OBAMA'S THREAT TO OUR CHILDREN

One of the most dangerous items on the Obama agenda is government control of children at ever younger ages, separating them from their parents under the guise of "early childhood education". Obama described early childhood education as among his highest priorities, and his nominee for Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, is a strong advocate.

As The New York Times observes, the $10 million Obama has pledged for early childhood education would amount to the largest new Federal initiative for young children since Head Start began in 1965. Richard Nixon, in 1971, wisely vetoed a bill that would have underwritten child care for everyone, arguing, correctly, that the bill would commit the vast moral authority of the national government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over/against the family-centered approach.

"It was the morning after the presidential election, and Matthew Melmed, executive director of Zero to Three, a national organization devoted to early childhood education, could barely contain his exultation.

"Mr. Melmed fired off an e-mail message to his board and staff, reminding them of President-elect Barack Obama’s interest in the care and education of the very young and congratulating Mr. Obama for campaigning on a ‘comprehensive platform for early childhood.’

"Mr. Melmed was not alone in his excitement. After years of what they call backhanded treatment by the Bush administration, whose focus has been on the testing of older children, many advocates are atremble with anticipation over Mr. Obama’s espousal of early childhood education.

"In the presidential debates, he twice described it as among his highest priorities, and his choice for secretary of education, Arne Duncan, the Chicago schools superintendent, is a strong advocate for it.

"And the $10 billion Mr. Obama has pledged for early childhood education would amount to the largest new federal initiative for young children since Head Start began in 1965. Now, Head Start is a $7 billion federal program serving about 900,000 preschoolers.

" ‘People are absolutely ecstatic,’ said Cornelia Grumman, executive director of the First Five Years Fund, an advocacy group. ‘Some people seem to think the Great Society is upon us again.’ …

"It is not as though Mr. Obama is running against the wind. Major philanthropists including Bill Gates; Warren Buffett’s children; and George B. Kaiser, an Oklahoma oil billionaire, are financing education efforts for the very young. And the chairman of the Federal Reserve and many governors have said that expanding early childhood education should be a national priority. …

"Mr. Obama’s platform, which Mr. Duncan helped write, emphasizes extending care to infants and toddlers as well, and it makes helping poor children a priority. It would also provide new federal financing for states rolling out programs to serve young children of all incomT>"Outright opponents are fewer, and certainly less influential than they once were. In 1971, President Richard M. Nixon vetoed a bill that would have underwritten child care for everyone, arguing that the bill ‘would commit the vast moral authority of the national government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over against the family-centered approach.’

"For years after that, conservatives blocked many early childhood initiatives, but resistance has diminished in recent years." Source: The New York Times, 12/17/08, p. 1, Sam Dillon

I first heard Odetta sing in the summer of 1960 when, as President of the Harvard Student Council, I was a leading participant in the National Student Congress held in Minneapolis.

That same year, I gave my permission to allow Communist folk singer Pete Seeger the opportunity to perform on the Harvard campus. This was my first real exposure to folk music – – – which was used by leftists as a means for radicalizing potential allies in the student community.

Here is what The Washington Post (12/4/08, p.B6) had to say on the occasion of Odetta’s death: "Odetta, 77, a forceful singer during the folk music revival and civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s and a self-described ‘musical historian’ who championed the downtrodden by reviving slave, prison and work songs, died Dec. 2 at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. She had heart disease and pulmonary fibrosis.

" ‘She was one of the great singers of late-20th-century America,’ said folk musician and peace activist Pete Seeger, who met Odetta at a folk songfest in 1950. He said in an interview that ‘she sang straight, no tricks,’ meaning her performance showed none of the idiosyncrasies that could detract from the melodies and messages of the words she sang. …

"Seeger and singer Harry Belafonte were among her earliest advocates, and she was said to have inspired Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Joan Baez and Joan Armatrading. …

"A classically trained singer, Odetta adapted her remarkable vocal range -- from soprano to baritone -- to a folk repertoire that included blues, swing, sea chanteys, spirituals and protest songs. She was widely remembered for singing ‘O Freedom’ and two other spirituals as part of what she called the ‘Freedom Trilogy’ at the 1963 March on Washington, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. introduced her.

