Archive for May 2010

It’s the largest financial aid package ever. And it remains to be seen whether the IMF and the European Eurozone nations will ever get their money back.

But according to senior foreign affairs correspondent for Radio Netherlands Bernard Hammelburg, France is a greater danger than Greece, Portugal or Spain.

The French economy is in deep trouble as well, and the importance of such an economic giant within the eurozone is far and far greater.

Video available here.

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

That was the slogan of the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s “1984,” where Winston Smith worked ceaselessly revising the past to conform to the latest party line of Big Brother.

And so we come to the battle over history books in the schools of Texas. Liberals are enraged that a Republican-dominated Board of Education is rewriting the texts. But is the rewrite being done to falsify history, or to undo a liberal bias embedded for decades?

Consider a few of the issues.

The new texts will emphasize that the separation of church and state was never written into the Constitution.

Is that not right? The First Amendment prohibits Congress from establishing a national religion. But, in 1776, nine of the 13 colonies had state religions established in their constitutions.

Thomas Jefferson’s words about a “separation of church and state” were not written until 1802, when he responded to a letter from the Danbury Baptist Association. Not until after World War II did the Supreme Court begin the systematic purge of Christianity from American public life.

Barack Obama may have declared, “We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation.” But Woodrow Wilson said, “America was born a Christian nation,” and Harry Truman wrote Pius XII to affirm, “This is a Christian nation.”

The Texas school board wants the U.S. economic system called “free enterprise” rather than the term Karl Marx used, “capitalism.”

Anything wrong with that?

The Christian Science Monitor cites one professor Phillip VanFossen [email him] as appalled the new history texts will put a “more positive spin on Sen. Joe McCarthy’s communist witch hunt.”

Witch hunt?

The FDR and Truman administrations were shot through with treason. Alger Hiss, who was with FDR at Yalta and Truman in San Francisco when the U.N. was founded, was a Stalinist spy, exposed by Whittaker Chambers and Rep. Richard Nixon.

Harry Dexter White, Treasury’s No. 2, who pushed the infamous Morgenthau Plan to turn Germany into a pastureland, was a Soviet agent, as was White House aide Laughlin Currie and State’s Laurence Duggan, whose treason was confirmed by the VENONA decrypts of Soviet cables in 1995.

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Mayor Eric McBride

The Hemet City Council today will consider a proposal by Mayor Eric McBride to formally support the new Arizona immigration law.

On April 23, Gov. Jan Brewer signed what is considered one of the nation’s toughest laws on illegal immigration. It requires police officers during a “lawful stop, detention or arrest” to detain people they reasonably suspect are in the country without authorization and to verify their status with federal officials. It is scheduled to take effect in August.

McBride said he would like California to pass a similar law but for now just wants the City Council to direct staff to draw up a resolution in support of it. A vote has not been scheduled.

“As far as violent crime, it has begun to creep across the border,” McBride said. “When is it going to cross over into an American being kidnapped because they have some affluence? The United States needs to get a handle on it.”

McBride also criticized those who have lived in the U.S. for decades and have never attempted to become legal citizens, saying many want to take without giving.

“Let’s reward those who do it legally,” he said. “A lot of us are immigrants. They all went through the system. Today, do it the same way.”

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Robert Mugabe

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One of Bill Ayers’ courses at the University of Illinois includes Pedagogy of the Oppressed as required reading. Author Paulo Freire, a Brazilian Marxist, declared:

“This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well.”

It turns out that the Freire book is required reading in “Raza Studies” or Mexican-American courses in the high schools in Tucson, Arizona, where students have been protesting Arizona’s new immigration law. Other required books are Occupied America by Rodolfo Acuña, a professor emeritus of Chicano studies at California State University in Northridge (CSUN), and Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Communist.

Occupied America, the fifth edition, includes an image of Fidel Castro on the front cover, and Castro and Che Guevara on the back cover. It refers to white people as “gringos” and actually includes a quotation on page 323 from Jose Angel Gutierrez of the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO), who was angry over the cancellation of a government program. He declared:

“We are fed up. We are going to move to do away with the injustice to the Chicano and if the ‘gringo’ doesn’t get out of our way, we will stampede over him.”

The book goes on:

“Gutierrez attacked the gringo establishment angrily at a press conference and called upon Chicanos to ‘Kill the gringo,’ which meant to end white control over Mexicans.”

Reviewing this material for the National Association of Scholars, Ashley Thorne commented that, “Actually, ‘kill the gringo’ meant ‘kill the gringo.’ But admitting that makes Mexicans look radical, infuriated, revolutionary, Acuña sidestepped that image and substituted it with one of browbeaten Latinos rising to overthrow injustice.”

