During the 1980s the idea of raising standards in public education emerged as a national cause and as an establishing issue for a certain kind of centrist politician. It provided a chance to demonstrate that the liberal impulse to offer opportunity to all and the conservative impulse to demand high performance could be joined. Among the people who used education reform to get onto the national stage were Bill and Hillary Clinton, in Arkansas, and Ross Perot, who was the head of a state commission on the subject, in Texas.
None of these people, however, could claim to be the most prominent neoliberal education reformer in the country. That position belonged to the superintendent of public instruction in California, Bill Honig, who was in charge of by far the biggest state school system in America, with a student population of more than five million. Honig was operating at a higher level of ambition -- for the schools, if not for himself -- than the other state superintendents, because he wanted not merely to make teachers and students submit to tests of competence but to change what was taught. A privileged idealist from San Francisco, tall, skinny, and enthusiastic to the point of obsession, Honig worked tirelessly to convert the California curriculum into an immersion in great books and ideas. The rumor was that he was thinking about running for governor in 1990.
A bizarre battle has erupted over the arrest on child pornography charges of a man at a California public library, with library and county officials siding against the staffer who called police to arrest the alleged criminal.
Librarian Brenda Biesterfeld was fired from her job after disregarding her supervisor's orders not to call police.
Now a pro-family organization and a law firm are rallying support for her.
"We've come alongside her, providing media training and legal representation," said Randy Thomasson, chief of the Campaign for Children and Families, a prominent pro-family leadership group. "Our goal is to get Brenda's job back, to institute a new library policy that has no tolerance for obscenity and child pornography, and to send a nationwide message that child predators will not be allowed to 'do their thing' in libraries."
"This issue of the magazine is breathtaking," said Editor and CEO Joseph Farah. "I don't think most people, even WND's sophisticated readership, know what 'gay rights' is really all about. The July issue just vaporizes the movement's slick marketing veneer, and then documents thoroughly the nightmarish world these powerful, well-funded activists have in store for America's children."
Called "Gay rights' secret agenda," the issue explores "How and why the homosexual activist movement has targeted America's children."
"Gay characters have become the norm on sitcoms," writes Steve Baldwin in one of the issue's reports. "It has become fashionable
to attack the Boy Scouts; homosexual propaganda inundates many of America's public schools; nearly all the mainstream religious denominations have 'revised' their understanding of biblical teaching concerning homosexuality; and the gay 'rights' legislative agenda is succeeding beyond the advocates' wildest imaginations."
Two conservative activists deeply involved in the anti-communism movement of the past are planning a broad strategy of re-creating those efforts in a new mass movement to fight radical Islam.
Jack Wheeler, a strategist credited with formulating "the Reagan Doctrine" that helped bring down the Soviet Empire and Steve Baldwin, a former California legislator and the executive director of the Council for National Policy, have teamed up for what they describe as the creation of an "Anti-Islamofascism Movement."
"One cannot write the history of the Cold War without acknowledging the key role played by the American Anti-Communist Movement," they write in a memo to conservative leaders. "It was a broad movement involving many different organizations that, for decades, kept its focus on the defeat of the Soviet Empire. And it succeeded."
Wheeler and Baldwin say anti-communism was "the defining issue that brought hundreds of thousands of people into the conservative movement in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. There was a sense that this movement had to be successful if not only America but Western Civilization itself were to survive."
Child molestation and pedophilia occur far more commonly among homosexuals than among heterosexuals on a per capita basis, according to a new study.
"Overwhelming evidence supports the belief that homosexuality is a sexual deviancy often accompanied by disorders that have dire consequences for our culture," wrote Steve Baldwin in, "Child Molestation and the Homosexual Movement," soon to be published by the Regent University Law Review.
Baldwin is the executive director of the Council for National Policy in Washington, D.C.
"It is difficult to convey the dark side of the homosexual culture without appearing harsh," wrote Baldwin. "However, it is time to acknowledge that homosexual behavior threatens the foundation of Western civilization – the nuclear family."
A Canadian political party leader's posting of a WND article on homosexuality has brought him before the country's Human Rights Commission to face accusations he was motivated by "hate and defamation."
Ron Gray of the Christian Heritage Party says he's been told directly by an employee of the Human Rights Commission that the Canadian Human Rights Act, under which he is being accused, is "about censorship," according to a report by WND columnist Tristan Emmanuel, who heads the Canada-based activist group ECP Centre
"From Crayons to Condoms: The Ugly Truth about America's Public Schools," a new book documenting the inaccurate textbooks, violations of parental rights, sex education that goes too far and other educational atrocities has rocketed from 100,000-plus on Amazon.com to No. 123 among all books in just about 24 hours.
The work by authors Steve Baldwin and Karen Holgate was discussed by Fox News personality Sean Hannity on his radio program today, and again on the "Hannity & Colmes" television show tonight.
The book, just released today, also was ranked No. 1 among nonfiction under aims and objectives of education theory, No. 1 among education theory, and No. 1 among nonfiction under conservatism. Stock also was running low because of the demand, with only 11 copies available during a recent check.
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A bizarre battle has erupted over the arrest on child pornography charges of a man at a California public library, with library and county officials siding against the staffer who called police to arrest the alleged criminal.
One of its most controversial, hard-hitting editions ever published, the 
