Education

The oldest trick in the book in the "news" biz is to take a photo of a politician that makes him look worried, sad, or downcast to offset a story of how things aren't working so well for that pol's policies or plans. Well, the Chicago Sun-Times has used that ages old trick to lambast president Bush's "No Child Left Behind" program by giving us the stories of several Illinois students that supposedly slipped through the cracks of the Federal program and using a picture of Bush with furrowed brow with inset pictures of the several students. Of course, their stories are expectedly filled with nonsense, but it is the photo that the Sun-Times really expects to tell the tale. This photo says "failure and he knows it" all over the thing and sets the tone of bias from the start.

The Sun-Times starts out to lower our expectations of Bush's policies:

This is the time of year for lighthearted fluff for most news agencies and it is usually a welcome respite from hard news as we all get ready to celebrate the arrival of "Baby New Year." The year-end list is a staple of that happy, fluff and we get them up the wazoo, for sure. The list of "overused words" is one of those that we see every year, as well, and Reuters gives us a list by which they hope we wring out a few overused words and phrases as we ring in 2008. But, I am a bit dismayed over the choice of two of the words and phrases they want us to forget. The first is "post 9/11"and the other one is "surge." The choice of words and phrases in the case of these particular two seems to be made not only with a left leaning bias, but with a bias that leads to the sort of dangerous ignorance that caused 9/11 and the surge in the first place. The ignorance of head-in-the-sand, looking the other way that allowed Islamofascism so so easily sneak up on all of us is rampant with the inclusion of these two in this list.

Chris Matthews shouldn't count on a Christmas card from Hillary after the way he absolutely unloaded on her on Morning Joe today. The topic was her Christmas ad [view YouTube here], which shows her "giving" a variety of government programs to the American people.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: I always thought the problem with Hillary was, her notion of government was, "I am Evita, I am the one who gives gifts to the little people and then they come and bring me flowers and they worship at me because I am the great Evita."

View video here. Chris was far from done.

I've noted previously that Old Media has developed a squeamishness towards describing this time of year in business stories as the "Christmas shopping season."

In the midst of media criticism of Mike Huckabee's Christmas ad, including the Whoopi Goldberg-Joy Behar exchange on "The View" noted earlier today by NewsBusters' Justin McCarthy, how interesting it is that one of Hillary Clinton's latest ads in Iowa joins in the C-word sqeamishness (HT Hot Air, whose Bryan Preston calls it "Hillary's Unintentionally Revealing Christmas Ad").

The ad shows Mrs. Clinton wrapping presents for the American people, including "Universal Health Care," "Alternative Energy," "Bring Troops Home," and "Middle Class Tax Breaks" (where have we heard that undelivered promise before?). In search of the final present to wrap, she asks, "Where's Universal Pre-K?" Finding it, she says, "Ah, there it is."

(Three of these "presents" to the American people would have to be paid for with money coming from the American people in the form of taxes -- but that's for another time.)

Then comes the ad's final new slide:

Hollywood doesn't learn. Even though the latest round of America-hating movies flopped, Project Greenlight producer Chris Moore will turn "A People's History of the United States" by pop historian and Karl Marx fanboy Howard Zinn into a TV miniseries and a feature-length documentary.

Zinn's 1980 book influenced a generation of students with its negatively-framed distortions of American history which minimized successes like WWII. It exchanged traditional history for marginal topics such as Great Railroad Strike of 1877, Joan Baez and Angela Davis while omitting Washington's Farewell Address, the Wright Brothers and the Normandy Invasion.

The December 10 Variety stated production begins in Boston this January. Ironically, it will use wealthy celebrities like Matt Damon, Danny Glover and Josh Brolin to convey the book's Marxist theory (bold mine):

Miniseries will center on the actors and musicians as they read from the books or perform music related to their themes: the struggles of women, war, class and race. (...)

Yeah, it was a yawner. Even so, in its coverage of today's GOP debate the MSM has overlooked one notable nugget: Mike Huckabee's fervent espousal of a radical egalitarianism that, at least in this NewsBuster's view, reflects a fundamental misreading of the Declaration of Independence and a departure from conservative principles.

View video here.

Who says businesspeople can't get a fair shake from the media? Just ask Warren Buffett, who knows the secret recipe for media adoration: support Democratic candidates who advocate populist social programs.

Buffett, known as the "Oracle of Omaha," was interviewed in San Francisco prior to a fundraiser for Clinton. Reporter Becky Quick referred to this appearance as a "special cause."

"Today he is in San Francisco and he's here for a very special cause - campaigning, or actually trying to raise money for Hillary Clinton, who's running for president," Quick said.

