The US Census and Sesame Street ... - Big Big Forums

Jolie Rouge · 08-27-2009, 05:25 PM

If Team Obama could send their ACORN foot soldiers into taxpayer-funded schools to collect Census data, they would.

Instead, they’re turning your own children into proxy Census collectors.

Specifically targeted: Bilingual children whom the government is relying on to reach non-English-speaking parents. (See my April 3, 2009 column: Obama Census - No Illegal Alien Left Behind. )

The White House is also joining with Sesame Street to help preschoolers evangelize about the Census to their parents.

Via USA Today:

Quote:

Anyone tempted to ignore the 2010 Census will have a tough time doing it — especially if they have kids in school.

The government has launched Census in Schools, an all-out campaign targeting superintendents, principals, teachers, students and, indirectly, parents, as schools open across the nation this month and next. The message: The Census is coming and here’s why everyone should care.

The goal is to send posters, teaching guides, maps and lesson plans to every school in the nation, Puerto Rico and U.S. island territories to encourage everyone to participate in the national count. The materials will land in more than 118,000 schools and reach 56 million students.

“It’s great to reach the children because children are such strong voices in their homes,” says Renee Jefferson-Copeland, chief of the Census schools program. “In households that are linguistically isolated, they can express the information to their parents.”

…Between January and March, the Census Bureau will help plan a week of Census education in schools. During Census Week, teachers will devote 15 minutes every day for five days to the topic by discussing such things as civic participation, confidentiality or geography.

ABC stands for Activate Barack’s Cadre!

***

And in related schoolkid exploitation news:

Quote:

The United Nations is recommending that children as young as five receive mandatory sexual education that would teach even pre-kindergarteners about masturbation and topics like gender violence.

The U.N.’s Economic, Social and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) released a 98-page report in June offering a universal lesson plan for kids ranging in age from 5-18, an “informed approach to effective sex, relationships” and HIV education that they say is essential for “all young people.”

The U.N. insists the program is “age appropriate,” but critics say it’s exposing kids to sex far too early, and offers up abstract ideas — like “transphobia” — they might not even understand.

“At that age they should be learning about … the proper name of certain parts of their bodies,” said Michelle Turner, president of Citizens for a Responsible Curriculum, “certainly not about masturbation.”

Turner was disturbed by UNESCO’s plans to explain to children as young as nine about the safety of legal abortions, and to advocate and “promote the right to and access to safe abortion” for everyone over the age of 15.

“This is absurd,” she told FOXNews.com.

http://michellemalkin.com/2009/08/27...ors-your-kids/

read up on the comments :

In other words, it’s not a democracy if your candidate doesn’t win. You’re so sure you’re right that the only way people could disagree with you is that they are stupid or corrupt.

The only thing I would add is that we live in a republic - not a democracy. That means that we are governed by laws and not by polls. Both of the entrenched political parties (the only ones whose candidates have a real chance of winning, barring exceptions) do not concern themselves with the law. They wouldn’t be able to get away with it if the electorate was properly informed and educated. You mentioned the “stupid and corrupt”, but you left out the largest group, by far: the uneducated, uninformed, well-intentioned, misguided citizen. The Federal government has systematically stripped the citizen from this knowledge.

How? The public education system.

Government is like fire. It naturally seeks to grow beyond bounds. Fire in the fireplace and on the stove is a useful tool; So is government in its rightful use …but left unchecked and unattended, government, like fire, will expand to consume everything. The citizenry must keep vigil on the government to make sure it doesn’t get out of control. The people running the government have a natural bias, if not an active agenda, to remove these checks preventing it from expanding. One of the best ways to do this, they’ve found, is to erode the public’s knowledge of the origins of this nation: why it was created, what abuses occurred that led to its founding, why the Constitution was worded so carefully and succinctly, the intent of the Founders (the Federalist Papers), why we fought a war over this against the world’s super power and how we won, the biographies of the Founders and other principal players, etc… I don’t know about you, but my public school experience didn’t include much of this at all. I grew up hearing about FDR’s New Deal and all of the “alphabet-soup” agencies that he created. They taught us about Johnson’s “Great Society” and “War on Poverty”. The curriculum was a steady diet of the ebb and flow of the struggle of the Republicans versus the Democrats. It was a “floating standard” rather than a “fixed anchor” that misdirected our minds away from the transcendent principles by which this nation was founded. As a people, we’ve lost our way. We don’t know if a bill, law, tax, candidate, etc. is good, bad, or in-between. We don’t have a measuring stick or scales to decide; Actually, we do have these tools, we’ve just not been taught about them.

