Diseases Cross Open Borders by Phyllis Schlafly

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The spread of the Zika virus has become so alarming that more than 150 health experts from over a dozen countries published an open letter urging the postponement or relocation of the Summer Olympics scheduled for August 5-21 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Never before in world history have the Olympics been cancelled due to a public health crisis.

“The Brazilian strain of Zika virus harms health in ways that science has not observed before,” the scientists warned. They added that an “unnecessary risk is posed when 500,000 foreign tourists from all countries attend the Games, potentially acquire that strain, and return home to places where it can become endemic.”

Imagine that! Global health experts are sounding alarm bells against the transmission of disease from one country to another, declaring that the risk is so great that the most famous international event of all should be called off to prevent it.

Yet our open southern border allows an even greater number of people from Zika-plagued countries to invade our country every year, and thereby spread their diseases in our communities. Most countries in Central and South America, not just Brazil, are beset by the Zika virus today.

Countries having a problem with the Zika virus include Mexico, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, and Venezuela. Those are the same countries that are flooding our Nation with illegal immigrants.

President Obama demanded that Congress appropriate $1.9 billion to fight the Zika virus in other countries, but none of that money would be spent on securing our southern border against illegal immigration from Zika-plagued nations. Obama’s clueless Secretary of State, John Kerry, told the graduating class at Northeastern University, “You’re about to graduate into a complex and borderless world.”

Australia doesn’t have a wide-open border with adjacent countries, but an expert there expressed concern about the risk of a single Zika-infected person entering that nation. “A single person actually caused the epidemic that” Brazil is struggling with now, Australian Professor of Health Sciences Charles Watson observed.

In Britain, a professor of international public health, Jimmy Whitworth, warned pregnant women in that country to “think twice” before traveling to Texas and Florida, including Walt Disney World. Although Zika has not yet been found in American mosquitos, Professor Whitworth expects that to change “in two or three months’ time” because mosquito transmission is already occurring in Mexico and Cuba.

It is through mosquitos that the Zika virus can spread quickly from one infected person to others in the same community, causing terrible birth defects when pregnant women become infected. This transmission by mosquito is similar to that of dengue, an untreatable disease also being brought into the United States from Central and South America.

The Zika virus is not the only devastating disease that is brought into our Nation through illegal immigration. The Ebola virus with its 70% fatality rate has killed more than 11,000 people worldwide and caused a national panic in 2014 when it reached our shores through an African visitor who was not properly screened before he showed up in Dallas.

Among refugees from Somalia who have been resettled in Minnesota, a shocking 22% are infected with latent tuberculous (TB), which is more than five times the rate in the general American population. In addition to its harmful effects to health, TB is also very costly to treat: easier cases cost $17,000 per patient, while the most serious strains cost $430,000 per patient using treatments extending over three years.

Promoters of free trade insist that our economy can absorb these astronomical health care costs, but they drive up health insurance premiums for everyone. Illegal immigrants typically lack their own health insurance, and they show up at emergency rooms to demand medical care paid for by the American taxpayers.

Measles cases are also brought to us mostly by immigrants. Measles outbreaks in detention centers for illegal aliens are commonplace now.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has officially advised pregnant women to postpone visiting the many Central and South American countries having a Zika epidemic. But if it makes sense to tell Americans not to go there, then why does the Obama Administration welcome infected people from those countries to come here?

The World Health Organization concluded that cancelling or moving the Olympics would not have a significant benefit in slowing the spread of the Zika virus. But their reasoning is due to the fact that the virus is already widespread in many countries in the Western Hemisphere, though not yet in the United States.

We have no control over whether the Olympics is cancelled, but we do have control over our borders. Billions of taxpayer dollars are currently spent on disease control that could be more cheaply and more effectively used to halt the flow of illegal aliens over our southern border.

RELATED ARTICLE: Ohio: Active TB in Muslim refugees there too!

The Republic of Turkey Wants the State of Texas to Investigate Gulen Charter Schools

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In October 2015, the Republic of Turkey retained the international law firm, Amsterdam and Partners, to investigate the global activities of Pennsylvania resident, the mysterious Turkish cleric, Fethullah Gulen, whose network of followers happen to operate over 100 US charter schools.

fethullah gulen 2

Fethullah Gulen

On May 19, 2016, the Texas Tribune reported that Amsterdam and Partners planned to file a complaint with the Texas Education Agency (TEA) regarding alleged illegal operation of one specific Gulen-run charter school network, Harmony Schools.

Here is the text of that 32-page complaint, dated May 26, 2016.

And here are some powerful excerpts supporting the need for TEA intervention (citations removed for ease of reading):

This brief in support of the complaint against Cosmos Foundation, Inc., d/b/a Harmony Public Schools, (collectively “Harmony”) is submitted to the Texas Education Agency (“TEA”) with a request for a comprehensive investigation and sanctions as appropriate. … Though Harmony has been the subject of federal and state investigations in the last five years, each has been limited in scope and none has focused on Harmony’s employment, procurement, or operational practices. Though Harmony has been the subject of federal and state investigations in the last five years, each has been limited in scope and none has focused on Harmony’s employment, procurement, or operational practices. …

The need for a thorough TEA investigation of Harmony is even more pressing given Harmony’s aggressive growth plans. Taking advantage of Texas’ permissive replication rules, Harmony is rapidly expanding throughout the State by opening new campuses with limited state involvement or oversight. With forty-six campuses already, Harmony is poised to open up to fifteen new campuses over the next two school years serving an estimated additional 10,000 students. These expansions, if allowed to proceed, will cost Texas millions of taxpayer dollars per campus. With documented evidence of employment discrimination, self-dealing, violation of procurement laws, and concerning connections to a confederation of charter schools and charter school networks across the United States and world, Harmony’s operations in the state call for a comprehensive investigation immediately. …

Federal law prohibits employment discrimination based on national origin and gender, yet Harmony systematically favors individuals of Turkish nationality in hiring and job assignment. and men 12 A plain review of Harmony’s employment data submitted to the TEA shows that Harmony discriminates 1) in the recruiting and hiring of Turkish teachers with no American teaching experience or credentialing at the expense of qualified American teachers; and 2) in the hiring and promotion of almost exclusively Turkish men to leadership positions throughout the Harmony network. This is particularly egregious behavior since Harmony has already been successfully sued by former employees for employment discrimination on the basis of gender and national origin. …

An H-1B visa is a special visa intended to be used for placing a foreign individual in a U.S. job that cannot be staffed with U.S. citizens. Harmony uses the H-1B visa process extensively, claiming it cannot find enough qualified teachers in Texas to teach its STEM curriculum and instead spends taxpayer dollars to source an extraordinary number of teachers from other countries, primarily Turkey. From 2013-2015, Harmony filed a remarkable 780 visa applications for a wide range of employment positions. In 2015 and 2016, Harmony sponsored more H-1B visas than any other elementary or secondary entity in the U.S. The number of visa applications sponsored by Harmony is especially abnormal considering the small size of Harmony’s workforce. For the 2014-2015 school year, Harmony employed approximately 2,600 personnel. By contrast, Baltimore City Public Schools—which sponsored the second highest number of H-1B visas among elementary and secondary schools in the U.S. in 2015—employs over 11,200 full-time staff. The use of H-1B visas to source employees is not new to Harmony in recent years, either. From 2001-2012, Harmony filed 2,500 H-1B applications, with an astonishing total of 3,280 applications from 2001-2015.

Harmony’s stated rationale that it cannot find qualified teachers within Texas to teach its STEM curriculum is weakened when examining the positions hired for through the H-1B visa process. Harmony positions staffed by H-1B visa employees include Physical Education teachers, English teachers, Fine Arts teachers, legal counsel, budget accountants, human resources managers, area superintendents, counselors, librarians, and assistant principals, for example. In fact, a minimum of 42% of Harmony’s Turkish teachers do not teach either math or science. …

The Cosmos Foundation, the governing board of Harmony Public Schools (hereinafter the “Cosmos Board”), has been dominated by a male Turkish super-majority since its inception. …

That Harmony has an illegal preference for Turkish nationals is an obvious inference from its excessive and improper use of H-1B visa process. Yet, Harmony’s overwhelming preference for Turkish nationals becomes even clearer upon analyzing Harmony’s teacher employment data. …

In addition to Harmony’s unlawful hiring preference for Turkish teachers, Turkish teachers are paid more on average annually than non-Turkish teachers. Furthermore, there are numerous examples of pay disparities between Turkish and non-Turkish teachers with similar years of experience and degrees and who teach similar subjects.

For example:

• In Austin, there are two special education teachers at Harmony schools each with master’s degrees and six years’ experience, yet the Turkish teacher is paid at a rate of $18,000 more than the non-Turkish teacher.36

• At Harmony School of Advancement – Houston, there are two science teachers with the same qualifications—a bachelor’s degree and four years’ experience. The Turkish male teacher is paid at a rate of $65,700 while his non-Turkish female counterpart is paid at a rate of $51,600—a difference of $14,100. In addition, a male Turkish special education teacher in Houston with a Master’s degree and 8 years’ experience is paid at a rate of $19,550 more than the non-Turkish teacher. 37

• At the Houston Science Academy, a male Turkish teacher with a Bachelor’s degree and three years’ experience teaching “Other” subjects is paid $51,000, while a female nonTurkish teacher with a Bachelor’s degree and three years’ experience teaching English Language Arts is paid $47,900 – a disparity of $3,100. In addition, a female teacher at the same school with a Master’s degree and two years’ experience teaching “Other” subjects and Fine Arts is paid $46,600, a disparity of $4,400.

• At the Harmony Science Academy in El Paso, a male Turkish science teacher with a Bachelor’s degree and four years’ experience is paid $63,700 annually. A female nonTurkish teacher who teaches science and CTE subject areas has a Bachelor’s degree and five years’ experience and is paid $50,500 annually, $13,200 less than the Turkish teacher.

• At the Harmony Science Academy – West Houston, a male Turkish teacher with a Bachelor’s degree and no experience, who teaches English Language Arts and “other”, is paid $56,875 annually. At the same school, a female non-Turkish teacher, who has one year of experience and teaches English Language Arts, “other”, and Social Studies is paid $47,000 annually, a disparity of $9,875.

