Original Post: Examiner
For the heinous act of allegedly selling gas to a Republican State Senator, a Sheboygan, Wisconsin gas station received threats from a local school district employee.
According to WBAY, Dick Hiers, owner of a Northeast Standard gas station, began receiving calls last Tuesday from an unidentified woman who thought she saw Senator Joe Leibham buying gas there. As it turns out, the person she thought was Senator Leibham was actually the Senator's brother.
Molly Hendrickson writes:
"I think that this whole thing has to end. It has to stop," said Hiers. "This type of stuff is totally uncalled for."
Hiers never thought his little gas station in the heart of Sheboygan would be the stage of political controversy. Then again, his week has been full of surprises.
"I was working back here and the answering machine went off, and I was a little surprised by that, and when I heard the message here, I was even a little more surprised."
The conversation was captured on an answering machine that was left on from the previous night.
Caller: "Can you verify that was Senator Leibham at the gas station this morning?"
Gas station clerk: "Senator Leibham?"
Caller: "Yes. Do you guys support him?"
Clerk: "I have nothing to say about that, I am not politically involved."
Caller: "Alright, well you can tell Dick he's not good for business, I'll tell you that."
Translation: Nice business you have here - be a shame if something happened to it.
Hiers quickly traced the call and discovered it came from the Sheboygan area district school office.
On Tuesday, a school district employee Hiers believed was the woman who made the call visited his business, but he was unable to speak with her. Hiers told the Sheboygan Press he thought the woman was instructed to apologize for the call.
Sheboygan School Superintendent Joseph Sheehan was not in the area Friday, but told WBAY the district has taken "appropriate disciplinary action" against the employee.
"Any type of phone call leaving any types of threats or condoning any type of intimidation is strictly prohibited," he said.
According to school officials, the 8:15 call was made before the employee was on the clock.
Hiers told WBAY he wants answers, and says the week's events are a "...sign things have gone too far."
"Everybody's money is green, it's all the same, and I don't pick and choose who can come into my business," Hiers said, according to WBAY. He also expressed concern for the Senator's safety, citing threats the Senator and his family have received.
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Leibham was one of the Republican lawmakers targeted with a death threat sent by email. Katherine Windels, 26, has been charged with two felony counts and two misdemeanor counts for the threats.
In March, a public sector union threatened businesses with boycotts if they did not display a poster showing solidarity with the unions. Most of the businesses refused to cave in to the demands made by the unions and instead of suffering from a public union boycott, saw increased support from the local community.
Earlier in March, a branch of the M&I bank was vandalized with pro-union graffiti and a Sendik's grocery store had its doors glued shut.
WBAY reports that Senator Leibham has filed an open records request with the school district.
According to the Sheboygan Press:
Leibham said his concern is whether a school employee on school time would make statements like that from a school phone.
"My interest in this is as a taxpayer," Leibham said. "I'm interested if this was a call made from a school district phone system and I'm intrigued if it's the responsibility of school district employees to be monitoring the activities of citizens and to be calling businesses to give them advice on how to run their business. I've never, as a taxpayer, understood that was the responsibility of school district employees or the school district as a whole."
Audio of the call can be heard at the Sheboygan Press.
Monday, April 25, 2011
Hooray! Obama’s Going to Sue Our Way to Lower Gas Prices
Original Post: Gatwaypundit
Posted by Jim Hoft on Friday, April 22, 2011, 7:50 AM
In order to slow soaring gas prices Barack Obama has turned to the Justice Department.
Makes perfect sense, huh?
Gas Price Czar Eric Holder
Barack Obama said the Justice Department will try to “root out” cases of fraud or manipulation in oil markets.
MSNBC reported:
President Barack Obama said Thursday that the Justice Department will try to “root out” cases of fraud or manipulation in oil markets, even as Attorney General Eric Holder suggested a variety of legal reasons may be behind gasoline’s surge to $4 a gallon.
“We are going to make sure that no one is taking advantage of the American people for their own short-term gain,” Obama said at a town-hall style meeting at a renewable energy plant in Reno, Nev.
The town hall was sandwiched in between Obama’s four fundraising events in California on Thursday — one in San Francisco and three in Los Angeles. The president was holding six fundraisers over the course of his three-day West Coast trip, aimed at high-dollar donors and young people, both of whom will be integral to a campaign that could set fundraising records.
And, that is just one more reason why community organizers don’t make good presidents.
