American Conservative Union Pushes Back on Politico Pay-for-Play Story

As a conservative, it kills me to see how the American Conservative Union is totally a sellout. But evidently, this sort of phoniness has been going on for a while. A writer, "JFK" wrote an article I saw last night about his time working at ACU and how they often changed their position to match a crowd: http://bit.ly/s1ojC . This seems like the next logical step.

They did the same thing two years ago with Boeing and Northrup Grumman and nobody reported anything... now that's embarrassing. Will Lauderback is now a lobbyist for Northrup Grumman because they are "more conservative." Conservatism for sale is no conservatism at all... Apparently it based on who has the biggest checkbook rather than the most straightforward principles.

David Keene personifies what's wrong with the Republican Party and the conservative movement. The problem with the GOP isn't Sarah Palin but insider types like Keene, Mike Murphy and Kevin Madden who are always ready to sell their soul to the highest bidder.

Keene has made millions influence peddling in Washington.

Hopefully, this will cost him his leadership position in the ACU.

Dear Friends,

This is what is wrong with our country, it is all about the money all the time. We bailed out the banking industry while business were starved for capital. Now the banking industry is making record profits, providing record payments to lobbyist while small business across america is failing every day.

Please remember friends we voted for this, Mr McCain told us the key to recover was small business during the election and Mr Obama said the key was to get banks, green power, and health care reform.

Friends we did this to ourselves, we can not blame Mr Obama he told us what he would do, and he is doing it. Elections are important.

Get out your waders, the BS is piling high!

Unions have as much relevance to the real world as dinosaurs on the interstate would. They have created much of the so-called crisis by paying teachers, and union workers high salaries to do nothing in many cases, and preventing the firing of bad workers. They are socialism and they are not good for America. The better solution is to have an educated populace that knows the real agreed upon laws by the citizens of the U S Constitution and Amendments to it, instead of a Congress that creates ways to bypass the Constitution and instead of any court making up its own rules as it goes along.The communist Congress has to be defeated at next election--unseat Pelosi, Kennedy, Clintons, Obamas, and get some who believe in free enterprise, and liberty not mandated payment of premiums to refill the socialists' coffers of trick and treachery.
/s/ Gloria Poole, R.N. and artist in oils; Denver Colorado @ 9:48AM 17-July-2009

Do you realize how nonsensical that sounds? The "solution" is education, but let's not pay the teachers a decent salary?
And, your respect for laws and the Constitution would probably be a little more convincing if you didn't sound like such a partisan Republican. You know, the party that did everything they could to eviscerate both during the last eight years if it got in the way of their (vice) president?
And, do you have any idea of the definition of communism?

If there's a solution in education, that solution does not necessarily lie in education for its own sake.

What is the productive economic value of an Islamic madrasah, a Hindu ashram, or a Talmudic schul? Or, for that matter, a Protestant or Catholic seminary? In all such institutions, there is undoubtedly education taking place.

But does any of that learning equip the matriculant to go out into the commercial world and perform services or create goods that other people are willing to buy? The market for witch-doctors and priests and mullahs and similar boojum-peddlers gets saturated damned fast.

The truth of the matter is that government education bureaucrats - the members of the various teachers' unions, whether they're actual classroom pedagogues or just bureaucrats without direct instructional function - do not do an effective job in imparting skills to their pupils, particularly considering the exorbitant cost per pupil per year in virtually every American school district.

Moreover, such skills as these educationalists strive to impart to their students are not marketable skills. More horrible still, the majority of undergraduate and graduate degree programs operating produce people whose academic concentrations are in areas which are of just about precisely the same economic value of the people to come out of school as experts in the Qu'ran, the Torah, or Dungeons & Dragons.

Well, not quite. A lot of D&D experts have some potential future in games design.

Economist Thomas Sowell some years ago voiced the distinguishing characteristics of economically successful families and ethnic groups in cultures all over the world. They are three:

1) They work very hard, their purpose being to make money by providing goods and services for which other people are willing to pay.

2) They save as much money as they can, so as to create capital upon which they can draw for future actions.

3) They study - or support their children in school - to gain marketable skills.

That's it. Education AS SUCH can serve no purpose if it is not undertaken to acquire economically valuable skills. Mr. Soetoro's encouragement of community college study programs - most of them concentrating on what will inevitably be the "squishy" subjects, aptitudes in which do not contribute to the matriculants' productivity in later years - is a bucket of bilge.

But, that's true of bloody everything Mr. Soetoro espouses, isn't it?

In English:
"David Keene went off the reservation all on his own when he asked for the money for us from Fedex, but we're not actually denying the politico story."