The first crack in the monolithic left-wing control of public education?
Texas schoolchildren will be required to learn that the words “separation of church and state” aren’t in the Constitution and evaluate whether the United Nations undermines U.S. sovereignty under new social studies curriculum.
In final votes late Friday, conservatives on the State Board of Education strengthened requirements on teaching the Judeo-Christian influences of the nation’s Founding Fathers and required that the U.S. government be referred to as a “constitutional republic” rather than “democratic.” (See earlier story)
The board approved the new standards with two 9-5 votes along party lines after months of ideological haggling and debate that drew attention beyond Texas.
How horrible! Texan schoolchildren might learn…the truth? Of course, for those on the Left, this IS horrible. As you can imagine, the Dems and other lefties are apoplectic about these changes. But really, I don’t see what the controversy is all about. Let’s look at the sore points for a moment,
“Separation of church and state” is not in the Constitution – well, uh, actually it isn’t. It appears in a private letter written by Thomas Jefferson, the context of which pretty clearly shows that Jefferson wasn’t anywhere close to advocating today’s radical, secularfascist approach to religion in the public square.
The United Nations undermines US sovereignty – This has been pretty common knowledge since the beginning of the Cold War. In fact, we were aware that the UN had been subverted by the Soviets since 1950. One look at the long list of UN proposed treaties (such as the Small Arms Treaty) makes it pretty clear that the UN intended to infringe on American liberties and freedom of action.
The Judeo-Christian influences on our Founders – Well, duh. Even the ones who weren’t Christians (and no, they weren’t all, but some of them were) are pretty clearly within the general Judeo-Christian orbit with respect to their views on religion and its impact on governance. The myth that they were all “Rational Deists” who couldn’t have cared less what the Bible or Christianity said is just that – a myth.
Referring to the US as a constitutional Republic instead of a democracy – well yeah, that’s because we ARE a constitutional Republic. I wonder if any of these naysayers have ever actually read what the Founders had to say about democracy (hint – it wasn’t positive)?
This change in curricula is a tremendous step forward toward retaking our public schools from the radical Left. Per their Gramscian master plan, the Left made taking the public schools one of their primary goals, because if they can shape and mold the thinking of impressionable children, then they create an entire generation that thinks the way they want it to because its most formative years were spent sucking down non-stop propaganda of their devising. Why do you think most reasonable and intelligent people know, based on the evidences, that global warming is nothing but a con game, yet America’s kids are still being propagandised to believe it as absolute truth? It’s because the Left knows that sooner or later, we will pass off the scene, but the kids will still be left, and old enough to vote, and get elected, and make policy decisions.
The new curricula flatly contradicts so many dishonest Leftist truisms, it’s no wonder the lefties are up in arms (one Texan lawmaker – a Democrat – has vowed to “rein in” the board). In other words, punish them for doing their jobs, and doing them well.
Even better, it’s not just 4.8 million Texan kids who will be shown the truth by these curricula. Texas is one of two states (the other being California) that basically serve as a “gold standard” for public school curricula. As Texas goes, so go a lot of other states, when the time comes for them to pick out the new textbooks that will be used in their schools.
The public education establishment hates alternatives to the public schools, especially homeschooling. Every kid that is homeschooled, going to a religious school, etc. is a kid who is not in the clutches of the left-wing educrats. While alternatives are good solutions, all the same, I think it’s pretty obvious that not every parent can afford a private school, and not every parent is capable of homeschooling their kids. This leaves the public schools as an unfortunate necessity. If we can actually succeed in wrestling back public education from the radical left fruitcakes who control so much of it now, it may not be an unfortunate option anymore. This Texan curricula is a good first step, one which will hopefully be followed by other states as well.
71 Comments »Make Mine Freedom (1948)
This is great. Imagine if they still taught this stuff in every school.
posted by Trevor Loudon at
Beat And Starve The Ox
A very funny Bloomberg article about the private-market effect of the political BS in Europe. The politics of envy and malice amount to the economics of poverty:
Company borrowing costs jumped the most in two weeks after Germany’s short-selling ban, wiping out declines triggered by Europe’s $1 trillion aid package that was meant to halt contagion from the sovereign debt crisis.
