by Tom Berger
In 1971, Mrs. Michael Hoff, an MIA wife and member of the National League of Families, recognized the need for a symbol of our POW MIAs. Prompted by an article in the Jacksonville, Florida Times-Union, Mrs. Hoff contacted Norman Rivkees, Vice President of Annin & Company which had made a banner for the newest member of the United Nations, the People's Republic of China, as a part of their policy to provide flags to all United Nations members states. Mrs. Hoff found Mr. Rivkees very sympathetic to the POW/MIA issue, and he, along with Annin's advertising agency, designed a flag to represent our missing men. Following League approval, the flags were manufactured for distribution.
On March 9, 1989, an official League flag, which flew over the White House on 1988 National POW MIA Recognition Day, was installed in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda as a result of legislation passed overwhelmingly during the 100th Congress. In a demonstration of bipartisan Congressional support, the leadership of both Houses hosted the installation ceremony.
The League's POW MIA flag is the only flag ever displayed in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda where it will stand as a powerful symbol of national commitment to America's POW MIAs until the fullest possible accounting has been achieved for U.S. personnel still missing and unaccounted for from the Vietnam War. On August 10, 1990, the 101st Congress passed U.S. Public Law 101-355, which recognized the League's POW MIA flag and designated it "as the symbol of our Nation's concern and commitment to resolving as fully as possible the fates of Americans still prisoner, missing and unaccounted for in Southeast Asia, thus ending the uncertainty for their families and the Nation".
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Posted by Walt as Patriotism, US Military, Vietnam at 3:43 PM EDT
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By Thomas E. Brewton
From the beginning of colonial life in British North America, Puritans insisted that every man, woman, and child be literate enough to read the Bible and to discuss theological questions. From this came America's first publicly funded elementary schools and our first colleges.
The Puritans who founded New England were among the most highly educated persons in England, the leaders and ministers being mostly Cambridge University graduates. All of the original colonists, men and women, were able to read and write and were students of the Bible.
Even more important than formal training to read and write, however, was the totality of family, church, and political society in the formation of children's character, which was the original meaning of education. Education was conceived broadly as the transference to its children of a society's culture, the absolute essentiality for the survival of society, particularly for Puritans in the savage wilds of North America in the early 17th century.
I wrote in How Far Have We Fallen?:
"Some scholars have described [John] Locke as the father of modern education in England. His 1692 “Some Thoughts Concerning Education” provides us a base line for assessing present-day educational practices. Harvard at that time was 56 years old. The Pilgrims had landed at Plymouth 72 years earlier.
"Locke begins with a child’s infancy and lays out an educational path through the child’s coming of age. Locke also advises that children’s natural curiosity should be used to engage them in learning. He continually admonishes against the use of punishments in education.
"He brooks no nonsense or bullying by students, however, seeing that as a flaw in teaching morality and decorum.
"Several things will surprise today’s students.
"The first surprise is the order of emphasis Locke assigns to the objects of education. They are virtue, wisdom, breeding (courtesy and decorum), and, last, learning specific subjects."
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Posted by Walt as Education at 7:07 AM EDT
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Documents produced through the Freedom of Information Act now proves the existence of the fledging North American Union as a "shadow" trilateral government" between Mexico, Canada, and U.S. The U.S. Department of Commerce has had a lead hand inputting this shadow government in place without any congressional oversight.
According to WND columnist and author Jerome R. Corsi:
Among the initial discoveries, said Corsi, is the existence of an internal Intranet website that never has been revealed to Congress or the public.
"This private internal website," he claims, "undoubtedly contains a wealth of documentation that the FOIA request has so far intentionally excluded."
[...] "We have here the beginnings of a whitewash," he said, "in which SPP evidently thinks the public will be hoodwinked by a 'Myths vs. Facts' document posted for public relations purposes on their public website."
[...] "There is no specific authorization for this massive administrative-branch integration with Mexico and Canada other than what amounts to a press conference jointly issued by President Bush, Mexico's President Vicente Fox, and Canada's then-Prime Minister Paul Martin on March 23, 2005, at the end of their summit in Waco, Texas," Corsi said.
Corsi added that even the "Myth vs. Facts" blurb on the SPP.gov website admits the SPP is neither a treaty nor a law. (World Net Daily)
We should pray that Congress takes this threat against our freedoms and sovereignty seriously and puts an end to this illegal "shadow" government.
Posted by Walt as North American Union, U.S. Borders Issues, U.S. Constitutional Issues, U.S. Political Issues at 7:27 AM EDT
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Since President Clinton, the dumbing down of American students through education has become evident. Our public education system never really intended to truly educate our children. The father of our modern public education, Dewey, was a true socialist who did not have the best of interests in our Children's education.
by Alan Caruba
http://www.anxietycenter.com/
It is an act of thievery to take money to provide goods or services and then fail to do so. Our nation’s schools have become a great criminal conspiracy, promising to educate our children, but more often producing “graduates” without even the most basic skills, let alone a useful, wider body of knowledge.
