To those of us who understand the inherent wastefulness and inefficiency of public bureaucracies (i.e. gubimint), today’s Boston Globe story on the “stimulus” is hardly surprising. The same people who brought you the ” stimulus” want to “stimulate” your health care.  Fight them. Here are some story excerpts; they speak for themselves.

Organizations that received stimulus money miscounted jobs, filed erroneous figures, or claimed jobs for work that has not yet started.

One of the largest reported jobs figures comes from Bridgewater State College, which is listed as using $77,181 in stimulus money for 160 full-time work-study jobs for students. But Bridgewater State spokesman Bryan Baldwin said the college made a mistake and the actual number of new jobs was “almost nothing.’’

“There were no jobs created. It was just shuffling around of the funds,’’ said Susan Kelly, director of property management for Boston Land Co., which reported retaining 26 jobs with $2.7 million in rental subsidies for its affordable housing developments in Waltham.

Massachusetts property owners received $75.5 million in rental subsidies from the stimulus bill, for a reported total of 437 jobs. Recipients of 27 of the 87 contracts reported zero jobs. The others, meanwhile, simply reported the number of employees working at the property. If they received two contracts, for a larger property, they reported the employee figure twice.

The only good thing to say about this is that the respondents appear to be honest about the shortcomings of this scam.

In a refreshing moment, a Reagan-appointed federal judge tossed a lawsuit filed by a group of teachers who made the patently absurd claim that the state’s teacher licensing test is unfair against people of color. The Boston Globe notes that the judge’s ruling “…was based on legal technicalities, but in his 11-page decision the judge seemed to take issue with the lawsuit itself, saying a teacher’s qualifications should not hinge on a legal definition.”

The story also notes: “In a time of growing diversity among students in classrooms across the state, educators and researchers suggest that academically low-achieving student groups such as blacks, Latinos, and English-language learners could fare better if they are more often taught by teachers of similar background.” What a load of garbage that argument is. “Academically low-achieving student groups” could fare better if they were taught by competent teachers, regardless of what those teachers look like.

The Boston Globe informs us that Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick’s administration “… urged approval of a controversial Gloucester charter school earlier this year, over the fierce objections of city residents and the advice of state specialists, based not on its merits but because it would further the governor’s political agenda, according to a recently published e-mail.” Wonderful!

“The e-mail,” the story notes, “..contrasted with the administration’s repeated denials that politics played a role in approval of the charter school and could potentially weaken its credibility as it seeks legislative approval of proposals to help the state’s worst schools.”

Wouldn’t it be nice if Gov. Patrick approved more charter schools not for political purposes, but because they were the right thing to do? And don’t you wonder if President Obama is leaning on Gov. Patrick not to run for re-election?

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(Hat tip to Lancelhoff for assistance rendered on posting)

I had the privilege of interviewing Frances Rice for my radio show in 2008. For those unfamiliar, Dr. Rice chairs the National Black Republican Association. As such, she easily ranks as one of America’s foremost apologists for conservative matters. She has actually managed to outdo herself with her latest work, entitled “In Commemoration of Juneteenth – The Celebration of Black Freedom”. In the article,(Click here to read), Dr. Rice takes the reader on a systematic and devastating tour of the history of the Democrat Party in America, a party established, defined, and perpetuated by its support of and for slavery and segregation. For example:

Southern Democrats passed discriminatory Black Codes in 1865 to suppress, restrict, and deny
blacks the same privileges as whites. The Codes forced blacks to serve as apprentices to their
former slave masters.
In 1866, the Ku Klux Klan was started by Democrats to lynch and terrorize Republicans, black and
white, and the Ku Klux Klan became the terrorist arm of the Democratic Party.

Undaunted, Democrats passed discriminatory Jim Crow Laws in 1875 to restrict the rights of blacks to
use public facilities. In response, Republicans passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875 which prohibited
racial discrimination in public facilities.
Shamefully, Democrats fought against anti-lynching laws, and when the Democrats regained control
of Congress in 1892, they passed the Repeal Act of 1894 that overturned civil right laws enacted by
Republicans.

