ChiTrib’s Steve Chapman says the NSA-eavesdropping leaks and the Valerie Plame leaks are different, because
unmasking Valerie Plame served no useful purpose. The leaks in this case, by contrast, served a function that is vital in a democracy: letting the public know that the government is secretly doing something it is not authorized to do.
How is this different from saying it’s ok to break the law because your motives are good?
This lady didn’t like it in OP,
the only place [she] ever lived where she didn’t feel welcome.
“They were so suspicious of the Eastern establishment,” she said. “‘Harvard’ [her alma mater by way of its women’s college, Radcliffe] was a dirty word. I always voted Democrat, but there was only one other person in Oak Park that I know of who did. I was scared to death to mention it to anyone.”
Still years before the Civil Rights movement, [she and her husband, Rev.] Martin [Sargent] — fed up with the racial intolerance they saw around them — began to organize ways to document the racism, mostly by bringing black people in from Chicago and having them try to shop at segregated local malls.
It was a difficult time for the Sargents in many ways, and a time of change. They had their first two children before Martin was reassigned to a church in Foxborough, Mass. — a place where they felt more at home.
This would have been in the mid– to late 40s. She is Barbara Sargent, 84, interviewed in the Bath, Maine, Times-Record News, “in her stately living room with her dog sleeping on her lap.” She had grown up in NY City, daughter of a Lutheran pastor in mid-town Manhattan across from Central Park, where a flock of real sheep was tended by a real shepherd.
In Massachusetts “they felt more at home.” Then there was Maine and Paris, France, where she thrived. They got to know Martin Luther King. She got over her Oak Park experience, apparently, which is nice.
DePaul U. can’t win for losing in the left-right scheme of things. Its College Republicans say their posters were banned in protest of the U. of Colorado pseudo-Indian and terrorist sympathizer Ward Churchill before his lecture there in October. they couldn’t even attend a Churchill workshop, they say, barred by a special regulation. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) stepped in, complaining to the president, Dennis Holtschneider, who said, “Denunciations of speakers are not posted.” New policy, said the Republicans, citing First Amendment rights but mostly doubletalk by DePaul administration.
DePaul came under FIRE earlier in the fall in the Thomas Klocek case, he being the veteran adjunct prof who has sued it for penalizing him for arguing with pro-Palestinian students in a cafeteria on campus.
… when it comes to education
By JIM BOWMAN
January 4, 2006, Wednesday Journal of OP&RF
Columnist Jack Crowe says let’s talk about school [Viewpoints, Dec. 14]. OK, don’t blame me. It was his idea. He has middle schools in mind-public, or government, schools. The latter is preferred by ex-UIC Prof. Herbert J. Walberg in his and Joseph L. Bast’s Education and Capitalism: How Overcoming Our Fear of Markets and Economics Can Improve America’s Schools because they are funded and run by government agencies. That’s a cruel and heartless way to refer to our beloved school staffs and leadership, but let’s do it this once.
Let’s also put an interesting question: Can government schools be competitive? They must be, you say. Most kids go there, don’t they? But they are a monopoly as to funding, and we have found that monopolies do nothing for competition. Remember Ma Bell?
Competition happens, however. Ask any real estate broker selling a neighborhood. This is school-to-school competition, aided and abetted by published test scores. It happens within schools, too, in the choice parents have about middle-school subjects-typing? chorus? art? French? Spanish?-and even about teachers. There could be more of this: you could have homework classes and non-homework classes. Parents could choose. This would be a pro-choice program that even conservatives would approve.
Or teachers could declare for phonics or not, and parents could choose. Or for drilling in fundamentals vs. enrichment. For memorizing poetry or not. As freshmen at Fenwick in 1945, we memorized poetry-“The stag at eve had drunk its fill, where danced the moon on Monan’s rill,” “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” “‘Shoot, if you must, this old gray head,
But spare your country’s flag,’ she said.” And much, much more. Our lives were never the same. Mine wasn’t, anyhow. We gave speeches, too; every freshman took speech, like it or not.
In this pro-choice environment, teachers would still run classrooms, out of which parents could butt. But parents would choose this or that in general terms. They’re the ones who have to live with the kids anyhow. Let them decide.
Some do it already, big time. They say no to government schools, paying their money and taking their choice at schools called Grace or Ascension or Calvary [No: Oak Park Christian Academy is the day school at Calvary church: better here wld be Alcuin or Waldorf, to name two
]. Others skip school buildings completely, like Cindy Miller, on Wesley Avenue. She and her husband Jay and other couples do it themselves. Jay, an engineering consultant, teaches physics. Cindy’s friend Pat Larson teaches Latin and history. Cindy teaches literature. As many as 15 kids might be in a session, from five families. These are mini-schools, or as one observer put it, “private schools on the cheap.”The kids get out, as to see “Nutcracker Suite” at Morton East High School. The Millers’ oldest is an Eagle Scout. Their oldest daughter has taken acting classes at Village Players; she’s in her second season as a Lyric Opera supernumerary. Another son is pitcher and shortstop with a local traveling team. Another daughter takes violin, another guitar.
Home-schoolers’ reasons run a gamut. For the Millers, members of Calvary Memorial Church, where home-schooler parents meet regularly, “the Christian element” is the big thing. Cindy Miller has found it’s “good to cater to” each child’s progress. The experience has also been good for “family dynamics,” which in their case are super-dynamics-the Millers have nine children, from two to age 19.
The nine have been home-schooled since birth. She and her husband, unsure at first, were willing to try it. If it didn’t work, they were willing to pack their first-born off to kindergarten. So it went with the other eight: schooling began when they were born. It progressed seamlessly. As for truancy issues and the long arm of the state, which in some places can be quite intrusive, Illinois law is liberal in the matter. Home-schooled kids are to be taught core subjects in English for a required number of days, but no reporting is required. It’s a fairly pro-choice environment.
