Well... when I brought this up a wee time ago... I was treated as a pariah with derision.
Well... I told ya so... unless this is totally fabricated.
William Ayers comes clean; I held Fundraiser for Obama; Wife and Michelle were at law firm together
William Ayers, the radical Leftist who was part of the domestic terrorist group The Weather Underground in the 1970′s, has given an in-depth interview to The Daily Beast and confirmed the fact that Barack Obama’s political career began in his living room with a 1995 fundraiser:
THE DAILY BEAST: There was a big hullabaloo during the 2008 presidential election over your relationship to Obama. What is or was your relationship to him?
AYERS: “I brief him every Monday in the White House, and he never listens! No. The truth is exactly what he said and what the campaign said in 2008. David Axelrod said we were friendly, that was true; we served on a couple of boards together, that was true; he held a fundraiser in our living room, that was true; Michelle [Obama] and Bernardine were at the law firm together, that was true. Hyde Park in Chicago is a tiny neighborhood, so when he said I was “a guy around the neighborhood,” that was true. Today, I wish I knew him better and he was listening to me. Obama’s not a radical. I wish he were, but he’s not.”
It's just that when I brought this up as one of the reason why I didn't want him to be my President... I got jumped here.
I wasn't sure so I thought I'd ask, I vaguely remember this back when Obama was running in '07-'08 and I hadn't met my wife. Odd that its coming out after he can't run again for President though
It's just that when I brought this up as one of the reason why I didn't want him to be my President... I got jumped here.
I wasn't sure so I thought I'd ask, I vaguely remember this back when Obama was running in '07-'08 and I hadn't met my wife. Odd that its coming out after he can't run again for President though
I'm in bankruptcy... Obama's administration is trying to make it to be able to discharge school loans... if that happens... I'll vote for him .
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hotsauceman1 wrote: Did Obama know he was a terrorist?
Did he? If so, maybe, If not, it doesnt matter.
whembly wrote: I'm in bankruptcy... Obama's administration is trying to make it to be able to discharge school loans... if that happens... I'll vote for him .
The way student loans are structured in this country is problematic in a lot of ways, and I think there is a really big need for reform. I'm not sure what shape that should take, but I think action needs to be taken.
It's just that when I brought this up as one of the reason why I didn't want him to be my President... I got jumped here.
I wasn't sure so I thought I'd ask, I vaguely remember this back when Obama was running in '07-'08 and I hadn't met my wife. Odd that its coming out after he can't run again for President though
I'm in bankruptcy... Obama's administration is trying to make it to be able to discharge school loans... if that happens... I'll vote for him .
It's just that when I brought this up as one of the reason why I didn't want him to be my President... I got jumped here.
I wasn't sure so I thought I'd ask, I vaguely remember this back when Obama was running in '07-'08 and I hadn't met my wife. Odd that its coming out after he can't run again for President though
I'm in bankruptcy... Obama's administration is trying to make it to be able to discharge school loans... if that happens... I'll vote for him .
Honestly I think people give presidents too much credit, I mean pretty much every president in the US is only known for a few things anyways like Kennedy got shot, Bush is known for the War on Terror and 911, Nixon's political scandal, etc. Barack Obama is the first black president,
supports same-sex marriage and tighter gun regulation, death of Osama, charismatic, good oratory skills, recession president, ended US involvement in the Iraq War, trying to improve healthcare for America, etc I think most of those qualities are positive but then again I don't expect
Grey Templar wrote: Well if we are going to nitpick I'd say a wanted terrorist is worse than a drug dealer, assuming the drug dealer isn't a cartel member.
Ahhh, so we can measure this on some form of 'scales of evil'?
What about Maggie Thatcher hanging out with Jimmy Saville then, is pedo worse than domestic terrorist or drug dealer? What about George Bush Senior attending the same fundraiser as known felon Winona 'lightfingers' Ryder?
I recall a documentary/TV show that had a quantifiable scale of EEE-vil.
As to the topic of the thread, I'm not sure that Ayers holding a fundraiser or whatever exactly happened for Obama is that big a deal. I mean, I have questions as to why he's out and about when it's pretty clear he shouldn't be, but I don't think that this news is a smoking gun that proves the sitting President approves of leftist terrorism.
MGS... if you knew this information prior to the 2008 Presidential election... would that even give you a pause?
Dude, from this guy's own lips:
AYERS: “I brief him every Monday in the White House, and he never listens! No. The truth is exactly what he said and what the campaign said in 2008. David Axelrod said we were friendly, that was true; we served on a couple of boards together, that was true; he held a fundraiser in our living room, that was true; Michelle [Obama] and Bernardine were at the law firm together, that was true. Hyde Park in Chicago is a tiny neighborhood, so when he said I was “a guy around the neighborhood,” that was true. Today, I wish I knew him better and he was listening to me. Obama’s not a radical. I wish he were, but he’s not.”
This is the quote that you want me to balk at? The guy saying 'we had knowledge of each other' and 'he's not one of mine'.
Can't say that knowing this causes me even a slow in my step. Why does any of this alarm you? Your own previous emphasis in the quote seems like grasping at straws, there's absolutely feth all here.
Monster Rain wrote: Whembly, seriously, what point are you trying to make here?
Just lay it out and make me understand it.
First and foremost, let me just say that Obama hasn't been as bad as I feared. He's probably one of the best politician we're ever going to see in our life time as the man just ouzes Charisma.
But, back in 2007 during that Presidential campaign I was concerned about his associations with percieved radicals.
Now, mind you... he's a Chicago Politician (that should've been my first clue... Obi Wan said it best: "You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious")
And it's not just one or two associations that MGS is trying to argue about other politicians (Thatcher, et el).
THere were many:
Frank Marshall Davis
Charles Ogletree
Reverend Jeremiah Wright
Quentin Young
Tony Rezko
Bill Ayers
Bernardine Dohrn
Saul Mendelson
The Rod Blagojevich mess
on and on....
See the picture?
Good thing he's a Chicago politician, rather than a true "Ayers Radical".
The point really was that ALL OF THIS WAS DENIED by the supporters.
And Mr. Ayers saying "he's not a radical" doesn't hold any waters when that dude is so far left, he's off the political spectrum.
This reeks of grasping at something, anything, to pin on The President, it's like that 'Homeland Security is buying tanks to become the new SS' thing a week or so ago.
I know so many of you folks are really really hopeful that Obama is going to suddenly reveal himself to be the Uberfascislammunist Overlord and fill the skies with black helicopters and the streets with tanks and troops (all from where I really don't fething know, because 99% of soldiery I talk to vote republican, as do most law enforcement and agency types I've spoken to or read about - so, perhaps students and hipsters? Imagine the terror they'd inflict on the nice folks of central PA... ) but the actual truth is, after several years of this not happening and all the Palin loving birther loonies getting bored, taking off their tricorn hats and going back to their homes to be just mildly angry... Still no fething ragnarok.
I mean, nothing has happened, no calamity, no apocalypse, the economy is slowly improving, there are still golden girl reruns on tv, the price of oil fell, people started buying houses again and no trumpets, no whore of babylon, no seven headed beast and no wrath of god because a fairly staid mixed race man and his nice family moved into the white house.
Your President, duly elected according to your democratic process, is just a reasonably good orator, somewhat reserved, left of the current US political center which still makes him entirely right of the world political center and even the Western European political center by a sizeable amount, church going, father of children, happily married, hasn't started any wars, seems to have been 'on the money' with the car companies and America avoided falling into a full economic depression, which was looking like a possibility 4 years back.
I don't see any problem with his time in office, at all. I see the opposition party in absolute disarray and in dire need of getting it's own gak in order and presenting it's own platform instead of simply saying 'we will vote against anything he says or does' as their only strategy.
If you don't like him, sit it out, it's almost over, few more years. As the saying goes, We survived Bush, you will survive Obama...
This reeks of grasping at something, anything, to pin on The President, it's like that 'Homeland Security is buying tanks to become the new SS' thing a week or so ago.
I know so many of you folks are really really hopeful that Obama is going to suddenly reveal himself to be the Uberfascislammunist Overlord and fill the skies with black helicopters and the streets with tanks and troops (all from where I really don't fething know, because 99% of soldiery I talk to vote republican, as do most law enforcement and agency types I've spoken to or read about - so, perhaps students and hipsters? Imagine the terror they'd inflict on the nice folks of central PA... ) but the actual truth is, after several years of this not happening and all the Palin loving birther loonies getting bored, taking off their tricorn hats and going back to their homes to be just mildly angry... Still no fething ragnarok.
I mean, nothing has happened, no calamity, no apocalypse, the economy is slowly improving, there are still golden girl reruns on tv, the price of oil fell, people started buying houses again and no trumpets, no whore of babylon, no seven headed beast and no wrath of god because a fairly staid mixed race man and his nice family moved into the white house.
Your President, duly elected according to your democratic process, is just a reasonably good orator, somewhat reserved, left of the current US political center which still makes him entirely right of the world political center and even the Western European political center by a sizeable amount, church going, father of children, happily married, hasn't started any wars, seems to have been 'on the money' with the car companies and America avoided falling into a full economic depression, which was looking like a possibility 4 years back.
