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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (13773)	8/23/2007 4:47:03 PM
From: Hope Praytochange	Respond to of 224729

Dems Endorse The Teachers' Radical Agenda By PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY \| Posted Wednesday, August 22, 2007 Some critics complain that the issue of education has been conspicuously absent from presidential television debates. But Democratic presidential candidates did sound off with their pro-federal government, pro-spending policies at the annual convention of the National Education Association, and the nation's largest teachers union liked what it heard. Sen. Hillary Clinton told delegates she would fight school vouchers "with every breath in my body." Reiterating the message of her book "It Takes a Village," she called for universal preschool for 4-year-olds. Sen. Barack Obama likewise inveighed against "passing out vouchers." Former Sen. John Edwards also announced his opposition to vouchers and proposed that the federal government pay college tuition for all students who will work 10 hours a week. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson wants to "raise teacher's average minimum wage to $40,000 a year." Rep. Dennis Kucinich goes all out for "a universal pre-kindergarten system that will provide year-round day care for children age 3 to 5." All Democratic candidates look forward to increased federal control of and spending for public schools. And they all attacked President George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind law for not appropriating more funds to implement it. After cheering the promises made by the candidates, NEA delegates buckled down to the serious business of spelling out their political goals, many of which have nothing whatever to do with better education. The NEA demands a tax-supported, single-payer health care plan for all "residents," a word artfully chosen to include illegal immigrants. The NEA supports immigration "reform" that "includes a path to permanent residency, citizenship or asylum" for illegal immigrants. For many years, and again this year, the NEA urged a national holiday honoring Cesar Chavez. The NEA must have forgotten that Chavez, a strident advocate for farmworkers, opposed illegal immigration because he knew it depressed the wages of U.S. citizens and legal immigrants. The NEA supports a beefed-up federal hate crimes law with heavier penalties. The NEA wants federal legislation to confer special rights on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity and expression. The NEA passed at least a dozen resolutions supporting the "gay rights agenda" in public schools. These cover employment, curricula, textbooks, resource and instructional materials, school activities, role models and language, with frequent use of terms such as sexual orientation, gender identification and homophobia. The NEA enthusiastically supports all the goals of radical feminism, including abortion, the Equal Rights Amendment, school-based health clinics, wage control so the government can arbitrarily raise the pay of women but not men, the feminist pork called the Women's Educational Equity Act and letting feminists rewrite textbooks to conform to feminist ideology. The NEA supports statehood for the District of Columbia. The NEA supports affirmative action. The NEA calls for repeal of right-to-work laws, which allow teachers in some states to decline joining the NEA. The NEA supports U.N. treaties, especially the U.N. Convention on Women, the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the International Court of Justice. The NEA loves global education, which promotes world citizenship and taxing U.S. citizens to give away their wealth to other countries. Another NEA favorite is environmental education, which teaches that human activity is generally harmful to the environment and population should be reduced. Here are some things the NEA opposes: vouchers, tuition tax credits, parental choice programs, making English the official language of the U.S., the use of voter identification for elections, and the privatization of Social Security. High on the list of NEA policies that actually relate to education is opposition to the testing of teachers as a criterion for job retention, promotion, tenure or salary. The NEA reiterated its support for pre-kindergarten for "all 3- and 4-year-old children," mandatory full-day kindergarten, and "early childhood education programs in the public schools for children from birth through age 8." The NEA demands that this "early" education have "diversity-based curricula" and "bias-free screening devices." The NEA wants the right to teach schoolchildren about sex without interference from parents, but wants its pals in the bureaucracy to regulate all home-schooling taught by parents. The NEA opposes allowing home-schoolers to participate in public school sports or extracurricular activities. Two of the NEA's favorite words in its resolutions and policies are "diversity," which means teaching that gay behavior is OK, and "multiculturalism," which means stressing negative things about the U.S. and positive things about non-Christian cultures. The exorbitant dues teachers pay to the NEA enable its well-paid staff to lobby Congress and state legislatures on behalf of all these goals. © 2007 PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY. Copley News Service

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (13773)	8/23/2007 5:18:01 PM
From: Hope Praytochange	Respond to of 224729

Warner: Bush Should Bring Troops Home : kennyliar where is the number 5000 ??? By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Published: August 23, 2007 Filed at 4:26 p.m. ET WASHINGTON (AP) -- Sen. John Warner, a prominent Republican on military affairs, urged President Bush on Thursday to start bringing some troops home by Christmas -- a move the senator said would send a powerful warning to the Iraqi government that time is running out. Warner, R-Va., who spent the morning at the White House meeting with Bush's top aides, said the president next month should announce the withdrawal of a certain number of troops to send a ''sharp and clear message throughout the region and the United States'' that the commitment in Iraq is not open ended. ''We simply cannot as a nation stand and continue to put our troops at continuous risk of loss of life and limb without beginning to take some decisive action,'' he told reporters. Warner visited Iraq this month with Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the Armed Services Committee. Warner is a ranking member of the panel and former chairman. The Virginia Republican said he still would not support Democratic legislation championed by Levin that would call for Bush to bring troops home by a certain date. ''Let the president establish the timetable for withdrawal, not the Congress,'' he said.

