From Business Insider.

People have started to realize that putting in four years and racking up tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt only to find yourself out of a job (or working as a barista at Starbucks) is a raw deal.

Some entrepreneurs and academics have decided to do something about it. They’re looking to give quality education for free online, or job training in fields that actually pay enough to afford their tuition.

Several of the programs have over 90% of graduates working as software engineers, making an average salary of over $80,000 per year, for instance.

There’s a list of twelve of these companies, for those of you who just had kids graduate from high school and are having the higher education wallet panic right now.

Youth Vote Suck Up 101.

President Barack Obama on Friday pushed his plan to tie federal student loan interest rates to the market, and criticized a Republican plan passed by the House of Representatives that he said would cost borrowers more.

The mounting burden of student loan debt, now pegged at more than $1 trillion, with an average borrower owing $27,000, is seen as a drag on the economy and a barrier to people getting educations needed for better jobs.

This is a business the federal government shouldn’t be in at all. The Democrats want to stay in it so they can always seem like the heroic bearers of “free stuff” and portray Republicans as “OMG, SEND YOU BACK TO THE DARK AGES!” for any sensible counter-suggestions they might make.

Some of us got around this issue by, um, WORKING during college.

A chilling fact, and one that EVERY American needs to be fully aware, is the IRS will have a major role in the implementation of Obamacare, officially known as Affordable Care Act. (ACA)

Now, in light of the current IRS scandal, the thought of the IRS legally wedded to the ACA should give every American serious heart burn.

Here is how The Blaze reported this issue on May 15th:

Stuart Varney appeared on Fox News this morning to discuss just how much the IRS will have control over with the complete implementation of the president’s health care overhaul. “The IRS will be the policing agent for Obamacare,” Varney said. “You’re going to have to, on your next tax return, you’re going to have to report to the IRS personal health care information…Do you trust the IRS with your personal health care information?”

Most Americans would answer, “Hell no” to that question.

However, the vast majority of Americans are unaware that the IRS is taking a lead role in implementing Obamacare — a program that is viewed favorably by only 35 percent of Americans.

Here is an explanation behind the Obamacare/IRS joint venture as reported by The Week:

When the Supreme Court upheld the ACA last year, it ruled that the law was constitutional because it used tax penalties and credits to make the new health care system work. The agency is in charge of implementing 47 tax provisions, including new taxes on medical devices and new subsidies for those who want to purchase coverage through health care exchanges set to debut later this year. The agency will also be tasked with ensuring that all Americans can prove they have “qualifying” coverage under the law.

Now one can only imagine the horrors awaiting all Americans when the IRS and the ACA  join forces later this year.

But today, House Republicans are voting on what will only amount to a symbolic repeal of the ACA. Symbolic, because the bill will die in the Senate and the mainstream media will make light of the fact that the Republican controlled House is trying for the third time to repeal this unpopular bill since they took control in 2011.

Therefore, what I believe we have is a major communication problem.

Certainly, if all Americans knew of the forthcoming marriage between a mismanaged, scandal plagued IRS and the unpopular ACA program in control of one/sixth of the nation’s economy, than today’s House repeal vote might have a chance of making it to the floor of the Democrat controlled Senate.

Then numerous “red state” Democrat Senators up for reelection in 2014 would be forced to vote for or against the ACA. (Which is precisely why this kind of vote will not happen.)

All Americans must be made aware and Republicans must properly convey, just what is at stake when this unholy alliance between the IRS and the ACA is implemented.

To quote Newt Gingrich on MSNBC’s Morning Joe earlier this week, “Why would you trust the bureaucracy with your health if you can’t trust the bureaucracy with your politics?”

Watch for that question to be the bumper sticker issue of the 2014 midterm elections.

How about a separation of idiots and state?

A New York City elementary school became the first public school in the nation to go completely vegetarian when it stopped serving meat in its cafeteria this year.
Flushing’s P.S. 244 consists of about 400 students between kindergarten and third grade. And the staff say that the school lunches — which include options like black bean quesadillas, brown rice, falafel, roasted red potatoes, and tofu — are a hit among those young kids, some of whom have started requesting similar foods at home

This isn’t about children’s health, it’s about indoctrination in a fringe lifestyle. There is nothing wrong with vegetarian options for children whose parents have chosen to raise them that way.

“Yay, the kids like it!” isn’t a reason to keep doing it if you’re a responsible adult. These are children who are only a year or so removed from eating whatever they could find in their noses. Kids that age like a lot of things that may not be the best for them. Kids this age are growing a lot and, guess what, they need some good protein sources in their diets.

This is a decision that is one for the parents to make, not for school administrators who seek to undermine the role of parents, which is what’s really going on here.

Also read: Bloomberg Pizza Open Thread: Know Your Satire Sites

There are several phony arguments making their way through the “progressive” quarters of the commentariat that need to be addressed at once. One of them goes like this: We can’t blame Islam for the the Boston terror bombings because that would be committing “the sin of essentialism,” to quote Marc Ambinder at The Week. The brilliant if unintended non-sequitur is that since not all Muslims are terrorists, therefore no Muslims are terrorists, or at least no terrorists are actually Muslim. Think about that one. This has actually cleared an editor.

But the anti-essentialists want to have it both ways. They chide others for thinking (allegedly, as I’ve never seen one credible writer actually make this argument) that Islam is a completely violent religion, even as they argue that it is a “religion of peace.” Well, if it is a sin to boil Islam down to any single essence, the proscription works in both directions, and it’s just as ridiculous to say it’s completely evil than that it’s completely peaceful.

The other pernicious argument is a variation on the anti-essentialist theme. These people adopt a form of linguistic slipperiness, in which “Islam” as a concept is said to be undefinable and amorphous. To use the unfortunate language of postmodernism, it is an “unstable” concept.  Nobody, then, is *really* a Muslim. Following this internal logic, nobody can *really* be a Muslim terrorist. Get it?

The obvious flaw in this argument is that if no one can really be motivated by Islam, nobody can really be motivated by Islamophobia. (How can you hate that which doesn’t exist?) I doubt the anti-essentialists would consent to this corollary. It also ignores the, well, pretty important fact that the bombers were obsessed with radical Islam!

I have put the following question to many people since last week, and no one has chosen to answer it. If a black church is burned to the ground, and the crime traced to a white kid with a swastika hanging in his room and a YouTube account full of KKK and Nazi videos, are we allowed to say the crime was the result of white supremacism? What we have in the Boston terror attacks is, mutatis mutandis, the exact analogue of that crime.

Last Tuesday, April 16th, in response to a piece I had written on the day of the Boston attack, Politico reporter Dylan Byers tweeted the following:

A right-wing blogger gambles on speculation: “Why It Is Obvious That The Boston Marathon Attack Is Islamic Terrorism” http://bit.ly/ZmGwpG

Even though my “gamble” paid off, I will not be collecting any winnings.  However, two developments connected to the Boston attack — one involving a carjacking and the other a mosque — hit the winning jackpot of supreme irony.

First up is the “COEXIST” bumper sticker on the back of the Mercedes that was carjacked by the brothers Tsarnaev last Friday night. This incident began what turned out to be a deadly shoot-out that killed big brother, Tamerlan.

Now, COEXIST bumper stickers are often found on pricey foreign-made cars in liberal conclaves and are also popular among college students and twenty-somethings.

As reported by the Daily Caller and accompanied by the screen image below:

The bumper sticker, which spells out “COEXIST” using the Islamic moon, a peace symbol, a gender symbol, the Star of David, a pagan symbol, a ying-yang and a cross, is put out by the Coexist Foundation — “a non-profit organization creating understanding across divides.”

 

Wondering whether the Coexist Foundation acknowledged the carjacking that globally showcased their bumper sticker, led me to the foundation’s web site.  There I was “shocked” to learn that the foundation had totally neglected to take advantage of all the free publicity. Surely they were missing a lucrative fundraising opportunity that would have read something like this:

Donate to the Coexist Foundation and receive the iconic bumper sticker that attracts sensitive Islamic terrorists looking for get-away wheels.

As a side note, this bumper sticker has always intrigued me, especially because my own twenty-something stepson used to have one on his car after he attended college in Massachusetts.

The second supreme irony is that the mosque where the Tsarnaev brothers worshiped was built on land that was greatly subsidized by the City of Boston.

Again from the Daily Caller:

Suspected Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (and his older brother revealed later) attended a Massachusetts mosque that made a controversial deal with a Boston city agency that allowed it to buy land at a lower-than-market price in exchange for various token services to the Boston community, despite the mosque’s links to some radical anti-American figures.

