It’s Monday, October 3rd, 2011….and before we begin, we say good-bye to bad rubbish:

Retiring Andy Rooney Knew of Media’s Liberalism and Espoused It Himself

Sure, Andy had his funny moments; but by some accounts….

“Communism got in with a bad crowd when it was young and never had a fair chance,” Rooney wrote. According to Rooney, “the original communist philosophy may have been wrong, but they didn’t plan it as a totalitarian system… Communist governments have been dominated by men, not Marxist ideals.” Rooney explained that the “communist idea of creating a society in which everyone does his best for the good of everyone is appealing and fundamentally a more uplifting idea than capitalism.”

http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/brent-baker/2011/10/02/andy-rooney-recognized-media-s-liberalism-and-espoused-it-himself#ixzz1Zg99GAgS

Andy may well be missed….but not by us.  Then again, we haven’t watched 60 Minutes, or anything else on CBS other than football, in well over 20 years.

Now, here’s the Gouge!

Since Andy Rooney’s introduced the subject of those soft on Communism, we’ll kick off the first of our Oktober editions with the latest from The Obamao, courtesy of the WSJ:

America the Soft

President Obama’s national diagnosis.

On the matter of President Obama yesterday saying that Americans “had gotten a little soft,” let us first say that it could not have been the President’s intention to launch zillions of tweets referencing Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech. (The only thing missing was a Cardigan sweater and an icicle-covered thermostat!)

By now, we’ve become accustomed to trying to discern the political strategy behind Mr. Obama’s policies and statements. We still don’t see the political logic in proposing that a country teetering on the edge of a double-dip recession should welcome a $1 trillion increase in taxes. (Then again, we never saw the sense in electing a President whose only experience consisted of community-organizing!) Now the incumbent is telling the country it’s become “a little soft.”

On the morning of Mr. Obama’s remarks, his admirers at the New York Times editorialized that it is the Republicans’ plan to “wind down the government’s longstanding guarantee of health care to the elderly and the poor and incinerate the Democrats’ new promise to cover the uninsured.” And “stop virtually all regulation” . . .

Permit us to volunteer as the voice of moderation in this discussion. We take the President’s point about some competitive softness. We’ll even concede the Times’s point that government really does mean well whenever it outputs one more law, such as Dodd-Frank. (The Journal might, but WE won’t!!!) Is it not possible, though, that if America’s competitive instincts have softened, this has something to do with its compulsively intrusive, protective national government? (See Bill Whittle’s video on our home page.)

We noted here recently that an oil pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico required environmental sign-offs from the EPA, DOT, USDA, DOI, DOE and others. Might not this dull anyone’s competitive edge?

Trade is the lifeblood of the competitive instinct, but the administration still won’t finalize trade deals with those two economic giants, Colombia and Panama. What of the current competitive mindset of couples with taxable income over $250,000 whom the President describes as “millionaires”?

At the risk of being accused of wishing to incinerate the government, we suspect that if Mr. Obama backed off his ever-expanding embrace of the American economy—health-care, housing, energy—Americans would, as he put it, “get back on track.”

Face it folks, the only way we get America back on track is by derailing The Obamao’s Re-election Express!

And as this next item from Best of the Web demonstrates, even when Team Tick-Tock efforts produce what should constitute victory, the “anti-anything-Bush” seeds they previously sowed continue to reap a harvest that robs them of the achievement:

‘Moderate’ Meets Maker

Anwar al-Awlaki, then and now.

Welcome to Hell, Anwar!

The Yemeni Air Force has attacked America, or so you might have thought if you’d read the Associated Press’ technically true but misleading headline this morning: “2 US Citizens Dead in Yemen Airstrike.” It was actually a CIA airstrike in Yemen, and the targets, Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, were unlawful enemy combatants who happened to be U.S. citizens by accident of birth.

Khan was a propagandist, one of the editors of “an English-language Al Qaeda web magazine called ‘Inspire.’ ” Inspire recently published an article critical of Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for denying that al Qaeda perpetrated the 9/11 attacks–which, as we noted Wednesday, makes it a sort of unfunny terrorist version of the Onion.

