Why Johnny Birch Can't Think For Himself

Tomorrow Obama will deliver a national address directly to students, which will be the first day of classes for many children across the country. The address, to be broadcast live on the White House's Web site, was announced in a letter to school principals last week by Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

Obama intends to "challenge students to work hard, set educational goals and take responsibility for their learning," Duncan wrote. Obama will also call for a "shared responsibility" among students, parents and educators to maximize learning potential.

"The goal of the speech and the lesson plans is to challenge students to work hard in school, to not drop out and to meet short-term goals like behaving in class, doing their homework and goals that parents and teachers alike can agree are noble. This isn't a policy speech. This is a speech designed to encourage kids to stay in school."

Tommy Vietor
White House Spokesperson

Numerous conservatives have claimed that President Obama's upcoming September 8 speech about "persisting and succeeding in school," along with classroom activities about the "importance of education," will "indoctrinate" and "brainwash" schoolchildren. Conservatives have compared Obama's address to Chinese communism and the Hitler Youth, while also calling for parents to "keep your kids home" from the "fascist in chief."

"In general, I don't think there's a problem if the president uses the bully pulpit to tell kids to work hard, study hard and things like that. But there are some troubling hints in this, both educationally and politically...It essentially tries to force kids to say the president and the presidency is inspiring, and that's very problematic. It's very concerning that you would do that."

Neal McCluskey
Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom.

"I don't think it's appropriate for teachers to ask students to help promote the president's preferred school reforms and policies. It very much starts to set up the president as a superintendent in chief."

Frederick Hess
American Enterprise Institute

"...it seems very close to indoctrination..."

Sean Hannity
FOX New Host

"...just when you think this administration can't get any more surreal and Orwellian, here they come to indoctrinate our kids..."

Monica Crawley
FOX News Commentator

"...the left has always used kids in public schools as guinea pigs and as junior lobbyists for their social liberal agenda..."

Michelle Malkin
Frequent FOX News pundit

RIP Reaganomics

"We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals. We know now that it is bad economics."

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1937)


"...Let's talk for a moment about why the age of Reagan should be over.

First of all, even before the current crisis Reaganomics had failed to deliver what it promised. Remember how lower taxes on high incomes and deregulation that unleashed the "magic of the marketplace" were supposed to lead to dramatically better outcomes for everyone? Well, it didn't happen.

To be sure, the wealthy benefited enormously: the real incomes of the top .01 percent of Americans rose sevenfold between 1980 and 2007. But the real income of the median family rose only 22 percent, less than a third of its growth over the previous 27 years.

Moreover, most of whatever gains ordinary Americans achieved came during the Clinton years. President George W. Bush, who had the distinction of being the first Reaganite president to also have a fully Republican Congress, also had the distinction of presiding over the first administration since Herbert Hoover in which the typical family failed to see any significant income gains.
And then there's the small matter of the worst recession since the 1930s.

There's a lot to be said about the financial disaster of the last two years, but the short version is simple: Politicians in the thrall of Reaganite ideology dismantled the New Deal regulations that had prevented banking crises for half a century, believing that financial markets could take care of themselves. The effect was to make the financial system vulnerable to a 1930s-style crisis — and the crisis came..."

Paul Krugman
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"Ronald Reagan cut everything in the budget, and yet they say he made the biggest deficit (until George W. Bush) in the country. I don't know how they come up with that. It's Washington math."

Rush Limbaugh
on the Radio

Reagan didn't cut the military budget. It reached historic highs. Under Reagan, the national debt more than doubled.

Town Hall Update

Budgets & Debt: Where The Truth Lies

"We are, quite bluntly, broke. We don't have the money to sustain the dreams and experiments of liberalism any longer. We have a $400 billion a year budget deficit and a $4 trillion debt."

Rush Limbaugh
The Way Things Ought To Be (1992)
Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill was told "deficits don't matter" when he warned of a looming fiscal crisis.

O'Neill, fired in a shakeup of Bush's economic team in December 2002, raised objections to a new round of tax cuts and said the president balked at his more aggressive plan to combat corporate crime after a string of accounting scandals because of opposition from "the corporate crowd," a key constituency.

