Dakota Beacon

What Obama has done in the education arena has weakened education. What the man has done overall has weakened America. Obama’s economic policies have hurt the middle class. Yet reality doesn’t seem to register with the progressives at the NEA. After all, to lefty zealots such as those who populate NEA leadership, “talking about the importance” of something is as valuable as actually making that something happen. Having a “vision for a stronger America” makes America stronger. To the NEA’s starry-eyed “educators,” just as with all staunch liberals, noble intent is everything. Results are irrelevant.

The "old guard" is having as much trouble with a "fair and equal" approach to income taxation as they did with the elimination of earmarks. That is why it was so important to eliminate earmarks, not because they amount to much spending reduction but that it is the RIGHT thing to do. The old guard is not used to doing what is RIGHT, only what gets them re-elected. Soon they will realize that those days are gone...

It is time that the issue of out-of-state tuition subsidization be brought out from the shadows and discussed in a serious and non-confrontational way.

 How much longer will North Dakota taxpayers be asked to subsidize low cost education for college graduates that simply leave the state for better pay?

In 2010, there was a ‘tax gap’—i.e., the difference between federal taxes owed and those actually paid—of $410–$500 billion. Some of the gap stems from the complexity of the tax code. Much of it, though, is deliberate­­: self-employed individuals working for cash, table-servers under-reporting tips, taxpayers claiming unauthorized credits and deductions. And don’t forget the highly paid White House, congressional, and federal agency staff (including some at the Internal Revenue Service) who, according to reports last year, collectively underpaid their taxes by tens of millions of dollars.

One cannot condone breaking the law, but if millions of otherwise law-abiding Americans are defying a law, then maybe something is wrong with the law itself. Millions of Americans despise our tax laws. They believe that taxes are excessive and that the tax regime is arbitrary, discriminatory, and oppressive…. The fundamental problem is the widespread perception that our political system itself is immoral, dishonest, and corrupt.

A few liberal Republican wannabes, desiring to be liked and re-elected, followed the Democrat vote-buying scheme. However, to say that Republicans share a major part of responsibility in perpetuating the myth of the “little guy” is a stretch.

Embracing the myth is embarrassing. It’s time to retire the myth that Democrats are the party of the “little guy.”

Bad news for Minot flood victims, 6.5 million acres are affected by flooding, dropping service to individual farmer, homeowners should not panic, Jamestown is warming up for a lurid trial, cut and muck, column overweights the UND Fighting Sioux issue, What if Kelley and others fought back?

Obama’s cousin Milton points out, “The eye does not see what the mind does not know.” Indeed, Barack Obama understands little about sound economics but a great deal about ideological agenda pushing. The American people will not experience anything resembling sound economics from the Ideologue in Chief. In the debt resolution standoff, if Republicans blink and agree to raise taxes on Americans, we shall suffer Obama’s ideology all the way down. The distance to the bottom is anyone’s guess.

Nothing good is going to come from these ludicrously protracted negotiations over laughably meaningless accounting sleights-of-hand scheduled to kick in circa 2020. All the charade does is confirm to prudent analysts around the world that the depraved ruling class of the United States cannot self-correct, and, indeed, has no desire to.

In a recent editorial, The Wall Street Journal calls 2011 the ‘year of school choice.’ Parents and the legislators who represent them, particularly in inner-city schools, are tired of waiting for the promised effects of ‘educational reform’ on the public schools their children attend…. Despite progress in many places, New York City children, many of them African-American, may not be able to return to charters or start in them anew in the fall due to a lawsuit instituted against the NYC’s Department of Education by what would seem to be a tragically ironic twosome: the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the United Federation of Teachers (UFT).

Here is a case where political/ideological dedication to the public-school monopoly is stronger than loyalty to the very people which the NAACP is pledged to help.

To a hard-core relativistic leftist, there is no Truth, only “truths.”  And a person’s “truth” is just his own perspective.  It thus possesses no special status.  This failure to recognize transcendent Truth – that great author of morality – causes the leftist to become his own source of right and wrong.  His desires then take on the character of Truth in his own mind, and, consequently, whatever contradicts them takes on the character of a lie.  This is what enables a leftist to condemn those who speak the Truth as liars.  They have contradicted the only god the leftist knows – himself.

The idea that the activity caused by damage can help the economy grow is a foolish misunderstanding of basic economics.

This level of economic illiteracy is no surprise as it is pervasive within all levels of government.  North Dakota's policies of economic development over the last decade have also defied the economics explained by the Broken Window Fallacy. 

Here is Bernanke’s problem: As of June 30, the Fed’s ‘Quantitative Easing Two’ program ended … If nothing else changes, the removal of $80 billion of demand for government debt means lower prices for bonds and consequently higher interest rates…. There are only two ways to avert a painful rise in interest rates in the post-QE2 environment. One would be ... to agree on spending $80 billion less per month. Think: ‘snowball in hell.’ The other option would be if other buyers lined up to replace the Fed. But who could take up so much slack? The Chinese, Russians, and others are already reducing their purchases of U.S. debt, and the Europeans are engulfed in their own sovereign debt crises.

MIT linguistics professor Noam Chomsky recently denounced Hugo Chavez, accusing the Venezuelan strongman of making an “assault” on his nation’s democracy and of cruelty with respect to a female judge he imprisoned for issuing an unwelcome ruling.  The criticism made headlines, as the “renowned scholar” had long given aid and comfort to Ego-and-Mouth Chavez.  In fact, when the leader denounced President Bush in an infamous 2006 U.N. address, it was Chomsky’s book Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance that he waved and used as a prop.  And Chomsky often praises Venezuela’s socialist revolution, most recently saying, “It's hard to judge how successful they [the Venezuelan socialists] are, but if they are successful they would be seeds of a better world.”

