Obama indoctrinating schoolchildren

...or not. Susannah, over at Get the Big Idea, posted on this. Obama, on Tuesday, September 8th, which will be the first day of school for most of the country's schoolchildren, will be delivering an address over the internet that most schools will be broadcasting into every classroom.


In Susannah's post, she likens this to the "Hitler Youth," and in her comments links to a video where children were pledging their undying support to Hitler in Nazi Germany. She says she will be pulling her children out of school due to this "unprecedented 'Presidential address' to the captive audience of our nation's school children." She has said she will be pulling her children out of school, which is her right, but is a little ridiculous. I normally wouldn't say anything, but she correctly points out that "hundreds of thousands of other parents across the nation" are doing the same, and she says it is because "Our country’s current political climate has produced unparalleled Government control in our society, and has raised to high alert suspicions of socialist motivations (& worse). In such a climate, for the President to deliver an unprecedented “address” to every child in the nation’s public schools..."


Susannah isn't alone in her hysteria. That's why it is scary. I'm seeing so much hysteria on both sides right now...the left saying the right wants to kill Obama, the right saying the left and Obama want to round them up and put them in concentration camps...enough!

The hysteria has to stop. Susannah, I do respect you, but you are just as guilty as the left in falling into hysteria about the opposition's President.

This address isn't socialistic, nor is it unprecedented.

On the U.S. Department of Education Web site Secretary Arne Duncan wrote that the speech was about "the importance of education."

"The president will challenge students to work hard, set educational goals, and take responsibility for their learning," Duncan wrote. "He will also call for a shared responsibility and commitment on the part of students, parents and educators to ensure that every child in every school receives the best education possible so they can compete in the global economy for good jobs and live rewarding and productive lives as American citizens."
...
President George H.W. Bush addressed the nation's students in a televised speech during school hours in 1991. ''I can't understand for the life of me what's so great about being stupid,'' Bush said, according to news reports from the time. He told students to ''block out the kids who think it's not cool to be smart'' and ''work harder, learn more.''

Democrats at the time criticized the speech. "The Department of Education should not be producing paid political advertising for the president, it should be helping us to produce smarter students," said Richard Gephardt, then the Democratic majority leader in the House of Representatives.

Republican Newt Gingrich defended Bush's speech, though. "Why is it political for the president of the United States to discuss education?" Gingrich said at the time. "It was done at a nonpolitical site and was beamed to a nonpolitical audience. . . . They wanted to reach the maximum audience with the maximum effect to improve education."

Everyone needs to calm down.

Mexico's war on drugs escalating.

While living in Mexico last year, I got to see a little of this firsthand. During independence day last september, while I was watching fireworks in Cuernavaca, the drug cartels threw grenades into the crowd in Michoacan, killing and injuring dozens of people there just to celebrate and watch the fireworks.

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MEXICO CITY, Mexico (CNN) -- Gunmen shot and killed 17 patients and wounded two others in a drug rehabilitation center in northern Mexico late Wednesday, the mayor of Ciudad Juarez said Thursday.

Police gather at the rehab facility where 17 people were killed in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, late Wednesday.

Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz said authorities believe a rival drug gang attacked the men at the El Aviane rehab facility.

"At the very least, it was one organized crime group thinking that another group was operating in that place," Reyes told CNN.

Wednesday night's shootings, he said, are similar to an attack at a drug facility in March that left 20 patients dead.

A Mexican civic group said last week that Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, had the most slayings per capita in 2008 of any city in the world.

More than 1,420 people have been killed in Juarez this year, Reyes told CNN on Monday. About 1,600 people were killed in Juarez in 2008, Reyes said.

The latest Juarez killings came on the same day that gunmen shot dead the No. 2 security official and three others in Michoacan, the home state of Mexican President Felipe Calderon.
Jose Manuel Revuelta Lopez, the deputy public safety secretary of Mexico's Michoacan state, was killed in a shootout that also claimed the lives of two of his bodyguards and a bystander caught in the crossfire, said Jesus Humberto Adame Ortiz, spokesman for the state.
Revuelta was leaving his office at 5:15 p.m. in the state capital, Morelia, when the shooting occurred, Adame said.

An unprecedented wave of violence has washed over Mexico since Calderon declared war on drug cartels shortly after coming into office in December 2006. More than 11,000 people have since died, about 1,000 of them police.

The offensive against the government has been especially fierce in Michoacan.
In July, La Familia Michoacana drug cartel was accused of assaults in a half-dozen cities across the state and of torturing and killing 12 off-duty federal agents and dumping their bodies on a remote road. That violence was thought to have been retaliation for the arrest of a La Familia leader.

