School To 8-Year-Old: Jesus Is No Hero

(Western Journalism) – Unfortunately, today’s morally bankrupt public education system apparently has no room for such a message of love and hope.

Second grade students at Cerro Gordo Elementary School in North Carolina were recently given a fairly common assignment. The kids were asked to think about who they consider to be a hero and begin writing a paper explaining their decision.

When 8-year-old Ryleigh Watts returned to class and informed her teacher who she wanted to honor, however, her mother said she was told to “write about something different.”

Who was the proposed subject of young Ryleigh’s paper? Jesus Christ.

“I think she should have freedom to write about what she wants to write about,” Heather Watts said of her daughter. “If she wants to write about Jesus, she should write about Jesus.”

According to a local NBC affiliate, the school disputes the controversy, explaining “we have learned that students were not restricted from writing on any topic of their choosing.”

The official statement encourages “our parents and guardians to contact or visit their child’s school to address any concerns.”

Ryleigh and her mother, however, are not budging from their original story. Watts met with both the school’s principal and her daughter’s teacher and reports that the situation has not been rectified. The young girl, she confirmed, must still find a new hero for her report.

The ordeal, Watts concluded, amounts to the school trampling on a student’s constitutional rights. Freedom of speech and religion are clearly delineated in the Bill of Rights; and, as she noted, both are being attacked through this assignment.

Obviously, students in school are held to a somewhat stricter standard than Americans in other environments. Rejecting an 8-year-old’s report based only on her admiration of Jesus Christ, however, is objectively discriminatory.

Much to the chagrin of many leftists, there is no basis for schools – or any public place – to ban personal displays of Christianity. Activists across the nation, however, seem to be pursuing that very goal.

In reality, Ryleigh’s choice made much more sense than any other imaginable subject. Christ left a perfect place to lay down his life for all mankind. If ever there was a story of heroism, the Gospel is it.

Unfortunately, today’s morally bankrupt public education system apparently has no room for such a message of love and hope.

Profane rappers like Jay-Z are heralded as role models by this administration, while kids idolize vampires and other monsters brought to life by leftists in Hollywood. Either of these choices, one might assume, would have been enthusiastically embraced by Ryleigh’s teacher.

[H/T WesternJournalism: B. Christopher Agee]

Next: Federal Department of Internet Gambling?

(Washington Examiner) – A war over online gambling is about to spill out in Congress as opponents move to restore a long-standing Internet gambling ban and block Uncle Sam from creating a sprawling new federal department to police the web.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., plan to introduce legislation next week to challenge two bills introduced earlier this session that would either create an “Office of Internet Poker Oversight” in the Commerce Department or a broader “Office of Internet Gambling Oversight” in Treasury.

Those bills, also sponsored by Republicans, were inspired by states eager to cash in on gambling and the Justice Department’s abrupt December 2011 move to re-interpret the 1961 Interstate Wire Act that effectively banned Internet gambling.

Without informing Congress beforehand, Justice reinterpreted the law to outlaw only sports gambling, opening the door for states to legalize online gambling and lottery games.

In addition to dividing Republicans, the legislation has split the casino community. Backing online betting is Democratic donor and casino investor George Soros. The American Gaming Association also hired former Obama campaign manager Jim Messina to help on the issue.

GOP donor and casino owner Sheldon Adelson is fighting it, concerned that online wagering will take jobs from traditional betting parlors, hurt small casinos not in Las Vegas and Atlantic City, and be harmful to some. He has even created a coalition to kill it, The Coalition to Stop Internet Gambling.

Other critics, like Ken Blackwell, a prominent legal and family advocate, noted that casinos are already heavily regulated and that legalizing online betting would bring those rules to the Internet. That, he warned, would “create a brand new form of government internet content cops and destroy the sort of openness that’s on the web.”

In addition, a legislative critic of the gambling legislation said that federal officials would have to track consumer online spending in order to police who is allowed to bet.

And some fear that online gambling will be used for money-laundering purposes.

New York Rep. Peter King’s pro-betting bill would create a federal set of controls and fight underage and compulsive gambling. His measure would create the “Office of Internet Gambling Oversight” in the Treasury Department.

The bill from Texas Republican Rep. Joe Barton focuses on poker and would creating a new regulatory office in Commerce called the “Office of Internet Poker Oversight.”

[H/T WashingtonExaminer: Paul Bedard]

Russia imposes own sanctions after U.S. “hostile thrust”

(Reuters) – Russia imposed retaliatory sanctions on nine U.S. officials and lawmakers on Thursday as tension over Moscow’s annexation of Crimea mounted, warning the West it would hit back over “every hostile thrust.”