I don't see any problem with his time in office, at all. I see the opposition party in absolute disarray and in dire need of getting it's own gak in order and presenting it's own platform instead of simply saying 'we will vote against anything he says or does' as their only strategy.
If you don't like him, sit it out, it's almost over, few more years. As the saying goes, We survived Bush, you will survive Obama...
You're right... we will survive Obama.
The point was, with those associations, plus these:
Joe the Plumber
Flexibility
Painted a PICTURE that I didn't like and when I brought these up... I was ganged up on being accused of a birther (which I didn't give a feth).
I don't like his politics... but, I respect the hell out him as a politician and a person.
Seaward wrote: So you want to prove to Obama supporters that he knew Bill Ayers?
They don't care, dude.
I know... because "they won".
Doesn't matter.
I knew.
Most everybody knew.
It was never about Obama "knowing" Bill Ayers.
The whole thing was that the right wanted to paint Obama as a crazy left wing radical that will destroy the Constitution and ruin our way of life because he must be the same as Bill Ayers because he knew him.
And even with this fancy report and "admission" of something that we knew to be true since 2008 doesn't change the fact that association doesn't mean that Obama is a radical.
But who knows. Maybe this will hurt Obama's run at a third term when he decides to change the Constitution via executive order.
Were there as many of the (guy who lost to Bush)'s supporters pulling up things about Bush while he was in office in the way you are whembley? I'm not trying to be rude, just curious, I didn't spend much time on the internet while Bush was in office
Seaward wrote: So you want to prove to Obama supporters that he knew Bill Ayers?
They don't care, dude.
I know... because "they won".
Doesn't matter.
I knew.
Most everybody knew.
Not really... just look at articles in '07 during the Presidential compaigns.... Most everyone didn't care.
It was never about Obama "knowing" Bill Ayers.
The whole thing was that the right wanted to paint Obama as a crazy left wing radical that will destroy the Constitution and ruin our way of life because he must be the same as Bill Ayers because he knew him.
You mean the same kinds of people who claims that Romney gave someone cancer, Republicans wants to dirty your air/water and Paul Ryan wants to throw granny off the cliff?
And even with this fancy report and "admission" of something that we knew to be true since 2008 doesn't change the fact that association doesn't mean that Obama is a radical.
That remains to be seen.
But who knows. Maybe this will hurt Obama's run at a third term when he decides to change the Constitution via executive order.
But first, he needs to make it so that I can discharge my school loans... then, he can do that.
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motyak wrote: Were there as many of the (guy who lost to Bush)'s supporters pulling up things about Bush while he was in office in the way you are whembley? I'm not trying to be rude, just curious, I didn't spend much time on the internet while Bush was in office
motyak wrote: Were there as many of the (guy who lost to Bush)'s supporters pulling up things about Bush while he was in office in the way you are whembley? I'm not trying to be rude, just curious, I didn't spend much time on the internet while Bush was in office
Every president has had people pulling up dirt while he's in office.
While most of the time its nothing important it can pull up important stuff, like Watergate. Or Clinton's lying under oath.
Its an annoying but vital part of the system, it allows us to keep the politicians somewhat honest.
Joe the Plumber: Did you not get the 'you would have achieved the wealth faster and been in a more secure and capable situation earlier' bit and the 'a wealthier average working class spends more and promotes growth' bit, or did you hear 'spread the wealth around' and turn it into 'the State will take away your possessions and share them with the proletariat, you bourgeois swine!' What Obama said on the taxation seemed entirely reasoned to me.
Flexibility: 'Yes Russian chap, I'd like to discuss this but I have an election to deal with, that means I must postpone things that may make me appear weak or cast me in an unfavorable light until I've won.' or 'I'm giving you an excuse not to discuss this right now and fobbing you off with something much more important, you do understand I hope'...
Again, there is nothing wrong with either of these interviews.
Joe the Plumber: Did you not get the 'you would have achieved the wealth faster and been in a more secure and capable situation earlier' bit and the 'a wealthier average working class spends more and promotes growth' bit, or did you hear 'spread the wealth around' and turn it into 'the State will take away your possessions and share them with the proletariat, you bourgeois swine!' What Obama said on the taxation seemed entirely reasoned to me.
I took it as 'the State will take away your possessions and share them with the proletariat, you bourgeois swine!'
Flexibility: 'Yes Russian chap, I'd like to discuss this but I have an election to deal with, that means I must postpone things that may make me appear weak or cast me in an unfavorable light until I've won.' or 'I'm giving you an excuse not to discuss this right now and fobbing you off with something much more important, you do understand I hope'...
I took it as 'Yes Russian chap, I'd like to discuss this but I have an election to deal with, that means I must postpone things that may make me appear weak or cast me in an unfavorable light until I've won.'
Again, there is nothing wrong with either of these interviews.
Related question (since we are sort of discussing radical presidents), say a president gets along with his party well, and they own both houses with a clear majority, can he use an executive order to make him president for life? Or is that in writing as illegal.
motyak wrote: Were there as many of the (guy who lost to Bush)'s supporters pulling up things about Bush while he was in office in the way you are whembley? I'm not trying to be rude, just curious, I didn't spend much time on the internet while Bush was in office
Oh, my, yes. The anti-Bush folks were hilariously rabid. They even included national network news anchors who faked documents to make him look bad.
Not really... just look at articles in '07 during the Presidential compaigns.... Most everyone didn't care.
And there is mistake number one from you. There is a world of difference between "nobody knew this was true" and "most everybody didn't care".
People knew that Obama knew Ayers. They didn't care because knowing doesn't mean what you want it to mean.
It was never about Obama "knowing" Bill Ayers.
The whole thing was that the right wanted to paint Obama as a crazy left wing radical that will destroy the Constitution and ruin our way of life because he must be the same as Bill Ayers because he knew him.
You mean the same kinds of people who claims that Romney gave someone cancer, Republicans wants to dirty your air/water and Paul Ryan wants to throw granny off the cliff?
Nope.
People were claiming these evil Republicans want to do things based on stuff that they actually have done and said.
People were claiming that Obama wanted to do these things and was a radical because of what Bill Ayres has said and done in the past.
Big difference.
And even with this fancy report and "admission" of something that we knew to be true since 2008 doesn't change the fact that association doesn't mean that Obama is a radical.
That remains to be seen.
Here is what you and I both know.
You don't like Obama and you would really wish for one of those crazy theories to pan out so that you can feel more justified for not liking him. You want him to be this bad guy, so you are looking for "proof" that he is a bad guy. Don't let what you want to be true lead you down the path of crap sources and stupid internet sites. You got a science background, you know that if you have a theory that is not backed up by any of the experimentsthen you change your theory. You don't screw around and break the experiment until your theory is right.
But who knows. Maybe this will hurt Obama's run at a third term when he decides to change the Constitution via executive order.
But first, he needs to make it so that I can discharge my school loans... then, he can do that.
motyak wrote: Were there as many of the (guy who lost to Bush)'s supporters pulling up things about Bush while he was in office in the way you are whembley? I'm not trying to be rude, just curious, I didn't spend much time on the internet while Bush was in office
Oh, my, yes. The anti-Bush folks were hilariously rabid. They even included national network news anchors who faked documents to make him look bad.
You mean Rathergate? Man... forgot about that one...
1. I took it as 'the State will take away your possessions and share them with the proletariat, you bourgeois swine!'
2. I took it as 'Yes Russian chap, I'd like to discuss this but I have an election to deal with, that means I must postpone things that may make me appear weak or cast me in an unfavorable light until I've won.'
That's how I took it.
1. Death and Taxes. More dosh you have, more taxes you pay.
2. If that were the case, other than being caught out with a live mic, that's a smart move. It's also part of diplomacy. It's a bit like saying 'I'd like to tell my rich friends that 47% of this country are gak-eating parasites, but I'll wait til after the elections as I don't want to appear like an elitist prick... Oh balls...
motyak wrote: Related question (since we are sort of discussing radical presidents), say a president gets along with his party well, and they own both houses with a clear majority, can he use an executive order to make him president for life? Or is that in writing as illegal.
No, its not in the presidents power to have an executive order make him president for life.
We'd have to have a Constitutional amendment to get a president for more than 2 terms.
motyak wrote: Related question (since we are sort of discussing radical presidents), say a president gets along with his party well, and they own both houses with a clear majority, can he use an executive order to make him president for life? Or is that in writing as illegal.
Illegal.
Presidential Term limits is codified in Constitution.
Needs another constitutional amendment to change that
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d-usa wrote: Let me brake this down for you a bit there.
Not really... just look at articles in '07 during the Presidential compaigns.... Most everyone didn't care.
And there is mistake number one from you. There is a world of difference between "nobody knew this was true" and "most everybody didn't care".
People knew that Obama knew Ayers. They didn't care because knowing doesn't mean what you want it to mean.
Eh... maybe I should've clarified.... the low information voters either don't know or didn't care. I believe it's more likely that they didn't know.
Political junkies like you and me would know about it.
It was never about Obama "knowing" Bill Ayers.
The whole thing was that the right wanted to paint Obama as a crazy left wing radical that will destroy the Constitution and ruin our way of life because he must be the same as Bill Ayers because he knew him.