• At the school of Innovation in Fort Worth, a male Turkish teacher, with a master’s degree and thirteen years of experience, teaching “other” subjects, makes $72,000 annually. At a different school, but in the same district, a female, non-Turkish teacher with thirteen years of experience and a master’s degree, who is teaching “other” subjects”, makes $55,000 annually, a disparity of $17,000.

Again, differential in pay based on preference for national origin and/or gender is per se employment discrimination prohibited by federal law. These figures and inferences were drawn from data in the public record and demonstrate that on its face, Harmony appears to discriminate based on national origin. Harmony was required as part of a consent decree and settlement with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2014 to put into place policies, training, and practices to prevent discrimination on the basis of gender and national origin. However, it is evident from this preliminary review of Harmony’s most recent employment data that Harmony continues to overpay Turkish males over all other backgrounds, notably the same gender and national origin of the Harmony board and charter holder. …

Unsurprisingly, Harmony also favors Turkish nationals for leadership positions and, in most cases, Turkish men. The Turkish-run Cosmos Board’s favoritism for individuals with the same national origin is displayed in its recruiting, hiring, and promotion of Turkish individuals. The Cosmos Board, also male-dominated, displays its preference for Turkish men specifically by unlawfully reserving leadership positions almost exclusively for Turkish men. Turkish men in leadership positions include: Harmony’s CEO, all eight Harmony executive officers, all six cluster superintendents, and 72% of campus principals. All five members of the Cosmos Board Finance Committee are Turkish. Additionally, 79% of Harmony’s counselors, 42% of business managers, 50% of Human Resources personnel, and 76% of other non-instructional “District personnel” are Turkish. This illegal preference is not new—if TEA investigates Harmony’s distribution of leadership roles, it will find that Turkish men have been in control of this organization from its inception. This is not by accident, nor is it legal. …

Harmony repeatedly selects vendors owned or operated by individuals of the same preferred national origin (Turkish) as the Cosmos governing board. Many of these individuals were also formerly employed by Harmony before starting these vendor companies and have other overlapping ties with current Harmony employees and leadership. Furthermore, Harmony appears to share land and resources with some of its highest paid affiliated Turkish vendors. All of these facts provide strong circumstantial evidence that Harmony may be violating state and federal laws related to competitive bidding, conflict of interest, and nepotism prohibitions and warrants the TEA to investigate Harmony’s procurement practices closely.

From a review of Harmony’s publicly available IRS 990 forms between 2004-2014 which list the top five paid contractors each year, 61% of those contractors are Turkish-owned and operated. Of the $202,024,228 of state and federal funds paid out to Harmony’s top fifty-four contractors over that same period of time, $152,770,870 went to the Turkish-owned and operated businesses, or 76%. More information is needed about the additional contracts of $100,000 and over that Harmony has executed. There were 124 additional contracts issued in 2014 alone, but they are not publically available. Interestingly, the Cosmos Board Finance Committee is run by five individuals—all Turkish—and at least one bid proposal in 2014, and likely others, was reviewed by an all Turkish internal review committee.

And there is much more, too much to include in this post, such as specifics regarding the cozy, profitable network of Turkish-operated businesses and school employees profiting handsomely off of American taxpayer money; specifics on the operation of and interconnections between Harmony and other Turkish-dominated schools in Oklahoma, Ohio, Arkansas, and Louisiana.

Still, a couple more must-read excerpts, including reference to the Gulen-network money dump into the pockets of American politicians:

Like all charter networks and businesses operating within the Gülen organization, Harmony and its affiliates regularly donate to state and federal politicians on both sides of the aisle. In fact, Gülen himself reportedly stated in a Turkish newspaper that his followers must donate to their local politicians to gain admittance to his secretive compound in rural Pennsylvania to visit him, though Gülen later denied making the remark. These giving campaigns are well-timed. In the 2012 election cycle, Harmony’s state political contributions sky-rocketed. Harmony and its affiliates fit this pattern through a high degree of activity toward influencing state and federal policy, legislation, and general treatment for their business model through institutionalized giving. A search of the Texas Tribune Campaign Finance website underscores the extent of political contributions by this network of inter-related Turkish individuals and businesses. This increase in donations followed the 2011 call to audit Harmony’s procurement practices by the Texas House Government Investigations and Ethics Committee. There is no record that the procurement audit was ever conducted, however, and it was not included in the House interim charges for the 82nd Legislature.

And, finally, jumping to the conclusion of the complaint:

Notably, all of the information gathered in this complaint is in the public record or available through public record requests. While we have made several legitimate requests for open records from Harmony and its schools, we have been continuously denied access to any and all of the information we have requested. Additionally, we have experienced the following issues in the course of our research:

– Harmony does not post basic documents online that should be publically available, and in some cases, retracts documents that have been previously available. For example:

– Minutes from the Harmony Public Schools Board meetings are not available online. We know they exist because approval of Board minutes is an item on Board agendas (which are posted online).

– Minutes from the Harmony Public Schools Committee meetings are not available online. Again, we know they exist because approval appears on Board agendas.

– Importantly, while the agenda for meetings of the Academic and Facility and Construction Committees are available online, the agendas for the Finance Committee meetings, which were available online until early May, are no longer posted. The link for the agenda of each meeting now says “this link appears to be broken.”

– Unlike other public organizations (TEA, AISD, etc), Harmony does not make the names or contact information of employees at the campus or district level available online or in any other document. This is an issue for parents that might want to contact a district superintendent or other Harmony official directly if facing a problem at the campus level.

– Of the last nine Board meetings, the dates of four have been changed, making monitoring the meetings more difficult.

– In 2014 alone, Harmony contracted with 129 entities for amounts over $100,000 (this number is reported on IRS Form 990) but the vendor information is not publically available. Only the five largest contracts are listed in the IRS 990 tax forms.

As Harmony’s authorizer, the TEA has the power to gather records sufficient to conduct a comprehensive investigation. To date, Harmony has managed to evade such a comprehensive investigation. However, the TEA and the Commissioner of Education have the opportunity and the obligation to investigate the irregular practices and operations of Harmony Public Schools across the state that are exhaustively documented in this complaint. The TEA has the authority to address this organization’s questionable operations by reconstituting the Cosmos Foundation and applying sanctions, thereby preventing further mismanagement of state and federal tax dollars that makes victims of families, teachers, and taxpayers in Texas. We urge you to investigate Harmony’s discriminatory treatment of its employees and students, abuse of the H- 1B visa program, and questionable business practices, and to reconstitute the Cosmos Foundation governing board, to prevent further misconduct as is TEA’s prerogative, and indeed, duty.

Stay tuned to see how Texas responds.h1b

Scrutinizing and subsequently cutting off that convenient H-1B visa flow would be a good start.

 

Hawaii: Obama’s favorite Democrat run state ranks 50th in Cost of Doing Business

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CNBC: America’s Top States for Business 2016

49. Hawaii

Quality of life in the Aloha State can’t be beat. But neither can costs, which are the highest in the nation.

Category
Score
2016 Rank
2015 Rank
Workforce 165 48 46
Cost of Doing Business 45 50 50
Infrastructure 116 46 49
Economy 181 25 42 (Tie)
Quality of Life 295 1 1
Technology & Innovation 90 38 36 (Tie)
Education 74 43 45
Business Friendliness 27 46 44
Cost of Living 2 50 50
Access to Capital 14 37 37
Overall 1009 49 50

Economic Profile

  • Governor: David Ige, Democrat
  • Population: 1,431,603
  • GDP growth: 1.7 percent
  • Unemployment rate (May 2016): 3.2 percent
  • Top corporate tax rate: 6.4 percent
  • Top individual income tax rate: 8.25 percent
  • Gasoline tax: 60.39 cents/gallon
  • Bond rating/outlook: Aa2, positive
  • Major private employers: Bank of Hawaii, Corp., Hawaiian Electric Industries Inc.

Economic profile sources: U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Federation of Tax Administrators, American Petroleum Institute, Moody’s Investor Service, S&P

Many Black Activists Are Full of Bunk

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Black activists for years have been complaining about police brutality throughout the United States of America.  Yes, there have been cases of trigger happy police officers who have gunned down innocent victims.  But I want to point out that on a regular basis, black brutes usually raised in homes without a proper moral compass are themselves on a regular basis more brutal than the police could dream of being.  On average, a black male (usually young) is murdered every 14 hours in the city of Chicago.  On weekends the pace quickens with nearly twenty young men neutralized by another black person within a 48 hour period.

Dozens and dozens of little children are murdered by black people regularly as well in Detroit, Baltimore, and other black and democrat party dominated cities throughout America.  If there was an honest effort to simply deal with the scourge of murder, the alarming numbers of black on black murders would have been of great concern long ago.  It almost seems as if the black liars matter folks are minions hired by the likes of George Soros to cause mayhem in the streets of America so that President Obama can declare Marshall Law and suspend the upcoming elections. But we all know that our fine upstanding commander in chief would not engage in such shenanigans, right?

For years so-called black community leaders like Jesse (hey where’s the camera?) Jackson and Al (wind bag of bones) Sharpton have lied to and swindled the black community.  They and others like them have consistently persuaded blacks to be angry at or hate America.  While at the same time not promoting ideas like common decency amongst black people.  By the way, when was the last time Mr. Jackson, or Mr. Sharpton spoke out about the need to encourage more fatherhood in the black community?  It is commonly known that children that grow up without a good father in the home are four times more likely to engage in criminal activity.

Quite often Black Lives Matters activists and others of that ilk holler about how the black community is short changed in America.  They are also hateful toward Black Americans who believe that blacks can be successful in the United States and that many problems plaguing the black community can be overcome through, better education, increased emphasis on better morals, an opportunity based economy, etc. Being undereducated and angry all the time is a recipe for a disaster filled life.

I long ago concluded that the reason why positive stories like the life of Frederick Douglas are no longer taught to American students, is because those that oversee the progressive government school system in America would not be able to convince young black Americans that they cannot make it in America.  Or that white privilege prevents them from succeeding in this life.