"She tirelessly performed benefit concerts for the civil rights movement, and in 1963, she sang in front of President John F. Kennedy on the nationally televised civil rights special ‘Dinner With the President.’ Alongside King, she marched for voting rights in 1965 in Selma, Ala.

" ‘In folk music, complex emotions are spoken about with such simplicity that it's the highest form of art to me,’ she told the New York Times in 1965. ‘You can unclutter things.’ …

"Her interest in long-forgotten music from chain gangs, fieldworkers and cowboys -- music she unearthed in many cases from the vaults of the Library of Congress -- earned her a reputation as the ‘First Lady of the Folk Song.’ But she shunned categorization and saw herself foremost as a ‘musical historian,’ she told The Washington Post.

"Accompanied by her wood-bodied guitar ‘Baby,’ Odetta rose to international prominence on television, stage and record with an indomitable presence and voice that flexed from bell-like clarity to nasal grittiness on songs such as ‘Waterboy,’ ‘The House of the Rising Sun,’ ‘He's Got the Whole World in His Hands,’ ‘Somebody Talking 'Bout Jesus’ and ‘Keep On Moving It On.’

"In 1960, New York Times music critic Robert Shelton called Odetta ‘the most glorious new voice in American folk music.’ But she was already a veteran. She had played coffeehouses and Carnegie Hall, as well as the Newport Folk Festival, and appeared to poignant effect on TV shows with Belafonte and poet Langston Hughes. …

"After graduating from high school, Odetta followed her mother into work as a domestic worker. She also studied music in night classes at Los Angeles City College and found choral work in the West Coast touring company of the musical ‘Finian's Rainbow.’

"The show took her to San Francisco in 1949, and it was there that she was exposed to the folk music scene. …

"While maintaining a prolific career in concerts and festivals, Odetta starred in a stage production about the life of blues singer Bessie Smith and periodically took supporting roles onscreen, including a dramatic part as a servant who kills a child in ‘Sanctuary’ (1961), a film based on a William Faulkner novel. She also played a supporting part in the 1974 TV movie ‘The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman’ starring Cicely Tyson.

"Her late-career albums were devoted to jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald (‘To Ella,’ 1998) and blues guitarist and singer Leadbelly (‘Looking for a Home,’ 2001). She earned a Grammy Award nomination for ‘Blues Everywhere I Go,’ a 1999 release honoring blueswomen of the 1920s and 1930s, and a second nomination for ‘Gonna Let it Shine’ (2005), a live album of Christmas spirituals.

"In 1999, she won the National Endowment for the Arts' National Medal of Arts.

Vera Glaser tried to get me to date her daughter, and shared some of her personal secrets with me. Now she’s dead.

"Vera Glaser thought the questions asked by her fellow reporters at President Nixon's February 1969 news conference were entirely too easy. Her colleagues asked about international affairs, cigarette advertising on television, school desegregation and an oil spill off the California coast.

" ‘I had about seven questions in mind that he could be asked,’ the veteran journalist told a Penn State oral history project. ‘When he recognized me, I had to decide quickly what I was going to ask him.’

"She noted that of his 200 presidential appointments at that point, only three had gone to women. ‘Can we expect some more equitable recognition of women's abilities or are we going to remain the lost sex?’ she asked.

"Some of her colleagues chuckled, she noticed, and Nixon smiled and asked teasingly if she would like to come into the administration. ‘But he must have realized, "I'm on television with 50 million people watching," and he turned quite serious,’ Ms. Glaser said.

" ‘Very seriously, I did not know that only three had gone to women, and I shall see that we correct that imbalance very promptly,’ he said, according to a transcript of the conference.

"Catharine East, the Labor Department researcher whose work on women's employment inspired the National Organization for Women, saw the news conference and was delighted with Ms. Glaser's question.

