Written on March 8th, 2010 by adminno shouts
-By Warner Todd Huston
We send our young adults to university to be educated in the ways of the world, we all know. Following that well-worn path, young James Schackleford decided on the publicly funded Florida Atlantic University for his edification and boy did he learn a lesson about modern education last week. Mr. Schackleford learned that the FAU administration prefers on its campus Islamic terrorist supporters over representatives of the conservative Young Americans for Freedom organization. He also learned that it’s open season on all conservatives at our American universities.
At the Boca Raton campus Mr. Schackleford determined that his school needed a chapter of YAF, a 40-year-old conservative student organization, and so gathered a few like-minded students to meet with YAF State Director Daniel P. Diaz to discuss how they should proceed on organizing a chapter in the school.
As the few gathered were meeting, university administrator *David Blank burst into the room and demanded that they cease their meeting and vacate the room. According to the YAF press release, Mr. Schackleford asked for an additional 15 minutes to finish and Blank acquiesced to the request. But the 15-minute grant was short lived.
Upon hearing Diaz address the liberal bias on the FAU campus, Blank stopped the meeting again and boorishly ordered the students to vacate the meeting room. Blank then shut off the room lights, tore down the group’s promotional posters, and called the campus police.
It didn’t end there. According to YAF, the campus police arrived and began to harass the students and Mr. Diaz outside as they were in the process of leaving the campus. The police demanded to see student IDs and then menacingly followed YAF rep. Diaz to his car.
Police told Diaz that they were investigating a “possible trespassing charge,” and then loudly joked that Diaz “probably had tea bags hanging out the back of his car” as Diaz prepared to leave.
Diaz says that the whole incident is proof positive of why a conservative group is needed at Florida Atlantic University.
“If we were a Marxist, Socialist or Liberal group they would have let us finish our meeting, but the university officials and police harassed us because we are conservatives. This was the exact liberal bias on campus that I was discussing in the meeting that these future YAFers experienced firsthand. The university is no longer a place of open discussion and freedom of expression, but a breeding ground of intolerance for conservative beliefs.”
One question immediately comes to mind over this incident: did student organizer Schackleford and YAF representative Diaz officially reserve a room at FAU for their informal meeting? I asked Diaz this very question.
Diaz told me that since it was an informal meeting that should have been over rather quickly, Mr. Schackleford did not think that he needed to officially reserve a room through the university staff. In fact, according to Diaz, himself a former FAU student, such unscheduled meetings occur all the time.
No we did not reserve a room. When I was a student at the university when a room wasn’t being occupied one could go in and meet or study, and as long they left before the next scheduled group arrived they would be ok. After asking around that is how it still is.
In retrospect it was an obvious lapse in judgment not to officially reserve a room. Or perhaps they should have met off campus.
However, that small lapse in judgment does not absolve this oppressive, over-the-top reaction that university administrator David Blank exhibited. After all, not long ago Florida Atlantic University hosted a whole slew of Islamic terror supporters on campus. In 2006, for instance, the Muslim students group at FAU hosted an event at which appeared Hamas and Hezbollah supporter, Al-Haaj Ghazi Khankan; alleged Neo-Nazi, William Baker; and potential co-conspirator of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, Siraj Wahhaj.
Apparently it’s perfectly O.K., as far as the FAU administration is concerned, to have Islamofascist terror given full-throated support on its campus but it is a serious no-no to talk about organizing a patriotic American conservative student’s organization there.
Perhaps Mr. Diaz is right in his contention that a YAF chapter is sorely needed at Florida Atlantic University?
*David Blank appears to be the Event Planning Specialist for the Student Union at FAU. He can be reached at dblank@fau.edu.
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Written on March 8th, 2010 by adminno shouts
Here we go
Seeking to step up enforcement of civil rights laws, the federal Department of Education says it will be sending letters in coming weeks to thousands of school districts and colleges, outlining their responsibilities on issues of fairness and equal opportunity.
As part of that effort, the department intends to open investigations known as compliance reviews in about 32 school districts nationwide, seeking to verify that students of both sexes and all races are getting equal access to college preparatory curriculums and to advanced placement courses. The department plans to open similar civil rights investigations at half a dozen colleges.
While it is certainly a noble goal to make sure that schools are providing equal access, this seems more like a way of placating a certain segment of the US population which believes that there is rampant racism and discrimination everywhere. Except against Black and female conservatives, of course. We can expect the report to conclude, after the DOE is done interfering with the way schools operate, that there is rampant racism and discrimination occurring, and it is Bush’s fault. Speaking of Bush’s fault
Education Secretary Arne Duncan is to announce the initiatives in a speech on Monday in Selma, Ala., where on March 7, 1965, hundreds of civil rights marchers were beaten by Alabama state troopers.
Mr. Duncan plans to say that in the past decade the department’s Office for Civil Rights “has not been as vigilant as it should have been in combating gender and racial discrimination and protecting the rights of individuals with disabilities,” according to a text of the speech distributed to reporters on Sunday.
It continues, “We are going to reinvigorate civil rights enforcement.”
And we all know that “in the past decade” is code word for “Blame Bush.”
This is exactly the kind of thing Democrats and left leaners do not understand: rights are derived from the people, not the government. The government should follow the people, not dictate behavior.
Crossed at Pirate’s Cove
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Written on March 7th, 2010 by adminno shouts
-By Warner Todd Huston
The left is constantly attempting to wave its hand dismissively at our claims that they are socialists and communists. They claim they are true blue Americans and we are lying about them. Unions are one of the biggest perpetrators of this misinformation.
