It’s true!

But it seems that publicly airing your grievances stopped being patriotic right around noon on January 20th, 2009.

Once President Obama was sworn in, protesting became incitement to violence.

If you’ve opened up a newspaper or watched a cable news program in the past week or so, you’ve probably seen members of the media painting Tea Party activists as dangerous bigots. That’s because disagreeing with President Obama on issues like government spending and high taxes makes you a racist, you see.

What’s interesting about the media’s latest freak-out is that there were radicals a-plenty under President Bush. They protested in the streets. They talked openly about revolution and killing. But oddly, the violent imagery used by people claiming to be advocates for peace never registered with the media. They were too busy fawning over Cindy Sheehan.

Why the difference in coverage? Did the media cheerlead the protests against President Bush to hurt him politically? Are they trying to marginalize the increasingly powerful Tea Party movement because they favor President Obama’s agenda?

One thing’s for sure: If there is such a thing as dangerous rhetoric, then the media is at least one president too late in reporting the story.

Don’t believe me?

Well, then let’s take a trip down memory lane...

Related: Once They Encouraged the Pitchforks, Now Democrats are Frightened of Them

And when two staunch allies of the Democratic Party—the SEIU and ACORN—drove busloads of protesters to the private homes of AIG executives, just days later, President Obama told a meeting of bankers that “my administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”

Implicitly, Obama was using the threat of violence to get the bankers to acquiesce.

During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama didn’t shy away from confrontation. In fact, he encouraged it by telling supporters to “argue with” opponents and to “get in their face[s].”

The Obama Administration’s confrontational tone included some violent imagery last August, when one White House official encouraged Obama supporters to “punch back twice as hard” against opponents.

Later that day, at an anti-ObamaCare rally in St. Louis, a black man named Kenneth Gladney was handing out “Don’t Tread on Me” flags when he was approached by pro-ObamaCare SEIU union members. One of the men asked Gladney, “What kind of nigger are you to be giving out this kind of stuff?”

The union thugs then beat him so badly he required overnight hospitalization.

Obama’s supporters got the message. They were getting in people’s faces, and they were punching. And kicking. Repeatedly.

Yet despite the fact that the Kenneth Gladney beating occurred the same day that the Obama Administration recommended supporters “punch back twice as hard,” there was no hyperventilating in the media about political violence or the veiled threats that encouraged it.

Today, however, the Democratic politicians who rammed through ObamaCare over the wishes of the American public are worried about the ugly environment that the Obama Administration spent over a year stoking. And if Obama and the Democrats truly believe that words lead to violence, then they should accept responsibility for the beating of Kenneth Gladney.

I’m certainly not condoning political violence, and would condemn any that actually happens. But there has been no reported violence against any Congressman, Senator or government official, despite the media frenzy of stories describing a crazed American public ready to terrorize politicians.

All politicians receive threats; any moderately trafficked blogger receives threats. So while I would hate for there to be any actual violence, excuse me if I chuckle at the chatter of the chickens in the media and our political class. This media-driven national freakout is a diversion, designed to de-legitimize opposition to ObamaCare and to take your attention away from the illegitimate and unprecedented usurpation of power by the Democrats in Congress and President Obama. They’re banking on you forgetting by November.

If the media is going to report on this atmosphere without discussing the Obama Administration’s words or the SEIU beat-down of Kenneth Gladney, if they are going to spend time breathlessly reporting rumored threats that have not been carried out while ignoring violence that actually occurred but didn’t fit their narrative, then it is yet more proof of the media’s patent bias.

One day shortly after the Second World War ended, Winston Churchill and Labour Party Prime Minister Clement Attlee encountered one another at the urinal trough in the House of Common’s men’s washroom. Attlee arrived first. When Churchill arrived, he stood as far away from him as possible. Attlee said, “Feeling standoffish today, are we, Winston?” Churchill said: “That’s right. Every time you see something big, you want to nationalize it.”

Photo credit: Robert Philabaum

To the Editor:

In “The Court’s Blow to Democracy” (editorial, Jan. 22), you strenuously disagree with the proposition that “corporations are just like people and entitled to the same First Amendment rights.”

