Schools are not allowed to limit free speech.
So, now the left is trying to limit speech by suspending fifth graders? Really? Daxx Dalton, an 11-year-old living in Colorado, wore a homemade anti-Obama shirt. The shirt had Obama with a veto sign and read: “Obama: A Terrorist's Best Friend.” The shirt was made especially for patriotism day, where all students were encouraged to wear red, white, and blue.…
Article comments
76 - david Black
"That might not extend far beyond signing free trade deals, or it might extend as far as redistributing wealth, depending on your economic theory."
Anything that generates $$$ is a good thing.
Pissing away money on underclasses generates NO profit.
77 - Dave Nalle
Yeah, what PETI said. And I'm fiscally conservative, if that counts for anything.
Dave
78 - david Black
If that's what Dave Nalle meant by "promoting welfare," then I don't have to call into question his conservative cred.
Although I still have to wonder why a conservative would want to be accepted by libs.
After all, they are the enemy, just like Islamo-fascists are the enemy.
79 - Pablo
Mr. Black I just want you to know that I for one really enjoy reading your rants. In fact I am smiling right now as I have just read one of them. :)
I wonder if you ever take the time when you are alone, and actually read what you write, you know when your in a reflective mood, kind of like looking in the mirror bubba. I wonder what you see? Can you share?
80 - Pablo
re 63
"College campuses are for the most part dominated by leftist faculty and administrators who impose their own leftist beliefs on the students and do all that they can to silence and ridicule any thought that is at all right of center."
If that is true, and it very well may be, the reason is obvious. Most uhhhm intelligent people do no subscribe to right wing fascist idealogy. It is simply a reflecton on the fact that they are educated, and uhhhm use their brain bubba!
81 - pleasexcusetheinterruption
If that is true, and it very well may be, the reason is obvious. Most uhhhm intelligent people do no subscribe to right wing fascist idealogy. It is simply a reflecton on the fact that they are educated, and uhhhm use their brain bubba!
While I'd like to believe this true.. there are many very intelligent conservative thinkers within and outside academia...
82 - pleasexcusetheinterruption
Although I still have to wonder why a conservative would want to be accepted by libs.
I hardly think Dave is searching for acceptance by me or anyone else on this board. He's just [sometimes] a reasonable guy :D
83 - El Bicho
"Anything that generates $$$ is a good thing."
Like crime?
84 - Cindy D
Who said Dave wants to be accepted by liberals?
Dave defends what he believes in. He doesn't seem to pay attention to being accepted.
It's just that he's actually a member of the human race. He doesn't have a black heart full of slime.
85 - Dave Nalle
Why thanks, Cindy.
And Black, I don't have a problem with liberals.
But I don't think there are a hell of a lot of actual liberals left in the American left.
Dave
86 - Whatever
I don't support Obama for president, but the shirt is offensive - linking Obama to terrorists. Would you support a kid wearing a racist T-shirt?
Schools can limit what people wear. As the first commenter noted, kids cannot wear shirts with beer slogans on them to school. I'm sure they can't wear shirts with offensive language either.
The right to free speech doesn't apply to every situation. It means the government can't put you in jail for saying Obama is a friend of terrorists. Freedom of speech doesn't mean you can say whatever you want, wherever you are and no one can get mad at you. It just means you can't be arrested for it.
87 - robbieZZ
If this is about free speech I'll have my 11-year old daughter wear a Hooters T-Shirt to school.
Point is, free speech can be offensive especially where 11-year olds are concerned. It would be different on a college campus.
I do not think the boy should have been suspended but I think he should have been sent home or spent the day in the principal's office until he parents could come and get him after work, that is, if they work.
88 - Zedd
David Black
#56
You are too old to still be in 7th grade mode. You mean in college you were embarrassing yourself with stupid comments not knowing that you were missing the point all together.
What your professor was saying is that the reason that institutions of learning are established and supported by the people is because your knowledge is an asset to society. States (the people) invest greatly in education. The learned improve society. From a philosophical stand point it is your moral obligation to give back to the society that has invested in you. He was responding from that stand point and you were being a child simply yapping back with no real desire to get to what is the sensible in the proposition.
89 - Arch Conservative
How rich....a bunch of lefties telling me that most colleges and universities aren't dominated by intolerant leftists.
I guess when the socialist shithead club at Columbia attacked the stage at Columbia University after the Minutmen had been invited to speak it was a prime example of how intellectually superior liberal lefties are.
Or maybe a better example is when several lefty faculty members at Boston College threateneed to resign if Condaleezxa Rice came there to speak.