O'Neill said he tried to warn Vice President Dick Cheney that growing budget deficits-expected to top $500 billion this fiscal year alone-posed a threat to the economy. Cheney cut him off. "You know, Paul, Reagan proved deficits don't matter," he said, according to excerpts. Cheney continued: "We won the midterms (congressional elections). This is our due." A month later, Cheney told the Treasury secretary he was fired.

The vice president's office had no immediate comment, but John Snow, who replaced O'Neill, insisted that deficits "do matter" to the administration.

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"...The truth is more complicated and less frightening. Right now deficits are actually helping the economy. In fact, deficits here and in other major economies saved the world from a much deeper slump. The longer-term outlook is worrying, but it's not catastrophic.

The only real reason for concern is political. The United States can deal with its debts if politicians of both parties are, in the end, willing to show at least a bit of maturity. Need I say more?

Let's start with the effects of this year's deficit.

There are two main reasons for the surge in red ink. First, the recession has led both to a sharp drop in tax receipts and to increased spending on unemployment insurance and other safety-net programs. Second, there have been large outlays on financial rescues. These are counted as part of the deficit, although the government is acquiring assets in the process and will eventually get at least part of its money back.

What this tells us is that right now it's good to run a deficit. Consider what would have happened if the U.S. government and its counterparts around the world had tried to balance their budgets as they did in the early 1930s. It's a scary thought. If governments had raised taxes or slashed spending in the face of the slump, if they had refused to rescue distressed financial institutions, we could all too easily have seen a full replay of the Great Depression.
As I said, deficits saved the world..."

Paul Krugman

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"That means our debt - yearly debt - is only 2.9 percent of our total budget. If you at home could say that the total amount of your debt was only 2.9 percent of all that you earn and produce, you'd be happy/ This deficit is a straw dog. It's always been a phone monster. This is manageable debt as long as our economy stays strong."

Rush Limbuagh
July 7, 1994

"...my friends, we know what Obama's economics are built on. We know what his new foundation is. His new foundation is built on money we don't have. His foundation is built on money created out of thin air and debt. Debt that is an anchor around all of our collective necks, so heavy is the anchor, we, the people can't move. We're weighed down by a plan that's designed to pull off a seismic switcheroo. We're going for an economy driven by the private sector to one driven by Obama, except we aren't told that. We're told the exact opposite. Barack Obama is building a new economy on a foundation of so much debt that he has reached into our children's and grandchildren's pockets. They will be born broke. It's called generational theft. He calls it his new foundation. The foundation is debt, printed money. We know that but we don't hear that, and that's because Obama can't get what he wants by telling the truth. No liberal can..."

Rush Limbaugh
Radio show transcript April 15, 2009

TEA Party Needs A Few More Nut Jobs

"...the Nazis were the ones who shoved sand down a boy's throat until he died, who tossed candies to Jewish children as they sank to their deaths in a sand pit, who threw babies from a hospital window to compete to see how many "little Jews" could be caught on a bayonet, who injected a cement-like fluid into women's uteruses to see what would happen, stomped a pregnant woman to death, who snatched a woman's baby from her arms and, in the words of a witness, "tore him as one would tear a rag."

That's who the Nazis were, ladies and gentlemen - those obscenities plus 6 million more. They were the triumph of ideology over reason and even over humanity, the demonization of racial, religious and political difference, the objectification of the vulnerable other. And the authors of a mass murder that staggers imagination, still.

You would think that where they are invoked to make a point, it would be done with a respect for the incalculable evil the Nazis represent. You would think people would tread carefully, not because of the potential insult to a given politician (they are big boys and girls) but because to do otherwise profanes the profound and renders trivial that which ought to be held sacred by anyone who regards himself as a truly human being.

But in modern America, unfortunately, rhetoric often starts over the top and goes up from there. So fine, George W. Bush is "a smirking chimp." Fine, Barack Obama is "a Chicago thug." We have a Constitution, after all, and it says we can say whatever we want. It doesn't say that it has to be intelligent.

And yes, you are even protected if you liken Obama or Bush to Hitler."

Leonard Pitts Jr.

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