Posted by Jim Hoft on Friday, April 22, 2011, 7:50 AM
In order to slow soaring gas prices Barack Obama has turned to the Justice Department.
Makes perfect sense, huh?
Gas Price Czar Eric Holder
Barack Obama said the Justice Department will try to “root out” cases of fraud or manipulation in oil markets.
MSNBC reported:
President Barack Obama said Thursday that the Justice Department will try to “root out” cases of fraud or manipulation in oil markets, even as Attorney General Eric Holder suggested a variety of legal reasons may be behind gasoline’s surge to $4 a gallon.
“We are going to make sure that no one is taking advantage of the American people for their own short-term gain,” Obama said at a town-hall style meeting at a renewable energy plant in Reno, Nev.
The town hall was sandwiched in between Obama’s four fundraising events in California on Thursday — one in San Francisco and three in Los Angeles. The president was holding six fundraisers over the course of his three-day West Coast trip, aimed at high-dollar donors and young people, both of whom will be integral to a campaign that could set fundraising records.
And, that is just one more reason why community organizers don’t make good presidents.
Friday, April 15, 2011
There are death panels in Obamacare? I can't *****ing belive it!
Barack Obama Fully Embraces Death Panels
Orignial Post: Red State
Posted by Erick Erickson
While everyone else was focused on Barack Obama bashing Paul Ryan, I noticed that he took full ownership of death panels yesterday. Naturally, Obama did not call them death panels. He called them “an independent commission of doctors, nurses, medical experts and consumers.” But his description hits dead on with what his death panels will do.
According to Barack Obama yesterday, the death panels “will look at all the evidence and recommend the best ways to reduce unnecessary spending while protecting access to the services seniors need.”
We already know what they’ll recommend as “the best ways to reduce unnecessary spending”. Barack Obama’s own advisers have told us. They will prioritize giving health care to healthier people and let sicker people die. At end of life, they will deny people life sustaining treatment because, after all, they’re going to die anyway. Note his phrasing: “protecting access to the services seniors need.” Dying people, according to Obama’s advisers, need hospice not hope. They certainly do not need expensive treatments that may buy them time to see the birth of a new grandchild or other reasons.
“We will change the way we pay for health care – not by procedure or the number of days spent in a hospital, but with new incentives for doctors and hospitals to prevent injuries and improve results. . . . If we’re wrong, and Medicare costs rise faster than we expect, this approach will give the independent commission the authority to make additional savings by further improving Medicare,” Obama said. At a time Democrats are saying Republicans want to starve old people to death, Democrats are intent on embracing a cost savings model for Medicare that incentivizes doctors to encourage people to die and, when all else fails, gives a death panel “the authority to make additional savings by” ensuring the dying elderly die quickly.
“Our approach lowers the government’s health care bills by reducing the cost of health care itself,” Obama said. Really? The only way that will happen is by rationing. You may not like the use of the phrase “death panel,” but make no mistake about it — at the end of your life, in Barack Obama’s America, his death panel will throw you under the bus in a way much closer to reality than metaphor.
Orignial Post: Red State
Posted by Erick Erickson
While everyone else was focused on Barack Obama bashing Paul Ryan, I noticed that he took full ownership of death panels yesterday. Naturally, Obama did not call them death panels. He called them “an independent commission of doctors, nurses, medical experts and consumers.” But his description hits dead on with what his death panels will do.
According to Barack Obama yesterday, the death panels “will look at all the evidence and recommend the best ways to reduce unnecessary spending while protecting access to the services seniors need.”
We already know what they’ll recommend as “the best ways to reduce unnecessary spending”. Barack Obama’s own advisers have told us. They will prioritize giving health care to healthier people and let sicker people die. At end of life, they will deny people life sustaining treatment because, after all, they’re going to die anyway. Note his phrasing: “protecting access to the services seniors need.” Dying people, according to Obama’s advisers, need hospice not hope. They certainly do not need expensive treatments that may buy them time to see the birth of a new grandchild or other reasons.
“We will change the way we pay for health care – not by procedure or the number of days spent in a hospital, but with new incentives for doctors and hospitals to prevent injuries and improve results. . . . If we’re wrong, and Medicare costs rise faster than we expect, this approach will give the independent commission the authority to make additional savings by further improving Medicare,” Obama said. At a time Democrats are saying Republicans want to starve old people to death, Democrats are intent on embracing a cost savings model for Medicare that incentivizes doctors to encourage people to die and, when all else fails, gives a death panel “the authority to make additional savings by” ensuring the dying elderly die quickly.
