Millions of Americans are marching, blogging, calling Congress, E-mailing friends, and writing to newspapers to say that President Obama and Congress are expanding government too far, too fast. We need to do more, because it’s clear that they’re not getting the message. The latest example: the House of Representatives is preparing to put the Department of Education into the business of creating educational curriculum for American students.

This week the House is scheduled to approve H.R. 3221, an education lending bill that CBO reports will increase the deficit by $50 billion. The bill includes a little-known provision to give the Secretary of Education $500 million - to be provided to to any entity he deems “appropriate” - to develop and disseminate free and “freely available” online courses.

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THIS is what our fetid universities promulgate instead of actually teaching anything useful.

I will admit it. I am a subscriber to the Claremont Review of Books. Whatever you make of that, don’t imagine that I am one of those pointy-headed, University types that sit about in tweed jackets with leather elbow patches, drawing on a pipe, and pontificating about the Greek Classics. On the other hand, I ain’t no anti-intellectual neither. Just consider me one of those fellows that knows just enough to be dangerous.

In any case, one thing that always strikes me about The CRB is that I always find at least one article that proves to me that while eggheads might make for wonderful support for policy, that they may be ideal for an intellectual underpinning of ideas, they would be horrible implementers of it should they be the ones in charge– yes even those ostensibly on our own side of the issues. As it happens, the Winter issue of the CRB did not disappoint me in this area.

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Most people imagine that our schools are to be institutes of higher learning. Apparently the ACLU has a little different conception of what “higher learning” means because it is demanding that public schools in Nashville, Tennessee allow gay advocacy sites to go unblocked at library Internet stations throughout the Metro Nashville District.

The porn peddlers of the ACLU have given the Metro schools a “deadline” of April 29 to reverse its Internet policies or they take the issue before the courts.

The ACLU, of course, pretends that it is “helping” kids “understand” gay issues, but that would presuppose that homosexual issues are to be taught in schools, naturally. The central issue is just that: what should we be teaching in our schools?

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On Tuesday, March 10, the U.S. Senate voted to terminate the experimental Washington, DC school voucher program, which had been implemented in order to help provide poor minority children in failing DC schools with the same educational opportunities that so many children of Senators, Congressmen, and Presidents within the district have as a result of their advantageous birth.

During his Presidential campaign, President Obama indicated that he would put his personal opposition to vouchers aside “if he saw more proof that vouchers are successful.” I would “not allow my predispositions to stand in the way of making sure that our kids can learn,” he told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel in February 2008. “You do what works for the kids.”

Now, it appears that the Obama administration and the U.S. Senate purposely kept the results of a Congressionally-mandated study showing the benefits of the Washington, DC voucher program from becoming public until after they had managed to spike the program due to its supposed “lack of effectiveness.” (The executive summary is available here; the full report can be seen here.)

The information contained in the report was collected in spring and fall of 2008, and it was prepared for publication over the winter — then held from the public until April 3, when it was finally made available online.

The result of the Obama administration delaying the release of this report, which showed that participants in the voucher program outperformed those in the district’s public schools by a large margin on reading tests, until after the Senate vote is that the 1,700 low-income, minority children who are currently receiving up to $7,500 in vouchers per year to attend private school instead of their own failing DC public schools, will be forced to return to those publics after the 2009-10 school year, over the wishes of DC mayor Adrian Fenty, who said “it would not be productive to disrupt the education of children who are presently enrolled in private schools,” and despite empirical evidence that such a move will consign them to a lower-quality education and a far less optimistic future.

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Implicit in the right to associate with a union is the right to disassociate from one and the later is the right that the teachers of KIPP Academy in New York are trying to employ by attempting to oust the United Federation of Teachers from their places of work.

Teachers at two KIPP charter schools in the Bronx and Manhattan, New York, took the action after the UFT tired to meddle in school affairs without contacting teachers and staff first.

