What we were taught:
“The right of immigration is a hallowed American principle that has been recognized since the days of the Founding Fathers.”
The Truth:
The Founding Fathers were generally wary of immigration, and many of them warned about the consequences for the United States if immigration levels were not limited.

What we were taught:
“Martin Luther King Jr. believed in a color-blind society, calling only for equal rights, not for affirmative action and other special privileges for black Americans.”
The Truth:
Contrary to the sentiments he expressed in his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, King favored racial quotas. In fact, he called for massive government spending to make up for centuries of discrimination for blacks- “a broad based and gigantic Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged.” Late in his life he grew more radical, calling for a socialist system in America.

What we were taught:
“Pre-Columbian America was still the first Eden, a pristine natural kingdom.”
The Truth:
The American Indians practiced slash-and-burn agriculture, destroyed forests and grasslands, and wiped out entire animal populations.

What we were taught:
“The arguments for states’ rights were just thinly veiled justifications for the southern system of slavery. Anyone who defends the concept today is a crank or a racist or both.”
The Truth:
The idea of states’ rights is central to American history and political theory. In antebellum America northern states invoked these important principles at least as often as their southern counterparts. Fearful of an unaccountable federal government, Thomas Jefferson and other important Americans even believed the states could nullify unconstitutional laws.

What we were taught:
“The Monica Lewsinsky affair was the worst scandal of Bill Clinton’s presidency.”
The Truth:
A far greater scandal is that in his war against the Serbs, Clinton aided and abetted the spread of Islamic radicalism into the Balkans.

What we were taught:
“The old West was violent and lawless, with life and property insecure and no restraints imposed on gunfighters or other criminals.”
The Truth:
Even in the absence of government, the old West was far less violent than most American cities today. Frontiersmen developed private mechanisms to enforce the law and define and enforce property rights.

What we were taught:
“American liberals today as yesterday, have opposed American wars, while conservatives have just as naturally supported them.”
The Truth:
The truth is not so simple. Liberals supported all major American wars including (initially) Vietnam. On the other hand, traditional conservatives like Richard Weaver and Senator Robert Taft have been cautious about the use of military power, and skeptical of Utopian claims about what it can accomplish.

What we were taught:
“Native America had substantial role in shaping everything from the basic principles animating the Declaration of Independence to the political system established by the U.S. Constitution.”
The Truth:
American Indians did almost nothing to influence the Declaration or the Constitution. The Iroquois League bears virtually no resemblance to the U.S. system of government for which it supposedly was a model.

What we were taught:
“Segregation of schools- even de facto segregation- harms the self-esteem of minority students and leads to poor educational performance. By desegregating schools, we will close the educational achievement gap.”
The Truth:
The Black-white educational gap- which is as big as four grade levels in some subjects- is alive and well despite decades of desegregation efforts and has shown no greater improvement in integrated schools than in largely black ones.

What we were taught:
“The Civil War was a simple morality play between supporters of slavery on the one hand and opponents on the other”
The Truth:
For starters, Lincoln aimed to keep the Union together, even if that meant protecting slavery, and many southerners viewed slavery as an evil. But for the South, there was a larger issue at stake: preserving the last check on the power of the federal government.

What we were taught:
“The Constitution gives the president a free hand in foreign affairs, allowing him to send troops into battle without consulting Congress.”
The Truth:
In a deliberate break from the British tradition, the Framers of the Constitution specifically invested the legislative branch, not the executive, with war-making powers. Today Republicans and Democrats alike claim that it is outdated to believe the president cannot send troops into battle without congressional approval, but the historical justifications they push to make this case are misleading or just plain wrong.

What we were taught:
“It was the incredible economic stimulus of World War II that finally pulled the United States out of the Great Depression.”
The Truth:
The “wartime prosperity” that historians frequently describe was nothing but an illusion. World War II was in fact a period of deprivation. Thanks to government rationing and the diversion of so much of the private sector’s efforts to war-related work, consumer goods were less readily available and more expensive, and people had less money with which to buy those goods.

