Headlines

The next time your pastor delivers a pro-life sermon or urges the congregation to stand up for pro-life values in the political or public arena, he could be taken to task by the IRS.

The vicar of the only Anglican church in Iraq has warned the end for Christians in the country appears “very near” as he appealed for help after a deadline set by Islamic militants to convert or be killed expired.

in the CNN survey, a record-low 46 percent say Obama "shares [their] values," while only 49 percent say he is "sincere in what he says," also a record-low.  

US history takes drastic left turn this fall

AP course 'rewrites America's past, cuts out Founding Fathers'

By John Aman


High-school history teachers nationwide will give their top students a dark retelling of U.S. history this fall, courtesy of the College Board, a nonprofit college readiness firm led by Common Core architect David Coleman.
The College Board – which administers AP (advanced placement) courses and tests – is rolling out a revised curriculum framework for AP U.S. history, offering the 450,000 students who take AP U.S. history classes a hero-free account of America’s deeply stained past.
Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, calls the new AP U.S. history framework “a briefing document on progressive and leftist views of the American past,” one which “weaves together a vaguely Marxist or at least materialist reading of the key events with the whole litany of identity group grievances.”
Conservative author Stanley Kurtz asserts the College Board is “pushing U.S. history as far to the left as it can get away with at the high-school level.”
The new 124-page history curriculum is a dramatic departure from the five-page outline previously supplied by the College Board to guide AP U.S. history instructors. A much more detailed “history from below,” it focuses on how native Indians and Africans suffered at the hands of Europeans in the New World.
Founding Fathers omitted
It deletes the Pilgrims, John Winthrop, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Alexis de Tocqueville, Abraham Lincoln and other long-celebrated figures central to America’s founding and growth.
In their place, America’s future leaders are given a warts-only take on America’s past that casts European settlers as villains. These Europeans disrupted ecologically balanced native American society, bringing “widespread deadly epidemics,” a “caste system,” resource exploitation and slavery. The Europeans’ “belief in white superiority” was used, the framework declares, “to justify their subjugation of Africans and American Indians.”
Things got worse with the British. Instead of establishing a “city upon a hill,” as generations of students have been told, they are cast as bigots beholden to a “rigid racial hierarchy,” indicated by their failure to intermarry with native populations or Africans (John Rolfe and Pocahontas, notwithstanding).
The framework gives the father of the country, George Washington, a quick, passing nod, and the founding document, the Declaration of Independence, merits two brief mentions.
Meanwhile, Manifest Destiny was “built on a belief in white racial superiority and a sense of American cultural superiority.” The framework omits black leaders like W.E. DuBois but asserts “prominent racist and nativist theories, along with Supreme Court decisions such as Plessy v. Ferguson, were used to justify violence as well as local and national policies of discrimination and segregation.”
The document’s treatment of the New Deal echoes Democratic Party tributes, asserting that President Franklin Roosevelt’s Depression-era programs used “government power to provide relief to the poor, stimulate recovery, and reform the American economy.”
America’s central role in defeating Nazi Germany and Japan rescued much of the globe from a long night of tyranny, but the frameworks include no mention of the sacrifice of America’s “Greatest Generation.” Instead, the new College Board history curriculum announces that “the internment of Japanese Americans, challenges to civil liberties, debates over race and segregation, and the decision to drop the atomic bomb raised questions about American values.”
Read the No. 1 book “America” by Dinesh D’Souza, and see the many offerings on the most powerful nation ever, from “Armed America” and “Ameritopia” to “Pat Boone’s America 50 Years.”
Larry Krieger, who has taught U.S. history for 35 years and written numerous widely popular AP and SAT exam prep books, said he reacted with shock and dismay when he read the framework earlier this year.
“It’s relentless left-wing indoctrination,” he said, calling it “antithetical to everything that I believe about teaching and our country’s history.”
Leftist bias, poorly written
“Leaving aside its very leftist bias, it is a very poorly written, unprofessional document,” said Krieger, adding he found it “boring” and “dispiriting.”