Imagine them learning that during the height of slavery in the United States, Frederick Douglas decided he would not live out his days as a beaten down slave.  He creatively learned how to read, when it was illegal for a black individual to learn how to read.  After learning how to read and through astute planning, Mr. Douglas set out to gain his freedom.  But just being free to walk around unfettered was just the beginning for him.  Douglas chose to overcome whatever odds were thrown against him and built a very successful life as an abolitionist, businessman, and arguably the best orator of the nineteenth century.  Frederick Douglas sought the truth about America’s constitution and did not allow the negative interpretations of his former tormenting democrat party masters be the final word what the constitution meant for him.

In fact, after researching the constitution and Bill of Rights for himself, Douglas quickly gained a great appreciation for the United States and for the remainder of his years on earth sought to encourage America to live up to her wonderful ideals.  One of the things that Douglas stressed was for the white man not to coddle the black man.  After Lincoln freed the slaves, Frederick Douglas called for the white man to allow the black man to live and work by his own wits like everyone else.  He knew that if given the chance to engage in real opportunities, such as owning businesses as he had done, American blacks could have built for themselves a legacy of success.

Unfortunately, today many activists want to change America into a progressive socialist amoral cesspool.  They don’t share the vision of Frederick Douglas who desired to see Americans of all colors work and succeed to the best of their God given abilities.  Nor do the activists of today even appreciate what’s good about America like Douglas did.  Today, the Black community must free itself from the shackles of socialism, immorality, hatred of country and general activist bitterness in order to rise above the bunk of today’s activists, community organizers and thuggish gripers. Blocking freeways, rapping about killing police officers, and the call for more government handouts only confirms what people worldwide think about black Americans, as being not very bright and full of bunk like the evil activist leaders who influence them.

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It’s time to ditch Obama’s entire ‘Countering Violent Extremism’ strategy

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Last week, Senator Ted Cruz’s hearings graphically revealed the true extent of the Obama administration’s politically correct denial and willful ignorance concerning the nature and magnitude of the jihad threat and the ongoing attempts to assert Sharia principles and practices over those of American law and culture. DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson in particular demonstrated a contemptuous indifference to the importance of identifying the enemy ideology properly.

Meanwhile, the role of Muslim Brotherhood-allied groups in influencing the Obama administration and guiding its hamstringing and deforming our response to the jihad threat has never yet been adequately addressed. The worst manifestation of this baneful influence is the administration’s “Countering Violent Extremism” policy, which pretends that “right-wingers” are as much or more of a terror threat than Islamic jihadis — and generally ignores the existence of Islamic jihad altogether.

But tomorrow Reps. Kevin McCarthy and Mike McCaul plan to make things even worse. They’re pushing for a rule to bring up a bill that will give Jeh Johnson an Assistant Secretary whose job will be to “partner” with “communities” against “radical Islamist terrorism” — a slightly more accurate and truthful phrase than “violent extremism,” but unfortunately, not one that heralds a positive change: this new Assistant Secretary’s office will have at least a $10 million budget for this “partnering,” and its “partners” will almost certainly be Muslim Brotherhood-linked and Hamas-linked groups such as the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Enough is enough. Americans are fed up with the Obama administration’s denial, willful ignorance, and pandering to Islamic supremacist groups. It’s time to repudiate the entire “Countering Violent Extremism” and call Islamic jihad what it is: Islamic jihad.

McCarthy and McCaul’s travesty has to be stopped. In its place, we need legislation that will bar individuals or groups linked with Hamas and/or the Muslim Brotherhood, and that were named unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation trial, from ever “partnering” with U.S. government organizations in any way, and from receiving federal grants for countering “radical Islamic terrorism,” “violent extremism,” or anything else.

And beyond that, we must put an end to the “Countering Violent Extremism” approach, and devise one for “Countering Jihad.” The key premises of the “Countering Violent Extremism” strategy — that Islam is a religion of peace that has nothing to do with “violent extremism”; that those who engage in violence in its name are twisting and hijacking its peaceful tenets; that jihad is an interior spiritual struggle that has nothing to do with violence; that mosques are entirely benign places of worship, akin to churches and synagogues, and that it would be “Islamophobic” to subject them to surveillance; that intelligence and law enforcement agents must work to win the “trust” of Muslim communities, rather than the other way around; and that “right-wing extremists” are more of a threat than violent (and stealth) jihadists — must be decisively and explicitly rejected.

What should be put in its place? Reality.

The U.S. government should recognize that there are aspects of Islamic law (Sharia) that are directly contradictory to Constitutional freedoms and protections, and make it clear that preaching and spreading those aspects of Islamic law in the U.S. will be regarded as sedition. It must recognize the ideology of the jihadis as rooted in the Qur’an and Sunnah, and require U.S. mosques and Islamic schools to back up their pro-forma condemnations of jihad terror with genuine action, including honest and inspectable programs teaching against the ISIS/al-Qaeda understanding of Islam. Mosques must be monitored to ensure that sedition, violence, and hatred of unbelievers is not being preached. The government must also recognize that jihad and Islamic supremacism are global, and have no counterpart among returning veterans, Tea Party activists, etc.

The time is now. Please contact your Congressmen and exhort them to repudiate the McCarthy/McCaul initiative, and the entire “Countering Violent Extremism” superstructure. Obama’s fantasy-based policies are costing lives. One death for political correctness was one too many, and there have been many more than one. It is time to call a halt to this suicidal nonsense once and for all.

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Schools Shouldn’t Exercise Students Like Animals

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One way to attack Western civilization is to change the learning environment from a quiet, contemplative one to a busy, communal one.

Recently I was horrified to find the latest missive from the U.S. Department of Education in my email inbox. It was the Teachers Edition newsletter, which is usually full of teaching tips, like getting kids interested in “The Old Man and the Sea” by having them reenact a crucifixion during Holy Week.

On April 23, 2016, there was no mention of Shakespeare or Ernest Hemingway. The top item was related to Earth Day: new U.S. Education Secretary John King announced Green Ribbon Schools Districts Sustainability Awards and a blog post by a Minnesota elementary school teacher discussed how teachers integrate “an active, outdoor learning component into existing lessons.”

But what really caught my eye was a photo of children lined up on stationary bikes, reading and pedaling away. It accompanied the article “In This Kinesthetic Classroom, Everyone’s Moving All Day.” It was about the “Active Brains” program at the Charles Pinckney Elementary School in Charleston, South Carolina, where “action-based learning” takes place in a classroom equipped with 15 stations featuring such things as mini basketball and stationary bikes, with each focused on different “academic tasks.”

A linked Washington Post article described another classroom, where 28 fifth-graders “sit at specially outfitted kinesthetic desks” or stand at them swaying, or pedal bikes, or march on climbers, while teacher Stacey Shoecraft delivers instruction from a strider at the front of the room. Shoecraft was keynote speaker at the “Kidsfit’s National Charleston Training” and has written a book, “Teaching Through Movement,” on the cover of which a grinning boy jumps into the air and a smiling girl sits on an exercise ball—like one I used when doing physical therapy for my back.

As if all this activity weren’t enough, an article headlined “Libraries Transforming from Quiet Places to Active Spaces” described the American Library Association’s new campaign to transform libraries from “quiet places of research” into “centers of community.” Instagram photos illustrated the concept with “collaborative work spaces, MakerSpaces, [and] bright displays.” The same day the Washington Post had set ten poems to animation in honor of National Poetry Month.

So When Do We Read Books?

As someone who found refuge in the quiet of the library and the order of the classroom as a child, I am disturbed by all this activity. As someone who taught college English for 20 years and saw students’ attention spans decline, I am saddened. My last year of teaching was in 2013, and by then only a couple students would raise their hands when I asked how many had had the experience of getting “lost in a book.” Only a couple had the patience to read carefully the assigned material by Frederick Douglass and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

I’d been observing the transition in teaching styles away from what I knew in the 1960s, when we sat up straight with both feet planted on the floor at desks in rows. Increasingly, news reports show classrooms with kids sprawled on the carpet, reading or writing, or gathered around tables putting objects together, or gabbling like pip-squeak ambassadors about global politics.

Such active learning has been popularized by teacher-celebrities, like Ron Clark, founder of the Ron Clark Academy in Atlanta. At their annual meeting in 2009, I saw social studies teachers applaud him as he jumped onto a chair to describe how his school encouraged “fun!” with a bungee jump and slides instead of staircases (which teachers also use). We were then treated to a demonstration of students’ understanding of civics—through the performance of a rap song about the election.

At the community college where I was then teaching, the annual “faculty development” day featured a session where a popular biology professor rolled her shoulders and stepped side to side to demonstrate how she used dance moves to motivate students. I knew my efforts to adapt this method to discussions about poetic meter or punctuation would get nothing but laughter. It’s not what I signed up for when I earned my PhD and envisioned myself in the female version of the tweed jacket leading thoughtful discussions about John Donne.

At the Core of All This, an Insult to Children

Behind all this emphasis on movement is the effort to close the racial achievement gap, one of the primary objectives of Common Core, evidenced through emphasis on “speaking and listening skills” and “visual literacy.” It’s also evidenced by the U.S. Department of Education’s promotion of educational video games. Such strategies presumably address different learning styles that are said to cause the gap.

This is not a new theory, but one evolved from New Left teachers who founded “urban schools.” By 1988 the theory had gained so much acceptance that the New York State Board of Regents used it in a booklet about high drop-out rates for black students, according to The New York Times. The article explained that proponents argue that “black children require instructions that deal more with people than with symbols or abstractions.”

These educators asserted that black pupils “need more chances for expressive talking rather than writing” and “more freedom to move around the classroom without being rebuked for misbehavior. . . .” Back then the theory was controversial among educators. Today, the U.S. Department of Education promotes this kind of learning for all students.

Thomas Sowell’s recounting of statistics about the superior performance of some black schools against similarly situated white schools during segregation refutes such ultimately racist ideas. He is ignored. That’s because the evidence Sowell presents undermines the stereotypes the Left uses to achieve its ultimate goal: tearing down or significantly altering Western civilization. One way to do that is to change the learning environment from a quiet, contemplative one to a busy, communal one. This assault on “Eurocentrism,” or Western modes of thinking, was deliberate in the 1960s. It is now in the classroom.

