10/26/2014

Thoughts On A Sunday

October is fast fading away as we approach Halloween. The foliage is now fading away from its reds, oranges, and yellows to browns. A majority of trees have shed most of their leaves. We haven't yet had a hard frost, meaning I still have at least one last mow of the lawn to perform before the mower is put away for the winter.

It is indeed fall.

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Anyone who has read this blog knows I am a staunch opponent to zero-tolerance polices, particularly at schools. More often than not they end up hurting the innocent and do nothing to stop actual miscreants. As I have stated more than once, such policies are merely a means for school officials to duck out of having actually make a decision. They can all fall back on “But it's policy!” as an excuse.

What brings this up yet again is the case of another student – an honor student with an impeccable record – being expelled from school because she forgot she had her grandfather's pocketknife in her backpack.

The only ones who should be expelled are the school administrators.

When I was a kid and all through school, most boys had a pocketknife. It was considered benign and as much a necessity as clothing. No one thought anything of it.

Yet today, at a time when violent crime of all kinds are down to some of the lowest level in over 100 years, we are treating students like violent criminals for things like pocketknives, keychains with depictions of a firearm, poptarts eaten into a shape vaguely gun-like, and a pen bearing the name of a gun manufacturer. All of these things have led to overreactions by our so-called betters and damaged the reputations of students and the schools themselves.

And to think we trust our children to these deluded people.

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Do the Democrats really want to keep telling me it's the Republicans who are waging a War on Women? Not from what I've been seeing, they aren't.

We should remind the Democrats that when they point a finger towards Republicans and accusing them of all kinds of supposed misdeeds, that three of them are pointing back at them.

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If corporations and businesses don't create jobs, then who does?

Oh, that's right, I forgot. According to people like Obama and Hillary Clinton, it's either Nanny Government or, possibly, the Jobs Fairy.

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Related to the above: Don't tell Mike Rowe that businesses don't create jobs. He'll set you straight.

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George Will delves into the nastiest political tactic this year, in this case the “criminalization of politics to silence people occupying just one portion of the political spectrum.”

The so-called “John Doe” investigations and para-military style raids by police officers acting at the behest of openly and blatantly partisan District Attorneys in a small number of Wisconsin counties had but one aim: silence Republicans and supporters of Governor Scott Walker.

These criminals masquerading as officers of the court should be disbarred.

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Charles Krauthammer is right: Obama is nothing but a bewildered bystander.

The president is upset. Very upset. Frustrated and angry. Seething about the government’s handling of Ebola, said the front-page headline in the New York Times last Saturday.

There’s only one problem with this pose, so obligingly transcribed for him by the Times. It’s his government. He’s president. Has been for almost six years. Yet Barack Obama reflexively insists on playing the shocked outsider when something goes wrong within his own administration.

As I and many others have opined, Obama likes the perks and prestige of his office, but he really doesn't like to do the work his position requires.

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It's rare that I've been able to watch an NFL game on a Sunday morning. The Atlanta Falcons were playing the Detroit Lions at Wembley Stadium in London to a crowd of 85,000 fans.

Knowing how popular the NFL is in the UK, I'm surprised it hasn't fielded and expansion team in London.

Maybe some day.

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As the perpetually offended Left both in and out of government must be reminded, support of due process does not equate to support of rape on college campuses.

Between the Dear Colleague letter from the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Education and the fatally flawed and disingenuous claim that one-in-five college women have been or will be sexually assaulted, as well as vague definitions of what constitutes sexual assault, too many college men have fallen victim to the kangaroo courts instituted by institutions of higher learning and been sanctioned, either suspended or expelled, in some cases with no evidence that such an assault ever took place and being denied the opportunity to mount a defense.

One attorney in New York City, Andrew Miltenberg, has seen this destruction of due process and decided to do something about it.

He’s already filed four lawsuits—against Vassar College, Columbia University, University of Massachusetts Amherst and Drew University—will file several more before month’s end, and is consulting on 20 or so appeals at the college disciplinary level. In each, he is suing the schools for violations of the Title IX gender-parity law of 1972, contractual claims, unfair trade practices, as well as a number of tort claims.

Every single one of the men he’s representing, Mr. Miltenberg argues, has suffered egregious due process violations in closed-door college hearings. (He also believes that his clients are innocent of the charges against them.) And that is how he has found himself in the decidedly impolitic position of not only defending those accused of rape, but also suing on their behalf.

This is just the latest embodiment of what many have come to call witch hunts, something we've seen many times over the past few decades alone where a single case that may have come to light triggers a panic and numerous innocents are accused, tried, and convicted of crimes that never took place.

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This isn't surprising to anyone paying attention: the Democrats want to silence Conservative speech. Heaven forbid people who disagree woth them should be allowed to speak against them.

So the saying “inside every tolerant liberal is  a totalitarian waiting to come out” has never rung more true for me than when I saw a little headline on Drudge. It seems that late Friday, a key Democrat on the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) called to regulate Internet campaigns and videos. While this all sounds very “above board” and “reasonable” by their logic, the Republican chairman of the FEC cautioned that instituting these types of regulations on the internet has the potential to affect political blog sites (like this one) and conservative news aggregators like The Drudge Report in addition to regulating free online political ads placed on sites like You Tube.

If they succeed I daresay an underground means of supporting free speech will arise, no different than the samizdat, or underground publications, that existed during the bad old days of the Soviet Union.

(H/T Pirate's Cove)

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Climate change: Is there nothing it cannot do?

The latest claim – climate change is responsible for an increase in autism.

And all this time I thought it was caused by vaccines, or so Jenny McCarthy says.

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And one more from Cap'n Teach, in this case how unions and liberals are working hard to kill jobs.

Then again, they aren't really for creating jobs. They're about maintaining control over portions of our economy in order to keep funding the Democrats in office that they own.

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I haven't checked in with Bogie for a couple of weeks and when I did I found that her faithful canine companion, Prince, passed away last week. I wanted to leave a message of condolences, but apparently the comment app at her blog isn't working.

It's never easy losing a family member, even if they have four feet, fur, and a tail.

As I tried to write in the comments:

I just read this as I haven't checked in for a while. I'm so sorry to hear about Prince. I know there is a Prince-shaped hole in your life. There's little I can add to what has already been said by others. All I can do is add my condolences.

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Election day is a little over a week away and I can't wait for it to get here if for no other reason that I won't have to listen to or watch another campaign ad until the New Hampshire Presidential Primary campaign season starts in about a year.

As bad as it's been in the past, it's been far worse this year with the millions of dollars flowing into New Hampshire to pay for attack ads, much of this due to the close race between the Democrat incumbent Senator Jeanne Shaheen and GOP challenger Scott Brown.

This has to be the 'dirtiest' campaign season I have ever experienced in my five decades as a registered voter. Even the down-ticket ads for the House and governor have been pretty nasty.

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And that's the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where fall has fully settled in, preparations for Halloween are in full swing, and where we're waiting for our first delivery of cord wood.