Showing posts with label teachers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label teachers. Show all posts

Monday, December 24, 2012

American Gun Nuts Shoot Out a Petition to Deport Piers Morgan of CNN

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White House Petition to Deport Piers Morgan





From Sky News
Thousands of Americans have signed a petition calling for British CNN host Piers Morgan to be deported over his criticism of the country's gun laws.
Just two days after it was posted on the White House website, it had already garnered more than 30,000 signatures by late on Sunday, surpassing the 25,000 required to get a response from the White House.
. . . a Texas journalist posted a petition on the White House website alleging Morgan "is engaged in a hostile attack against the US Constitution by targeting the Second Amendment".
"We demand that Mr Morgan be deported immediately for his effort to undermine the Bill of Rights and for exploiting his position as a national network television host to stage attacks against the rights of American citizens," the petition says.

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Piers Morgan on CNN, Transcript December 18, 2012
PIERS MORGAN: The AR-15, as we've now seen from the last three mass shootings in America, Aurora, the shopping mall in Oregon, and now at Sandy Hook school, is the preferred choice of weapon for disturbed young men who want to commit mass atrocity, can fire hundreds of bullets at rapid speed, if you have the right magazines.

The president of the United States has indicated he wants to ban assault weapons like this. What is your view?

LARRY PRATT, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, GUN OWNERS OF AMERICA: I think we need to ban gun control laws that keep people from being able to protect themselves. The problem is not going to go away if we ban this or that gun. We've tried that. That doesn't work. Doesn't even work in England. You have mass murders there all over Europe. There have been mass murderers.

MORGAN: You're talking complete and utter -- you are talking complete and utter nonsense.

PRATT: The solution is for people to be able to defend themselves at the point of the crime and not wait for 20 minutes for the police come after everybody is dead.

MORGAN: What you've just said, Mr. Pratt, was an absolute lie. The gun murder rate in countries like Britain or Germany or Australia, we've all suffered massacres many years ago, similar nature, have -- there are 35 people killed a year. Your country has 12,000.

PRATT: Your murder rate has -- your murder rate is lower than ours, that is true. Your violent --

MORGAN: Lower? It's 75 against 12,000 in Australia.

PRATT: Your violent crime rate --

MORGAN: They had a massacre. And they got rid of the assault weapons.

PRATT: Your violent crime rate is higher than ours as is the violent crime rate in Australia. America is not the Wild West that you are depicting. We only have the problems in our cities, and unhappily, in our schools where people like you have been able to get laws put on the books that keep people from being able to defend themselves.

I honestly don't understand why you would rather have people be victims of a crime than be able to defend themselves. It's incomprehensible.

MORGAN: You're an unbelievably stupid man, aren't you?

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Friday, December 21, 2012

NRA Wants Armed Guards in All Schools

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National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre at a press conference on the Newtown massacre, held Friday Dec. 21, 2012
Full Text Here
. . . As brave, heroic and self-sacrificing as those teachers were in those classrooms, and as prompt, professional and well-trained as those police were when they responded, they were unable — through no fault of their own — to stop it.

. . . You know, five years ago, after the Virginia Tech tragedy, when I said we should put armed security in every school, the media called me crazy. But what if, when Adam Lanza started shooting his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School last Friday, he had been confronted by qualified, armed security?

Will you at least admit it’s possible that 26 innocent lives might have been spared? Is that so abhorrent to you that you would rather continue to risk the alternative?

Is the press and political class here in Washington so consumed by fear and hatred of the NRA and America’s gun owners that you’re willing to accept a world where real resistance to evil monsters is a lone, unarmed school principal left to surrender her life to shield the children in her care? No one — regardless of personal political prejudice — has the right to impose that sacrifice.

. . . Our training programs are the most advanced in the world. That expertise must be brought to bear to protect our schools and our children now. We did it for the nation’s defense industries and military installations during World War II, and we’ll do it for our schools today.

The NRA is going to bring all of its knowledge, dedication and resources to develop a model National School Shield Emergency Response Program for every school that wants it. From armed security to building design and access control to information technology to student and teacher training, this multi-faceted program will be developed by the very best experts in their fields.

Former Congressman Asa Hutchinson will lead this effort as National Director of the National School Shield Program, with a budget provided by the NRA of whatever scope the task requires. His experience as a U.S. Attorney, Director of the Drug Enforcement Agency and Undersecretary of the Department of Homeland Security will give him the knowledge and expertise to hire the most knowledgeable and credentialed experts available anywhere, to get this program up and running from the first day forward.

