My sister and I grew up during the time when the school system was being saturated with anti-smoking material. I remember it as any childhood memory – everything was bigger. The teachers were all-knowing, authority. “Smoking was bad. Smoking can be bad for people around you… etc.” Who knew what that would eventually become in today’s world? Not only was smoking bad for us, but the whole tobacco industry were beyond bad. Now if you’re seen with a cigarette in public, you might almost feel a need to run.
And it was all started in the school system. “Tell your parents that smoking is bad,” they said. And we did. We pestered my mom until she quit. When we went after my aunt, my mom told us to back off. We did. They did the same with alcohol of course – and probably a bunch of other stuff we didn’t notice.
So what are today’s school rooms and today’s hot-button topics going to be like?
I now know.
The gutless leadership we have in our country would love to send ACORN door to door, but they no longer have to. The 2010 census will be pushed into school rooms everywhere, and children will be told to push the program on parents who may not be interested in cooperating.
Think this can’t possibly be true?
Renee Jefferson-Copelan, chief of the Census Schools Program has said that “it’s great to reach the children because children are such strong voices in their homes.” Between January and March, the Census Bureau will put into play a week of “census education” in schools. During that week, posters, teaching guides, maps and lessons will be used to indoctrinate children in more than 118,000 schools. That’s 56 million children.
Our children.
But it doesn’t stop there. Not just grade-school persuasion will be in-play, but citizen volunteers are already actively recruiting college-age students across the nation to “build support for President Obama’s agenda” while they earn college credit while being “change” advocates.
Obama’s political campaign actually merged with the Democratic National Committee in January and is now being called Organizing For America. OFA is now offering internships on several websites including the teen favorite social networking site, Facebook.
“As an Organizing Intern, you’ll work side by side with OFA staff and community leaders to help build support for President Obama’s agenda,” reads some of the recruitment material. “You’ll learn core organizing principles that are crucial for any campaign and play an important role in building our organization in your state.”
Volunteers must commit to working at least 12 hours a week according to the OFA website and could receive college credit from their schools for doing so.
Set in tranquil blue tones, the Obama site also urges viewers to organize locally with their special online tools, titled lovingly, my.barrackobama.com.
“I’m asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington… I’m asking you to believe in yours,” reads the Obama quote which tops the website page.
So where does the use of children by the current administration stop? I’m not sure it does. If they are allowed to proceed with their census programming, one can easily imagine the use of children as mouthpieces for healthy eating, and teen informants who drop the dime when they catch their parents enjoying French fries or ice-cream. Guess I won’t have to inform on Ben and Jerry’s anymore to the White House. Kids all around the country will be doing it for me.
In 1922 an organization was started for youth in another country. Called the HJ, the organization had recruited nearly 25,000 youths from 14-years-old and up. A junior version of the group was also set up for boys aged 10 to 14. These children were viewed as future “supermen,” and were indoctrinated in the various views of their country’s ultimate leader.
The youth groups were organized into local cells on a “community” level. By the end of 1932, more than 107,000 children were involved in the program. One year later, there were 2,300,000 members. By 1936, there were five million and by that time, membership by children was required even when the parents protested. The membership had reached eight million by 1940.
So how did this juggernaut of the young get started? The nearest anyone can accurately determine, the genesis of the whole thing started with an article by Gergor Strasser in the 1920s. The title of the article, “Make Way You Old Ones,” gained momentum in an environment, which was bringing focus to the young. The propaganda focused on harnessing and exploiting the emotions of the young within the political arena.
This youth group, the HJ, were of course, the Hitler-Jugend.
The Hitler Youth.
I need some tobacco, some good rum and maybe some French fries. Care to join me?
Former top Democratic fundraiser Norman Hsu pleaded guilty in federal court Thursday to charges he cheated investors out of at least $20 million in a massive Ponzi scheme.
The 58-year-old Hsu (SHOO) pleaded guilty to 10 counts of wire and mail fraud before U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero.