“My daughter is now 20 years old,” one mother wrote to me recently. “After graduating from high school in June 2005, she enrolled at the local community college. It was necessary for her to take a placement test and it was determined she needed to take Basic Skills Math and English before she could take [college level courses.] After failing both classes twice, she will not be returning. It breaks my heart to see that she can’t pass basic math or English class. How did she graduate high school?”
The answer is that her parents were heavily levied with property taxes, the vast portion of which was then given to the local school system to pay teachers and administrators salaries, along with all the other costs of operation. They, in turn, passed her daughter along, unmindful and indifferent to whether she learned anything. “She has been robbed of a basic education and we have been robbed of our tax dollars for 19 years.”
Early in his first term, President Bush embraced the “No Child Left Behind” legislation that has since been found wanting for its one-size-fits-all approach to education, its over-emphasis on testing, and its punishment of “under-performing” schools. The result has been to expose most schools as inadequate and to encourage every form of administrative cheating necessary for a school to meet the standards set by the law.
The idea was to force some improvement on a system everyone already knew was failing students. Laws, however, do not educate students. Teachers are expected to do that and it is no surprise that the National Education Association—a union—hated the idea of improvement. Indeed, from the 1960s to the present day, the NEA has done its best to undermine, if not destroy, a system of education that served previous generations of Americans quite well.
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Posted by Walt as Education at 7:11 AM EDT
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After a year-long study, the federally funded Commission on the Future of Higher Education reported that U.S. colleges are not giving students “the education that they need.” Pointing to “disturbing signs,” the panel concluded that even though degrees are being awarded, many graduates “have not actually mastered the reading, writing and thinking skills” they should have gained. As can be expected, the report urged wider access to federal grants for those who want to spend four years earning an increasingly suspect degree.
Our colleges are suffering form the same malady as all of our public schools, the dumbing down of the students. This is all because of the government intrusion in operating our school systems. Parents or students no longer have any opportunity for input and are helpless to change the curriculum.
It is no wonder that many graduating students are unable to balance a checking account.
Posted by Walt as Education, General Commentary at 8:23 AM EDT
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By Thomas E. Brewton
Liberals have enjoyed the convenience of calling for shifting American troops out of Iraq and into Afghanistan, where terrorist action was much less until recent dates. That stance has been a good way to camouflage defeatist appeasement with a phony national- security firmness.
The Associated Press, for example, quotes socialist candidate Ned Lamont as saying in New Haven that,
"We have sacrificed our daughters and sons and our treasure in a war we didn’t have to fight ….. We have ignored the real threats and security needs in the war we should be fighting, the one against the terrorists. …
Senator Lieberman believes that President Bush has it right in Iraq.
I believe that he’s dangerously wrong….. Today we have five times as many troops in Iraq as we have in Afghanistan," [Lamont] said. "We spend more in a month in Iraq than we do in a year in Afghanistan. These decisions are wrong and they have left us less safe."
Evidently the "fight against the terrorists" boils down to nothing more than having troops in Afghanistan instead of Iraq, because liberals oppose all measures to combat terrorism through CIA, NSA, and FBI surveillance and interrogation.
Another possibility is that the liberals want to make their version of the "fight against the terrorists" into a way for tort-bar lawyers to replace revenues lost from the Federal clamp-down on fraudulent securities and asbestos litigation. That’s vital, of course, as the tort bar, along with socialist teachers’ unions, are the big money sources for liberal political campaigns.
Liberals have long insisted that combatting terrorism be simply an extension of after-the-fact criminal prosecution, rather than truly effective preventive action. What a delicious prospect for liberal candidates and their tort-bar henchmen: years of litigation, funded by Amnesty International, to represent terrorist prisoners who have been deprived of their 14th Amendment rights!
Mr. Lamont and his fellow socialist candidates have endlessly cudgeled President Bush for fomenting terrorism by our presence in Iraq, while failing to pour troops into Afghanistan to capture Osama Bin Ladin. Among other inconsistencies, that "plan" requires ignoring the probability that Bin Ladin is in neighboring Pakistan, where officials have flatly refused to permit U.S. troops to operate.
Now, with strikingly bad timing, terrorism has re-heated with a bang in Afghanistan and is blowing the socialists’ cover. Moving troops from Iraq to Afghanistan is, at the moment, merely a matter of which frying pan to use.
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Posted by Walt as Terrorism, U.S Foreign Policy, U.S. Political Issues at 11:45 AM EDT
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In early August, General John Abizaid, the commander of the U.S. Central Command and the most knowledgeable senior military official about Iraq, expressed his fears to a Senate Committee that conditions in Iraq are the very next thing to a “civil war.” New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman went further one day later when he wrote that our armed forces in Iraq “are baby-sitting a civil war.” Can any good come of continued U.S. presence in such a conflict? Isn’t it time to consider letting the Sunnis and Shiites settle their centuries-old animosity without our forces caught in the middle?
Wisdom imparted by past presidents of our nation has never been more needed than today. As the quagmire in Iraq deepens, and as cries are heard for U.S. involvement in the conflict between Israel and Lebanon, George Washington’s advice should be heeded. He urged commercial relations with other nations “but to have with them as little political connection as possible.” The sixth U.S. president, John Quincy Adams, concurred when he stated: “America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.” And Calvin Coolidge, our nation’s 30th chief executive, famously summarized: “Perhaps one of the most important accomplishments of my administration has been minding my own business.”