Wednesday night's CNN/YouTube presidential debate for the Republican candidates largely lived up to its promise to be a debate fitting for Republican voters as the vast majority of the questions used were asked from a conservative point of view. But the GOP debate's slant toward conservative questions was less than the July 23 CNN/YouTube Democratic debate's slant toward liberal questions. On Wednesday, out of a total of 34 video questions presented, conservative questions outnumbered liberal questions by 14 to 8, with the remaining questions ideologically ambiguous or neutral. During the Democratic debate, out of a total of 38 video questions, the slant toward liberal questions came in at 17 liberal to 6 conservative, with the remainder ambiguous or neutral.

During a Monday November 19 appearance at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, CNN founder Ted Turner charged that the Bush administration has "turned a lot of our friends into enemies," as he contended that when President Bush came into office, "we were friends with just about everybody in the world." Turner remarked, as documented by Raleigh's newspaper the "News and Observer": "Making friends where there used to be enemies is a very important thing to do. ... That's why I'm so sorry about this administration. Because we were friends with just about everybody in this world -- the United States was -- when this administration came to power. Now, we've turned a lot of our friends into enemies. ... I think the country with the most friends is the one that wins in the end." (More quotes follow)

Americans would love the President Bush that Rush Limbaugh has had a chance to spend time with. That was one of Rush's concluding comments in a unique simulcast of his show that he conducted with Martha MacCallum on Fox News Channel this afternoon from 1:30-2 PM ET.

View video here.

RUSH LIMBAUGH: The president is a fine man, I like him. He's incredibly upbeat. He's so different in person than the guy you see on television.

On Monday, NewsBusters reported the ironic occurrence of a Missouri newspaper firing a former journalism professor for plagiarism.

At the time, I wrote, "I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry."

Well, new information suggests the latter, as the piece which started the brouhaha, a November 3 column by professor emeritus John Merrill, was critical of a new department for women's and gender studies at the University of Missouri-Columbia (emphasis added):

Thanks to changes being implemented by the newspaper industry's Audit Board of Circulations (ABC), it may be, as I suspected in a previous post (NewsBusters; BizzyBlog) that the 30-month analysis of newspaper print circulation drops I did last week (NewsBusters; BizzyBlog) is the last "clean" one I'll be able to do.

The ABC announcement is here. Editor and Publisher's Jennifer Saba describes the changes that appear likely to prevent meaningful comparisons of new circulation figures to those in prior reports (bolds are mine; HT to Recovering Journalist, whose post on the topic is hysterical, though I always thought that CPAs were the ones who answered "What do you want it to be?" when asked "What is 2 + 2?" :-->):

Barbara Walters wanted "The View" audience to understand that she normally disagrees with Bill O'Reilly. But when it came to his views on child-rearing, Walters had to admit that she largely agreed with the Factor host. And that depressed her.

O'Reilly, the father of two young children, appeared on today's View to promote his new book on child-rearing and related issues, Kids Are Americans Too.

View video here.

In the November 7 "Washington Post," in an article reporting on the Virginia General Assembly elections, staff writer Tim Craig adopted the liberal terminology of referring to government spending as "investing" as he relayed that Democratic Governor Tim Kaine hopes to get more support for his "agenda to invest more in education, health care, and the environment." The complete text of a similar article using the same line can be found on the Washington Post's Web site here. In the front-page article "Delays in Counting Slow Results in State, Local Races," after summarizing some of the early election results, including the plight of some Republican state senators running for re-election in Democratic-trending districts, the following one-sentence paragraph ran on page A12:

Fox TV's The Morning Show with Mike and Juliet ran a segment this morning that promoted the Rutgers University Sex, ETC. site for teens. Unfortunately I was not able to watch the program so I can not comment on the specifics of the segment but I can provide some background on the site that should have every parent concerned about the effort to circumvent parental involvement in teaching their teens, and yes, pre-teen children about sex within the context of a parent's perspective.

The first item you may not be surprised to learn is that while the site runs under the subtext of "a website by teens for teens" that it is heavily influenced by adults with a particular agenda. Adults such as Nora Gelperin who is the training coordinator for the Network for Family Life Education based out of Rutgers University. The organization has been renamed to the more child friendly name of Answer and has been the recipient of government sponsored earmarks for the New Jersey Teen to Teen education project.

The United States is not the only country turning out spoiled children, ungrateful for the blessings of life in their land. Cuba is suffering from the same affliction, to judge by "My father's 'crime'" by Yan Valdes Morejon, which appears in today's Boston Globe.

Morejon's column turns out to be just one long complaint. Rather than giving proper thanks for all the wonders of the workers' paradise, like members of our MSM regularly do, it's filled with this kind of kvetching:

As we've noted at NewsBusters before, it's perfectly sporting to liberal reporters to scoff at conservative activism by college-aged Republicans. Just the same, the left-wing activists of kids not old enough to drive is enough to make journalists warm and gushy inside.

