Michigan Tea Partier Says Getting College Education is Communism

Rick Santorum believes that President Obama’s plan to make college more accessible is just a plan to brainwash people into becoming liberals.

Most rationale people understand that at best these type of assertions are just hyperbole meant to rile up the GOP base and also at best are a clear demonstration as to why someone like Santorum is clearly un-electable.

But for the tea party crowd gathered at the Americans For Prosperity rally, Santorum’s words about higher education were right on target.

“President Obama wants everybody in America to go to college,” Santorum said. “What a snob!”

Santorum started by saying some people don’t require college to be successful.

“Not all folks are gifted the same way. Some people have incredible gifts with their hands.” He then went on to imply that Obama’s push to get more Americans to attend college was some kind of sinister plot.

“There are good, decent men and women who work hard every day and put their skills to the test that aren’t taught by some liberal college professor… That’s why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image,” Santorum said. “I want to create jobs so people can remake their children into their image, not his.”

“I thought that was brilliant,” said Angie Clement of Commerce, Mich. “Not everybody has to go to college. We need garbagemen, we need welders, carpenters.”

“Everybody can’t be equal,” agreed Paul Murrow of Milford, MI seated nearby. “Somebody needs to do the manual labor.”

Clement’s husband, Stephen, said Santorum was right on the mark when he said that Obama wants to send kids to get college degrees to create more liberals.

“It starts down at the elementary school level with all this bullshit about diversity, pardon my French,” he said. “Diversity and sensitivity and all that crap. That’s the stuff that needs to be taught at home not by my teachers. My teachers need to be academic: Math, science, history, social studies, that sort of thing and keep political opinions out of it, bottom line.”

Stephen and Angie are middle-aged. Stephen said his two step kids are grown and one, his stepson, went to the University of Michigan and got an engineering degree, “but now he’s not using it. And that’s his choice.”

“I think he’s saying, ‘Do you think that that’s the only way you can be a successful person? To go to college?’” said another attendee, Elizabeth, who didn’t want her last name used. “That is snobbery. In this entrepreneurial country that we have, where fortunes are made in a lot of ways, they’re not only made by college-educated people.”

They all agreed that college can help some people, but they also believe that universities brainwash individuals into socialists.

“They try and disguise it with, you know, ‘equal opportunity’…” Stephen Clement began.

“It’s communism,” Murrow said, cutting him off. “The professors are all teaching the kids…”

“Where does the social engineering stop?” Clement added. “Does it stop after we send everybody to college, or does it stop after we set their curriculum and said, ‘these are the things you’re allowed to study?’ Does it become the Soviet Union?”

Florida County Votes to eliminate fluoride in drinking water…

Eight years ago, Pinellas County commissioners decided to add fluoride to the drinking water. On Tuesday, the board eliminated fluoride despite warnings from dentists who say that removing fluoride would cause more rotten teeth. Credit tea party activism for the reversal.

“What you see is the rise of the new conservatism,” said Todd Pressman, who lobbies county government. “I think it’s the tea party, but it’s also the mood shifting across the country. … The tea party is the tip of the sword.”

Most American medical groups strongly advocate adding fluoride to drinking water to improve dental health, particularly for needy children. A majority of U.S. communities provide fluoridated water.

Pinellas County provides water to about 700,000 people in the unincorporated areas and to most cities. Some officials in those cities were baffled by the decision to eliminate fluoride.

“I think it’s embarrassing and shortsighted,” Largo Mayor Pat Gerard said. Former County Commissioner Ronnie Duncan chastised commissioners for wrongly siding with tea party members.

“We’ve got big problems in this county and that’s the best they can do?” he said, noting unemployment and housing troubles.

“We’re disheartened by that,” said Dr. William Bailey, chief dental officer of the U.S. Public Health Service and acting director of the division of oral health for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “The CDC’s position is all communities should receive the benefit of fluoridated water.”

Morroni, Roche and the two other commissioners who voted against fluoride, Neil Brickfield and Nancy Bostock, stood by the decision. They cited conflicting answers from dentists and major health groups about fluoride, such as whether topical use was better than drinking it in water. Skeptics and tea party members scoffed at national health organizations’ support of fluoride, noting questions and resistance in other countries.