What we were taught:
“Social Security operates like an insurance program: individuals pay a premium into a fund and are thereby entitled to receive benefits in the future. This is just as President Franklin Roosevelt sold the program to the American people”.
The Truth:
As the U.S. government has conceded only when forced to before the Supreme Court, the Social Security payments an individual makes are not an “insurance premium” but a tax, which does not give the individual the right to any benefit or earmark funds for him. The individual receives nothing but a promise “to tax your children to take care of you in your old age.”

What we were taught:
“George Washington Carver was one of the greatest scientists in American history, revolutionizing southern agriculture with his discoveries and developing some three hundred distinct products out of the peanut alone.”
The Truth:
Carver’s scientific achievements were quite modest, but many people, including Carver himself, inflated the myth of his scientific genius. The U.S. government even tried to suppress the truth.

What we were taught:
“The Constitution is a “living breathing” document that changes with the times.”
The Truth:
It was precisely Britain’s own “living breathing” constitution- and the oppressions it produced- that the Founding Fathers rebelled against.

What we were taught:
“A friendly Indian named Squanto taught the Pilgrims a special Indian fertilization practice that enabled the new settlers to grow corn in greater abundance, thus allowing the fledgling colony to flourish.”
The Truth:
American Indians simply didn’t use fertilizer. Squanto showed the Pilgrims a technique he had probably learned from the Europeans.

What we were taught:
“The modern presidency is a wonderful institution that has been mysteriously abused by recent occupants of the White House.”
The Truth:
Presidential lawlessness goes back a long way- at least to Theodore Roosevelt- whom everyone is taught to love and revere.

What we were taught:
“Blacks on average lag behind whites in income and educational achievement because of ongoing racial discrimination.”
The Truth:
The causal assumption that discrimination is the source of all these problems is simply false. In many cases there is a wide range of factors at work, none of which has to do with discrimination. Sometimes too, black Americans benefit from discrimination in their favor.

What we were taught:
“Thomas Jefferson concocted his radical theory of nullification on the spot to address the terrible Alien and Sedition Acts. This notion was a radical departure from the American political tradition.”
The Truth:
Jefferson’s theory grew directly out of the mainstream political tradition, as it had been articulated by such Founders as James Madison, Patrick Henry, and Edmund Randolph.

What we were taught:
“In one of the earliest tests of the federal system established by the constitution, frontiersmen in western Pennsylvania rebelled against a tax on whiskey. President George Washington swiftly restored order by leading a militia into Pennsylvania, thus winning an import victory for the federal government.”
The Truth:
Actually, resistance to the whiskey tax was widespread, and the federal government did nothing to curtail it outside Pennsylvania. Frontiersmen continued to evade the tax, until the federal government finally gave up on it entirely.

What we were taught:
“The government and labor unions have protected American workers from greedy and exploitative businessmen.”
The Truth:
Government intervention in the economy is counterproductive and ends up hurting the very workers it is supposed to help, as it hampers the very thing- capital investment- that raises our standard of living.

What we were taught:
“Capitalism’s capricious “boom and bust” cycle inevitably led to the Great Depression, the sort of disaster that can be avoided only by careful government management of the economy.””
The Truth:
Despite the capitalism-bashing popular among historians and politicians alike, the free market is not responsible for economic downturns; government intervention in the economy- our supposed savior- is in fact the culprit.

What we were taught:
“President Herbert Hoover, clinging to an outmoded laissez-faire philosophy, stood idly by while the nation plunged into the Great Depression, an economic disaster he could have offset had the federal government intervened in the economy decisively and immediately.”
The Truth:
Hoover was anything but a believer in the free market; his interventionist efforts to try to starve off the Depression- which, in fact, he thereby prolonged and deepened- laid the groundwork for Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

What we were taught:
“Franklin Roosevelt lifted the country out of the Depression and saved American capitalism from its own internal flaws. At the very least he gave people hope at a time of despair.”
The Truth:
As a growing body of scholarship continues to show, the New Deal actually prolonged the Depression and crippled American capitalism.

