Our country is run by idiots...

You know you live in a Country run by idiots if…

You can get arrested for expired tags on your car but not for being in the country illegally.

Your government believes that the best way to eradicate trillions of dollars of debt is to spend trillions more of our money.

A seven year old boy can be thrown out of school for calling his teacher “cute”, but hosting a sexual exploration or diversity class in grade school is perfectly acceptable.

The Supreme Court of the United States can rule that lower courts cannot display the 10 Commandments in their courtroom…while sitting in front of a display of the 10 Commandments.

Children are forcibly removed from parents who appropriately discipline them while children of “underprivileged” drug addicts are left to rot in filth infested cesspools of a ‘home’

Hard work and success are rewarded with higher taxes and government intrusion, while at least some slothful, lazy behavior is rewarded with EBT cards, WIC checks, Medicaid, subsidized housing, and free cell phones.

The government’s plan for getting people back to work is to provide 99 weeks of unemployment checks (to not work).

Being self-sufficient is considered a threat to the government.

Politicians think that stripping away the amendments to the constitution is really protecting the rights of the people.

The rights of the Government come before the rights of the individual.

You pay your mortgage faithfully, denying yourself the newest big screen TV while your neighbor defaults on his mortgage (while buying iPhones, TV’s and new cars) and the government forgives his debt and reduces his mortgage (with your tax dollars).

Being stripped of the ability to defend yourself makes you “safe”.

An 80 year old woman can be stripped searched by the TSA but a Muslim woman in a burka is only subject to having her neck and head searched.

Using the “N” word is considered “hate speech” but writing and singing songs about raping women and killing cops is considered “art”.

You can write a post like this just by reading the news headlines.

Unfortunately, this list could go on and on. Our country is run by idiots. We are in distress. Where do we go from here?

Read more: http://teapartyeconomist.com/2012/12/20/a-nation-run-by-idiots/#ixzz2FbM4Syzn

FORWARD?

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE         

‘Forward’ to the Past? By Thomas Sowell December 19, 2012 12:00 A.M. The political slogan “Forward” served Barack Obama well during this year’s election campaign. It said that he was for going forward, while Republicans were for “going back to the failed policies that got us into this mess in the first place.” It was great political rhetoric and great political theater. Moreover, the Republicans did virtually nothing to challenge its shaky assumptions, though a few hard facts could have made those assumptions collapse like a house of cards. More is involved than this year’s political battles. The word “forward” has been a political battle cry on the left for more than a century. It has been almost as widely used as the Left’s other favorite word, “equality,” which goes back more than two centuries. The seductive notion of economic equality has appealed to many people. The pilgrims started out with the idea of equal sharing. The colony of Georgia began with very similar ideas. In the Midwest, Britain’s Robert Owen — who coined the term “socialism” — set up colonies based on communal living and economic equality. What these idealistic experiments all had in common was that they failed. They learned the hard way that people would not do as much for the common good as they would do for their own good. The Pilgrims nearly starved learning that lesson. But they learned it. Land that had been common property was turned into private property, which produced a lot more food. Similar experiments were tried on a larger scale in other countries around the world. In the biggest of these experiments — the Soviet Union under Stalin and Communist China under Mao — people literally starved to death by the millions. In the Soviet Union, at least six million people starved to death in the 1930s, in a country with some of the most fertile land on the continent of Europe, a country that had once been a major exporter of food. In China, tens of millions of people starved to death under Mao. Despite what the Left seems to believe, private-property rights do not exist simply for the sake of people who own property. Americans who do not own a single acre of land have abundant food available because land is still private property in the United States, even though the Left is doing its best to restrict property rights in both the countryside and in the cities. The other big feature of the egalitarian Left is promotion of a huge inequality of power, while deploring economic inequality. It is no coincidence that those who are going ballistic over the economic inequality between the top 1 or 2 percent and the rest of us are promoting a far more dangerous concentration of political power in Washington — where far less than 1 percent of the population increasingly tells 300 million Americans what they can and cannot do, on everything from their light bulbs and toilets to their medical care. This movement in the direction of central planning, under the name of “forward,” is in fact going back to a system that has failed in countries around the world — under both democratic and dictatorial governments and among peoples of virtually every race, color, creed, and nationality. It is one thing when conservative leaders like Ronald Reagan in America and Margaret Thatcher in Britain declared central planning a failure. But what really puts the nails in the coffin is that, before the end of the 20th century, both socialist and communist governments around the world began abandoning central planning. India and China are the biggest examples. In both countries, cutbacks on government control of the economy were followed by dramatically increased economic-growth rates, lifting millions of people out of poverty in both countries. The ultimate irony is that the most recent international survey of free markets found the world’s freest market p-to be in Hong Kong — in a country still ruled by Communists! But the Chinese Communists have at least learned, the hard way, a lesson that Barack Obama seems oblivious to. We are going “forward” to a repeatedly failed past following a charismatic leader, after a 20th century in which charismatic leaders led countries into unprecedented catastrophes. — Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. © 2012 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Obama's strategic class warfare

