Connecticut School Bans Physical Contact

MILFORD, Conn. (CBS) ―

A Connecticut middle school principal has laid down the law: You put your hands on someone -- anyone -- in any way, you're going to pay.

A violent incident that put one student in the hospital has officials at the Milford school implementing a "no touching" policy, according to a letter written by the school's principal.

East Shore Middle School parents said the change came after a student was sent to the hospital after being struck in the groin.

Principal Catherine Williams sent out a letter earlier in the week telling parents recent behavior has seriously impacted the safety and learning at the school.

"Observed behaviors of concern recently exhibited include kicking others in the groin area, grabbing and touching of others in personal areas, hugging and horseplay. Physical contact is prohibited to keep all students safe in the learning environment," Williams wrote.

Students and parents are outraged. They said the new policy means no high-fives and hugs, as well as horseplay of any kind. The consequences could be dire, Williams warned in the letter.

"Potential consequences and disciplinary action may include parent conferences, detention, suspension and/or a request for expulsion from school," Williams wrote.

Many think the school's no tolerance policy goes way too far. Others said it's utterly ridiculous.

"Now it's almost as if it's a sanitized school. Where you have to keep your distance from everybody? And that's not what school is about," one father said.

"What if they are out on the playground at recess, or in gym class?" parent Kathy Casey wondered. "You know, gym class is physical."

This is just more of the ongoing foolishness from public school educrats. Obviously, this dumbass of a principal is either too stupid or too lazy to be able to distinguish between affection or play and potential violence. Such a person should not be in a position to exercise authority over anyone else, child or adult.

Ignoring the fact that this silly policy will make it nigh well impossible for students to play any kind of competitive sport, there are other ramifications. Presumably if two students are walking along together and one trips and falls, helping one's friend back to his feet will be considered a punishable offense.

In the dog-training business, we taught owners that you are always teaching an animal or child, by virtue of your actions and reactions towards them. Accordingly, we suggested that people be extra cautious, to be sure they were not teaching something unintended and undesirable.

The students of East Shore Middle School have just been taught an important lesson: that the school is run by a flock of jackasses who are not worth of their respect.

I see that the county has spent over a million dollars to install artificial turf and lighting at Woodlawn High.

I have heard this is happening at all county high schools.

What purpose does this serve, especially at Woodlawn, which is failing academically?

From what I have seen inside several schools, money would have been better spend on new classroom seating. We drug students for ADHD: how much the problem may be caused by chairs that don't sit evenly on the floor, and are uncomfortable?

Not to mention the atrocious rest room facilities at some middle and high schools. In one high school, the boys' restrooms have had missing toilets and urinals for some time, and the water in the toilets and sinks is a rusty brown. God help us if the students are consuming the same water from fountains and the cafeteria.

 Note: I'll publish Smith's answer, when and if I receive one.

Dear Ms. Dorsey:

I am in receipt of your postcard that says there are some communications from Johns Hopkins that I am not receiving.

I have had several discussions with representatives of the Office of Annual Giving, which heretofore have been of the most amiable nature. Please consider this my final, and non-negotiable answer to that postcard. There are but two chances of my giving money to JHU: (1.) Slim  (2.) None The institution collects upwards of 3/4 billion per year in Federal tax money.  I consider my involuntary contribution, as gobbled into the gaping maw of the IRS and excreted through the cloaca of Congress to be more than sufficient. Moreover, JHU openly and willingly accepts hundreds of millions of dollars in donations from the Soros clan, and Michael Bloomberg, among the wealthiest of the USA's ultra-wealthy parlor socialists, and enemies of Consitutional freedom.  I will not voluntarily have my hard-earned dollars commingled with those of such execrable people. Out of concern for your student volunteers, I suggest that you be certain any and all of them refrain from telephoning me, now or in the foreseeable future. I assure you that any such telephone calls will be met with the most vile insults I am capable of dredging up, and we wouldn't want to hurt the little darlings'  feelings, now would we? Wishing you absolutely everything you deserve, I remain,  

 

Stan M------- 

But Berry may just find herself an unwitting hero, in the same sense that Rosa Parks did the day she had her fill of being sent to the back of the bus.

Ironically, it was the Monday after the attack on Berry that Mayor Dixon and her yes-man, Police Commissioner Bealfeld, held a press conference to boast about the reduction in the murder rate for the first quarter of the year. Only 50 people were murdered, a reduction of "thirty percent" over the first quarter of last year. But that reduction amounts to only 21 fewer murders, a number that Baltimore's thug element has demonstrated that it can rack up on its scoreboard in no more than a weekend or two.

A change in the number of murders over as short a period as three months is too statistically insignificant to be a bragging point. Moreover, if the mayor wants to credit Bealfeld's tough new policies and new efficiencies in Prosecutor Jessamy's office, she had better be prepared to demonstrate a direct correlation between the policy changes and the number of murders.

Outrageously, this announcement came scarcely twelve days after the death of Zach Sowers, who had been in a coma since a beating he took last summer. In its zeal to close the case, the city cut deals with the four perpetrators that closed out the case in November, and precluded the possibility that any of them will be tried for the murder of Sowers. They will likely be out of jail before they are 30, and it's a sucker bet to say none of them will commit more violent crimes.

That's where the attack on Berry becomes important. Dixon will have to face the fact that irrespective of the number of people who actually died, the number of violent crimes has not been reduced. Nor, I suspect, has Jessamy's dismal record of obtaining convictions. Dixon can stamp her foot all day and utter platitudes such as "This might sound harsh, but I believe we have to come up with some very stern discipline action. Young people now feel, some feel, that it's acceptable, and it's not acceptable." But she cannot escape the statistics, provided ALL the statistics are revealed. And in the aftermath of Berry's attack, it will probably turn out that violent crime is being grossly under-reported. The president of the city teachers' union has said that administrators (read: principals and superintendents) routinely avoid reporting student assaults on teachers, out of a fear that more city schools will be declared "persistently dangerous" under the federal No Child Left Behind law. We can only hope that the union president has kept careful records of her own, and will reveal them.

The city will sooner or later have to face the fact that its main source of violence is black children of school age. Unlike the beat-down of Sarah Kreager, nobody will have the luxury of claiming that Berry used a racial slur against her attacker. Because Ms. Berry herself is black, and by all appearances is not one of that stiff-necked sort that black thugs like to characterize as "Oreos," traitors to the race.

Bealfeld told the press conference that citizens should play a greater role in reporting crimes. Perhaps now he will amend that statement to include school administrators. Notably, neither he nor Dixon have made any measurable progress against the witness intimidation and jury nullification that plague the city; that might be a motivator. 

The Baltimore Sun provides a useful database for tracking murders in the city. You can see a map showing the locations where murder victims have been found, and can filter the victim population by age, gender, race, and cause of death, going back as far as January 1, 2007. One thing you quickly discover is that among the hundreds murdered last year, only thirteen were white. That's provided you don't count Sowers, who was murdered last year but didn't die until this year; or the two white would-be witnesses who were tracked into the county and killed. 

