One more time…
“Forwarding an email” does not necessarily imply sending along the name/address of who sent it to you. Some people may choose to send it, others may choose to delete that bit.
On the other hand, “forwarding an email” DOES necessarily imply sending along the body of that email.
The claim was that the White House had asked people to send the names or email addresses of others who are sending these rumors out, and that seems to have been shown to be false.
Is there a default when told to forward an e-mail? Or is it 50/50? 80/20? 1/99?
The first rule of political controversies is, if there isn’t one make one up and pretend it is very, very important. But that does not make it true.
This whole thing is a clumsy fabrication. It will have no legs except among the rightwing Fox types ,who made it up. They will take turns asking each other how offended they are . Even tighty righties have to get bored with that crap sometimes. Don’t they?
Goodnes, intention, I guess it’s a good thing you’re not against President Obama.
I am a retired teacher and I think that I know why the optional lesson plan suggestion asked the six year olds to write about what they could do to help the President (after they had heard his speech.) The idea of doing something “to help the President” would make children of that age feel that they are doing something especially important.
School children in the last century were so anxious to help their President to stamp out polio that when he established The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, school children everywhere began to send dimes to the White House. The fund raising was soon focused in schools and was known, of course, as the March of Dimes. It began every year on President Roosevelt’s birthday – January 30. After his death, the dimes had his image on them. Many of the students had been unaware that their President had been mostly paralyzed from the waist down by polio.
What are these buzzwords I’ve been hearing about a “cult of personality”? When John Kennedy was in office, they called it charisma. We finally have someone in office that is likeable. The worst thing they have been able to come up with on him is that he tries too hard to please both sides on a first grade lesson plan.
When President Bush II was about this far into his first term, we were invaded by enemies.
The Republicans might consider using C-Span to solicit suggestions from first graders on how they can make everyone on their side play nice again and quit telling whoppers.
I don’t think I have EVER heard one side backlash, belittle, ridicule, and dismiss out of hand everything a President did more than what was done to George W. Bush.
You still seem to be missing the point that the whitehouse.gov blog doesn’t actually say “forward us the email”. What they say is that they’re looking for examples of “disinformation about health insurance reform” in order to rebut them, so if you encounter such disinformation in an email or on a website, you should “send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.”
It is clear from the context of the whole blog post that the “it” they want to see is the actual content of the “fishy” disinformation. But they phrased the suggestion ambiguously enough to allow nervous people to imagine that instead they’re nefariously compiling a record of the names and email addresses of people who oppose their health reform plans.
In short, the position you’re defending is dependent on your misinterpreting, and in fact outright misquoting, what was actually said. Again, I agree that it would have been smarter for the administration to have phrased what they said differently, but the fact remains that they didn’t actually say what you’re claiming they said.
If you had actually looked at my cite instead of just its URL, you would have seen that the link in question is an article reprinted from the June 17 New York Times. Now, I make no claim that absolutely everything that appears in the NYT is factually infallible, but I think its accuracy is unaffected by whatever loony biases may be represented in whatever blog happens to reprint its articles.
I bolded the correct answer. I suppose the president and staff should be like companies trying to avoid liability and dumb their language down to the lowest denominator to avoid more complaints and accusations.
“But your honor , they didn’t specifically tell me not to give my one year old the plastic bag to play with, so when I did it, it’s their fault”
The fact is the WH did not ask anyone to inform on their neighbor or to include email addresses in any forwarded material. That is at the discretion of the the sender which just maybe the WH considers it’s citizens to be composed mainly of reasonable people. It’d be a shame if they’re wrong.
Then you haven’t been paying attention for the last few months. You really think Al Franken would have come up with something like death panels?
It depends on how lazy and/or paranoid the sender is.
And the 2nd rule is, try not to help them if you’re a supporter.
I have a friend who was upset that people actually booed Bush at Obama’s inauguration. It was very disrespectful to him. To his credit he is now defending Obama as our president even though he disagrees with his policies. He’s getting flack from other conservatives because he won’t let them bash Obama for ridiculous irrational reasons.
My take on it is Bush earned a certain amount of disrespect after eight years of horrible policies. Obama has barely gotten started and they’ve been at his every move form the get go.
I’m not asking why you think various people would press the “forward” button when told to forward an e-mail. I’m asking you what percentage you think would do so: 50/50? 80/20? 1/99?
and I answered. {partially kidding} A reasonable person who was concerned about sending their neighbors information without their permission would do more than just hit forward.
Don’t ask me – it was cosmodan who made the reference.
Wait – people actually BOOED at Bush during the inauguration? That IS disrespectful – even if you don’t like the guy, have some class.