Every day, The New York Times Company exercises its First Amendment right to engage in political speech. Today, it expresses its desire to deny that right to most other corporations.

The Constitution does not permit the government to criminalize speech based on the identity of the speaker. If any corporation has First Amendment rights, all corporations must have First Amendment rights.

Adam J. Kwiatkowski
Baltimore, Jan. 22, 2010

The writer is a lawyer in private practice.

Today, politicians and pundits on both sides of the aisle will be spinning, assigning blame, and taking credit.

Here’s my not-at-all-scientific breakdown of the factors I think went into Scott Brown’s victory over Democrat Martha Coakley:

• 30% - Opposition to high taxes and out-of-control government spending
• 25% - Backlash at the political hijinks of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid’s “get it done at all costs” tactics
• 20% - Rejection of ObamaCare specifically
• 15% - Martha Coakley being a bad candidate
• 5% - Scott Brown being a charismatic candidate
• 5% - Disappointment in President Obama’s first year
• 0% - Repudiation of Ted Kennedy’s legacy

By this measure, it’s hard to say that President Obama had nothing to do with the defeat, but in my view, his party shares more of the blame than he does personally.

Someone is getting called for jury duty...but it’s no human.

A family is trying to figure out how their pet cat was summonsed for jury duty.

[...]

[The cat’s] owners, Guy and Anna Esposito, think they may know the source of the mix up: [the cat] really is a member of the family, so on the last Census form, Anna Esposito listed him under “pets”.

[...]

Anna filed for [the cat’s] disqualification of service. However, the jury commissioner was unmoved and denied the request.

[The] service date at Suffolk Superior Court is set for March 23. Anna said that if the issue isn’t cleared up by then, she will simply have to bring the cat to court.

Less than a month after major Nidal Hasan allegedly killed 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, the Pentagon’s top intelligence officer sent the White House a report detailing an earlier failure to connect the dots. It reads like a dress rehearsal for the Detroit bomber case, reports CBS News chief national security correspondent David Martin.

According to that still-classified report, the terrorism task force responsible for determining whether Hasan posed a threat never saw all 18 e-mails he exchanged with that radical Yemeni cleric Awlaki whose communications were being monitored under a court ordered wiretap.

Guess which radical Yemeni cleric won’t be using the same communication channels anymore?

This is why we shouldn’t be trying to fight wars in a courtroom.

The first airing will be Thursday, December 10th at 2:50PM (Eastern).

The second showing is on Friday, December 18th at 5:00PM (Eastern).

The Documentary Channel is available on satellite and many cable systems nationwide. Check your provider for channel information.

If your provider doesn’t carry the Documentary Channel, several PBS stations simulcast the Documentary Channel during certain time slots, so you may want to check those listings as well.

An Associated Press dispatch, written by Erica Werner and Richard Alonso-Zaldivar, compares the House and Senate ObamaCare bills. We’d like to compare this dispatch to the AP’s dispatch earlier this week “fact checking” Sarah Palin’s new book. Here goes:

Number of AP reporters assigned to story:

• ObamaCare bills: 2
• Palin book: 11

Number of pages in document being covered:

• ObamaCare bills: 4,064
• Palin book: 432

Number of pages per AP reporter:

• ObamaCare bill: 2,032
• Palin book: 39.3

On a per-page basis, that is, the AP devoted 52 times as much manpower to the memoir of a former Republican officeholder as to a piece of legislation that will cost trillions of dollars and an untold number of lives. That’s what they call accountability journalism.

I posted a link to the Times piece on my Facebook page, and it ignited a discussion of the fontumentary Helvetica, and of course the typeface of the same name.

It reminded me of the first time I noticed Helvetica in wide use. I was a kid walking down Main Street on Roosevelt Island, where all the retail store signs were rendered in that font.

It seems the typeface has changed in the years since, but most of the signs still do use the same typeface.

