I was reading the text of Obama’s speech to students today and here’s what I found: it was focused basically on hard work and doing your homework (no political or scary stuff like the right-wingers said), but I noted some peculiar parts, which I think you guys will like:
That’s no excuse for talking back to your teacher, or cutting class, or dropping out of school.
You will obey, obey, obey…
If you get a bad grade, that doesn’t mean you’re stupid, it just means you need to spend more time studying.
I had quite a laugh. If you guys see anything else that’s funny or plain weird, post it on the comments.
For any president to address kids in school is inappropriate unless there’s an incredibly devastating national reason
What’s so inappropriate about it? Is it any more inappropriate than forcing all the kids into the gym to listen to a politician come and talk like they did when I was in school and at another school when I taught there?
#60–Iowa==you perfectly demonstrate my point. Now, do yourself a favor: “If you disagree==print out a statement of hers and actually parse it.” === I CHALLENGE YOU TO DO THIS.
I think you’ll wind up like shittybc with a corncob up your ass.
#61
That the kids have no choice but to listen makes it inappropriate. That you had politicians come to your school and talk is also inappropriate. If they were campaigning it would be illegal.
If you put a red cover on his speech and change the wording, he’s in China, and a green cover, and he’s in Libya. This is what totalitarian societies do. They grab the children in the schools who don’t have any choice. I’m not saying this is exactly what Obama is doing, but it’s close enough to make it creepy. The teacher can’t say you know what? I don’t want to do this, or a child can’t say I don’t want to read this, because it’s part of a mandated curriculum.
Remember, this is at a time when his polls are crashing, so you get the impression that last week, it was to invoke God and say that people who were against health care were not properly religious, and now it’s let’s go over the heads of everybody straight to the children and have them push my agenda.
It amazes me that the left doesn’t get this, and it will be their undoing. You know, with this administration, we saw this in the campaign with the Latinate, Vero Possumus; yes we can in place of e pluribus unum; from many one, on the “presidential seal”, and this is our moment that the seas will stop rising, the planet still start cooling. There was this whole narcissistic, messianic sense of himself. And unless you are a true believer in Obama, it’s kind of, no…it is just creepy.
#63–shittybc==you are a retard. There is NOTHING in law, morality, common practice, or common sense that supports the notion that politicians from time to time should not make speeches in schools. Bush and Regan both did it.
Kiddies being forced to attend schools is part of a cogent argument but not on the subject you raise. Can you even guess when it is relevant? If you could, I doubt you would be posting now.
Quit trolling for the Glenn Beck crowd. Alfie (((((HEY ALFIE!!!!!!!!))) appears to be sleeping in this morning.
Wingnut Dolt.
Well, just got thru Obama’s speech.
I think our kiddies would do well to write a letter to the President telling him how they plan to help, what they are going to do with their lives.
Who could be against this except those parents who don’t want their kiddies to ever amount to much?
Shitty?
I think I saw on one blog that the entire nation’s school kids are now liberal zombies.
Are you remaining Republicans embarrassed enough yet?
First off #65 thank you for working the leftist playbook. You morph the name of those you disagree with then you start in with the ad hominem stuff (hint it means against the person) because you know you can’t make a cogent point. It’s sad that you really aren’t as bright as you claim to be.
This is what people are now realizing about the Obama movement and those like you who voted for him. It is full of totalitarian-esque, non-thinking angry people like you and Olberman. The irony is you claim to be tolerant, and a double irony that you open the door for nut cases like Beck to thrive.
It’s true that both President’s Reagan and the first President Bush gave speeches to the nation’s schoolchildren. But there is no evidence to suggest that either man used the Dept. of Education to issue guidelines for teaching plans to accompany the speech in the way
Obama has. That’s the problem, you don’t seem to see the difference, OK fine.
PreK-6 Menu of Classroom Activities:
President Obama’s Address to Students
Across America
Produced by Teaching Ambassador Fellows, U.S. Department of Education
Before the Speech:
Teachers can build background knowledge about the President of the United States and his speech by reading books about presidents and Barack Obama and motivate students by asking the following questions.
…
Why is it important that we listen to the President and other elected officials, like the mayor, senators, members of congress, or the governor? Why is what they say important?