One can only assume that new churches in Boston are also receiving similar subsidized land deals. Ya think?

So what have we learned today? Here is the re-cap:

There once was a Boston man driving a Mercedes with a COEXIST bumper sticker that told the world he was a supporter of peace, love and “kumbayah.” That same man is now lucky to be alive after Islamic terrorists took him and his car hostage, making him withdraw money from an ATM. Finally, Mercedes man’s Friday evening ended after his COEXIST themed peace-mobile was riddled with bullets.

And then, these same Islamic terrorists who attacked Boston attended a mosque that stands on prime real estate because of a subsidized land sale — approved by the city, no doubt, because of  COEXIST-themed political correctness.

For the record, the mosque’s exact role in the radicalization of the brothers Tsarnaev has yet to be specifically determined. However, once again I am willing to gamble that there could be some connection.

Political correctness makes us want to close our collective eyes to the growing threat posed by American Islamic would-be terrorists. Our response is to display feel-good bumper stickers on our cars, and watch as cities subsidize land sales for new mosques knowing full well that hate is sometimes sowed in a few of those mosques. Than occasionally, that same hate is channeled into violence against innocent Americans, as with the Boston attacks, and the Ft. Hood shootings in 2009 which resulted in the killing of 13 people and wounding dozens more.

Finally, I will conclude in a manner similar to my second terror related piece from last week, with a profound quote from then Secretary of State Condi Rice when she testified before the 9/11 Commission saying:

The terrorists were at war with us, but we were not yet at war with them.

Now 12 years after September 11, 2001,  the American domestic mindset is that we are STILL, not really at war with them.

So is it finally time to wise up?

A New York teacher who gave her students a writing assignment to research Nazi propaganda and then write a letter trying to convince an official of the Third Reich “that Jews are evil and the source of our problems” has been placed on leave.

From the Associated Press:

A high school English teacher who had students pretend to be Jew-hating Nazis in a writing assignment has been placed on leave.

The teacher at Albany High School caused a storm of criticism after having students practice the art of persuasive writing by penning a letter to a fictitious Nazi government official arguing that “Jews are evil.”

District Superintendent Marguerite Vanden Wyngaard held a news conference Friday to apologize for the assignment.

The Times Union newspaper reported ( http://bit.ly/ZTc4PU ) on Saturday that the teacher was not in class on Friday and had been placed on leave by the school district.

The writing assignment was done before a planned class reading of the memoir “Night,” by Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel.

For the assignment, the teacher asked students to research Nazi propaganda, then write a letter trying to convince an official of the Third Reich “that Jews are evil and the source of our problems.”

“Review in your notebooks the definitions for logos, ethos, and pathos,” the teacher’s assignment said. “Choose which argument style will be most effective in making your point. Please remember, your life (here in Nazi Germany in the 30′s) may depend on it!”

Wyngaard said she didn’t think the assignment was malicious but “it displayed a level of insensitivity that we absolutely will not tolerate.”

One of the most enjoyable aspects of reading, writing, and thinking about history for me is how the subject matter has the ability to transport me back in time and set me down as a stranger in a strange land.  Reading about the Revolutionary War? Square your conservative beliefs with being on the side of the rebels. Where would you have stood as a southerner during the Civil War? How about as a northerner? Superficially, there are easy answers. But in order to truly understand the subject, you must know yourself. Writing does that. It makes one “an exact man,” as Francis Bacon noted.

It appears to me that the unnamed teacher approached this assignment in the correct manner. She told students to research Nazi propaganda and argue that propaganda from a particular point of view using accepted styles of argument. The exercise expanded their minds, made them think, took them out of their comfort zone, and forced them to think like an entirely different person.

What kind of person would you have been in Nazi Germany circa 1936? Think about it. A particularly virulent and nauseating form of  anti-Semitism gripped the entire continent of Europe in the period between the wars. It was normal. It was natural to harbor evil thoughts about the Jews. Everyone you knew hated the Jews. Your parents hated the Jews. Your friends and neighbors hated the Jews.

Forget about the “good Germans” who opposed Hitler. There were damn few of them and they were weak-willed and weak-minded. For the most part, the good German people approved of and applauded Hitler’s oppression.

Is it a valuable lesson to force students into that world, that mindset, and have them act out what they would have been thinking by having them write about it? I think it is an extremely valuable exercise. It won’t change anyone’s mind about the Nazis or the Jews. But it will help the students know themselves better. What could possibly be wrong with that?
More on the next page.

It’s Rasmussen and it runs counter to what Democrats want, so expect them to ignore this.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that just 28% of Likely U.S. Voters think additional tax hikes are needed to fund the federal government. More than twice as many (63%) disagree and feel more taxes are not necessary. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

President Obama’s budget, of course, raises taxes.

The professor’s name is Darry Sragow. He openly endorses illegally suppressing Republican votes.

Campus Reform has more.

A professor at the University of Southern California (USC) appears to have used a fall semester 2012 political science class to deliver sustained and angered attacks on Republicans, who he characterized as old, white, racist, and “losers.”

In a 15 min. video secretly captured by USC student Tyler Talgo, political science Professor Darry Sragow also appears to endorse the illegal suppression of Republican votes.

“You lose their information on the election in the mail,” he suggested when a student asked him how to keep Republicans from voting. “I mean there is lots of ways to do it [SIC].”

A teaching assistant (TA), who also appeared to work for the university, then seemed to suggest Black Panthers could be placed at polling stations to intimidate Republican voters.

Rather than rebuking the TA, Sragow appeared to confirm the suggestion.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “You can do that.”

Sragow also claims that GOP voter ID efforts are about suppressing votes, not protecting legitimate votes. That’s a typical Democrat lie about voter ID. At one point during his rant, Sragow says that Democrats have to “fight the law” in order to win elections.

The University of Southern California, a taxpayer funded school, employs a professor who openly tells his student that breaking the law and suppressing votes is a fine thing to do, because of his biased and ill-informed opinion of some voters. Darry Sragow is, by the way, a current board member of the Constitutional Rights Foundation.

A week ago, former comedian Jim Carrey publicly advocated for restricting the law-abiding citizen’s access to firearms. He was militating against a right plainly spelled out in the Constitution.

This week, Jim Carrey has put his name to a letter advocating relaxing drug laws and clemency for drug offenders. The letter also hints at restoring voting rights to felons at the federal level, which up to now has been a state issue. These same people fight against voter ID, which protects the voting rights of Americans who have broken no laws.

Whatever you may think of the drug war, and I question the growing militarization of ordinary police forces, Carrey’s two positions are common on the left: Against the law-abiding citizen’s right to bear arms, simultaneously for the law breaker whose actions make the law-abiding citizen’s self-defense necessary. “Free Mumia” goes with universities hiring domestic terrorists goes with “gun free zones” that help killers plan massacres.

Carrey and other liberals do not see the contradiction here. Your right to bear arms, written into the Constitution, does not count. Yet they will find shadows and penumbras to create rights that are not written there.

On issues of life, liberals tend to favor the most radical policies on abortion, while they oppose the death penalty for our worst criminals. In court this week they won a victory allowing people of any age to purchase a powerful abortifacient drug, meaning children will end up buying, using, and probably being harmed by this drug. When a girl is harmed and sues the manufacturer, the same liberals will stand up and denounce “Big Pharma.” Liberals are literally turning a blind eye now to the ongoing trial in Pennsylvania, in which the details of an abortion mill/charnel house are being laid bare. Kermit Gosnell’s trial is among the most grisly in American history. But the lives of those children he and his employees callously snuffed and snipped out do not matter to liberals, at all. Their silence says all that needs to be said. Liberals who favor the death of the thousands of children killed at Gosnell’s slaughter house will oppose meting out the death penalty to the doctor who systematically killed them.

On the other hand, President Obama, Hillary Clinton and other liberals incessantly claim that their policies are — sing along if you’d like — “for the children.” MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry advocates for the collective against the family in an ad, yet pushes against any collective disgust or restrictions when it comes to abortion. She says children matter to all of us, yet if a child is born while a doctor is trying to kill her, that child does not matter at all. Gosnell is free to keep her feet in a jar, as he did with many of his victims.

Liberals also claim to be be voices for the powerless against the powerful. If they really cared about the children, and were really advocates of the powerless against the powerful, would they not see in the Gosnell trial a chance to side with both? Likewise, they claim to be women’s advocates, yet women were victims at Gosnell’s horror lab. He employed a person with no medical education at all to anesthetize patients. Women were injured and died due to his unsafe and unsanitary practices, practices government ignored for years.

Liberals have nothing at all to say about any of this. Nothing.