December 17, 2012

Obama's Stealth Redistribution Strategy

By Karl Ushanka

Resentment of the rich trumps all else in liberalism, and we are defending against a multi-front class war. President Obama is using a shotgun approach to redistribute your wealth, with multiple attacks on your income, property, savings, and cost of living.  These coordinated attacks started after the 2008 election and are now set to hit critical mass in his second term. 

You may be hearing about the automatic tax increases in the fiscal cliff, plus additional tax increases President Obama is negotiating with Speaker Boehner.  But you won't hear much about liberalism's most powerful, and silent, redistribution tool: inflation. 
How is inflation redistributive?  While not actually taking from one and giving to another, inflation satisfies the first step of the two-step redistribution proces

Step One: Reduce the wealth of the bourgeoisie. 

Step Two: Increase the wealth of the proletariat. 

The liberals, progressives, communists (or whatever label you're using these days) never achieve their redistribution goals, as they often fail at or before Step Two.  But for them, this is okay.  In their zero-sum world, a dollar taken from one must have been given to another.  Therefore, the redistribution effort is seen as a success, by them and in hindsight, if only Step One occurred.

We have seen this before.  Lenin triggered inflation to eliminate the Tsarist monetary system, which he planned to replace with centrally-managed rationing.  He increased the money supply twenty-five fold.  Lenin said:

The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstone of taxation and inflation.

Inflation is triggered when either the money supply increases faster than the economy (quantitative easing), or when the supply of goods is reduced (Corn - biofuel demand plus the 2012 drought).  Inflation causes uncertainty about future purchasing power, creates inefficiencies, and stifles productivity. Since the economy is a total of all goods rather than the total of all currency, the real money is not the $3 in your wallet but the gallon of milk in your fridge.

Despite the price increases you've seen in the grocery store, our government's recent Cost Price Index (CPI) is suggesting mild inflation at 2.2%.  Do you trust a report from this government more than your grocery receipt?  Your dollar buys less today than it did in 2008, and it will continue to lose value.  Expect this to get worse in the post-cliff economy, as Ben Bernanke continues his quantitative easing with President Obama's implicit support.

Some say precious metals are a safe haven in an inflationary period.  The canaries in the mine include Montana state representative Jerry O'Neil when he recently asked his state to pay him in gold and silver.  Here's the preface to his request:

It is very likely the bottom will fall out from under the US dollar.  Only so many dollars can be printed before they have no value.  The Keynesian era of financing government with debt appears to be close to its demise.

But, are metals really increasing in value?  Or are the metals' purchasing power constant and the value of our currency decreasing?  The latter is true at our hat store (CommieObama.com).  Starting Election Night 2012, we pegged the price of our hat to an ounce of silver.  November's hat price was $32.13.  December's price is $33.64.  Every business is making these adjustments, albeit in a more opaque manner. 

Let's assume for a moment that precious metals are a reliable gauge of inflation.  Let's calculate the dollar's lost purchasing power to the old money, gold and silver.  Since November 3rd, 2008, the last business day before Obama was elected president, the US dollar has lost 58% of its purchasing power (gold), and 70% of its purchasing power (silver).  The same date range shows a 41% purchasing power loss to gas, and 11% to milk. 