The conclusion is inescapable that it's far more dangerous to be a black person in Baltimore City than to be a white, Asian or Latino, and few, if any, black Baltimoreans have recently been murdered by people of another race. Unfortunately, none of the local rabble-rousers (such as "Doc" Cheatham, Larnell Custis Butler, Dwight Pettit and his cohort of black defense lawyers,  or the myriad "reverends" around the city, not to mention those fierce-looking Nation of Islam guys selling bean pies on the street corners) have enough spine to point this out. They are too busy trying to blame some outside influence, primarily white people.

• The Dr. Spock philosophy. Parents are forbidden any kind of physical discipline beyond sending the kid to his "naughty spot." The argument is that spanking a child is violent. And the result of that has been that the children themselves have grown exponentially more violent.
• This is probably the third generation of children raised in day care. At home, a child is under constant supervision of Mom, and has contact with other children only as she permits it. In day care, there are fewer adults than children, and thus no close supervision. The children learn from each other rather than from the adults, and apparently what they learn is the baser part of human instinct. Certainly nothing polite, noble or altruistic. I don't think many of us are born with those characteristics. 
• Black people seem to lack the will to take the next step beyond complaining these days. Most of the murders in the city are black people killing other black people. But when someone like Bill Cosby shows up and reminds people that they have only themselves to blame, for not having disciplined their offspring, he is viewed as having sold out his race. Yes, the audience will nod and applaud in agreement. Then they will go back home to the status quo.

“’There is (a) class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs. … There is a certain class of race-problem solvers who don't want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public.’"

ITEM: This year is the earliest possible date on the calendar for Easter. The holiday falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the vernal equinox. This dating of Easter is based on the lunar calendar that Hebrew people used to identify Passover, which is why it moves around on our Roman calendar. As it happens, 2008's equinox is on March 20, followed by a full moon the next day, making that Good Friday. According to some information I received (but have not verified),

This year is the earliest Easter any of us will ever see the rest of our lives! And only the most elderly of our population have ever seen it this early (95 years old or above!). And none of us have ever, or will ever, see it a day earlier! Here's [sic] the facts:
 

1) The next time Easter will be this early (March 23) will be the year 2228 (220 years from now). The last time it was this early was 1913 (so if you're 95 or older, you are the only ones that were around for that!).

2) The next time it will be a day earlier, March 22, will be in the year 2285 (277 years from now). The last time it was on March 22 was 1818. So, no one alive today has or will ever see it any earlier than this year!

The oldest member of my mother's church happens to be 94, with a great sense of humor. I can't wait until Sunday to rib her about having been "born too late" to have seen two March 23 Easter Sundays.

ITEM: The top story (front page, above the fold) in the March 20 issue of The Jeffersonian is a puff piece about a center for the practice of Wicca! This is an ongoing story of some interest in the county. It seems that a thirty-ish man here who won millions of dollars in the state lottery is a follower of Wicca, and he decided to convey quite a bit of money to this existing business for its expansion. The place is a café-cum-book-and-coffee shop run by a handful of people who consider themselves pagans-in the most charitable and innocuous sense of the word. The newspapers have been at pains to point out that this quasi-religion does not involve Satanism; in fact that the practitioners do not even acknowledge the existence of Beelzebub or his equivalent.

This is all very fine, and it's a nice, heartwarming tale, but the Jeff's timing is just awful. The grand reopening of this place occurred last weekend, which meant that the story could-with a bit of extra effort-been run in the Tuesday number of the paper. Or it could have waited until next week. To headline this story on the day before Good Friday seems like a deliberate slap in the face of the Christians who comprise the majority of the county's population.

I cannot imagine that the paper would have run a feature about  radical Islam three days before the start of Yom Kippur, just as it wouldn't have run a feature about the Jewish Defense League on the eve of Ramadan. But apparently Christianity is fair game for any sort of abuse.

ITEM:  Wednesday nights, I am out at a community band rehearsal across town, and on the way home it has become my practice to tune in to about ten minutes of the Les Kinsolving show on WCBM. There are several reasons: (1) ten minutes is about all I can abide of this old gasbag; (2) he occasionally gives half an hour or more of air time to one Larnell Custis Butler, arguably the greatest crackpot caller in the entire history of talk radio; and (3) when Kinsolving is on a tear about homosexuality, it's interesting to count how many times he can work the term "sodomy lobby" into the conversation in a short period of time.

As it happened, last night I managed to just miss Ms. Butler's diatribe, but shortly after I tuned in Kinsolving was hyperventilating with another caller, a man from Delaware who was in a lather about his local school system having ordered the removal of Easter decorations, as of Thursday.

Now this might have been an outrage if the decorations in question made even the most indirect reference to the betrayal, trial, crucifixion and rebirth of Jesus of Nazareth. But this caller's complaint dealt with nothing more than decorations depicting bunnies and colorfully decorated eggs.

Initially my reaction was to think that the school administrators were a bunch of old soreheads who found yet another excuse to make the public school experience dull and enervating. But as a bit of research this morning revealed, the caller was merely repeating an unsubstantiated rumor. WGMD radio reports in some detail that the story appears untrue. Moreover, perusing the web site of the Indian River School District, where this non-event occurred, reveals that the school administration had been the defendant in a recent lawsuit related to prayer in the schools, and has crafted a policy relating to prayer, religious symbols, teaching of religious history, and other forms of religious expression that seems quite fair and well-crafted, albeit a bit ponderous. But that's what you get when lawyers get their hands on an issue.

So, as usual, Kinsolving's blast was a waste of oxygen that someone else could have been using.

Look for a dispatch early next week about this Easter Sunday, which will be an interesting and bittersweet occasion for some of my friends and family.

(03-07) 04:00 PST LOS ANGELES --

A California appeals court ruling clamping down on homeschooling by parents without teaching credentials sent shock waves across the state this week, leaving an estimated 166,000 children as possible truants and their parents at risk of prosecution.

The homeschooling movement never saw the case coming.

"At first, there was a sense of, 'No way,' " said homeschool parent Loren Mavromati, a resident of Redondo Beach (Los Angeles County) who is active with a homeschool association. "Then there was a little bit of fear. I think it has moved now into indignation."

The ruling arose from a child welfare dispute between the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services and Philip and Mary Long of Lynwood, who have been homeschooling their eight children. Mary Long is their teacher, but holds no teaching credential.

The parents said they also enrolled their children in Sunland Christian School, a private religious academy in Sylmar (Los Angeles County), which considers the Long children part of its independent study program and visits the home about four times a year.

The Second District Court of Appeal ruled that California law requires parents to send their children to full-time public or private schools or have them taught by credentialed tutors at home.

