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Responding to an exclusive yearender DRUDGE dispatch, which presented NIELSEN’s Top 20 BOOKSCAN list of 2003 sales, O’Reilly called the DRUDGE REPORT a “threat to democracy.”

“I mean you can’t believe a word Matt Drudge says,” O’Reilly told the cameras. “Now you’ve got the Matt Drudges of the world and these other people, Michael Moore and all of these crazies, all right, no responsibility… that is a threat to democracy, I think.” O’Reilly warned: “They’ll just spin it and twist it and take it out of proportion every which way.”

So Matt Drudge is now magically manipulating Bookscan numbers? O’Reilly has been seriously losing it for some time now, but he’s going off the deep end here. People may call him a conservative, but if you’ve read what passes for his first book, you know he’s nothing of the kind, except perhaps this new model “big government conservative” of which Fred Barnes writes. Or, as I see it, weak sister moderate bootlicker.

You want extreme? (I’ll give you extreme. You can’t handle extreme.) Ditch the dying dollar and adopt the gold standard. Do it now, before China or the EU does and steals world economic leadership. We rode the dollar hegemony pony as far as it would go, and it was a good run – even a record-setting run in historical terms. But it’s ending.

Also, my Internet service was down for 48 hours. And yes, CONCEPTION. It’s been corrected.

Now, why are you still reading this? Go see Return of the King!

“If I drink water I will have to urinate, and how can I urinate when my people are in bondage?”

– Saddam Hussein

Truth is funnier than fiction.

TE writes: You’re right about the classrooms. When my daughter was in kindergarten she could read, write, add, subtract and do some simple multiplication. I asked the school system about her level when she was going to enter the 1st grade. I was told not to worry, she would sit in the class until the rest of the kids caught up!

Space Bunny points out the telling dichotomy between what public school teachers and educrats say publicly and what they tell parents in private. When they are attempting to cadge more money from an unsuspecting state legislature, they lament that their burden is overwhelming because they lack support from parents. How can they possibly be expected to teach these children anything in eight hours a day when the children aren’t being helped by parents at home? Parental support is vital for learning!

However, when a parent actually does help his child and teaches them reading, writing and arithmetic by daily spending one/eighth the time demanded by the educationists, they tell the parent to butt out and leave the kid to them. How very mysterious!

No, not really. You cannot possibly understand the public school system or the fundamental purpose of the classroom environment if you are still operating under the mistaken assumption that either are designed to teach children a basic foundation of knowledge or to maximize their potential. Both are conceived to hold them back and cripple them, and the latter has been that way since it was first conceived by an elite caste to suppress the more numerous children of the lower castes.

Free your children from intellectual maiming. Keep them out of the public schools.

The annual death count has been released and it stands at 227,385. That’s the number of abortions performed by Planned Parenthood during its 2002-2003 fiscal year, according to its newly released annual report

Do you believe in Progress? Do you believe that the world is headed in the right direction? Then compare the ongoing American holocaust with some of the other great tragedies of history. Once the consensus is reached that human life does indeed begin at conception, how do you think our society will be viewed by our descendants? As one of the most morally disgusting of all time.

American abortion: 227,385 murders per year (Planned Parenthood alone)

Spanish Inquisition: 17 executions per year

Global witch burnings: 260 burnings per year

French Reign of Terror: 53,200 executions per year

“”We are at war with America. Yes, a permanent war, a vital war, a war without death. Yes, they are very hard, the Americans, they are voracious, they want undivided power over the world.”

Osama? The soon-to-be-late Mr. Hussein? No, try Francois Mitterand, former President of France and an architect of the European Union. That’s what the EU is about.

Wilfox sends the following poem:

The dragon that hid the moon is gone,

The bloodsucker has vanished into the abyss.

Let me taste this day like the ripest of dates,

And come tomorrow to talk about the days to come.

– Jahiz

Saddam Hussein is by no means the last dragon. But it is a joy to see one bite the dust even so. Let us hope that the Iraqi people are more fortunate with their next government.

