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ox News Radio on Sirius doesn’t get many paying advertisers at night when I frequently listen to it while driving home from meetings, so I get to hear a lot of public service announcements from the federal government.  Oh, joy.

One that’s running a lot nowadays features a little girl who’s afraid to go to sleep.  It turns out she’s afraid because of what happened during Hurricane Katrina, but don’t worry, the soothing voice of the announcer tells us, just bring the little girl to us, the government, where there are caring people ready to make everything all better.

What?! Isn’t that the family’s job? The pastor’s job? When did America become so trusting of the government that a parent would hand a frightened child over to a bureaucracy?  Surely they know that this is the sort of thing you should expect from government:

A multi-million pound initiative to reduce teenage pregnancies more than doubled the number of girls conceiving.

The Government-backed scheme tried to persuade teenage girls not to get pregnant by handing out condoms and teaching them about sex.

But research funded by the Department of Health shows that young women who attended the programme, at a cost of £2,500 each, were ’significantly’ more likely to become pregnant than those on other youth programmes who were not given contraception and sex advice.

A total of 16 per cent of those on the Young People’s Development Programme conceived compared with just 6 per cent in other programmes. (Daily Mail)

That’s what that mom with the frightened child should consider - if the rate of little girls going crazy in the general population is six percent, it’ll be 16 percent for those given over to the U.S. Department of Love & Caring.

Now let’s see … the Prez tells us we’ll be healthier if we just let government take care of our health care ….  Sure - that sounds like a great idea!

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hat better way to get ready for the 4th of July than to pull up a chair in George Washington’s study and have a friendly conversation about his feelings about the Revolutionary War, the Congress and man’s quest for liberty? Wouldn’t that be grand?

Well, pull up that chair.  History News Network is highlighting an article by Thomas Fleming, Channeling George Washington: The Glorious Fourth! that puts you in his study for a Q&A in which he uses sentences considerably shorter and fresher than those Geo. wrote in his letters.  I’ll entice you with the lead-in paragraphs and the closing ones.

The good general  has just explained how he and Continental Congress secretary Charles Thompson had decided in their old age not to write their memoirs.

“Why not, General? There isn’t an historian I know who wouldn’t give an arm and maybe a leg to read them.”

“We both agreed that if either of us committed such an act of folly – and told the truth about how close we came to losing the war -  it would disillusion every man and woman in the country.”

“Does that mean you don’t have an answer for how we won?”

”I told Charlie Thomson  there  was only one explanation - Divine Providence.  Charlie was a hotheaded Irishman in his youth –  for a while he was known  as the Sam Adams of Philadelphia.  But he was older and a lot wiser when we talked. He replied: “That’s the only answer.”

“Does Ben Franklin agree with that answer?”

“Absolutely. Do you know that by 1781, Franklin was so disgusted and discouraged with the way things were going, he resigned as ambassador to France? Congress persuaded him to change his mind, thank God.”

If you’ve read any history of the American Revolution, it’s hard not to see God’s hand in the war, from the fog bank that rolled in at the opportune time or the cloud that covered the moon, to the strength our generals and soldiers drew from their faith.  So remember to make a part of your 4th of July celebration a prayer of thanksgiving.

Now to the close:

“Does the American Revolution still matter, General?”

“It will always matter. Within a century of  our victory, no less than 200 similar declarations of independence were published around the world. I like to think there are invisible American Revolutions happening today in Iran,  in Russia, in China,  in Venezuela. Wherever men and women realize they’re being deprived of freedom,  America’s example stirs resistance in their souls.”

It is a fundamental purpose of America to be the shining light of freedom in a still-dark world.  Our current president does not seem to grasp the overriding importance of that purpose, but fortunately he will not outlast the strength of our Constitution and the power of this nation’s spirit and will.  At least I don’t think he will.  I have great faith in America … and great awareness that if Gen. Washington were here today, he would find much to his displeasure eminating from Washington DC and spreading throughout the land.

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C-based Carl’s Jr. was founded by an outstanding gentleman, a devout Catholic and patriotic American, Carl Karcher. He sold the company late in his life and all the good, wholesomeness he put into his advertising campaigns disappeared, replaced with Paris Hilton making love to a hamburger and similar tawdry and sleazy campaigns designed to appeal to their target market: sex-obsessed, hormone-drenched nitwits.

