So Republicans are more knowledgeable than Democrats,
contrary to what many would like to believe.
According to whom? None
other than the Pew Research Center, a left-of-center organization. Moreover,
Pew’s latest survey only reaffirms previous surveys demonstrating the same
result.
In fact, the results weren’t even close.
In a scientific
survey of 1,168 adults conducted during September and October of last year,
respondents were asked not only multiple-choice questions, but also queries
using maps, photographs and symbols. Among other subjects, participants
identified international leaders, cabinet members, Supreme Court justices,
nations on a world map, the current unemployment and poverty rates and war
casualty totals.
In a 2010 Pew survey, Republicans outperformed
Democrats on 10 of 12 questions, with one tie and Democrats outperforming
Republicans on just 1 of the 12. In the latest survey, however, Republicans
outperformed Democrats on every single one of 19 questions.
Amusingly,
the Pew report attempted to soften the stark partisan knowledge disparity:
“Republicans generally outperformed Democrats on the current quiz. On 13
of the 19 questions, Republicans score significantly higher than Democrats and
there are no questions on which Democrats did better than Republicans. In past
knowledge quizzes, partisan differences have been more muted, though Republicans
often have scored somewhat higher than Democrats.”
“Generally
outperformed?” “Somewhat higher?” That’s a curiously charitable way to describe
the surveys, which went from previous blowouts to a complete shutout in the
latest edition.
Those Pew results are confirmed by some surprising other
sources. According to a New York Times headline dated April 14, 2010, “Poll
Finds Tea Party Backers Wealthier and More Educated.” Shattering widespread
myths, that survey revealed that Tea Party supporters were more likely to
possess a college degree than their counterparts (23% to 15%), and also more
likely to have completed post-graduate studies (14% to 10%). Tea Partiers were
also more likely to have completed “some college” by a 33% to 28% margin, and
substantially less likely to have not completed high school than non-supporters
(3% versus 12%), or to possess only a high school degree (26% versus 35%).
Those results will probably come as a rude awakening to supporters of
Barack Obama, but it won’t to anyone paying attention. As just the latest
example, consider the cheap laugh line that Obama keeps repeating on his current
reelection tour thinly disguised as an energy policy apologia. As gasoline
prices continue to rise due in part to his agenda, Obama likens anyone critical
of his failed energy decisions to a modern-day “Flat Earth Society” in speech
after speech.
The problem for Obama is that his attempted slur betrays
historical illiteracy, as summarized nicely by conservative blogger Clayton
Cramer:
“Now, if you attended high school, or college, you would know
(or should know) that there was no educated European who thought the Earth was
flat. None. The dispute that made it hard for Columbus to get funding was that
he insisted the Earth was 18,000 miles in circumference, so the Indies were a
plausible voyage west from Spain. The experts who told the various governments
of Europe that Columbus wasn’t going to be successful thought the Earth was
closer to 25,000 miles around – and sailing west to the Indies was going to be a
failure. Had there not been the Americas in the way, Columbus and crew would
have died of thirst.”
On his current tour, Obama also inaccurately
maligned former President Rutherford B. Hayes as disdainful of the telephone. As
Mona Charen also noted this week, Obama also “told us that America invented the
automobile and that John F. Kennedy had met with Nikita Kruschev when we were on
the brink of nuclear war,” when in fact the automobile was invented in Germany
and Kennedy actually met Kruschev one year prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis.
This is the same President who referred to “57 states,” misstated the
Citizens United decision in an address to the nation, pronounced Navy “corpsman”
as “corpse-man” and blatantly misrepresented that Japanese automobiles now
average 45 miles per gallon to our 27.5 standard.
Meanwhile, gas prices
continue to break records while the Trash-Talker-in-Chief trots out fraudulent
“flat earth” and “Rutherford B. Hayes” rhetoric.
None of this disparages
anyone of any educational pedigree. It does, however, once again debunk the
notion among preening liberals that they collectively maintain a knowledge or
educational superiority.
