Obama Directs NASA to "Reach Out" to Muslim Nations
Tuesday, 06 Jul 2010 03:03 PM
By: Frank Gaffney
Just when you thought Barack Obama's toadying to Islam could not get any worse, now comes this: The president directed the new administrator of NASA, retired Marine Major Gen. Charles Bolden, as "perhaps [his] foremost" charge to "find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage more dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science . . . and math and engineering."
This comment came in an interview the NASA chief conducted with Al-Jazeera while touring the Middle East to mark the first anniversary of Mr. Obama's much-ballyhooed Cairo paean to Muslims.
Bolden elaborated, "It is a matter of trying to reach out and get the best of all worlds, if you will, and there is much to be gained by drawing in the contributions that are possible from the Muslim (nations)."
In an address to the American University in Cairo, Bolden added that Mr. Obama has "asked NASA to change . . . by reaching out to ‘nontraditional' partners and strengthening our cooperation in the Middle East, North Africa, Southeast Asia and in particular in Muslim-majority nations." He declared that "NASA is not only a space exploration agency, but also an Earth improvement agency."
As it happens, the NASA administrator made it pretty clear in his remarks to Al-Jazeera that the U.S. space program is not going anywhere without foreign help. That will soon be literally true since, with the retirement of the last space shuttle this fall, we will be entirely dependent on Russian launchers to put people into space.
Such a state of affairs will persist unless and until experimental American rockets being developed by private American concerns pan out. Or the Chinese offer us a ride.
Unfortunately, the prospect of America's space program relying — like a fading superpower version of "A Streetcar Named Desire's" Blanche DuBois — on the "kindness of strangers" is the inevitable result of programmatic decisions being taken by the Obama administration.
The most obvious one was the cancellation earlier this year of NASA's Constellation program, which was intended to provide a "man-rated" expendable rocket to replace the shuttle as America's means of putting humans into space.
The national security and commercial implications of this decision have been exacerbated, however, by two other, seemingly unrelated actions: President Obama's decision to stop producing long-range missile defense interceptors and to defer indefinitely any replacement of our aging nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile force.
As a result, real concerns are beginning to be expressed about the viability of the U.S. industrial base for solid-fuel rocket motors. Without government procurements in one or more of these areas — possibly for years to come, America will see at a minimum the continuing attrition of domestic suppliers for vital components and the steady erosion of the skills required to manufacture boosters capable of reliably lofting large payloads.
Matters would be made worse when one combines this reality with another Obama priority: relaxing export controls on sensitive dual-use technologies.
The argument usually made is that such steps are necessary to ensure that American producers can compete in world markets and that "higher fences around fewer technologies" can safeguard what absolutely must be protected, and allow easier transfer of products that need not be.
In practice, it is predictable that the result of this policy will be that manufacturing jobs associated with presently controlled technologies will move offshore, where production can take place at lower cost. And the price that will surely be extracted by Saudi Arabia and other wealthy Muslim nations from whom NASA will be seeking "contributions" will be access to know-how and possibly space-launch-related production capabilities currently deemed too sensitive to transfer.
It would be bad enough if the results of such initiatives would be simply to build up America's commercial competitors. Given that many of the relevant technologies are inherently applicable to military uses — notably, delivering nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction over long distances via ballistic missiles — these steps will ineluctably result in greater threats to American citizens, interests, and allies, as well.
Worse yet, in a recently unveiled policy pronouncement, President Obama has expressed an openness to exploring Russian and Chinese ideas for new, multilateral space arms control negotiations.
As Moscow and Beijing have long appreciated, unavoidable verification and definitional problems ensure that, as a practical matter, any treaty likely to emerge from such talks would further weaken America's ability to protect its interests in space and on the ground — without denying such advantages to our potential adversaries.
As in so many areas, it seems President Obama's space policies and programs are designed to "fundamentally transform" America from a preeminent world power to just another nation, dependent on the good will and assistance of others to safeguard its interests.
To the extent that such reliance is placed on sources like the Russians, the Chinese and "the Muslim world" that have made little secret of their ambition to weaken, if not destroy, the United States, it is likely to end badly, as it did for poor Blanche DuBois.
Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy, a columnist for the Washington Times and host of the syndicated program, Secure Freedom Radio, |
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We need volunteers to help with the booth at the Anoka County Fair. July 27-August 1, daily 10-10 in 3 hour shifts. Please contact the SD48 leadership.
