Worcester County Freedom Trail

A new report is out that takes an in-depth look at the information being displayed in Washington DC’s new Capitol Visitor Center (CVC). Amazing how many mistakes were made. Sad how many were obviously politically motivated.

The National Motto
The CVC had incorrectly indentified “E pluribus unum” in its Unity display as our national motto. Since 1956, our national motto has been “In God We Trust.” The CVC text had previously stated, “The nation’s motto, E pluribus unum–Out of many, one–expresses the ideal of our Union: many states, one nation. Representing all of the states, Congress has promoted national unity through a process of inquiry, debate, compromise, and consensus. These documents record the continuing legislative efforts to meet the broadest needs of the people.”

After congressional members pointed out the error and asked that the display be corrected, the words, “THE NATION’S MOTTO” were plastered over.

Additionally, after objections raised by several members, the words “IN GOD WE TRUST” were added above the replica of the Speaker’s Rostrum in the Virtual House Theater in order to accurately portray the actual Speaker’s Rostrum in the House Chamber. The words were not included in the originally approved CVC text.

The 1824 Presidential Election
The CVC text states: “The 1824 presidential election was the first one to excite high public interest and participation.” Without an equivocation, it was the presidential election of 1800 between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson that was “the first one to excite high public interest and participation.” In that election, the two-party system matured to full operation, with the Federalists of Adams being tossed over in both the House and the Senate in preference for Jefferson’s Republicans, or Anti-Federalists. Both newspapers and pamphleteers were in full swing for that election, and some of the most outrageous news coverage and electioneering ever to arise in any presidential election occurred in the election of 1800.

The Northwest Ordinance, 1787
The CVC text states: “The authors of the Northwest Ordinance believed educated citizens were critical to the success of self-government. Article 3 declared, ‘… education shall forever be encouraged.’ The Northwest Ordinance, together with the earlier Land Ordinance of 1785, set aside a section of each new township’s land for the support of public schools.”

Article 3 of the Northwest Ordinance states: “Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”

Very clearly, then, the Framers of the Northwest Ordinance did not indicate in the Ordinance that they “believed educated citizens were critical to the success of self-government”; to the contrary, they stated that they believed that “religion, morality, and knowledge” were critical to the success of self-government. Schools were not the object of the Ordinance (as indicated by the abbreviated quote in the CVC text) but instead were the means of implementing those three items of congressional concern.

And there are many more errors. Read the full report: Reconstructing American History.

I don’t understand. There are dozens or more dating service web sites that cater to the GBLT community. How is it that the government can force eHarmony to change it’s core business because a gay person wants eHarmony rather than Match.com? What’s next? A gay person will want to buy a Toyota Corolla from General Motors, so the government will step in and force General Motors to change it’s business and start producing Corolla’s? Or my business will have to discontinue it’s focus on the tech community and start to work with retailers if a gay person objects to our business model?

This from Fox News:

Online dating service eHarmony has agreed to create a new Web site — “Compatible Partners” — for gay and lesbian users, the New Jersey Office of the Attorney General announced.

Created as part of a settlement with Eric McKinley, a gay man from New Jersey, the Web site will provide services for users seeking same-sex partners by March 31, New Jersey Division on Civil Rights Director J. Frank Vespa-Papaleo said.

eHarmony, which was founded by Dr. Neil Clark Warren in 2000, said the settlement was triggered by a Law Against Discrimination complaint filed by McKinley against the online service on March 14, 2005. As part of the agreement, eHarmony will pay McKinley $5,000 and will provide him a one-year complimentary membership.

eHarmony — which was not found in violation of the law — also agreed to ensure that same-sex users will be matched using the same or equivalent technology used for its heterosexual clients. It will also post photographs of same-sex couples in its “Diversity” section of its Web site and in advertising materials.

Registration on the “Compatible Partners” site will be free to the first 10,000 users. The site and eHarmony will maintain individual matching pools and registration information. As a result, users of the “Compatible Partners” site and eHarmony.com cannot be paired together, the company announced.

“With the launch of the Compatible Partners site, our policy is to welcome all single individuals who are genuinely seeking long-term relationships,” eHarmony Vice President of Legal Affairs Antone Johnson said in a statement.

Blame the financial crisis on those who deserve the blame: the pols and lobbyists and community organizers who forced us into this situation to begin with. Excellent analysis from Investors Business Daily:

As the financial crisis spreads, denials on Capitol Hill grow more shrill. Blame an aloof President Bush, greedy Wall Street, risky capitalism — anybody but those in Congress who wrote the banking rules.

Such denials won’t hold against the angry facts banging on their doors. The only question is whether the guilty party can keep up the barricade until Election Day.

A visibly annoyed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected suggestions that Democrats share blame for the meltdown. “No,” she snapped at reporters who dared ask.