It was Macnee's fault Diana got away.From her Bio- Dispirited, she left the series after 51 episodes. Patrick regrets not trying to persuade her to stay. “Sometime later, she said to me, ‘Pat. If only you had been stronger with me, more forceful, and said, “No! You’ve got to stay!”… we would have gone on and done another two years together… and it would have been great!
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Antique Fan Collectors Association in Sarasota, FL is a private company categorized under Antique Dealers. Our records show it was established in 2007 and incorporated in Florida. Register for free to see additional information such as annual revenue and employment figures.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fBnGGv1xMMJan 9, 2010 - 5 min - Uploaded by TheCoolmaster100
Here is a video showing all my fans in my collection in my room. Also any fans you see in ... I think they ...
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Beige Lakewood P-223 box fan ... I don't plan on starting a fan collection, but this will make an excellent ...
I put the blame where the blame is due. You call it angst. I call it righteous indignation. I believe the man who with the highest "vibrational energy" to ever walk this earth would most certainly agree with the position that I have taken and my admonishment of these practices and the people who promote them. You call it rhetoric. I call it truth. That same man would appreciate my willingness to speak it. I wish you well in your attempts to raise your spiritual level, everyone should.
Did it ever occur to you that perhaps the reason I have been targeted relates to my "vibrational energy," and that when people direct electromagnetic frequencies and chemical contamination into my space to disrupt my natural electrical and biological rhythms it might have an effect on my "vibrational energy?" I think that I have done a pretty good job maintaining my vibrational energy despite the assassination attempt. These things can be stopped in the material world, if one tries.
Yes, it is defeatism to suggest that the evils that exist on this planet can only be fought by focusing on our "vibrational energy." Is leaving crafty putdowns designed to blame the victim and disrupt their vibrational energy a good "soul vibration?" While I exist in this material world, I am going to take steps in that world to change it, and not resort to the thinking that the way that other people behave is somehow my fault because I haven't done enough to ignore it and focus my vibrations.
For years, 49-year-old Michael Brutsch hid behind the online screen name
"Violentacrez," creating hundreds of subforums on the user-generated website,
such as "Rapebait," "Incest," "Pics of Dead Kids," "Choke a Bitch," and "Rape
Jokes." "Violentacrez" has been banned from the site several times, although
Brutsch still maintains a separate account.
By KEVIN CIRILLI | 10/18/12 1:06 PM EDT
An 80-year-old woman was arrested in Hebron, Conn., after she tore down
posters that depicted President Barack Obama with a Hitler mustache and called
for Obama’s impeachment.
Police charged Nancy Lack with sixth-degree larceny and breach of peace for
removing the posters, and she could get three months in jail if convicted, NBC
Connecticut reported.
The posters state, “Impeach him fast and furiously,” and are backed by
LaRouchePAC, which supports Lyndon LaRouche for president.
Lack said LaRouchePAC members tried to stop her from removing the posters and
then got her license plate number as she drove away with them.
“I guess I deserved it. I stole the posters,” Lack told NBC Connecticut. “My
generation went through the Second World War, and Nazism is about the worst
there can be.”
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1012/82585.html#ixzz29kO9QsmD
Go sell crazy somewhere else. We're all
full up here. GE antique fans worth millions of dollars because they be old as hell..fools pay hundreds of dollars for old junk fans... Dope comes to mind.
http://www.amctv.com/thewalkingdead4dish/Poor guys that have Dish Network don't have to miss the
season premier tonite..... I have had dish for years but getting ready to change. they
keep dropping channels and giving you back junk in exchange. They are now saying
we are in danger of loosing local channels over a dispute of a few pennies a
year.Dish is the most worthless tv provider I could imagine. I
wonder if they're not secretly controlled by DirecTV operatives.
It's official in Florida: Blacks can't be held to same
standards Thomas Lifson
The deep internal contradictions of liberal
race dogma have reached their logical, horrifying conclusion at the hands of the
Florida State Board of Education. CBS Tampa reports:
The Florida State
Board of Education passed a plan that sets goals for students in math and
reading based upon their race.
