The Left is the side of the emotions. Leftism is the politics of feeling. Is there anything collectivists dread so much as reason? Anything they avoid so frantically, so acrobatically, as fact?

These are extracts from an article in Canada Free Press, by the excellent Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh, on the Left’s campaign to keep rising generations uncontaminated by knowledge, and safe from the vice of reasoning. (Our only significant difference of opinion with her is over religion. We think, unlike the author, that education should not include religion – except as history and literature – so among the passages we omit are some where she touches on that issue.)

Few parents actually know what Common Core Education is. Teachers who are finding out do not seem to care, let the state fight it out. For teachers, it is a means to an end; the end translates into keeping their jobs and a paycheck coming in this tough economy which the current administration celebrates as a “recovery” from a self-induced coma.

Although touted as a means to improve education standards, the Brookings Institution said, “The empirical evidence suggests that the Common Core will have little effect on American students’ achievement. The nation will have to look elsewhere for ways to improve its schools.” …

The Department of Education at the federal and state levels had developed many experimental programs that promised to be breakthroughs in education but were discarded later as giant wastes of time and taxpayer dollars while the achievement levels had continuously declined.

Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education, described Core Standards as an important tool for international competitiveness, access to high quality education, and a way to prepare “all students for college, work and citizenship. These standards are an important foundation for our collective work.” I emphasized “collective” because that is what Common Core is about, indoctrination into the “collective” mindset.

In spite of the fact that we have different brains, IQs, learning styles, and  …  talents, Common Core standards insist that “all children can and should learn to high achievement standards based on a “universal design for learning.”

This would be achieved by having different sets of standards based on race, ethnic background, socio-economic background, and disability, a type of “separate and unequal” education.

All students will receive the same diploma but for “unequal” work in mathematics and reading and for “unequal” achievement.

Furthermore, a video surfaced that shows that wrong answers in math are acceptable under Common Core standards as long as students can explain how they got the wrong answer and feel good about it.

We had to read that sentence twice before we could stop saying “Incredible!” and say instead, “Absurd enough to be true of this administration!”

The states who adopted the Common Core Standards were excused from the detested No Child Left Behind Act which set the standards too high for low achievers and low motivators who are not really interested in education. It is criminal and sad to see semi-literate individuals receive diplomas when they cannot actually read or write, cursive or otherwise, very well and are glorified by the MSM for speaking Ebonics.

“Beginning this fall, Alabama public schools will be under a new state-created academic accountability system that sets different goals for students in math and reading, based on their race, economic status, ability to speak English and disabilities.”

The English Arts Curriculum textbooks used in Utah, called Voices, Literature and Writing, emphasize the Democracy Plan, preparing students for community organizing. …

The Utahans Against Common Core has mounted an opposition. A short video shows the first grade textbook, Voices, Literature, and Writing, that teaches nothing about literature or writing. Instead, “In the Voices of Democracy theme, students use their voices to advocate solutions to social problems that they care deeply about. They are engaged in learning the following theme-related social knowledge and skills: social role models, social advocacy, and respect for each other. They learn to develop a Democracy Plan in which they develop ways to help people in need.” …

This [the Democracy Plan] is community organizing; this is communism, not literature and writing.

Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh has lived under communism in Romania, so she has no trouble recognizing it.

In the same series of books, educators are directed to teach first graders about emotional words of anger and fear in order to accomplish their social justice goals. The workbook gives the following example, “My mom_____ (tells) (nags) me to clean my room.” Students are supposed to choose “nags” because it is an emotional word of anger. If a student chooses “tells” the answer is incorrect.

Students are taught about feelings instead of logical thinking and parents are marginalized as some annoying individuals who nag their children. Would the collectivist village take over the rearing of our children?

Homework activities include practicing being upset and angry because “feelings cause people to act”. Is there any wonder that we have the Occupy Wall Street mobs, angry mobs, flash mobs, and people talking over each other? Liberals are taught to be ruled by feelings and not by logic.

Are these curriculum materials limited to first grade? No, all grades have the same theme, the Democracy Plan. By third grade teachers must “measure attitudes, beliefs, and dispositions,” making specific notes on the Student Observation Form whether “growth and change in individual student’s behavior and attitudes is observed”. One rubric asks, “Does the student use the plural ‘we’ and ‘our’ to advocate ways to solve social problems?” In other words, I and my, individualism, are frowned upon. …

Is this what we are trying to do with Common Core standards? Force every student into a government-dictated and enforced mold, dumbing down the curriculum so much that everyone appears equally intelligent, equally capable, equally trained, equally able?

The focus will no longer be education, the classics, language, government, mathematics, science, history, chemistry and individual achievement in those fields but social justice, activism, and community organizing for the socialist collective?

Yes. Because a childishly emotional population, living in a state of primitive dread, unable to reason and armed neither with guns nor education will be easy for a tyrannous government to control.

As the prurient news media have made known around the planet, a lubricious narcissist named Anthony Weiner persistently and compulsively stands for public office while disseminating pictures of his private parts, by means of the world wide web, in the hope of setting young women on fire with lust for him – figuratively speaking. His sexual perversion would be of little interest to the world if it were not for the odd fact that, despite being in public disgrace, he is standing – sometimes in underwear – as a Democratic candidate for election to the office of Mayor of New York.