And they apparently see no contradiction between their rhetoric and their true policies. If liberals have a conscience, even the alleged crimes of Kermit Gosnell does not sear it.

The mental jujitsu that it takes to be a modern liberal doesn’t stop there. If you’re a law-abiding Christian church leader in America, the Obama administration wants to dictate to you, tell you whom to hire and what products you will pay for through insurance. But if you’re a drug cartel operative in Mexico with designs on expanding your business in the US, liberals want to make sure your path across the border is smooth. Liberals create “free speech zones” on university campuses that explicitly restrict free speech that liberals don’t like. Liberals claim to be for education, yet always side with unions that oppose firing incompetent teachers. Liberals claim to be racially tolerant, yet routinely launch racist attacks against minorities who disagree with them, as Clarence Thomas, Ted Cruz and our own Allen West can testify. Liberals claim to be pro-woman, yet demonize women leaders like Margaret Thatcher, Sarah Palin and Condoleezza Rice. Liberals claim to be pro-science, yet ignore the science on the beginning of life and on climate and everything else that contradicts their political point of view. They claim to be lovers of reason, yet get into a discussion with one and if it doesn’t go their way, liberals tend to become the most hysterical shriekers on earth. Despite their claims to be open-minded and free-thinkers, the America that liberals are trying to create has no room at all for anyone who disagrees with them, on anything. Their America would consist of endless purges as political correctness evolves and metastasizes, a movie we’ve seen before in France and Cambodia. Liberals claim to stand for freedom, yet consistently expand the power of a less and less accountable bureaucratic state. They’re for due process for foreign terrorists, against due process for the American farmer on whose land an endangered species resides. They’re pro-choice, as long as you choose what they want you to choose. Choose to go to church, listen to Rush Limbaugh, hunt, or vote Republican and watch how tolerant and pro-choice they really are.

Take it all in, and it leaves little room for the existence of a well-meaning liberal. There must be some, but the vast majority must be either dupes who do not really understand the effects of their beliefs, they have succumbed to bullying or are liberals just to be seen as cool, or they know exactly what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, and who stands in their way and must therefore be destroyed.

First, I want you to remove all sharp objects within reach and clear away anything that could be used as a projectile to throw at your monitor.

Done? OK – it is safe to watch this video now:

I can’t decide what is scarier; what Melissa Harris-Perry is saying or the fact that she has a weekend gig on a major cable news network — MSNBC.

Not even Hillary Clinton went this far in her It Takes a Village book. Clinton never posited the notion that the child belonged to the community as Harris-Perry obviously believes, and that parental responsibility was superseded by the needs of the community to “invest” in a child’s development.

I note in comments across the net conservatives trying to connect Harris-Perry’s beliefs with those of Adolf Hitler and the concept behind the “Hitler Youth.” It’s a provocative analogy but mistaken. Nazi ideology elevated the family to supreme status, with the mother being almost a figure of worship. It is true that children served the state, but Hitler was interested in indoctrination, not raising the kids to be good Germans. That was a job for parents. I daresay if Hitler had really tried something along the lines that Harris-Perry suggests, German families would have been in open revolt.

The left is transforming into a sect of radical communitarians, where everything including individual rights, the family, even our immediate communities are inferior to the overall vision of a national community. We are told what is best for all, and that everyone must sacrifice for that greater good. Assets, including children, are shared and nurtured within the larger community. You didn’t build that, you didn’t make that, and any idea you’ve ever had belongs to the community.

The “private idea” that children should be raised by their parents and not the state is an anathema to these people because they sincerely believe they have a much better idea of what your child needs than you do. How dare you deny your kid the benefits of their obviously superior wisdom? In the end, if we follow their ideas to their logical conclusion, someone or some collective body would have to make decisions regarding each individual child. Just who would that be? I can tell you who wouldn’t be in on those decisions; anyone who disagreed with liberals.

They will deny it, but the evidence is there for anyone interested in looking at it. These are not mainstream beliefs. They are — and here I use a word I never use — un-American. The left would never openly run a political campaign telling Americans what they really believe because they would get slaughtered. In Barack Obama, they finally found someone who could promote their beliefs by couching their ideology in soothing, moderate language. But the president can’t hide his radical communitarianism — and his contempt for individualism as expressed in a real voluntary community that most Americans embrace.

Currently, as the president recently admitted, they are “constrained” by the Constitution. A takeover of the House by Democrats in 2014 will likely give us an excellent idea of just how far Obama is willing to go to bring his radical vision of community to life.

Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis missed her calling. She should have been a stand-up comic.

Lewis appeared before the New York Collective of Radical Educators (an appropriate audience, to be sure) March 16 to give the keynote address at the group’s annual conference.

Lewis reminisced about her teaching days, when she would lie to parents when it came time to discuss their child’s performance. She then said – because of her lies – the student became her “hostage” who would do what she wanted.

You may remember Karen Lewis from her days as an occupier.

Educators deliver heavy-handed lesson to kid for the crime, basically, of being a kid.

“I was being a high school kid getting on Twitter,” [Arlington, TX junior Kyron Birdine] explained.

Using an iPad, he tweeted a photo of the word YOLO (“you only live once”) and a smiley face scribbled on the essay portion of the exam, along with this declaration: “I have the TAKS test to study for, not this unneeded craziness.”

He sent it to Arlington ISD and the Texas Education Agency.

The junior, who nearly has a 3.0 grade point average and a high score on the PSAT, will be graduating under TAKS testing standards, not STAAR.

“It wasn’t for a grade,” Kyron said. “Colleges don’t see it. It didn’t benefit my personal life at all.”

But STAAR impacts the money that public schools get.

After the tweet, school officials yanked him from class, called his parents, claimed he had violated the test’s security somehow, and handed him a four-day in school suspension.

Kind of ridiculous. Kind of Stalinist, actually, unless blue lines on a white page are a STAAR state secret. It looks like they’ll hang him on this.

Any student’s cell phones will be confiscated before testing begins. If one does not turn in a cell phone to the proctor before the test and the cell phone rings during the test, a student’s test scores will be invalidated, and the proctor, along with the student, will be dealt with by an administrator. The proctor or student may wind up in legal trouble.

The real security violation in this case is that the student is openly contemptuous of the bureaucrats.

He had to delete the tweet, and apparently has taken one Twitter stream private. He has another with no tweets, and the only message there is “I’m just chill.”

Birdine sounds like a good kid, and he isn’t alone in being skeptical of the STAAR testing regime.

The testing requirements in No Child Left Behind have been a constant source of complaint by many educators over the years. The notion that children were being taught to “test well” rather than filling their heads with knowledge had a lot of support among school districts — especially those from the inner city. The standards demanded by the law meant that bad test scores could eventually lead to losing some federal dollars.

The Atlanta school system found a way around that; they simply took the test scores from inner city kids and corrected some wrong answers. Presto! They created aggregate scores that beat a lot of suburban districts.

I suppose I should mention that many of those educators got big, fat, juicy cash bonuses for doing such a fine job.

On Friday, the state of Georgia indicted 35 teachers and administrators — including the former superintendent Beverly Hall — on charges ranging from racketeering to theft.

New York Times:

Paul L. Howard Jr., the district attorney, said that under Dr. Hall’s leadership, there was “a single-minded purpose, and that is to cheat.”

“She is a full participant in that conspiracy,” he said. “Without her, this conspiracy could not have taken place, particularly in the degree it took place.”

For years there had been reports of widespread cheating in Atlanta, but Dr. Hall was feared by teachers and principals, and few dared to speak out. “Principals and teachers were frequently told by Beverly Hall and her subordinates that excuses for not meeting targets would not be tolerated,” the indictment said.

Reporters for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and state education officials repeatedly found strong indications of cheating — extraordinary increases in test scores from one year to the next, along with a high number of erasures on answering sheets from wrong to right.

But they were not able to find anyone who would confess to it.

That is until August 2010, when Gov. Sonny Perdue named two special prosecutors — Michael Bowers, a Republican former attorney general, and Robert E. Wilson, a Democratic former district attorney — along with Mr. Hyde to conduct a criminal investigation.

[...]

Ms. Parks told Mr. Hyde that the cheating had been going on at least since 2004 and was overseen by the principal, who wore gloves so as not to leave her fingerprints on the answer sheets.

Children who scored 1 on the state test out of a possible 4 became 2s, she said; 2s became 3s.

“The cheating had been going on so long,” Ms. Parks said. “We considered it part of our jobs.”

She said teachers were under constant pressure from principals who feared they would be fired if they did not meet the testing targets set by the superintendent.

