To the personal attacks, including profanity, hurled at Pennsbury school board member Simon Campbell during a recent meeting.As one commenter noted…
Campbell is a strident opponent of teachers' right to strike and has become a recognized spokesman on the issue across the state. Locally, he and his allies on the board have become a thorn in the side of the teachers union as negotiators try to ink a new contract.
The success of candidates Simons supported in the primary election apparently piqued the emotions of some teachers, who attended last week's meeting. Foul language and other insults were tossed at a silent Simon, to the delight of applauding opponents. The board president, a Simon opponent, should have cut it off immediately.
It was a classless and disturbing performance and also a horrible lesson for impressionable students in attendance.
Regarding the insults directed at Simon Campbell at a recent board meeting.And as another commenter noted, the paper’s august editorial board had not one word to say when Campbell published the salaries and compensation amounts of Pennsbury school district teachers and other employees (though other residents have quite rightly expressed their outrage over Campbell’s stunt).
Not a single profanity was used and not a single student was present. The criticism came from residents, not teachers. It should be noted that one former teacher, a resident, did speak harshly.
Campbell who literally has said he can 'take it' might have been caught off guard by the flow of honest emotion. It was all in reaction to his behavior and tasteless propaganda, and not due to some election results.
Sadly his wife was in attendance that evening. I am sure she was stunned.
But Campbell, ever the opportunist, uses that fact to call crying to the paper.
And this paper dutifully carried his water.
Please stop your bias, BCCT. The week prior Mr. Campbell held the meeting hostage with his classless attack on the school board president. Additionally a Falls township supervisor screamed that the school board president was a derelict.
And remaining with the Courier Times, J.D. Mullane wrote here about Huguette M. Clark, the New York benefactress who passed away this week at 104. Clark sought privacy to the point where inquiries have been made into her financial affairs (not a reflection on Clark, but only to ensure that her estate was managed properly – no criminal charges have been filed, according to Mullane).
And as you might expect, Mullane used this as an excuse to dive into familiar territory (no privacy online or otherwise, people too nosey, rude, pushy, whatever – yawn), claiming that Clark sought to be “Boo” Radley in terms of seclusion from the world (a reference to a character from Harper Lee’s “To Kill A Mockingbird”).
Though it’s a bit of a stretch, I suppose you could draw a parallel between Clark and Radley, though what the character represented in the book was a dark, mysterious force, and the kids (who are the central characters) try to show courage by running up onto his porch and taunting him by various means. When one of the kids comes face to face with actual evil as opposed to the make-believe kind, Radley emerges to save one of them, teaching an important lesson about growing up and making assumptions about people.
Basically, I’m not sure what kind of a “compliment” it is to Clark to compare her to a mysterious, threatening (but ultimately benevolent) hulk.
The first concerned oil-industry tax breaks…”Voting 52-48, the Senate failed to reach 60 votes needed to advance a Democratic-sponsored bill (S 940) to end several tax breaks for the five largest oil and gas companies, with the savings of $21 billion over 10 years applied to deficit reduction.”
Toomey voted No.
The second concerned expedited oil drilling…”Voting 42-57, the Senate defeated a GOP-sponsored bill (S 953) requiring the Department of the Interior to act within 60 days on several dozen applications for deepwater oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Many of these applications have been put on hold in response to last year's BP-Deepwater Horizon spill. The bill also sets deadlines for the administration to auction certain outer continental shelf leases in the gulf and off the Atlantic Coast that have been delayed because of the spill.”
Speaking for everyone else but Toomey, Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey opposed the bill, primarily for environmental concerns (also because it won’t do a damn thing now or later to lower the price of gas).
Toomey voted Yes.
The third concerned the filibuster of Obama judicial nominee Goodwin Liu (more on him shortly)…”Voting 52-43, the Senate failed to reach 60 votes needed to end a GOP filibuster against the nomination of Goodwin Liu as a judge on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, based in San Francisco. This was the first defeat of one of President Obama's judicial nominees.”
Toomey voted No, which helped to kill Liu’s nomination.
Toomey is proving to be every bit of the right-wing ideologue and utter embarrassment I believed he would be throughout his campaign for the U.S. Senate (and to think that the Courier Times favored him over Joe Sestak because they thought Admiral Joe was long-winded, or something…what a joke).
The first is this post telling us about the “Obama Scandal Indicator,” which makes the somewhat interesting observation that the teabagger “scandals” we all know about have diverted attention from some of the more legitimate ones (if not actual scandals, controversies at the very least) concerning Pfc. Bradley Manning, the recent renewal of the Patriot Act, continuation of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and whatever our commitment is at the moment in Libya), etc. (and the line graph projecting the probability of scandal in a second Obama term is pretty funny, I have to admit).