And one of the more odd aspects of Roosevelt Island still remains: the storefront occupants on Main Street seemed to compete over whose sign would display the most generic and lifeless name:

• THE THRIFT STORE
• HARDWARE AND VIDEO STORE
• FLOWER SHOP
• NAIL SALON
• ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH
• ...and my personal favorite: THE CHILD SCHOOL

The drab brutalist architecture of Main Street, Roosevelt Island and the austerity of Helvetica always made me wonder if that’s what NYC would have “evolved” into had the Bolsheviks taken over here and not in Russia.

I always felt Helvetica was like the Soviet Union of typefaces, aspiring to but failing at unadorned efficiency while entirely lacking in human spirit.

In Virginia, Republican candidate Bob McDonnell beat Democrat Creigh Deeds by more than 17%.* This in a recently-trending-Democrat state that Obama carried by more than 6%. That’s nearly a 24% swing in one year.

And in New Jersey, a heavily Democratic state that Obama won by over 14% last year, Republican Chris Christie beat incumbent Democrat Jon Corzine by almost 5%. That’s more than an 18% swing.

Even before the election, White House spinners were claiming that Democratic defeats would not reflect poorly on Obama, even though the president visited both states several times to campaign for the candidates that ended up losing.

In fact, in both states, the losing Democrats aligned themselves so closely with Obama that a quick glance at their campaign materials might lead you to think that they were running to become Obama’s vice president. So if anyone was trying to make this election about Obama, it was the Democrats who lost.

But now that the results are in, expect to hear the refrain repeated: these elections had absolutely nothing to do with Barack Obama!

And if recent history is any indication, you can expect Obama to start pinning the blame on George W. Bush any time now.

(Hat tip: Jim Geraghty.)

* All figures as of this writing and subject to change as election returns are finalized.

Al Gore, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama go to heaven.

God addresses Gore first. “Al, what do you believe in?”

Gore replies: “Well, I believe that I won that election, but that it was your will that I did not serve. And I’ve come to understand that now.”

God thinks for a second and says: “Very good. Come and sit at my left.”

God then addresses Clinton. “Bill, what do you believe in?”

Clinton replies: “I believe in forgiveness. I’ve sinned, but I’ve never held a grudge against my fellow man, and I hope no grudges are held against me.”

God thinks for a second and says: “You are forgiven, my son. Come and sit at my right.”

Then God addresses Obama. “Barack, what do you believe in?”

Obama replies...

“I believe you’re in my chair.”

Leaders of the Maryland NAACP, worried that a Baltimore mayor’s criminal conviction could result in the appointment of a white or Republican leader who may not fully represent the majority black and Democratic city, are asking state lawmakers to strip the governor of authority to permanently fill the office.

[...]

“There is that possibility of a conviction, and we want to know those protocols that are in place,” said Elbridge James, the political action chairman of the state National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “If it looks like it is going to rain, I am going to buy an umbrella.”

[...]

Marvin L. Cheatham, the president of the Baltimore Chapter of the NAACP, introduced the resolution because he heard an attorney on a radio program discussing a lack of clarity on succession if [Baltimore’s mayor] were to be convicted and sentenced.

“Our concern is who would the governor appoint?” Cheatham said. “Here you have a predominantly African-American city. What if the governor appointed somebody white? ... Would he appoint someone Irish to be the mayor?”

[...]

The resolution passed “nearly unanimously” with little debate from the 150 or so delegates who attended the meeting, James said.

(Hat tip: James Taranto.)

To anyone who’s spent any time in New York City—where makeshift sidewalk vendors are more plentiful than Starbucks—that probably doesn’t sound so strange. But as someone who’s lived here since before the Reagan/Carter election, these vendors were different. Rather, the nature of what they sold was different.

Months before Barack Obama formally accepted the Democratic presidential nomination, the name “Obama” was already being stamped on or sewn into objects of every type, and these objects could be purchased just about anywhere you happened to be standing. Keychains, buttons, hats, t-shirts were all readily available. I saw Obama skateboards and heard rumors of Obama bongs. Eventually, companies usually seen selling things like pewter gnomes and porcelain kittens got into the game, hawking commemorative coins and Obama dinner plates on late-night cable shows.

