No, they really don’t, these members of the current majority festering in Congress. Anytime any opportunity arises where they have the chance to sabotage our economy, our freedom of speech or our security in the name of liberal quagmirism, they’re wide awake and on it with a vengeance.

The Senate rejected a move Thursday to block the Obama administration from using ordinary federal courts to prosecute those alleged to have plotted the Sept. 11 attacks.

On a 54-45 vote, the Senate tabled an amendment from Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) that would have left military commissions as the only option for prosecuting Sept. 11 suspects.

All 40 Republicans supported the amendment, along with Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and four Democrats: Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.), Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) and Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.)

Graham said the measure, offered as an amendment to the annual appropriations bill for the Commerce and Justice Departments, was needed to head off what he said were plans by the Obama administration to send Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others allegedly involved in the Sept. 11 plot to trials before civilian courts in the U.S.

Of course, we were expecting something like that, the left having discussed it for a long time, often with comparisons of the gulag and Nazi death camps when referring to the Camp Delta incarceration facility at Guantanamo Bay, the feeble argument that these Butchers For Allah are mere felons, not captured prisoners in a war between civilizations we did not start, but to now see that they’ve actually done it, well, is nevertheless disconcerting.

The more sensible among our leaders, mostly Republicans, were, rightly, completely for the bill.

“These people are not criminals. They’re warriors — and they need to be dealt with in a legal system that recognizes that,” Graham said. “Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, did not rob a liquor store.”

“The attacks of 9/11 were not a crime. They were a war crime,” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said.

Some Democrats flatly disagreed, arguing that military trials could play into the Al Qaeda operatives’ claims that they are fighters in a holy war against America.

“They are criminals. They committed murder,” Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) said. “These are not holy warriors. They are criminals.”

Here, here!

Jim Webb, one of the few smart Democrats present:

“I have consistently argued that the appropriate venue for trying perpetrators of international terrorism who are in fact enemy combatants is a military tribunal,” Webb said. He said federal court procedures for turning over evidence to defense lawyers and for calling military and intelligence agency witnesses “could lead to the exposure of classified materials.”

My emphasis, there, and the man said a mouthful.

Regular court procedures would require the prosecution to produce evidence that might consist of disclosure of methods, means and personnel we can’t afford to have the enemy read about in the New York Times.

Then again, that precedent was already set back when the NYT was printing the details of Bush terrorist surveillance strategies, so I don’t suppose it would be anything new.

Webb also indicated he was concerned that a terror suspect sent to federal court could be released in the U.S. if he was found not guilty.

Fancy that!

The whole story is here.

…a few minutes to check my email before being obligated for the rest of the day, and right off the bat, ran across a perfect example of a liberal elitist in action can be found here.

Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Michael Moore told CNSNews.com “it’s absolutely a good thing” for government to drive private health insurance companies out of business and replace them with a single-payer system.

President Obama, Moore said, should stop trying to sneak a single-payer health care system through the “backdoor” and come straight at it instead. Moore said he would advise the president to tell the American people: “Look, we should be like every other Western Democracy and have a single-payer health care system. Pure and simple.”

Do you think that extreme leftist, disgusting, fat tub of treasonous combination of lard and excrement Michael Moore will, if the “single payer” system is passed, victimize himself with it as he is so determined to see the unwashed masses© so victimized?

Of course not!

A corpulent human balloon like that would no doubt be terrified, given his certain future of heart problems and other obesity related ailments, of subjecting himself to the government controlled healthcare he wishes on the rest of us, and I’d bet that if he wasn’t a very rich man (wealth “earned” by means that only a traitor could lay claim to), we wouldn’t hear a peep from the blimp-like son-of-a-bitch about this.

Later.

…from today’s Washington Times Online. I’m somewhat pressed for time this morning, I have some people to meet, but figured I’d share them.

Here we have a fine example of the term, “haste makes waste” in action, in this case mongers of political agendas in such a hurry to blow our hard earned tax money that they misinformed the public, largely through failure to do their homework and largely to get their itinerary pushed through in a hurry, in an un-thought-out, unconstitutional, just plain stupid act, part of the idiotic and ill advised TARP program.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and former Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. misled the public about the financial weakness of Bank of America and other early recipients of the government’s $700 billion Wall Street bailout, creating “unrealistic expectations” about the companies and damaging the program’s credibility, according to a report by the program’s independent watchdog.