What is less known and hardly at all discussed is that his wife, Huma Abedin, has helped to set a part of the planet on fire literally, along with her bosom friend Hillary Clinton. (See also here and here and here.)

Diana West asks, most pertinently, in her Townhall column today:

Isn’t the Abedin-Clinton national security story at least as newsworthy as Weiner’s private parts?

Anthony Weiner, candidate for mayor of New York City, turns out to be a recidivist pervert.

Abedin is also a veritable Muslim Brotherhood princess. As such, the ideological implications of her actions — plus her long and privileged access to US policy-making through Hillary Clinton — must be considered, particularly in the context of national security. …

If the Abedin-Muslim Brotherhood story rings any bells, it is probably because of Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn. Last summer, Bachmann, along with four other House Republicans, raised the issue of Huma Abedin among other examples of possible Muslim Brotherhood penetration of the federal policy-making chain. They asked inspectors general at five departments, including the State Department, to investigate their concerns, but nothing happened – nothing, that is, except that Bachmann was crucified, by Democrats and Republicans alike, for asking urgently important questions about national security.

This made the entire subject, already taboo, positively radioactive – with Huma Abedin becoming the poster victim of this supposed “McCarthyism” redux.*

Someone who has looked into “the Muslim Brotherhood penetration of the federal policy-making chain”, in particular Huma Abedin’s amazing success in becoming chief adviser to the Secretary of State, is Andrew C. McCarthy.

He writes at National Review Online:

Ms. Abedin worked for many years at a journal that promotes Islamic-supremacist ideology that was founded by a top al-Qaeda financier, Abdullah Omar Naseef. Naseef ran the Rabita Trust, a formally designated foreign terrorist organization under American law. Ms. Abedin and Naseef overlapped at the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs (JMMA) for at least seven years. Throughout that time (1996–2003), Ms. Abdein worked for Hillary Clinton in various capacities.

Ms. Abedin’s late father, Dr. Zyed Abedin, was recruited by Naseef to run the JMMA in Saudi Arabia. The journal was operated under the management of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, a virulently anti-Semitic and sharia-supremacist organization.

And yet Huma married a Jew. A Clinton-favored Jew. Bill Clinton performed the wedding ceremony. Who would believe this story if it were fiction?

When Dr. Abedin died, editorial control of the journal passed to his wife, Dr. Saleha Mahmood Abedin — Huma’s mother.

Saleha Abedin is closely tied to the Muslim Brotherhood and to supporters of violent jihad. Among other things, she directs an organization – the International Islamic Committee for Woman and Child. The IICWC, through its parent entity (the International Islamic Council for Dawa and Relief), is a component of the Union for Good (also known as the Union of Good), another formally designated terrorist organization. The Union for Good is led by Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the notorious Muslim Brotherhood jurist who has issued fatwas calling for the killing of American military and support personnel in Iraq as well as suicide bombings in Israel. (As detailed here, the Obama White House recently hosted Qaradawi’s principal deputy, Sheikh Abdulla bin Bayyah, who also endorsed the fatwa calling for the killing of U.S. troops and personnel in Iraq.)

Like Sheikh Qaradawi, who helped write the charter for the IICWC, Saleha Abedin is an influential sharia activist who has, for example, published a book called Women in Islam that claims man-made laws enslave women. It reportedly provides sharia justifications for such practices as female-genital mutilation, the death penalty for apostates from Islam, the legal subordination of women, and the participation of women in violent jihad. Dr. Abedin has nevertheless been hailed in the progressive press as a “leading voice on women’s rights in the Muslim world” (to quote Foreign Policy). …

Back to daughter Huma. In the late mid to late Nineties, while she was an intern at the Clinton White House and an assistant editor at JMMA, Ms. Abedin was a member of the executive board of the Muslim Students Association (MSA) at George Washington University, heading its “Social Committee.” The MSA, which has a vast network of chapters at universities across North America, is the foundation of the Muslim Brotherhood’s infrastructure in the United States. Obviously, not every Muslim student who joins the MSA graduates to the Brotherhood — many join for the same social and networking reasons that cause college students in general to join campus organizations. But the MSA does have an indoctrination program … a lengthy process of study and service that leads to Brotherhood membership — a process “designed to ensure with absolute certainty that there is conformity to the movement’s ideology and a clear adherence to its leadership’s authority”. The MSA gave birth to the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the largest Islamist organization in the U.S. Indeed the MSA and ISNA consider themselves the same organization. Because of its support for Hamas (a designated terrorist organization that is the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch), ISNA was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case, in which several Hamas operatives were convicted of providing the terrorist organization with lavish financing. …

The MSA chapter to which Ms. Abedin belonged at George Washington University has an intriguing history. In 2001 [to be clear, that is after Ms. Abedin had graduated from GWU], its spiritual guide was . . . Anwar al-Awlaki, the al-Qaeda operative who was then ministering to some of the eventual 9/11 suicide-hijackers. Awlaki himself had led the MSA chapter at Colorado State University in the early nineties. [He] is far from the only jihadist to hone his supremacist ideology in the MSA’s friendly confines. In the eighties, Wael Jalaidan ran the MSA at the University of Arizona. He would soon go on to help Osama bin Laden found al-Qaeda; he also partnered with the Abedin family’s patron, Abdullah Omar Naseef, to establish the [aforementioned] Rabita Trust — formally designated as a terrorist organization under U.S. law due to its funding of al-Qaeda.

