When “Zero Tolerance” = Zero Sense

Jay over at STACLU noticed this bit of politically correct total insanity. A second grader from New Jersey was suspended from school for drawing a crude stick-figure drawing of a gun. No, really, he was.

When did the First Amendment stop applying to 7 year olds?

A second-grader’s drawing of a stick figure shooting a gun earned him a one-day school suspension.

Kyle Walker, 7, was suspended last week for violating Dennis Township Primary School’s zero-tolerance policy on guns, the boy’s mother, Shirley McDevitt, told The Press of Atlantic City.

Kyle gave the picture to another child on the school bus, and that child’s parents complained about it to school officials, McDevitt said. Her son told her the drawing was of a water gun, she said.

A photocopy of the picture provided by McDevitt showed two stick figures with one pointing a crude-looking gun at the other, the newspaper said. What appeared to be the word “me” was written above the shooter, with another name scribbled above the other figure.

What has happened to this Country! They’d thrown me in jail for some of the things I drew as a kid if this is worthy of suspension. Our schools have lost their minds! Zero tolerance on guns equals suspension over a piece of notebook paper? More like zero common sense. I wonder if they would charge him with possession of a deadly weapon if he folded it up into a paper airplane? Meanwhile they want to hand out BIRTH CONTROL to eleven year olds!

A seven-year old boy now stigmatized in the school district he is unfortunate enough to live in over a crude sketch. The world has gone insane. I suppose I had better warn my son not to tell anyone at school that I handed him one of these just today to take a look at. (That is a true story, incidentally, I was looking at one of these today, handed it to him and asked him what he thought of it.)

Is Amsterdam Burning?

I have not been paying attention to this until I noticed a hit on the hit counter from  Klein Verzet, a Dutch blog that I have exchanged links with several times. Almost at the same time I saw that come up in the logs, I noticed two things pop on Memeorandum. Amsterdam has a big problem. Let me go to the Sydney Morning Herald first here.

Disturbances broke out for a sixth successive night in an immigrant quarter of Amsterdam when four cars were set on fire, police said.

The unrest started after police shot dead a man of Moroccan origin last weekend who had stabbed and injured two officers.

The fires brought the total number of burnt cars to 11, a police spokesman said.

The 22-year-old Moroccan had been undergoing treatment for psychiatric problems and had in the past been questioned over contacts with Islamic militants linked to the murderer of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh.

Next, Gateway Pundit has video. But Klein Verzet has a continuously updated post that give the entire timeline from the initial attacks right up to the latest violence:

Last Sunday a 22 year old Islamic terrorist named Bilal Bajaka walked into a police station in Amsterdam and directly started knifing the first police officers he saw. As all Dutch police officers are armed, this was clearly a suicide mission. During his mission he was shot dead by one of the attacked officers. Who her self and a colleague narrowly escaped dead her self after being stabbed in breast, face, neck and back. Their lives could only be saved after a night long surgery in the hospital.

Bilal the Dutch-Moroccan terrorist was well know with the police. He was a known felon who was known to have contact with other, now convicted, Dutch Islamic terrorists. But he was never charged due to lack of evidence. He was however a violent convicted felon who already at age 13 was convicted for attacking someone with a screwdriver and wounding that persons head (for which he was convicted and did community service). Later he was convicted for multiple other crimes, but in the Netherlands that does not add up to very long prison sentences.

From April of this year, he was locked up, by court order, in a psychiatric clinic for his “suicidal” tendencies (Which of course has nothing to do with his study of the Koran). But in August he was suddenly miraculously cured and was released. But this Ramadan seems to be just to much for him.

It is a long, detailed report with a ton of links (a lot of them in Dutch, of course). But it is more complete than any major media report and a lot more thorough.

UPDATE: Others: Michael Van Der Galien has an article up at Pajamas Media about this. Still more at: Right Wing News (Dr. Melissa Clouthier writing) , Neptunus Lex, The Van Der Galiën Gazette (pointing to his PJM post), Noblesse Oblige,

The Daschle Effect

A devastating signed editorial in the Las Vegas Review-Journal by Sherman Frederick, the publisher of that paper, savages Harry Reid. Frederick predicts a brutal reelection fight in three years or a quiet retirement. Because Reid is following directly in the footsteps of the last Senate Majority Leader from a conservative state who carried water for the far left wing of the Democratic party, Tom Daschle. The farther to the left Daschle went, the less support he got back home. The result was an electoral defeat.