Awlaki, whose killing by drone President Obama approved last year, was the better known of the two. Among other things, as FoxNews.com reports, he “exchanged up to 20 emails with U.S. Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, alleged killer of 13 people in the Nov. 5, 2009, rampage at Fort Hood.” He also inspired or helped plan “the botched Christmas 2009 attempt to blow up an American airliner heading to Detroit and a foiled 2010 attempt to send explosives to Chicago,” as well as the failed Times Square bombing of 2010.

Fox quotes our friend Richard Miniter, author of several books on terrorism, as observing of Awlaki that “he understood American society very well. He understood American idioms and pop culture and how to appeal to Americans.” That’s an understatement. Years before Awlaki became known for recruiting American Muslims for violent jihad, he was a poster boy for “moderate” Islam, as evidenced by this New York Times story dated Oct. 19, 2001:

Imam Anwar Al-Awlaki, spiritual leader at the Dar al-Hijra mosque in Virginia, one of the nation’s largest, which draws about 3,000 worshipers for communal prayers each Friday, said: “In the past we were oblivious. We didn’t really care much because we never expected things to happen. Now I think things are different. What we might have tolerated in the past, we won’t tolerate any more.”

“There were some statements that were inflammatory, and were considered just talk, but now we realize that talk can be taken seriously and acted upon in a violent radical way,” said Mr. Al-Awlaki, who at 30 is held up as a new generation of Muslim leader capable of merging East and West: born in New Mexico to parents from Yemen, who studied Islam in Yemen and civil engineering at Colorado State University.

It is too early to say whether their message will be heeded, or whether it is mere posturing.

As Alana Goodman noted in an August 2010 NewsBusters.org report, the Times wasn’t alone:

The Baltimore Sun also latched onto the theme. “Al-Awlaki bridges the two worlds as easily as he shifts from lecturing on the lives of the prophets to tapping phone numbers into his Palm Pilot [a now-antiquated electronic device],” reported the paper on October 28, 2001. “He and other Muslims say they support action against terrorist leader Osama bin Laden in retaliation for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks[.]”

And while there was no coverage of the Virginia mosque by the major network news stations, other media outlets expressed concern over the difficulties faced by Muslim “moderates” like Al-Awlaki.

“The war of ideas in the Muslim world pits extremists, like Osama bin Laden . . . and moderates, who want to solve the problems without violence. But right now this war of ideas is a lopsided one, says Imam Anwar Awlaki, the prayer leader at the Dar Al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Virginia,” reported NPR on Nov. 1, 2001.

“Awlaki, whose mosque is one of the largest in the U.S., sees himself as a Muslim leader who could help build bridges between Islam and the West. [B]ut political scientist Telhami says these are difficult days for Muslim moderates,” the NPR report continued.

Of the 30 articles in the [Washington] Post that mentioned the Dar al-Hijrah mosque, not one questioned the prayer center’s extremist leadership. Instead, many were glowing portraits of the mosque’s summer camp, its charitable activities and its members’ apparent concerns about anti-Muslim hate crimes.

“A sparkling sun in a pale blue sky, crisp air, children laughing and friends all around: ‘Yes, it is a beautiful day,’ declared Mohammad Hassan. Outside the Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, a festival was going on, a celebration at the end of the holiest month on the Islamic calendar, and now Hassan looked toward the heavens,” began one particularly flattering Washington Post story from Mar. 3, 1995.

We wondered if, in the course of covering today’s news, any of these organizations would own up to their past credulity in covering today’s news. The Sun doesn’t even cover it, relying on a Reuters dispatch about the dispatching. The Post has a report from Dar al-Hijrah, where the news “ripped open a wound that congregants wish would heal.” It quotes a statement from the mosque:

“Today the Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center acknowledges the death of a former imam, Imam Anwar Al-Awlaki. While employed at Dar Al-Hijrah, Imam Al-Awlaki was known for his interfaith outreach, civic engagement and tolerance in the Northern Virginia community,” read the statement. . . .

