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Teacher Suspended for Showing Kids Pliers

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Photo Credit: MAURO CATEBA veteran Chicago teacher is suing the school district after he was suspended and charged with possessing tools that school officials said violated their weapons policy.

Doug Bartlett, a second grade teacher at Washington Irving Elementary School, was suspended for four days after administrators determined the tools he used for visual aids endangered students.

In 2011 Bartlett was teaching a mandated course on “tools.” He showed students several tools that he used in his classroom including wrenches, screwdrivers, pliers, a box cutter, and a small pocketknife. He explained how the tools were used and kept the items secured in a tool box.

“The visual aids were used in an effort to facilitate student understanding and remembrance of the curriculum,” the lawsuit states. “As he displayed the box cutter and pocketknife, Plaintiff specifically described the proper use of these tools. Neither of these items was made available to the students.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Video: University of Chicago Ignores Protests, Destroys Ronald Reagan's Childhood Home

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Photo Credit: chicagogeek

Despite appeals to the University of Chicago to stop the destruction of Ronald Reagan’s childhood home, the university went forward with its demolition yesterday.

Why? The university-land owner wants to build a parking lot.

Here’s a short video of what happened:



As we noted last month, it’s hard to even believe that Reagan served in most of our lifetimes. In this video, he comes to us now as an obscure figure out of the not-so-distant past.

His simple and straightforward faith in God, and in America, was winsome and poignant.

One cannot help but be struck by the stark contrast to the current occupant of the White House, 21st Century America, and of the vanguard of the GOP.

Ronald Reagan spoke deeply to the American soul.

Chicago To Close 54 Schools To Address $1B Deficit

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Photo Credit: gingerbydesign

Tens of thousands of Chicago students, parents and teachers learned Thursday their schools were on a long-feared list of 54 the city plans to close in an effort to stabilize an educational system facing a huge budget shortfall.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel says the closures are necessary because too many Chicago Public School buildings are half-empty, with 403,000 students in a system that has seats for more than 500,000. But opponents say the closures will further erode troubled neighborhoods and endanger students who may have to cross gang boundaries to attend school. The schools slated for closure are all elementary schools and are overwhelmingly black and in low-income neighborhoods.

CPS officials say money being spent to keep underutilized schools open could be better used to educate students elsewhere as the district deals with a $1 billion budget deficit. About 30,000 students will be affected by the plan, with about half that number moving into new schools.

“Every child in every neighborhood in Chicago deserves access to a high quality education that prepares them to succeed in life, but for too long children in certain parts of Chicago have been cheated out of the resources they need to succeed because they are in underutilized, under-resourced schools,” said district CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett. “As a former teacher and a principal, I’ve lived through school closings and I know that this will not be easy, but I also know that in the end this will benefit our children.”

As word of the closures trickled out, parents and teachers reacted with anger and shock, some even crying. Sandra Leon said she got a tearful call from her grandchildren’s kindergarten teacher saying the school was on the list to be closed. Her two grown children also attended the school, and Leon wiped her eyes as she waited outside for her grandchildren.

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Chicago Public Schools to Start Sex Education in Kindergarten

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Photo Credit: The New American

A new policy approved by the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) will require all public school students to participate in sex education instruction, beginning in kindergarten. According to the CPS website, the new mandate, passed on February 27, will require each student to receive “minimum instructional minutes” of sex-ed information that is “medically accurate” as well as (supposedly) age-appropriate.

“It is important that we provide students of all ages with accurate and appropriate information so they can make healthy choices in regards to their social interactions, behaviors, and relationships,” Chicago Public Schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett said in the CPS announcement about the policy. “By implementing a new sexual health education policy, we will be helping them to build a foundation of knowledge that can guide them not just in the pre-adolescent and adolescent years, but throughout their lives.”

In its announcement, the CPS explained that in the earliest grades students “will focus on the family, feelings, and appropriate and inappropriate touching, while students in fourth grade will learn about puberty, including the physical, social, and emotional changes that accompany it, and the causes and transmission of HIV infection.”