What we were taught:
“When the Constitution grants the federal government the power of Congress to “regulate commerce,” it means the government can regulate virtually all gainful activity and almost anything that “affects” interstate commerce.”
The Truth:
The courts have ignored the Framers’ stated aims in order to grant the federal government extraordinary power to interfere in Americans’ lives.

What we were taught:
“The Constitution’s general welfare clause authorizes the federal government to appropriate funds for a wide array of purposes as long as the aim is to help the American people.
The Truth:
A broad reading of the general welfare clause makes no logical sense and contradicts the stated intentions of the Framers.

What we were taught:
“The Constitution includes an “elastic clause” that gives the federal government sweeping power to do what it considers to be useful or convenient.”
The Truth:
The Framers explicitly and repeatedly affirmed that the Constitution granted the federal government only the authority to carry out its specifically enumerated powers. The Supreme Court ignored that history to grant the federal government far more expansive powers.

What we were taught:
“The only role of a jury is to determine the facts of a case, not whether the relevant law is just.”
The Truth:
The Founding Fathers frequently argued that juries had the right to decide both fact and the law itself.

What we were taught:
“Foreign aid can play an important role in lifting countries out of poverty. The United States should increase its foreign aid expenditures accordingly.”
The Truth:
Some $2 trillion later foreign aid programs have essentially nothing to show for themselves, apart from propping up corrupt regimes, introducing perverse and destructive incentives and postponing economic reform.

What we were taught:
“Were it not for Labor unions, American workers would be forced to work for a mere pittance in horrifying conditions. The unions blocked corporations from exploiting workers.”
The Truth:
Americans are actually less free as a result of changes in American labor law since the 1930s. It is simply a myth that workers have little to no bargaining power if they are not unionized.

What we were taught:
“Our greatest presidents have been those who had “vision” and exercised their power to the fullest to lead the nation and serve the American people.”
The Truth:
The Framers never intended the presidency to be an all-powerful, all-important office, yet those who do best in presidential rankings tend to be those who grew the federal government and grabbed more power for themselves. Polls of historians reveal more about the historians themselves than about the presidents.

What we were taught:
“The only way forward for disadvantaged people whether Irish American, Chinese American, or black, is through political activism.”
The Truth:
S.B. Fuller, all but forgotten today, was a great example of the use of economic means to bring prosperity and independence to a disadvantaged people.

What we were taught:
“By standing up to the Serbs in 1999, President Bill Clinton stopped a genocide from occurring in Kosovo. Thanks to the Western military intervention, “the burning of villages and killing of innocents was history” as Clinton himself proudly recalled.”
The Truth:
The Clinton administration used fabricated casualty figures to obscure what was taking place in Kosovo- not “genocide” but a brutal civil war that had claimed several thousand lives. The Kosovo Liberation Army, which the Clinton administration itself had previously called a “terrorist group,” proved resistant to peace efforts and actually conducted ethnic cleansing of its own- not that anyone consulting the Western media would know anything about it.

“33 Questions about American History You’re Not Supposed to Ask”
-Thomas E. Woods Jr.

“It is clear that the current approach has not worked and cannot work in today’s environment,” Mr. Greenberg, who was ousted from A.I.G. in 2005, told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. “A.I.G., in my judgment, in the current plan, will not pay the taxpayers back.”

Will this now officially put the ball in the peoples court who said the bailouts were bad? Will those people who said that the bailouts will not work and are bad in the long run now get a say? Probably not, but who knows. The people who brought about this problem don’t have a CLUE how to fix it. When will people wake up? Is it going to take bare food shelves? By that point the hole is going to be too big to fix.

In other bailout news Savior BO decided that it maybe is to just let GM go bankrupt. First decent decision he has made since becoming President.

Wow. Take a look at that last statement. The President now has the power and authority to pick and choose which companies can go bankrupt and get bailed out. This isn’t socialism anymore, it’s fascism.