“However, after Mr. Al-Awlaki’s departure from the mosque in 2002 he was arrested by Yemeni authorities and allegedly tortured. It was then that Al-Awlaki began preaching violence and has now died violently in an apparent drone strike. (Although how arrest and torture by “Yemeni authorities” either bred or justified violence against America remains unexplained!) In recent years, while in his self imposed exile, Mr. Al-Awlaki encouraged impressionable American Muslims to attack their own country. With his death, Al-Awlaki will no longer be able to spread his hate speech over the internet to our youth.

“We reiterate that as an American faith community we do not accept violence nor extremism and re-commit ourselves to our message living our faith in peace, tolerance and the promotion of the public good,” the statement concluded.

So far today’s New York Times story has nothing about Awlaki’s “moderate” background, though the homepage does link to a 2010 piece titled “Imam’s Path From Condemning Terror to Preaching Jihad.”

NPR, to its credit, posts transcripts of the two “Talk of the Nation” programs on which Awlaki appeared. Of the second, in January 2002, the network’s Mark Memmott observes:

And at the end of the conversation, al-Awlaki made a point that in retrospect reads looks like a signal of where his attitude toward America was heading:

“If you go down the list, whether it’s Iraq or Afghanistan or some other countries–plus, a lot of the oppression that is happening in the Muslim world is from governments in the Muslim world that are allies of the United States. So it’s quite natural to have a level of anti-American foreign policy among the Muslim community simply because the victims or the ones who are affected are Muslim countries.”

On the other hand, how is that Awlaki quote from 2002 different from what, say, Ron Paul says in 2011? And predictably enough, as NPR reports, Paul denounced the U.S. for “assassinating” Awlaki. Fellow libertarian Republican presidential candidate Gary Johnson said he had “mixed feelings” about the strike, the Hill reports:

“This is the first US citizen that has ever been targeted for death by the United States government. So this is unprecedented and I certainly at best have mixed feelings about this, this is why this country was established, was you can’t have a government going through the countryside rounding up citizens because they are a threat to the country and then putting them to death,” Johnson said.

How fatuous. If Awlaki had been hiding out “in the countryside” he might have been arrested and brought to trial. He had to be hit with a drone because he was in a foreign country whose government was unable to take care of the matter itself. Johnson “did, however, say that he would continue drone attacks on non-American terrorist leaders as president,” the Hill reports. And after all, as a candidate, Johnson certainly has kept droning on.

Like we needed ANOTHER reason to dismiss Ron Paul!

For more on the subject of those who speak their minds without gauging the consequences, we turn to the latest utterance by Valerie Jarrett, courtesy of Guy Benson and Townhall.com:

 Lifting People Out of Poverty is “What Government Is Supposed to Do”

A clarifying moment, courtesy of Senior White House adviser Valerie Jarrett (via The Blaze):

Though where this indispensable obligation is enumerated in the Constitution remains unclear; good thing Jarrett’s immediate superior is the Smartest Man in the World….AND a “constitutional lawyer”!

Speaking of the UNconstitutional, here’s the latest on ObamaScare, courtesy of The Obamao’s cousin, Dr. Milton Wolf, in the Washington Times and Speed Mach:

Bending Obamacare’s honesty curve downward

Growing list of health care lies plagues president’s overhaul

The Obamacare house of cards is crumbling before our eyes. The Obama administration’s signature piece of legislation brings a sixth of the U.S. economy under federal control, and the writing is on the wall: Obamacare will collapse under the weight of its own false promises. The only mystery left is whether we will allow America to go down with it.

Remember when President Obama claimed over and over again that his health care plan would “bend the cost curve downward”? He even declared resolutely that he would not otherwise sign the bill. Well, add that to the growing list of Obamacare lies.

This is going to be a bumpy flight.

The nonprofit and nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation recently released the results of a survey that shakes the president’s health care law right down to its core. Health insurance premiums rose in 2011 to more than $15,000 per family for the first time in American history. Not surprisingly, Obamacare itself is to blame for much of the increase. The forced requirement to include adult “children” on their parents’ insurance up to the age of 26, as just one example, contributed to 20 percent of the increase.

