All this time you thought
it was about teaching your
Sherman and Abigail to READ.

The University of Minnesota is purging the incoming teaching classes of cultural biases. It’s “for the children” as you know, dumbing them down makes them malleable.

Denounce exclusionary biases and embrace the vision. (Or else.)

Do you believe in the American dream — the idea that in this country, hardworking people of every race, color and creed can get ahead on their own merits? If so, that belief may soon bar you from getting a license to teach in Minnesota public schools — at least if you plan to get your teaching degree at the University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities campus.

In a report compiled last summer, the Race, Culture, Class and Gender Task Group at the U’s College of Education and Human Development recommended that aspiring teachers there must repudiate the notion of “the American Dream” in order to obtain the recommendation for licensure required by the Minnesota Board of Teaching. Instead, teacher candidates must embrace — and be prepared to teach our state’s kids — the task force’s own vision of America as an oppressive hellhole: racist, sexist and homophobic. [snip] (emphasis added)

Sound familiar?

Does this have a pinkish tinge of Mao wowism?
Adjusting the purity level of your kids thoughts can’t be accomplished if the Teach’s mind is clogged with impure crap.

The D’ OH patrol caught this on the scope right at the time of utterance.

“Leahy Lunacy” at Powerline
These quotes right from the Senior Senator’s mouth

Vermonters, you voted for this; imagine how this looks to the sane part of the country!

All photos by J. Kirk Edwards-courtesy of the Eagle newspaper, Addison County- All rights reserved

I thank Mr. Edwards for sending these photos of the Crown Point (Champlain) Bridge to me and graciously allowing their use.

The ominous heavy flapping of gallinaceous wings bodes ill for the remnants of Vermont taxpayers.

Scrawny starved AOT chickens coming to roost are clogging bridges, closing them to traffic. Following them are the heavily wattled, bloated body turkeys of the Legislature crashing into the feeding trough, stealing more tax dollars acutely needed to clear out the roosting, defecating birds.
Successive years of stealing funds from the AOT budget, these turkeys in the Vermont Legislature will find out that Civil Engineering is far more important than Social Engineering.

Oh the pain, the pain of this lesson, since the tax dollars are not extant and the children will truly suffer.

How will the state shell out for the bridge and road repairs? More taxes on fuel should especially appeal to business and the growing number of the unemployed. Tourists, provided they’re able to find a way into the state that won’t destroy their vehicles, ought to be thrilled. Maybe an extra 8% R & M tax to elevate Vermont’s Vermontness! You know, make it “special.”

What will Chummy Shummy and the Progs tell the kids of the families who were laid off in West Addison when the bridge closed. Maybe that great line the liberals use will work, “It’s for the children.” Yeah, that sounds good, “We shut down the businesses just for you!”

So is Vermont open for business? Remember that dunbass slogan?

Companies from below Middlebury to Ferrisburgh have employees from NY State using this bridge; one business, the Dock Doctors manufactures in Ferrisburgh and does major work through their showroom in Lake George.
Vergennes and Middlebury businesses such as Goodrich and Porter Hospital as well as The Bridge Restaurant are feeling the brunt. These are just a few of many. This isn’t the only problem facing this state but it is the biggest as of now. Ask them how they like their tax dollars at work! This will do wonders for them.

Other Vermonters work in Fort Ti at IP. Vermont will be collecting higher fuel taxes plus with the increase in driving. Maybe the Addison County Jackass Party can give them hints on how to conserve on their fuel costs!

Ask Senator Ayer what to do. Since she was elected, she hasn’t done a damn thing except meddle in Nanny state BS and vote to spend more dollars on social engineering instead of civil engineering.

They fix one bridge while another bridge over Rte 2  closes. Bridges over the Winooski River are bad. A bridge over the New Haven River on Rte. 116 south of Bristol is single lane since Silent Cal left office.
Vermont is quite far behind the curve on repairs; that doesn’t cover regular maintenance on the other structures, roadways, culverts and mowing.

The entire eastern side of Vermont avoids the sales tax by shoping in New Hampshire; that will continue until the bridges over the Connecticut River rot and fall into the water.

