I’m Not The Only One

Ten years from now, when people look back on 2011, if they remember little else, it will most certainly be all the protesting that went on this year.  Perhaps inspired by ongoing Tea Party protests which began in 2009 and continued into the next year, Occupy Wall Street has inspired copycat protests in cities and states around the world.

Some college students, inspired by the larger Occupy Movement inspired by OWS as well as in a show of solidarity with OWS, have occupied public spaces on their universities’ campuses, protesting such issues as tuition hikes and demanding increased scholarship funds for low-income students.  The most famous of these campus occupations have been the one at University of California Davis during which campus police doused the protestors with large amounts of pepper spray.

The spraying of the occupiers quickly became infamous, spurring national debate about police abuse.  The image and video footage of the incident has since gone viral and has even evolved into an Internet meme called Casually Pepper Spray Everything Cop. (more…)

Anyone who has their finger on the pulse of viral videos has most likely seen by now the YouTube video of a Manchester, New Hampshire high school student being manhandled by a police officer in the school cafeteria.  The video was quickly picked up by Cop Block, an organization dedicated to increasing police accountability and educating people on their civil rights.  Cop Block interviewed Frank Harrington, the 17-year old who was slammed into a cafeteria table by Manchester PD Officer Darren Murphy.  Cop Block also interviewed Harrington’s friend who video recorded the incident and in another video attempted to interview Officer Murphy.

Why was Harrington handled so roughly by this officer assigned to West Manchester High?  This kid isn’t exactly a model student.  At 17, he’s still taking sophomore classes, and doesn’t spend to much time worrying about classwork, or homework for that matter.  He stole his sister’s purse (also a student in the high school) with the intention of returning the purse to her after lunch period. His teachers and principal asked him for the purse, and he refused.  Apparently since the school officials felt they didn’t have the right to use physical force on Harrington to retrieve his sister’s purse without any legal repercussions, they sent in someone who they believed did. (more…)

With March Madness upon us, a touchy issue comes up, the proverbial elephant in the room everyone can see but nobody wants to discuss: player compensation.

Let’s focus on college basketball, which with football, is one of the most popular collegiate spectator sports today.  Games between Division I teams are almost always televised with big-name sponsors paying a fortune for ad space, then there’s the ticket sales and the merchandising of everything from apparel to video games.  Everybody wins; coaches and support staff of winning teams enjoy high salaries, the universities rake in the revenue from ticket sales (when games are played on campus) and merchandising and the TV and cable networks rake in the advertising revenue.  Well, everybody wins except the players. (more…)

Today is the last day of Black History Month, an empty gesture by mainstream America to acknowledge the aspects of the African-American experience that makes them the most comfortable. (more…)

As millions of students return to college to prepare to fill jobs that probably won’t exist by the time they graduate, I am reminded of a dubious concept from my own college years: academic integrity.

You can’t take one college course, read one syllabus or even read university literature without coming across that word. It is a concept used to enforce rules on students that prohibit among other things, plagiarism, cheating, using Cliff Notes, Wikipedia or any other act perceived as academic dishonesty.

Unfortunately I’d learned over the years in college that academic integrity only applies to students.  Faculty, text book companies and even entire universities do not have to adhere to any standards of academic integrity. (more…)

I didn’t realize how controversial the whole Notre Dame’s issue (granting President Barack Obama an honorary degree and inviting him to give their 2009 commencement speech) was until I logged on to YouTube the other day and saw the featured video was of Notre Dame students and members of the Roman Catholic community sounding off on the issue.  I was made even more aware when I learned of notredamescandal.com.

Honestly, I think people made a much bigger deal out of it than it really was.  I think the real scandal was that President Obama was offered an “honorary” degree in the first place.  Besides the fact that it is a slap in the face to all the students who paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition and spent years earning their degrees, an honorary degree, which is usually a Masters or Doctorate, is nothing more than a cheap fundraising gimmick. (more…)

This post may be a bit late, but so what?

I think by now the whole nation is aware-and amused-by the recent protest by a fringe group of students at New York University who occupied a portion of the campus demanding the university make tuition affordable.

For those unfamiliar with NYU, it is the largest private university in the U.S., ridiculously selective and has an endowment of $2.5 billion.  Among its 350,000 alumni are 31 Nobel Prize winners, nine winnders of the National Medal in Science, 16 Pulitzer Prize winners, 19 Academy Award winners, and the current Presidents of Taiwan and Panama.  NYU has its own student daily newspaper, consists of 16 colleges/institutes and study abroad facilities in eight countries and the tuition for a full-time undergraduate costs around $37,000.  Despite the fact that the University’s headquarters is located in New York City, only 10 percent of the student body are from New York City.