In theory, Bernanke's Fed exists to monitor inflation and adjust the money supply and interest rates accordingly.  But the endless quantitative easing and near 0% rates suggests the Fed has lost control.  Hyperinflation occurs when this type of mismanagement runs amok. 

When hyperinflation dilutes currency beyond usefulness, a currency swap becomes necessary.  A currency swap is to a stock split what a bread line is to a line for the next new iphone.  In 1922, Lenin exchanged 'new rubles' for old rubles in a 1-for-10,000 swap.  In March 1924, two months after Lenin's death, Soviet Russia issued another ruble with the exchange rate of 1-to-50,000.  By then, all the banks had closed and any faith in the currency was gone.  Stalin did not complain about inheriting a bad economy because the elimination of private wealth (Step one) was always the goal.

At Lenin's death in 1924, the inflation rate was approximately 5,000,000%.  By comparison: 1923 Germany: 3.817B% inflation.  Zimbabwe, just four years ago: 4.700B%.  Despite the warnings, each of these hyperinflation events was triggered by overprinting the nation's currency.

For perspective, today's $3.15 gallon of gas would cost this much next month:

• 1924 Russia:               $113,125
• 1923 Germany:           $1,001,962,500
• 2009 Zimbabwe:         $1,236,375,000

Unfortunately, this assault on our wealth will continue non-stop regardless of who controls Congress.  President Obama was smart to take advantage of super majorities to pass the most destructive policies of his administration, Stimulus and ObamaCare.  His other attacks on our savings do not require majorities in Congress, nor any more effort.  The Bush-era tax cuts are set to expire, as are the rules limiting the Alternative Minimum Tax. 

The new tax on the sale of a house, another ObamaCare tax, begins in January.  Mortgage deductions are also on the chopping block, with significant Republican backing. And the icing on this redistribution cake, Comrades? Inflation. 
FORWARD!

Karl blogs at Ushanka.us and can be reached at ushanka.us@gmail.com.

illustration by Erin Bonsteel of anti-anti-underground

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/12/obamas_stealth_redistribution_strategy.html at December 18, 2012 - 07:29:13 AM CST

The most convincing, concise case against public unions I've read yet

December 17, 2012

Unions Chant "Pork, Pork, Pork!"

By John Ransom

12/17/2012

 

Unions suck.

“They suck the money out of our wallets,” I wrote in July, “they suck productivity out of workers; and suck up all the leavings from the public trough. Increasingly, the public has had it with the private country clubs known as ‘public’ unions.”

The trouble with education, much public policy, government spending and the every-twenty-five-year bailout of auto companies in this country starts and ends with unions. I continued:

They are out-of- touch museum relics, fitting for a day that used rotary presses to distribute the news, but wildly inappropriate for an age that‘s both wired and wireless. Unions have prevented, and continue to prevent, much-needed reforms in education, public finance and government. They cultivate a sense of entitlement wholly out of order for the times, which call for more self-reliance and entrepreneurship.

Union advocates like to reply to this thesis- with good reason- by sticking fingers in their ears, jumping up and down in place, saying “pork, pork, pork,” while vaguely threatening the voting public with vengeance if unions don’t get more “pork.”

The good reason they chose this line of attack is that they have no logical argument to make.
They are like the man told to us by Patrick Henry.

Amid the general joy and shouts of triumph by the freezing, threadbare American army that accepted the surrender of the British army under Cornwallis at Yorktown, Henry tells us, was one John Hook, who could only think of the beef he lost, confiscated to provide food for the starving, yet victorious army.
“But hark!” says Henry. “What notes of discord are these that disturb the general joy and silence the acclimations of victory? They are the notes of John Hook, hoarsely bawling through the American camp ‘Beef! Beef! Beef !’” in protest of his loss.

So it goes with unions.

Cities may go bankrupt, police may be laid off, public safety endangered and public finance corrupted but the unions get paid first, no matter what.

As real-life mobster and union delegate Henry Hill explained it in the movie Goodfellas: “Business bad? F-- you, pay me. Oh, you had a fire? F-- you, pay me. Place got hit by lightning huh? F-- you, pay me."