Dr. Hall was known to rule by fear. She gave principals three years to meet their testing goals. Few did; in her decade as superintendent, she replaced 90 percent of the principals.

Teachers and principals whose students had high test scores received tenure and thousands of dollars in performance bonuses. Otherwise, as one teacher explained, it was “low score out the door.”

The cheaters weren’t very clever — and cost at-risk children hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal and state aid:

At Parks Middle School, which investigators say was the site of the city’s worst cheating, test scores soared right after the arrival of a new principal, Christopher Waller — who was one of the 35 named in Friday’s indictment.

His first year at Parks, 2005, 86 percent of eighth graders scored proficient in math compared with 24 percent the year before; 78 percent passed the state reading test versus 35 percent the previous year.

The falsified test scores were so high that Parks Middle was no longer classified as a school in need of improvement and, as a result, lost $750,000 in state and federal aid, according to investigators. That money could have been used to give struggling children extra academic support. Stacey Johnson, a Parks teacher, told investigators that she had students in her class who had scored proficient on state tests in previous years but were actually reading on the first-grade level. Cheating masked the deficiencies and skewed the diagnosis.

One wonders if there are school districts where the cheating is more sophisticated and better hidden. And it calls into question NCLB testing protocols that place so much emphasis on standardized tests.

This probably won’t be the last school district to suffer such ignominy.

There is no doubt that the youth of America are being recruited at breakneck speed by the progressives, both at the university level as well as elementary and high school. Many efforts are underway to expand their reach to preschool, as they attempt to start those programs at earlier and earlier ages. But what about community colleges? Surely, you don’t think they would leave any stone unturned.

Yes, they are actively working to train community college students to be “community organizers” and activists. And what a ripe audience! With tuitions rising and a large population of lower income and minority students, it is the perfect training ground.

One such effort is underway by the Rappaport Family Foundation, established by Andrew and Deborah Rappaport, one of the biggest contributors to progressive politics and financial supporters of Soros’ Center for American Progress. Their program in partnership with the New Organizing Institute, is called “The Milllennial Project.” Their catch phrase on site is “because leadership and organizing compliment ever major.” Offered is a course in organizing, so they can be sure community college students are well versed in the art of “change.”

A current publication on their site reviews the results of this project so far. Introductory pages suggest that “community college is where the struggle is.” Yet another struggle?

Community college students are ideal recruits in their eyes. From the same publication, page 5:

Since then, RFF has invested large amounts of time, energy, and more than $5 million in civic engagement initiatives led by young people, including those on university campuses, and among non-college youth. Through this work, we saw many strong and active training and advocacy organizations on 4-year university campuses. But when we looked to community college campuses – where the other half of our nation’s college students enroll – the picture looked very different. As funders of youth civic engagement, we realized that we were neglecting a critical segment of the youth population.

Do you think they are doing this out of the goodness of their hearts? Do they just want to help these young adults learn how to be leaders? Or might they have more in mind? We get that answer on page 14 of the report:

An investment in community college students is an investment in…the civic and political potential of the millennial generation. As we’ve witnessed, young people are a key constituency whose voter participation rates can swing elections. We’ve also seen the success of civic engagement programs at 4-year campuses and universities with campaigns focused on the Dream Act and student cost increases, as well as in the strong student voice in the national Occupy Wall Street Movement. We need to ignite more of the same activism on 2-year campuses.

Page 19:

We looked for programs that would prepare community college students to be a generation of committed, skilled, life-long, progressive activists.

They have planned this program using the very best in the business. Their pilot program was designed by Marshall Ganz:

…a senior lecturer in public policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He worked on the staff of the United Farm Workers for sixteen years before becoming a trainer and organizer for political campaigns, unions and nonprofit groups. He is credited with devising the successful grassroots organizing model and training for Barack Obama’s winning 2008 presidential campaign.

Ganz has done it all. From the early days with Cesar Chavez to campaigns for Nancy Pelosi and Jerry Brown to SEIU to the Screen Actors Guild to the current Organizing for America, he’s worked with them all.

You can read their entire publication to learn about the many activist organizations their initial California effort has already spawned, although most of us would never realize all of these different student initiatives were sparked by the same program.

One thing they emphasize is the importance of getting community college faculty and administration on board, but that is likely an easy task.

Their concluding statements, addressed to potential funders of this continuing effort, make it clear what the potential for this program can be:

Throughout our Initiative, we have been struck by just how below-the-radar and under-resourced community college student organizing, advocacy, and civic engagement has been until now. In the words of Campaign for College Opportunity, we see the potential for a “community college student leadership legacy for the State of California.” We do believe that the seeds of that movement are currently taking root; that the day is not far off when community college campuses will be fertile training grounds for the Millennial generation’s most effective civic leaders, and serve as the spawning grounds for the most timely campaigns for change. We encourage you as a funder and philanthropist to consider incorporating community college into your own thinking and how incorporating their talents, experience and wisdom can help you achieve your own philanthropic goals more quickly.

Unless we want to see their “philanthropic goals” take over this country, it might be wise for us to start paying close attention to the community college indoctrination movement already well underway.

Finally, Ryan Rotela the student hero of this ongoing “Jesus stomping” incident from Florida Atlantic University was vindicated as first reported by Fox News:

Florida Atlantic University (FAU) has issued a formal apology to a student that was facing academic charges after he complained about a professor who ordered the class to write the name “Jesus” on pieces of paper and then stomp on the paper.

Here in bold is my favorite part of FAU’s apology when Corey King, the university’s dean of students told Fox News:

“As a result, we feel it’s necessary to no longer offer this assignment or activity,” he said. “We did not anticipate the hurt and pain it would cause in the community.”

Well now it appears that FAU itself will continue to feel more “hurt and pain” as Florida Governor Rick Scott has reprimanded FAU and is requesting an incident report on the entire “Jesus stomping” incident from Frank Brogan, Chancellor of the Florida University System.

Governor Scott also had this to say about Ryan Rotela:

“I just spoke to Ryan Rotela and applauded him for having the courage to stand up for his faith,” Scott said in a statement. “I told him that it took great conviction and bravery to stand up and say what he was asked to do was wrong, and went against what he believed in.”

The blazing fire from this incident may be extinguished but the smoke will continue. This is because, as of this writing, Professor Poole still has his job teaching “Cultural Communications” at FAU.

So with that in mind, I recommend Professor Poole trash his existing “Cultural Communications” class lesson plans, and instead have his students study the dynamics of how this entire saga played out. Then his students might learn how “cultural communications” works in the real world. A world where just a few people have strongly held beliefs that they hold dear and are willing to stand up for, even fight and die for, if necessary.

The students would study the timeline of “hurt and pain” caused in the community by cultural insensitivity from an activist professor, who is also vice-chairman of the Palm Beach County Democratic Party.  Students would learn how the local and national community rose up to defend a brave student who was wronged, first by the professor and then by the university.

Those would-be cultural communications lessons might be worth thousands of dollars in student loans. But wait, the most meaningful and important class lessons are still to come.

In my first Tatler post on this story, I asked what if Professor Poole had requested his students stomp on the name Mohammed instead of Jesus’ name.

My new suggestion is for Poole’s students to write essays about what they think might have happened if they had been asked to do just that. Would the saga have taken a different turn?  Would their classroom have been torched?

Students must use some “cultural communications” imagination to complete this exercise.  They could also discuss the outcome if Professor Poole had asked them to stomp on the words “Torah” or “Jews” or “Gays” or “Obama” or “Martin Luther King.”

Most likely, if any of those names had been used instead of Jesus, students would have complained en mass. Then Professor Poole would have been fired immediately and that would have been the end of the story.

Finally, we have arrived at the most important class lesson.

In my second post I posed the question: “Why was there only one student in the class who found stomping on Jesus objectionable?”

The one student who did, Ryan Rotela also happens to be a devout Mormon. Rotela displayed, in the words of Governor Scott, “great conviction and bravery” when he refused the class stomp and told Professor Poole, “Never do the assignment again because it’s offensive.”

Rotela’s statement leaves one to conclude that the rest of his classmates proceeded to stomp on Jesus’ name, blindly following Professor Poole’s instructions whether they objected or not.

So now it’s time for the class to familiarize themselves with a German named Martin Niemöller (1892-1984).

Niemöller was a prominent Lutheran pastor who emerged as an outspoken public foe of Adolf Hitler and, as a result, spent seven years in Nazi concentration camps. He is best known for a series of quotations, which define for me (what has gone undefined up until this point), the class title itself, “Cultural Communications.”  Niemöller wrote:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out–
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out–
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out–
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me–and there was no one left to speak for me.