You mean the same kinds of people who claims that Romney gave someone cancer, Republicans wants to dirty your air/water and Paul Ryan wants to throw granny off the cliff?
Nope.
People were claiming these evil Republicans want to do things based on stuff that they actually have done and said.
Really? Citations please.
People were claiming that Obama wanted to do these things and was a radical because of what Bill Ayres has said and done in the past.
Big difference.
Not quite sure I follow... Obama said a lot of things that many of us disagrees with.
And even with this fancy report and "admission" of something that we knew to be true since 2008 doesn't change the fact that association doesn't mean that Obama is a radical.
That remains to be seen.
Here is what you and I both know.
You don't like Obama and you would really wish for one of those crazy theories to pan out so that you can feel more justified for not liking him. You want him to be this bad guy, so you are looking for "proof" that he is a bad guy. Don't let what you want to be true lead you down the path of crap sources and stupid internet sites. You got a science background, you know that if you have a theory that is not backed up by any of the experimentsthen you change your theory. You don't screw around and break the experiment until your theory is right.
I think Obama is truly constrained by the Consitution... or, he'd would've championed a more socialistic vision for US.
But who knows. Maybe this will hurt Obama's run at a third term when he decides to change the Constitution via executive order.
But first, he needs to make it so that I can discharge my school loans... then, he can do that.
1. I took it as 'the State will take away your possessions and share them with the proletariat, you bourgeois swine!'
2. I took it as 'Yes Russian chap, I'd like to discuss this but I have an election to deal with, that means I must postpone things that may make me appear weak or cast me in an unfavorable light until I've won.'
That's how I took it.
1. Death and Taxes. More dosh you have, more taxes you pay.
Yep... let's punish successful folks even more... you know... 'cuz, you didn't build that. Nevermind that US already HAD the highest corporate tax rates in the world AND very PROGRESSIVE individual income tax rate.
2. If that were the case, other than being caught out with a live mic, that's a smart move. It's also part of diplomacy. It's a bit like saying 'I'd like to tell my rich friends that 47% of this country are gak-eating parasites, but I'll wait til after the elections as I don't want to appear like an elitist prick... Oh balls...
Going by the logic that President Obama knew Ayers and sat in meetings where they both attended, I can surmise that Paul Ryan is a liberal because he has attended meetings that Diane Feinstein also attended.
whembly wrote: Well... when I brought this up a wee time ago... I was treated as a pariah with derision.
Well... I told ya so... unless this is totally fabricated.
William Ayers comes clean; I held Fundraiser for Obama; Wife and Michelle were at law firm together
William Ayers, the radical Leftist who was part of the domestic terrorist group The Weather Underground in the 1970′s, has given an in-depth interview to The Daily Beast and confirmed the fact that Barack Obama’s political career began in his living room with a 1995 fundraiser:
THE DAILY BEAST: There was a big hullabaloo during the 2008 presidential election over your relationship to Obama. What is or was your relationship to him?
AYERS: “I brief him every Monday in the White House, and he never listens! No. The truth is exactly what he said and what the campaign said in 2008. David Axelrod said we were friendly, that was true; we served on a couple of boards together, that was true; he held a fundraiser in our living room, that was true; Michelle [Obama] and Bernardine were at the law firm together, that was true. Hyde Park in Chicago is a tiny neighborhood, so when he said I was “a guy around the neighborhood,” that was true. Today, I wish I knew him better and he was listening to me. Obama’s not a radical. I wish he were, but he’s not.”
Seaward wrote: So you want to prove to Obama supporters that he knew Bill Ayers?
They don't care, dude.
You want to prove something he's admitted? Shock horror!
Seriously, it says in the first post that he had at one point associated with Ayers, and that Ayers was unhappy with how little an effect he'd had on him.
Grey Templar wrote: Well if we are going to nitpick I'd say a wanted terrorist is worse than a drug dealer, assuming the drug dealer isn't a cartel member.
Ahhh, so we can measure this on some form of 'scales of evil'?
What about Maggie Thatcher hanging out with Jimmy Saville then, is pedo worse than domestic terrorist or drug dealer? What about George Bush Senior attending the same fundraiser as known felon Winona 'lightfingers' Ryder?
Won't someone think of the children!!!
George Bush wasn't running and neither was Thatcher /Saville. We're talking a US election.
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MeanGreenStompa wrote: not happening and all the Palin loving birther loonies getting bored, taking off their tricorn hats and going back to their homes to be just mildly angry... Still no fething ragnarok.
I mean, nothing has happened, no calamity, no apocalypse, the economy is slowly improving, there are still golden girl reruns on tv, the price of oil fell, people started buying houses again and no trumpets, no whore of babylon, no seven headed beast and no wrath of god because a fairly staid mixed race man and his nice family moved into the white house.
Wo wo wo you can't say there's been no calamity and then say Golden Girls is on TV.
motyak wrote: Were there as many of the (guy who lost to Bush)'s supporters pulling up things about Bush while he was in office in the way you are whembley? I'm not trying to be rude, just curious, I didn't spend much time on the internet while Bush was in office
Oh, my, yes. The anti-Bush folks were hilariously rabid.
I know right!?!? It's like that mutha started two wars on two continents at a cost of thousands of US lives and billions of dollars or something! Oh yeah and got us into the financial gak storm that O got left cleaning up.
whembly wrote:
Yep... let's punish successful folks even more... you know... 'cuz, you didn't build that. Nevermind that US already HAD the highest corporate tax rates in the world AND very PROGRESSIVE individual income tax rate.
As I understand it, and feel free to correct me, he was principally proposing the end of the Bush era (his immediate predecessor) tax breaks for people above a certain wealth line as the nation had fallen into economic difficulties and he required them to return to paying their regular tax rate whilst he wanted to extend the tax breaks for those below that line to protect them from the severity of the economic crisis which included rising grocery prices and utility prices, something more easily tolerated by richer people.
Frazzled wrote:
Wo wo wo you can't say there's been no calamity and then say Golden Girls is on TV.
Don't ever disrespect the Golden Girls on my watch Mr...
MeanGreenStompa wrote: [
I know right!?!? It's like that mutha started two wars on two continents at a cost of thousands of US lives and billions of dollars or something! Oh yeah and got us into the financial gak storm that O got left cleaning up.
One war. We were quite content staying out to the ME until someone attacked us.
Easy E wrote: I once knew a guy who became a convicted felon and fraudster. He loaned me money once.
Does that mean you should think of me as a convicted felon and fraudster? Am I no longer eligible to have my current job since I lead people?
What is the end game?
So was he a convicted fraudster when he lent you the money? Did you use this money to run for public office? Do you hold public office? If not then you're trying to compare apples with oranges.
In this instance it appears that a known domestic terrorist knew the then candidate, organised a fund raiser for him to run for public office and the then candidate was less than truthful with his disclosure of the facts while campaigning for the highest office in the country.
MeanGreenStompa wrote: [
I know right!?!? It's like that mutha started two wars on two continents at a cost of thousands of US lives and billions of dollars or something! Oh yeah and got us into the financial gak storm that O got left cleaning up.
One war. We were quite content staying out to the ME until someone attacked us.
Dreadclaw69 wrote: I once knew a guy who became a convicted felon and fraudster. He loaned me money once.
Does that mean you should think of me as a convicted felon and fraudster? Am I no longer eligible to have my current job since I lead people?
What is the end game?
Dreadclaw69 wrote: So was he a convicted fraudster when he lent you the money? Did you use this money to run for public office? Do you hold public office? If not then you're trying to compare apples with oranges.
No. However I did use the money to further my career goals. He was not a convicted fraudester at the time, but most assuredly earned the moeny he loaned me via fraud. Therefore, when he was convicted shouldn't I lose the benefits I earned from his ill-gotten loan?
Apples and oranges, but most ethical dilemmas are.
Dreadclaw69 wrote: In this instance it appears that a known domestic terrorist knew the then candidate, organised a fund raiser for him to run for public office and the then candidate was less than truthful with his disclosure of the facts while campaigning for the highest office in the country.
Great. So what is the end game? What is the point? Impeachment? Gueld your own hatred? Get a sense of superiroity over the rest of us rubes? What? I honestly want to know
Easy E wrote: No. However I did use the money to further my career goals. He was not a convicted fraudester at the time, but most assuredly earned the moeny he loaned me via fraud. Therefore, when he was convicted shouldn't I lose the benefits I earned from his ill-gotten loan?
Apples and oranges, but most ethical dilemmas are.
So you received money from a source that was to the best of your knowledge perfectly legitimate. What you learned after the fact does not change this so there isn't really an ethical dilemma, unless you're making one
Easy E wrote: Great. So what is the end game? What is the point? Impeachment? Gueld your own hatred? Get a sense of superiroity over the rest of us rubes? What? I honestly want to know
The end game is that I would like to see someone who mislead the public account for this, and give reasons for his actions. There is no sense of superiority from me, I don't have a dog in this fight and I'm not eligible to vote until I am a citizen so I'm not sure where you think this "hatred" is coming from.
Da Boss wrote: Meh? In Ireland's last election, a known domestic terrorist ran for office.
Bush was fairly obviously a worse president than Obama. I don't see how it can be argued.
And in the North both the First and Deputy First Ministers have connections to terrorist groups. That doesn't make it right.
