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Heidelberger rejected

Cory Heidelberger of Madville Times was rejected by the Madison School Board:

Tom Farrell, a retired Dakota State University professor, was selected Monday night as the newest member of the Madison School Board.

Farrell and Corey Heidelberger, both Madison residents, applied for the open position that became available when former board member Dennis Hegg moved outside of the Madison Central School District.
The school board held a special meeting on Monday to interview the two candidates and make a selection.

Local control takes another hit

The state rules again:

Despite criticism that they are setting the bar too high, the South Dakota Board of Education passed a new set of high school graduation rules Monday that make upper- level math and science classes mandatory.

Unless they get waivers from their schools, all students starting high school next year will have to take geometry and algebra II and chemistry or physics. The new rules also require, for the first time, a semester each of physical education and health, although students could satisfy the health half-credit in any grade 6-12.

While health advocates praised the changes, some teachers say not all students can handle advanced math and science courses.

Did Cap & Trade kill Big Stone II?

The Argus Leader informs us  that Big Stone II cannot get enough investors, so it is shut down:

The Big Stone II coal-fired power plant project is no more, as the remaining partners in the venture said Monday that building the $1.6 billion plant near Milbank no longer is economically possible.

Those partners include the Central Minnesota Municipal Power Agency, Heartland Consumers Power District, Missouri River Energy Services and Montana-Dakota Utilities Co.

The plant was to generate about 580 megawatts of electricity by burning low-sulfur, pulverized coal from Wyoming. In a joint statement, the partners said it was the least costly, most environmentally sound baseload power plant for the participants. But when no new partners came forward to share in the costs, it was apparent that the plant could not be built.

The report made no mention of teh impact Obama's fascist Cap & Trade agenda had on those investors. The report did cover teh celbration of Obama's political allies:

Environmental groups hailed the move Monday, saying the Midwest needs to divest itself from coal and invest heavily in green power, such as wind and solar. About 76 percent of the electricity generated in the West North Central region - Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota - is coal-fired.

Again we have political forces and not free markets dictate what we do.

Obama faction's totalitarian philosophy of government

That is what Alan Keyes knows:

"Congress has never before required citizens to purchase any good or service, but that is what both House and Senate health bills would mandate." With these words, Donald Lambro of the Washington Times reports the unprecedented destruction of liberty that is the real aim of the Obama faction's so-called health-care plan. Because most Americans have never thought much about the doctrine of unalienable rights that has until now been the presumed basis for America's form of government, the politicians and the controlled media may get away with treating the central goal of the health sector takeover as a secondary issue. Such ignorance-induced nonchalance won't change the devastating new reality that will emerge if the Obama faction's totalitarian philosophy of government is allowed to stand.

To convince the public of the "urgent need" for a comprehensive reorganization of administration and finance in the health sector, the new totalitarians held up the plight of the 10 percent or so of Americans without health insurance. Though opponents of their totalitarian ideology frequently pointed out that as many as half of this 10 percent voluntarily forego health insurance, the Obama totalitarians went on acting as if such people didn't exist, or their existence didn't affect the urgent need for government action.

Are we living in America or in Communist Russia under Lenin and Stalin?

Ellis Washington wonders:

Chelsea Schilling, my colleague at WorldNetDaily, I thought did an excellent job in her recent article on this administration's latest act against America, "Obama signs 'hate-crimes' bill into law."

Hate-crimes bill? How can this be? I thought the Constitution said that Congress shall make no law against religious freedom or the right to hold political opinions and express them.

The Democrats were Machiavellian enough to link this hate-crimes bill to their new $680 billion bill called the 2010 National Defense Authorization Act which many Republicans felt compelled to support to stand behind our troops fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Why the urgency for a hate-crimes bill?

President Obama said, "After more than a decade, we've passed inclusive hate-crimes legislation to help protect our citizens from violence based on what they look like, who they love, how they pray or who they are." Obama, by the passage of this hate-crimes bill, has succeeded in fulfilling the 1960s countercultural dream of normalizing the abnormal and morally perverse while concurrently denigrating the normal, the good and the godly.

This hate-crimes bill should have been named the ACA – Anti-Christian Act – for this legislation in essence will put a muzzle on ministers and rabbis and forbid them from preaching against the homosexual, lesbian, bisexual and transgender lifestyles dominating our culture at pain of civil rights lawsuits, fines, arrests and even imprisonment.

Are we living in America or in Communist Russia under Lenin and Stalin?