On Tuesday, the board passed a revised
strategic plan that says that by 2018, it wants 90 percent of Asian students, 88
percent of white students, 81 percent of Hispanics and 74 percent of black
students to be reading at or above grade level. For math, the goals are 92
percent of Asian kids to be proficient, whites at 86 percent, Hispanics at 80
percent and blacks at 74 percent. It also measures by other groupings, such as
poverty and disabilities, reported the Palm Beach Post.
The message sent
to young people is clear: blacks, Hispanics, and whites simply cannot be
expected to perform at the level of Asians. There is a racial hierarchy of
acceptable achievement proclaimed an official government body. Not since the
days of segregation has a state officially proclaimed such a pernicious racial
doctrine. Read More @ http://tiny.cc/qxc6lw
PRICHARD,
Ala. — This struggling small city on the outskirts of Mobile was warned for
years that if it did nothing, its pension fund would run out of money by 2009.
Right on schedule, its fund ran dry.
Then Prichard did something that
pension experts say they have never seen before: it stopped sending monthly
pension checks to its 150 retired workers, breaking a state law requiring it to
pay its promised retirement benefits in full.
Since then, Nettie Banks,
68, a retired Prichard police and fire dispatcher, has filed for bankruptcy.
Alfred Arnold, a 66-year-old retired fire captain, has gone back to work as a
shopping mall security guard to try to keep his house. Eddie Ragland, 59, a
retired police captain, accepted help from colleagues, bake sales and collection
jars after he was shot by a robber, leaving him badly wounded and unable to get
to his new job as a police officer at the regional airport.
Far worse was
the retired fire marshal who died in June. Like many of the others, he was too
young to collect Social Security. “When they found him, he had no electricity
and no running water in his house,” said David Anders, 58, a retired district
fire chief. “He was a proud enough man that he wouldn’t accept help.”
The
situation in Prichard is extremely unusual — the city has sought bankruptcy
protection twice — but it proves that the unthinkable can, in fact, sometimes
happen. And it stands as a warning to cities like Philadelphia and states like
Illinois, whose pension funds are under great strain: if nothing changes, the
money eventually does run out, and when that happens, misery and turmoil
follow.
It is not just the pensioners who suffer when a pension fund runs
dry. If a city tried to follow the law and pay its pensioners with money from
its annual operating budget, it would probably have to adopt large tax
increases, or make huge service cuts, to come up with the money.
Current
city workers could find themselves paying into a pension plan that will not be
there for their own retirements. In Prichard, some older workers have delayed
retiring, since they cannot afford to give up their paychecks if no pension
checks will follow.
So the declining, little-known city of Prichard is
now attracting the attention of bankruptcy lawyers, labor leaders, municipal
credit analysts and local officials from across the country. They want to see if
the situation in Prichard, like the continuing bankruptcy of Vallejo, Calif.,
ultimately creates a legal precedent on whether distressed cities can legally
cut or reduce their pensions, and if so, how.
“Prichard is the future,”
said Michael Aguirre, the former San Diego city attorney, who has called for San
Diego to declare bankruptcy and restructure its own outsize pension obligations.
“We’re all on the same conveyor belt. Prichard is just a little further down the
road.”
Many cities and states are struggling to keep their pension plans
adequately funded, with varying success. New York City plans to put $8.3 billion
into its pension fund next year, twice what it paid five years ago. Maryland is
considering a proposal to raise the retirement age to 62 for all public workers
with fewer than five years of service.
Illinois keeps borrowing money to
invest in its pension funds, gambling that the funds’ investments will earn
enough to pay back the debt with interest. New Jersey simply decided not to pay
the $3.1 billion that was due its pension plan this year.
Colorado,
Minnesota and South Dakota have all taken the unusual step of reducing the
benefits they pay their current retirees by cutting cost-of-living increases;
retirees in all three states are suing.
No state or city wants to wind up
like Prichard.
Driving down Wilson Avenue here — a bleak stretch of
shuttered storefronts, with pawn shops and beauty parlors that operate behind
barred windows and signs warning of guard dogs — it is hard to see vestiges of
the Prichard that was a boom town until the 1960s. The city once had thriving
department stores, two theaters and even a zoo. “You couldn’t find a place to
park in that city,” recalled Kenneth G. Turner, a retired paramedic whose
grandfather pushed for the city’s incorporation in 1925.