And what has Bush got to do with anything? Was he at the fundraisers too? Or because the US once had a "worse" President that all others are excused from wrong doing and not accountable?
Easy E wrote: Fair enough. How would Obama have to be held to account?
What is he supposed to be held to account for?
Nothing has changed from 2008. Everything we knew then is the same as today. That is what is so stupid about this whole mess and the people that are worked up about this.
Everything Ayres is saying is the same as what was said in 2008. That they knew each other and worked at some of the same places together and served on some of the same boards together. No breaking news here, not any actual news here at all.
Just people who don't like Obama wanting to feel justified for not liking him and spending part of April 2013 raging over something that is exactly the same as it was in 2008 and thinking that people are stupid for not thinking that knowing a radical makes Obama a radical extremist as well.
Easy E wrote: Fair enough. How would Obama have to be held to account?
Uh... he won't.
It's not impeachable...
Honest question to you E... just replace "Obama" with some generic Republican candidate... do you think that this generic (R) candidate would be treated the same way as Obama was during the usual media vetting process?
I was just venting a little fustration because back in '07, I brought this up (even in '10 here) and I was regularly denounced....
MeanGreenStompa wrote: [
I know right!?!? It's like that mutha started two wars on two continents at a cost of thousands of US lives and billions of dollars or something! Oh yeah and got us into the financial gak storm that O got left cleaning up.
One war. We were quite content staying out to the ME until someone attacked us.
We sure put Saudi Arabia in it's place!
Er...whatsa you saying you?
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Da Boss wrote: Meh? In Ireland's last election, a known domestic terrorist ran for office.
Bush was fairly obviously a worse president than Obama. I don't see how it can be argued.
I was just venting a little fustration because back in '07, I brought this up (even in '10 here) and I was regularly denounced....
What was denounced.
The fact that they knew each other, or the fact that it mattered?
The fact that it mattered.
So nothing has changed since 2008 and this is a complete waste of time and the title of this thread is stupid. Because there is absolutely no news here, and the "Ahem...told ya so" should really be "Ahem...I still think this should have mattered 5 years ago".
Because honestly, please tell me what the "told ya so" part of this thread is supposed to be. I don't see it. There is nothing new here that wasn't already talked to death in 2008. You didn't uncover some giant proof that Obama is in fact an evil radical extremist. You uncovered breaking news, from 2008.
Let me ask you what I asked E...
During a candidate's Vetting process... do you think a Republican candidate would've survived had they had the same associations as Obama's?
I don't have to think about it because we know that they did. You can cry about MSM BS all you want, but study after study have shown that both candidates received the same amounts of negative press and Obama frequently faced more than the challenger.
I was just venting a little fustration because back in '07, I brought this up (even in '10 here) and I was regularly denounced....
What was denounced.
The fact that they knew each other, or the fact that it mattered?
The fact that it mattered.
Let me ask you what I asked E...
During a candidate's Vetting process... do you think a Republican candidate would've survived had they had the same associations as Obama's?
Would this be the same vetting process that gave us Nixon, the duo of Bushes (.. thus far !) whose whole family have certain... questionable.. actions and associations in their family history and G.W. Bush certainly had some... colourful.. friends and associates when he was younger. And then there's the Kennedy clan too.....
... Passed Palin too presumably .. but to be fair that's w hole different set of failings there so . ..
MeanGreenStompa wrote: ...Because, as whembly established in the OP, none of this is substantiated.
Also because it isn't news, nor is it even relevant.
Not quite... it IS substantiated... that was the point.
Just doesn't matter now.
*shrugs* get ready for a Hillary Administration in a couple of years.
Well, you know, if republicans wanted to actually present someone not gak to the middle ground folks, we might consider something else.
You know, smuggle a sensible and erudite person past the primaries, like Jon 'I think science might be right' Huntsman, then we don't have to necessarily go down that route. But if the right offers up another string of fruit loops like last time, she'll rip them to shreds.
Remember just what was on offer:
Married multiple times, dumps each wife when they get ill, dumped one wife for refusing swinging clubs. Secretes his own resin. Wants to build moonbase...
Hates the gays, thinks the rest of the world should also be Texas, slightly stupider than toast...
Pizzalord, very very strange, highly creepy... likes the ladies, even if they don't like him...
Simple country boy, looks good in a tank top or cardigan, similar world view as that scary as feth preacher from poltergeist, wants to reintroduce witch burnings...
I don't have to think about it because we know that they did. You can cry about MSM BS all you want, but study after study have shown that both candidates received the same amounts of negative press and Obama frequently faced more than the challenger.
Um... citations please? I really want to know why/how you can formulate that statement as a fact...
Would this be the same vetting process that gave us Nixon, the duo of Bushes (.. thus far !) whose whole family have certain... questionable.. actions and associations in their family history and G.W. Bush certainly had some... colourful.. friends and associates when he was younger. And then there's the Kennedy clan too.....
... Passed Palin too presumably .. but to be fair that's w hole different set of failings there so . ..
I'd argue there's always going be double-standards...
MeanGreenStompa wrote: ...Because, as whembly established in the OP, none of this is substantiated.
Also because it isn't news, nor is it even relevant.
Not quite... it IS substantiated... that was the point.
Just doesn't matter now.
*shrugs* get ready for a Hillary Administration in a couple of years.
Well, you know, if republicans wanted to actually present someone not gak to the middle ground folks, we might consider something else.
You know, smuggle a sensible and erudite person past the primaries, like Jon 'I think science might be right' Huntsman, then we don't have to necessarily go down that route. But if the right offers up another string of fruit loops like last time, she'll rip them to shreds.
Remember just what was on offer:
Spoiler:
Married multiple times, dumps each wife when they get ill, dumped one wife for refusing swinging clubs. Secretes his own resin. Wants to build moonbase...
Hates the gays, thinks the rest of the world should also be Texas, slightly stupider than toast...
Pizzalord, very very strange, highly creepy... likes the ladies, even if they don't like him...
Simple country boy, looks good in a tank top or cardigan, similar world view as that scary as feth preacher from poltergeist, wants to reintroduce witch burnings...
RELEASE THE KRAKEN!!!
You could have saved bandwidth and just posted one picture:
Um... citations please? I really want to know why/how you can formulate that statement as a fact...
Depends on how you define press, by viewership? a viewership/air minute metric? Number of unnecessary uses of "Hussain"? Do you count the daily show as news? what about fox news (since they claim its 99% opinion)?
Well, you know, if republicans wanted to actually present someone not gak to the middle ground folks, we might consider something else.
You know, smuggle a sensible and erudite person past the primaries, like Jon 'I think science might be right' Huntsman, then we don't have to necessarily go down that route. But if the right offers up another string of fruit loops like last time, she'll rip them to shreds.
Remember just what was on offer:
Married multiple times, dumps each wife when they get ill, dumped one wife for refusing swinging clubs. Secretes his own resin. Wants to build moonbase...
Dude... I'd fething love for Gingrich to be prez for all the great things he'd say and do... and all the idiotic things he'd say and do... I mean, c'mon, as political jukies, his administration is a gold mine (plus, plethora of SNL and late night skits would never lack materials )
Hates the gays, thinks the rest of the world should also be Texas, slightly stupider than toast...
Hate gays?
Another guy I'd vote for Pres... Texas is doing great now... why wouldn't you want the rest of the world be like Texas? Okay, okay... they can keep the heat.
Pizzalord, very very strange, highly creepy... likes the ladies, even if they don't like him...
I think he's hilarious...
Simple country boy, looks good in a tank top or cardigan, similar world view as that scary as feth preacher from poltergeist, wants to reintroduce witch burnings...
Yeah... agree with you there. Not sure what folks see in him.
Um... citations please? I really want to know why/how you can formulate that statement as a fact...
Depends on how you define press, by viewership? a viewership/air minute metric? Number of unnecessary uses of "Hussain"? Do you count the daily show as news? what about fox news (since they claim its 99% opinion)?
No... I'm interested in how he came to those conclusions...
I don't have to think about it because we know that they did. You can cry about MSM BS all you want, but study after study have shown that both candidates received the same amounts of negative press and Obama frequently faced more than the challenger.
Um... citations please? I really want to know why/how you can formulate that statement as a fact...
This has an average of the coverage during the whole election:
An examination of the dominant or master narratives in the press about the character and record of presidential contenders finds that 72% of this coverage has been negative for Barack Obama and 71% has been negative for Mitt Romney. The study, conducted by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, examined the personal portrayal of the candidate in 50 major news outlets over a 10-week period.
The study found that Obama’s negative coverage exceeded positive coverage in 14 of 15 weeks examined, while positive coverage outweighed negative for Romney in six of the 15 weeks and was fairly evenly divided in four more.
I don't have to think about it because we know that they did. You can cry about MSM BS all you want, but study after study have shown that both candidates received the same amounts of negative press and Obama frequently faced more than the challenger.
Um... citations please? I really want to know why/how you can formulate that statement as a fact...
This has an average of the coverage during the whole election:
An examination of the dominant or master narratives in the press about the character and record of presidential contenders finds that 72% of this coverage has been negative for Barack Obama and 71% has been negative for Mitt Romney. The study, conducted by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, examined the personal portrayal of the candidate in 50 major news outlets over a 10-week period.