 

Muslims angry over 9/11 children’s coloring book…

We Shall Never Forget 9/11: The Kids’ Book of Freedom has been published by Missouri-based “Really Big Coloring Books”. The coloring book according to them is “designed to be a tool that parents can use to help teach children about the facts surrounding 9/11”. Depicting scenes from 9/11 for children to color in and telling the story of the attacks and the hunt for Osama bin Laden, “the book was created with honesty, integrity, reverence, respect and does not shy away from the truth”, according to the publisher, which says that it has sold out of its first print run of 10,000 copies.

Obviously The Council on American-Islamic Relations has condemned the book as “disgusting”, that it characterises all Muslims as linked to extremism, terrorism and radicalism, which could lead children reading the book to believe that all Muslims are responsible for 9/11, and that followers of the Islamic faith are their enemies.

Publisher Wayne Bell told American television that the book does not portray Muslims “in a negative light at all. That is incorrect. This is about 19 terrorist hijackers that came over here under the leadership of a devil worshipper, Osama bin Laden, to murder our people,” Bell said. “He [Dawud Walid, executive director of CAIR] calls the book disgusting … but he should call the people in the book, the 19 terrorists, Osama bin Laden, he should call him disgusting. This is history. It is absolutely factual.”

But Walid said that “given the fact that this is a very emotional and sensitive topic and that there were Muslims who were victims in 9/11 [and] who were first responders, we think it would have been more responsible if the language would not have been such that every time Muslim was used it’s radical, extremist, terrorist … All these characters are painted to the mind of a young person that perhaps all Muslims may be somewhat responsible for 9/11 or that Muslims are an enemy.”

Really Big Coloring Books, which also published a colouring book teaching children about the Tea Party last year, has said that it will donate a portion of its proceeds from sales of the book to Bridges for Peace, “a Jerusalem-based, Bible-believing Christian organisation supporting Israel and building relationships between Christians and Jews worldwide through education and practical deeds expressing God’s love and mercy”.

One page of the $6.99 book, which has been given a PG rating, shows Bin Laden hiding behind a hijab-wearing woman as he is shot by a Navy SEAL. “Being the elusive character that he was, and after hiding out with his terrorist buddies in Pakistan and Afghanistan, American soldiers finally locate the terrorist leader Osama bin Laden,” runs the text accompanying the picture. “Children, the truth is, these terrorist acts were done by freedom-hating radical Islamic Muslim extremists. These crazy people hate the American way of life because we are FREE and our society is FREE.”

 

Tea Party summer camp brainwashing kids?

The “Tampa 912 Project” an offshoot of the Tea Party is hosting a week long seminar in Tampa, Florida about our nation’s founding principles. Three of the principles that will be taught to children between the ages of 8 and 12 are “America is good,” “I believe in God,” and “I work hard for what I have and I will share it with who I want to. Government cannot force me to be charitable.”

Organizer Jeff Lukens said of the camp’s purpose “We want to impart to our children what our nation is about, and what they may or may not be told,” and that he was not familiar with public school curriculum, but what he did know is that “they have a lot of political correctness. We are a faithful people, and when you talk about natural law, you have to talk about God. When you take that out of the discussion, you miss the whole thing.”

Some of the activities are as follows:

Children will win candy to use as currency for a store, representing the gold standard. On the second day, the “banker” will issue paper money. Over time, students will realize their paper money buys less and less, while the candies retain their value. “Some of the kids will fall for it,” Lukens said. “Others kids will wise up.”

Starting in an austere room where they are made to sit quietly, symbolizing Europe, the children will pass through an obstacle course to arrive at a brightly decorated party room (the New World). Red-white-and-blue confetti will be thrown, but afterward the kids will have to clean up the confetti, learning that with freedom comes responsibility.