Some homeschoolers are affiliated with private or charter schools, like the Longs, but others fly under the radar completely. Many homeschooling families avoid truancy laws by registering with the state as a private school and then enroll only their own children.

Yet the appeals court said state law has been clear since at least 1953, when another appellate court rejected a challenge by homeschooling parents to California's compulsory education statutes. Those statutes require children ages 6 to 18 to attend a full-time day school, either public or private, or to be instructed by a tutor who holds a state credential for the child's grade level.

"California courts have held that ... parents do not have a constitutional right to homeschool their children," Justice H. Walter Croskey said in the 3-0 ruling issued on Feb. 28. "Parents have a legal duty to see to their children's schooling under the provisions of these laws."

Parents can be criminally prosecuted for failing to comply, Croskey said.

"A primary purpose of the educational system is to train school children in good citizenship, patriotism and loyalty to the state and the nation as a means of protecting the public welfare," the judge wrote, quoting from a 1961 case on a similar issue.

Union pleased with ruling

The ruling was applauded by a director for the state's largest teachers union.

"We're happy," said Lloyd Porter, who is on the California Teachers Association board of directors. "We always think students should be taught by credentialed teachers, no matter what the setting."

A spokesman for the state Department of Education said the agency is reviewing the decision to determine its impact on current policies and procedures. State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell issued a statement saying he supports "parental choice when it comes to homeschooling."

Brad Dacus, president of the Pacific Justice Institute, which agreed earlier this week to represent Sunland Christian School and legally advise the Long family on a likely appeal to the state Supreme Court, said the appellate court ruling has set a precedent that can now be used to go after homeschoolers. "With this case law, anyone in California who is homeschooling without a teaching credential is subject to prosecution for truancy violation, which could require community service, heavy fines and possibly removal of their children under allegations of educational neglect," Dacus said.

Parents say they choose homeschooling for a variety of reasons, from religious beliefs to disillusionment with the local public schools.

Homeschooling parent Debbie Schwarzer of Los Altos said she's ready for a fight.

Schwarzer runs Oak Hill Academy out of her Santa Clara County home. It is a state-registered private school with two students, she said, noting they are her own children, ages 10 and 12. She does not have a teaching credential, but she does have a law degree.

"I'm kind of hoping some truancy officer shows up on my doorstep," she said. "I'm ready. I have damn good arguments."

She opted to teach her children at home to better meet their needs.

The ruling, Schwarzer said, "stinks."

Began as child welfare case

The Long family legal battle didn't start out as a test case on the validity of homeschooling. It was a child welfare case.

A juvenile court judge looking into one child's complaint of mistreatment by Philip Long found that the children were being poorly educated but refused to order two of the children, ages 7 and 9, to be enrolled in a full-time school. He said parents in California have a right to educate their children at home. [Yet no one is held personally accountable when a child is "being poorly educated" in a public school. Examples abound.]

The appeals court told the juvenile court judge to require the parents to comply with the law by enrolling their children in a school, but excluded the Sunland Christian School from enrolling the children because that institution "was willing to participate in the deprivation of the children's right to a legal education."

The decision could also affect other kinds of homeschooled children, including those enrolled in independent study or distance learning through public charter schools - a setup similar to the one the Longs have, Dacus said.

Charter school advocates disagreed, saying Thursday that charter schools are public and are required to employ only credentialed teachers to supervise students - whether in class or through independent study.

Ruling will apply statewide

Michael Smith, president of the Home School Legal Defense Association, said the ruling would effectively ban homeschooling in the state.

"California is now on the path to being the only state to deny the vast majority of homeschooling parents their fundamental right to teach their own children at home," he said in a statement.

But Leslie Heimov, executive director of the Children's Law Center of Los Angeles, which represented the Longs' two children in the case, said the ruling did not change the law.

"They just affirmed that the current California law, which has been unchanged since the last time it was ruled on in the 1950s, is that children have to be educated in a public school, an accredited private school, or with an accredited tutor," she said. "If they want to send them to a private Christian school, they can, but they have to actually go to the school and be taught by teachers."

Heimov said her organization's chief concern was not the quality of the children's education, but their "being in a place daily where they would be observed by people who had a duty to ensure their ongoing safety." [In short, the we are expected to believe that duty of the government of California towards children trumps that of their biological parents and/or legal guardians.]

 

A recent issue of The Jeffersonian carried an article about a bill introduced in the state legislature that would change the way Baltimore County's school board members are selected.

The school board has twelve members, who under current law are appointed by the governor. Considering that Maryland's governor is the same person under whose watch the Baltimore City school system not only went into the toilet academically, but lost track of tens of millions of dollars, Martin O'Malley might just be among the least qualified people to appoint school board members. In any case, how is something related purely to the governance of a single county under the control of the state?

The problem is that this bill (House Bill 954) seems as though it will make matters worse than they already are. The proposed change would "establish a nominating commission to recommend three names to the governor."  But get this: the 13-member nominating commission would be made up of three members appointed by the governor, three appointed by the Baltimore County Executive, with the remaining six membership slots reserved for representatives from a select group of, ahem, community organizations. These members would represent the county teachers' union, the county PTA council, chamber of commerce, county-wide student council, and local chapters of the League of Women Voters and the NAACP.

There's no explanation why these particular seven entrenched interest groups should get a reserved spot on the nominating committee. Most of the League of Women Voters members I've encountered are old enough to be great-grandmothers, and pretty well out of the flow of things. Giving the teachers' union a say in who runs the system is a move that could best be described as "novel," and more truthfully is a matter of hiring a fox to guard your henhouse. And as far as the NAACP involvement is concerned, why is that bunch any more deserving of a place at the table than the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, The B'nai Brith, the Sons of Italy, the Polish National Alliance, or for that matter, the Ku Kluxers?

Now, all this fuss will apparently result in the nomination of only three potential members, with no requirement that the governor appoint them anyway. The remaining nine school board members will be political friends of the governor that he has not yet found a way to reward. I don't even believe the county executive is qualified to name members to this committee, considering that he has been part of a scheme to create a new $90,000 a year county job for the governor's little brother, whom he described (with no further elaboration) as "uniquely qualified." Indeed.

The common-sense solution would be to have the entire school board elected by the voting (read: taxpaying) public. This works in countless jurisdictions across the country, and is one hell of a lot less complicated than this goofy scheme that is being proposed.

But we Marylanders do have this unfortunate habit of electing, and re-electing politicians who do what they damn well please to line their own pockets and spread favors among their bedfellow, and to Hell with what the People might actually want.

But then, that's life under an essentially single-party system where the opposition has been browbeaten into silence by a governor who values "solidarity" more than healthy discussion of alternatives.

CORRECTIONS: My sincere apologies for having depended solely on the reporting of The Jeffersonian in drafting the above. Today, I had an opportunity to read the text of HB954, which can be found on the web in PDF form.