. . . via Forbes.com [via Instapundit]:
“Microsoft is again facing a public relations backlash after a Chinese web blog hosted on its MSN Spaces service was allegedly shut down.”
This echoes Reader Cynthia’s concerns in “Get Serious” below.
Egad! The ink hardly dry on my Wed. Journal column due out tomorrow (if my tardiness deadline-wise does not delay it), which I close with reference to Illinois’ liberalism in the matter, not prosecuting home-schoolers for truancy, I hear from the Home School Legal Defense Assn. (HSLDA) about a Joliet family hauled into court:
In Illinois, homeschoolers only need to teach the same branches of instruction in the English language that are being taught in public schools . . . ever since an important state Supreme Court case [in] 1950 [that gave them private-school status].
Nonetheless, certain school districts tend to demand more of homeschoolers than is actually required by law. . . . The Will County Regional Superintendent’s Office sent a truant officer to contact the [Walters] family.
He said the kids — all four but one “chronic” — were truant. HSLDA complained immediately, but the truant officer went to the local prosecutor, who charged the family with truancy. He said the chronic required “supervision.” HSLDA found the truant officer in violation of a statute requiring written notice of truancy before charges were filed. The father asked for a continuance, the judge refused, not allowing the father even to ask. The kid had to be in school the next day.
The mother went to the district the next day. Once the regional superintendent saw she had a teaching certificate, lesson plans and plenty of books and was told of the truant officer’s failure to file proper notice, he called the state’s attorney and got the case dropped.
Newspaper establishment pillar Bill Kovach in the Louisville Courier-Journal:
I think blogging is one of the great advances in democratizing speech with all the pitfalls and values any expansion of unrestrained speech can have. I believe it is one of the tools MSM [MainStreamMedia] should embrace to make themselves more transparent and create the continuing dialogue journalists and the public must have.
I check out a lot of blogs including, not in any order: Instapundit, LA Observed, Buzz Machine, Power Line, Press Think, RealClear Politics, Daily Kos, The Volokh Conspiracy, etc., etc.
I really don’t have a favorite and sample something new every time I have a chance.
Some good points made here:
Chicago Tribune Labels Very Liberal Congressman ‘Mainstream Democrat’
Posted by Michael M. Bates on January 1, 2006 – 13:28.
In today’s front page story on Bobby Rush, “Pastor Rush stirs hope, skeptics in Englewood,” the Chicago Tribune describes the Illinois Democrat as a “former militant Black Panther turned mainstream Democratic congressman.” One wonders what the Tribune considers mainstream.Rush’s voting record in Congress, as measured by assorted special interest groups, reflects little in the way of moderation. In their most recent evaluations, for example, the National Abortion Reproductive Rights Action League awarded him a 100 percent rating. The National Taxpayers Union gave him a puny 11 percent while Americans for Tax Reform ranked him at 10 percent. Getting a 100 percent rating from the American Civil Liberties Union, the AFL-CIO, Americans for Democratic Action, and the National Education Association, Rush received a zero percent rating from the American Conservative Union and the National Rifle Association, and 10 percent rankings from both the American Security Council and Citizens Against Government Waste.
All in all, Bobby Rush can hardly be designated mainstream. Then again, among Democrats and the Chicago Tribune, perhaps his record is considered fairly moderate.
Chicago Tribune Labels Very Liberal Congressman ‘Mainstream Democrat’ | NewsBusters.org
Pajamas Media was formed after a TV News macher dismissed bloggers’ reporting as just something from a lot of guys “in their pajamas,” meaning they weren’t showing up at a news room or assignment desk or even calling in to say where they were, for gosh sakes. He should never have said that. Now he has this to contend with, complete with a call to arms against the establishment:
“The core of the American people has manifested itself most purely in blogs because elites for so long controlled all avenues of communication. Those days are over now.”
— Tammy Bruce, Editorial Board
It’s slick, it’s sharp, it looks to bloggers for news and commentary, pulling together what they say on a given breaking topic. Yes, Virginia, there is something new under the sun.
“So yes on the evidence this is FUD,” says L’Ombre de l’Olivier, meaning the “fear uncertainty and doubt” that attacks a “large incumbent company . . . when it sees a threat on the radar screen from a start up.” He refers to the WaPo “hit job” on embedded blogger-journalist Bill Roggio — Bloggers, Money Now Weapons in Information War U.S. Recruits Advocates to the Front, Pays Iraqi TV Stations for Coverage, which Roggio rebutted in Disinformation Operations: Flaws in The Washington Post’s article on Information Operations.
L’Ombre calls the WaPo story
fascinating stuff because the production of FUD is a sign of an organization whose product is facing a competitive threat that it can’t beat head to head. I would say that Bill and Michael Yon, Michael Totten and, for that matter the Iraqi bloggers at Pajamas Media, are indeed a threat to the MSM [MainStreamMedia] foreign reporters. The reason they are a threat is that they are providing a better quality story. They don’t make the elementary mistakes that MSM journos do such as calling a Bradley a tank or failing to note such inconsistencies from their sources. One could go on, but the fact is that Bill & co, as well other Citizen Journalist efforts are making it clear that journalism is not something that has, in the jargon, a moat or high barriers of entry. In fact thanks to the web it has about the lowest barrier of entry of any profession. All that is required is a story and an ability to write and the web then helps that story and writing ability, if either or both are attractive, to get wider coverage.
You don’t need a master’s from Columbia or Medill, you don’t need apprenticeship at City News. No wonder the officially accredited take umbrage.
