Ouch:
The truth about what their elders have done to Millennials and younger people hurts, but Whittle’s final message, after encouraging them to learn and liberate themselves, is crucial: While doing all of that, “Hang in there.”
On March 1, 2011, 14 year-old Makayla Norman of Dayton died of neglect at the hands of adults (her mother and three others) who were responsible for her care and safety. Makayla weighed 28 pounds when she died, and was found “covered in bedsores, living in filth and starved to the point the she looked more like a skeleton than a teenager.” On Friday, her mother pled guilty to involuntary manslaughter and endangering children. The cases of the three other adults go to trial on April 16.
In January, an investigative report by Cox Newspapers Dayton-area staff writers Josh Sweigart and Doug Page identified several parties who could and should have prevented the neglect in the first place, or detected it while in progress: “the home care agency responsible for feeding her”; “an extensive bureaucracy where officials say fraud is a massive and growing problem”; her case manager (among those indicted), who “worked for CareStar of Ohio”; and the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services. Bizarrely, two months later, while barely mentioning any of the aforementioned parties in their report, Mary McCarty and Margo Kissell at the Dayton Daily News, using questionable methods and verbiage (to be noted later), decided that one other element in Makayla’s life should be nominated to receive part of the blame — homeschooling:
Don’t quite understand why this is datelined from Louisville, because the news is primarily from Lexington:
Fans burn couches, flip cars after Kentucky’s win
Riot police used pepper spray in small amounts for crowd control as thousands of rowdy fans swarmed into the streets near the University of Kentucky campus, overturning cars and lighting couches ablaze after a victory over cross-state rival Louisville in a Final Four matchup.
Police had been bracing for the possibility of post-game violence and resorted to pepper spray though large amounts weren’t needed before they ultimately began dispersing the throngs, Lexington police spokeswoman Sherelle Roberts said.
She said 150 officers deployed on the streets at one point to quell what she called “a very dangerous situation with the fires and the violence” that dragged on for hours.
Many streets had already been blocked off around Kentucky’s Lexington campus earlier to make way for the crowds, but sirens blared and police shut down more streets when the blazes broke out. Twitter feeds reported police in riot gear moved in to disperse crowds as some people on the streets were overturning and vandalizing vehicles and others smashed glass bottles.
Straub said the crowds began to disperse by about 11 p.m., nearly three hours after the game ended. But she said at no point had things “gotten out of control.”
I’d say that if people are overturning cars and setting, you’ve hit the “out of control” stage. Lexington isn’t Paris — or at least it isn’t supposed to be.
The sad thing (obviously besides the damage and any injuries which might have occcurred, which are sadder) is that this has the potential to distract the team from the task at hand.
Sad — and true:
White House Feeds Minority Paranoia To Gain Votes
… the biggest hoax of the past two generations is still going strong — namely, the hoax that statistical differences in outcomes for different groups are due to the way other people treat those groups.
The latest example of this hoax is the joint crusade of the Department of Education and the Department of Justice against schools that discipline black males more often than other students. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan says this disparity in punishment violates the “promise” of “equity.”
Just who made this promise remains unclear, and why equity should mean equal outcomes despite differences in behavior is even more unclear. This crusade by Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is only the latest in a long line of fraudulent arguments based on statistics.
If black males get punished more often than Asian-American females, does that mean that it is somebody else’s fault? That it is impossible that black males are behaving differently from Asian-American females?
Nobody in his right mind believes that.
… Among the many serious problems of ghetto schools is the legal difficulty of getting rid of disruptive hoodlums, a mere handful of whom can be enough to destroy the education of a far larger number of other black students — and with it destroy their chances for a better life.
… Among the many serious problems of ghetto schools is the legal difficulty of getting rid of disruptive hoodlums, a mere handful of whom can be enough to destroy the education of a far larger number of other black students — and with it destroy their chances for a better life.
