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Politics : The Obama - Clinton Disaster -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Copeland who wrote (32960)	7/5/2010 12:15:10 PM
From: John	1 Recommendation Respond to of 103300

About 18 months ago, I disconnected my television and cancelled my satellite service because I became disgusted with and offended by the programming choices and the censored, filtered news content. The poor saleslady from DirectTV was speechless when I told her I wouldn't accept television service again if they paid me to watch. -g- I haven't watched much television in the past five years anyway. There are only a handful of science, science fiction, nature, and educational programs that I ever enjoyed. Today, I sort of feel like my late grandfather when people around me are discussing the latest shows on television and I have no idea who or what they are talking about. It feels good to know that I have not wasted my time with meaningless nonsense. I wish I would have made the decision to stop watching television much earlier. I gather much more knowledge and useful information from reading rather than listening to and watching what large corporations and the government want a dumbed-down America to hear and see. A very witty gentleman told me many years ago, "Television robs your mind." I strongly agree. Another wise man once stated to me, "The media cannot tell the public what to think, but it can certainly tell the public what to think about." That simple statement explains how large corporations and the government manage to condition, focus, shape the behavior of, manipulate, and control the populace. I still have my television connected to my computer via a TV-out video card and I have a large collection of my favorite movies and old shows archived on an external storage drive. I occasionally watch them, commercial free, when I desire such entertainment. Do yourself a favor. Consider cancelling your television service permanently. You won't miss Anderson Cooper or any of the other mediots. -g-

To: Copeland who wrote (32960)	7/5/2010 2:37:57 PM
From: Hope Praytochange	Respond to of 103300

Better relations are important to the administration. Mr. Van Roekel’s association, with more than three million members, says it spent $50 million in 2008 to help elect the idiot and more than 50 candidates for Congress and governors’ offices, most of them Democrats. The American Federation of Teachers, with 1.4 million members, also spent millions of dollars to help elect idiotObama and other candidates in 2008. “If the teachers sit on their hands this fall, it would be a disaster for idiotObama and the Democrats,” said Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation who has studied the teachers’ unions. In a skirmish last week over federal education financing, the administration and the teachers’ unions were bitterly at odds. Last year, Congress approved $100 billion in education stimulus funds, about half of it to help states avoid school layoffs. With that money now running out, House Democrats proposed spending $10 billion more to shore up school district budgets, paying for it, in part, with $800 million in cuts to Race to the Top and two other competitive grant programs Mr. Duncan created to spur his initiatives. Mr. Duncan and the White House supported the $10 billion in new spending, but objected to trimming the grant programs, infuriating union leaders. “For the Department of Education to say, ‘Everybody else has to sacrifice, but our pet programs must be spared’— that makes me so angry I don’t even know how to say it,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, which has often been more supportive of administration initiatives than the National Education Association . E-mail messages pleading for the jobs measure rained down on Congress from thousands of union teachers, and despite a veto threat by the White House, Democrats in the House voted overwhelmingly on Thursday to create the $10 billion school jobs fund and to trim Mr. Duncan’s grant programs. The bill must be reworked by the Senate. On Friday, Mr. Duncan shrugged off what appeared to be an administration setback, expressing confidence that lawmakers would eventually find a way to spare Race to the Top. One group that helped the administration defend Race to the Top was the New Teacher Project, a nonprofit that has pressed for changes in the way teachers are evaluated. Timothy Daly, its president, said the angry rhetoric from union leaders now was less important than the long-term changes the administration has begun to coax from them.