Last night I got a call from a survey company out of Denver.  It went something like this:

Hello, my name is ***** and I’m calling from ***** and was wondering if you had some time for a brief survey concerning your political opinions?

I felt a little energetic, so I replied in the affirmative.

Great Mrs. ****.  Tell me, how likely are you to vote in Tennessee’s next gubernatorial election? Not Likely, Likely, or Certainly?

Certainly.

(here I begin paraphrasing a bit.)

Thank you.  Mrs. ****.  Some in the administration have proposed that in order for Tennessee to be fiscally healthy, there should be a one cent tax on sugar, soft drinks, and sports drinks.  Others have proposed that local officials come and take your babies by force and have them severed in two.  Tell me Mrs. *****, which option would you support?

Uh.  Um.  Can I pass on that one?

Sure.  I’ll just note that you “don’t know”.

In the country right now there is an epidemic of obesity.  Some lawmakers in Tennessee have proposed that special funds should be set aside for educating school children, especially at-risk kids, about healthy lifestyles.  Others have proposed that all Tennessee babies should be force-fed crack sandwiches.  Tell me Mrs. *****, which option would you support?

I’ve gotta pass on that too.

Sure.  I’ll just note that you don’t care about children.

All right,  let’s see.  Mrs. *****, due to the same obesity epidemic, some lawmakers have proposed a law that would require chain restaurants to list nutritional information on their menus.  Those who don’t support the proposal have stated that they would like to stand by as fat customers choke to death on their fried buffalo bacon and bleu cheese sandwiches.  Which option sounds best to you Mrs. *****?

You know, all of these questions seem designed to get me to choose option A.

Ma’am, I didn’t design the questionnaire, I’m just reading from a form here.

Oh, I understand.  Can I just say something here?

Sure.

(here begins the transcript of my fantasy conversation.  The one I came up with after the survey while I was making bean sprout sandwiches on whole wheat with sugar free yogurt for the kiddies, and Nutri-Crap cake for dessert.  This is what I would have said if I had a quick wit to match my justifiable political cynicism.  I mean, do you know how long it takes me to write these things?!)

I think I understand the political purpose of this survey.  First to publish in the news that the population of Tennessee overwhelmingly supports higher taxes and greater government intrusion, since no decent survey taker ever supported option B.  Secondly to place in my mind (the Tennessee voter) that there are no other viable alternative solutions (besides the evil option B) to the problems of the budget or obesity. Thirdly, to place in my mind that the candidate I must vote for is the option A candidate, because his opponent is obviously an option “B” man, and to give the option “B” man our vote would prove that I hated children and thought they should grow up ignorant and die a slow painful death from diabetes and heart disease. Right?

Like I said, I didn’t design the questionnaire.

Let me just say this.  I’ll start taking the advice of my school officials on issues of children’s health when they stop loading my kids with white bread and high fructose corn syrup in the lunch room, and chocking kindergartner’s pie holes with marshmallows and chocolate kisses every time they bark like a trained seal.
And I’ll start giving Tennessee’s wise government authorities my ear about my kid’s health and safety when they start putting aside a bit of the budget to make sure autistic kids don’t end up in cages, and to do background checks on elementary school teachers to make sure they haven’t attempted to kill anybody in the last few years.

Mrs. ****, should I note that you intend to discontinue the survey?

Click.

Yeah.  That’s how it should have gone.

In response to the Georgia Right-To-Life billboard above, another overeducated fool stumbles on the Holy Grail Fail:

Abortion rights advocates are disturbed. Spelman College professor Beverly Guy-Sheftall called the strategy a gimmick.

“To use racist arguments to try to bait black people to get them to be anti-abortion is just disgusting,” said Guy-Sheftall, who teaches women’s history and feminist thought at the historically black women’s college.

“These one-issue approaches that are not about saving the black family or black children, it’s just a big distraction,” she said. “Many black people don’t know who Margaret Sanger is and could care less.”

