OK, my aunt brought up this in converation the other day.
She said that Ted Kennedy said that "the government shouldn't help private school kids affected by hurricane Katrina". Being savvy to the type of stuff that Rush Limbaugh does (like misquoting people) I challenged to see if this is what Kennedy had actually said. She said yes.
On my Google searches, I could only come up with one article that popped up in multiple places:
Kennedy kills aid plan for parochial-school Katrina victims
Washington, Sep. 21 (Culture of Life Foundation/CWNews.com) - One of America's most prominent Catholic politicians has killed a proposal by President Bush would have given families displaced by Hurricane Katrina financial aid to send their children to private or parochial schools, the Culture of Life Foundation reports.
A bipartisan student relief package put forth by Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy and Wyoming Senator Michael Enzi did not include a provision that would have given students up to $7,500, because Senator Kennedy opposed the provision, according to a high-level Congressional staffer who spoke with Culture & Cosmos, an online newsletter from the Culture of Life Foundation.
Culture & Cosmos also reports that a prominent Church prelate said he was furious that aid to private schools had been kept out of the package and he was especially angry that it is being blocked by "four Irish Catholic Senators."
The proposal for financial aid came from the Bush administration and the Department of Education and noted that, "Communities in Louisiana significantly impacted by the hurricane had an above average number of children enrolled in private schools-- 61,000 students in private schools compared to 187,000 in public schools in four severely impacted parishes. These significantly impacted Louisiana communities averaged 25 percent of students attending private K-12 schools-- much higher than the 11% national average of private school students."
Out of the 61,000 students in private schools, 81 percent, or 50,000 attend Catholic schools. In fact, New Orleans public schools have long had a reputation for poor quality and the Catholic school system there is seen as an affordable refuge.
Senator Kennedy publicly criticized aid for private schools yesterday in a statement, saying: "This is not the time for a partisan political debate on vouchers." Despite the high percentage of New Orleans students who attend private school, Kennedy said that "we need to focus on rebuilding the public school systems which are the cornerstones of the Gulf Coast communities and economies."
This is even the article that the freepers went off on.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1488973/postsSo does anyone have the skinny. Is this Rush Limbaugh simply "paraphrasing" someone in a way to make them say something COMPLETELY different than what they said?
It would seem to me that Kennedy wants to put lots of $$$ into rebuilding PUBLIC schools that EVERYONE can attend instead of pouring subsidizing private schools that a select few can attend.
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