The study found that Obama’s negative coverage exceeded positive coverage in 14 of 15 weeks examined, while positive coverage outweighed negative for Romney in six of the 15 weeks and was fairly evenly divided in four more.
he Texas Legislative Study Group released its 2013 “Texas on the Brink” report at the end of last week. The report is an annual study to determine Texas’ rankings among the 50 states and the District of Columbia on health care, education, and the environment.
How’s Texas doing? Not so great: The state ranks 50th in high school graduation rate, first in amount of carbon emissions, first in hazardous waste produced, last in voter turnout, first in percentage of people without health insurance, and second in percentage of uninsured kids.
“Too many of our children do not have access to health insurance,” said Rep. Garnet Coleman (D-Houston), who led the 2013 study group effort and introduced the report with fellow Democrats in a Capitol press conference on Monday morning.
The report made clear that while legislators are—through restrictions on abortion and cuts to family planning—doing well to ensure that babies are actually being born, representatives at the press conference said too little is being done to ensure that Texas children and their mothers are cared for. Texas ranks third in the nation for overall birth rate, but it also ranks fourth highest for teenage birth rate.
The specifics are worse. Texas ranks the lowest in the nation for women with health insurance, and is the second lowest in the nation for percent of pregnant women receiving prenatal care in the first trimester. Texas also ranks the fourth highest in the nation for percentage of women living in poverty.
According to the report, Texas ranks 44th in graduation rates (contrary to what Gov. Perry has said, the number more accurately reflects Texas’ increasing problem with dropout rates—according to the LSG, Texas has previously boasted high graduation rates because studies often to not take dropout numbers into account) and 47th in SAT scores.
Rep. Abel Herrero (D-Robstown) elaborated on the dismal state of education in Texas. “Texas’ investment per student is 27 percent less than the national average. … Yet, as we’ve seen on the House floor, there are still roadblocks to this state, in getting our children the resources they need to succeed.”
The numbers are worse for higher education. In Texas, only 51% of students earn a bachelor’s degree within six years, meaning that only 17% of Texans will earn a bachelor’s degree, said Rep. Mary Gonzales (D-Clint).
Rep. Lon Burnam (D-Fort Worth) spoke on Texas’ environmental rankings, which weren’t particularly good. “The state of Texas gets an ‘F’ on the environmental comprehensive issues, but what that really means is, it gets an F in healthcare. Not just because we don’t insure our kids, but because we create an environment that is unhealthy for our kids and every other person who breathes in this state. It’s a crisis,” Burnam said. “Across the board, Texas fails its children, in particular, and the general public on environmental and healthcare issues.”
Don’t be too alarmed. It’s not all gloom and doom, Coleman pointed out. Texas currently ranks 46th for credit card debt, and 6th highest for affordability of homes. But, he stressed, it’s not enough.
“This is undoubtedly a difficult time for Texas families and a difficult time for our state,” Coleman said. “Texas on the Brink is designed not to shame Texas, but rather to inspire us to do better. … Moving forward we must be mindful as we set our priorities and solve problems based the information that is available to us today. Texas can do better.”
The charge on the police docket was "disrupting class". But that's not how 12-year-old Sarah Bustamantes saw her arrest for spraying two bursts of perfume on her neck in class because other children were bullying her with taunts of "you smell".
"I'm weird. Other kids don't like me," said Sarah, who has been diagnosed with attention-deficit and bipolar disorders and who is conscious of being overweight. "They were saying a lot of rude things to me. Just picking on me. So I sprayed myself with perfume. Then they said: 'Put that away, that's the most terrible smell I've ever smelled.' Then the teacher called the police."
The policeman didn't have far to come. He patrols the corridors of Sarah's school, Fulmore Middle in Austin, Texas. Like hundreds of schools in the state, and across large parts of the rest of the US, Fulmore Middle has its own police force with officers in uniform who carry guns to keep order in the canteens, playgrounds and lessons. Sarah was taken from class, charged with a criminal misdemeanour and ordered to appear in court.
Each day, hundreds of schoolchildren appear before courts in Texas charged with offences such as swearing, misbehaving on the school bus or getting in to a punch-up in the playground. Children have been arrested for possessing cigarettes, wearing "inappropriate" clothes and being late for school.
In 2010, the police gave close to 300,000 "Class C misdemeanour" tickets to children as young as six in Texas for offences in and out of school, which result in fines, community service and even prison time. What was once handled with a telling-off by the teacher or a call to parents can now result in arrest and a record that may cost a young person a place in college or a job years later.
"We've taken childhood behaviour and made it criminal," said Kady Simpkins, a lawyer who represented Sarah Bustamantes. "They're kids. Disruption of class? Every time I look at this law I think: good lord, I never would have made it in school in the US. I grew up in Australia and it's just rowdy there. I don't know how these kids do it, how they go to school every day without breaking these laws."
The British government is studying the American experience in dealing with gangs, unruly young people and juvenile justice in the wake of the riots in England. The UK's justice minister, Crispin Blunt, visited Texas last September to study juvenile courts and prisons, youth gangs and police outreach in schools, among other things. But his trip came at a time when Texas is reassessing its own reaction to fears of feral youth that critics say has created a "school-to-prison pipeline". The Texas supreme court chief justice, Wallace Jefferson, has warned that "charging kids with criminal offences for low-level behavioural issues" is helping to drive many of them to a life in jail.
The Texas state legislature last year changed the law to stop the issuing of tickets to 10- and 11-year-olds over classroom behaviour. (In the state, the age of criminal responsibility is 10.) But a broader bill to end the practice entirely – championed by a state senator, John Whitmire, who called the system "ridiculous" – failed to pass and cannot be considered again for another two years.
Even the federal government has waded in, with the US attorney general, Eric Holder, saying of criminal citations being used to maintain discipline in schools: "That is something that clearly has to stop."
As almost every parent of a child drawn in to the legal labyrinth by school policing observes, it wasn't this way when they were young.
The emphasis on law and order in the classroom parallels more than two decades of rapid expansion of all areas of policing in Texas in response to misplaced fears across the US in the 1980s of a looming crime wave stoked by the crack epidemic, alarmist academic studies and the media.
"It's very much tied in with some of the hyperbole around the rise in juvenile crime rate that took place back in the early 90s," said Deborah Fowler, deputy director of Texas Appleseed, an Austin legal rights group, and principal author of a 200-page study of the consequences of policing in Texas schools. "They ushered in tough, punitive policies. It was all part of the tough-on-crime movement."
Part of that included the passing of laws that made the US the only developed country to lock up children as young as 13 for life without the possibility of parole, often as accomplices to murders committed by an adult.
As the hand of law and order grew heavier across Texas, its grip also tightened on schools. The number of school districts in the state with police departments has risen more than 20-fold over the past two decades.
"Zero tolerance started out as a term that was used in combating drug trafficking and it became a term that is now used widely when you're referring to some very punitive school discipline measures. Those two policy worlds became conflated with each other," said Fowler.
In the midst of that drive came the 1999 Columbine high school massacre, in which two students in Colorado shot dead 12 other pupils and a teacher before killing themselves. Parents clamoured for someone to protect their children and police in schools seemed to many to be the answer.
But most schools do not face any serious threat of violence and police officers patrolling the corridors and canteens are largely confronted with little more than boisterous or disrespectful childhood behaviour.
"What we see often is a real overreaction to behaviour that others would generally think of as just childish misbehaviour rather than law breaking," said Fowler. Tickets are most frequently issued by school police for "disruption of class", which can mean causing problems during lessons but is also defined as disruptive behaviour within 500ft (150 metres) of school property such as shouting, which is classified as "making an unreasonable noise".
Among the more extreme cases documented by Appleseed is of a teacher who had a pupil arrested after the child responded to a question as to where a word could be found in a text by saying: "In your culo (arse)", making the other children laugh. Another pupil was arrested for throwing paper aeroplanes.
Students are also regularly fined for "disorderly behaviour", which includes playground scraps not serious enough to warrant an assault charge or for swearing or an offensive gesture. One teenage student was arrested and sent to court in Houston after he and his girlfriend poured milk on each other after they broke up. Nearly one third of tickets involve drugs or alcohol. Although a relatively high number of tickets – up to 20% in some school districts – involve charges over the use of weapons, mostly the weapons used were fists.
The very young are not spared. According to Appleseed, Texas records show more than 1,000 tickets were issued to primary schoolchildren over the past six years (although these have no legal force at that age). Appleseed said that "several districts ticketed a six-year-old at least once in the last five years".
Fines run up to $500. For poorer parents, the cost can be crippling. Some parents and students ignore the financial penalty, but that can have consequences years down the road. Schoolchildren with outstanding fines are regularly jailed in an adult prison for non-payment once they turn 17. Stumping up the fine is not an end to the offending student's problems either. A class-C misdemeanour is a criminal offence.
"Once you pay it, that's a guilty plea and that's on your record," said Simpkins. "In the US we have these astronomical college and university expenses and you go to fill out the application to get your federal aid for that and it says have you ever been arrested. And there you are, no aid."