While Huma Abedin “served as one of Secretary of State Clinton’s top staffers and advisers at the State Department”, it became US foreign policy to support the Muslim Brotherhood. 

During that time, the State Department strongly supported abandoning the federal government’s prior policy against official dealings with the Muslim Brotherhood. State, furthermore, embraced a number of Muslim Brotherhood positions that undermine both American constitutional rights and our alliance with Israel.

To name just a few manifestations of this policy sea change:

• The State Department had an emissary in Egypt who trained operatives of the Brotherhood and other Islamist organizations in democracy procedures.
• The State Department announced that the Obama administration would be “satisfied” with the election of a Muslim Brotherhood–dominated government in Egypt.
• Secretary Clinton personally intervened to reverse a Bush-administration ruling that barred Tariq Ramadan, grandson of the Brotherhood’s founder and son of one of its most influential early leaders, from entering the United States.
• The State Department collaborated with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, a bloc of governments heavily influenced by the Brotherhood, in seeking to restrict American free-speech rights in deference to sharia proscriptions against negative criticism of Islam.
• The State Department excluded Israel, the world’s leading target of terrorism, from its “Global Counterterrorism Forum,” a group that brings the United States together with several Islamist governments, prominently including its co-chair, Turkey — which now finances Hamas and avidly supports the flotillas that seek to break Israel’s blockade of Hamas. At the forum’s kickoff, Secretary Clinton decried various terrorist attacks and groups; but she did not mention Hamas or attacks against Israel — in transparent deference to the Islamist governments, which echo the Brotherhood’s position that Hamas is not a terrorist organization and that attacks against Israel are not terrorism.
• The State Department and the Obama administration waived congressional restrictions in order to transfer $1.5 billion dollars in aid to Egypt after the Muslim Brotherhood’s victory in the parliamentary elections.
• The State Department and the Obama administration waived congressional restrictions in order to transfer millions of dollars in aid to the Palestinian territories notwithstanding that Gaza is ruled by the terrorist organization Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch.
• The State Department and the administration hosted a contingent from Egypt’s newly elected parliament that included not only Muslim Brotherhood members but a member of the Islamic Group (Gamaa al-Islamiyya), which is formally designated as a foreign terrorist organization. The State Department refused to provide Americans with information about the process by which it issued a visa to a member of a designated terrorist organization, about how the members of the Egyptian delegation were selected, or about what security procedures were followed before the delegation was allowed to enter our country.
• On a trip to Egypt, Secretary Clinton pressured General Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, head of the military junta then governing the country, to surrender power to the parliament dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, and the then–newly elected president, Mohamed Morsi, a top Brotherhood official. She also visited with Morsi; immediately after his victory, Morsi had proclaimed that his top priorities included pressuring the United States to release the Blind Sheikh. Quite apart from the Brotherhood’s self-proclaimed “grand jihad” to destroy the United States . . . the group’s supreme guide, Mohammed Badie, publicly called for jihad against the United States in an October 2010 speech. After it became clear the Brotherhood would win the parliamentary election, Badie said the victory was a stepping stone to “the establishment of a just Islamic caliphate.”

As more recent events remind us, this is not an exhaustive account of Obama-administration coziness with the Muslim Brotherhood. It is just some of the lowlights.

When a handful of House conservatives tried to draw the attention of the State Department’s inspector general to some of these matters – wondering how on earth someone with Ms. Abdein’s background could have qualified for a top-secret security clearance – they were castigated by the Obama White House and the Beltway Republican establishment.

As reaffirmed in the last 24 hours, Ms. Abedin’s connections to prominent Islamic-supremacist figures and groups are deemed unsuitable for public discussion – Egyptians may be able to eject the Muslim Brotherhood, but in today’s Washington it is raising questions about the Muslim Brotherhood that gets you run out of town.

Naturally, what did get Washington chattering was a scandal far more typical in Clinton circles — the lucrative arrangement Ms. Abedin struck with Mrs. Clinton’s State Department that allowed her, after returning from maternity leave, to draw a $135,000 State Department salary while remaining in New York, not actually working at Foggy Bottom, and moonlighting as a “strategic consultant” for an outfit called Teneo – founded by Bill Clinton’s chum Doug Band.

Andrew McCarthy ends his article on a note of justified outrage, which we share with him.

What a racket. The marriage to Huma Abedin, a Clinton insider, enables Anthony Weiner to resurrect a debased career and deflect attention from his psychotic antics even as he continues them. The marriage to Anthony Weiner, a prominent Jewish progressive, enables Huma Abedin to deflect attention from her associations with various Islamic supremacists even as, during her tenure as a top State Department official, American policy embraces Islamic supremacists.

This political story is extremely obscene. Yet the prurient news media will not tell it.