During the Speech:
As the President speaks, teachers can ask students to write down key ideas or phrases that are important or personally meaningful. Students could use a note-taking graphic organizer such as a Cluster Web, or students could record their thoughts on sticky notes. Younger children can draw pictures and write as appropriate. As students listen to the speech, they could think about the following: What is the President trying to tell me? What is the President asking me to do? What new ideas and actions is the President challenging me to think about?
…
Extension of the Speech: Teachers can extend learning by having students:
Write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president. These would be collected and redistributed at an appropriate later date by the teacher to make students accountable to their goals.
#67–shittybc==you are a retard.
Since you fail to address the issues, I assume you agree there is NOTHING inappropriate legal or otherwise of the President addressing the kiddies.
You also fail to identify ANYTHING that is inappropriate with the lesson plan that got removed because of idiot partisans like yourself.
Get enough retards like you together, and you have a political party==the repuglicans.
I guess you’ll never recognize the damage you do to your kiddies. The pernicious discrimination of low expectations.
Why do you hate your kiddies? Our kiddies will never have the material life that we had but their intellectual life could be as full and easily more full than our own, especially YOUR’s shitty, but not when the kiddies are denied access to hope and self actualization.
Shitty==YOU have obviously failed. Don’t pass that legacy on to your kiddies. Let Obamagod be their role model if you refuse that obligation.
Yea, verily.
Ok this should be good all my peers whose parents had Bush/Cheney bumper stickers on their Suburbans had to stay home and their moms and dads were in the Principal’s face, This should be good… Obama: Hello everyone – how’s everybody doing today? I’m here with students at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia. And we’ve got students tuning in from all across America, kindergarten through twelfth grazzzz zZzzz z zzzZZzz nts who sat where you sit 250 years agZZzzzzz less you, and God bless America.–!!?¿ Huh WHAT we have to write a report on this thing good thing I tivo’ed it. I’ll paraphrase it tonight and add some I think this I think that stuff, damn wish my parents were assholes and I could have stayed home too.
Republicans not only denounced Obama’s speech — they also ordered the General Accounting Office to investigate its production and later summoned top Obama administration officials to Capitol Hill for an extensive hearing on the issue. …
The day after Obama spoke, the Washington Post published a front-page story suggesting the speech was carefully staged for the president’s political benefit. “The White House turned a Northwest Washington junior high classroom into a television studio and its students into props,” the Post reported.
With the Post article in hand, Republicans pounced. “The Department of Education should not be producing paid political advertising for the president, it should be helping us to produce smarter students,” said John Boehner Gephardt, the House Minority Leader. “And the president should be doing more about education than saying, ‘Lights, camera, action.’”
Republicans did not stop with words. The chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, ordered the General Accounting Office to investigate the cost and legality of Obama’s appearance. On October 17, 1991, he summoned Education Secretary Arne Duncan and other top Bush administration officials to testify at a hearing devoted to the speech.
Oh wait this is what happened when George Bush gave the speech, with Democrats doing all this, and the liberal media piling on.
#70–Mike==very clever and illustrative. Well done.
I ignored shitty’s skipping Bushieboys goat speech to the kiddies. If he wanted to ignore it, or was ignorant of its relevance, I wouldn’t quibble knowing he wanted to muck around in the ad hominem.
But you recount it well. Pleasure to read.
Does anybody else notice that the bits and pieces Smittybc posted at #67 from the suggested lesson plan seem to be suggestions rather than dictates. I don’t see a lot of “shalls” or “musts” but a lot of “cans” or “coulds”. Doesn’t seem to be the language of a dictatorship at all. Seems to be a lot of free will and choice in this suggested lesson plan.
It was much ado about nothing and the more the right cries wolf the more and more the intelligent masses will ignore their bleating.
#71
Why don’t you show me Bush’s My Pet Goat lesson plan that Bush requested of the Department of Education to produce? Maybe because you can’t. But you still don’t understand the objection is in how the president is attempting to force kids to study his speech.
You don’t think there’s a problem when the Department of Education puts together a lesson plan to be used with the speech, with its suggestions that students discuss such questions as “What do you think the President wants us to do?” and “Are we able to do what President Obama is asking of us?” and “Write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president.” I understand that. You are a totalitarian. You can’t see the problem there.
