Marty gets a Limo!?

I'm so sick and tired of people making millions off tax payer dollars. If you thought Billy Bulger wasn't bad enough, check this out from Lowell. Marty Meehan gets a limo driver.

What's not covered for 'public officials' these days in this state? Do they get cooks? Do they get state-paid maids? You've got to wonder if we'll ever get to a point where enough is enough in this state. But herein lies the problem with socialism. When everyone is seemingly on the dole, don't expect anything to change.

Meehan's frivolous behavior is disturbing because this impacts the tax payer two-fold. It's reasons like this that college tuition is so high. Washington State University built the largest jacuzzi on the continent just to have it. Boat loads of tax payer dollars are forcefully taken from their hands and used to purchase 'needs' like limo drivers, Jacuzzis and build new hockey and basketball arenas for the sports teams. Dorms are falling apart and so are, that matter, the classrooms. College professors aren't seeing the money, either. Couple that with the fact that admissions standards are down to whether or not you have a pulse and the money, and there's really no reason for a college professor to give a crap. Milli0ns and billions of both tuition and tax payer dollars a year are wasted on Colleges and Universities. At least at Private Colleges, you know what you're paying into and making the choice based on the services provided. You pay tuition for UMass whether you like it or not.

Social droolers like Billy Bulger and Marty Meehan are all beginning to escape back into college life. There, they can steal as much as humanly possible from the tax payers and go relatively unnoticed. Stealing out in the open wasn't efficient enough, so now they're taking the gravy train under ground. Ask to see the budgets for many state colleges an universities. You'll be appalled. When guys like Marty and Billy see them though, they lick their chops.

Speech Codes for Professors?

Rarely does a day go by when we aren’t assaulted by some story of censorship on a college or university campus or even in general by the left. Just last week the Western Massachusetts Republicans had their Calvin Coolidge Banquet interrupted by a bomb threat.

Where do we draw the line? For those of us that think free speech is an okay thing, even when it means I have to listen to someone whose opinion I may detest, it’s a difficult question to grapple with. When it comes to students being able to voice their opinions on a college or university campus, there is no line and nor should there be. However, what about professors, especially those employed at state universities? Should we maybe institute a litmus test?

Many people in academia these days subscribe to the views of Herbert Marcuse, who would say that it’s okay to censor views that are deemed ‘oppressive’ (see Conservative). For Example, Marcusianists would argue that largely conservative religious views regarding safe sex should be censored because they function as a repressive social mechanism to sexual minorities.

Last October, there was a batch of students at Columbia University who charged the stage of an anti-Illegal Immigration speaker, claiming that he had zero right to speak. Leaders of the group said later on Fox News’s Hannity & Colmes that the speaker was ‘spewing hate’ and that their actions were justified because the speaker’s views were unacceptable.

Depending on the circumstances, censorship can either be a heckler’s veto (like it was in the case I just mentioned) and other times it’s through more official channels. Despite their rhetoric, College and University campuses are becoming notorious for their speech codes. Prohibited speech is really anything that supposedly make someone, especially minorities, fell uncomfortable. There are even some campuses where certain jokes are banned!

Marcusian regulations would say these speech codes are a-okay and even in most cases beneficial because they allow minorities the freedom to express their views instead. Full-fledged free speech cannot exist they claim, because oppressive views might be instilled in minorities and they will, as a result, be intimidated to the degree that they will fall silent. Most levelheaded, common sense people see the problem with these views and they rarely hold up in court.

But really, what about professors? Students don't just naturally behave this way. They have to learn it from somewhere and many times today, their world views are spoon fed to them by a decidedly liberal academic elite.

The University campus should be an entirely open marketplace of ideas and debate. Some of my best friends in college were professed Democrats whom I rarely agreed with anything on, but found ourselves to be quite a dangerous beer pong team. Former State Representative and 2001 Mayoral Candidate Paul Caron was an ardent Democrat. His roommate at Springfield College, few people know, was Craig Shirley, who is one of Washington D.C.’s most pre-eminent power brokers. Shirley’s clients include Ann Coulter, Zell Miller, and just about every major Republican think tank in Washington. He’s an executive board member at the Patrick Henry Center as well as the American Conservatives Union, the same group that puts on the annual conservative Woodstock known as “CPAC”. Imagine what those conversations must have been like?