In Juarez, much of the violence is being committed by the rival Sinaloa and Juarez drug cartels, which are fighting for lucrative routes into the United States as well as local street sales, Reyes said.

The deportations of thousands of Mexicans who have served time in U.S. jails into Ciudad Juarez are adding a deadly ingredient to an already volatile state of security, he said.
In the past 45 days, 10 percent of those killed in Juarez had been deported from the United States in the past two years, Reyes said.

"We don't have the statistics to know if they were criminals from the United States or not," he told CNN. "We know they were deported from the U.S. Most of them come from U.S. jails. They end up in the city of Juarez, and that's a problem generated for us, but also for the United States."

Most deportees are simply Mexicans who crossed the border illegally, but some hardened criminals get involved with the gangs, which have networks in the United States, Reyes said.
According to a report released last week by the Mexican Citizens Council for Public Security watchdog group, Juarez had an estimated rate of 130 killings per 100,000 people. The city has a population of around 1.5 million.

By comparison, the homicide rate in New Orleans, Louisiana, the deadliest city in the United States in 2008, was 64 homicides per 100,000 residents, based on preliminary FBI figures.
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Honestly, I think this is another reason we need to tighten up our borders. We do not need this to spill over into the US. It's easier to keep it out than to stop it later. While we do that, we need to help Calderon end it there so it doesn't further escalate and spill over. This is something previously only seen in South America, but it has spread further and further north and cannot be ignored any longer.

Waterboarding saved NO lives.

I have previously blogged about the morality and legality of waterboarding here, here, here, here, here, and here. There are other articles out there that deal with this, such as the illegality of threats of imminent death. But this post will be about the other argument I've heard: "It worked." Not true.

Even though Cheney has claimed that documents would vindicate his claim that his "enhanced interrogation techniques" [torture] saved "hundreds of thousands of lives," (a claim he later backtracked on, implicity denying that they saved a single life in reality) one of the FBI's best interrogaters has shown that, in reality, waterboarding doesn't work.

Here are some of the highlights of the article:

Former FBI Interrogator Ali Soufan testified on the use of torture before a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee and stated that the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques are "slow, ineffective, unreliable, and harmful to our efforts." Soufan was able to obtain valuable intel using techniques labeled the "informed interrogation approach", which are consistent with the Army Field Manual. His testimony is fascinating.

Soufin was the agent who first interrogated Abu Zubaydah, the man now famous for being waterboarded 83 times. Zubaydah had been badly wounded in the struggle to capture him and was almost immediately taken to a hospital. It was there that Soufin began his interrogation, and gained "important, actionable intelligence" within the first hour regarding the role Khalid Sheikh Mohammed played in the 9-11 attacks. Committee Chair Sheldon called this "one of the more significant pieces of intelligence information we've ever obtained in the war on terror."

Soon the CIA-CTC was brought in, and a private contractor instructed them to subject Zubaydah to harsh interrogation techniques. Michael Isikoff wrote that: "Agency operatives were aiming to crack him with rough and unorthodox interrogation tactics—including stripping him nude, turning down the temperature and bombarding him with loud music." Soufan told the committee that Zubaydah "shut down." Later, Soufan interrogated the man again, using Army sanctioned methods, and Zubaydah disclosed information about the alleged "dirty bomber" Jose Padilla. According to Soufan, the contractor soon reasserted control, ordering the use of "enhanced" techniques and Zubaydah shut down again. Worried, Soufan objected to his FBI superiors, and was soon ordered home by Director Mueller, who also decreed that FBI personnel should no longer participate in CIA interrogations.

Soufan's account of this interrogation contradicts the May 2005 memo from the Office of Legal Counsel which implied that this valuable information was elicited from Zubaydah as a result of the harsh interrogation techniques used. Soufan's account is deeply damaging to arguments about torture's effectiveness Dick Cheney and other Bush-era officials have been making of late.

Soufan describes his methods as follows:
The approach is based on leveraging our knowledge of a detainee's mindset, vulnerabilities, and culture together with using intelligence already known about him. The interrogator uses a combination of interpersonal, cognitive, and emotional strategies to exact the information needed. If done correctly, this approach works quickly and effectively because it outsmarts the detainee using a method that he is not trained nor able to resist.