“Our approach lowers the government’s health care bills by reducing the cost of health care itself,” Obama said. Really? The only way that will happen is by rationing. You may not like the use of the phrase “death panel,” but make no mistake about it — at the end of your life, in Barack Obama’s America, his death panel will throw you under the bus in a way much closer to reality than metaphor.
There Is No Male-Female Wage Gap
Original Post: WSJ
By CARRIE LUKAS
Tuesday is Equal Pay Day—so dubbed by the National Committee for Pay Equity, which represents feminist groups including the National Organization for Women, Feminist Majority, the National Council of Women's Organizations and others. The day falls on April 12 because, according to feminist logic, women have to work that far into a calendar year before they earn what men already earned the year before.
In years past, feminist leaders marked the occasion by rallying outside the U.S. Capitol to decry the pernicious wage gap and call for government action to address systematic discrimination against women. This year will be relatively quiet. Perhaps feminists feel awkward protesting a liberal-dominated government—or perhaps they know that the recent economic downturn has exposed as ridiculous their claims that our economy is ruled by a sexist patriarchy.
The unemployment rate is consistently higher among men than among women. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 9.3% of men over the age of 16 are currently out of work. The figure for women is 8.3%. Unemployment fell for both sexes over the past year, but labor force participation (the percentage of working age people employed) also dropped. The participation rate fell more among men (to 70.4% today from 71.4% in March 2010) than women (to 58.3% from 58.8%). That means much of the improvement in unemployment numbers comes from discouraged workers—particularly male ones—giving up their job searches entirely.
Men have been hit harder by this recession because they tend to work in fields like construction, manufacturing and trucking, which are disproportionately affected by bad economic conditions. Women cluster in more insulated occupations, such as teaching, health care and service industries.
Yet if you can accept that the job choices of men and women lead to different unemployment rates, then you shouldn't be surprised by other differences—like differences in average pay.
Feminist hand-wringing about the wage gap relies on the assumption that the differences in average earnings stem from discrimination. Thus the mantra that women make only 77% of what men earn for equal work. But even a cursory review of the data proves this assumption false.
The Department of Labor's Time Use survey shows that full-time working women spend an average of 8.01 hours per day on the job, compared to 8.75 hours for full-time working men. One would expect that someone who works 9% more would also earn more. This one fact alone accounts for more than a third of the wage gap.
Choice of occupation also plays an important role in earnings. While feminists suggest that women are coerced into lower-paying job sectors, most women know that something else is often at work. Women gravitate toward jobs with fewer risks, more comfortable conditions, regular hours, more personal fulfillment and greater flexibility. Simply put, many women—not all, but enough to have a big impact on the statistics—are willing to trade higher pay for other desirable job characteristics.
Men, by contrast, often take on jobs that involve physical labor, outdoor work, overnight shifts and dangerous conditions (which is also why men suffer the overwhelming majority of injuries and deaths at the workplace). They put up with these unpleasant factors so that they can earn more.
Recent studies have shown that the wage gap shrinks—or even reverses—when relevant factors are taken into account and comparisons are made between men and women in similar circumstances. In a 2010 study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30, the research firm Reach Advisors found that women earned an average of 8% more than their male counterparts. Given that women are outpacing men in educational attainment, and that our economy is increasingly geared toward knowledge-based jobs, it makes sense that women's earnings are going up compared to men's.
Should we celebrate the closing of the wage gap? Certainly it's good news that women are increasingly productive workers, but women whose husbands and sons are out of work or under-employed are likely to have a different perspective. After all, many American women wish they could work less, and that they weren't the primary earners for their families.
Few Americans see the economy as a battle between the sexes. They want opportunity to abound so that men and women can find satisfying work situations that meet their unique needs. That—not a day dedicated to manufactured feminist grievances—would be something to celebrate.
By CARRIE LUKAS
Tuesday is Equal Pay Day—so dubbed by the National Committee for Pay Equity, which represents feminist groups including the National Organization for Women, Feminist Majority, the National Council of Women's Organizations and others. The day falls on April 12 because, according to feminist logic, women have to work that far into a calendar year before they earn what men already earned the year before.