Earlier this year, the teachers union filed a grievance against KIPP Academy’s “at-will” employment policies but the union did so without first meeting with teachers to see if they wanted this action. Teacher Matt Hureau told The New York Post that the union never talked to teachers first. “It was the union acting and notifying the teachers afterward,” Hureau said

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No one wants to see a beautiful 18-year-old girl commit suicide. No one wants to make any worse the pain that surviving family members feel. No one wants to make light of the situation that causes a child or young person to chose suicide, either. But high emotion makes for bad laws and this is no exception.

Last year, Jessica Logan imagined that she was sending a nude cell-phone photo of herself only to her new boyfriend. But he was not as circumspect as she might have hoped passing the salacious picture to his friends, and they to theirs, until it surged through some seven Cincinnati high schools.

It wasn’t long before Jessica was the butt of jokes and the target of epithets like “slut” and “porn queen.” The ribbing shook her so hard that she hanged herself in her bedroom last July.

And now, parents Albert and Cynthia Logan want new laws passed to somehow stop “sexting” of nude or half nude photos from one teen’s cell-phone to another. Unfortunately, such laws are just a bad idea. They will do nothing to stop the low-born practice while only piling more strangling regulations on the business community as well as giving government and police officials even more intrusive powers into our individual lives.

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Our institutes of “higher” learning are all about being inclusive. They are stridently for freedom of speech and stand 100% behind the concept of open political debate. Well, unless you’re a Christian, that is. Christians, you see, are the only group that our fetid colleges and universities have agreed to discriminate against.

Last week, another example of that well known “tolerance” our schools are so concerned with promulgating was seen in Pomona College in Claremont, California. There two Christian, pro-life students were banned from the Pamona campus. Their crime? Video taping a question-and-answer session with a Planned Parenthood representative invited to speak there.

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Senator Durbin, why do you want to throw these kids out of their schools?

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The assignment for Central Connecticut State University student John Walberg and his two classmates was to give an oral presentation on a “relevant issue in the media.” The three chose school violence for their topic.

After the oral presentation was over, professor Paula Anderson of Communication 140, promptly filed a complaint with the CCSU Police against student Wahlberg claiming he made students “scared and uncomfortable.” Professor Anderson deemed Wahlberg a “perceived risk” and felt it was her duty to “protect” her class.

What did the young man say in his oral assignment that was so threatening? Shockingly, Wahlberg had the temerity to discuss concealed carry laws, guns on campus in the hands of law abiding students, and the problems with the concept of a “gun free zone.” He was gauche enough to have posited that if students and/or professors had legal guns on their persons in 2007 the death toll in the Virginia Tech shooting spree could have been much lower.

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Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York has been a self-styled education mayor. He’s made all sorts of proposals and tried several different angles — some good some not so good — to improve the education of the kids of New York. He has, though, been a proponent of school choice and this advocacy looks to be a success, at least for the kids of Harlem’s District 5.

Recently District 5 sponsored the first ever Harlem Education Fair at which 5,000 parents and kids turned out to see what opportunities for school choice can be employed to improve their children’s education. 50 different schools, traditional as well as charter, competed for parents’ attention and the public money that will follow their children.

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Dear Illinois,  
Thanks for Paying me to talk to your kids.  
Love, Bill Ayres,  
writer, teacher, terrorist

Illinois you have the honor of seeing your tax dollars go to pay terrorist William Ayers to “lecture” students at the University of Illinois. Not only will he be “lecturing” your students for a week at the Urbana campus, but your tax dollars at work will afford him free room and board at Allen Hall, as well.

Isn’t it heart warming that this killer and hater of America is being paid state dollars to help teach your college kids? Doesn’t it make you all warm and squishy inside that this anti-American, hater is there in Urbana to spread his lies and destructive ideas among the students he encounters there? And doesn’t it make us as a society so smart and open-minded to allow enemies to nurture our youth?

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U.S. colleges are demanding. That’s right they are sternly demanding. You see, they are all upset that the Japanese government is not promoting study abroad for its citizens and they are demanding that the Japanese government get more of its citizens to pony up the cash for a U.S. college degree and if the people won’t do it, why these U.S. colleges demand that the government do it in their stead.

And this demand proves once again just how unAmerican U.S. colleges are.