* Diana West has recently published an important book, American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character (St. Martin’s Press, New York), in which she demonstrates that the demonized Joseph McCarthy was right to have done what he did.

And it’s nobody’s business but the mother’s.

Because a mother has a RIGHT to do what she likes with her own baby. If it’s a nuisance, she may exercise that right by killing it.

Women should not be punished by having to care for and raise a child.

So Dan Joseph pretended to believe as he tried to find people who really agreed with those statements.

This is from Campus Reform.

Several students [and a teacher] at George Mason University (GMU) signed a petition on Wednesday demanding lawmakers legalize “fourth trimester” abortions.

The petition .. was circulated on GMU’s flagship campus in Fairfax, VA., just outside Washington D.C., by Media Research Center reporter Dan Joseph.

The Media Research Center says of itself on its home page that it is “The Leader in Documenting, Exposing and Neutralizing Liberal Media Bias“.

In the video, Dan Joseph explains to those he is canvassing for signatures that the petition –

– was aimed at sending “a message to our lawmakers that women have the right to choose what to do with their bodies and babies” even “after their pregnancies.”

“If you don’t know what fourth trimester is, it’s after the baby is already born,” Joseph added in a video showing him collect the signatures.

“Currently fourth trimester abortions are illegal in all 50 states,” he told students before asking them to sign his petition.

Most student responses varied from “okay” to “cool.”

One concerned student asked if the procedure would “cause harm to the child.”

“Well the child wouldn’t be there anymore,” responded Joseph. “It’s abortion.”

That student then signed the petition.

Strange. She has a conscience yet not much intelligence.

Four refuse to sign, two men and two women. (One of the women may just be in too much of a hurry.)

A religious guy invites Dan Joseph to a bible reading – but signs the petition.

Joseph said that after one hour he was able to garner fourteen signatures.

“That is a lot for the summer because there aren’t as many people on campus,” he said in the video.

Christianity and Islam are both cults of martyrdom.

We’ll say no more just now about Christians seeking and applauding martyrdom. We’ll just let the gorgeous picture below tell its own story of Christians being tortured to death by Muslims and their souls winding their way to a weird sort of heaven.

But here’s a tale of Muslim martyrs that feeds our prejudice and endorses our judgment against the Muslim Brotherhood. It comes from Gatestone, and is written by Raymond Ibrahim:

New evidence indicates that some of the pro-Morsi protesters reportedly killed by the Egyptian military, after the Muslim Brotherhood president’s ouster, were actually killed by fellow pro-Morsi protesters. They did this, according to the report, to frame the military, incite more Islamist violence and unrest, and garner sympathy from America, which has been extremely critical of the military, especially in the context of the post-Morsi violence.

“Garner sympathy from America”. It’s an old Arab trick. They condemned generations of their fellow Arabs to a life of misery as “Palestinians” in order to “garner sympathy” from the West. They largely succeeded too. The West has been complicit in keeping them as beggars – the West’s way (these days) of dealing with beggar nations being to put money in the outstretched left hand while quaking at the threatening right hand raised in a fist.

The Arabic satellite program, Al Dalil, (“The Evidence”) recently showed the evidence, which consisted mostly of video recordings.

One video records events on July 8, during pro-Morsi protests in front of the Republican Guard building in Cairo, where Morsi was being held, and where the bloodshed between the military and Brotherhood began. The video shows a young man with a shaven head and a Salafi-style beard approaching the Republican Guard barrier; he gets shot, collapses to the ground, and dies — as other protesters fly into a rage against the military.

At first watching, it seems that he was shot by the military. But when the video is played “in slow motion and in zoom” it becomes apparent –

– that someone from behind him, from the pro-Morsi throng, shot him. The whole time he falls, in slow motion, he is still facing the Republican Guard. Yet when the camera zooms in, the bullet wound and blood are visibly at the back of his head; his front, facing the military even after he falls, does not appear to have a scratch. Considering that the military was facing him, it seems apparent that a fellow Morsi-supporter shot him from behind.

On the same day this man in the video and others were killed, Muhammad Mahsoub, a former Brotherhood member and politician tweeted the following: “The Brotherhood sacrifice their youth in the streets, even as the sons of their leaders are at the beach resorts …  Allah curse the hypocrites [based on a Koran verse];” and “I repeatedly warned al-Baltagi against his plan to antagonize the military in order to implicate it [in] an attack on the protesters, but he insists on his plan…”

Baltagi is a Brotherhood leader who has been especially vocal about “getting back” at the military; he apparently also enjoys close relations with the widely disliked U.S. ambassador to Egypt, Anne Patterson. 

Whose sympathies were long ago garnered by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Another video shown on Al Dalil is even more obvious. An armored vehicle appears slowly driving by a group of pro-Morsi protesters, many easily discernible with their Salafi-style beards. A shot is heard and the man nearest the passing vehicle collapses. Again, at first it appears that the men in the armored vehicle shot him.

Played, again in slow motion, however, it becomes apparent that the man in a gilbab [long Muslim style robe] standing directly behind the murdered man is actually the one who shot him, then walked over to another man near him, gave him the weapon, and then quickly walked off the scene. Even the man on the roof who is taping this scene is heard to be asked, “Did the car [armored vehicle] shoot?” only to reply, “No, no.”