That was then.  It’s gotten worse.  Carl’s Jr. and its co-brand, Hardee’s, have just introduced donut holes on their breakfast menu - a nasty looking product of fried, cinnamon-sprinkled bread globs with a sugar and chemical dipping sauce that looks to be made of 100% artery plaque.

OK, so that should be fairly simple to advertise without offending the multitudes and crumbling the civilization.  But what fun would that be?

In the first TV spot, the announcer says Hardee’s is announcing its new product, “Biscuit Holes,” and asks passers-by, who look like normal people but are really gutter-dwellers for hire, what they think the product should be named.  Cover the kids’ eyes; here come some of their responses: Goodie Balls, Hole Munchers, Puffy Nuts, Melting Holes.

Not content to let that pass by without some one-upsmanship, the announcer cleverly holds up two of the balls side by side and asks the last taster, “What about ‘Bistecles?’”

Not appalling enough? There’s always TV spot #2, where the announcer has conventional donut holes and Carl’s/Hardee’s Biscuit Holes on a little table, the donut holes marked “A” and the Biscuit Holes marked “B.”  He asks another group of sex-obsessed sell-outs which they prefer.  You guessed it:

“The B hole has it over the A hole.” “The A hole seems kind of small.” “The A hole tastes nasty.”

These are not commercials that play on late-night pay-per-view soft porn channels. They are designed for every day, all day TV - the kind families watch together and kids watch alone. The TV we watch after church on Sunday.

One Million Dads has set up an auto-letter you can use to send a protest letter to the company’s president, Andrew Puzder.  I suggest you click here and fire one off.  And, come to think of it, you might want to offer him a name or two of your own. Like sleazeballs.

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espite the never-ending whining of the race victimhood lobby and the shrill bitching from the feminists, America is no longer a country that needs to cut special deals with minorities and women because of our racist, sexist ways.  (As Sonia Sotomayor may soon find out.)

The case-closer to the unhappy era of affirmative action in America is, without a doubt, Rear Admiral Michelle Howard.  “Michelle Howard who?” I thought when I first heard the name via Huffpo this a.m., after which I quickly clicked through to a lengthy profile on Essence. (Can’t leave HuffPo fast enough!)

Rear Admiral Michelle Howard is, to dispense with the blather quickly, the U.S. Navy’s first black woman admiral. Yay.  Now we won’t have to ever use that discriptor again; she’s euthanized it.  Here’s the more important part, from the Essence piece:

Rear Admiral Michelle Howard awoke on April 8 to sunshine, the rolling swells of the Indian Ocean, and the beginning of another day looking for pirates. No one could have predicted just a few days later she would be embroiled in a major international crisis, and saving a man’s life from the deadly forces of Somali pirates.

Howard, 49, had just officially transitioned from a desk job in Washington, D.C., where she was senior military adviser to Donald Winter, secretary of the Navy, to the helm of the USS Boxer, a large deck assault ship patrolling off the Gulf of Aden, otherwise known as “Pirate Alley,” in the Arabian Sea.

Now the Boxer had become Howard’s flagship, where she is the first African-American woman and second female to head a Navy strike force. And in this role she oversees a dozen warships and a contingent of 1,000 Marines, as well as runs the international Combined Task Force 151 with another 14 warships.

When Howard received word that the containership Maersk Alabama had been attacked and boarded by pirates and its American captain, Phillips, was taken hostage, she immediately devised a tactical plan with her team to save his life.

When the Navy Seal snipers took out Capt. Phillips’ captors, they were under the command of Adm. Howard.  And when Capt. Phillips returned home to the embrace of his wife and kids, it was because of the tactical plan Adm. Howard had devised.  And I don’t know about you, but I never heard peep one about this until today.

Now, I suppose there are some crazed leftists out there that will confront this same set of facts and scream hysterically that America is a sexist, racist country for not glorifying Adm. Howard’s role in these dramatic events.  But they miss the point. To us, Adm. Howard is just Adm. Howard, a consummate Navy professional doing the job she was sent out to do, and doing it as a Navy officer, not a black woman Navy officer.

She has made me prouder to be an American, because her quiet, competent work shows that we are the world leader in utilizing the talents of our best, no matter what their race, gender or heritage may be.