President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman said the U.S. sanctions imposed this week were unacceptable and that the Kremlin would act on the principle of reciprocity.

Three White House officials and five U.S. senators – Harry Reid, Robert Menendez, John McCain, Mary Landrieu and Dan Coats – were among the Americans barred from Russia, the Russian Foreign Ministry said.

U.S. House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner was also on the list.

“We have repeatedly warned that sanctions are a double-edged instrument and would hit the United States like a boomerang,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said. “There must be no doubt: We will respond adequately to every hostile thrust.”

Moscow’s action followed U.S. sanctions on Russian, Ukrainian and Crimean individuals announced by President Barack Obama on Monday and again on Thursday.

The latest U.S. sanctions, which also involved a bank, targeted several individuals close to Putin in retaliation for his military seizure of Ukraine’s Crimea region. Any assets they have in the United States will be frozen and they will also be barred from U.S. travel.

“The appearance of some of the names on the list causes nothing but extreme perplexity,” Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. “But no matter what the names are, the practice of (issuing sanctions) lists is unacceptable for us.”

The White House officials cited by Moscow were senior Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer and deputy national security advisers Ben Rhodes and Caroline Atkinson.

Lawmakers in Washington were quick to welcome their new designation.

“If standing up for the Ukrainian people, their freedom, their hard earned democracy, and sovereignty means I’m sanctioned by Putin, so be it,” said Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

McCain threw in a bit of sarcasm.

“I guess this means my spring break in Siberia is off, my Gazprom stock is lost, and my secret bank account in Moscow is frozen,” said the Arizona Republican, who travelled to Kiev in December and addressed huge crowds of protesters against what was then Ukraine’s Moscow-backed government.

Peskov said the Kremlin was studying the latest U.S. sanctions list and Swiss-based oil trading firm Gunvor said it was assessing the impact of the inclusion of the company’s Russian shareholder Gennady Timchenko.

A Gunvor statement said Putin had no ownership, beneficial or otherwise, of the firm, and any understanding otherwise was “fundamentally misinformed and outrageous”.

Russian Railways, the country’s railway monopoly, said the decision to put its president Vladimir Yakunin on the U.S. list was unjustified.

(Additional reporting by Ludmila Danilova in Moscow and Patricia Zengerle in Washington; writing by Steve Gutterman, Doina Chiacu and Alexei Anishchuk; editing by Andrew Roche, James Dalgleish, Andrew Hay and Philippa Fletcher)

[H/T Reuters: Maria Kiselyova]

 

LBJ: “I’ll have those niggers voting Democratic for the next 200 years.”

(Allen B. West) – On March 20, 1854 the Republican Party was established in Ripon, Wisconsin. Referred to as the GOP or Grand Old Party, it established for one reason: to break the chains of slavery and ensure the unalienable rights endowed by the Creator of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness would be for all Americans.

The Republican Party was created to achieve individual freedom. Then, as now, the antagonist to the Republican party has been the Democrats, the party of collective subjugation and individual enslavement — then physical, now economic.

The first black members of the US House and Senate were Republicans. The first civil rights legislation came from Republicans. Democrats gave us the KKK, Jim Crow, lynchings, poll taxes, literacy tests, and failed policies like the “Great Society.”

Republican President Eisenhower ordered troops to enforce school desegregation. Republican Senator Everett Dirksen enabled the 1964 civil rights legislation to pass, in opposition to Democrat Senators Robert Byrd (KKK Grand Wizard) and Al Gore, Sr.

As a matter of fact, it was Democrat President Lyndon Baines Johnson who stated, “I’ll have those niggers voting Democratic for the next 200 years” as he confided with two like-minded governors on Air Force One regarding his underlying intentions for the “Great Society” programs.

Yep, and who are the real racists? So far, thanks to a Republican Party that is ignorant of its own history and gave up on the black community, Democrats have 50 of those 200 years under their belt.

The problem with today’s Republican Party is that it has forgotten its own history and raison d’ etre: individual liberty. The Party must come to realize that GOP also stands for “Growth, Opportunity, Prosperity” and articulate how it stands, as its history and founding clearly demonstrate, for the individual pursuit of happiness as opposed to the progressive socialist (Democrat) lie of a collective guarantee of happiness.

So, happy 160th birthday to my Party, the Republican Party. I am a strong Conservative and I hope Republicans recommit to those fundamental principles which established this Party — the historical antithesis of the Democrats. Do I agree with every Republican on everything? Not always, but I doggone ain’t about to join up with the other liberal socialist rascals. And I do have a word of caution to my fellow Republicans, (wo)man up, or go the way of the Whigs.

[H/T: AllenBWest]