1. Terhune's article omitted the fact that the bill proposes reducing the size of the school board from 12 members to 10. No explanation is given as to the rationale behind the change.  As the law currently stands, the board includes one member from each of the seven county council districts. Under the proposed change, these seven will be replaced by five members, one representing each of the five "administrative areas of the Baltimore County Public School System." *

2. Contrary to the newspaper article, the nominating commission will give the governor a choice among three nominees for each school board seat. However, the governor has the right to reject any and all of these and order the commission to nominate other candidates. In short, he can continue refusing nominations until he obtains a list of candidates that suit his personal agenda. Therefore, the entire nominating-commission process is a sham.

3. The six members of the nominating commission appointed by the Governor and the County Executive "SHALL BE MADE WITH CONSIDERATION OF THE GEOGRAPHIC, RACIAL, ETHNIC, CULTURAL, AND GENDER DIVERSITY OF THE COMMISSION." [reference page 3, lines 16-19.] Read this requirement however you will--I think it's meant to give O'Malley and Smith the power to "stack the deck" racially. Among the parties not automatically invited to the table are Asians, Middle Easterners and Latinos. And it goes without saying that nobody will be appointed to appoint "white interests." That would comprise racial prejudice, since there are only "black" and other ethnic interests. I question the constitutionality of this requirement.

* Not solely related to this bill, I have to question why the taxpayers of Baltimore County have been so willing to tolerate a political system that divides the county into 5 public school districts, but incorporates 7 county council districts and ten police precincts. Would it not make sense to have one set of boundary lines common to these government functions?

West Virginia is considering a bill to teach schoolchildren how to handle a gun and hunt safely its proponent hopes will increase state revenues from hunting licenses, a state lawmaker said Thursday. "We will teach a hunting safety course during their physical education class," state senator and bill sponsor Billy Wayne Bailey told AFP. The courses would be imparted in secondary schools, from the eighth to 10th grade (13-16 years of age). "They will learn gun safety, the proper use of fire arms. All the weapons will be disabled so there is no chance of discharging," he said, adding that the state Senate was expected to take up the bill next week. "Hunting is an economic and cultural thing and we have seen a decline of hunting licenses over the past years," said the lawmaker, explaining that his bill would boost interest in hunting in West Virginia. Children 10 years and older can already apply for a hunting license in West Virginia, which makes 1.5 billion dollars a year from hunting-related activities, the senator said. Kudos to the folks in WV! The absolutely best way, bar none, to satisfy a child’s natural interest in firearms is to teach him or her to handle them safely and to shoot. When the anti-gun bedwetters start ranting about the number of “children”* killed every day by guns, someone needs to ask if they can name a single incident of accidental shooting death, or a school shoot-em-up being perpetrated by a child who is a competitive marksman. *A large percentage of the “children” killled by gunfire seem to be 17 to 21 years old, and dabbling in drugs, but that’s an insignificant detail, no?

A middle school teacher has been placed on administrative leave after being charged with being drunk in her Loudoun County [VA] classroom.

Sheriff's spokesman Kraig Troxell says officials at Sterling Middle School called authorities to report that reading specialist Mary Ann Livoti of Hamilton appeared to be intoxicated in a classroom before 11 a.m. with students present.

Troxell says Livoti was arrested and placed in the county's adult detention center jail until she was deemed to be sober. Troxell says the county commonwealth's attorney planned to review the case to determine if more charges are warranted.

Gosh, I know it's tough teaching in public schools. Especially in middle school. All those kids with their raging hormones. Still, she could have waited until her lunch break.

Of course the real question might be which one of the kids gave her the booze?

Pepper Spray Used On Woodlawn Student
Monday, October 29, 2007
WBAL Radio as reported by Anne Kramer and The Associated Press

Baltimore County Police say they've charged two Woodlawn High School students with assault after a fight.

Police spokesman Bill Toohey says the two 14-year-old girls are charged as juveniles with second-degree assault and disorderly conduct.

A school resource officer* used the pepper spray to break up the fight. Then police say one of two girls involved resisted arrest and the officer used pepper spray to subdue her. The spray also affected bystanders and entered the building's ventilation system.

Twenty students were treated at five area hospitals after the pepper spray was released. The injuries weren't considered serious.

*For those uninitiated in Baltimore County newspeak, a "school resource officer" is a policeman or woman permanently assigned to attempt to maintain order in a school where the faculty and administrative staff have failed to do so.

By the way, the incident was not serious enough to have affected this afternoon's football game. Just another Day in the Life.

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) - The plan was simple: Invite families feuding over problems between their fifth-grade sons to counseling sessions. But that went awry when the two families ran into each other in the parking lot, and yet another fight broke out - this time between adults.

When it was over, the father of one of the boys was dead...

A significant, but overlooked fact in this story is that both the adult combatants were in--shall we say "non traditional"?--family situations.

Frank Jude, the dead guy, came to the meeting with his fianceé. Now, in case you have just landed here from another galaxy, "fianceé" is the current euphemism for your shack-up mate. The woman is apparently not the mother of Jude's child.

Grant Reese, the man who struck the fatal blow, is described as "the boyfriend of the second child's mother." In other words, another shack-up. And unlike Jude, Reese has no legal responsibility for or power over the raising of the child.

It would be too great a leap to draw any conclusions from the situations of the four adults involved in this cock-up. But it's damned tempting to think that if either or both the children were being raised by a legally married couple, both of whom were the biological parents of the respective child, the matter might have played out differently.

Nostalgia can be a dangerous thing, but life was so much simpler when all occupants of a household shared the same family name. Broken families, broken lives.

 

A Harvard medical student sued the National Board of Medical Examiners demanding more break time from taking the Board test in order to pump breast milk to feed her daughter.  ... In addition to the extra break time, Ms. Currier [requested] permission to take the test over two days (rather than one) because of her dyslexia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. According to a letter to the editor from a Connecticut doctor, "Sophie Currier failed her medical-licensing examination in April when she first took the examination. She will now repeat her test with double the time and with extra breaks."

God help anyone who presents to the future Dr. Currier with a severe hemorrhage, stroke or heart attack.

Since then I have heard a few rumors floating around, but no new information has been published, and as far as I can tell, the zoning variance process for the school is on permanent "hold." However, I did stumble across an article I had missed in The Community Times.

As I digested this article, I became increasingly convinced that the objections posed by the so-called concerned neighbors are terribly thin, and that the only fathomable reason for all the fuss is an irrational fear of all things Muslim.

Read a few quotes from the article, along with my observations:

Thomas H. Bostwick, the deputy zoning commissioner, found Sept. 27 that even though the school property in the 6300 block of Dogwood Road had been duly posted, the surrounding community was not informed "in a timely manner."