After that, instruction gets more intimate, said the announcement, with content in grades five through twelve including “information appropriate for each grade level on human reproduction, transmission and prevention of HIV/AIDS and other sexually-transmitted infections (STIs), healthy decision-making, sexual orientation and bullying, and contraception, including abstinence.”

The announcement emphasized that “as is the case under the current CPS policy, parents and guardians are able to opt out of having their children participate in the sexual health education instruction.”

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Video: Feds Swarm Chicago Train After Detecting Nuclear Threat

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Photo Credit: CBS

It was stunning for those who watched Thursday night as federal agents investigated a possible nuclear threat at Chicago’s Ogilvie Transportation Center.

CBS 2′s photojournalist Lana Hinshaw-Klann happened to be at the scene and used a cell-phone camera to record agents in action. Reporter Dave Savini looks into what agents were looking for and what they found.

Sources say the agents were members of the elite TSA VIPR team on the 5:04pm Union Pacific West line. They were carrying hand-held nuclear-detection devices that picked up a reading.

VIPR teams were created after the 2004 bombing of a train in Madrid, Spain, to protect U.S. transportation. At the Ogilvie station, officers held the train and searched for a person or bag that posed a potential nuclear threat.

Jerry Jones, a Chicago lawyer, was heading home on that train. He says the federal officers narrowed the trouble to the area where he was sitting.

Watch video here:

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Public Sector Unions Are Very Different From Private Sector Unions

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Photo Credit: Washington Examiner A strike in Chicago and New York City; rallies of tens of thousands in Wisconsin; politician walkouts in Indiana; attempts to change the constitution in Michigan — these events and more featured government unions and their leaders at the forefront of the recent battles over public policy.

As a recessed economy dragged down state expenditures, governors and legislatures increasingly looked to trim from the fattest part of government: Public-sector employees. Salaries and pensions that saw government workers being compensated far more generously than their private-sector counterparts were finally beginning to be addressed.

While it would be easy to classify this battle as between those who are “pro-union” or “anti-union,” a distinction should be made between unions in the private-sector versus the public-sector counterpart. Historically and in modern-day practice, these are two very different things.

Under the National Labor Relations Act, private-sector unions are allowed to extract dues and fees from workers if the employer is a unionized workplace. The NLRA, passed in 1935 during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first term, does not, however, apply to public-sector employees, including state and federal workers, because the thinking was that this would over-politicize government and cause a conflict of interest between unions and politicians.

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Godfather Doubles Down: Chicago May Expand ‘Gun Offender’ Registry

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Photo Credit: Ted CoxChicago’s gun offender registry needs to be expanded to include the names of people busted committing crimes with a gun, Ald. Ed Burke (14th) said Thursday. And Mayor Rahm Emanuel agrees. The powerful alderman wants to force anyone convicted of a violent crime with a firearm, including kidnapping, assault, robbery and vehicular hijacking, to end up on the list, which now has 584 names on it of those convicted of less serious gun violations.

Burke said he was shocked to hear the current list had so few names. “Clearly I felt that there are thousands of offenders that should have been added to the registry,” Burke said.

In July 2010, the City Council passed an ordinance establishing a “gun offender registry,” similar to a sex offender registry. But the law only requires those convicted of unlawful use of a weapon, which includes illegal possession of a gun among other charges, to register with police.

Burke’s plan to expand the list was approved at the City Council’s Committee on Public Safety hearing Thursday and is on the agenda in front of the full council Wednesday. “We believe the ordinance can be implemented and will help achieve the Mayor’s goal of reducing gun violence and illegal weapons in the city of Chicago,” Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s office said in a statement.

Thomas Byrne, chief of the Chicago Police Department’s Bureau of Detectives, told the committee that the number of people that would be added to this registry is currently uncertain.

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Author Quotes Then-Professor Obama Saying, ‘I Don’t Believe People Should Be Able To Own Guns’

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Photo Credit: paljoakimIn his new book, At the Brink, economist and author John R. Lott Jr., assesses the presidency of Barack Obama and recalls conversations regarding gun laws they had while working at the University of Chicago.

In Chapter Three, Mr. Lott discusses gun-control and takes the reader back to his time at the University of Chicago, where he and then-professor Barack Obama spoke on numerous occasions about guns in America.