I suppose we’ll see the Bennington-Hoosick fault shift creating a rift valley with Champlain flowing to Long Island Sound. That will stop westward migration, leaving Massachusetts as a way out.

Why would anyone want to go there?

I feel safe here in Vermont knowing our fiscal leaders, like Sens. Ancel, Bartlett and Ayer have a solid grip on reality.

Of course they do, that’s why Vermont’s shortfall isn’t $300,000,000.00 and growing.

We’re so lucky to have them!

New Mexico faces Medicaid Cuts!

Nearly one-in-four New Mexicans receives health care assistance from the state or federal government, including Medicare that covers older Americans and Medicaid that covers children, poor adults, and the disabled. Medicaid is New Mexico’s largest health care program and it accounts for 11% of state spending. New Mexico’s Medicaid program faces a budget shortfall of up to $300M in the next two years that will result in reductions in coverage, payments to providers, and/or services:

“Options range from reducing or eliminating benefits, such as dental care for poor adults, to lowering the reimbursement rates for doctors and other providers, according to New Mexico Human Services Secretary Pam Hyde. If drastic cost-cutting becomes necessary, she said, the state might need to scrap entire portions of Medicaid, such as a program to help low-income workers with insurance coverage, or revamp Medicaid to provide a minimum amount of services.

“We know there is going to be some cost containment. The only question is how much,” Hyde said in an interview last week.” [snip]

Reduced services, limits on payments to health care providers, onerous bureaucracy, and increased taxes … it could be a preview of ObamaCare.

What do you mean “COULD BE?”

According to the Wicked Witch of the West this is an American Right!
Unless of course it is an American wrong!

Here’s a flashback to the Ranter of the House talking about disruption. Great video from the”‘Naked Emperor”

Just ask Bernie about protest the one’s on the Left are GOOD. On the Right are an OUTRAGE! A UGE outrage.

The GOP in Vermont are RINO’s. Bibbed overall wearing hayseeds sitting on the curb, getting their toes run over by the left’s uncivil parade. The dope smoking granolas have more brains.

Think not? 6 years ago, the GOP let the Jackasses vote in their primary, elect a goof from Tunbridge who then dropped out saying “You da Man, Leahy.” The RINO’s mumbled, “Well you see, McMullen, well you know, he was, well from MA, a uh-ah,a carpetbagger, you know.”

What in hell is Sanders? He never held a productive job in his life and he bozoed a city to boot. That didn’t bother the Loony Left. That gave the sickle swinging Marxist Street Creds! Like Yo dude, like I shot that %*#@% city, yo dig!

Then the GOP went and found Martha Rainville, who turns out to be a closet Cap&Taxer. A gender based promotion over a Flag Officer to head the Vermont Guard might have tipped off the Vermont Republicans, EXCEPT, they’re all RINO’s, moderates, the types that believe we shouldn’t offend anyone. We rather lose and be liked.
No wonder there isn’t a GOP Congressman in all of New England!
This is akin to Tug of war where the GOP starts at the crossover line!

As that idiot Dr. Phil asks, “How’s that working out for you?”

According to the body count after the last election battle, not well! Veto overrides just for yuks.The legislature yukked it up with social engineering, meddling in family and church, instead of the state’s true prefecture, fiscal responsibility. (Damn, I know not to use those two words together in the same sentence in Vermont.)

So, whomever is heading up the Vermont Pachy Party this week, name the sacrificial corporate/income groups tossed in to the fiscal sinkhole in 2010. NEA or teachers can’t be touched. Neither can the parasites of the Vermont budget, the non-profit lampreys.
If they’re strong movers and shakers for humanity, corporate money donations flow their way simply for the tax write-off.
If not, let Sanders warmth and generosity pick them up; otherwise, they wither and die.

Bernie’s myrmidons run rampant through GOP rallies, disrupt meetings; meanwhile go to the Vermont Tiger and read the comments. One from someone exhorting all to be civil; he moved to Alabama, doesn’t care for Bernie’s  and Madlein’s social programs I guess. The link will take you these; I commented too.