This is a genuinely weird assertion, for which the newspaper article offered no support. I learned of the matter through a legal notice in The Jeffersonian, the county paper in which all zoning matters are announced. The scheduling for the hearing did not appear to provide any less time than the others posted alongside it. Aside from posting the property and placing a legal notice in the paper, neither the county nor the property owner has any obligation to "inform the surrounding community." If you are concerned about this kind of stuff, you get a subscription to the paper and read the notices regularly. If you don't then you have no right to complain about something you missed.

The zoning hearing had been set for Oct. 1 on a request to grant a special exception and variance for a dormitory for students attending the Darul Uloom school.

The commissioner received several letters of concern from neighbors and decided to allow more time before proceeding.

As of this writing, the case has not reappeared on the zoning commission's schedule. One might ask how much time Mr. Bostwick plans to allow.

In addition to the special exception, Kabiruddin also sought a zoning variance for a slimmer side-yard setback and for a narrower driveway.

The next-door property has been operated as a storage yard for heavy equipment for at least a decade, and continues to be zoned for commercial use. Its driveway is scarcely larger than that of the Darul Uloom property.

The school, ... is intended to offer religious education for students in grades six through high school, according to Kabiruddin. The school Web site says Darul Uloom will also offer secular home schooling for students using the Calvert curriculum and Keyton program.

This sounds as though it would be a welcome addition to the neighborhood, especially since the local high school ranks dead last in the county, and the middle school serving the area is near the bottom of the heap.

Kabiruddin said he finalized the purchase of the dormitory property in February.

It would be correct to say that Kabiruddin finalized the purchase of the entire property in February. The dormitory is proposed for the site of a large carriage house on that property.

The property is in the district of state Delegate Emmett C. Burns (D-10th), who attended a Sept. 27 community meeting where some neighbors of the property voiced concern that the dorm could generate too much traffic or even become a group home for troubled youths.

"People are not concerned that it's an Islamic school but they're concerned about traffic patterns and group homes and they don't know much about the intention," Burns said in a telephone interview after the community meeting. "The overwhelming concern is that there's too much congestion. A pub is across the street and just down the street is Woodlawn High School."

That particular high school built a football "stadium" several years ago, and most of the traffic congestion in the area stems from illegal parking of cars and buses during games. But the football field--which has a much greater impact on the neighborhood--was built without public discussion, and ballyhooed as a grand addition to the area.

Kerri Lastner, who lives a block from the property, said that speculation is flying because neighbors weren't sufficiently informed about the project.

"You wonder what kind of families these kids are coming from, what kind of background they are coming from," she said. "We haven't been given any information."

In a telephone interview, Kabiruddin sought to correct the group home misconception.

"This is a religious school. We only take students that are the opposite background of that. . These are not disturbed kids," Kabiruddin said. He added that the students would be models and be an asset to the community.

***
Neighbors of the school wrote Bostwick contending that neighborhood calm is threatened by non-residential development.

The closest non-residential uses added recently include two auto repair shops, both of which maintain junkyard conditions on their properties; two Pentecostal-flavored churches, at least one of which creates a traffic jam whenever it holds an event; the football field; and several home-based day care centers.

Where were the concerned citizens when this stuff arrived? 

(Three blocks away, the local volunteer fire department built a new station, and a hundred yards north of that, the old station was purchased and converted into an automobile repair shop. Compared to the other two shops, that place is a model of responsible ownership. Yet the owner of the place was put through an expensive ordeal by one of the same busybodies who appear to be behind the objection to Darul Uloom.)

 One neighbor used the example of rowdies who spilled from the nearby tavern one night, leaving a trail of broken glass to be swept up.

The tavern in question has been a neighborhood trouble spot since I moved nearby in 1975. To draw a connection between that joint and any other neighborhood activity requires a huge leap of logic.

If you go back to my original blog entry on this subject, you will find a somewhat different set of citizen concerns being voiced. There's the so-called "group home" objection. This has been the pet arguing point of a handful of neighborhood busybodies for as long as I can remember. They have yet to provide any concrete evidence of the problem that they claim exists.

More to come...

The Gwynn Oak Park had been built in the 1890s as a "trolley park," a destination at the end of one of the city's trolley lines that would provide an excuse to run the cars on weekends. In addition to a wooden roller coaster and other rides, there was the Dixie Ballroom, a venue for concerts and dancing. This being the Jim Crow era, black people were excluded altogether from admission to the park. The owners had failed to see any economic advantage, and thus had not even gone the extent of providing the separate-but-equal sort of facilities to be found in some of the city parks, such as Druid Hill Park.

On July 4, 1963 the situation reached a tipping point, and a large group of demonstrators marched from the city to the amusement park, demanding the right to spend their money there. Several people were arrested, and the event is said to have been the first time that white clergymen participated in a desegregation action. Chester Wickwire, the chaplain of Johns Hopkins University, was one of the arrestees.

The park owners grudgingly admitted black customers, and the results were predictable. A rowdy element among both races provoked a few fights, and the owners apparently decided it was no longer worth keeping up the place. The condition of the park and its rides deteriorated, until Hurricane Agnes dealt it the final blow.

Fast forward to around 1987, the year I left my 9-to-5 job to become a real estate salesman. Having lived in Woodlawn for twelve years, I decided it should be my home turf as a salesman. It was not until then that I discovered bigotry still alive and well. One popular watering hole was not formally segregated, but there seemed to be an understanding that blacks were welcome to order carry-out food through the liquor store up front, but far less welcome to spend their money in the bar/dining room. Just around the corner, a block away, I found myself trapped in a conversation in which a local lawyer and a local real estate appraiser were casually discussing how they might "keep the niggers from taking over Woodlawn." It seemed to me that particular ship had already sailed, not to mention that what they were about to discuss would have been a federal crime, so I made an excuse to leave.

Now it's twenty years farther along still, and the bigots are still out in force. Ironically, it appears that the old-time white bigots have joined forces with some black ones.

The Baltimore Sun reported the story thus: [commentary added in brackets]

School's dorm proposal has neighbors worried

It would be too much like group home, some say

By Laura Barnhardt | Sun reporter

September 29, 2007

"We don't know where these kids are coming from," said Van Ross, president of the Woodlawn Community Education and Development Association. "We don't know if they are troubled young people or what. How would you like a dormitory or a group home next to your house?"

[comment: This property is located on the corner of Gwynn Oak Avenue and Dogwood Road. The property immediately abutting the proposed school is a large tract of land that has been home to a commercial diving operation, and used for the storage of heavy equipment. The owner of the diving service DID live there, until his recent death. Across the street is Hertsch's Tavern, where you can easily observe rowdy behavior in the parking lot, in addition to a number of illegally posted beer and liquor signs on the fence. Across Dogwood road are a pair of two-story office buildings, perpetually under-utilized because they were built in a flood plain, and periodically flooded.]

A zoning hearing on the religious school's plans, originally scheduled for Monday, has been postponed, in response to a request by County Councilman Kenneth N. Oliver and community leaders, who have expressed concerns about the proposal and said they want to learn more about it.