Never before had I seen such an orgy of political merchandising. And that was before the election. Afterwards, ObamaMarketing got cranked up to 11, going from street corners and the backwaters of cable TV to mass-market advertisers. In the weeks leading up to President Obama’s inauguration, Pepsi launched an ad campaign featuring Obama campaign poster look-alikes and modified slogans like “Yes You Can.”

From a business standpoint, that seemed a bit risky to me. Big brands usually try to appeal to the widest possible audience, so why would a company like Pepsi risk being seen as endorsing Obama, potentially alienating some of the nearly 60 million people who voted for someone else? Was Pepsi willing to cede the non-Obama vote to Coke?

In baseball, even the best batters go through major slumps. And in politics, presidents have periods where they lose popularity. So companies tying their brands to individual politicians are either naive about politics, or they and their ad agencies are run by people suffering from groupthink. Were they all drinking the Obama kool-aid? Had they not considered what might happen when Obama inevitably fell from messiah status to that of mortal politician?

[T]here is a shortage of conservatives working in the news media — or, I should say, an imbalance between liberals and conservatives. The last survey I saw was on the ‘04 election - I don’t know what it was in ‘08 - but in ‘04 something like 75 percent of working journalists at daily newspapers voted for the Democrat. I mean, you can’t deny this. It’s a reality.

[...]

When I was at the Times - my term there ended four years ago - everybody on the editorial board was a Democrat. I asked Gail Collins, who was then the editorial page editor, “Why don’t you have a greater ideological variety and philosophical variety so you can have richer debate on the page?” And she said, “If I had a couple of conservatives on this page, they’d be unhappy all the time. They’d either have to write something that wasn’t their view, because we decide our view consensually, or they’d never get to write. So, what’s the point?” Now, Gail knows a lot better than I the dynamics of coming to an editorial position, but it would seem to me that, if for no other reason than to challenge the conventional thinking that may - and I stress the may - dominate the conversation on the editorial board, it’d be nice to have somebody else there who might say, “Well, here’s another point of view.”

[...]

If it’s to survive and flourish, the Times has to be an honest broker, and the perception left by that op-ed page and the adjoining editorial page is that it’s not.

[...]

When I was at the paper I criticized it pretty strongly for not having ideological diversity or religious diversity on the staff. The same reason we would want racial diversity, to provide different perspectives on the world, would suggest that we want the same thing religiously and ideologically and philosophically. And I was very roundly criticized by some people on the left about that, people who thought it was an outrage that I was suggesting that the Times hire more conservatives. Why is that an outrage? Why is it an outrage to get a more varied view of the world? We want a varied view if we’re going to be good citizens, if we’re going to have a functioning democracy. We must have a varied view.

Daniel Okrent was an honest broker during his tenure as the Times’s public editor, and the paper would be better off if it paid closer attention to his advice.

Results from a national Sacred Heart University survey released today reveal that many news consumers believe the media played a significant role in electing President Barack Obama and that the media continue to promote his presidency.

[...]

“A large majority, 89.3 percent, suggested the national media played a very or somewhat strong role in helping to elect President Obama,” according to a summary of the findings. “Just 10.0 percent suggested the national media played little or no role. Further, 69.9 percent agreed the national news media are intent on promoting the Obama presidency while 26.5 percent disagreed. Some, 3.6 percent, were unsure.”

And 86.6 percent said they believe the news media try to influence public opinion and that they have their own public policy and political positions. This compares to 87.6 percent in 2008 and 70.3 percent in 2003.

[...]

The study did not indicate which medium the respondents turn to for news, but it did indicate that about 38 percent say they read newspapers less frequently than they did five years ago. Nearly 68 percent said they agreed with the statement: “Old-style, traditionally objective and fair journalism is dead.”

Best quote:

[W]here were the real reporters on this story? You know what investigative media, see me on camera three: Where the hell were you?

[...]

You’re telling me that two kids from the cast of “High School Musical III” can break this story with a video camera and their grandmother’s chinchilla coat? And you got nothing? They did it for $3,000, and that’s Blitzer’s monthly beard Wetvac budget. It probably cost CNN that much to turn on their hologram machine.