Stick to our narrative, she scolded: The bursting of the housing bubble was another story of market failure and deregulation.

“The American people are not protected from the risk-taking and the greed of these financial institutions,” she said, while calling for investigations of the industry.

Only, the risk-taking was her idea — and the idea of all the other Democrats, along with a handful of Republicans, who over the past 30 years have demonized lenders as racist and passed regulation after regulation pressuring them to make more loans to unqualified borrowers in the name of diversity.

They were the ones who screamed — “REDLINING!” — and sent banks scurrying for cover in low-income neighborhoods, where they have been forced to lower long-held industry standards for judging creditworthiness to make the subprime loans.

If they don’t comply, they are threatened with stiff penalties under the Community Reinvestment Act, or CRA, a law that forces banks to make home loans to people with poor credit risks.

No fewer than four federal banking regulatory agencies are responsible for enforcing the law. They subject lenders to racial litmus tests and issue regular report cards, the industry’s dreaded “CRA rating.”

The more branches that lenders put in poor neighborhoods, and the more loans they make there, the better their rating. Those lenders with low ratings can not only be fined, but also blocked from mergers and other business transactions needed to expand.

The regulation grew to monstrous proportions during the Clinton administration, obsessed as it was with multiculturalism. Amendments to the CRA in the mid-1990s dramatically raised the amount of home loans to otherwise unqualified low-income borrowers.

The revisions also allowed for the first time the securitization of CRA-regulated loans containing subprime mortgages. The changes came as radical “housing rights” groups led by ACORN lobbied for such loans. ACORN at the time was represented by a young public-interest lawyer in Chicago by the name of Barack Obama.

HUD, in turn, pressured Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to purchase more subprime mortgages, and Fannie and Freddie, in turn, donated to the campaigns of leading Democrats like Barney Frank and Pelosi who throttled investigations into fraud at the agencies.

Soon, investment banks such as Bear Stearns were aggressively hawking the securities as “guaranteed.” Wall Street’s pitch was that MBSs were as safe as Treasuries, but with a higher yield.

But they weren’t safe. Everyone in the subprime business — from brokers to lenders to banks to investment houses — absolved themselves of responsibility for ensuring the high-risk loans were good.

The mortgage lenders didn’t care, because they were going to sell the loans to other banks. The banks didn’t care, because they were going to repackage the loans as MBSs. The investors and traders didn’t care, because the MBSs were backed by Fannie and Freddie and their implicit government guarantees.

In other words, nobody up and down the line — from the branch office on main street to the high-rise on Wall Street — analyzed the risk of such ill-advised loans. But why should they? Everybody was just doing what the regulators in Washington wanted them to do.

So everybody won until everybody lost, including the minorities the government originally mandated the banks to serve.

The original culprits in all this were the social engineers who compelled banks to make the bad loans. The private sector has no business conducting social experiments on behalf of government. Its business is making profit. Period. So it did what it naturally does and turned the subprime social mandate into a lucrative industry.

Of course, it was a Ponzi scheme, because they weren’t allowed to play by their rules. The government changed the rules for risk.

In order to put low-income minorities into home loans, they were ordered to suspend lending standards that had served the banking industry well for centuries. No one wants to talk about it, so they just scapegoat Wall Street. Even John McCain has joined the Democrat chorus on this.

The FBI is now investigating 24 large mortgage lenders for alleged abuses. But who will investigate the pols and the lobbyists and the community agitators who made the bad decisions that ultimately forced businesses to make their bad decisions?

As a high school student and a future college student, I was simply horrified at what’s going on in college campuses across the United States these days after watching an independent film titled Indoctrinate U. This film showed the gruesome truth behind universities’ administration and students. Students and professors at colleges are being slandered and mistreated just for being a conservative or believing that America is truly a great nation.

Administrations deny protests against affirmative action, arrest students for posting flyers promoting conservative speakers, and provide no comprehensible answer when asked questions regarding why they are so biased against conservatives. Of course they allow protests against military recruitment on campuses. Of course they allow mobs of feminists to form. Of course they turn their heads when the liberals do something wrong. They all say they want free speech and equality. What about the white, Christian males? Why don’t they get anything? Why can’t someone hand out a conservative newspaper on campus without being spit on?

I should re-title this post. It should really be called “Unjustifiable Lack of Thinking on Campuses.” Because that is what this is all about. No one thinks anymore. They go through life accepting things at face value. No questioning what they’re told, no demanding for solid evidence.

I wrap up this post with a quote from the film:

“What most faculty want is for students to validate their pathetic life experiences. If we were secure, we would have different jobs. But, we’re faculty, so we want people to agree with us, to nod, to write stuff down, as if it were important.”