If we truly cherish our kids more than our money or our celebrities, we must give them the greatest level of protection possible and the security that is only available with a properly trained — armed — good guy.

Under Asa’s leadership, our team of security experts will make this the best program in the world for protecting our children at school, and we will make that program available to every school in America free of charge.

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No one seriously believed the N.R.A. when it said it would contribute something “meaningful” to the discussion about gun violence. The organization’s very existence is predicated on the nation being torn in half over guns. Still, we were stunned by Mr. LaPierre’s mendacious, delusional, almost deranged rant.
~ New York Times Editorial

Their press conference was a shameful evasion of the crisis facing our country. Instead of offering solutions to a problem they have helped create, they offered a paranoid, dystopian vision of a more dangerous and violent America where everyone is armed and no place is safe.
~ Mayor Bloomberg of NYC

Did the NRA just help "seal" the message that we really need to talk about this more than we ever did before? Because if their meaningful contribution is that all of us have a target on our back and all of us need to carry a gun, then we have big problems.
~ MSNBC Thomas Roberts to Michael Steele

I don’t even know where to begin. As a supporter of the Second Amendment and a supporter of the NRA (even though I'm not a member of the NRA), I just found it very haunting and very disturbing that we are country talking about arming our teachers and principals in classrooms. What does that say about us? I do not believe that’s where the American people want to go. I do not believe that is the response that should be coming out of the tragedy in Newtown.
I just think that this was a missed opportunity to create another conversation at a higher level where the American people are right now. This incident cut to the bone. This is unlike anything that’s come before it because it did involve such precious young people and it really starkly called us to think about our society, those issues, not just gun control laws but mental health and a whole bunch of other things I think the NRA could have brought to the table, the idea that the message, the top line message out of this press conference is let’s put a gun in the hands of teachers in our classroom and I do not think that’s where rank-and-file NRA members expected this to go to.
~ Ex-RNC Chairman Michael Steele on MSNBC













Their solution to resolve the issue around guns is to put more guns in the equation? If anything it would be less safe for kids. You would be putting them in the midst of potentially more gunfire.
~ Hank Grishman, Superintendent of Jericho, NY, schools

This is not an Old West shootout. We're talking about an elementary school.
~ Helen Gym, Philadelphia Community Activist

CodePink-AntiNRA

From Alternet
. . . the National Rifle Association today broke its silence with an extraordinary press event in which Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre blamed everybody and everything but the gun culture it has fostered for the deaths of 20 children and seven adults last week at the hands of Adam Lanza.
. . . Twice during his speech, LaPierre was interrupted by protesters from CODE PINK, each of whom stood at the front of the room, before the velvet-draped barrier, some four feet high, that appeared designed to protect the NRA speakers from the press. The podium was set back some 10 or 15 feet from the barrier, evoking the sense of paranoia that drives America's gun culture.
The first sign, held up by a male protester, was a pink banner that read: "NRA KILLING OUR KIDS." After unfurling it, he was escorted out of the room by security. About 10 minutes later, CODE PINK founder Medea Benjamin stepped with her own banner, which I could not read from my vantage point. Receiving the same treatment as the previous protester, Benjamin shouted: "Ban assault weapons now!"






Everyone was to blame. The media and their corporate owners. The political class in Washington. Video games. Violent movies. The mentally ill. But at no point did he point his finger back at the NRA, the one institution that has made it difficult, if not impossible, to bring about common-sense firearms legislation in the country.
~ Jonathan Capehart on Washington Post







. . . Columbine High School had a sheriff’s deputy assigned to the school who engaged the shooters almost immediately in 1999 and wasn’t able to stop the massacre. At Virginia Tech, there was an entire armed police force on campus that was unable to stop the worst school shooting in US history.
As we chronicled last week, there were sixteen mass shootings in the US this year alone—they occurred at shopping malls, spas, movie theatres, and coffee shops. Does LaPierre want armed guards there, and everywhere?
~ George Zornick on The Nation











