Paul M. Jones

The past several weeks have made one thing crystal-clear: Our country faces unmitigated disaster if the Other Side wins.

No reasonably intelligent person can deny this. All you have to do is look at the way the Other Side has been running its campaign. Instead of focusing on the big issues that are important to the American People, it has fired a relentlessly negative barrage of distortions, misrepresentations, and flat-out lies.

Just look at the Other Side’s latest commercial, which take a perfectly reasonable statement by the candidate for My Side completely out of context to make it seem as if he is saying something nefarious. This just shows you how desperate the Other Side is and how willing it is to mislead the American People.

The Other Side also has been hammering away at My Side to release certain documents that have nothing to do with anything, and making all sorts of outrageous accusations about what might be in them. Meanwhile, the Other Side has stonewalled perfectly reasonable requests to release its own documents that would expose some very embarrassing details if anybody ever found out what was in them. This just shows you what a bunch of hypocrites they are.

Naturally, the media won’t report any of this.

Read the whole thing, and recognize yourself. Via The Wrong Side Absolutely Must Not Win - Reason.com.

I'm sure it's better for the children this way.

Chicago's teachers set up picket lines this morning after talks with public school officials ended over the weekend without resolution.

"Rahm says cut back, we say fight back," picketers dressed in red T-shirts chanted this morning outside Chicago Public Schools headquarters.

Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis announced late Sunday night that weekend talks had failed to resolve all the union's issues.  “We have failed to reach an agreement that will prevent a labor strike,” she said. “No CTU members will be inside of our schools Monday.”

 After an all-day negotiating session Sunday, school board President David Vitale told reporters the district had changed its proposal 20 times over the course of talks and didn't have much more to offer.

 “This is about as much as we can do,” Vitale said. “There is only so much money in the system.”

The district said it offered teachers a 16 percent pay raise over four years and a host of benefit proposals.

 “This is not a small commitment we're handing out at a time when our fiscal situation is really challenged,” Vitale said.

 Lewis said the two sides are close on teacher compensation but the union has serious concerns about the cost of health benefits, the makeup of the teacher evaluation system and job security.

 With a strike, CPS will put its contingency plan in effect, opening 144 schools to students from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. But parents are being urged to find alternatives and use the schools only as a last resort. The city's 118 charter schools are not affected by a strike.

All emphasis mine. This hits several of my hot buttons: government-worker unions, government education, charter schools. Via Teachers union on strike in Chicago - chicagotribune.com.

Some of Kenwood Academy High School student Muhammed Kebbeh’s family say they are considering going back to Africa after he became the city’s 370th murder victim this year and second of his six siblings to be gunned down on the South Side in the last six months.

“I want to pack everything up and go back,” his oldest brother, Momadu Kebbeh, 36, said Wednesday, as his devoutly Muslim family mourned and prayed at their Washington Park home. “What’s the point of staying here?”

Muhammed, 19, was sitting with his girlfriend when he was shot dead by masked gunmen in a drive-by shooting in the 8100 block of South Ingleside shortly after 11:30 p.m. Tuesday. Relatives say they had been especially worried about him ever since his 23-year-old brother Omar Kebbeh became Chicago’s 68th murder victim of 2012 back in February.

I wonder what the gun-control laws are in Gambia? Via After second in family killed, family may return to Africa - Chicago Sun-Times.

I always said the man could give a speech to an audience of two opposed factions, and each faction would believe he was on their side:

... during the campaign what Barack Obama offered the American people was classic epideictic in the Greek sense. A rhetoric that created a sense of collective community grounded in hope and a sense of reconciliation embodied in who he was as an individual and in that message.

That's been, that concept isn't new or controversial, I'm just going to assume that you'll accept it on its face. But the point I want to make about it is that the credibility of Barack Obama, an African­American winning the primary in Iowa, giving this sort of message, meant that we were investing that message with Barack Obama. He became the evidence for his own message. And at a time in which the public was widely ready to repudiate George Bush, he became the incarnation of everyone's hopes and dreams as the "un­Bush."

As a result people read into his candidacy whatever they wanted, particularly everything they didn't like about George Bush. And every unfulfilled aspiration of liberals or progressives was also bodied in this person Barack Obama regardless of what he actually said.