Let’s Walk Our Students Like Dogs

Of course, those promoting the new kinesthetic teaching don’t say that. They talk about physical fitness (a problem, to be sure), “motivated” students, and superior test results.

But I wonder: will such strategies backfire? Will making students perform “academic tasks” on treadmills compel them to hate both exercise and learning? I think it might. Such mechanistic exercises, along with Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” program, remind me of President Kennedy’s “Physical Fitness in Schools” program and having to run around the perimeter of a scruffy fenced-in yard at Carthage School Number 8 in Rochester, New York.

As a first-grader, I thought it was ridiculous and boring—especially after I’d walked the mile to school and would walk home for lunch and then back, and then home. Of course, children don’t just walk. They run, and skip, and chase each other. Changing into our play clothes when we came home marked the transition to play time, full of tag, hopscotch, dodge ball, jumping rope, and riding bikes, and for the boys, the politically incorrect “cowboys and Indians” and “cops and robbers.”

I thought of this when I saw the picture of students on exercise machines. They reminded me of race horses being cooled down on mechanical walkers. “Academic tasks” sounds like dog training.

The decade of the 1960s brought many upheavals: assassinations, demonstrations, riots. My first-grade class was dismissed early on the day of President Kennedy’s assassination. The riots in adjoining neighborhoods brought over vandalism and violence in ensuing years. Children still played in the streets, though. I would become the exception as I assumed the role of caretaker for my younger sisters. Yet I still had the classroom and library as places of refuge. We were not put on machines; the mandatory runs ended.

I could also walk to the library with my cherished yellow library card. That quiet, mote-filled refuge, long disappeared in urban decay, held rows of books beckoning me to get lost in the wonderful stories. It’s sad that children today are deprived of such simple, quiet pleasures.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in The Federalist. The featured image of students exercising while reading is courtesy of Walnut Valley Unified.

No Retreat from Hillary’s Village: Clinton’s dream of sending federal agents into American homes

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A campaign ad that Hillary Clinton used against Barack Obama in 2008 featured images of sleeping children, with a voice asking who would answer the phone ringing in the White House at 3 a.m., “someone who already knows the world leaders . . . the military,” someone “tested and ready to lead”—or (by implication) a first-term U.S. Senator/community organizer?

Hillary Clinton is running for president again, and of course is ignoring her failure as secretary of state to answer the late-night phone call coming from Benghazi on September 11, 2012. Instead, she is advertising how she wants to send federal emissaries into the homes of parents with newborn infants to teach them how to handle 3 a.m. feedings and baby talk. It’s an extension of her agenda as first lady in the Arkansas governor’s mansion and in the White House.  Her political career, after graduating and having written a thesis on friend Saul Alinsky, was launched with the Children’s Defense Fund under the direction of Marian Wright Edelman, agitator for increased welfare “for the children,” including federally funded childcare workers.

As president, Hillary Clinton would implement the Edelman/Alinsky domestic vision she put forward, in more palatable terms, in her 1996 book, It Takes a Village to Raise a Child. Of course, it takes someone like Clinton to see the federal government as a “village.”

In that book Clinton wrote, “government is not something outside us—something irrelevant or even alien to us—but is us.  To acknowledge this is to acknowledge that government has a responsibility not only to provide essential services but to bring individuals and communities together.”  This is the backwards notion of the community organizer.

Recently, in a May 21, 2016, Washington Post op-ed, Clinton revealed her totalizing domestic plans by reiterating her commitment to paid family leave legislation and to the “big idea” of “increasing federal investments and incentivizing states so that no family ever has to pay more than 10 percent of its income for child care.”

She also proposed doubling the investment in programs that she helped develop as first lady: Early Head Start and the Early Head Start-Child Care Partnership program. Parroting bureaucrats, Clinton claimed, “These programs bring an evidenced-based curriculum to child care and make sure kids get the best possible start in life. . . . .”

She, however, ignores the studies, including one by the agency administering the program, that show that when Head Start does have a positive impact, it is slight and disappears by third grade.

Even so, Clinton wants to expand federal daycare, and also to send government agents into homes, following her efforts as first lady of Arkansas when she introduced the “Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters,” or “HIPPY.” Her campaign website boasts of a more recent feat, “As a leader at the Clinton Foundation,” when she “started a national public awareness campaign called ‘Too Small to Fail’ or ‘Pequeños y Valiosos’ aimed at closing the ‘word gap.’”

The Clinton Foundation, a purported charity (in reality a campaign slush fund with contributions helping friends’ business pursuits), is using the latest “gap” as the basis for the programs she hopes to enact as  president. The campaign site explains: “This gap refers to the 30 million fewer words heard by lower-income children by the time they are 4 years old, which leads to disparities in language development and school readiness.”  Low-income students already receive free breakfasts and lunches, even in the summer.  Under the recently passed Every Student Succeeds Act they can look forward to attending “community schools,” where they will receive homework help, family dinners, and health and dental services.

Under Clinton’s plan, the federal government would provide childcare subsidies to families, raise the wages of childcare workers, and provide “home visiting services”—the latter to teach parents to talk to their children.  In It Takes a Village,Clinton celebrated England’s tradition of providing home visits through its national health service.  (She also bragged about her work on Goals 2000, the precursor to Common Core.)

Initiatives, like the one to end the “word gap” may sound head-scratching-ly bizarre to people who have been around babies, and made idiots of themselves by cooing and lapsing into inane talk.

But the studies that show that many low-income (i.e., single and government-dependent) parents do not speak to their young children are borne out by observation.

It is an uncomfortable subject for many leftists.  Anyone who has taken public transportation in cities like Atlanta, where it is mostly used by those who cannot afford cars, knows this–including one of my leftist friends. In traffic-choked Atlanta it made sense for her to commute to her job downtown via the rail line, a straight shot from her apartment.  She would save on time, car wear-and-tear, gas, and parking—not to mention “The Environment.”

But she stopped, explaining in an agonized voice that she couldn’t bear to watch how young mothers treated their children, with slaps and pulls, screaming abuses at them, at the train station.

Of course, no one would dare reprimand such parents.

So my friend retreated.  Leftist parents retreat by sending their children to private schools, while arguing for more funding for public schools.

The reaction is to retreat, to one’s car, and to vote for and advocate more government social programs so that “experts” can deal with such parents.  Leftists refuse to acknowledge that government programs that incentivize family breakdown and interfere with natural communities are the problem.

Conservatives, frustrated by the inability of political representatives to cut back on detrimental government programs and despairing at the takeover of education by radicals, retreat to far-flung suburbs, where they undertake the dual tasks of parenting and teaching.  No one can or should blame them.  In fact, they are to be commended.  When I taught college I could count on homeschooled students to be better educated and more motivated than students from public schools.

But with the retreat of such parents, public schools suffer.  It’s a vicious cycle, but the progressive’s solution (or opportunity) is to use the deterioration as an entrée to more government meddling.

Now, especially in Obama’s final year, we are witnessing the Washington overlords hounding the middle-class citizens into their retreats.  They are forcing “individuals and communities together” under Obama’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing regulation of 2015.  The suburbs are being forced to build housing for the poor, who will bring their dysfunction to everything from the playground to the shopping mall.  As the feds impose their diktats on public spaces and private businesses, the homeschooling family will find fewer and fewer places where they are comfortable.  Under Obama’s Department of Education, they have found themselves forced to adhere to crazy Common Core standards if they want to pass GED tests, college entrance exams, and AP exams.  They find that many colleges now use Common Core test scores for placement in classes.  This overreach inspired many conservatives into activism and made Common Core part of the presidential campaign.

But as the presidential election approaches, many of the same conservatives are retreating–from the voting booth.  Morally repulsed by the profligate past, rhetoric, and impure ideology of presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, they vow to back a third-party candidate, write in a name, or just stay home and pray. They are impervious to arguments that their retreat makes a Hillary Clinton (Obama.2) presidency likely.

Surprisingly, the anti-Trump super PAC, Our Principles, as part of their attacks on Trump’s sexism, has been using statements about fatherhood that he made on the Howard Stern show in 2005.  Like the leftists, these Republicans take umbrage at Trump’s comments about husbands who relent to pressures and “act like the wife.”

Trump expressed traditional sentiments and said he believed in supplying “funds,” but not changing diapers or pushing a stroller through Central Park.  In contrast, I am reminded of one of many absurd helpful hints about fatherhood coming from the Obama administration.  Early on, a Father’s Day campaign that encouraged fathers’ involvement showed a picture of a burly father with his young daughter.  They were both painting their fingernails.

Voters should be asking themselves if they want the Big-Nanny-in-Chief sending government agents into homes.  Or do they want to become breadwinners again?

Trump: When asked about repealing Refugee Resettlement Act responded ‘I agree’

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This morning our Ex. Dir. of Refugee Resettlement Relief spoke with the presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump at the Trump Victory event. Our director raised his hand and was acknowledged by Mr. Trump, then stated: “Mr. Trump please repeal the Refugee Resettlement Act.*** That is how the terrorist are getting into the country.”

Trump responded, “I agree” and then pointed out several recent acts of Islamic terrorism committed by refugees and their families.

Mr. Trump had already spent most of his time talking about terrorism. With regard to the mass shooting in Orlando at the Pulse nightclub he said a high ranking representative in the gay community told him that the LGBT community was going to support him because “they know I am the only one who is going to protect them.” He went on to say that this is not only true for the gay community, but for all of us.

He again committed to building the wall and reminded us that the 16,000 Federal Border Patrol employees have endorsed him—-something they have never done in any other presidential race.

Trump emphasized the immigration issue at the Mexican border.  He dwelled on the massive amount of illegal drugs coming across the border, and claimed that the wall would help stem the flow of the drugs.

Trump was calm, well spoken and reasonable. He was a very pleasant, but a firmly committed gentleman. This is not the Donald Trump the media is describing. Donald Trump is thoroughly a gentleman, knows where he is going and what he wants to do when elected president.”