Take Linda Ellerbee, formerly of NBC and CNN, who has a new Nick News special on kids engaging in political activism, and yes, it's heavy on left-wing action items from protesting alleged "torture" sanctioned by the Bush administration, to decrying standardized testing in Seattle, Washington, as racist, to aiding PETA in protesting the use of circus animals. (h/t Blackfive)

The 22-minute Ellerbee report, "Rebels with a Cause," can be found at the Nickelodeon Web site.

Here's the condescending patter with which Ellerbee opened her program:

Today I'm pleased to announce a new feature: The NewsBusters Interview. These will be a series of lengthy, candid conversations we'll be conducting with prominent individuals in the media and political worlds.

Recently I had the privilege of attending the premier of the "Indoctrinate U," a documentary that exposes the widespread suppression of conservative and libertarian opinions on America's college campuses. Turns out, the same 60s and 70s radicals who marched for free speech back then aren't so interested in the concept now that they're running academia.

This is a great film and a very necessary one as well. I was so impressed by it that I wanted to interview its creator, Evan Coyne Maloney. We had an in-depth and candid discussion about a variety of things including how he got interested in film, getting funding for it, the background behind campus speech codes, how the media covers academic censorship and much more.

The most interesting aspect of the interview was his discussion of why there are so few conservatives and libertarians in the entertainment media. Read past the fold for excerpts and the full transcript.

It took 15 years to become official, but Carole Simpson has now confirmed what we always suspected: she's a Clinton backer. Readers will recall that during the 1992 campaign, the then ABC News anchor moderated a presidential debate in which she made life uncomfortable for Bush 41, notably with her snide "who would like to begin, the 'education president?'" poke.

According to this Boston Globe article, back in 2003 Simpson was "eased out" of her anchor chair in favor of Elizabeth Vargas. Simpson has now taken a teaching position at Emerson College in Boston, and last night turned up at a Clinton campaign stop in Salem, New Hampshire, where she proceeded to endorse Hillary's presidential bid. Here's how "First Read," a frequently-updated analysis of the day's political news from the NBC News political unit, reported it [emphasis added]:

At the beginning of September, Channel 5 News revealed a shocking story in Roma, Texas. As their cameras chronicled, each morning dozens of Mexican kids are crossing the border from Mexico into the Texas border town of Roma to attend an American school, free of charge. You read that correctly. American tax money is funding the education of kids who actually live IN Mexico and who are illegally crossing the border every single day to attend U.S. schools. I have waited a suitable period of time to bring this story up, hoping that the national news sources will pick up on this absurd violation of our National sovereignty and misuse of our tax money... yet not a peep has been heard to my knowledge.

It is estimated that $4 million has been spent on Mexican kids just in Roma, Texas, alone. And no one really even knows how much has been thrown down the rat hole in other Texas border towns, not to mentions similar towns in other border states.

News Channel 5 reported on the 6th of September that these Mexican kids are getting a free education from US taxpayers because the county schools do not have very stringent residency requirements. (See video here)

Regular readers of this space know that MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski is one of our favorites, serving up heaps of grist for our mill with her regular injections of liberal opinion into her newsreading on "Morning Joe," as here.

We'd been searching for an apt nickname for Brzezinski, and as of this morning, Mika herself has supplied one. Meet "Bubbles" Brzezinski. Mika was reading headlines from the morning's crop of newspapers, when she came across an item from the Boston Globe.

MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Boston Globe: "Many colleges ignore SAT writing test." I find this very interesting because SATs were not my strong suit. I probably would never have been allowed to go to college if it was based on just my SAT scores. But apparently hundreds of universities, including several top schools, are ignoring or paying little heed to students' scores on the writing section of the SAT in admissions. I never had a writing section, just bubbles.

View video here.

I found little coincidence in the fact that yesterday's New York Times Learning Network word of the day was "belie". Especially considering that this weeks lesson plan for teachers (grades 3-12) is a romantic walk down the path of the "pre-Reagan (and pre-Giuliani)" days of drugs, sex and parental permissiveness.

The lesson plan is a discussion of author Chris Sorrentino's yearning for the return to parenting as it was when he was 17. An era where the rules were different but lamentably better in his eyes. The message however is not being sent to parents, it is being peddled like a drug to kids in high schools across the nation.

Harvard Magazine, a magazine that caters to the alumnus of Harvard University, gives us the blather of one of their professors, Howard Gardner, who is despairing on how we eeeevil conservatives are taking over his country.

To start with, the short Harvard Mag piece tries hard to explain why anyone should care about Gardner. Apparently it's mostly because of his 1983 theory of "multiple intelligences." This theory holds that humanity has different types of intelligences, that an IQ test cannot measure a person's intelligence effectively, and that our different kinds of intelligence (I've heard it called "genius") is often hard to quantify. Some have a genius in dealing with people, some have their ability in music, some in mathematics, etc. Everyone's great ability is different than the next fellow's. That this particular theory seemed innovative or groundbreaking proves that the only "genius" that people in academia have is that of stating the obvious and pompously proclaiming it to be of great insight.

