The CRs also are circulating a petition for a protected zone around the Marine recruiting center. Funny enough, the same libs who probably have no problem with speech-free zones around abortion clinics are balking at applying the idea to recruiting centers.
The varsity lacrosse players displayed the question, "Will You Go To The Prom With Me? Yes or No?" on their bottoms, which they bared during a junior varsity game last Thursday.
Officials suspended the 13 players for an undetermined number of games and ordered them to perform 20 hours of community service. They also were suspended from school for one day.
Campbell accepted the invitation by patting the back of the player who displayed the word "Yes."
Many analysts were predicting that the gross domestic product (GDP) would weaken a bit more — to a pace of just 0.5 percent — in the first quarter. Earlier this year, some economists thought the economy would actually lurch into reverse during the opening quarter. Now, they say they believe that will likely happen during the current April-to-June period.
Several students at Centennial High School have picked up on a trend to shave lines into their eyebrows. They say it's a fashion statement; school administrators, however, contend it's a gang sign.
Centennial administrators are telling students who shave the lines that they can't return to school until they take care of the problem — by shaving their eyebrows off. Four students have been sent home. One came back immediately with a bandage covering the shaved brow. The others are still out of school.
Assistant Principal Mark Porterfield said the students are not suspended, but they are not allowed in school until they cooperate.
Roads in Saudi Arabia are among the most dangerous in the world, with a high rate of traffic accidents. But one type of victim stands out: female teachers, who are dying at alarming rates because of long commutes through the desert to reach schools in remote locations.
A study released in October by the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology found that female teachers commuting to their jobs have about a 50 percent greater chance of getting into car accidents than average Saudi citizens. Its findings were based on figures from the late 1990s...
Women are not allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia, so the teachers must hire drivers — sometimes sharing rides in minivans, leaving home as early as 3 a.m. Many of the roads leading to the remote schools are windy, unpaved and full of potholes.
"It's as if Saudi (female) teachers are doomed to bid farewell to their families every day and embark on a journey they may not return from," wrote Hasan al-Harthi in Al-Hayat newspaper.
A suspended middle school teacher out on bail for allegedly having sex with two students will be back in court Tuesday after police say they caught her having sex with one of them again.Apparently they've done this a couple dozen times. He must be some stallion--apparently he was worth it, though, because she can't help but go to jail for this one. Let's hope, anyway.
By pioneering the science of seasonal hurricane forecasting, William Gray turned a university far from the stormy seas into a hurricane research mecca.What's the problem?
But last year, the long-term relationship between Gray and Colorado State University, where he has worked for nearly half a century, nearly unraveled in an episode that highlights the politically charged atmosphere that surrounds the global warming debate.
University officials told Gray that handling media inquiries related to his forecasting required too much time and detracted from efforts to promote other professors' work.
Gray, who has emerged as a leading voice of skepticism about global warming, reacted hotly, firing off a memo to Dick Johnson, head of CSU's Department of Atmospheric Sciences, and others. He didn't buy the too-much-media reasoning.
Gray, an emeritus professor at CSU who has taught dozens of graduate students who populate the National Hurricane Center and other research institutions, has become increasingly vocal in his skepticism about climate change, saying the planet is warming due to natural causes.
CSU officials said late last week that they intend to support the release of Gray's forecasts as long as they continue to be co-authored by Phil Klotzbach, a former student of Gray's who earned his doctorate last summer, and as long as Klotzbach remains at CSU.
Obama wants me to believe that a candidate who: (1) was utterly supine and silent for 20 years in his own church as racial hate was propagated by the pastor; (2) who refuses to condemn a prominent supporter and fundraiser for whom bombing American sites is still seen as a good thing, and (3) who has said not a single word on the campaign trail as his party heavyweights removed post-Abramoff earmark reforms... is a candidate who will stand up to Washington interests and change the way business is done. While helping get America past its racial issues, and healing its political divides. That a candidate talking up charter schools as part of the solution, who has received positive ratings from teachers unions for blocking them, is to be taken at face value.