In Austin, about 3% of the school district's 80,000 pupils were given criminal citations in the 2007/8 school year, the last date for which figures are available. But the chances of a teenager receiving a ticket in any given year are much higher than that because citations are generally issued to high-school pupils, not those in kindergarten or primary school.
The result, says the Appleseed report, is that "school-to-prison pipeline" in which a high proportion of children who receive tickets and end up in front of a court are arrested time and again because they are then marked out as troublemakers or find their future blighted by a criminal record.
From her perch on the bench in an Austin courtroom, Judge Jeanne Meurer has spent close on 30 years dealing with children hauled up for infractions, some serious, others minor. Some of the difficulties faced by teachers can be seen as Meurer decides whether a parade of children should be released to await trial or held in custody. Meurer switches between motherly and intimidating depending on what she makes of the child before her.
"Some of them are rough kids," she said. "I've been on the bench 30 years and you used to never have a child cuss you out like you do now. I appreciate the frustrations that adults have in dealing with children who seem to have no manners or respect. But these are our future. Shouldn't we find a tool to change that dynamic versus just arresting them in school and coming down with the hard criminal justice hammer?"
Many of those who appear in front of Meurer have learning problems. Children with disabilities are particularly vulnerable to the consequences of police in schools. Simpkins describes the case of a boy with attention deficit disorder who as a 12-year-old tipped a desk over in class in a rage. He was charged with threatening behaviour and sent to a juvenile prison where he was required to earn his release by meeting certain educational and behavioural standards.
"But he can't," she said. "Because of that he is turning 18 within the juvenile justice system for something that happened when he was 12. It's a real trap. A lot of these kids do have disabilities and that's how they end up there and can't get out. Instead of dealing with it within school system like we used to, we have these school police, they come in and it escalates from there."
Sometimes that escalation involves force. "We had one young man with an IQ well below 70 who was pepper-sprayed in the hallway because he didn't understand what the police were saying," said Simpkins. "After they pepper-sprayed him he started swinging his arms around in pain and he hit one of the police officers – it's on video, his eyes were shut – and they charged him with assault of a public servant. He was 16. He was charged with two counts of assault of a public servant and he is still awaiting trial. He could end up in prison."
Austin's school police department is well armed with officers carrying guns and pepper spray, and with dog units on call for sniffing out drugs and explosives.
According to the department's records, officers used force in schools more than 400 times in the five years to 2008, including incidents in which pepper spray was fired to break up a food fight in a canteen and guns were drawn on lippy students.
In recent months the questionable use of force has included the tasering of a 16-year-old boy at a high school in Seguin, Texas, after "he refused to cooperate" when asked why he wasn't wearing his school identification tag. He then used "abusive language". The police said that when an officer tried to arrest the boy, he attempted to bite the policeman. The youth was charged with resisting arrest and criminal trespass even though the school acknowledges he is a student and was legitimately on the grounds.
Such cases are not limited to Texas. In one notorious instance in California, a school security officer broke the arm of a girl he was arresting for failing to clear up crumbs after dropping cake in the school canteen. In another incident, University of Florida campus police tasered a student for pressing Senator John Kerry with an awkward question at a debate after he had been told to shut up.
Sometimes the force is deadly. Last week, Texas police were accused of overreacting in shooting dead a 15-year-old student, Jaime Gonzalez, at a school in Brownsville after he pointed an air gun, which resembled a real pistol, at them outside the principal's office. The boy's father, also called Jaime, said the police were too quick to shoot to kill when they could have wounded him or used another means to arrest him. "If they would have tased him all this wouldn't have happened," he told the Brownsville Herald. "Like people say there's been stand-offs with people that have hostages for hours … But here, they didn't even give I don't think five minutes. No negotiating." The police say Gonzalez defied orders to put the gun down.
Meurer says she is not against police in schools but questions whether officers should regard patrolling the playground the same way they go about addressing crime on the streets.
"When you start going overboard and using laws to control non-illegal behaviour – I mean if any adult did it it's not going to be a violation – that's where we start seeing a problem," she says. "You've gradually seen this morphing from schools taking care of their own environments to the police and security personnel, and all of a sudden it just became more and more that we were relying on law enforcement to control everyday behaviour."
Chief Brian Allen, head of the school police department for the Aldine district and president of the Texas school police chiefs' association, is having none of it.
"There's quite a substantial number of students that break the law. In Texas and in the US, if you're issued a ticket, it's not automatically that you're found guilty. You have an opportunity to go before the judge and plead your case. If you're a teacher and a kid that's twice as big as you comes up and hits you right in the face, what are you going to do? Are you going to use your skills that they taught you or are you going to call a police officer?"
But Allen concedes that the vast majority of incidents in which the police become involved are for offences that regarded as little more than misbehaviour elsewhere.
"Just like anything else, sometimes mistakes are made." he said. "Each circumstance is different and there's no set guideline. There's also something called officer discretion. If you take five auto mechanics and ask them to diagnose the problem of a vehicle, you'll come up with five different solutions. If you ask five different doctors to diagnose a patient, a lot of times you'll have five different diagnoses. Conversely, if you ask five different police officers if they would write a ticket or not for the same offence, you possibly have five different answers."
Parents who have been sucked into the system, such as Jennifer Rambo, the mother of Sarah Bustamantes, wonder what happened to teachers taking responsibility for school discipline.
"I was very upset at the teacher because the teacher could have just stopped it. She could have said: OK class, that's enough. She could have asked Sarah for her perfume and told her that's inappropriate, don't do that in class. But she did none of that. She called the police," she says.
Politicians and civil liberties groups have raised the same question, asking if schools are not using the police to shift responsibility, and accountability, for discipline.
"Teachers rely on the police to enforce discipline," says Simpkins. "Part of it is that they're not accountable. They're not going to get into trouble for it. The parent can't come in and yell at them. They say: it's not us, it's the police."
That view is not shared by an Austin teacher who declined to be named because he said he did not want to stigmatise the children in his class.
"There's this illusion that it's just a few kids acting up; kids being kids. This is not the 50s. Too many parents today don't control their children. Their fathers aren't around. They're in gangs. They come in to the classroom and they have no respect, no self-discipline. They're doing badly, they don't want to learn, they just want to disrupt. They can be very threatening," he says. "The police get called because that way the teacher can go on with teaching instead of wasting half the class dealing with one child, and it sends a message to the other kids."
The Texas State Teachers Association, the state's main teachers union, did not take a position on ticketing at the recent debate in the legislature over Whitmire's proposal to scrap it. But the association's Clay Robison says that most teachers welcome the presence of police in schools.
"Obviously it looks as if some police officers are overreacting at some schools. I'm a parent and I wouldn't want my 17-year-old son hauled in to court if he and another student got in to an argument in a cafeteria. Police officers need to exercise a little bit of common sense but the police are what they are. They enforce the law," he says. "At the same time, years ago, at a school in one of the better neighbourhoods of Austin, a teacher was shot to death in his classroom. It's still a very rare occurrence but it does happen. Anything that increases the security of the teacher is good so they don't have to worry about personal safety and they can concentrate on teaching the kids. We get complaints from some teachers that the police aren't aggressive enough at moving against some of the older juveniles, those that they feel actually do pose a danger to the teachers or the other students."
Because of Sarah Bustamentes's mental disorders, a disability rights group took up her case and after months of legal battles prosecutors dropped the charges. Ask her how she feels about police in schools after her experience and she's equivocal.
"We need police in school. In my school it can get physical and it can turn out very bad," she says. "But they should stop issuing tickets. Only for physical stuff or bullying. Not what you do in class."
In Texas, non-citizens are almost three times as likely to be uninsured as native U.S. citizens. Immigrants, many of whom are Hispanics, often work in economic sectors less likely to offer health insurance than others, such as construction.
Foreign Born Residents and Non Citizens in Relation to Uninsured Population
Non-citizens are almost three times as likely to be uninsured as are native US citizens. Over 62 percent of non-citizens went without insurance in 2010, compared to 18.3 percent of US native citizens and 26.2 percent of naturalized citizens. In Texas, 29.3 percent of the uninsured are non-citizens.
he Texas Legislative Study Group released its 2013 “Texas on the Brink” report at the end of last week. The report is an annual study to determine Texas’ rankings among the 50 states and the District of Columbia on health care, education, and the environment.
How’s Texas doing? Not so great: The state ranks 50th in high school graduation rate, first in amount of carbon emissions, first in hazardous waste produced, last in voter turnout, first in percentage of people without health insurance, and second in percentage of uninsured kids.
“Too many of our children do not have access to health insurance,” said Rep. Garnet Coleman (D-Houston), who led the 2013 study group effort and introduced the report with fellow Democrats in a Capitol press conference on Monday morning.
The report made clear that while legislators are—through restrictions on abortion and cuts to family planning—doing well to ensure that babies are actually being born, representatives at the press conference said too little is being done to ensure that Texas children and their mothers are cared for. Texas ranks third in the nation for overall birth rate, but it also ranks fourth highest for teenage birth rate.
The specifics are worse. Texas ranks the lowest in the nation for women with health insurance, and is the second lowest in the nation for percent of pregnant women receiving prenatal care in the first trimester. Texas also ranks the fourth highest in the nation for percentage of women living in poverty.
