Fired Texas Principal Speaks Out: ‘It Would Be Best to Speak English in Classrooms’

/4 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: TownHall

Photo Credit: TownHall

On November 12, 2013, Amy Lacey, the principal of Texas’ Hempstead Middle School, was placed on administrative leave and subsequently fired when she made a simple request to students: speak English.

Now that the gag order has expired, Lacey is speaking out about what happened that day, dispelling rumors that she banned Spanish from the school’s campus.

“I informed students it would be best to speak English in the classrooms to the extent possible, in order to help prepare them for [state] tests,” she wrote in a letter to the Houston Chronicle explaining her side of the story. “It is important to note that I did not ban the use of Spanish anywhere in the school or at any time, even though teachers had reported to me that they had experienced instances in which students had been asked to stop talking during instruction, and they responded that it was their right to speak Spanish — ignoring the fact that they shouldn’t have been speaking [in any language] during class without permission. The perception of the teachers was that students were being disrespectful and disrupting learning, and they believed they could get away with it by claiming racism.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Ted Cruz: ‘Conservatives Are Winning’

/1 Comment/in , /by

Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore

Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore

Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) laid out a seven-point argument for how he knows “conservatives are winning” that almost doubles as the case for his presidential candidacy.

“What I’m going to talk to you about this afternoon is how we can win. And let me tell you something that is not getting a whole lot of coverage in the mainstream media: Conservatives are winning,” Cruz said Friday evening during a speech at the 2014 RedState Gathering in Fort Worth, Texas. (In his brief pause after that remark, one audience member asked, just audibly, “Really?”)

“The grassroots are winning fight after fight after fight,” he continued, citing “seven victories all together.” Cruz’s listed five completed victories and two that he said were “fixin’ to be” won.

In the five: 1) Stopping the gun legislation that followed the Newtown shooting. “I was proud to stand with my friends Rand Paul and Mike Lee and say we would filibuster any legislation [against the Second Amendment,” Cruz said. “That gave the opportunity for y’all to engage . . . suddenly all the folks that were getting wobbly on guns started having their phone lines melt down.”

Read more from this story HERE.

ISIS Buries 500 Yazidis Alive, Orders Other to Convert to Islam or Die

/1 Comment/in , /by

Photo Credit: AFP

Photo Credit: AFP

Not every Yazidi resident in northern Iraq escaped before the Islamic State, formerly known as ISIS, captured towns in the region. The terrorist group told the people to convert to Islam or die, killed 500 of them, buried some alive, and took hundreds of girls as slaves.

“We have striking evidence obtained from Yazidis fleeing Sinjar and some who escaped death, and also crime scene images that show indisputably that the gangs of the Islamic State have executed at least 500 Yazidis after seizing Sinjar,” said human rights minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani. “Some of the victims, including women and children were buried alive in scattered mass graves in and around Sinjar.”

“In some of the images we have obtained there are lines of dead Yazidis who have been shot in the head while the Islamic State fighters cheer and wave their weapons over the corpses,” he said. “This is a vicious atrocity.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama: 'Extremist Ideology' That's Taken Over GOP, 'Balkanization of Media' Has 'Blocked' My Agenda

/10 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

President Barack Obama said the power of conservative opposition, including in the media, is blocking his agenda in an interview with New York Times columnist Tom Friedman late last week.

“What you’ve seen with our politics, partly because of gerrymandering, partly because of the Balkanization of media so people just watch what reinforces their deepest biases, partly because of big money in politics, is increasingly politicians are rewarded for taking the most extreme, maximalist positions,” Obama told the liberal Times columnist. “Sooner or later, that catches up with you. You end up not being able to move forward on things we need to move forward on. We need to reform our immigration system. That would be good not just for our domestic economy but for our position in the world. You travel around Latin America—nothing would more reinforce an admiration for the United States than us doing that. We need to rebuild our infrastructure. You go to the Singapore airport and then you come back to one of our airports and you say, huh? We’re not acting like a superpower.”

“It’s like going from the Jetsons to the Flintstones,” Friedman agreed.