(Unless you’re off sick from work, at home, sitting on the sofa, like I was. Then boo, yell, cheer, give it the MST3K treatment all you want)
Nobody helped them .Tell the righties “in honor of our troops, quit making stuff up”. There is no controversy. The speech is so innocuous that the righties will have to use a lot of imagination to try and justify their lame and wrong attacks.
I hesitate to step into this debate because I won’t have time to follow up for the next several days. Yet, I feel an obligation to say, in passing if no more, that I think Intention makes some good points. And I say this, like him (her?), as an Obama supporter. There was no need for the speech to be accompanied by a lesson plan. Teachers could have, would have, figured out how to use and teach from the speech with no help. When the Right objected, it would have been easy to say, “We’re sorry, that wasn’t our intention; of course, all we meant was that students should think about how we could achieve these objectives, about which we all agree.” Calling out the Right as silly was counterproductive.
Nice try. The context of the speech was clear from the day it was announced. Earliest reference I can find here. On August 14, UPI reported that the president said during an interview with an 11 year-old student reporter that the speech would be about “the importance of education, the importance of staying in school, how we want to improve our education system, and why it’s so important for the country.”
Even as of September 3, the Christian Science Monitor quoted a WH spokesperson describing it as such: "
Quote:
“The goal of the speech and the lesson plans is to challenge students to work hard in school, to not drop out and to meet short-term goals like behaving in class, doing their homework and goals that parents and teachers alike can agree are noble,” spokesman Tommy Vietor told FOXNews.com yesterday. “This isn’t a policy speech. This is a speech designed to encourage kids to stay in school.”
What part of the lesson plan indicated that this was anything other than what it was reported as, a discussion about the importance of education? The correct answer is nothing. Nothing at all. There is no rational reason to believe the cherry-picked statement meant anything other than what are your ideas for helping the president with the topic at hand? The context was clear. You’ve clearly been duped.
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Brown Eyed Girl, thanks for the response. You seem to hold a misapprehension about my position in all of this. I’m not saying that I thought that Obama was going to brainwash the kids. I’m saying that it was foolish to ask teachers to ask kids to “help the President” without specifying what they should help him to do. And I’m saying that an outline for a speech means nothing about what the president would actually say, and thus provides no context at all. See my comment about Ronald Reagans “education” speech below.
[QUOTE=Brown Eyed Girl]
[QUOTE=intention]
I agree that asking kids to think about what’s important to America is not indoctrination.
Asking them to “help the president” do something unspecified might or might not be …
[/QUOTE]
Really? Why not? Used to be a time when POTUS was an honored and respected position. Used to be a time when we encouraged kids who aspired to the presidency. Used to be a time when the president asked citizens to contribute to the betterment of our country, we were inspired and proud to a part of the process. Why shouldn’t we aspire to help the president? He’s got a big job, he needs to hear from his citizens; kids should learn that they are part of the process, not just bitter reactionaries to the machinations of politicians. Who says the help means I agree with everything the president says? Why can’t help be speaking out by saying, “You should be working on this problem, Mr. President. Here’s my idea of a solution.”
Jumping to the conclusion that simply asking kids to “help the president” is nefarious from the get-go is unreasonable and steeped in political bias. Especially in light of the completely reasonable topic of the speech, reported from the moment of its announcement and reinforced by the subsequently released lesson plan.
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Look, many people don’t trust Obama any more than I trusted Bush. Because of that, Obama’s request, that kids be asked by the teachers to “help the president”, was foolish in the extreme. It depended on your lovely idealized vision of the Presidency, a vision which hasn’t been true for some time. If Bush had made the request, I would have been suspicious. For Obama to think it would be just fine was naive.
[QUOTE=Brown Eyed Girl]
[QUOTE=intention]
Yes, and teachers also have it in spades.
As far as I know, this is the first presidential address to kids that includes a “lesson plan” from the Department of Education.
[/QUOTE]
Then I would say the DOE fell down on the job in previous years. The lesson plan is simply a resource for teachers. It’s a jumping off point for turning the speech into a teachable moment. I can’t find anywhere that says the speech or the lesson plan are mandatory. It seems reasonable for an organization to provide a guideline for questions and answers with regard to the material its presenting. Of course, it stands to reason that the individual schools or teachers might decide to create its own lesson plan. What’s the big deal?
[/QUOTE]
The big deal, as I wrote above, is that Federal involvement with local schools is a hot button subject for a large part of the populace. And it is forbidden for the DofEd to give “direction” to local schools, so they’re out at the edge of their envelope to have any involvement at all.
As such, if you’re going to do it, you’re a fool if you don’t think long and hard about every word in the lesson, and how it will be interpreted by those who don’t trust either the president or the DofEd.
