Vinny123 again droning on about the utility of DETC doctorates.

Degreediscussion thread

Does anyone really care anymore?

Hawaii elections clerk: Obama not born here

Quote:Official who oversaw ballots in 2008 race says hospital birth certificate non-existent

Posted: June 10, 2010
3:39 am Eastern

By Joe Kovacs
© 2010 WorldNetDaily

A college instructor who worked as a senior elections clerk for the city and county of Honolulu in 2008 is making the stunning claim Barack Obama was definitely not born in Hawaii as the White House maintains, and that a long-form, hospital-generated birth certificate for Obama does not even exist in the Aloha State.

"There is no birth certificate," said Tim Adams, a graduate assistant who teaches English at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, Ky. "It's like an open secret. There isn't one. Everyone in the government there knows this."

Adams, who says he's a Hillary Clinton supporter who ended up voting for John McCain when Clinton lost the Democratic nomination to Obama, told WND, "I managed the absentee-ballot office. It was my job to verify the voters' identity."

He says during the 2008 campaign when the issue of Obama's constitutional eligibility first arose, the elections office was inundated with requests to verify the birthplace of the U.S. senator from Illinois.

"I had direct access to the Social Security database, the national crime computer, state driver's license information, international passport information, basically just about anything you can imagine to get someone's identity," Adams explained. "I could look up what bank your home mortgage was in. I was informed by my boss that we did not have a birth record [for Obama]."

At the time, there were conflicting reports that Obama had been born at the Queen's Medical Center in Honolulu, as well as the Kapi'olani Medical Center for Women and Children across town. So Adams says his office checked with both facilities.

"They told us, 'We don't have a birth certificate for him,'" he said. "They told my supervisor, either by phone or by e-mail, neither one has a document that a doctor signed off on saying they were present at this man's birth."

To date, no Hawaiian hospital has provided documented confirmation that Obama was born at its facility.

WND confirmed with Hawaiian officials that Adams was indeed working in their election offices during the last presidential election.

"His title was senior elections clerk in 2008," said Glen Takahashi, elections administrator for the city and county of Honolulu.

Takahashi also confirmed Adams' time frame at the office from spring until the month of August.

"We hire temporary workers, because we're seasonal," he said.

However, when WND asked Takahashi if the elections office could check on birth records, he said, "We don't have access to that kind of records. [There's] no access to birth records."

Adams responded, "They may say, 'We don't have access to that.' The regular workers don't, the ones processing ballots; but the people in administration do. I was the one overseeing the work of the people doing the balloting."

Adams stressed, "In my professional opinion, [Obama] definitely was not born in Hawaii. I can say without a shadow of a doubt that he was not born in Hawaii because there is no legal record of him being born there. If someone called and asked about it, I could not tell them that person was born in the state."

The White House has maintained a computer-generated Certification of Live Birth, or COLB, is proof enough of Obama's Hawaiian birth, even though it has no hospital or doctor's name on it. Such documents differ from a Certificate of Live Birth which includes those details. In response to a direct question from WND, the Hawaii Department of Health refused to authenticate either of the two versions of Obama's short-form COLB, posted online – neither the image produced by the Obama campaign nor the images released by FactCheck.org.

"Anyone can get that [COLB]," said Adams. "They are normally given if you give birth at home or while traveling overseas. We have a lot of Asian population [in Hawaii]. It's quite common for people to come back and get that."

When WND mentioned there were announcements of Obama's birth published in Hawaiian newspapers, Adams noted, "I'm sure the [maternal] grandparents were happy to put that in the paper when he got born."

But Adams says that doesn't necessarily mean he was actually born in Hawaii. While he's not 100 percent sure of Obama's true birthplace, he does think Kenya is a possibility, since his paternal grandmother stated that before allegedly being silenced by other family members.

Last month, as WND reported, Hawaii's Republican Gov. Linda Lingle reignited Obama's origin on a New York radio show.

"It's been an odd situation," Lingle said. "This issue kept coming up so much in the campaign, and again I think it's one of those issues that is simply a distraction from the more critical issues that are facing the country.

