South Carolina Education Association Wracked by Union Troubles

A national education newsletter that focuses on labor issues is reporting that the South Carolina affiliate of the National Education Association (NEA) is having union troubles of its own.

According to the Education Intelligence Agency, "negotiations between the South Carolina Education Association (SCEA) and its staff are souring, with the staff union president asserting SCEA executives told employees 'that the South Carolina Education Association is two years from closing its doors.'"

The newsletter reports "this may be a negotiating tactic, but SCEA is a mess."

South Carolina's relatively small teachers' union has been losing membership for years to alternative organizations that offer teachers insurance and professional development, without the NEA's radical promotion of abortion, the homosexual agenda, and other left-wing causes.

Reflections on the Kennedy Funeral

From LifeSiteNews
Commentary by Steve Jalsevac

I am not dismayed or downhearted, just amazed at the depth of human weakness and self delusion revealed by the Kennedy funeral. Let me explain, and also urge what should be the response of pro-life people be to this event.

It was a fascinating funeral with many touching moments and fine speeches. Ted Kennedy was shown to have presented in many ways a very attractive image - an exceptionally generous person, a good father, a faithful friend to many, an accomplished man of the world despite many personal setbacks and hardships.

For Kennedy, Obama, and many of the pro-abortion politicians at the funeral - image is crucial. They rely upon it to influence the public to trust them and to support their political goals. They know that the public can be lulled away from critical thinking and attention to facts if political image is well cultivated and presented.

As we have repeated a number of times in our coverage of Ted Kennedy's illness and then death, we do not judge his relationship with God. No one can do that. But his public record is another thing. We can and must judge that. He profoundly helped to advance the Culture of Death and other developments harmful to life, family and faith in America.

As for the grandiose funeral broadcast around the world - the Mass, the Church, the priests and Cardinal O'Malley - all appeared to be merely useful props for the liberal establishment to exploit. That establishment was given the keys to do whatever they wanted.

This was not a funeral to beseech God on behalf of the dead and to remind the living of what God expects from them in this life and that they too will meet their maker. That is the purpose of a Catholic funeral. Nothing is taken for granted. We beseech God's mercy at a Catholic funeral. A Catholic funeral reminds all that there is eternal reward for the faithful but also, a price for sin, a need for repentance, and a need to pray for the dead - since there is indeed a Heaven, a Purgatory and a Hell.

However, the Catholic Church in Boston and Cardinal O'Malley totally capitulated. I felt embarrassment and shame for the good Cardinal.

Saint Kennedy was canonized with not even one appropriate reference from anyone during the entire proceedings addressing his extreme pro-abortion record. By implication, everything that the senator from Massachusetts did in his political life was affirmed during that Catholic Church event.

The tyranny of moral relativism triumphed. The false, very selective, "spirit of Vatican II" social justice version of Catholicism dominated. The beatitudes taken out of context from the gospel can give false assuance and soothingly warp consciences for those who live personal lives in serious violation of that real gospel.

The message from the Boston Catholic Basilica to all Catholic politicians, to all Catholics in positions of authority and to the world was clear. In the end, abortion doesn't really matter. Same-sex marriage is not really an important issue. Church moral teachings in general are just talking points for consideration. And finally, the central teaching authority of the Church is an outdated concept. It does not matter what Christ, the Ten Commandments, the Pope's and the saints have said. Image, worldly respect, your local bishop or priest friend or theologian trump all the other universal things of the faith.

Much of what took place in the Basilica, regarding Kennedy's political legacy, was missing real love and real charity. Christ showed what true love was and they crucified him for it.

Despite all this, we at LifeSiteNews will continue to do what we must. Pro-life, pro-family leaders will soldier on.

A few years ago in Toronto, the late Fr. Richard Neuhaus addressed the issue of what our response should be to disappointments in the pro-life struggle. He stated,

"There are many who do not understand that this is the great civil rights movement of our time, that this is the great human rights movement of our time… and the future will vindicate that we are the avant guard - we are the vanguard.

There are those in the pro-abortion camp who view their position as the progressive position. They are wrong. It is not progressive but barbaric.

This cause will not let you go. Will the Gospel of Life prevail? Oh, yes. The Gospel of Life will prevail. When and in what way we do not know. I am sure some of you know the lines of T.S. Elliot…"For us, there is only trying, the rest is not our business." I understand Elliot to be saying, "the rest is not our business, the rest is God's business."

