One of America’s clearest thinkers hits the bulls eye again with his analysis of the most critical failing of our education system and its role in our current political quagmire.

Thomas Sowell’s essay entitled Artificial Stupidity was published in The National Review Online which features many excellent articles.

The American education system focuses more on politically correct crusades than intellectually correct arguments.

A woman with a petition went among the crowds attending a state fair, asking people to sign her petition demanding the banning of dihydroxymonoxide. She said it was in our lakes and streams, and now it was in our sweat and urine and tears.

She collected hundreds of signatures to ban dihydroxymonoxide — a fancy chemical name for water. A couple of comedians were behind this ploy. But there is nothing funny about its implications. It is one of the grim and dangerous signs of our times.

This little episode revealed how conditioned we have become, responding like Pavlov’s dog when we hear a certain sound — in this case, the sound of some politically correct crusade.

People are all born ignorant but they are not born stupid. Much of the stupidity we see today is induced by our educational system, from the elementary schools to the universities. In a high-tech age that has seen the creation of artificial intelligence by computers, we are also seeing the creation of artificial stupidity by people who call themselves educators.

The experiences of life can help people outgrow whatever they were indoctrinated with. What may persist, however, is the lazy habit of hearing one side of an issue and being galvanized into action without hearing the other side — and, more fundamentally, not having developed any mental skills that would enable you to systematically test one set of beliefs against another.

It was once the proud declaration of many educators that “We are here to teach you how to think, not what to think.” But far too many of our teachers and professors today are teaching their students what to think — about everything from global warming to the new trinity of “race, class, and gender.” Even if all the conclusions with which they indoctrinate their students were 100 percent correct, that would still not be equipping students with the mental skills to weigh opposing views for themselves, in order to be prepared for new and unforeseeable issues that will arise over their lifetimes, after they leave the schools and colleges.

Many of today’s “educators” not only supply students with conclusions, but promote the idea that students should spring into action because of these prepackaged conclusions — in other words, vent their feelings and go galloping off on crusades, with neither a knowledge of what is said by those on the other side nor the intellectual discipline to know how to analyze opposing arguments.

When we see children in elementary schools out carrying signs in demonstrations, we are seeing the kind of mindless groupthink that causes adults to sign petitions they don’t understand or, worse yet, follow leaders they don’t understand, whether to the White House, the Kremlin, or Jonestown.

A philosopher once said that the most important knowledge is knowledge of one’s own ignorance. That is the knowledge that too many of our schools and colleges are failing to teach our young people.

Will Rogers once said that it was not ignorance that was so bad but “all the things we know that ain’t so.” But our classroom indoctrinators are getting students to think that they know after hearing only one side of an issue. It is artificial stupidity.

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Budget Deficit in U.S. Widens to Record $221 Billion

Written By: Vincent Del Giudice

The U.S. budget deficit widened to a record in February as the government boosted spending to help revive the economy.

The excess of spending over revenue increased to $221 billion last month, compared with a shortfall of $194 billion in February 2009, according to Treasury Department figures released today in Washington. The figures show the deficit this year will likely surpass the record $1.4 trillion in the fiscal year that ended in September.
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Spending for February increased 17 percent from the same month a year ago, to $328.4 billion. Revenue and other income rose 23 percent to $107.5 billion, marking the first increase in receipts since April 2008, according to the Treasury.

The deficit five months into the 2010 fiscal year was $651.6 billion compared with $589.8 billion during the same period in the previous fiscal year.

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Canadian dollar likely to trump US greenback: experts

The Canadian dollar, or loonie as it is affectionately called here, is likely to soar above parity with the US greenback this year, experts at a Canadian bank said Wednesday.

Canadian Imperial Bank of Canada (CIBC) chief economist Avery Shenfeld said the Canadian dollar had already gained several cents in recent weeks as the market firms up expectations of an interest rate hike in July.

If as expected, the central bank “is out in front of the US Federal Reserve by a couple of quarters” in raising interest rates, the Canadian dollar could reach 1.02 dollars versus the US dollar by September, before dipping back to 0.97 dollars by year end,” Shenfeld said.

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Oil Rises to Eight-Week High, Gasoline Surges on Fuel Supplies

Written By: Mark Shenk

Crude oil rose to an eight-week high and gasoline surged after a government report showed that U.S. fuel supplies declined as demand climbed and refineries idled units.