One could safely venture that the majority of Americans are unaware of this history, or, would attribute it to conservatives and/or the Republican Party, proving Churchill’s assertion that “History is writtenby the victors”. The Democrat victory comes in the form of dominance of the academy by its liberal members, who dominate the teaching and journalism professions. This legacy of misinformation will be countered by the efforts of people like Dr. Rice and Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby. If the national Republican Party is serious about winning elections again, it would do well to enlist Dr. Rice as a spokesperson.

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A tip of the hat to my Twitter compadre Staunch Conserv for alerting me to this publication detailing the failures of American public “schools”.  The blame for this sordid state of affairs rests squarely on the shoulders of American liberals, those self-anointed bastions of integrity, compassion, and social justice. It’s easy to be “compassionate” when it doesn’t cost you anything, like perhaps incurring the wrath of teachers unions, of which the modern day Democrat Party has become a wholly-owned subsidiary. Which brings us to the shameful tale of Washington D.C.’s Opportunity Scholarship program. The Wall Street Journal has done an excellent job of chronicling the key issues surrounding this situation. I link to the most recent pieces here and here. Today, the battle shifted directly to Washington, D.C. where school choice activists rallied for their cause. Predictably, the Know-Nothing crowd, took the shallow way out and effectively ended the program for future enrollees whilst preserving it for current enrollees. The cynical view is that the public will forget about the issue entirely and that the poor people will fade into obscurity. We here at Patriot Games will do our best to see that this issue does NOT fade away.

Is free speech being suppressed at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst?

Apparently, former Boston Herald columnist Don Feder agitated the wrong people when he appeared at UMASS-Amherst a few weeks ago. As UMASS-Amherst senior Greg Collins notes in Human Events, Feder “…had to end his speech abruptly after ten minutes due to repeated heckling and interruptions. Protesters incessantly yelled, booed, hissed, jeered, and shouted at him during his talk. Others surged into the room through the side door after admittance was halted, and many of them turned chairs around rambunctiously to incite further disruptions. One protester even brought a rat into the auditorium. Overall, leftist demonstrators successfully and intentionally created organized chaos at the event.

“Astonishingly, UMass officials have blamed Feder for the ruckus, not those students who prevented him from speaking. In a letter to the Boston Globe, Ed Blaguszewski, a spokesman for UMass, wrote, ‘Feder chose to discontinue his speech,’ thereby absolving the police officers, the protestors, and the administration of any culpability.”

There’s something about the sight of a conservative Republican on a progressive college campus that seems to rouse certain people into a hateful fervor. Collins asks: “Does this incident demonstrate liberal bias at the University of Massachusetts Amherst? Try a thought experiment with me: would UMass officials have allowed conservative students to interrupt and shout down Sen. John Kerry and Gov. Deval Patrick, both of whom have spoken on campus within the past few years? Furthermore, would have UMass administrators then blamed Kerry and Patrick for the commotion?

“Truth be told, conservatives would never engage in that type of disrespectful behavior, for we understand that tolerance is a two-way street. Students should be allowed to explore all ideas, not just the ones that liberal students and administrators prefer. A balanced education, after all, is not attained when only one side of an issue is presented.”

The sabotage at free speech at UMASS-Amherst is no surprise–it’s been happing at major colleges and universities for years. It’s bizarre that college leftists are so threatened by conservative speakers: it’s not like conservatives have any real power right now, in this state or in any region of the country besides the South.

Feder has always had a knack for riling up the left. His Herald column, which ran from 1983 to 2002, took dead aim at progressive ideology and its internal contradictions. Certainly, progressives were relieved to see Feder leave the Herald, since they wouldn’t have to read his words anymore. It appears, however, that some progressives don’t even want his voice to be heard.

Boston Herald columnists and WTKK-FM talk radio stars  Margery Eagan and Michael Graham have a slight disagreement today over Graham’s successful effort to get Boston College to reverse its decision to invite 1960s radical terrorist William Ayers to speak on-campus. Graham is under fire by Boston progressives for his anti-Ayers activism:

And that’s when the Angry Left turned their sights on me.

I attacked “free speech.” I was a talk radio hypocrite, only supporting controversial opinions from the right. My favorite is the blogger bemoaning “a verbal terrorist assault by right-wing yakker Michael Graham.”

