“Twenty-one years later I can see how I should have handled the situation differently. I should have asked for more information and consulted legal or medical authorities. Teachers back then had little training and guidance about this kind of thing. All teachers should have a basic level of preparedness. I would like to see the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools play a bigger role in helping to prepare teachers.”
That last office is the one he presently heads. So he’s trying to turn a story about a past mistake into a pitch for how important his current job is. Class has a new definition.
But beyond that, why on earth should anyone need training to know that when a 15 year old tells you he’s having sex with old men who pick him up in bathrooms, the proper response isn’t, “I hope you knew to use a condom.”
And he should have “consulted legal or medical authorities”? Really? Why is it that any time anything happens, we have to alert “authorities” and call in the counselors and educators? If you don’t have proper advice for the kid, that’s fine, but that doesn’t mean he needs either a cop (whom the kid will almost certainly not speak with) or a “medical authority” – whatever that is.
The other teacher brought this student to him to get a little personal counseling. Then this guy responded by just telling the student that he should be marginally more careful when having sex with strangers. That student didn’t need “authorities,” he needed a respected adult to explain why having sex with old men in bathrooms isn’t positive behavior for a 15-year old. As human beings, we shouldn’t need lots of extra training to explain that to him.
Without judging its propriety — it may well be the best choice available — the terms of Israel’s upcoming exchange of twenty Palestinian criminals for a mere video of one of its soldiers who was captured three years ago is simply outrageous. We get a score of prisoners of varying importance, you get to know for certain that you haven’t executed one of your guys. Yet. Deal?
Israel is neither a hapless victim nor a blushing maiden, but it’s a decent and productive country that wishes little but the saftey and liberty of its citizens. In contrast, the Palestinians have produced a loathsome, hate-filled, kleptocratic society that brainwashes children and glorifies the worst kind of violence. They deserve neither our sympathy nor our support.
Tom posted this at 12:01 PM EDT on Wednesday, September 30th, 2009 as Arafatistan
There is usually only a limited amount of damage that can be done by dull or stupid people. For creating a truly monumental disaster, you need people with high IQs.
Hubbard posted this at 1:17 PM EDT on Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 as The Conservative Sowell
This column from the New York Times’s “public editor” is kinda cute.
Jill Abramson, the managing editor for news, agreed with me that the paper was “slow off the mark,” and blamed “insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio.” She and Bill Keller, the executive editor, said last week that they would now assign an editor to monitor opinion media and brief them frequently on bubbling controversies. Keller declined to identify the editor, saying he wanted to spare that person “a bombardment of e-mails and excoriation in the blogosphere.”
Despite what the critics think, Abramson said the problem was not liberal bias.
First, the Times had no clue what was going on on Fox, a channel that has more viewers than MSNBC and CNN combined, and which has significantly more viewers than the Times does readers. At this point in time, the Times is small potatoes next to Fox.
Second, the Times denigrating Fox as mere “opinion media” is funny in the same way it’s funny for a third grader to insist that he doesn’t want to sit at the same table as those baby first graders. If there’s a difference in levels of bias between the Times and Fox, it’s pretty marginal.
Third, that last line is just priceless. They don’t know what’s going on on Fox because of . . . well . . . um . . . I’m sure whatever it is, it isn’t liberal bias.
Apollo posted this at 1:54 AM EDT on Sunday, September 27th, 2009 as Journalism
You’ll get arrested for not paying your fine for not buying insurance.
Don’t be fooled by those who compare this to auto insurance mandates. I’m not aware of a state the forces people to buy insurance to protect their own car. Every state I’m aware of simply requires that you carry liability insurance to cover the damage you do to others.
Fining people for not buying health insurance might be forgivable if there were more low cost options. Indeed, if we require hospitals to treat anyone who gets brought in, then it seems reasonable to require that individuals at least buy low-cost hospital-only policies. The problem, of course, is that the same politicians who want to fine people for not having any insurance are the same politicians who want to increase the amount of mandated coverage, which significantly increases the price of insurance. In the car insurance analogy, this would be akin to a state requiring that all drivers carry insurance with a $250 comprehensive deductible and 24-7 roadside assistance. We tolerate auto insurance mandates because they don’t require such foolishness.
On a more philosophic level, the differences between car and health insurance show exactly how far into our personal lives the Democrats wish to insert government. Driving is always treated as a privilege, not a right; it’s an activity that poses serious risks to others, so we require that people pass driving tests and carry liability insurance in order to do it. But what privilege would a health care mandate be tied to? If you don’t want to pay for car insurance, you can just not drive. But if you don’t want to pay for health insurance, you can just . . . um . . . die? You can’t opt out out of EMTALA. Even if you buy your health insurance from a private company, this would be an enormous expansion of government control over our lives.
Apollo posted this at 11:17 PM EDT on Friday, September 25th, 2009 as CHANGE!, Politics
A highlight of the traditional wedding pageantry is the groom’s entrance riding a white horse or a more prestigious elephant. It’s a custom that harks back to days when the groom was usually a boy from another village and would travel in style to the celebrations.
Gurleen Puri, a Mumbai-based wedding planner who assisted with the Macau nuptials, says because there was no elephant in Macau, the wedding party wanted to bring one in. But Macau authorities turned down the request for an import permit. (A Macau veterinary official says elephants can be imported to the Chinese territory only for such purposes as performing in a circus.)