The rules changed in the late ’60’s, Chicago Convention to be exact. The GOP didn’t react politically to the message. The Far Left has worked on this from the ’70’s forward, making strides in the early ’90’s, moved too soon, and came back in 2000. It doesn’t take many to steal elections at grassroots level. Obama intends to control the Census; what do you think that is going to do to Congressional Districts and the Electoral College?

How many of you know who the 3%’ers were? Go find out; you’ll be shocked! But this is what is happened to the GOP/RINO Party. I don’t belong to it; I don’t have a dog in this fight except to try and pick off the moderates and replace them with Libertarians. Not the dope smoking type, the fiscal conservative, non-social engineering individuals.

Then,

can someone explain just what in hell the GOP is thinking?

The simple Senator comes to Vermont to tell you bibbed overall wearing fools how he’s working for you.

Meanwhile he’s voting YOUR tax dollars to pay for every illegal’s dream of free everything on your dime including ObamaCare.

The only NO vote cast on health care was for him to join the mess.

Here’s how he votes to protect your money from going to illegals taking American’s jobs.

Sanders and Welch are no better; it’s your tax dollars spent paying for other countries to rid their problems ON YOUR WALLET.

Interacting with a government
run anything is always a joy.

The well worn lefty chant “anything is better than this” needs a gimlet-eyed look the next time you hear those words. Think about it when you contemplate a looking to hook up at your favorite haunt.

From Maggie’s Farm this delightful morsel, smile when you read it.

Another of Britain’s National Health Service debacles is hard to chew on, as found by Chris Reed, an editor at the San Diego Union-Tribune, who relays to us an essay by a state-run medicine supporting former U of Chicago PoliSci professor and aide to former Dem Senator Bill Bradley.  She now lives in Britain.

The idea that if the government expanded control of health care, costs could be reduced without any reduction in available services is just on its face laughable. Yet that is actually a talking point of the proponents of President Obama’s health “reform” proposal. C’mon. Please be serious. If you really think this is a good idea, be honest about it. [snip]

[Dentists] are now paid a flat rate covering the amount of work they are contracted to do each year, which is measured in UDAs (units of dental activity). In theory, at least, there is both greater guarantee of access … as well as more emphasis on clinical and preventative dentistry (you are paid the same amount for one filling as for six). Crucially, the new contract also simplified the complex pay structure for dentistry (unlike other areas of the public health system, you do pay a nominal fee to see [a National Health Service] dentist). The previously highly complex payment structure of more than 400 charges is now divided into three bands: roughly 16 pounds ($27) for a check-up or minor treatment, 44 pounds ($75) for fillings, root canal work or extractions and 198 pounds ($336) for crowns, dentures or bridges.

So far, so good. Right?

Well, actually not. While these reforms were supposed to increase access to NHS dentists, in practice, they’ve had the opposite effect. NHS estimates suggest that nearly 1 million fewer people have access to an NHS dentist than they did three years ago. According to a citizen’s advice survey carried out in early 2008, approximately 7.4 million people hadn’t been to an NHS dentist since April 2006 because of difficulties in finding one. In light of these access problems, many Brits simply do without a dentist or go abroad for treatments. (The NHS acknowledges that there is an access problem, but argues that it is closing the gap.)

Not surprisingly, the new system also makes NHS work less attractive for dentists. Before Tony Blair became prime minister in 1997, only 6 percent of dentists’ income came from private patients. By 2006, it was 58 percent. The first month that the new contract went into effect, some 2,000 dentists (about 10 percent) refused to sign the new contracts and left the NHS altogether, while many more signed “in protest.” Many of the dentists I’ve talked to informally have complained about the “assembly line” feel of the new target-driven system. …

The incentives set up by the new system also mean that dentists are more likely to “under-treat,” i.e., to fail to provide complex (and costly) treatment, even if it’s clinically necessary. After all, they are now paid the same to perform a root canal as they are to pull a tooth. Not surprisingly, the number of complex procedures has dropped precipitously in the last few years.

Think about the story above. And the photo above.
Oh yeah, and that good night kiss!

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) is calculated to rouse the economy, create and protect jobs, and invest in key priorities, alleged Governor Douglas.

Keeping the spirit of t he American Recovery and Reinvestment Act alive in Vermont, Governor Douglas achieves this by awarding Gold Shovels to 42 Vermont arts organizations totaling $606,000 through Porkulus (ARRA). These grants taxes will help preserve jobs in Vermont’s nonprofit arts sector that have been threatened by declines.