Competing ideologies amongst students on campus should be welcome. However, there should be some ground rules in place. In the 1950’s, Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek said that the constitution of liberty that professors who oppose the principles upon which their position rests should forfeit their position. He gave an example of a communist, relevant to the time he was writing, who advocated for the overthrow of the American system and the imprisonment of the enemies of the Proletariat, including his fellow intellectuals. According to him, if such an individual were given power, they would send a majority of their coworkers and the rest of us as well, to the gulag or to the gallows.

Perhaps most importantly, Hayek said that ‘tolerance shouldn’t include the advocacy of intolerance’. A professor’s job depends on the existence of free society and it, under no circumstances can or should advocate for the destruction of that society. The constitution of a free society should not be a suicide pact or the blessings of liberty become the means of its undoing and we’re all worse off in the long run

Understanding Hayek’s argument is important. There is a huge difference between believing that certain change, even radical change, to the status quo is necessary and believing that the freedom one has to speak should be unconditionally denied to all who disagree.

Radical Islam poses a similar threat as communism did decades ago. If in power, its adherents would silence dissent and kill many dissenters. Should professors with this view forfeit their right to tenure, a privilege dependent upon Western ideals of tolerance and free inquiry? This discussion is difficult because it strikes at the heart of many of the ideas we hold dear. We didn't like it when it involved communists and, to our credit, we still don't like it today. But it's a discussion we must have nonetheless.

Oink, Oink

How or why can anyone justify adding to fmr. Senate President Billy Bulger's pension? Treasurer Tim Cahill announced yesterday that retired college Presidents would be receiving substantial increases in their pensions.... even thought they don't need it.

According to Cahill, the five-member state Board of Retirement will meet Thursday to take up requests from 16 retired and active college presidents seeking to benefit from former University of Massachusetts President William M. Bulger's legal victory in November to boost his pension by $17,000.
Former Holyoke Community College President David M. Bartley and former Springfield Technical Community College President Andrew M. Scibelli applied to increase their annual pensions by between $12,000 and $15,000, Cahill said. The board will probably vote unanimously to approve the requests, along with similar bids by other current and former college presidents, Cahill said.

"I don't think any of them need it," Cahill said. However, he added, "It's certainly theirs as much as it was Bulger's."

Bartley's current pension is $137,566; Scibelli's is $136,522.

Tiny Tim..... if they don't need it, THEN STEP IN AND TELL SOMEONE THAT! I thought this state was a little strapped for cash or is it only strapped for cash whenever someone other than a Democrat needs some extra dough in their retirement fund? Kind of like how we were strapped for cash when Mitt Romney wanted to use State Police helicopters to help local police in Boston and the state legislature turned around and said the idea was nuts because we didn't have the money to do it. Deval Patrick suggested doing the exact same thing the other day and now he's a genius.

I'm seriously beginning to question the sanity of the people of this state that they'll just let their public officials not only enforce a ridiculous double standard, but steal this much from tax payers. This is a complete travesty and level headed (and even some not so level headed) people everywhere should be appalled.

Teachers and (S)Extra Credit

More teachers are diddling kids these days, but no one seems to really care. At least not with the kind of outrage and gusto in fighting the problem in the Catholic Church. So where is it? Where's the Outrage? Because they don't invoke God, does it somehow make them less fun to go after?


Here's A Principal in Long Island, some diddling in Peoria, IL and last but never least, a New York City school teacher who just couldn't keep herself from raping one of her students.

Dateline should do a "To Catch a Predator" episode on this crap.

Testing Teachers!?... Great Idea

An article in today's Republican (Found here: , it has been discovered that state education officials will be Seeking to boost student achievement in mathematics by focusing on how well prepared teachers are to teach what they're supposed to be teaching.

This makes me melt with joy. I really mean that.

