Congressman Marino introduces bill for term limits
PA State Representative Fred Keller annouces Summer 2013 Town Hall Meetings
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Thursday, June 6 or Thursday, June 13 |
These interactive forums are a unique opportunity for local residents to share suggestions, ask questions and offer solutions on how to address your most important legislative concerns both at home and in Harrisburg.
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Light refreshments will be served. |
Snyder County 2013 Primary Election Results
Republican Women reaching out to OK Republican Women suffering from tornados
Assistance for Oklahoma Federation Members
Dear NFRW Members,
Progress was slow in reaching out to all our local Oklahoma RW Club members but we completed our contacts and have identified six members of the Helen Cole RW Club and two members of the Cleveland County RW Club that sustained loss of their homes and belongings from the Moore, Oklahoma tornado.
Those wishing to assist these federation members directly are requested to send GIFT CARDS for Visa, Walmart or Target stores or if preferred, make checks payable to the HELEN COLE Republican Women’s Club and mail to the local club president:
Helen Cole RW Club
Attn: Kay Osborn
101 E. Gray, Suite A
Norman, OK 73069
All donations will be distributed to these identified members immediately to fill-in the lapse of time until insurance or disaster relief funds are made available. Our Local RW members are furnishing temporary housing, supplies, transportation and labor for recovering any personal items at the demolished home sites.
I also ask for your continued prayers in the coming weeks for the residents of Moore. While the news cycle will soon change, these women, their families, businesses and their community will continue to face challenges of daily living and rebuilding in the coming months and yes, even years.
Thanks to the National Federation members for your messages of comfort, prayers and actions that show what “caring for America” is all about.
Warms regards,
Sue Thompson
Ok.FRW – State President
Conestoga Wood Lancaster County Mennonite Family’s Wood Arguing Before Third Circuit Court of Appeals Tomorrow
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Susquehanna Valley Conservatives looking for volunteers to walk in the 4th of July Veteran’s Parade
The Union County Veterans 4th of July Parade will be held in Lewisburg on Saturday, June 29 starting at 10:00AM. Susquehanna Valley Conservatives would like to participate in this outstanding annual event provided we can get enough of our members and their friends to commit to walking the 1.2 mile parade route. Bob Harder and Bob Lebda, SVC co-founders, will lead our group and proudly carry the red and white SVC banner. However, we need to have at least 25 adults, and as many children and grandchildren as possible, agree to walk behind the banner to make it a worthwhile venture. We are contemplating having hand outs of some kind that can be distributed to people along the parade route. This will be given further consideration if we meet the required number of at least 25 adult participants.
Please email Bob Harder at rharder@ptd,net if you want to walk with the SVC in the parade. Give him your name, email address and telephone number. Indicate how many adults (including yourself) would participate and how many youth/children will accompany you. Provide him with this information by no later than June 1. If you have questions email him at the aforementioned address.
Suffering indignities from the party I embraced 25 years ago by Star Parker
Jewish World Review May 27, 2013/ 18 Sivan, 5773 Suffering indignities from the party I embraced 25 years ago By Star Parker
JewishWorldReview.com | Some 25 years ago, I changed my life.