The school, Darul Uloom Maryland, is seeking approval from Baltimore County to build a dormitory for 15 to 20 students.

[The school also happens to operate a web page, which explains quite adequately its mission. My impression is that it will be the Islamic equivalent of a Rabbinical school.]

***

Del. Emmett C. Burns Jr., a Baltimore County Democrat who organized a meeting with residents this week about the boarding school, said, "We don't want to appear that we are anti-Islamic. But we don't want any more group homes in our district."

As of last year, about two-thirds of the approximately 500 group homes in Maryland were in Baltimore County. Most are in Randallstown, Woodlawn and elsewhere in the northwestern part of the county.

[Now, nobody knows precisely how many group homes exist in the state, much less where they are located, because no single government entity regulates them.  Burns, a political veteran who knows which side his bread is buttered on, knows he'd better make some kind of obesiance to Islamic people, since there are any number of Nation-of-Islam "mosques" in the Baltimore City portion of his district.]

In letters to county officials, neighbors of the boarding school said they are also concerned about businesses being allowed to open in residential areas and about possible disruptions of what they describe as a quiet, peaceful area.

"Please," one resident wrote to county officials, "don't disturb a good thing."

[This "good thing" that the anonymous letter-writer mentions includes the high school with the absolutely worst academic performance in the county, a middle school that is in the bottom 1/3 of the heap, and a community with the county's worst crime rate. As for "businesses"opening in the immediate area, there are two auto repair shops within a block of Darul Uoom, both of which maintain junkyard conditions, in violation of county law. the high school has a football "stadium" that draws, on game days, dozens of illegally parked vehicles, and whose P.A. system can be clearly heard more than a mile away. The neighborhood is dotted with day care centers, including one that for at least five years has touted itself as providing "Christain [sic] Day Care," and the enterprises that cause the worst traffic congestion are churches of the penetcostal flavor. In the so-called business park whose buildings are scattered throughout the area inside the Beltway along Security Boulevard, the worst problem is the number of medium-to-large office buildings that have remained vacant for at least a decade.]

The neighborhood's good-news rag, a monthly calling itself The Woodlawn Villager, reports the story a little differently. The rationale this paper cites is that:

...the members of the communities surrounding the proposed school noted that the additional traffic on the narrow streets would cause safety concerns for their children.

[Unfortunately, this is more than a little disingenuous. People traveling to and from the school will use Security Boulevard (a major local highway), the widest portion of Gwynn Oak Avenue (most of which is one-way), and Dogwood and Windsor Mill Roads, two other minor traffic arteries in the area. The only reason for school staff or parents to drive on the "narrow streets" would be if they lived there! Moreover, none of these concerned citizens have stepped forward to complain about the traffic and illegal parking created by the Redemption Christian Fellowship, a block away on Dogwood Road, or the New Rehoboth Baptist Church, another large congregation two blocks away on Windsor Mill Road.]

The contention that "group homes" is insupportable, at least in terms of any hard evidence. When the community meeting was announced, I queried Captain Barry Barber, commander of the local police precinct, about trouble and group homes. Here's our exchange of emails:

Captain Barber:

Does the BCPD keep track of the number of calls to so-called group homes?

***

Stan,

... We don't arbitrarily track statistics at all group homes in the Precinct.  When we start to notice an increase in calls for service, especially criminal calls, at a particular group home location, we then begin to track all calls there.

At the same time we start to target the location with increased enforcement. At the same time we contact the home administrator in a effort to relocate some of the problem residents and/or to close the facility all together.

For all other homes, if given an address, we can pull up calls for service over a given period.  We will not do this unless specifically asked to do so.

[Captain Barber continues] As for the location on Dogwood Road, it is not a group home.  The proposal is for this to be a dormitory for an Islamic School.  There are no known problems connected to the school and there is no reason to believe that its presence would cause a problem within the community.

My sense of the group home situation in general is that it has been blown out of proportion. You see a few mentally handicapped people on the streets, and of course they are the most high-functioning members of that little sub-group. I have never known one of the folks I see regularly to misbehave in any way. We also see groups of people from these homes escorted here and there--for example you'll find them eating at Old Country Buffet, or taking a trip to the bank. Again, no problem. [The same can't be said of the local high school students, who can regularly be heard swearing at each other and us homeowners on their way to and from school. One afternoon as I was letting my dog out, some high schooler accosted me from forty yards away, yelling "What the fuck are you lookin'at, cracker?" As far as I could see, he was not mentally handicapped or a Muslim. And I'm sure it was not a Muslim or a  "mental case" who scrawled "Black is Back" on the side of my car, or who made any of the three attempted thefts of my vehicles.]

What bothers me the most about the attitude towards the group homes is that it's so unrealistic. People don't want this kind of housing in their neighborhood, but they also want the Rosewood School closed, and the same for Spring Grove. Unless someone decides to propose shipping these people out of state or euthanizing them, they have to live somewhere.

The "group home" category also includes housing for people with devastating physical problems, as well as mental ones. On Carlynn Avenue, there's one poor fellow whom I've seen now and again being dropped off at the house or at Kernan's, who is completely paralyzed, apparently with cerebral palsy, and horribly atrophied. [The man is literally a "basket case."] Again, since we do not euthanize people in this country (thank God!) the choices of housing for someone so helpless boil down to either a so-called group home, which might at least look and smell like a genuine home, or [permanent] hospitalization.

Furthermore, the houses that become group homes are often functionally and economically obsolete. The former Bauhof residence, where Darul Uloom has located itself, is a prime example of this. When the Bauhof family sold it to Mr. Cignatta (who owned it until recently), the place had between six and nine bedrooms, and only one bathroom. When you have a property of that sort, there are only a few alternatives, and re-adapting it for a commercial or educational enterprise is one of the best. Others get cut up into apartments, often in violation of the zoning regulations, and still others end up vacant and boarded. Those houses don't do anything for the neighborhood.

I'm impressed by the fact that Darul Uloom has--at least thus far--not applied for tax-exempt status. As you know, many "church" operated properties get themselves a tidy little exemption, removing a valuable property from the county tax base. (One example is the Set the Captives Free center. That property is worth at least two million, and we don't see a dime in property taxes from them. Another is the New Rehoboth church, which I believe sold
for more than half a million dollars.)

 

I am talking about Woodlawn Senior High, the worst school in Baltimore County, according to recent test score rankings. Students were tested in four subject areas. Woodlawn's students scored dead last in three of those areas, and next-to-last in the fourth. This, despite the fact that the school has been ballyhooed over its "engineering magnet school program."

For those of you outside this area, our school system attaches a so-called magnet program to any high school whose student performance is unsatisfactory. The rationale being that those academic high-achievers attracted to the magnet program will improve the average performance statistics for the school. Apparently it's cheaper than raising the academic standards, or hiring teachers who can command the respect and attention of the students.

