Democrats have been stealing elections for a very long time, but lately they have been working a new angle: exploiting the mentally handicapped for votes. David Horowitz relates what he learned at a Thanksgiving dinner:
“Obama saved me,” he said to me out of the blue.
“I voted for him for president and now he’s saving me.”
Lest you think this might be an isolated case, read this:
Jimmy Green’s stepdaughter had never voted before. The 57-year-old is mentally disabled, and Green said she doesn’t understand the concept of casting a ballot.
But this week, she called her parents to say she had voted for President Obama. The care home in Fayetteville where she lives registered its residents to vote and drove them to the polls, Green said.
“My concern is that somebody told her who to vote for,” he said. “She didn’t even know there’s two different parties.”
Complaints of uncomprehending voters being ferried to cast ballots surface every election. And in a presidential race as close as this year’s, with huge levels of early voting, any perceived irregularity is falling under intense scrutiny.
But federal and state laws are very clear – there is no competency test for voting.
Go here to FayObserver.com to read the rest. Regular readers of this blog know that I have an autistic son who is the light of my life. I am completely disgusted that anyone would take an individual like him and steal his vote, a vote that he does not have the mental capacity to cast for himself. It is the ruthless exploitation of some of the most innocent and helpless among us for crass political gain. People who would do this will stoop to anything to gain or keep political power and this development bodes ill for our Republic.
The looters and tyrants need to experience the righteous antipathy of millions of producers and taxpayers.
There are a mess of dubious characters in the helping professions.
The National Association of Scholars published a report a few years back on how social workers are educated; in a word: scandalously. Now take a look at this from Washington University in St. Louis, which has a purportedly highly rated program:
http://gwbweb.wustl.edu/Admissions/MSWProgram/Pages/CurriculumandCourseOverview.aspx
Examining their course lists, can you figure what these dames are being trained to do that would not and could not be covered in programs in public administration or clinical psychology?
One project the starboard side might get cracking on on the state level is euthanizing this ideologized pseudo-profession.
“The National Association of Scholars published a report a few years back on how social workers are educated; in a word: scandalously.”
Agreed! I have written about this:
https://the-american-catholic.com/2010/07/29/intolerance-in-the-name-of-tolerance/
One of the main problems with academia is that too many areas of study on too many campuses are basically leftist politics with a patina of academic gibberish.
(Don’s wife Cathy here) Art, our daughter is applying for admission to college, and has been indicating that long-term, she’d like to become a school counselor. (No comment on whether we think that’s the best career option for her.) Don & I insisted that she had to think shorter-term as well, and pick an undergrad major which would make her employable, so she’s going with elementary education.
Anyway, the Children, Youth & Families concentration in that Wash U MSW program description you linked to sounds an awful lot like the M.S. programs in educational psychology and developmental psychology I looked up when investigating what additional coursework our daughter would need after teacher certification to qualify as a school counselor. The main difference I can spot is that the MSW program sounds “squishier” and more advocacy/policy/agenda-oriented, even in the direct practice tracks that I looked at. It looks like the MSW program at Wash U wants to turn out social workers who not only have a certain set of skills, but also all fit a certain ideological mold.
Mr Horowitz of all people should know the Left’s playbook – what you pro-lifers want to deny votes to the mentally different? The chance to reach for significance, for revenge. What would Jesus say? And a whole swathe of Christians will then fold as a pack of cards.
Mrs. McClarey:
A good reason to major in education is that trade associations, teacher training faculty, and unions have buffaloed state legislatures into making it a requirement for employment in the public schools. Critics of these programs (e.g. Thomas Sowell) say their value-added is undetectable.
I do hope your daughter has
1. mastered algebra;
2. writes grammatical English;
3. knows the basics of American history, geography, and civics;
4. selects a school of education which has as its focus courses in practical teaching strategies and not in promoting rancid social ideology (Stanford University and LeMoyne College have been the focus of scandals in this regard, as has NCATE, the accrediting association for teacher-training programs).
5. selects a decent 2d major and/or is very careful in her selection of courses to fulfill distribution requirements; courses in accounting, statistics, insurance foreign languages, economics, and mathematics are good; art history might be, if it stops at 1918; philosophy might be; social sciences should be avoided unless they are grounded in quantitative methods (or are studying work by Gabriel Almond, Dankwart Rustow, et al).
