North Carolina Schools May Cut Chunk Out of U.S. History Lessons

Wednesday, February 03, 2010

 

By Molly Henneberg

He may be the president who governed during the Civil War, freeing the slaves, but under a new curriculum proposal for North Carolina high schools, U.S. history would begin years after President Lincoln, with the presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1877.

State education leaders say this may help students learn about more recent history in greater depth.

"We are certainly not trying to go away from American history," Rebecca Garland, the chief academic officer for North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, told Fox News. "What we are trying to do is figure out a way to teach it where students are connected to it, where they see the big idea, where they are able to make connections and draw relationships between parts of our history and the present day."

As the North Carolina curriculum stands now, ninth-grade students take world history, 10th-graders study civics and economics and 11th-graders take U.S. history going back to the country's founding.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,584758,00.html

Lincoln challenges Obama on liberal "extremes"

The seminal moment of this morning's Q and A between Senate Democrats and President Obama was an extraordinary — and extraordinarily uncomfortable — exchange between Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) and Obama over the party's left and right wings.

Lincoln, who faces serious competition in her '10 reelection — and a 27 percent approval rate in Arkansas — practically demanded Obama "push back in our own party ... for people at the extremes."

http://www.politico.com/blogs/glennthrush/0210/Lincoln_challenges_Obama_on_liberal_extremes_.html?showall

 

Here is a link to the video:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2010/02/03/sen_lincoln_asks_obama_dems_to_push_back_against_left.html

Democrats consider constitutional amendment to combat Supreme Court decision on campaign finance

Democrats in Congress want to amend the U.S. Constitution to say free speech does not extend to corporations in response to the Supreme Court’s decision allowing freer corporate spending in political campaigns.

On Tuesday, Rep. John Conyers, Michigan Democrat and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Donna F. Edwards, Maryland Democrat, introduced an amendment to combat “the flawed ruling by the Supreme Court allowing corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money on elections.”

The amendment will undo the Supreme Court decision and allow the government to regulate the expenditure of funds by corporations for political speech, according to a release.

“It is time we remove corporate influence from our policies and our politics. We cannot allow corporations to dominate our elections, to do so would be both undemocratic and unfair to ordinary citizens,” Edwards said.

http://dailycaller.com/2010/02/03/democrats-consider-constitutional-amendment-to-combat-supreme-court-decision-on-campaign-finance/

February 3, 2010 5:30 P.M.

Illinois Primary Day Ends
And you had just learned how to spell “Andrzejewski.”

If Illinois Primary Day snuck up on you, don’t feel bad. Until two years ago, it was held in March; the state moved up its primary to help out native son Barack Obama in 2008 and never switched back. Thus, this year’s crop of aspiring challengers had less time than usual to grab voters’ attention and harness that burgeoning dissatisfaction and anger.Right now, no two positions in American politics are more infamous than “Illinois governor” and “Illinois senator,” thanks to the almost-open auctioneering that took place between Rod Blagojevich and the craven and obsequious career pol who ultimately was given the Senate seat, Roland Burris. Even in a state where politicians have become famous for their, er, convictions (Dan Rostenkowski, Mel Reynolds, George Ryan, Daniel Walker), the Blagojevich scandal stood out for its participants’ wildly reckless disregard for the law and the duties of their offices.

When the local U.S. attorney is on national television using phrases like “corruption crime spree” and “would make Abe Lincoln turn over in his grave,” it’s a sign the stables need to be cleaned out.

And yet turnout was strikingly low, in the neighborhood of 26 percent. That can’t be attributed to a lack of competitive races; as of midday, neither party’s gubernatorial nominee looked absolutely certain, and the Democratic Senate primary, as well as several primaries for the House, turned out to be surprisingly competitive.

http://article.nationalreview.com/423892/illinois-primary-day-ends/jim-geraghty

Warning sign in Illinois

I think last night's Illinois primary results indicate some difficulties ahead in the state for Democrats that have nothing to do with who the winners and losers were.

Based on the current numbers 885,268 voters were cast in the Democratic primary for Senate compared to 736,137 on the Republican side. Those numbers are awfully close to each other for a state that's overwhelmingly Democratic.

For sake of comparison the last time there were competitive Senate primaries on both sides in Illinois, in 2004 when Barack Obama was nominated, there were nearly twice as many votes cast in the Democratic primary as the Republican one. 1,242,996 voted in the Democratic race to 661, 804 for the Republicans.

http://publicpolicypolling.blogspot.com/2010/02/warning-sign-in-illinois.html

HOWARD ZINN’S LEGACY: Instructing Teachers to Disobey Education Codes

by Adam Baldwin

“[Howard Zinn] was a treasure and an inspiration. That he was considered radical says way more about this society than it does about him.” -  Bob Herbert 

Public school children are innocent victims of a radical “guerrilla warfare” being waged by the late professor Howard Zinn’s Zinn Education Project (ZEP), Rethinking Schools Magazine, and Teaching for Change.

These anti-establishment educators’ mission includes curriculum-subversion in order to radically transform schools into centers of social justice wherein  students are trained to become global citizen change agents. 

Perpetuating Zinn’s revolutionary mission, his surviving business partners proclaimed: 

Howard Zinn, in honor of the marvelous victory of your life, we will act in defiance of all that is bad around us and attempt to spin the world towards justice. 

With the national spotlight on History Channel’s “The People Speak” and its ZEP curriculum — parents, teachers, school boards and administrators should beware of the celebrity-opiate being dealt to their schoolchildren by way of Zinn-doctrination.

http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/abaldwin/2010/02/03/howard-zinns-legacy-instructing-teachers-to-disobey-education-codes/

Rigging the Numbers
We have not “convicted 195 terrorists in federal court since 2001.”