The federal government last October loaned Bank of America and eight other “healthy” financial institutions a total of $125 billion - the initial payout from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP - in an attempt to avoid a series of major bank collapses that would push the sputtering economy into a free fall or depression.

The rationale for giving money to stable banks and not failing ones, regulators said, was that such institutions would be better able to lend money and thus unfreeze tight credit markets - a major factor in last year’s Wall Street losses.

Right. Now the American taxpayer gets to pay the price for the blatant miscalculations due to political agendas and faulty thinking of a number of general purpose assholes.

Moving right along, we have the messiah Barack Hussein, whose military expertise evidently outshines that of his generals, coming up with excuses as to why he’d rather allow U.S. servicemen and woman to die than to commit more troops where General McChrystal says they are needed. What does McChrystal know, anyway, right? He’s just a general, whereas Obama, the guy who once, for campaign reasons, said the war in Afghanistan is justified in order to compare it to Iraq (according to his excellency, unjustified) is so much more knowledgeable about warfare that, well,

One day after an attack in Afghanistan killed eight American soldiers, President Obama’s national security adviser downplayed both the importance of U.S. troop levels and the possibility of a Taliban return to power.

National security adviser James L. Jones suggested that Gen. McChrystal’s call for more troops must be tempered by diplomatic considerations as the president weighs how to deal with the 8-year-old war.

“Well, I think the end is much more complex than just about adding ‘X’ number of troops. Afghanistan is a country that’s quite large and that swallows up a lot of people,” the retired Marine general said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Right, let’s here more, Jones. What else did Obama instruct you to say, and being an ex-military man yourself, how does it feel to be a party to it?

The rest of the story can be found here.

One trend I’ve noticed for quite some time is that of the mainstream media’s OpEds tending to echo whatever the agendas of our farthest-left politicians happen to be. The farther these anti-America intentions list to port, the more likely the MSM is to “go for the gusto”.

That said, the Grey Lady is at it again.

The next big thing in heart surgery are replacement valves, which can be implanted without open-heart surgery. But instead of evaluating this as a straightforward boon to humanity, the Times maintained its year-long push for health care rationing, emphasizing the new technology as a “costly valve for the frail” that may drive up health care spending even further with costly new procedures.”

Okay, they’ve said it, a “costly valve for the frail” that may drive up health care spending even further with costly new procedures.”

They’re not concerned with the damage done to our economy by massive illegal immigration, cap-&-trade legislation, government controlled healthcare or any number of social services that gouge the taxpayer, but here they are complaining about the cost of a specific procedure for “the frail”, which can only, or mostly, mean senior citizens.

A race is on to develop the potentially next big thing in heart surgery: a replacement valve that can be implanted through thin tubes known as catheters rather than by traditional open-heart surgery.

The contest pits two major companies, Edwards Lifesciences and Medtronic. Analysts estimate a market for the product that could exceed $1.5 billion within six years. But if the valves catch on, their benefits for the nation’s aging population could be substantial — even if the impact on the nation’s health care bill may be hard to calculate.

Our “compassionate” liberals evidently feel that since the old folks are beneficiaries of the system (never mind all the Social Security taxes and so forth they’ve had extracted from their paychecks over the years, like it or not) and no longer paying into it, they are some sort of parasite better expunged.

God protect Grandma and Grandpa from the New York Times and their ilk…

…and see a more secure America.

From 2 August, 2009:

The Obama administration is looking at creating a courtroom-within-a-prison complex in the U.S. to house suspected terrorists, combining military and civilian detention facilities at a single maximum-security prison.

Several senior U.S. officials said the administration is eyeing a soon-to-be-shuttered state maximum security prison in Michigan and the 134-year-old military penitentiary at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., as possible locations for a heavily guarded site to hold the 229 suspected al-Qaida, Taliban and foreign fighters now jailed at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba.

The officials outlined the plans — the latest effort to comply with President Barack Obama’s order to close the prison camp by Jan. 22, 2010, and satisfy congressional and public fears about incarcerating terror suspects on American soil — on condition of anonymity because the options are under review.