The simple fact of the matter is that a large part of the education crisis in this country is due to the fact that those teaching and preparing our best and brightest are, well, anything but bright. It is a lot to expect the teachers themselves to teach what they do not know or understand. Tests have repeatedly shown, for decades on end, that college students who go into teaching score at or near the bottom among students in a wide variety of fields. No wonder teachers hate tests so much! And no wonder that they find innumerable fads more attractive than teaching solid skills, which they themselves may not have mastered.

For decades, our children have been incredibly outperformed in math, with American children almost ending up at or near the bottom when compared with children in other countries, DESPITE spending just as much time in the class room as students in foreign countries. Somehow, someway, this has yet to convince 'edgekaters' that they're doing anything wrong of course.

When asked the question; what is more important in math, that children 'know the right answers to the questions' or that they 'struggle with the process' of trying to find the right answer, 86% of these fools answered 'struggling' over knowing the answer according to a recent study. Good grief, Charlie Brown.

Learning match, like learning every other subject teachers don't bother to teach, is part of a bigger picture. That picture involves children 'discovering' their own knowledge rather than having teachers take things that are, you know, already known and passing them along to our youth. The concept of thinking that children will 'discover' something that took scholars and geniuses decades and generations to 'discover' is truly a faith to me, which passeth all understanding.

If it couldn't get any better, discipline isn't to be bothered with, either. Fewer than half of the professors of 'education majors' felt that discipline was 'absolutely essential' to the educational process. In fact one even wrote down 'when you have students engaged and not vessels to receive information, you tend to have fewer discipline problems'. All the evidence, in all actuality, points to the exact opposite, but who needs evidence when you've got a golden calf? We need more "teaching to the test" and "Testing to Teachers" so that these truly ridiculous dogmas can be subjected to evidence.

A good teacher is someone who stirs up from within us an internal curiosity. They make us eager to read books. They get us to try new things and prepare us for wanting to learn more and more. In order to be this type of teacher one needs to have that same fire, expertise and passion for whatever their intellectual pursuit may be. Sadly these days, that's not so much the case. Never mind the fact that teacher's don't merely 'know' their subjects. They don't care to learn them at all.

A new survey of education majors at American Universities paints a dismal picture, indeed. College students who are training to become teachers have little interest in, well, learning much of anything.

The Foundation for Academic Standards and Tradition, which is a nonprofit student advocacy organization with members all over the political and ideological spectrum are expressing great concern over the results. Here are just two sobering realities:

--49 percent of the 1,005 education majors surveyed had read no book, or only one book, that was not actually required in their courses.

--Barely a majority, 55 percent, regarded a liberal arts education as better than an education in a trade, and 60 percent think there's too much emphasis on the study of great books.

Apparently, these are the folks who're educating the next generation of Americans, but it's most definitely not clear how that's going to happen. "K-12 education was a top priority for most Americans this election year,'' says pollster John Zogby, who was one of the fine folks whom conducted the survey. "This survey revealed some compelling data about the nation's education majors.''

That's an understatement. In all reality, not all education majors are going to be horrible teachers, but let's face it, one needs to question the sanity of someone who chooses to major in 'education' when the idea of an 'Education Major' is oxymoronic unto itself.

However, what should be most disturbing to all of us, is that this group of education majors is so clueless as to their own ignorance that they've implicated themselves via their own shortcomings, not having any clue as to what they're doing. They're not only products of our now fully retarded Education system, but they fail to see, in any way, that they're contributing to more retardation. They're ignorant of their own ignorance.

What would posses someone to want to be a teacher if they aren't interested in LEARNING?

The public schools recruit from the education majors and private schools are more likely to draw on teachers with a greater depth of knowledge, because, well, they TEST their incoming teachers to determine their competence. That's certainly one reason that there exists a growing number of parents who're supporting school choice. In essence, school choice IS the school reform of choice. I'm willing to bet most who vote against school choice wouldn't ever send their kids to public school. After all, they wouldn't want your kids touching theirs! Who knows where they've been!

In the end, finding out why stupid people try to become exactly what they shouldn't ever be considered for is a problem that will take much studying. However, testing teachers in core competencies is at least a massive step in the right direction towards making sure our kids don't end up wearing helmets to work and eating their own boogers for the rest of their lives. Test those teachers!