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San Diego Urged to Consider Bankruptcy
Thursday, 17 Jun 2010 12:43 PM Article By: Dan Weil
The city of San Diego should consider bankruptcy, the county of San Diego Grand Jury said in a recent report. The grand jury, which examines local governments in addition to indicting suspected criminals, says such a step could help the city cut its onerous retirement and health benefits. The city has an unfunded pension obligation of $2.2 billion and an unfunded retiree healthcare liability of $1.3 billion, according to the report. San Diego represents the fifth major city this year to arouse bankruptcy talk by the count of Bloomberg columnist Joe Mysak. San Diego’s neighbor Los Angeles is one of the others. San Diego’s situation is unsustainable, the report points out. “The city leadership should acknowledge the financial crisis the city is facing and make fundamental changes in how our government operates in order to avoid future crises,” it says. However, bankruptcy won’t be an easy path, experts say. “It will be difficult to make the case that the city is insolvent,” Natalie Cohen of National Municipal Research, told Mysak. “It seems the grand jury report is looking to bust open the discussion about the irrevocable nature of pension obligations.” Ironically enough, while cities teeter on the verge of bankruptcy, municipal bond prices continue to rise. "The day of reckoning is here," Jeffrey Schoenfeld, chief investment officer of Brown Brothers Harriman, told the Wall Street Journal. "But municipal investors continue to act as if there's no default risk in municipal bonds."
© Moneynews. All rights reserved. |
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Think it can't happen here? These anti-American, anti-Christian board members are spending their district's money on this travesty of a lawsuit, when they've already lost. This is the kind of thinking that drives the marxist\socialist\democrat\liberal\"progressive" agenda, and this is the kind of thinking and agenda we as conservatives, need to fight for. Get Up Off The Couch !!
Poway School Board Continues Fight to Ban “God” In Patriotic Classroom Banners
March 09. 2010
ANN ARBOR, MI – In a closed-session meeting held on Monday night, the Poway Unified School District board in San Diego, California, voted to appeal the ruling of Federal District Court Judge Roger T. Benitez that held school officials violated math teacher Bradley Johnson’s constitutional rights when they ordered him to remove two patriotic banners from the walls of his classroom because they referred to “God.”
The banners included the phrases, “In God We Trust, ” “One Nation Under God, ” and “God Bless America.” The school district claimed Johnson’s banners, which had hung in his classroom for two decades without complaint, advocated an impermissible Judeo-Christian view point and may be offensive to a Muslim student.
However, the school district left untouched displays that included a 35 to 40 foot string of Tibetan prayer flags with images of Buddha; a poster with the lyrics from John Lennon’s anti-religion song “Imagine, ” which begins, Imagine there’s no Heaven; a poster with Hindu leader Mahatma Gandhi’s “7 Social Sins;” a poster of Muslim leader Malcolm X, and a poster of Buddhist leader Dali Lama.
The appeal will be filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
The Thomas More Law Center, a national public interest law firm based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, filed the federal lawsuit on Johnson’s behalf after the school district ordered him to take down his banners in January 2007. The Law Center vows to defend Judge Benitez’s ruling before the Ninth Circuit and to the U.S. Supreme Court, if necessary. [Court ruling attached].
Richard Thompson, President and Chief Counsel for the Thomas More Law Center, commented, “It seems the Poway School District has a distaste for our nation’s Christian heritage represented by Mr. Johnson’s patriotic slogans. This is another example of public school boards attempting to eradicate the essential role played by Christianity in our nation’s history. This attempt to rewrite American history and propagandize our children must stop! We are in this fight for the long haul, and we intend to uphold our Constitution and the values it protects, including Mr. Johnson’s right to display his patriotic banners.”
The two banners at issue are approximately seven feet wide and two feet tall and contained phrases highlighting our Nation’s history and religious heritage. One banner with red, white, and blue stripes hung on the wall for twenty-five years and displayed famous patriotic phrases: “In God We Trust, ” “One Nation Under God, ” “God Bless America, ” and “God Shed His Grace on Thee.” The other banner, which was displayed for seventeen years, contained an excerpt from the Declaration of Independence: “All Men Are Created Equal, They Are Endowed By Their Creator.”
In a public statement made shortly after the vote to appeal the ruling, School Board member Jeff Mangum stated, “f this is allowed, what else can go up on the wall?” The board member’s question was answered by Judge Benitez, who noted in his ruling that school officials banned Johnson’s patriotic displays while permitting other teachers to display personal posters and banners promoting partisan political issues such as gay rights and environmental causes, including global warming.