The best way to satisfy public fears about incarcerating terror suspects on American soil would be to leave them incarcerated at Camp Delta, Guantanamo Bay, and try them there, as well!

Getting that bit out of the way,

Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the Obama administration is working to recover from missteps that have put officials behind schedule and left them struggling to win the cooperation of Congress.

Even before the inauguration, President Obama’s top advisers settled on a course of action they With four months left to meet its self-imposed deadline for closing the U.S. military prison at were counseled against: announcing that they would close the facility within one year. Today, officials are acknowledging that they will be hard-pressed to meet that goal.

The White House has faltered in part because of the legal, political and diplomatic complexities involved in determining what to do with more than 200 terrorism suspects at the prison. But senior advisers privately acknowledge not devising a concrete plan for where to move the detainees and mishandling Congress.

Truncating…

Craig said Thursday that some of his early assumptions were based on miscalculations, in part because Bush administration officials and senior Republicans in Congress had spoken publicly about closing the facility. “I thought there was, in fact, and I may have been wrong, a broad consensus about the importance to our national security objectives to close Guantanamo and how keeping Guantanamo open actually did damage to our national security objectives,” he said.

the importance to our national security objectives to close Guantanamo and how keeping Guantanamo open actually did damage to our national security objectives

Is that convoluted thinking, or what?

One of the chief concerns in the whole “what to do with the terrorists imprisoned at GITMO” kerfuffle is a typical liberal concern, of course: Other countries, particularly European countries, disapprove of our holding them there.

American liberals, for the most part, are more concerned with the approval of the European Union than they are with what’s actually in the best interests of the American people. Shame on them!

Durn, I forgot — liberals have no sense of shame.

However, I haven’t read anyplace where the EU countries have pledged to take the detainees off our hands and accept them into their own societies.

Q:Why is that?

A:Old fashioned good sense!

Maybe our President needs to GITMO of that!

At least I’ll assume (I know, assume makes an “ass” out of UME), to judge by the sense of logic, patriotism and common sense Obama has demonstrated as POTUS to date, that the graduate of the corrupt Chicago machine won’t heed the advice of these former DCIs. After all, the Obama credo is “politics before the people.”

Seven of the 10 living former CIA chiefs Friday urged President Obama to overrule his attorney general and not reopen investigations into CIA employees who may have abused detainees during the George W. Bush administration.

The former directors warned that further investigations would demoralize current CIA officers and might also lead allied intelligence services to suspend or scale back cooperation with the United States because the judicial probes could disclose joint operations and activities.

Why should Obama care about compromising methods and personnel? His good fiends friends at the New York Times certainly didn’t care about that kind of thing during the Bush Administration, when they blared every counter-terrorist program or strategy they could get their teeth into in order to play politics at the peril of the American people, just as Mr. O would likely have no qualms about.

If I’m wrong, I’m wrong, but to judge, as a horse handicapper might say, from Past Performances, it’s a good bet I’m right.

On Aug. 24, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. appointed a federal prosecutor, John Durham, to review cases against CIA officers suspected of exceeding Justice Department guidelines for interrogations of terrorist suspects following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The decision to reopen the cases was controversial in part because the Justice Department under the Bush administration had already considered the charges and declined to prosecute the officers.

In a letter released Friday, the former directors of the CIA, who included Democratic and Republican appointees, wrote: “If criminal investigations closed by career prosecutors during one administration can so easily be reopened at the direction of political appointees in the next, declinations of prosecution will be rendered meaningless. Those men and women who undertake difficult intelligence assignments in the aftermath of an attack such as September 11 must believe there is permanence in the legal rules that govern their actions.”

The entire article is here.

While we’re visiting the Washington Times, anyway, I’d like to direct your attention to the picture of Nancy Pelosi in this article.

Doesn’t she look like she uses the same cosmetic surgeon as the late Michael Jackson?

Knowing how much I detest liberal interference in what was once among the best systems of education in the world, Seth forwarded the following material to me awhile ago, from Red State.

