Best and worst states for homeschooling

We are told America is “home of the free and the brave.”

The last time I checked, no where in the U.S. Constitution does it say that Americans are compelled to send our children to dysfunctional public government schools, run by the NEA teachers’ union that recommends to its members a book dedicated to Satan.

And yet, since education is regulated by the states, if parents choose to teach their children themselves, they should know that 4o of America’s 50 states put restrictions on homeschooling, ranging from the mildest (parents must notify the state of their homeschooling) to the most onerous, including home visits by government officials.

The non-profit homeschool advocate organization HSLDA (Home School Legal Defense Association) has a map showing which states fall into which of the following four categories:

• States requiring no notice: No state requirement for parents to initiate any contact
• States with low regulation: State requires parental notification only.
• States with moderate regulation: State requires parents to send notification, test scores, and/or professional evaluation of student progress.
• State with high regulation: State requires parents to send notification or achievement test scores and/or professional evaluation, plus other requirements (e.g. curriculum approval by the state, teacher qualification of parents, or home visits by state officials).

Here are the 10 freest states for home schooling (in green):

1. Alaska
2. Connecticut
3. Idaho
4. Illinois
5. Indiana
6. Michigan
7. Missouri
8. New Jersey
9. Oklahoma
10. Texas

Here are the 6 least free states for home schooling (in red):

1. Massachusetts
2. New York
3. North Dakota
4. Pennsylvania
5. Rhode Island
6. Vermont

I guess we should be glad that homeschooling is still legal in all 50 states, although I doubt that will remain so for long.

H/t Eric Blair of Activist Post

See sage_brush’s excellent series on homeschooling, drawing on her experience and lessons she learnt successfully homeschooling her children:

• “Hints for Home Schoolers – Pets,” April 11, 2012.
• “Hints for Home Schoolers – Top Ten Reasons to Home School,” April 18, 2012.
• “Hints for Home Schoolers – Taking Care of Mom,” April 25, 2012.
• “Hints for Home Schoolers – Handling the Allowance Question,” May 1, 2012.
• “Hints for Home Schoolers – Socialization?,” May 8, 2012.
• “Hints for Home Schoolers – Declutter!,” May 16, 2012.
• “Hints for Home Schoolers – Finding Forgiveness,” May 23, 2012.
• “Hints for Home Schoolers – Being a Keeper at Home,” May 30, 2012.
• “Hints for Home Schoolers – The Prodigal,” June 6, 2012.

and “Government Tentacles Reaching Into Home Schools,” May 4, 2012.

~Eowyn

Econ 101: Ann Romney’s Horse

In the just-finished London Olympics, a horse partly owned by Mitt Romney’s wife, Ann, had competed (and lost) in dressage. Dressage refers to the guiding of a horse through a series of complex maneuvers by slight movements of the rider’s hands, legs, and weight.

Ann Romney’s part-ownership of the horse has been lampooned by liberal critics as being symbolic of the family being out of touch with “ordinary” Americans.

Here’s a rebuttal to the class-warfare critics:

So the Romneys are selfish for keeping a horse? For:

• Employing a groom with a family to support.

• Paying for feed that’s sold by someone with a family to support.

• Feed that’s transported in trucks by drivers with families to support.

• The trucks are manufactured in a factory by people with families to support who are fed with stuff that’s grown by farmers with families to support.

• The barn to house Ann Romney’s horse was built by construction workers with families to support, with materials trucked by drivers with families to support, from factories with workers with families to support.

Ann Romney’s horse has done more to put Americans to work than that horse’s ass in the White House!

But then Econ 101 was never Obama’s strong suit, having spent his political formative years as a Saul “I-dedicated-my-book-to-Satan” Alinsky community organizer class-warfarer….

H/t FOTM’s beloved Joan

~Eowyn

Democratic Party is a criminal corrupt organization

That’s what Michael Walsh, a former associate editor of Time magazine says, in his new book, The People v. the Democratic Party.

Chelsea Schilling reports for WND that Walsh gives compelling evidence for the entire history of the Democratic Party being one of crime and corruption – from its beginning in Aaron Burr’s Tammany Hall, to its efforts to defeat Abraham Lincoln’s re-election bid, to Franklin Roosevelt’s rise to the presidency, and the Chicago machine connected to the Obama administration.

Walsh explains:

“What distinguishes them [the Democrats] is a real desire to win. They’re the oldest party in the country … They’ve stayed because they know how to win, and they’re willing to change at the drop of a hat. They’re willing to change their policies. They’ve gone from being the party of slavery and segregation to now claiming to be the party of civil rights laws passed in ’64 and ’65, when, in fact, those were passed with greater Republican support than Democrat support. But they’re always mutating and trying to grab the moral high ground. And it seems to me they don’t have any moral high ground.”

Walsh detailed what he believes is a history of corruption in the Democratic Party, going all the way back to Aaron Burr, who “founded Tammany Hall, which turned into, over the course of its 150-year existence, the prototypical big-city political machine: corrupt, in league with the most violent gangsters in New York during its heyday and the source of patronage and power on which the Democratic Party rests.”

