Watcher’s Council Nominations – May Day Edition

JoshuaPundit on May 02 2012

Welcome to the Watcher’s Council, a blogging group consisting of some of the most incisive blogs in the ‘sphere, and the longest running group of its kind in existence. Every week, the members nominate two posts each, one written by themselves and one written by someone from outside the group for consideration by the whole Council.Then we vote on the best two posts, with the results appearing on Friday.

Ah, the OWS movement..back again like a rancid smell you thought you’d gotten rid of in spring cleaning. Together with pals from the SEIU and other radical groups, they used the old Communist holiday of May Day to exercise their usual tyranny over other people’s rights to travel, work, buy and sell.

There was an old saying..I believe it came from Ben Franklin – that one person’s rights ended at the next man’s nose. Sadly, a lot of people seem to have forgotten that, with the result that everyone’s miserable.

However, after thinking about it, I came up with a solution that ought to make everybody as happy as rats in a cheese factory. It’s amazing what you can accomplish by simply giving people what they want.

Council News:

This week, The Stewart Blog,Right Truth Ask Marion, Modern Sojourners and Pirates Cove took advantage of my generous offer of linkage. turned in some great stuff and earned honorable mention status.

You can, too! Want to see your work appear on the Watcher’s Council homepage in our weekly contest listing? Didn’t get nominated by a Council member? No worries.

Simply head over to Joshuapundit and post the title a link to the piece you want considered along with an e-mail address ( which won’t be published) in the comments section no later than Monday 6PM PST in order to be considered for our honorable mention category, and return the favor by creating a post on your site linking to the Watcher’s Council contest for the week.

It’s a great way of exposing your best work to Watcher’s Council readers and Council members, while grabbing the increased traffic and notoriety. And how good is that, eh?

So, let’s see what we have this week….

Council Submissions

• The Colossus of Rhodey – “Progressivism” = Insanity
• The Noisy Room – Pathological Politics – Predatory Partners and Persecuting Patriots
• The Political Commentator – Talking Heads say invest, invest, invest but closer inspection may say no, no, no!
• Simply Jews – On Zionist Cruelty To Minors
• Joshuapundit-Obama Campaign’s Latest Claim – ‘Romney Wouldn’t Have Ordered Bin-Laden Hit’
• The Right Planet – Re:Islam
• VA Right! - Thanks Obama:The Car Is STILL in the Ditch and Now We Are FLAT BROKE and Out of Gas!
• Bookworm Room – President Obama’s church is the Chapel of (Progressive) Democracy
• Rhymes With Right – Why Are We Dealing With This Again?
• Gay Patriot – Spiking the Osama ball, Obama forgets what team he’s on
• The Independent Sentinel – Bishops Issue Call To Action To Defend Religious Liberty
• The Glittering Eye -Common Theme/Common Solution
• The Mellow Jihadi – The Black And White Mohawk
• The Razor – Marriage and the State: It’s Time For a Divorce
• GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD – Liquidation Day: A Year After OBL’s Death

Honorable Mentions

• Ask Marion – Alinsky Alive and Well in the White House
• The Stewart Blog – Turning from the Heavens
• Right Truth – FDA may let patients buy drugs without prescriptions
• Modern Sojourners – The Easy Road Of Deception
• Pirates Cove – Obama To Spike Osama Football Live From Afghanistan

Non-Council Submissions

• OpenMarket.org – Diversity Training Doesn’t Work, But It Persists Anyway, Due to Compulsion submitted by The Colossus of Rhodey
• Sultan Knish –The Empire of Poverty submitted by The Noisy Room
• World Net Daily -‘Civilization Jihad’ And Obama’s Connections submitted by The Political Commentator
• Confessions of a Closet Republican – Obama’s Bin Laden Ad “Despicable” Says HuffPo’s Arianna Huffington submitted by Simply Jews
• American Digest – Abortion in America: A Personal Journey submitted by Joshuapundit
• Barry Rubin – Needed: A Marxist-Style Analysis to Understand and Combat the Extreme Left’s Hegemony submitted by The Right Planet
• Marooned In Marin – “Breitbart Is Here” DC Chapter of FreeRepublic “Freeps” The White House Correspondent’s Dinner submitted by VA Right!
• Afterburner with Bill Whittle -The Train Set submitted by Bookworm Room
• PJ Media/J. Christian Adams – DOJ Employee Contempt for Mississippi Citizens on Facebook submitted by Rhymes with Right
• Powerline -More Blowback Against Our Whiney, Immodest, And Shamelessly Self-Promoting President submitted by Gay Patriot
• National Review Online/Daniel Pipes And Steve Emerson – Chris Christie’s Islam Problem submitted by The Independent Sentinel
• Patterico’s Pontifications – Let’s just say it: The Democrats are the problem submitted by The Glittering Eye
• BostonMaggie –Name A Navy Ship After MOH Recipient Tom Hudner submitted by The Mellow Jihadi
• Zombie –‘Unite Against the War on Women’ march, Los Angeles submitted by The Razor
• The Duck Of Minerva – “Seriously, Guys!”: How (Not) to Write About Gender and Foreign Affair submitted by GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD
• Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion – Obama got Osama, but lost the Middle East submitted by The Watcher
• City Journal/Joel Kotkin – The New Class Warfare submitted by The Watcher