As I drove home from errands just now, I passed the high school's athletic field, where the bleachers were filled with students, who had apparently been given the afternoon off from academic endeavors to attend a football pep rally. When my granddaughter attended this school, the pep rally was "mandatory," which meant that they expected everyone to attend who hadn't already cut classes and gone elsewhere earlier in the day.

Two police helicopters were hovering overhead. No fewer than six patrol cars were parked in the lot of a car repair shop across the road. I did not check, but it's a safe assumption that there were additional patrol cars on the street bordering the opposite edge of the campus.

This was a teachable moment that was undoubtedly ignored. You can be certain that, in their zeal to leave the little darlings' self-esteem untouched, none of the responsible adults could be bothered to appeal to their sense of self-respect. At the very least, someone should have pointed out the massive police presence, and asked whether the students were ashamed or embarrassed in the slightest that their community trusts them so little.

Zelman is now offering what he calls "Goody Guns," cookie cutters in the shape of little semiautomatic pistols. As he envisions it, "With the supervision and help of the adults in their lives, boys and girls can turn their own kitchens into "Arsenals of Liberty" by making gun-shaped cookies to keep and share, while absorbing firearms safety lessons the public schools would never teach them, and which the mass media don't want to see taught."

 Halloween would be a great time to send a message to the anti-gun whackos in your neighborhood by baking up a batch of trick or treat cookies using this insidious cookie cutter. Being a responsible adult, you would of course wrap each cookie individually, and enclose a name and address label.

When the rabidly gun-hating parent shows up at your doorstep, you can offer a barter: you will trade the cookie for one of the window stickers shown at the right, provided the neighbor promises to paste it on his front door for at least a month.

If you're operating in a virulently anti-freedom environment like Baltimore, Maryland, you will want to have your lawer on retainer ahead of time, and a bail bondsman on alert. The police will surely throw you "under the jail," and you are guaranteed to make the Late News. Chances are, they will send a news crew to do a "stand up" in front of your house for at least the next two newscasts, and you can take advantage of the air time to paste the pro-liberty poster of your choice on the front of your house, knowing it will be televised.

But wait! There's more...

The next step will be deploying the Goody Gun device as a sandwich cutter, sending little Joshua and Emily to school with gun-shaped sandwiches.

Yellow American cheese would be the most symbolically appropriate filling, although peanut butter and jelly would drive those my-kid-has-allergies whiners straight up the wall as well. White bread is a must, the doughier the better.

Now, envision the news story that will result when the vice-principal confiscates your child's lunch as evidence, and attempts suspending him or her from school.

You'll be able to have a field day with the kid interviewed on television, tearfully describing how "Mr. Goober took away my sam'wich and made me go hungry." The school officials will look like the fools they are, and you can probably make book on an "emergency school board meeting" being called.

 

If you are a member of a "protected minority," or can claim poverty, you get extra credit.

(CBS) OAK LAWN, Ill. A southwest suburban school district has taken action, responding to the concerns of a Muslim parent. [ed. note: that's "a," as in "one."]

But now, as [TV newsie] Suzanne Le Mignot reports, other parents are angry that traditional school holidays will be renamed or even eliminated.

"That does not represent all the Muslims, all of the Arabs at that school," said Qais Nofel, the father of a student in Ridgeland School District 122.

There was some heated discussion between parents outside Columbus Manor Elementary School in Oak Lawn on Friday. The thought of no more traditional holiday celebrations has many parents really upset.

For now, children in Ridgeland School District 122 will celebrate fall festival instead of Halloween and winter festival instead of Christmas.

Brenda Elvidge said, "It's not fair to our kids. This is America and that's an American tradition."

The decision affects the children at four elementary schools in Oak Lawn and one junior high school in Bridgeview.

The district has a 30 percent Arab-American population, many of whom practice Islam. The superintendent says the reason for the change in tradition comes after one parent wanted Ramadan decorations put up inside Columbus Manor Elementary. They were taken down.

Superintendent Tom Smyth said, "I go back to our policy which says that public schools are to remain neutral in this respect."*

Ridgeland School District 122 has called for an emergency meeting on the issue, to be held on Tuesday.

Meantime, Muslim children are being allowed to pray during what's being called their own time, that's lunch time, during Ramadan.

Parent June Quigley said, "They get to pray in our schools. That is religion in a public school."

Muslim parents have different views on the issue.

Sala Abour said, "To take away Halloween and Christmas from little kids, that is very wrong."

Nofel said, "We go and we celebrate the holidays and traditions here, but we do have the right to be Muslims as well."

Other parents say the controversy is overshadowing what really needs to be addressed at all five schools in the district.

Ronnie Carroll said, "The fact that they are cash strapped. Our classroom size is way above the average mean, 38 children in our first grade classroom. The concern should be our school, not the whole holiday issues."

Those issues along with the holiday controversy are going to be addressed at a school board meeting on Tuesday. Members will decide if holidays will be celebrated or not.

Meantime, the Illinois PTA district director says the state is now investigating this issue and there's a meeting with the superintendent next week.

A few observations, if I may.

ONE parent objected to the more traditional American holidays. Thirty percent of the school district population (which is not to say 30% of the school's students) are "Arab-American," and MANY (not "most," in fact the percentage is not quantified) practice Islam.

Public schools have always been "sold" as the place where children learn to get along with other children who are not just like them. Removing any holiday from the mix defeats that mission.

Superintendent Smyth's statement that the schools are to "remain neutral in this respect" represents a huge departure from the philosophy of having the public school system teach the important cultural stuff about the USA, even if some of it involves (God forbid!) religion. Peruse any pre-WWII public school textbook for a perspective on this.

Until recently, parents in the USA who favored separatism for their children in areas of religion and culture formed "private" or "parochial" schools to serve this need. In some cases, those schools were an alternative to the government-funded school; in others they were supplemental education. This way of doing things has always worked adequately, has harmed no one, and ought to be left in place.

Here in Woodlawn, a suburb of Baltimore, the high school has made many concessions to Muslim students, unbalancing the privileges granted to the student body at large. I won't leap to the assumption this is the entire cause, but I don't think it is altogether coincidental that Woodlawn High School (in spite of having a "magnet" school subdivision) has the lowest standard test scores among all the county's high schools.

This, despite the fact that Iran has had no diplomatic relations with the USA for some years, its shrill pronouncements about the destruction of Israel, the distinct possibility that the Iran government is supporting terrorist operations as well as insurgents in Iraq.