That’s why it shouldn’t surprise us that while most of America hails Michigan for victory in passing a right-to-work law in the union-controlled state that borders Canada, the unions are complaining about their beef- and their benefits. They did much the same in Madison in 2011 as Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker forced unions to compete in an open way for benefit contracts. And despite union grousing, the world did not come to an end in Wisconsin. In fact, quite the opposite is true.

Magically, school districts on the verge of financial ruin suddenly were able to find millions of dollars in new money. How did that magic act happen?

“When the Appleton School District put its health-insurance contract up for bid for instance,” writes the City-Journal, “WEA Trust [the benefit provider run by the union] suddenly lowered its rates and promised to match any competitor’s price. Appleton will save $3 million during the current school year.” That open bidding process outside of the union monopoly was a result of Walker’s reforms.

And it reduced costs without degrading benefits.

So now, $3 million will go directly into the classroom, which is what teachers tell us they really care about.

So now, $3 million will allow the district to retain employees, which what the union ought to care most about.

And that’s also what’s at stake in Michigan.

Right-to-work means an end to the union monopoly on employment. It means that more people can have jobs. It means that unions have to provide a competitive environment or their customers will leave.

But in the up-is-down, black-is-white and right-is-wrong world of unions, progressives and mental patients, a competitive environment must be avoided at all costs. That's way too much pressure.

“Exclusivity for a union with majority support is not a monopoly, it is democracy,” said Brenda Smith, local head of the AFL-CIO affiliated American Federation of Teachers and apparently an Orwell fan. “It is order rather than chaos. It allows employees to select their representative freely, without coercion from the employer. It allows them to amplify their voice through collective action under our constitutionally protected right to freedom of association.” And for unions freedom of association means workers are given only one representative, one association, one, non-dissenting voice carefully following the party line 
Spoken like a true Menshevik.   

John Ransom

John Ransom is the Finance Editor for Townhall Finance. You can follow him on twitter @bamransom and on Facebook: bamransom.

I don't think the bar can be lowered any further with this president

Merry Christmas, America-Haters?

Brent Bozell

When TNT was preparing its annual special "Christmas in Washington" with the president of the United States, you'd think the last star musician they would consider to join the official caroling would be Psy, the South Korean rapper. What on Earth is Christmasy about this man's invisible-horse-riding dance to his dorky disco-rap hit "Gangnam Style"? It's not exactly the natural flip-side to "O Holy Night." But TNT couldn't resist this year's YouTube sensation.

This inane publicity stunt backfired when the website Mediaite reported on Dec. 7 that Psy (real name: Park Jae-sang) had participated in a 2002 protest in which he crushed a model of an American tank with a microphone stand. But that's nothing compared to the footage of a 2004 performance after a Korean missionary was slaughtered by Islamists in Iraq. These lyrics cannot be misunderstood.

"Kill those f---ing Yankees who have been torturing Iraqi captives ... Kill those f---ing Yankees who ordered them to torture ... Kill their daughters, mothers, daughters-in-law and fathers ... Kill them all slowly and painfully."

This isn't just anti-American. It's anti-human.

Guess where this story first surfaced in the American media? CNN, from the same corporate family tree as TNT. It was posted back on Oct. 6 on CNN's iReport, an open-source online news feature that allows users to submit stories for CNN consideration.

The Korean one-hit wonder put out the usual abject careerist apology, but he weirdly said, "I'm deeply sorry for how these lyrics could be interpreted." Those darn lyrics and those darn people who misinterpret lyrics about killing Yankees' mothers. It is like Barack Obama expressing regret for the awful things said about Susan Rice, ignoring the awful things said by Susan Rice.

Psy is now a millionaire. As Jim Treacher wrote at the Daily Caller: "So far he's made over $8 million from the song, about $3 million of it from the people he once wanted to kill." Brad Schaeffer at Big Hollywood noted his own father fought for South Korea's independence in the Korean War: "Had it not been for 'f-----g Yankees' like my Dad, this now-wealthy South Korean wouldn't be 'Oppan Gangnam Style' so much as 'Starving Pyongyang Style.'" (Gangnam is a posh district in the South Korean capital of Seoul.)