That’s right – the guy who founded a terrorist group and said post-9/11 “I wish I’d done more” isn’t a terrorist. But the guy who reports his itinerary is.

Such is the intellectual rigor of the contemporary left.

Eagan is nowhere near as radical as the anti-Graham blogosphere bashers, but she isn’t exactly pleased by Graham’s initiative:

At BC the uproar was fueled Friday by WTKK-FM talk host and Herald opinion columnist Michael Graham, a conservative and, full disclosure, a friend and colleague. E-mails started streaming into BC. Bomb-makers have no free speech rights – that became the argument.

Too bad BC didn’t do what Columbia did in 2007 when that Israel-hating lunatic Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, spoke at their New York campus. They let him speak – but not before he was brutally denounced, his sadistic atrocities detailed, for 15 minutes, as he sat on stage 20 feet from his denouncer, Columbia University’s president.

How instructive for BC students, and satisfying for Ayers’ foes, might that have been?

When I heard about Graham’s efforts to shotblock the Ayers speech, I couldn’t help thinking that he was motivated in part by a desire to give the academic left a taste of its own medicine. After all, silencing conservative speech has been the left’s stock-in-trade at major colleges and universities. As Eagan herself notes,

Typically, it’s conservatives who complain, with justification, when their political brethren get the heave-ho from left-leaning academia. Right-wing provocateur Ann Coulter is drowned out by jeers at the University of Connecticut or hit by a pie at the University of Arizona.

Two weeks ago, ex-Boston Herald columnist Don Feder, a conservative, was harassed at University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he was invited to speak by college Republicans. Four times he began a speech arguing against special “hate crime” classifications. Four times he was cut short by catcalls and laughter. At one point students stood up and turned to sit with their backs to him. “Ironically I was talking about free speech,” Feder said yesterday. “And I wasn’t allowed to speak. So there you go.”

Even if payback did play a role in Graham’s anti-Ayers efforts, there’s a part of me that asks: so what? Maybe the academic left should know how it feels to be silenced for a change.

Progressives who are angry at Graham should ask themselves: if what happened to Ayers is wrong, isn’t it also wrong for conservatives and Republicans to be silenced, harassed or threatened when they show up to speak at a college or university? Is the “silencing of dissent” only wrong when it’s done to a liberal?

I understand the argument that Ayers should have the right to speak at BC, his evil past actions notwithstanding. However, one must ask: of the folks who support Ayers’ right to speak at BC, how many would also support, say, a conservative student group’s effort to have William Kristol speak at the school? After all, according to the antiwar left, Kristol bears some responsibility for the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq because he strongly supported President Bush’s decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power.

Yesterday, Eagan’s WTKK colleague Jim Braude admitted that the left’s past treatment of conservative speakers at colleges and universities has been atrocious. Well, two wrongs may not make a right–but doesn’t it make it even?

A major chink in the liberal/Democrat armor: their snobbery regarding education. As a party, Democrats are a wholly-owned subsidiary of the teachers unions. They endlessly profess their “support” of public education. However, the facts on the ground are somewhat different when their own children are involved. In that case, the children of said liberals/Democrats almost invariably send their children to…. Private Schools. What a surprise. Sandra Tsing Loh points this out beautifully.

Tags: SandraTsing Loh, education, sarah palin, democrat, patriot games radio, social internet radio, internet, radio,

Let’s Not, and Say We Did – New York Times. The Bottom Line Radio expanded view:

1) Education, education, education. Those who find themselves on the outside looking in tend to be frightfully undereducated relative to those who are “affluent”. Korean, Vietnamese, Chinese and Indian immigrants, are among those who come to the United States “on the outside looking in” and emerge on the affluent side. These groups also tend to pursue quality education AGGRESSIVELY.

2) Marriage first, children and parenthood later. There is overwhelming empirical evidence to support the fact that unwed parenthood is nearly perfectly positively correlated to poverty. It’s hard to aggressively pursue a quality education while simultaneously raising children, particularly as a single parent.

3) Learn Manners. Never forget the importance of Yes, No, Please, Thank You. These words, sincerely uttered, can work wonders, even when all else has apparently failed.

4) Eliminate political correctness. It insults people’s intelligence, fans the flames of animosity, and perpetuates resentment among groups.