Dumbing Down History in North Carolina and America

Dumbing Down History in North Carolina and America
Revising History to Favor Socialism and Marxism
A Commentary by J. D. Longstreet
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Another leftist plot is afoot here, in North Carolina, to reinforce the ignorance of our young students of their history, their heritage, and their REAL American culture. And this is not the first time the left has tried this move in North Carolina. We urge you to go to "ncsouth's" blog site and read the article there.

This is a must read! Go HERE!

http://ncsouth.blogspot.com/2010/02/dumbing-down-history-again.html

In an article at "Common Core" entitled "Dumbing Down The Tar Heel State," James Elias says the following: "Newly proposed standards would mean that, over their high school career, students in North Carolina would take an ambiguous course called global studies in 9th grade, take study civics and economics in 10th grade, and study U.S. history from 1877 to the present in 11th grade." He goes on to say: " The Lexington Institute’s recent report, The Teaching of American History: Promise and Performance, documents the country’s growing indifference toward its own history. How can students assume the responsibilities and privileges of democratic citizenship if they don’t know the basic facts of our national experience?" You may read the entire article HERE.

In an article by Molly Henneberg at "The Water Cooler" entitled: "North Carolina Schools May Cut Chunk Out of U.S. History Lessons" Ms. Henneberg says: "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." She goes on to say: "State education leaders say this may help students learn about more recent history in greater depth." Ms. Henneberg continues: "Under the proposed change, the ninth-graders would take a course called global studies, focusing in part on issues such as the environment. The 10th grade still would study civics and economics, but 11th-graders would take U.S. history only from 1877 onward." You may read the entire article HERE.

What we have, here in North Carolina, is a bold-faced move, by the political left, to isolate young Tar Heels from their history, their true culture, and their true heritage.

There has been a movement by the left, for a number of decades now, to dumb down our students -- especially as to their history, the history of their respective states, and the history of western civilization -- especially the history of America. Why? Well allow me to answer that question with another question: Had the American electorate actually known American history, the history of western civilization, do you seriously think they would have elected Obama to be President of the United States? The answer, of course, is a resounding NO!

This is all about the indoctrination of America's young to favor socialism/Marxism, at an early age, while they are still within the government/union-run indoctrination machine we refer to, laughingly, as the Public Education System in America. This is about creating a generation(s) of young socialists/Marxists. AND IT IS WORKING! If you doubt me, look at Congress and the Office of the President of the United States. Today America has a socialist government!

For more on the indoctrination of our young students, go to the Internet and look for something called "Organizing for America." You will learn that Organizing for America is the grassroots arm of the Democratic National Committee. You will also learn how the Obama Regime is using America's high school students as a leftist army of young people supporting Obama's socialist/Marxist agenda. You will also learn that some high school students have been given applications for employment at Barack Obama's personal political wing: Organizing for America (OFA). Included on the 20-page application is a recommended reading list that includes the most radical propaganda literature imaginable. Prominent on the list: Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, which is a step-by-step guide to the violent overthrow of the United States government. You may read more about this and see the "Intern application" for "Organizing for America" for yourself HERE.

Why aren't you hearing about this in the Mainstream Media? Do you REALLY have to ask that? The MsM is so deep in the tank for Obama, and his socialist/Marxist agenda, that it is embarrassing!! Had the Republican National Committee done this, the MsM would have been howling to high heaven! Of course, we all KNOW they are not biased!

According to Wikipedia: "Organizing for America" is a community organizing project of the Democratic National Committee. Founded after the presidential inauguration of Barack Obama, the group seeks to mobilize supporters in favor of Obama's legislative agenda." Read the entire article HERE.

What is happening in North Carolina Public Education is inexcusable! For Tar Heels to sit on their hands, and do nothing to stop it is even worse. North Carolinians should be contacting their state representatives and state senators about this issue by personal contact, letters, telephone calls, faxes, and e-mail -- any way they can -- to make sure the General Assembly KNOWS, without a shadow of a doubt, that Tar Heels want their kids left alone! We do not want our children indoctrinated in leftist politics while spending those precious hours in an attempt to gain, at least, a rudimentary education!