50 bucks for that whole bridge, you say?
A Coffee County High School substitute teacher has been arrested in what police say appears to be a scheme to bilk money from students promised a trip to Disney World.
Police charged 39-year-old Christy Wise with theft by conversion after they say she collected more than $7,400 from students for their senior trip but never booked the reservations.
Nearly 50 students toting suitcases and bags lined up outside Coffee County High on Friday waiting to start their vacation, but the bus never came and Wise never showed up.
Local school officials say they have no policies concerning social networking pages or blogs kept by teachers. But they said that online improprieties would fall under general guidelines requiring proper behavior in and outside school and that sketchy Web sites would be handled case by case.
"I hate to think of what's out there. . . . There's so much out there that it's hard to know what's there," said Ken Blackstone, a Prince William schools spokesman. "But as public employees, we all understand the importance of living a public life above reproach."
In Prince William, Rich Davila, a real estate company director and the father of a 6-year-old first-grader, said that when he found a substitute teacher's risque MySpace page recently, he complained to school officials and the teacher was eventually removed. School officials said they cannot comment on the teacher's case, citing personnel rules.
The teacher's page includes a painting of a young woman lifting up her dress, exposing her lingerie, and another showing her bare chest. "I felt sick to my stomach when I saw the page," Davila said. "These Web sites are the bars and restaurants of our new era. It's like running into your teacher in a restaurant and seeing them not act appropriately. It's going to come back and haunt him."
If teachers claim free speech protection under the First Amendment...the U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled that governments can fire employees if their speech harmed the workplace's mission and function.
And, the questions.
- The rules of this game get posted at the beginning.
- Each player answers the questions about themselves.
- At the end of the post, the player then tags 5-6 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves a comment, letting them know that they've been tagged and asking them read your blog. (I will email them instead--Darren)
- Let the person who tagged you know when you've posted your answer.
How will the government know to whom it will grant this federal shield? It will be necessary for the federal government to define “journalists.” It is, in effect, a federal license to practice the First Amendment. Won’t it be a comfort when your license to practice journalism is granted by the likes of John Ashcroft or Alberto Gonzales?
We can go anywhere and cover what we please because we are American citizens. Every citizen has always had freedom of the press—the freedom to print a pamphlet like Tom Paine, start a Kiplinger newsletter, or write a book like Upton Sinclair. The Internet has made it even easier to practice citizen journalism.
When the government starts to decide who is qualified to be a journalist, where does that leave bloggers? Freelance writers? Documentary filmmakers? People writing books based on investigative journalism? Where does it leave the average American who wants to speak out about their government? Can the government decide Chris Cillizza (Washington Post blogger) is a journalist but that Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) is not?
There is a false argument raging on the Internet about whether bloggers are “journalists” and whether they should be accorded the same rights and privileges. This is idiocy. The rights and privileges belong to every American citizen, whether they work for a newspaper or whether they even have a blog. For it to be any other way the government would have to be able to define what constitutes journalism. Any takers?
Why do we do this when you know I am not a terrorist, and you know I know you know I am not a terrorist? Why this costly and harassing kabuki when we both know the facts, and would agree that all this harassment is the government's way of showing "fairness," of showing that it will equally humiliate anyone in order to show its high-mindedness and sense of justice? Our politicians congratulate themselves on this as we stand in line.
A pregnant bank teller lost the twins she was carrying when she was shot in an Indianapolis bank robbery, a prosecutor said Friday.
Katherin Shuffield, who was five months pregnant, was critically wounded in the robbery Tuesday morning at a Huntington Bank branch. Police have been searching for the gunman.
On the day of the incident, Williams says the pair walked into her classroom during class and began arguing about a book. The teacher says she asked them to leave, but the mother pushed past her and grabbed a book off her desk.
According to a police report, when Williams tried to get the book back, the mother pulled the teacher's hair and threw her to the ground. Then the mother and daughter stomped on the teacher.