Therefore, I proclaim Ryan Rotela as the new Martin Niemoller of our time and Professor Poole’s students should remember both their names for the rest of their lives.

For now, Professor Poole’s “Jesus stomping” students should follow Governor Scott’s example and applaud Ryan Rotela. For Rotela, as the only student not afraid to speak out may in fact, be a rare breed. The sad truth is, as the dumbing down of our education system continues, there may not be anyone left who is bold enough to speak out.

The state of Florida will now investigate why Florida Atlantic University Prof. Deandre Poole had students performing an anti-Christian ritual in class.

BOCA RATON, Fla. – State education officials will be taking a closer look at Florida Atlantic University today after Gov. Rick Scott responded to a controversial classroom exercise.

—

Gov. Rick Scott wants a detailed report from state university system Chancellor Frank Brogan regarding the incident.

“Whether the student was reprimanded or whether an apology was given is in many ways (inconsequential) to the larger issue of a professor’s poor judgment,” Scott stated in a letter to Brogan. “The professor’s lesson was offensive, and even intolerant, to Christians and those of all faiths who deserve to be respected as Americans entitled to religious freedom.”

In the guise of not offending anyone, an Alabama school has singled out Christians for offending during the week leading up to Christianity’s most important day.

There’s nothing religious about big bunnies toting colorful plastic eggs, but an Alabama elementary school is doing what they can to make sure they don’t offend anyone with an upcoming “academic egg hunt.”

Teachers at Heritage Elementary School in Madison, Ala., were informed Monday (March 25) their plans to have an “academic egg hunt” with their kindergarten and second grade students would need to be scrapped, according to a report from WHNT.com.

School Principal Lydia Davenport informed staff no activities related to or centered around any religious holiday would be allowed in the interest of religious diversity among students.

Parents are upset of course.

We should all grow up and be clear about something. There is no way that you can live in a community of any size and never ever offend anyone. It’s even more impossible, if such a concept exists, to not offend anyone when some people go around constantly looking for ways to be offended.

Being offended is a path to gaining power in our screwed up society. So some people will pursue offense, because it gives them power. It’s quicker and easier than actually achieving anything.

In this case, the school sought to cater to people who are professionally and perpetually offended. In seeking to avoid offending them, it has offended parents and kids who were just minding their own business. We have competing groups here, people who get strategically offended, and people who just want to be left alone. The latter never win.

Of course, the bunny and eggs aren’t the real issue. Most Christians don’t even care much about the bunny or the eggs. They’re distractions from what Easter is really about. The real issue is that the E-word is being made taboo.

The activity will go on, but with some changes. Teachers are being asked to use other different kinds of shapes besides eggs and to not mention the word “Easter.”

“Kids love the bunny and we just make sure we don’t say ‘the Easter bunny’ so that we don’t infringe on the rights of others because people relate the Easter bunny to religion; a bunny is a bunny and a rabbit is a rabbit,” Davenport said.

How does saying the word “Easter” infringe on anyone’s rights? How?

It only offends those looking to be offended. Placating them is conditioning people to turn their backs on traditions and faith.

Just in time for Holy Week, this “Stomp Jesus” story has developed some intriguing twists and turns. To recap, here is a quick synopsis from last week’s Tatler post titled “‘Jesus Stomping’ FAU Professor is Democrat Party Vice-Chairman in Palm Beach County, FL”

A professor at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) Davie campus named Deandre Poole teaches an “Intercultural Communication” class from a textbook by the same name.  The textbook calls for an exercise where students write the name of Jesus in large letters on a piece of paper and then stomp on it.

Enter Ryan Rotela, a student in the class who happens to be a devout Mormon. Rotela refused to stomp and complained to Professor Poole, telling him, “Never do the assignment again because it’s offensive.”  Rotela also told the professor that he was going to complain to the university.  Then, according to Rotela, FAU responded by suspending him from Poole’s class.

FAU, when asked about the incident by local television station WPEC, then issued the following statement:

Faculty and students at academic institutions pursue knowledge and engage in open discourse. While at times the topics discussed may be sensitive, a university environment is a venue for such dialogue and debate.

Shortly after, it was first reported by a local Palm Beach County website called Biz Pac Review that Professor Poole is vice-chairman of the Democratic Party of Palm Beach County.  That news was greeted by a big yawn from most in the media. One can only imagine if the professor had been vice-chairman of the Palm Beach County Republican Party and students were made to stomp on any number of prominent religious figures, but that is another story.

OK, now you are up to speed on the news from last week, so here are the latest developments.

Late on Friday, March 22nd, Fox News and the Palm Beach Post, among others, reported that FAU finally had released a statement of apology:

FAU officials issued a statement of apology, saying the exercise was optional and that no students had been disciplined as a result of it.

“This exercise will not be used again,” the statement continued. “The University holds dear its core values. We sincerely apologize for any offense this caused. Florida Atlantic University respects all religions and welcomes people of all faiths, backgrounds and beliefs.”

But the story does not end there.

More on the next page.

Just in time for Holy Week are many reports about this controversial incident involving a local college professor at Florida Atlantic University in Davie, Florida making his students literally stomp on paper after they were instructed to write the name Jesus on it.

However national media, while reporting on this incident, neglected to include the fact that the professor is also vice-chairman of the Palm Beach County Democratic Party as reported today by a popular and influential local business/political web site called Biz Pac Review.

Stomp Jesus FAU Professor is Dem Party Official

A South Florida college professor’s bizarre classroom antics have made waves for their shocking display of religious intolerance. But they were even more instructive in educating the rest of us on the alarming thought process of yet another Palm Beach County Democratic leader.

Florida Atlantic University (FAU) professor Deandre Poole instructed his intercultural communications class earlier this month to write the name “Jesus” on a piece of paper, then drop it on the floor and stomp on it.

One student, a devout Mormon, was so disturbed by the exercise that he complained to school officials, sayingPoolehad offended his religious convictions. The school responded by suspending the student from the class.

While the incident has made the news, the media has failed to report a key component of Poole’s resume: He is vice-chairman of the Palm Beach County Democratic Party. His recent actions add fire to an already-disturbing pattern of hate coming out of the local party.

The story has been widely reported in the last few days including today on the Drudge Report.

However, today Biz Pac Review was first to reveal that the professor holds a leadership position in the Palm Beach Country Democratic Party and that revelation is shaking the palm trees in Palm Beach just in time for Palm Sunday.

Now just imagine if this professor instructed his students to stomp on the name Mohammad. Then let’s say a Muslim student was offended and then got suspended for going against his professor’s instructions. Then it was revealed that the professor was vice-chairman of the Palm Beach Republican Party. Would there be riots in the streets? Would FAU be set aflame? Would this professor lose his job? You betcha is the correct answer to all of the above.

But according to WPEC ( a local television station) here’s how the school responded to an inquiry about the situation:

“Faculty and students at academic institutions pursue knowledge and engage in open discourse. While at times the topics discussed may be sensitive, a university environment is a venue for such dialogue and debate.”

Like I said, just in time for Holy Week this incident will spark some outrage and then go away quietly as the professor continues teaching his Intercultural Communications class while holding the title of vice- chairman of the Palm Beach County Democratic Party.

What are the odds that during election time Professor Poole instructs his students to work for the Democrat party and earn class credit as part of their “intercultural communications” experience?  Odds as high as the royal palms is my guess.

The Washington Times reports that a quiz given to 5th graders at a Flour Bluff school included the following question:

“Why might the United States be a target for terrorism?”

The possible multiple choice answers on the quiz are:

A: Other people just don’t like Americans
B: Decisions we made in the United States have had negative effects on people elsewhere.
C: Terrorists hate everyone
D: None of the above

Answer B was graded as the correct answer. Parents are not happy.

One student’s mother, Kara Sands, is outraged, telling local TV station KRISTV that “I’m not going to justify radical terrorists by saying we did anything to deserve that; over 3,000 people died.”

Her son was also marked wrong on a worksheet covering the Bill of Rights, because he refused to classify food and medicine as Constitutional rights.

Nothing about this story has appeared so far on the Flour Bluff ISD’s Facebook page. It includes a number of items about sports (Home of the Hornets!), and even posts about a former student who appeared on American Idol, but nothing about the falsehood it’s teaching 5th grade kids about the 9-11 terrorist attacks, an event that happened before most of these fifth graders were born, or about the actual rights described in the Constitution. Food and medicine are not among them.

Parents are reportedly taking the issue up at the next school board meeting. Setting the politics aside, the teacher is teaching things to students that are factually wrong, and should be fired on the spot.

We can’t have a culture in which success is honored, now, can we? It wouldn’t be nice.

