Lots of interesting items in the news this week.
Republicans in Congress have had to threaten a subpoena to get Whitehouse officials to answer questions about the half-billion dollars in taxpayer money the executives of Solyndra got after donating to President Obama’s campaign war chest.
Paul Kengor has written an interesting column about the history of left wing anti-Catholicism. (Kengor wrote the excellent book Dupes, which profiles various public relations successes of Communists in the United States during the Cold War.) In today’s column he talks about Frank Marshall Davis, a card-carrying Communists whom President Obama has acknowledged as friend and mentor. Kengor makes the point that the President’s campaign against Catholicism is very much like Davis’ anti-Catholic campaigns of earlier years.
On Valentines Day a Seattle newspaper ran an article about the internment of Japanese Americans in prison camps during WWII. The article is more honest than most freshman history textbooks, in that it at least mentions that it was an executive order by Democrat icon Franklin Roosevelt that put these innocent Americans behind bars. Of course it doesn’t mention that the only people in the government who strongly opposed the idea were conservative Republicans like Robert Taft and J. Edgar Hoover.
In this date in history: On February 17 of 1801 the House of Representatives resolved an electoral tie between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, selecting Jefferson as President and making Burr VP.