Archive for the ‘Liberalism’ Category
New “Non-Stop” Film Slanders 9/11 Victims as Terrorists
Big Hollywood: ‘Non-Stop’ Review: Liam Neeson Thriller Hits New Left-Wing Low
It turns out that the villain is not a hijacker but a terrorist — someone who wants to murder everyone on the plane to further a political goal.
You ready…?
The terrorist is a 9/11 family member. Yes, you read that right; the terrorist is a 9/11 family-member who lost a loved-one in the World Trade Center on that terrible September morning.
It gets worse…
Apparently some people are aginst this
Via HotAir:
Campbell Brown: Keeping Sex Predators Out of Schoolrooms
Anyone with violent or sexual convictions against a child—whether a misdemeanor or felony—would be ineligible for school employment. Background checks would be more thorough, using expanded databases including the FBI’s fingerprint database, the national and state sex offender registries. And districts would be prohibited from knowingly unloading sex abusers on other schools—a practice known as “pass the trash.” These are sensible measures that are overdue. Yet the two most powerful teachers unions in the country have voiced objections to the bill. Both the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers complained about the bill before it passed the House. The NEA claimed in a letter to House members that background checks “often have a huge, racially disparate impact.” Randi Weingarten, the AFT chief, warned of inaccuracies in the FBI database and cautioned that teachers would be inconvenienced by potentially long screening delays.
Yes, that’s their argument against background checks to keep child molesters from working at schools. It’s bad enough that they would argue against this at all, but this claptrap that it would be racist, and *gasp* inconvenient. I do so love unions.
The educator war on gun culture continues
Subtitled: Being a dick to children.
Legal Insurrection: All your front yards are belong to school zero-tolerance policies by William A. Jacobson
Reason: School Defends Long Term Suspension of Students For Playing With Air Soft Gun: It’s For The Children, Even the Suspended Ones by Ed Krayewski
NRO: Schools Are Not Parents by Charles C. W. Cooke
Quotes from the 911 call made by a neighbor:
“He is pointing the gun, and it looks like there’s a target in a tree in his front yard,” she told the dispatcher. “This is not a real one, but it makes people uncomfortable. I know that it makes me [uncomfortable], as a mom, to see a boy pointing a gun.”
Yes, you read that right. She called 911 over a boy pointing something she knew was not a gun, at a tree, in his own yard.
Quote from the Larkspur Middle School principle:
This was a dangerous situation that involved the intervention of law enforcement, the Office of Safety and Loss Control and our school administration.
Translation: everyone massively overreacted so we are going to retroactively brand them as dangers to society to cover our backsides.
Something worth pointing out (Update: or not)
John Hinderaker raises what I think is an important point:
What is odd about this is that a filibuster occurs in the context of a cloture motion, for which 60 votes are required. “Cloture” means cutting off debate, but the Democrats aren’t planning on having a debate–any debate. They apparently intend, in keeping with their recent practice, that senators should read Reid’s bill and vote on it simultaneously. It is the Republicans, not the Democrats, who would relish a debate on the Left’s harebrained gun control schemes.
We’ve already seen a lot of this from the Democrats on the state level in places like New York and Connecticut: they want to avoid public debate of their legislation. They don’t want the public to know what is being done to them until it is already law. Despicable.
Update: Learn something new every day. There are apparently several stages at which a bill can be filibustered, and in this case it was filibustering the motion to open the bill for consideration and debate. There will be a later stage where the filibuster occurs in the context of a cloture motion.
Educator drafts students to make war on gun culture
campusreform.org: Prof at public univ under investigation for allegedly forcing students to make anti-gun posters
According to the complaint, obtained by Campus Reform, the professor compelled students in her graphic design class to create artwork opposing firearms on campus and opposing pro-gun legislation currently pending before the Texas state legislature.
The professor then used the artwork students created online to publicize an anti-gun petition entitled “MSU is anti-Concealed Carry on Campus” and on a now deleted Facebook page opposing firearms, says the complaint.
“On Monday, April 1, around 7 PM (class was 5:30 – 8:20), Jennifer Yucus, Assistant Professor of Graphic Art/Design, compelled students from her Computers For Artists class to advocate in favor of a political petition opposing firearms on campus, in opposition to a pair of bills currently before the Texas legislature, using personal art materials and MSU resources,” reads the complaint.