Gasoline inventories dropped 2.96 million barrels to 229 million in the week ended March 5, the Energy Department said. Total fuel consumption increased 0.2 percent to 19.7 million barrels a day, the highest level since August. Refinery operating rates fell for the first time in five weeks.

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Why Obama Can’t Move the Health-Care Numbers

Written By: SCOTT RASMUSSEN AND DOUG SCHOEN

In 15 consecutive Rasmussen Reports polls conducted over the past four months, the percentage of Americans that oppose the plan has stayed between 52% and 58%. The number in favor has held steady between 38% and 44%.

The dynamics of the numbers have remained constant as well. Democratic voters strongly support the plan while Republicans and unaffiliated voters oppose it. Senior citizens—the people who use the health-care system more than anybody else and who vote more than anybody else in midterm elections—are more opposed to the plan than younger voters. For every person who strongly favors it, two are strongly opposed.

Why can’t the president move the numbers? One reason may be that he keeps talking about details of the proposal while voters are looking at the issue in a broader context. Polling conducted earlier this week shows that 57% of voters believe that passage of the legislation would hurt the economy, while only 25% believe it would help. That makes sense in a nation where most voters believe that increases in government spending are bad for the economy.

When the president responds that the plan is deficit neutral, he runs into a pair of basic problems. The first is that voters think reducing spending is more important than reducing the deficit. So a plan that is deficit neutral with a big spending hike is not going to be well received.

But the bigger problem is that people simply don’t trust the official projections. People in Washington may live and die by the pronouncements of the Congressional Budget Office, but 81% of voters say it’s likely the plan will end up costing more than projected. Only 10% say the official numbers are likely to be on target.

As a result, 66% of voters believe passage of the president’s plan will lead to higher deficits and 78% say it’s at least somewhat likely to mean higher middle-class taxes. Even within the president’s own political party there are concerns on these fronts.

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Durbin: Of Course Premiums Will Still Go Up With Obamacare

Final ‘reform’ push: twisting arms

Written By: MICHAEL TANNER

President Obama’s attempts to ram health- care reform through an increasingly reluctant Congress are starting to resemble a really eventful episode of “The Sopranos.”

Whether or not you believe former Rep. Eric Massa’s bizarre accusations of locker-room confrontations and conspiracies to drive him from office, there is no doubt that the Obama administration and its congressional allies are willing to use every trick in the book to get this bill passed.

They’ve already bought votes with pork and special deals — the “Louisiana purchase” ($300 million to bolster that state’s Medicaid program, which swayed Sen. Mary Landrieu); the “Cornhusker kickback” ($100 million to Medicaid there, sweetening the pot for Sen. Ben Nelson), and Florida’s “Gator Aid” (a Medicare deal potentially worth $5 billion, a hefty price for Sen. Bill Nelson’s vote). Plus the millions for Connecticut hospitals, Montana asbestos abatement and so on.

Nor were the Obamans willing to let a little thing like election laws stand in the way. They rewrote Massachusetts law to allow for an appointed senator to hold office for several months, hoping to get the bill through before the special election that Scott Brown ultimately won. Their plans spoiled, they even considered holding up Brown’s seating to let the appointed senator continue to vote on health care — until public outrage forced them to back down.

And, of course, there has been an unprecedented willingness to ignore congressional rules — from the failure to appoint a “conference committee” to negotiate differences between the House and Senate bills, to their current plans to use the reconciliation process to bypass a Republican filibuster.

Expect the tactics to get even dirtier now.

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Senate Health Care Bill Dead on Arrival, Pro-Life House Democrats Say

Written By: Carl Cameron

The health care reform bill passed by the Senate on Christmas Eve appears to be dead on arrival in the House, as seven anti-abortion Democrats intend to join the ranks of lawmakers who plan to vote against the legislation, Fox News has confirmed.

Seven new no votes would be enough to kill the Senate bill, and several more fence-sitting lawmakers are under pressure from both sides of the aisle.

Foremost among the seven new no votes is Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., whose anti-abortion amendment to the House version of the legislation got the bill passed in that chamber last year.

But because the Senate and House Democratic leaders weren’t able to agree on joint legislation before losing their supermajority in the Senate this year, they have few options other than getting the House to pass the Senate bill and then making changes to the law through a separate budget reconciliation bill that could pass with simple majorities.