To use anti-racist arguments to bait black people into killing themselves is what’s disgusting in an evil genius kind of way.  You don’t know who Margaret Sanger is but I assure you that she’s looking up to you and smiling at this very moment for continuing her pioneering work in  “Weed” Eradication.

Fortunately for you, your mother was not as “educated” as you are.

Dramatic Re-enactment

Portrait of 69,456,897 Oddballs. We’re going to need a bigger canvas:

A family source said Bishop…was a far-left political extremist who was “obsessed” with President Obama to the point of being off-putting.

This story of the Alabama professor who gunned down her colleagues just keeps getting stranger and stranger. After all, I’ve never heard of a far-left extremist in Academia with an off-putting Obama cult mentality before.

Somebody get Incompetano monitoring the Twitter feeds. We may have to shut down every single U.S. college and newsroom. When this latter-day Unabombette was questioned about mailing a pipebomb to a doctor thanklessly tasked with examining some of her research:

“She was quite cavalier about it,” Fluckiger said of Bishop’s description of her interview with police. She said Bishop “grinned” as she described being asked by cops whether she’d ever taken stamps off an envelope and fastened them onto something else. “I cannot tell you what the grin meant,” Fluckiger said.

Seven years prior, Bishop shot her brother to death in Braintree in an incident that was ruled an accident at the time.

Somehow none of this disqualified her from jumping in front of a classroom full of kids.

Oh, and she tried to hold up a car dealership.  It’s stuff like this that makes Massachusetts look like some commie cuddling, crook coddling CuckooLand.

Sometimes appearances can be deceiving.  Other times, devastatingly accurate.

Homeland Security can just wait until Bishop gets her own show on MSNBC. At least that would ensure that her infectious ideas won’t be exposed to as many people as the university.

No word yet as to whether the President will send out some free t-shirts for the victims but I expect a full rebuke of violent, leftwing looney bin radio is forthcoming.

I have a friend who despite her knee-jerk liberalism is quite dear to me. She is convinced that the people who don’t buy into the global climate change belief are a bunch of hayseeds, of course she doesn’t include me in her assessment. I just don’t  fit her cartoon image of ignorant right winger.  I’d love for her to watch someone with a British accent agree with me. I mean  if a British accent can manage to increase sales on ridiculous infomercial crap, it might just work on the global warming kool aid drinkers.  Maybe I’ll buy a copy of this documentary for her since her birthday is coming up.  She would be so pleased, wouldn’t she?

And if your kids are getting freaked out by their teachers, Animal Planet, and Discovery Channel, this film might be good emotional ammunition to have handy.

I don’t know what Day By Day’s copyright standards are or I would have reposted it here but this pretty well sums it up.

Really, what would we do without the Federal Government? Here, Kathleen Sebelius, former Governor of Kansas, demonstrates how to cough properly.

Leave it to the Anti-American Associated Press to find this event newsworthy.

In next week’s installment, the Federal Government will teach us how to use soap.

The Old Media is aghast that anyone would dare question the wisdom of putting our Commie-in-Chief in front of a bunch of school kids to force his way into their psyche so that they may give and serve Dear Leader at his request.

I mean, come on, all he’s telling them is to stay in school and learn to read, right?

When President Bush Sr wanted to tell kids not to do drugs, they dragged him in front of Congress and tried to get him impeached.

I say we drag Rahm, Axlegrease, Soros and the rest of the Administration before Congress and just spit loogies on them. We don’t even have to question them. Just coat them with phlegm and then tell them to get the hell out.

The worst part of all this? The fact that we even have a Federal Department of Education. No President should have a role in public education. Period.

to teach your children smiley faced communism.  You really have to watch the whole thing.  It starts out with some very beautiful people making noble and romantic quazi-political pledges, and some humorous ones, followed by some soft-core  environmentalism, concluding with some truly hard-core propaganda for fascist Obama worship.

What will your kids be watching on Sept. 8th? I’ll count this video as a parental screening personally. Then I’ll count my blessings that my kids won’t be indoctrinated by this.

Today we are watching Milton Friedman’s “What’s Wrong with our Schools?”