The there's the case of the intelligient lefties at Harvard who used their brains to drum up some politically correct bullshit reason to make LArry Summers resign after he had the umitigated gall to refer to scientific studies which suggested that men and women's brains process information differently and that this may possibley explain discrepencies in performances on science and math tests among the sexes.
For everyone of you moonbats who has some personal anecdote about how fair the debate on our campuses is I can rebut with 20 cases that are actually true and have been documented that show how intolerant and close minded the lefties that run most universities are.
90 - Lisa Solod Warren
Maddy
Your defensiveness is overwhelming although I am, honored, I guess that mine were the only comments you responded to. I see that you did not choose to respond to all you called you on the free specch question.
I will say that is should have told you something when you googled and all roads led back to Fox.
THAT is not doing research, just to google. I have children, too, and I tell them that all the time.
And, if all the links led back to one source that should tell you something: there was no STORY. It was just Fox making a mountain out of a molehill. An irate father pissed at the school for suspending his son for breaking the rules and Fox getting on its high horse: no free speech issue there.
I am sorry you feel beleagured by liberals. You live, obviously, in a place where you feel like there are less of "you" than "them." You could move here and you would be in the majority!
To quote you:
Ok. I think that's it.
Lisa
91 - David Black
Maddie: Don't be cowed by these liberal morons who take their marching orders from the HuffPo and the dailykos.
Just remember that libs are degenerate loving LOSERS and always have been.
"I will say that is should have told you something when you googled and all roads led back to Fox.
(yawn)
92 - Cindy D
RE#86 and #87
ouch, and ouch
sometimes it takes a good mental picture to give one perspective
i was wrong and reactionary to first support the wearing of the shirt.
although discussing it would still be in my agenda. my own style with children is generally to allow them to grow by making choices based on reason rather than to force them to do or believe something.
simply forcing people to do what we want has never seemed to inspire much except rebellion and what is commonly called "the generation gap"
my experience shows that children respond to respect. and what they learn by the way we treat them, is directly related to the way they treat others.
schools have a bully problem and that problem, is never out of my awareness whenever i consider a solution related to school problems. because children aren't born bullies.
93 - Lisa Solod Warren
And Maddy, if you read any of David's posts and take him as your mentor, you will grow up to be a misogynist racist who is friendless and horribly unhappy..... so please don't.
94 - Jordan Richardson
If that kid's allowed to wear the Obama shirt, this kid should be allowed to wear this one.
95 - Lisa Solod Warren
Jordan, that site was forbidden to me for some reason....
OTOH hand, he WASN'T allowed to wear that shirt.
I don't know what school rules are like in Canada, but that is all the issue it was. It was made into a free speech issue by Fox, which it wasn't at all....
96 - Jordan Richardson
It was a picture of a chubby kid wearing a rather obscene shirt.
I don't know what school rules are like in Canada
We have schools?
I think we're all forgetting the real issue here, though: who the hell names their kid Daxx?
97 - pleasexcusetheinterruption
How rich....a bunch of lefties telling me that most colleges and universities aren't dominated by intolerant leftists.
I guess when the socialist shithead club at Columbia attacked the stage at Columbia University after the Minutmen had been invited to speak it was a prime example of how intellectually superior liberal lefties are.
Or maybe a better example is when several lefty faculty members at Boston College threateneed to resign if Condaleezxa Rice came there to speak.
The there's the case of the intelligient lefties at Harvard who used their brains to drum up some politically correct bullshit reason to make LArry Summers resign after he had the umitigated gall to refer to scientific studies which suggested that men and women's brains process information differently and that this may possibley explain discrepencies in performances on science and math tests among the sexes.
For everyone of you moonbats who has some personal anecdote about how fair the debate on our campuses is I can rebut with 20 cases that are actually true and have been documented that show how intolerant and close minded the lefties that run most universities are.
That hardly amounts to the generalization you are trying to make. I cited just as many examples of conservative measures taken by the administration/faculty at my campus alone in post 71. I would venture to say a very large portion of the student body here feels the administration is too conservative and represses their liberal ideology. (I'm using conservative and liberal rather loosely here obviously).
98 - Cindy D
Arch,
Your lefty, socialist buddy Prez Bush called the Minutemen a group of vigilantes and does not support armed private citizens patrolling the border.
99 - mandy
This kid shouldnt have been able to wear this shirt. All this was, was the parents views. What year is this? Oh yeah 2008.I thought that we trying to teach our children to not be racist biggots. This man was a pour excuse for a good father to let his child wear this to school. We need to be educating these children on politics and how to vote in the future so that they might have one.