It’s also an anonymous document. While the College Board convened two committees composed of 27 college professors and teachers to oversee the new curriculum, the actual author or authors and the process used to produce it are unknown.
The framework is one of 34 AP courses that are being revised under the leadership of College Board president and CEO David Coleman, who arrived at the organization in 2012.
“When they hired David Coleman, the chief architect of Common Core, they effectively politicized the College Board,” Krieger asserted. “The first thing he did was to yoke the SAT to Common Core, and now we’re going to apply Common Core principles to AP courses.”
The College Board denies that Common Core elements have made their way into its new AP U.S. history curriculum, but College Board executive Lawrence Charap indicated otherwise in May. Charap, who leads the College Board’s History and Social Sciences Content Development Group, told a gathering of the Organization of American Historians that his boss, David Coleman, is implementing the Common Core approach in both the AP and SAT exams, according to a report from Mary Graybar, an English professor and Common Core critic who attended the conference.
Formed in 1900, the College Board is a deep-pocketed association of more than 6,000 educational institutions. It took in $759 million in fiscal year 2012 and reported a surplus of $45 million. Funding sources include the federal government, the Gates Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The organization has headquarters in Manhattan and Reston, Virginia, with six regional offices around the nation. It says its mission is to promote “excellence and equity in education.”
‘Curricular coup’
Krieger calls the new framework a “curricular coup” that shoves aside state-mandated history guidelines in favor of the new College Board curriculum.
Jane Robbins, an attorney who joined Krieger in a sharp critique of the new curriculum framework published this spring, said the framework is a radical departure from the state history standards they have reviewed.
“I would venture to guess it’s different from all states,” she said.
Krieger and Robbins report that a College Board-commissioned analysis turned up 181 specific elements required in the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills are missing from the new College Board history curriculum. Another study found that 134 elements required in the Alabama Standards for U.S. History were not in the framework.

The College Board’s new history curriculum for AP students “does commandeer how history is taught,” said Robbins, a senior fellow at the American Principles Project.
Instead of following state-mandated history guidelines, AP history instructors will “teach to the test” to ensure that students do well on the AP U.S. history exam. Good AP test scores can enable students to skip college history survey courses or jump ahead to take more advanced courses.
Teachers “can’t really focus on state standards,” she explained, “because that is a whole different body of knowledge, in most cases, so the AP course therefore will replace the history standards.”
And the impact of the new curriculum will go beyond AP classes, Robbins said, since most AP history instructors teach other students as well.
“It’s very likely that whatever is taught in the AP class is going to be taught to some extent in the other history classes,” she stated.
“So this is actually a quite effective way of changing what’s taught in history classes all over the country, in both public schools and private schools.”
It’s also being done without much public scrutiny. The College Board posted its new framework on its website in 2012, but for unclear reasons that did not generate much reaction until this spring when Robbins and Krieger published their critique.
The College Board is also keeping its sample AP U.S. history exam for the new framework a tightly guarded secret. The sample test is provided only to certified AP U.S. history teachers who face the loss of the AP teaching credentials – a severe, career-busting consequence – if they disclose test questions.
Teachers around the nation have contacted Krieger to vent their concern, telling him, he said: “I don’t like this. This is wrong. Can you help?”
At the same time, teachers are “very afraid of repercussions for speaking out.” They fear, Krieger said, negative consequences from either the College Board or their local school system.
One teacher who attended a gathering of some 1,000 AP exam “readers” – those who read and evaluate student AP exam essays – told Krieger 90 percent of teachers there either detested the new framework or viewed it with skepticism.
The College Board did not respond to interview requests from WND but claims in the framework document that teachers have “flexibility” to teach relevant history topics outside the prescribed curriculum. However, the framework also emphatically states that the new AP U.S. history exam will be limited to information in the framework.
In boldface and underlined text, the College Board states: “Beginning with the May 2015 AP U.S. History Exams, no AP U.S. History Exam question will require students to know historical content that falls outside this concept outline.”
Attempt to derail framework
Krieger and Robbins are working to derail the framework’s implementation, alerting parents and legislators about the College Board’s new history. One pivotal battlefront is Texas, where state school board member Ken Mercer wants the College Board to postpone the implementation of the framework in his state for one year. He and another school board member have said they will push for a rule that requires AP classes to conform to Texas history standards.
Texas is one of the College Board’s largest customers. Mercer told WND that some 46,000 Texas high schoolers take AP U.S. history classes, more than 10 percent of the roughly 450,000 students that will be taking the class nationwide this fall. College Board President David Coleman and others executives from the AP firm have spoken with Mercer to allay his concern but Mercer remains opposed to the new framework.
He blasted the new framework as a “rewrite of American history.” “It’s so negative that only America haters like former Illinois professor Bill Ayers would like this.”
Mercer decried the glaring absence of uplifting aspects of the U.S. civil rights struggle, including the Gettysburg Address, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, the Tuskegee Institute, the Navajo code talkers and the election of Barack Obama.
“If you look at the lessons on civil rights, Martin Luther King is nowhere to be found. How can that be?”
Mercer also charged that the College Board is “usurping the authority of the states’ boards of education and the state legislatures” with the implementation of the new framework.
“I don’t believe there is any elected board in the nation that could pass what they have,” said Mercer. “These are unelected people who don’t have to stand before my constituents, and they’re taking the power away from the state board and state legislature in all 50 legislatures.”
The Texas school board won’t consider a new rule to force AP history instruction to follow state standards until it meets in September, by which time instructors will already be teaching the new curriculum across Texas.
Concerned Texans spoke out against the new AP U.S. history curriculum at a July 18 meeting of the Texas school board. Mary Bowen, a Texas teacher with 30 years of instructional experience told the board, “If parents up and down the neighborhoods knew that this is what would be taught to their children they would be rising up in droves against it.”
‘Not the story of dead, white men’
The College Board’s Debbie Pennington testified as well, assuring the board that the new framework leaves ample room for the state history standards.
“This is designed so state standards can be integrated. It’s not on its own. It’s supposed to work in partnership with you to get what you need.”
Pennington also gave insight into the College Board’s approach to U.S. history, asserting history “can be fuzzy in a lot of different places.”
“You’ve got to remember, this is not the story of dead, white men as taught by almost dead, white men,” she said, citing the words of a mentor. “There were other people there, too, and you’ve got to give room for that flexibility, you’ve got to give room for that flavor and a true understanding of all those issues.”
That view of U.S. history – especially as it is presented in the new AP U.S. history framework – “is designed to create a cynical generation,” Robbins countered.
“Cynicism does not coexist very well with pride in one’s country and the belief that this country can accomplish great things. So, to me, it’s very disturbing. It’s not just that it leaves [students] without some of the factual foundation they need to have but it really does create a different mindset that is going to makes them skeptical of any real belief in the country, that we are exceptional that we have something to offer the rest of the world.”