6. If you can work in a business major, perhaps a five-year plan is worth it.
7. Every family should have an engineer. Tell your son or one of your nephews to get cracking.
—
Now I will stop being overbearing (which is the moderator’s job in any case).
Mr Horowitz of all people should know the Left’s playbook – what you pro-lifers want to deny votes to the mentally different? The chance to reach for significance, for revenge. What would Jesus say? And a whole swathe of Christians will then fold as a pack of cards.
Martinis for breakfast is a bad habit.
(Don’s wife Cathy again) Art, we’ve been trying to talk her into a business-oriented major (f.ex. Computer Information Systems or Accounting), but she hasn’t bitten yet. There are a couple of small Midwestern colleges where our daughter’s test scores & class rank make her overqualified compared to their average freshmen (with decent U.S. News & World Report rankings, and decent results in their Net Price Calculators) where she has a shot at good merit scholarships, and has already been accepted; hopefully they aren’t as P.C.-nuts as larger schools. I’ll be driving her to their merit scholarship interviews myself, so I’ll be able to get an in-person feel for what those colleges are like.
I do not know why I was assuming elementary school. If she aims to be a high school teacher, she would need to be subject trained (whether the board of regents requires it or not). Of course, you could persuade her she wants to teach vocational business classes.
I suspect with accounting there is enough temp work around that she might be able to get out of painting houses in the summer time.
Don’t write off an entire career path because of a bad trend among teachers. If you feel called to a particular career, and it’s something that’s marketable and you have an aptitude for, don’t let a few lousy professors push you around. I got a bachelor’s and master’s degree in economics – definitely not a hard science – and didn’t get brainwashed along the way.
First off, the average teacher doesn’t do a lot of work. He assigns texts and homework, and blathers in front of the class for a set period of time. The student regurgitates all over a midterm and a final, and maybe has to write a paper. The paper can be unorthodox as anything, but if it’s about one of the foundational texts or theories in the field, the teacher will usually accept it – and every field has some decent thought within it. Even if the teacher doesn’t like the student (and you’d have to be pretty obnoxious to get noticed in a classroom of 500 kids), with grade inflation being what it is, the student might get a B- instead of an A. Big deal. The student will still end up graduating with a 3.2 GPA.
You might be able to find a school that has a reputation for not contaminating the students, although each teacher is different, and in a lot of cases it’s the TA who’s doing the teaching. But once you get out of the classroom, there will be a wide range of thinkers in the field. And most employers don’t care about a particular person’s ideology as long as they don’t make anyone’s life difficult and fill out the paperwork correctly. So don’t fret over a particular major.
Actually, if I could offer one piece of advice to beginning college students, it’d be to take a minor as well as a major.
Pinky,
As a student or professors my wife and I have been associated with six colleges/universities (a large state school, a large Catholic University and four small liberal arts schools). The experience you describe (professor who does little work, TAs grading, large classes, etc.) only really exist at research universities. At small colleges, professors teach 4-6 lectures per school year, do most of the grading, and, in many cases, even teach science labs. At those schools it is really difficult to ‘hide’ from the professors. My wife is currently a tenure track professor in biology at a college in the Northwest and she knows every student in the ‘large’ lecture of sixty – the largest lecture of any class at the school.
(Don’s wife Cathy again) The 2 colleges which have already accepted our daughter for admission are both tiny, as colleges go ( <1,500 students each) so, if she attended one of them, the profs would certainly get to know her. On the other hand, the other schools she's waiting to hear back from on admission decisions range from 2,000-35,000 students each, so there's certainly a chance she'd end up at a "Mega-U".
As to majors/minors, our daughter is definitely interested in at least a minor in addition to a major. The way she's changed her mind each year during high school on what she'd like to major in, though, she may well change her mind again by the time she has to officially declare a major. It had better be something which will make her employable with just a BA/BS, though!
I got a bachelor’s and master’s degree in economics – definitely not a hard science – and didn’t get brainwashed along the way.
Economics is not sociology. It is a social science in actuality, not in aspiration. I think the same deal applies in demography, but undergraduate courses in demography are rare. One might hope a future generation will return American history, anthropology, sociology, and social psychology to a state where practicing them is not functionally dependent upon signing on to a Marxist, feminist, or multi-culti catechism.