Even so, the desired effect of all these “human sacrifices” by the Brotherhood was accomplished: as with the other man, shot in front of the Republican Guard, many other pro-Morsi protesters rushed to the fallen man, screaming Islamic slogans and vowing relentless war on the military, as it supposedly “shot first.” 

This second incident prompted the Freedom and Justice Party, the Muslim Brotherhood’s political arm, to call for “an uprising by the great people of Egypt against those trying to steal their revolution with tanks.”

To many Islamists, killing an ally to empower Islam is legitimate, especially in the context of two Islamic ideas: 1) jihad [war in the service of Islam], in Islamic jurisprudence — for its function, under Muhammad, of making Islam supreme — is considered the “pinnacle” of Islam; and 2) Islam’s overarching juridical idea that “necessity makes the prohibited permissible” – in other words, that a pious end, such as empowering Islam, justifies the use of forbidden means. All that matters is one’s intention, or niyya.

Thus, killing fellow Muslims, lying, prostitution, even sodomy all become permissible, so long as they are seen as ways of advancing and empowering Islam. Those who commit or promote even the most horrific crimes are exonerated, and those “sacrificed” to empower Islam — as those pro-Morsi supporters killed by the Brotherhood — are deemed martyrs who will achieve the highest level of paradise.

The Ten Thousand Martyrs on the Mount Ararat by Vittorio Carpaccio, 1515

A passing thought: “Carpaccio” is also the name of a dish made of sliced raw meat.

At a ceremony in Havana last week UNESCO (U.N. Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) honored Che Guevara by enshrining his writings in its hallowed “Memory of the World Register.” The ceremony included several members of Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s family.

Humberto Fontova comments on this disgraceful event at Canada Free Press. His article vividly displays the utterly shameless hypocrisy of the UN and its agencies with this egregious example:

“UNESCO’s work is part of our support for freedom of expression as an inalienable human right set down in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” declares the UN’s mission statement.

But not far from where this UNESCO/Guevara ceremony took place Cubans were being starved and beaten in pestiferous torture chambers for the crime of quoting the UN Declaration of Human Rights in public.

UNESCO is known as the intellectual agency of the United Nation’s while “Protecting freedom of expression: an essential condition for democracy, development and human dignity,” reads the UN charter.

But not far from where this UNESCO/Guevara ceremony took place, the regime being honored by UNESCO [had] burned hundreds of books and documents …  The bonfire was accompanied by the beating and jailing of the owners and purveyors of these works. The Castroite bonfire was fueled by [inter alia] the UN Declaration of Human Rights. …

“As the United Nations agency with a specific mandate to promote the free flow of ideas by word and image, UNESCO works to foster free, independent and pluralistic media in print, broadcast and online. This foundation is why UNESCO today promotes policies for press freedom and the safety of journalists,” reads the UNESCO charter.

But the regime honored by UNESCO last week also holds the honor, according to the Paris-based “Reporters Without Borders, of jailing and torturing the most journalists per-capita on earth. Stunningly, the total number of journalists jailed by the nation honored by UNESCO (pop. 11 million) is only slightly behind that of China (pop. 1.4 billion!)

“Our purpose is to contribute to peace and security by promoting international collaboration through education, science, and culture in order to further universal respect for justice, the rule of law, and human rights along with fundamental freedom,” declares the UNESCO charter.

“We reject any peaceful approach! “declared the man they honored last week in Havana. “Violence is inevitable! To establish Socialism rivers of blood must flow! If the nuclear missiles had remained (in Cuba) we would have fired them against the heart of the U.S. including New York City. The victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims!”

And he, Che Guevara, evil hero of the evil Left, also wrote this passage, which – Humberto Fontova points out – “comes from the very works enshrined and honored by UNESCO last week”:

“My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any surrendered enemy that falls in my hands! We must keep our hatred alive and fan it to paroxysm!” 

The “acrid odor of gunpowder and blood” rarely reached Che Guevara’s nostril from actual combat. It came from the close-range murder of bound, gagged or blindfolded men (and boys).

Rigoberto Hernandez was 17 when Che’s soldiers dragged him from his cell in La Cabana, jerked his head back to gag him, and started dragging him to the stake. Little “Rigo” pleaded his innocence to the very bloody end. But his pleas were garbled and difficult to understand. His struggles while being gagged and bound to the stake were also awkward. The boy had been a janitor in a Havana high school and was mentally retarded.

His single mother had pleaded his case with hysterical sobs. She had begged, beseeched and finally proven to his “prosecutors” that it was a case of mistaken identity. Her only son, a boy in such a condition, couldn’t possibly have been “a CIA agent planting bombs.”

But proof made no difference. Comrade Che, with his bottomless malice and his lust for inflicting extreme anguish, recognized no proofs, no justice.

“FUEGO!” and the firing squad volley shattered Rigo’s little bent body …

Of course Che Guevara, being an iniquitous criminal – like others of his kidney, such as Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – was invited to speak at the UN. There on December 9, 1964, he said:

“Certainly we execute! And we will continue executing as long as it is necessary!”

