Posted by Tina
They’ll soon be back. The OWS movement is planning for a volatile summer. Who are they and what are they doing to prepare? Unions and leftist organization are the “who” and they are training people in the fine art of civil disobedience now:
In her makeshift classroom in lower Manhattan, Lisa Fithian turns to a group of several dozen students, squares her shoulders, and issues a challenge: “Does someone want to be a cop and come get me?”
Fithian stands to deliver her lesson. “Of the two choices, running away or going limp, what does running away communicate?” she asks.
“Guilt,” several people say.
She smiles and nods. “Guilt.”
When it comes to civil disobedience, there’s often a right and wrong way to break the law, and one of Fithian’s jobs is to teach the right way to hundreds of newly minted Occupy activists.
The list of unions and organizations planning to make summer a madhouse can be found in the article linked above.
After listening to Ron Paul, I look at how law enforcement dealt with OWS and I’m not happy. I do not like what the Obama administration has done to our civil liberties and how he took Bush’s corrupt Department of Homeland Security and made it worse. The people should have the right to assemble. Denying the OWS demonstrators that right is against the constitution.
Ron Paul was a huge wake-up call for me about what we allowed the Bush administration to take away from us: No Child Left Behind forced states to comply with Federal education standards (regulation), credit card reform that turned banks into loan sharks, two wars, the Department of Homeland Security, long lines for airport security screening (Ron Paul mentioned this last night), illegal search and seizure, the list is endless. Republicans did this to us. Republicans.
Now a Democrat is in charge. Did he reverse all of that stuff? Nope. He made it worse. Obama could have done away with NCLB, he is making it worse. He signed a law that allows him to order the assassination of US citizens. He is right now allowing his corrupt DOJ to detain whistleblower Bradley Manning without the right to a speedy trial. Look at how demonstrators were hosed with pepper spray during OWS. That is crazy. I wish everyone would listen to Ron Paul. He is telling us to wake up.
Princess: “Denying the OWS demonstrators that right is against the constitution.”
I’m confused. My recollection is that OWS was protesting for weeks on end before the police were dispatched to remove them and then for health and other considerations. This was not an attempt to deprive them of the right to assemble, clearly they were given that right. But to ensure public health and safety in most cases
But what about their responsibilities as citizens? Do they have the right to deficate and urinate in public open spaces? Do they have the right to deprive businesses of customers or block cargo from moving? Do they have the right to occupy public spaces indefinitely without obtaining permits or paying fees to cover insurance, clean up and law enforcement costs? Do they have the right to engage in illegal activity like public fornication, robbery, and rape? is the public expected to just accept an endless wave of such activity without question? I don’t think so.
“No Child Left Behind forced states to comply with Federal education standards”
Yeah…because expecting educators to actually teach children to read and write and show that they have completed the job successfully is unacceptable. But students that are ubable to read their own high school diploma and are sitting in college anyway is totally acceptable. It’s disgracefull that this bill ever had to be written. It was an attempt to bring accountability to our school system. Unfortunately it didn’t work as well as we would like.
The thing I don’t like about Occupy, besides their deplorable sense of civic responsibility, is they have no solutions and many of them don’t even know the questions!
After listening to Ron Paul, I look at how law enforcement dealt with OWS and I’m not happy. I do not like what the Obama administration has done to our civil liberties and how he took Bush’s corrupt Department of Homeland Security and made it worse. The people should have the right to assemble. Denying the OWS demonstrators that right is against the constitution.
Ron Paul was a huge wake-up call for me about what we allowed the Bush administration to take away from us: No Child Left Behind forced states to comply with Federal education standards (regulation), credit card reform that turned banks into loan sharks, two wars, the Department of Homeland Security, long lines for airport security screening (Ron Paul mentioned this last night), illegal search and seizure, the list is endless. Republicans did this to us. Republicans.
Now a Democrat is in charge. Did he reverse all of that stuff? Nope. He made it worse. Obama could have done away with NCLB, he is making it worse. He signed a law that allows him to order the assassination of US citizens. He is right now allowing his corrupt DOJ to detain whistleblower Bradley Manning without the right to a speedy trial. Look at how demonstrators were hosed with pepper spray during OWS. That is crazy. I wish everyone would listen to Ron Paul. He is telling us to wake up.
Just like Obamacare was a huge, huge, huge giveaway to insurance companies, NCLB was a huge giveaway to the textbook companies.
First they wrote new curriculum that schools have to buy to pass the tests they write. As a parent of teenagers who went though school during the inception of NCLB I can tell you that what happened to education is garbage. Our kids not at all more educated. Schools used to have units in art, health, etc. Now it is all drill and kill BS. When it is time for tests it is a big rally and snacks galore to reward the students for doing well for the school. The worst teachers get the smartest students who will test well no matter what. This is especially true in high school.
They did not get rid of one single bad teacher because of NCLB, they just spend all of our money on testing related materials. The federal government should not require the states to comply with their pathetic “race to the top” or whatever Obama decided was the criteria to give some states billions of taxpayer money.
I think the occutards are going to find most people have lost that loving feeling as far as they are concerned and be unwilling to tolerate round two of occutardation.
Princess: “Schools used to have units in art, health, etc. Now it is all drill and kill BS.”
I think you can blame money for some of this in California. The bureaucracy gobbles up way too much of our education dollars.
There’s a report from Heritage about reforms to NCLB that are being introduced by Republicans to return power back to states and parents…don’t know whether they will make it through the Senate.
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2012/01/student-success-act-reforming-no-child-left-behind
Read particulars about the changes at the link above which include:
Several states have apparently enacted “success act” of their own to improve teacher performance.
Bush’s mistake was thinking he could work with Democrats in a bipartisan fashion in Washington just as he did in Texas with some success. But DC is a whole nuther animal. Ted Kennedy authored the NCLB law making it a federally controlled law and written with a central planning underpinning…that’s what the left loves. Republicans, naively and stupidly, went along to get along thinking that some “progress” in the direction of accountability would be an improvement.
This reform, attempts to place power back at a local level.
“They did not get rid of one single bad teacher because of NCLB”
Are you kidding me? The Union is way too powerful and would never have allowed it! With Kennedy writing NCLB and Democrats in bed with the teachers unions it just never would have happened. Bad teachers remain on the payroll even if they are not teaching in some districts! They don’t support vouchers for kids in bad schools either. They fight charter schools but at least they are creating some competition. The union may have to get it’s act together if they want to survive. Parents are rightly angry. Our country will not survive a couple more of generations of students unprepared to be adults and compete in the work place.
I sure hope you’re right Toby, otherwise it’s going to be a messy, smelly, possibly riotous trek to November!