From the Boston Globe:

BENNINGTON, Vt. --The school superintendent whose district includes Mount Anthony Union High School has labeled "inappropriate" and "irresponsible" an English teacher's use of liberal statements in a vocabulary quiz.

"I wish Bush would be (coherent, eschewed) for once during a speech, but there are theories that his everyday diction charms the below-average mind, hence insuring him Republican votes," said one question on a quiz written by English and social studies teacher Bret Chenkin.

"A teacher would be of (below-average, unsound) mind to endanger his job over his own (radical, infantile) political views."

It certainly takes a well-below-average mind to think that teenagers are going to keep quiet about it. The school superintendent is not amused:

Southwest Vermont Supervisory Union Superintendent Wesley Knapp said he would not want his children subjected to such teaching.

"It's absolutely unacceptable," he said. "They (teachers) don't have a license to hold forth on a particular standpoint."

Knapp said he was recently informed of the situation and that it was a personnel issue that he took seriously.

After school, head for The Dread Pundit Bluto, where every liberal dork gets a free swirly.

Posted by: Bluto at 11:31 PM | Comments (23) | Add Comment
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I hadn't planned any serious posts for Thanksgiving. However, opening the local newsrag this morning to a snotty little piece of disinformation from New York Times political hack Paul Krugman (and no, I won't provide the link) changed my mind. Since the enemies within won't take a break today, neither will I.

From the Associated Press via Yahoo!News:

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration and military leaders are sounding optimistic notes about scaling back U.S. troops in Iraq next year, as public opposition to the war and congressional demands for withdrawal get louder.

While military leaders would not confirm the size of possible withdrawals, conversations with defense officials and analysts suggest troop levels could drop below 100,000 next year, contingent on the progress of the Iraqi government and its security forces. There are currently about 155,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.

Now we know the reason for increasingly loud Democrat attacks on the Administration and the troops. Democrat leaders got wind of (were most likely consulted on) contingency plans to lower the number of troops, and made a cynical decision to create the illusion that any planned cutbacks were the result of their "protests", knowing of course, that they could depend on their water-carriers in the mainstream media to help them make the case.

I am continually amazed at the willingness of Democrat party leaders to put US troops at risk to further their own political schemes. Of course, as someone educated in the purported principles of journalism I'm continually amazed at the overwhelming number of "journalists" who are willing to aid and abet such schemes.

Also at The Dread Pundit Bluto. Get there before the tryptophan kicks in.

Posted by: Bluto at 10:55 AM | Comments (23) | Add Comment
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If you haven't been following how one Professor of History at the University of Northern Iowa has been trying to sink the academic career of Ph.D. student (and good friend of the Jawa Report) Paul Deignan of Info Theory, you should. It seems that Paul had the nerve to make a pro-life argument in the comments section of a liberal blog. And that, says the liberal professor, should disqualify Paul from getting a Ph.D.

Jeff Goldstein has summarized the exchange here along with phone numbers and e-mails of the relevant parties. Go give Paul your support.

Note to fellow non-tenured academic bloggers and graduate students: blog anonymously or risk your career. Yes, it is that bad at the modern university.

Posted by: Rusty at 08:19 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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The aim stated by Senators Rockefeller, Feinstein and Levin, for the second phase of the work by the Committee to Investigate Pre-Iraq Intelligence is to "assess" whether the intelligence "justified" the public statements made by the Bush Administration. It presumes that the members of this committee can, and will, apply some consistent unbiased standard to the correspondence between the certainty and uncertainty about what we knew and what administration officials said. They're apparently going to close the gap between natural and scientific language that Habermas and Gadamer left open. That'll be fun.

But, why do we need a Senate Intelligence Committee to go through these kinds of heuristic deliberations? What makes their rule of thumb better than my rule of thumb, as a citizen, concerning the public statements of our officials? Doesn't their hubris imply a whopping condescension toward those of us in the Peanut Gallery? Why is Carl Levin's opinion about the President's Niger statement better than mine? Will he take into account the fact that Wilson's own debrief with the CIA supported concerns that Iraq was interested in buying uranium, and that the intelligence agencies of the UK and France still maintain that Iraq was seeking such a buy? Or will he just gauge the statement against the common meme that Wilson was truthful in his NYT dispatch, and that he has adequately debunked that whole yellow-cake myth by sipping a little sweet tea in Africa? Anyone taking bets?

And doesn't the urgency placed on this report by the unprecedented grandstanding of the Democrats also imply a profoundly statist deference toward the black-box hermeneutic/analytic skills of a group of high-placed non-experts? Next thing we know they'll be proposing to re-write the New Testament in order to make it more "accurate." They could sure help us out by "assessing" the extent to which the certainties and uncertainties about the Resurrection justify the many public statements about it by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. About time they got around to that, dontcha think?

And how much is this Report from Mount Olympus going to cost us, anyway? Couldn't we just siphon that to the victims of Katrina, Rita, and Wilma? Frankly I'd rather have a comprehensive audit of FEMA. That would make some sense.

Posted by: Demosophist at 10:43 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
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