The Senate bill, however, doesn’t contain the same language as the Stupak amendment, which explicitly prohibits federal funding of abortion in any of the reform measures intended to expand health care coverage to millions of uninsured Americans.

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So we have to pass the bill before we can know what’s in it. Incredible!

U.S. “cap and trade” rebranded “pollution reduction”

Reporting by Thomas Ferraro; Writing by Richard Cowan, Editing by Cynthia Osterman

Like a savvy Madison Avenue advertising team, senators pushing climate-control legislation have decided to scrap the name “cap and trade” and rebrand their product as “pollution reduction targets.”

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Kerry Blames Talk Radio for Lagging Global Warming Concerns Spurred by ClimateGate

Written By: Jeff Poor

ClimateGate, when a hacker broke into computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit and released a myriad of confidential files, continues to cause controversy. The documents showed scientists had attempted to suppress and manipulate data that would hurt the case proving anthropogenic global warming. They also cast doubts about what sort of policy measures should be implemented to attack this alleged global problem.

However, according to Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, it’s not ClimateGate – but the messenger who is at fault for growing hesitation to enact a cap-and-trade policy that would radically change the U.S. economy. Although traditional media went for weeks without reporting the matter, it was talk radio that busted the story wide open and the target of Kerry’s frustration, which he revealed in an interview with the Boston Globe on March 8. (h/t Matt Dempsey, Senate Environment and Public Works Committee)

“What we have to do is go on the offensive,” Kerry said. The science “has been maligned and misinterpreted, and we need to fight back . . . people [need to] stop being moved by these talk show [hosts] and start looking for the facts” themselves.”

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ID Card for Workers Is at Center of Immigration Plan

Written By: LAURA MECKLER

Lawmakers working to craft a new comprehensive immigration bill have settled on a way to prevent employers from hiring illegal immigrants: a national biometric identification card all American workers would eventually be required to obtain.

Under the potentially controversial plan still taking shape in the Senate, all legal U.S. workers, including citizens and immigrants, would be issued an ID card with embedded information, such as fingerprints, to tie the card to the worker.

The ID card plan is one of several steps advocates of an immigration overhaul are taking to address concerns that have defeated similar bills in the past.

The uphill effort to pass a bill is being led by Sens. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), who plan to meet with President Barack Obama as soon as this week to update him on their work. An administration official said the White House had no position on the biometric card.

“It’s the nub of solving the immigration dilemma politically speaking,” Mr. Schumer said in an interview. The card, he said, would directly answer concerns that after legislation is signed, another wave of illegal immigrants would arrive. “If you say they can’t get a job when they come here, you’ll stop it.”

The biggest objections to the biometric cards may come from privacy advocates, who fear they would become de facto national ID cards that enable the government to track citizens

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Sen. Schumer’s Immigration Reform Is a National ID

Written By: Jim Harper

…It’s the natural evolution of the policy called “internal enforcement” of immigration law, as I wrote in my paper, “Franz Kafka’s Solution to Illegal Immigration.”

Once in place, watch for this national ID to regulate access to financial services, housing, medical care and prescriptions—and, of course, serve as an internal passport.

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Van Hollen charges five with election fraud

Written By: Daniel Bice

Five Wisconsin residents have been charged with criminal counts of voter fraud in the November 2008 general election, state Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen announced today.

Two of those charged – Maria Miles, 36, of Milwaukee, and Kevin Clancy, 26, of Racine – worked for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), the embattled community organizing group.

“The complaint alleges that Miles and Clancy submitted multiple voter registration applications for the same individuals, and also were part of a scheme in which they and other (special registration deputies) registered each other to vote multiple times in order to meet voter registration quotas imposed by ACORN,” the Van Hollen release says.

Both were charged with one felony count.

Attempts to reach ACORN today were unsuccessful.

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In Denial. The meltdown of the climate campaign

Written By: Steven F. Hayward

It is increasingly clear that the leak of the internal emails and documents of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in November has done for the climate change debate what the Pentagon Papers did for the Vietnam war debate 40 years ago—changed the narrative decisively. Additional revelations of unethical behavior, errors, and serial exaggeration in climate science are rolling out on an almost daily basis, and there is good reason to expect more.