Probably won’t cover indoctrination though.

I’ve always supported the idea of homeschooling.  All the way back in college a creative writing teacher asked me what I was planning to do with all of my talents (not trying to boast, simply a necessary lead-up) and I said “I think I’ll have kids and homeschool them.”

I planned on homeschooling them when they were babies, then after my eldest hit toddlerhood, I booted her out to the nearest preschool as fast as I could.  A mom could only be tormented for so long by hair-raising meltdowns over the “green cup” or the texture of the pop tarts.  A mom needs a break. I guess the same goes for paid daycare workers, because they kept booting her back to me.  So did kindergarten, and first grade, and second grade.  We finally figured out that we were dealing with more than a bit of nasty stubbornness, we were dealing with a syndrome for which few teachers have much compassion or time.

Now I’ve been teaching at home for four years and have made quite a list reasons to love homeschooling.  It can be a bitch, don’t get me wrong.  Just last week, three days into our school year, four years into homeschooling, I was complaining that I already felt burned out.  The child has improved so much behaviorally, and she’s always been brilliant, so I’ve been considering sending her somewhere else to get her education.  But yesterday, we skipped the curriculum suggestions, you know, Math, History, Social Studies, and watched “The Ten Commandments” a two-part mini series made for ABC in 2006.  We spent all day talking about Moses and Aaron, betrayal, what it means to be a brother, what it means to be a leader, what it must have felt like to be Moses.  How some people have minds like slaves and want to be led around, and how those types of people can be easily swayed to the occult, theft, murder etc.  What an education!

Why am I posting this at the always irreverent Sixmeat?  Because for the next ten days we’re going to skip ten chapters in our History book, and ten current events lessons to watch Milton Friedman’s “Free to Choose” series on the importance of American freedom. Since the almighty Google has folded to some socialist China man and pulled it, we will have to make a little detour to Youtube on day 6 to watch the best one: “What’s Wrong With our Schools”.

Are the school kids going to get to watch this series?  I bet not, and it saddens me.

After watching this series, my child will know more than most Americans about the significance of freedom and why we should fight for it.  Maybe this will all culminate in a little family trip to DC after all.

There is probably a minivan full of homeschoolers we can hop on to get there.

BTW, it’s not hard to find one of these fascinating groups. One can usually locate them by standing in the parking lot of a public school for a while until a gray van passes with a couple of kids hanging out, making moose ears and yelling “neener neener!”

Well, at least that’s what one would see my kids do.

Did you know that you can now sue a teacher who expresses a fact contrary to your political ideology?  It’s true.

Well, technically you can sue anybody for any reason at all.  It doesn’t mean that you’ll win but you can certainly waste everybody’s money and time which is really the point of the legal terrorism that some people gleefully engage in.

Case in point, Robertson county’s own Rick Casares is throwing down the gauntlet because a teacher had the nerve to say that illegal immigration is a burden on our healthcare system.  Behold, fajita-eating fascism at it’s finest:

It has come to my attention that you use your classroom to extol the virtues of Conservative thought.  It should not be my responsibility to remind you that you are there to teach, not preach.  It is your right to have an opinion, but it is my right to have my daughter receive an education free from political propaganda.  You may not be aware that Alena’s grandparents were undocumented when they arrived in this country.  Your inference that illegal immigrants are to blame for this country’s health care crisis upset her, and I am putting you on notice that if it happens again, I will contact our family’s attorney.  I am sure the Robertson County School District has plenty of excess funds with which to fight off a lawsuit, especially one where precedent is clearly set.

Nevermind if what the teacher said was true.  Since it is. It’s also a burden on the school systems while we’re at it. And the courts. Admittedly, since hospitals do not track this information it’s hard to determine an exact number but having hard data has never stopped hard headed liberals before. Just ask a discredited Lancet study that every liberal sings by heart.

