Tag Archives: morality

How is this Not a Firing Offense?

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The principal of Brooklyn’s Coney Island PS 90–the Edna Cohen School–Greta Hawkins, has cancelled her kindergarten’s scheduled performance of Lee Greenwood’s “Proud to be an American” at their moving-up ceremony.

Her excuses?

We don’t want to offend other cultures

and the lyrics are “too grown up” for five year olds.  The opening lines, the “too grown up” lines, are these:

If tomorrow all the things were gone,
I’d worked for all my life,
And I had to start again,
With just my children and my wife,
I’d thank my lucky stars,
To be livin’ here today.

But  a Justin Bieber song was “age appropriate” for these same five year olds, and they were allowed to sing this song in the their ceremony.  This song opens with

Are we an item?
Girl, quit playing.

And the President Obama approves of this.  His Department of Education agrees with Hawkins.

The lyrics are not age-appropriate.

I’d like to hear his definition of “age-appropriate,” since he thinks patriotic lines are not, but Bieber’s lines are, for these children.

And those offended cultures?  The school has a significant immigrant student population, and so the neighborhood has a significant immigrant parent population.  Those parents, many of whom are immigrants from Pakistan, Mexico, and Ecuador, to name a few, “love” the song, which used to be performed annually by the kindergartners.  When last year’s fifth graders—who seem to be old enough to handle both patriotism and Bieber on the same day—sang “Proud to be an American” at their year-end ceremony, the parents of those fifth-graders gave it a standing ovation.

Yet, even though the school does have its students recite the Pledge of Allegiance and sing a stanza or two of “God Bless America” each morning, kindergartners aren’t allowed to be patriotic at their year-end ceremony.

Because patriotism is an “age-appropriate” topic.  And American patriotism might offend other cultures.

Update:  Now Hawkins has decided to can the Bieber song, too.  She’s not reinstating “Proud to be an American,” though; patriotism remains offensive at her school.  Congressman Michael G. Grimm (R, NY), whose district includes Brooklyn and this school, had some thoughts on the matter.

I am outraged that NYC’s Department of Education is standing by the decision of PS 90’s principal to pull the song “Proud to be an American” from the upcoming kindergarten ceremony, for fear of offending other cultures.   The only thing offensive about any of this is the anti-American message being engrained in our youth.  We all should be proud to be American and we should never ever apologize for it!

And Lee Greenwald had this about Hawkins’ banning of his song:

I think [Hawkins is] confused between allegiance and worship.  I don’t think it’s a religious issue to salute the flag.  You always respect the flag.  That’s just simple for me.  A religion that says you can’t do that is out of place

Give Him a Speedy Trial and a Fast Impeachment

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Convicted serial bomber, drug trafficker, and perjuror, Brett Kimberlin, is continuing his assault on any and all who are rude enough to write about him in any way less than completely fawning of his wonderfulness.  In one such assault, done under the guise of his lawfare war, he had the rude blogger Aaron Walker arrested while in court responding to a prior Peace Order Kimberlin had managed to obtain.

But of interest here is not so much Kimberlin’s behavior, but the behavior of Maryland Judge C.J. Vaughey in that matter.  The Peace Order Kimberlin had obtained, and under which Walker was arrested in Vaughey’s court, centered on this:

Mr. Walker has tweeted on Twitter about me in alarming and annoying ways over hundreds of times in the past week and urged others to attack me.  He has generated hundreds of blog posts directly and indirectly based on false allegations that I framed him for an assault.

Mr. Walker has had many people threaten me directly with death, and told me to stop talking to the police, and not show up in court or I would die.

These are carefully, cynically, vague and unsubstantiated claims, yet Vaughey took them at face value, not even inquiring into evidence to support the claims.  Then we get this from Walker’s hearing before Vaughey [emphasis mine]:

VAUGHEY: –You’ve decided to battle, and he comes back.  And see, you’re—you—you’re the kind of guy, you don’t want to get into this to settle this, mano y mano.  You want to get all these friends who got nothing else to do with their time, in this judge’s opinion, because—my God, I’m a little bit older than you are, and I haven’t got enough time in the day to do all the things I want to do.  And I thought by retirement, I would have less to do.  I got more!  Because everybody knows I’m free!  So they all come to me.  But you, you are starting a—a conflagration, for lack of a better word, and you’re just letting the thing go recklessly no matter where it goes.  I mean, you get some—and I’m going to use word I (ph)—freak somewhere up Oklahoma, got nothing better to do with his time, so he does the nastiest things in the world he can do to this poor gentleman.  What right has that guy got to do it?