… Whether the current generation of black students get a decent education is infinitely more important than whether the current generation of Democratic politicians hang on to their jobs.
Well, that depends on whether you’re among “the current generation of Democratic politicians.” If you are, nothing else matters, regardless of the collateral damage.
The non-story of the week was that female grad students at Georgetown have to spend what was thought to be about $60 a month for contraception the Jesuit Catholic school won’t cover.
Even before getting into the reality that there are free resources available in many instances, it turns out that the amount involved is much lower, to a level where if you won’t get it unless someone else pays for it, you must not really care about your own health:
Attention Media: Walmart and Target Have Been Offering $9 (per 28 days) Birth Control Since 2007
Sources:
Y’know, there’s a lot of hardship out here in the real world, e.g., the “tent cities” no one in the press but the BBC has seen fit to notice.
But having to pay $9 every 28 days on a drug purchase which is almost always only necessary because of certain completely optional “lifestyle” choices is NOT one of them.
Accusing people who don’t think that someone else should be forced to pay that $9 or even $60 a month, especially if goes directly against their religious beliefs, of being heartless misogynists is completely out of bounds.
Forcing people to go against their religious beliefs is tyranny (“arbitrary or unrestrained exercise of power; despotic abuse of authority”).
During his first hour today, Rush mentioned the reaction of Peter King at Sports illustrated in King’s “Monday Morning Quarterback” collection to a paragraph in the magazine’s cover story on Jeremy Lin, the New York Knicks’ point guard who has broken through from obscurity to phenom during the past two weeks. What King wrote is indeed an interesting giveaway of what I believe is a common but unsupportable media perspective, namely that students at and graduates of elite upper-echelon universities like those in the Ivy League are presumptively free of overt racism, because, well, they’re all so enlightened.
Uh, no. As Pablo S. Torre reveals in said cover story:
Lin would brush off racist jeers from opposing fans (“Sweet and sour pork!”) and Ivy League opponents (he was called “Ch—” on the court) to average 16.4 points, 4.5 assists and 2.4 steals as a senior.
How quaint (and admirable) that Torre chose not to finish the slur word. In the past few days, ESPN’s repeated employment of the full word (“Chink”) has blasted Torre’s attempt at decorum to bits.
Here’s King’s reaction to what Torre found:
Friday, Mass Resistance leader and Mitt Romney’s Deception author Amy Contrada tore apart Mitt Romney’s CPAC speech piece by piece.
In the speech (quoting Amy’s opening list), Romney made patently false claims in the following areas:
Contrada’s critique is absolutely devastating (HT to a Steven Baldwin email).
Key pulls (but please carve out the time to read the whole thing):
Mitt Romney’s speech at CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference, Feb. 10, 2012) was at best full of half-truths and misrepresentations. What a mistake he made, inviting scrutiny of his record on constitutional and social issues as Governor of Massachusetts.
ROMNEY CLAIMED: “The state’s supreme court inexplicably found a right to same-sex marriage in our constitution.”
The TRUTH: The Court did so find, but Governor Romney followed their lead and unconstitutionally implemented “gay marriage” without legislative authorization. He treated the “inexplicable” opinion as law.
ROMNEY CLAIMED: “I pushed for a stay of the decision.”
The TRUTH: He wrongly accepted the Court as the ultimate authority, instead of doing his duty to act as a check on the Court.
ROMNEY CLAIMED: He “fought for a marriage amendment to our constitution.”
The TRUTH: Romney had opposed the only real chance for an amendment in 2002, and later attempts were poorly worded and doomed to failure. He offered little public support or leadership.
ROMNEY CLAIMED: “I fought for abstinence education in our public schools.”
The TRUTH: It was not an “abstinence only” approach; it did not say “wait until marriage”; it was “LGBT-friendly”; it lasted only two years; it included “peer teaching” by 12-14 year olds; and it was limited to very few middle schools in the state.