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got a gift this week from CBMC, a Christian ministry to men in business.  (My CMBC Forum group serves as my informal board of directors - a group of men who own their own businesses that get together once a month to provide each other advice and pray for each other.)  The gift was a book, Facts of the Matter, Daily Meditations for the Marketplace, by Dwight Hill. I’d like to share with you this wonderful and thought-provoking passage from one of the meditations I read this morning:

Perhaps for too long we have indulged in this thing called LIBERTY:  Making choices without bearing the responsibility of those choices.  In the U.S. we have the STATUE OF LIBERTY on the East Coast. Maybe what we need is a STATUE OF RESPONSIBILITY on the West Coast.  We could all then choose to live somewhere between LIBERTY and RESPONSIBILITY!

What a wonderful idea!  Given how much Hollywood shapes the nation, and how fanatical the California Coastal Commission is about stopping any building of anything along the California coast, I officially nominate Santa Monica Bay in LA as the ideal spot for the statue.

I see her on one knee, acknowledging a superior power, with one hand on her heart, and one stretched up towards the heavens.  And if she were there, I would be content to live on the West Coast, closer to responsibility than to liberty itself.

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ou know how much the world hates us, right? You’re up on the latest soundbites about how Bush destroyed America’s global reputation, and how we need Obama to repair it? You do pack your hair shirt every time you go abroad, right?

Well then, put this into your American-made pipe and smoke it:

LOS ANGELES (AP) - Hollywood’s six major studios say they broke overseas box office records in 2008, with an estimated $9.9 billion in tickets sold.

That’s a 4 percent increase from a year earlier, The Hollywood Reporter said Friday.

Each of the six majors - Paramount, Warner Bros., Universal, 20th Century Fox, Sony and Disney - collected more than $1 billion for the second year running.

I haven’t checked, but I don’t really have to:  I’ll bet you a box of popcorn that the French, Iranian, Russian and Chinese film industries’ international boxoffice takes aren’t quite so robust. Don’t buy the America-hatred rhetoric from America-hating Americans.  We are still one very popular country out there.

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et’s get right to the point:  California will soon be part of China or under Chinese influence. Texas and a cluster of nearby states will go to Mexico or fall under Mexican influence. Washington, D.C., and New York may soon join the European Union. Canada will grab a group of Northern states.  Hawaii will be a protectorate of Japan or China, and Alaska will be subsumed into Russia.

And when is all that going to happen?  Oh, around 2010 or so.  I just ordered Mandarin Chinese from Rosetta Stone.

The projected imminent fall of the U.S., a theory of Igor Panarin, a former KGB analyst and current dean of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s academy for future diplomats, is getting a ton of play in Putin’s captive national media - and increasingly, here.  There was a spurt of Drudge-driven posts back in November, and now the WSJ has picked up the story:

A polite and cheerful man with a buzz cut, Mr. Panarin insists he does not dislike Americans. But he warns that the outlook for them is dire.

“There’s a 55-45% chance right now that disintegration will occur,” he says. “One could rejoice in that process,” he adds, poker-faced. “But if we’re talking reasonably, it’s not the best scenario — for Russia.” Though Russia would become more powerful on the global stage, he says, its economy would suffer because it currently depends heavily on the dollar and on trade with the U.S.

Mr. Panarin posits, in brief, that mass immigration, economic decline, and moral degradation will trigger a civil war next fall and the collapse of the dollar. Around the end of June 2010, or early July, he says, the U.S. will break into six pieces — with Alaska reverting to Russian control.

Panarin’s theory dates back to 1998, and was pretty far-fetched in those robust times.  The current economy makes you tug your collar a bit - but it’s also taken the “mass” out of our immigration problem.  Moral degredation could well do us in - but that’s in God’s hands, and if moral degredation is a nation-ender, the Russians better look in the mirror.

In a recent article in Isvestia, Panarin laid out his theory yet again and summarily dismissed Obama’s ability to deal with it:

Americans hope President-elect Barack Obama “can work miracles,” he wrote. “But when spring comes, it will be clear that there are no miracles.”

Well, I can agree with Panarin’s assessment of Obama as no miracle-worker.  White House spokesperson Dana Perino was more subdued; she declined to comment when asked about Panarin’s theories.  But that’s just fodder for the anti-Bush conspiratists.