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Thursday, December 20, 2012

Charlotte Allen's Insidious Sandy Hook Op-Ed in National Review

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Charlotte Allen on National Review
There was not a single adult male on the school premises when the shooting occurred. In this school of 450 students, a sizeable number of whom were undoubtedly 11- and 12-year-old boys (it was a K–6 school), all the personnel — the teachers, the principal, the assistant principal, the school psychologist, the “reading specialist” — were female. There didn’t even seem to be a male janitor to heave his bucket at Adam Lanza’s knees. Women and small children are sitting ducks for mass-murderers. The principal, Dawn Hochsprung, seemed to have performed bravely. According to reports, she activated the school’s public-address system and also lunged at Lanza, before he shot her to death. Some of the teachers managed to save all or some of their charges by rushing them into closets or bathrooms. But in general, a feminized setting is a setting in which helpless passivity is the norm. Male aggression can be a good thing, as in protecting the weak — but it has been forced out of the culture of elementary schools and the education schools that train their personnel. Think of what Sandy Hook might have been like if a couple of male teachers who had played high-school football, or even some of the huskier 12-year-old boys, had converged on Lanza.

. . . Parents of sick children need to be realistic about them. I know at least two sets of fine and devoted parents who have had the misfortune to raise sons who were troubled for genetic reasons beyond anyone’s control. Either of those boys could have been an Adam Lanza. You simply can’t give a non-working, non-school-enrolled 20-year-old man free range of your home, much less your cache of weapons. You have to set boundaries. You have to say, “You can’t live here anymore — you’re an adult, and it’s time for you to be a man. We’ll give you all the support you need, but we won’t be enablers.” Unfortunately, the idea of being an “adult” and a “man” once one has reached physical maturity seems to have faded out of our coddling culture.

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The school was K-4. There was a male janitor there. There were male teachers employed at Sandy Hook. This article is disgusting.
~ comment by Gina F.N. on National Review

OMG CHARLOTTE ALLEN YOU'RE INSANE! ("Women and small children are sitting ducks for mass-murderers") And, men are what, soaring superhero eagles? They have firearms implanted between their eyebrows? A genetic spidey-sense that allows them to anticipate the outbreak of violence? OH, and Adam Lanza's mother SHOULD HAVE KICKED HIM OUT OF THE HOUSE? How do you even remember to breathe?
~ comment by Suzy Cakes on National Review

Ah, yes, had a man been at the school, he could have thrown a bucket at a heavily armed killer. That would have stopped EVERYthing.
~ comment by Cartoon Peril on National Review

LOL for Ms. Allen's remark that we have to keep our troubled kids from getting into our cache of weapons and that we need to show them the door. Lord knows that if the choice is between the child and the guns, the kid has to go.
~ comment by padfoot on National Review

It shouldn't go without saying on this forum that the Ms. Allen's cruel and delusional ideas aren't just about women being "helpless," but about what is right for a 20-year old with horrible psychological issues. She advocates kicking them out of the house as a solution. Which is ridiculous, if not sociopathic.
We're all deep in mourning for these children and adults. We're all casting about for answers. But Ms. Allen's delusional rant is no answer.
~ comment by LacyM on National Review

I have to wonder how the author would explain the Ft Bragg massacre - where there were more than enough big burly men around, and even lots of big macho weapons - and yet it happened, with 12 deaths and 32 injuries. Perhaps her low regard for women's intellect and strength comes from self-observation.
~ comment by Shari Lewis on National Review

Charlotte Allen should be fired. As should the editors who thought this article was a worthy contribution to the conversation. Disgusting, ignorant, and ill informed.
~ comment by sophebe on National Review

Yeah, what a difference that made at Columbine when the entire football team rushed...oh, wait.
Well, Virginia Tech that was definitely better when all the burly men...hmmm, nope, not there either.
Of course Fort Hood is the perfect example because it's full of Miss Allen's dream of
real men so no one died in that shooting rampage...
Nope, this is just another of Miss Allen's attempts at controversy to gain notoriety.
Congrats! You're unfavorables are now on par with those of Westboro Baptist's and the plague. Well done.
~ comment by LLG on National Review

Because there's no way a madman with a Bushmaster could have stood up to a couple of husky 12-year-old boys, right? Allen's is possibly the most foolish commentary yet about this horror.
~ comment by Julie G. on National Review

I think this Ms. Allen's piece demonstrates the level of credibility that the National Review deserves--none.
~ comment by Mary G. on National Review

Is this site just trolling for page hits at this point? This post reads like satire. I'm sitting here rereading it and looking for any semblance of accuracy... or value for that matter.
As an Army Infantry vet, as someone that's worked security in one of the most dangerous parts of Washington DC, as competitive grappler, as someone that's been in physical altercations on the street, as a person that's lived out the male stereotype you're trying to invoke with this trash of a post - you, your publication, and any people that accept what you've written as fact...
You disappoint and embarrass me.
You are part of the problem.
You and the other Anne Coulters of the world are ruining the country my friends and family have served and died for.
You are a disgraceful and unnecessary caricature.
Please stop before someone takes you seriously and gets themselves killed.
~ comment by Shawn Lord on National Review