Despite the controversy, neither the Obama White House nor the TNT brass felt it was necessary to send Psy packing before the Dec. 9 taping. On Saturday, ABC reporter Muhammad Lila merely repeated, "the White House says the concert will go on and that President Obama will attend, saying that they have no control over who performs at that concert."

What moral cowardice. On Monday morning, another pliant publicist, NBC correspondent Peter Alexander, calmly relayed that the White House did take control on the Psy front -- on its own "We The People" website, where the people may post petitions to the president for their fellow citizens to sign. A petition asking Obama to dump Psy from the Christmas concert was itself dumped. Alexander explained: "But that petition was removed because the rules say the petitions only apply to federal actions. And, of course, the President had no say over who the private charity chose to invite."

This is double baloney. The White House hasn't removed silly "federal action" petitions like the one asking to "Nationalize the Twinkie Industry," or one to "Secure resources and funding, and begin construction of a Death Star by 2016." They removed one that they didn't want people to sign.

As for Obama having "no say over" who appeared on the TNT show, the president could easily declare he wasn't going to share a stage with this America-hater. Or he could have obviously placed one phone call to Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes (an Obama donor), and expressed the dismay of the President of the United States.

Instead, the Obamas came and honored Psy. Yes, the president honored a man who despised America enough to want its citizens slaughtered.

John Eggerton of Broadcasting and Cable magazine observed, "At the end of the taping, when the First Family customarily shakes hands and talks briefly with the performers, the First Lady gave Psy a hug, followed by a handshake from the President, who engaged Psy in a short, animated discussion -- at one point Psy appeared to rock back with laughter -- and patted the singer on the shoulder."

I never thought I'd ever view a Christmas special featuring a hideous hater of America celebrated by the President of the United States.

We have met the enemy, and he is us

Blasphemy and Islam

By Andrew C. McCarthy

December 15, 2012   4:00 AM

 

In Cairo on Wednesday, a Coptic Christian blogger named Alber Saber was convicted of blasphemy and “contempt of religion.” There’s a tragic irony: As any of the country’s Christians can tell you, contempt of religion is not merely permitted but encouraged in the new, post-Mubarak Egypt. What is criminal, what has become increasingly perilous, is any criticism of Islam.

Nor is truth a defense. Another Egyptian court recently upheld the blasphemy conviction of Makarem Diab, also a Coptic Christian. Diab had gotten into a discussion with a Muslim acquaintance, Abd al-Hameed, who, in the course of mocking Diab’s faith, insisted that Jesus was a serial fornicator. Diab countered Hameed’s baseless taunt with an assertion most Islamic scholars regard as accurate: namely, that Mohammed had more than four wives. Yet, because the context of Diab’s assertion evinced an intention to cast Islam’s prophet in an unfavorable light, Diab was prosecuted for “insulting the prophet” and “provoking students.” He was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment.

This is now everyday life in Egypt. It is also certain to be the future of Egypt. The overwhelmingly Islamist population, having first elected Islamic supremacists led by the Muslim Brotherhood to top leadership positions, is now poised to adopt a constitution that is founded on sharia, Islam’s totalitarian legal framework, and that expressly enshrines these blasphemy standards. But the problem is not just sharia in Egypt. Sharia is here.

About three weeks ago, another Egyptian court sentenced seven people to death after convicting them in absentia on blasphemy charges. Most of the seven are in the United States. Most of them are Coptic Christians; one is a Florida-based pastor who is a blistering critic of Islamic scripture. The charges relate to the defendants’ alleged involvement in “Innocence of Muslims,” an obscure amateur video that Islamists have frivolously cited as a pretext for their latest round of international mayhem — and that the Obama administration has fraudulently portrayed as the catalyst of a massacre in Benghazi in which jihadists killed four Americans, including our ambassador to Libya.

So how has President Obama responded to the Egyptian government’s human-rights violations, its failure to protect the Copts from persecution (indeed, its willing participation in that persecution), and its provocations against Americans — which now include ordering their killing, through a kangaroo-court process that flouts our due-process standards, over their engagement in activity that is expressly protected by our Constitution?