Walsh explains that the Democratic Party’s win-at-all-cost attitude led to the creation of political machines that ran big-city politics for years:

“what’s interesting about the Roosevelt era – if you go back to the ’20s and ’30s when you have basically Hoover and Roosevelt – it’s also the time of the great gangster empires in America. It’s when organized crime was really founded. That occurred in 1929 in Atlantic City, when every great gangster from all the ethnic groups came to Atlantic City and they split up the country into zones of influence. But they were very political as well, and the gangsters tended to be Democrats. Except for the Republican mayor of Atlantic City, ‘Nucky’ Johnson, it’s hard to think of a gangster who was not a Democrat. They were very influential in getting Roosevelt nominated.

In 1932, Al Smith had thought he had their allegiance, but they double-crossed him and they thought they’d get off easy with Roosevelt, who then promptly double-crossed the gangsters and sent Tom Dewey after them in the great clean-up of gangs in the ’20s and ’30s.

But the party has always been in bed with this sort of criminal element, and sometimes a seditious criminal element. That was also true in the Roosevelt administration, where a number of Roosevelt administration officials turned out, subsequently, to have been Soviet agents of influence. Again, it’s not a pretty sight.”

Walsh said President Harry Truman, when he came up in politics in Kansas City, was the bag man for the great criminal Irish gangster who ran the city, Tom Pendergast: “Truman never lost his affection for Pendergast. Even after he was finally brought to justice and sent to jail, Truman admired him very much.”

The father of President John F. Kennedy was very much in league with gangsters, including Owney Madden, the biggest bootlegger and politically influential gangster in New York City.

Walsh emphasizes that “There’s always this sub current running underneath the Democratic presidents. The party got seized in 1968 in the streets of Chicago during the riots … and is now basically turned into the McGovern-Alinsky group that runs the country today.”

As for Obama, Walsh writes in his book that “With Obama in office, all Washington is a skating rink on which characters like Barney Frank and Chris Dodd turn triple-Lutzes while their media cronies applaud like the Harvard-trained seals that many of them are.”

In an interview with WND, Walsh also has something to say about his former colleagues in the mainstream media, who are doing little more than carrying water for their preferred candidates and issues:

“What’s left of the mainstream media is a pretty hard-core group of leftists whose life’s work and ambition is to promote their agenda. And they’re doing a good job of it. It’s just that they’re losing their influence, and I think they’ll continue to lose it as the public realizes they’re not playing straight with them anymore.”

Michael Walsh’s book, The People v. the Democratic Party, is on sale on Amazon.com for only $5.99 for a paperback copy, or a mere $4.99 for the Kindle edition!

~Eowyn

Breitbart Warned the Left – Bring It On!

Words of Warning from a Founding Father

“And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever.” –Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 18, 1781

In other words, our Founders had a proper conception of Liberty as freedom that is made possible only with morality. Without a firm foundation in morality, freedom becomes license.

Contrast Thomas Jefferson’s words with those of Obama’s and the Left’s political guru, Saul Alinsky:

Alinsky so admired Satan that he dedicated his book on community organizing, Rules for Radicals, to the fallen angel. Like all Leftists, Alinsky could only conceive liberty to be freedom from all authority and all constraints — except his and the Left’s authority, of course.

And so, it’s really not so much that the Left have problems with authority. It is that they want to be the authority — to be as gods, which exactly was the First Sin of the apostate angel and of our first parents in that garden….

Alas, that is not freedom. Desiring to be free from his Creator, the rebel instead found eternal misery in his own grandiosity. In John Milton’s immortal words:

“Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell.”

And Hell’s exactly where Alinsky hoped to go and where, no doubt, he is.

~Eowyn

Obama’s Mentor Was a Satan Worshipper, What Does That Make Obama?

Many of us know that Saul Alinsky, the leftwing guru of community organizers such as Barack Obama, had dedicated his book, Rules for Radicals, to Lucifer.

Lucifer was the name of the fallen angel who rebelled against his Creator and so became Satan. In other words, Alinksy dedicated his book to Satan.

Worse than that, in a 1972 Playboy interview before he died, Alinsky so admired Satan he professed he’d rather go to Hell than Heaven.

Reverend/Dr. James David Manning, of Atlah World Missionary Church in Harlem, makes a thought-provoking observation in the video below. He points out that, in his many years as a pastor, he’s met many sinners who had fallen away from God but also many who worship and praise God. But Manning had never met anyone who actually praises Satan.

So it is noteworthy that Alinsky openly proclaimed his admiration and praise of Lucifer as “the first radical…who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom.”

Here’s a screen shot of Alinsky’s dedication from Rules for Radicals:

Manning asks what does this say about those on the Left — especially the President of the United States, Obama — who, in turn, admire and look up to the man who praised and worshipped Satan. Are they not also Satan worshippers?

Sobering thought….

~Eowyn

Teachers’ Union Recommends Book Dedicated to Satan

Saul Alinsky (1909-1972), one of the gurus of the Left, was an American “community organizer” and writer most famous for his last book, Rules for Radicals, which tutored a fresh-out-of-Harvard-Law radical named Barack Hussein Obama in community organizing Marxist agitprop. 