"So I had my health director, who is a physician by background, go personally view the birth certificate in the birth records of the Department of Health, and we issued a news release at that time saying that the president was, in fact, born at Kapi'olani Hospital in Honolulu, Hawaii. And that's just a fact and yet people continue to call up and e-mail and want to make it an issue and I think it's again a horrible distraction for the country by those people who continue this."

Although the governor now claims she issued a news release stating Kapi'olani is Obama's birthplace, the actual release said no such thing, making no reference to Kapi'olani nor any other specific location of Obama's birth.

WND asked Adams why the governor would make such assertions if a Hawaiian hospital-generated birth certificate did not exist.

"Why would they say they've seen it and not produce it? I don't know," he said. "If they said they've seen the document, then why not produce the document? There's no need to put themselves out like that. I can't even begin to think why they did that except for some kind of political expediency. I'm too far down the totem pole [to know]."

While Adams, who noted he spent nearly 10 years in the islands and has a bachelor's degree from the University of Hawaii, says he's certain Obama was not born there, he also does think the president is indeed a U.S. citizen, since his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham was an American.

He says he merely would like to see the truth come out and have the controversy over natural-born citizenship and presidential eligibility resolved once and for all.

"It's come to the point where it's a monster, and it's time to kill it," Adams said. "Solve the problem so that everyone can get back to cooperating to improve the country. People have lost sight that we're trying to make the country a better place."

He also feels some empathy for Obama, foreseeing what the president would potentially experience based on confirmation of his claims.

"You don't have to like President Obama," he said, "but it is sad that he's going to have to go through this public pillory by the time this all comes out, that they did cover this up; and that's sad because the first African-American man to become president shouldn't have this blight on his term in office. That's what he'll get remembered for. It's sad."

Adams says he's been telling other people his information for a long time, and he's free to talk about it publicly since he no longer has any confidentiality restrictions from his former employer, the Honolulu government. People started to pay attention this week after he was briefly interviewed by James Edwards, host of a weekly radio show on WLRM Radio in Memphis, Tenn.

As WND reported last July, the Kapi'olani Medical Center trumpeted – then later concealed – a letter allegedly written by President Obama in which he ostensibly declares his birth at the facility.

"As a beneficiary of the excellence of Kapi'olani Medical Center – the place of my birth – I am pleased to add my voice to your chorus of supporters," Obama purportedly wrote.

But the authenticity of that letter remains in doubt. Since WND raised questions about the veracity of the letter itself and its content, the White House has refused to say if the message is real and if its text originated with the president.

When WND correspondent Les Kinsolving asked Press Secretary Robert Gibbs about the letter at the July 13 news briefing, Gibbs dodged the question, refusing to confirm its authenticity while belittling Kinsolving for even posing the question.

"Do all of your listeners and the listeners throughout this country the service to which any journalist owes those listeners, and that is the pursuit of the noble truth," Gibbs lectured Kinsolving. "And the noble truth is that the president was born in Hawaii, a state of the United States of America."

Since the medical center used the letter for a high-profile fundraising campaign in the Spring 2009 edition of its Inspire Magazine, the FBI and United States Secret Service said the matter could potentially lead to criminal prosecution were the letter determined to be fraudulent.

"It would be a charity-fraud scheme," said FBI spokesman Steve Kodak. "It would be investigated by us or the Secret Service. We both have jurisdiction over that."

WND also revealed the discovery by private investigators who say Obama is mysteriously using a Social Security Number that was issued in Connecticut, despite having worked in Hawaii as a teen and there being no mention of him living in Connecticut.

Meanwhile, Hawaii continues to get requests for release of Obama's hospital-generated birth certificate, leading state lawmakers to take action.

They passed a bill in April allowing any Hawaii department to ignore repeated inquiries for information from the same person, if the department already has responded within a year. Gov. Lingle signed it into law shortly after WND's report about her declaration on radio that Obama was born at Kapi'olani.

Accreditors are lacking "analytical firepower"?  Is that a nice way of saying "fucking stupid"?

