http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ MSNBC is to news channels as Ringling Bros’ Clown College is to Harvard University. There’s a certain distant resemblance. Everyone sits behind desks and reads from teleprompters. And that’s where the resemblance ends. The cable news version of Air America only has two topics. 1. How Congressional Republicans are obstructing some bill or measure […]
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/06/the_guillotine_–_a_film_review.html Andrew Lau’s (Infernal Affairs, Legend of the Fist, The Return of the Chen Zhen) The Guillotines is a visual feast, with beautifully reconstructed Qing-era costumery, important hairstyles, court pageantry, authentic architectural icons, eye-pleasing rustic villages and vistas, and codes of honor. The fight scenes, and those featuring the remarkable decapitational “guillotines” are ablaze with […]
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/06/orwell_goes_to_college.html
As yet another edition of the text titled Writing and Reading across the Curriculum edited by Laurence Behrens and Leonard J. Rosen is rolled out, I am faced with a serious dilemma concerning academic integrity. In chapter 11 entitled “Have You Heard This? The Latest on Rumor” I read one after another essay with a pro-Obama tilt. What irony for a book that purports to be about critical thinking acquisition!
In their introduction to the chapter, the editors write “[c]onsider political rumors, which often arise out of fear about what a president or political party might do unless stopped. During the health care debate of 2009, so many rumors were competing for public attention (among them, the government’s ‘death panels’) that the White House eventually created a Web site to attempt to set the record straight” (341).
Apparently Behrens and Rosen conveniently forget pro-Obama sycophant Paul Krugman who recently admitted that, indeed,
We’re going to need more revenue, we’re going to need, and probably in the end, surely in the end it will require some sort of middle class taxes as well. So again, we won’t be able to pay …without some increase in taxes, not a huge one, but some increase on taxes on the middle class, maybe a value-added tax. We’re going to have to make decisions about health care, not pay for health care that has no demonstrated medical benefits. So you know the snarky version I use, which is, I shouldn’t even say because it will get me in trouble, is death panels and sales taxes is how we do this.
Will other instructors who teach from this text offer up this information to their students who are already low-information individuals? Will they update students about Sarah Palin’s comments concerning the recent government intervention in the case of a 10-year old with cystic fibrosis? Will they expose the outright hypocrisy of Sebelius?
Then in the same introduction, Behrens and Rosen assert that “President Obama felt compelled to release his long form birth certificate to put to rest the stubbornly persistent rumor that he was not born in the United States” (341). Then there are “the falsehoods about Barack Obama’s citizenship [which] are the most prominent recent manifestations of rumor in American presidential politics” (341).
Again, how do these academics refute the in-depth American Thinker investigations that have repeatedly exposed the forged documents? Certainly I will be telling my students about the Obama literary agency that touted Obama’s birth in Kenya. But since the mainstream media ignored this information, most of my colleagues remained uninformed and cannot present these details.
In fact, Nick Chase and others have painstakingly pointed out that the Obama “birth certificate” is “a fake.” Will other instructors present the “Obama Built This Forgery” piece to contemplate? Consequently, neither Behrens nor Rosen saw fit to include this information and instead made an outright assertion, and disregarded countering evidence. This is hardly notable in a text which is supposed to assist a student with “deducing consequences from what he knows, and … seeking relevant sources of information to inform himself.”
The relevant source in this chapter is none other than Cass R. Sunstein. Will the students have a chance to consider the myriad of Sunstein’s ideas? Labeled as a “rumor expert” Mr. Sunstein seems most comfortable assaulting freedom of speech since he wrote,
http://www.carolineglick.com/e/2013/06/woundedand-dangerous.php?utm_source=MadMimi&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Wounded___and+dangerous&utm_ US Secretary of State John Kerry looks like a bit of an idiot these days. On Monday he announced that he will be returning to Israel and the Palestinian Authority and Jordan for the fifth time since he was sworn into office on February 1. That is an average of more than one visit […]
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=4591 Two appointments made this week by U.S. President Barack Obama have been causing a stir reminiscent of the brouhaha surrounding his nomination a few months ago of Chuck Hagel as defense secretary. The first was the promotion of Susan Rice from ambassador to the U.N. to national security adviser. The second was the filling […]
http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/novelists-view-world/2013/jun/7/me-and-esther-williams/#.UbJA9-Lrwv8.twitter When I came to the United States the movies were magic…double features and I often sta through both twice. I wanted only to be Esther Williams and marry Peter Lawford….rsk WASHINGTON, June 7, 2013 — Right now she is probably teaching the angels how to swim. Esther Williams is dead. She left us last […]
The inevitable corruption of the permanent bureaucracy http://www.nationalreview.com/article/350537/all-seeing-state-mark-steyn A few years ago, after one corruption scandal too many, the then Liberal government in Canada announced that, to prevent further outbreaks of malfeasance, it would be hiring 300 new federal auditors plus a bunch of ethics czars, and mandating “integrity provisions” in government contracts, including “prohibitions […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/350546/what-private-what-not-andrew-c-mccarthy The national security of the United States justifies the collection of “metadata.” Seemed reasonable to me. “I want the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of every person in the five boroughs.” I barked the instruction to one of the eager young interns whose job was not to wonder aloud why cranky federal prosecutors made […]
Dear Rachel Abrams was a witty, irreverent, sassy, brilliant friend and writer and the daughter of my beloved friends Midge and Norman Podhoretz, sister of Naomi Munson, Ruthie Blum and John Podhoretz. Here is John’s tribute to his sister.
John Podhoretz |
Rachel Abrams, the legendary Bad Rachel of the Internet, was as tender a woman as she was the soul of toughness on her blog. Rachel died this morning at the age of 62 after a three-year battle against stomach cancer. She was an extraordinary artist and a writer of great power. She was my sister. The best tribute to her is her own work. Here, from 1988, is a short story she published in COMMENTARY called “School Days.” Her memory will be for a blessing as her life was our blessing.
And here is a sample of her brilliant writing at her blog. Rest in peace Rachel…an angel now among angels. rsk
http://badrachel.blogspot.com/2011/05/what-if-arab-spring-springs-leak.html
What If The Arab Spring Springs A Leak?
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/liberal-scandal-strategy-the-cincinnatibenghazi-connection?f=puball Ongoing revelations of fraud and deceit on the part of the Obama Administration in response to the Benghazi attacks, combined with expanding news of politically motivated abuses of power by the Internal Revenue Service, might seem to be putting the Democrat juggernaut on the ropes, or at the very least relegating the second term […]