Ultimately the Muthas settled for a local horse—and a brown one at that. The cost was more than $5,000 for the groom to make his 20-minute debut in the saddle. Other transportation included a white 1950s MG car that was leased from Hong Kong and brought to Macau by ferry to be used in the wedding procession for about 25 minutes. The tab? Nearly $10,000.
I’d go to more weddings if I knew there would be elephants involved.
Apollo posted this at 10:48 PM EDT on Friday, September 25th, 2009 as Those Wacky Foreigners
In contrast to the vitriol and bile that’s become the exclusive property of the Right, here is MSNBC host Ed Schultz doing his best to Elevate the National Debate™.
After a lot of thought on the subject, I’ve brought myself to the point where I can at least understand where a lot of traditional anti-Semitism comes from, though I certainly don’t approve. In medieval Europe, the Jews kept to themselves, made a point of never fully assimilating, and had a lot in common with other Jewish communities in far-flung locations. So it’s fairly easy to see how they might become the bogeymen in unenlightened minds.
What’s somewhat harder to understand is anti-Semitism in the modern world. Specifically, Marxist anti-Semitism. Marx himself didn’t like the Jews. If you see the world split in two, between the workers and the capitalists, a people who insist on cultural continuity no matter where they live and no matter their class, and who would rather live in peace with their second-class status than start a revolution – well, it’s not too difficult to see how the Jews would become something of an ideological enemy to 19th and early 20th Century Marxists.
But, in the 21st Century, when the Marxist ex-president of Honduras – HONDURAS! – starts ranting that Israeli mercenaries are trying to kill him . . . surely it has all become farce. Except that the Leftist government of the United States, the most Jew-friendly country not named Israel, wants that ex-president reinstated. That is not a farce, and it is something I cannot bring myself to understand.
In numerous ways, that cut for both major ideologies, it makes things simpler to use these words. But that doesn’t make it accurate, and it doesn’t change the underlying realities of war.
For the second time in five years, Massachusetts has changed state law to ensure the state’s Democratic monopoly its citizens are properly represented in the US Senate:
BOSTON — Gov. Deval Patrick today named Paul G. Kirk Jr., a former aide and longtime confidant of the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy, to Mr. Kennedy’s seat.
“He shares the sense of service that so distinguished Senator Kennedy,” Governor Patrick, a Democrat, said at a news conference in Boston. “The interests of the commonwealth have never been more vital or at stake in the Congress today.”
Mr. Kirk, a longtime friend of the Kennedy family and onetime special assistant to Senator Kennedy, is scheduled to take the oath of office on Friday and serve until a special election on Jan. 19; he has pledged not to run in the election. He said on Thursday that he would keep the late senator’s staff in place.
Mr. Kirk was the favorite of the late senator’s wife and two sons, as well as some officials in President Obama’s administration, according to people familiar with the matter. The president issued a statement after the appointment was announced.
Oh, thank God. Imagine if we had appointed someone had been appointed who wasn’t the preferred choice of their lordships. But that’s not the real scandal:
Just before Mr. Kennedy died on Aug. 25, he asked the legislature to change the law and let Mr. Patrick appoint a temporary replacement for his seat until a special election could be held. That election is scheduled for Jan. 19.
Although Mr. Kennedy did not mention it when he made the request, it is clear that Democratic votes will be crucial to passing the contentious health care legislation making its way through Congress. He was a champion of overhauling the health care system, but with his seat empty, Democrats in the Senate are not assured the 60 votes necessary to pass the legislation.
Under the State Constitution, Mr. Patrick has to take the unusual step of declaring the law an emergency to make it effective immediately; most new laws cannot take effect for 90 days.
In my last post on this subject, I went out of my way to polite. Now I’m just angry. Kennedy had been dying for over a year and his illness prevented him from “properly representing” his constituents since at least March. If he honestly cared about representing his constituents, he could have resigned months ago and would would already have had a special election and a new senator by now. But now because of one senator — a frickin’ senator! Who cares? — was too proud and thought himself too important to resign when he should have, we have to pass an ex post facto law to change the way we elect senators for the second time in five years.
Shame on Deval Patrick, shame on the state legislature, and shame on the people of Massachusetts (of whom I count myself) for electing these corrupt asshats.
We’ve got a lot of czars in this administration. Did they not understand that “czar” has something to do with the old Soviet Union and Communism? Maybe a little Socialism?
Update: In the original version of this post, I erroneously attributed this quote to Mark Taylor, who guest-hosted for Dennis the day before. My apologies to Taylor for the mistake.
Williams and witnesses say officers tasered the wheelchair-bound man twice, then left him handcuffed with his pants down on the sidewalk in broad daylight. Williams spent six days in jail before prosecutors said they lacked evidence to charge him.
I have to ask, what kind of pussy ass cops are we training that need to taser a paraplegic man in order to get control of a situation?
Jamie posted this at 10:58 AM EDT on Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 as Liberty and/or Security
Anyone who supports the war on drugs would do well to watch this video:
My grandfather was a pharmacist in Australia. My father told me many times that before The West’s insane and myopic obsession with eradicating all drug use it never was a problem. Pharmacists knew who the abusers were and things were monitored and kept safe.
Now we have doctors lives destroyed because they try to take away someones pain. Well done.