However, I am increasingly disturbed by the way the state of Texas is handling this matter. The wholesale rounding up and de facto incarceration of hundreds of women and children - none of whom have (sic) been individually accused of any crime - is very troublesome.
A public school district in Ohio says it has hired an independent investigator to look into allegations by parents that a teacher used an electrostatic device to burn crosses on to students' arms.
The Mount Vernon City School District has assigned an administrator to monitor the classroom of eighth-grade science teacher John Freshwater until the investigation is over.
It's the district's latest run-in with Freshwater, who last week refused to obey an order to remove a Bible on his desk from view of students.
School district officials say they are required by the U.S. Constitution not to promote religious beliefs.
Hotels are figuratively falling all over themselves to out-green each other. Most of their efforts look sincere but have a negligible effect on the environment. So you're washing fewer towels? Good for you. That's not saving the planet -- it's saving you money. You're recycling? Nice, but in many places, that's just following the law. You installed water-saving showerheads? Great, now can you convince those Americans who insist on taking two showers a day to cut back? Being socially responsible, say experts, isn't just about adopting one or even several "green" practices, but changing the way a resort and its guests think about the environment and their limited resources...
One question you must ask yourself when booking a green vacation is: How sustainable is each component? It's easy to write off a plane running on biofuel as unworkable, at least for now. But what about the golf resort that bills itself as green but then irrigates the desert in order to offer guests a lush lawn to play on? How about the full-service hotel that practically scolds you for not reusing your towels, but then stocks its minibars with overpriced water bottled in landfill-clogging plastic? And don't even get me started on cruise ships ...
When the Gilroy Unified School District deemed a South Valley Middle School English teacher and an Eliot Elementary School second grade teacher identical in every way in terms of their qualifications, a judge flipped a coin to break the tie and determine which teacher was more senior, a decision that will affect the order in which teachers who received layoff notices will be hired back if the district has the resources to do so. When the coin fell, Jessica Chessani of Eliot won the prize. At this point, she still doesn't have a job next year. But when and if the district can, it will hire the teachers back in reverse order, based on their ranking. (boldface mine--Darren)
About 300 Galena Park High School students and staff members will be tested for tuberculosis as a precaution after a student tested positive for the disease earlier this month...
The test date was chosen because health officials didn't want to interfere with upcoming TAKS testing and wanted to give parents plenty of time to turn in consent forms, Eichhorn said. (boldface mine--Darren)
Bloody Weekend: 32 Shot, 2 Stabbed, 6 Dead
CHICAGO (CBS) ― A violent and deadly weekend continues in Chicago. At least 12 people have been shot, two of them killed, since Saturday morning. Two others were stabbed in a home invasion. This comes after at least 20 people were shot, four of them killed, from Friday night through early Saturday.
There is no evidence after-school clubs or cognitive-behavioral interventions can prevent youth age 7 to 16 from joining a gang, a British review said.
“I have bitched and moaned for years about the lack of tolerance in the elitist wing of the Democratic Party, or what I refer to as the ‘Metropolitan Opera Wing.’ These are the people who talk of tolerance but the only true tolerance they ever exhibit is for their own pseudo-intellectual arrogance,” the then-Edwards adviser proclaimed in his typical profanity-peppered prose on Time magazine’s Swampland blog.
I'm in no position to argue whether or not California spends enough money per student on education--even though education consumes a full 50% of our state budget. And if it were my job being saved by this charity, I'd be plenty thankful. But looking from the outside, this is just unseemly. Honestly, aren't they playing on the guilt of parents here? "If you don't help these poor, helpless teachers, your child may suffer."
A free public school education is guaranteed by the state Constitution to every California child. But as districts grapple with proposed state funding cuts that could cause the layoffs of thousands of teachers and inflate class sizes, parents are being asked to dig deeper into their pocketbooks to help.