Rick’s site “Coyote Chronicles” is presumably a celebration of the noble “coyote”. A coyote is a man who sees another man with a leafblower and a dream and helps him to scam government services and drunk drive over families after fleeing the mess he made of his own country under the cover of darkness for a nominally outrageous fee. Not a celebration of the same coyotes who haul in the drugs and human traffic hispanics into the underground sex slave trade. Just so we’re clear. Coyotes with a heart of gold.

Some people conservatively put that healthcare number at $10.7 billion a year. But we know how some people feel about the word “Conservative” so let’s make that a more liberal number like $100 Billion a year. The facts aren’t fully in but if you don’t consider potentially billions of unpaid hospital bills a burden on the system, maybe not the biggest but definitely big by any measure, then perhaps you’d like to just give me $500,000 since it ain’t no thing.

You see, by Mr. Casares’ estimation no teacher can interject their opinion into a classroom if that opinion upsets their child or a parent’s well-established set of beliefs (no matter how ill-founded) to which I wholeheartedly agree!

By that rationale, we can now sue every teacher and school system who:

- teaches evolution as a fact and not a theory.
- Teaches sex education to under 13 youngsters at all instead of leaving it to their parents
- Teaching elementary schoolers that Heather Having Two Mommies is a-okay
- insult children if their parents voted for John McCain (and make them cry – call my attorney!)
- recruiting students to work for political campaigns in exchange for credit

Just a few. If we were to throw out all the bums who teach their opinions as fact the schools and colleges would be closed tomorrow. I guess it only matters when you feel it’s your particular pet issue that’s being attacked once in a very infrequent while.

Try having the board that accredits the schools forcing teachers to take an ideological litmus test before they could teach and forcing students to take a loyalty test to their definition of “social justice” before they would be allowed to graduate and then get back with me.

This is really very simple, Sir. Were the shoe on the other foot, and I had your children in my classroom, and attempted to indoctrinate my charges into the Godless, heathen, liberal agenda, I believe you would be as concerned as I.

And a godless, heathen, liberal agenda isn’t what we have now?

By their own description, 72 percent of those teaching at American universities and colleges are liberal and 15 percent are conservative, says the study being published this week. The imbalance is almost as striking in partisan terms, with 50 percent of the faculty members surveyed identifying themselves as Democrats and 11 percent as Republicans.

We just need to sue everybody who presents their opinions as fact in the public school system and browbeats their students with it. Were it the case, your leftarded side would be getting beat with the shit end of the stick that they wield so often that it has prompted a nationwide homeschooling movement.

Do yourself a favor “Teach” and take out the warrant now. Casares and reasoned debate go together like Ivan Moreno and Mary Sadler. Reasoned debate may try to put up a good fight but at the end of the day it’s going to be strangled to death and raped in the name of diversity.

Very early, according to Woman of Abomination.

Don’t forget hope, WoA.

RTWT.

Behold!  The negotiating prowess of the United Auto Workers.

Is it worthwhile to have a job and work out the retiree health benefits issue later or to have no company, no job and no health benefits now or later?  If you guessed the later, welcome to the worst economy in recent memory.  You are not going to find a $75 an hour job with three or four months of paid vacation per year and to-the-grave healthcare for turning out substandard, overpriced cars.

Back to work dock monkeys.

I’ve been completely happy with my Zune until about 2 am this morning. That was roughly around the time that every first generation 30GB Zune in the world froze up with no foreseeable fix in sight outside of a hard reset.   Z2K9 – here we come!

An unidentified software bug has affected 30GB first generation versions of the Microsoft Zune digital media player.

The company appears baffled by the cause but on its website said it is aware of the problem and is working to correct it.

The problem is apparently a worldwide one with customers reporting their devices freeze when booted.

Let’s not confuse “appears baffled” with “pantshittingly retarded”.

Quote one expert:

“I’ve never heard of a consumer electronic device fail en masse like this,” said Matt Rosoff, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, a Seattle-based research firm that focuses on the software giant.

Rosoff estimated that as many as one million people may have been affected by the glitch, which disabled the original 30 gigabyte Zune players.

Never again, MicroStank.  This the Corvair of the Digital Age and unsafe at any speed.