Alinsky addressed his book at the 1960s generation of socialist-communist radicals. Simply put, Rules for Radicals is a socialist how-to manual on organizing for mass power. As Alinsky put it, the book is meant ”for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be…for the Have-Nots on how to take it [power] away” from the Haves.

It gets worse.

Alinsky dedicated the book to Lucifer — the fallen angel who was the best and brightest of God’s angels, but who chose himself instead of God, and so became the sworn enemy of God and goodness. Lucifer is also known as Satan or the Devil. Here’s a screen shot of Alinsky’s dedication:

This book, Rules for Radicals, that was dedicated to Satan, is the very same book that the National Education Association (NEA) recommends to its members!

The NEA is a teachers’ union and the largest labor union in the United States at 3.2 million members. The NEA represents public school teachers and other support personnel; faculty and staffers at colleges and universities; retired educators; and college students preparing to become teachers. Headquartered in Washington, D.C. (all the better to lobby Congress), the NEA has affiliate organizations in every state and in more than 14,000 communities across America. It employs over 550 staff and had a budget of more than $307 million for the 2006–2007 fiscal year.

In other words, the NEA is enormously powerful, wielding power not only over politicians but, more importantly, over our children via how and what teachers teach. So you should be alarmed that on its website, the NEA is recommending socialist Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. Here’s what the NEA website says:

Recommended Reading: Saul Alinsky, the American Organizer

A Resource for Every Organizer and Everyone Contemplating Action in Their Community

NEA recommends the following Saul Alinsky books to those members of our Association who are involved in grassroots organizing, especially Association Representatives (ARs) — also known as building reps or shop stewards — and leaders at local affiliates…. Alinsky’s writings have been called the “mother’s milk of the left”….

Thanks to First Things, here’s a screen shot from the NEA website (Click to Enlarge):

(H/t Fellowship co-founder Steve)

To further convey to you the malignancy of Alinsky and Rules for Radicals, here’s what David Horowitz wrote in his August 16, 2009 essay, “Alinsky, Beck, Satan, and Me“:

For the Hillary-Soros generation of johnny-come-lately radicals and their ACORN footsoldiers, Alinksy is their Sun-Tzu and his book Rules for Radicals is the field manual for their struggle. I thought while I’m refreshing my acquaintance with this destructive fellow and re-reading his text, I would share my thoughts with you, serially over the next week.

For this first post, let’s just focus on the dedication of the book — to Satan:

“Lest we forget, an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical:” (Pause there for second. Now continue): “from all our legends, mythology, and history(and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins — or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom — Lucifer.”

So Alinsky begins by telling readers what a radical is. He is not a reformer of the system but its would-be destroyer. This is something that in my experience conservatives have a very hard time understanding. Conservatives are altogether too decent, too civilized to match up adequately, at least in the initital stages of the battle, with their adversaries. They are too prone to give them the benefit of the doubt. They assume that radicals can’t really want to destroy a society that is democratic and liberal and has brought wealth and prosperity to so many. Oh yes they can. That is in fact the essence of what it means to be a radical — to be willing to destroy the values, structures and institutions that sustain the society we live in. Marx himself famously cited Alinsky’s first rebel (using another of his names — Mephistopheles): “Everything that exists deserves to perish.”

This is why ACORN activists, for example, have such contempt for the election process, why they are so willing to commit election fraud. Because just as Lucifer didn’t believe in God’s kingdom, so the radicals who run ACORN don’t believe in the democratic system. To them it is itself a fraud — an instrument of the ruling class, or as Alinsky prefers to call it, of the Haves. If the electoral system doesn’t serve all of us, but is only an instrument of the Haves, then election fraud is justified because it is a means of creating a system that serves the Have-Nots — social justice. Until conservatives begin to understand exactly what drives radicals and how dishonest they are — dishonest in the their core — it is going to be very hard to defend the system that is under attack. For radicals the noble end — creating a new heaven on earth — justifies any means. And if one actually believed it was possible to create heaven on earth, would he not willingly destroy any system hitherto created by human beings?

The many names of Satan, by the way, are also a model for radicals who camouflage their agendas by alternatively calling themselves Communists, socialists, new leftists, liberals and most consistently progressives. My parents, who were card-carrying Communists, never referred to themselves as Communists but always as “progressives.” The Progressive Party was run by the Communist Party and split off from the Democrats in 1948 (because Harry Truman opposed Stalin), but rejoined the Democrats in the McGovern campaign of 1972 and with the ascension of Barack Obama has become the Democratic Party.

Alinsky’s tribute to Satan as the first radical, and as the model of radicals to come, should cause us to reflect on how Satan tempted Adam and Eve to destroy their paradise. If you rebel and violate the law that has been laid down for you, “You shall be as gods” the serpent told them. You think Rahm Emmanuel was listening?

Oh, and let’s not forget this — the kingdom that the first radical “won” was hell.

~Eowyn