LOL! Check out this story about the event. Trump left empty seats for the banned Washington Post Reporters!

***Of course we all know it takes Congress to repeal the Act (Trump can press Congress from the bully pulpit), that is why it is so important that Speaker Ryan be given the heave-ho. Under his leadership it will never happen!

For all of our comments worth noting and guest posts, click here.

EDITORS NOTE: If you are a regular reader, you know that occasionally we post a comment from a reader that we don’t want to lose buried at a specific post.  This is from Joe Newton of Georgia’s ‘Refugee Resettlement Relief’ a citizens’ group (a pocket of resistance!).

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Is forced multiculturalism to blame for second generation Muslim killers?

More active TB cases in the refugee population, Colorado this time

Syrian ‘refugees’ going home, thought they were going to be cared for in Europe

The Government Has Gone to Nutsville

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Now that the federal government is officially no longer operating under the prudent and inspired guidance of the United States Constitution, matters have gone awry in a rather huge way.  The old adage if you move your feet you lose your seat, has been fully enacted in regards to government operations and social norms.

The United States Constitution plainly states that “We the People” of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Article 1 Section 1 states – All legislative powers herein granted shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.  Unfortunately, thanks to years of the increasingly ignorant masses, our republic has evolved from a system government that at least made an effort to operate under the premise of protecting American interests into a dangerous enemy of those of us born in this republic turned mob ruled democracy.

The president has gotten in on this horrible trend by acting like a one-man band government entity that legislates through an executive order avalanche which has placed unparalleled levels of economic, moral, and military dangers against our nation.  President Obama has done more to protect and defend his fellow Muslims and their interests in one year than for the United States over eight years.

The so-called negotiated agreement with Iran where secretary of state John Kerry bent over and put Israel, the United States and other non-Muslim nations in potential mortal danger is a perfect example of where Obama’s heart is and who’s interest he is ready to protect.

Our constitutionally limited republic concepts, including government being of, by and for the people has literally and unofficially been replaced with a trashy governmental concept of by and for the progressive elites.  They elitists wish to demolish your right to worship Christ, own firearms, and even to teach your children the truth, regarding our nation’s history, the correct biological identity of human beings, and of course our republic’s founding documents.  The progressive elites also hope to snuff out of existence the fundamental roots of America’s greatness, so that would accept her desired decline and your dependence upon government from cradle to grave.

Along with other horrendous decisions made in the year 1913, the addition of the seventeenth amendment to the United States Constitution helped open the door to the ushering in of an elitist portion of government who’s senatorial participants like John McCain usually do not govern on behalf of our interests.  It is their mission to hold onto power, even through compromise with enemies both foreign and domestic, just like president Obama even though such actions place our republic in danger of dismissal from greatness amongst nations.

In my opinion, there is no logical reason why President Obama and Hillary Clinton should not be brought up on charges ranging from traitor to reckless endangerment of the United States.  The president swore to uphold the constitution of the United States, but has done everything imaginable to undermine the constitution and every good aspect of our republic.

Obama has allowed the bringing into our nation thousands of Muslims, (many of whom were picked by Isis leaders) unvetted and are for waiting orders to bring harm to Americans and our property.  No decent well meaning president would knowingly dare stand for the admittance of individuals who are governed by a code of ultimate destruction of those who are not members of their Islamic-sharia law political/religious dogma.

Also, Obama’s effort to join with those who are bigoted gender impersonators who use the insane juggernaut of political correctness to discredit God and defile his creation of man and woman is wicked and treasonous against truth, reality and society.  Parents should no-longer allow their children to be taught in government schools or anywhere that marriage between a man and a woman is obsolete.

Not long ago, Massachusetts legislators passed a bill that does away with biological gender identity.  That is evidence of government gone to nutsville and is not coming back to reality until we the taxpayer-bosses demonstrate without ceasing that we will no longer live below our God given call to greatness.

One final example of government gone to nutsville is the horrible disregard of the safety of law abiding citizens in San Jose, California.  The police department of San Jose issued a statement saying “they refused to protect Trump supporters being attacked by pro illegal immigrant-anti American thugs because they didn’t want to inflame the socialist anti-American protesters.”

OK, then I say to all law abiding sovereign-citizens of San Jose and throughout America, say your prayers, go and get your legal firearm protection. Then begin calling for the dismissal of officials in that city and anywhere officials do not believe in protecting “We the People” from enemies both foreign and domestic.  Wake up America, before it is too late.

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is of the cartoon character Scrat, played by Chris Wadge, from the film Ice Age.

Undoing the Damage of the Obama Regime: Disproportionate Discipline in Education

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Certain students see themselves as “untouchable.” Oklahoma City Schools and other school districts forced to adopt the Department of Education’s “steps of action” can expect similar outcomes. As others have pointed out, all students, including minority students, are harmed when criminals and criminals-in-the-making are allowed to control our schools. One civics lesson students need to learn is that under our system of justice, the punishment fits the crime, not the race. That should be the policy of the next administration. The next attorney general should lift the diktats and restore justice in our schools.

On April 20, the U.S. Department of Education announced that it had reached an agreement with the Oklahoma City Public Schools to “address disproportionate discipline of black students.”  In chilling language, the press release stated, “Before the Department’s Office for Civil Rights had completed its probe, the district expressed an interest in resolving the case voluntarily.”

The school district was “voluntarily” resolving the case after feds charged that “black students were considerably overrepresented in all of the district’s disciplinary actions.”  They found that in the 2014/2015 school year black students accounted for 42 percent of in-school suspensions even though they represented only 26 percent of the population. Patterns of discrimination were also alleged for 2011/2012.

An early signal of this backwards thinking came on February 25, 2012, when Eric Holder, then Attorney General, gave a speech advancing the “school-to-prison pipeline” theory that claims that higher rates of punishment, which are due to racism, lead to higher drop-out and imprisonment rates. In January 2014 he put school districts on notice with a memo that stated that it is a violation of federal law to punish certain races more than others.  A particularly Orwellian section read, “Schools also violate Federal law when they evenhandedly implement facially neutral policies and practices that, although not adopted with the intent to discriminate, nonetheless have an unjustified effect of discriminating against students on the basis of race.”  In other words, in defiance of logic, the “effect,” the statistical outcome, can determine whether policies were neutral or just “facially neutral.”

Such an argument would be a hard sell with obvious and serious crimes, such as assault.  So the Department focuses on violations that are minor and open to interpretation.  The memo asked school officials to give a second look to such offenses as “being tardy to class, being in possession of a cellular phone, being found insubordinate, acting out, or not wearing the proper school uniform.”

The Department also charged Oklahoma City Schools with lack of clarity on “parameters of certain disciplinary actions . . . such as ‘defiance of authority’ and ‘disrespect.’”

Such infractions can fall under the category of “willful defiance,” which a number of school districts in California are eliminating as a category for punishment. The Daily Caller reported in May 2015 that Oakland schools were joining a number of other California districts in lessening or eliminating punishment for such behavior as ignoring or swearing at teachers, sleeping, or texting.

As part of its “voluntary” compliance agreement, the Oklahoma City school district has agreed to take “twelve steps of action,” including hiring a “discipline supervisor” and expert advisors; training staff, students, and parents; and making other efforts to change school “climate.”  “Resources” for “positive discipline” are offered at the Office of Civil Rights’ “Rethink Discipline” website.  It, however, only provides links to videos and left-wing groups.  One, Teachers Unite, promotes “restorative justice,” a practice that often involves a lot of talking and “apologies.”

The Link to Black Lives Matter

The basis for such harmful policies—the idea that black students are punished disproportionately because of their race—is not borne out by the evidence.  A 2014 study in the Journal of Criminal Justice showed that suspensions were given on the basis of students’ behavior.

It is radical groups, like the Black Lives Matter movement, that are providing the charges, according to A.P.Dillon, a North Carolina blogger, researcher, and writer.  She exposes the agents promoting the “school-to-prison” pipeline theory, a term coined by radical sociology professor Nancy Heitzag in 2009.

Dillon has been writing about a case in Wake County.  In January 2014, the North Carolina NAACP, the ACLU, and several “school to prison” groups filed suit against Wake County Schools and the Wake County Sheriffs alleging a “pattern of discrimination and unlawful criminalization.”

In an April 15, 2016, blog post on a public hearing on school discipline, Dillon provided additional information on the left-wing groups that provide the “statistics” behind the complaints.  These include Youth Organizing Institute, NC HEAT, Education Justice Alliance, Dignity in Schools, and Coalition of Concerned Citizens for African-American Children. The students who make the complaints have been indoctrinated and radicalized by such student groups as NC Student Power Union, remnants of Occupy Chapel Hill, the Southern Vision Alliance, NC HEAT, and Youth Organizing Institute.

I wanted to know who brought charges in Oklahoma City and how many schools are being investigated, but received no reply to multiple telephone calls and emails to the Department of Education.

The Outcomes?

What will the outcomes be?

We can get a foretaste from Minneapolis schools, whose superintendant, Valeria Silva, led the way.  Silva sees “defiance, disrespect, and disruption” as “subjective behaviors.”  In 2011, the district adopted a “Strong Schools, Strong Communities” plan that replaced suspension for “continual willful disobedience” with “restorative justice.” For $2 million, “diversity” consultant Pacific Educational Group taught teachers that their “white privilege” distorted their judgment.

The result, as Katherine Kersten reports, is that certain students see themselves as “untouchable.”  High school students, who come to school only for the free breakfasts, lunches, and WiFi, roam uncontrolled through hallways.  They invade classrooms, riot, and body-slam teachers.  In elementary schools, students spew obscenities, knock over chairs and trash cans, and attack each other, as teachers stand by helplessly.

Oklahoma City Schools and other school districts forced to adopt the Department’s “steps of action” can expect similar outcomes.  As others have pointed out, all students, including minority students, are harmed when criminals and criminals-in-the-making are allowed to control our schools.

One civics lesson students need to learn is that under our system of justice, the punishment fits the crime, not the race.

That should be the policy of the next administration.  The next attorney general should lift these diktats and restore justice in our schools.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on the Selous Foundation for Public Policy Research website.

