Archive for the ‘News releases’ Category
« Older Entries |Texas Approves Curriculum Revised by Conservatives
Friday, March 12th, 2010
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
Published: March 12, 2010
AUSTIN, Tex. — After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday voted to approve a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.
The vote was 11 to 4, with 10 Republicans and one Democrat voting for the curriculum, and four Democrats voting against.
The board, whose members are elected, has influence beyond Texas because the state is one of the largest purchasers of textbooks. In the digital age, however, that influence has been diminished as technological advances have made it possible for publishers to tailor books to individual states.
In recent years, board members have been locked in an ideological battle between a bloc of conservatives who question Darwin’s theory of evolution and believe the Founding Fathers were guided by Christian principles and a handful of Democrats and moderate Republicans who have fought to preserve the teaching of Darwinism and the separation of church and state.
Since January, Republicans on the board have passed more than 160 amendments to the 120-page curriculum standards affecting history, sociology and economics courses from elementary to high school. The standards were proposed by a board of teachers.
Efforts by Hispanic board members to include more Latino figures as role models for the state’s large Hispanic population were consistently defeated, prompting one member, Mary Helen Berlanga, to storm out of a meeting late Thursday night, saying, “They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist.”
“They are going overboard, they are not experts, they are not historians,” she said. “They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world.”
The curriculum standards will now be published in a state register, opening them up for 30 days of public comment. A final vote will be taken in May, but given the Republican dominance of the board, it is unlikely many changes will be made.
The standards, reviewed every decade, serve as a template for publishers of textbooks, who must come before the board next year with drafts of their books. The board’s makeup will have changed by then because the leader of the conservative faction, Dr. Don McLeroy, lost in a primary to a more moderate Republican, and two others — one Democrat and one conservative Republican — have announced they are not seeking re-election.
There are seven members of the conservative bloc on the board, but they are often joined by one of the other three Republicans on crucial votes. There were no historians, sociologists or economists consulted at the meetings, though some members of the conservative bloc held themselves out as experts on certain topics.
The conservative members maintain that they are trying to correct what they see as a liberal bias among the teachers who proposed the curriculum. To that end, they made dozens of minor changes aimed at calling into question, among other things, concepts like the separation of church and state and the secular nature of the American Revolution.
“I reject the notion by the left of a constitutional separation of church and state,” said David Bradley, a conservative from Beaumont who works in real estate. “I have $1,000 for the charity of your choice if you can find it in the Constitution.”
They also included a plank to ensure that students learn about “the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schalfly, the Contract With America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association.”
Dr. McLeroy pushed through a change to the teaching of the civil rights movement to ensure that students study the violent philosophy of the Black Panthers in addition to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent approach. He also made sure that textbooks would mention the votes in Congress on civil rights legislation, which Republicans supported.
“Republicans need a little credit for that,” he said. “I think it’s going to surprise some students.”
Mr. Bradley won approval for an amendment saying students should study “the unintended consequences” of the Great Society legislation, affirmative action and Title IX legislation. He also won approval for an amendment stressing that Germans and Italians were interned in the United States as well as the Japanese during World War II, to counter the idea that the internment of Japanese was motivated by racism.
Tags: Conservatives, Election 2010, Houston Voters, Texas Text Books
Posted in National Issues, News releases | No Comments »
Obama Selling Judgeships For Health Care Votes
Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010
Graphic Courtesy of bobmccarty.com
By Lori Ziganto at Red State
If you can’t beat ‘em, bribe ‘em! Chicago-style politics once again coming home to roost. The Weekly Standard is reporting that Obama is now selling judgeships for health care votes:
Tonight, Barack Obama will host ten House Democrats who voted against the health care bill in November at the White House; he’s obviously trying to persuade them to switch their votes to yes. One of the ten is Jim Matheson of Utah. The White House just sent out a press release announcing that today President Obama nominated Matheson’s brother Scott M. Matheson, Jr. to the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.
“Scott Matheson is a distinguished candidate for the Tenth Circuit court,” President Obama said. “Both his legal and academic credentials are impressive and his commitment to judicial integrity is unwavering. I am honored to nominate this lifelong Utahn to the federal bench.”
Huh. How convenient. Especially when one takes into account Matheson’s past record on the health care boondoggle:
He voted against the bill in the Energy and Commerce Committee back in July and again when it passed the House in November. But now he’s “undecided” on ramming the bill through Congress. “The Congressman is looking for development of bipartisan consensus,” Matheson’s press secretary Alyson Heyrend wrote to THE WEEKLY STANDARD on February 22. “It’s too early to know if that will occur.”
Perhaps they learned from the bribes of Senators “you don’t even have to get us drunk first” Landrieu and Nelson that outright cash money bribery back-fires a bit and are trying different tactics for Congressman. Scratch my back and I’ll scratch — your brother’s!
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Follow Lori on Twitter and read more of her work at Snark and Boobs, iOwntheWorld , Right Wing News and Red State.
Tags: Barack Obama, Congress, Election 2010, Houston Voters, national healthcare, socialized medicine
Posted in News releases, The U.S. Government | No Comments »
It’s about the Constitution, not Identity politics!
Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010
I understand that Brenda Page recently sent out a communiqué regarding her qualifications to represent the residents of the 18th Congressional District.
After reading it again, I am a little dismayed to see Ms. Page resort to identity politics. She states:
“Democrats are running three attorneys, one woman and two males. Brenda Page is the only Republican woman attorney in this contest.”
I was hoping this race would be about the issues and how the people of CD18 are best served. Issues like shrinking the size of Government, reducing taxes and protecting our nation from all enemies. If Ms. Page truly thinks a female attorney is the best choice for CD18, then why not keep Sheila Jackson Lee?