People attend NYU because of its prestigious legacy and its reputation for offering a world-class education.  It looks great on a resume, and some graduates go on to hold positions of great power in the public and private sectors.  Even if you don’t learn a damn thing there, graduates will benefit for the rest of their lives from the extensive network of well-connected and powerful alumni.

Given all these facts, the public was not impressed one bit when a group of radical students called Take Back NYU staged a sit-in protest and refused to leave a portion of the campus until their demands were met.  Among their ridiculous demands for NYU were: (more…)

You’d probably call me crazy if I told you a book written eight years ago focusing on the flaws of the Clinton Presidency would have a greater wealth of relevance for Americans today than it did when it was written.  But Rob Nelson’s Last Call: 10 Commonsense Solutions to America’s Biggest Problems conveys serious issues facing our country (ironically, issues that have gone unresolved since 2000) and unintentionally puts the last eight years with George W. Bush in context.  The author draws examples from his own life, his experience working with the Clinton administration and being the co-founder of a Gen-X grassroots organization that was once 30,000 strong to illustrate then ten most pressing issues (which are actually far worse than they were when Clinton left office) to which he offers radical yet sensible solutions.

It’s almost impossible to not hear many Americans these days, especially liberals, look at the turmoil of the Bush Administration and long for the days when Bubba was in office. Bill Clinton’s Presidency as a result has become romanticized, with Bill’s less noble moments vanishing from public memory.  Written way back in 2000, Nelson frowns on what he considered to be the lame duck Presidency of Bill Clinton (needless to say, this book was published before George W. Bush became President) that failed to serve the Americans of the future.  This eight-year old critique offers a refreshing view of the Clinton Presidency, debunking the existence of the so-called “budget surpluses” of the Clinton years, Clinton’s signing of the Defense of Marriage Act which basically refused to acknowledge gay marriage, and continued air strikes in the Middle East and Africa.

The book focuses on the U.S. national debt, something that is often ignored in the discourse of national politics because it isn’t very well understood.  Most Americans don’t understand why it exists and understand even less how it will absolutely cripple the economy 10, maybe even 20 or 30 years in the future.  The U.S has borrowed trillions of dollars from banks around the world and pay about $300 million a year in interest payments alone.  At the end of the day, all debts must be repaid, Nelson argues, and the leaders of the present have decided America can gleefully live beyond its means, doling out funds to as many special interest groups as possible, and stick future generations with the tab.  As the then-twenty-something Nelson says, he was born at the beginning of the end of the American Dream. (more…)

Okay, I just took an online quiz from the Chicago Tribune testing my knowledge of Senators Barack Obama and John McCain.

I scored 35% on Obama and 50% on McCain. I took both quizzes for fun, expecting I’d know more about Obama than about McCain. But according to this quiz, it is John McCain with whom I am more familiar.

How should I interpret these test results? Does knowing less about the candidate I’m supporting make me a less informed voter, or does knowing more about the candidate I’m not supporting make me a more informed voter?

Personally, I was expecting to score at least 75% on both candidates. Guess I’m not as informed as I thought I was. Although, I’m fairly certain most voters, regardless of who they support, would’ve gotten a lower score than myself.

In case you’ve already clicked on the links above and have just finished both tests, the parts of the tests I got right were their campaign platforms. The parts I failed were the questions regarding the Senators’ personal histories, although I found I knew much more about John McCain’s personal history than that of Obama’s. Still, I was expecting to score much higher than I actually did.

If you’ve gotten to the end of this entry without taking the tests, go do so now, and please share the results with the rest of the class.

After 11 years of attending college (I dropped out three times and spent a few semesters part-time) I finally earned my Baccalaureate degree last December. All I really have to show for it is a shelf full of books I was unable to sell back to the college bookstore that I’ll never read, a dozen or so notebooks whose few remaining unused pages serve as a memo pad and a shitload of debt.

I’ve always considered myself to be a fairly practical person, but choosing to attend college forced me to make some fairly impractical decisions. For example, attending classes full-time made it absolutely impossible to work full-time; my grades suffered the few times I did attempt to do so. As a result, I could only search for part-time employment and passed up several promising full-time positions. (more…)

Since no one has really responded to my scam rundown, I figured I’d get the ball rolling by discussing Affirmative Action, one of the most destructive scams ever enforced by the government and the most racist policy ever supported by liberals.