—
By the way, I did most of my undergraduate study at research universities. There was a minor kerfuffle at the engineering school at one place when students were assigned a TA who spoke only some odd dialect of Chinese. Otherwise, I do not recall much trouble with professors sloughing off. TAs graded exercises in large survey courses with scores of students enrolled, but the faculty did all their own lectures and relied on TAs only for end-of-the-week discussion sessions which amounted to about 25% of class time. Professors did the whole shebang for seminars and lecture courses of ordinary enrollment. I’ve a family member on the faculty of George Mason, a large research university. He usually teaches a 2-2 schedule because he commonly has important administrative responsibilities in addition to bringing in masses of grant money and having published several dozen papers in recent decades. He puts his all into his teaching as well, and would have been overqualified at the small college I attended (which makes a point of being a redoubt of ‘scholar/teachers’).
It had better be something which will make her employable with just a BA/BS, though!
I hope that little college has an accounting department.
Maybe Pravda (Russian for “truth”) needs to update its Obama re-election coverage.
Quoted:
‘Recently, Obama has been re-elected for a 2nd term by an illiterate society . . . .”
Truth.
(Don’s wife Cathy again)
“I hope that little college has an accounting department.”
Both of them do, Art, and they both emphasize internship opportunities – especially the one that’s outside our own state, and approx. a 1/2-hour drive away from a major Midwestern city.
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Don, to get back to the topic of using the mentally handicapped as vote generating tools for the democrats. I too have an autistic son who will likely end up in a group home when my husband and I are no longer physically up to caring for him. I have also worked as a county caseworker for intellectually disabled individuals who live in group homes. As a caseworker I was required to ask each individual on my caseload every year whether they wished to register to vote. If yes, I was required to see that they got registered. If they said no, I had to have them sign a paper stating their disinterest in registering, and turn these in to my supervisor who would presumably turn a record in to the state. As you say, there is no competency criteria. So long as the individual nods or gives some other sign that means yes, he can register to vote. He can sign with an X or other mark if he can not write his name, as long as there is a witness.
In theory this law protects an individual who has a mild degree of mental retardation but functions with a fair degree of independence. Some of these individuals hold jobs, follow the news on tv and yes, have as much a right and ability to cast a vote as any “normal” person with a high school degree and the same susceptibility to persuasion by the media, by relatives, etc.
In practice, the abuses mentioned in the post are widespread. I live in a conservative rural county, and so my impression is that mentally disabled individuals from groups homes are as likely to be persuaded by caregivers to vote republican as democrat. But yes, it’s a terrible situation. It would be a rare poll watcher who could get up the nerve to be seen as “supressing” the vote of a disabled person.
If your autistic son does not advance beyond a child’s intellectual capacity by adulthood, I recommend that you obtain legal guardianship when he turns 18. Guardianship does not accrue to you automatically just because you are the parent. Your son is considered a legally competent person once he turns 18 no matter how severely handicapped. If you do not get yourself named as guardian, there is nothing to stop a caregiver from manipulating him into voting for whomever the caregiver determines is the best candidate for “disabilities rights”
At least this is the case here in Pennsylvania, and I suspect it is the same elsewhere.
“If your autistic son does not advance beyond a child’s intellectual capacity by adulthood, I recommend that you obtain legal guardianship when he turns 18. Guardianship does not accrue to you automatically just because you are the parent. Your son is considered a legally competent person once he turns 18 no matter how severely handicapped. If you do not get yourself named as guardian, there is nothing to stop a caregiver from manipulating him into voting for whomever the caregiver determines is the best candidate for “disabilities rights”
At least this is the case here in Pennsylvania, and I suspect it is the same elsewhere.”
I had my wife, myself and my autistic son’s twin brother appointed by the court as guardians shortly after his 18th birthday. After my wife and I are gone, the plan is for him to live with his brother who is planning to join me in my law firm after he graduates from law school. From what I have seen of state institutions and group homes I will do whatever it takes to make certain, as far as I am able, that my autistic son will always live with family.
(Don’s wife Cathy again) “If your autistic son does not advance beyond a child’s intellectual capacity by adulthood, I recommend that you obtain legal guardianship when he turns 18.”
That’s just what we did, Daria. In fact, we just had to file our first 3-year report on the guardianship, and we’ll all be appearing at a hearing on that report during Christmas break (when our son’s twin & co-guardian will be home from college).
One other thing you did not ask for:
Your daughter should lay off any vocational discipline with high rates of innovation until her children are of such an age that she expects not to be departing the labor force until retirement. A lady IT tech of my acquaintance once lamented that things she had learned just three years earlier were now useless. You cannot come and go with IT.