Here’s an example of this: You’ve probably heard about the so-called art P!ss Christ. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piss_Christ ) Most people were upset by this, and especially since it was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts (i.e. the taxpayers). I remember the debate. Everyone was talking about how the NEA should or shouldn’t fund this art. No one ever stopped to ask the question: Should the Federal government be funding art, AT ALL??

Nowhere in the Constitution does it authorize this function. Is it a good thing to do - for the taxpayer to fund art? Maybe - maybe not, but that’s what the amendment process is for. We should permit no behavior by the Federal government that is not explicitly authorized by the Constitution. We should measure the Federals’ actions by whether it is legal, not by if it makes us feel good. Once we opened the door to allow Uncle Sam to help someone by unconstitutional means, it set the precedent allowing him to do bad or sneaky things. Thomas Jefferson said, “In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”

So I don’t believe that most people are corrupt or stupid who disagree with me. I’ve made a lot of mistakes (many embarrassing) as I’m sure you have. I don’t have all knowledge and wisdom. I do have faith in what the Founders set out to do. This gives me a fixed point of reference by which to make judgments of what goes on in our government. Believers in the two party system have no such point of reference. Each side feels secure if their party is currently in power. Never mind what the parties are doing, just that they’re calling the shots. Each side takes credit for “good” things that happen while blaming the other for the “bad”. It’s like we’re fighting for control of a boat that’s about to go over a waterfall. The answer is not getting control of the helm. The answer is getting to solid ground.

How can liberals like chapoutier support the census, as currently administered, while at the same time droning on and on about some supposed right to privacy inherent (but unwritten) in the Constitution to justify murdering babies and sex ed for preschoolers ?

gmyers · 08-27-2009, 05:32 PM

Why don't they just teach tolerance of people that are different and leave the sex out of it.

Jolie Rouge · 08-27-2009, 05:44 PM

Quote:

Why don't they just teach tolerance of people that are different
and leave the sex out of it.

Thank YOU!

mikej · 08-27-2009, 07:56 PM

I so do not believe that 5 year olds would be taught about masturbation. Might the author of this article be exaggerating much as the GOP did last Fall when they asserted that Obama wanted to teach kindergärtners about sex?

By the way, ACORN will not be collecting census data.

littlebuggy · 08-27-2009, 08:05 PM

Under the U.N.'s voluntary sex-ed regime, kids just 5-8 years old will be told that "touching and rubbing one's genitals is called masturbation" and that private parts "can feel pleasurable when touched by oneself"

I think that's over the line. Kids that young don't need to be taught things like that. It does say 'voluntary se-ed regime' I just don't see what parent would want their 5 year old to participate in something like that.

mikej · 08-27-2009, 08:29 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by littlebuggy

Under the U.N.'s voluntary sex-ed regime, kids just 5-8 years old will be told that "touching and rubbing one's genitals is called masturbation" and that private parts "can feel pleasurable when touched by oneself"

I think that's over the line. Kids that young don't need to be taught things like that. It does say 'voluntary se-ed regime' I just don't see what parent would want their 5 year old to participate in something like that.

I'll agree with not wanting five year olds to be exposed to that type of information. I do not find Michelle to be a credible interpreter of doctrine. She's not as bad as others, nut, she isn't at all credible.

Jolie Rouge · 09-01-2009, 04:16 PM

Obama’s Sept. 8 speech to schoolchildren
By Michelle Malkin • September 1, 2009 01:06 PM[/i]
http://michellemalkin.com/2009/09/01...choolchildren/

President Obama told a student report last month that he would be making an address to schoolchildren on September 8...

ServiceWire has the announcement and broadcast schedule for the speech. http://servicewire.org/node/6620

The Daily Paul picked up the story last week and linked to teachers’ manuals pegged to Obama’s address, which have now been linked on Drudge. http://www.dailypaul.com/node/104812

The documents have a heavy activist bent:

Quote:

During the Speech:

• As the President speaks, teachers can ask students to write down key ideas or phrases that are important or personally meaningful. Students could use a note-taking graphic organizer such as a Cluster Web, or students could record their thoughts on sticky notes. Younger children can draw pictures and write as appropriate. As students listen to the speech, they could think about the following:

What is the President trying to tell me?

What is the President asking me to do?

What new ideas and actions is the President challenging me to think about?

• Students can record important parts of the speech where the President is asking them to do something. Students might think about: What specific job is he asking me to do? Is he asking anything of anyone else? Teachers? Principals? Parents? The American people?