In years past, feminist leaders marked the occasion by rallying outside the U.S. Capitol to decry the pernicious wage gap and call for government action to address systematic discrimination against women. This year will be relatively quiet. Perhaps feminists feel awkward protesting a liberal-dominated government—or perhaps they know that the recent economic downturn has exposed as ridiculous their claims that our economy is ruled by a sexist patriarchy.
The unemployment rate is consistently higher among men than among women. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 9.3% of men over the age of 16 are currently out of work. The figure for women is 8.3%. Unemployment fell for both sexes over the past year, but labor force participation (the percentage of working age people employed) also dropped. The participation rate fell more among men (to 70.4% today from 71.4% in March 2010) than women (to 58.3% from 58.8%). That means much of the improvement in unemployment numbers comes from discouraged workers—particularly male ones—giving up their job searches entirely.
Men have been hit harder by this recession because they tend to work in fields like construction, manufacturing and trucking, which are disproportionately affected by bad economic conditions. Women cluster in more insulated occupations, such as teaching, health care and service industries.
Yet if you can accept that the job choices of men and women lead to different unemployment rates, then you shouldn't be surprised by other differences—like differences in average pay.
Feminist hand-wringing about the wage gap relies on the assumption that the differences in average earnings stem from discrimination. Thus the mantra that women make only 77% of what men earn for equal work. But even a cursory review of the data proves this assumption false.
The Department of Labor's Time Use survey shows that full-time working women spend an average of 8.01 hours per day on the job, compared to 8.75 hours for full-time working men. One would expect that someone who works 9% more would also earn more. This one fact alone accounts for more than a third of the wage gap.
Choice of occupation also plays an important role in earnings. While feminists suggest that women are coerced into lower-paying job sectors, most women know that something else is often at work. Women gravitate toward jobs with fewer risks, more comfortable conditions, regular hours, more personal fulfillment and greater flexibility. Simply put, many women—not all, but enough to have a big impact on the statistics—are willing to trade higher pay for other desirable job characteristics.
Men, by contrast, often take on jobs that involve physical labor, outdoor work, overnight shifts and dangerous conditions (which is also why men suffer the overwhelming majority of injuries and deaths at the workplace). They put up with these unpleasant factors so that they can earn more.
Recent studies have shown that the wage gap shrinks—or even reverses—when relevant factors are taken into account and comparisons are made between men and women in similar circumstances. In a 2010 study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30, the research firm Reach Advisors found that women earned an average of 8% more than their male counterparts. Given that women are outpacing men in educational attainment, and that our economy is increasingly geared toward knowledge-based jobs, it makes sense that women's earnings are going up compared to men's.
Should we celebrate the closing of the wage gap? Certainly it's good news that women are increasingly productive workers, but women whose husbands and sons are out of work or under-employed are likely to have a different perspective. After all, many American women wish they could work less, and that they weren't the primary earners for their families.
Few Americans see the economy as a battle between the sexes. They want opportunity to abound so that men and women can find satisfying work situations that meet their unique needs. That—not a day dedicated to manufactured feminist grievances—would be something to celebrate.
Saturday, April 9, 2011
Where have I heard Kloppenburg before?
That voice sounds very familiar...Oh I know, she did voice acting. Here is the proof.
Friday, April 1, 2011
Why isn't Libya a liberal utopia?
Libya has free health care.
Libya has free basic education and compulsory secondary education. (and at a 82% literacy rate, about four times as effective as MPS)
Libya has subsidized housing and transportation.
The government controls the price, credit and trade of the private sector.
About 13% of the workforce works for the government.
These all seem to be goals to which the left strives. Clearly this is an example of a Liberal Utopia. It's like looking into the future of the heaven to which we can have if only we work a little harder, if only we care a little more.
Libya has free basic education and compulsory secondary education. (and at a 82% literacy rate, about four times as effective as MPS)
Libya has subsidized housing and transportation.
The government controls the price, credit and trade of the private sector.
About 13% of the workforce works for the government.
These all seem to be goals to which the left strives. Clearly this is an example of a Liberal Utopia. It's like looking into the future of the heaven to which we can have if only we work a little harder, if only we care a little more.
Obama accepts open government award in closed-door ceremony
Original Post: Washington Post
By Associated Press, Thursday, March 31, 3:55 PM
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama accepted an award for making the government more open and transparent — presented to him behind closed doors with no media coverage or public access allowed.