I’m a fake journalist, and I’m embarrassed these guys scooped me. Let’s get to work people.

Journalists need to ask themselves, how did this happen? How could they miss the corruption at ACORN? President Obama was once an ACORN lawyer, so the group is certainly significant enough to warrant media scrutiny. Then how did all the seasoned professionals get scooped by two students—James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles—one of whom isn’t old enough to legally drink?

ACORN’s many problems have been well known for quite a while, at least to anyone venturing beyond network newscasts and liberal blogs. As an organization, ACORN doesn’t just limit itself to churning out forged voter registrations. It’s a full-blown racketeering enterprise worthy of The Sopranos, and it finances its operations with the help of taxpayer money.

So how could the major media fail to hold ACORN to account all these years?

I have my pet theory.

Political correctness has been slowly rotting the establishment media to its core, to the point where few professional journalists would dare launch a serious investigation into the exalted Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now. Why? Simple: according to the tenets of political correctness, the racial makeup of the communities being “organized” automatically confers the presumption of moral superiority upon ACORN. So all those nasty rumors about ACORN must be no more than lies spread by racist propagandists.

To understand the mindset of the politically correct, there are a few rules of racial relations that you need to know. These rules establish the Hierarchy of Multiculturalism:

1. If a person is a member of a group guilty of past racial oppression, that person has no moral standing in relation to anyone in any group that’s ever been a victim of that oppression.
2. A member of an oppressor group is always assumed to be guilty in relation to a member of a victim group.
3. An oppressor can only avoid presumed guilt by making a display of his or her sympathy for the oppressed.
4. Members of victim groups can lose their moral standing by expressing a preference for individual rights as opposed to group rights.
5. Advocating on behalf of a victim makes one almost as unassailable as being that victim.
6. Coming to the defense of an oppressor is even more repugnant than being that oppressor.

This thinking is so common these days that many prominent liberals—from New York Times columnists to former presidents—believe that criticism of President Obama can only be motivated by racial bigotry.

That’s because people at a lower rung of the Multicultural Hierarchy are never allowed to challenge those above them. The purpose of this is to quell criticism and enforce thought conformity. Why break the rules and risk being thought of as a bigot?

Media coverage of Kanye West’s latest outburst at the MTV Video Music Awards illustrates this. Imagine the racial roles reversed:

It’s the Country Music Awards. A black female performer is accepting her first-ever award. She’s happy and a bit surprised; her style of music doesn’t usually win Country Music Awards. Halfway through her emotional acceptance speech, a white male country music singer runs up on stage, grabs the microphone from her, and announces that another woman should have won, a white woman—a “real” country singer—instead of the underdog black woman.

I’d bet my life savings that the reporting would be quite different than what happened in Kanye’s case. Sure, he was roundly criticized in the media, but we’re in an age when hidden motivations are attributed to every interracial interaction, so it’s interesting that few dared to discuss a racial angle to the Kanye West/Taylor Swift confrontation.

There’s a simple explanation. By the rules of the Hierarchy of Multiculturalism, when a member of a victim group is the actual victim in a real-world encounter, it’s an example of oppression. But when an oppressor becomes a victim in real life, that’s just karma, man. Any possible racial angle becomes irrelevant.

So forgive me if I don’t believe that the abundantly Caucasian and overwhelmingly liberal journalist class is capable of taking on a target like ACORN, no matter how apparent the criminality might be.

In the end, though, it doesn’t matter. The work of Giles and O’Keefe highlights the diminishing relevance of the establishment media. Despite the story getting no coverage on broadcast TV or in any major newspaper, it propagated online, then to talk radio and Fox News. And before any “mainstream” media outlet covered it, the political pressure grew to the point that the Census Bureau cut all ties to ACORN, and U.S. Senate voted by the overwhelming margin of 83-7 to cut off the group’s federal funding.

Even after these events, a vast majority of the media ignored the story. And yet the public kept getting the truth, which only made the media appear to be in the business of hiding news rather than reporting it. Realizing that this is not a winning business model for an ailing industry, a few of the more independent-minded reporters started covering the story, and now the White House Press Secretary is busy deflecting questions about the president’s former colleagues and fellow community organizers at ACORN. Despite the media’s best efforts.