[QUOTE=Brown Eyed Girl]
[QUOTE=intention]
Now it may be a jolly good whiz-bang idea to have a DofEd “lesson plan” along with a presidential speech to kids … or it may be a perilous voyage into uncharted waters. Many people don’t like the Department of Education a bit, and feel that education is a function reserved for the states … just sayin’, not advocating here.
[/QUOTE]
What’s your point? It’s not mandatory. It’s simply a resource that’s available to those who wish to use it. It’s a guideline. Would it make any difference if it were written by an educator? Is there any indication it wasn’t?
Hmm, let’s see. The plan says it was produced by Teaching Ambassador Fellows. I wonder who they are… Oh look, they’re public school teachers! Who better to write a lesson plan?
[/QUOTE]
The point, to say it again, is that if a president is going to venture into shark infested waters, he should be very careful. Obama wasn’t, and reaped the whirlwind. Now I agree with you that the whirlwind was not deserved … but he should have expected that people would parse every inch of the lesson plan very carefully. And in that regard, the Teaching Ambassador Fellows did a very poor job. Their idea of what to focus the kids on (after the offending instruction was removed) was still:
Now, given that until the speech was released nobody knew what the President was going to ask the kids to do, this is a fertile field for people who don’t trust the President, it could have been written just to give Glen Beck ammunition. Where is the “education” part of the equation? There’s not a word about education in any of that, it’s a litany of what the President wants the kids to do … which is unspecified.
The fact that the Teaching Ambassador Fellows didn’t think of the predictable pushback from that is understandable, they’re teachers, not politicians. But the fact that the White House didn’t think of the predictable pushback from those kind of instructions, which mention the President ad nauseum and education not in the slightest, is very depressing to me. I had expected much more political acumen from Obama and his administration.
[QUOTE=Brown Eyed Girl]
I call BS on this too. It’s always been about the speech and, most importantly, that Obama has the audacity to address public school children. Shall I remind you once again that using the lesson plan the DOE provided is optional? Since this is the case, what’s the big deal, again? That actual public school teachers wrote a lesson plan that asked children how they could help the president in conjunction with a speech about personal responsibility and educational excellence? Could it be that the answers they are looking for might have something to do with, oh I don’t know, staying in school and doing their homework?
[/QUOTE]
No, it wasn’t the speech. The speech, as you point out, was all about staying in school. The big deal was the vague and easily misinterpreted call for kids to “help the President”. We know that was the issue, because the White House changed it. If it was not the issue … then why did the White House change it?
Paraphrasing doesn’t go in quotes. You did not “misrepresent [my] statement”. You claimed I said something I never said, and now you think I should congratulate you because you’re not “defensive” when I object to your cheap tactics. Anyone joining the discussion at your post would think I actually said that, because that’s what quotes mean.
Upon review, I have no problem with Obama or Bush Jr. or Sr. or anyone asking my child to study hard. I do have a problem with them enlisting her teacher to convince her to “help the president”. My daughter is not likely to do what the President says. She is very likely to do what her teacher says. Neither Bush, junior or senior, tried to enlist the teachers in the crusade to “help the president”. They just asked the kids to stay in school and study hard, not to help the president. Why is that difference so hard to get through to you?
[QUOTE=Brown Eyed Girl]
[QUOTE=intention]
There was no context, because there was no speech at the time. If you want to have an honest discussion, you have to discuss the lession with no context. Go ahead. Give it a shot.
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Unnecessary. As I pointed out above, with cites (!), there was context. Are you disputing that context? Are you suggesting that the Obama administration was misrepresenting the intent and content of the speech?
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If you think the announcement that “it’s going to be a speech about education” provides context for “help the president” do something unspecified, I fear I can’t help you with this.
[QUOTE=Brown Eyed Girl]
[QUOTE=intention]
Again, this is a straw man. My issue was never with the speech, I have no objection to any president speaking to the kids, it’s part of their job. My issue was with the lesson plan. Perhaps you see it as a brilliant idea for the Department of Education to request teachers of all political persuasions to ask kids to contemplate how they can “help the president” in some unspecified task … me, not so much, seems like a recipe for disaster to me. There’s going to be plenty of people, both parents and teachers, who are almost guaranteed to object to that, particularly when they don’t know what the president is going to say.
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You only don’t know since you seem to have been sticking your fingers in your ears. The context of the speech was announced on the day the speech was announced. So, now that the speech has been released, will you concede that it’s much ado about nothing?