" ‘I thought, "Here's a woman after my own heart," ’ she told The Washington Post in 1983. East, who died in 1996, noted that the women's movement was not receiving any serious news coverage, and most of what was written was patronizing and the issues trivialized.

"So East sent Ms. Glaser a letter. ‘I gather from the tone of your question, you might be interested in a few statistics,’ the researcher said. From that start, Ms. Glaser wrote her definitive work, a five-part syndicated newspaper series about discrimination against women in employment and government policy.

"Ms. Glaser, 92, Washington bureau chief for the former North American Newspaper Alliance syndicate of 90 newspapers, and national correspondent and syndicated columnist for the old Knight Ridder newspaper chain, died Nov. 26 at Brighton Gardens at Friendship Heights in Chevy Chase. She had Parkinson's disease.

"As a result of her question to Nixon, the first systematic program to recruit women into federal executive positions was set up.

" ‘She made a significant difference in the coverage of the women's liberation movement,’ said Kimberly Wilmot Voss, a journalism historian at the University of Central Florida. Women like her ‘worked behind the scenes. Their names might not be well known, but they laid the groundwork, and she was on the forefront of writing about the women's movement.’

"Ms. Glaser's daughter agreed. ‘She felt she was a voice for women in journalism when it was an uphill fight,’ said the Rev. Carol Barriger of Redwood City, Calif. Survivors also include three grandchildren and a great-grandson.

"Ms. Glaser served on a couple of presidential commissions having to do with women and the White House Fellows. She and Malvina Stephenson shared the ‘Offbeat Washington’ column for five years and broke several important stories.

"In June 1969, she quoted FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover calling columnist Carl Rowan ‘racist’ for raising objections to FBI wiretaps of political activists. In 1970, she and Stephenson wrote about Clark Mollenhoff, a special counsel to the White House, collecting the names of 250 State Department employees who criticized Nixon's decision to expand the Vietnam War into Cambodia.

"She was a past president of the Washington Press Club, formerly the Women's National Press Club, which was started in response to the prohibition against women in the National Press Club. In 1963, after Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev insisted during a visit to Washington that female as well as male correspondents be permitted to cover him, she wrote a pointed story about the event.

" ‘Female writers in Washington had a communist dictator to thank for temporarily lifting them from their second-class status,’ she wrote.

"Born in St. Louis, Ms. Glaser became aware of gender discrimination when she graduated first in her high school class during the Depression. That typically meant a scholarship to the local Washington University, but a young man got it. Decades later, she recalled, that snub and later workplace discrimination turned her into ‘a fighting feminist.’

"In 1939, she married Herbert R. Glaser, who died in 1992. They moved to Washington and she began publishing freelance pieces in magazines until joining the old Washington Times Herald in 1944. She worked for a series of news outlets, as well as on the staffs of Sen. Charles Potter (R-Mich.), Sen. Kenneth Keating (R-N.Y.) and the women's division of the Republican National Committee.

"During the 1960s and 1970s, she was with her newspaper syndicate and Knight Ridder, and in the 1980s worked at Washingtonian magazine. In the 1990s, she was a correspondent for Maturity News Service. Ms. Glaser also was a member of the Cosmos Club and the International Women's Media Foundation.

"In the past few years, she lost much of her sight, but friends, who described her as a warm woman with a ready smile, said she still enjoyed having front-page headlines and editorials read to her." Source: The Washington Post, 12/7/08, p. C7, Patricia Sullivan

The new Capitol Visitors Center is a disgrace, projecting, as it does, unauthorized changes in the text and meaning of the Constitution of the United States.

"Matthew Spalding, director of the Center for American Studies at the Heritage Foundation, says the visitor center selectively cuts passages from the Constitution, weighing in on a long-running debate about the scope and limits of federal power by taking the liberal side of that debate, envisioning broad congressional powers that the Founding Fathers never intended.