I got off welfare, went to work, got politically active and became a Republican. I didn’t become a Republican because of what the party looked like. I became a Republican because of what the party stood for: individual freedom, traditional values, with a view that government’s role is to protect our freedom at home and abroad. For the next 25 years, I had to suffer indignities from liberals who could not fathom that a black could be a Republican because she actually embraced these values. But now, we have a strange turn of events. Liberals no longer feel on the run like they did in the 1980s and 1990s. They are running the show and they know it. So I hear less from them. Now the indignities come from inside the party that I embraced 25 years ago. It was always the Democrats that were about interest group politics. Now Republicans have somehow concluded that their party’s woes are because it once stood for something. So the game plan is to morph into the Democrats’ stepsister. Whereas once Republican buzzwords were family and freedom, now it is inclusion. The marching orders, according to the post-election “autopsy” report from the Republican National Committee, is outreach to blacks, Hispanics, gays, women and Asians. It’s now about what the party looks like, not what it stands for. Christian conservatives, once the answer, are now the problem. Which gets to Bishop E. W. Jackson. Bishop Jackson is an outspoken black Christian conservative with a law degree from Harvard. He also was just selected as the nominee for lieutenant governor of Virginia. Although Republicans are talking about black outreach, it is not, unfortunately, blacks like Jackson that they have in mind. He is outspoken about limited government and personal freedom, about the importance of family and traditional marriage, and about doing something about the scourge of abortion. In other words, E.W. Jackson stands for everything that the Republican Party once stood for. He’s making the Republicans of inclusion squirm. The current Republican lieutenant governor of Virginia, Bill Bolling, immediately criticized his party for nominating Jackson, saying it will feed the “image of extremism” in the party. Ronald Reagan used to say that the 11th commandment was to not speak ill of a fellow Republican. That commandment has now been modified to permit it, if that fellow Republican is a Christian conservative. Certainly, Jackson does not pull punches. But his statements about the government “plantation” are 100 percent true. It’s no accident that trillions of dollars in government programs have had zero impact on black poverty. Black single-parent homes and out-of-wedlock births have tripled since the War on Poverty began in 1965. A new Gallup poll shows a dramatic shift in American attitudes on traditional morality. Fifty-nine percent now say homosexual relations are acceptable, up 19 points from 2001; 60 percent say out-of-wedlock birth is OK, up 15 points from 2001; 68 percent say divorce is OK, up 9 points from 2001; and 14 percent are OK with polygamy, twice that of 2001. The economy is sputtering at 2 percent growth, four points below the expected recovery growth rate from a deep recession, and our national debt is now greater than our gross domestic product. The country needs a bold alternative voice to wake it up. The conservative Ken Cuccinelli-E W Jackson ticket in Virginia is such a voice. Will their party get behind them or pull the rug out, as it has done to other conservatives in recent races? Will the Republican Party get back to what it once was about, or will it become just another symptom of a nation in decline? |
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Rotten to the Core: The Feds’ Invasive Student Tracking Database
Rotten to the Core: The Feds’ Invasive Student Tracking Database
By Michelle Malkin • March 8, 2013 09:41 AM
Rotten to the Core: The Feds’ Invasive Student Tracking Database
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2012
(This is the fourth installment of a continuing series on nationalized academic standards known as the “Common Core.”)
While many Americans worry about government drones in the sky spying on our private lives, Washington meddlers are already on the ground and in our schools gathering intimate data on children and families.
Say goodbye to your children’s privacy. Say hello to an unprecedented nationwide student tracking system, whose data will apparently be sold by government officials to the highest bidders. It’s yet another encroachment of centralized education bureaucrats on local control and parental rights under the banner of “Common Core.”
As the American Principles Project, a conservative education think tank, reported last year, Common Core’s technological project is “merely one part of a much broader plan by the federal government to track individuals from birth through their participation in the workforce.” The 2009 porkulus package included a “State Fiscal Stabilization Fund” to bribe states into constructing “longitudinal data systems (LDS) to collect data on public-school students.”
These systems will aggregate massive amounts of personal data — health-care histories, income information, religious affiliations, voting status and even blood types and homework completion. The data will be available to a wide variety of public agencies. And despite federal student-privacy protections guaranteed by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, the Obama administration is paving the way for private entities to buy their way into the data boondoggle. Even more alarming, the U.S. Department of Education is encouraging a radical push from aggregate-level data-gathering to invasive individual student-level data collection.
At the South by Southwest education conference in Austin, Texas, this week, education technology gurus were salivating at the prospects of information plunder. “This is going to be a huge win for us,” Jeffrey Olen, a product manager at education software company CompassLearning, told Reuters. Cha-ching-ching-ching.
