Truth Serum Today: stupid voters

Showing posts with label stupid voters. Show all posts

Friday, May 22, 2015

Republicans lose faith in party leadership

From the files of Jeff Crouere at Ringside Politics on WLAE-TV 32 in New Orleans, LA

I Really Wonder If There Is A Difference

A new Pew Research Center poll shows that America is unhappy with the GOP led Congress. In fact, Americans are disgusted as Republican congressional leaders only registered a 22% overall approval rating.

What is especially significant is that the poll shows this anger is bi-partisan. Only 41% of Republicans approve of the performance of the GOP congressional leadership. This is much lower than the 60% approval rating GOP leaders received in 2011 and the 78% approval rating they received from Republicans in 1995, months after the party took control of Congress for the first time in 40 years.

There is a major difference between the congressional leaders of today and those at the helm in 1995. During that era, Newt Gingrich was Speaker of the House. In the November 1994 elections, Americans sent Republicans to Congress with a mission, enact the Contract with America.

Led by Gingrich, the Congress was actually able to get some tangible goals accomplished by moving then President Bill Clinton to the right. As a result, Clinton signed into law bills that lowered capital gains taxes and established welfare reform. Even more miraculous, a significant budget surplus was created.

Gingrich was an unabashed conservative, who truly believed in the concepts of lower taxes and less government. Unfortunately, today, the GOP leadership in Congress, specifically Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner, are typical establishment Republicans who have been on Capitol Hill too long.

They are opposed to the Tea Party and true conservatives and have no interest in real reform or following the wishes of grassroots Republicans.

Just four months after the Republicans took control of the Senate and House, most of the GOP electorate has lost faith in congressional leadership. It is no surprise since nothing has been accomplished except the Keystone Pipeline bill, which President Obama vetoed, and the House passed bill ending abortions after the 20th week of pregnancy. On almost everything else, there has been rhetoric, but no action.

Despite the fact that almost every Republican congressional candidate campaigned against Obamacare and the President’s executive amnesty for five million illegal aliens, Congress voted to fund both programs. The Senate approved the radical nomination of Loretta Lynch as Attorney General and just gave Obama a major victory by approving legislation giving him more power to enact trade deals.

This trade promotion authority would force Congress to accept the upcoming Trans-Pacific Partnership between the United States and 11 other nations without any amendments. It would require Congress to schedule an up or down vote on the trade pact, creating “fast track” legislation.

Many conservatives are leery of any trade deal that gives the President more power and might lead to the further dissolution of American manufacturing jobs. Both Boehner and McConnell are supportive of this agreement, which critics label as another gift to big business at the expense of middle class America.

After passing a trade deal, McConnell will turn to renewing the Patriot Act, despite major NSA abuses and a significant invasion of the privacy of ordinary Americans. It is another issue that pits GOP leadership against the majority of Republicans.

Clearly, congressional Republicans are not advancing a conservative agenda or stopping President Obama. This betrayal of conservatism is reflected in the Pew poll. The stage is now set for the 2016 presidential race where true conservative candidates will be facing establishment backed candidates like former Florida Governor Jeb Bush.

If an establishment Republican is nominated, millions of conservatives will be disgusted and will bid farewell to the GOP. This will insure that the Republican Party, which has lost the popular vote in 5 out of the last 6 presidential elections, will lose again.

____________________________

Jeff Crouere is a native of New Orleans, LA and he is the host of a Louisiana based program, “Ringside Politics,” which airs at 7:30 p.m. Friday and 10:00 p.m. Sunday on WLAE-TV 32, a PBS station, and 7 till 11 a.m. weekdays on WGSO 990 AM in New Orleans and the Northshore.

For more information, visit Jeff's web site at www.ringsidepolitics.com or email him at jeff@ringsidepolitics.com.

_____________________________

Become a Truth Serum Partner Now

Democratic Party being deleted

From the files of Josh Kraushaar at the National Journal

Becoming a Disappearing Political Party

One of the most underappreciated stories in recent years is the deterioration of the Democratic bench under President Obama's tenure in office.

The party has become much more ideologically homogenous, losing most of its moderate wing as a result of the last two disastrous midterm elections.

By one new catch-all measure, a party-strength index introduced by RealClearPolitics analysts Sean Trende and David Byler, Democrats are in their worst position since 1928.

That dynamic has manifested itself in the Democratic presidential contest, where the bench is so barren that a flawed Hillary Clinton is barreling to an uncontested nomination.

But less attention has been paid to how the shrinking number of Democratic officeholders in the House and in statewide offices is affecting the party's Senate races.

It's awfully unusual to see how dependent Democrats are in relying on former losing candidates as their standard-bearers in 2016. Wisconsin's Russ Feingold, Pennsylvania's Joe Sestak, Indiana's Baron Hill, and Ohio's Ted Strickland all ran underwhelming campaigns in losing office in 2010—and are looking to return to politics six years later.

Party officials are courting former Sen. Kay Hagan of North Carolina to make a comeback bid, despite mediocre favorability ratings and the fact that she lost a race just months ago that most had expected her to win.