New Scrutiny for College Accreditation Groups

Quote:JUNE 7, 2010
By MELISSA KORN

Groups that accredit colleges and universities are facing new scrutiny after the U.S. Department of Education's inspector general urged department officials to curtail the authority of the nation's largest regional oversight group.

The inspector general's office found that the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools granted accreditation to a for-profit university despite what investigators considered the school's questionable practices in awarding credit hours to students.

The inspector general urged federal officials, in a final report released May 24, to "limit, suspend or terminate" the HLC's accrediting power.

Officials with the department said they were awaiting a response from the commission before making a decision.

The HLC has objected to the report's conclusions. Karen Solinski, the commission's vice president for legal and governmental affairs, said it has been working with the department on responding to suggested corrective actions. "We'll see where that process comes out," she said.

Many analysts doubt federal officials would take such extreme actions as those called for by the report. A loss of governmental recognition could put students at HLC's 1,000-plus schools in jeopardy of losing federal student aid. Colleges and universities need approval from government-recognized accreditors to participate in federal student-aid programs.

The report comes as the department is pushing for stronger oversight of for-profit higher education amid explosive growth in the sector. Robert Shireman, deputy undersecretary of education, told regulators in April that he feared accreditors didn't have the "analytical firepower" needed to fairly assess schools.

Colleges and universities pay accrediting agencies such as the HLC to evaluate educational activities, financial stability, governance and administrative structure.

Mr. Shireman likened accreditors to credit-rating agencies that gave top marks to underperforming securities amid the financial crisis and said the organizations have an "inherent conflict of interest," as they are funded by the educational institutions they are meant to critique.

The inspector general's report blasted the HLC for accrediting Career Education Corp.'s American Intercontinental University, even though HLC had previously expressed concerns about the school's credit-hour structure.

The report said HLC's failure to define what constitutes a credit hour allowed the university to inflate course value and, consequently, award students too much in federal student loans.

Jeff Leshay, a spokesman for Career Education, said American Intercontinental supports the accreditation process and that HLC's advisory committee found no violations in its recent review of the university.

Department officials said a newly reconstituted oversight body, the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, would help correct problems in the accrediting process. The group has not met for two years because of a holdup in member nominations.

RA = No Way for the NCAA. Seems that cheaters like certain RA online high schools. The "gold standard" doesn't quite cut it for non-academics, so it seems.

Too bad there's not some sort of self-appointed diploma mill expert in Illinois to investigate that Illinois-based fraud. When it's happening right under his big nose he doesn't know anything about it.

Quote:After years of questions over whether athletes across the country were cheating on them, the NCAA said Tuesday it will no longer accept [NWCCU accredited] Brigham Young University's online courses.

The NCAA in its announcement framed the prohibition as part of a larger effort to clamp down on online or mailed-correspondence courses taken by athletes. But for the moment, the NCAA is only banning online courses from BYU and one other institution, the Illinois-based [NCACS accredited] American School.

The NCAA, in the press release on its website, said BYU and American School were "two of the programs most frequently submitted to the NCAA Eligibility Center." The decision only applies to BYU's online high school courses.

BYU spokeswoman Carri Jenkins said the NCAA notified BYU of its decision Friday. Administrators there were surprised, Jenkins said, and want to put BYU's online courses back in compliance.

"We do have some questions we want to pose to the NCAA," Jenkins said. "We've always had a good relationship with the NCAA and hope to be able to address those questions with them soon."

The prohibition goes into effect Aug. 1. Courses completed before then will be considered on a case-by-case basis, the NCAA said.

In 2006, The Salt Lake Tribune reported how an unknown number of high school and transferring athletes have taken online courses to become eligible to play Division I college sports. The students typically need credits in subjects like math or English or need to increase their grade point average.

Some of those athletes and their suitors or coaches have been caught cheating, especially with BYU correspondence.

One of the best-known cases remains that of Ricky Clemons, who took nine credit hours from BYU as part of 24 credit hours he completed from three schools in the summer of 2002. Clemons was a high school dropout who was trying to get eligible to play basketball at the University of Missouri. Students trying to get or stay eligible to play sports at the University of Kansas, University of Mississippi and Nicholls State University also have been found to have improperly taken BYU correspondence courses. In the case of Nicholls State, some athletes didn't know coaches enrolled them in the BYU courses.