-Michael Munger
Professor, Duke

The majority of the faculty on campuses these days are poisoning the minds of their students. And the sad part? These students have absolutely no idea how twisted their philosophies are.

Link to Indoctrinate U‘’s website here.

Man, we can’t even honor our vets in school any more. This poor kid has now been suspended for carrying a harmless memento — an expended rifle shell that was given to him by a veteran on Memorial Day. Have our schools have become so overrun with hoodlums that school staff can’t tell the good from the bad? And now this kid might be assigned a parole officer? Give me a break!

This from the Telegram:

Ten-year-old Bradley Geslak was suspended from school this week for bringing a Memorial Day souvenir to school.

The Toy Town Elementary School fourth-grader had received two empty rifle shell casings from blanks used during the town celebration held at the GAR Park Monday morning.

He brought one of the casings with him to school the next day.

“He was just playing with it at lunch,” explained Crystal Geslak, Bradley’s mother. “He wasn’t showing it to anyone; he had it in his hand and was playing with it.”

Bradley said a teacher saw him with it and told him to hand it over.

“The teacher told me to give it to her and I did,” he said.

After the piece of brass was confiscated, Ms. Geslak was called at work and told to come and pick up her son; he was being suspended for the next five days.

Her son was in tears when she got there.

“I was totally shocked. I couldn’t believe this was happening,” she said.

“Ordinarily, I try to think ahead about things, but to me, this was something good, not bad. It was just an empty shell, not even from a real bullet. A sharpened pencil would be more dangerous than this piece of metal.”

Her son had been given the two blank shells by a uniformed veteran who participated in the ceremony Monday. Bradley gave one to his grandfather and kept the other souvenir for himself.

Having received the souvenir from an adult, he never considered it wrong for him to have it, his mother said.

“He was so proud to have been given them. His dad’s a veteran, his uncle’s a veteran, both his grandfathers are veterans. Memorial Day is a big thing to us. It’s a very important holiday and we have a big celebration every year,” Ms. Geslak said.

According to the family, a school official said on Tuesday that the shell would not be returned to them. The family said they were also told that the next step might involve assigning a probation officer to Bradley.

School officials refused to comment on the incident yesterday, citing privacy regulations.

“I cannot give any comment on school suspensions,” Principal Deborah Peterson said. “I cannot confirm or deny a suspension took place, and I cannot speak about anything involving a minor. It’s all confidential, just like at a doctor’s office.”

Attempts to reach Superintendent Brooke Clenchy and School Committee Chairman Michael Niles for comment were unsuccessful.

“If he had been suspended for having a bad attitude, I could have understood it. I would have supported them in that. But not for this. He didn’t even know he did anything wrong,” she said.

Ms. Geslak will have plenty of time to think about that in the coming days, because the suspension also means that she has had to give up hours at work to be with her son.

Wow, I didn’t think there were any American universities left that would publicly acknowledge a conservative. But here you go. This from Townhall.com:

This graduation season Washington University stands out as a sign of hope and rebellion against the traditional political correctness that dominates the selection process.  Washington University decided to award Phyllis Schlafly an honorary doctorate of humane letters earlier this May.

Schlafly, who earned her undergraduate and law degrees from Washington University, has been a leader of the conservative movement in America for over 50 years.  She is most well-known (and despised by feminist academics) for leading the effort to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment.  She has authored or edited 18 books, has run for Congress and heads her own national organization.  She is also the proud mother of six children.

During the week leading up to commencement, students led protests outside the Chancellor’s residence.  As if this wasn’t enough, at the commencement ceremony this past weekend, students, faculty and parents transformed this celebratory occasion into a political event.  They wore white armbands and stood with their backs towards Schlafly as she received her award.  Three faculty members even walked off the stage and turned their backs.  Schlafly was unaffected by the protest.  According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, when interviewed about the protest, Schlafly said about her opposition, “I’m not sure they’re mature enough to graduate.”

This kind of behavior on a college campus is not particularly surprising, but the fact that the Chancellor stood up against the opposition is a sign of hope.  Granted, he defended the decision in an email to the student body by first distancing himself from Schlafly, “Personally, I do not endorse her views or opinions, and in many instances, I strongly disagree with them.”  He justified the decision in terms of diversity, “I want to affirm my personal and the University’s institutional commitment to strengthening diversity and inclusiveness…”  The fact that he did not bend to the pressure is a step in the right direction.

Even more striking about this controversy is that Trustee Emeritus Margaret Bush Wilson volunteered to read the citation to award the degree.  Wilson was the first woman of color to serve as the national chair of the NAACP, the second woman of color admitted to practice law in Missouri and is a prominent civil rights attorney.  She volunteered to read because of her strong belief in the importance of free speech.