Teacher's Desk: Tuition Break Nada

There’s a personal angle when I read a story like the one today about 20 colleges and universities asking the federal government to allow illegal immigrants in-state tuition rates. I know three high school seniors where I teach whom this would help. Two of the students are special education students who will probably limit their post-secondary experiences to a certificate program at Emily Griffith Opportunity School, and the third has decided to attend college in Mexico. Even though I enjoy these students and know the parents of the young ladies well, I cannot condone illegal trafficking of human beings, nor the additional pressure placed on our infrastructure and natural resources by those who immigrate illegally.

Because I try to be kind while still holding this opinion, I gave the three families the business card of the immigration attorney upstairs, and one of the parents made an appointment. It was the same mother who had asked me to adopt her 21-year-old daughter, but she was going to pay for her needs. Fortunately, I had an easy out; we don’t legally adopt 21-year-olds! But that got me wondering what other illegal activities these folks who I felt were generally good people willing to do?

Obviously, they drive without licenses, do not buy car insurance, and many don’t have health insurance, so they use the emergency rooms at hospitals. Those same hospitals are required to have Spanish interpreters.

Per Texas case law, our schools are required to educate the legal and illegal alike, and unless the parents of these children are homeowners, we’re the ones who pay for it. We teach the children English, but until they grasp the language, it will be awhile before they are reading and writing at grade level. We hire staff to teach in Spanish. We hire teachers to test in Spanish. We provide interpreters for Spanish speaking parents. All this costs thousands of dollars to every school. Thousands of dollars that is no longer available for the general student population.

If we allow illegal students to attend our state colleges and universities at in-state tuition rates, the influx of Spanish speaking only college students will rise and costly services will likely be provided to them. We do not do the same for students with other native languages. We will become the destination for those who trespass our borders.

Kathleen Kullback is a licensed special educator with an M. A. in educational leadership and is a former candidate for the Colorado State Board of Education.

Obama may abort the American dream

I have been looking for "the sign" that the good times are over for good. It came in a Denver Post headline: "Abortions increase in face of economy". Family planning has a new definition. In the words of country singer Merle Haggard, "Are we rolling downhill like a snowball headed for Hell?" Good ol' Merle said things would be better when Ford and Chevy made cars that last ten years like they should.

Gone are the days of procreating children to help run the family farm or business. The word "family" has been destroyed by cultural revolution. The most famous family today depicts a welfare mother prostituting the images of eight new babies. Now there is a retirement plan.

President Obama and Democrats will do what they want now that they can. It's frustrating. Plans for retirement for most of us now must consider a future of massive inflation to repay more debt than all the nations previous presidents had accumulated. Charge today! No payment till next year!

President Obama talks about the urgent need to pass his oversized-credit-card economic plan, some of which already passed without a chance to readthe fine print. Congress deserves a pay cut. Withdrawal is the new plan for the Middle East. Our Mexican border leaks immigrants and drugs, both of which are killing us in their own way. Shall we expect "amnesty and legalization" as a bold border plan? It would fit the mold.

Mortgaging a nation on "false appraisal" is worse than mortgaging our homes for 125 percent of speculated value was. U.S. taxpayers have been conned into bailing out bad-banking behavior. Our creditors have noticed. The Chinese are abandoning the dollar because they fear our inflation will erode their investments. The international Ponzi scheme has been outed.

Some hard truths

Fellow conservative blogger Donald Douglas has an interesting post up that cites Robert Bork's recent book entitled: A Time To Speak:Selected Writings and Arguments. Many of you will remember Bork as having been an unfair victim of left-wing demagoguery during his 1987 Senate confirmation hearings after Ronald Reagan nominated him for the U.S. Supreme Court. Though beaten in that instance, Bork has been unbowed in using his prodigious intellectual talents to influence the national debate via his writings over the past 20 years. As Douglas recounts, Bork wrote back in 1995 with uncanny prescience in his essay Hard Truths About the Culture War that we face a real and growing threat from liberalism that is destroying our culture: Modern liberalism is most particularly a disease of our cultural elites, the people who control the institutions that manufacture or disseminate ideas, attitudes, and symbols-universities, some churches, Hollywood, the national press (print and electronic), much of the congressional Democratic party and some of the congressional Republicans as well, large sections of the judiciary, foundation staffs, and almost all the "public interest" organizations that exercise a profound if largely unseen effect on public policy. So pervasive is the influence of those who occupy the commanding heights of our culture that it is not entirely accurate to call the United States a majoritarian democracy. The elites of modern liberalism do not win all the battles, but despite their relatively small numbers, they win more than their share and move the culture always in one direction ....