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Today's McArdle Award Winner

In which we memorialize the dumbest punditry connected to the schoolhouse massacre in Connecticut by measuring it against the thoughts of Megan McArdle, who believes that human-wave attacks by toddlers would have been the best solution.
Here we have Charlotte Allen, who thinks the basic problem was that there weren't enough manly men around Sandy Hook Elementary School last Friday.
. . . OK. I've thought about it. THEY'D ALL BE DEAD NOW, TOO.
Give Allen credit. At least she's upped the age for the schoolchildren who should be used for suicide missions against armored gunmen into the pre-adolescent range.
. . . American conservatism has been rendered a parody of a burlesque of a puppet show. And Charlotte Allen should be shunned by decent people. Hell, people who think like this should be shunned by bacteria.
~ Charles P. Pierce on Esquire

Via afeminizedsetting.tumblr.com/

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Monday, December 17, 2012

Who Needs Assault Weapons? (Updated)

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On Dec. 14, the day an armed citizen killed 26 unarmed women and children at a Connecticut elementary school, the NRA's Twitter account went silent. It has not tweeted since. Meanwhile, its Facebook page has disappeared, along with those 1.7 million "likes." Navigating to www.facebook.com/nationalrifleassociation now redirects to the Facebook homepage.
~ Slate



I wish to God she had an M-4 in her office locked up so when she heard gunfire she pulls it out and she didn’t have to lunge heroically with nothing in her hands but she takes him out, takes his head off before he can kill those precious kids.
~ Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-TX, on Fox News

If school teachers are now to be armed, wouldn’t the teachers have to carry around their assault rifles at all time since they would not know when an attack would occur? Indeed, given the low likelihood of such an attack, should they also be equipped with ebola-medical kits, rabies treatment packs, floatation devices, and other equipment for more likely threats. The average soldier, after all, carries as much as 135 pounds depending on their unit. Should our teachers carry less to protect our children?
~ Law Professor Jonathan Turley

. . . teachers are not soldiers, nor do the vast majority of us want to be soldiers. Could we ever train teachers and other school personnel as well as we would need to? Realistically, can we create an armed line of defense between these peculiar Rambos who want to kill us for reasons none of us truly understand? I don’t think so.
However, the ethical and moral question is: do we want to give over every safe space we have — even our homes, churches and schools — to violence? Do we want to make every caretaker — every parent, minister, teacher, coach, nurse, Scout leader — into a potential soldier? I say no. And it’s time to tell the NRA, the multi-billion dollar arms business and the government that we refuse the escalation of violence.
Teachers: we are not soldiers.
~ Claire B. Potter, Professor of History at The New School for Public Engagement, New York,

Who needs an assault rifle to go hunting? You can't even use the prey that you kill with an assault rifle if you indeed do it. No one needs an assault rifle to go out and shoot a deer. No one needs an assault rifle that's capable of shooting 10, 20, 30 rounds off at the same time to shoot a duck or to shoot quail. It does not make sense.
~ Don Lemon on CNN


In the coming weeks, I’ll use whatever power this office holds to engage my fellow citizens, from law enforcement, to mental health professionals, to parents and educators, in an effort aimed at preventing more tragedies like this, because what choice do we have? We can’t accept events like this as routine.
Are we really prepared to say that we’re powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard?
Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?
. . . We can’t tolerate this anymore. These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change.
~ President Obama speaking at the Newtown, CT, Prayer Vigil

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After mass shootings, it’s always said we must improve our mental-health system and the treatment of those who may be prone to violence. Of course we should. But this noble sentiment is too often part of a strategy to evade any action on guns themselves.
Not this time. Americans are not the only people in the world who confront mental-health problems. We are the only country that regularly experiences horrors of this sort. The difference, as the writer Garry Wills has said, is that the United States treats the gun as a secular god, immune to rational analysis and human intervention.
We must depose the false deity. We must act now to curb gun violence, or we never will.
~ E.J. Dionne on National Memo

It's time to move beyond rhetoric. We need to sit down and have a common-sense discussion and move in a reasonable way.
. . . Everything has to be on the table.
~ Senator Joe Manchin D-WV, and member of the NRA