“Several of my classmates were uncomfortable with the assignment and either quietly or openly expressed this,” it continues. “Professor Yucus asked students to rationalize objections by thinking of it as a job from an employer (or words to that effect).”
Of course in reality the students were the ones paying for this class. They aren’t employees; they are customers. I think the ethical thing to do would be for the university to refund the student’s cost for the class.
The complaint adds that Yucus “did require all works to include the URL to the petition” she had created and adds that students were photographed while crafting the posters to give the illusion of youth support.
“Professor Yucus took photos of her students in the process of drafting and creating the posters, but did not say how these would be used,” says the complaint. “The posters were then hung in the hallways of the Fain Arts building, giving the impression of student support.”
Some of the photos later appeared on an anti-gun Facebook page that appeared to have been created by Yucus. The page appeared to have been deleted after the complaint was filed, but Campus Reform was able to capture the posted images before they were removed.
I am not a lawyer, and that goes double for Texas law, but I wonder if that crossed the legal line into misappropriating the student’s likenesses since it sounds like she was taking advantage of their reputation, prestige, or other value associated with them, for purposes of publicity.
According to the complaint, Yucus used her official university-issued e-mail address to later forward a URL to her petition to the entire class.
State law in Texas appears to forbid professors at public universities from using their authority to compel others to advocate for political causes.
“A state officer or employee may not use official authority… to interfere with or affect the result of an election or nomination of a candidate or to achieve any other political purpose,” reads subsection C of 556.004 of Government Code, Title 5, entitled “Open Government, Ethics.”
So at the least, that bit of the law seems to have been broken.
Insanity
Democrats in 2008: How dare those evil banks make loans to people who people with bad credit!
Democrats in 2013: Why aren’t banks making more loans to people with bad credit?
Feminist Sci-fi fans get Locus April Fool’s piece taken down
Via Instapundit:
Lawrence Person’s BattleSwarm Blog: WisCon’s Feminist Failfandom Brigade Gets My Locus April Fool’s Piece Taken Down
For those tuning in for the first time, this was a direct jab (in humorous form) at WisCon’s previous decision to yank their Guest-of-Honor invitation to Elizabeth Moon for daring to voice (in the mildest possible form) politically incorrect thoughts about certain aspects of modern Islam.
How radical Islam became so sacred to radical feminists is a topic for another time, and I have hamburgers to cook. But it’s sad to think how a tiny, unimportant, radical fringe of disgruntled feminists (so aptly dubbed “Failfandom” by Steven Francis Murphy) have not only come to believe that their right not to be offended trumps the free speech of others, but that other people in the SF community have come to cave into their petulant demands. (Whatever happened to “The solution to free speech is more free speech?” It seems that fewer and fewer people on the left side of the political aisle believe that any more.)
I once considered myself a progressive in part because I thought of liberals/progressives as the tireless defenders of free speech. This is just another example of how ass-backwards I had things. In retrospect the basis for that assumption was that liberals/progressives said it was true, therefore it must be so.
The ‘Colorado Model’
BayouRenaissanceMan: The ‘Colorado Model’: the danger spreads?
I daresay readers have heard mention of the ‘Colorado model‘, the techniques used by activists in the Democratic Party to take control of the state government of Colorado. They’ve just used that control to ram through draconian gun control legislation, in the face of enormous opposition from their constituents – opposition that they deliberately, contemptuously and defiantly ignored. The Examiner, true to its name, examined the situation in a recent article.
I had not actually heard of this before. People need to be made aware of the danger.
Mike Bloomberg: “I do think there are certain times we should infringe on your freedom”
Yes Mikey, we’ve noticed.
Courtesy of Ben Howe:
Mike Bloomberg: “I do think there are certain times we should infringe on your freedom”
Now he wasn’t talking about guns when he said this, but he might have well have been doing so. For him, and people like him, this philosophy extends to everything.
Also, as Howe pointed out: “Make special note of Bloomberg’s use of “we” and “you.” “We” is he and the other elites, unencumbered by such infringements since they are the ones that make the rules, not the ones that live by them.”
But apparently my attitude is anti-Semitic, according to Mike Barnicle and Al Sharpton.
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