• Students can record any questions they have while he is speaking and then discuss them after the speech. Younger children may need to dictate their questions.

After the Speech:

• Teachers could ask students to share the ideas they recorded, exchange sticky notes or stick notes on a butcher paper poster in the classroom to discuss main ideas from the speech, i.e. citizenship, personal responsibility, civic duty.

• Students could discuss their responses to the following questions:

What do you think the President wants us to do?

Does the speech make you want to do anything?

Are we able to do what President Obama is asking of us?

Schools have used students as little lobbyists on everything from illegal immigration to gay marriage to anti-war activism.

And most recently: Census collection.

Will Obama be able to resist issuing a call to youth arms to marshal help in passing his legislative agenda?

The thing is: He won’t need to make the call explicit.

Obama zealot teachers like this one across the country will do all the extra-curricular bullying and haranguing for him. Remember: http://www.belch.com/blog/2008/11/06...upport-mccain/

Partial transcript:

Quote:

Harris:We want to talk about the presidential election. I want to ask you, who are you pulling for? Raise your hand.

Student: Obama.

Harris: You pullin for Obama. Who you pullin for?

Student: Obama.

Harris:Any of you pullin for John McCain? That’s fine, say him as well.

Student: Obama.

Student: Obama.

[Cathy, the daughter of an American soldier answers McCain.]

Harris:John, oh lord, John McCain.

Oh Jesus, John McCain.

Ok, now I wanna axe you somethin.

Why are you pullin for John McCain? It’s ok, but why are you pullin for John McCain?

Cathy: I thinks it’s because my parents are going for him too.

Harris: Ok, your parents are going for him. Why are you pullin for Ba-RACK. Barack.

Student: I just want a black president sometimes.

Ok, you want a black president.

Student: The reason why I want Barack Obama is because he’s making good changes in the good country and stuff like that.

Harris: So, he’s making good changes for our country. Now can you tell me just a little bit more, like what type of changes?

Like not having big fights between Iraq and having soldiers killed.

So in other words, Barack is going to end that war in Iraq. What do you all know about that war in Iraq?

[Harris addresses Kathy] Talk, cause yo daddy in the military. Talk. It’s a senseless war! And by the way, Cathy, the person that you’re picking for president said that our troops could stay in Iraq for another hundred years if they need to!

[Camera pans to Cathy, in near tears.]

Harris: So that means that your daddy could stay in the military for another hundred years!

Reason number 999,999,965 to take control of your own children’s education.

littlebuggy · 09-01-2009, 04:36 PM

Oh hell no!!! Who in the hell does that woman think she is?! If that was my child you can bet I would have been at the school the next day, and that woman would not be teaching there anymore. PERIOD. Her job as a teacher is not to influence my childrens way of thinking, but to present FACTS and let the children make their own conclusions about things of this nature! This sort of thing makes me so angry. They need to leave children out of things like this! My heart goes out to that poor girl!

***ahippiechic*** · 09-01-2009, 05:51 PM

It says' voluntary, so mine would be opted out of that class at 5.

Jolie Rouge · 09-02-2009, 05:41 PM

MM's column today digs a little deeper into President Obama’s September 8 speech to schoolchildren. The school guides now featured front and center on the http://www.ed.gov website were developed by the White House Teaching Fellows — a group which includes several activist educators as you’ll see below.

Downplaying academic achievement in favor of left-wing radical activism in the public schools is rooted in old neighborhood pal and Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers’ pedagogical philosophy. It was the Chicago Annenberg Challenge way when the two served as board members of the educational foundation — and it is the Washington Obama way now.

Obama’s classroom campaign: No junior lobbyist left behind
by Michelle Malkin

“ABC” stands for All Barack’s Children. On September 8, young students across the country will be watching television. Yes, they’ll be parked in front of the boob tube and computer screens watching President Obama’s address on education.

Instead of practicing cursive, reviewing multiplication tables, diagramming sentences, or learning something concrete, America’s kids will be lectured about the importance of learning. And then the schoolchildren, from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade, will be exhorted to Do Something — other than sit in their seats and receive academic instruction, that is.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan dispatched letters to principals nationwide boasting that “This is the first time an American president has spoken directly to the nation’s school children about persisting and succeeding in school.” http://www.ed.gov/admins/lead/academic/bts.html But the goal is not merely morale-boosting. According to White House event-related guides developed by the U.S. Department of Education’s Teaching Fellows, grade-school students will be told to “listen to the speech” and “could think about the following:”

[quote]*What is the President trying to tell me ?