The company is already aggressively marketing curricular material “aligned” to fuzzy, dumbed-down Common Core math and reading guidelines (which more than a dozen states are now revolting against). Along with two dozen other tech firms, CompassLearning sees even greater financial opportunities to mine Common Core student tracking systems. The centralized database is a strange-bedfellows alliance between the liberal Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (which largely underwrote and promoted the Common Core curricular scheme) and a division of conservative Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. (which built the database infrastructure).
Another nonprofit startup, “inBloom, Inc.,” has evolved out of that partnership to operate the database. The Gates Foundation and other partners provided $100 million in seed money. Reuters reports that inBloom, Inc. will “likely start to charge fees in 2015″ to states and school districts participating in the system. “So far, seven states — Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, North Carolina and Massachusetts — have committed to enter data from select school districts. Louisiana and New York will be entering nearly all student records statewide.”
The National Education Data Model, available online at http://nces.sifinfo.org/datamodel/eiebrowser/techview.aspx?instance=studentElementarySecondary, lists hundreds of data points considered indispensable to the nationalized student tracking racket. These include:
–”Bus Stop Arrival Time” and “Bus Stop Description.”
–”Dwelling arrangement.”
–”Diseases, Illnesses and Other Health Conditions.”
–”Religious Affiliation.”
–”Telephone Number Type” and “Telephone Status.”
Home-schoolers and religious families that reject traditional government education would be tracked. Original NEDM data points included hair color, eye color, weight, blood types and even dental status.
How exactly does amassing and selling such personal data improve educational outcomes? It doesn’t. This, at its core, is the central fraud of Washington’s top-down nationalized curricular scheme. The Bill Gates-endorsed Common Core “standards” are a phony pretext for big-government expansion. The dazzling allure of “21st-century technology” masks the privacy-undermining agenda of nosy bureaucratic drones allergic to transparency, accountability and parental autonomy. Individual student privacy is sacrificed at the collective “For the Children” altar.
Fed Ed is not about excellence or academic achievement. It’s about control, control and more control.
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Related:
My child’s Common Core-aligned Algebra book is crap
Opposition to the Common Core Proliferating
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Previous:
Rotten to the Core, Part 3: Lessons from Texas and the Growing Grassroots Revolt
Rotten to the Core, Part 2: Readin’, writin’ and deconstructionism
Rotten to the Core, Part 1: Obama’s War on Academic Standards
Rotten to the Core: Reader feedback from the frontlines
Fuzzy math: A nationwide epidemic
Obama’s Sputter-nik moment: Cash for Education Clunkers
January 2005: NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND, ACT II
February 2005: THE REVOLT AGAINST NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND
Stupid education fad of the day: “Mayan Math”
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More resources/background/links:
Barry Garelick: A New Kind of Problem: The Common Core Math Standards
EmpoweredGA.org – Georgia activists: Here, here, here and here.
Pennsylvania revolt against TERC Investigations math.
http://truthinamericaneducation.com/
http://www.utahnsagainstcommoncore.com/
Indiana: hoosiersagainstcommoncore.com
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And more:
“Related Websites” from Truth in American Education has links to all of the following:
Alabamians United for Excellence in Education
Arizonans Against Common Core
Californians United Against Common Core
Closing the Door on Innovation Why One National Curriculum Is Bad for America
Common Core: Education Without Representation
Common Core Facts
Hoosiers Against Common Core
Keep Education Local
Missouri Coalition Against Common Core
Pioneer Institute Public Policy Research: Academic Standards
Stop Common Core: Reclaiming Local Control in Education
Tennessee Against Common Core
United States Coalition for World Class Math: Common Core Standards
Utahns Against Common Core
Utah’s Republic: Common Core Standards
Where’s the Math? Common Core State Standards
Where’s the Math? Standard Algorithms in the Common Core State Standards
Rock Star GOP - Grassroots Activism Awareness 