The Department of Public Instruction should understand that we want our children taught the true, un-revised, history of the North Carolina, of the United States of America -- and of Western Civilization. We want our children to know WHO they are, and WHERE their ancestors came from, and WHY. We want them to understand their TRUE culture -- and just as important -- we want our children to know and understand their true HERITAGE!

If you wish to control a people, any people, these are the things from which you isolate them. You cut them off from any ties to their history, their culture, and their heritage -- and you do it FIRST and you do it EARLY in their development.

It is not difficult to see and understand what is happening in North Carolina. It is happening all over the United States. Americans are watching a coup de tat take place right before our eyes!

Americans have lost their government to socialism/Marxism. The country is on its knees economically. It is weakened, humbled, and very, very, vulnerable. The enemies of freedom, within our country, know this and they are striking now to take advantage of America's preoccupation with its current economic woes. We cannot allow them to win. We cannot allow them to crush, to destroy, the experiment in freedom that was America.

We can, and we must, begin the struggle to fight back right here in North Carolina.

The state motto of North Carolina is: "To BE rather than to SEEM." There is a reason that phrase was chosen as our state motto.

The tenacity of North Carolina’s Confederate troops is still extolled where real history is taught. During America's War Between the States North Carolina Troops were known to be "FIRST at Bethel, FARTHEST at Gettysburg and Chickamauga, and LAST to surrender at Appomattox." The bravery of Tar Heels is legendary. North Carolina actually declared its independence from Great Britain BEFORE the other colonies. THIS is only a tiny fraction of the history Tar Heel students should be taught. No matter if the history is good, bad, or even ugly, our students should know it. It is THEIR Story. It is from their history they draw when developing their own personal identity.

We urge you to contact your North Carolina state representative and state senator and demand they step in and stop this move to "dumb down" North Carolina's students. Do it for the sake of the students, for the sake of North Carolina, and for the sake of America.

J. D. Longstreet

The Failed Presidency of B. H. Obama

The Failed Presidency of B. H. Obama
A Commentary by J. D. Longstreet
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A conservative friend, early on in the presidential campaign of Obama, informed me that the man was an empty suit. There was no "THERE" there, my friend insisted. I was assured Obama was, and is, running a con game on the American people.

Now that I, along with all of America and the world, have had a chance to observe the man in action (actually, that should be "INACTION"... about the only action we have seen from him is his mouth moving during those hundreds of speeches he made over the past year) I have to admit there was more than a little truth to what my friend said. So far as getting anything done, well, what did he DO?

There can be no question Obama's presidency is a failure. In my opinion Obama is a phony. He ain't that smart and he ain't that articulate. Take away the TelePrompTer and the man is clueless.

I have been a public speaker practically all my life and I must tell you, speaking with notes is quite different than speaking extemporaneously, without notes, off the top of your head, so to speak. (No pun intended.) The use of a TelePrompTer basically requires that you show up for the event and that is about all there is to it.

A well-written speech can make anyone look exceptional. The President, all presidents, have a battery of speechwriters to do just that. One of the best, in my humble opinion, is Peggy Noonan. The lady has a way with a phrase, any phrase. If I learned that Ms. Noonan had written a speech -- I wanted to hear it. She is THAT good!

The American Thinker, in a piece by Geoffrey P. Hunt entitled: "Another Failed Presidency" said the following: "... It's not so much that he's a phony, knows nothing about economics, is historically illiterate, and woefully small minded for the size of the task-- all contributory of course. It's that he's not one of us. And whatever he is, his profile is fuzzy and devoid of content, like a cardboard cutout made from delaminated corrugated paper. Moreover, he doesn't command our respect and is unable to appeal to our own common sense. His notions of right and wrong are repugnant and how things work just don't add up. They are not existential. His descriptions of the world we live in don't make sense and don't correspond with our experience.

In the meantime, while we've been struggling to take a measurement of this man, he's dissed just about every one of us--financiers, energy producers, banks, insurance executives, police officers, doctors, nurses, hospital administrators, post office workers, and anybody else who has a non-green job. ...” You can read the entire article, and we encourage you to do just that, HERE.

It is a shame there is no constitutional mechanism by which Obama can be removed from office before he does even more harm to the country. Alas, there isn't.

But what if there was? Back in August of 2007 Robert Dallek wrote an op-ed piece for the Washington Post entitled "Ouster By the People." He proposed a constitutional amendment which would allow a national referendum to decide whether to remove a President and Vice-President by voting "Yes" or "No".