“I knew what I was doing was illegal,” Hsu told the judge.
His contributions went 83% to Democrats; 17% to Other, and 0% to Republicans…
For more detail go to the smoking gun- they reported on this story back in December, but it was pushed under the rug because the Madoff case was the big news of the day.
UPDATE:
I reported above that Hsu was in fact a contributer to the Obama campaign – which should matter to Americans. What was not known was another interesting detail as to the extent of their relationship. Something the media will not report:
Businessman Norman Hsu, 58, was convicted by a jury in federal court in New York of violating election laws by making donations to political campaigns in other people’s names. Hsu also pleaded guilty on May 7 to charges of mail fraud and wire fraud in running a Ponzi scheme of up to $60 million.
Jurors convicted Hsu of violating four counts of federal election law between 2004 and 2007. During the trial, prosecutors said Hsu pressured some of the investors involved in his Ponzi scheme to make thousands of dollars in contributions to political candidates on his behalf.
Obama has considerably more of a connection to Hsu than Reuters relates. In 2007, The Washington Post reported in the story “Hsu Steered Major Fundraiser to Obama:”
Before becoming a major bundler for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign, disgraced Democratic donor Norman Hsu helped host a 2005 California event for Barack Obama’s political action committee and introduced the senator from Illinois to one of the biggest fundraisers for his presidential bid.
Federal Election Commission records show that Hsu gave $5,000 to Obama’s Hopefund PAC in connection with the fundraiser and that people publicly identified with Hsu and his companies gave an additional $19,500 to the PAC in 2005 and 2006.
Mark Gorenberg, who now sits on Obama’s national finance committee and is one of his biggest fundraisers, said Hsu organized an early 2005 event for the Hopefund and invited him to help raise money.
“He introduced me to Barack Obama,” Gorenberg said of Hsu. “He was working on an event for Barack’s PAC, and he asked me to help, and I did. Barack came up to San Francisco, and [Hsu] introduced him to a bunch of people.”
Obama’s relationship with sleazy hustlers like Norman Hsu doesn’t comport with the narrative of Mr. Hope and Change tailored by the mainstream media. That’s possibly why Hsu’s conviction, which occurred this morning, still hadn’t been reported on CNN as of 4:00 PM (ET) this afternoon.
Two of the latest corruption/fraud stories coming out of the media, ABOUT the media, are from the New York Slimes!
I realize that this is incredibly surprising to hear about one of the most reputable news organizations in existence today, but it is important to remember that it can happen to any of us…/sarc.
Acknowledging what the blogosphere has known for weeks, the New York Times finally went on record to admit that just before last Election Day it killed a politically sensitive news story involving corruption allegations that might have made the Obama campaign look bad.
But the admission on Sunday, which came seven months after NYT staff reporter Stephanie Strom’s reporting about possibly illegal coordination between the Obama campaign and ACORN last year, took the form of a snarky column from Clark Hoyt, the Old Gray Lady’s “public editor.” Hoyt used the word “nonsense” to describe the allegations of impropriety leveled against ACORN and the Obama campaign.
When isn’t the NYT snarky and condescending? It’s not like they have the country’s or the American citizens’ best interests at heart…
A little background:
The aborted story that gave rise to the Obama/ACORN controversy centers around information provided by Anita MonCrief, a former ACORN employee whom Hoyt acknowledges “fed information to Stephanie Strom of The Times for several articles on troubles within the group.” Apparently the information MonCrief provided was good.
We know this because Strom broke a number of important stories about ACORN and surely much of the information she used came from her trusted source Anita MonCrief. In July she reported that Dale Rathke, brother of ACORN founder Wade Rathke, embezzled nearly $1 million from the group. She also reported that ACORN management covered up the embezzlement for eight years, withholding information even from ACORN’s national board.