Well . . . the president has announced that not only will he continue funding Egypt’s Islamist government, but he intends to include in that U.S. aid the provision of 20 F-16 fighter jets. Moreover, Obama is continuing his administration’s collaboration with the 57-government Organization of Islamic Cooperation on the “Istanbul Process.” That is the OIC’s campaign to impose sharia’s repressive blasphemy standards.

The most recent aggression in this blasphemy enterprise — a years-long, carefully plotted OIC campaign to snuff out American free-speech rights under the guise of “defamation of religion” — is U.N. Human Rights Council Resolution 16/18. It calls on Western governments to outlaw “any advocacy of religious hatred against individuals that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has zealously colluded with the OIC in seeking the implementation of 16/18. Notwithstanding her contortions, it is a gross violation of the First Amendment. Our law permits the criminalization of incitement to violence only when an agitator willfully calls for violence. Our Constitution does not abide what the resolution is designed to achieve: the heckler’s veto and, worse, the suppression of speech predicated on mob intimidation — the legitimation of barbaric lawlessness.

Nor does the Constitution’s guarantee of free expression tolerate the outlawing of speech that prompts discrimination, much less hostility. And contrary to administration hairsplitting, it makes no difference that the resolution would not “criminalize” expression that prompts discrimination or hostility. To quote the First Amendment, “Congress shall make no law” suppressing protected speech. It does not say “Congress shall make no criminal law.” No law means no law — no civil law, rule, regulation, guideline, etc.

As the framers understood, virtually everything we actually need a government for can be handled — more responsively and thus more responsibly — at the local and state level. There is one essential reason for having a federal government, and one principal reason for the creation of the office of President of the United States: to protect our citizens in the exercise of their fundamental rights from hostile foreign forces.

Our fundamental rights are now under attack. As far as that is concerned, it is of little moment that the Egyptian government, joined by its Islamist confederates, threatens our lives and our liberties through court orders and resolutions — through lawfare rather than violent jihad. We are every bit as much under siege.
What is of great moment is that the president has joined the hostile forces against us, against Americans whose protection is the sole reason for the federal government’s existence.

If that is to be Washington’s posture, what do we need it for? It is bad enough when Leviathan cannot tell America’s friends from America’s enemies. But what is the point of a federal government that cannot tell America’s enemies from America? Or that can tell perfectly well, but chooses to fight for the wrong side?

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the executive director of the Philadelphia Freedom Center. He is the author, most recently, of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, which was published by Encounter Books.

More on "The Dumbing of America"

December 14, 2012

Educating Ignorance

By Janice Shaw Crouse
The best-kept secret in America today is the precipitous drop in the quality of college since the Left seized power in higher education. Every year, various magazines publish a list of rankings for American undergraduate institutions. Forbes assures parents that "Every school with a Forbes grade meets a high standard." U.S. News and World Report assures its readers that they consider a wide variety of factors in measuring a college's effectiveness. While American colleges were once great institutions of learning, those who know higher education today recognize that "high standards" of quality are casualties in the war against traditionalism and American values. Where religion and love of country and family were once revered, radical Leftist ideology now prevails. Traditional values have been replaced by moral relativism, anti-establishment teachings, and the breakdown of the family.

The radicalization of colleges did not happen overnight. What we have now is a product of past indifference and disinclination to do anything to reverse the spread of Leftist trends. John Howard's new book, America's Best Colleges! Really?, lays out his analysis of how the traditional purpose of education has been eradicated and replaced by radical ideologies of the Left. Howard outlines a brief history of how our Founders desired our public education system to reinforce religion and morality in order for our self-reliant experiment to survive and thrive. In contrast, he points out how the Left has imbedded its teachings in America's educational system and perverted the Founders' original intent in order to undermine the country's foundation.

Howard quotes ancient philosophers about the purpose and foundations of education. Aristotle: "Of all the things I have mentioned, that which contributes most to the permanence of constitutions is the adaption of education to the form of government." Howard then states that "schooling is the foremost determinant of the well-being of a nation," with the exceptions of religion and family. Howard cites Diogenes Laërtius who said, "The foundation of every state is the education of its youth."  