New World Order

By Soopermexican  

I’m not really partial to conspiracy theories, in fact, I love to debunk them, but even though a certain quote from Obama’s speech on Tuesday will bring out the crazies, it should also alarm the more rational among us.
The Washington Post‘s Chris Cilliza highlighted this excerpt [emphasis added]:

“But whether people see what’s happening in Ukraine, and Russia’s aggression towards its neighbors in the manner in which it’s financing and arming separatists; to what’s happened in Syria — the devastation that Assad has wrought on his own people; to the failure in Iraq for Sunni and Shia and Kurd to compromise — although we’re trying to see if we can put together a government that actually can function; to ongoing terrorist threats; to what’s happening in Israel and Gaza — part of peoples’ concern is just the sense that around the world the old order isn’t holding and we’re not quite yet to where we need to be in terms of a new order that’s based on a different set of principles, that’s based on a sense of common humanity, that’s based on economies that work for all people.”

Yes, this is the kind of “New World Order” quote that puts money in the wallet of Alex Jones, but aside from positing that Obama is a lizard space alien hellbent on imposing Sharia-Illuminati martial law on the world, it actually displays an amazing but troubling aspect of Obama’s “philosophy” of the world, if you can call it that.

While more and more people are looking around the world and seeing the turmoil that follows on America receding from the global stage, Obama just sees business as usual – he doesn’t believe he has any hand at all in all these events. He doesn’t believe that selling out our allies on missile defense and the “Russian Reset” encouraged Putin, or that making impotent threats against Assad emboldened him, or that pulling out of Iraq prematurely brought on the ISIS terrorist resurgence. He really believes this is all just normal.
And so he’s seizing on these crises that he himself worsened, and using them as a springboard to say we need more “hope and change” or whatever vapid phrase he’s going to attach to whatever it is he’s selling.
Let’s hope the American people choose something better than the broken road Obama has been us guiding onto.