While we are all focusing on H.R. 3200, the House Democrats’ health care plan, we should at least glance at H.R. 3221, the House Democrats’ plan to kill off higher education access. (PDF)

The legislation is opposed by many major universities including Notre Dame, among others. Basically, the bill would shut down all private providers of student loans, drive up costs for universities, and become a bureaucratic nightmare for institutions of higher learning. The professors may be leftists, but the administrators have to pay attention to the bottom line.

Incredible! It’s bad enough that today’s students are subjected to a course of liberal indoctrination during the span of their educations, now the lefties in Congress have decided that the government should decide, by controlling student loans, who gets, and doesn’t get, a college education?

In the process, putting the government in charge of something like this will create another big bureaucracy, one fraught with the same quagmire of ineptitude and the normal attached smothering taxation we always get from government usurpation of private sector functions. Prime example: The mess to which we’ll be treated if we are victimized by government run healthcare.

The Director of Student Financial Strategies at University of Notre Dame warns in a letter to Congressman Miller, “Any legislation that eliminates choice and competition and mandates that all institutions adopt an all-government run program for the 2010/11 academic year is filled with immense risk and would create massive confusion.”

Get that? The Democrats want an “all-government run program” to provide people access to money to pay for college. And if they do that, then they can force universities to comply with lots of new rules or deny students the right to use federal student loans to go to particular colleges.

But it gets better. Boy does it ever get better.

How!!!?

§ 343 of the plan creates a Green Schools Czar. No kidding. A Green Schools Czar (and committee naturally) would examine the impact of more environmentally friendly universities and find ways to create even more environmentally friendly universities. Oh . . . I have an idea . . . if students need financial assistance and they are forced to go through the feds, the feds can simply tell universities to become compliant or they won’t let students use their student loans to go there.

What is so funny is that §312 of Obama’s stimulus plan also sent money to schools to become more environmentally friendly. That was the carrot. Well, this new law will become the stick.

A green schools czar. Czars and more czars, all the better for the Obama Administration and the Kommie Left to maintain Kontrol.

Recapped today,

If you want an indication of just how radical the Democrats in Congress have become, consider the vote on H.R. 3221. The legislation, which I wrote about yesterday, shuts down all private lenders for higher education student loans, requires that colleges and universities adhere to a new federal bureaucracy, creates a new Green Schools Czar, and hints that any school not complying will see its students denied federal student loans.

The liberals now in firm control of our government will stop at nothing to change America into something entirely different than the great country in which we were born and raised.

We right thinkers had best enjoy it while there’s something left to enjoy.

…at the taxpayer’s expense, wherein the Democrats are misleading the American people (not a bad deal, bullshit people and make them pay for it!) about how the “Stimulus” is working.

They’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars to stimulate the economy, so Senate Democrats said Wednesday they might as well spend millions putting up signs to highlight where the money is being spent.

The road signs, which let motorists know the paving and construction projects they see are being paid for by the $787 billion economic stimulus program, have popped up across the country. In a 52-45 vote, the Senate decided the signs should stay.

Sure, why not? It’s just the taxpayer’s money, right? “Spend, spend, spend!” as the liberal credo goes.

“Why on earth would you want to hide from the American people the fact that the recovery package we passed is putting people to work?” asked Sen. Barbara Boxer, California Democrat, who took the lead in defending the expenditure. She said stimulus spending is beginning to improve the economy and charged that Republicans and Democrats who voted to strip out the funds are angry about that success.

“It’s my sense that there’s a frustration by the people who voted ‘no’ on the economic recovery act, the stimulus bill, there’s a frustration that it’s working. They predicted gloom and doom,” Mrs. Boxer said.

Campaigning at the expense of working Americans seems to be an institution that has really gained traction among Democrats of late, but then, it seems that the Obama Administration has set the stage for a new kind of government — kind of like one that can bill us for their spam and junk mail, a “we will like it!”

But Sen. Judd Gregg, the New Hampshire Republican who tried to excise the funds, called his amendment a no-brainer. He said it’s common sense to get rid of tens of millions of dollars in spending.

“These are self-congratulatory signs; they’re political signs. They’re so that lawmakers can pat themselves on the back,” he said. “But these signs cost money. Actually, when you add them all up, they cost a lot of money.”

Some localities have objected to the signs, arguing that they would rather spend the money on more projects. But Mr. Gregg said one community in New Hampshire was told no sign, no money for their original project.