...
“What investors need most of all is security and predictability, but they are getting ever less,” said Ciaran O’Hagan, a strategist at Societe Generale SA in Paris. “Instead they are vilified as sharks, wolves or locusts, while governments rack up ever higher debt and contingent liabilities.”
...
“One thing the markets really don’t like is political interference, and that’s what the German announcement smacked of,” said Tim Barker, head of credit research at Aviva Investors in London. “Investors are trying to come to terms with political uncertainty.”
Higher corporate borrowing costs are an economic drag.
In the meantime, France and especially Italy are quietly working on cleaning up their acts. The first steps (from the UK on ) are to cut high-level government salaries. Italy's finance minister has been trying to manage their situation very tightly, and now unions are saying that their cuts will be much higher:
The Italian government may cut the salaries of public servants by 10 percent and politicians by 15 percent, in a bid to reduce the country’s deficit.
...
The reports cited unnamed sources who discussed the proposals after a meeting between union officials and finance minister Giulio Tremonti.
Tremonti earlier this month said he aimed to cut the country’s budget deficit by at least 25 billion euros by the end of 2012.
They are also going to cut the federal payments to local and regional governments.
We aren't going to see any acknowledgment of this in DC, but the UK is cutting at least top-level government salaries, and there is much more to come, Spain is cutting government salaries and is reducing welfare payments, Italy is clearly going to get serious, and Sarkozy either will cut or just freeze hiring, which could reduce public payrolls very substantially and eventually might bring the unions to the table after a titular strike or two. This article gives an idea of the sweep, but Spain has also announced that they are going to drop the baby premium next year (2.5K Euros). Spain and Germany are probably going to be cutting a lot of their energy subsidies for that green sustainable stuff which they are finding to be an economic drag. The UK is still debating measures, but it is certain that they will be dismantling portions of their social support measures.
Thus, the irony is that Christie (in NJ) is now following the European model; the liberals in DC who always talk about the benefits of the European approach are sadly out of date. The Tea Bag Party are the Europeanists; DC is just gasping out its last breath in DC Disneyland.
And how crazy is DC Disneyland, fiscally speaking? They keep introducing proposals to pay for everything. Take NoFP's coverage of the "Homeowner's Defense Act":
On April 27th, the House Financial Services Committee approved the Homeowners’ Defense Act of 2009, and sent it to the House floor. The bill, H.R. 2555, would authorize the Secretary of the Treasury to guarantee debt of certain state catastrophic natural disaster insurance. In effect, see Section 202, it's a guarantee for earthquake and hurricane insurance, making the Federal government "the insurer of last resort for nearly every disaster-prone home in the country." Though the bill modestly limits (Section 202) the obligations to $5 billion for earthquakes and $20 billion for all other natural disasters, the legislation would allow the Feds to backstop (see Section 304) an "aggregate potential liability . . . sold in any single year" of up to $200 billion.
If passed, the law would be an "implicit subsidy [making] it practical for developers to build in currently wild or lightly developed coastal areas where conventional private companies won't write policies."
Follow the link for the ugly details. This could be amazingly expensive.
And then, of course, there is the growing drive for the government to assume state government pension liabilities. Snort. We can't even afford to pay Social Security, and now we are going to assume state government pension liabilities? Isn't that a lot like asking Germans to pay for Greek retirements?
Washington is insane - just barking mad. And our press is stupid, except for very few such as Samuelson:
All the mumbo jumbo about stabilizing "debt to GDP" and according special treatment to interest payments are examples of budget-speak. It's the language of "experts," employed to deaden debate and convince people that "something is being done" when little, or nothing, is being done. For example, Obama's target for 2015 would involve a deficit of about $500 billion, despite an assumed full economic recovery (unemployment: 5.1 percent). The commission is also supposed to "propose recommendations that meaningfully improve the long-run fiscal outlook, including changes to address the growth of entitlement spending," a mushy mandate. But balance the budget? There's no mention.