In the article Mr. Dallek said the following: "Such an amendment would need to set a high bar for removal and include a process that would be the greatest possible expression of the popular will. This could best be achieved through a recall procedure beginning in the House and the Senate, where a 60 percent vote would be required in both chambers to initiate a national referendum that would be open to all citizens eligible to vote in state elections. The ballot would simply ask voters to say yes or no to removing the president and vice president from office immediately. Should a majority vote to recall both incumbents, the speaker of the House would succeed to the presidency and, under the provisions of the 25th Amendment, would choose a vice president, who would need to be confirmed by majorities in the House and the Senate." Mr. Dallek concluded by saying: "The nation should be able to remove by an orderly constitutional process any president with an unyielding commitment to failed policies and an inability to renew the country's hope."

Mr. Dallek was lamenting the "failed presidency of George W. Bush" at the time. What is truly frightening about such a "law" is the current Speaker of the House of Representatives is... Nancy Pelosi! I'd vote "NO!" Yes, I admit it! I'd vote to keep Obama rather than place the country in the hands of Madam Speaker. You may read the entire article HERE.

(By the way, there are eighteen states that allow recall elections for removing a sitting governor.)

Obama has made it clear to Americans that the office of President has become far too powerful. His appointing "Czars" to by-pass Congress, and carry out his wishes, smacks of abuse of power. I am still not comfortable assuming Obama's Czars are constitutional. I have been waiting for someone to challenge the Czars in court, but I know of no such litigation.

Obama has shown disdain for the constitution, he has embarrassed a huge portion of the country by bowing to foreign leaders, and making that world-wide “Apology Tour” in which he spoke ill of America while on foreign soil. That was unforgivable.

By delaying a decision on sending more troops to Afghanistan, in my opinion, he was directly culpable in the deaths of American servicemen during the months he delayed those reinforcements. Those were wasted American lives.

Obama has placed America in unbelievable debt. America is so deeply in debt that our grandkids and great grandkids will be stuck with the bill. It will take generations to pay it off.

The Obama Regime knows that if it expects to get anything done he must do it now -- before the Mid-Term Election in November. The handwriting is on the wall. Consider what happened in Massachusetts. It was a referendum on the Obama Regime and it is the bellwether of things to come for the Democratic Party.

Obama has secured his place in the history books. America's first black President. Other than that, well, there's not much to tell, really.

J. D. Longstreet

The New Bad Deal ... by Alan Caruba

The New Bad Deal

By Alan Caruba

In 1939, ten years after the crash on Wall Street, the Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., told the House Ways and Means Committee:

“We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong…somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises…I say after eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started…And an enormous debt to boot!”

Does history repeat itself? Yes, it does. And there is every appearance that the White House and the Congress intends to repeat many of the errors of the last Depression that came to be known as Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal.

With exquisite timing, after ten years of research, professor of history, Burton Folsom, Jr. has published “New Deal or Raw Deal? How FDR’s Economic Legacy has Damaged America” ($27.00, Threshold Editions).

To get an idea of just how bad the U.S. economy was during the 1930’s, Folsom notes that, even though the U.S. had budget surpluses in 1930 and 1931, government spending “ballooned and far outstripped revenue from taxes.” It was the Wall Street Crash of 1929 that precipitated the Depression, but it was FDR’s “solutions” that deepened and lengthened it, actually preventing any solution.

Initially voted into office in 1933, from 1937 to 1939 “the value of all stocks dropped almost in half…Car sales plummeted one-third in those same years, and were lower in 1939 than in any of the last seven years of the 1920s. Business failures jumped 50 percent from 1937 to 1939; patent applications for inventions were lower in 1939 than for any years of the 1920s. Real estate foreclosures, which did decrease steadily in the 1930s, were still higher in 1939 than in any years during the next two decades.”

FDR was an enormously popular President in his day. His photo could be found everywhere in people’s homes and apartment, in barbershops, in businesses, and just about anywhere people gathered, but he not only did not solve the nation’s economic problems, he made them worse with the help of a Congress. By 1936 Congress was totally dominated by the Democrat Party in ways that exceeded any previous party for 150 years.