Also in her email, Ms. Page states:
“…Brenda is a fiscal and social conservative who embraces the Republican platform…”
In light of the “Massachusetts Miracle” and the clear message sent to Washington, the people of CD18 will demand more than just another RINO. They deserve a conservative constitutionalist. There is a difference and I make it very clear on my website at www.faulkforcongress.org. There, I have stated my position on over 20 issues. To put it bluntly, and in the words of Ronald Reagan (neither a woman nor an attorney):
“There are no limits to growth and human progress when men and women are free to follow their dreams.”
I encourage you to look at my website, call me or send me a note if you have any questions.
Sincerely,
John Faulk
john@faulkforcongress.org
www.faulkforcongress.org
Posted in John Faulk, News releases, Voices of the 18th Congressional District | No Comments »
Support The VAT (Value Added Tax) – Bruce Bartlett, Forbes
Saturday, October 24th, 2009
Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives (D-Ca), mentioned a week ago that this would be a good time to consider adding a value added tax (VAT).
(I fear that it would be in addition to other taxes not instead of them. But this is a good explanation of how they would work)
A few years ago, I concluded that the magnitude of our looming fiscal problem was so enormous that higher taxes were inevitable–and that was long before the recent crisis made matters vastly worse. Moreover, I concluded that the magnitude of this tax increase is so great that it would seriously cripple the economy if accomplished through higher rates on an already dysfunctional income tax system. Reluctantly, I concluded that a value-added tax (VAT) is the best way to raise the revenue that would, in any case, be raised.
When I first made this suggestion in a Los Angeles Timesarticle in 2004, I was building on a large body of tax analysis showing that the VAT is the best known way of raising revenue. When I say “best” I mean that it raises large revenues from low rates and has minimal disincentive effects. In economists’ speak, it has a very small dead weight or welfare cost–the economic output lost by the tax over and above the revenue collected.
Based on the experience in other countries, I estimate that a U.S. VAT could realistically tax about a third of the gross domestic product (GDP), which would raise close to $50 billion per percentage point. If we adopted Europe’s average VAT rate of 20%, we could raise $1 trillion per year in 2009 dollars.
Back in the early 1980s, practically every leading conservative economist supported a VAT for the United States. Norman Ture, one of the godfathers of supply-side economics, and Murray Weidenbaum, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Ronald Reagan, wrote many articles, books and papers supporting the VAT. The conservative American Enterprise Institute published a book in 1987 saying that the VAT was the key to deficit reduction.
Perhaps the strongest evidence that the VAT was considered the conservative tax reform is that it is the foundation of the flat tax, which is still supported by practically every serious conservative tax reformer. To see why this is the case, I have to explain a little bit about how the VAT works.
The VAT is a kind of sales tax. But unlike the retail sales or excise taxes we are familiar with, the VAT is embedded in the prices of goods. There are two ways it can be calculated. The first is called the credit-invoice method and is the way VATs typically work in Europe. Under this method, taxes are assessed on goods at each stage of production or distribution. However, at each stage, a producer or distributor gets a credit for the taxes paid at earlier stages, which they subtract from the gross tax to calculate the net tax payment.
Obviously, this requires everyone involved in production and distribution to keep careful records of taxes paid so that they can claim credit for them; otherwise they are liable for the full burden of the tax. For this reason, the VAT is largely self-enforcing. Also, it means that taxes can be rebated at the border on exports. That is, exporters get credit for all the taxes embedded in the goods they sell but do not have to collect taxes on sales themselves. Similarly, VAT is assessed on the full value of imports.
World trade law prohibits taxes from being rebated at the border unless the precise amount of tax embedded in a good is known. Since there is no certainty on who bears the burden of the corporate tax, it may not be rebated. Replacing the corporate tax with a VAT would unquestionably improve the competitiveness of all U.S. exporters.
The purpose of this system is to prevent cascading–taxes levied on taxes–when goods move through multiple countries on their way to the final consumer. It also allows different tax rates to be applied in different countries, and consumers will only pay the rate that applies in their country regardless of where goods were produced. Thus border adjustability ensures tax neutrality.
The second type of VAT is called the subtraction-method VAT. Under this method, sellers subtract the full amount of the cost of their inputs including VAT from their sales and calculate the VAT on the difference. Mathematically, the two methods are identical. The key difference is that the subtraction method is much simpler because businesses don’t need to keep special records beyond those they keep already. The main drawback is that it requires a uniform rate on all goods. Subtraction-method VATs are also border adjustable.
Tags: Congress, economy, Nancy Pelosi, Taxes, Value Added Tax, VAT
Posted in National Issues, News releases, The U.S. Government | No Comments »
Obama’s Manufacturing Czar agrees with Mao: Power comes from the barrel of a gun
Thursday, October 22nd, 2009
Another Obama Maoist to go along with Party Central Communication Commissar Dunn
A couple days ago I posted about Anita Dunn, White House communications Director. She said her two favorite philosophers were Mao Tse Tung and Mother Teresa. In my post I linked to information about how Mao gained power by entering a Chinese village with his supporters and murdering someone to get the attention of the villagers and get their cooperation.
In case you thought I was being overly reactive, listen to this guy.
Several paragraphs down in this link you see the quote “in a revolution innocent people have to die”.
The YouTube below connects Obama to Bill Ayers for at least 5 years.
Tags: Barack Obama, First Amendment Rights, socialism
Posted in National Issues, News releases, The U.S. Government, Voices of the 18th Congressional District | No Comments »