Those executions (murders, actually; execution implies a judicial process) had reached about 16,000 by the time of Che Guevara’s boast, the equivalent, given the relative populations, of almost a million executions in the U.S.

And the demons who run the UN and UNESCO, like millions of adolescents in the West who show his icon on their walls and T-shirts, honor and adore him.

The UN must be destroyed.

This letter to two Senators was launched on the Internet by its writer because he wants it to reach as many people as possible.

We are happy to help spread it. We post it here unedited and in full, taking out only a line of his home address and his zip code. The use of bold to stress some passages is ours.

We like what he says and applaud him for saying it. We think it sweet and decorous to spend one’s own money as generously as one chooses, but base and odious for a government to spend a cent more of taxpayers’ money than it unquestionably has to.

Our differences with him are few and not central to his concerns. We would not ourselves bring into the discussion those old fictions “God” and “Heaven”, but we tolerate his mentioning them. We do not consider “greed” – the desire to be richer – a vice, but a sterling virtue. And while we agree that Congress is corrupt, we do not think it is more corrupt than the Administration and its agencies, or the mainstream media.

April 3, 2013

Senator Patty Murray

Senator Maria Cantwell

Washington, DC , 20510

 

Dear Senator:

I have tried to live by the rules my entire life. My father was a Command Sergeant Major, U.S. Army, who died of combat related stresses shortly after his retirement. It was he who instilled in me those virtues he felt important – honesty, duty, patriotism and obeying the laws of God and of our various governments. I have served my country, paid my taxes, worked hard, volunteered and donated my fair share of money, time and artifacts.

Today, as I approach my 79th birthday, I am heart-broken when I look at my country and my government. I shall only point out a very few things abysmally wrong which you can multiply by a thousand fold. I have calculated that all the money I have paid in income taxes my entire life cannot even keep the Senate barbershop open for one year! Only Heaven and a few tight-lipped actuarial types know what the Senate dining room costs the taxpayers. So please, enjoy your haircuts and meals on us.

Last year, the president spent an estimated 1.4 $billion on himself and his family. The vice president spends $millions on hotels. They have had 8 vacations so far this year! And our House of Representatives and Senate have become America’s answer to the Saudi royal family. You have become the “perfumed princes and princesses” of our country.

In the middle of the night, you voted in the Affordable Health Care Act, a.k.a. “Obama Care,” a bill which no more than a handful of senators or representatives read more than several paragraphs, crammed it down our throats, and then promptly exempted yourselves from it substituting your own taxpayer-subsidized golden health care insurance.

You live exceedingly well, eat and drink as well as the “one percenters,” consistently vote yourselves perks and pay raises while making 3.5 times the average U.S. individual income, and give up nothing while you (as well as the president and veep) ask us to sacrifice due to sequestration (for which, of course, you plan to blame the Republicans, anyway).

You understand very well the only two rules you need to know – (1) How to get elected, and (2) How to get re-elected. And you do this with the aid of an eagerly willing and partisan press, speeches permeated with a certain economy of truth, and by buying the votes of the greedy, the ill-informed and under-educated citizens (and non-citizens, too, many of whom do vote ) who are looking for a handout rather than a job. Your so-called “safety net” has become a hammock for the lazy. And, what is it now, about 49 or 50 million on food stamps – pretty much all Democrat voters – and the program is absolutely rife with fraud with absolutely no congressional oversight?

I would offer that you are not entirely to blame. What changed you is the seductive environment of power in which you have immersed yourselves. It is the nature of both houses of Congress which requires you to subordinate your virtue in order to get anything done until you have achieved a leadership role. To paraphrase President Reagan, it appears that the second oldest profession (politics), bears a remarkably strong resemblance to the oldest.

As the hirsute first Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton (1834 -1902), English historian and moralist, so aptly and accurately stated, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.” I’m only guessing that this applies to the female sex as well. Tell me, is there a more corrupt entity in this country than Congress?

While we middle class people continue to struggle, our government becomes less and less transparent, more and more bureaucratic, and ever so much more dictatorial, using Czars and Secretaries to tell us (just to mention a very few) what kind of light bulbs we must purchase, how much soda or hamburgers we can eat, what cars we can drive, gasoline to use, and what health care we must buy. Countless thousands of pages of regulations strangle our businesses costing the consumer more and more every day.

As I face my final year, or so, with cancer, my president and my government tell me “You’ll just have to take a pill,” while you, Senator, your colleagues, the president, and other exulted government officials and their families will get the best possible health care on our tax dollars until you are called home by your Creator while also enjoying a retirement beyond my wildest dreams, which of course, you voted for yourselves and we pay for.

The chances of you reading this letter are practically zero as your staff will not pass it on, but with a little luck, a form letter response might be generated by them with an auto signature applied, hoping we will believe that you, our senator or representative, has heard us and actually cares. This letter will, however, go on line where many others will have the chance to read one person’s opinion, rightly or wrongly, about this government, its administration and its senators and representatives.

I only hope that occasionally you might quietly thank the taxpayer for all the generous entitlements which you have voted yourselves, for which, by law, we must pay, unless, of course, it just goes on the $17 trillion national debt for which your children and ours, and your grandchildren and ours, ad infinitum, must eventually try to pick up the tab.