It’s Time to Put the Market Back in Housing Finance

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Today’s government-centric housing finance system is an “economics free zone” indifferent to supply and demand. Composed of an alphabet soup of agencies, this system has fostered a massive liberalization of mortgage terms and provided countless trillions of dollars in lending in up and down markets. At the same time, other government polices constrain supply. As a result, housing has become less, not more affordable or accessible. Here’s why.

“[In a seller’s market] it is more likely that the liberalization of mortgage terms will increase both price and the amount of the debt, with debt service remaining approximately unchanged. … Thus, the liberalization of terms easily becomes capitalized in higher prices.” (Fisher 1951).

Because of a reliance on excessive leverage, US homeownership policy has failed to broaden homeownership access, failed to achieve wealth accumulation for low- and middle-income homeowners, and led to 11 to 12 million foreclosures since 1973.

US multifamily policy failed to promote plentiful rental housing opportunities at rents accessible to low- and moderate-income tenants (Fisher 1975; Jakabovics et al. 2014). With the supply of unsubsidized, economical, workforce housing stagnating, there are calls for large expansions in subsidies.1 Building hundreds of thousands of high-cost apartment units—with inflated costs because of federal, state, and local regulations as well as layers of subsidies to lease to extremely low and very low income households—is not viable (Fisher 1975).

The Case against Current US Homeownership Policy

For 60 years, policymakers have loosened mortgage lending standards ostensibly to promote broader homeownership and wealth accumulation, particularly for low- and moderate-income households.

  • In 1954, Federal Housing Administration (FHA) borrowers had an average loan-to-value of 79.9 percent, an average loan term of 21.4 years, and an average housing debt-to-income ratio of 15 percent.
  • By 1964, these metrics had risen to 92.8 percent, 29.9 years, and 16.5 percent, respectively.
  • Today, the average figures are 96 percent, 29.5 years, and 28 percent, respectively.

Today’s FHA borrowers spend nearly twice as much of their income—2.15 times the debt, for a home at 1.79 times the price, with 6 times the default risk under stress—compared with typical 1954 FHA borrowers with the same nominal income.

It not surprising that the FHA has experienced 3.4 million foreclosures from 1973 to 2014 (one in eight purchase borrowers) compared with a near-zero rate in its first 25 years.2 For the 25 percent of FHA borrowers living in the highest default rate zip codes, an estimated one in five lost their homes, with untold neighborhood devastation (Pinto 2012).

Fact 1: The US homeownership rate is no higher today than in the early 1960s and is only marginally higher than in 1956, before FHA loans with low down payments or 30-year terms became broadly available.3

Fact 2:  Homes are less affordable today, standing at a multiple of 3.32 times median home price and median income compared with 2.95 times in 1979 or 2.86 times in 1992.  A new round of increasing loan leverage began after 1992, the year Congress imposed government-sponsored enterprise (GSE) affordable housing mandates. This helped drive home prices to unsustainable levels (4.05 times in 2006). After hitting a trough of 3.03 times in 2012, the ratio now stands at 3.32 times.4

Fact 3: Low- and middle-income households have lost wealth since 1989.

Fact 4: Liberalizing credit terms during a seller’s market inflates home prices and sets up future price volatility and higher default rates under stress.5 Extended periods of increasing leverage fuel a price boom that makes homes unaffordable, promotes price volatility, and leads to unforgiving mean reversion.6

Figure 2 confirms FHA’s first chief economist Ernest M. Fisher’s 1951 prediction that in a seller’s market, liberalized credit terms easily translate into higher prices. During the current up cycle, real home prices are up 16 percent.

In January 2015, the FHA announced a mortgage insurance premium cut during a seller’s market. It had the effect predicted by Fisher: nearly three-quarters of the additional buying power was absorbed by price (18 percent) and quality/quantity (55 percent) effects.7 Because the price effect increased the cost for all FHA buyers, the marginal cost of attracting each new first-time buyer was high ($82,000).8

Fact 5: Averages are misleading, and home prices are volatile.

National averages are misleading because they mask price volatility (figure 3) and price dispersion at the metro, zip code, and neighborhood levels (figures 4 and 5).

Lower-priced homes, generally owned by low-income and minority households, experience higher price volatility and lower nominal gains. In figure 5, the bottom price tier of all 28 cities had a lower nominal price increase per year than the top tier (computed over 18 years). These borrowers also experience higher default rates because of the higher leverage.9

Fact 6: Post crisis credit is not tight;10 underwriting and regulatory changes promote rather than constrain a boom.11 Whether leverage is exotic is less relevant than the relative change in buying power generated by increasing leverage, which drives deviation from the price mean.

Fact 7: Federal, state, and local policies increase home-building costs (Jakabovics et al. 2014).  The 10 metros with the lowest multiples of 2013 median home price and 2013 median household income had less restrictive land-use regulations.  The 15 metros with the highest multiples had more restrictive land-use regulations.12 Even California has recognized that public policies are largely responsible for it being the most expensive housing market in the country (Taylor 2015). Burgeoning impact fees have a disproportionate impact by constraining the construction of entry-level homes. 13

The Case against Current US Multifamily Policy

Fact 1: Rents are increasingly less affordable. In 1979 (earliest Zillow data available), median rents nationally stood at 24 percent of median incomes (Los Angeles rents stood at 30 percent of median incomes).  Today, the national rate stands at 30percent with Los Angeles at 49 percent.

Fact 2: Federal, state, and local policies increase apartment construction costs.  Eight of the 10 metros with the lowest multiples of 2015 median rent and median household income had less restrictive land-use regulations.  Thirteen of the 15 metros with the highest multiples of 2015 median rent and median household income had more restrictive land-use regulations.14

Fact 3: Multifamily debt (in 2010 dollars) is rising much faster than the number of total units because of liberal financing from Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, FHA, and Ginnie Mae, as well as highly accommodative monetary policy.15

Fact 4: While the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) is the primary means of promoting the construction of “affordable” apartments, it’s expensive and opaque.

New LIHTC credits total $10 billion annually, funding about 100,000 LIHTC units.

  • These units have high construction costs (estimated $175,000 to $200,000 per unit).
  • These units serve few low-income tenants; 80 percent are either extremely low income (area median income less than or equal to 30 percent) or very low income (area median income from 31 to 50 percent); only 7 percent have an area median income greater than 60 percent but less than or equal to 80 percent (Furman Center 2012).
  • These units benefit from layers of subsidies, driving subsidy costs to $12,000 per unit, raising questions about unfair distribution of scarce resources. These subsidies include government-aided financing, state and local subsidies, and rental assistance (e.g., Section 8 and Housing Choice Vouchers) targeted to very low and extremely low income households.
  • This tax credit risks repeating same errors as previous housing subsidy programs.
    • Tenants are overwhelmingly minority households (61 percent), and nonelderly units are concentrated in metropolitan statistical area census tracts with high minority concentrations (Office of Policy Development and Research 2016).
    • Many developments face fiscal challenges to avoid blight that sets in after 16 to 20 years.

Market-Based Solutions to Bring Home Prices Back in Line with Median Incomes and Improve Accessibility

Objective: A more stable housing finance market that provides a reliable path to wealth building and broader low- and middle-income access to homeownership.

  • Repeal Title XIV (qualified mortgage) and section 941 (qualified residential mortgage) provisions of Dodd-Frank (Pinto 2016) (legislative action needed)
  • Require the FHA and GSEs to adopt sound underwriting, pricing, and capital standards (legislative and administrative action needed)
  • Repeal the GSE affordable housing goals (see replacement Low-Income First-Time Buyer tax credit below) to end destabilizing competition between the FHA and the GSEs (legislative action needed)
  • Adopt policies to support market stability by ensuring a high preponderance of good-quality mortgages (administrative action needed)
  • Help low- and middle-income families with wealth-building strategies
    • The American Enterprise Institute’s Wealth Building Home Loan offers such a path, but the 30-year mortgage does not.16(administrative action needed)
  • Enact the Low-income First Time Homebuyer (LIFT Home) tax credit (legislative action needed)
    • This credit would allow low-income,17 first-time buyers to forgo the interest deduction and receive a one-time refundable tax credit.
    • This credit is equal to 4 percent of the mortgage loan ($10,000 maximum) and can be used to buy down the loan’s interest rate for at least seven years on loans with terms of 20 years or less.
    • The legislation would funnel $4.5 billion per year to fund 500,000 LIFT Home buyers, 250,000 of whom would be incremental low-income, first-time buyers. This assumes that 150,000 live in apartments (freed-up units would be a bonus).
    • Funding LIFT Home would require the following:
      • Reductions in the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s budget
      • Repurposing other budgeted amounts that support affordable housing to push tax dollars directly to homebuyers instead of having the money siphoned off by bureaucracies and advocacy groups
      • Restructuring home mortgage interest deductions to promote wealth, not debt accumulation
        • For future homebuyers, this restructuring would
          • limit interest deductions to purchase loans and exclude second mortgages and cash-out refinances (also for existing homeowners) and
          • cap mortgage interest deductions to amounts payable on a loan with a 20-year amortization term.
      • For existing home loan borrowers, the restructuring would
        • grandfather current interest deductions, ameliorating impact of change on current home prices; and
        • direct any interest savings (from refinancing an existing loan at a lower rate) toward shortening the loan term.

Over 10 years, these solutions would reduce capital needs by 60 percent and allow weaning off the federal government’s overwhelming loan guarantee role. Outstanding debt would be reduced by approximately 20 percent, and risk-absorbing capital per loan would be reduced by 50 percent.

  • With less interest rate risk and lower capital requirements, these loans would be safer and easier for depository institutions to hold in portfolio.  Today, these institutions hold about 50 percent of total single-family mortgage debt.

Market-Based Rental Housing Solutions to Bring Rents Back in Line with Median Incomes and Improve Accessibility: the “Blight Preventer” Loan

Objectives: Shift from the current debt- and government-centric finance system to a rental housing market where supply is permitted and encouraged to meet demand; establish life cycle underwriting18and the “Blight Preventer” Loan as best practices in financing subsidized multifamily housing.

