-By Warner Todd Huston
History is not an easy subject. It takes decades, sometimes hundreds of them, for historians to come to a full understanding of what happened in any particular era. Sometimes, in fact, the truth is lost forever and only conjecture is left for the living to ponder. Still, it takes long, hard study and painstaking detective work to ferret out what really happened in the past, even the recent past.
Consequently, history isn’t something that your average journalist should attempt. This maxim couldn’t be proved out better than by a recent effort by Eve Conant of Newsweek. Conant so badly garbled the facts in her piece about America’s “anti-census sentiment” that one wished she’d take up writing cook books instead of articles based on historical facts. She didn’t even get current sentiment right, much less that of history.
Conant begins her discussion of historical American anti-census sentiment by confusing the suspicion of census workers with that of the revenue agents that plagued backwoods moonshiners of the 1940s and 50s. She assumed in her piece that census agents were hated simply because they were from the government. Of course, it was Treasury Dept. Agents that were hated, not census workers. People may mistrust the government, but no one is up in arms about the census itself.
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Newsweek’s Lack of Knowledge of American History”
Poor Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown of the UK has been the subject of some scurrilous web rumors lately that he is “self-medicating” by popping pills in order to “get himself through” his high pressure/low respect days. Who could blame Brown, if he took to at least the bottle after not only being snubbed five times in a row to get a bilateral conference with US President Barack Obama but ended up disgracing himself and his country over the Lockerbie bomber release-for-oil fiasco earlier on? Brown strikes me as a scotch and soda sort of fellow, who drinks in private but that old adage about never drinking alone because, if discovered, it will only arouse pity comes to mind here.
The left is in an uproar today. They got their panties in a bunch over a piece that ran on the conservative newsblog NewsMax.com where it was suggested that Obama’s irresponsible actions as president could result in a military coup that would “restore” the Constitution. 
Reuters newswire service recently published a story reporting that 
In a Meet the Press interview with Bill Clinton on September 27, NBC’s David Gregory seemed to assume as accepted fact that the only way to fix healthcare was for Americans to “pay higher taxes.” He also asked the former chief executive if the “vast right wing conspiracy” that his wife bemoaned in 1998 was now in high gear attacking President Obama.
Who said that government ever made any logical sense? The State of Michigan has lighted upon a brilliant plan. It has been suggested that the state 
Here is yet another story where union members undergoing disciplinary procedures can sometimes spend years being paid their full salary to sit home and watch TV, doing nothing, working not a minute of their day. In this case it is costing a local school system at least $2.25 million to pay teachers that aren’t teaching.
The Hill is reporting that 
Oopsie. Palin smear artist Joe McGinnis was denied his chance to make a mockery of the Palin diner auction when the good Guv nixed his ebay bid last week, sources say.
Many elitist American leftists like to go about claiming that it is only Americans that are dunces on foreign matters. There is some truth to the accusation that Americans are not knowledgeable about the rest of the world but if a column in the UK Telegraph is any indication it isn’t much better for Britain’s understanding of American politics. Worse, it is plain that even a British journalist hasn’t a clue what he’s on about when attempting to discuss the differences between a Democrat and Republican in today’s climate.