"Public education is free, but an excellent public education is not free at this point," said Janet Berry, president of the Davis Schools Foundation, which recently launched the Dollar-a-Day campaign, urging citizens of the city near Sacramento to donate $365 per child, grandchild or student acquaintance...
South Orange County families are being urged to donate $400 per student to save the jobs of 266 teachers in the Capistrano Unified School District.
David Long, California's education secretary, acknowledged the inequity (between those communities that can contribute extra to schools and those that cannot) but said money from nonprofit organizations and federal funds earmarked for poorer schools help level the playing field somewhat. However, he said the only way to fix the state's finances is for the Legislature to approve Schwarzenegger's budget stabilization act, which would put away surplus revenue during economic booms for use in leaner times.
Beginning next Tuesday, Shvarts will be displaying her senior art project, a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself "as often as possible" while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process.
Global warming is not pushing the robin to extinction. Au contraire: It’s expanding the robin’s range northward, into places where it's never been seen. Robins are venturing so far north that they’ve even been sighted in the Inuit territory of northern Canada, where, Sen. John McCain tells us, there isn’t even a word for the birds...
But, of course, it’s not true. Like the tale of the endangered polar bears that happen to be at or near record population levels, the robin story is yet another climate confabulation. It ranks with the death of frogs in the mountains of Colombia now shown to be caused not by global warming, but by the introduction of fatal fungus on the shoes of concerned ecotourists...
There are plenty of words in Inuit, or Eskimo, describing our red-breasted harbingers of spring. What’s a little disturbing is how the myth of the robin persists, when it is so easy to find the truth.
Oldham County family court Judge Tim Feeley said in a ruling published Monday that 14-year-old Michael Ryan can attend St. Xavier High School because that's where he wants to go.
His divorced parents disagreed over whether their son should go to the religious school, which his mother Susan Bisig wanted.
The principal of Kent Gardens Elementary School in McLean told students this month that they are not allowed to play the game of chasing and yelling "You're it!" at recess after determining the playground pastime had gotten out of hand.
"We're seeing our food cost growing at a rate that is putting pressure on our budget. Increases in corn, wheat, milk -- it's really hitting us," Goldstein said. "We're having to be creative, but we're worried it's not sustainable."
Tomi-Ann Roberts, director of the feminist and gender studies program that publishes "The Monthly Rag," said participants in her program were surprised when this situation arose.
"We were like 'whoa ... wow ... wait.' Obviously, there are some men here on this campus who are very angry at our flier," Roberts said.
In response, Robinson and a friend created their flier, which provided tips on chainsaw etiquette, detailed a sexual position from Men's Health magazine and provided trivia about a sniper rifle — what Robinson called information for the stereotypical macho man. Staff members removed The Bag within hours of receiving complaints that the publication was threatening...
"We quickly determined this was one of the worst cases of the year," said Adam Kissel, director of FIRE, because the parody publication was singled out. "It's such an obvious double standard. The fact that 'The Monthly Rag' mentions male castration alongside an announcement for a feminist porn activist provides the same juxtaposition they're claiming for Robinson of violence and sexuality."
As a private institution, Colorado College is not bound by the same limitations for controlling speech that public institutions are, Kissel said. However, they have a contractual obligation because they include free speech as a value in the student handbook.
Reginald Fentress wants to succeed Yvonne B. Acey as president of the Memphis Education Association, and he is not willing to wait. However, the Memphis Education Association board of directors has said he must.
The board voted April 1 not to include Fentress’ name, or that of any other African-American candidate, on the ballot for the 2008-10 presidential term. Since Acey is African American, Fentress was ruled ineligible to run for the office because the next MEA president must be white.
“We voted to follow the bylaws,” said Acey.
According to bylaws formed when all-white and all-black teacher associations joined in the mid-1970s: “The position of president shall alternate from white to ethnic minority.”
“I have directed that the program be stopped immediately. No further activities under the current framework will be conducted.”