In the First Things article, Scandal Time, regarding the clergy sexual abuse scandals, Neuhaus made some comments that would also seem pertinent to Church tolerance of pro-abortion Catholic politicians. Neuhaus wrote,

"What is this crisis about? The answer is that this crisis is about three things: fidelity, fidelity, and fidelity. The fidelity of bishops and priests to the teaching of the Church and to their solemn vows; the fidelity of bishops in exercising oversight in ensuring obedience to that teaching and to those vows; and the fidelity of the lay faithful in holding bishops and priests accountable.

I have been told that the proposition is "controversial," but I suggest it is almost embarrassingly self-evident: if bishops and priests had been faithful to the teaching of the Church and their sacred vows, there would be no scandal. Those who would confuse the subject reflexively reach for complexity. No, I am sorry, it is as simple as that. We are reaping the whirlwind of widespread infidelity."

And finally, a LifeSiteNews reader sent us this excerpt from an address by Archbishop Fulton Sheen to the Supreme Convention of the Knights of Columbus in June 1972,

"Who is going to save our Church? Not our bishops, not our priests and religious. It is up to you, the people. You have the minds, the eyes, and the ears to save the Church. Your mission is to see that your priests act like priests, your bishops act like bishops, and your religious act like religious."

Doctor Admits Euthanizing Patient During Hurricane Katrina

From LifeSiteNews
By Thaddeus M. Baklinski

A doctor has admitted that he gave orders for a lethal dose of medication to be administered to a patient under his care during the hurricane Katrina disaster in 2005 - a decision that he says he does not regret having made.

Dr. Ewing Cook said that as staff at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans were struggling to evacuate patients from the flooded building, he gave the order to give Jannie Burgess, 79, who was dying of uterine cancer and kidney failure, a dose of morphine that he knew would kill her.

"Do you mind just increasing the morphine and giving her enough until she goes?" Cook said he asked the patient's nurse, and then wrote "Pronounced dead at" on the patient's chart and left it blank to be filled in later.

Cook described the "double effect" of morphine, which is frequently used to control severe pain or discomfort but can also slow breathing and, if suddenly introduced in much higher doses, lead to death.

"If you don't think that by giving a person a lot of morphine you're not prematurely sending them to their grave, then you're a very naïve doctor," Cook said.

"To me, it was a no-brainer, and to this day I don't feel bad about what I did," Cook told ProPublica, an independent nonprofit investigative organization.

"There's no question I hastened her demise," he said. "I gave her medicine so I could get rid of her faster, get the nurses off the floor."

Cook also described another area of the hospital that was crowded with patients on cots and stretchers where he considered euthanizing the ones that had "do not resuscitate (DNR)" on their charts. "We didn't do it because we had too many witnesses," he told ProPublica. "That's the honest-to-God truth."

Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell told AP he would not reopen an investigation launched by his predecessor, Charles Foti, because of the disclosures by Dr. Cook.

In that investigation another doctor and two nurses were arrested on charges of second-degree homicide, but a Grand Jury declined to indict them.

Dr. Anna Pou, a surgeon who specializes in working with cancer patients, and nurses Cheri Landry and Lori Budo, who had admitted to administering lethal doses of medication to patients during the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, were offered immunity from prosecution by Attorney General Foti, before testifying to a Grand Jury that four patients died after being administered what Foti called a "lethal cocktail" of drugs.

Dr. Pou denied the charges, insisting that she did not support euthanasia and claimed to have given only comfort care for the patients.

However, court documents asserted that witnesses had testified that Dr. Pou and the two nurses took syringes full of drugs to a ward for the chronically-ill and injected four patients. Thirty-four patients died in Memorial Medical Center following the Katrina disaster, more than in any comparable-sized hospital in the drowned city.

A coroner's report stated that more than half of the bodies taken from Memorial tested positive for morphine or midazolam, or both. Robert Middleberg, the director of the toxicology laboratory where the autopsy samples were tested, said the high drug concentrations found in many of the patients stuck out "like a sore thumb."

The ProPublica report cites University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Arthur Caplan, who, after reviewing the records of the patients who died and the coroner's report, concluded that nine patients were euthanized, and that the way the drugs were given was "not consistent with the ethical standards of palliative care that prevail in the United States." Those standards are clear, Caplan wrote, in that the death of a patient cannot be the goal of a doctor's treatment.

The complete investigative article from ProPublica is available here.

Experts See Double-Digit Dem Losses

Americans are clearly aroused and angry that they have been duped by a smooth-talking Marxist.

The loss of freedoms, government takeover of the US economy, recruiting citizens to become informants and snitch on their neighbors, threats to free speech and the possible shutdown of talk radio, spending, taxes and deficits designed to exacerbate a national crisis, socialized medicine, health care rationing, contempt for traditional American allies and support for Marxist movements in this hemisphere and around the world, and unelected commissars in the White House governing outside the Constitution and any accountability to Congress, will not be tolerated by the American people.