Enjoy! And don’t forget to follow us on Facebook and Twitter..’cause we’re cool like that!

How California's Colleges Indoctrinate Students

This topic hits home because I am a product of the California public school system and of the UC college system… And most of my friends and our children went to school and college in California as well.  I was a college student in the early 1970’s, when Berkley radicalism was in its hay day and Angela Davis was teaching at UCLA. (Even in the 1970’s the focus was on politics and for the professors to publish… not on teaching the basics.  I once had an English professor, who regularly said, “Once you are our of college and have time to get a real education, you should read this book…”)  It was a time when all things radical were cool with the young and most parents thought it was just an unsettling fad… that would pass.  Instead it was the first open test of the modern American Progressive Movement that changed America forever.  But as the turbulent 1960’s and 1970’s drew to a close and the radicals went to work underground to promote their progressive ideas to eventually become mainstream enough to ‘become the man’, mainstream middle-America went back to sleep believing that it was just a minor flare-up.

The radicals of the 1970’s  who were inspired by Saul Alinsky and his writings and Cloward & Piven and their strategies are still politically active and are still working to overthrow Capitalism and the American system as we know it. They are teaching in our universities where they have trained several new generations of radicals and are teaching them to agitate using the same techniques they used… to reach the planned endgame.

The next generation, inspired by these ‘60’s radical progressives, included the Clintons (Video: Remember Hillary’s famous debate comment in 2007: “I prefer to think of myself as a Progressive!”, after being asked if she was a liberal.) and Barack Obama and his Team in the White House. The newest generation are out in the streets as Occupy Wall Street or Occupy all over America and all over the world, being manipulated by Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, the Radke brothers, Andy Stern, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and many progressives in our government, including in the White House… and their disciples, people like Van Jones.

Video: William Ayers: 'I Get Up Every Morning Thinking ... Today I'm Gonna End Capitalism'

William Ayers, in a pep talk to an Occupy Wall Street gaggle, said he (still) wakes up every morning thinking about how he's going to end capitalism -- though he acknowledged he goes to bed "every night disappointed."

The co-founder of the radical, Vietnam-era Weather Underground was videotaped chatting up what was identified as an Occupy Union Square group this past week in New York City. He was out checking on the seeds of his American Bolshevik
Revolution.  

For anyone who missed it, Barack Obama started his political career in Bill Ayer’s home and now it seems that Ayers’ family helped Obama with college, as well as Ayers’s being involved in the writing if not the actual author of Obama’s 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father.  Yet Obama tells us he hardly knew him?!?

Peter Berkowitz, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and a member of the National Association of Scholars board of directors produced a new report on the UC system, "A Crisis of Competence" which  documents the plague of politicized classrooms. He says the problem is national in scope. "A Crisis of Competence" is posted at:  ww.nas.org/images/documents/A_Crisis_of_Competence.pdf.  Also recently posted at the WSJ. See Video.

Berkowitz’s findings confirm what most non-progressives who have spent anytime on a college campus, in California or most anywhere else in the United States, or with college students already figured out.  The universities (the UC system) are hot beds for radicals: Progressives, Communists, Marxists who generally proselytize their beliefs in the classroom and at activities on and off campus… and are encouraged to do so. (Conservative ideas, critical and  free thinking and individualism are pretty much non-existent and not taught… if even tolerated.)

The politicization of higher education by activist professors and compliant university administrators deprives students of the opportunity to acquire knowledge and refine their minds. It also erodes the nation's civic cohesion and its ability to preserve the institutions that undergird democracy in America.

So argues "A Crisis of Competence: The Corrupting Effect of Political Activism in the University of California," a new report by the California Association of Scholars, a division of the National Association of Scholars (NAS). The report is addressed to the Regents of the University of California, which has ultimate responsibility for governing the UC system, but the pathologies it diagnoses prevail throughout the country.

