Liberally Challenged

About the time our original thirteen states adopted their new constitution in 1787, Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh, had this to say about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years earlier:

‘A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government.’

‘A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.’

‘From that moment on, the majority always vote for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.’

‘The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years’

‘During those 200 years, those nations always progressed through the following sequence:

1. from bondage to spiritual faith

2. from spiritual faith to great courage

3. from courage to liberty

4. from liberty to abundance

5. from abundance to complacency

6. from complacency to apathy

7. from apathy to dependence

8. from dependence back into bondage’

Professor Joseph Olson believes the United States is now somewhere between the ‘complacency and apathy’ phase of Professor Tyler’s definition of democracy, with some forty percent of the nation’s population already having reached the ‘governmental dependency’ phase.

If Congress grants amnesty and citizenship to twenty million criminal invaders called illegals and they vote, then we can say goodbye to the USA in fewer than five years.

FROM THE LA TIMES: 
1. 40% of all workers in L.A. County (L.A. County has 10.2 million people) are working for cash and not paying taxes. This is because they are predominantly illegal immigrants working without a green card.

2. 95% of warrants for murder in Los Angeles are for illegal aliens.

3. 75% of people on the most wanted list in Los Angeles are illegal aliens.

4. Over 2/3 of all births in Los Angeles County are to illegal alien Mexicans on Medi-Cal , whose births were paid for by taxpayers.

5. Nearly 35% of all inmates in California detention centers are Mexican nationals here illegally.

6. Over 300,000 illegal aliens in Los Angeles County are living in garages.

7. The FBI reports half of all gang members in Los Angeles are most likely illegal aliens from south of the border.

8 Nearly 60% of all occupants of HUD properties are illegal.
 9. 21 radio stations in L.A. are Spanish speaking.
 

10. In L.A. County 5.1 million people speak English, 3.9 million speak Spanish. ( There are 10.2 million people in L.A. County )   

All 10 of the above are from the Los Angeles Times Less than 2% of illegal aliens are picking our crops, but 29% are on welfare. Over 70% of the United States‘ annual population growth (and over 90% of California , Florida , and New York) results from immigration.  29% of inmates in federal prisons are illegal aliens.  We are a bunch of fools for letting this continue.

Why Parents Don’t Trust the Educator-in-Chief and His Comrades

by Michelle Malkin

They think we’re crazy. “They” are the sneering defenders of Barack Obama who can’t fathom the backlash against the president’s nationwide speech to schoolchildren next Tuesday. “We” are parents with eyes wide open to the potential for politicized abuse in America’s classrooms.

Ask moms and dads in Farmington, Utah, who discovered this week that their children sat through a Hollywood propaganda video promoting the cult of Obama. In the clip, a parade of entertainers vow to flush their toilets less, buy hybrid vehicles, end poverty and world hunger, and commit to “service” for “change.” Actress Demi Moore leads the glitterati in a collective promise “to be a servant to our president.” Musician Anthony Kiedis pledges “to be of service to Barack Obama.”

The campaign commercial crescendos with the stars and starlets asking their audience: “What’s your pledge?”

This same “Do Something” ethos infected the U.S. Department of Education teachers guides accompanying the announcement of Obama’s speech — until late Wednesday, that is, when the White House removed some of the activist language exhorting students to come up with ways to “help the president.” Education Secretary Arne Duncan had disseminated the material directly to principals across the country — circumventing elected school board members and superintendents now facing neighborhood revolts.

O’s bureaucrats can whitewash offending language from the Sept. 8 speech-related documents, but they can’t remove the taint of left-wing radicalism that informs Obama and his education mentors. A spokesman maintained that the speech is “about the value of education and the importance of staying in school as part of his effort to dramatically cut the dropout rate.” But the historical subtext is far less innocent.

Obama served with Weather Underground terrorist and neighbor Bill Ayers on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge education initiative. Downplaying academic achievement in favor of left-wing radical activism in the public schools is rooted in Ayers’ pedagogical philosophy. Obama served as the program’s first chairman of the board, while Ayers steered its curricular policy. The two oversaw grants to welfare rights enterprise ACORN and to avowed communist Michael Klonsky — a close pal of Ayers and member of the militant Students for a Democratic Society. SDS served as a precursor to the violent Weather Underground organization.