My final thoughts are that it must take a person who has either lost his or her soul, or conscience, or both, to seek re-election and continue to destroy this country I deeply love and put it so far in debt that we will never pay it off while your lot improves by the minute, because of your power. For you, Senator, will never stand up to the rascals in your House who constantly deceive the American people. And that, my dear Senator, is how power has corrupted you and the entire Congress. The only answer to clean up this cesspool is term limits. This, of course, will kill the goose that lays your golden eggs.

And woe be to him (or her) who would dare to bring it up.

Sincerely,

Bill Schoonover

Oak Harbor, WA

As was promised (see the post immediately below), yesterday Congress heard the IRS lawyer Carter Hull reveal that William Wilkins, head of the IRS chief counsel’s office, launched the policy of keeping Tea Party groups from acquiring tax-exempt status, and so keeping them from functioning.

What more of William Wilkins? He is an Obama appointee, and is known to have attended numerous meetings at the White House. He and Lois Lerner, head of the IRS office that deals with tax-exempt applications, worked the plot, the skulduggery, against the conservative Tea Party movement.

The Tea Party’s cause is chiefly fiscal responsibility. It is the most effective opposition to redistributive socialism in America, and would have been even more effective – perhaps to the extent of  tipping the balance against Obama in the 2012 election –  had it not been  sabotaged by a government department.

Now we know: the campaign of sabotage by the IRS was started in Washington, D.C. and directed from Washington, D.C.

Peggy Noonan writes in the Wall Street Journal:

The IRS scandal was connected this week not just to the Washington office — that had been established — but to the office of the chief counsel.

That is a bombshell …  And Democrats know it. Which is why they are so desperate to make the investigation go away. They know, as Republicans do, that the chief counsel of the IRS is one of only two Obama political appointees in the entire agency.

To quickly review why the new information, which came most succinctly in a nine-page congressional letter to IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel, is big news:

When the scandal broke two months ago, in May, IRS leadership in Washington claimed the harassment of tea-party and other conservative groups requesting tax-exempt status was confined to the Cincinnati office, where a few rogue workers bungled the application process.

Lois Lerner, then the head of the exempt organizations unit in Washington, said “line people in Cincinnati” did work that was “not so fine.” They asked questions that “weren’t really necessary,” she claimed, and operated without “the appropriate level of sensitivity.” But the targeting was “not intentional.” Ousted acting commissioner Steven Miller also put it off on “people in Cincinnati.” They provided “horrible customer service.”

They were lying. And they really seemed to think they’d get away with their lies.

House investigators soon talked to workers in the Cincinnati office, who said everything they did came from Washington.

Elizabeth Hofacre, in charge of processing tea-party applications in Cincinnati, told investigators that her work was overseen and directed by a lawyer in the IRS Washington office named Carter Hull.

Now comes Mr. Hull’s testimony. And like Ms. Hofacre, he pointed his finger upward. Mr. Hull — a 48-year IRS veteran and an expert on tax exemption law — told investigators that tea-party applications under his review were sent upstairs within the Washington office, at the direction of Lois Lerner. …

Michael Seto, head of Mr. Hull’s unit, also spoke to investigators. He told them Lois Lerner made an unusual decision: Tea-party applications would undergo additional scrutiny — a multilayered review.

Mr. Hull told House investigators that at some point in the winter of 2010-11, Ms. Lerner’s senior adviser, whose name is withheld in the publicly released partial interview transcript, told him the applications would require further review:

Q: Did [the senior adviser to Ms. Lerner] indicate to you whether she agreed with your recommendations?

A: She did not say whether she agreed or not. She said it should go to chief counsel.

Q: The IRS chief counsel?

A: The IRS chief counsel.

The IRS chief counsel is named William Wilkins … one of only two Obama political appointees in the IRS.

What was the chief counsel’s office looking for? …  The counsel’s office wanted, in the words of the congressional committees, “information about the applicants’ political activities leading up to the 2010 election.”

It’s almost as if … the conservative organizations in question were, during two major election cycles, deliberately held in a holding pattern.

Almost as if? They were “held in a holding pattern”.

So: What the IRS originally claimed was a rogue operation now reaches up not only to the Washington office, but into the office of the IRS chief counsel himself.

These findings were confirmed at the House Oversight Committee Hearings yesterday, and other “big things still got said”, as Peggy Noonan puts it.

Ms. Hofacre of the Cincinnati office testified that when she was given tea-party applications, she had to kick them upstairs. When she was given non-tea-party applications, they were sent on for normal treatment. Was she told to send liberal or progressive groups for special scrutiny? No, she did not scrutinize the applications of liberal or progressive groups. “I would send those to general inventory.” Who got extra scrutiny? “They were all tea-party and patriot cases.” …

Rep. Trey Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican … [described] what he called “the evolution of the defense” since the scandal began. First, Ms. Lerner planted a question at a conference. Then she said the Cincinnati office did it — a narrative that was advanced by the president’s spokesman, Jay Carney. Then came the suggestion the IRS was too badly managed to pull off a sophisticated conspiracy. Then the charge that liberal groups were targeted too — “we did it against both ends of the political spectrum.”

But that was also untrue.