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Imagine a fast food place that makes you buy a cheeseburger when you want a chicken sandwich. Oh, they don’t mind if you buy the chicken sandwich, too, mind you, but you are forced to purchase a cheeseburger every time you walk through the doors whether you want it or not. Seems a bit like a rip off, not to mention unAmerican, to force you to buy something you don’t want, doesn’t it? Well, this is unionism. Only unions prevent you from even having a job in your chosen profession in the first place to have the cash to buy your chicken sandwich unless you follow their rules. That’s forced labor for other’s benefit.

We used to call that a form of enslavement… now it’s called union membership.

Case in point, teachers unions and teacher’s support for California’s Proposition 8 — the sanctity of marriage law now embroiling California in such turmoil.

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Another Example of How Liberals Destroy This Country

We often call them “our best and brightest.” They are the men and women of our armed forces, all volunteers putting their lives on the line to defend our nation. Some of our most able and trustworthy leaders have come from their ranks. In times of need their sacrifice is cause for us to well with pride and their inevitable loss cause to shed a tear of gratitude. We encourage our young people to consider this life of sacrifice to our country and when at a young age they so choose the life of a soldier, almost without fail we find such young folks to be the cream of our society. Polite. Earnest. Intelligent. Hard working.

So why are the administrators in the Aurora, Colorado public school system harassing and punishing one of those very young people that we should be celebrating? With actions such as this, liberals are not only destroying our schools but also our traditions and our very social fabric.

High school senior Marie Morrow, 17, of Cherokee Trail High School is serving an illicitly sentenced 10-day suspension and her expulsion from school is on the line within the month. Miss Morrow is a team leader of the Young Marines youth leadership group and participates in the group’s drill team.

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Since Barack “Giant Killer” Obama thinks it’s his business how much CEOs and captains of business should be paid predicated on receiving federal money one has to wonder why this principle is not being applied fairly across the board? If receipt of federal money is enough to constitute total government control over salaries, let’s apply it everywhere. We can start with the salaries of university presidents.

Back in 2005, Senator Charles Grassley (R, Iowa) wanted to launch an investigation of the president and board of trustees of American University in Washington because of a giant severance package of $1.3 million given outgoing President Benjamin Ladner who only had a base salary of $633,000 in 2003. The severance seemed excessive, to say the least.

In 2005 Bloomberg published a story investigating the salaries of a handful of the nation’s top paid university presidents. The numbers then all exceeded President Obama’s new $500,000 cap for the evil CEOs of 2009.

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Sadly, we are used to the anti-Semitism of Europe. After all, that is where anti-Semitism has historically thrived in a most virulent form and does still today. We are also used to the Jew hatred of the illiterati of Europe’s universities having seen so often the petitions they’ve raised to denounce Israel and give succor to Hamas and Fatah — and any other terrorist group that comes down the pike, for that matter. Of course, this infection of hate, racism and self-destructive terror worship is increasingly appearing at our own universities in the U.S. Nothing is more representative of that than the example of the “U.S. Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel” recently emanating out of several California Universities.

Sponsored by several radical Muslimists that claim at being professors in a handful of California universities, this petition is one of the first of it’s kind here in the U.S. A disgusting milestone on the road to the Islamization of our tax payer funded institutions of higher learning. It is also an effort that pushes an extreme anti-intellectualism in our schools.

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Here is a little list:

1. The ability to restore fiscal discipline, given that we passed a stimulus bill in the House that spends more than did the massive New Deal boondoggles of years past.
2. The ability to have a separate and vigorous argument over education policy, given that federal education outlays have been doubled in the stimulus bill.
3. The ability to have a separate and vigorous argument over health care policy, given that the states are receiving $87 billion in Medicare funds, and that Medicaid and SCHIP coverage is being determined through the stimulus bill.
4. The ability to have a separate and vigorous argument over redistribution of wealth, given that the stimulus bill engages in redistribution.
5. The ability to crack down on the culture of earmarks.

Sources are here, here, and here. These are the “good government” policies that were sold to us during the election?