The discrepancy between the honor and the circumstances under which it was delivered bothered open-government advocates in attendance, they said Thursday. They were even more perturbed when they discovered later that the meeting hadn’t even been listed on Obama’s public schedule, so there was no way for anyone to know about it.
“To have such a meeting not be transparent is the height of irony. How absurd can that be?” said one participant, Gary Bass, executive director of OMB Watch, which keeps tabs on the White House Office of Management and Budget.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest said that, “Given the number of pressing items on the president’s agenda, the White House didn’t carve out time for a public event on the president’s schedule for the sole purpose of accepting an award from journalists praising his commitment to government transparency.”
The award was given by Bass’s group and several others Monday to recognize Obama’s work toward government openness and encourage him to do more.
Obama took office promising the most open and transparent administration in history, and advocates have been encouraged by steps he’s taken including releasing White House visitor logs. They say more needs to be done in getting agencies to respond more thoroughly to public records requests, among other things.
Monday’s meeting was rescheduled from one set for March 16, which is National Freedom of Information Day. On that day the meeting was listed on the president’s public schedule, but it was canceled at the last minute.
Bass said he’d been assured that Monday’s meeting would be open to the media and didn’t learn it wouldn’t be until arriving at the White House.
Nonetheless he and other advocates were pleased with how the 20-minute discussion went, saying Obama expressed support for greater transparency and backed legislation to protect reporters’ confidential sources.
A couple of days later they learned from reporters that the meeting had been omitted from Obama’s public schedule altogether.
“I think the action by the White House has taken a meeting where the storyline could have been how to strengthen disclosure, and it’s become a storyline about how the meeting is a secret meeting,” Bass said.
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
By Associated Press, Thursday, March 31, 3:55 PM
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama accepted an award for making the government more open and transparent — presented to him behind closed doors with no media coverage or public access allowed.
The discrepancy between the honor and the circumstances under which it was delivered bothered open-government advocates in attendance, they said Thursday. They were even more perturbed when they discovered later that the meeting hadn’t even been listed on Obama’s public schedule, so there was no way for anyone to know about it.
“To have such a meeting not be transparent is the height of irony. How absurd can that be?” said one participant, Gary Bass, executive director of OMB Watch, which keeps tabs on the White House Office of Management and Budget.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest said that, “Given the number of pressing items on the president’s agenda, the White House didn’t carve out time for a public event on the president’s schedule for the sole purpose of accepting an award from journalists praising his commitment to government transparency.”
The award was given by Bass’s group and several others Monday to recognize Obama’s work toward government openness and encourage him to do more.
Obama took office promising the most open and transparent administration in history, and advocates have been encouraged by steps he’s taken including releasing White House visitor logs. They say more needs to be done in getting agencies to respond more thoroughly to public records requests, among other things.
Monday’s meeting was rescheduled from one set for March 16, which is National Freedom of Information Day. On that day the meeting was listed on the president’s public schedule, but it was canceled at the last minute.
Bass said he’d been assured that Monday’s meeting would be open to the media and didn’t learn it wouldn’t be until arriving at the White House.
Nonetheless he and other advocates were pleased with how the 20-minute discussion went, saying Obama expressed support for greater transparency and backed legislation to protect reporters’ confidential sources.
A couple of days later they learned from reporters that the meeting had been omitted from Obama’s public schedule altogether.
“I think the action by the White House has taken a meeting where the storyline could have been how to strengthen disclosure, and it’s become a storyline about how the meeting is a secret meeting,” Bass said.
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Joe Biden keeps the press in the closet
Freedom of the press? Not if you’re in a closet, Florida reporter notes
Original Post: NY Post
By CATHY BURKE
A Florida political reporter says he was consigned to a crowded, stuffy closet to wait out the arrival of Vice President Joe Biden at a $500-a-pop fundraiser — calling the 75-minute confinement "awkward" and a "stupid" attempt to keep him from mingling at the event.
"First off, it was a bad thing that they wouldn’t let me interact with other guests," 11-year Orlando Sentinel newspaper veteran Scott Powers, 51, told The Post today.
"It was silly and stupid and it annoyed the hell out of me. And second, it was a highly inappropriate and demeaning place to put someone.
"They told me, ‘you wait in here until the vice president comes, and every time I stuck my head out, they’d say, ‘he’s not here yet.’
"I guess they didn’t want me to get any state secrets."
The closet caper occurred last Wednesday, when Biden visited the Winter Park, Fla., home of developer and philanthropist Alan Ginsburg.