Things are not going to get better in this country or around the world until the governments let bad companies fail. This concept is what gave Americans one of the highest standards of living for the entire world. If you suck, you suck. Try again at something else. This moral hazard that the government has created is going to be insane. Politicians blame all these problems on the free market. I say bullshit. They want to be able to control and regulate their part of the market to benefit them and their buddies. Don’t you people get it? You’re getting punk’d!

I went to eat lunch with my 10-year-old daughter at school the other day and afterwards, the principle came up to me and, with a stern voice and face, informed me that my daughter would be literally kicked out of school the following week if I didn’t provide her with proof of our address.

You see we had moved recently and the school board requires proof of a student’s home address for zoning purposes.

This task had slipped my and my wife’s mind and I told the principle that we would go home straightaway and get a copy of our lease and a utility bill and bring it by.

I also mentioned that I thought it was kind of absurd to threaten, and even worse to actually do it, to kick a child out of school for something so trivial. A simple phone call to remind us would have sufficed.

And then, that’s when it happened. That’s when the principle of the elementary school uttered the most popular copout in the history of civilized society: “I don’t make the rules, I just enforce them.”

I have to admit: I didn’t hear the principle say “I don’t make the rules, I just enforce them.” But rather I heard: I’m a mindless cretin who lacks the ability for reasonable thought so regardless of how absurd something might be I’ll do it anyway because that’s what I was told to do.”

That’s why I’d like to propose adding the human brain’s frontal lobe to the list of useless tissue that should be removed at birth since they are no longer of any vital use to humans:

* Tonsils
* Adenoids
* Spleen
* Gallbladder
* One kidney
* Thyroid
* Prostate
* Appendix
* Frontal Lobe

I’d start with the cops. They are the poster children for the phrase: I don’t make the laws, I just enforce them. Of course when a cop says it I hear: I’m an undereducated cowboy who, if not for working for the state, would have no real skills to market and would most likely be in prison myself so I do what I’m told.

Then I’d move on to the customer service representatives at banks. The ones that look at you with that blank, robotic stare and talk in circles as you try to explain to them that you don’t think it’s fair that they charged you a fee for going over the credit limit on your card since the reason you went over your credit limit is because of a fee that they charged your card with. Some monthly maintenance fee or cash advance fee or “we want to undeservedly take more of your money” fee.

I kid you not: a customer service representative once told me when I asked what the “over the credit limit” fee was, that it is a charge the bank assesses you when you go over your credit limit.

Then when I asked why they charge such a fee, he replied: “because it’s in your terms of agreement.”

When I asked why such a clause is in the terms of agreement he replied: “because we cannot legally charge you a fee that is not in the terms of agreement.”

I put my head in a bottle of bourbon and have yet to come out.

This attitude of blind compliance and self-preservation at the expense of others is found at every level of society in America. It evokes for me a vision of soulless beings wandering aimlessly through life just doing what they are told until they can retire and then finally start living the good life. You know those 10–20 years out of your 70–80 years of life when you’re too old to do the really fun stuff anymore. But you do get to play a lot of cards, golf, bowling, shuffle board and be on a first name basis with the emergency services crews since they come to your trailer park at least twice a week when someone falls and breaks a hip or dies.

It echoes of a complete lack of self-reliance, self-esteem, confidence, intelligence, courage and free will. All the sorts of things it seems the people who built this country had.

But in the end, as you lay in a state-funded nursing home because your social security and Medicare are non-existent and the economy ate your retirement account; you won’t have control of your faculties but at least you’ll have peace of mind knowing that you always did what you were told.

You were a patriot. You never questioned authority. You never questioned the status quo. You supported the troops. And for that you left the world worse off.

Yes, how does a bankrupt government save a bankrupt banking industry?  Where are these simple questions?

Oh yeah, and I just saw Obama is telling business to withhold less taxes as part of his “simulate the economy” package.  It’s gonna be pretty frickin redic when these people have to pay the government back tax money next year.  Hopefully we’ll see a good tax riot.  Maybe another tea party.

Your current national debt watch is at 10,815,532,970,186.66.  That means you have a personal debt to the country’s debtors of $35,379.51.