*What is the President asking me to do?

*What new ideas and actions is the President challenging me to think about?

• Students can record important parts of the speech where the President is asking them to do something. Students might think about: What specific job is he asking me to do? Is he asking anything of anyone else? Teachers? Principals? Parents? The American people?

After the speech, teachers will ask students:

*What do you think the President wants us to do?

*Does the speech make you want to do anything?

*Are we able to do what President Obama is asking of us?

Obama’s White House Teaching Fellows include Chicago high school educator Xian Barrett, a fierce opponent of charter schools who founded a “Social Justice Club” and bussed students to protests and Michelle Bissonette, a Los Altos, Calif., teacher who is “focused on developing my leadership as a more culturally and racially conscious educator.”

The activist tradition of government schools using students as junior lobbyists cannot be ignored. Zealous teacher’s unions have enlisted captive schoolchildren as letter-writers in their campaigns for higher education spending. Out-of-control activists have enlisted their secondary-school charges in pro-illegal immigration protests, gay marriage ceremonies, environmental propaganda stunts, and anti-war events.

And last year’s presidential campaign saw disgraceful abuses of power by pro-Obama instructors. In New Rochelle, New York, elementary students were given an in-class assignment to color in drawings of Barack Obama – including a picture of a campaign button featuring his face and the slogan “Students for Obama 2008.”

In Cumberland County, N.C., a fifth-grade-school teacher turned a “civics” discussion into an unhinged harangue against a girl who said her family supported John McCain.

Nor can the Democrats’ strategy of using kiddie human shields to advance their legislative agenda be overlooked in the context and timing of Obama’s speech. Children have been front and center of the Left’s push for an ever-increasing government role in health care – from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s use of seventh-grader Baltimore school kid Graeme Frost to push for the massive S-CHIP entitlement expansion, to President Obama’s none-too-coincidental choice of Massachusetts 11-year-old town hall questioner Julia Hall (the daughter of a prominent Obama activist/organizer who assailed Obamacare critics’ “mean” signs), to the Kennedy family’s decision to put grandson Max Allen on center stage to pray for health care reform at his uncle’s funeral last week.

So when the Department of Education directs schools to gather children ‘round the TV monitors for Obama’s pep talk and then do this…

Quote:

• Create posters of their goals. Posters could be formatted in quadrants or puzzle pieces or trails marked with the labels: personal, academic, community, country. Each area could be labeled with three steps for achieving goals in those areas. It might make sense to focus on personal and academic so community and country goals come more readily.

• Write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president. These would be collected and redistributed at an appropriate later date by the teacher to make students accountable to their goals.

…parents have every right to worry about their children being used as Political Guinea Pigs for Change.

Stanley Kurtz’s invaluable investigation of the Obama/Ayers/Chicago Annenberg Challenge ties last fall is must-read. A very timely and relevant excerpt:

Quote:

The Chicago Annenberg Challenge was created ostensibly to improve Chicago’s public schools. The funding came from a national education initiative by Ambassador Walter Annenberg. In early 1995, Mr. Obama was appointed the first chairman of the board, which handled fiscal matters. Mr. Ayers co-chaired the foundation’s other key body, the “Collaborative,” which shaped education policy.

The CAC’s basic functioning has long been known, because its annual reports, evaluations and some board minutes were public. But the Daley archive contains additional board minutes, the Collaborative minutes, and documentation on the groups that CAC funded and rejected. The Daley archives show that Mr. Obama and Mr. Ayers worked as a team to advance the CAC agenda.

…The CAC’s agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers’s educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism. In the mid-1960s, Mr. Ayers taught at a radical alternative school, and served as a community organizer in Cleveland’s ghetto.

In works like “City Kids, City Teachers” and “Teaching the Personal and the Political,” Mr. Ayers wrote that teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression. His preferred alternative? “I’m a radical, Leftist, small ‘c’ communist,” Mr. Ayers said in an interview in Ron Chepesiuk’s, “Sixties Radicals,” at about the same time Mr. Ayers was forming CAC.

…CAC translated Mr. Ayers’s radicalism into practice. Instead of funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate with “external partners,” which actually got the money. Proposals from groups focused on math/science achievement were turned down. Instead CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or Acorn).