The next month Strom reported that Tides Foundation founder Drummond Pike, a comrade-in-arms of liberal philanthropist George Soros, had personally covered what remained of Wade Rathke’s debt (the embezzler had agreed to a slow-as-molasses repayment plan that would have kept him in debt well into old age).
In September Strom reported on two ACORN national board members’ lawsuit aimed at forcing ACORN to provide financial documents regarding the embezzlement.
She followed up the next month with a story on ACORN’s efforts to sever its remaining ties with its founder. (Strom reported that Wade Rathke resigned as chief organizer of ACORN. In fact, Rathke was fired, as shown in the ACORN national board’s minutes of June 20, 2008, available at page 11 of the linked PDF file.)
The same month Strom wrote about an internal memo written by ACORN’s lawyer that alerted the group to potential legal problems related to its organizational structure.
But apparently MonCrief’s information was suddenly no good when it might have embarrassed the Obama campaign.
Heidelbaugh testified before a congressional committee in March that the nonprofit group violated a host of tax, campaign finance, and other laws. She said the Obama campaign sent ACORN its “maxed out donor list” and asked two of the avowedly nonpartisan group’s employees “to reach out to the maxed out donors and solicit donations from them for Get Out the Vote efforts to be run by ACORN.”
As if the withholding of a story that size during a presidential election wasn’t enough, there is also proof of plagiarism by one of NYT’s most prominent/famous columnists; Maureen Dowd.
It was a wild Sunday for New York Times columnist. It opened with her latest column in the newspaper, which closed by declaring that she had once opposed a wide-ranging probe of the uses of torture, and who authorized and knew about it, during the Bush administration but now favored it. This brought some praise liberal news sites and bloggers often critical of Dowd.
But by mid-afternoon she was on the hot seat for using a paragraph almost word-for-word from one of the most prominent liberal bloggers, Jost Marshall of Talking Points Memo, without attribution. Charges of “plagiarism” ensued.
By early evening, Dowd had admitted wrongdoing, in an email to Huffington Post, and said she wanted to apologize to Marshall. She also said that the Times would issue a correction tomorrow — and the copy was changed in her column to attribute the line of thought to Marshall.
She seemed to be suggesting, however, that she had merely heard the line of argument from a friend, who did not attribute it to Marshall. This wouldn’t explain, however, why the rather lengthy sentence, a full paragraph, matched Marshall’s writing virtually word for word.
Can I ask why this liberal rag is still in business or is used as a credible source?
You don’t think there could be a reason she is hiding do you? Could it be that she doesn’t want to be trapped in yet another lie or contradictions from previous recollections of her CIA briefings?
The Speaker was invited to appear on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” ABC’s “This Week,” “Fox News Sunday” and CNN’s “State of the Union,” according to sources at the networks.
One source said Pelosi (D-Calif.) will be attending her granddaughter’s first communion in Phoenix on Sunday.
The Sunday morning talk show circuit is a traditional place to find politicians trying to recover from political missteps or trying to explain themselves after a week at the top of the news cycle. It can also give them a chance to set the agenda for the week ahead. A Sunday show appearance, with its in-depth, one-on-one interview format, gives politicians a chance to answer many questions on a specific topic, often resulting in a controversy being put to bed.
Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.), for example, opted to go on the Sunday morning show circuit after his decision to switch parties, appearing on “Meet the Press” and CBS’ “Face the Nation” on May 3.
Am I buying the “communion?” Nope! Everyone knows that you go on the Sunday morning circuit if there are current events going on in which you are involved… As many of us already know, the controversies will not be put to bed because Nancy Pelosi is not smart enough to lie well and tends to put her foot in her mouth. The fact that these lies are directed at the national intelligence community only hurts her more.
Barney Frank recently reneged on his vote for the original amendment that would stop any group under indictment or convicted of voter fraud to receive federal money/tax payer grants. He reneged because ACORN is a major player on the Hill these days. ACORN has helped elect Democrats for years now, although it attempts to call itself a non-partisan organization. The corruption and fraud only exacerbate the true problems facing this country and fair elections.