The Arizona citizens upset about this kind of material said that they initiated an investigation into the problem back in 2007 and found it difficult to get access to the books. One activist said the concern began when parents came to be aware of violence in the schools directed against white and black children. “This investigation was undertaken to find the roots of this hate,” she told me. Another person, in turn, “told me the books in their Mexican-American classes are kept under ‘lock and key’ and the kids can’t even take them home. She said she asked to see them but they were very secretive about them and she was prohibited.”
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Barack Obama has made the Communist Party United States of America (CPUSA) relevant again.
The dangerous little twerps are active again in our major cites, fighting to destroy America as they have every country they’ve controlled.

By cleaving themselves to the Democrat Party, infiltrating labor unions “peace groups” certain “Black” groups “mainstream churches” and Obamacare supporting organizations, the Communists have stolen some respectability and gained entry to the halls of power, achievements they couldn’t realize standing alone.

Their biggest prize is becoming the driving influence in Obama’s brown shirt army: Organizing for America.

Sensing it is safe for him and his band of rodents to come out of the woodwork, Dan Margolis former chair of the New York State CPUSA recently bragged about the aid communists have supplied to Obama and their Party, the Democrats.

Margolis talked about how CPUSA took a leadership position in an Obama Marxist front group, “Organizing for America” and contributed “a strategic concept of who the main players are, who the main enemies [are] slowing down the process of change, what is possible and so on.”
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A few years ago, Cornell University spokesperson Thomas W. Bruce rejoiced that the Ivy League school had brought to Ithaca a man whose “distinguished background in contemporary global cultural studies,” and whose “unique perspectives and talents” would “add to the range of reasoned intellectual discourse at Cornell.”

Grant Farred

The professor about whom Bruce gushed was Grant Farred, whose latest contribution to “intellectual discourse at Cornell” came when he labeled two graduate students “black bitches.” One of the most extreme members of the Group of 88 (the Duke faculty members who issued a guilt-presuming public statement two weeks into the lacrosse case), Farred had denounced as “racist” those Duke students who registered to vote in Durham; and had wildly charged that unnamed lacrosse players had committed perjury. Duke’s settlement with the three falsely accused players shielded him from civil liability for the latter remarks. Cornell knew this record of contempt for the students he taught when it not only awarded Farred a tenured position, but promoted him to full professor, with a median salary of $154,300.

Farred’s experience typifies the Group of 88’s rebounding from their rush to judgment in the lacrosse case. Indeed, at least three Group members moved on from Duke to endowed chairs at other institutions. Charles Payne, who violated Duke rules by authorizing departmental funds to pay for the Group of 88’s ad, is now Frank Hixon Professor at the University of Chicago. He has moved on from presuming the guilt of his own school’s students to receiving fellowships to fund his work on urban schools. Payne’s most recent book, Teach Freedom: Education for Liberation in the African-American Tradition, is an edited volume published by Columbia Teachers’ College Press; it features contributions from self-described “educator-activists” on how principles of African-American “liberation” education remain relevant today.

Rom Coles, who denounced an early 2007 from Duke economics professors that affirmed that the economics professors would welcome all Duke students, even student-athletes, into their classes, is now McAllister Chair in Community, Culture & Environment at Northern Arizona University. He’s involved himself in a host of pedagogically predictable causes, ranging from learning communities to “sustainability” initiatives.

Houston Baker

Then there’s Houston Baker. The race-baiter who—after Mike Nifong’s case collapsed—still denounced a lacrosse parent as “mother of a ‘farm animal’” is now Distinguished University Professor at Vanderbilt. His behavior in the lacrosse case seemingly did nothing to lessen Baker’s credibility in academic circles (Vanderbilt featured a conference last year with the “distinguished professor” opining about the 2008 election); or those with similar ideological outlooks, such as NPR, which gave Baker space to attack other black intellectuals for having betrayed their cause.

Mark Twain, pictured around the turn of the 20th century, created such loved characters as Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer

Exactly a century after rumours of his death turned out to be entirely accurate, one of Mark Twain’s dying wishes is at last coming true: an extensive, outspoken and revelatory autobiography which he devoted the last decade of his life to writing is finally going to be published.

The creator of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and some of the most frequently misquoted catchphrases in the English language left behind 5,000 unedited pages of memoirs when he died in 1910, together with handwritten notes saying that he did not want them to hit bookshops for at least a century.

That milestone has now been reached, and in November the University of California, Berkeley, where the manuscript is in a vault, will release the first volume of Mark Twain’s autobiography. The eventual trilogy will run to half a million words, and shed new light on the quintessentially American novelist.

Scholars are divided as to why Twain wanted the first-hand account of his life kept under wraps for so long. Some believe it was because he wanted to talk freely about issues such as religion and politics. Others argue that the time lag prevented him from having to worry about offending friends.
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Iowa Rep. Steve King

Video linked here.