Posted by Walt as Middle East Issues, U.S Foreign Policy, U.S. Political Issues at 12:29 PM EDT
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By Thomas E. Brewton
The International Monetary Fund condemns the effect of liberal- socialist policies instituted by President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.
In an article in today's Wall Street Journal, headlined "IMF Warns Lingering Imbalances May Spur Volatile Fall in Dollar," reporters Iain McDonald and Takashi Nakamichi write:
"The risk of a disorderly decline in the U.S. dollar could increase unless policies are put in place to address global savings-and- investment imbalances, the International Monetary Fund said."
Let's first define "disorderly decline in the U.S. dollar." That means simply that the United States money supply, basically the volume of currency in circulation and bank deposit balances, is continually expanding faster than the real output of goods and services in the United States. The results are rising domestic prices and rapid expansion of imports of goods and services from other countries.
In effect, we are temporarily exporting some of our dollar inflation by getting foreigners to hold ever-growing amounts of U. S. dollars.
Because we in the United States are not producing goods and services in amounts large enough to absorb the accumulating dollar balances held by foreigners at prices competitive on world markets, they will eventually dump their dollar holdings and exchange them for other, sounder currencies.
At some point in the future, the prices of imported goods will have to rise in order to compensate foreign shippers for the increasing risk of dollar devaluation. When that begins to happen, the only real check on domestic inflation (low-priced imports) will be removed, and large-scale inflation will commence in the United States.
If our inflation should come even close to what happened in the 1960s and 1970s under Presidents Johnson, Nixon, and Carter, a huge part of the purchasing power of your personal savings will evaporate. When that occurred in the the earlier period, more than half the value of people's lifetime savings for children's education and retirement was washed away in the inflationary deluge.
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Posted by Walt as Economics, U.S. Political Issues at 5:19 AM EDT
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John Miller, Assistant Director responded to pending changes in domestic intelligence with this release.
With the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks coming shortly after British authorities disrupted the plot to bomb airliners over the Atlantic, we are seeing another round of calls to break up the F.B.I. or to create a domestic intelligence agency separate from the F.B.I. with no police powers, similar to Britain’s MI5.
But these critics, who have been joined by the prominent federal appeals court judge Richard Posner, seem to be unaware of two critical things. One is how far the F.B.I. has come in transforming itself into an intelligence-driven organization in the last five years; the other is how many attacks we have prevented in that span.
Using intelligence and technology—and our authority to make arrests—the F.B.I. has stopped five terrorist plots in progress in roughly the last year alone:
- On Aug. 31, 2005, in Los Angeles, we arrested four members of a group of radicals that had grown out of the prison system and was planning to attack military recruiting centers and synagogues.
- In February, in Toledo, Ohio, we arrested three men who had conspired to travel to Iraq and attack American forces there.
- In a case out of Atlanta, indictments were handed down in March and July against two men who had traveled to Washington to videotape possible targets near the Capitol and then met with other extremists in Canada to compare notes.
- In Miami in June, seven extremists were arrested after being recorded on F.B.I. surveillance tapes swearing allegiance to Al Qaeda and making plans to attack targets in Miami and Chicago, including the Sears Tower.
- In July a plot to attack subways in New York was disrupted with the arrest of the mastermind in Lebanon.
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Posted by Walt as 9-11, Terrorism, U.S. Political Issues at 10:49 AM EDT
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By Alan Caruba
In May 2006 I wrote, “I know about the “Peak Oil” theory that says we either have or are about the reach the point of diminishing returns regarding the world’s oil supply, but these recent discoveries suggest there is still plenty of oil to be found.” In that commentary I documented nearly a dozen new fields of oil and natural gas discovered since 1995.
So I wasn’t surprised when, on September 5, Chevron Corporation announced it had discovered new, huge reserves of oil some five miles below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. The initial estimates were that these reserves “could boost U.S. oil reserves by 50 percent.”
Good news for Americans and good news as well for other oil companies such as BP, Anadarko Petroleum, and Exxon Mobil that have their own projects in progress. Indeed, two days later, Exxon Mobil announced that its Sakhalin-1 project offshore Russia had begun to export crude oil, the eighth startup within the past year.
Suffice it to say that the new Gulf of Mexico discovery rivals that of Alaska’s giant Prudhoe Bay oil field in 1968. President Bush may think we’re “addicted” to oil and, along with other politicians, call for oil “independency”, but the fact is we, like every other modern nation require oil for transportation, plastics, heating homes, and the countless other uses to which we put petroleum.
Recently, Abdallah Jum’ah, president and CEO of the state-owned Saudi Arabian Oil, better known as Aramco, said the world has the potential of 4.5 trillion barrels in reserves. At current levels of consumption, that’s 140 years worth of oil to power the world. Even at the lowest level of estimated reserves, there’s still enough until 2070 and does anyone believe we will not find more?
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Posted by Walt as Oil Production at 9:21 PM EDT
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