Due to your complete inability to produce a media player untainted by the foul stench of your software failures, I will never buy one of these again and will likely choose a Mac or a Linux OS in the future for all future desktops or laptops.

Congratulations on another successful PR campaign, doucherags.  Z2K9, indeed.

Not one just to bitch and moan, I’m all about solutions:

A)  You can bite the bullet and trade these out for new models of the same size.

B)  Sub out the repair to local outlets like Best Buy.

C) Overnight the tiny screwdriver kit to remove the case to everyone responding on your website with directions for the hard reset.  Not even my eyeglass screwdriver is small enough to fit these screws.

D)  Eat the peanuts out of my crap.

The choice is yours.

Cranky gloats in the comments.  What can I say?  We didn’t listen!

Blank Zune templates after the jump.  Just do a “Save As” and  Photoshop your own idea of what a real frozen Zune screen should look like and I’ll post them (send to -b-dot-mcmurphy-at-yah00000!-dot-com).

Micro Soft On Quality Update: Allegedly this time freeing feature of the Zune will work itself out at the stroke of midnight.  In other words, “don’t just do something – sit there!”*

Yay.  Just in time for everybody to go home.

Another wonderful bit of tech advice from the people who never met a problem that powering down your system and restarting couldn’t fix.

(more…)

2nd and 3rd String cannot be any worse.  Please, oh merciful Lord (the Obamessiah), from my mouth to your ears, from your telekinetic brainwaves to the talking hot dog bun in The Great Pumpkin’s fanny pack.  Please, for all that is Orange outside of prison jumpsuits and traffic cones, set Jonathan Crompton down until further notice:

It’s halftime at Neyland Stadium, and one team looks like it’s serious about winning a championship. The other looks like it’s serious about … well, being the laughing stock of the SEC.

We all make mistakes.  Hell, I bought the wrong kind of Wet Jet hardwood floor solution at the store 2 years ago and I haven’t heard the end of it yet.

Your playcalling is to scoring what RU-486 is to a birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese.  It’s just not happening.

My drinking, however, is coming along quite nicely.

Fulmer, you should be handed a pink slip at the end of this game.

Didn’t see this coming didja?  Gotcha!

Palin claim on eBay plane sale* doesn’t fly

(ed. – italics and asterisk mine)

JUNEAU, Alaska — When Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin sought to illustrate her frugality and flair to delegates at the GOP convention Wednesday, she described how she disposed of a corporate jet acquired by her unpopular predecessor.

“That luxury jet was over the top,” Palin, the Republican vice presidential nominee, said to loud cheers. “I put it on eBay.”

Palin’s statement implied the plane was sold through the online auction site revered for empowering millions of small entrepreneurs, and Palin’s spokeswoman insisted Thursday that the transaction occurred. But the plane failed to sell on eBay.

This is where we have to explain to people who presumably studied journalism for years the difference between an “implication” and an “inference”.

I put a set of Polk Audio speakers on Craigslist but since no one offered me what I asked for, I am now a liar for saying that I put my speakers on Craigslist too.  Dammit.  There is no winning with you guys.

Instead, the 23-year-old 10-seat Westwind II was sold in August 2007 for $2.1 million to a Valdez, Alaska, entrepreneur; that’s about $300,000 less than a broker’s asking price, according to news accounts.

And she can’t negotiate for squat either.  We’ll ignore the differences between replacement cost, fair market value, “as-is / where-is”, or orderly liquidation costs for the time being as this courageously robust and beefy bit of e-Tarded Old Media sleuthery has shown that Palin’s red meat was only fit for Republican consumption – not human consumption.

Kudos, fellas.  Next up, that’s not her real hair color.  *Meeeeow*.

Here’s the eBay Plane Sale I’m waiting to see and good bidding!

Sharpen your pencils, kids:

People dying to ______________ to Marilyn Monroe’s newly discovered sex tape are as disgusting as Jimmy Carter wanting to ______________ Yasser Arafat’s AIDS riddled corpse*.