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oday we turn to the 20th and 21st chapters of Larry Schweikart’s 48 Liberal Lies about American History (That You Probably Learned in School), which details the revisionist lies history profs are teaching to our next generation. C-SM presents this in the hope that you’ll buy the book.

Lie #20 - Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK because he was a deranged Marine, not because he was a Communist

Oswald was a troubled former Marine - Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty

I was a bit skeptical that Schweikart had a case here - are history books really teaching this? - but he ran through a half dozen quotes calling Oswald a misfit Marine, a quiet Marine, a deeply disturbed Marine. They all say “former,” but we who understand the military - a demographic that apparently doesn’t include history profs - know there’s no such thing as a former Marine.

Several history books he researched mentioned that he had spent time in the Soviet Union and one actually called him a Marxist, but none called him what he called himself: a Communist. (Noted lefty historian Howard Zinn doesn’t even deal with the JFK assassination and Oswald in A People’s History of the United States.) James Pierson does cover it in his book, Camelot and teh Cultural Revolution:

Pierson notes that “the assassination of a popular president by a communist should ahve generated a revulsion against everything associated with left-wing doctrines. Yet something very close to the opposite happened.” Instead the historians routinely described Oswald as “emotionally unstable -and one whose] actions were never fully explained….”

Not fully explained, of course, unless you take Oswald’s own admission that he was a communist.

Lie #21 - Columbus was responsible for killing millions of Indians

When Hernando Cortes and his Spanish army of fewer than a thousand men stormed into Mexico in 1519, the native population numbered about 22 million. By the end of the century, following a series of devastating epidemics, only 2 million people remained.

Excluding epidemic, such destruction is ridiculous.  A bludnerbuss-armed handful of men simply couldn’t eliminate 20 million people in such a short timeframe - not even if the natives lined themselves up  to be neatly and expeditiously executed.

The problem with these teachings is that assumptions about pre-Columbian populations are just that - assumptions.  There are, of course, no recorded censuses of Aztek, Cherokee, Navejo or any of the other native populations; there are just various guess and extrapolations, some as high as 100 million or more. Writes Schweikart:

Most recent research puts the entire native populations on both continents and the islands ofthe New World at 53 million.  But an interesting trend has been that with each new study, the population estimates fall:  since 1976, the experts have lowered their estimates by four million.  More conservative estimates are that there were a total of (on the high side) 8.5 million for all of North America, and a low estimate of only 1.8 million.  The “European genocide” crowd has more Indians being killed or dying of disease than ever existed in all the New World put together!

The other element in this formula is the baseline:  How many native Americans were dying of disease before Columbus appeared.  Are we to believe that the Americas were a disease-free paradise?  Obviously not; now some anthropologists are positing that epidemics were killing natives by the mass-grave-full before the Spaniards waded ashore.

Also, these anti-European historians neglect to mention how efficient the noble savages were at killing themselves - the Azteks alown killed hundreds of t housands in their religious ceremonies (and these may well be the same historians who call Christianity a violent religion!).

Of course, Native Americans died as a result of European settling. But historians have an obligation to do all they can to report the truth, not feed anti-European prejudices.

The Lies They Teach: #19
The Lies They Teach: #16 and #17
The Lies They Teach: #13 - #15
The Lies They Teach #11 And #12
The Lies They Teach: #9 And #10
The Lies They Teach - #8
The Lies They Teach: #6 And #7
The Lies They Teach: #4 And #5
The Lies They Teach: #1 - #3

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h, parents! Role models to the next generation - and where else to model those roles better than at Junior’s birthday party at the nearby Chuck E. Cheese pizza emporium, where, as the corporate slogan goes, a kid can be a kid.

And an adult can be a jerk.

In Brookfield, Wis., no restaurant has triggered more calls to the police department since last year than Chuck E. Cheese’s.

Officers have been called to break up 12 fights, some of them physical, at the child-oriented pizza parlor since January 2007. The biggest melee broke out in April, when an uninvited adult disrupted a child’s birthday party. Seven officers arrived and found as many as 40 people knocking over chairs and yelling in front of the restaurant’s music stage, where a robotic singing chicken and the chain’s namesake mouse perform.

Chuck E. Cheese’s bills itself as a place “where a kid can be a kid.” But to law-enforcement officials across the country, it has a more particular distinction: the scene of a surprising amount of disorderly conduct and battery among grown-ups.