WALKER: He has no right to do that, Your Honor.

VAUGHEY: Well, he’s—you incited him.

WALKER: But, your honor, I did not incite him within the Brandenburg standard though.

VAUGHEY: Forget Bradenburg [sic].  Let’s go by Vaughey right now, and common sense out in the world.  But you know, where I grew up in Brooklyn, when that stuff was pulled, it was settled real quickly.

WALKER: I’m not sure what that means, your honor.

VAUGHEY: –Very quickly. And I’m not going to talk about those ways, but boy, it ended fast.  I even can tell you, when I grew up in my community, you wanted to date an Italian girl, you had to get the Italian boy’s permission.  But that was the old neighborhoods back in the city.  And it was really fair.  When someone did something up there to you, your sister, your girlfriend, you got some friends to take them for a ride in the back of the truck.

WALKER: Well, Your Honor, what–

VAUGHEY: –That ended it.  You guys have got this new mechanical stuff out here, the electronic stuff, that you can just ruin somebody without doing anything. But you started it.

As Popehat points out, the Brandenburg standard is from a Supreme Court ruling that held that speech may be banned on the theory that it is incitement only when it is intended to create, and is likely to create, a clear and present danger of imminent lawless action.

What do we have in this…judge’s…actions, then?

First we have his statement that the law is what he says it is, not what is actually written by our legislators, not what has been ruled by his superiors, the Supreme Court.

We also have this judge’s implicit recommendation that if someone offends Walker, then Walker should simply take that offender for a ride in a truck and “settle” the matter.  And by extension, he’s given that ex-con Kimberlin permission to do exactly that.

And he’s accused the victim of Kimberlin’s assault of having started the ex-con’s assault.

Vaughey is unfit to be a judge; he should be removed from the bench he’s sullying as soon as possible.

 

h/t to Grim’s Hall.

Voter ID and Hypocrisy

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We already need a photo ID for nearly anything we do: board a commercial airplane, drive our car, check into a shooting range (oh, wait—we’re not supposed to be allowed to do that, either, according to some), get into a federal building; the list goes on and on.

Oh, and get into a Big Do involving the President or First Lady.

A PHOTO ID [WAS] BE REQUIRED TO ENTER THE MASSMUTUAL CENTER [for last May’s Massachusetts Democratic Party Convention, emphasis in the original]

A photo ID will be required to enter the 2012 Democratic National Convention this September in Charlotte.

On Friday, June 8th, those wishing to attend [Mrs Obama’s book signing] must…submit their social security number and show an official photo ID (driver’s license, passport) to a Secret Service agent

No Jim Crow here.  No siree.

Yet the Progressives demand that anyone should be allowed to vote—residents, the dead, cartoon characters, illegal aliens, non-citizens; it’s all the same to them.  They’re suing states for insisting on photo IDs in order to get a ballot.

More on the EU Crisis

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The Wall Street Journal asks whether, with the EU and the euro zone falling deeper into their pit, Germany will act.

Germany, the only euro-zone nation with the economic heft to do so, has done the minimum necessary to keep vulnerable countries afloat…

they say, and

[T]he German government must decide whether saving the euro is worth putting the country’s own prosperity at risk.

But Germany has been acting, and for the most part quite appropriately—that “minimum” being too much intervention.

No one can save us from ourselves, or the Greeks from themselves.  We—and the Greeks—are the only ones who can do this.  Indeed, “salvation” imposed from outside can only make the inevitable conflagration that much worse.  It does so, in part, by not allowing the natural forces, of a free market in this case, to clear away the dead brush as it accumulates, so that when an otherwise lesser recession succeeds in igniting that inflammable detritus in several areas, they all explode into an out of control disaster—the current EU debt crisis.