Some 150 guests were invited to the pricey function, and helped themselves to a nice buffet while Powers was stuck inside the crowded storage closet stuffed with furniture.
"It was a stupid room they picked," he scoffed.
Powers said he was offered some food while he was stuck in the closet — "I never accept food at functions," he said.
He said he also was told he was free to use the bathroom close by. "I could hear the guests go in and out, the flushing," he said. "It wasn’t like I was locked in."
When Biden showed up, Powers said he was escorted to the room for a speech and offered a chair.
"You’re not going to see much with people standing in front of you, so I stood up, held my recorder up in the air with one hand and wrote notes with the other hand," he said.
Afterward, Powers said he got an effusive apology from the home owner.
"He said he had no idea that the VP’s team put me in his closet," Powers said. "It was a nice apology, gracious."
But Biden’s press secretary’s email later "was something less than heartfelt," Powers said.
"It was one or two sentences, like, sorry it happened to you," he said.
Powers said he took a picture of his confines while he waited out the Biden speech, and his editor posted the picture with the comment about the "life of the reporter is not always easy."
"The following morning we ran that blog post picture in our paper," he said. "Am I suing? No. Frankly I’ve been treated badly at other events. I’m over it."
A spokeswoman for Biden said it was standard policy to provide "hold rooms" for pool reporters covering events, though such rooms "should not be a storage room. This was the unfortunate mistake of an inexperienced staffer and the Vice President's office has made sure it will never happen again."
The spokeswoman, Elizabeth Alexander, also said she "made an unequivocal apology to the reporter after I was made aware of the situation on Wednesday afternoon ... The reporter thanked me for the apology and said that it was accepted."
Original Post: NY Post
By CATHY BURKE
A Florida political reporter says he was consigned to a crowded, stuffy closet to wait out the arrival of Vice President Joe Biden at a $500-a-pop fundraiser — calling the 75-minute confinement "awkward" and a "stupid" attempt to keep him from mingling at the event.
"First off, it was a bad thing that they wouldn’t let me interact with other guests," 11-year Orlando Sentinel newspaper veteran Scott Powers, 51, told The Post today.
"It was silly and stupid and it annoyed the hell out of me. And second, it was a highly inappropriate and demeaning place to put someone.
"They told me, ‘you wait in here until the vice president comes, and every time I stuck my head out, they’d say, ‘he’s not here yet.’
"I guess they didn’t want me to get any state secrets."
The closet caper occurred last Wednesday, when Biden visited the Winter Park, Fla., home of developer and philanthropist Alan Ginsburg.
Some 150 guests were invited to the pricey function, and helped themselves to a nice buffet while Powers was stuck inside the crowded storage closet stuffed with furniture.
"It was a stupid room they picked," he scoffed.
Powers said he was offered some food while he was stuck in the closet — "I never accept food at functions," he said.
He said he also was told he was free to use the bathroom close by. "I could hear the guests go in and out, the flushing," he said. "It wasn’t like I was locked in."
When Biden showed up, Powers said he was escorted to the room for a speech and offered a chair.
"You’re not going to see much with people standing in front of you, so I stood up, held my recorder up in the air with one hand and wrote notes with the other hand," he said.
Afterward, Powers said he got an effusive apology from the home owner.
"He said he had no idea that the VP’s team put me in his closet," Powers said. "It was a nice apology, gracious."
But Biden’s press secretary’s email later "was something less than heartfelt," Powers said.
"It was one or two sentences, like, sorry it happened to you," he said.
Powers said he took a picture of his confines while he waited out the Biden speech, and his editor posted the picture with the comment about the "life of the reporter is not always easy."
"The following morning we ran that blog post picture in our paper," he said. "Am I suing? No. Frankly I’ve been treated badly at other events. I’m over it."
A spokeswoman for Biden said it was standard policy to provide "hold rooms" for pool reporters covering events, though such rooms "should not be a storage room. This was the unfortunate mistake of an inexperienced staffer and the Vice President's office has made sure it will never happen again."
The spokeswoman, Elizabeth Alexander, also said she "made an unequivocal apology to the reporter after I was made aware of the situation on Wednesday afternoon ... The reporter thanked me for the apology and said that it was accepted."