University President Lee Bollinger apparently believes that he is such a mensch that he will successfully be able to challenge Ahmadinejad on these issues. Columbia's web site includes the following statement from Bollinger:

In order to have such a University-wide forum, we have insisted that a number of conditions be met, first and foremost that President Ahmadinejad agree to divide his time evenly between delivering remarks and responding to audience questions. I also wanted to be sure the Iranians understood that I would myself introduce the event with a series of sharp challenges to the president on issues including:

• the Iranian president’s denial of the Holocaust;
• his public call for the destruction of the State of Israel;
• his reported support for international terrorism that targets innocent civilians and American troops;
• Iran's pursuit of nuclear ambitions in opposition to international sanction;
• his government's widely documented suppression of civil society and particularly of women's rights; and
• his government's imprisoning of journalists and scholars, including one of Columbia’s own alumni, Dr. Kian Tajbakhsh (see President Bollinger's prior statement).

In plain language, this paper-pusher has such an ego that he believes he can accomplish something that the combined diplomatic corps of the USA and UK, the United Nations, and God knows who else have been unable to do.

I would not bet you a small coffee from 7-11 that he'll prevail. "Alphabet" is a master of this sort of thing, and will manipulate the event to his disadvantage.

You can also make book that any anti-Iran sentiments expressed at the event will be sharply suppressed, while the entire panoply of moonbat behavior will be on display.

I am of the opinion that such an ill-considered decision ought to have consequences for Columbia, and that those consequences ought to include, at a minimum, the withdrawal of any and all federal support of the university, to include the repayment of any federal funds now on account there.

Predictably, Bollinger's e-mail address seems to be a state secret. So much for the spirit of openness.

However, the university web page does include the telephone and fax numbers of Bollinger's office, which I have repeated below.

May I humbly suggest that you spend the weekend flooding these numbers with voice messages and faxes?

phone: 212.854.9970,  fax: 212.854.9973

UPDATE: Monday September 24--"the day of..."

Those who were following the news over the weekend learned that Dean John Coatsworth remarked, in response to the uproar over Ahmadinejad's impending appearance, that they'd invite Adolf Hitler, if he were still living.

The New York Sun posted an editorial on that subject this morning. It reads, in part:

Jewish students at Columbia who went to their computers after breaking the fast for Yom Kippur were met Saturday evening with a link on the Drudge Report to an interview with the dean of the School of International and Public Affairs saying that he'd have been happy to welcome Hitler to the campus. The interview, aired on Fox News, was with John Coatsworth. He is seen in the Day of Atonement broadcast chuckling like a veritable Mearsheimer or Walt. Could he be oblivious to the impact his words were going to have in a Jewish community already on notice that its sensibilities were of little rank to either the president or the faculty of the university? Columbia, it seems, is bound and determined to honor the president of Iran and provide him with a platform to agitate against our country, and Israel, in midst of a war in which our GIs are facing Iranian backed forces on the field of battle.

Dean Coatsworth seems to be laboring under the illusion that had Columbia actually hosted Hitler in the late 1930s, World War II and the war against the Jews might have been prevented...

I don't think the timing of Coatsworth's stupid remark was specifically intended to offend Jews at Columbia, as the Sun implies. But it is ironic when an academic makes such a foolish statement without heed to the consequences. After all, these guys consider themselves the Conscience of America, microscopically examining everything that passes their noses to discern whether some "minority" may have been offended, intentionally or otherwise.

If only these "college" guys were half as smart as they think they are...

 

Could some New Yorker step forward and

"do the right thing?"

The MIT student who walked into Logan International Airport wearing a computer circuit board and wiring on her sweat shirt claimed it was harmless artwork. But to troopers who arrested her at gunpoint, it was a fake bomb.

Nineteen-year-old Star Simpson was charged Friday with possessing a hoax device. Her attorney described the charge as offbase and "almost paranoid," arguing at a court hearing that she did not act in a suspicious manner and had told an airport worker that the device was art. ...

[The student] wore the white circuit board on her chest over a black hooded sweat shirt, Pare said at a news conference. The battery-powered rectangular device had nine flashing lights, and Simpson had Play-Doh in her hands, he said. ...

A Massachusetts Port Authority staffer manning an information booth in the terminal became suspicious when Simpson - wearing the device - approached to ask about an incoming flight, Pare said. Simpson then walked outside, and the staffer notified a nearby trooper.

The trooper, joined by others with submachine guns, confronted her in front of the terminal.

"She was immediately told to stop, to raise her hands and not to make any movement, so we could observe all her movements to see if she was trying to trip any type of device," Pare said. "Had she not followed the protocol, we might have used deadly force."

He added, "She's lucky to be in a cell as opposed to the morgue."

I agree with the student's lawyer, up to a point. Prosecuting this young woman will serve no useful purpose. On the other hand, a public spanking might just reinforce the message that these security guys do not have the luxury of deciding who is serious, and who's just farting around.

FORT COLLINS, Colo. -- A four word editorial with a four letter word in it is sparking a spirited discussion on free speech at Colorado State University.

The Rocky Mountain Collegian published an editorial on page 4 of the paper Friday which read "Taser this ... F*** Bush."

The expletive was spelled out.

The last two words were in bold type, larger than most headlines. A caption below said, "this column represents the views of the Collegian's Editorial Board."

"I think they went over the line a little bit, but it's free speech and they're allowed to write what they want," one student told 7NEWS.

The editorial comes fresh on the heels of freedom of speech issues that arose from the Tasering of a Florida student at a Sen. John Kerry speech. ...

Unfortunately, this puerile attempt at provocation was misdirected. The headline should have read "Fuck Kerry," since it was the Senator who stood idly by while student Andrew Meyer was abused by the campus police.

Since the incident there has been a lot of speculation about Meyer's motives, and a disturbing amount of vitriol directed towards the kid.

Suffice it to say that in every White House press briefing over the past decade, either Helen Thomas or Les Kinsolving has asked a disrespectful, off-topic question, and refused to shut up when asked to do so. But neither of these two superannuated old farts has been tasered for their actions. What makes Meyer any less deserving of deference? This WAS supposed to be a political "forum," after all.

UPDATE:  Tuesday, September 25

The Daily Camera reports an all-too-predictable reaction:

College Republicans at Colorado State University collected more than 300 signatures calling on CSU's Board of Student Communications to fire Editor in Chief David McSwane.

"It was very unprofessional," College Republicans chairwoman Chelsey Penoyer said at a tent her group had set up next to the Lory Student Center.

"The nation is looking at us as a bunch of uneducated children. It reflects horribly on CSU."

Well, they ARE "uneducated children." Generally those who attend university are barely out of their teens, and a product of the public school system.

I have to wonder whether the College Republicans would be calling for McSwine McSwane's firing if the headline had read "Fuck Kerry" or "Fuck Ahmadinejad."  If I had to make book on it, I'd bet that those alternate headlines would have brought only 75 to 100 signatures from the College Republicans.

This is an issue about which the little repubs ought to have remained silent. There is no way to take a stand on it one way or another without appearing foolish. With maturity, people often learn that the best way to deal with someone's embarrassing social habits is to ignore them.