What we are seeing in modern liberalism is the ultimate triumph of the New Left of the 1960s - the New Left that collapsed as a unified political movement and splintered into a multitude of intense, single-issue groups. We now have, to name but a few, radical feminists, black extremists, animal rights groups, radical environmentalists, activist homosexual groups, multiculturalists, People for the American Way, Planned Parenthood, the American Civil Liberties Union, and many more. In a real sense, however, the New Left did not collapse. Each of its splinters pursues a leftist agenda, but there is no publicly announced overarching philosophy that enables people to see easily that the separate groups and causes add up to a general radical left philosophy. The groups support one another and come together easily on many issues. In that sense, the splintering of the New Left made it less visible and therefore more powerful, its goals more attainable, than ever before.

In their final stages, radical egalitarianism becomes tyranny and radical individualism descends into hedonism. These translate as bread and circuses. Government grows larger and more intrusive in order to direct the distribution of goods and services in an ever more equal fashion, while people are diverted, led to believe that their freedoms are increasing, by a great variety of entertainments featuring violence and sex ...

As Douglas also notes, the "splintered" left-wing groups that Bork described in 1995 look a lot like the various liberal organizations that have now organized to make change within the Obama Administration.

An excellent example of this can be found in Ben Smith's recent article at Politico.com entitled: Unity '09 -- Dem Groups Quietly Align:

A broad coalition of left-leaning groups is quietly closing ranks into a new coalition, "Unity '09," aimed at helping President Barack Obama push his agenda through Congress.

Conceived at a New York meeting before the November election, two Democrats familiar with the planning said, Unity '09 will draw together money and grassroots organizations to pressure lawmakers in their home states to back White House legislation and other progressive causes.

The online-based MoveOn.org is a central player in the nascent organization, but other groups involved in planning Unity '09 span a broad spectrum of interests, from the American Civil Liberties Union to the National Council of La Raza to Planned Parenthood, as well as labor unions and environmental groups.

The obvious point to be made here is that the most radical of left-wing interest groups are organizing to have a major impact on public policy in the Obama White House. What follows logically from this is a pro-choice, pro-illegal immigration, pro-tort/pro-defendant and pro-union orientation that will systematically weaken the foundation of our nation and our economy. Just today, for example, it was revealed that estimates for Obama's "Cap and Trade" environmental protection regime will cost the economy well over $1 trillion over the next several years -- a huge tax on business in the name of satisfying the global warming alarmists who seek curbs on carbon at any cost.

With the Obama presidency we have opened the West Wing to the worst kind of single-minded interest groups -- for whom the word "compromise" and "in the national interest" have absolutely no meaning. There is no quid-pro-quo among the true believers, who have organized their lives around unyielding belief in the importance of a single issue -- be it abortion, immigration, torture, civil liberties or the environment.  For these disciples, there is no second place  -- total victory is the only option.  And for those of us who believe in open, honest debate, this is a hard truth, indeed.

'Rest of story' suffers with Rocky gone

Just in the first week since the Rocky shut down, think about the state and local stories that were covered less robustly in the absence of a competing metro daily. Three for starters would be: ** Senate Dems seek to bust the 6% constitutional spending limit.

** Senate Dems endorse college subsidies for illegal aliens.

** CU students welcome plagiarist Ward Churchill and terrorist Bill Ayers.

Nothing against the solid reporting and commentary we've read in the Denver Post about these events, but they contain so many deeper levels and cross-currents that no single newspaper can possibly do them justice.

There's a reason people have two eyes and ears; a reason we say two heads are better than one; a reason Scripture says wisdom needs many counselors.

At 90, Paul Harvey, the founding father of opinion radio, was going to leave us one of these days. But how fitting that we lost him on the same weekend when Coloradans lost some of our access to "the rest of the story" with the Rocky's demise.