Union thugs try to squelch free speech from the radio
WISN
You can voice your disgust at their mafia like tactics directly
Teamsters "General" Local Union No. 200
6200 W. Bluemound Road
Milwaukee, WI 53213
Phone (414) 771-6363
Toll free (800) 272-3934
Fax (414) 771-5850
You can voice your disgust at their mafia like tactics directly
Teamsters "General" Local Union No. 200
6200 W. Bluemound Road
Milwaukee, WI 53213
Phone (414) 771-6363
Toll free (800) 272-3934
Fax (414) 771-5850
Marquette Warrior Blogger Threatened by Provost, Dean and Department Chair
Original Post: MU Warrior
We just got out of a meeting with Provost John Pauly, interim Arts & Sciences Dean Phil Rossi, and Political Science Department Chair Barry McCormick.
This was the meeting we were summoned to by Pauly.
Pauly, in an e-mail to us, said the meeting was about “some of the ongoing potential conflicts between your role as Marquette professor and employee, and independent blogger-journalist.”
The bottom line: all three – Pauly, Rossi and McCormick – want us to entirely stop blogging about student organizations.
Pauly claimed to have no problem with our blogging about faculty and administrators, but claimed our blogging about student affairs has been out of line. How much of this was a genuine concern (some of it probably was) and how much was the result of an ideological bias from liberal administrators two a conservative blogger (there was almost certainly some of that too) we can’t say.
Two specific instances were mentioned. First, we called the listed home number of a student, talked to (apparently) her father and left a polite message asking for a return call, explaining that we were working on a blog post about The Vagina Monologues (the student was listed as the Marquette contact on vday.org). Apparently, the student’s parents freaked. All three administrators (Pauly, Rossi and McCormick) condemned the call saying that faculty should never call the parents of students. They said that the parents should have been in Fr. Wild’s office loudly complaining about it.
We replied that we were calling the listed number of the student (and had no way of knowing that she was living with her parents), and that’s it’s standard practice for a journalist to call a potential source at home. But Pauly, Rossi and McCormick explicitly stated that we should somehow have known that the parents would freak. We were accused of merely offering “rationalizations.”
All thee insisted that we don’t have any of the prerogatives of a journalist, since the role of a professor trumps that of a faculty blogger.
The other issue raised was the fact that we had mentioned a student’s research paper, and were accused of “criticizing” it. In reality, we did not mention the student’s name, and the point of the blog post was that “‘gender studies’ has been added to ‘women’s studies’ signals a move toward a homosexual emphasis, as shown by one of the papers completed by a WGST fellow this summer . . . .” The blog post was, quite simply, a comment on the fact that the Women’s and Gender Studies program has begun to slip “queer studies” into the university.
Pauly, Rossi and McCormick lamely replied that people could find the name of the student (we included the title of the paper, which could be googled), and that some people knew that we had supposedly “criticized the student.” In fact, nothing was said that was favorable or unfavorable about the student.
A Sandbox?
McCormick, using a metaphor that was supremely insulting to students, insisted that student activities are a “sandbox,” and that faculty should never comment on what student organizations do.
We pointed out that, in the issues they brought up, Marquette as an institution had been the issue. The Vagina Monologues will be sponsored by Social and Cultural Sciences, and the post that “criticized student research” was about the Women’s and Gender Studies Program.
We further pointed out that when students do high-profile public things, there is a legitimate news interest in what they do. In fact, it serves students well to learn that when they do highly visible controversial public things in some official role, they might get criticized.
Further, what student organizations do has consequences for the University. When Fr. Wild announced that Marquette is going to provide domestic partner benefits for gay and lesbian couples, he explicitly cited a resolution calling for that from Marquette University Student Government. If student organizations can affect Marquette University policy, it’s hard to see how they should be exempt from scrutiny.
As the meeting moved on, Rossi and McCormick became more ad hominem, Rossi accusing us of having a “blind spot,” and McCormick asserting that nobody he knew felt that our blogging about student organizations was acceptable. Since we’ve gotten multiple supporting e-mails, that says more about McCormick’s circle of friends than about what “everybody believes.”
All three implied (and sometimes stated) that we had been guilty of some violation of professional ethics, but could not explain what that would be, beyond McCormick’s “sandbox” metaphor, and the general notion that faculty should never publicly say anything negative about a student, even a student in a very public role doing something controversial.
We were willing to make only one concession: we assured the group that we would be more careful in the future about mentioning student’s names. (It typically isn’t that significant who the student is anyway.) But that wasn’t enough.