Emphasis mine.

In the states’ rights department,

Also Wednesday, senators voted against allowing states to determine their own transportation funding priorities, such as repairing deficient bridges. A day earlier, the Senate voted against an effort by Sen. John McCain, Arizona Republican, to drop all of the pork-barrel earmark projects from the $67.7 billion transportation and housing spending bill and use the $1.7 billion slated for earmarks to modernize the nation’s air traffic control system instead.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, thanks largely to the liberals on the Hill, this country has come full circle, back to the same state of affairs good men died kicking out of here back in the 1770s.

Bummer.

Mr. Gregg acknowledged that this effort was as much a message as a cost-saving move. His amendment to the annual transportation spending bill would have banned putting up physical signs to tout stimulus transportation projects.

Five Democrats — Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and Charles E. Schumer of New York — voted with all 40 Republicans to try to strip the money, but their support was not enough.

With typical dumbass, idiotic, mares-eat-oats, shallowbrained, downright stupid, aimed-at-the-gullible liberal reasoning,

Mrs. Boxer called the effort “anti-jobs” and said the signs are an example of government transparency.

Methinks this is time, once again, to recall a quote by a commenter at a blog I used to visit about 6 years ago: “Arguing with a liberal is like standing in a bucket and trying to pick yourself up by the handle.”

…is available for our perusal at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Canadian and American filmmakers lashed back Friday at what they described as an ” outrageous” boycott of the Toronto International Film Festival by some filmmakers and writers in protest of the event’s spotlight on filmmakers from Tel Aviv.

Producer, writer and director David Zucker (”Scary Movie,” “Naked Gun,” “Airplane!” ) denounced as “left-wing crazies” the individuals who signed a letter called ” The Toronto Declaration” to protest Israeli government policies.

Even artistic endeavors are not safe from the injection of politics by the far left and its minions.

Mr. Zucker said he is “outraged” that actors such as Danny Glover and Jane Fonda, along with about 50 other activists, would sign a declaration that condemns Israel as an “apartheid regime” and dismisses the work of Tel Aviv filmmakers as “Israeli propaganda.”

The protest of Israel began Aug. 27 when Canadian filmmaker John Greyson released a public letter stating he would withdraw his film from the 10-day festival, which opens Thursday, to protest Israel’s “brutal” military assault on Gaza earlier this year.
On Thursday Sept. 3, writer Naomi Klein and others joined Mr. Greyson’s protest and issued ” The Toronto Declaration: No Celebration of Occupation.”

Israel’s “brutal” military assault on Gaza earlier this year.

Didn’t that have something to do with stopping Hamas’ launching missiles at civilian targets in southern Israel, and curtailing the smuggling of weapons into the Gaza Strip to prevent further violence against innocent civilians?

Then again, Liberals, who are always the first up to preach peace, are also always right there to raise their voices in support of the worst murderers, torturers and enslavers of civilian populations on the planet. If your cause involves genocide and totalitarianism, rest assured there will be millions of liberals, especially the American kind who have never had to worry about falling victim to the same evils, marching in your support.

Nevertheless, a liberal will be outraged if you even hint that he or she has even a single hypocritical bone in his or her body.

I’ll tell you one thing: Had I been Henry Fonda, not only would I have been the most ashamed father in America, I would probably, also, have looked into the possibility of a total gene replacement decades ago.

Mr. Greyson’s film, “Covered,” is a documentary about violence in Bosnia-Herzegovina that shut down the 2008 Sarajevo Queer Festival.

The 2008 Sarajevo Queer Festival?

ROTFLMAO!

I wonder how many people the withdrawal of Mr. Greyson’s film has brought to the very brink of suicidal despair!

Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici complained that Mr. Greyson is now trying to shut down the voices of filmmakers in the only country in the Middle East that allows free expression.

If Mr. Greyson “were to walk down the streets of Tel Aviv with a sign saying he is a homosexual filmmaker, he would be invited to the Tel Aviv Queer Film Festival. But if he did that in Ramallah or any Palestinian village in the Territories, his films would have to be shown posthumously because they would kill him,” said Mr. Jacobovici.