Let me spell out Harry's problem. No one can win a statewide race in Nevada on a platform that appears anti-military, anti-family, anti-marriage, anti-religion, anti-free speech, pro-illegal immigration, pro-abortion, and pro-taxation. While Harry isn't all of that personally, he clearly projects elements of them all when he's doing the bidding of his party on the national stage.

(It also doesn't help Harry's numbers when he foolishly attacks Rush Limbaugh, only to have the conservative radio talk show host lash back in a brutally effective rebuttal for the entire nation to hear.)

Tom Daschle knows what I'm talking about. He was Harry's predecessor in the Senate. He, like Reid does now, carried the liberal banner of his national party and slowly but surely his support eroded in his conservative home state of South Dakota. Then one day he woke up with big negatives and the next day he was unelected.

Whether you buy into the 51 percent number as the precise level of Nevada dissatisfaction with Reid or not, it's crystal clear the Daschle effect is in play with Reid. And that means his next race may be the political fight of his life.

While Harry demonstrated resiliency in past races, let's not forget he's no spring chicken anymore. He was born in 1939, just about the time golf moved from hickory shafted clubs to steel. He's already suffered one stroke, and most folks who see him regularly say he looks weary. Of course, we're all getting older, so we ought not to hold that against him.

It's just to point out that getting old is not for sissies. Katharine Hepburn said that.

For politicians, the one thing worse than getting old is not death. It's getting a midterm unfavorable rating of 51 percent. I said that.

You can bet if that number doesn't improve, he will draw a quality, younger opponent, well-funded and perfectly willing to engage him door-to-door up and down the state, from Laughlin to Winnemucca and Gardnerville to Mesquite.

It does not help Reid that is is also singularly ineffective at his job. My guess is that his attempt to grab credit for Rush Limbaugh's auction of the smear letter from Reid and 40 other Democrats didn't play well back in Nevada, either. I have been saying for a long time now that the party rank and file would come to vilify the Reid-Pelosi regime in Congress. Harry may get it directly from home.

Monkeys Kill Senior Official In India

A gang of Rhesus macaques attacked the deputy mayor of New Delhi, India while he was on a balcony, resulting in his fall and subsequent death.

NEW DELHI - Wild monkeys attacked a senior government official who then fell from a balcony at his home and died Sunday, media reported.

New Delhi Deputy Mayor S.S. Bajwa was rushed to a hospital after the attack by a gang of Rhesus macaques, but succumbed to head injuries sustained in his fall, the Press Trust of India news agency and The Times of India reported.

Many government buildings, temples and residential neighborhoods in New Delhi are overrun by Rhesus macaques, which scare passers-by and occasionally bite or snatch food from unsuspecting visitors.

Last year, the Delhi High Court reprimanded city authorities for failing to stop the animals from terrifying residents and asked them to find a permanent solution to the monkey menace.

Officials in India are up against two things here. The usual human-loathing animal activists and a religion that holds that the monkeys are the physical manifestation of the monkey god Hanuman. This is now coming to a lethal head.

Patterico’s Pontifications Notices Flaming Squirrels

Well, it's about time. That's all we can say. We've been trying to spread the word about the deadly, hive mind of the squirrels for some time. Talking squirrels, tripping squirrels, chocoholic squirrels, crutch-tenderized squirrels, arsonist squirrels, never-ending squirrels, zombie squirrels, the list is endless.

All we can say is, it sure took you long enough.

The Wasteland

David Drucker looks at the accomplishments of the Democrat-led Congress to date and forecasts the future progress expected in an election year. In short, if you think Congress has done nothing useful this year, just wait until 2008.

Just another week in the legislative wasteland - these unprecedented two years when a timid Congress and a neutered president appear unable or unwilling to act until the election. With both parties frightened to take any political risks, virtually every major piece of legislation has been put on hold or sidetracked.