… While running for Governor, Romney told Planned Parenthood in April 2002 that he would “support the teaching of responsible, age-appropriate, factually accurate health and sexuality education, including information about both abstinence and contraception, in public schools.” (Helman) This “comprehensive” sex education is just what his supposed abstinence program did.
ROMNEY CLAIMED: “And I defended the Catholic Church’s right to serve their community in ways that were consistent with their conscience through adoption programs that placed children in a home with a mom and a dad.”
The TRUTH: … This claim is the height of grandstanding and hypocrisy.
That final assertion concerning one topic can and should be made about Romney’s entire campaign and candidacy.
I get upset, perhaps more than most, when people use the memory and life of the Rev. Martin Luther King to promote things that run opposite to his message, as the Cincinnati Public Library just has done in using today’s holiday as a vehicle to promote a book by racist, violence-supporting 1990s rapper Sister Souljah.
So does Mark at Weapons of Mass Discussion, who has articulated why we cringe and mourn at the serial abuse. Two of many key paragraphs:
I always believed in content of character over color. Always. And where is the status of Dr. King’s dream today? Sadly, with what I see in our culture today, the Dream is dying on the vine. Color and ethnicity are being trumped over character and shared values. Color and tribe are being used to divide us, especially at a time in our nation when we should and need to be together.
The Sistah Souljah garbage at Cincinnati Public Library is just a small part of the problem. There has been a huge shift in our culture and in the dynamic of the black community. Where once we were about coming together and being color blind, now we seem to be overly color sensitive. And it is spawning a backlash. Don’t get me wrong. Martin’s dream was not about giving up identity or being proud of one’s race or background. Rather, it was about respecting that; but at the same time, looking past the paradigms of color and getting to the essence of each other. We don’t seem to do that much anymore.
He goes on to provide many examples.
Read the whole thing.
The Cincinnati Public Library, despite being made aware of the obvious conflict between Sister Souljah’s “contributions” to the violent, racist strand of rap music in the early 1990s what today’s holiday is supposed to be about, has not removed her book Midnight and the Meaning of Love from its Martin Luther King Day recommended reading list (a “pick” is a recommendation, folks).
In asserting in a response to yours truly that “Selecting a book for one of our many booklists does not indicate that the Library endorses any or all opinions and statements made by an author,” it dodges the fact that putting a book on a recommended reading list is at a minimum a statement that of all of the thousands of books available on a topic — in this instance, supposedly the life, teachings, literary output, and impact of Dr. King — Sister Souljah’s is somehow one of the few which rises to the top and should be read.
As Bill Sloat at the Daily Bellwether explained earlier this month, the relationship of Midnight and the Meaning of Love to Dr. King is somewhere between nonexistent and polar opposite:
It is about a teenage boy and his teenage wife. He is black and 16, she is Japanese. Yes, they are underage minors. There is sex, violence, polygamy and a showdown with Asians — who some might feel are stereotyped in Sister Souljah’s tale. Fans believe she has mellowed since she became the Queen of urban lit. Still, it’s hard to square her gritty novel with the humanitarian works that Ohio’s Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday Commission wants celebrated in his memory this year. The commission’s idea of a humanitarian is someone who pours their heart into making life better for others — someone who promotes the betterment of all people and the elimination of pain and suffering through their own selfless service. Pretty tall order.
Obviously, Sister Souljah books should not be banned nor censored. The library is absolutely within its responsibilities to own and circulate titles under her authorship. But it might want to weigh whether her newst novel is consistent with Dr. King’s standards, teachings and the spirit of his dreams for our nation. He knew that hate was hate, whether preached by white, black, Christian, Muslim or anybody in any culture or religion. He stood up to it.
It is naive and dangerous to the Library’s long-term prospects for its management to continue to believe that the public’s (and taxpayers’) well of goodwill is bottomless.
Three items in Ann Coulter’s latest column are so self-evidently false that they simply cannot be accidents.