According to the report, Texas ranks 44th in graduation rates (contrary to what Gov. Perry has said, the number more accurately reflects Texas’ increasing problem with dropout rates—according to the LSG, Texas has previously boasted high graduation rates because studies often to not take dropout numbers into account) and 47th in SAT scores.
Rep. Abel Herrero (D-Robstown) elaborated on the dismal state of education in Texas. “Texas’ investment per student is 27 percent less than the national average. … Yet, as we’ve seen on the House floor, there are still roadblocks to this state, in getting our children the resources they need to succeed.”
The numbers are worse for higher education. In Texas, only 51% of students earn a bachelor’s degree within six years, meaning that only 17% of Texans will earn a bachelor’s degree, said Rep. Mary Gonzales (D-Clint).
Rep. Lon Burnam (D-Fort Worth) spoke on Texas’ environmental rankings, which weren’t particularly good. “The state of Texas gets an ‘F’ on the environmental comprehensive issues, but what that really means is, it gets an F in healthcare. Not just because we don’t insure our kids, but because we create an environment that is unhealthy for our kids and every other person who breathes in this state. It’s a crisis,” Burnam said. “Across the board, Texas fails its children, in particular, and the general public on environmental and healthcare issues.”
Don’t be too alarmed. It’s not all gloom and doom, Coleman pointed out. Texas currently ranks 46th for credit card debt, and 6th highest for affordability of homes. But, he stressed, it’s not enough.
“This is undoubtedly a difficult time for Texas families and a difficult time for our state,” Coleman said. “Texas on the Brink is designed not to shame Texas, but rather to inspire us to do better. … Moving forward we must be mindful as we set our priorities and solve problems based the information that is available to us today. Texas can do better.”
The charge on the police docket was "disrupting class". But that's not how 12-year-old Sarah Bustamantes saw her arrest for spraying two bursts of perfume on her neck in class because other children were bullying her with taunts of "you smell".
"I'm weird. Other kids don't like me," said Sarah, who has been diagnosed with attention-deficit and bipolar disorders and who is conscious of being overweight. "They were saying a lot of rude things to me. Just picking on me. So I sprayed myself with perfume. Then they said: 'Put that away, that's the most terrible smell I've ever smelled.' Then the teacher called the police."
The policeman didn't have far to come. He patrols the corridors of Sarah's school, Fulmore Middle in Austin, Texas. Like hundreds of schools in the state, and across large parts of the rest of the US, Fulmore Middle has its own police force with officers in uniform who carry guns to keep order in the canteens, playgrounds and lessons. Sarah was taken from class, charged with a criminal misdemeanour and ordered to appear in court.
Each day, hundreds of schoolchildren appear before courts in Texas charged with offences such as swearing, misbehaving on the school bus or getting in to a punch-up in the playground. Children have been arrested for possessing cigarettes, wearing "inappropriate" clothes and being late for school.
In 2010, the police gave close to 300,000 "Class C misdemeanour" tickets to children as young as six in Texas for offences in and out of school, which result in fines, community service and even prison time. What was once handled with a telling-off by the teacher or a call to parents can now result in arrest and a record that may cost a young person a place in college or a job years later.
"We've taken childhood behaviour and made it criminal," said Kady Simpkins, a lawyer who represented Sarah Bustamantes. "They're kids. Disruption of class? Every time I look at this law I think: good lord, I never would have made it in school in the US. I grew up in Australia and it's just rowdy there. I don't know how these kids do it, how they go to school every day without breaking these laws."
The British government is studying the American experience in dealing with gangs, unruly young people and juvenile justice in the wake of the riots in England. The UK's justice minister, Crispin Blunt, visited Texas last September to study juvenile courts and prisons, youth gangs and police outreach in schools, among other things. But his trip came at a time when Texas is reassessing its own reaction to fears of feral youth that critics say has created a "school-to-prison pipeline". The Texas supreme court chief justice, Wallace Jefferson, has warned that "charging kids with criminal offences for low-level behavioural issues" is helping to drive many of them to a life in jail.
The Texas state legislature last year changed the law to stop the issuing of tickets to 10- and 11-year-olds over classroom behaviour. (In the state, the age of criminal responsibility is 10.) But a broader bill to end the practice entirely – championed by a state senator, John Whitmire, who called the system "ridiculous" – failed to pass and cannot be considered again for another two years.
Even the federal government has waded in, with the US attorney general, Eric Holder, saying of criminal citations being used to maintain discipline in schools: "That is something that clearly has to stop."
As almost every parent of a child drawn in to the legal labyrinth by school policing observes, it wasn't this way when they were young.
The emphasis on law and order in the classroom parallels more than two decades of rapid expansion of all areas of policing in Texas in response to misplaced fears across the US in the 1980s of a looming crime wave stoked by the crack epidemic, alarmist academic studies and the media.
"It's very much tied in with some of the hyperbole around the rise in juvenile crime rate that took place back in the early 90s," said Deborah Fowler, deputy director of Texas Appleseed, an Austin legal rights group, and principal author of a 200-page study of the consequences of policing in Texas schools. "They ushered in tough, punitive policies. It was all part of the tough-on-crime movement."
Part of that included the passing of laws that made the US the only developed country to lock up children as young as 13 for life without the possibility of parole, often as accomplices to murders committed by an adult.
As the hand of law and order grew heavier across Texas, its grip also tightened on schools. The number of school districts in the state with police departments has risen more than 20-fold over the past two decades.
"Zero tolerance started out as a term that was used in combating drug trafficking and it became a term that is now used widely when you're referring to some very punitive school discipline measures. Those two policy worlds became conflated with each other," said Fowler.
In the midst of that drive came the 1999 Columbine high school massacre, in which two students in Colorado shot dead 12 other pupils and a teacher before killing themselves. Parents clamoured for someone to protect their children and police in schools seemed to many to be the answer.
But most schools do not face any serious threat of violence and police officers patrolling the corridors and canteens are largely confronted with little more than boisterous or disrespectful childhood behaviour.
"What we see often is a real overreaction to behaviour that others would generally think of as just childish misbehaviour rather than law breaking," said Fowler. Tickets are most frequently issued by school police for "disruption of class", which can mean causing problems during lessons but is also defined as disruptive behaviour within 500ft (150 metres) of school property such as shouting, which is classified as "making an unreasonable noise".
Among the more extreme cases documented by Appleseed is of a teacher who had a pupil arrested after the child responded to a question as to where a word could be found in a text by saying: "In your culo (arse)", making the other children laugh. Another pupil was arrested for throwing paper aeroplanes.
Students are also regularly fined for "disorderly behaviour", which includes playground scraps not serious enough to warrant an assault charge or for swearing or an offensive gesture. One teenage student was arrested and sent to court in Houston after he and his girlfriend poured milk on each other after they broke up. Nearly one third of tickets involve drugs or alcohol. Although a relatively high number of tickets – up to 20% in some school districts – involve charges over the use of weapons, mostly the weapons used were fists.
The very young are not spared. According to Appleseed, Texas records show more than 1,000 tickets were issued to primary schoolchildren over the past six years (although these have no legal force at that age). Appleseed said that "several districts ticketed a six-year-old at least once in the last five years".
Fines run up to $500. For poorer parents, the cost can be crippling. Some parents and students ignore the financial penalty, but that can have consequences years down the road. Schoolchildren with outstanding fines are regularly jailed in an adult prison for non-payment once they turn 17. Stumping up the fine is not an end to the offending student's problems either. A class-C misdemeanour is a criminal offence.
"Once you pay it, that's a guilty plea and that's on your record," said Simpkins. "In the US we have these astronomical college and university expenses and you go to fill out the application to get your federal aid for that and it says have you ever been arrested. And there you are, no aid."
In Austin, about 3% of the school district's 80,000 pupils were given criminal citations in the 2007/8 school year, the last date for which figures are available. But the chances of a teenager receiving a ticket in any given year are much higher than that because citations are generally issued to high-school pupils, not those in kindergarten or primary school.
The result, says the Appleseed report, is that "school-to-prison pipeline" in which a high proportion of children who receive tickets and end up in front of a court are arrested time and again because they are then marked out as troublemakers or find their future blighted by a criminal record.
From her perch on the bench in an Austin courtroom, Judge Jeanne Meurer has spent close on 30 years dealing with children hauled up for infractions, some serious, others minor. Some of the difficulties faced by teachers can be seen as Meurer decides whether a parade of children should be released to await trial or held in custody. Meurer switches between motherly and intimidating depending on what she makes of the child before her.
"Some of them are rough kids," she said. "I've been on the bench 30 years and you used to never have a child cuss you out like you do now. I appreciate the frustrations that adults have in dealing with children who seem to have no manners or respect. But these are our future. Shouldn't we find a tool to change that dynamic versus just arresting them in school and coming down with the hard criminal justice hammer?"
Many of those who appear in front of Meurer have learning problems. Children with disabilities are particularly vulnerable to the consequences of police in schools. Simpkins describes the case of a boy with attention deficit disorder who as a 12-year-old tipped a desk over in class in a rage. He was charged with threatening behaviour and sent to a juvenile prison where he was required to earn his release by meeting certain educational and behavioural standards.