“I have assumed that the most difficult political issues will not be raised next year," Assistant U.S. Senate Majority Leader Richard Durbin said late last week, speaking to reporters just off the Senate floor. “There may be a few exceptions, but by and large the biggest issues will not come up in a campaign year. It's just not a good environment for productive work."

Bush, in a meeting with journalists last week, chastised Congress for not sending him more bills, particularly a renewal of the No Child Left Behind Act.

“One of Congress' basic duties is to fund the day-to-day operations of the federal government," Bush said. “Yet Congress has not sent me a single appropriations bill."

The president also mentioned free trade agreements with countries such as Peru and Colombia, mortgage reforms and care for veterans as languishing legislation. That's beside big-picture reforms, on issues such as immigration, Iraq and Social Security and Medicare. Or addressing tax issues like fixing the Alternative Minimum Tax and making permanent many of the president's tax cuts that passed during his first term but are due to sunset in the next few years.

In many cases, bills haven't even been brought to committee - ideas are stuck in the drafting stage as party leadership decides what's best to pursue.

As for appropriations, the basic laws that fund government, Congress has sent none of its 12 bills to the president. Not that it matters: He's threatened to veto 10 of them.

Drucker is not kind to either party, but he especially points out that the gridlock in the Senate is exacerbated by the routine absence of a number of presidential contenders. The outlook for 2008 is even worse. In fact, it looks a lot like this:

The Real War On Children

Mark Steyn points out that the Democrats are using "for the children" as a sort of twisted version of Tourette's syndrome. It is peppered throughout almost any discussion popping up, for the children, at odd intervals, for the children, in any statement the make. For the children. The problem here is that the emotional blackmail of "for the children" is actually conducting a real war on children: the young ones of today and the yet to be born ones who will have to pick up the tab for the entitlements enacted "for the children."

One assumes he means some illegal Republican Party "war on children." Last Thursday, Nancy Pelosi, as is the fashion, used the phrase "the children" like some twitchy verbal tic, a kind of Democrat Tourette's syndrome: "This is a discussion about America's children … We could establish ourselves as the children's Congress … Come forward on behalf of the children … I tried to do that when I was sworn in as speaker surrounded by children. It was a spontaneous moment, but it was one that was clear in its message: we are gaveling this House to order on behalf of the children."

Etc. So what is the best thing America could do "for the children"? Well, it could try not to make the same mistake as most of the rest of the Western world and avoid bequeathing the next generation a system of unsustainable entitlements that turns the entire nation into a giant Ponzi scheme. Most of us understand, for example, that Social Security needs to be "fixed" – or we'll have to raise taxes, or the retirement age, or cut benefits, etc. But, just to get the entitlements debate in perspective, projected public pensions liabilities in the United States are expected to rise by 2040 to about 6.8 percent of our gross domestic product. In Greece, the equivalent figure is 25 percent – that's not a matter of raising taxes or tweaking retirement age; that's total societal collapse.

So what? shrug the voters. Not my problem. I paid my taxes, I want my benefits.

In France, President Sarkozy is proposing a very modest step – that those who retire before the age of 65 should not receive free health care – and the French are up in arms about it. He's being angrily denounced by 53-year-old retirees, a demographic hitherto unknown to functioning societies. You spend your first 25 years being educated, you work for two or three decades, and then you spend a third of a century living off a lavish pension, with the state picking up every health care expense. No society can make that math add up.

And so, in a democratic system today's electors vote to keep the government gravy coming and leave it to tomorrow for "the children" to worry about. That's the real "war on children" – and every time you add a new entitlement to the budget you make it less and less likely they'll win it.

That is the real danger of the "for the children" mantra. It really is "sticking it to the children." The lavish larding of government "gravy" for all makes people into serfs - wholly dependent on the largess of the government. It takes away personal responsibility for one's actions and replaces it with the all-knowing, beneficent nanny state. Only the beneficence soon enough disappears as the bills come due. The taxes go up, the benefits decline, the system collapses. The children are left holding the bag.

So, think hard here. Are the Democrats acting "for the children" or against them?