In other words Barack Obama was never as eloquent as we thought he was. A person matched a moment with a rhetoric in a context in which the audience created something it heard as eloquence.

Via http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/PDFFiles/Kathleen%20Hall%20Jamieson%20-%20Obama%20Rhetoric.pdf, itself via http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/09/03/the-presidents-failure-and-his-challenge/.

... if they [Christians] are truly interested in restoring marriage and the family to their proper places as the twin bulwarks of civilized society, they must leap at the opportunity to remove the state, at all levels, from the process entirely. Marriage is a sacred trinity of a man and a woman before God, there is neither room nor reason for a fourth party to enter into the relationship, still less one that corrupts and destroys the tripartite relationship.

Note that the author is talking about Christian sacraments, not civil law. Via Alpha Game: Divorcing the State.

Another InfoWars link. I mean, really, can we disband and outlaw this creeping Stasi now?

The footage shows TSA agents walking around a departure lounge asking to test passengers’ drinks for explosive residue with a swab they hold over the liquid.

“Now remember that this is inside the terminal, well beyond the security check and purchased inside the terminal…just people waiting to get on the plane,” writes the You Tube user who uploaded the video.

“My wife and son came back from a coffee shop just around the corner, then we were approached. I asked them what they were doing. One of the TSA ladies said that they were checking for explosive chemicals (as we are drinking them). I said “really – inside the terminal? You have got to be kidding me.” I asked them if they wanted to swab us all. She responded with something like, ‘yes sometimes we need to do that’. I then asked if she wanted a urine sample…nonetheless, the TSA is way out of control,” he adds, joking that the TSA’s next move could be to visit people’s homes before they even leave for the airport (they’re already in the parking lot demanding to search people who aren’t even flying!)

via » Video Shows TSA’s Bizarre New Security Policy Alex Jones' Infowars: There's a war on for your mind!.

I am not normally one to link to InfoWars. However, this story does appeal to my priors, to wit: the TSA is expanding its reach to public venues, not merely transportation areas. Can we disband them yet?

The Transportation Security Administration will be conducting grope downs and bag searches at three different locations in Charlotte this week at the Democratic National Convention, illustrating the fact that the TSA has expanded well beyond its remit of transportation and into public venues.

The DNC will be held at three separate sites this week, all of which will have security checkpoints staffed by TSA officers.

55 TSA screeners “Will help the Secret Service with screening at Time Warner Cable Arena, the Convention Center and Bank of America stadium,” reports WSOCTV.com.

via » TSA To Conduct Grope Downs at DNC Alex Jones' Infowars: There's a war on for your mind!.

The amount of waste and duplication in education is huge. Why should tens of thousands of explain calculus every year? Why not just record the lectures and use all live teaching labor for Q&A sessions?

When universities and colleges start doing massive layoffs think of it as the freeing up of a dwindling supply of high IQ labor.

via ParaPundit: Venture Capitalists And Universities Rush To Online Education.

File this under "flattering, and appeals to my prior beliefs":

Researchers from the London School of Economics have found that people with high I.Q.s are more likely to be night owls, whereas folks with lower I.Q.s are more likely to wake up early and function their best during the day. Other studies have found a link between “eveningness” and getting good grades in school.

However, all is not well with those who burn the midnight oil. People who are disposed to staying up late are less reliable and more likely to suffer from depression and various addictions when compared to early risers.

Thank goodness I don't have the "addictions" part. /me pours another drink

Via Smart People Stay Up Late And Sleep Late!.

PolitiFact zinged Paul Ryan (“mostly false”) for saying that Obama “puts a board of 15 unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats in charge of Medicare who are required to cut Medicare in ways that will lead to denied care for current seniors.” Those bureaucrats aren’t “unaccountable,” says PolitiFact, because they can be removed for “malfeasance in office” -- which obviously isn’t what Ryan was getting at. “Their recommendations can be rejected by Congress,” it continues. Sure. But their recommendations can also become law without any congressional action: a process that can reasonably be described as lacking the accountability some people find worthwhile in lawmaking. PolitiFact complains as well about “bureaucrats”: “They become members of the bureaucracy by definition once they join the board. But they won’t all start that way.”

via PolitiFiction - The Editors - National Review Online.