We cannot simply accept this as a routine product of modern American life. If now is not the time to have a serious discussion about gun control and the epidemic of gun violence plaguing our society, I don’t know when is. How many more Columbines and Newtowns must we live through? I am challenging President Obama, the Congress, and the American public to act on our outrage and, finally, do something about this.
~ Congressman Gerald Nadler, D-NY

Joe Scarborough on MSNBC's Morning Joe, via Blue Virginia
You know me. I am a conservative Republican who received the NRA's highest rating over four terms in Congress...There's no easy ideological way forward...I come to you this morning with a heavy heart and no easy answers. Still, I've spent the past few days grasping for solutions and struggling for answers, while daring to question my own long-held belief on these subjects. I've always taken the libertarian's approach to Hollywood's 1st amendment rights and gun collector's 2nd amendment rights, and I stood by those libertarian beliefs after Columbine, after Aurora, and after Arizona..."
I knew the ending of this story because we've all seen it too often. I knew that day that the ideologies of my past career were no longer relevant to the future that I want, that I demand for my children. Friday changed everything, it must change everything, we all must begin anew and demand that Washington's old way of doing business is no longer acceptable.
...our Bill of Rights does not guarantee gun manufacturers the absolute right to sell military-styled, high-caliber, semiautomatic, combat assault rifles with high-capacity magazines to whoever the hell they want. It is time for Congress to put children before deadly dogmas...
We've already given up too much ground across America. We've already ceded too many schoolyards, too many shopping malls, too many movie theaters, and too many college campuses. We must give no more ground.
For the sake of my four children, and yours, I choose life and I choose change. It's time to turn over the tables inside the temple, and for the sake of our children, we must do what's right. And for the sake of this great nation that we love, let's pray to god that we do.


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Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Romney Wants to Fire Public Servants ~ Except Himself


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“For the president of the United States to stand up and say the private sector is doing fine is going to go down in history as an extraordinary miscalculation and misunderstanding by a president who’s out of touch,” the GOP hopeful charged.
“And his answer for economic vitality, by the way, was, of course, pushing aside the private sector, which he said is doing fine,” Romney continued. “Instead, he wants to add more to government. He wants another stimulus. He wants to hire more government workers."
“He says we need more firemen, more policeman, more teachers. Did he not get the message of Wisconsin? The American people did! It’s time for us to cut back on government!”
~ Mitt Romney Via Raw Story




One of the biggest weaknesses has been state and local governments, which have laid off 450,000 Americans. These are teachers and cops and firefighters. Congress should pass a bill putting them back to work right now, giving help to the states so that those layoffs are not occurring.
~ Line from an Obama Ad hitting back at Romney

KILMEADE: [Obama] says you want to cut firefighters and teachers, that you don’t understand what’s going on in these communities. What do you say to that, governor?
ROMNEY: Well, that’s a very strange accusation. Of course, teachers and firemen and policemen are hired at the local level and also by states. The federal government doesn’t pay for teachers, firefighters or policemen. So obviously that’s completely absurd.
~ Mitt Romney on Fox and Friends stating that certain public jobs receive no federal funds, when in fact they do.
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Sounded like an attack on public workers to me. Um...does he know HE'S a public worker? Maybe someone should tell him.
~ comment by catgirl1973 on ABC News

Federal block grants to states were introduced in 1973. They were mostly used for the 3 professions Romney refers to. As Gov of Mass. he filtered that money to municipalities for the very thing he now disparages.
~ comment by WowJones on Huffington Post

It seems like Mitt could have taken time away from his busy schedule to read up on what the federal government spends money on by now.
~ comment by onasphere on Huff Post

I think they have gone stark raving mad! Lets see we have heard how awful American schools are and we are not competing with other nations and yet you have Romney saying we need less teachers. Romney has not a clue. From his past bulling and other things it is clear he skated through school also ! They would pack kids in a class room like sardines and careless ! Pathetic is what they are!!!!
~ comment by Pam52 on MSNBC

Willard's campaign is an on going, avante garde, theater of the absurd. Way, way off Broadway and totally unaware of recording devices.
~ comment by Hoodathunk on Raw Story

I'm sure the Federal Government (or any governmental agency) didn't fund the schools Mitt Romney (or his kids) attended.
Give Mitt a break. He's new at this "being just a regular guy" thing. His team is attempting to gather all of Mitt's (seemingly) contradictory positions, so they can try to come up with a coherent, somewhat believable explanation (at least to the average Fox News viewer).
~ comment by Docmark on Huffington Post





















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