Of the many constitutional problems with hate-crime laws, one of the most venal, surreptitious and reminiscent of George Orwell's "1984" is the fact that these fascist laws punish our very thoughts. It is not so much a hate-crimes law, but in reality a thought-crimes law, for (absent an invalidation by the Supreme Court) people, particularly Christians, will be severely punished for speaking out against what they consider to be immoral behavior expressly prohibited in the Bible.

The great Austrian economist and writer Friedrich Hayek, in his book "The Road To Serfdom," said, "Wherever liberty as we understand it has been destroyed, this has almost always been done in the name of some new freedom promised to the people. … The collective freedom (the Tyrant) offers us is not freedom of the members of society but the unlimited freedom of the planner to do with society what he pleases."

Hayek was right, and though this book was first published 65 years ago he could have easily been speaking about President Obama today, for with these new, expansive powers Obama will have under the hate-crimes laws, like tyrannical regimes of the past, he can go after his No. 1 enemies – the Christian right and conservative media, including Fox News, alternative media like WorldNetDaily and talk radio like Michael Savage.

The unconstitutinal Obamacare

Patrice Lewis joins the ranks of those who understand that Obamacare is unconstitutional:

As our freedoms and liberties have been chipped away in the last few years, how many times have you wanted to ask a politician why? Why are you doing this? Why are you destroying our country? How can you justify trashing the Constitution in order to advance your particular agenda?

A reporter finally – finally! – asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi a version of this simple and logical question.

CNSNews.com: "Madam Speaker, where specifically does the Constitution grant Congress the authority to enact an individual health insurance mandate?"

Pelosi: "Are you serious? Are you serious?"

CNSNews.com: "Yes, yes I am."

Pelosi then shook her head before taking a question from another reporter. Her press spokesman, Nadeam Elshami, then told CNSNews.com that asking the speaker of the House where the Constitution authorized Congress to mandate that individual Americans buy health insurance was not a "serious question."

"You can put this on the record," said Elshami. "That is not a serious question."

Yes, Madam Speaker, it is a serious question. In fact, it is probably the most serious question anyone could ever ask. The reason you're flustered, Nancy dear, is because you know exactly what the answer is … namely, NONE. There is no authority in the Constitution to require people to buy health insurance.

GOP and Democrats, victims of the Progressive Movement

This current day analysis includes Teddy Roosovelt, (remember Tony Dean said several times that he as a Teddy Roosevelt Republican) one of the Progressive Movement's early advocates. The two political parties have both adopted teh Progressive ideology and their onoly fight is over who controls an ever-growing big government:

You would think, given the massive dissatisfaction with an economy that guarantees mega-bonuses for the rich and continued high unemployment, that the GOP would smell an opportunity. In my travels around the country — including in midstream places like suburban Kansas City and Kentucky — few, including Democrats, express any faith in the president’s basic economic strategy.

Ask a local mayor or chamber of commerce executive in Kentucky or Kansas City about the stimulus, and at best you get a shrug. Many feel the only people really benefiting from Obamanomics are Wall Street grandees, public employees, subsidized “green” companies and various other professional rent seekers.

It’s not surprising, then, that most Americans — upward of 60 percent — feel the country is headed in the “wrong direction.” Most of these malcontents are not zealots such as those you might find at a tea party. They are more akin to villagers watching in horror as two armies, each fighting in their name, wage war on each other, leaving desolation in their wake.

Yet it’s unlikely that the independent-minded will move to the GOP until the party comes up with a credible economic plan that addresses popular concerns. One big problem lies in the very nature of the Republican Party. Since Theodore Roosevelt, the party has devolved into a de facto shill for large corporate interests. One notable exception, to some extent, was Ronald Reagan, whose rise challenged the hegemony of some in the corporate establishment, first in California, when he was governor, and later nationally.

Atheists can't handle the truth

Ray Comfort has the atheists upset by the truth:

When I discovered that the famous On the Origin of Species was public domain, I decided to publish it myself and write an Introduction and give away copies of the book to university students, in honor of the book's 150th year of publication.

But when Kirk Cameron (my TV cohost on The Way of the Master) and I produced a short video clip explaining what I wanted to do and posted it online, we kicked a hornet's nest. A big one. 