David Fabrizio, principal of Ipswich Middle School (near Boston, of course), notified parents of his plan to eliminate the school’s Honors Night last week.

“The Honors Night, which can be a great sense of pride for the recipients’ families, can also be devastating to a child who has worked extremely hard in a difficult class but who, despite growth, has not been able to maintain a high grade point average,” Fabrizio penned in his first letter to parents.

Fabrizio also said he decided to make the change because academic success can be influenced by the amount of support a student receives at home and not all students receive the same level of emotional and academic support at home.

Fabrizio now says he’ll honor kids at the end of the year in one big assembly and it was never his intention to do anything otherwise. Which is a lie, and should not pass unnoticed.

I think he just didn’t go far enough. We can’t live with the possibility that someone somewhere might at some point find something devastating. He should cancel all sports, since success in sports can be influenced by diet and genes and by how maniacal some parents get by trying to live out their glory years through their kids. It’s just not fair that some kids can run faster and jump higher than others. It’s just not fair that some kids will study hard to get good grads and some kids don’t have to, and some kids are just lazy or lousy at academics. It’s Just. Not. Fair. for a school to single anyone out for anything, ever.

In fact, he should just cancel everything, give everyone an A+ and a trophy in every single sport and send them all home. It could potentially be devastating if he doesn’t.

I do feel compelled to ask a question: When did we turn our schools over to dishonest morons? When did this happen?

In my previous post, I mentioned in passing that school-vouchers need to be revived as a key issue for Republicans. I’ll broaden this and say that education in general should be moved to the center of the debate. For too long the Democrats have been allowed to slide by without having to talk about how they’ve helped to wreck the American public-education system. Putting education front and center will highlight the absolute devastation that liberal “education” has brought to lower-class black and white kids; it will also target an area of our public life that is a key part of the cultural “narrative” in this country.

There is a caveat to this, though: The issue has to be talked about as though it were a local issue. Voters are tired of hearing issues talked about in the abstract: “We will fund education,” “we will protect our children’s future,” “we will go after unions,” etc. It’s bogus. No one listens. Be like Reagan: frame the issue in smaller, working-class terms. Win over a new segment of Reagan Democrats. There are plenty of blue-collar types out there, many of them Democrats, who aren’t and have never been fully on-board with the interest-group liberalism of that party. I know many of these people. Long Island, where many local Democrats tend to be pretty conservative fiscally and culturally, is full of them.

There are also many younger teachers who are seeing how difficult it is to get full-time jobs in today’s education system. They are stuck with subbing, or teaching in inner-city schools full of apathy and violence. If they do get a full-time gig, it’s with a private school or charter school, and they are surprised at the quality. I had a liberal acquaintance recently tell me she’s sick to death of the rhetoric against private schools by unions and their Democratic enablers.

Do NOT frame the issue in theoretical, abstract, elitist terms. Don’t say you’re going to abolish the Department of Education. (Good idea, but not prudent at this juncture.) Don’t say anything except that Democrats are destroying education, have been doing so for at least 50 years, and that’s it’s time for a change. Then lay out an agenda: better standards, foreign-language instruction at earlier ages, English grammar, funding for science, etc. Lay off tax cuts for a minute and first win over some people with other dinner-table issues.

“But, but, but…that’s abandoning our principles of tax cuts!” No, it’s not. Who said anything about abandoning that? It’s simply forcing the other side to talk about an issue they understandably don’t want to confront. It’s not “re-branding”; it’s putting your full brand forward. Liberals have NO ideas on education. NONE. The record is pure failure.

There needs to be some heavy linkage here too, including tying the issue of education to urban blight in general. Detractors will say that Republicans have tried this before and that it hasn’t worked, the media doesn’t listen, the culture’s rigged, blah blah blah. Well, you have to try. If you hammer away at this loudly and often enough, it will become part of the so-called national debate. It should be part of the more general strategy of putting the Left on the defensive. I know it’s tough with the media. But the way to handle the media’s power is by refusing to answer every little charge of “racism” and instead hammering away at some fresh new issues. They will eventually be forced to cover what we’re talking about.

Keep everyone on their toes by triangulating, linking, refusing to answer “racism” charges, and introducing frequently ignored issues. Change the subject frequently and don’t let them get too comfortable. When they think they have the answers, change the questions. Stage media stunts. Contracts with America, Tea Party rallies in Washington. (How about a Contract with the Children of America?) Take a page out of Rand Paul’s book and hammer away at something seemingly irrelevant and insignificant. Was the federal government about to drone us all to death while we sipped our lattes at Starbucks? No, but Paul dominated the news cycle by essentially staging a 13-hour magic show in which he used a very-nearly-fringe viewpoint to trick even liberals into agreeing with him. If we can figure out a way to do THAT with every issue, or at least a few issues, we can regain some control.

Two years ago yesterday, the Honshu Earthquake, along with the subsequent tsunami, devastated the north shore of Japan.  At the time, I wrote a series of articles on the earthquake, tsunami, and the subsequent major accident in the Fukushima Daiichi and Daini reactors.

The first of those was called “Fear the Media Meltdown, Not the Nuclear One“. In this series, I made the point that the actual damage from the radiation would be relatively minor, with few or no long-term health effects — after all, there had been no observable long-term health effects except for plant workers at Chernobyl, and this was never going to be as big as Chernobyl.

For this I was roundly reviled, including by one lunatic who suggested the Navy was going to drop hydrogen bombs on the reactors to keep them from blowing up.

Two years later, here’s a story from Bloomberg: “Fukushima Radiation Proves Less Deadly Than Feared“.

The headline, even then, is a little bit exaggerated. It should have been “Fukushima Radiation Has No Detectable Effects Outside Immediate Area of Reactors”.

Here’s a quote:

And what of the lasting threat from radiation? Remarkably, outside the immediate area of Fukushima, this is hardly a problem at all. Although the crippled nuclear reactors themselves still pose a danger, no one, including personnel who worked in the buildings, died fromradiation exposure. Most experts agree that future health risks from the released radiation, notably radioactive iodine-131 and cesiums-134 and – 137, are extremely small and likely to be undetectable.

Even considering the upper boundary of estimated effects, there is unlikely to be any detectable increase in cancers in Japan, Asia or the world except close to the facility, according to a World Health Organization report. There will almost certainly be no increase in birth defects or genetic abnormalities from radiation.

Even in the most contaminated areas, any increase in cancer risk will be small. For example, a male exposed at age 1 has his lifetime cancer risk increase from 43 percent to 44 percent. Those exposed at 10 or 20 face even smaller increases in risk — similar to what comes from having a whole-body computer tomography scan or living for 12 to 25 years in Denver amid background radiation in the Rocky Mountains. (There is no discernible difference in the cancer rates between people who live in Denver and those in Los Angeles or New York.)

Rather than stand as a warning of the radiation danger posed by nuclear power, in other words, Fukushima has become a reminder that uninformed fears aren’t the same as actual risks.

There are few joys in life comparable than being able to say “I told you so.”

He said, smugly.

This one comes via Weasel Zippers, who has nothing to say except for “So dumb, so, so, so, so dumb.” Here’s the story:

A Michigan elementary school is defending its decision to confiscate a third-graders batch of homemade cupcakes because the birthday treats were decorated with plastic green Army soldiers.

Casey Fountain told Fox News that the principal of his son’s elementary school called the cupcakes “insensitive” — in light of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.

“It disgusted me,” he said. “It’s vile they lump true American heroes with psychopathic killers.”

Now, I like to think of myself as more of a wordsmith than Weasel Zippers could ever hope to be, so I’d like to just say…

So dumb, so, so, so, so dumb.

After all the howling and vituperative whining from left-wingers it turns out Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) was absolutely correct when he said Harvard Law School had significant numbers of what might reasonably be called “communists.”

These “communists” adhere to a bizarre school of legal thought called critical legal theory. The brilliant Judge Alex Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals describes critical legal studies (CLS) as “horse manure.”

Critical legal theory is anti-law. It’s like throwing a shrapnel grenade into a packed courtroom. Teaching it to law students is Marxist indoctrination, not education.

It takes the neo-Marxist perspective that the law is concerned with power, not justice. Because the law is a fraud perpetrated on the people, an oppressive tool of capitalism, imperialism, sexism, racism, and whatever other ism it is currently fashionable to attack, the legal system should be criticized endlessly as a means of tearing it down.

If you’re a communist it’s natural to embrace critical legal theory as a way of wrecking American society.

The issue arose recently when Jane Mayer, a reporter on the New Yorker’s anti-conservative beat, unearthed a three year old speech the freshman senator made in which he described Barack Obama as “the most radical” president “ever to occupy the Oval Office.”