" ‘I started looking at this stuff, and it’s just patently absurd,’ he said. ‘The dominant message when you walk [through] the doors in this exhibit you’re hit with is the role of Congress is to fulfill our greatest aspirations. So the message you’re teaching these millions of visitors each year is the Constitution really isn’t what we thought it was; it’s the open-ended thing that’s up to Congress to decide what it means.’

"The top leaders from each party in the House and Senate are expected to host an opening ceremony Tuesday morning for the new center.

"The center cost twice its original budget and is four years late in opening, and as the delays and cost overruns have piled up, so has criticism. Some lawmakers have objected to what they say is left out of the exhibits. Sen. Jim DeMint, South Carolina Republican, fought to have the Pledge of Allegiance and the national motto, ‘In God We Trust,’ added to the displays.

"Mr. Spalding said what was put into the displays is just as problematic as what was left out.

"He singled out the display on ‘Knowledge,’ which he said selectively cuts the powers granted to Congress by Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, reducing the full explanation – ‘To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries’ – to an expansive grant: ‘The Congress shall have Power To … promote … useful Arts.’

"The display says that grant of powers is the basis under which Congress founded the Library of Congress, ‘promoted public education, supported the arts and sciences, and funded extensive research.’

"In addition to knowledge, the other aspirations the displays say Congress is charged with helping fulfill are unity, freedom, defense, exploration and the general welfare.

" ‘In the seeds of how they’re dealing with the Constitution, what they’re really telling everybody, the message they’re really telling everybody, is Congress is unlimited, and it’s Congress that will define our highest ideals and aspirations,’ Mr. Spalding said. ‘When you think about that, that’s a radical message.’ …

"Donald A. Ritchie, the Senate’s associate historian, said the script has been vetted by the leadership of both parties in both the House and Senate and revised repeatedly. …

"Mr. Ritchie said the Library of Congress requested that a section on knowledge be included, and he said even though the library isn’t mentioned in the Constitution, more than 200 years of operation have shown it is fundamental to Congress’ operation." Source: Stephen Dinan, The Washington Times, 12/2/08, B1, B4

In 1968, I was campaign manager for Pennsylvania Congressman Dick Schweiker in a successful campaign to unseat Left-wing Democrat U.S. Senator Joe Clark. Our campaign headquarters was in Harrisburg, and, on a typical day, I would take a long lunchtime walk down Harrisburg’s Main Street to reflect on our strategy and its implementation.

On a particular day I stopped in front of a bookstore and gazed at some very tempting volumes displayed in the window. Then, a very tall man stepped outside the bookstore, and beckoned me inside.

He said, "Young man" (I was then 27 years of age), "ten years from now you will be the same person you are today, except for the people you meet and the books you read. Here are some books you ought to read." He then presented me with about twenty books. I said, "I have a young family and can’t afford to pay for these." He said: "They are my gift to you."

I gratefully accepted the books, and read every one of them. They were well worth my time.

Some years later, when my youngest son, Sam, was twelve years old, we observed that the donor of those books, Charles "Tremendous" Jones, was the featured speaker at a meeting of the Christian Businessmen’s Association in Washington, D.C.

Sam and I went to the meeting, expectantly, because I was tremendously impressed with the man known as Charles "Tremendous" Jones. At the close of the meeting, I went to the front of the hall and introduced myself, and Mr. Jones said, "Howard, of course I know who you are. I’ve been following your career, and I’m grateful for all that you do. Here is my list of the 100 most important books I’ve ever read. Please give me your list." I subsequently provided such a list to Mr. Jones.

Recently, Charles "Tremendous" Jones went to his Heavenly reward, following a very successful career in the life insurance business and as president of Executive Books/Life Management Services in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.

Here is some of the advice that he gave to his grandson, Sammy.

"Remember:
Learn to laugh at yourself.
Learn to help others laugh.
Learn to laugh when you are up.
Learn to laugh when you are down.
Learn to laugh."

Charles "Tremendous" Jones included in every speech the inspiring phrase "Life is tremendous". He was a great evangelist and a great man.