With regard to violence, what we are learning and what we are teaching

  Once again, the machine that is the government is siphoning money and time from the nation's schools because the schools (those who are actually concerned about educating children rather than participating in political demonstrations) apparently do not have enough to do. 

  Last October, this administration established that they will be legally pursuing schools that should have known about cyber bullying, even if no threat is explicitly stated or the school had no knowledge of Facebook postings that may be interpreted as threatening. In an article entitled "Fed instructs teachers to Facebook creep students" from the Daily Caller:

  Education Department officials are threatening school principals with lawsuits if they fail to monitor and curb students’ lunchtime chat and evening Facebook time for expressing ideas and words that are deemed by Washington special-interest groups to be harassment of some students.

[SNIP]

“Harassing conduct may take many forms, including verbal acts and name-calling; graphic and written statements, which may include use of cell phones or the Internet… it does not have to include intent to harm, be directed at a specific target, or involve repeated incidents [but] creates a hostile environment … [which can] limit a student’s ability to participate in or benefit from the services, activities, or opportunities offered by a school,” according to the far-reaching letter, which was completed Oct. 26 by Russlynn Ali, who heads the agency’s civil rights office.

  Facebook, as in many schools, is blocked in Perrysburg Schools. In addition, many school districts forbid teachers from even having accounts with Facebook, and some from friending current students.

  But they have it all worked out, Facebook and the gummint. They are going to set up ways to detect threats on FAcebook and report them to the school's staff. 

  Oooooo.

  Now, first thing they should have done is call in a couple kids to tell them what's going to happen as a result  of this new law. Kids will leave Facebook. *MYSPACE* where have you been all my life**?   Somewhere Rupert Murdoch is smiling. 

  Great business model, eh, ZSuckerman?

  Kids joke. Kids tease. They fight. Then they learn how to work out their problems. Or they don't. Parents have some responsibility in this, or should.

  Any way you figure it, the school should not be sued if a couple kids get into fights on Facebook, even if this civil rights law has been conveniently "reinterpreted" so the gummint can use it to bludgeon educators into compliance.

  But DOJ wasn't finished trying to ruin the schools yet. Hey, we've already ruined the private sector, the economy, the auto industry. Why not the schools?

  From the Washington Times we learn that only certain children will be protected. 

  This isn't news for this color blind administration.We already figured this out when it came to voting rights, viz. the NBPP, but now the DOJ's policy of only guarding the rights of certain Americans has come to education:

Here is the catch. DOJ will only investigate bullying cases if the victim is considered protected under the 1964 Civil Rights legislation. In essence, only discrimination of the victim’s race, sex, national origin, disability, or religion will be considered by DOJ. The overweight straight white male who is verbally and/or physically harassed because of his size can consider himself invisible to the Justice Department.
Apparently, the Justice Department is going by George Orwell’s famous Animal Farm ending: “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.”

  So what have we learned, class? 

  The lesson is, in the home of the free and the brave, that your color, gender and sexual preferences are more important than your citizenship. 

  Meanwhile, the unions and their ilk are shooting threats by the dozen to those who oppose them, to the politicians trying to preserve the union pensions, and to anyone who gets in their way. From NRO:

‘We will hunt you down. We will slit your throats. We will drink your blood. I will have your decapitated head on a pike in the Madison town square. This is your last warning.”
Is this a passage from Bram Stoker’s Dracula? A snippet from al-Qaeda’s latest missive? No, this e-mail reached Wisconsin state senator Dan Kapanke (R., La Crosse) on March 9, after he voted for GOP governor Scott Walker’s controversial budget and labor reforms.

  So let me be perfectly clear.

  If you're a gay 14 year old who gets into a squabble at midnight on Facebook with someone who says something like, "You stink," thus creating what you consider a hostile environment, the DOJ will come riding in on white black horses to sue the school district, which, of course, has *ample resources to defend itself with taxpayer dollars and should have known that you were offended.

  But if you're a Republican politician or conservative blogger, you're SOL. 

  (Class, we all know what SOL means. Admittedly it's a crude way of making the point, but colloquial vernacular reflects hallway talk and thus will make the point more clearly to you than using formal English.)

  Not only will the DOJ not be interested in whoever wrote that he or she wished to cut off your head, you might also be SOL with regard to the local police force who are also unionized and may be unwilling to defend the rights of the citizens, using the rationale that if you aren't willing to pay for the whole of my pension fund, I won't lift a finger to stop the machete from hitting your neck.

 *The use of the word ample here implies irony, which is defined as conveying a meaning that is the opposite of its literal meaning.

 Now our last vocab word for the day, class, is the word hypocrisy, which is defined as having a pretense of having a virtuous character,moral or religious beliefs or principles, etc., that one does not really possess.

  Got it?