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (13773)	8/23/2007 5:24:34 PM
From: Hope Praytochange	Respond to of 224729

2.August 23rd, 2007 4:20 pm Strategically speaking, I think Edwards’ campaign has been wrong from the beginning. He has tried to appeal to the extreme left of the Democratic party when he should have appealed to the center. The people in the center of the Democratic party are the ones who would prefer a White Southern Handsome Man over a woman or a black. He can also implicitly tout how he would be the most likely candidate to win the general election because he is a white male (as shown by the polling statistics). Besides, he should know by now it’s the candidate who appeals to the center during the campaign process who wins. Clinton - “New Democrat” and Bush - “Compassionate Conservative”. Instead, he hired some extreme left bloggers who bashed the Catholic Church and so forth. And then hired a campaign team who didn’t have enough common sense not to hire a $400 stylist. Of course, if he ran as a centrist candidate, the centrist people wouldn’t have much of a problem with him getting an expensive haircut, living in a big house and making money from a hedge fund so no one would be calling him a hypocrite. Edwards had so much potential and just blew it with poor campaign judgment. — Posted by Helen NYC

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (13773)	8/23/2007 5:25:42 PM
From: Hope Praytochange	Respond to of 224729

Edwards Keeps Trying Out Change Theme By Kate Phillips John Edwards in New Hampshire today. (Photo: Jim Cole/Associated Press)Democratic candidate John Edwards jump-started his “One America’’ campaign with a bus-tour in New Hampshire today, a four-day rollout that began with a speech replete with the populist, anti-establishment themes he’s been pounding home elsewhere on the stump and at recent debates. His campaign called it a major speech, but much of it weaves together what he’s been saying lately. He once again challenged his fellow Democrats to eschew lobbying money – something Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has refused to do – and he again painted himself as an outsider versus the Washington insiders. (Though he was a senator from North Carolina and the 2004 Democratic vice-presidential nominee.) You could say that, in some ways, he’s honing his voice on these themes, and in the Granite State, trying to appeal to the same independents as Senator Barack Obama, Mrs. Clinton and others. You can also read the veiled digs at his rivals threaded through the words, as he urges his listeners not to rely on the policies of the 70s, the 80s, or the 90s: The choice for our party could not be more clear. We cannot replace a group of corporate Republicans with a group of corporate Democrats, just swapping the Washington insiders of one party for the Washington insiders of the other. The American people deserve to know that their presidency is not for sale, the Lincoln Bedroom is not for rent, and lobbyist money can no longer influence policy in the House or the Senate. It’s time to end the game. It’s time to tell the big corporations and the lobbyists who have been running things for too long that their time is over. It’s time to challenge politicians to put the American people’s interests ahead of their own calculated political interests, to look the lobbyists in the eye and just say no. And one of the other ways in which he has tried to distinguish himself is through the universal health care plan he offered months and months ago. (Senator Clinton today offered several more proposals, promising to outline her full plan for universal health care next month.) Mr. Edwards: I have a bold plan to finally guarantee true universal health care for every single American and cut health care costs for everyone. My plan will require everyone — business, government and individuals — to contribute something to reach universal coverage. And I am honest about the cost: $90 to $120 billion a year, and I’ll pay for it by repealing the Bush tax cuts for families above $200,000. If we end the game in Washington, we can finally have a health care system that treats the health of all our people with equal worth. The question is whether repealing, or letting the Bush tax cuts expire, will really be enough to cover the full costs of such a mandated health care plan, especially for the 45 to 47 million uninsured. Mr. Edwards has been pretty explicit that his plan would indeed be costly. Senator Obama has also offered a plan, but he does not call for mandated coverage for adults. Senators Clinton and Obama also favor getting rid of the Bush tax cuts to help pay for health care coverage. Mr. Edwards also repeated his call for withdrawing some troops from Iraq immediately, and demanded that Congress – faced with more confrontations with the Bush administration over funding for the troops in the coming months – cut off the money spigot: And let’s support our troops and end this war in Iraq. We should immediately withdraw 40-50,000 combat troops immediately and have the rest out in about a year. And when President Bush refuses to act, Congress should use its funding power to force him to act. That stance has made him a thorn in the side of the Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill, which has had to juggle the unhappiness of its constituency with the war in Iraq against the anticipated taint of being anti-troops that would wash over it were it to cut off funding. And some of his Democratic rivals in the presidential primary race want to leave some forces there to offer what they believe may be a stabilizing force. The rest of the speech is fairly familiar. Mr. Edwards talks about his father, the mill worker (we thought his wife Elizabeth told him to stop mentioning the mill background though mind you, we’re not inclined either way except that we too lived through the mill-closing era). And he keeps talking about how he can beat back, beat those corporate interests because he did it in the courtroom against corporate lawyers when he was representing plaintiffs. (And made his family fortune that way, too.) Granted, the candidates right now are vying for the activist, liberal base of the Democratic party and the independents in places like New Hampshire. How “beating back” the big bad drug companies or the big bad oil companies will work for any of them in a general election campaign, when candidates traditionally move to more centrist positions, and adopt a more modulated voice, to capture moderates on either side, remains a question. Is the critical voting bloc so upset about the war that it’s no longer simply a “change” election, but an “anger” election? Will the domestic economy, beset at the moment by the mortgage lending debacle, overtake the war as an issue and drive more of the debate in mid-2008? Questions that linger far longer than speeches.