Last fall, University of Delaware President Patrick Harker appeared to pull the plug, once and for all, on a totalitarian-style dorm program for indoctrinating freshmen in the full complement of today’s radical dicta. But in fact, as the Wilmington News-Journal now reports, Harker passed the buck, as university administrators are wont to do in time of controversy, by lobbing the program to the faculty for what has proven to be a feckless “review”...
However, the faculty’s overriding failure, as the News-Journal and others strongly decried, was not to give example to all higher education by terminating the program, simply and irrevocably. Instead, as Faculty Senate President Alan Fox now vaguely notes, the faculty anticipates approving, later in the year, a “new program” with a continued but less narrow focus on diversity and gender. Moreover, the same Gestapo-like Residence Life administrators, who ought to have been summarily fired, will continue to administer it, albeit with annual faculty oversight.
U.D. President Harker got it right when he decreed — with false promise as it turned out — that the campus’s repressive dorm program had to “be stopped immediately.” Shame on him, and all other university administrators, trustees and professors who cower before despotic campus “change agents” intent on upending American society. Shame on them all for flagrantly violating the public trust.
Recently, I wrote about Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy (TIZA), a K-8 charter school in Inver Grove Heights. Charter schools are public schools and by law must not endorse or promote religion.
Evidence suggests, however, that TIZA is an Islamic school, funded by Minnesota taxpayers.
"The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more."
Mose Jefferson, the eldest brother and chief political strategist of embattled U.S. Rep. William Jefferson, was indicted by a federal grand jury Wednesday on charges that he bribed Ellenese Brooks-Simms, the former president of the Orleans Parish School Board, to ensure her support for a computer-based algebra curriculum he was selling.
Two of the seven felony counts faced by Mose Jefferson, 65, stem from what federal prosecutors describe as two attempts to cover up the bribes by meeting with Brooks-Simms and trying to persuade her to give the feds a bogus explanation for the $140,000 she accepted from him.
Unbeknownst to Jefferson, Brooks-Simms had already cut a deal with the government. At both meetings, she wore a wire to record her conversations with Jefferson, according to a source close to the case.
The charges against Mose Jefferson have no direct bearing on William Jefferson, who is awaiting trial in Virginia on 16 unrelated corruption charges.
But the case does have close links to the congressman. John Lee, the founder of JRL Enterprises (the company that sells I CAN Learn), has held fundraisers for him. William Jefferson has been a big supporter of "I CAN Learn," arranging for at least some of the $45 million in congressional earmarks the company has received.
The exact amount of money the congressman set aside for the company is unclear, because until recently bills containing earmarks passed by Congress did not identify which member inserted the request.
Lee said JRL Enterprises did nothing inappropriate.
In a previous interview, Lee described the commissions paid to Mose Jefferson as the going rate for "introductions to the decision-makers." Lee has said he does not know which members of Congress arranged for JRL's earmarks; regardless of who inserted them, the company's hiring of Mose Jefferson was unrelated, he said.
To curtail Japan's overweight population, the Japanese health ministry recently mandated that all waistlines among its 56 million workers over age 40 be below “regulation size” of 33.5 inches (for men). Any company failing to bring its employees’ weight under control--as well as the weights of their family members--will be fined up to 10% of its earnings by the government.
Companies will be required to cut the number of overweight workers and dependents by 10 percent as of 2012 and 25 percent by 2015. Failing to do so will result in a surcharge of as much as 10 percent on contributions to a fund for elderly care. Insurance groups paid 6.4 trillion yen into the fund in 2004.
Must be an election coming up, or something.
UNPRECEDENTED EXECUTIVE AUTHORITY -- Bad when it's used to fight terrorists, but good when it's used to fight "global warming!"
That's the idea behind a new study from a team of researchers at the University of Colorado law school, who worked full time for nearly six months on a project that could help the next U.S. president make sweeping climate-change policies -- fast. The new report probes the edges of executive orders and lays out the authority the next president could use to introduce global-warming policies without waiting for legislation to wind its way through the notoriously slow congressional machine.