Before Obamacare, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) projected annual health care spending would increase an average of 6.1 percent per year over the next decade. Despite the promises, after Obamacare passed, CMS recalculated its projections upward to 6.3 percent. Huh? Now the Kaiser survey shows that the actual results for the first year amounted to a 9 percent increase. Mr. Obama bent the cost curve all right – upward.

Are the increased costs justified, even if it does break the president’s cost-curve promise because, after all, Obamacare finally was going to provide insurance for 46 million uninsured people? Brace yourself. According to Gallup, the percentage of adults in America without health insurance has increased since Mr. Obama took office and since he signed Obamacare into law.

Please return your seat backs and tray tables to their full upright position. We are hitting some major turbulence now.

OK, so health care costs are going up because of Obamacare, and more adults are uninsured since it began – mostly because of Obamanomics (that’s another story) – but at least Mr. Obama promised it would reduce the deficit, right? Well, that was then, and this is now. Administration officials are quietly abandoning the so-called CLASS Act portion of Obamacare, supposedly meant to provide long-term elderly care. In reality, this was the mother of all accounting gimmicks, which counted 10 years of tax revenues but just five years of expenditures to give a false sense of fiscal sanity. Democratic senator and Obamacare supporter Kent Conrad of North Dakota called this “a Ponzi scheme of the first order, the kind of thing Bernie Madoff would have been proud of.” Absent the accounting gimmicks, the Congressional Budget Office now acknowledges that Obamacare actually increases the national deficit by $540 billion over the next 10 years.

We have just lost cabin pressure.

Of course, while each of these three lies is damning in its own right, they barely scratch the surface of the Obamacare duplicity. And let me be clear: These are lies. There’s normally something generous about our human nature that seeks to avoid that word – lies – but we are in an existential crisis in America, and it demands blunt and precise language. We did not get here because of simple distortions or exaggerations or even misrepresentations. Obamacare is the product of statements known by their makers to be untrue and meant to deceive – lies.

Mr. Obama promised on at least eight occasions that he would open his health care hearings to the public. Invite the C-SPAN cameras in, he said, so Americans would know who’s on their side. C-SPAN Chief Executive Brian Lamb said the network certainly would have covered the meetings, but the president “never asked us.”

The Obamacare lies are mounting: You could keep your current insurance. You could keep your doctor. The plan would cost less than a trillion dollars. Medicare would be protected. There would be no health care rationing. No one earning less than $250,000 per year would see an increase in his taxes. Tax credits would alleviate the burdens placed on small businesses. The plan would create 4 million new jobs, 400,000 almost immediately. Americans would love Obamacare once they saw what was in it.

The crumbling of Obamacare is now so unmistakable that its supporters have become the dog that didn’t bark. It’s difficult to find anyone outside the administration who is still willing to defend it publicly.

Calling a lie a lie is difficult for some people, but I cannot apologize for being blunt when America’s future is at stake on such a serious matter. At best, the only alternative is what “Tonight Show” host Jay Leno recently said of the president: “I can’t figure out if he’s the kind of guy who makes infomercials or the kind of guy who falls for infomercials.”

As sugar-coating the truth has never been one of our faults, allow us to interject:

And for those wondering why health insurance costs continue to skyrocket, here’s one reason:

New York Panel Wants Taxpayers to Foot the Bill for Gender Reassignment Surgery

Next up, former NFL-great Fran Tarkenton weighs in on what’s NOT the solution to our under-performing schools, courtesy of the WSJ:

What if the NFL Played by Teachers’ Rules?

Imagine a league where players who make it through three seasons could never be cut from the roster.

Imagine the National Football League in an alternate reality. Each player’s salary is based on how long he’s been in the league. It’s about tenure, not talent. The same scale is used for every player, no matter whether he’s an All-Pro quarterback or the last man on the roster. For every year a player’s been in this NFL, he gets a bump in pay. The only difference between Tom Brady and the worst player in the league is a few years of step increases. And if a player makes it through his third season, he can never be cut from the roster until he chooses to retire, except in the most extreme cases of misconduct.