  • Repeal GSE affordable housing policies and the Community Reinvestment Act
  • Increase supply of unsubsidized economical workforce and entry-level apartments
  • Use lifecycle underwriting and 15- and 20-year self-amortizing first mortgage—the “Blight Preventer” Loan (White and Wilkins 2016):
    • Excessively long loan terms used to finance affordable multifamily properties leave many properties unable to fulfill affordability commitments without additional public subsidies and leaves those properties poorly maintained, leading to blight and urban decay.
    • Most affordable multifamily housing is located in lower-income neighborhoods, leaving public funders to accept blight or throw good money at bad investments.

Bending the Cost Curve to Increase the Supply of Unsubsidized Economical Workforce and Entry-Level Houses and Apartments

  • Local and state governments should
    • authorize expedited permitting and “just-in-time” building inspections;
    • identify building code interpretations to reduce cost impact;
    • review and amend density and parking requirements, height maximums, size minimums, and other provisions that increase barriers and raise costs;
    • expand permitted uses in a zoning district that are not subject to special review and approval by local government;
    • review and amend building codes that dictate costs and amenities that put economical workforce developments at a disadvantage;
    • reduce regulatory complexity and include staff flexibility in applying and interpreting burdensome requirements (direct staff to be as flexible as possible);
    • adjust impact and permitting fees to reflect any reduced impact of such housing;
    • establish a “good enough to be economical” standard; and
    • reduce the expenses calculated as a percentage of costs.
  • Designers and  builders should implement innovative and economical techniques for
    • design and construction,
    • sustainability,
    • utilizing existing infrastructure,
    • repurposing existing structures, and
    • management.

Notes

  1. “Cantwell Launches National Campaign to Increase Federal Resources for Affordable Housing,” press release, March 24, 2016, https://www.cantwell.senate.gov/news/press-releases/cantwell-launches-national-campaign-to-increase-federal-resources-for-affordable-housing; Peter Dreier, “How to House the Working Poor,” How Housing Matters, last updated April 7, 2016, http://howhousingmatters.org/articles/house-working-poor/.
  2. FHA Actuarial Studies and author. See Pinto (2012).
  3. Edward J. Pinto, “Housing finance fact or fiction? FHA pioneered the 30-year fixed rate mortgage during the Great Depression?” AEIdeas (blog), June 24, 2015,http://www.aei.org/publication/housing-finance-fact-or-fiction-fha-pioneered-the-30-year-fixed-rate-mortgage-during-the-great-depression/.
  4. Zillow and author.
  5. Liberalization of credit terms takes many forms, including smaller down payments, higher debt-to-income ratios, longer loan terms, lower interest rates, quantitative easing, and reduced mortgage insurance premium.
  6. Mean reversion is a theory suggesting prices and returns eventually move back toward the mean.
  7. The 0.50 percent decrease in premium increased buying power by 6 percent. This could be “spent” in three ways: price effect (seller raises price), quality/quantity effect (buyer purchases larger or better-quality home), or expanded access (attracts new buyers).
  8. Forthcoming research to be published by Stephen Oliner, Edward Pinto, and Tobias Peter.
  9. Default risk increased in zip codes where median family income and median home prices are low. See Pinto (2012).
  10. First-time buyer credit metrics are follows: 69 percent of buyers have a combined loan-to-value ratio less than or equal to 95 percent, 97 percent have a 30-year loan, 29 percent have a debt-to-income ratio less than 43 percent, and 22 percent have a FICO score below 660. See “Mortgage Risk Index Release of March 2016 Data,” American Enterprise Institute’s International Center on Housing Risk, last updated April 26, 2016.  As an up real estate cycle ages, credit maximums usually become minimums, thus leading to calls for even more liberal credit terms, including less traditional ones. See Fisher (1951).
  11. For example, income leverage (measured by borrower debt-to-income ratio) is largely unconstrained by Dodd-Frank’s qualified mortgage regulation. Its 43 percent limit is swallowed by agency exemptions (Fannie, Freddie, FHA, the US Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Rural Housing Service guarantee some 85 percent of all primary home purchase loans). An effective income leverage limitation operates to “take the punch bowl away” before a leverage-fueled price boom goes too far.
  12. Demographia.com and author. “Regulations Add a Whopping $84,671 to New Home Prices,”NAHBNow (blog), May 9, 2016, http://nahbnow.com/2016/05/regulations-add-a-whopping-84671-to-new-home-prices/.
  13. Nick Timiraos, “How City Hall Exacerbates the Entry-Level Housing Squeeze,” The Wall Street Journal, May 5, 2016, http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2016/05/05/how-city-hall-exacerbates-the-entry-level-housing-squeeze/.
  14. Demographia.com and author.
  15. Paul Bubny, “CRE Debt Increase Hits 8-Year High,” Law.com, March 15, 2016,http://www.law.com/sites/paulbubny/2016/03/15/cre-debt-increase-hits-8-year-high/?slreturn=20160419120431.
  16. Edward Pinto and Stephen Oliner, “WBHL,” American Enterprise Institute’s International Center on Housing Risk, accessed May 19, 2016, http://www.housingrisk.org/category/wealth-building-home-loan/.
  17. Incomes below 80 percent of the area median income.
  18. Lifecycle underwriting considers a property’s ability to cover its long-term capital needs (e.g., replacing worn-out roofs, air conditioners, and appliances) over the property’s life cycle. See Brennan and colleagues (2013).

References

Brennan, Maya, Amy Deora, Ethan Handelman, Anker Heegaard, Albert Lee, Jeffrey Lubell, and Charlie Wilkins. 2013. “Lifecycle Underwriting: Potential Policy and Practical Implications. Working paper. Washington, DC: Center for Housing Policy.http://media.wix.com/ugd/19cfbe_891b4788e2e64d0cb71a75940a101f2f.pdf.

Fisher, Ernest M. 1951. “Financing Home Ownership.” In Urban Real Estate Markets: Characteristics and Financing, edited by Ernest M. Fisher, 61–90. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. http://www.nber.org/chapters/c3180.pdf.

———. 1975. Housing Markets and Congressional Goals. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers Inc.

Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. 2012. “What Can We Learn about the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Program by Looking at the Tenants?” New York: New York University.http://furmancenter.org/files/publications/LIHTC_Final_Policy_Brief_v2.pdf.

Jakabovics, Andrew, Lynn M. Ross, Molly Simpson, and Michael Spotts. 2014. Bending the Cost Curve: Solutions to Expand the Supply of Affordable Rentals. Washington, DC: Urban Land Institute.http://uli.org/wp-content/uploads/ULI-Documents/BendingCostCurve-Solutions_2014_web.pdf.

Office of Policy Development and Research. 2016. Data on Tenants in LIHTC Units as of December 31, 2013. Washington, DC: US Department of Housing and Urban Development.https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/LIHTC-Tenants-2013.pdf.

Pinto, Edward J. 2012. How the FHA Hurts Working-Class Families and Communities. Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute. http://www.nightmareatfha.com/how-the-fha-hurts-working-class-families-and-communities/.

———. 2016. “Repealing Dodd-Frank’s Qualified Mortgage and Qualified Residential Mortgage.” InThe Case Against Dodd-Frank: How the “Consumer Protection” Law Endangers Americans, edited by Norbert J. Michel, 31–38. Washington, DC: The Heritage Foundation. http://thf-reports.s3.amazonaws.com/2016/The%20Case%20Against%20Dodd-Frank.pdf.

Taylor, Mac. 2015. California’s High Housing Costs: Causes and Consequences. Sacramento, CA: Legislative Analyst’s Office. http://www.lao.ca.gov/reports/2015/finance/housing-costs/housing-costs.pdf.

White, Tom, and Charlie Wilkins. 2016. “‘Blight Preventer’ Loan: Property Lifecycle Underwriting and 15–20 Year Self-Amortizing First Mortgage Debt as a Best Practice for Financing Subsidized Multifamily Housing.” Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute.http://www.housingrisk.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/White-Wilkins-MF-debt-paper-final.pdf.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on the Urban.org website.

Kindergartner Suspended for Princess Bubble Gun

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Early last week, school officials at Southeast Elementary in Brighton, Colo. suspended a 5-year-old kindergartner for bringing a “fake weapon” to school. Illustrating the fanatical manner in which school weapons policies are enforced throughout the country, the “weapon” in question was a battery-powered clear plastic gun that blows bubbles when the trigger is pulled. The item’s clear plastic construction may not have been enough for the administrators to distinguish it from an actual weapon, but if the zealots had been in less of a fervor to punish the young student they might have noticed the portrait of two Disney princesses on the toy.

In an interview with Denver’s KDVR, the young girl’s mother made clear that she was upset with how her daughter had been treated, telling a reporter, “If they had contacted me and said can you make sure this doesn’t happen again, we just want you to be aware, I think that would have been a more appropriate way to handle the situation. Could we have a warning? It blows bubbles.”

Princess Bubble Gun

Princess Bubble Gun

Despite attention from the local media, Southeast Elementary officials issued the following statement defending their actions:

While we hear and understand the parents of this student being concerned about this discipline in light of the student’s age and type of item, this suspension is consistent with our district policy as well as how Southeast has handled similar situations throughout this school year. This has involved similar situations where students have brought items such as Nerf guns to school and also received one-day suspensions. The bringing of weapons, real or facsimile, to our schools by students can not only create a potential safety concern but also cause a distraction for our students in the learning process. Our schools, particularly Southeast because of past instances with students bringing fake weapons to school, make a point of asking parents to be partners in making sure students are not bringing these items to school. This includes asking parents to check backpacks.

Note the word “facsimile.” The Southeast Elementary Student Code of Conduct cites a school district weapons policy that states:

Carrying, using, actively displaying or threatening with the use of a firearm facsimile that could reasonably be mistaken for an actual firearm on district property, when being transported in vehicles dispatched by the district or one of its schools, during a school sponsored or district-sponsored activity or event, and off school property when such conduct has a reasonable connection to school or any district curricular or non-curricular event without the authorization of the school or school district is prohibited. Students who violate this policy provision may be subject to disciplinary action including but not limited to suspension and/or expulsion.

