmisano, former president of the American Medical Association, warns, “Today, we are perilously close to a true crisis as newly insured Americans enter the health care system and our population continues to age.” If current physicians leave the practice early because of the health law, the problem will be exacerbated even further.

Finally, the survey revealed concerns that the health law will compromise the doctor-patient relationship. Slightly more than half of doctors surveyed believe “that increased bureaucracy is reducing the personal interaction with patients essential for building a close relationship and understanding the nature of patient health.”

Under Obamacare, Heritage expert Robert Moffit writes, “physicians will be subject to more government regulation and oversight, and will be increasingly dependent on unreliable government reimbursement for medical services. Doctors, already under tremendous pressure, will only see their jobs become more difficult.” To reverse this trend, the U.S. needs health care reform that doctors and patients alike can eagerly support.