Why are many atheists so angry? Why are they talking about book burnings, threatening to resist the giveaway and rip out the Introduction, etc.? Why was richarddawkins.net encouraging people to collect copies and rip out the Introduction? Professor Dawkins himself said that even though "a lot of people seem to be very worried about this," he wasn't at all worried. Why did he then tell Toronto university students to tear out the Introduction? There have been more than 140 different editions of On the Origin of Species, many with special Introductions, so what's the big deal with this one? If I am (as Professor Dawkins says) "an ignorant fool," why are so many feeling threatened by what I've written? Surely, the Introduction will be ignorance and foolishness, and simply confirm the students' presuppositions that intelligent design isn't worthy of even a first look.

There's a reason that they are deeply concerned.

The Introduction quotes Charles Darwin saying that blacks are closer to gorillas than whites and that natural selection has left men more intelligent than women. It also has quotes from Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf showing Hitler's undeniable links to evolution. Of course, Hitler also used Christianity to further his political agenda, but my point is that Nazi Germany was the natural outcome of what Darwin called "one general law." Darwin said the law of natural selection is "Let the strongest live and the weakest die" (Chapter Seven, "Instinct"). Adolf Hitler put the theory of Darwinism into practice.

The Introduction also defines an atheist as someone who believes that nothing created everything—which is a scientific impossibility. Professor Dawkins believes that nothing created everything, and his belief is a big intellectual embarrassment to his followers. Now, anyone can get their own copy of the book on Amazon.com and read the Introduction, but don't be fooled by the comments. No doubt they will be hijacked by atheists. When my book You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence But You Can't Make Him Think bumped Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion on Amazon.com in the atheist category, hundreds of angry atheists left scathing comments on Amazon.com and gave my book the lowest rating.

So, is this book going to be a backward step for science, as some have maintained? Of course not. Science is a wonderful discipline, to which we are deeply indebted. It will, however, be a backward step for the pseudo science of Darwinian evolution, of which there is no empirical proof. 

Jesus is fair game for ridicule, but Muhammad is not

The Cultural Marxists call this diversity:

A friend of mine frequently gathers information on the Internet regarding attacks on Jesus Christ in the modern culture. It is really quite amazing what is out there: from Jesus on the Cross dress-up dolls to "Jesus Was Queer" posters to videos such as "Rock Me, Sexy Jesus." (There is also quite a bit that I couldn't even begin to describe in this column.)

In these instances we see that it has become fashionable in our so-called culture of diversity to assail Jesus and those who follow Him.

The most recent example came this week on the HBO broadcast of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" in which the character of Larry (apparently a semi-fictional character played by "Seinfeld" co-creator Larry David) desecrates a painting of Jesus, thereby triggering an assumption by two women that the painting is miraculously crying. 

In a statement to FoxNews.com, HBO said of the episode, "Larry David makes fun of everyone, most especially himself. The humor is always playful and certainly never malicious."

Maybe there's no maliciousness in the presentation, but can't those who run the networks see that it is Christ and Christianity that are so often the target of such jokes? In the spirit of diversity that the left frequently touts, I wonder if HBO would try broadcasting a similar story line with a character desecrating a portrait of Muhammad or Martin Luther King or Mother Teresa. I think we know the answer.

We saw a few years ago on Comedy Central's "South Park" that the network permitted a scatological-themed episode to include a depiction of Jesus, but not Muhammad. The message: Jesus is fair game for ridicule, but Muhammad is not.

Conservative Party more popular than GOP, GOP bows down

This is incredible news coming out of New York:

Republican state Assemblywoman Dierdre Scozzafava has suspended her campaign for upstate New York's 23rd Congressional seat, giving a possible boost to Conservative Party nominee Doug Hoffman against Democrat Bill Owens, Fox News has confirmed. 

The move comes on the heels of a new poll that showed Scozzafava had fallen behind her two competitors in a race too close.

The special election is Tuesday and political analysts believe upstate New York is a preview of the races in 2010 and 2012 as Republican leaders struggle to rebuild, redefine and regain control of Washington.

The Siena College poll has Owens picking up 36 percent of the vote, while Hoffman has 35 percent. Scozzafava has 20 percent, with nine percent of voters undecided.

It's a turnaround from the first Siena poll on the race in September, which had Scozzafava leading, followed by Owens and Hoffman.

Scozzafava's team pulled the plug on the campaign after viewing the Siena poll, sources told Fox News, adding that there was no pressure from the National Republican Congressional Committee or the Republican National Committee.

Ken Spain, a spokesman for the NRCC, said Scozzafava will now release her supporters to vote for Hoffman.