All told, more than half of the Democrats' Senate challengers in 2016 are comeback candidates.

Complete story here

_____________________________

Become a Truth Serum Partner Now

Wednesday, May 20, 2015

Journalism for dummies

From the art studios of A.F. (Tony) Branco at Comically Incorrect.com

Get Your Daily Dose of Humor and Reality from A.F. (Tony) Branco

_____________________________

Become a Truth Serum Partner Now

Stupefying generations of Americans

From the Warning Signs of Alan Caruba at Facts-not-Fantasy

Know Caruba's Warning Signs

I used the verb “stupefying” to describe a long process in our nation’s schools that has produced several generations of Americans, dumbed down and resulting in more than half who are functionally illiterate, nor can do math, and, as a recent headline reported “Student’s Results in Social Studies Stagnate.”

“U.S. middle-school students’ performance on social studies didn’t improve much between 2010 and 2014, federal test scores released Wednesday (April 29) show, underscoring concerns about the uniformed citizenry and workforce.” When it comes to U.S. history, the share of students scoring at or above proficiency last year was 18%, up one percentage point from 2010. In other words, over 80% failed to have a grasp on the subject, critical to every citizen’s understanding of U.S. history, its Constitution, and governance.

An extraordinary new book by Samuel Blumenfeld and Alex Newman, “Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children” ($26.95, WND Books) should be the center of conversation for a nation’s media, but I suspect this may be among the few places you would learn about it. Blumenfeld has written ten books on education and Newman is an international journalist, educator and consultant.

What history does teach us is that progressives, also known as communists, have slaughtered millions in their quest to create the perfect society where everybody earns the same amount, thus abandoning them to equal poverty. To achieve this, it was necessary to exercise complete control over what the children learned and what the media shared as news.

Blumenfeld notes that “In the United States the socialist utopians adopted a new and unique method of conquering a nation; by dumbing down its people, by destroying the brainpower of millions of its citizens.”

This was launched in 1898 by John Dewey, a socialist, and outlined in his essay titled ‘The Primary-Education Fetich.’ “In it he showed his fellow progressives how to transform America into a collectivist utopia by taking over the public schools and destroying the literacy of millions of Americans.”

“The plan has been so successfully implemented that it is now a fact that half of America’s adult population are functionally illiterate. They can’t read their nation’s Constitution or its Declaration of Independence. They can’t even read their high school diploma.”

This was achieved by changing how children are taught to read in our government schools. Previously the method was phonetics in which children learned the alphabet, the sounds the letters represented, and how in combination they composed words. The present method is called “whole word” in which the child must recognize the whole word without identifying its alphabetical elements. “That forces children to read English as if it were Chinese,” says Blumenfeld.

He notes that most teachers are unaware of what they are doing and most parents trust the public schools that are supposed to represent the cherished values of our democratic republic. “But the unhappy truth is that today’s public schools have rejected the values of the Founding Fathers and adopted values from nineteenth-century European social utopian plans that completely contradict our own concepts of individual freedom.”

Blumenfeld also identifies a fact that is hidden in the growing numbers of people who having passed through our schools or attending experience dyslexia and learning disabilities. Brain scans have demonstrated this.

Our schools are places where the answer to the normal child’s energy and curiousity is deemed being “over-active” and our schools “push various psychiatric drugs on millions of children by requiring them to take such powerful, mid-altering stimulants as Ritalin or Adderal to alleviate such school-induced disorders as attention deficit disorder (ADD) and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

These drugs are as potent as cocaine and have even caused sudden death among teen athletes.”

“The long-term utopian plan required destroying America’s political, social, and moral culture of religious freedom, individual rights, unobtrusive government, and high literacy for all.”

That is a virtual definition of what has occurred in America today. We see it in the attack on religion, particularly Christianity, in America. We see it in the attack on traditional marriage in the name of the homosexual objective of “same-sex marriage.”

We see individual businesses attacked for not wanting to give up their spiritual values and beliefs when challenged by homosexuals. We see it in the vast growth in the numbers of single mothers, often never married. And, of late, we see it in the obscene hatred being directed against our nation’s police forces.

The statistics cited in “Crimes of the Educators” have been published by Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education and they include:

Eighty-one percent of American 18 year olds are unprepared for college coursework.

More than 25 percent of students fail to graduate from high school in four years; for African-American and Hispanic students, this number is approaching 40 percent.

Seventy percent of those in prison and 70 percent of those on welfare read at the lowest literacy levels according to the 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey.

According to tests in 2012 given to 15-year-olds by the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development, U.S. students were at 17th place in the world on reading, 29th in math, and 20th in science.

“These failures,” says Blumenfeld, “ are not the result of an accident. They are the result of programs created by the best-organized and best-paid educators on the planet. All of these programs that create failure were conceived to produce precisely the results we are getting.”

This explains, too, why many concerned parents have decided to teach their children at home while others spend their money to have their children tutored to overcome the damage of our public schools.

If you have looked around and thought to yourself that too many of the people who see, hear, work with, and who vote are dumb, you now know why.

_____________________________

Become a Truth Serum Partner Now