However, we believe that the Marxist thugs in the White House are so contemptuous of the Constitution and American freedoms, that they will do whatever it takes to avoid the constitutional and political consequences of their program. We will not be surprised if they create an incident in which they will seize ultimate power. Whatever the outcome of this dangerous passage, the American people have awakened to what they are about. The Politico holds out the hope of big changes in Congress:

Experts See Double-Digit Dem Losses

From Politico

After an August recess marked by raucous town halls, troubling polling data and widespread anecdotal evidence of a volatile electorate, the small universe of political analysts who closely follow House races is predicting moderate to heavy Democratic losses in 2010.

Some of the most prominent and respected handicappers can now envision an election in which Democrats suffer double-digit losses in the House — not enough to provide the 40 seats necessary to return the GOP to power but enough to put them within striking distance.

Top political analyst Charlie Cook, in a special August 20 update to subscribers, wrote that “the situation this summer has slipped completely out of control for President Obama and congressional Democrats.”

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Kennedy and the KGB

From American Thinker
By Paul Kengor

Shortly after the announcement of Ted Kennedy's death, I had already received several interview requests. I declined them, not wanting to be uncharitable to the man upon his death. Since then, I've seen the need to step up and provide some clarification.

The issue is a remarkable 1983 KGB document on Kennedy, which I published in my 2006 book, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism (HarperCollins). The document is a May 14, 1983 memo from KGB head Victor Chebrikov to his boss, the odious Soviet General Secretary Yuri Andropov, designated with the highest classification. It concerns a confidential offer to the Soviet leadership by Senator Kennedy. The target: President Ronald Reagan. (A pdf file of the original Russian language document and an English translation is available here.)

With Kennedy's death, this stunning revelation is again making the rounds, especially after Rush Limbaugh flagged it in his "Stack of Stuff." I'm being inundated with emails, asking basically two questions: 1) is the document legitimate; and 2) what does it allege of Senator Kennedy?

First off, yes, the document is legitimate. If it were not, I would have never reported it. Over the years, from my book to radio and web interviews, I've provided specifics. Briefly summarized, here are the basics:

The document was first reported in a February 2, 1992 article in the London Times, titled, "Teddy, the KGB and the top secret file," by reporter Tim Sebastian. Russian President Boris Yeltsin had opened the Soviet archives. Sebastian discovered the document in the Central Committee archives specifically. When his article appeared in the Times, other on-site researchers dashed to the archives and grabbed their own copy. Those archives have been resealed.

The Times merely quoted the document and ran a tiny photo of its heading. Once I got ahold of it later, I published the entire text (English translation) in my book.

Importantly, when I published the document, Senator Kennedy's office didn't dispute its authenticity, instead ambiguously (and briefly) arguing with its "interpretation." This was clever. The senator's office didn't specify whether this interpretation problem was a matter of my personal misunderstanding of the document or the misunderstanding of the document's author, Chebrikov. Chebrikov couldn't be reached for comment; he was dead.

So, what was the offer?

The subject head, carried under the words, "Special Importance," read: "Regarding Senator Kennedy's request to the General Secretary of the Communist Party Y. V. Andropov." According to the memo, Senator Kennedy was "very troubled" by U.S.-Soviet relations, which Kennedy attributed not to the murderous tyrant running the USSR but to President Reagan. The problem was Reagan's "belligerence."

This was allegedly made worse by Reagan's stubbornness. "According to Kennedy," reported Chebrikov, "the current threat is due to the President's refusal to engage any modification to his politics." That refusal, said the memo, was exacerbated by Reagan's political success, which made the president surer of his course, and more obstinate -- and, worst of all, re-electable.

On that, the fourth and fifth paragraphs of Chebrikov's memo got to the thrust of Kennedy's offer: The senator was apparently clinging to hope that President Reagan's 1984 reelection bid could be thwarted. Of course, this seemed unlikely, given Reagan's undeniable popularity. So, where was the president vulnerable?

Alas, Kennedy had an answer, and suggestion, for his Soviet friends: In Chebrikov's words, "The only real threats to Reagan are problems of war and peace and Soviet-American relations. These issues, according to the senator, will without a doubt become the most important of the election campaign."

Therein, Chebrikov got to the heart of the U.S. senator's offer to the USSR's general secretary: "Kennedy believes that, given the state of current affairs, and in the interest of peace, it would be prudent and timely to undertake the following steps to counter the militaristic politics of Reagan."

Of these, step one would be for Andropov to invite the senator to Moscow for a personal meeting. Said Chebrikov: "The main purpose of the meeting, according to the senator, would be to arm Soviet officials with explanations regarding problems of nuclear disarmament so they would be better prepared and more convincing during appearances in the USA."