Children will blow bubbles from a single container of soapy solution, and then pop each other’s bubbles with squirt guns in an arrangement that mimics socialism. They are to count how many bubbles they pop. Then they will work with individual bottles of solution and pop their own bubbles. “What they will find out is that you can do a lot more with individual freedom,” Lukens said.

“We’ve had classes for adults,” said Karen Jaroch, who chairs the Tampa 912 Project. “Now we want to introduce a younger generation to economics and history, but in a fun way.”

If successful, Jaroch and Lukens will look to run more sessions, either during the summer or after school resumes and may try to bring its curriculum to public schools during Constitution week in September.

“We definitely teach the Constitution, especially during Constitution Week,” said Linda Cobbe, a school district spokeswoman. She said the district would need to make sure the organization does not have a political agenda, and that they would need to be approved by SERVE, a nonprofit agency that clears volunteers in the schools.

 

Tea Party candidate wants to end minimum wage

This obsession with all things “free market” is starting to get a little weird. Corporations are not patriots, they have no allegiance to anyone but their stock holders and profits. The idea that corporations will do what’s in the best interest of middle America, just because, is beyond naive. Watch via Thinkprogress as Tea Party Senate candidate Jamie Radtke talks about what a great idea it would be to eliminate the minimum wage because employers would never take advantage of employees, nooooo, of course not.

Exposing Tea Party hypocrisy on farm subsidies…

The whole point of the Tea Party was to counteract all the liberty stealing bankrupting policies of those wild eyed liberals in Washington, but as it turns out like almost all politicians, saying one thing and doing another is an affliction that even affects the Tea Party. Turns out at least five “federal government is always the problem, never the solution” Tea Party affiliated lawmakers have actually been receiving federal farm subsidies. Noooo, it can’t be, can it? It can and it is. Government spending on farm subsidies totaled more than $16 billion in 2009 alone and these Representatives are making sure they get their fair share.

Rep. Stephen Fincher, a R-Tenn, calls himself a  Tea Party patriot, a Tea Party patriot whose family has received more than $3 million tax payer dollars in the form of farm subsidies from 1995 to 2009. When asked about the subsidies Fincher gave a brilliant answer saying “We need a good, better, we need a better farm program and we need to streamline it,We need to look at many many options. And that’s a long way off.” A long way off? Of course, when it comes to cutting public workers salaries, cutting education, cutting assistance for the poor, defunding NPR and Planned Parenthood, it’s right now. When it comes to using tax dollars to run his farm, which you can be fairly confident in saying he can afford to run on his own, it’s a long way off. Rep. Vicky Hartzler, R-Mo., received $774,489 in farm subsidies over the same period while Rep. Marlin Stutzman, R-Ind., got $180,000 between 1997 and 2009. Republican Rep. Tom Latham of Iowa has four farms and he’s received a little more than $1 million in taxpayer money while congresswoman, Rep. Kristi Noem’s Racota Valley Ranch got more than $3 million from 1995 to 2008.

ABC News spoke to Rep. Noem in September, when she was still just candidate Noem, about farm subsidies and if they were waste that could be cut from the budget. She said “I think there has been, in the past, and there is some potential there, I think we need to make sure the dollars are going where they are intended to go.” The representative also said “You know, the United States engages in a cheap food policy and we have got a lot of government regulations that come in and impact markets and prices, so we need to make sure we are giving our farmers an opportunity to work on a level playing field with other countries and market our products, But we need to make sure we are spending our taxpayer dollars correctly as well.” There are three problems with that logic. One is that the majority of small farmers receive no money from the federal government. Two is that a major reason why we have cheap food is because most it’s mass produced by large corporations. Three is that 90% of farm subsidies go to only 5 crops, those crops being cotton, corn, rice, wheat, and soybeans.

At least one of the new Tea Party Representatives stood by his principles. When asked about the more than $100,000 in farm subsidies he received Rep. Stutzman told ABC News that he would vote to eliminate all farm subsidies. Of all the things that are being listed as waste and needing to be cut, taxpayer backed farm subsidies is not one, so while Stutzman says he would vote to end them it’s more likely than not that there won’t be any such vote anytime soon and he’ll continue to rake in that sweet federal cash.