So where are the liberal lovers of the arts? The NPR listeners, who constantly harangue us. Why are you not leaping into the breach, fetching out the checkbook and quill and dashing off a doubling donation.

Waiting for the Philistines loot?

Isn’t this simply marvelous?
The $9,200 allows the VSO to play Happy Days are Here Again for those queued up at E&T or Family Services.
While Dad is there, he can have his face painted by a working artist, might as well look good for the non-existent job interview.

Middlebury lucked out too! Folk life in the Shire town gets archived by a real live Archivist at the Vermont Folk life Center for the munificent sum of $10,000. Evidently, this also keeps the Center’s Director of Education from begging on the street.
One would have thought the College could have “coughed” up this loose change from the Biomess plant savings.

Vermont has a surfeit of non-profit jobs. Even those intended to be for profit aren’t, witness the dairy farmers. As for the rest, the Marxist in the Legislature are working very hard on either making them non-profit or running them out of the state.
With that, we have a NON-PROFIT NIRVANA, where quality of life reigns supreme.

The Stimulus funds enable us to continue staff and programs at current levels and to add back an important artist residency. Both are hugely important to Burlington’s downtown economy and the quality of life of the region, said Andrea Rogers, Executive Director and CEO, Flynn Theater, Burlington

You BETCHA, Andrea!

Congressman Welch voted so that ANY illegal that can get here has FREE health care! You have to pay for theirs and yours too.
Nice of him to spend your tax dollars that way.

It is clear that the Democratic leadership is keen to pass H.R. 3200 as written because it will allow illegal aliens to access taxpayer-funded health care.
Rep. Deal’s amendment would have prevented this from happening. Yet, you voted in the Energy and Commerce Committee against verifying the eligibility of government health care applicants. Why?

Do you really believe that the USA should pay for ANY AND ALL illegal aliens non-essential health services even though this will cost American and Vermont taxpayers billions of dollars?

Any and everybody who crossed the border, we pay for ANY AND ALL THEIR HEALTH CARE.

That’s what you voted for us to pay. Isn’t that JUST swell.

Why did you vote against Rep. Deal’s amendment, which prevents illegal aliens to access taxpayer-funded health services? Are you concerned that an illegal alien will be denied emergency care?
Why weren’t you paying attention to your own Democratic-appointed lawyer to the Committee who stated during the hearing, that the Deal’s amendment would not prevent illegal aliens from receiving emergency care?

You need to get your priorities straight and start protecting the interests of Vermont taxpayers and not the interests of illegal aliens! We pay taxes, they don’t! We pay your salary, they don’t!

Get it right! Get Pelosi’s hand out from under your shirt; Stop being her puppet!

This is for the walking dead, the zombies the feed off the MSM news to the exclusion of all else.

Diana West: But there’s still Cronkite’s offensive history

It’s time for a post-Cronkite post-mortem, but not on the late “icon” himself — the “most trusted man in America,” the “voice of God,” “the gold standard,” the “proxy for a nation,” or, in plainer English, the lush-lived celebrity “anchor” who died this month at age 92. [snip]

So, to use his own words, was Cronkite an honorable journalist who did the best he could?

No. What may — may — have resulted from forgivable misimpressions due to the “fog of war” long ago crystallized into obdurate lies. Cronkite never clarified the record, never admitted that the Tet offensive — the Vietcong’s surprise holiday attack on cities across South Vietnam — resulted in a military and political fiasco for North Vietnam.

This was becoming apparent even before the dust had settled in 1968, as we learn in Peter Braestrup’s indispensable “The Big Story”, one of the signal historical works of the 20th century, which meticulously analyzes the media’s failure to assess Tet correctly as a defeat for North Vietnam.

Even Leftist journalist Frances Fitzgerald in her Pulitzer Prize-winning “Fire in the Lake” reported that Tet had “seriously depleted” Vietcong forces and “wiped out” many of their “most experienced cadres,” noting that such losses drove “the southern movement for the first time into almost total dependency on the north.” Her conclusion: “By all the indices available to the American military, the Tet offensive was a major defeat for the enemy.”