Mr. Obama once conducted “leadership training” seminars with Acorn, and Acorn members also served as volunteers in Mr. Obama’s early campaigns. External partners like the South Shore African Village Collaborative and the Dual Language Exchange focused more on political consciousness, Afrocentricity and bilingualism than traditional education. CAC’s in-house evaluators comprehensively studied the effects of its grants on the test scores of Chicago public-school students. They found no evidence of educational improvement.

…Mr. Ayers is the founder of the “small schools” movement (heavily funded by CAC), in which individual schools built around specific political themes push students to “confront issues of inequity, war, and violence.” He believes teacher education programs should serve as “sites of resistance” to an oppressive system. (His teacher-training programs were also CAC funded.) The point, says Mr. Ayers in his “Teaching Toward Freedom,” is to “teach against oppression,” against America’s history of evil and racism, thereby forcing social transformation.

The Obama campaign has cried foul when Bill Ayers comes up, claiming “guilt by association.” Yet the issue here isn’t guilt by association; it’s guilt by participation. As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle. That is a story even if Mr. Ayers had never planted a single bomb 40 years ago.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122212856075765367.html

Quote:

...to the Kennedy family’s decision to put grandson Max Allen on center stage to pray for health care reform at his uncle’s funeral last week.

Poor kid.... and to think people critized the Jackson family for putting Paris up on stage at Micheal's memorial.

Quote:

... teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression...

Teachers' should be focused on reading; writing; and math skills.

Jolie Rouge · 09-02-2009, 06:12 PM

As if I needed any more evidence to bolster today’s column about the Obama junior lobbyist campaign in America’s schools, here’s another item fresh from the headlines in Utah: http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_132491...uestid=5883011

Quote:

A school principal has apologized for showing a video at an assembly that a politically conservative group leader is calling “radical, leftist propaganda.”

Children at Eagle Bay Elementary School in Farmington were shown a short video called “I pledge” on Aug. 28. The video opens with an image of President Barack Obama and part of a speech in which he says, “Let us summon a new spirit of patriotism, of responsibility where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves but each other.” The video then features celebrities making pledges about how they will help the president and the world — and that’s where some say the problem lies… Many pledges, such as supporting local food banks, smiling more, and caring for the elderly are noncontroversial. But other pledges, such as "to never give anyone the finger when I'm driving again," "to sell my obnoxious car and buy a hybrid" and to advance stem cell research cross the line, some say...

Chris Williams, Davis School District spokesman, said school principal Ofelia Wade and school PTA leaders decided to show the video as part of an assembly about the school's theme for the year, service. He said the PTA board chose the video and Wade did not see it before it was shown in the assembly. "It got to a point where she turned to her assistant and said, 'Oops, I wish I would have seen this before. I don't think I would have shown it,' " Williams said. He said Wade could see how some adults might find the video political.

… Gayle Ruzicka, president of conservative Utah Eagle Forum, said the video was blatantly political. She said other offensive pledges included, “I pledge to be of service to Barack Obama,” “I pledge allegiance to the funk, to the united funk of funkadelica,” and pledges to not use plastic grocery bags and not flush the toilet after urinating. :eww:

“It’s very inappropriate to show a radical, leftist propaganda piece that political to children,” Ruzicka said. “If parents want their children to learn about those things and do them in the home, wonderful, fine, but it’s not the place of the school to show a one-sided propaganda piece to children without parents knowing about it.”

Cieslewicz said such values should be decided in the home, not at school. "They shouldn't be troubling our youth with the woes of the world and making them feel like we're in slavery or they have to worry about how many times they flush the toilet or if they have a plastic water bottle,"
(Cieslewicz said, referring to pledges in the video to "end slavery." )

Coming to a classroom assembly near you…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqcPA1ysSbw

I’m waiting for the video where members of Congress pledge:

— To read bills before voting on them

— To then have the guts to vote yes or no and not “present”

— To meet with their constituents and listen to them in a respectful manner without labeling them as a stupid, misinformed, angry mob of astroturfed terrorists.

— And to recognize that we elected them and if we’re really that stupid, it doesn’t say much for them.

Quote:

Chris Williams, Davis School District spokesman, said school principal Ofelia Wade and school PTA leaders decided to show the video as part of an assembly about the school's theme for the year, service. He said the PTA board chose the video and Wade did not see it before it was shown in the assembly. "It got to a point where she turned to her assistant and said, 'Oops, I wish I would have seen this before. I don't think I would have shown it,' " Williams said. He said Wade could see how some adults might find the video political.

"I pledge allegiance ... to Barak Obama ?" might be political ??

Sorry - as principle she had the responsibility and obligation to view the video prior to it being shown in a school assmebly. PERIOD.