Robert Muise, the Thomas More Law Center Senior Trial Counsel handling the case, commented, “The school district’s public statements about this case are dishonest. School officials have stated under oath that they have no objection to allowing teachers to promote personal political causes such as gay rights and global warming. And they have no objection to a 40-foot display of sacred, Tibetan prayer flags in a science classroom, among countless other religious and political displays. But they do have a personal objection to Mr. Johnson’s patriotic banners because they recognize a fundamental truth that school officials dislike: God plays a prominent role in our Nation’s history and heritage.”
Judge Benitez’s 32-page opinion was strongly worded and critical of the Poway school districts aversion to God: “[The school district officials] apparently fear their students are incapable of dealing with diverse viewpoints that include God’s place in American history and culture. . . . That God places prominently in our Nation’s history does not create an Establishment Clause violation requiring curettage and disinfectant for Johnson’s public high school classroom walls. It is a matter of historical fact that our institutions and government actors have in past and present times given place to a supreme God.”
Thompson concluded, “To avoid the fact that our nation was founded on Christian principles is to rewrite history in favor of political correctness. What our public school system needs is more teachers like Brad Johnson.”
The Thomas More Law Center defends and promotes America’s Christian heritage and moral values, including the religious freedom of Christians, time-honored family values, and the sanctity of human life. It supports a strong national defense and an independent and sovereign United States of America. The Law Center accomplishes its mission through litigation, education, and related activities. It does not charge for its services. The Law Center is supported by contributions from individuals, corporations and foundations, and is recognized by the IRS as a section 501(c)(3) organization. You may reach the Thomas More Law Center at (734) 827-2001 or visit our website at www.thomasmore.org.
http://www.thomasmore.org/downloads/sb_thomasmore/Johnson-PowayOrderGrantingSummaryJudgment.pdf |
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The Top 100 donors to political parties ranked by dollars spent. Also shows which parties they donate to.
The democrats are afraid someone besides the unions would be able to donate to campaigns and spend money on political ads.
http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/list.php?order=A |
Katherine Kersten: At U, future teachers may be reeducated
They must denounce exclusionary biases and embrace the vision. (Or else.)
By KATHERINE KERSTEN, Star Tribune
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.
The task group is part of the Teacher Education Redesign Initiative, a multiyear project to change the way future teachers are trained at the U's flagship campus. The initiative is premised, in part, on the conviction that Minnesota teachers' lack of "cultural competence" contributes to the poor academic performance of the state's minority students. Last spring, it charged the task group with coming up with recommendations to change this. In January, planners will review the recommendations and decide how to proceed.
The report advocates making race, class and gender politics the "overarching framework" for all teaching courses at the U. It calls for evaluating future teachers in both coursework and practice teaching based on their willingness to fall into ideological lockstep.
The first step toward "cultural competence," says the task group, is for future teachers to recognize -- and confess -- their own bigotry. Anyone familiar with the reeducation camps of China's Cultural Revolution will recognize the modus operandi.
The task group recommends, for example, that prospective teachers be required to prepare an "autoethnography" report. They must describe their own prejudices and stereotypes, question their "cultural" motives for wishing to become teachers, and take a "cultural intelligence" assessment designed to ferret out their latent racism, classism and other "isms." They "earn points" for "demonstrating the ability to be self-critical."
The task group opens its report with a model for officially approved confessional statements: "As an Anglo teacher, I struggle to quiet voices from my own farm family, echoing as always from some unstated standard. ... How can we untangle our own deeply entrenched assumptions?"
The goal of these exercises, in the task group's words, is to ensure that "future teachers will be able to discuss their own histories and current thinking drawing on notions of white privilege, hegemonic masculinity, heteronormativity, and internalized oppression."
Future teachers must also recognize and denounce the fundamental injustices at the heart of American society, says the task group. From a historical perspective, they must "understand that ... many groups are typically not included" within America's "celebrated cultural identity," and that "such exclusion is frequently a result of dissimilarities in power and influence." In particular, aspiring teachers must be able "to explain how institutional racism works in schools."
After indoctrination of this kind, who wouldn't conclude that the American Dream of equality for all is a cruel hoax? But just to make sure, the task force recommends requiring "our future teachers" to "articulate a sophisticated and nuanced critical analysis" of this view of the American promise. In the process, they must incorporate the "myth of meritocracy in the United States," the "history of demands for assimilation to white, middle-class, Christian meanings and values, [and] history of white racism, with special focus on current colorblind ideology."