James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles represent another massive power-shift in the age of Internet media. The first occurred when the Drudge Report broke Monica Lewinsky’s affair with President Clinton, a story that Newsweek got first but declined to run. The second was when CBS News got hoodwinked by documents that purported to impugn President Bush. After bloggers exposed them as forgeries, the documents ended up tarnishing CBS News instead. Long-time anchor Dan Rather was forced to retire in disgrace.

This is another huge embarrassment for Big Media—not so much because they look foolish, but because they’re beginning to look irrelevant.

...and text.

Institutions on the Red Alert list are unrepentant offenders against basic rights that are guaranteed either by the U.S. Constitution or the schools themselves, and they have policies and/or practices that demonstrate a serious and ongoing threat to current and future students. They are the “worst of the worst” when it comes to protecting liberty on campus.

FIRE explains the latest in a years-long campaign by Bucknell’s administrators to shut down the speech of students whose opinions they don’t share:

The controversy at Bucknell began in March, when [Bucknell University Conservatives Club] members attempted to distribute fake dollar bills in protest of the federal stimulus, featuring an image of President Obama. BUCC members were told by a campus administrator that they were “busted,” and that their activities were a violation of Bucknell’s Sales and Solicitation policy. Even after pointing out that the “stimulus dollars” distribution was an obvious act of political protest and that the students were not engaged in solicitation, Bucknell still considered the act to fall under this policy, seeing it as the equivalent of “handing out Bibles” (which also would not be solicitation under the policy). Such a misinterpretation of this policy effectively subjects any distribution of materials between students to the prior review and approval of the administration, significantly undermining Bucknell’s commitment to free expression.

The next month, Bucknell shut down BUCC’s previously approved “affirmative action bake sale,” designed to protest affirmative action by charging different prices based on ethnicity. The sales are a well-known method of attracting attention to the issue, and are not intended to raise revenue. Associate Dean of Students Gerald Commerford cited a discrepancy between the prices being charged and the prices BUCC listed on its event application form (BUCC was charging lower-than-expected prices), telling BUCC “we have the opportunity to shut you down.”

When BUCC applied to hold a second bake sale, Commerford rejected the application outright, this time saying that the bake sale violated Bucknell’s policies against discrimination. Despite the fact that BUCC was engaging in a well-known form of political protest—which FIRE has defended numerous times at public and private universities—Commerford flatly rejected the possibility of the bake sale even if BUCC made all pricing options optional, saying “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, because it’s a discriminatory [pricing] policy.” Making matters worse, Commerford suggested that only under certain circumstances would any discussion of affirmative action be welcome, telling them, “It’s not a political issue, ok; it needs to be debated in its proper forum, ok, and not on the public property of the campus.”

FIRE wrote to Bucknell President Brian C. Mitchell, pointing out the numerous violations Bucknell had committed of its own policies in suppressing BUCC’s activities, and of its legal and moral obligation to protect its students’ free speech rights. After receiving a response from Bucknell General Counsel Wayne Bromfield upholding the rationale for Bucknell’s deplorable treatment of BUCC and refusing to accept fault, FIRE wrote to President Mitchell once more. After receiving another response from Bromfield in which he refused to address FIRE’s concerns further, Bucknell was added to FIRE’s Red Alert list. President Mitchell has yet to offer any public comment on Bucknell’s free speech crisis, which has been chronicled in The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications.

Bucknell’s contemptuous treatment of BUCC should send a message to all current and prospective Bucknell students that their free speech rights are at the whim of an administration all too willing to bend its own policies and strong-arm its students to stifle speech it does not want heard on campus. By placing Bucknell on its Red Alert list, FIRE hopes to amplify that message, and to finally compel Bucknell to end its embarrassing fight against free speech.

Along with Brandeis, Colorado College, Johns Hopkins, Michigan State, and Tufts, Bucknell now shares the “honor” of a spot on FIRE’s Red Alert list.

I’ve covered Bucknell’s various attempts at political censorship extensively over the years. It’s a shameful record.