They hang tough with the position that we should never comment on student affairs, and we were threatened by both Pauly and McCormick saying that we would “be here [in a meeting like this] again” if we persisted in blogging about the activities of student groups.
Needless to say, we will continue to blog about activities on campus, and when the actions of student organizations have substantial news interest, we will report them.
We just got out of a meeting with Provost John Pauly, interim Arts & Sciences Dean Phil Rossi, and Political Science Department Chair Barry McCormick.
This was the meeting we were summoned to by Pauly.
Pauly, in an e-mail to us, said the meeting was about “some of the ongoing potential conflicts between your role as Marquette professor and employee, and independent blogger-journalist.”
The bottom line: all three – Pauly, Rossi and McCormick – want us to entirely stop blogging about student organizations.
Pauly claimed to have no problem with our blogging about faculty and administrators, but claimed our blogging about student affairs has been out of line. How much of this was a genuine concern (some of it probably was) and how much was the result of an ideological bias from liberal administrators two a conservative blogger (there was almost certainly some of that too) we can’t say.
Two specific instances were mentioned. First, we called the listed home number of a student, talked to (apparently) her father and left a polite message asking for a return call, explaining that we were working on a blog post about The Vagina Monologues (the student was listed as the Marquette contact on vday.org). Apparently, the student’s parents freaked. All three administrators (Pauly, Rossi and McCormick) condemned the call saying that faculty should never call the parents of students. They said that the parents should have been in Fr. Wild’s office loudly complaining about it.
We replied that we were calling the listed number of the student (and had no way of knowing that she was living with her parents), and that’s it’s standard practice for a journalist to call a potential source at home. But Pauly, Rossi and McCormick explicitly stated that we should somehow have known that the parents would freak. We were accused of merely offering “rationalizations.”
All thee insisted that we don’t have any of the prerogatives of a journalist, since the role of a professor trumps that of a faculty blogger.
The other issue raised was the fact that we had mentioned a student’s research paper, and were accused of “criticizing” it. In reality, we did not mention the student’s name, and the point of the blog post was that “‘gender studies’ has been added to ‘women’s studies’ signals a move toward a homosexual emphasis, as shown by one of the papers completed by a WGST fellow this summer . . . .” The blog post was, quite simply, a comment on the fact that the Women’s and Gender Studies program has begun to slip “queer studies” into the university.
Pauly, Rossi and McCormick lamely replied that people could find the name of the student (we included the title of the paper, which could be googled), and that some people knew that we had supposedly “criticized the student.” In fact, nothing was said that was favorable or unfavorable about the student.
A Sandbox?
McCormick, using a metaphor that was supremely insulting to students, insisted that student activities are a “sandbox,” and that faculty should never comment on what student organizations do.
We pointed out that, in the issues they brought up, Marquette as an institution had been the issue. The Vagina Monologues will be sponsored by Social and Cultural Sciences, and the post that “criticized student research” was about the Women’s and Gender Studies Program.
We further pointed out that when students do high-profile public things, there is a legitimate news interest in what they do. In fact, it serves students well to learn that when they do highly visible controversial public things in some official role, they might get criticized.
Further, what student organizations do has consequences for the University. When Fr. Wild announced that Marquette is going to provide domestic partner benefits for gay and lesbian couples, he explicitly cited a resolution calling for that from Marquette University Student Government. If student organizations can affect Marquette University policy, it’s hard to see how they should be exempt from scrutiny.
As the meeting moved on, Rossi and McCormick became more ad hominem, Rossi accusing us of having a “blind spot,” and McCormick asserting that nobody he knew felt that our blogging about student organizations was acceptable. Since we’ve gotten multiple supporting e-mails, that says more about McCormick’s circle of friends than about what “everybody believes.”
All three implied (and sometimes stated) that we had been guilty of some violation of professional ethics, but could not explain what that would be, beyond McCormick’s “sandbox” metaphor, and the general notion that faculty should never publicly say anything negative about a student, even a student in a very public role doing something controversial.
We were willing to make only one concession: we assured the group that we would be more careful in the future about mentioning student’s names. (It typically isn’t that significant who the student is anyway.) But that wasn’t enough.
They hang tough with the position that we should never comment on student affairs, and we were threatened by both Pauly and McCormick saying that we would “be here [in a meeting like this] again” if we persisted in blogging about the activities of student groups.
Needless to say, we will continue to blog about activities on campus, and when the actions of student organizations have substantial news interest, we will report them.
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