We also found out this week that less than 25% of votes coming in from overseas ever get counted. Many of these votes are from expats. or military service men and women, who, more than likely, lean towards the right.
Sen. Charles Schumer, chairman of the Senate Rules and Administration Committee, said the study, while providing only a snapshot of voting patterns, “is enough to show that the balloting process for service members is clearly in need of an overhaul.”
The committee, working with the Congressional Research Service, surveyed election offices in seven states with high numbers of military personnel: California, Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, Washington and West Virginia.
It said that of 441,000 absentee ballots requested by eligible voters living abroad – mainly active-duty and reserve troops – more than 98,000 were “lost” ballots that were mailed out but never received by election officials. Taking into account 13,500 ballots that were rejected for such reasons as a missing signature or failure to notarize, one-quarter of those requesting a ballot were disenfranchised.
The study found that an additional 11,000 ballots were returned as undeliverable.
Schumer’s office said that because a person living abroad must request the absentee ballot and show a clear intention to vote, voter negligence is not thought to be a major factor.
Rather, the New York Democrat said in a statement, there is a chronic problem of military voters being sent a ballot without sufficient time to complete it and send it back. He cited estimates that a ballot can take up to 13 days to reach an overseas voter.
Among the states surveyed, California had 30,000 “lost” votes out of 103,000 ballots mailed out. An additional 3,000 ballots were returned as undeliverable and 4,000 were rejected.
It’s no wonder that conservative politicians are up in arms over the obvious voter fraud that is occurring in this nation, which was supposed to exemplify free and fair elections. We have become so corrupt it seems that we may as well be a third world country. One of the heavy hitters that is lobbying to block funding for groups such as ACORN is Michele Bachmann.
Video:
Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann called on Congress Thursday to block ACORN’s access to federal housing funds, citing repeated charges of voter registration fraud against the low-income advocacy group.
The Republican congresswoman, flanked by an ACORN whistleblower and an attorney who worked on an ACORN case in Pennsylvania, escalated a media offensive against the group, which is a favorite target of conservatives who claim liberals are unjustly protecting a dysfunctional organization by allowing it access to taxpayer money.
“ACORN, as you know, is no stranger to the spotlight,” Bachmann said outside the Capitol. “Yet no matter how many times prosecutors investigate and even indict ACORN and their employees, they emerge unblemished as far as the federal government is concerned from having access to federal tax dollars.”
Bachmann, who hit the same themes in an op-ed in the Washington Times on Wednesday, complained that House Democrats killed her amendment to block organizations indicted for voter fraud from receiving federal housing money. She said ACORN has received at least $53 million in tax dollars since 1994, and that she will have new legislation in the coming weeks.
“We simply believe that the bar needs to be very high,” she said.
The call for congressional action comes after Nevada officials filed voter registration fraud charges against ACORN last week, and Pennsylvania authorities charged seven local ACORN workers with forging voter registration forms.
In the Nevada case, officials alleged the group illegally based employment and compensation on a quota system for voter registration. The group required canvassers to register 20 voters per shift or be fired, officials said, and gave bonus money to canvassers who registered more than 20 people.
ACORN issued a response to Bachmann Thursday accusing the congresswoman of “partisan witch hunts.”
How can there be a partisan witch hunt against a group that is being charged with fraud in various states by state attorneys who are both Democrat and Republic – but just seem to want to do the legal and ethical thing? If we really want to talk about witch hunts maybe we should discuss the Democrats going after the Bush administration with their “truth commission.”
The good news for Bachmann is the latest backing of a very influential Republican, Michael Steele. Steele and the RNC will fully support Michele’s call to present an amendment or legislation that will block funding to ACORN.
Republican National Chairman Michael Steele urged supporters Thursday to get behind Rep. Michele Bachmann’s drive to block public dollars from going to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.