I can admit when I’m wrong.  Vanilla Ice still can get arrested in this town:

The police report tells a slightly different story that Palm Beach County Sheriff’s deputies say began with a call from Laura saying Van Winkle struck and kicked her during an argument at their $801,695 Wellington home.

But Laura played down the dispute when sheriff’s deputies arrived around 7:45 p.m. Thursday, saying she was pushed, not kicked or struck.

“Forget the whole thing,” she said, telling deputies she didn’t want to deal with the media attention and “just wanted a divorce.”

When you take the name “Van Winkle” in holy matrimony you are making a pact, bitch.   A pact that says “I’ll screw an early 90s has-been to live in an $800,000 house.”

Own it. Or at least half of it.

Why we’re not too keen on the recent Knox County rezoning proposal for our neighborhood.

h/t Cutting School

By way of Glen Dean’s completely innocuous post that got threadjacked:

But that you have no right to be born until a head pops out is disingenuous. Maybe I’m the worse in this line of thinking for having demystified the gated community that is the vagina where rights cannot enter but only escape upon crossing some magical threshold.

I want to believe in the magic but somehow I can’t suspend my imagination long enough to concede the rabbit wasn’t present before he got yanked out of the tophat.

Our increasing unlikely drinking acquaintance, Sarcastro, recently became the proud papa of a fully-functional fetus and I’ve been at loggerheads trying to determine why a baby should have no rights at 8 months, 30 days and 12 hours but is slapped on the ass with a spanking new copy of The Constitution at 9 months.

Bunny Christ, why do you mock me with peep induced visions? Were that I cast in your furry image I could twitch my nose, hop along, and dwell in pollinated fields of sweet, fetus carrots forever and ever. Amen.

I suppose it’s no mystery why the rest of the country mercilessly mocks the South. Especially when our *chuckle* best and brightest legislators do stuff like this: State Senator calls for answer on Creation of the Universe.

(Shakes head in shame…)

Can’t you just hear it? “Get me the answer to the origin of all creation – and have it on my desk by Friday…”

Then again, it’s just another political publicity stunt that further demonstrates the level of intelligent discourse that goes on in our state government. It’s hard to say for sure, but I have a feeling that our state may lead the nation in political publicity stunts.

Yep, publicity stunt.

The most embarrassing part of the whole affair may be that the Senator is going to the State Department of Education for the answer to any important question. If the topic isn’t directly related to skin-color- or sexual-orientation-based- diversity training, I’m afraid the TDOE probably doesn’t have much to offer in the way of actual answers.

UPDATE: Also see Uncle’s exclusive interview. Thanks Lissa!

WaPo weenie Courtland Malloy wet himself shortly before clutching his pearls and fainting yesterday when faced with soaring violence that’s grabbing national headlines as a result of the gruesome throat-slashing of a British activist. But don’t dial 911 yet, the Washington Post is keeping it all in perspective:

A new crime trend is unfolding in the District — and some suburbs, too: an increase in armed robberies committed by thugs whose motivation appears to be less about getting money than inflicting pain. For even if you comply with demands to hand over your belongings, you are still likely to be assaulted, raped, kidnapped or killed.
[...]
“So far this year, we’ve had a 95 percent increase in juveniles arrested for robberies, and it’s not uncommon to have physical assaults in the process,” D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey..,

So we’ve eschewed money as the primary catalyst to Washington’s criminal woes but still embrace class war?

“We’ve got a lot of new people who are not accustomed to living in an urban environment,” Ramsey said. “They’ll park blocks away from a restaurant or a nightclub, then come out in the early morning hours, cut through side streets and become easy prey.”

Insty picks up on the “more guns, less crime” theme.
(more…)

Abe Stoklasa, class Valedictorian at Eagleville High School near Murfreesboro, Tennessee, had his diploma withheld for telling the truth about government schools during his graduation speech.

(more…)

(via Boortz)

I heard this story over the holidays, but didn’t think much of it. Now that I’ve read more details, it’s starting to fester like a sore.