The first problem with Affirmative Action is that it is based on the assumption that all white people are wealthy and that all minorities are poor. This theory is highly flawed; even when Affirmative Action was first drafted in federal law in the 1960s, this was not true. There were many successful African-Americans who were, although segregated from whites, highly educated and among the middle-class, well before the Civil Rights Movement. (more…)

No, that wasn’t a typo.  Xenophobes like California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger have long insisted that Latinos, especially those who don’t speak English very well, should watch English language television news.  But a recent article in the Washington Post indicates otherwise.

“Schwarzenegger is wrong, and so is this new consensus. The error is particularly obvious in cities with the largest immigrant populations, especially Los Angeles, the town the governor calls home. Schwarzenegger could discover ample evidence of this all by himself — simply by turning on his television.

Extremely well-informed gringo reporter Joe Mathews offered the following:

“On most nights here, the most timely, serious and civic-minded local news is not available on the Internet, the radio or any of the half-dozen English-language stations that broadcast nightly shows that purport to be newscasts. At 11 p.m. each night here, the best newscasts in the market appear on two Spanish-language channels, Univision’s flagship KMEX and Telemundo affiliate KVEA.”

“If immigrants took Schwarzenegger’s advice and flipped off Spanish stations in favor of English-language news, they wouldn’t have nearly as good an idea of what was happening in their adopted city, state and country.”

Mathews goes on to compare one night of newscasts among Los Angeles affiliates of Telemundo and Univision to newscasts on the same night of LA affiliates of CBS, ABC and NBC.

Take a recent night, after a typical day of Los Angeles news. English-language TV led with the weather (it was raining, which is not as unusual as you might think during an L.A. winter), then moved into splashy reports with dramatic footage of a gang shootout and possible hostage situation in a city neighborhood. Less than eight minutes into the newscast, trivia took over. The CBS affiliate’s third piece involved new questions about the death of Marilyn Monroe. The NBC affiliate dwelled on a hepatitis scare at a party for celebrities and swimsuit models, then attempted a brief consumer-oriented investigation about people’s need to replace their tires more frequently. The ABC affiliate gave five minutes to movies and entertainment, from an Oscar preview to a sit-down interview with Jon Stewart.

“In Spanish, viewers got fewer soft features and more deeply reported, longer pieces. KMEX mentioned the gang shootout but provided far more context, interviewing local residents about recent crime and about how local businesses and schools were affected by an hours-long neighborhood lockdown as police searched for a suspect. KMEX also aired a detailed report on a major beef recall from a local firm, a couple of pieces on local politics (including a roundup of what city and county leaders had done that day) and a four-minute examination of key policy issues in the presidential campaign. The Oscars went unmentioned. KVEA’s half-hour newscast, ” En Contexto” (which means what it sounds like), was even more substantive. It gave a thorough review of local political and government news, then delved deeply into nearly 20 minutes of explanation of rising home foreclosures and mortgage problems. (Yes, Spanish-language viewers were callously left to figure out that it was raining all by themselves.)

“This was no fluke. The next night, KMEX broke the news that the LAPD had more Latino officers than white officers, and KVEA ran a piece on the pay and working conditions of security guards. Meanwhile, their English-language rival KABC was finishing another Oscar preview and beginning a heartwarming story involving dogs.

“There’s no comparison in the coverage,” says Josh Kun, a communications professor at the University of Southern California who closely follows Spanish TV. “For people here, there are two places to look for better news: BBC News and Spanish-language news.”

“Why the difference? As English-language news organizations — desperate to stop the declines of their audiences and ad revenues — cut back on news-gathering, they devote their time and resources to entertainment, celebrities, pets and crime (or, best of all, stories that combine all four). But Spanish-language TV producers, who serve a clearly defined, growing audience, have space to tackle weightier topics.

“The result: The sharpest coverage of state and local issues — government, politics, immigration, labor, economics, health care — is now found on Spanish-language TV. They compete hard on serious stories. As a labor reporter for the Los Angeles Times in 2006, the only competitors I routinely saw at major union stories were reporters for KMEX, KVEA and La Opinion, a Spanish-language daily newspaper. These outlets tell their viewers more about how the state and the region work, they are more persistent in demanding explanations from public officials, and their reports routinely include more interviews with more sources from more perspectives.

“The Spanish-language TV broadcasts are, for lack of a better word, more American.

“On a recent night, KVEA did eight minutes on the Iraq war, spent five minutes on deplorable working conditions in Southern California car washes and had reports on narco-traffickers and the latest key legislation in the state legislature and Los Angeles City Hall. Meanwhile, the CBS affiliate had a reporter doing a trend piece on “night spas” that are open until midnight, and ABC was running an item on high-tech fitness equipment.

“It’s enough to make one wonder if it isn’t time for our political leaders to turn off the English-language TV and encourage good citizens to learn Spanish, the language of civic-minded news.