It is welcome news that the Obama administration has reversed its irrational decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other 9/11 plotters in Manhattan’s federal court. So far, however, the administration has merely — and grudgingly — begun to climb out of this hole of its own making.

The president seems more poised to move his error than to correct it. Reports indicate that the administration thinks the challenge now is to find a new location in which to proceed with the same ill-advised civilian prosecution. Instead, the idea at this point should be to build a sensible strategy going forward: military commissions for now, and, ultimately, a new system for handling national-security cases.

No such luck. Rather than learn from this experience, the Left is doubling down on civilian due process. Its agitprop du jour is a bogus numbers game. “We need to develop a greater resiliency in this country on security issues,” Sarah E. Mendelson of the Center for Strategic and International Studies told the New York Times. “The administration needs to remind the American public that we have convicted 195 international terrorists in federal courts since 2001.”

That 195 number is making the rounds. It is both false and an exercise in hypocrisy.

The figure is mined from “In Pursuit of Justice,” a report published by Human Rights First (HRF) in May 2008 and updated last July (available here). But the report does not claim that 195 international terrorists have been convicted. Rather, it says that 195 defendants have been convicted so far in 119 cases that have some connection, however attenuated, to terrorism. (See the report’s preface.)

http://article.nationalreview.com/423463/rigging-the-numbers/andrew-c-mccarthy

100 Months at #1 for 'FOX Report,' 'Special Report'

As of January 2010's close, Fox News' "Special Report" and "FOX Report" both hit 100 consecutive months as the top rated cable news programs in their time slots.

http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser/fnc/100_months_at_1_for_fox_report_special_report_150962.asp

Ideology: Three Deep South States Are the Most Conservative

Only District of Columbia has more liberals than conservatives

PRINCETON, NJ -- Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana are the most conservative states, with just under half of the residents in each identifying as politically conservative. Massachusetts and Vermont -- along with the District of Columbia -- have the greatest percentage of self-identified liberals.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/125480/Ideology-Three-Deep-South-States-Conservative.aspx

Obama admnistration takes several wrong paths in dealing with terrorism

By Michael V. Hayden

Sunday, January 31, 2010

In the war on terrorism, this country faces an enemy whose theory of warfare ends the hard-won distinction in modern thought between combatant and noncombatant. In doing that for which we have created government -- ensuring life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness -- how can we be adequately aggressive to ensure the first value, without unduly threatening the other two? This is hard. And people don't have to be lazy or stupid to get it wrong.

We got it wrong in Detroit on Christmas Day. We allowed an enemy combatant the protections of our Constitution before we had adequately interrogated him. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is not "an isolated extremist." He is the tip of the spear of a complex al-Qaeda plot to kill Americans in our homeland.

In the 50 minutes the FBI had to question him, agents reportedly got actionable intelligence. Good. But were there any experts on al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in the room (other than Abdulmutallab)? Was there anyone intimately familiar with any National Security Agency raw traffic to, from or about the captured terrorist? Did they have a list or photos of suspected recruits?

When questioning its detainees, the CIA routinely turns the information provided over to its experts for verification and recommendations for follow-up. The responses of these experts -- "Press him more on this, he knows the details" or "First time we've heard that" -- helps set up more detailed questioning.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/29/AR2010012903954.html

A Tale of Two Terrorists

The Justice Department defended the lengthy interrogation of one terror suspect days before the Christmas bomber was hastily Mirandized.

By DAVID B. RIVKIN JR. AND MARC A. THIESSEN

The Obama administration's decision to read the Christmas Day bomber his Miranda rights has rightly come under withering criticism. Instead of a lengthy interrogation by officials with al Qaeda expertise, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was questioned for 50 minutes by local FBI agents and then later advised of his "right to remain silent."

It's well understood that the focus on gaining evidence for a criminal trial was an intelligence failure of massive proportions. Not well understood is that the most powerful recent argument for aggressively interrogating terrorists, keeping them in military detention, and prosecuting them in military commissions comes to us from the Obama Justice Department itself.

On Dec. 18, 2009, days before the Christmas attack, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, made a secret filing in federal district court that was aimed at saving the prosecution of Ahmed Ghailani, another al Qaeda terrorist. Ghailani is facing charges for helping al Qaeda bomb U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. Ghailani argues that those charges should be dropped because lengthy CIA interrogations have denied him his constitutional right to a speedy trial.

Mr. Bharara, on behalf of the Justice Department, filed a memorandum with the court stating that Ghailani's claims are dangerous and off the mark. Interrogating terrorists must come before criminal prosecution, he wrote in language so strong that even a redacted version of his filing (which we have obtained) serves as a searing indictment of the administration's mishandling of Abdulmutallab.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704107204575039201390613906.html

How to Make a Weak Economy Worse

FDR's war against business showed that a president must choose between retribution and recovery.

By AMITY SHLAES

You get the feeling President Obama is girding for battle with the financial sector. In last week's State of the Union address, he promised to regulate the industry. On Jan. 21, he was blunter, warning that he would not let companies that enjoyed "soaring profits and obscene bonuses" block his financial reforms. "If these folks want a fight," he said, "it's a fight I'm ready to have."

This declaration of war echoes that of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In 1936, late in his campaign for a second presidential term, FDR spoke of the challenges of "business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking." Wall Streeters and businessmen hated him, he said, adding that "I welcome their hatred."

Then Roosevelt escalated: "I should like to have it said of my first administration that in it the forces of selfishness and the lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second administration that in it these forces met their master."

Mr. Obama might want to stick to a moderate approach. FDR's war against business played to the crowd, but it hurt the economy. While monetary policies impeded recovery in the late 1930s, it was the administration's assault on companies and capital that ensured the Depression's duration.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703808904575024981110918808.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion