Choir practice for the Obama Youth

This is why so many people went ballistic when they heard about Obama's plan to address all the nation's children in a televised speech in the captive environment of the public schools.

The culture of the public school system is dominated by the National Education Association which is one of the primary pillars supporting the Democrat party and the political far left. Teachers belonging to the NEA have a history of doing things like requiring as a for-credit class assignment the children in their charge to write letters to congress advocating some left-wing position. They have also used paid teacher "work days" to travel to state capitals or even Washington to participate in demonstrations supporting left-wing causes.

At least one school that was planning to require students to watch Obama's speech was also going to show the children a video in which various celebrities urged the children to pledge to, among other bits of left-wing moonbattery, "serve President Obama".

Michelle Malkin tells us of a class where children were required to watch Obama's address to the joint session of congress and then given a quiz in which all of Obama's claims about his health care plan were treated as facts.

This tendency of Obama's supporters to recreate Germany's Hitler Youth or the USSR's Young Pioneers is both sickening and dangerous. Brainwashing children into giving unthinking support to a leader/party/philosophy which will leave the nation which they are to inherit weaker, poorer and less free constitutes child abuse as far as I'm concerned.

Child pornography on the rise again

From The Washington Post:

Lewd photographs of children were disappearing from adult bookstores. Child porn magazines in plain brown envelopes were no longer reaching customers through the mail. It was the early 1990s, and experts believed that federal law enforcement efforts were ending child pornography.

"We thought this was one of those rare forms of social deviance, of criminal behavior, that had been eradicated," said Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. "Except for a fixated group of hard-core pedophiles, we thought it was gone."

But an increase of Internet-fueled child pornography has triggered a new federal crackdown. Cybercrime, the majority of which involves child pornography, is now the FBI's third-highest priority, behind counterterrorism and counterintelligence.

In the past 11 months, federal prosecutors in Virginia and Maryland have helped convict or send to prison on child pornography charges the former head of the Virginia American Civil Liberties Union, an Ivy League professor, a sheriff's deputy, a Transportation Security Administration employee, an Army sergeant, a former Navy cryptologist, a contractor working at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, a National Institutes of Health researcher and a U.S. Capitol Police officer.

"The problem is as bad as it appears," said Arnold E. Bell, unit chief of the FBI's Calverton-based Innocent Images National Initiative. "There are not enough badges out there to cover all the people to be had in terms of offenders."

The crackdown on child pornography is a lesser-publicized effort than the pursuit of people who solicit sex from minors and are arrested, often through sting operations, when they show up for an encounter with someone they meet on the Internet. And it has touched off a debate over how often this type of crime leads to molestation of children and whether viewing photographs warrants years in prisons.

Some defense lawyers and treatment professionals say that the focus on pornography has become excessive. Many caught in the dragnet, they say, viewed images for their private gratification but never intended to hurt a child.

"Sending people to prison for five or 10 or 15 years for looking at pictures is killing an ant with a sledgehammer," said Peter Greenspun, who defended Charles Rust-Tierney, the former ACLU head sentenced to seven years in prison for downloading hundreds of images. "These people are being put on sex-offender registries, they are being ostracized from the community, for looking at pictures."

But the nature of the images alarms law enforcement officials, who say Internet child pornography is increasingly sadistic and depicts young children whose victimization fuels a growing market.

Many defendants obsessively collect huge numbers of images -- the FBI recently seized a computer with 1.5 million images suspected to be child pornography -- and many have molested children, officials say. People who download the images once or twice, possibly by accident, are unlikely to be prosecuted, officials said.

"You can't wrap your brain around what we're talking about here," said Bonnie S. Greenberg, a prosecutor in the U.S. attorney's office in Maryland. "We're not talking about a 16-year-old who looks like she could be 19. We're seeing prepubescent children who are being raped, babies, toddlers being tied up."

The part about the ACLU lawyer made me laugh. How many people join or support that organization because they have some deviate behavior that they want to see legalized and/or normalized? I would suspect a great many. This is a problem the Libertarian Party also has to contend with.

As far as child pornography goes it's production requires the victimization of children. To be a customer for kid porn you have to be an accessory to the molestation of a child or children. Of course such people should be prosecuted.

What I mean by true child pornography is actual photographs or video recordings of actual children being raped or otherwise molested. People who get off on watching a video of a 4-year-old child being sodomized should not be walking around free.

Say it ain't so

NEW YORK - On-again friends Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie are taking "The Simple Life" — which shows the tabloid-ready celebutantes thrown into everyday situations with real people — to camp. After last season's format allowed the then-feuding friends to have little to do with each other, this year's edition brings them together again.

"The Simple Life Goes to Camp," set to debut in May, has Hilton and Richie working as counselors at Camp Shawnee in the mountains near Los Angeles. . .


"Paris and Nicole will be advising and training girls and their moms for beauty pageants, or providing therapy for couples seeking to strengthen their relationships," she said.

They are going to be "counselors".

They will be giving advice to children.

Spank your child in public and someone will call the cops and report you for child abuse, but turning your daughter over to Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie and you get to be on TV.

Lord come back; it's time.