The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), hitherto the gold standard in climate science, is under fire for shoddy work and facing calls for a serious shakeup. The U.S. Climate Action Partnership, the self-serving coalition of environmentalists and big business hoping to create a carbon cartel, is falling apart in the wake of the collapse of any prospect of enacting cap and trade in Congress. Meanwhile, the climate campaign’s fallback plan to have the EPA regulate greenhouse gas emissions through the cumbersome Clean Air Act is generating bipartisan opposition. The British media—even the left-leaning, climate alarmists of the Guardian and BBC—are turning on the climate campaign with a vengeance. The somnolent American media, which have done as poor a job reporting about climate change as they did on John Edwards, have largely averted their gaze from the inconvenient meltdown of the climate campaign, but the rock solid edifice in the newsrooms is cracking. Al Gore was conspicuously missing in action before surfacing with a long article in the New York Times on February 28, reiterating his familiar parade of horribles: The sea level will rise! Monster storms! Climate refugees in the hundreds of millions! Political chaos the world over! It was the rhetorical equivalent of stamping his feet and saying “It is too so!” In a sign of how dramatic the reversal of fortune has been for the climate campaign, it is now James Inhofe, the leading climate skeptic in the Senate, who is eager to have Gore testify before Congress.

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Gore: Organized Campaign Behind Climate Skeptics

Former Vice President Al Gore says critics of his global warming warnings are part of a “massive, organized campaign.”

Appearing on the Norwegian talk show “Skavlan” to promote his newest book “Our Choice,” Gore said:

“There has been a very large, organized campaign to try to convince people that it [global warming] is not real, to try to convince people that they shouldn’t worry about it.

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‘Trust’ Gap Between House, Senate Dems Hurting Health Care Push

House Democrats’ distrust of the Senate is turning up as a major roadblock to passing health care reform. And they’re playing right into Republicans’ hands.

With President Obama pushing anew to pass the health care package through Congress in the coming weeks, several House Democrats have voiced concern that the Senate could betray them if they go along and pass its version of the health bill.

“The Senate has given us a lot of reason not to trust them,” Rep. Jason Altmire, D-Pa., who voted against the House bill last year and is currently undecided, told “Fox News Sunday.”

Trust is such a key factor because the end game for health care reform involves House lawmakers passing the Senate-passed bill, and then crossing their fingers in hopes that the Senate will follow up with a packages of changes to get it more in line with what many House Democrats want to see. That bill could, under the scenario, be passed with a simple majority by using the controversial tool known as reconciliation.

But what if the Senate never passes a second bill?

That question is one that Republicans have tried to raise and is apparently nagging at Democrats.
Altmire said Sunday that the trust factor could be a stumbling block.

“Certainly that’s a key component of the dynamic of getting the votes — is there has to be some certainty that the Senate is going to follow through on their part,” he said.

He said the thought that the Senate would leave the House hanging “gives me concern.”

Other Democrats have suggested the House should not budge until the Senate passes the package of changes — though it’s not clear if that’s even allowed under Senate rules.

Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., told CBS News last week that the Senate “has been the single problem” with getting the bill out of the House. He referenced the hundreds of bills that have languished in the Senate after passing the House.

“Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me 290 times, shame on you,” Weiner said.

The paranoia about the Senate turning its back on the House has been fed by Republicans hoping to send the bill back to the drawing board.

“Once they pass that bill, what’s the incentive for anyone here (in the Senate) to do anything?” Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., said last week. “I don’t see the incentive for them to pass a reconciliation bill.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., also suggested the Senate could sit on the package of fixes.

“The House has to trust the Senate that we’ll go back in and fix the most egregious political problems,” he told ABC News’ “This Week” on Sunday.

Trust is hardly the only roadblock, though it is a big one. Another hurdle seemingly getting higher by the day is restrictions on abortion funding.

The House-passed bill was considered far stricter on that issue, and many House Democrats have threatened to reject the Senate bill without more assurances.

“Given the vote dynamic, abortion may be the decisive issue,” Altmire said.

Cleaver: Obama doesn’t have the votes to pass health care reform

Written By: Steve Kraske

Congressman Emanuel Cleaver said today on KCUR’s “Up to Date” that President Barack Obama doesn’t have the votes to pass health care reform in the U.S. House.

“We’re not at 217,” Cleaver said, referring to the number needed to pass the bill.

Later, the three-term Democrat from Kansas City said the passage number could be 216 given vacancies in the House.

The count today, Cleaver said, is about 201 health care supporters.

That number, he added, could fluctuate significantly as a final vote nears.

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