“Exactly,” Obama concurred. “We need to revamp our education system, K-12 in particular. You look at what Finland’s doing with its kids, and you look at what we’re doing with our kids, and you say, ‘we’re falling short.’ All these things are doable. Our fiscal position, actually, now is such—you know, the deficit’s been cut by more than half—where we’re in a position to make some smart investments that have huge payoffs, that historically have not been controversial, historically have garnered bipartisan support. But because of this maximalist ideological position, we’ve been blocked…

Read more from this story HERE.

Spying, Lying and Torture: Obama, CIA, DOJ vs Congress

/1 Comment/in , /by

Photo Credit: CNSNews.com / Penny Starr

Photo Credit: CNSNews.com / Penny Starr

In some respects, the recent admission by CIA Director John Brennan that his agents and his lawyers have been spying on the senators whose job it is to monitor the agency should come as no surprise. The agency’s job is to steal and keep secrets, and implicit in those tasks, Brennan would no doubt argue, is lying.

Yet in another respect, this may very well be a smoking gun in the now substantial case against President Barack Obama that alleges that much of his official behavior has manifested lawlessness and incompetence. It is hard to believe that the president did not know about this but not hard to believe he would look the other way.

In the post-9/11 world, Congress has become a potted plant, ready to give any president whatever he wants, lest it appear less than muscular in the face of whatever danger the president says is lurking in the dark.

About four months ago, California Democrat Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, went to the Senate floor and accused the CIA of committing torture during the presidency of George W. Bush and of spying on the committee that she chairs as it was examining records of that torture. Brennan responded by denying both charges and leveling his own — that investigators for the Senate Intelligence Committee had exceeded their lawful access to CIA records and that that constituted spying on the CIA.

Brennan even got his predecessor, George Tenet, under whose watch Feinstein claimed the torture had occurred and the attacks of 9/11 took place, to deny vehemently that his agents had committed torture. With this mutual finger-pointing, both the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee reported each other to the Department of Justice, which promptly punted.

Read more from this story HERE.

District Drops Federal Lunch Program

/4 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: The Enquirer / Patrick Reddy

Photo Credit: The Enquirer / Patrick Reddy

Lunch at Fort Thomas Independent Schools may include more French fries, fewer vegetables and larger portions this year. One thing that won’t be on the menu: federal dollars.

The Campbell County district is opting out of the federal school lunch program, forfeiting hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal funding.

The reason: Kids didn’t like their healthful lunches.

“The calorie limitations and types of foods that have to be provided … have resulted in the kids just saying ‘I’m not going to eat that,'” Fort Thomas Superintendent Gene Kirchner said.

The 2,800-student district joins a small but growing number of school districts across the country – mostly wealthy districts who can afford to forfeit the money – who have dropped out of the federal program in the wake of stricter nutritional standards.

Read more from this story HERE.

Missouri Crowd after Shooting: 'Kill the Police'

/6 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: AP / St. Louis Post-Dispatch, David Carson

Photo Credit: AP / St. Louis Post-Dispatch, David Carson

The fatal shooting of a black teenager by police sent hundreds of angry residents out of their apartments Saturday in a St. Louis suburb, igniting shouts of “kill the police” during a confrontation that lasted several hours.

A St. Louis County chapter of the NAACP called for the FBI to look into the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, a predominantly black suburb a few miles north of downtown St. Louis.

Brown’s grandmother, Desiree Harris, said she saw him running in her neighborhood Saturday afternoon when she passed him in her car. Just minutes later, after she returned home, she heard a commotion and went outside to check on it. Less than two blocks away, she found Brown’s body.

“He was running this way,” she said. “When I got up there, my grandson was lying on the pavement. I asked the police what happened. They didn’t tell me nothing.”

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported several distraught relatives were outside talking with neighbors, including Brown’s mother, Lesley McSpadden, and stepfather, Louis Head. Head held a sign that read: “Ferguson police just executed my unarmed son!!!”

Read more from this story HERE.

Clinton Blames Islamic Militants Rise on Obama Policies

/3 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: AFP / Thomas Samson

Photo Credit: AFP / Thomas Samson

By AFP.

Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton blamed the rise of Islamist militants in Iraq and Syria on failures of US policy under President Barack Obama, in an interview published Sunday.

Clinton specifically faulted the US decision to stay on the sidelines of the insurgency against Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad as opening the way for the most extreme rebel faction, the Islamic State.

“The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad —- there were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middle -— the failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled,” Clinton told the Atlantic.