"Given the extreme importance of climate change, this is a way for the next president to be able to take rapid action," said Kevin Doran, a researcher at CU's Center for Energy and Environmental Security. . . .
The report is part of a larger project, the Presidential Climate Action Project, which has created "a bold, comprehensive and non-partisan plan for presidential leadership rooted in climate science," according to its Web site, www.climateactionproject .com.
Guess the days of worrying about the imperial presidency have come to an end.
I'm sorry to see unemployment climb to 5.1%, but by historic standards, that's not exactly a "grim picture." For example, nothing like the unemployment rates that, along with runaway inflation, propelled Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980. But I wondered about a more recent comparison. Do you remember 1996, when Bill Clinton swept to an easy re-election victory over Bob Dole, on the basis of what pretty much everyone in the press considered a near-perfect economy? No "pink slip nation" in 1996!
Actually, though, the unemployment rate in November 1996, when Clinton rode a soaring economy to victory, was 5.4%. That's right--three tenths of a percent higher than the "grim picture" of a "pink slip nation" painted by this month's unemployment report.
This may well be true; we're overdue for a recession -- we haven't had a really deep one in over 25 years -- and my sense is that there remains a lot of economic idiocy still to be wrung out of the system, which is what recessions are for.
Speaking for myself, though, I'm not an econo-blogger. I tend to be over-pessimistic, but I guess I have tuned out a lot of the media econo-doomsaying because they've been predicting massive economic collapse for pretty much my entire sensate life and so far it hasn't come. Plus, at the moment they're playing their usual pre-election gloom-and-doom game in the hopes of helping the Democrats.
Which doesn't mean that the economy is necessarily doing better than they say, since their bias is exceeded only by their laziness and ignorance. As I noted some years ago about their Iraq reporting, the fact that they're transparently playing up bogus bad news doesn't mean that there isn't genuine bad news that they're not reporting, because reporting that would require knowledge and effort. So you can't just apply "Kentucky windage" and assume that things are better than the reports say. They may actually be worse, just in a different way than is reported . . .
An anti-violence rally at George Washington High School turned ugly Thursday when a series of fights broke out in a crowd of students being dismissed for the day.
Parents and students had gathered at 3 p.m. to protest what they said has been escalating violence between black and Latino students at the school, at 3535 E. 114th St. on the Far Southeast Side.
Tensions between the groups have persisted for years, parents and students said. But this week has been particularly violent, with several flare-ups that caused some parents to pull children out of school for their safety. Several parents said they would not allow their children to return to school until the violence was addressed.
The protest came on the heels of a larger rally Chicago Public Schools held earlier this week calling for an end to the shootings that have claimed 20 students this year. (emphasis mine--Darren)
Like an online Goliath girding for battle, Craigslist.org moved Thursday to quash a Sacramento man who launched the first national blog about the classified ad Web site that has successfully cultivated a populist community and image.
Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster fired off an e-mail to blogger Tim White that told the 38-year-old to change the name of his site, a move that would make it tough to find.
"We need you to stop using the infringing domain CRAIGSLISTBLOG.ORG immediately, and arrange for transfer of it to us asap – using/selling/transferring infringing domains is illegal, and penalties up to $100,000 per domain can be applied," Buckmaster wrote to White.
Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster, feeling media pressure, on Friday acknowledged he had been "acting like a jerk" a day earlier to push a Sacramento man to cease and desist in his Craigslist blog.
Buckmaster, while saying he was "getting some well-deserved flak" for his heavy-handed e-mail to Tim White, also charged that White had placed "deceptive" ads on his unofficial blog before taking them down and contacting the media Thursday.
"We have no interest in shutting down blogs about Craigslist, critical or otherwise, and have never tried to do so," he wrote on the official Craigslist blog that was born Thursday. "But in the strange world of trademarks and copyright, it's poor practice to allow a confusingly similar domain or business name to go unchallenged."
I--Growing up in Cold War Sacramento