“I don’t believe people should be able to own guns,” Obama told Lott one day at the University of Chicago Law School. Lott explains that he first met Obama shortly after completing his research on concealed handgun laws and crime.

“He did not come across as a moderate who wanted to bring people together,” Lott writes.

After he introduced himself to Obama, Lott suggested that they have lunch one day to discuss their views on guns. According to Lott, Obama “grimaced and turned away.” That was the way many conversations with Obama ended, Lott says.

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Woman Killed In Chicago Hours After Her Sister Sat Behind Obama On Stage

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesAn 18-year-old Chicago woman was shot and killed Friday night, just hours after her younger sister sat onstage behind President Barack Obama as he spoke about gun violence.

Janay Mcfarlane was visiting friends and family when she was shot once in the head around 11:30 p.m. Friday in North Chicago, the Chicago Sun-Times reported. The bullet had been meant for a friend, said her mother, Angela Blakely. Mcfarlane had a 3-month-old son.

“I really feel like somebody cut a part of my heart out,” Blakely said. Hours before the slaying, Mcfarlane’s 14-year-old sister Destini was part of a group of teens who sat onstage behind the president when he delivered remarks at Hyde Park Career Academy.

“Barack Obama said teenagers are killing each other,” Destini Mcfarlane told the Sun-Times Saturday. “He was saying we need to cut down on street violence.”

Mcfarlane’s murder was apparently separate from the four shootings that took place in Chicago within a 90-minute period after Obama left. Those shootings occurred between about 5:55 p.m. and 7:20 p.m.; Mcfarlane was killed several hours later.

Read more from this story HERE.

NRA’s LaPierre Singles Out Violent Chicago, Calls For 1,000 Federal Agents To Patrol Its Streets

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On Fox News Sunday, National Rifle Association’s Wayne la Pierre came out with both barrels blasting, singling out the gun violence in Chicago.

Chicago, a city with one of the nation’s strictest gun control laws, is also one of the nation’s most violent, leading it in death by gunfire.

LaPierre took on the violence in Chicago and noted that if federal gun laws already on the books were enforced, instead of putting even more restrictions on gun legal ownership, it could help solve the city’s violence problems.

“We are all obsessed with the Taliban and we ought to be. What about the gangs?” “They are ruining neighborhoods all over the country? We need a federal task force, if it takes 500 agents; if it takes a thousand agents, go into Chicago.”

“Every gang member on the street of Chicago, starting tomorrow morning, let’s pick ’em up, we’ve got a federal law to get them off the street and put them in prison, and that would cut crime and we’re not doing it.”

There seems to be a lack of will to enforce existing gun laws. New York for example, has a mandatory law requiring prison time for anyone found with an illegal gun in his possession…Yet the law is full of loopholes and less than half of those arrested for illegal gun possession face any prison time.

There are over nine thousand gun laws on the books already. Perhaps it’s time for existing gun laws to be enforced, before any new laws are proposed.

Several years ago a city in the San Francisco bay area was suffering from a massive wave of violence. East Palo Alto was becoming a shooting gallery; so violent it was dangerous for the thousands of motorists who used its main artery daily to travel to other parts of the bay. Shootings, rapes, armed robbery, arson, carjacking and open drug dealing were the norm. The local police department was not up to the task to protect its citizens and put a halt to the crime.

To combat this unprecedented crime wave, communities in the San Francisco bay area & the state of California pitched in with extra police forces to swarm the city. They soon had rounded up gang leaders and the violent individuals who were creating much of the crime. They had a task force that instantly responded to crime and aggressively hunted down the criminals. Existing laws were enforced and soon the streets of this city were relatively safe. The criminal element had been broken.

LaPierre’s suggestion for federal intervention in Chicago is a good one. Bring in federal police forces to help patrol the violent streets. Make it a national priority to protect the law abiding citizens of Chicago. When the criminals are taken off the streets, the percentage of gun violence will be drastically reduced.

This same formula should be used to target other crime and violence plagued cities. Disarm and jail the criminals who use guns, enforce the existing gun laws.