The MODERN Day Ant and the Grasshopper

OLD VERSION
The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. The grasshopper has no food or shelter, so he dies out in the cold.

MORAL OF THE OLD STORY: Be responsible for yourself!

MODERN VERSION
The ant works hard in the withering heat and the rain all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while he is cold and starving.

CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, and ABC show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to a video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food. America is stunned by the sharp contrast. How can this be, that in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?

Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper and everybody cries when they sing, 'It's Not Easy Being Green...' ACORN stages a demonstration in front of the ant's house where the news stations film the SEIU group singing, "We Shall Overcome." Then Rev. Jeremiah Wright has the group kneel down to pray for the grasshopper's sake, while he damns the ants. President Obama condemns the ant and blames President Bush 43, President Bush 41, President Reagan, Christopher Columbus, and the Pope for the grasshopper's plight.

Nancy Pelosi & Harry Reid exclaim in an interview with Larry King that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and both call for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his fair share.

Finally, the EEOC drafts the Economic Equity & Anti-Grasshopper Act retroactive to the beginning of the summer. The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, his home is confiscated by the Government Green Czar and given to the grasshopper.

The story ends as we see the grasshopper and his free-loading friends finishing up the last bits of the ant's food while the government house he is in, which, as you recall, just happens to be the ant's old house, crumbles around them because the grasshopper doesn't maintain it. The ant has disappeared in the snow, never to be seen again. The grasshopper is found dead in a drug related incident, and the house, now abandoned, is taken over by a gang of spiders who terrorize the ramshackle, once prosperous and peaceful, neighborhood.

The entire Nation collapses bringing the rest of the free world with it.

MORAL OF THE STORY: Be careful how you vote in 2012.
Are you the ant or the grasshopper?

Rep. Duffy's (WI-7) Plan for Health Care Reform

• Ends ACA and replaces it with a base of provisions in the President's plan.
• Combats waste, fraud, and abuse in Medicare.
• Ends the denial of insurance based on pre-existing conditions.
• Controls cost of care without the arbitrary dropping of consumer's coverage.
• Adds limits to lawsuits against medical providers.
• Allows transportability of insurance across state lines.

Sounds good, right? After further looking, Rep. Sean Duffy is sponsoring the Patient Centered Healthcare Savings Act of 2011. Right now it has no co sponsors. On March 29th of this year it was referred to a House Subcommittee of Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions.View the full outline of the bill and read the legislation here.

If Anyone Accuses You Of ..

"If anyone ever says you are a "flat earther"- tell them you're gonna push them off." - @stephenkruiser

White House Denies That Obama Feasted on Human Flesh

Obama joked about the difference between dog meat and human flesh at the White House Correspondents Dinner. We know the President ate dog, but has he ever eaten a hockey mom? Find out more about the Obama dog controversy, plus the Occupy strike and the details of the Chinese abortion dissident holed up in the US Embassy:

Dale Folwell: The Leading Fiscal Conservative

Public Policy Polling released a new poll today showing that Dale Folwell is leading in the race for Lieutenant Governor at 20%, Dan Forest coming up second at 15%. I'm going to share a few thoughts here. There has been a BIG bru ha ha about Forest being the "tea party darling", how Folwell should not have even gotten IN the race because Forest had been campaigning since early last year, so forth. None of that has made any sense to me.

If you're "tea party", you are going to know the work that has been accomplished by Dale Folwell. There should not be a doubt in anyone's mind that he is FISCALLY RESPONSIBLE. He has saved the tax payers of this state MILLIONS. Through the many bills he has sponsored and co sponsored, he has made the government more efficient:

• How would you feel about a law that could lower your property taxes and cut down on your interactions with the government? See H1779 legislation
• Why should you pay for the lifetime medical bills of someone who only worked for the state for 5 years + 1 day? See S837 legislation
• Did you realize that with life expectancy, state employees could be retired with pension and healthcare benefits for longer than they worked? See H1221 legislation

{ SEE MORE examples of what Dale has done to make government more efficient, getting it off our backs and saving us money. }

We are watching Raleigh (and Washington D.C.) like hawks these days to see how they are spending our hard earned money. Something I have picked up since the 2010 elections is the desire to see how a candidate is spending the money entrusted to them by donors. So in light of today's recent polling, it struck me to look up both candidate's campaign finance reports to see how things were going.