In fact, Mr. Greyson was invited to the Tel Aviv Queer Festival and withdrew another of his films from that event.

My, these “queer festivals” really seem to be making the rounds. Even in “evil, apartheid mongering” Tel Aviv, imagine that!

Gays in Palestine “flee to Tel Aviv to protect themselves from their brothers who would lynch them,” Mr. Jacobovici added.

Yes, but that doesn’t count, because,

“It seems that nothing the Jews do is right and nothing the enemies of the Jews do is wrong,” said Mr. Jacobovici.

{Both above emphasis’ mine}

The idea of an Israeli apartheid is also “a lie,” said Mr. Jacobovici, noting that 1 million Palestinians live in Israel (about 20 percent of Israel’s population), “while not one Jew lives in the Territories or is even buried there because they have disinterred those bodies.”

Anyway, the entire Washington Times article is here.

Liberals…

…There’s no way I would want my children to be subjected to anything like this, not an organized address aimed at school children by a socialist, anti-Israel, anti-U.S. Constitution president like Barack Hussein Obama. I mean, one that’s actually providing advance instructions for how teachers should prep students for the event?

Look, we all know how the Democrats, under liberal control, have adapted the same indoctrination procedures as so many totalitarian governments, working through the classroom to program future adults.

When I was a kid and teachers/schools were more conservative and dedicated to teaching rather than forcing political indoctrination on their pupils, we were taught how to think, encouraged to analyse the facts of a matter and draw our own conclusions. Today, they teach students what to think.

Here we have a president who managed to get himself elected by millions of idiots by speaking for months without saying a damn thing of substance, a president who even now is trying to push a healthcare bill down our throats without saying what he means when he “explains” himself, and seeing as he’s running more and more into right thinking people who are asking questions he doesn’t want to answer (if he told the truth, something B. Hussein Obama finds repulsive, always has, always will, Americans would laugh his healthcare bill out of existence as they realized what an anti-America, anti-freedom entity we’ve (well, not me, not anyone with all their facilities intact) ushered into the White House, insulting our intelligence as he does.

But, he figures, if I work through the children, like we liberals have been doing with our gay rights and global warming agendas, at least I may be able to help program future generations.

On September 8, in what the Department of Education is touting as a “historic” speech, President Obama will be talking directly to students across the U.S., live on the White House website. But some parents and conservatives are blasting the president, calling the speech an excuse to brainwash American children.

Last month, in an interview with 11-year-old student reporter Damon Weaver, the president announced his big back-to-school plan:

“I’m going to be making a big speech to young people all across the country about the importance of education; about the importance of staying in school; how we want to improve our education system and why it’s so important for the country. So I hope everybody tunes in.”

Yeah, everybody tune in. Where liberals are concerned, communist indoctrination education needn’t concern itself with accurate history, the three Rs or anything else that might cloud the mindsof potential future Democrat voters.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan sent a letter to the nation’s principals, inviting schools to watch the speech and included suggested classroom activities. But Jim Greer, the chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, came out swinging against the planned speech. An excerpt from his statement:

“The address scheduled for September 8, 2009, does not allow for healthy debate on the President’s agenda, but rather obligates the youngest children in our public school system to agree with our President’s initiatives or be ostracized by their teachers and classmates.”

NBC spoke with Katie Gordon, a spokeswoman for the Florida Republican Party, who said the party’s “beef” is with the accompanying lesson plans. The guide for pre-K through grade 6 suggests questions students think about during the speech, such as “What is the President trying to tell me? What is the President asking me to do?”

The plan for grades 7-12 includes a “guided discussion,” with suggested topics: “What resonated with you from President Obama’s speech? What is President Obama inspiring you to do?”

“Guided discussion”, indeed.

The Cato Institute, a public-policy research foundation, issued a press release entitled “Hey Obama, Leave Those Kids Alone,” criticizing the “troubling buzzwords” in the lesson plans:

“It’s one thing for a president to encourage all kids to work hard and stay in school – that’s a reasonable use of the bully pulpit. It’s another thing entirely, however, to have the U.S. Department of Education send detailed instructions to public schools nationwide on how to glorify the president and the presidency, and push them to drive social change.”

That sounds about Obama’s speed, him bein’ a left winger an’ all.