Educators and homeschoolers these days are teaching their students how to exercise their critical thinking skills.  In other words, students must be able to look at a problem or controversy, take it apart, and find out what makes sense and what doesn’t, what is true and what isn’t. The main tool in that form of critical thinking is logic, the ability to take a fact and connect it with other facts, the ability to separate fact from fiction, and fact from opinion. Thus critical thinking must involve analysis and judgment.

It was obvious that no sooner did the media learn of the horrible shooting rampage on Saturday, January 9th, in Tucson, Arizona, that seriously wounded Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and killed six people, that liberal bloggers and commentators would begin blaming conservatives for the massacre. Even though the killer, a 22-year-old male, by the name of Jared Lee Loughner was not affiliated with any right-wing organization or group, he was immediately characterized as an anti-abortion right winger. Yet, his rambling thoughts on YouTube reveal an individual who was obviously not playing with a full deck.

Is America still a free country? We like to think so, even with ObamaCare. Yes, we can get into a car and drive wherever we want. We can go to the mall and buy whatever we want. We can read whatever we want, and we can say whatever we want.

The first American Revolution officially began on July 4th, 1776, when the Thirteen Colonies declared their independence from Great Britain. And it didn’t end until 1781, when General Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, and the Treaty of Paris was signed with Great Britain in 1783. In other words it took seven years of hard struggle before the colonists could become the free and sovereign United States of America.

The most obvious indication that the Palestinians do not want a state is their constant demands for Israel to make far-reaching concessions which they know the Jewish state cannot make. The Palestinians know that the only way to maintain their present status is to make demands that cannot be met. And so, the question is: Why don’t the Palestinians want a state? The reason is simple: Statehood would entail responsibilities the Palestinians do not want to assume.

It was typical of the Democrats to dump the mammoth Omnibus spending bill before the lame-duck Congress a week before Christmas. Lame-duck Congresses do not usually take up two-thousand-page bills that require intense scrutiny by the legislators and are too complex and important to be enacted without careful examination.

In the past it seemed that the best way to become President was through several well-established routes: by climbing the power ladder in either of the two political parties, by having gone to Harvard or Yale, by having had a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, or by belonging to the secret Skull & Bones Society at Yale.

As an advocate of full educational freedom, I am occasionally asked what America would be like if compulsory school attendance laws were done away with and the government got out of the education business.

YouTube, in just the few short years of its existence, has become the new Media of Record. In other words, if you want to see and hear a particular politician make a jerk of himself, someone will have made a video of the occasion and posted it on YouTube. Also, if you want to see and hear the complete remarks or speech of someone of note — a statesman, President, a foreign dignitary — you can usually find it on YouTube. If you want to see actual footage of riots in Teheran or Greece or London, which you will only see bits of on TV news, you’ll see them on YouTube, sent in by individuals using their cell-phone cameras. What an incredible instrument of vital and instant communication!

My dictionary has several definitions for “stupid.” But the one I like best reads: “showing or resulting from a lack of normal intelligence; foolish; irrational; also used colloquially as a generalized term of disapproval.” So I am not entirely out of line by calling the Nobel Prize committee stupid and the award of the prestigious prize to President Barack Hussein Obama as an act of stupidity. And most of the world agrees with me. But they’re too kind to call the committee stupid. Remember, that this is the same committee that gave terrorist Arafat the Nobel Peace Prize, whose life-long ambition was to destroy Israel.