The second step, the KGB head informed Andropov, was a Kennedy strategy to help the Soviets "influence Americans." Chebrikov explained: "Kennedy believes that in order to influence Americans it would be important to organize in August-September of this year [1983], televised interviews with Y. V. Andropov in the USA." The media savvy Massachusetts senator recommended to the Soviet dictator that he seek a "direct appeal" to the American people. And, on that, "Kennedy and his friends," explained Chebrikov, were willing to help, listing Walter Cronkite and Barbara Walters (both listed by name in the memo) as good candidates for sit-down interviews with the dictator.

Kennedy concluded that the Soviets needed, in effect, some PR help, given that Reagan was good at "propaganda" (the word used in the memo). The senator wanted them to know he was more than eager to lend a hand.

Kennedy wanted the Soviets to saturate the American media during such a visit. Chebrikov said Kennedy could arrange interviews not only for the dictator but for "lower level Soviet officials, particularly from the military," who "would also have an opportunity to appeal directly to the American people about the peaceful intentions of the USSR."

This was apparently deemed crucial because of the dangerous threat posed not by Andropov's regime but -- in Kennedy's view -- by Ronald Reagan and his administration. It was up to the Kremlin folks to "root out the threat of nuclear war," "improve Soviet-American relations," and "define the safety for the world."

Quite contrary to the ludicrous assertions now being made about Ted Kennedy working jovially with Ronald Reagan, Kennedy, in truth, thought Reagan was a trigger-happy buffoon, and said so constantly, with vicious words of caricature and ridicule. The senator felt very differently about Yuri Andropov. As Chebrikov noted in his memo, "Kennedy is very impressed with the activities of Y. V. Andropov and other Soviet leaders."

Alas, the memo concluded with a discussion of Kennedy's own presidential prospects in 1984, and a note that Kennedy "underscored that he eagerly awaits a reply to his appeal."

What happened next? We will never know. None of the Kennedy admirers and court composers who serve as "journalists" bothered to ask, even with decades available to pose questions, beginning back in January 1992 when the highly reputable London Times broke the story.

In 2006, when my book was released, there was a virtual media blackout on coverage of the document, with the exception of conservative media: talk-radio, Rush Limbaugh, some websites, and mention on FoxNews by Brit Hume. Amazingly, I didn't even get calls from mainstream reporters seeking to shoot down the story. I had prepared in great detail to be grilled on national television, picturing the likes of Katie Couric needling me. I didn't need to worry.

I worked up a detailed op-ed on the document, where I even played devil's advocate by defending Kennedy, trying to get at his thinking, being as fair as possible. No major newspapers would touch it. The Boston Globe editors refused to acknowledge it or reply to my emails. The editor at the New York Times confessed to being "fascinated" by the piece but conceded that he wouldn't "be able to get it in."

One editor at a West Coast newspaper, a genuinely fair liberal, considered it carefully. We went back and forth. I was shocked to see that neither the editor nor his staff would do any investigating, not placing a single phone call to Kennedy's office. In the end, the editor rejected the piece, telling me: "I just can't believe Kennedy would do something that stupid."

Alas, here we are now, after Kennedy's death, and I'm reliving the same experience, as no one from the mainstream media has contacted me. Liberal reporters lionized Ted Kennedy in life and have begun the canonization process in death. They are liberal activists first, and journalists second.

Finally, a postscript for these liberal Democrat "journalists:" We know they don't care that Ted Kennedy did this to Ronald Reagan. Fine. Well, how about this? As the Mitrokhin Archives reveal, Senator Kennedy did something similar to President Jimmy Carter in 1980 -- his own political flesh and blood.

Does that story interest liberal reporters? No. I likewise noted that gem in 2006. I didn't get a single media inquiry.

It will be left to future generations to examine these truths. As for Senator Ted Kennedy's motivations for doing what he did with the Soviet leadership? Alas, now we can definitively say, he will never tell us. The liberal media protected him, all the way to the grave.

Paul Kengor is author of The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism (HarperPerennial, 2007) and professor of political science at Grove City College. His latest book is The Judge: William P. Clark, Ronald Reagan's Top Hand (Ignatius Press, 2007).

Rasmussen: 57% Would Vote to Replace Entire Congress

From Rasmussen Reports

If they could vote to keep or replace the entire Congress, just 25% of voters nationwide would keep the current batch of legislators.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 57% would vote to replace the entire Congress and start all over again. Eighteen percent (18%) are not sure how they would vote.

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"O God Our Help In Ages Past"

From Our Friends at Piddingworth