First:
Santorum is not as conservative as his social-issues credentials suggest. He is more of a Catholic than a conservative, which means he’s good on 60 percent of the issues, but bad on others, such as big government social programs. He’d be Ted Kennedy if he didn’t believe in God.
This is from the woman who falsely claimed last week (as shown in two BizzyBlog posts: long version; short version) that Santorum opposes E-Verify because he voted against the de facto immigration amnesty bill (which happened to contain E-Verify — big whoop), but has otherwise consistently supported E-Verify.
Oh, did I mention that the amnesty bill Santorum voted against was co-sponsored by John McCain, who endorsed Mitt Romney yesterday, and, uh … Ted Kennedy?
And who can forget that Ann Coulter’s very next column after the 2006 shamnesty vote ripped into Republicans who supported the law, thereby taking the same position of opposition Rick Santorum took when he voted against it the previous week?
Coulter’s “Ted Kennedy” slur — and yes, I consider associating Rick Santorum with the criminal of Chappaquiddick a slur — is not an accident or oversight. Santorum corrected “Chairman Ann” about McCain-Kennedy and E-Verify publicly last week. Clearly, she has thrown any concern about the truth overboard.
Second and third:
The Catholic missionary (i.e., Santorum — Ed.) was fantastic on issues like partial-birth abortion, but more like a Catholic bishop in his support for No Child Left Behind, the Medicare drug entitlement program (now costing taxpayers more than $60 billion a year), and a highway bill with a Christmas tree of earmarks, including the famous “bridge to nowhere.”
Coulter has a point on earmarks, but it ends there:
That’s three huge whoppers about Santorum or Santorum v. Romney.
What Bill Jacobsen at Legal Insurrection wrote a week ago has again been shown to be true, this time in triplicate:
Ann’s a lawyer, so she knows that omitting material facts can be just as much a fraud as stating false facts.
… Ann Coulter is willing to say anything to elect Romney.
Coulter’s high-water mark was Treason. That was nine years ago. Since then, when it comes to Republican presidential politics, she has gradually turned into a reckless polemicist with almost no regard for the truth.
Oh, and one more thing — Here’s Coulter in yesterday’s column:
Even in Iowa, the only Republican with a chance of doing that (i.e., defeating Obama — Ed.) won.
Here is Coulter in February 2011:
(at the 0:45 mark) I’ll put it in a nutshell: If we don’t run Chris Christie, Romney will be the nominee, and we’ll lose.
__________________________________________
UPDATE: At Legal Insurrection — “Coulter: Santorum ‘more of a Catholic than a conservative’”
UPDATE 2: The comments at the NewsBusters post of Chairman Ann’s column are mostly less than complimentary.
I hope that the nominations for dumbest wire service item of the year are still open, because the December 20 report by Associated Press Education Writer Jay Pope on the alleged negative impact of a successful college football team on the grades of male students on campus must be placed in the running.
Based on an eight-year study of grades by economists at just one school, the University of Oregon, who are either getting grant money they don’t deserve or have totally run out of productive things to do, a three-win improvement by a football team can increase the differential between male and female students’ grade-point averages by as much as 0.0144 points. Seriously. Pope never disclosed the degree of difference I just cited, and wasted almost 900 words on a story which should never have been written. What follows is some of the AP writer’s vapid verbiage:
Study: When a football team wins, male grades drop
On campus, a successful football team is a cause for celebration.
So much celebration, in fact, that three economists have found a link between a winning season at one big-time football program and lower grades for male students.
In a new paper, the economists at the University of Oregon chart the grade point averages of students there alongside the fortunes of the football team between 1999 and 2007. Their findings could give ammo to critics of big-time college sports.
Their conclusion: When the Ducks were winning, students celebrated more and grades suffered. And that doesn’t bode well for upcoming report cards – the Ducks are 11-2 this season, Pac-12 champions for the third straight year, and headed to the Rose Bowl.