[/QUOTE]
Again the advantage of age, I’ve seen some of this before. I meant “I don’t know” as in, until the President gives the speech, we don’t know what he’ll actually say. You may or may not have been following politics in 1988 when Reagan gave a speech to students that, like Obama’s, was billed as being about the importance of education. But in the middle he wandered off the reservation and said:
[QUOTE=Ronnie Raygun]
Today, to a degree never before seen in human history, one nation, the United States, has become the model to be followed and imitated by the rest of the world. But America’s world leadership goes well beyond the tide toward democracy. We also find that more countries than ever before are following America’s revolutionary economic message of free enterprise, low taxes, and open world trade. These days, whenever I see foreign leaders, they tell me about their plans for reducing taxes, and other economic reforms that they are using, copying what we have done here in our country.
I wonder if they realize that this vision of economic freedom, the freedom to work, to create and produce, to own and use property without the interference of the state, was central to the American Revolution, when the American colonists rebelled against a whole web of economic restrictions, taxes and barriers to free trade. The message at the Boston Tea Party – have you studied yet in history about the Boston Tea Party, where because of a tax they went down and dumped the tea in the Harbor. Well, that was America’s original tax revolt, and it was the fruits of our labor – it belonged to us and not to the state. And that truth is fundamental to both liberty and prosperity.
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“Education”, my ass. Would you agree that teachers asking kids to “help the President” achieve those goals might not have been a good thing? Would you agree that before Reagan’s speech, despite the fact that it was billed (like Obama’s) to be about education, we didn’t know what the president would say?
As to whether it is “much ado about nothing”, it doesn’t matter in the slightest. Again I say that if people have concerns we need to deal with those concerns, not just claim that they are unreasonable or that they are upset “about nothing”.
[QUOTE=Brown Eyed Girl]
[QUOTE=intention]
Again with the context and the speech. There was no context because there was no speech, there was nothing but a lesson plan. And I’ve never heard of a “time-honored tradition” of the President handing out lesson plans to local schools, perhaps you could provide a citation for that.
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Hmm, let’s talk again about paraphrasing statements. At what point did I indicate that the DOE lesson plan was a time-honored tradition? I really have no basis for knowing that. But what I do know is a time-honored tradition, just as I said, is the POTUS addressing school children as evidenced by George H.W. Bush’s address and Reagan’s address. (I’m pretty sure I remember Dubya and Clinton school addresses, but I can find no reference to them.)
[/QUOTE]
I apologize for my lack of clarity. I did not mean that you said there was a time-honored tradition of DofEd involvement in presidential education speeches, quite the opposite. I meant that although there is a tradition of presidential education speeches, there is no such tradition of DofEd involvement. Because of that, Obama’s speech differed from the “time honored tradition” you spoke of, and as such it would be likely to raise eyebrows.
Let me sum up my position. I was not concerned in the slightest about the speech or the lesson plans, they were not an issue to me. I did not think it would be about anything but education. I did not think they were out to brainwash the kids.
However, having heard Reagan go off the rails in his “education” speech in 1988 and talk about party politics, and knowing that Federal involvement in education is a huge red flag for many people in the US, it was entirely predictable and understandable that people would be very suspicious of Obama’s plan. Thus, it was naive of the WH not to vet the lesson plan down to its most minute detail.
In particular, asking kids to “help the president” was very foolish — why is the president interjecting himself in a speech about education? The whole lesson plan hardly mentions education, it’s all about what the President wants the kids to do. If you want kids to think about education, ask them to think about education, not about helping the president. That’s a step too far, and one that is guaranteed to cause controversy in the present political climate.
Most importantly, I hold that when there is misunderstanding and controversy about something, it is always counterproductive to blow people off and tell them that they’re crazy to be concerned about whatever it is. It’s much better to try to understand what people are worried about, and then fix it however you can. Which is why I was very happy that the WH pulled the offending lesson instruction and replaced it with something about education rather than about the president. Now if they had only omitted saying that people were “silly” to be concerned …
You seem to be missing the point that the President of the US actually did say “forward us the email”. Check it out. Look it up. It’s exactly what he said, which is why I put it in quotes.
Man, I’ve never seen such a bunch of nit-picking lawyers in my life. Consider these three requests:
Forward me your neighbor’s email.
Forward me your neighbor’s email and remove his/her email address.
Forward me your neighbor’s email and remove the body of their email.
Which of these are likely to contain the neighbor’s email address? Call me crazy, but I’d say #1 and #3.
Again, I’m not saying that Obama had evil designs by asking #1. I’m just saying it was foolish not to ask #2.
I also note that, despite requests from a variety of people, the WH has refused to say whether they’ve destroyed the email addresses they did get. Again, not evil, just dumb. Trash them and let it be known that they’ve done so. Don’t provide more ammunition for the naysayers.
Of course, Obama never asked anyone to forward him their neighbor’s email.
The ‘neighbor’ thing is just a conservative schtick to humanize the people and groups who propagate lies about healthcare reform. It makes em sound cuddly, instead of ill intentioned and deceptive.