What if some aspiring teachers resist this effort at thought control and object to parroting back an ideological line as a condition of future employment? The task group has Orwellian plans for such rebels: The U, it says, must "develop clear steps and procedures for working with non-performing students, including a remediation plan."
And what if students' ideological purity is tainted once they begin to do practice teaching in the public schools? The task group frames the danger this way: "How can we be sure that teaching supervisors are themselves developed and equipped in cultural competence outcomes in order to supervise beginning teachers around issues of race, class, culture, and gender?"
Its answer? "Requir[e] training/workshop for all supervisors. Perhaps a training session disguised as a thank you/recognition ceremony/reception at the beginning of the year?"
When teacher training requires a "disguise," you know something sinister is going on. |
The Inquisition of Global Warming
A Commentary by Debra J. Saunders
Tuesday, December 01, 2009
This just in from the Times of London: After the leak of highly embarrassing e-mail messages from the University of East Anglia's influential Climatic Research Unit, CRU has been forced to admit that it dumped "the original raw" climate data used to bolster the case for human-caused global warming, while retaining only the "value-added" -- read: massaged -- data.
In short, the CRU dumped the scientific data, but archived information that supports its conclusions. "It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years," wrote Times environment editor Jonathan Leake.
Of course, global warming skeptics see Climategate as vindication. For years, global warming activists have maintained that they alone could claim the mantle of dispassionate science, while skeptics were venal, nutty or both.
The publication of these e-mails puts an end to that happy conceit, as they reveal a small cabal of scientists obsessed with obliterating dissenting scholarship and destroying the reputations of any who stood in their way.
For years, I've read global warming activists cite the work of UC San Diego science historian Naomi Oreskes, who looked at 928 abstracts of peer-reviewed articles from 1993 and 2003 and found, "Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position" in favor of man-made global warming.
No surprise, her unbelievable claim was wrong. In a leaked e-mail, CRU Director Phil Jones complained of a 2003 peer-reviewed article that departed from global warming orthodoxy. Jones went so far as to boast, "I will be e-mailing the journal (Climate Research) to tell them I'm having nothing to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor," who approved printing the piece.
In 2004, Jones said he would keep two troublesome papers out of a U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report "somehow -- even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"
In another e-mail, Pennsylvania State University environmental sciences Professor Michael Mann proposed considering a boycott of Climate Research. But that's nothing compared with Benjamin D. Santer, a climate scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who, the Washington Post reported, said he was tempted to beat up skeptic Pat Michaels.
Polls show that Americans are cooling on the notion of man-made global warming. I must credit the bully mentality of activists, whose claims often defy common sense -- and at times, simple decency.
The defying-common-sense part: They claim that no credible scientist departs from the IPCC orthodoxy. Counter with some names -- Richard Lindzen, Fred Singer, William Gray, John Christy, Don Easterbrook, Piers Corbyn, Roy Spencer, Pat Michaels, James O'Brien -- and they impugn their scientific credentials.
If they have to redefine peer review, they'll do that, too. And then they ask you to trust them on the dumped CRU data. After all, they're scientists.
COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS.COM |
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You are invited to attend a free screening of
Not Evil, Just Wrong: The true Cost of Global Warming Hysteria
The movie looks at how false, extreme environmentalism threatens the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people in the developed and developing world. Whether you loved An Inconvenient Truth or hated it, I think you're going to be very curious what this documentary brings forth and it's perspective on the climate debate.
Here are the details:
Thursday, November 5th
6:00 social, 6:30 movie (80 minutes in length)
Ramsey City Hall
Alexander Ramsey Room
7550 Sunwood Dr. in Ramsey
Get Engaged... Join us on Thursday!!
For more information, contact DeeDee at 763-323-2026
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Lord Christopher Monckton is one of the most respected climate researchers in the world and spoke at Bethel College in October. He brought enough evidence to prove to all but the completely deranged that "global warming" and "climate change" are not real, but just words the left uses to try to scare people into giving up their money and freedom. Everyone who values TRUTH needs to watch HIS PRESENTATION ON YOUTUBE.
More Global Warming/Climate Change links to document the lies of "scientists", spread by the fraud Gore.
http://www.nocapandtrade.com/climategate/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/25/climategate-hide-the-decline-codified/
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/12/understanding_climategates_hid.html
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 Inviting everyone to come and watch the first Truth Tour presentation following the BPOU Meeting on Thursday Sept. 10, at 8pm. The meeting begins at 7pm, and will be done by 8pm, so we hope all who have middle school and High School kids will show up with their children and watch the presentation with them and give us feedback afterwards.
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