… [T]he inspector general of the IRS said no, it was conservative groups that were targeted. …

So there it is in all its shabbiness – this low dishonest administration.

The  directive to the tyrannical Internal Revenue “Service” to make it hard for conservative and pro-Israel organizations to get the tax-exempt status they apply for, came down from the White House? From Tyranny Central? So we assumed. And so it now seems.

This is from PJ Media, by Ed Driscoll:

“Top IRS officials in Washington, D.C. planned and oversaw the agency’s improper targeting of conservative groups, according to the 72-year old retiring IRS lawyer who will testify Thursday before the House Oversight Committee,” the Daily Caller reports.

That’s today these revelations are promised us.

The Daily Caller goes on:

Retiring IRS lawyer Carter C. Hull implicated the IRS Chief Counsel’s office, headed by Obama appointee William J. Wilkins, and Lois Lerner, the embattled head of the IRS’ exempt organizations office, in the IRS targeting scandal and made clear that the targeting started in Washington, according to leaked interviews that Hull granted to the Oversight Committee in advance of Thursday’s hearing.

Treasury Inspector General J. Russell George will return to Republican chairman Darrell Issa’s committee Thursday along with two central characters in the IRS saga: Hull and Cincinnati-based IRS employee Elizabeth Hofacre, who previously gave Hull’s name to congressional investigators, fingering him as her Washington-based supervisor.

Hull is naming names.

“In April 2010, Mr. Hull was instructed to scrutinize certain Tea Party applications by one of his superiors in Washington. According to Mr. Hull, these applications were used as ‘test’ cases and assigned to him because of his expertise and because IRS leadership in Washington was ‘trying to find out how [the IRS] should approach these organizations, and how [the IRS] should handle them’ … According to Hull’s testimony, Ms. [Lois] Lerner … gave an atypical instruction that the Tea Party applications undergo special scrutiny that included an uncommon multi-layer review that involved a top advisor to Lerner as well as the Chief Counsel’s office,” according to Oversight Committee documents.

As Ace noted last week, “Lerner Embraces Theory That The Process Is The Punishment” — and does so quite publicly and cavalierly:

1 March, 2010 – IRS officials start targeting organizations with “tea party”, “patriot”, and “9-12;” in their names. …

17 November, 2011 – Lois Lerner, Director of Exempt Operations, tells Businessweek that receiving a thick questionnaire from the IRS is a “behavior changer.”

The “behavior”. In the eyes of this petty tyrant – a type of woman who in past times would have been a household termagant – a difference of opinion is “bad behavior”.

… Lois Lerner … embraces the notion that people can and should be punished and compelled into acting the way she prefers, not after Due Process has found them blameworthy, but before anyone even thinks to file charges.

She’s decided that the process itself can and should be a tool of state coercion. She doesn’t need a finding from a legal tribunal to impose burdens on freedoms and to compel what she considers “correct” behavior — she’ll serve as judge and jury herself, and impose the punishment of a “thick questionnaire” as a tool of “behavior change.”  …

And just as a reminder, in 2009 President Obama “joked” about siccing the IRS on his enemies.

The local police, the FBI, special prosecutor Angela Corey,  and the prosecutors in court tried their utmost to find George Zimmerman “guilty of racism”. They were pressed to do so by the Obama administration – chiefly through the “Justice” Department. They failed.

They brought him to trial on insufficient evidence to prove that Zimmerman – who is of Hispanic and black descent – had murdered a black delinquent named Trayvon Martin, who attacked him and whom Zimmerman shot in self-defense, and that he did it because he hated blacks. They failed again.

The Attorney General Eric Holder will not accept the verdict. He is going on with his campaign to sniff out a race hater in George Zimmerman; to find whatever grounds he can, or trump them up, for another trial.

Eric Holder wants the shooting to have been a crime motivated by race-hatred – and so to stir up as much real race hatred as he possibly can.

Well, his evil plan has started working.

This is from the Baltimore Sun:

Baltimore police say they are investigating a witness account that a group of black youths beat a Hispanic man near Patterson Park Sunday while saying, “This is for Trayvon.” …

Real estate agent Christina Dudley said she was walking to her car just before 9 p.m. when she saw several young black males and two black females chasing [someone who was later identified as] a 37-year-old Hispanic man west on North Linwood Avenue past East Fairmont Avenue.

“One of the boys had a handgun out and it was pointed at the back of him,” Dudley said in an interview.

They caught up to the man at the corner of Fairmount and N. Streeper Street, and the male with the gun beat the victim with what appeared to be his gun while others kicked and stomped him, Dudley said.

“They were just yelling and calling him names as they ran after him, but once they were hitting him and after that they started yelling, “This is for Trayvon, [expletive],” said Dudley, who heard the chant repeated multiple times.

Dudley and a woman walking her dog across the street told the group to stop and warned that they were calling 911. The group scattered before police arrived. Police have made no arrests …

Dudley, who lives in the neighborhood, said she worries about her Hispanic neighbors … Patterson Park has one of the city’s highest concentration of Latinos and is home to the city’s annual Latino Fest.

Pleased with how it’s going, Barack and Eric?

Hat tip: Our Facebook reader and commenter Timothy Cla.