The idea that the speech would be political in nature is not something that people fantasized; it was related to the fact that the Department of Education’s lesson plan asked students to “help the president” and write about “what the president wants us to do.”

The Obama administration has since removed such language from the lesson plan, and has issued a rather lame excuse. The Associated Press reports:

Critics are particularly upset about lesson plans the administration created to accompany the speech. The lesson plans, available online, originally recommended having students “write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president.”

The White House revised the plans Wednesday to say students could “write letters to themselves about how they can achieve their short-term and long-term education goals.”

“That was inartfully worded, and we corrected it,” [White House deputy policy director Heather] Higginbottom said.

Of course, the only way the “inartfully worded” excuse works is if the new wording is a clearer way of saying what the original statement intended to convey.

In what universe is “what they can do to help the president” even remotely related to “how they can achieve their short-term and long-term education goals”?

One is not a more “artful wording” of the other. The administration’s new phrasing represents a completely different statement altogether.

If the president had intended to deliver a speech asking for students’ help achieving his political goals, I suspect this controversy will dissuade him from doing that.

We shall see.

In order to help President Obama use the memory of Senator Kennedy to sell his healthcare bill, I present the official KennedyCare t-shirts:

Many more colors and varieties—not to mention hats, thongs and even dog clothing—available at the KennedyCare store.

The Documentary Channel will be showing Indoctrinate U several more times over the coming weeks. Here’s the schedule (all times shown are Eastern U.S.):

• Tuesday, September 1st at 5:00 PM
• Tuesday, September 15th at 2:30 PM
• Monday, September 28th at 11:30 PM
• Wednesday, September 30th at 3:30 AM
• Friday, October 2nd at 8:00 PM and again at 11:00 PM

The Documentary Channel is available on satellite and many cable systems nationwide. Check your provider for channel information.

If your provider doesn’t carry the Documentary Channel, several PBS stations simulcast the Documentary Channel during certain time slots, so you may want to check those listings as well.

As always, you can also get the DVD or download Indoctrinate U.

A paedophile with a 30-year history of abusing children is being prescribed Viagra on the [National Health Service] — and there is nothing the authorities can do to stop him.

Roger Martin, 71, merely has to visit his GP to obtain the libido-enhancing drug, even though experts warn it will enable him to continue preying on children despite his age.

The probation officers who oversee Martin are powerless to interfere with the administration of prescription drugs.

He does not have to tell his GP about his criminal past and even if he does, doctors cannot take convictions into account.

[...]

He has forced himself on a string of youngsters and his latest assault was on an 11-year-old girl last year.

Jolly old England.

It was a time when Democratic politicians complained loudly whenever they felt their patriotism was being impugned. In those days, bumper stickers reminded us that “Dissent is the Highest Form of Patriotism” and Nancy Pelosi, the top Democrat in the House of Representatives, declared that disruptive protests were “very American and very important.” Now that protests are directed against a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress, Nancy Pelosi thinks such disruptions are “un-American.”

During the Bush era, the media looked the other way at the extremist element in the protest movement; the large number of protest signs bearing swastikas and mathematical formulae like “Bush=Hitler” just didn’t interest them. But it did interest me, and because the media didn’t want to report it, I did some reporting of my own. The videos I posted online inadvertently launched me on a second career as a documentary filmmaker.

I recently dug through my old footage and found many examples of the same kind of inflammatory speech that the media and the Democratic Party—forgive the redundancy—now decry. What follows are just a few examples.

At President Bush’s second inauguration in 2005, I visited Washington D.C. to hand out consolation prizes to crestfallen leftists. Folks got a chance to select their own action figure: one of Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Michael Moore or Hillary Clinton. The resulting video, Stop Bitching, Start a Revolution, captured derogatory signs and predictions of violence. Among the highlights:

• “Us Democrats are going to get up in arms...we’ll have to come out and do what we have to do in the spirit of revolution. We’ll have to come out and kill somebody, I guess.”
• One sign had a double-digit number of swastikas: large swastikas with President Bush’s face superimposed and smaller ones replacing the letter “s” in the president’s surname
• A number of “Buck Fush” signs and stickers, which shouldn’t need explaining to the dyslexic
• “Bush=Death”
• “Karl Rove is a Nazi, and so is Bush”
• “We are in a Christian Fascist state”
• “There needs to be a revolution in this country”