Rules passed last month by the NCAA require students and instructors to have "regular access and interaction."

"Students cannot teach themselves, and they cannot pace themselves," NCAA spokesman Chuck Wynne told the Associated Press. "The courses need to have a certain amount of rigor."

Jenkins said the NCAA did not cite any specific reasons for the ban. As BYU has become aware of cheating problems in its online courses in recent years, the university has placed tighter controls on the tests it administers and prohibited current college athletes from enrolling in online courses.

The NCAA's ban on BYU online courses drew concern Tuesday night from Kadie Otto, a former president of The Drake Group, a collection of professors advocating for improved academics for college athletes. Otto said if the NCAA is singling out BYU and American School, the NCAA will have to sort through the dozens of other institutions offering such courses.

"As far as we knew up to this point, [the NCAA wasn't] making judgement on curriculum issues," said Otto, who also is an associate professor of sports management at Western Carolina University. "That's a big deal. The integrity of the curriculum has always been in the hands of the faculty."

http://online.degree.net/

I registered there, posted something and was banned all in the same day. I was not even given an explaination. And my post was deleted!

What I posted was a link to the same article I posted before here.

Who the hell runs that forum anyway?

Former thread: http://www.dltruth.com/showthread.php?tid=720

I made a complaint to the  Middle States Commission on Higher Education (A Regional Accreditor) about Excelsior College, the state sponsored diploma mill which allows one to sit for a single substandard GRE and then award the student an advanced degree. Excelsior has been operating since the 1970s, and has released hundreds of thousands of students out into the world with criminal credentials. An advanced degree based on a single easy 120 question test!

They emailed me back and told me that they only accept postmarked complaints.

Ha ha, like they only tell one lie.  More like one of many.  This is the system the higher ed cartel and their shills are protecting.  Go into hock up to your eyeballs for a degree that gets you nothing more than you could have gotten right out of high school.  Assuming you even get a degree at all.  


Higher Education's Big Lie

Quote:...With millions more students attending college, it makes sense to ask whether their degrees will pay off.

First of all, it is debatable whether a majority of future job openings will require a college degree. ...The New York Times reports that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, most job growth in the next decade will be in labor markets where a bachelor's degree is not necessary. Furthermore, the cost of attending college has risen dramatically in recent years. Conflicting claims about the economic value of a degree along with skyrocketing tuition raise a question about whether college is a good investment for all students, especially those low-income students who can least afford to spend money and years on a higher education venture that may not produce rewards.

Secondly, the issue of college payoff becomes even more complicated when we consider that many students who begin college will not complete degrees. While the U.S. leads the world in college attendance, it is ranked near the bottom in the number of students who actually graduate. In fact, college access, which is touted as a symbol of our meritocratic ideals, leads to a degree for only about half of all students who enroll. Completion rates are even lower for first-generation collegians and people of color. According to education researcher Peter Sacks, the chance that a low-income child will earn a bachelor's degree is no higher today than it was in 1970, a grave contradiction in the meritocratic narrative of the education gospel.

In fact, as the sociologist Annette Lareau has shown in Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, the qualities that lead to academic success are not linked to college access, effort, or intelligence, but to accidents of birth. For the most part, the children of affluent parents attend the best colleges and get the best jobs. Opening the doors of higher education has not altered this basic arrangement. Still, the myth persists that, to get ahead in life, the first thing you ought to do is write a tuition check.

These days it is more likely that a student's first tuition bill will be paid with money from a loan. What looks like an investment in the future, however, can often turn into an economic disaster.

...We can all point to success stories in which nontraditional collegians achieve a sense of purpose and satisfaction in the life of the mind, earn degrees, and find jobs worthy of their tremendous effort and intelligence. But there is a pervasive silence in academe about the tarnished hopes and debt loads of many other students who do not complete degrees. ...

Student loans...are the most burdensome to nontraditional collegians, especially working-class students and people of color. These students are disproportionately enrolled in institutions that do not look anything like the colleges of popular imagination in which full-time students live on residential campuses, party on fraternity row, and attend football games.