Facsimile typically connotes an exact copy, however, the policy does broaden the definition to allow for punishment if a student brings an item that “could reasonably be mistaken for a firearm.” It is hard to imagine how any reasonable person could mistake a clear, Disney-branded bubble toy for an actual firearm. But, here lies the problem, this kindergartner was clearly not interacting with reasonable individuals. Worse, the school’s response reveals that this type of unreasonable behavior is standard procedure for the school’s administrators.

Incidents like this are why NRA has supported legislation in some states to protect children and parents from the abuse of weapons policies by overzealous school officials. In Florida, NRA helped enact the “Right to be a Kid” Act, also known as the “Pop Tart” bill – referring to a well-publicized incident where a student was disciplined for chewing a breakfast pastry into the shape of a firearm. This law targets some of the worst abuses, by making clear that “Simulating a firearm or weapon while playing or wearing clothing or accessories that depict a firearm or weapon or express an opinion regarding a right guaranteed by the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution is not grounds for disciplinary action or referral to the criminal justice or juvenile justice system.”

Given an apparent pattern of weapons policy abuse by Southeast Elementary school administrators, Colorado lawmakers would be wise to better define how school officials deal with innocuous toys and other harmless items and behavior. Such harmful encounters with school officials can have a lasting negative effect on students. As the mother in this this case explained to a reporter, “What bugs me is this is going to be something they can refer to if we have any issues in the future which I don’t foresee, but it’s always going to be lingering there in her school file.”

Katie Couric is an Anti-Gun Fraud and Hypocrite

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Google-search “Katie Couric, gun control, edited” and you’ll see what we’re talking about. Actually, you’ll see what most news organizations are talking about.

Fox News: Katie Couric slammed for ‘deceptive’ documentary about gun rights

Washington Post: Audiotape: Katie Couric documentary falsely depicts gun supporters as “idiots”

New York Times: Audio of Katie Couric Interview Shows Editing Slant in Gun Documentary, Site Claims

Reason: Katie Couric Anti-Gun Doc Deceptively Edited to Suggest Gun Rights Activists Don’t Have Answers

The Blaze: Katie Couric Documentary Accused of Deceptively Editing Gun Rights Activists—Here’s the Evidence

Washington Free Beacon: Audio Shows Katie Couric Documentary Deceptively Edited Interview with Pro-Gun Activists

Daily Caller: Katie Couric Edited Gun Documentary to Silence Pro-Gun Opinions

The articles’ titles pretty much tell the story, but the details go something like this: Couric has produced a documentary promoting gun control. Lest there be any confusion on that point, the documentary’s website says that its partners include Everytown, Moms Demand Action, the Brady Campaign, the Violence Policy Center, the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, and other anti-gun groups. And it urges people to “Reject the NRA” and to contact lawmakers, urging them to support background check legislation and other gun control efforts.

In the documentary, Couric interviews members of a local, Virginia-based pro-Second Amendment group. She asks them why they don’t support “universal” background check legislation. What is shown on camera thereafter is the interviewees sitting speechless for a full nine seconds, after which time the video cuts away, as if they never figured out an answer and the cameraman gave up and turned the camera off. The implication? Couric had proven once and for all that gun control opponents are incapable of producing a single argument against gun control.

But an audio-only tape of the interview, available here, proves that several of those being interviewed answered Couric immediately and at considerable length. Couric’s team simply deleted their answers, and inserted the “speechless” video footage in their place.

The articles linked above make clear that Couric and her director, Stephanie Soechtig, set out not to “document” anything, but to persuade viewers to adopt their anti-gun views. All of this reminds us that Couric is the same political activist that she has always been, first as a “journalist” that would bend the truth to propagandize audiences, and now as a “filmmaker” that will do the same.

According to CNN, Couric says she is “very proud of the film.” Her hubris notwithstanding, it remains to be seen if Couric’s legacy is forever tainted – as it should be – from her attempt to mislead the American public into believing a false narrative on gun control.

Huge Victory for Free Speech and Unborn Babies Against Planned Parenthood

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In a huge victory for free speech and unborn babies, United States District Judge Nancy Torresen, yesterday, issued a preliminary injunction barring the Maine Attorney General and City of Portland police officers from enforcing the Noise Provision of the Maine Civil Rights Act (“Act”).  Under the Act, after being warned by a police officer, it is illegal to make noise that can be heard inside an abortion clinic with the intent to interfere with a medical procedure.

Thomas More Law Center Wins Huge Victory for Free Speech and Unborn Babies Against Planned Parenthood - Judge Torresen

In a 35–page opinion and order, Judge Torresen, an Obama appointee, held that the Noise Provision of the Act is content-based because it restricts speech based on its purpose, and therefore, is facially unconstitutional. Read Judge Torresen’s entire opinion here.

The Thomas More Law Center (“TMLC”), a national, nonprofit public interest law firm based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, filed a lawsuit in December 2015, on behalf of Pastor Andrew March after a Portland police officer officially warned Pastor March under the Act, and ordered him to quiet his pro-life speech on the public sidewalk outside the Portland Planned Parenthood facility or face prosecution. Despite this threat of prosecution, Pastor Andrew March courageously continued to plead for the lives of the unborn at the doors of the Planned Parenthood facility.

Thomas More Law Center Wins Huge Victory for Free Speech and Unborn Babies Against Planned Parenthood - Kate Oliveri

Kate Oliveri, the Thomas More Law Center Trial Counsel handling the case, commented, “This is a victory regardless of whether you acknowledge that unborn children posses lives worth defending. Free speech rights are central to maintaining a free society and the court took a huge step toward protecting those rights for all citizens of Maine.”

The Planned Parenthood facility, located on a loud and busy thoroughfare in downtown Portland, has been the focus of pro-life counselors and prayer groups for the last several years. However, in October 2015, the Maine Attorney General resurrected the 15-year-old Noise Provision of the Act to sue Pastor Brian Ingalls in a state court for his opposition to abortion on those sidewalks. This occurred only two weeks after the City of Portland admitted that their a previous attempt to drown out free speech on the public sidewalk—a 39 foot buffer zone—was unconstitutional. The state case against Brian Ingalls is still pending.  After the State sued Pastor Ingalls, Pastor March stepped in and began his preaching to save the lives of unborn babies.

Because a judge must determine that a plaintiff seeking a preliminary injunction has a likelihood of success on the merits, by granting TMLC’s Motion for Preliminary Injunction, Judge Torresen has indicated that Pastor March will ultimately prevail in his claim that the Act is an unconstitutional suppression of free speech when the case goes to summary judgment. In the mean time, the order assures that Pastor March and other individuals can continue to preach pro-life messages and pray without being silenced by the Noise Provision.

Thomas More Law Center Wins Huge Victory for Free Speech and Unborn Babies Against Planned Parenthood - Andrew March

Judge Torresen focused on the “intent to interfere with a medical procedure” portion of the statute. This portion restricts speech based on the purpose for which the speech is made and differentiates speech based on the message expressed. In order for a content-based restriction on speech to be constitutional, it must be the least restrictive means of furthering a compelling governmental interest. Judge Torresen concluded that the State had other content-neutral means of keeping peace at abortion clinics.

The difference between Hillary and Trump — Confusing Effort with Results

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C P Sennett, a multi award winning business owner, trainer and author based in Suffolk, England, wrote,”Don’t confuse efforts with results….”

People have a great pit into which they fall. It is the bottomless pit called effort. We see this in public schools, colleges, universities, businesses, private lives and in government. There is a tendency to confuse effort with results, leading to individuals and institutions being graded on trying, not their results or outcomes. Doing something does not result to getting something positive done. When people and institutions lose sight of the result, mission, goal or objective bad things happen.

The only true measure of success is achieving results.

Effort can result in success, achieving the result, but it may also end in failure to achieve the result. Failure is a good thing if one learns from their mistakes and corrects for them to increase the possibility of success, i.e. achieving the result.

heraclitus119731In 2011 Alex Adamopoulos wrote in his column “Confusing Effort with Results”:

I first heard this saying in 2001 from an executive I was working for who had the decency and courage to pull me aside one afternoon and share that although my work ethic and effort was not in question, the results, or lack of them, were in question. To be completely transparent, I was speechless when he explained this principle to me. I realized in that moment that I was viewing my work efforts as a measure of my success vs. weighing the results they were producing. I imagine this is a difficult conversation to have with anyone as a manager but it is certainly more difficult and challenging when you are having it with someone who has a big title and is expected to deliver quite a lot back to the business.

Forbes Magazine’s Paul B. Brown did a column titled, “If You Want To Be Successful, Don’t Confuse Being Busy With Getting The Right Things Done.” Brown wrote:

Just because you show up at work every day doesn’t mean you are getting anything done.

In fact, thinking about the numbers of hours you work, just confuses the issue.

Time is not a factor. Quality, making progress, and accomplishing your goals is.

Americans are frustrated with the lack of results, particularly when it comes to the political class.

Daily we see press releases about legislation introduced, rules formulated and regulations implemented. What is missing are the results. First question: Did what was done create results? Second question: Were those results positive or negative?

Former Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater wrote this in his book “The Conscience of a Conservative“:

“I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution, or that have failed their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is “needed” before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents’ “interests,” I shall reply that I was informed that their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can.”

Goldwater understood that government programs which “have failed their purpose” are never repealed. Ronald Reagan at his first inaugural said, “Now, so there will be no misunderstanding, it is not my intention to do away with government. It is, rather, to make it work-work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back. Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it.”

In other words government’s purpose is to get results, without doing harm.

Both Goldwater and Reagan understood that government had become effort oriented at the expense of the people. Is it not the time to measure the success of government based on results? Is it not the time to hold government to task for it’s results? It it not time for public works at every level to be based upon success? Success as defined by the public?

This election cycle is all about two forms of governing – one that is effort based and the other that is outcome based.

The idea of effort versus results is embodied in the campaign slogans of the presumptive candidates for president. Hillary Clinton’s campaign slogan is “Hillary for America.” Donald Trump’s is “Make America Great Again.” The operative words are “for” and “make.” For is a preposition, make is a verb. One is passive, the other is active.

Which one is focused on effort? Which one on results.

Which candidate do you want? The effort one or result one?

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