"But he can't," she said. "Because of that he is turning 18 within the juvenile justice system for something that happened when he was 12. It's a real trap. A lot of these kids do have disabilities and that's how they end up there and can't get out. Instead of dealing with it within school system like we used to, we have these school police, they come in and it escalates from there."
Sometimes that escalation involves force. "We had one young man with an IQ well below 70 who was pepper-sprayed in the hallway because he didn't understand what the police were saying," said Simpkins. "After they pepper-sprayed him he started swinging his arms around in pain and he hit one of the police officers – it's on video, his eyes were shut – and they charged him with assault of a public servant. He was 16. He was charged with two counts of assault of a public servant and he is still awaiting trial. He could end up in prison."
Austin's school police department is well armed with officers carrying guns and pepper spray, and with dog units on call for sniffing out drugs and explosives.
According to the department's records, officers used force in schools more than 400 times in the five years to 2008, including incidents in which pepper spray was fired to break up a food fight in a canteen and guns were drawn on lippy students.
In recent months the questionable use of force has included the tasering of a 16-year-old boy at a high school in Seguin, Texas, after "he refused to cooperate" when asked why he wasn't wearing his school identification tag. He then used "abusive language". The police said that when an officer tried to arrest the boy, he attempted to bite the policeman. The youth was charged with resisting arrest and criminal trespass even though the school acknowledges he is a student and was legitimately on the grounds.
Such cases are not limited to Texas. In one notorious instance in California, a school security officer broke the arm of a girl he was arresting for failing to clear up crumbs after dropping cake in the school canteen. In another incident, University of Florida campus police tasered a student for pressing Senator John Kerry with an awkward question at a debate after he had been told to shut up.
Sometimes the force is deadly. Last week, Texas police were accused of overreacting in shooting dead a 15-year-old student, Jaime Gonzalez, at a school in Brownsville after he pointed an air gun, which resembled a real pistol, at them outside the principal's office. The boy's father, also called Jaime, said the police were too quick to shoot to kill when they could have wounded him or used another means to arrest him. "If they would have tased him all this wouldn't have happened," he told the Brownsville Herald. "Like people say there's been stand-offs with people that have hostages for hours … But here, they didn't even give I don't think five minutes. No negotiating." The police say Gonzalez defied orders to put the gun down.
Meurer says she is not against police in schools but questions whether officers should regard patrolling the playground the same way they go about addressing crime on the streets.
"When you start going overboard and using laws to control non-illegal behaviour – I mean if any adult did it it's not going to be a violation – that's where we start seeing a problem," she says. "You've gradually seen this morphing from schools taking care of their own environments to the police and security personnel, and all of a sudden it just became more and more that we were relying on law enforcement to control everyday behaviour."
Chief Brian Allen, head of the school police department for the Aldine district and president of the Texas school police chiefs' association, is having none of it.
"There's quite a substantial number of students that break the law. In Texas and in the US, if you're issued a ticket, it's not automatically that you're found guilty. You have an opportunity to go before the judge and plead your case. If you're a teacher and a kid that's twice as big as you comes up and hits you right in the face, what are you going to do? Are you going to use your skills that they taught you or are you going to call a police officer?"
But Allen concedes that the vast majority of incidents in which the police become involved are for offences that regarded as little more than misbehaviour elsewhere.
"Just like anything else, sometimes mistakes are made." he said. "Each circumstance is different and there's no set guideline. There's also something called officer discretion. If you take five auto mechanics and ask them to diagnose the problem of a vehicle, you'll come up with five different solutions. If you ask five different doctors to diagnose a patient, a lot of times you'll have five different diagnoses. Conversely, if you ask five different police officers if they would write a ticket or not for the same offence, you possibly have five different answers."
Parents who have been sucked into the system, such as Jennifer Rambo, the mother of Sarah Bustamantes, wonder what happened to teachers taking responsibility for school discipline.
"I was very upset at the teacher because the teacher could have just stopped it. She could have said: OK class, that's enough. She could have asked Sarah for her perfume and told her that's inappropriate, don't do that in class. But she did none of that. She called the police," she says.
Politicians and civil liberties groups have raised the same question, asking if schools are not using the police to shift responsibility, and accountability, for discipline.
"Teachers rely on the police to enforce discipline," says Simpkins. "Part of it is that they're not accountable. They're not going to get into trouble for it. The parent can't come in and yell at them. They say: it's not us, it's the police."
That view is not shared by an Austin teacher who declined to be named because he said he did not want to stigmatise the children in his class.
"There's this illusion that it's just a few kids acting up; kids being kids. This is not the 50s. Too many parents today don't control their children. Their fathers aren't around. They're in gangs. They come in to the classroom and they have no respect, no self-discipline. They're doing badly, they don't want to learn, they just want to disrupt. They can be very threatening," he says. "The police get called because that way the teacher can go on with teaching instead of wasting half the class dealing with one child, and it sends a message to the other kids."
The Texas State Teachers Association, the state's main teachers union, did not take a position on ticketing at the recent debate in the legislature over Whitmire's proposal to scrap it. But the association's Clay Robison says that most teachers welcome the presence of police in schools.
"Obviously it looks as if some police officers are overreacting at some schools. I'm a parent and I wouldn't want my 17-year-old son hauled in to court if he and another student got in to an argument in a cafeteria. Police officers need to exercise a little bit of common sense but the police are what they are. They enforce the law," he says. "At the same time, years ago, at a school in one of the better neighbourhoods of Austin, a teacher was shot to death in his classroom. It's still a very rare occurrence but it does happen. Anything that increases the security of the teacher is good so they don't have to worry about personal safety and they can concentrate on teaching the kids. We get complaints from some teachers that the police aren't aggressive enough at moving against some of the older juveniles, those that they feel actually do pose a danger to the teachers or the other students."
Because of Sarah Bustamentes's mental disorders, a disability rights group took up her case and after months of legal battles prosecutors dropped the charges. Ask her how she feels about police in schools after her experience and she's equivocal.
"We need police in school. In my school it can get physical and it can turn out very bad," she says. "But they should stop issuing tickets. Only for physical stuff or bullying. Not what you do in class."
.. yeah, it sounds delightful.
If I could stay awake long enough to read that wall of text, I'd swear you just besmirched the great name of Texas.
I know right!?!? It's like that mutha started two wars on two continents at a cost of thousands of US lives and billions of dollars or something! Oh yeah and got us into the financial gak storm that O got left cleaning up.
I know right!?!? It's like that mutha started two wars on two continents at a cost of thousands of US lives and billions of dollars or something! Oh yeah and got us into the financial gak storm that O got left cleaning up.
That's cute. Inaccurate, as always, but cute.
What's that you say? A patronizing yet entirely failed to respond to the point retort from Seaward, oh really, say it ain't so!
I know right!?!? It's like that mutha started two wars on two continents at a cost of thousands of US lives and billions of dollars or something! Oh yeah and got us into the financial gak storm that O got left cleaning up.
That's cute. Inaccurate, as always, but cute.
What's that you say? A patronizing yet entirely failed to respond to the point retort from Seaward, oh really, say it ain't so!
<looking around>
Do I see a gauntlet on the ground?
MeanGreenStompa wrote: What's that you say? A patronizing yet entirely failed to respond to the point retort from Seaward, oh really, say it ain't so!
You can pin Iraq on him, that's about it.
Anyone who believes Afghanistan didn't need sorting after 9/11 is fething insane. I'm not sure what you're crying about, anyway, it's not like you went.
And if you think Bush was responsible for the financial meltdown, I'm not entirely sure what to say. Facts can only do so much against that sort of willful lack of knowledge on the subject.
MeanGreenStompa wrote: What's that you say? A patronizing yet entirely failed to respond to the point retort from Seaward, oh really, say it ain't so!
You can pin Iraq on him, that's about it.
Anyone who believes Afghanistan didn't need sorting after 9/11 is fething insane. I'm not sure what you're crying about, anyway, it's not like you went.
Afghanistan did indeed need sorting, I did not go, my cousin did and returned in a box. He believed in that war and I believe in that war and if you'd read my post in the actual thread about Bush, I said this:
we've brought back the troops from your personal oil grab in Iraq, including the dead ones and we're working on bringing the troops back from Afghanistan, including the dead ones, that being the war you fethed up by starting the second one.
I supported and still support the war in Afghanistan, I will never support or even claim to understand the logic behind then starting a second war in Iraq, denying the funding, resources and man-power to Afghanistan, which could be strongly argued to have cost additional allied troops in Afghanistan.
Another of my cousins is there right now. My mother's side of the family has always been military, since the Napoleonic wars as far as we know. I've had family serve in many of the major conflicts of the last century, all with my total support for what they do.
Neither of my cousins believes or believed in Iraq.
And regardless of my own not going there, as a citizen, I have the right to speak out when my nation - that democratic freedom to voice dissent is what they fight for and defend, my friends and my family are taken into war against an enemy. That is how democracy works, as does being incensed and angered at a war being fought for no good reason. Iraq yielded the people of America and Great Britain nothing but dead sons and daughters, it wasn't even fought for revenge for an attack.
) but the actual truth is, after several years of this not happening and all the Palin loving birther loonies getting bored, taking off their tricorn hats and going back to their homes to be just mildly angry... Still no fething ragnarok.