Clinton, widely considered an undeclared presidential candidate, was an unsuccessful advocate of arming the Syrian rebels when she was secretary of state during Obama’s first term.

Read more from this story HERE.

_______________________________________________________________________

Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Why Hillary Clinton spoke out on Obama

By Maggie Haberman.

Hillary Clinton has taken her furthest, most public step away yet from President Barack Obama, rejecting the core of his self-described foreign policy doctrine and describing his decision against backing Syrian rebels early on as a “failure.”

She also stood unequivocally with Israel in its current battle with Hamas in a lengthy, detailed interview on foreign policy with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, which was conducted last week prior to the president’s authorization of airstrikes against Islamist militants in Iraq. The interview was published late Saturday.

Obama’s foreign policy doctrine as a whole has been slammed as too slow to respond, too passive instead of proactive, especially as crises have unfolded everywhere from Ukraine to the Gaza Strip. In the interview, Clinton, who served as secretary of state during Obama’s first term, argues there’s a balance that can be struck between muscularity and isolationism — bolstering the concept of American exceptionalism, which she promotes in her new book, “Hard Choices.”

A source familiar with the interview said Clinton’s team gave the White House a warning that it had taken place. Clinton aides described the interview as one intended to promote her memoir, and Goldberg as a long-planned-for target on a list of interviews around the book — and not part of an overarching political strategy related to 2016.

Read more from this story HERE.

Meet Liberia's Ebola Burial Squad

/1 Comment/in , /by

Photo Credit: Will Wintercross

Photo Credit: Will Wintercross

In calmer times in Liberia, before the fear of Ebola became as feverish as the onset of the disease itself, Cecilia Johnson’s funeral could have been a dignified affair.

But when she died of an unspecified illness on Thursday, her family in St Paul’s Bridge, a slum district of the capital, Monrovia, ignored government edicts to hand her body over for cremation.

Instead, fearing the prospect of being quarantined themselves if they reported it, they sneaked it to the cemetery in neighbouring Tyre Shop Community for burial the following morning.

The problem was that nobody wanted it there. Halfway through the burial, they were confronted by an angry crowd of Tyre Shop residents, demanding to know why a potentially-infected corpse was going in “their” cemetery. A scuffle ensued, and eight hours later, Ms Johnson’s corpse lay parked by the roadside in a rusting, mud-spattered wheelbarrow, covered by a piece of carpet and still seeking a final resting place.

Read more from this story HERE.

In the Future We’ll All Be Renters: America’s Disappearing Middle Class

/0 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: The Daily Beast

Photo Credit: The Daily Beast

In ways not seen since the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, America is becoming a nation of increasingly sharply divided classes. Joel Kotkin’s The New Class Conflict breaks down these new divisions for the first time, focusing on the ascendency of two classes: the tech Oligarchy, based in Silicon Valley; and the Clerisy, which includes much of the nation’s policy, media, and academic elites.

The Proleterianization of the Middle Class

From early in its history, the United States rested on the notion of a large class of small proprietors and owners. “The small landholders,” Jefferson wrote to his fellow Virginian James Madison, “are the most precious part of a state.” To both Jefferson and Madison, both the widespread dispersion of property and limits on its concentration—“the possession of different degrees and kinds of property”—were necessary in a functioning republic.

Jefferson, admitting that the “equal division of property” was “impractical,” also believed “the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind” that “legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property.” The notion of a dispersed base of ownership became the central principle which the Republic was, at least ostensibly, built around. As one delegate to the 1821 New York constitutional convention put it, property was “infinitely divided” and even laborers “expect soon to be freeholders” was a bulwark for the democratic order.

This notion of American opportunity has ebbed and flowed, but generally gained ground well into the 1960s and 1970s. The very fact that the United States was more demographically dynamic, notes Thomas Piketty, naturally reduced the role of inherited wealth compared to Europe, most notably in France, where population growth was slower. Mass prosperity hit a high point in America in the first decades after the Second World War, the period where the country achieved its highest share of world GDP at some forty percent. By the mid-1950s the percentage of households earning middle incomes doubled to 60 percent compared with the boom years of the 1920s. By 1962 over 60 percent of Americans owned their own homes; the increase in homeownership, notes Stephanie Coontz, between 1946 and 1956 was greater than that achieved in the preceding century and a half.

Read more from this story HERE.