Let’s face the truth about this alternate reality: The on-field product would steadily decline. Why bother playing harder or better and risk getting hurt? No matter how much money was poured into the league, it wouldn’t get better. In fact, in many ways the disincentive to play harder or to try to stand out would be even stronger with more money.

Of course, a few wild-eyed reformers might suggest the whole system was broken and needed revamping to reward better results, but the players union would refuse to budge and then demonize the reform advocates: “They hate football. They hate the players. They hate the fans.” The only thing that might get done would be building bigger, more expensive stadiums and installing more state-of-the-art technology. But that just wouldn’t help.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, the NFL in this alternate reality is the real -life American public education system. Teachers’ salaries have no relation to whether teachers are actually good at their job—excellence isn’t rewarded, and neither is extra effort. Pay is almost solely determined by how many years they’ve been teaching. That’s it. After a teacher earns tenure, which is often essentially automatic, firing him or her becomes almost impossible, no matter how bad the performance might be. And if you criticize the system, you’re demonized for hating teachers and not believing in our nation’s children.

Inflation-adjusted spending per student in the United States has nearly tripled since 1970. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, we spend more per student than any nation except Switzerland, with only middling results to show for it.

Over the past 20 years, we’ve been told that a big part of the problem is crumbling schools—that with new buildings and computers in every classroom, everything would improve. But even though spending on facilities and equipment has more than doubled since 1989 (again adjusted for inflation), we’re still not seeing results, and officials assume the answer is that we haven’t spent enough.

These same misguided beliefs are front and center in President Obama’s jobs plan, which includes billions for “public school modernization.” The popular definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. We’ve been spending billions of dollars on school modernization for decades, and I suspect we could keep on doing it until the end of the world, without much in the way of academic results. The only beneficiaries are the teachers unions.

Some reformers, including Bill Gates, are finally catching on that our federally centralized, union-created system provides no incentive for better performance. If anything, it penalizes those who work hard because they spend time, energy and their own money to help students, only to get the same check each month as the worst teacher in the district (or an even smaller one, if that teacher has been there longer). Is it any surprise, then, that so many good teachers burn out or become disenchanted?

Perhaps no other sector of American society so demonstrates the failure of government spending and interference. We’ve destroyed individual initiative, individual innovation and personal achievement, and marginalized anyone willing to point it out. As one of my coaches used to say, “You don’t get vast results with half-vast efforts!”

The results we’re looking for are students learning, so we need to reward great teachers who show they can make that happen—and get rid of bad teachers who don’t get the job done. It’s what we do in every other profession: If you’re good, you get rewarded, and if you’re not, then you look for other work. It’s fine to look for ways to improve the measuring tools, but don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Our rigid, top-down, union-dictated system isn’t working. If results are the objective, then we need to loosen the reins, giving teachers the ability to fulfill their responsibilities to students to the best of their abilities, not to the letter of the union contract and federal standards.

In a related item, it’s the “You’re Damned If You Do, Your Kids Are Damned If You DON’T!” segment, Michael Flaherty details the latest miscarriage of justice in the Education Wars, courtesy again of the WSJ:

The Latest Crime Wave: Sending Your Child to a Better School

School districts hire special investigators to follow kids home in order to verify their true residences.

In case you needed further proof of the American education system’s failings, especially in poor and minority communities, consider the latest crime to spread across the country: educational theft. That’s the charge that has landed several parents, such as Ohio’s Kelley Williams-Bolar, in jail this year.

Good thing they clapped the bracelets on her!

An African-American mother of two, Ms. Williams-Bolar last year used her father’s address to enroll her two daughters in a better public school outside of their neighborhood. After spending nine days behind bars charged with grand theft, the single mother was convicted of two felony counts. Not only did this stain her spotless record, but it threatened her ability to earn the teacher’s license she had been working on.

Ms. Williams-Bolar caught a break last month when Ohio Gov. John Kasich granted her clemency, reducing her charges to misdemeanors from felonies. His decision allows her to pursue her teacher’s license, and it may provide hope to parents beyond the Buckeye State. In the last year, parents in Connecticut, Kentucky and Missouri have all been arrested—and await sentencing—for enrolling their children in better public schools outside of their districts.