The analysis begins from a nonpolitical fact: Numerous studies of both the UC system and of higher education nationwide demonstrate that students who graduate from college are increasingly ignorant of history and literature. They are unfamiliar with the principles of American constitutional government. And they are bereft of the skills necessary to comprehend serious books and effectively marshal evidence and argument in written work.

Hoover Institution fellow Peter Berkowitz on the politicization of higher education by activist professors:

This decline in the quality of education coincides with a profound transformation of the college curriculum. None of the nine general campuses in the UC system requires students to study the history and institutions of the United States. None requires students to study Western civilization, and on seven of the nine UC campuses, including Berkeley, a survey course in Western civilization is not even offered. In several English departments one can graduate without taking a course in Shakespeare. In many political science departments majors need not take a course in American politics.

Moreover, the evidence suggests that the hollowing of the curriculum stems from too many professors' preference for promoting a partisan political agenda.

National studies by Stanley Rothman in 1999, and by Neil Gross and Solon Simmons in 2007, have shown that universities' leftward tilt has become severe. And a 2005 study by Daniel Klein and Andrew Western in Academic Questions (a NAS publication) shows this is certainly true in California. For example, Democrats outnumbered Republicans four to one on University of California, Berkeley, professional school faculties; in the social sciences the ratio was approximately 21 to one.

The same 2005 study revealed that the Berkeley sociology department faculty was home to 17 Democrats and no Republicans. The political science department included 28 Democrats and two Republicans. The English department had 29 Democrats and one Republican; and the history department had 31 Democrats and one Republican.

While political affiliation alone need not carry classroom implications, the overwhelmingly left-leaning faculty openly declare the inculcation of progressive political ideas their pedagogical priority. As "A Crisis of Competence" notes, "a recent study by UCLA's prestigious Higher Education Research Institute found that more faculty now believe that they should teach their students to be agents of social change than believe that it is important to teach them the classics of Western civilization."

Some university programs tout their political presuppositions and objectives openly. The mission statements of the Women's Studies program at UCLA prejudges the issues by declaring that it proceeds from "the perspectives of those whose participation has been traditionally distorted, omitted, neglected, or denied." And the Critical Race Studies program at the UCLA School of law announces that its aim is to "transform racial justice advocacy."

Even the august American Association of University Professors—which in 1915 and 1940 published classic statements explaining that the aim of academic freedom was not to indoctrinate but to equip students to think for themselves—has sided with the politicized professoriate.

In 1915, the AAUP affirmed that in teaching controversial subjects a professor should "set forth justly without suppression or innuendo the divergent opinions of other investigators; he should cause his students to become familiar with the best published expressions of the great historic types of doctrine upon the questions at issue."

However, in recent statements on academic freedom in 2007 and 2011, the AAUP has undermined its almost century-old strictures against proselytizing. Its new position is that restricting professors to the use of relevant materials and obliging them to provide a reasonably comprehensive treatment of the subject represent unworkable requirements because relevance and comprehensiveness can themselves be controversial.

On the boundaries, they can be—like anything else. However, it is wrong to dismiss professors' duty to avoid introducing into classroom discussion opinions extraneous to the subject and to provide a well-rounded treatment of the matter under consideration. That opens the classroom to whatever professors wish to talk about. And in all too many cases what they wish to talk about in the classroom is the need to transform America in a progressive direction. Last year the leadership of AAUP officially endorsed the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Excluding from the curriculum those ideas that depart from the progressive agenda implicitly teaches students that conservative ideas are contemptible and unworthy of discussion. This exclusion, the California report points out, also harms progressives for the reason John Stuart Mill elaborated in his famous 1859 essay, "On Liberty": "He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that."

The removal of partisan advocacy from the classroom would have long-term political benefits. Liberal education equips students with intellectual skills valued by the marketplace. It prepares citizens to discharge civic responsibilities in an informed and deliberate manner. It fosters a common culture by revealing that much serious disagreement between progressives and conservatives revolves around differing interpretations of how to fulfill America's promise of individual freedom and equality.

It is certainly true that not all progressive professors intrude their politics into the classroom, but a culture of politicization has developed on campus in which department chairs and deans treat its occurrence as routine. "UC administrators," the California report sadly concludes, "far from performing their role as the university's quality control mechanism, now routinely function as the enablers, protectors, and even apologists for the politicized university and its degraded scholarly and educational standards."

In California, this is more than a failure of their duty as educators. It is also a violation of the law. Article IX, Section 9, of the California state constitution provides that "The university shall be entirely independent of all political or sectarian influence and kept free therefrom."