The World is a mess

Sunday on CBS's “Face the Nation,” former Clinton administration Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said, "To put it mildly, the world is a mess.

Children crossing border: 'Obama will take care of us'

By Jerome R. Corsi
 
McALLEN, Texas – In an exclusive interview with WND and Rep. Steve Stockman, R-Texas, a 13-year Border Patrol veteran revealed many in the recent surge of illegal immigrants, including unaccompanied minors, are coming prepared to game the U.S. immigration system, even repeating the mantra, “Obama will take care of us.”
“I don’t usually get into the political part of it,” explained Chris Cabrera, now a vice president in the National Border Patrol Council Local 3307, “but I find it odd that their whole thing is, ‘We are going to get amnesty when we get here. Where is my permiso? Where is my permission to go north so I can get my medical care and my schooling and all that? President Obama is going to take care of us and make sure we’re all OK.’
“Whether it’s the adults or the young kids, one thing we consistently hear is, ‘Obama will take care of us,’” he explained.

He also suggested the tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors illegally entering the United States appear to have been coached on what to say when they cross the border.
“The ‘magic words’ are something along the lines of ‘asylum,’ or ‘political asylum’ or to say ‘fighting in my home country,’” Cabrera said. “They know these words … because we can’t send them home because it’s too dangerous back there.”
The only way to stop the flow of illegal immigration and child smuggling across the border, he says, is to eliminate the entitlement mentality with a return to strict, border enforcement.
“What needs to be done is 100-percent detention and 100-percent removal,” Cabrera says.

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2014/07/children-crossing-border-obama-will-take-care-of-us/#0JjmDZQdTjrJmBAd.99

Among Religions, Muslims approve most of Obama

Article By Melanie Batley

President Barack Obama's approval rating is higher among Muslims than any other religious group in the United States, a new poll has found.

According to a Gallup Poll conducted over six months from January to June, 72 percent of Muslims said they approve of the president, compared with just 20 percent who disapprove.

But in the survey of 88,801 adults, a higher percentage of Christians — both Catholic and Protestant — disapprove of Obama than approve. Specifically, 44 percent of Catholics approve of the president compared to 51 percent who disapprove.

In the category Protestants/Other Christians, just 37 percent approve compared to 58 percent who disapprove.

"The United States remains a predominantly Christian nation, with roughly half of Americans identifying with a Protestant religion and another quarter identifying as Catholics. Thus, the opinions of these Christian groups are by far the most influential in determining Obama's overall ratings," Gallup's Jeffrey Jones said in the poll's statement.

Behind Muslims, Non-Christians and No Religion/Atheists give the president the next highest approval ratings, of 59 percent and 54 percent, respectively. Those who identify as Jewish also give him a comparable approval rating of 55 percent.

Mormons are the least approving religious group with a 78 percent disapproval rating compared to just 18 percent who approve of the job Obama is doing.

The poll noted that the relative rank order of the religious groups on job approval has been consistent throughout Obama's presidency. "In fact, the current rank order, with Muslims most approving and Mormons least, exactly matches the order seen over the more than five years he has been in office since January 2009," Jones writes.

At the same time, approval ratings among each religious subgroup is currently between 5 and 7 percentage points lower than the average rating the president has had from 2009-2014.

"In general, when Obama's approval rating has dropped among all Americans, his approval rating in each religious subgroup has dropped by a similar amount," Jones said.

"As Obama's overall job approval rating has had its ups and downs over the five-plus years he has been president, his ratings among religious groups have moved in tandem. That is, Americans of various faiths seem to react similarly to the factors that cause the president's popularity to wax and wane, rather than reacting in idiosyncratic ways tied to their religious beliefs," Jones said.

Someone on the right gets hammered for her conservative beliefs

Holly Fisher is no stranger to people disagreeing with her political beliefs. But the West Virginia mother has recently been receiving death threats, some that have extended beyond her to her children.
It all started with this photo, which earned her the nickname “Hobby Lobby Holly.”