The next is this column at The Hill written by Lt. Gen. John Castellaw, who served in the military for 36 years and was, at one time, the head of U.S. CENTCOMM…
The New START treaty was vigorously debated in the Senate, and was ratified with broad bipartisan support. This was because the treaty is in our national security interest, is supported by every former secretary of state, seven former Stratcom commanders and many other respected voices from both sides of the aisle.It figures that those Republican knuckleheads in the House would do something like this to try and tie the hands of our Kenyan Marxist pre-zee-dint who was too busy killing bin Laden to show us his Hawaiian birth certificate (not drawing the lines of presidential prerogative at something as hugely important as nuclear deterrence, or anything else for that matter).
The treaty makes modest reductions to the U.S. deployed strategic arsenal, but more importantly it creates stability between the United States and Russia and allows the American military to inspect the Russian arsenal.
Two controversial parts of the NDAA, sections 1055 and 1056, seek to constrain the ability of the President and military leaders to make strategic choices for our nuclear strategy.
Section 1055 would prevent the reductions mandated under the New START treaty from taking place until the administration certifies that nuclear modernization is taking place. It would also withhold funds for the reduction of non-deployed and non-strategic nuclear weapons until two major facilities in the nuclear weapons complex are completed and operating, which will not take place until the middle of the next decade.
Section 1056 makes any nuclear arsenal reductions below the New START treaty ceiling of 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads contingent on assurances to Congress that the president will not change America’s nuclear targeting strategy. The formulation of this strategy has been a prerogative of every President since the end of World War II, so this provision amounts to a significant rewriting of the rules.
…
Rep. Michael Turner (R-Ohio) introduced the legislation responsible for these provisions on the grounds that “[w]e need to act now, to codify the promised ‘To-Do-List’ for modernizing our nuclear forces.”
This is not the case. They are unnecessary, and run counter to the interests of American national security.
Also, this column calls for President Obama to speak out more forcefully against Repug obstruction on his judicial appointments; the article also makes what I believe is a good point about the relative youth of conservative ideologues appointed to district courts versus the relative age of Obama nominees (one of the reason why Goodwin Liu’s nomination was targeted was because of his age).
And on that subject, I give you the following from Texas Sen. John Cornyn in the New York Times today (here)…
In your May 23 editorial “Breaking Faith,” you claim that I “falsely” accused Goodwin Liu, President Obama’s judicial nominee, of holding the view that the United States Constitution somehow guarantees a European-style welfare state. Yet in a 2006 Yale Law Journal article, Mr. Liu argued:Actually, Cornyn’s characterization was ridiculous. Besides, as noted here, child care tax credit savings are higher in Republican states. Also, on the subject of “transportation subsidies” David Frum (hardly a liberal) wrote here in favor of subsidies for high-speed rail.
“On my account of the Constitution’s citizenship guarantee, federal responsibility logically extends to areas beyond education. ... Beyond a minimal safety net, the legislative agenda of equal citizenship should extend to systems of support and opportunity that, like education, provide a foundation for political and economic autonomy and participation. The main pillars of the agenda would include basic employment supports such as expanded health insurance, child care, transportation subsidies, job training and a robust earned income tax credit.”
I believe that the professor’s words speak for themselves, and that my characterization was fair.
In addition, as noted here, Cornyn doesn’t have room to lecture anybody about federal subsidies, considering that his state (under the direction of Gov. Rick “Goodhair” Perry) is running a $23 billion deficit and relies on about $12 billion in federal funds.
(Also, I have a feeling Cornyn cropped that quote, but I’m not really able to investigate that at the moment.)
Update: I meant to include this and this in support of Liu earlier...my bad.
And to conclude, I should note that former Bushie and Repug consultant/fundraiser Ed Gillespie said here that “Catholics were right to applaud” Orange Man Boehner when he recently spoke at the Catholic University of America.
I understand why many Catholics measure compassion by how many Americans are on food stamps, and individuals and families in need of legitimate government assistance should get it. But many of us measure compassion by how many Americans can be moved from food stamps and other government programs to self-sufficiency through what Pope John Paul II called “the dignity of work.” Given the record of the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress the past two years, if more federal spending created more jobs, we wouldn’t be stuck at 9 percent unemployment.Oh, cute.
I’ll tell you what…check out this post from Matt Yglesias, in which we learn the following (about economic projections from 2001 by The Heritage Foundation, another Repug-simpatico outfit who no doubt have made common cause with Gillespie and will do so again)…
(Heritage) Promised us that George W. Bush’s tax policies would lead the country into a brave new era of prosperity. In fact, by the end of 2009, payroll employment in the United States was back down to 2001 levels despite population growth.(There is also a link to a graph in the Yglesias post showing employment over the course of the last ten years or so that makes the case better than I can that Obama has turned the economy around from the free-fall that concluded Dubya’s sorry second term.)
Besides, if the Bush tax cuts had been so bloody wonderful for job creation, wouldn’t we now have more jobs than we would know what to do with?
Gillespie tells us that he’s a CUA alumnus, thus (in his mind) giving him the right to opine accordingly. However, based on this column, it’s obvious that, in his theological study, he somehow missed the lesson about bearing false witness.
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