The final maneuver, which was designed to provide cover for waffling senators by providing anonymity and preventing a vote on the bill itself, was the culmination of three and a half weeks of maneuvers, deceptions, delays, and a final rush orchestrated by Olafson, apparently in collusion with the Senate Republican leadership.

It takes vigilance to maintain freedom as it was handed to us by the Founding Fathers after the Constitutional Convention.

And vigilance requires a vigilante-a Lone Ranger- until others begin to be emboldened to follow.  He lost friends from the ranks of the Senate and has lived with criticism and isolation.  But he knows the cause is worth it.

Nobody should be forced to pay for anything that benefits other people but not himself. This is axiomatic. Being compelled to support other people is surely "involuntary servitude." If taxation can be justified at all, it must be for the common good, not for the advantage of some at the expense of others.

Otherwise, government becomes an instrument of depredation and extortion - as indeed it now is. People like me can use it to rob people like you, and vice versa. Modern democracy serves organized greed.

"We don't necessarily need to change what we say-we talk about being conservative in terms of limiting government, promoting growth for the economy, and following the Constitutional guidelines set by the Founders.  We just need to get a lot better at doing what we say." 

As a one-term senator, Barack Obama voted against raising the debt limit. In his March 20, 2006, floor speech he said, “The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the US Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies....Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here.’...America deserves better.” That’s when Bush was president.

At The News Of The World, every single employee is clearing out his desk. But, at the Atlantic Public Schools, at the DEATFBI, life goes on. A curious contrast. The striking feature of Big Government, from Athens to Sacramento, is its imperviousness to any kind of accountability – legal, fiscal, electoral, popular. A media mogul, a bank chairman, an oil executive, a corporate-jet depreciation-claimant are easily demonizable: As President Obama cautioned CEOs a couple of years back, “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”

More fool us. Our pitchforks are misdirected.       

The position of the NCAA is ridiculous, It’s stupid, Let’s play turnabout with Al Carlson, GF became a poster child for successful disaster recovery, Grahams Island State Park, Omdahl is nearly apocalyptic, a certain absurdity, first woman superintendent, 2,000 semi-truck trips, The flood could not drown this fund, something hadn’t gone well, What is the irony?, MORE MINOT:, DAKTOIDS

The national news media found Nodaks hard to fathom, ND’s six largest cities experienced major flooding or worse, uncontrolled overflow could be catastrophic, manage the level of Devils Lake now, The beasts are calmly waiting out the flood, The People of ND vs. the Usual Suspects, Kingsbury argued that property taxes should be abolished, underground cables act as lightning rods, book learning in the ND Legislature?, Be careful about retiring in Minnesota, “Stupid is as stupid does”, an Upper-Midwestern German-Russian guide to emotions, I know I’m a talk show host, spectacular crashes in the middle of the night

The tendency by Obama began literally at the very start of his presidency. In quoting what seemed to be an amalgam of the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, our new president excluded 'life' among the inalienables, as well as the 'Creator' that endows that right to life. It was quite a statement for his first presidential statement. What to make of all of this? It’s hard to say, but it’s surely no accident.”

Another recent statement by the president, in which he addressed the inalienable rights put forward in the Declaration of Independence without acknowledging that all men are endowed by their “Creator” with these rights. With Obama’s statements, are we witnessing larger symptoms of a progressive push to reshape and redefine the Declaration’s inalienable rights and, more fundamentally, their very source? Are we observing an attempt to remake these rights in the progressives’ own image, with the Creator out of the process?

Big Government on America’s unprecedented money-no-object scale will always be profoundly wasteful (as on that Williamsburg flight), stupid (as at the TSA) and arbitrary (as in those waivers). But it’s not republican in any sense the Founders would recognize. If (like Obama) you’re a lifetime member of the government class, you can survive it. For the rest, it ought to be a source of shame to today’s Americans that this will be the first generation in US history to bequeath its children the certainty of poorer, meaner lives – if not a broader decay into a fetid swamp divided between a well-connected Latin-American-style elite enjoying their waivers and a vast downwardly mobile morass. On Independence Day 2011, debt-ridden America is now dependent, not on far-off kings but on global bond and currency markets, which fulfill the same role the cliff edge does in a Wile E Coyote cartoon. At some point, Wile looks down and realizes he’s outrun solid ground. You know what happens next.

Lamenting that ‘the English have often forgotten the cross on their flag,’ Chesterton hoped that ‘the crossless flag’ of the United States ‘may yet become a symbol of something; by whose stars we are illumined, and by whose stripes we are healed.’

Americans, ever earnest about what "history" says, can't bear to believe that some of their "great" presidents have been evil men. So it was probably inevitable that the aging historian-courtier Arthur Schlesinger Jr. should observe the end of the twentieth century by naming Franklin D. Roosevelt "Person of the Century."

 Like all those whose lips are still attached to FDR's backside, Professor Schlesinger neglects to mention that FDR's own lips were attached to Joe Stalin's backside. In a near-miracle of distortion, he even manages to give the totally false impression that Roosevelt had something against Stalin.

From the start, Americans have been divided between the visions and values of Founding Fathers Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. That intellectual and political debate continues undiminished today. In fact, during a recent radio interview, the host asked me out of the blue, ‘Whose side are you on, Hamilton’s or Jefferson’s?’” There is no definitive, indisputable interpretation of Hamilton and Jefferson here are a few generalities.