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 On The O'Reilly Factor last Monday night, there was a female guest talking
about claims that an angry Tea Party crowd had hurled racial invective at a
black congressman. She and O'Reilly (or at least his staff) had pored over all
the available video and audio from the event and could not find any of the
alleged racial invective.
O'Reilly, contrary to the fond beliefs of the Left, is careful to make sure he
sticks to the facts in evidence; his guest did not share that attitude. O'Reilly
said, "We can't find any video corroboration, but that doesn't mean it didn't
happen."
His guest, however, said, "We only have the word of a couple of congresspeople
who just voted to trample on the Constitution, so we can be sure they just
made up false charges against the Tea Party crowd."
O'Reilly pushed the point: Just because somebody voted for the health care bill
does not mean he's a liar.
The news headline on the WRAL website says "A new draft of history:
Curriculum change defeated by negative feedback."
So it looks as though the North Carolina State Department of Public
Instruction has backed down and won't be eliminating the teaching of
American history before 1877 from our high schools.
But let's look a little more closely. Because the original plan is not actually
dead. It's just getting a facelift.
The same people are still setting out to change the state's high school
curriculum. They still have the same goals. They just discovered that, after
7,000 emails protesting the plan, they have to disguise it better.
We weren't supposed to notice. So now they're waving their hands and, presto-change-o, they're going to pretend they're not really changing anything.
Practically everyone agrees that American schools are doing a lousy job of
teaching history to our children.
But there are two opposite views of what the problem is.
A lot of us think the schools are failing to teach our children the roots of the
American system -- the Constitution, the great men who founded our republic
and brought it through its early struggles, especially the fight to abolish
slavery, the wars and why we fought them, the development of the frontier, the
growth of technology.
When I was a kid in California -- when that state had the finest public schools
in the world -- that's precisely what I was taught. And the goal of the teaching
of history in those days was to turn out informed citizens who knew how we
came to be the nation we are today.
But there are a lot of other people -- including the entire educational
establishment of our state (and almost every other state as well!) -- that thinks
the reason our public-school history teaching is lousy is because we spend way
too much time on all that early stuff that nobody cares about anymore, and
don't do enough to give our kids the full array of politically correct opinions.
Those of us who have been following the real science on Global Warming over the past two decades are not at all surprised by the revelations about and admissions by the Global Warming Alarmists in recent months. They have known all along that their "conclusions" were unwarranted and their "data" bogus. Why else would they have been hiding their source material, manipulating the peer review process, and using polls and name-calling to buttress their position instead of firm, clear, reproducible science?
Please keep in mind the vast, economy-wrecking international treaties and national legislation that depended on the "conclusions" of the global warming hoax for their sole justification. Notice also that the people pushing this legislation are still saying, "We need to go ahead anyway!" (Scientific American just echoed that refrain in the latest issue.) But ... if there is no data supporting the Anthropogenic Global Warming claims, why in the world should we wreck the global economic system?
Those who vilified me for daring to be a skeptic on the obviously bad science involved with the Global Warming Hoax are now welcome to post their apologies.
Suddenly a charismatic 50-year-old legislator from Massachusetts is propelled
to national prominence because he wins, as a Republican, the seat long held by
Ted Kennedy.
After Kennedy died, this outcome seemed about as likely as the moon suddenly
turning spongy and bouncy. There are some things that don't happen, and
since the death of the liberal wing of the Republican Party, it seemed that
Republican victories in statewide elections were going to be flukes -- like Mitt
Romney's election as governor.
I'm still in the midst of reading Sarah Palin's book, Going Rogue. I have been
angry for more than a year now about the way she has been, and continues to
be, savaged by the liberal media. She has done nothing to warrant this
treatment. If she had been a Democrat with the identical record of
achievements, she would be celebrated as one of the heroes of the Left.
Most Americans don't belong to unions. It happens that I do -- Hollywood is a
closed union shop, and in order to be hired to write screenplays one has to be a
member of the Writers Guild.
They take a small percentage of every screenwriting check I receive -- and it's
worth every penny. Even though at times the Writers Guild seems to be run by
short-sighted, squabbling, territorial chimps, we have ample proof that without
the union, screenwriters would be treated even worse than they already are.
My first exposure to unions, however, came when I was a young child, growing
up in California. My uncle Gordon was employed by United Airlines.
People have been asking me why I haven't written a WorldWatch or a
Civilization Watch in nine months.
At first it was because I wanted to give Obama a chance to show us who he is.
I even hoped that maybe his pose as a middle-of-the-road bring-us-together
candidate was actually true.
Now he's shown us that he's a radical leftist at heart and all his promises --
every one of them -- were lies. But he's still relatively harmless domestically
because he's such an incompetent leader, unable to hold his course or
persuade even his followers.
Because the mainstream press refuses to see anything wrong in the Obama
administration, even the most outrageous actions are given astonishingly
gentle treatment -- if they get any treatment at all.
So of course we hear almost nothing about the coup d'etat that is under way in
the White House.
People have been talking about a "historic realignment," but of course that is
nonsense. Most Americans report mostly conservative viewpoints on most
issues. That hasn't changed.
I don't know about you, but I thought it was a delicious moment when
President Obama made his condescending handshaking visit to the press room
and got testy when the reporters insisted on asking him questions.
"If you keep asking questions I won't be able to do this any more," he says,
sternly, like a father saying, "Do I have to turn this car around?" He was so
arrogant that I laughed out loud.
Something extraordinary happened to me today. Somebody actually asked me
for my opinion.
You have to understand how rare this is. Because I have so many chances to
sound off about -- well, about everything -- it's not as if there's an opinion
shortage anywhere near me.
As I write this column, Americans are voting.
In Greensboro, the kids are out of school because so many of their buildings
are being used as polling places.
My wife canceled the tomorrow's session of the six a.m. New Testament class
she teaches in our home, so that her high-school-age students could stay up
late tonight to watch election returns.
I thought of my good friend who until 2008 lived in a country where elections
are meaningless, because brutal intimidation and institutionalized voter fraud
guarantee that the ruling party is reelected every time. Soon his family will join
him here in the United States (legally, in case you wonder). He loves his native
country -- but he loves freedom more.
And that's what it's about when we vote.
Obama's "ideological" energy plan would cripple U.S. economy
Obama isn't cutting taxes for the poor, because they don't pay any.
Instead, he's planning to make it so expensive to generate electricity that only
the rich can afford to use their appliances whenever they want.
Why? It's all in the name of Obama's True Belief in Global Warming. He says
it himself -- he'll take coal off the table as an "ideological matter." Even if
technology allows us to use coal in a clean way, he's opposed to pursuing it.
He wants to put a huge penalty on companies that emit carbon -- which
means that starting up new coal-powered electrical plants will be prohibitively
expensive. In Obama's own words, "It will bankrupt them."
Sometimes it seems like this election is one big pillow fight. The air is now so
full of floating feathers that it's hard to see the furniture, and the media isn't
helping, as they blow the fluff around.
But there are solid issues in this election, and how we vote will have lasting
effect on our future.
On one extreme, we have the idea that the Constitution is a written document that can only be altered by a deliberately time-consuming process of amendment.
On the other extreme, we have the idea that the Constitution means whatever a group of judges says it means.
The Constitution itself belongs to the first group -- it declares that it can only be changed through the amendment process.
An open letter to the local daily paper -- almost every local daily paper in America:
I remember reading All the President's Men and thinking: That's journalism. You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know.
This housing crisis didn't come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.
It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.
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March 21, 2010
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