Well, it appears that in Detroit, unions came out in support of a goof ball that claimed himself to be a socialist. They all stood in the Michigan cold saying their “yeas” as he spoke about getting a free university degree, and as he touted a socialist “right” to food and their own house.
Here we see members of the AFT and the SEIU nodding in appreciation of this socialist’s ideas. They stood by his side as he pronounced these socialist “principles.”
Anyone that tells you that unions aren’t socialists and communists needs to explain why unions came out in support of this un-American nut in Detroit.
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Written on March 5th, 2010 by adminno shouts
Good thing the Nanny State jumped on this quickly!
To the little boy’s mother, it was just a 6-year-old boy playing around.
But when Mason Jammer, a kindergarten student at Jefferson Elementary in Ionia, curled his fist into the shape of a gun Wednesday and pointed it at another student, school officials said it was no laughing matter.
They suspended Mason until Friday, saying the behavior made other students uncomfortable, said Erin Jammer, Mason’s mother.
Whew! That made everyone safe, eh? Just because “He’s only six and he doesn’t understand any of this” is no reason to take action against this violent child, who is probably anti-IRS, too. And this wasn’t the first time he displayed this behavior! I bet he makes crayon posters comparing Obama to the Joker, as well!
Speaking of actual crazies, the NY Times has their story about the Pentagon shooting, and just can’t be bothered to make the connections
A gunman described by police officials as well-dressed, well-educated and well-armed for his minute-long shootout with police on Thursday just outside the Pentagon has died from his wounds.
Law enforcement officials said they still had not determined a specific motive for the gunman, identified as John Patrick Bedell, 36, but officials said he “had issues” and that there were records of previous brushes he had had with law enforcement officials.
Seeking clues for what prompted the suspect to open fire at a Pentagon entrance, police and F.B.I. investigators were examining a series of Internet postings thought to have been his work.
Still looking, eh?
Messages posted on the Web under the username JPatrickBedell seemed to share some biographical details with the shooter and pointed to a distrust of the military and the government at large. “I am determined to see that justice is served in the death of Colonel James Sabow, as a step toward establishing the truth of events such as the September 11 demolitions,” the user wrote, referring to the suicide of an Army officer in 1991.
So, a Truther. Kudos to Charles Johnson for finding more about Bedell’s Trutherism, bad boy for going the normal route and attempting to insinuate that Bedell was a right winger by writing “Another anti-government loon?”, as well as writing that Bedell is “a devotee of libertarian icon Ludwig Von Mises.” His brain washed followers took the hint, and ran with it.
The Times provides more
A 2006 arrest report for a man identified as John Patrick Bedell, then 33 years old, appeared to connect to the user JPatrickBedell, who wrote: “My desire for justice led me to violate what I think is one of the most unjust laws, cannabis prohibition, by growing 16 cannabis plants on my balcony in Irvine, CA from March 2006 to June 2006.”
And a pot user. He was also an anti-Bush nutter (via Patterico). I wonder, how will the media attempt the LGF spin to paint him as someone on the right?
Crossed at Pirate’s Cove
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Written on March 4th, 2010 by adminno shouts
Here we go: Darwin Foes Add Warming to Targets
Critics of the teaching of evolution in the nation’s classrooms are gaining ground in some states by linking the issue to global warming, arguing that dissenting views on both scientific subjects should be taught in public schools.
My first thought when I caught the headline and first paragraph (above) on my iPhone news app (Fluent News) was “please, no. Do not combine anti-Darwinism with anti-AGW. Let the science or lack thereof stand on their own merits.” As I have written, and said, time and time again, one of the things I hate the most about what the climate alarmists have done is incorporating every real environmental issue with global warming. We forget the real reasons. Manatees (I’m a big donor) must be saved from climate change, not boats going too fast in areas that are restricted. Coral must be saved from AGW, not polluted waters. The Amazon must be saved from globull warming, not pollution and deforestation. So, the real issues are not addressed anymore.
That said, the reality
In Kentucky, a bill recently introduced in the Legislature would encourage teachers to discuss “the advantages and disadvantages of scientific theories,” including “evolution, the origins of life, global warming and human cloning.”
The bill, which has yet to be voted on, is patterned on even more aggressive efforts in other states to fuse such issues. In Louisiana, a law passed in 2008 says the state board of education may assist teachers in promoting “critical thinking” on all of those subjects.
Last year, the Texas Board of Education adopted language requiring that teachers present all sides of the evidence on evolution and global warming.
This is what Excitable Chucky Johnson call “stealth creationism,” and, in some small cases, he is correct, however, what exactly is wrong with teaching all sides of an issue? Not all those bills, or others, are telling or allowing teachers to teach religious tenets, or even Intelligent Design (funny how the same liberals had no problem with teaching Islam in schools, something that happened quite a bit after 9/11, as lefties tried to teach “tolerance” and “multiculturalism”). Should not kids be taught the good and bad of scientific theories? Should they not be provided with all the facts from all sides, to allow themselves to make a rational, intelligent decision on where they stand? Or, are our schools simply to be used as indoctrination centers, much as in North Korea and Hitler’s Germany?
James D. Marston, director of the Texas regional office of the Environmental Defense Fund, said he worried that, given Texas’ size and centralized approval process, its decision on textbooks could have an outsize influence on how publishers prepare science content for the national market.
“If a textbook does not give enough deference to critics of climate change — or does not say that there is real scientific debate, when in fact there is little to none — they will have a basis for turning it down,” Mr. Marston said of the Texas board. “And that is scary for what our children will learn everywhere.”
A perfect example of which side is actually anti-science. It is “scary” that children be presented with all sides of a scientific argument.
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