The city’s rapid
decline began in the 1970s. The growth of other suburbs, white flight and then
middle-class flight all took their tolls, and the city’s population shrank by 40
percent to about 27,000 today, from its peak of 45,000. As people left, the
city’s tax base dwindled.
Prichard’s pension plan was established by
state law during the good times, in 1956, to supplement Social Security. By the
standard of other public pension plans, and the six-figure pensions that draw
outrage in places like California and New Jersey, it is not especially rich. Its
biggest pension came to about $39,000 a year, for a retired fire chief with many
years of service. The average retiree got around $12,000 a year. But the plan
allowed workers to retire young, in their 50s. And its benefits were sweetened
over time by the state legislature, which did not pay for the added
benefits.
For many years, the city — like many other cities and states
today — knew that its pension plan was underfunded. As recently as 2004, the
city hired an actuary, who reported that “the plan is projected to exhaust the
assets around 2009, at which time benefits will need to be paid directly from
the city’s annual finances.”
The city had already taken the unusual step
of reducing pension benefits by 8.5 percent for current retirees, after it
declared bankruptcy in 1999, yielding to years of dwindling money, mismanagement
and corruption. (A previous mayor was removed from office and found guilty of
neglect of duty.) The city paid off its last creditors from the bankruptcy in
2007. But its current mayor, Ronald K. Davis, never complied with an order from
the bankruptcy court to begin paying $16.5 million into the pension fund to
reduce its shortfall.
A lawyer representing the city, R. Scott Williams,
said that the city simply did not have the money. “The reality for Prichard is
that if you took money to build the pension up, who’s going to pay the garbage
man?” he asked. “Who’s going to pay to run the police department? Who’s going to
pay the bill for the street lights? There’s only so much money to go
around.”
Workers paid 5.5 percent of their salaries into the pension
fund, and the city paid 10.5 percent. But the fund paid out more money than it
took in, and by September 2009 there was no longer enough left in the fund to
send out the $150,000 worth of monthly checks owed to the retirees. The city
stopped paying its pensions. And no one stepped in to enforce the
law.
The retirees, who were not unionized, sued. The city tried to block
their suit by declaring bankruptcy, but a judge denied the request. The city is
appealing. The retirees filed another suit, asking the city to pay at least some
of the benefits they are owed. A mediation effort is expected to begin soon.
Many retirees say they would accept reduced benefits.
Companies with
pension plans are required by federal law to put money behind their promises
years in advance, and the government can impose punitive taxes on those that
fail to do so, or in some cases even seize their pension funds.
Companies
are also required to protect their pension assets. So if a corporate pension
fund falls below 60 cents’ worth of assets for every dollar of benefits owed,
workers can no longer accrue additional benefits. (Prichard was down to just 33
cents on the dollar in 2003.)
And if a company goes bankrupt, the federal
government can take over its pension plan and see that its retirees receive
their benefits. Although some retirees receive less than they were promised, no
retiree from a federally insured plan in the private sector has come away
empty-handed since the federal pension law was enacted in 1974. The law does not
cover public sector workers.
Last week several dozen retirees — one using
a wheelchair, some with canes — attended the weekly City Council meeting, asking
for something before Christmas. Mary Berg, 61, a former assistant city clerk
whose mother was once the city’s zookeeper, read them the names of 11 retirees
who had died since the checks stopped coming.
“I hope that on Christmas
morning, when you are with your families around your Christmas trees, that you
remember that most of the retirees will not be opening presents with their
families,” she told them.
The budget did not move forward. Mayor Davis
was out of town.
“Merry Christmas!” shouted a man from the back row of
the folding chairs. The retirees filed out. One woman could not hold back her
tears.
After the meeting, Troy Ephriam, a council member who became
chairman of the pension fund when it was nearly broke, sat in his office and
recalled some of the failed efforts to put more money into the pension
fund.
“I think the biggest disappointment I have is that there was not a
strong enough effort to put something in there,” he said. “And that’s the reason
that it’s hard for me to look these people in the face: because I’m not certain
we really gave our all to prevent this.”