He then critiqued the "enhanced techniques":
The Army Field Manual is not about being soft; it's about outwitting, outsmarting, and manipulating the detainee. The approach is in sharp contrast of the enhanced interrogation method that instead tries to subjugate the detainee into submission through humiliation and cruelty. The idea behind it is to force the detainee to see the interrogator as the master who controls his pain. It's merely an exercise in trying to force compliance rather than elicit cooperation. A major problem with it is it is ineffective. Al Qaeda are trained to resist torture. As shocking as these techniques are to us, their training prepares them for much worse. The torture that they would receive if caught by dictatorships, for example. In a democracy, however, there is a glass ceiling the interrogator cannot breach. And eventually, the detainee will call the interrogator's bluff..... The technique is also unreliable. We don't know whether the detainee is being truthful or just speaking to mitigate his discomfort. The technique is also slow. Waiting 180 hours as part of a sleep deprivation stage is time we cannot afford to waste in a ticking-bomb scenario.
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There is more in the article linked above. It's a good read. We could've gotten the information in many different ways. But no, we wanted to feel better and [torture] our detainees, getting back at them for 9/11. But we did not have to, and it was an exercise in futility.

Here is something else that has bothered me in this whole debate: the questioning of our patriotism if we have a legitimate problems with torture, even of our enemies. I personally have had my Republican credentials questioned because I didn't, and never will, support torturing our enemies.

I think this summed it up quite well for me:

Conservative pundits casually liken waterboarding to prep-school initiation, and claim that anyone who opposes prisoner abuse must simply hate America. The president himself asks us to move on. And the great number of ordinary Americans who have, in fact, expressed outrage are dismissed as members of the bloodthirsty "hard left."

Tort Reform...

Through all of the healthcare "debate" I've seen a few common things. One of those is tort reform. These days, the American people sue over anything. If we want to bring the price of healthcare down, we need to stop suing our doctors over everything, especially for MILLIONS. Oops, your dentist did your root canal wrong. Sue 'em for 15 million.

Or this one. Suing a comedian because she tells mother in law jokes? Ya gotta be jokin'...(pun intended)...

LOS ANGELES -- Veteran comedian Sunda Croonquist has had a lot of success with her "mother-in-law" jokes, but her mother-in-law isn't laughing.In fact, she's suing the comic for making her the butt of too many jokes.The lawsuit was filed by Ruth Zafrin, her daughter, Shelley Edelman, and Shelley's husband, Neil.

They're accusing Croonquist of spreading false, defamatory and racist lies with her in-law jokes that have become a staple of her routine in nightclubs and on television channels like Comedy Central.

Croonquist knows all too well about culture clashes -- she's half-black, half-Swedish, grew up Roman Catholic and married into a Jewish family. She has joked about her first visit to her mother-in-law's house, saying: "I walk in, I say, 'Thank you so much for having me here, Ruthie.' She says, 'The pleasure's all mine, have a seat."' Then, in a loud aside, 'Harriet, put my pocketbook away."'Then there's the one about her mother-in-law's reaction to news she was pregnant with her first child: "OK, now that we know you're having a little girl I want to know what you're naming that little tchotchke. Now we don't want a name that's difficult to pronounce like Shaniqua. We're thinking a name short but delicious.Like Hadassah or Goldie."

Croonquist said there was a time when her in-laws would laugh with everyone else at the black-member-of-a-Jewish-family jokes."They played my tape at Passover one year, and they loved it!" she said.But things changed after the comedian posted information on her Web site, promoting upcoming gigs in New Jersey.

According to her in-laws, the information allowed pretty much anyone to figure out their identities.They sued in April in U.S. District Court in New Jersey, where they live.The action seeks unspecified damages and demands that Croonquist remove any offensive statements from her Web site, routines and recordings.Croonquist says she would drop any language her family finds offensive, but refuses to pay any settlement.Her lawyer has filed a motion to have the suit dismissed, and a judge is scheduled to hear it on Sept. 8.

Croonquist, who lives in Beverly Hills, is being represented by her husband's law firm.She says it should be obvious to her in-laws that she's not anti-Jewish since she converted to Judaism before she met her husband and keeps a kosher house.Attorney Gary L. Bostwick, an expert in First Amendment law who isn't involved in the case, said suing a comedian is often difficult because courts tend to rule that it should be obvious they are joking.

Rest in Peace, Ted Kennedy.

Whether or not one agreed with his politics, he was a great senator. He spoke his mind and fought for legislation. We need more Senators like him on both sides of the aisle.

Edward Moore "Ted" Kennedy
February 22, 1932-August 25, 2009