Prosecutor outrages the Left

Action from 2/22 Radio: For breaking an ID theft ring of over 1300 illegal aliens, DA Ken Buck finds himself sued by ACLU and pilloried by the New York Times. The Weld County prosecutor and his colleague, Sheriff John Cooke, must be doing something right. Here is a partial archive of web links for state and national news coverage of the story since it broke in November.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/us/02greeley.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=Ken%20Buck&st=cse

http://www.greeleytribune.com/article/20081120/NEWS/811199888/1001&title=Allard%20talks%20%27Number%20Games%27%20on%20Senate%20floor

http://www.greeleytribune.com/article/20081120/NEWS/811199886/1001&title=%27Number%20Games%27%20suspect%27s%20family%20confused%20by%20arrest

http://www.noco5.com/index.aspx

Greeley Tribune

11/16/08

http://www.greeleytribune.com/article/20081116/NEWS/811159876/1002/NONE&parentprofile=1001&title=Farmers%2C%20business%20owners%20concerned%20about%20finding%20workers

Editorial

http://www.greeleytribune.com/article/20081116/TRIBEDIT/811159936/1029/NONE&parentprofile=1025&title=Immigration%20reform%20long%20overdue

11/15/08

http://www.greeleytribune.com/article/20081115/NEWS/811159958/1002/NONE&parentprofile=1001&title=Officials%20hope%20arrests%20lead%20to%20widespread%20change

http://www.greeleytribune.com/article/20081115/NEWS/811159994/1002/NONE&parentprofile=1001&title=ANALYSIS%3A%20Federal%20policies%20hinder%20immigration%20enforcement

http://www.greeleytribune.com/article/20081115/NEWS/811159996/1002/NONE&parentprofile=1001&title=New%20immigration%20rift

11/14/08

http://www.greeleytribune.com/article/20081114/NEWS/811139961/1002/NONE&parentprofile=1001&title=Weld%20cracks%20down%20on%201%2C300%20ID%20theft%20cases

http://www.greeleytribune.com/article/20081114/NEWS/811149962/1002/NONE&parentprofile=1001&title=ID%20THEFT%3A%20Arrested%20so%20far

http://www.greeleytribune.com/article/20081114/NEWS/811149949/1002/NONE&parentprofile=1001&title=ID%20THEFT%3A%20Understanding%20the%20tax%20ID%20number

http://www.greeleytribune.com/article/20081114/NEWS/811149947/1002/NONE&parentprofile=1001&title=ID%20THEFT%3A%20Examples%20of%20returns

http://www.greeleytribune.com/article/20081114/NEWS/811149974/1002/NONE&parentprofile=1001&title=ID%20THEFT%3A%20By%20the%20numbers

http://www.greeleytribune.com/article/20081114/NEWS/811149942/1002/NONE&parentprofile=1001&title=Woman%20finds%20herself%20a%20victim%20

Television

11/14/08

Channel 5

http://www.noco5.com/story.aspx?ID=471&Cat=2

Channel 9

http://www.9news.com/rss/article.aspx?storyid=103992

http://www.9news.com/news/investigative/article.aspx?storyid=103852&catid=207

Channel 7

http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/17992968/detail.html

Channel 4

http://cbs4denver.com/local/illegal.immigration.greeley.2.864743.html

Channel 2

http://www.kwgn.com/pages/news_local_landing/?Weld-Co-probe-focuses-on-illegal-tax-ref=1&blockID=134747&feedID=202

Longmont Times-Call

http://www.timescall.com/print.asp?ID=12168

Boulder Daily Camera

http://www.dailycamera.com/news/2008/nov/16/1300-could-be-arrested-in-immigrants-tax-scam/

CNN LOU DOBBS

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2008/11/14/wian.bb.identity.theft.scheme.cnn

KKTV

http://www.kktv.com/home/headlines/34456909.html

NFIB: The Voice of Small Business

http://nfibelection2008.illumen.org/newsArticle.jsf?documentId=2c9e4f691d9ef3f3011da0d0a75f01eb

Free Republic

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2133235/posts

Americans for Legal Immigration

http://www.alipac.us/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=138238

Colorado Springs Gazette

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/C/CO_IMMIGRATION_TAXES_COOL-?SITE=COCOL&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

Denver Post

http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_10989583

Rocky Mountain News

http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2008/nov/14/weld-county-investigating-1330-tax-files-for/

MSNBC Message Board

http://boards.msn.com/MSNBCboards/thread.aspx?threadid=193977&boardsparam=Page%3D3277

Minuteman HQ Forum

http://forum.minutemanhq.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=18525&sid=c3696ee1597ff3a87e94ad5fedf4c425

AARP Bulletin Today

http://bulletin.aarp.org/states/co/articles/analysis_federal_policies_hinder_immigration_enforcement.html

United for A Sovereign American

http://immigrationbuzz.com/

http://www.9news.com/news/article.aspx?storyid=103852&catid=188

http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/17979255/detail.html

http://cbs4denver.com/local/illegal.immigration.greeley.2.864743.html

http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2008/nov/14/weld-county-investigating-1330-tax-files-for/