In Pin the Tale on the Donkeys, I quizzed peace protesters about the various hawkish statements Democrats made about Saddam Hussein over the years. I also captured a few choice signs, including:

• A “Stop Bush” sign where the “s” in Bush has been replaced with a swastika
• A sign accusing President Bush of being both a “fascist” and a “racist”
• One that refers to President Bush as a “terrorist”
• A “Protest = Patriotic” sign (an equation that liberals no longer seem to believe is true)
• A sign with a picture of President Bush calling him “a madman”

On an unusually cold day in New York City, Al Gore delivered a speech on global warming that was sponsored by MoveOn.org shortly after that Democratic Party-affiliated organization sponsored an ad comparing President Bush to Adolf Hitler. I interviewed some of the citizens I met outside the venue of Gore’s speech; they were an interesting cross-section of conspiracy theorists. In the video Gettin’ a MoveOn (The Gore Effect), you’ll see:

• Clips from the MoveOn.org ad that compares Bush to Hitler
• One person claiming President Bush is “bent on destroying the United States”
• Another saying Bush is one of the “super-villians of our world”
• A protester calling America under President Bush an “evil empire”
• One protester saying “Hitler, clearly” is the historical figure most similar to President Bush
• “I could very easily liken [Bush] to Hitler, but I’m not going to do that”
• A protester claiming Bush is a part of the “same Texas crew” that assassinated President John F. Kennedy

At a protest I filmed in San Francisco—shown here in Protesting the Protesters II—I found:

• A sign calling President Bush an “evil dictator”
• “George W. Bush is a terrorist!”
• “G.W. Bush is the AntiChrist”
• “Fuck Bush! I don’t support 400,000 murderers in U.S. Army uniforms!”
• “Down with the U.S. troops!”
• “9/11 = Inside Job”
• “U.S. Fascists Guilty”
• A chant: “Who are the biggest terrorists in the world today? Bush, Cheney and the CIA”
• An “Adolf Bush” sign with a picture of President Bush and a Hitler mustache drawn on
• A sign saying “Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft: The New 4th Reich” (for added effect, the “s” in Bush is a swastika, the first “e” in Cheney is a skull, and the “s” in Ashcroft is a Nazi SS logo)

And in my very first web video, Protesting the Protesters, you’ll see:

• A man with an intricately drawn sign showing Adolf Hitler in front of the burning Reichstag building, and George W. Bush in front of the burning Twin Towers. Both Hitler and Bush are saying, “Follow Me”
• A “dead or alive” sign with the name “George W. Bush”
• “George W. Bush is the worst terrorist”
• “Bush = Nuclear Terrorist”
• “Team Bush: The True Axis of Evil”
• “Bush the Baby Killer”
• “Buck Fush”
• “Fuck You Bush”

I didn’t like people comparing President Bush to Hitler, and I don’t like it when it happens to President Obama. There are many ways to argue against Obama’s planned health care takeover without invoking Godwin’s Law. An argument about contemporary American politics that’s strewn with Hitler comparisons is hard to take seriously, especially if you know anything about Hitler.

My real complaint is with the media, however. After years of ignoring the prevalence of violent sentiments at “peace” protests, the media has picked up the Democrats’ talking points that the town hall protesters are dangerous lunatics. (A small minority of them might be, such as the Lyndon LaRouche followers—neither conservatives nor Republicans—who have been showing up with Obama/Hitler signs. If the media were doing its job, the LaRouchies would be properly identified so they could receive the derision they deserve. Of course, if the LaRouchies were singled out, it’d undermine the impression that the media wants to convey: that the town hall protests are illegitimate, and the protesters extremists.)

Next time you see a media report that unfairly paints town hall protesters as extremists, send this page to the editor, the ombudsman, or whatever contact you can find. Show them this documentation and ask them where all their outrage was when the target was a Republican president, not a Democrat.