Image source: @HollyRFisher/Twitter

Fisher told TheBlaze in their town, the Chick-fil-A and the Hobby Lobby are next to each other. On the day of the Supreme Court’s decision to allow small companies with religious objections to decide not to provide certain kinds of birth control as part of their insurance, Fisher was wearing a “pro-life” shirt and she and her husband went to the fast-food chain, whose leadership has taken a stance against gay marriage.
“My husband looked at me and said, ‘you look total right winger right now,’” Fisher said.
That’s when Fisher, who had already amassed about 20,000 followers on Twitter for her political views since the 2012 presidential election, convinced her husband, a member of the U.S. military who served in Afghanistan, to take a photo of her outside the Hobby Lobby, holding her Chick-fil-A cup and sporting the “pro-life” shirt.
Fisher said she knew upon posting the photo that reactions would be a mixed bag based on people’s political views, but she never expected what happened next.
“One of first responses I got was from a guy who that said that he wanted to shove the Chick-fil-A cup down my throat,” she said.
And that was one of the mild reactions.
Some supported Fisher but pointed out that all she was missing in the photo was the American flag, a Bible and a gun.
So on the Fourth of July, Fisher snapped a picture with all those elements, which she said ended up causing even more of a ruckus than the first.
Biggest complaint I'm getting about my #HobbyLobby pic is there's no gun, bible, or flag. Tried to make up for it
“I know the picture is kind of ridiculous. It was kind of a joke for those people saying I was missing the bible and the gun, but it was also a kind of a ‘just deal with it — these are my beliefs. You’re not going to bring me down; you’re not going to silence me,’” Fisher said.
This photo was compared by some to an image of Reem Riyashi, an extremist mother from Gaza who killed four people with a suicide bomb a decade ago.
“It was Independence Day. I was standing in front of flag, which represents our freedom, holding my First and Second Amendment rights in my hands and people are comparing me to a woman who wants to kill everyone in our country and what it stands for?” Fisher said.
“This week I have realized why our Constitution was written, why our founders would write this out. It’s like they knew this would happen. These are the people the Constitution was written for,” Fisher said of the those attacking her viewpoints and those trying to take away what she believes are protections made in the Constitution.
For sharing her recent beliefs, which earned her another 16,000 or so followers on Twitter, Fisher has been blasted not only on the micro-blogging site but on liberal blogs in a way that she said she hasn’t seen before.
“It’s just been so vile and shocking I can’t even describe,” she said.
One person said he wished she would come down to Florida to be stoned, “you know, for religious fundamentalism.”
And it’s not the only death threat she’s received.
“The exact words were: I hope your murderer husband gets murdered. I hope your children shoot themselves, and I hope you get killed you dangerous c***,” Fisher read.
And she doesn’t think if the tables were turned that conservative equivalents would react the same way.
“We’ve seen the women walking around in the vagina costumes, these outrageous get ups. Code Pink then goes and screams at people…that’s always the left. We kind of expect that,” Fisher said. “I don’t see my friends going to those people and saying you’re fat, ugly. I’ve been called the c-word, the b-word. I don’t see conservative news sites personally attacking and twisting someone’s views to make them seem as crazy as possible.”
“I think they’re scared,” she added later as to why there’s such a backlash to her opinions. “I think they’re afraid that conservatives are going to gain some ground back.”
Though the harsh words of many have not gotten to her, Fisher said she does get upset when people say her husband is a murderer and make personal threats to her children.
Some, she said, have also dredged up her past posts and are spinning them into lies, specifically details about her family losing health coverage they had for a cardiologist for their 10-month-old daughter who had a condition after their plan changed when the Affordable Care Act was enacted.
Even when she was posting about her family’s trials in June, she said people messaged her saying they hoped her daughter would die “because that’s one less conservative underling that the world can worry about.”
In light of her more recent posts, Fisher said she’s glad most of the focus is back on her.
Overall, Fisher, who is involved in local politics — behind-the-scenes stuff like encouraging people to get out and vote, she said — doesn’t expect everyone to agree with her, she only hopes that they might seek out the whole story.
Though there have been times when she admits she wants to “crawl under my bed … at same time I feel like people are counting on me to be this voice.”
And she intends to continue putting her thoughts out there.