These arrests represent two major forms of exasperation. First is that of parents whose children are zoned into failing public schools—they can’t afford private schooling, they can’t access school vouchers, and they haven’t won or haven’t even been able to enter a lottery for a better charter school. Then there’s the exasperation of school officials finding it more and more difficult to deal with these boundary-hopping parents.

From California to Massachusetts, districts are hiring special investigators to follow children from school to their homes to determine their true residences and decide if they “belong” at high-achieving public schools. School districts in Florida, Pennsylvania and New Jersey all boasted recently about new address-verification programs designed to pull up their drawbridges and keep “illegal students” from entering their gates. (“Illegal students”….but NOT illegal aliens!)

Other school districts use services like VerifyResidence.com, which provides “the latest in covert video technology and digital photographic equipment to photograph, videotape, and document” children going from their house to school. School districts can enroll in the company’s rewards program, which awards anonymous tipsters $250 checks for reporting out-of-district students.

Only in a world where irony is dead could people not marvel at concerned parents being prosecuted for stealing a free public education for their children. (While granting in-state college tuition breaks to illegal aliens!)

In August, an internal PowerPoint presentation from the American Federation of Teachers surfaced online. The document described how the AFT undermined minority parent groups’ efforts in Connecticut to pass the “parent trigger” legislation that offers parents real governing authority to transform failing schools. A key to the AFT’s success in killing the effort, said the document, was keeping parent groups from “the table.” AFT President Randi Weingarten quickly distanced her organization from the document, but it was small consolation to the parents once again left in the cold.

Kevin Chavous, the board chairman for both the Black Alliance for Educational Options and Democrats for Education Reform, senses that these recent events herald a new age for fed-up parents. Like Martin Luther King Jr. before them, they understand “the fierce urgency of now” involving their children’s education. Hence some parents’ decisions to break the law—or practice civil disobedience.

This life-changing decision is portrayed in Betty Smith’s 1943 novel, “A Tree Grows In Brooklyn,” also adapted into an Academy Award-winning film. In the novel, Francie Nolan is the bright young daughter of Irish immigrants living in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg immigrant ghetto in the early 20th century. An avid reader, Francie is crushed when she attends her local public school and discovers that opportunity is nonexistent for girls of her ilk.

So Francie and her father Johnny claim the address of a house next to a good public school. Francie enrolls at the school and her life is transformed. A teacher nurtures her love for writing, and she goes on to thrive at the school. Francie eventually becomes an accomplished writer who tells the story of her transformation through education.

The defining difference between the two schools, writes the novel’s narrator, is parents: At the good school, “The parents were too American, too aware of the rights granted them by their Constitution to accept injustices meekly. They could not be bulldozed and exploited as could the immigrants and the second-generation Americans.”

Were Francie around today, she’d be sad but not surprised to see how little things have changed. Students are still poisoned by low expectations, their parents are still getting bulldozed. But Francie wouldn’t yield to despair. She would remind this new generation of courageous parents of the Tree of Heaven, from which her story gets its title—”the one tree in Francie’s yard that was neither a pine nor a hemlock. It grew in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps and it was the only tree that grew out of cement.” The tree, the narrator adds, “liked poor people.”

The defenders of the status quo in our nation’s public schools could learn a lot from that tree.

On The Lighter Side….

Speaking of jokes, here’s the latest bit of humor from presidential-wannabe Gingrich:

Newt: Why We Need a 21st Century ‘Contract With America’

By “contract”, we hope Newt means something more binding than the marriage contract Gingrich signed with his first two wives!

Finally, we’ll call it a day with an item which combines both News of the Bizarre and the Wide, Wild World of Sports:

New York Football Coach Suspended for Taking Team to Cemetery

Yo!  Coach Marsh!  Remember the Titans was a movie….and an historically-inaccurate move at that!  Then again, winning isn’t everything….it’s the ONLY thing!

Magoo