100 - Arch Conservative
So anyone that isn't on the obama bandwagon is a racist bigot MAndy?
Maybe you'd be better off posting on the daily kos where they'd be more receptive to you [Personal attack deleted by Comments Editor].
101 - Cindy D
Arch maybe you need some remedial reading classes.
How'd you do on those standardized tests where they ask you to explain what the text you read means?
102 - Arch Conservative
The editors of this website find it acceptable for a poster to call anyone and everyone who disagrees with his or her political views a racist but unacceptable to call someone stupid.
I suggested that mandy go post at the daily kos but maybe I should go post at some extreme nutbag right wing site if that's how it's going to be at BC. At least then they wouldn't be censoring my comments and I'd agree with some of the others commentors 5% of the time.
103 - Arch Conservative
Hey Mandy.
You're a racist.
104 - Christopher Rose
I know these things, like many others, are difficult for you to understand.
Bye then.
105 - Arch Conservative
Well technically Mandy didn't call another commentor a racist. She called the kid's father a racist.
But yet I have been called a racist by scores of boneheaded PC leftists on this site and yet their commenst were not removed. I don't think it is unreasonable to think that calling someone a racist, especially when there is no evidence, constitutes a personal attack.
106 - Christopher Rose
I'll keep it in mind. Keep being reasonable in how you express yourself, I like it.
107 - Dave Nalle
BTW, Arch. Is 'Mandy' some sort of bizarre hybrid of Cindy and Maddy?
Dave
108 - Arch Conservative
"I'll keep it in mind. Keep being reasonable in how you express yourself, I like it."
Well Believe it or not. I try. But then some nutbag leftist has to come along and make an implacation like "anyone the opposes Obama does so for racist reasons" and set me off.
No Dave, Mandy is the Obama harpie that chimed in with comment #99.
109 - Lisa Solod Warren
Arch, try to get this: the child's father allowed, perhaps even encouraged, the child to wear a tee-shirt that said that Obama was a terrorist. If the child had worn a tee-whirt that had said that McCain was a terrorist would you have found THAT acceptable? Would you have thought that was a free speech issue, still? Or a dress code issue? Or a homeland security issue?
It is usually helpful to try and see the other side.
In this case, Mandy made a fairly accurate assumption, however, in that there continue to be rumours, quite well-funded that Obama is a Muslim, which often makes it easier for people to talk about why they don't "like" him without saying that he is black.
Muslim, also, as you well know, connotes, to many in this country with terrorism, in that some large number of Americans believe that ALL Muslims are terrorists (including, apparently commenter David Black, from his posts) as opposed to those who profess support for the jihad.
Calling Mandy a racist was inflammatory and unnecessary.
I think, conversation between those of us more liberal (in the dictionary sense of the word) and those who identify as political conservatives could be possible, and perhaps, even construtive if so many assumptions were not made all the time and from the initial get go.
I certainly do not assume that anyone who opposes Obama does so because he is a racist. I do know that some who do do so because they don't like blacks. Others do so because they always vote Republican no matter what. Others do so because they don't like his politics.
But the entire issue of the tee shirt which started this whole discussion (which once again got woefully off track) was NOT, as I and several posters pointed out (and with which you seem to continue to disagree) an issue of Left vs Right, or even an issue of free speech, no matter how you wish to paint it. Do not be paranoid.
It is merely and solely and smally an issue of a young child flouting a dress code rule, with his parents' permission, those same parents who then went to Fox News to make a stink about it and get some anti-left sentiment stirred up.
The tee-shirt was particularly inflammatory because of the terrorist connection which made it even more difficult for the school to simply dismiss the issue as one of simple dress code violation (PLEASE remember the Republicans are the ones responsible for the Patriot Act which is probably what got people all worked up about this).
So, in essence, this is a non story that has gotten some people all het up, including the writer who is mad at me because I told her she didn't do her research. Which she didn't.
110 - Arch Conservative
Lisa...
I don't think any parent should be forcing their young child to express their own political beliefs. Children should be allowed ot be children and not used as political pawns.
That wasn't the point I was trying to make though. The point I was trying to make is that when it comes to contreversial subjects and academis there is a huge double standard that illustrates how biased to the left most admnistrators and faculty are. In case you missed it I never claimed it was a free speech issue, but rather that it was an issue of those in charge of our education system having a significantly left leaning political bias that anyone with a pulse an ounce of objectivity could see.
