Todd's Mischief Blog

I've been listening to far too much coverage of the 8/28 Restoring Honor Rally, and do you know what I keep hearing? I keep hearing about race. Race, race, race! Full article after the jump »

No surprise, HuffPo has a lot of MB devoted to trashing the Restoring Honor Rally on their site, much of which read as though they had actually been written before the rally. There are so many articles, I won't bother linking to any but my favorite, a photo gallery entitled Glenn Beck's Restoring Honor Rally: The Most Ridiculous Messages . Unfortunately, this morning the article boasted 30 photos, but as of right now, that number has been culled to 20. I wish I'd thought to grab them all, just to show how non-ridiculous many of them were. For example, one missing photo depicts a pleasant, likely octogenarian lady, wearing a stars and stripes scarf and smiling for the camera. Totally ridiculous, right? Even though the folks at HuffPo have culled their selection to the most "ridiculous" I don't think they even hold a candle to The Best Anti-Glenn Beck Signs At The 'Restoring Honor' Rally . Anyway, I perused and participated in the flood of comments accom...

David Frum wants to make the case on why conservatives ought not to refer to Obama as a socialist. Though he seems to define socialism in much the same way as others using it, he doesn’t seem to know who its practitioners are. His fear seems to be of muddying the political waters when really it ought to be of clearing them. He claims conservatives are railing against the wrong thing, but his case is weak because it stands on a nonexistent comparison. Full article after the jump » Read the Frum Forum article »

In the last post I pointed out that, technically, the government does not accredit schools; accrediting agencies like the Higher Learning Commission exist as private entities. Indeed, Ed.gov pointedly defines accreditation thus: "Accreditation in the United States is a voluntary, nongovernmental process, in which an institution and its programs are evaluated against standards for measuring quality." But the agencies exist in a highly political atmosphere where the Secretary of Education determines which agencies are recognized. All I can learn about the process is that their accreditation standards are reviewed by the U.S. Department of Education and must meet certain criteria. Accreditation by a recognized agency is part of the requirements for institutions to participate in federal student aid programs. Further, Ed.gov asserts that "Many employers in the United States only recognize degrees earned from institutions accredited by an accrediting agency recognized by the ...

Some additional thoughts: George Washington in his farewell address had many strong words to say about parties. He called their rivalries despotism and described in 1796 our present situation as a result of the party system. I would love to see the disintegration of the party system. The alternative is their dismantling, and that would come along with the worst possible outcome for our present experiment in liberty. I believe we are a long way from that outcome. However, we are at least as distant from my preceding hope. There is at least one political party that has put its own interests above those of the nation. Personally, I think the other one simply has no aim, currently. Before political factions can be safely done away with, conservatives need to put this county back on its Constitutional foundation. To do that, we gain control of the Republican Party and use it as a tool to fix what needs fixing. Think of the Republican Party as a crowbar to dislodge the liberal Democrat...

Ronald Reagan famously quipped on more than one occasion, "I didn't leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me." Today, many conservatives feel the same way about the Republican Party. While they may be right in some respects, their timing couldn’t be more wrong. Just as many registered Republicans are getting fed-up with their party for drifting away from conservative principles, many Democrats are waking up to the realization that they, too, have been left by their party; in some cases, left long ago. Add to that the number of so-called moderates who vote left on a number of issues, but still lean right on the fundamentals, and we are witnessing a conservative shift in the American voting population. But don’t take my word for it: on October 26, 2009, Gallup reported that 40% of Americans consider themselves conservative while 37% consider themselves as moderates. Now they are all looking for a politically conservative place to call home. So, where will t...