It's all just nonsense. That one sentence in bold summarizes so much about our current government, and that mindset encompasses most of our legislators from BOTH parties. There will have to be a sea change before we begin to address reality.
How many people working in the White House passed through this door?
This has to be cloak-and-dagger for the time being, because though we’ve not been sworn to secrecy on the project, we’re not at liberty to talk in depth about what we did yesterday, which was in response to one of the occasional requests we get from members of the media for background info on stories they’re doing.
Normally, it’s foreign journalists who get in touch with us when they’re in Chicago and want to go to the Southside to see how terrible it is, and talk about how Obama did absolutely jack squat for it as either a state senator or US Senator, and hasn’t used any of his particular brand of unicorn horn magic to improve it (or the black community residing there) since the illustrious Golden Age of Hope and Change began on January 20th, 2009.
But, this time it was a US reporter who wanted information on Man’s Country in Andersonville, which is a place both Obama and Rahm Emanuel frequented in the past. Obama until 2002 or so, and Emanuel through 2008, according to what we’ve been told. We spent a good amount of time on the ground in Uptown, Boystown, Andersonville, and Hyde Park yesterday with this reporter, also telling him everything we knew about Trinity United Church of Christ and the Down-Low Club it operated under Jeremiah Wright’s supervision/matchmaking.
What prompted this sudden interest in stories we’ve been hearing since 2004, when Obama first came onto the national scene, is the fact that at least one national journalist also thinks it’s odd — as we have been repeatedly saying — that The Enquirer, The Globe, and other papers have been so wildly gung-ho about reporting on old Vera Baker affair rumors pertaining to Obama…and how all of this comes on the heels of Kal Penn’s sudden and abrupt expulsion from the White House.
Something is definitely fishy.
Why the sudden need to portray this current president as an insatiably heterosexual stud who just can’t get enough women?
Baker’s a diversionary tactic…designed to cover SOMETHING up…and we think that something is an affair Obama had with Kal Penn, which seems to have ended badly. We also think Penn was mugged not by a street thug in Dupont Circle, but by someone working for either the DNC or Organizing for America (or any number of its umbrella thugs), because Penn’s phone had something in it that would prove some kind of romantic relationship between the president and a Hollywood actor with zero government experience who was plucked off a TV show unceremoniously and lifted into a high profile made-up position in the White House…so he could be close to Obama in Washington, where Obama wanted him. Wanted in more than one sense.
Until he didn’t want him anymore.
And then someone needed to take his cell phone away, so that any pictures, texts, voicemails, or other interesting itts and bitts could be secured by those wishing to protect the current president.
Some day in the future — and it might very well take 50 years, until all of Obama’s cultists are gone and historians start accurately reporting on this man — we believe Eric Massa, Larry Craig, Trent Lott, Mark Foley, James McGreevey, and their like are going to prove to be boring in comparison when all of Obama’s antics pre, during, and post White House days are exposed. It’s only a matter of time. The story will one day be written. We doubt it will be by the reporter we spent the day with yesterday, but who knows.
It certainly can’t hurt to have someone from the dinosaur media poking around. The more the better, in our opinions.
May 23, 2010 at 7:12 am
Would that it could explode like 4th of July fireworks for Fraudbama, and here’s wishing for safety for the National Media person.
to Rush ( His idea during the Clinton plague upon America ) I am starting a file on “The One,” mostly starting from the election date. 
The election results were long expected, but now that the day has arrived it’s quite a letdown, anyway. Reading about the joy expressed by Hamas and Syria and Italy and Indonesia… contemplating Obama’s Secretary of State, or (God help us) Defense… Thinking about the USA becoming just like Sweden, only with a real army, and aircraft carriers, and nukes… First Lady Michelle…
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
you too!