This is no mystery to anyone who gets their news from Spanish-language television.  It has literally been years since I’ve sat down and watched English-language network news shows.  When I do watch news in English, it is from one of the 24-hour cable news channels.  Unfortunately, Mathews left out FOX, whose affiliates in New York, WNYW, offer the most coverage of anything superficial.  Watching the news on WNYW makes me gag.

Mathews also forgot to mention how hard-hitting the morning news can be on Spanish-language television in comparison to that of any English-language news affiliate.

Despite the aforementioned oversights, I think Mathews wrote a great piece, an expose even, that should open the eyes of the non-Hispanic public to the inadequacies of their own TV news shows.

Now, if only Spanish-language news shows could do something about their lack of racial diversity.  I don’t know about the Telemundo or Univision affiliates in other cities, but in New York our Spanish-language news is inexplicably given to the Latino community mostly by blonde-haired blue-eyed anchors with German surnames.  To look at a Univision or Telemundo newscast, you would think they were filming the show not in New York, but perhaps Berlin or Copenhagen.

I’m not sure why these two networks are less willing to hire news staff of color than English-language networks, but it might have something to do with their owners and CEOs: Univision is owned by Haim Saban, an Egyptian Jew who is now an Israeli citizen and Telemundo is owned by NBC and the network’s president is a man named Don Browne.  People forget that you don’t need to be Latino to own or oversee a Spanish-language media company.  You just need a lot of money.  Though both networks were started by Latinos in the 1950s, they have both been sold off to the highest bidder over the years.

I was pleased to read in Fox News and the Cincinnati Post about college students at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio protesting the university’s policy of banning concealed firearms on campus. This protest, demonstrated by scores of college students carrying empty gun holsters, was held in response to the Virginia Tech shooting, with students pointing out that an armed student could have easily taken out the shooter and prevented the tragic massacre that took place there.

I was pleased to see this kind of demonstration from college students, especially since I am so used to seeing students staging protests for less significant or even wrongheaded leftist causes.

I most certainly support the Second Amendment, which grants Americans the right to carry firearms. Such a ban prohibiting anyone from carrying a concealed weapon is unconstitutional. As a college student myself, the constant liberal rhetoric I’ve heard for the years is, unfortunately, commonplace in modern-day American academia. Gun control is one of the flimsy arguments I’ve been forced to hear from professors as well as class-required lectures featuring fools bleating the same nonsense about gun control. (more…)

For those of you who do not know, I hate Rudy Giuliani, or as my mother calls him, Ghouliani (I concocted a first name, Doody Ghouliani, but then thought that was too juvenile to put on this blog). You can read my laundry list of grievances with Ghouliani if you already haven’t.
I visited Ghouliani’s Presidential campaign web site and was amused to hear of his 12 Commitments. Funny to hear the word commitment from a man who is on his third wife. (more…)

I often hear this remark from native-born Americans and other english speakers of all races. They get angry when they have a misunderstanding with people who don’t speak English well enough to be clearly understood or even if they overhear a conversation out in public carried on in a language other than English.

It’s easy to simply say that someone should learn English without having to think about how exactly to accomplish that. People fail to realize that education (in this case, learning English), even self-education, is not only an investment of one’s time, but of one’s money as well. Most immigrants, especially the undocumented kind, work long hours for very little pay, leaving them with neither the time or the money to learn English.

We native-born speakers are at a distinctive advantage over immigrants because we all learned English in elementary school, with an education provided free by the government.
When I think of all the money the government wastes accomodating people who don’t speak English that could instead be spent to teach those same people English, it makes me crazy.

The government could provide tuition vouchers to immigrants willing to learn English at an ESL school. The incentive to attend these classes, besides the free English lessons, would be that the government would no longer offer documents and forms in languages other than English. Even if it costs a lot to teach an immigrant English, it is cheaper in the long run to pay for a year or so of education than to have to accomodate a non-English speaking person for the rest of their life, or at least for the duration of their stay in the United States.

The current system fails not only because it involves coddling a large group of people for a long time, but that there will always be people who will be left out. When local boards of elections are legally obligated to provide materials and assistance in other languages, it is usually provided in the two or three most widely spoke languages. In New York City, those languages are Spanish, Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese) and Korean. But what about those registered voters who only speak Russian? Or Italian? Or Arabic? Or French? Obviously, the idea of accomodating every single language on the planet is absolutely ridiculous, so someone is always going to be left out.

Obligating everyone in America to learn English is the only fair way to ensure that everyone understands all and any communication between themselves and the government that represents them. To me, the idea of providing free English lessons to immigrants is the truest form of accomodation.