It is incumbent upon the UC Board of Regents, not to mention the governing bodies of other institutions of higher education across the country, to begin the long and arduous work of depoliticizing our universities and renewing liberal education.. and critical thinking.

Our daughter attended Chapman University, a small private college in California and went off to Semester at Sea as part of her college experience, a fabulous adventure of traveling around the world and studying along the way that we managed to provide for her.  They even had Desmond Tutu join them onboard for one leg of the journey where he lectured and the students had one on one access to him.  I think the vicarious journey was as exciting, if not even more exciting, for us as it was for her.  The professors and staff onboard were rotational from all over the United States and in some cases the world.  When our daughter returned home from her sail, she was full of exciting stories but our somewhat apolitical artsy daughter also came home espousing all that is wrong with America, our free-market system and an over-night expert on all that horrors and ills of the world either caused or not fixed by the country that her parents loved, gave her the opportunity to make this amazing journey and that her maternal grandparents sacrificed and left everything behind for to bring their families to the land of freedom and opportunity.

While mainstream America went back to sleep, was hypnotized by the left-controlled media and worked tirelessly to send their children to college, the likes of George Soros, the Rockefellers, Bill Gates and other wealthy progressives funded the radical transformation of America from college campuses to the White House that culminated in the election of Barack Hussein Obama in 2008 and has been working in overdrive ever since.

Ask Marion~ 

April's Whistleblower magazine, "THE COLLEGE ILLUSION," this almost sacrosanct belief in college is currently disintegrating before our eyes. It talks about why chasing a degree so often ends in financial and educational chaos. In light of this new study and what those of us paying attention realize, it seems they are right. Unless your child wants to be a doctor, lawyer, engineer or something that absolutely requires a specialized college education skills looking at trade school, entrepreneurship or working yourself up from the bottom and volunteering for internships may be better and definitely cheaper alternatives.  And if college is the path, while the college system rebuilds itself, check out the institution you are sending your child off to.  Hillsdale College is a good place to start.

It is time that Americans put aside their other activities and interests (including and especially TV) and take a stand. The subscribers to the Progressive Movement have been busy since the early 1900’s and even more so since the end of the open revolution of the 1960’s and 1970’s, now infiltrating every aspect of our lives… from media to education, to control of the food we eat to the White House and Congress… all the while dumbing us down generation by generation… radicalizing and sexualizing our kids.  It is time for us all to stand and work or we will surely fall as we sit on our couches watching the hypnotic screen(s)… TV, computers, games…

American Bolsheviks – The Second Act

By: Terresa Monroe-Hamilton - The NoisyRoom  -  Hat Tip: Nancy Jacques

Well, look who’s sprouting out of the radical ground! It reads like a who’s who of Communists…

From MoveOn.org:

99% Spring Action Training
We’re at a crossroads as a country. In recent years, millions have lost their jobs, homes have been foreclosed, and an unconscionable number of children live in poverty. We have to stand up to the people who caused of all this and confront the rampant greed and deliberate manipulation of our democracy and our economy by a tiny minority in the 1%.

Inspired by Occupy Wall Street and the fight for workers in Madison, Wisconsin, the 99% will rise up this spring. In the span of just one week, from April 9-15, 100,000 people will be trained to tell the story of what happened to our economy, learn the history of non-violent direct action, and use that knowledge to take action on our own campaigns to win change.

We’ll gather for trainings in homes, community centers, places of worship, campuses, and public spaces nationwide to learn how to join together in the work of reclaiming our country through sustained non-violent action.

Will you rise with us and join a 99% Spring action training?

Host your own 99% Spring Action Training event
Right now, there are 900 gatherings planned.

Already hosting or signed up for an event? We can e-mail you a link to your tools.