Obama “would have made a perfect president of Harvard Law School” because “there were fewer declared Republicans in the faculty when we were there than communists!” said Cruz. “There was one Republican. But there were 12 who would say they were Marxists who believed in the communists’ overthrowing the United States government.”

Like most Americans, Cruz wasn’t using the plural form of the word communist with the precision of a political theory scholar. He was referring to people who believe that markets are fundamentally unjust and that physical force should be used to create a classless society. They believe in extreme, forced equality and boring sameness at the expense of freedom and individual rights.

A Cruz spokeswoman explained that her employer’s “substantive point was absolutely correct:  in the mid-1990s, the Harvard Law School faculty included numerous self-described proponents of ‘critical legal studies’ – a school of thought explicitly derived from Marxism – and they far outnumbered Republicans.” (For more on law school radicalism see Walter Olson’s wonderful book, Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America.)

Naturally, Cruz, who earned his J.D. magna cum laude at Harvard Law School in 1995, has been vilified by left-wingers and mocked by the antique media for speaking truth to power.

He is portrayed as a liar, a bully, a lunatic, and –gasp!— a McCarthyite.

(Of course, the late Sen. Joe McCarthy had nothing to do with much of what has come to be known as McCarthyism. And he was correct about the presence of real, live, pro-Soviet Communist agents in the U.S. government, as M. Stanton Evans proved in his exhaustively researched book, Blacklisted By History.)

Left-wingers who apparently have no understanding of critical legal studies and its connection to communism trashed Cruz on cue.

For accurately describing his Harvard experience, the senator has been viciously attacked as a McCarthy wannabe by leftists such as Obama stenographer Greg Sargent, MSNBC halfwits Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow, feral character assassin Michael Tomasky, the clueless Steve Kornacki, and a large echo chamber of radical journalists and useful idiots.

Cruz may not have put together a list of Bolsheviks at Harvard, but I’ve compiled one.

Harvard has been the center of the CLS movement for decades, a fact Time acknowledged in 2005. The magazine identified Harvard law professors Roberto Mangabeira Unger (#1), Morton Horwitz (#2), and Duncan M. Kennedy (#3) as “three of the best-known” CLS adherents.  (Kennedy is also a member of the far-left Democratic Socialists of America and the radical, pro-terrorist National Lawyers Guild. Bernardine Dohrn, incidentally, used to be an organizer for the NLG.)

Other “Crits” on the Harvard faculty are Mark Tushnet (#4) and David W. Kennedy (#5). In a 1981 law review article titled “The Dilemmas of Liberal Constitutionalism,” Tushnet wrote that if he were a judge he “would decide what decision in a case was most likely to advance the cause of socialism.”

Crits Northeastern University law professor Clare Dalton (#6) and University of Wisconsin law professor emeritus David Trubek (#7) taught at Harvard Law but failed to earn tenure.

CLS-friendly law professors with ties to Harvard are easy to find. Yale’s Jack Balkin (#8) and Georgetown’s Gary Peller (#9) and Louis Michael Seidman (#10) (author of the infamous column “Let’s Give Up On the Constitution”) all received their law degrees from Harvard. So did academic Peter Gabel (#11) (who is also associate editor at leftist magazine Tikkun).

Stanford professor Robert W. Gordon (#12), who has a Harvard law degree, organized a campaign at Harvard Law in support of Dalton and Trubek when they were trying to get tenure. Gordon whined at the time that Harvard had engaged in “red-baiting” the two academics.

CLS enthusiast Mark G. Kelman (#13), a highly cited law professor and vice dean of Stanford Law School, also earned his law degree from Harvard.

And don’t forget that while Barack Obama was a law student at Harvard, he studied under CLS guru Unger. Moreover, the late Derrick Bell (#14), Obama’s racist, Marxist mentor at Harvard Law, was a proponent of critical race theory, the multiculturalist Left’s race-obsessed spinoff of critical legal theory.

Harvard is not the only university infected by CLS-loving communists.

In the groves of academe today such communists are mainstream or close to it.

Now this is a story all about how, gun freakouts turned school life upside down…

According to the The Times of Beaver, Pa., the receptionist on Thursday called 19-year-old Travis Clawson, a student at Ambridge Area High School, to remind him of an appointment and heard Clawson’s voice mail greeting, his own rendition of the theme to the 1990s hit show starring Will Smith. She thought she heard the words “shooting people outside of the school,” The Times reported, though the actual words of the song are, “And all shooting some b-ball outside of the school.”

The receptionist called the police, who put all Beaver County schools on lockdown while they looked for Clawson, who, it turned out, was in his guidance counselor’s office. Police took him into custody. He said he was just imitating the show’s theme song, which features Will Smith rapping the words written by Quincy Jones, and The Times reported, the district attorney said authorities listened closely to the phone greeting and decided Clawson was right. He was released.

Officials said that even though it was not a real security situation, everybody in the school system did what they should in light of the reported threat, The Times reported.

The receptionist involved had never, not one time, ever seen this?

Airsoft BB guns are not real guns. Photos of airsoft guns are not real guns. Some teachers, though, are hysterical idiots. Tony Katz has the story on his web site:

[Joseph C.] Phillips, best known for his role as Lt. Martin Kendall on The Cosby Show, lives with his wife and three sons in the San Fernando Valley. In addition to being a regular fill-in host for Larry Elder on KABC radio in Los Angeles, he owns Daddy J’s Wingshack, where his 15-year-old son works and earned the money for an Airsoft bb gun. Last week his son brought a digital camera to school to show his friends a picture of the Airsoft.

On my radio show Saturday, Phillips explained that as his son was showing off the single photo, his Social Studies teacher, a Mr. James DeLarme, walked by. As his son described the incident, DeLarme “snatched” the camera out of his hand and asked him about the photo. When his son explained that it was a picture of an Airsoft bb gun, DeLarme declared the police would have to be notified and promptly left the room to confer with another teacher. The two teachers scrolled through all the photos on the camera, finally handing it back to the boy. Then, in front of all the students, DeLarme asked him, “Do you have any animosity towards your classmates?” and “Are you angry at anyone at school?”

The school reportedly never even notified the parents that a teacher had snatched the student’s property, rifled through his photos and threatened him with police action. The teacher involved has a history of anti-firearm (but not anti-airsoft gun) activism, but evidently doesn’t know a real gun from a toy. The school backed the teacher.

Common sense is dying in this country.

I understand having a snap reaction to seeing what looks like a photo of a gun. Some BB guns are built to look like the real thing, but even an informed glance at a photo of one should be enough for a knowledgeable person to figure out that they’re not looking at a real firearm. What we don’t seem to have are enough people who know the first thing about firearms, in positions of power over our kids.

Is it too much to ask that our educators have some real-world education?

Related:

‘Tiny Terrorists’ Caught Up in Anti-Gun Hysteria

A few days back, many in the media got the vapors over a three-year-old speech in which Ted Cruz, then a candidate now a US senator, mentioned his belief that there are more Marxists professors at Harvard University than there are Republican. “McCarthyism!” they cried in unison while pretending not to be singing from the same sheet of music.

Set aside the fact that there are more Marxist professors at many universities across America than there are Republican professors.

I’ve been waiting to see if anyone in the media would bring this up. To my knowledge, no one has.

Ted Cruz isn’t the only person to bring up Marxist professors as a fact at US universities.

In one of his autobiographies, Dreams From My Father, Barack Obama wrote that during his time at Occidental College, he chose his friends “carefully” to “avoid being mistaken for a sellout.” Those friends were, “the politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors.” That’s on page 100 of his book.

You can hear him speak the words for yourself. Here is an excerpt from the audiobook.

It’s evident from the tone that not only did Obama know Marxist professors at his college, he found their presence uncontroversial. Occidental is not Harvard, of course, but no one in the media has explored what Obama’s college associations tell us about his worldview. Several have torn after Cruz’s speech, though.

Interestingly, while the media have seized on Cruz’s remarks while ignoring Obama’s, they have also failed to note a major difference between them. Cruz was clearly criticizing Marxist professors in his 2010 speech. According to Obama’s own words in his own book, he sought them out.

What has happened to our country?

[A] teacher allegedly encouraged high school girls to dress up in full-length Islamic burqas and then instructed the entire class that Muslim terrorists are actually freedom fighters.

The incident occurred in a world geography class at Lumberton High School in the small town of Lumberton, Texas. The general topic of the class that day was Islam.

An unnamed student informed WND that the teacher said, “We are going to work to change your perception of Islam.”