In one of the book's most compelling stories, John Howard recounts a revealing meeting with government officials concerning educational objectives:

In 1963, a group of college presidents - I was among them - visited a number of members of Congress and officials from the Office of Education with a proposal to substitute tax credits for gifts to colleges in place of Federal grants. When we explained the plan to Dr. Francis Keppel, the U.S. Commissioner of Education, he said "We couldn't allow that! It would prevent us from accomplishing our social objectives!" It was his intention to convert the educational institutions into agencies for achieving social objectives determined by the Federal government. Commissioner Keppel had just proven that the worst fears of what would happen to education if it were federalized, had already been fulfilled."

So the federal government's "social objectives" were paramount in the nation's educational institutions. Certainly, the history of radicalization isn't something that appeared out of nowhere. To anyone paying attention at the time, it was a steady pounding of extremist rhetoric and action in every aspect of the classroom.

Howard explains that during the 20^th Century, extremists - such as Carl Rogers, Bill Ayers, Bruce Franklin, Herbert Marcuse, Charles Hurst Jr., Michael Klonsky, and Angela Davis - saw fertile ground on college and university campuses where they were able to infiltrate and produce a sea change in how Americans viewed their country, families, morality, and religion.

In addition, radical activism spread rapidly - college students increasingly identified with Che Guevara, Castro, Mao Tse Tung, Lenin, and Trotsky. Howard noted that "The Underground Press, virtually unknown to the public, exerted a wide and powerful influence on the youth of the 1960s and 1970s." Indeed, radical publications grew from a handful in 1964 to over 400 in 1969 and more than 800 in 40 states in 1971.

Howard contends that morality is "the essential and irreplaceable foundation in a free society." He then documents how everyone from Edmund Burke, President John Adams, President James Madison, and President John Quincy Adams, all declared political liberty can't exist without morality. Howard believes that the "acculturation of the young for life in Christendom is carried on by religion, by the families, by educational institutions, by literature, and other cultural influences." They then have to constantly be reinforced by the culture around them.

Revolutionaries inevitably begin with an assault on religion. The Wall Street Journal reported on July 5, 2002, that three quarters of all college seniors believe in moral relativity. An October 2012 Pew Research poll showed, "One-fifth of the U.S. public - and a third of adults under 30 - are religiously unaffiliated today, the highest percentages ever in Pew Research Center polling." Because anti-American radicals have succeeded in undermining religion, standards of civil behavior have deteriorated, and our free society isn't so free anymore.

Colleges and universities - even such high-prestige institutions as Princeton, Yale, and Harvard - accept moral relativism as the intellectual standard. This widely prevalent attitude was exemplified very early on by Dr. Lewis Mayhew in his address as the new president of the American Association of Higher Education in 1969: "Colleges are not churches, clinics or even parents. Whether or not a student burns a draft card, participates in a civil rights march, engages in pre-marital sexual activity, becomes pregnant, attends church, sleeps all day or drinks all night, is not really the concern of an educational institution."

Political correctness, rejection of in loco parentis, and moral relativity are the new standards on campuses in both public and even private institutions, and the ramifications are staggering. Crime, drug use, cheating, money fraud, and a seemingly endless variety of licentious conduct are all accepted. This moral breakdown is producing no outrage from parents or the public. As long as parents demand nothing more from those who teach their children and those to whom they give their hard-earned money, nothing will change, except more erosion of values and more harm to young people.

Howard would like to see education restored to a place where it is seen as "helping the learners to come of age as a people, to conceive a good idea of themselves and to learn that the expression of the human spirit is most truly made in terms of wonder and delight. If education can move toward that ideal, it becomes its own abiding cause for optimism." Man is "a thinking and feeling being," a "social being," and a "spiritual being." Because of this premise, he asserts that our nation's colleges should "seek to improve and refine the educational process" and design programs that "will be valid and vital for each generation of students."

If higher education institutions would do that, there is hope for the future. ... And, perhaps, America's great institutions of the past will return to their former glory.
­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­Janice Shaw Crouse, Ph.D., is a former college professor and university academic officer. She is now Senior Fellow at Concerned Women for America's Beverly LaHaye Institute, a conservative think tank.

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