The imposed “salvation” also acts, in part, to create a moral hazard that anaesthetizes its victims against the pain of acting on one’s own obligations and suffering the consequences of choosing unwisely or unfortunately (and those of choosing wisely or fortunately) without eliminating the critical need.  And this results, in the other nations “needing” the same bailout, which series threatens to bankrupt the benefactors as well as the beneficiaries.  The beneficiaries of this “aid” will be bankrupted by it; have no doubt of this.  The recipients of the loans being forced can never hope to repay them, and this can only cost the taxpayers of the lending nations—taxpayers who have the wherewithal explicitly because they, and their nations, have been acting responsibility.

Germany, which the rest of Europe and especially the Greeks, sees as their piggy bank, recognizes this risk, at least sub rosa, as demonstrated by their reluctance to fork over the cash.  It’s time for the rest of Europe to man up, also.

As the WSJ notes,

At a conference in Brussels last week, Thomas Steffen, state secretary at the German finance ministry, responded to criticism that Germany had been too slow to help its neighbors by making reference to the fable of the ant and the grasshopper.  The ant, he noted, works through the summer to store up food for the winter while the grasshopper wastes the warm months singing.

Some in the audience took the analogy as a call on southern Europe to take their fate into their own hands.

Mr. Steffen didn’t tell audience members how the fable ends: When winter comes, the starving grasshopper begs the ant for food. Rebuking the grasshopper for his idleness, the ant turns his back and crawls away.

Those in the audience took the analogy correctly—knowing the outcome of the fable.  It’s time for the Greeces of the EU, in particular, take their fate into their own hands; it’s late summer, and the fall approaches.

The growth policies they need to emplace must not be the currently proposed—or forced from outside—policies of government growth through higher taxes (if with proclaimed spending cuts).  Rather, the growth policies must be policies of shrinking governments, greatly reduced government spending, and greatly reduced taxes.  And in the cases of some countries, actually collecting those taxes that are levied.  The social practice of not paying the taxes is a social practice of stealing from one’s neighbors.  If the tax is disliked so much, then the people of that polity must elect a government that will rescind that tax.

Progressive Civility

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In the run-up to the Wisconsin recall election, we got the Democrats’ attempt to smear Governor Walker with a carefully timed, just before the voting, dishonest claim of having fathered a child out of wedlock as a college kid.  We also got the Progressives’ preview of one of their core beliefs, that of a surveillance state, with a mailer they sent to all potential voters in the state:

We’re sending this mailing to you and your neighbors to publicise who does and does not vote.

… The chart shows the names of some of your neighbors, showing which have voted in the past.

After the June 5th election, public records will tell everyone who voted and who didn’t.

Ann Althouse has posted an image of the letter she received.  As Dr Althouse says, “This…is truly despicable.”

Now, post-election, Walker is the target—literally—of Democrats’ death threats.  Here are some of the…saner…threats.  And lest a reader thinks these are just angered BS, the Milwaukee Police Department and the Wisconsin Department of Justice think they’re real enough to investigate.

I wanna kill scott walker so fucking baddd!!!!! & the racist dumb assholes that voted for him

Please somebody kill Scott Walker.—

Scott walker will die within the next week ive already payed for the hit—

Oh Yeah, Somebody Gone Shoot Scott Walker White Ass.—

Scott Walker needs to die—

NBS I Know What School Scott Walker Son Go To—

As backdrop, we have this from last February by Congressman Michael Capuano (D, MA) about the Wisconsin recall election:

Every once and awhile you need to get out on the streets and get a little bloody when necessary.

It’s been interesting to see the denunciation by the Democratic Party leadership and by the NLMSM of these Progressive examples of civil discourse.

Here they are from President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, David Axelrod, Jim Messina, Debbie Wasserman Schulz, and Valerie Jarrett:

…http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8E_zMLCRNg

Here they are from the NYT, LAT, WaPo, CNN, and MSNBC:

MSNBC had this on the 6th, the day after the elections and the day the threats began appearing.  And WaPo had this piece on the 6th, which though is more along the lines of mine.  Since then, it’s been

…http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g04aCp3ej-I

for all of them.

Pair this with the Democrats’ atrocious attacks on the very fabric of our democracy 15 months ago when they ran from the state of Wisconsin (and Indiana) in order to block the democratically elected government from being able to function at all, solely because those Democrats were unable to impose their views on the majority.

The Progressives’ view of democracy and of individual liberty is not something we can afford four more years of.  Or ever again.