“The biggest problem is you have a bunch of adults acting like juveniles,” says Town of Brookfield Police Capt. Timothy Imler. “There’s a biker bar down the street, and we rarely get calls there.” (WSJ)

Law enforcement officials blame the presence of alcohol, the loud noise and the emotions that come with Junior’s birthday for the frequent fisticuffs and shouting matches.  I blame a generation of spoiled, self-centered parents shot full of fake self-esteem and video game/TV violence, with no idea of how to behave themselves. Case in point:

This most recent assault, described in police reports, occurred after a woman in her 30s approached a 6-year-old boy who was playing a videogame. When the boy went to insert more tokens to continue playing, the woman grabbed the tokens out of his hand and told him to stop hogging the game. The boy went and got his 26-year-old mother, who walked over to the woman. The woman began screaming at the boy’s mother, and another suspect, a man in his 30s, grabbed the mother by the throat and pushed her against the videogame machine. CEC employees had to pull the man off the mother. Both the man and the woman fled the scene.

The prosecution rests.

Hat-tip: Jim

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oday we turn to the 19th chapter of Larry Schweikart’s 48 Liberal Lies about American History (That You Probably Learned in School) - which C-SM presents in the hope that you’ll buy the book - especially for any high school or college-age kids in your acquaintance who need to understand how liberal history profs are teaching revisionist lies to pollute the minds of the next generation.

Lie #19 - The Rosenbergs Were Not Spies And Were Wrongfully Executed

Although they were not major spies and the information they revealed was not important, the Rosenbergs were executed, to the consternation of many liberals in the United States and elsewhere. - Mark C. Carnes and John A. Garraty, American Destiny

Funny. If they weren’t spies and their trial was so tainted, you’d think more people would be consternated by the Rosenbergs’ execution than just liberals. Weren’t we all outrages when O.J. was freed? Didn’t the conviction of border guards Ignacio Ramos Jose Compean raise hackles across political persuasions? Or, as Schweikart puts it,

Has there ever been any Communist, anywhere, who was guilty of anything. Reading liberal historians, it would seem not.

The Rosenberg’s trial established that they provided Soviet intelligence agents with notes and a sketch on the lens device of the Nagasaki bomb, which allowed the USSR to speed its atomic weapons program up by at least five years. What experts? How about the trial judge (a Jew, by the way, so don’t go all “Bigotry!” on me):

I consider your crime worse than murder …. [by] putting into the hands of the Russians the A-bomb years before our best scientists predicted Russia would perfect the bomb has already caused, in my opinion, the Communist aggression in Korea, with the resultant casualties exceeding 50,000 ….

Someone a bit closer to the case than even the judge, Nikita Khrushchev, also weighed in on the value of the Rosenberg’s treason:

According to ex-premier of the USSR Nikita Khrushchev, who quoted his spymaster Vyacheslam Molotov, the Rosenbergs “provided very significant help in accelerating the production of our atom bomb.”

Of course, treason is treason, and it matters not a whit whether the Rosenbergs speeded the Soviet WMD program or not.

Revisionist historians (and some frequent commenters on this site, I presume) have the Venona project to rebut, should they defend the innocence of the Rosenbergs. Venona, a long-running cryptanalysis project focused on the former Soviet intelligence agencies, has confirmed that the Rosenbergs were convicted for much more than merely “being Communists.” Further, it shows that Soviet agents whipped up the defense of the Rosenbergs and the demonstrations against their convictions.

Venona identified Julius, code name “Liberal” [heh]; showed that he was an active spy recruiter; and … [m]ore important, Venona decryptions identified Ethel as equally active in recruiting spies as Julius.

Faced with all this, even previously staunch leftist defenders of the Rosenbergs, like Radosh and Milton, could not deny Julius’ guilt and were left pleading that Ethel’s execution was improper and unfair. But it’s clear from the evidence that at a minimum she was a recruiter of spies for the Soviets, and that she actively supporter her husband’s treasonous work, which makes her guilty of treason as well.

The Lies They Teach: #16 and #17
The Lies They Teach: #13 - #15
The Lies They Teach #11 And #12
The Lies They Teach: #9 And #10
The Lies They Teach - #8
The Lies They Teach: #6 And #7
The Lies They Teach: #4 And #5
The Lies They Teach: #1 - #3