G.K. Chesterton on Temperament

Franklin Graham on Religious Freedom

Gary Kasparov on Dictators

Is Common Core a Co-Creation of Political Correctness and Crony Capitalism?

During a forum  held by the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College, Granite State professor Dr. David Pook offered that he helped craft the Common Core Standards for English Language Arts because of "white privilege".  

Ironically, the Derryfield School in Manchester, New Hampshire (which has a 91% Caucasian student body) where Pook serves as chair of the History Department, does not use those Common Core standards because they are inferior.

So why do some politicians continue to champion Common Core? Some have suggested crony capitalism. 

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush (R-FL) is a big backer of Common Core.  Kathleen Jasper, a former Florida educator and founder of ConversationED.com, suggest that there may be pecuniary interests in pushing Common Core.  Jeb Bush's Foundation for Excellence in Education is heavily tied to Pearson, a leading education publisher and test making company.  So Pearsons publishes the k-12 books, they create the tests, they score the tests and coincidentally keep the data.

Per Jasper, Pearson garners between $15-$30 for each test administered.  Due to No Child Left Behind and Race For the Top federal mandates, students have to retake the tests over and over again until they achieve an acceptable score.  So kids keep constantly taking tests (without knowing why they failed) and businesses like Pearson profit from processing the perpetual paperwork. 

Presuming this is an accurate assessment, it is ironic to see how Educrat's political correctness works well with crony capitalism in Common Core which imposes a regime which profits from failure to educate well. 

h/t: American Thinker 

Trey Gowdy on Hillary Clinton's E-Mails

    Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC 4th), the Chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, responded to the Hillary E-Mail controversy on CBS's Face The Nation.



 Some cynics wonder why Chairman Gowdy is now in the forefront about Hillary's sui generis e-mails while heading the State Department, as the Select Committee had knowledge of this practice going back to last summer.  Gowdy is a former federal prosecutor so he is patiently building a case and did not want Ms. Clinton to testify before he had all of the information vetted.

While a litigator in an Article III court wants all relevant information, such a broad request could be framed as a witch hunt or a fishing expedition in the political realm.  So now that there is sufficient public pressure, the former Secretary of State may feel compelled (for continued electoral viability) to "step up" and completely surrender the cyber records and not just feign compliance.

 Chairman Gowdy, who first came to office as part of the 2010 Tea Party wave elections, may distinguish himself between the bluster and the brashness of the District of Calamity by building a compelling case to discern what happened in the Benghazi bungle of September 11, 2012.

But if Gowdy fails to impressively interrogate the former chief of Foggy Bottom, conservative cynics may echo Hillary's last Congressional testimony--"What difference, at this point, does it make?"  Combined with Speaker Boehner's capitulation on DHS funding with a rider excluding Executive Amnesty (which lost 167 Republican votes on final passage), conservatives might wonder if having friends like that in high office whether they need enemies.

Former Secretary of State Clinton claimed that we should strive to figure out why the Benghazi bungle happened.  Could it be due to insecure communications from hdr22@clintonemail.com (or mau-suit@clintonemail.com)?  Or a pattern in the Obama Administration to use backdoor, off official communications, to convey inconvenient truths? It does not seem that it was just Hillary Clinton and Eric Holder, as we should not forget the pseudonym Richard Windsor (a.k.a. EPA chief Lisa Jackson ).  So much for the Obama Administration being the most transparent regime ever, as they took their anti-secrecy award in 2011 in a closed door presentation.