And the enemy agreed. In a 1995 interview with The Wall Street Journal, Bui Tin, a member of the North Vietnamese general staff who in 1975 personally received the unconditional surrender of South Vietnam, called North Vietnam’s losses in Tet “staggering.”

Communist forces in the South, he explained, “were nearly wiped out by all the fighting in 1968. It took us until 1971 to re-establish our presence, but we had to use North Vietnamese troops as local guerillas. If the American forces had not begun to withdraw under Nixon in 1969,” he added, “they could have punished us severely.” [snip]

There is considerably more on “Uncle Walter” and his ideas.

The Terrible Truth About Walter Cronkite

In 1988, seven years after his retirement as anchorman of the CBS Evening News, Cronkite addressed a left-wing People for the American Way conference and denounced President Reagan for the “unilateral” military actions in Grenada, when the U.S. military evicted a communist gang, and Libya, when Reagan ordered a military strike in retaliation for the acts of terrorism against Americans. Cronkite despised Reagan’s peace-through-strength policies and said that the smartest president he ever met was Jimmy Carter.

Later, Cronkite denounced Operation Iraqi Freedom and attacked the Bush administration for its “arrogance.” [snip]

In 1989, while expressing the hope that the Soviet archives would one day be opened to demonstrate how the Kremlin manipulated American journalists such as Walter Duranty of the New York Times, who had lied and helped Stalin cover up his monstrous crimes that resulted in the deaths of 7-10 million Ukrainians, Irvine added that “It will be fascinating to see what they say about Walter Cronkite, who spent two years in Moscow after World War II as a UPI correspondent and who has been remarkably restrained in his criticism of that country ever since.”

This may sound harsh, but the fact is that Cronkite was consistently wrong about Soviet intentions, and his attitude dominated CBS News coverage of the old Soviet Union.

After the Soviet collapse, Irvine wrote a 1990 AIM Report about those personalities who had taken “a benign or even adulatory view of communism and the Soviet Union in the years since the 1917 Bolshevik coup d’etat.” Cronkite was on this list of “doves,” which also included “Hanoi Jane” Fonda.

It is fine to recognize Cronkite for his long life and many years as anchorman of the CBS Evening News. He captured important moments and reached millions. But don’t pretend that he was an objective journalist. [snip]

The zombie left, blinded to Walter’s dementia, leaped into the lap of his tilted successor, Dan “Courage” Rather who, despite using that word as his signature signoff, lacked that item.

What is it with the diminutive Walter? Duranty and Cronkite, both Soviet syncophants and Kool-Aid gulpers followed the same path. I’d severely vet any individual wishing to work as a journalist with the name Walter.

Robert J. Caldwell:
On Vietnam, Cronkite told it the way it wasn’t

Late CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite may have been at one time “the most trusted man in America,” but he was hardly infallible.

When he broke his own code of objectivity to editorialize against the Vietnam War, he got it very wrong with terrible consequences.

Cronkite made a celebrity trip to South Vietnam in the immediate wake of the 1968 Tet Offensive, during which some 100 cities and towns were attacked by communist Viet Cong forces. Cronkite and much of the American press played this as a disaster for American efforts.

Cronkite returned to deliver an unprecedented on-air editorial calling the war an “unwinnable stalemate.” He urged an end to U.S. “escalation” and called for negotiations with the North Vietnamese to end the conflict. Despite its undoubted shock effect and its damaging political consequences in the United States, Tet was in fact a crushing military defeat for the communists. The Viet Cong lost 40,000 of their best troops, a shattering blow from which they never recovered.

The national uprising confidently predicted by the communists never occurred. South Vietnamese troops, which the Viet Cong hoped would collapse or defect, instead fought resolutely. The communists failed to hold a single town or city they attacked.

The strategic consequences of Tet were also far from what Cronkite supposed. Tet effectively destroyed the Viet Cong as a major military force. Thereafter, the brunt of ground fighting in South Vietnam on the communist side was borne by the North Vietnamese army, a distinctly alien force in the South Vietnamese countryside.

Well, hoo de doo , Uncle Walter flat out lied!