Like deja vu… with one exception

‘[T]he physical abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse of priests.’ So common is the transfer of offending teachers that it is called ‘passing the trash.’

via Errors or Lies? | Catholic Exchange.

I’m awaiting the daily-for-months news coverage of this, the spate of hundred-million-dollar lawsuits, and the late night comedians’ jokes characterizing all school teachers as molesters…

One change

The Congressional Budget Office figures, obtained by The Associated Press Friday, predict Obama’s budget will produce $9.3 trillion worth of red ink over 2010-2019. That’s $2.3 trillion worse than the White House predicted in its budget.

Worst of all, CBO says the deficit under Obama’s policies would never go below 4% of the size of the economy, figures that economists agree are unsustainable. By the end of the decade, the deficit would exceed 5% of gross domestic product, a dangerously high level.

via $1 trillion deficits estimated for each of next 10 years – USATODAY.com.

Here’s some of that change we can believe in.  Obama campaigned on reigning in deficits.  Apparently plans have changed.

Now the world admires America again… right?

As an aghast world — from China to Chicago and Chihuahua — watches, the circus-like U.S. political system seems to be declining into near chaos. Through it all, stock and financial markets are paralyzed. The more the policy regime does, the worse the outlook gets. The multi-ringed spectacle raises a disturbing question in many minds: Is this the end of America?

via Terence Corcoran: Is this the end of America? – FP Comment.

Cue REM.  Really, I’ve been getting the feeling that we are at a pivotal moment in world history.  I do think that the America that everyone is used to is ending or has ended.  The question is what will replace it.

The Roman Empire fueled its economic growth with military conquest and expansion, and when it reached the natural limits of that expansion it began to decline, because the influx of money and slaves had been compensating for an idle or semi-idle class of people who were consumers more than producers.  America too is consuming more than producing <real</i> goods and services, and this has been financed with borrowing.  Now that credit is drying up we are contracting.  We can’t afford everything that people are used to, so the political class that maintained its position through doling out political goodies is now throwing out bread and providing political circus.  It’s not sustainable.

Obama campaigned on “Change We Can Believe In.”  The catch was that change in general is neither good nor bad; <i>specific</i> changes can be good or bad.  Things started changing before the election as the bill collectors started showing up.  Now we will see what sort of change we get.

Same old same old at the UN

Is United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon trying to squelch a branch of the world organization whose string of recent reports have drawn member nations’ attention to dramatic U.N. failings?

via FOXNews.com – Is Ban Ki-moon Trying to Squelch the U.N.’s Watchdogs? – United Nations.

The article, quoting internal UN watchdogs, goes on to say that in fact he is.  I thought he was the Secretary General who was going to fight corruption and restore accountability at the UN.  I guess that promise was as empty as the ones we hear after each genocide in Africa, where the UN takes notice only after the killing is over, feigns outrage and vows that it won’t happen again.

Isn’t it past time for this unelected, unaccountable, wanna-be world government to be defunded?

Textbooks distort history

Jesus was a Palestinian…

[The Koran is] the “Holy Book of Islam containing revelations received by Muhammad from God”…

What’s this?  Palestinian TV?  Wahhabi texts for Muslims in American prisons?  Nope.  American public school textbooks.

But Ybarra said it goes deeper than pure economics. He thinks the school books are being used as tools for propaganda, particularly to perpetuate negative attitudes towards Christianity, Israel and pro-Palestinian views concerning the Middle East.

“We fear that this is creating a generation of biased school children,” he said. “Some of our projects in the higher education realm with some of these same subject matters, we find that students do show up at universities with these prejudices.”

via FOXNews.com – Authors Warn That Many Textbooks Distort Religion – Local News | News Articles | National News | US News.

Our 12 year old’s History & Geography class has been spending a lot of time this year “learning” about the Arab-Israeli conflict.  Learning things like moral equivalence between those who deliberately target schools for rocket attacks and those who accidentally kill civilians while trying to get at those who hide behind them.  Learning things like Israel’s need to give up the strategic  Golan heights because peace will come through trusting the good intentions of the Assad regime in Syria.

What they did not learn though is any history of the region prior to 1948 when Westerners in control of the Holy Land (How did they get there?  Who knows?)  stole productive  land from enlightened Arabs and gave it to some displaced Europeans who call themselves Jews.  Nope, no propaganda there…

Digging a hole to China

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd is moving to allow the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to temporarily borrow as much as $500 billion from the Treasury Department.

via Bill Seeks to Let FDIC Borrow up to $500 Billion – WSJ.com.

A half a trillion here, and half a trillion there, and pretty soon we’re talking about real money.  Borrowed from the federal government which …uh… borrowed it from someone else.

I’m no economist, but at some point don’t there have to be some real assets existing somewhere and not just IOUs?

The news in simple terms

My son just introduced me to Uncle Jay Explains the News.  Think Mister Rogers channelling Dennis Miller.