As investigative journalist Stanley Kurtz reported, Klonsky and Ayers teamed up on the so-called “small schools movement” to steer schoolchildren away from core academics to left-wing politicking on issues of “inequity, war and violence.”

A cadre of like-minded educators and national service administrators across the country share the same core commitment to transforming themselves from imparters of knowledge to transformers of society. The “change” agenda trains students to think only about what they should do for Obama — and rarely to contemplate how his powers and ambitions should be limited and restrained.

Ayers preached his education-as-”social justice” agenda to his “comrades” at the World Education Forum in Caracas, Venezuela, three years ago:

“This is my fourth visit to Venezuela, each time at the invitation of my comrade and friend Luis Bonilla, a brilliant educator and inspiring fighter for justice. Luis has taught me a great deal about the Bolivarian Revolution and about the profound educational reforms underway here in Venezuela under the leadership of President (Hugo) Chavez. We share the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution, and I’ve come to appreciate Luis as a major asset in both the Venezuelan and the international struggle — I look forward to seeing how he and all of you continue to overcome the failings of capitalist education as you seek to create something truly new and deeply humane.”

Ayers continued:

“I walked out of jail and into my first teaching position — and from that day until this I’ve thought of myself as a teacher, but I’ve also understood teaching as a project intimately connected with social justice. After all, the fundamental message of the teacher is this: You can change your life — whoever you are, wherever you’ve been, whatever you’ve done, another world is possible. As students and teachers begin to see themselves as linked to one another, as tied to history and capable of collective action, the fundamental message of teaching shifts slightly, and becomes broader, more generous: We must change ourselves as we come together to change the world. Teaching invites transformations, it urges revolutions small and large. La educacion es revolucion!”

This is why informed parents do not trust the Educator-in-Chief and his “comrades.” You can take Obama from the radicals in Chicago. But you can’t take the Chicago radicalism out of Obama.

Let me get this straight —
 
Obama’s health care plan will be written by a committee whose head says he doesn’t understand it, passed by a Congress that hasn’t read it and whose members will be exempt from it, signed by a president who smokes, funded by a treasury chief who did not pay his taxes, overseen by a surgeon general who is obese, and financed by a country that is broke.
 
What could possibly go wrong?

This week’s polls are a disaster for President Obama. The Rasmussen poll has his approval dropping to 45 percent, after several weeks at 49 percent. The Zogby poll has it even lower — at 42 percent.

Worse yet, he’s losing his political base:

* People under 30 — long a key element of his support — give him no better than break-even ratings, with 41 percent approving and 41 percent disapproving of the job he’s doing, according to Zogby.

* Only 75 percent of Democrats, who formerly have supported Obama strongly, now approve of his performance in office. Zogby reports that this represents a slide of more than 10 points over the summer.

* Even among blacks, only 74 percent approve of the job he’s doing (also a drop of more than 10 points).

* Hispanics, who voted for him by a margin of more than 40 points, now break even (36-36) when rating his performance.

Independents, the key swing group in our politics, now deliver a sharply negative 37-50 verdict on Obama’s job performance. The elderly also give him negative ratings by 42-51.

This poll-implosion leaves Obama with few good options.

He obviously can’t get 60 votes in the Senate for his health-care proposals in their current form. No Republican will support them, and moderate Democrats aren’t likely to vote with him.

If he tries to pass it with 50 votes, using so-called reconciliation procedures, he may also fail — because he’d also lose the votes of less-moderate Democrats who’d quail at using parliamentary tricks to pass such a radical, unpopular program.

If Obama waters down his proposals to attract moderate support, he’d lose votes on the left — perhaps more than he’d gain, at this point.

Yet the longer he takes to resolve this political problem, the more his ratings will slip — diminishing his power to achieve anything. No president with support in the 30s would be able to push through a program like his health-care agenda.

It now looks like health-care reform will cripple the Obama presidency, as it did Bill Clinton’s in 1993.

Of course, Clinton was able to move to the center and secure re-election in 1996. But can a true believer like Obama do the same? He’s shown a willingness to move to the center on foreign policy, leaving troops in Iraq and adding them in Afghanistan. But on the domestic front, the only aread where he’s been willing to embrace centrist positions is education.

At best, Obama will be months if not years recovering from this disaster. In the short term, he’s likely to finish September wishing he’d stayed in Martha’s Vineyard.