A fifth-grade teacher in a San Francisco suburb (of course, you knew this story had to come from the Soviet Socialist Republic of California) has been forbidden from using the DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE in his classroom because it mentions “God”.

Sadly, this type of news is no longer shocking, especially in California. In this case, however, the teacher in question has filed a lawsuit, the details of which are available at the Smoking Gun. Do you think the NEA and the state teachers’ union will rally to his side? Don’t hold your breath.

Though his odds of actually winning in a California court are abysmally low, hopefully this will bring enough attention to the case to show how far these Marxists who dominate the government schools infrastructure will go to rewrite history in the name of political correctness.

I mean really, it’s the fucking Declaration of Independence, not a Jack Chick Publication!

While there are states where the government schools are more tolerant of religion than others, the NEA, ACLU and Federal Department of Education are continuing their campaign to destroy public education, and they’re already most of the way there. Dumbing down the public is their collective goal, because an uninformed electorate is far easier to manipulate. Why else do you think John Kerry got more than 50 million votes?

(via Boortz)

New Jersey teacher threatened with dismissal over posting of President Junior’s picture on school bulletin board.

This the alleged story: Teacher puts up a picture of the President and First Lady… “and pictures of the president’s dog, the Oval Office and the Declaration of Independence. She said she also had a picture of Air Force One, and a poster with a signature of all the presidents.”

Parents come in for a school function and whine about how she should put up a picture of Lurch as well, or take down the picture of the President. Following their complaints to the school, “Jim Warfel, the school principal, tells Pillai-Diaz that she has disrupted the school with her ‘inflammatory politics.’ Warfel told Pillai-Diaz to hand over her keys to her classroom and leave the building.”

School Superintendent Gary McCartney notes “pictures of the president are ‘openly displayed’ in all district schools. A teacher at the Monmouth Junction School has displayed a portrait of President Bush for four years, without incident.” McCartney adds that the teacher was not fired, but was expected to return to work yesterday.

Pillai-Diaz denies this, stating that “you would have to be incredibly stupid to say those things to a student … I don’t talk politics with the kids.”

It remains to be seen whose version is the most accurate, but one thing is for sure, Pillai-Diaz is already well on the way to Media Whore™ status with appearances on Good Morning America and the O’Reilly Factor. She has also (predictably) hired a lawyer.

It’s hard to feel a lot of sympathy for someone who appears (on the surface, at least) to simply be cashing in on her 15 minutes of fame and some paid time off from her job. It is perfectly appropriate to have a photo of the current President in the classroom – it’s inappropriate for teachers to berate 7th and 8th graders with their personal politics. It remains to be seen if that’s what Pillai-Diaz was doing, but the fact that she’s already hired a lawyer and hit the media circuit doesn’t make her look very good.

10/6 UPDATE:

Jeff and the lovely Mrs. Holmes have convinced me to eat crow on my take on this story. The fact that Pillai-Diaz is not a union member already speaks volumes in her favor, and Mrs. Holmes reports that her performance on the O’Reilly Factor was sincere. Pillai-Diaz spent yesterday in talks with the superintendent and her attorney apparently trying to resolve the situation. I guess we’ll see what happens – perhaps she’s not the media-whore that my knee-jerk reaction indicated.

(via Jihad Watch & Right on Red)

This is exactly what I was worried about when we saw what happened in Beslan. San Diego school crisis plan found on disk in Iraq.

This educrat must have already swallowed the Kerry kool-aid. THIS IS NOT A THREAT.

If you want to live in blissful ignorance and denial with Lurch & John Boy, go right ahead. The FACTS are in direct opposition to this mental illness. These islamofascists target CHILDREN. They are not attacking military installations, government interests, or any other strategic targets. These islamic militants attack, murder and brutalize innocents – and here we have evidence that they’re looking to recreate the Russian school massacre right here in the states.

If you can actually look yourself in the eye and support a candidate (Lurch) that denies that terrorism is a REAL threat here and that our children are in the islamofascists’ crosshairs, more power to you. I, for one, do not want to wait on Kofi Annon’s approval to attack these bastards before they can slaughter our kids.