“I do not necessarily agree with this,” the teacher also allegedly said, “but I am supposed to teach you that we are not to call these people terrorists anymore, but freedom fighters.”

The lesson plan reportedly came as part of the secretive CSCOPE program, which is being used in many public schools throughout the state of Texas. CSCOPE has come under increasing fire by parents and some teachers over the controversial content in its lesson plans. Texas CSCOPE Review, which is run by former teachers, serves as a nerve center and clearing house for stories regarding CSCOPE’s problematic lesson plans.

The Lumberton ISD has issued a statement admitting that it has purchased CSCOPE, but denying that this particular lesson plan was part of the CSCOPE curriculum. Lumberton is located in southeast Texas near Beaumont.

The best word to describe this is “desecration.”

Allegheny College’s Ford Memorial Chapel was transformed into a boudoir of sorts Wednesday night, as professional sex educators advised students in attendance how best to touch themselves and their partners to reach orgasm in what was billed as an educational seminar.

The chapel, built and dedicated in 1902, is where Catholic mass and non-denominational services are conducted every week at the private liberal arts college in northwestern Pennsylvania. But all that took a back pew to Wednesday’s festivities, dubbed “I Heart the Female Orgasm” and hosted by a variety of student groups on campus.

The two sex educators, Marshall Miller and Kate Weinberg, talked students through a variety of masturbation techniques during the event.

The story is pretty lurid, but probably only skims the surface of what happened. The college chaplain was cool with hosting the event in the church.

Chaplain Jane Ellen Nickel, who conducts non-denominational Christian services each Sunday and manages the office of Spiritual and Religious Life, said in an email to The College Fix that she saw nothing wrong with the event, and hoped students would feel comfortable attending a religious service there later.

“I don’t have a problem with it being held in the chapel. The program advocates responsible, respectful decision-making regarding sexual behavior, and includes the option waiting for marriage, a message that resonates with many students of faith. While the name may have some shock value, the event itself is consistent with our policy of opening the building to campus groups. We would love it if students at such an event experience the chapel as a welcoming space, and then feel encouraged to attend a religious service or program.”

Just a guess, but students who are genuinely curious about the taboo subject of faith aren’t likely to seek it or find it with that chaplain.

Tuition at Allegheny college runs about $18,000 per semester.

Yikes.

The fliers touted new ballfields, science labs and modern classrooms. They didn’t mention the crushing debt or the investment bank that stood to make millions.

In early 2008, residents of Placentia and Yorba Linda approved a $200 million school construction bond after reading those fliers and being assured repeatedly that “their money will be spent wisely.”

What happened instead was that Measure A led to a debt so large and long lasting that it mortgaged the future of their children’s children.

With no public discussion, the school board had hired George K. Baum & Co. and its staff of political strategists to help push the measure through so the district could continue an ambitious building spree.

After the election, the board allowed the bank to sell some of the costliest bonds ever issued by a California public agency. Just one $22 million borrowing from 2011 will cost taxpayers nearly 13 times that amount – $280 million – to repay.

Those bonds, known to Wall Street traders as capital appreciation bonds, are like a loan for which no principal or interest payments are made for 35 years. Interest is charged on a growing pile of unpaid interest, causing the balance to balloon.

“It’s another method of pushing debt to future generations,” said state Treasurer Bill Lockyer, who compares the bonds to “payday loans.”

“I just don’t understand how these board members got away with this,” said Alexandria Coronado, a former member of the Orange County Board of Education. “These people need to be recalled.”

This is yet another story of wandering through a bureaucratic labyrinth that ostensibly has rules in place to prevent such a thing but finds people getting lost along the way.

The story of how Baum pushed California schools into complex bond deals that charged payments to future taxpayers is one of naïve public officials, sophisticated financiers, and laws, rules and guidelines ignored:

•It is illegal for California school officials to hire political consultants with public funds to help pass bond measures. Using the bank’s political consultants is not a legal way around that law, according to the state Office of Legislative Counsel.

•Finance experts advise school districts to sell bonds through public auctions to get the lowest interest rate and to employ independent financial advisers to review the details. Placentia-Yorba Linda, like most of Baum’s California school clients, did neither.

•State law requires that donated consulting work on an election be reported as an in-kind, or non-cash, political contribution. Baum did not disclose its consulting role on state campaign filings in three elections the Orange County Register reviewed.

Forget the long term repayment nightmare for a moment, there are already negative consequences.

Since Measure A passed in 2008, Placentia-Yorba Linda officials have struggled to find enough money to operate classrooms.

Later that year, the district eliminated some elementary music programs. It has repeatedly forced teachers to take days off without pay. And it has increased class sizes. Before the election, there were enough teachers to have 20 students in each first- and second-grade class, according to budget documents. Now those teachers have 30 students.

The district made those cuts to cope with reduced state funding even as construction firms continued with what officials call a “massive modernization program.”

The district has built four new schools since 2008. Still under construction is a $12 million concert hall that will feature a glass lobby and stage large enough for a 230-member choir.

Daily costs are eating up the district’s general fund balance, its reserve for operations. In December, the district told the state it may not meet its bills in the next two years.

No bond money can pay for teacher salaries and other operating costs.

The district superintendent who is currently refusing interviews issued a statement telling everyone not to worry.

Yeah, that should help.

More of this guy, please.

He insists that leaders can come from any background. Raised in poverty in Detroit by a semi-literate mother who was one of 24 children, he succeeded because of his faith in God and his mother’s insistence that he study hard and not accept his disadvantages as permanent. When he was 15, he almost stabbed a friend to death in a fit of anger. He went home, locked himself in a bathroom, and prayed to God to remove his anger before it prevented him from realizing his dreams of becoming a doctor. He has never had an issue with his temper since.

When asked what he thinks are the biggest obstacles facing the country, Carson singles out political correctness and the “deliberate dumbing down of our public schools.” He says, “Our schools too often want to shut people up so they can’t talk about real solutions. People who think differently tend to clam up because they think something is wrong with their ideas.” Another problem is people who indiscriminately accuse others of racism or sexism. “Illogical thinkers throw names and slurs around because they have no arguments with which to rebut their opponents,” he tells me. “Rational people have to keep hammering their points home.”

Honesty and political correctness have never gotten along, which is precisely the reason the lefty talking heads were exploding after Carson’s National Prayer Breakfast speech.

Also, for you social media types out there, the good doctor is now on Twitter:

Today I’ve officially joined the twitterverse.

— Dr. Ben Carson (@RealBenCarson) February 15, 2013

It’s on.

L.A. schools Supt. John Deasy announced Friday that 30% of a teacher’s evaluation will be based on student standardized test scores, setting off another round of contention in the nation’s second-largest school system just weeks before a critical school board election.

Leaders of the teachers union have insisted that there should be no fixed percentage for how much student test scores should count in evaluations — and that test results should serve almost entirely as a guide toward improving instruction.

Teachers’ unions have long preferred that their members be evaluated by…ok, I’m kidding, they’d prefer no serious set of evaluation criteria whatsoever. It’s interesting that this is happening in a city where Big Labor has managed to drive out even film and television production, for which it’s known.

Predictably, the unions are not amused.

Union leaders have not made opposing Deasy a litmus test for endorsement, but many union activists are open about their desire to replace him.

The last thing this hot mess of a school district (I long ago decided I would home school my daughter if LAUSD were the only option and I don’t recommend anybody spend all day with me) needs is a union crony in charge of it to keep it in a perpetual state of underachievement.

State Rep. James White (R-19) has filed a bill that would allow local school boards to create a new high school elective in Texas public schools: Firearms education.

“The origins of liberty in our great nation reside in large part with the idea espoused in the Second Amendment,” said Representative White. “As a conservative, I want Texas students to have the option to learn more about both this critical part of our Constitution, and the practical knowledge of how to safely operate the common arms Texans use for hunting and self-defense.”

HB 1142 would educate students about firearm safety and training, and hunter’s safety. All instructors would be required to be a qualified and certified handgun instructor, or a licensed peace officer employed by a local law enforcement agency. This optional course would involve students learning proper maintenance, cleaning, and safe use of common firearms such as: pistols, revolvers, rifles and shotguns. The bill would also provide for education on the history and importance of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Read more on White’s bill here.

James White is part of the class of 2010 in the Texas legislature, in which Texas Republicans won over 100 seats in the state House for the first time in state history. White defeated the last east Texas Democrat then elected to the state House, finishing a change that had been underway for years as Texans abandon the statist Democrats for the more business and family friendly GOP.

Rep. White is a black conservative Republican who served as a combat training officer in the US Army. He is also a former high school teacher.