The hostility torward any conservative/right of center thought on college campuses across this nation coming from faculty, administration and studnets is very real and epidemic.
You can deny it all you want as that is apprently your MO but it doesn't make it any less real.
111 - Ruvy
Ruvy and Joanne are wrong: it isn't about oppression or left or right.
You actually read what I wrote? How flattering!
When our kids were in school, I pushed for school uniforms simply because I did not want to have to spend money on all the bullshit "styles" that kids are exposed to in what passes for "culture" in America. If I'd only known that Israeli kids seem to worship what the scummy fools in America wear and there is no budget for school uniforms here!
Leaving that point aside, you just can't get away from the fact that there is a political agenda pushed by a lot of the media in all countries. Watching politics tip over to the loony side in your country leaves only the moneyed elite to run the media, sucking people's wallets empty on what you all think of as "culture".
Nevertheless, there is a basic loss of political liberty in your country, and a loss of political liberty that is even clearer here in Israel.
And to be blunt about it, schools are sickeningly boring in America because of the dumb attitudes of women like Heloise. There is a good reason that so many parents want to home school kids in America, and her stale mentality is one of them.
I generally do not like Cindy B's views, and she does not like mine - but at least she appreciates an opportunity to teach when it arises. That speaks well of her.
112 - Lisa Solod Warren
But Arch, the discussion was never about college campuses, really. It was about some grammar school kid wearing an inappropriate tee shirt.
If you want to write an opinion piece in which you back up, with facts, from reputable sources, from many different points of view, that says that universities in this country have shifted to the left significantly in the past (however many) years, show examples, bla bla bla, then, perhaps you might spark an interesting discussion that people could either agree with or refute.
Maddy suggested, illogically and without evidence, that the school banned the shirt because they were left wing....
And that siren call was taken up by you and others.
My last long post reiterated that what is or isn't happening in universities was not relevant to the subject matter of Maddy's original piece.
113 - Silas Kain
Much ado about nothing. I'm more concerned about this kid's education. Will this kid be able to read, write and S-P-E-L-L correctly? Will this kid be capable of doing simple arithmetic? Will this kid have knowledge of our history and be taught accountability and civic duty? Terrorism is not our only enemy. Apathy and disengagement from the political process are the ultimate enemies to America. We're just not educated enough to realize it!
114 - Lisa Solod Warren
Agreed, Silas.
115 - Cindy D
I had to come back here for my own personal edification. I shouldn't have let anyone talk me out of what I knew was right. The kid should wear the shirt and it should be taken as an opportunity for discussion. The kid's father already decided once what the kid should think. The school will decide the second time.
If I'm going to be a teacher, this is a lesson in how vigilant I'll have to be. It's disappointing that I let myself be cowed. Progressives/liberals will stifle opportunities for real education as much as anyone else.
116 - Douglas Mays
hhhmmm... so the parents made the shirt. then made the kid wear it, knowing there would be backlash....
That is child abuse... suspend the parents.
I can imagine the parents are the types who would say "HEY! George Bush fought terror for your freedom of speech. So shut the fuck up!"
Maybe their phone should at least be tapped! Obama fighting terror at home. Geez. What did we get out of this 43rd President of ours? Great Presidents had great thing to say to inspire the nation. FDR "we have nothing to fear but fear itself". What do we get with Bush? "terror!"
Geez, He goes back to Texas on Tuesday. Our sympathy is with you Texas.
DM
117 - Douglas Mays
This whole Obama hanging out with terrorists in his past thing really shows what an effete group of bedwetting single celled pools of slime the general Republican marketing mentality is.
So, let's make a deal with Daxx's parents. Let's investigate everyone they associate with in one way or another, be it a close friend or clerk at the grocery store.
It would be no problem to find a rapist, thief, child molester, dangerous drug dealer, embezzler of social security funds, psychopath, etc.
Daxx will probably murder his parents when he gets a bit older or else have a breakdown and kill himself.
You want terror? Daxx's parents is a good start. Ask Daxx.
DM
118 - Douglas Mays
or if Daxx grows up with his parents agenda, he will be killed as some point along the way...
119 - Cindy D
$1,000 worth of property damage (say graffiti) in MN makes you a terrorist.
120 - Nico Ortega
I agree that they uspended him. IM not an obama lover, i realy didn't care who won, but the statement was inapproporate, i wouldnt go to school in an anti republican shirt.
sure he has the freedom of speech, but cmon thats taking it too far, I woud know, im 15 years old