...Rather, I am proposing that those of us working in academe begin to dismantle the myth that higher education can facilitate social mobility on a mass scale. In fact, the opposite is true. According to a study by the Brookings Institution, "the average effect of education at all levels is to reinforce rather than compensate for the differences associated with family background and the many home-based advantages and disadvantages that children and adolescents bring with them into the classroom." This is a shattering indictment of the education gospel. Dismantling this myth means being honest with ourselves and with our students about the role of higher education in reproducing class inequality across generations. ...

Malaise At Mellon

Quote:Deja Vu: In a Carteresque speech Wednesday, the president said we should tax our way out of despondency and dependence on fossil fuels. The American dream isn't slipping away. It's being stolen by big government.

It might as well have been President Carter addressing the audience of students and faculty at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University. Instead it was President Obama who spoke of our dependence on fossil fuels and blamed everybody and everything, except for a lack of presidential leadership, for our current situation.

On July 15, 1979, President James Earl Carter gave what has become known as the "malaise" speech. He didn't actually use that term. Instead, he spoke of "a crisis in confidence ... that strikes at the very heart and souls and spirit of our national will."

On Wednesday, Obama spoke of the "feeling of not being in control of your own economic future — that sense that the American dream might slowly be slipping away."

In fact, the American dream is being taxed away by a government already spending our children's inheritance.

Carter spoke of an energy crisis that was "the moral equivalent of war" and of our "intolerable dependence on foreign oil." Obama warned of "our continued dependence on fossil fuels (that) will jeopardize our national security. It will smother our planet."

But it's our continued dependence on government, expanded under this administration, that will smother the American economy and people.

Obama also blamed "greed and irresponsibility on Wall Street" along with oil "corporations taking dangerous shortcuts to compromise safety." And don't forget those rascally Republicans: "Before I was even inaugurated, the congressional leaders of the other party got together and made a calculation that if I failed, they'd win."

Captain Queeg is still searching for the missing strawberries.

Sorry, but there's no one to blame for the president's failed policies but the president — from the trillion-dollar stimulus that created no jobs to the nationalization of health care that will lead to ballooning deficits, doctor shortages and rationing. It is the president who is failing, and the voters will remember in November.

As bad as things are, they'll get worse under policies Obama announced in the speech. He noted that the House passed the Waxman-Markey cap-and-tax bill and that a similar plan sponsored by Barbara Boxer and John Kerry is stalled in the Senate.

"I want you to know the votes may not be there right now, but I intend to find them in the coming months," he said. "The next generation will not be held hostage to energy sources from the last century." If the votes will be found as they were for the health care overhaul, this could get expensive.

He said the transition from fossil fuels is possible "if capital comes off the sidelines." That's a tough sell when his favorite energy sources don't work when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine.

"And the only way to do that is by finally putting a price on carbon pollution." In other words, a carbon tax.

As the Heritage Foundation notes, subsidizing experimental energy sources doesn't become more attractive because oil pollutes our waters. In Louisiana alone, Heritage reckons, Waxman-Markey would result in the loss of 15,000 jobs, higher gas prices and rocketing consumer electric rates. Whom will Obama blame that on?

What Obama offers is a skyrocketing misery index, unsustainable debt and oppressive, job-killing taxation.

If the students at Mellon were anxious, they had reason to be. We have labeled Jimmy Carter our worst ex-president. He may soon have a rival for that title.

http://detc.org/downloads/publications/M...tation.pdf

People have been alleging that Patriot Bible University is a "Diploma Mill," but I beg to differ.

Kent Hovind, the young earth creationist, wrote a doctoral dissertation on young earth creationism for Patriot Bible University. While very humorous to read, it's quite lengthy, about a hundred pages. Everyone I've shown it to seems to glaze over and say "too long; didn't read".

Thus, as they require a significant amount of work to obtain a credential, one must conclude that Patriot Bible University is NOT a Diploma Mill.

http://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/Young-eart...ssertation

Hovind didn't even need to co-author with 16 other people, either.