Obama’s youth and lack of experience to occupy the Oval Office should worry people. He arrived with a very slim resume and not even a single completed term as a Senator. What he knows and believes about the conduct of business in America is anyone’s guess, but it clearly reflects that bad economic policies of his party that have got us to this point.

As Prof. Folsom points out, “In part, his family’s wealth immunized him from having to learn how business worked or how to earn money.” He had been a mediocre student, getting by with a C average. Though he did not finish law school, he did pass the bar exam, but he showed little talent or interest in the practice of law. Oliver Wendell Holmes later observed of Roosevelt that he had “a second class intellect, but a first-class temperament.”

It was Roosevelt’s sunny and apparently endless optimism that buoyed up a nation that listen to his radio “fireside chats” and speeches. He was always convinced that whatever new program the New Dealers tried was bound to turn the economy around. Not only did they not achieve this, they saddled generations of Americans with a Ponzi scheme called Social Security and poured money into states and areas for solely political, not economic, purposes.

FDR was Governor of New York when the Wall Street Crash precipitated the Depression. Prof. Folsom identified several factors that led up to it. The First World War (U.S. participation from 1917-1918) had been a financial and social catastrophe that drove up the national debt from $1.3 to $24 billion in just three years. Ten billion loaned to European nations during the war largely went unpaid after the conflict.

The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, debated and passed during 1929 and 1930, instituted the highest tariffs ever, intended to protect U.S. industries by taxing 3,218 imported items. It enraged Europe, the nation’s greatest trading partner at the time. “Our exports, therefore, dropped from $7 billion in 1929 to $2.5 billion in 1932” and, with them, went the jobs of Americans.

“The third cause of the Great Depression,” writes Prof. Folsom, “was the poor performance of the Federal Reserve…In practice, the Fed had raised interest rates four times, from 3.5 to 6 percent, during 1928 and 1929. This made it harder for businessmen to borrow money to invest, which hindered economic growth.” In addition, the Fed let hundreds of banks fail rather than lending them money to continue operating.

In the same way President Obama spoke of “spreading the money around” as his economic plan to keep Americans prosperous, FDR spoke of a “more equitable distribution of the national income.” Giving money to people who don’t even pay taxes is an example of this.

Roosevelt and his “brain trust” of academics, most of whom had never met a payroll in their lives, really put the nation’s economy on the skids with their National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933. “It allowed American industrialists to collaborate to set the prices of their products, and even the wages and hours that went into making them.” The competition in the marketplace ceased and one could actually be sent to jail for offering a product or service for less than the fixed amount.

The NRA and the Agricultural Adjustment Act both had what are commonly called “unintended consequences”, another way of saying that were the worst possible solution because they imposed a centralized planning structure that involved the vast expansion of the federal government to oversee their requirements. Paying farmers not to plant crops, a practice that exists to this day was one of the more idiotic aspects of the AAA.

If this current recession is ever to be ended, massive spending programs that are largely political in nature have to be avoided. Isolating the bad debt acquired by banks, loan companies, and others like the insurance giant, AIG, has to be the top priority.

It is not likely to happen. President Obama, combining the same charm and lack of business acumen as FDR, is likely to pursue the same course of action as he did; he will use the present crisis to build up support for the Democrat Party through various forms of patronage. Employment by various government agencies is likely to expand.

FDR’s popularity was conditional during his first two terms in office. The American public knew he and Congress were not ending the Depression. Today, polls clearly indicate that the American public considers wants the economy strengthened. The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press recently released the findings of a national survey that revealed the economy and jobs are the top priority; higher than at any point in the past decade.

Thus, spending millions or billions to construct “more than 3,000 miles of transmission lines to convey this (solar and wind) new energy from coast to coast” repeats the errors of the past. Solar and wind represent barely one percent of the electricity generated or needed nationwide. The solar and wind farms are always located far from the major urban centers that require megawatts of electricity, currently provided primarily by coal and nuclear power. How much better and wiser it would be to update the current electrical grid and to build plants closer to where they are needed than to waste money on just this one project?

Politics, the pursuit of power, and the liberal’s distrust of capitalism will likely force a new generation of Americans to repeat what those in the 1930s experienced for no good reason.

Alan Caruba writes a daily blog at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/. Every week, he posts a column on the website of The National Anxiety Center, http://www.anxietycenter.com/.

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