The following organizations have called for a 99% Spring: Jobs With Justice, United Auto Workers, National Peoples Action, National Domestic Workers Alliance, MoveOn.org, New Organizing Institute, Movement Strategy Center, The Other 98%, Service Employees International Union, AFL-CIO, Rebuild the Dream, Color of Change, UNITE-HERE, Greenpeace, Institute for Policy Studies, PICO National Network, New Bottom Line, Veterans of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, SNCC Legacy Project, United Steel Workers, Working Families Party, Communications Workers of America, United States Student Association, Rainforest Action Network, American Federation of Teachers, Leadership Center for the Common Good, UNITY, National Guestworker Alliance, 350.org, The Ruckus Society, Citizen Engagement Lab, smartMeme Strategy & Training Project, Right to the City Alliance, Pushback Network, Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, Progressive Democrats of America, Change to Win, Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, Campaign for America’s Future, Public Campaign Action Fund, Fuse Washington, Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment, Citizen Action of New York, Engage, United Electrical Workers Union, National Day Laborers Organizing Network, Alliance for a Just Society, The Partnership for Working Families, United Students Against Sweatshops, Presente.org, Get Equal, American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, Corporate Accountability International, American Federation of Government Employees, Training for Change, People Organized for Westside Renewal (POWER), Student Labor Action Project, Colorado Progressive Coalition, Green for All, DC Jobs with Justice, Midwest Academy, The Coffee Party, International Forum on Globalization, UFCW International Union, Sunflower Community Action, Illinois People’s Action, Lakeview Action Coalition, Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada, International Brotherhood of the Teamsters, Resource Generation, Highlander Research and Education Center, TakeAction Minnesota, Energy Action Coalition

MoveOn.org Civic Action is hosting the online event registration process but is not responsible for the content or programming of the trainings or for the planning or organization of any specific actions. The 99% Spring is a collaborative effort between many organizations to train over 100,000 Americans in the basics of nonviolent direct action—not an electoral campaign.

They’re baaack… the American Bolsheviks. Can’t you just feel the violence in the spring air? Communism in bloom – just look at the list of them above. Occupy Wall Street is coming out of hibernation just as we predicted and they are good to go, ready for revolution and chaos. The American Spring is about to be born. Stay as far away from these useful idiots as you can.

The movement kicked off last Friday and was dubbed National Occupy Washington (NOW). It sprung into action with a march on the Environmental Protection Agency – accompanied by a brace of alpacas, a large polar bear and an even larger blow-up of planet Earth. I kid you not… But, before you write them off as looney (and they are), remember they are also dangerous and violent and coming to your town and neighborhood.

From Yahoo! News:

“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” Kevin Zeese, one of the co-organizers, says by cell phone while marching under the overcast capital skies.

“We are preparing to give people the skills and training they need for longer and more powerful involvement,” he says, adding, “the tents were just a tactic, not the purpose of this movement.”

While many have seen the disappearance of the signature tents from downtown parks from New York to Oakland and Boston to Los Angeles as a sign that OWS had lost both its appeal and vigor, Mr. Zeese counters that long-term social campaigns such as the civil rights movement unfolded over years and took many forms as they progressed.

“We may be less visible, but we are just getting started,” Zeese says.

Spring is inspiring other OWS-related activism as well, including the 99 Percent Spring, a coalition of progressive groups launching large-scale nonviolence training for its members and a national call for a general strike on May 1.

OWS is in transition, says Mark Tatge, journalism professor at DePauw University in Indiana. “I don’t see it dying, I see it morphing into something beyond just an attack on the big banks or Wall Street,” he says via e-mail, adding that the seeds of this movement can be seen elsewhere.

“There is really more than one ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement underway,” says Professor Tatge, pointing to coalitions of groups mobilizing over issues such as immigration, fights over creationism in schools, a fierce battle over health care now before the Supreme Court, and the recent shooting of an unarmed teen in Florida.

“I expect more, not less, political activism over the next five years,” he says. “Most of this is because of the widening split between the haves and have-nots in this country.”

Class warfare at its finest. The Marxists are gearing up to attack us, possibly physically as well as philosophically, on every major front. They are coming and don’t discount them; that would be a fatal mistake. Almost as bad as joining them. Do I need to remind everyone what happens to useful idiots once they have served their purpose? Death, death and death. No cake. All of these hapless fools are looking for a free lunch and in the end, all they will get is a lead sandwich. Nothing is ever free.

From Sultan Knish:

That is Utopia’s free lunch, a magic dance through the air, arm in arm with Wile E Coyote that ends when we realize there’s nothing underneath us and someone has stolen our shoes. It’s the magic of idealism mingled with corruption, dissonant musical instruments playing a mad waltz that ends with everyone falling down. A reminder that we can make a better world, but not by closing our eyes and believing in free lunches and fairies.

So, are you ready for the American Bolsheviks – The Second Act? I hear it’s to die for. They are lying just like the Russian Communists did. They characterized themselves as the majority in Russia then, just like they are here, trying to recreate the Bolshevist meme – it wasn’t true then and it’s not true now. Behold the violent minority! Or, we can get rid of these freaks and work industriously at restoring the Constitution, smaller government, way less debt and the freedom to succeed or fail without big brother breathing down our necks. Hmmm, decisions, decisions…

Language warning – but hysterically funny: