By Jerry A. Kane | Monday, October 12th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
A Delaware first grader fails to consider the serious consequences of his innocent action and has been suspended by school administrators. He now faces 45 days in the district’s reform school having been found guilty of violating the school’s zero-tolerance weapons policy by a disciplinary committee.
Six-year-old Zachary Christie was so proud of being a Cub Scout that he decided to take his camping utensil to school and use it to eat lunch. When he got off the bus a teacher asked him what he was holding in his hand, so he showed her the utensil and explained why he brought it. The teacher confiscated the utensil and gave it to the principal, unleashing the whirlwinds of political correctness.
As a student, Zachary has advanced math skills and reads above grade level. He is a Cub Scout who plays Little League Baseball, studies martial arts, belongs to a church youth group, and attends school activities, including the talent show, the science fair, and the PTA Art Contest, where he won first place for his film, “What Is My Job?”
The District’s code of conduct bans knives “regardless of possessor’s intent,” leaving school administrators no choice but to automatically suspend him. Residents question why administrators blindly follow such policies without using discretion for each case individually. But school officials contend that it’s hard to distinguish innocent mistakes from serious threats and their strict policies protect students.
Critics argue that student protection is a two-way street. Zero-tolerance policies have expelled kids to the streets or to institutions where their behaviors exacerbate. The “collateral damage” from the District’s zero tolerance policy has resulted in innocent children being alternatively placed in The Douglass School, a reform school for juvenile delinquents with severe behavioral problems convicted of rape, assault and battery, concealing a deadly weapon, and drug offenses.
While critics contend that zero-tolerance policies undermine the use of common sense in handling minor infractions, school board President, George Evans, defends the committee’s decision and the weapons’ policy.
“There is no parent who wants to get a phone call where they hear that their child no longer has two good seeing eyes because there was a scuffle and someone pulled out a knife,” Evans said.
The Columbine and Virginia Tech shootings have driven many of the nation’s school districts to adopt zero-tolerance policies for weapons on school grounds that have gone too far. What equivalence is there between a six year-old first grader and 17 and 18 year-old high school students or a 23 year-old college student?
How is showing off a combination knife, fork, and spoon camping utensil at school comparable to brandishing a Glock 19 and Walther P22, or a sawed off 12-gauge pump shotgun, 995 carbine rifle, TEC-DC9, and sawed off double-barrel shotgun?
Perhaps a better question is what indoctrination method or fluid is being given to education majors in graduate school to produce so many irrational, politically correct teachers and administrators? Obviously, something has sapped their common sense or they wouldn’t attempt to justify such absurd disciplinary actions.
Concerned citizens who would like to offer Evans and the school board a bit of common sense, a meeting is scheduled for Tuesday October 13, 2009 at 7:30 p.m. at Porter Road Elementary School, 500 Caledonia Way, Bear, Delaware; for those who like to make their views known, Zachary’s parents have created a website with phone numbers and e-mail addresses of administrators and board members.
By Jerry A. Kane | Thursday, October 1st, 2009 at 5:13 pm
Gamaliel is actually a more dangerous group than its corrupt cousin ACORN for it actually embodies the dreaded union of church and state, and, if left unchecked, will emasculate individual liberty in the name of God and sacred community and will sacrifice religious freedom on the advocacy altar of social justice and the greater good.
Brietbart TV has recently unearthed a 2:00 minute video of a Gamaliel International Leadership Assembly “prayer meeting” held December 4, 2008, in Washington, DC, which has created a bit of a stir.
In the video, people hurriedly enter a room while chanting, “Everybody in! Nobody out!” an apparent reference to universal health care. The group then gathers to offer a scripted prayer for “all of us who face health care without good health care insurance.”
In liturgical fashion, a woman leads a responsive reading, and the group purportedly responds at appropriate intervals “Hear our cry Obama” and “Deliver us Obama.” Whether the respondents clearly say “Obama” or “O God” is open to debate, but what is not debatable are the current and historical ties that Brother O has to the Gamaliel Foundation.
Alinsky’s organization was based in Chicago, and it trained a cadre of community organizers for such groups as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and the Gamaliel Foundation in the political strategies outlined in Rules for Radicals. To build left-wing political coalitions within inner city neighborhoods and black churches, Alinsky-style organizing specialized in ideological stealth, deception, and camouflage.
Like ACORN, the Gamaliel Foundation is a politically active organization with Marxist goals and differs only in its narrowly-focused outreach for infiltrating local church communities rather than entire neighborhoods. Once infiltrated, the Gamaliel Foundation hijacks the church leadership to combine a Marxist agenda with a smattering of Christian doctrine and push leftist political issues through methods of intimidation and agitation. Gamaliel organizers quietly share the same anti-American liberation theology brought to the limelight through the guttural discharges of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.
Gamaliel stands at the center of a well-coordinated, well-funded, and complex campaign to take back the debate and move Obamacare forward. Almost thirty denominations including mainstream Episcopal, Presbyterian USA, and United Methodist churches have joined Gamaliel and the Whitehouse to sell Obamacare through a nationwide TV ad with local clergy and lay leaders supporting reform, prayer rallies and in-district meetings, petition drives, and a call-in Webcast that featured Brother O and diverse faith leaders.
Alinsky created partnerships among faith-based community organizations as a means to seize power to realize his utopian dream of equality, justice, and peace. In Chicago, Brother O learned how to use power at the feet of some of the most radical socialists in America and to advance the Alinsky agenda into the highest levels in government.
Now that America is in the throes of an Alinsky dream, Americans may wish to examine what the Reverend John C. Welch and Gamaliel acolytes say about the man into whose hands the governance of this nation has been placed:
“He is Gamaliel. He is African American. He is one of us. He is the 44th President of the United States of America!”
Louise Slaughter (D-NY) has issued her latest unspeak rules of decorum for House members. The nanny Chair of the House Rules Committee permits the terms “disgrace” and “nitwit,” used to malign the actions of recent Republican presidents, but makes verboten the use of the terms “liar” or “sexual misconduct” that accurately define the actions of recent Democrat presidents.
Slaughter updates section 370 of the House Rules and Manual to control what Representatives can and cannot say on the floor and in committee regarding improper references to Brother O. The Slaughter House rules decree that Members can:
refer to the government as “something hated, something oppressive.”
refer to the President as “using legislative or judicial pork.”
refer to a Presidential message as a “disgrace to the country.”
refer to unnamed officials as “our half-baked nitwits handling foreign affairs.”
Conversely, Members must never:
call the President a “liar.”
call the President a “hypocrite.”
describe the President’s veto of a bill as “cowardly.”
charge that the President has been “intellectually dishonest.”
refer to the President as “giving aid and comfort to the enemy.”
refer to alleged “sexual misconduct on the President’s part.”
The Slaughter House rules graciously permit political criticism on matters of policy, but prohibit offensive criticism of the Democrat President. Members may say Brother O is unworthy of re-election, but they must never mention personal misconduct, for in doing so is to incite animosity and antagonism among House members and members of other branches of Government.
Aside from being openly subjective and imprecise, the Slaughter House rules are an overreaching attempt to impose political correctness and to strip the people’s representatives of their right to point out the progressive leader’s “terminological inexactitude.”
Titles can be bestowed, but genuine respect must be earned. To gain Americans’ respect for the man as well as the office, Slaughter and the Democrat ilk must refrain from treating their President like a victim.
Life used to be so hard
Now everything is easy ‘Cause of you
The U.S. government can legally take over your computer, and access every piece of data on it. This would include all your personal financial records, your family memorabilia, and any email correspondence to and from your friends. If you have an Internet phone service, such as Vonage, Skype, or Magic Jack, it would also include all your phone conversations. And once the government has tapped into your system, they can continue to track you forever.
There’s a trick to this. In order for this to be legal, you have to give your consent. But most of us are already conditioned to do this without being aware of it. When you buy software applications, like Turbotax or Photoshop, they come with a licensing agreement. As you are installing them on your computer, you come to a box filled with pages of legalese that includes all the restrictions on your use of the software. You have just spent big bucks for the app, and in order to use it you have to click the button that says “I agree.” Most folk do this without reading all the fine print.
And what is Big Brother’s ploy for luring you into this irreversible headlock? Here’s where it gets really interesting. It’s the Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS) program, aka “Cash For Clunkers.” If you log on to the website CARS-dot-gov the thought police will own you. The program was conceived by Obama’s new Green Jobs Czar Van Jones, who has a communist background:
Speaking to the East Bay Express, Jones said he first became radicalized in the wake of the 1992 Rodney King riots.
“I met all these young radical people of color — I mean really radical, communists and anarchists. And it was, like, ‘This is what I need to be a part of.’ I spent the next ten years of my life working with a lot of those people I met in jail, trying to be a revolutionary. I was a rowdy nationalist on April 28th, and then the verdicts came down on April 29th. By August, I was a communist.”
Do you see a pattern here? Originally, there was a notice on the CARS website that read:
“When logged on to the CARS system, your computer is considered a Federal computer system and is the property of the U.S. Government. Any or all uses of this system and all files on this system may be intercepted, monitored, recorded, copied, audited, inspected and disclosed to authorized CARS, [Department of Transportation] and law enforcement personnel, as well as authorized officials of other agencies, both domestic and foreign.”
Fox News cable TV host Glenn Beck alerted the American public to this outrage, and the original notice was replaced. The Washington Timesreports:
When asked if similarly intrusive warnings were posted in the past, NHTSA [National Highway Traffic Safety Administration] spokesman Debbie Boykin told us: “I haven’t heard of that happening before at all.” It was only at the close of business yesterday that Sasha Johnson, press secretary for the Department of Transportation, informed us that the warning had been replaced with a note saying, “We are working to revise the language.” Despite repeated requests, no explanation was ever offered for why the original warning was used or why it was taken down.
We’re curious why civil rights advocates aren’t up in arms over this invasion of privacy. …. In this clunkers deal, the government was claiming access to files on private computers in return for being part of the $1 billion (and counting) program to get cash for trading in an old car for a voucher to buy a new one.
The American Civil Liberties Union showed no interest in investigating the invasion of privacy and would only comment to us that “it is hard to believe that [the Obama administration] would do something like this.” Big Brother can get away with a lot when the watch dogs aren’t watching what’s going on.
Here’s video from the aforementioned Glenn Beck program:
Bypassing the authority of Congress, Barack Obama rules through czars — the beginnings of dictatorship. (Most recent update — Sept. 9.)
[The spelling of the title is a literary allusion to The Compleat Angler by Izaak Walton, circa 1653, a staple of English literature. The variant spelling "compleat" signifies "quintessential," the be all and end all, the last word.
This is an updated list. The original post is below the fold. Normally, we write about something and move on, but so many people have been using this list for reference that we feel an obligation to keep it current. We cannot do this as a new post without being unfair to the many fellow bloggers who have linked to the URL of this post. Also, we have a policy of never erasing something that we have posted, because it confuses readers who come back looking for something they remember reading, and we put courtesy to our readers ahead of everything. To accomodate these two constraints, we will keep a current list above the fold continually updated, and leave the original post unchanged below the fold.
The 8/06/09 update reflects the impending departure of the cybersecurity czar, Melissa Hathaway, adds the new "disinformation czar" and clarifies the media caused ambiguity between the "auto recovery czar" and the "car czar" -- see full discussion of this in update following the original post.]
Bailout czar, Herbert Allison Jr., [replaced Bush bailout czar Neel Kashkari, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Financial Stability confirmed by Senate]
Car czar, Ron Bloom [Counselor to the Secretary of the Treasury , under Senate oversight]
UPDATE, 9/07/09: Obama announced his appointment of Ron Bloom as “senior counselor for manufacturing policy,” a move that will eliminate Senate oversight. This position has been dubbed “manufacturing czar” and so this listing moves to a different alphabetical location.
UPDATE, 9/08/09: My bad. Ron Bloom continues as car czar and takes the appointment as manufacturing czar. He will be double dipping.
Intelligence czar, Dennis Blair [Director of National Intelligence, a Senate confirmed position. He is a retired United States Navy four-star admiral]
Latin-American czar, Arturo Valenzuela (nominee) [although this post is referred to as a czar, he is nominatied to be Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs and so is subject to Senate confirmation. Voting on his confirmation was delayed to clarify his position on Honduras. Watch WaPo's Head Count to track status of confirmation.]
Manufacturing czar, Ron Bloom, formerly a “car czar” under Senate oversight, now reporting directly to the President.
UPDATE from Labor Day.
Safe schools czar, Kevin Jennings [appointed to be Assistant Deputy Secretary of the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools, a newly created post (that does not require Senate confirmation); openly gay founder of an organization dedicated to promoting pro-homosexual clubs and curricula in public schools]
TARP czar, Elizabeth Warren [chair of the [Congressional Oversight Panel for the Trouble Assets Relief Program; note that Herb Allison is frequently called the TARP czar]
Radio-internet fairness czar
UPDATE, 7/29/09: Mark Lloyd was appointed FCC diversity czar.
Student loan czar, to oversee a program of mandatory service in return for college money (source)
Voter list czar
Zoning czar
Obama has moved swiftly to concentrate power in the White House, bypassing the review of our elected representatives in Congress in most of the posts listed above. Even though cabinet positions are part of the executive branch, the cabinet secretaries must be approved by Congress, they are funded by Congress, and they can be called before Congress to testify. Most of these czars, on the other hand, are appointed by Obama at his sole discretion, and are answerable only to him. If subpoenaed by Congress, they can claim executive privilege.
On July 15, Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA) introduced H.R.3226, the Czar Accountability and Reform (CZAR) Act of 2009, with 34 co-sponsors. There is some comfort in knowing that there are still a few folk in the House of Representatives who are fighting for constitutional government.
This new list is alphabetized by the czar positions, to facilitate comparison with the excellent research on the duties of each office done by Terresa Monroe-Hamilton at Noisy Room. Below the fold is the earlier list sorted by the last names of the appointees.
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Common Sense Is Wholly Uncommon for School District