RK writes: What a wonderful gift, your article How to teach your child to read at WND. I am working with my soon-to-be three year old granddaughter to teach her to read using phonics. I was kind of winging it. Now I have something concrete to work with. Here’s wishing a Merry Christmas to you and yours from my granddaughters A, 2 years, S, 2 months and from their “Pappa”. Thanks again.

Actually, this is precisely why I wrote the article. It’s not hard, truly! Even a grandparent probably has enough time to do it, and it’s a nice excuse to spend time with your grandkids. And what a great gift, to give them such a useful head start in life.

By the way, the two sigmas mentioned in the column refers to how a different character is used when a Greek word ends in sigma. This second sigma looks rather like our letter s, as opposed to a circle with a horizontal stem. The proper way to read it is to say “sigma?” while expressing some disbelief, then shout “two sigmas!” and allow a certain amount of time for the ensuing hilarity. It’s always a party at the Digital Ghetto.

DC, who is my kanji superior, writes: Your experience with Japanese is interesting, but incomplete, and reading Japanese is not precisely analogous to reading English. Like you, I studied Japanese as an adult (beginning when I was 43). Also like you, I found that the kana were easy to learn, and that the kanji are difficult. I presently know 500-1000 kanji. This is not sufficient to read a Japanese newspaper, but it is sufficient to read a Japanese patent, and my intent in studying Japanese was to be able to read Japanese patents.

Initially, I thought that Japanese would be much easier to read if the kanji were replaced with kana (or even romaji). I now know, after reading hundreds of Japanese patents, that reading Japanese is infinitely easier using kanji than it would be using only a phonetic system. The reason for this unexpected conclusion is that Japanese is a phonetically poor language. There are only about 110 syllables in Japanese, depending on who is counting. This results in a large number of homophones which are difficult to understand outside of the context of a sentence. Use of kanji for reading eliminates the ambiguity associated with these homophones, and improves reading comprehension.

English is much different. A large number of syllables are used, and there are relatively few homophones or homonyms. Consequently, there is no need for ideographic characters to provide meaning to written text. Teaching phonetics for English is the best way to learn to read. My wife is a reading specialist, and the primary methodology she uses in teaching is phonetics and phonemic awareness.

I quit with kanji before reaching DC’s conclusion, but I have little doubt that he’s correct. I do remember thinking that it was just insane to cling to what wasn’t even a Japanese system – it’s Chinese – instead of switching to kana, but now that I don’t have to learn 3,000 ideographs myself, I’m kind of glad they do. The world is already far too homogenized. Engrish is great, though. “The ribbon that becomes you, cookie girl… favorite ribbon time!” You tell ’em, coffee boy.

SC writes: I just read your latest writing on WorldNetDaily. We are blessed to have two boys, ages 5-1/2 and 4. I am not a teacher by profession, but my Mother taught me to read by age four. I am a passionate reader and knew I wanted my children to share the love of reading. And I knew it was possible….

Anyway, I did nearly exactly what you described because I didn’t find a reading program I was comfortable with. And it has gone just as you said. It was much easier than I ever expected. We don’t spend more than 20 minutes a day on phonics and we frequently miss days. I am by no means spending much or most of my days teaching my kids to read. My oldest goes to kindergarten at an academic Christian school. But he is so far ahead of the other children in reading and mathematics that his teacher says, somewhat disdainfully and disapprovingly, that he is bored. She hasn’t done a thing to challenge him more, even though we have requested it.

So we researched and picked the ‘best’ school district. After preschool at a Christian school, we figured we’d have to put him in pubic school. We went to register him at the public school and spoke with the principal, then the teachers. When we asked the principal about the reading programs, he told us phonics went out with the dinosaurs. I was surprised and told him of the progress we’ve made. He replied, “Parents need to stay out of their kids’ educational lives and leave teaching to the professionals.” He repeated this three times in ten minutes, admonishing us that working with them at home does a disservice to kids by giving them an unfair advantage that doesn’t even last. He said that ‘by third or fourth grade they are all in the same place anyway.’ We were in shock and it lasted for a couple of weeks….

We are no longer interested in having our kids in public school.

The significant question is, why doesn’t it last? The answer is, because public schooling is not designed to teach children to develop their abilities, it is designed to educate children to suppress them. The difference is crucial.