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Originally Posted by Charlatan
My issue is more this: OK, he may have broke school board policy. Was this the first time?
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Earlier, I solicited feedback here:
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..I look forward to posts of articles that report on teachers losing or advancing their careers by promoting Bush, Capitalism, official U.S. Foreign or Domestic policies, the justification for the invasion of Iraq, warrantless searches, justification for a torture "exemption" for Gitmo, justification of a secret CIA network of foreign prisons, making tax cuts permanent, prayer in school, Christian centric agendas, or statements that are anti-democratic party candidates or political issues, anti-choice.....etc.
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I've seen nothing posted yet, but it's still possible......
<b>Sorry, Charlatan, on edit, I now see that I misread your question. Now I realize that your asking specifically about Jay Bennish's "record".</b>
We discussed David Horowitz driven legislative intended to control the
ideas that college professors discuss with students here, just over a
year ago, at this link:
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthread.php?t=83340
After my posts related to Horowitz's "resume", no one posted any
counter arguments on that thread, in support of Horowitz.
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpos...1&postcount=21
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpos...5&postcount=32
Horowitz has renewed his PR campaign for his efforts to discredit tenured professors
by portraying them as "un-American" "terrorist sympathizers".
Quote:
http://mediamatters.org/items/200603030013
.......On the March 2 edition of MSNBC's Scarborough Country, right-wing activist David Horowitz claimed that "[t]here are 50,000 professors" who are "anti-American" and "identify with the terrorists." Horowitz, the president of Students for Academic Freedom and a proponent of an "Academic Bill of Rights" for American universities, is the author of The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (Regnery, January 2006).
According to statistics from the Department of Education, there are just over 400,000 tenured and tenure-track full-time university professors* in the United States. If Horowitz's numbers are accurate, that means approximately one out of every eight tenured or tenure-track college and university professors is a terrorist sympathizer.........
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<b>Horowitz is just one cog in a larger effort to control dissenting free speech in the entire country,
conducted as "official policy" by our highest elected and appointed federal officials, compared to the state
of official interference before Jan. 20, 2001, in the process of Americans routinely speaking their minds without government retribution.</b>
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http://www.greatfallstribune.com/app...603040305/1014
U.S. mustn't forget about openness and honesty
......If there are any doubts about the administration's hard-line stance on government-employee speech, its brief in a case before the Supreme Court should dispel them. The case, Garcetti vs. Ceballos, presents the question of whether the First Amendment protects job-related speech, even when it is a matter of public concern. The solicitor general, on behalf of the United States, argues that it does not.
Ironically, while government officials suppress speech and punish criticism by others, they are greatly expanding the boundaries of their own speech.
Last week, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld flayed the U.S. press for getting in the way of such Pentagon initiatives as planting articles in the Iraqi press, hiring private contractors to influence information in Iraq and elsewhere and engaging in disinformation operations.
Noting how "our enemies have skillfully adapted to fighting wars in today's media age," Rumsfeld called for even more aggressive information dissemination operations in the form of a "strategic communications framework."
And while the Pentagon targets foreign audiences, other federal agencies target American citizens.
The Government Accountability Office reported last week that in two and a half years, seven agencies spent $1.6 billion on media and advertising, including government-produced video news releases that both the GAO and Congress labeled "covert propaganda."
These developments, combined with aggressive tactics for withholding information from Congress, the courts, scholars, historians, the press and the people, represent a sea change in the information policies that have sustained and vitalized our democracy for more than two centuries.
This new climate of fear and intimidation is discouraging the very words that drive democratic decision-making in the right direction.
The authors of these policies appear to have thought neither long nor hard about the long-term consequences of such policies. The implications for good government and democracy, as well as the First Amendment, are profound.
A strategy of withholding, manipulating and distorting information to control and defeat our enemies works also to mislead and control allies and citizens alike.
Moreover, we are careening dangerously toward an information environment that not only punishes dissenters and critics but those who are insufficiently laudatory......
Paul K. McMasters is First Amendment ombudsman at the First Amendment Center, 1101 Wilson Blvd., Arlington, Va., 22209. He can be reached via e-mail at pmcmasters@fac.org.
Originally published March 4, 2006
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The signifigance of the following opinion piece is that it is authored by an instructor at
a conservative, private Christian University located in the POTUS "home" state. The piece is
published in the campus newspaper of that University. Is this an inappropriate communication for
the instructor to students at the university? Is the wave of anger and frustration growing too big
for "counter-measures" like those on display from Horowitz, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al, to contain it?
Quote:
http://www.smudailycampus.com/vnews/.../4407c90dc82c2
<b>No time for jokes</b>
By George Henson, ghenson@smu.edu
March 03, 2006
Someone who reads my columns regularly told me this week that I needed to re-inject humor into my writing. He argued that in past columns I had occasionally used levity to make my columns more entertaining and approachable.
Someone else this week asked me why I was so angry. “Because there’s a lot to be angry about, or haven’t you been paying attention?” I responded.
Try as I might, I can’t think of anything funny to say about what’s happening to our country. And, honestly, I am angry — very angry. Our country is being ripped apart and raped by a criminal enterprise that makes Jesse James look like Barney Fife. (Does that qualify as a joke?)
In the meantime, diehard Bush supporters (who would eat crap on a cracker if Bush told them it was caviar) ignore the $8 billion dollar elephant in the room: The Dubai Ports World deal is being pushed through because it’s good for the Bush family and everyone associated with it.
Maybe the handful of Americans who still trust Bush (the most recent poll has his overall approval rating at a record-low 34 percent) haven’t read that the UAE invested billions of dollars in the Carlyle Group, a global private equity investment firm from whom Bush Sr. earns millions of dollars in consulting fees.
They also ignore the fact that our own intelligence suggests the UAE may be infiltrated by al-Qaeda, just as they ignore the dangerous irony that the UAE is incapable of stopping nuclear components from being smuggled through their own ports to Iran.
I could go on, but I’m not sure how much anyone cares.
I suppose that’s another reason I’m angry: I just can’t understand how so many Americans allowed themselves to be duped into voting against their own interest — not once, but twice.........
.....Do I sound angry? I hope so. It’s time for more people to get angry. It’s time for everyone who thinks our economy is being bankrupted, that our future is being mortgaged and that our national interests are being betrayed, to get angry.
It’s time to stop letting Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity — and the rest of the bloviating idiots who pollute our airwaves with toxic rhetoric — define public debate and characterize anyone who disagrees with this administration as unpatriotic.
It’s time for those who have been lulled to sleep or into a false sense of security by this administration’s propaganda arm or lapsed into a coma of political indifference to wake up and take part in the democracy that is eroding under their noses.
The 18th-century Anglo-Irish political philosopher Edmund Burke is attributed with having said, “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” That aphorism should serve as a trumpet call for everyone who’s worried about the direction in which our country is headed.
Burke also said, “They defend their errors as if they were defending their inheritance.” If you’re worried about the country your children will inherit, don’t you think it’s time to stop defending Bush’s errors?
Yes, I’m angry. And there’s not anything funny I can think of to say about it.
George Henson is a lecturer of Spanish. He may be reached at ghenson@smu.edu.
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