UPDATE: Others: Mondoreb, Fausta, Bookworm Room,  BitsBlog, Sister Toldjah, Betsy's Page,

No Basis In Reality

Daniel Botkin has been studying the environment for 40 years or so. His credentials are impressive: he is president of the Center for the Study of the Environment and professor emeritus in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He developed a computer model of forest growth that is widely used by global warming scientists. And he is openly declaring the doomsayers from the true believers in global warming is not based in science - or even in reality.

Global warming doesn't matter except to the extent that it will affect life–ours and that of all living things on Earth. And contrary to the latest news, the evidence that global warming will have serious effects on life is thin. Most evidence suggests the contrary.

Case in point: This year's United Nations report on climate change and other documents say that 20% to 30% of plant and animal species will be threatened with extinction in this century due to global warming–a truly terrifying thought. Yet, during the past 2.5 million years, a period that scientists now know experienced climatic changes as rapid and as warm as modern climatological models suggest will happen to us, almost none of the millions of species on Earth went extinct. The exceptions were about 20 species of large mammals (the famous megafauna of the last ice age–saber-tooth tigers, hairy mammoths and the like), which went extinct about 10,000 to 5,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age, and many dominant trees and shrubs of northwestern Europe. But elsewhere, including North America, few plant species went extinct, and few mammals.

We're also warned that tropical diseases are going to spread, and that we can expect malaria and encephalitis epidemics. But scientific papers by Prof. Sarah Randolph of Oxford University show that temperature changes do not correlate well with changes in the distribution or frequency of these diseases; warming has not broadened their distribution and is highly unlikely to do so in the future, global warming or not.

The key point here is that living things respond to many factors in addition to temperature and rainfall. In most cases, however, climate-modeling-based forecasts look primarily at temperature alone, or temperature and precipitation only. You might ask, "Isn't this enough to forecast changes in the distribution of species?" Ask a mockingbird. The New York Times recently published an answer to a query about why mockingbirds were becoming common in Manhattan. The expert answer was: food–an exotic plant species that mockingbirds like to eat had spread to New York City. It was this, not temperature or rainfall, the expert said, that caused the change in mockingbird geography.

He decries the dramatic yet baseless pronouncements and says that many of the people sounding the loudest alarms know full well that they are not telling the truth:

Some colleagues who share some of my doubts argue that the only way to get our society to change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe, and that therefore it is all right and even necessary for scientists to exaggerate. They tell me that my belief in open and honest assessment is naïve. "Wolves deceive their prey, don't they?" one said to me recently. Therefore, biologically, he said, we are justified in exaggerating to get society to change.

One can dryly note that this same tactic is widely used in totalitarian regimes. Kind of a striking resemblance at that. Read the whole thing. Botkin does not doubt there is warming, but believe the "scientists" who are screeching warnings of doom are leading society down a very bad path indeed. Bad science makes bad policy. What Botkin is worried about - as I am - is that the "solutions" to global warming being touted so passionately are actually more harmful to the earth than a few degrees of temperature. (Botkin also mentions the orangutans as an example.) The biofuels fraud is only one example I have posted about. The much-praised "alternative energy" actually produces more carbon emissions than petroleum-based fuels. So you have a calculated deception leading to what is actually a worse situation.

Go read what Botkin wrote.  

Jindal Wins

Bobby Jindal will be the next governor of Louisiana.

BATON ROUGE, La. - U.S. Rep. Bobby Jindal easily defeated 11 opponents and became the state's first nonwhite governor since Reconstruction, decades after his parents moved to the state from India to pursue the American dream.

Jindal, a 36-year-old Republican, will be the nation's youngest governor. He had 53 percent with 625,036 votes with about 92 percent of the vote tallied. It was more than enough to win Saturday's election outright and avoid a Nov. 17 runoff.

"My mom and dad came to this country in pursuit of the American dream. And guess what happened. They found the American dream to be alive and well right here in Louisiana," he said to cheers and applause at his victory party.

He has promised to call the legislature into special session to deal with ethics reform as soon as he takes office in January. There's a fight coming in Louisiana. Jindal is already looking like a winner.