… Women’s grades held up better than men’s when the team was doing well – and the drop in men’s grades compounded a GPA gender gap that was already present at Oregon, as it is on many campuses.
… On average, men were earning GPAs of 2.94, compared to 3.12 for women. But the more the team won, the more the gap widened; three extra wins amounted to an approximately 8 percent increase in the difference.
Seriously, Jay, if you would have dusted off your calculator for a few seconds, you would have realized how infinitesimal the supposed effect of a successful football season is:
All kinds of other influences, including runs of bad or good weather on campus perhaps moving some students to study out of sheer boredom, could easily be as important or more important than how the football team happens to be performing.
The caption at the photo accompanying the story reads in part: "When the college football team was racking up wins on the field, the men in classrooms partied so hard their grades took a dive." Words fail.
Instead of showing that "Their findings could give ammo to critics of big-time college sports," as Pope claims, what they instead show is that a certain Associated Press writer needs to go back to school to learn something about statistical significance, so that he (and his editors) won't be deceived by a bunch of academics attempting to push utter garbage on the public.
Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.
A story generating a lot of discussion today concerns how former Philadelphia Schools Superintendent Arlene Ackerman, who is receiving $905,000 in severance, has applied for unemployment benefits, and has been promised that the school district will not contest her claim.
Not so fast, people. I searched Google and Google News briefly, and found an interesting aspect of the situation which no one in the media apparently wants to consider. It relates to how Ackerman’s employment ended. One of many place where that ending is described came from Matt Petrillo at Philadelphia Weekly just three weeks ago. It began thusly: “It’s been 11 weeks since the School Reform Commission unanimously voted to fire public school boss lady Arlene Ackerman.” A quick visit to the relevant page at the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry would appear to indicate that Ackerman should not get unemployment benefits, and that it shouldn’t matter whether the district contests her claim:
Who Can File for Benefits
Any individual who has become unemployed may file an application for UC benefits. Eligibility to receive those benefits will be dependent on whether the worker meets the various requirements specified in the Pennsylvania UC Law.
… To be Eligible to Receive Benefits
A worker may be eligible to receive benefits if the worker
- is unemployed through no fault of the worker;
…
So if you were fired, you can’t collect benefits, because it’s your fault (nebulous or not) that you don’t have a job.
The “Fire Arlene Ackerman” Facebook page identifies three reasons people wanted to fire her:
If Ms. Ackerman was brought in to fix those things and failed in any one of them, that would constitute valid grounds for the School Reform Commission to fire her. It should therefore constitute grounds for denying her unemployment benefits claim regardless of whether anyone contests it. The Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry does not work in a vacuum, and can’t ignore the widely reported fact of and reasons for Ackerman’s firing, up to and including Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter’s belief that, as a CBS Philly August headline stated (CBS’s words), “It was time for Ackerman to go.”
Separately, the money-grubbing for $573 a week in taxpayer-provided benefits by someone who has just received a buyout of over $900K is appalling, disgusting, and a whole lot of other adjectives I can’t use (apparently, about $400K of the buyout was raised privately, which itself must be an amazing story – Update: According to an Associated Press story tonight, the private donors “backed out after critics blasted the deal’s lack of transparency”).
Ms. Ackerman should be ashamed of herself for even thinking of it, let alone trying to get clearance from her former employer not to contest it. But I guess if a family with a paid-off $300,000 house, $80,000 in the bank, and nice cars can collect food stamp benefits in my home territory of Warren County, Ohio (yes, that did happen, and probably still happens throughout Ohio in similar circumstances without publicity), what’s another $2,300 a month or so for 26 or 99 weeks in unemployment to someone who may very well be a millionaire?
Remember this episode the next time someone dares to tell you that the problem with government finance is that people aren’t taxed enough. And yes, as offensive as a lot of golden parachutes in the private sector are, the story is and should be different when it involves public funds.
Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.
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