Keep your eye out for this story. It has the potential to go big… IF the MSM will report it wider than just by the local paper that broke the story. But, since it is a story that once again reveals the anti-American propaganda so prevalent in our government funded schools, will it get the coverage it deserves?

One often hears that government schools in totalitarian nations brainwash their children to love the government. People in free nations decry that as oppressing the free will of innocent children, and rightly so. In American schools, however, just the opposite is true as with the case of an anti-American teacher in a public school in Chico, California who hates this country so much that he sent a letter home to his student's parents urging them to renounce their citizenship in the U.S. as he announced he was so doing.

The BBC decided to set up a website explaining 911 to kids. They have several sections set up to help the kids out on understanding the war on terror the BBC way. In one section they ask, Why Did They Do It? Guess who gets the blame?

The way America has got involved in conflicts in regions like the Middle East has made some people very angry, including a group called al-Qaeda - who are widely thought to have been behind the attacks.

In the past, al-Qaeda leaders have declared a holy war - called a jihad - against the US. As part of this jihad, al-Qaeda members believe attacking US targets is something they should do.

When the attacks happened in 2001, there were a number of US troops in a country called Saudi Arabia, and the leader of al-Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, said he wanted them to leave.

Here are chilling words for any parent to hear: "Hollywood recruits kids to fight climate change." It isn't every day that someone admits that they are basically out to indoctrinate children with an ideological position, but Helen Andrews of Politico.com reports to us just such an admission from the globaloney forces in Hollywood. Not only do they intend to brainwash our children (and already are, for that matter) with their anti-capitalist, anti-growth ideas using fuzzy animals and cartoonish figures, but they are presenting it as a "moral" issue and, just as badly, trying to convince our children that humans aren't any more special than the animals -- because, you see, kids are "an animal," too. Naturally, these globaloney pushers imagine there isn't a thing wrong with their actions despite that they are trying to inculcate political positions on unsuspecting children, undercutting their parent's ideologies, and undermining the American way of life.

CNN, in their day-long reporting on Tuesday about the opening day for a controversial publicly-funded Arabic-language school in New York City, sympathized with the school and its supporters, and helped denigrate its opponents. On "American Morning" and throughout the day on Tuesday on their "Newsroom" program, CNN aired a report from correspondent Richard Roth on the Khalil Gibran International Academy, whose curriculum will focus on teaching "Arabic language and culture" (as detailed in a CNSNews.com report last week). The report focused on Carmen Colon, a mother and "community activist" in Brooklyn (a detail not mentioned in Roth’s report) who pulled her son from the school before its opening. The report closed with a clip from Colon, who said, "The people who are so against this school who, for me, seem more like the terrorists by terrorizing the community and making us feel that it's unsafe for our children to be there. They're the ones who are terrorizing us, not the school, not the principal, and not the administration."

Video (4:13): Real (3.10 MB) or Windows (2.56 MB), plus MP3 audio (1.92 kB).

In last night’s installment of the six-hour, three-part series God’s Warriors, CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour loads the deck to portray conservative Christians as dangerously at odds with science. She first uses an interview with maverick Rich Cizik of the National Association of Evangelicals, who has been criticized by many Christian leaders for his embrace of man-made Global Warming theory as fact, then turns to a family of homeschoolers.

Here’s a partial transcript:

The Chicago Sun-Times is blaming the Bush administration for what they claim is sure to be a rise in unplanned pregnancies at colleges and universities across the country. It hasn't happened yet, mind you, but they are sure it's gonna! Naturally, the paper cannot imagine we should place any blame on the stupid students who are getting themselves pregnant. I mean, it HAS to be Bush's fault, you see, with personal responsibility being so last century and all. No, the Sun-Times is sure that a cut in the amount of Federal money doled out to our institutions of higher learning for cheap birth control is going to wreak havoc with the student body. Our kids are obviously too stupid to get by without that government spending.

The Sun-Times, worrying that the cost of birth control available to students in colleges is going to rise, imagines a law reducing Federal spending is somehow forcing students to have unprotected sex. "Birth-control costs soaring at colleges -- Pregnancies could rise now that law limits drugmaker incentives", they proclaim. This calamity is all being blamed on the "Deficit Reduction Act signed by President Bush last year" according to the Sun-Times.

The San Francisco Chronicle joins the bandwagon of liberal newspapers that have addressed the "achievement gap" -- the difference between majority [white] student academic achievement and that of minority [black/Latino] pupils. Right from the headline of "Children of Color Being Left Behind," readers are clearly left with the impression that there has been some purposeful scheme to "shortchange" minority students.