The basic problem with you and the left in general is that you have to enforce your doctrine maximally. Your arguments never work so you have to resort to brainwash and attempt social derision, by attacking the person and attempting to publicly humiliate. There’s nothing here or in your comments that Saul Alinsky wouldn’t be perfectly comfortable with. It’s what you do, it’s who you are. The more I point out your totalitarian tendencies the angrier you get. This is expected.
#73–shitty==hah, hah. Normally I call people names because it strikes my funny bone. In your case, it is truly a summation of your capabilities/personality.
Just how retarded can you be and still type a coherent sentence? Then there is Alfie. Yes, it does happen regularly.
Show the world you aren’t a raving nutbag and post anything you think Obama said that all good people/kiddies should not agree with and why our good kiddies shouldn’t spend some time thinking about what was said and how they could implement in their own lives what Obama said.
We’ll wait. Like Iowa Boy, your compliant survives ONLY IN A VACUUM. Try to actually parse what was said, and you’ve got cornbob up your butt and in your ears. Sadly, in your case: sideways.
So go ahead========WHAT WAS IN OBAMA’S SPEECH WAS ANYTHING BUT ADMIRABLE????
We’ll wait and your failure to respond will be our recognition that even you see how retarded you are.
I remember as a child we had photos of the President’s up next to the flag we would pledge allegiance to every morning, even when it was Nixon and he was on his way out the school still had us show him the respect do to the office. Do these crazy parents think this too is some sort of subversive hero/messiah worship/indoctrination to even have the President of United States portrait up next to the flag?
“Not in our school I’ll not have my boy Pledging Allegiance to the Flag if that man is the decider! Pack your bag boy we are moving to …? damn all those other countries have a f#cken public option.. off the grid shack in Montana here we come gonna need more ammo”
#70 good one Mike this kind of crazy cuts both ways and has been for probably centuries but some how our country survives.
#54 Careful! There are people here real sensitive to those words.
#58 That broad is plain nuts.
#74
First let me sincerely apologize to the totalitarians for calling you a totalitarian. No matter how misguided at least Bill Ayres and Alinsky is/was bright.
I’m guessing you are in 6th grade maybe 5th, and as you grow up you will learn name calling is childish and silly and doesn’t help you, and you will learn (hopefully) how to read with comprehension, it’s called being an adult. I know the public schools don’t do a good job with this (I’ve graded enough undergrad papers to see), but if you are lucky you will get the very minimum, which is what our schools are set up to do. It’s sad that this is your plight but it’s true.
The point stands that giving a speech along with a lesson plan for kids to study is inappropriate. Not illegal, just inappropriate, and smacks of totalitarian dictatorships (since I have to spell everything out for you, I’m not calling him a dictator, just that it smacks of dictatorship to ask little kids to help him with his goals for “the nation”). I don’t think it’s nitpicking to say that using the power of the Department of Education to make Obama and his wishes a topic for study is inappropriate. As far as the speech itself, it’s pablum delivered interestingly, as are many of his speeches. This doesn’t change the fact that it was inappropriate.
You don’t understand the idea, and honestly I really don’t expect that much from you anyway, but one day you will become an adult and then maybe we can try again.
Man, that “You will obey, obey, obey” comment was a massive stretch.
Ask yourself, seriously, how massive of a mental stretch do you need to put yourself through to “have quite a laugh?”
About the only thing I find ironically laughable in this whole idea is that some parents have enough of a jerky bent to flame out on this idea in the first place.
I think you missed entirely the notion that unclefart.squarespace.com held up as a main theme on this issue: The parental objections were thinly veiled residual racism. Were yours?
Sorry… but the whole point of the conservative uproar is that we did not know what he was going to say, and no reason to believe it would not be a political stunt.
What we suspected was a political stunt. And what we were told were the questions the kids would be asked afterward (don’t forget, they were scrapped after the uproar, and for good reason). And what we have known for some time is that public teachers are highly sympathetic to liberal politics.
Is is so hard to admit that this was a bad mix for a truly free-thinking society… a society where not everyone is a liberal (oh, please forgive us!)?
It does no good to say (with perfect hindsight) that we overreacted to a speech that had not happened yet.
#77–shitty==you are a silly person.
#79–mutt==”you had no reason” FULL STOP.
Thanks for demonstrating the point boys.