Just in first quarter of this year:

	Donations	Money Spent	Difference
Dale Folwell	$142,349.58	$125,951.30	+$16398.28
Dan Forest	$92,108.80	$118,358.13	$-26249.33

Note only about $7000 of Dale's was raised before he announced he would be running for Lieutenant Governor. Oh but wait. There has been NUMEROUS debates in the social media community from the Forest side on how Dale should not have even entered the race, because Dan had already been campaigning for the position for almost a year. Lets examine that a little closer:

Last year, Dan:

	Collected	Spent	Difference
from 1/1/11 to 6/30/11	$100,201.67	$38,771.71	+$61429.96
from 7/7/11 to 12/31/11	$119,040.90	$151,510.77	-$32469.87
			Year end difference being: +$28960.09

So total for the Lieutenant Governor race, Dan Forest has collected (on record) a whopping $311,351.37, spent $308,640.61, netting a plus of  $2710.76 ... and less than a week before the election, he is still five points behind in the polls and falling?

Is that a good return on donor's investments? Is he efficiently running his campaign? By these numbers Dale's leadership and insight proves to be the more fiscally responsible choice in this race.

America at Risk: The Importance of Military Readiness

Because it must be seen:

Sarah Palin Saw That Coming A Mile Away

By Maggie Gallagher

Sarah Palin was the first to recognize the problem: By participating in President Obama’s signature education initiative, Race to the Top which pushed the Common Core standards, Alaska would lose control over its own curriculum.

On May 31, 2009, then-Gov. Palin announced Alaska would adopt a “watch and wait” attitude:

“If this initiative produces useful results, Alaska will remain free to incorporate them,” Gov. Palin said, adding that “high expectations are not always created by new, mandated federal standards written on paper. They are created in the home, the community and the classroom.”

Texas Gov. Rick Perry, to his credit, was the next to recognize a federal boondoggle when he saw one: “I will not commit Texas taxpayers to unfunded federal obligations or to the adoption of unproven, cost-prohibitive national standards and tests,” Gov. Perry wrote in a Jan. 13, 2010, letter to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

In the ensuing two years, it’s become clear that Perry and Palin — two core conservative figures whose intelligence is routinely mocked by liberal “sophisticates” — were brilliantly prescient, indeed prophetic.

Common Core Standards turn out to be like Obamacare — you don’t really know what’s in it until after you pass it and are mired in its tentacles.

Today, even more states are waking up to discover that they have lost control of both curriculum and costs for a program that is untested and unlikely to improve student performance. A February study by the Pioneer Institute conservatively estimates that Obama’s Common Core Standards will costs the states at least $16 billion — money that could be used to promote education in other ways.

This past week, Education Week’s blog published a review of criticism for Obama’s Common Core initiative. The shocking thing is how many liberals are now acknowledging Common Core comes at a high cost for little or no return. Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution, for example, wrote, “(T)he most reasonable prediction is that the Common Core will have little to no effect on student achievement.” Joanne Yatvin, a past president of the National Council on Teachers of English, writes, “Taken together, the standards and the criteria project an aura of arrogance and ignorance in their assumptions about how and why children learn.”

Four education experts came together at the Heritage Foundation on April 17 to comment on more problems emerging with the Common Core Standards. A blog post describing the expert panel, titled “Why States Should Hop Off the National Standards Bandwagon,” states:

“When ‘states signed on to Common Core Standards, they did not realize … that they were transferring control of the school curriculum to the federal government,’ explained Sandra Stotsky, 21st Century Chair in Teacher Quality at the University of Arkansas’ Department of Education Reform.

“Theodor Rebarber, CEO and founder of Accountability Works, explained, ‘States did almost no cost analysis’ when they signed on to adopt the Common Core Standards, although Rebarber noted, the Pioneer Institute report he authored conservatively estimated the overall national cost for implementing Common Core at a hefty $16 billion.

“Jim Stergios of the Pioneer Institute warned that the standards create ‘a disincentive to innovators long term.’ Federal involvement in curriculum, as attorney Kent Talbert of Talbert and Eitel explained, may even be illegal because three federal laws prohibit ‘federal direction, control or supervision of curricula, programs of instruction and instructional materials … in the elementary and secondary school arena.’”

A pivotal moment in the history of American education will quietly occur on May 11 in Charlotte, N.C., when the board of the influential (and under fire) conservative American Legislative Exchange Council will meet to decide whether or not to accept its own education task force’s recommendation of model legislation blocking implementation of Obama’s Common Core.

“We eagerly anticipate that the ALEC Board will affirm the task force vote,” said Emmett McGroarty, who works with the American Principles Project, which co-sponsored the Pioneer study and which lobbied for model legislation at ALEC. (Full disclosure: One of my projects, the Culture War Victory Fund, is also housed at APP.)

Obama’s Common Core Standards violate federal laws in order to take over control of curriculum, on behalf of an unproven education initiative that leaves states $16 billion in debt.

Sarah Palin and Rick Perry are proven to be prophets. ALEC, you know what to do.

Maggie Gallagher is co-founder of the National Organization for Marriage.

Originally posted at American Principles Project