Anti-Americanism passing as education in Tucson

Republic columnist Doug MacEachern has written a must-read column titled Defenses of “ethnic studies are feeble.” He discussed the taxpayer funded LaRaza programs being taught in the Tucson Unified School District’s public schools.

His piece includes several excellent links, and this stunning quote from Augustine Romero, the director of the program, which MacEachern describes as happily expressed to him last year: “Our teachers are left-leaning. They are progressives. They’re going to have things that conservatives are not going to like.”

I have written a fair bit about TUSD’s innocent, little set of survey courses in world history and governments. I’ve written about the instructors’ obsession with the United States as a land of racism and oppression, writes MacEachern.

 MacEachern continues: I’ve written about Romero’s annual summer symposiums that constitute a freak show of radical education theorists. And about their unhinged obsession with Marxism. Really, you simply must see the Web site of the featured speaker at last year’s symposium: www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/ pages/mclaren/.

State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tom Horne,  is correct in sponsoring legislation to ban such programs in Arizona’s public schools.

Seeing Red AZ has previously written about this travesty in Tucson where the Marxist agenda is alive and well.

Human Events carried this exposé of La Raza by former Georgia U. S. Rep. Charlie Norwood who wrote about “the dark side of our current illegal immigration crisis.”

Tucson area Superintendent of Schools arrested as child sexual predator

The Superintendent of the Tanque Verde Unified School District in Tucson has been arrested by federal authorities on charges related to the sexual exploitation of children.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials said 51-year-old Albert Thomas Rogers was arrested Friday when he arrived for a “tour” in Mexico allegedly including “relaxation intimacy” with a 13- to 14-year-old boy. He had submitted a $50 deposit and reservation form in February.

ICE says that Rogers had contacted an undercover special agent a month earlier. The undercover operation based in Yuma seeks to catch adults looking to tour foreign countries to sexually exploit children. The investigation is part of Operation Predator, an ongoing agency initiative to protect children from sexual predators, including those who travel overseas for sex with minors, Internet child pornographers, criminal alien sex offenders, and child sex traffickers.

Since starting its undercover sex tourism operation in Yuma in 1997, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have arrested 43 suspects, including Rogers.

The Arizona Daily Star carries the descriptive article, including a photo of this child predator. Last November, Rogers was the Libertarian candidate for Pima County Superintendent of Schools. The Star has a copy of the questionnaire Rogers submitted at the time.

UPDATE:

The governing board of the Tanque Verde Unified School District has acknowledged that District Superintendent Albert Thomas “Tom” Rogers has submitted a handwritten letter of resignation.

ICE spokesman Vincent Picard said Rogers was charged with one count of travel with the intent to engage in illicit sexual conduct.  If convicted, Rogers could face a sentence of up to 30 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

E Pluribus Unum: “Out of many, one”

Sen. Jonathan Paton, (R-Dist.30), is sponsoring legislation that would ban ethnic-studies courses from high schools — specifically the 22 courses offered at four Tucson high schools in history, government, and literature.

If Senate Bill 1069 becomes law, a district or charter school that features such courses would lose 10 percent of its state funding each month. The money would be restored when the district shut down the program.

“The job of the public schools is to develop the student’s identity as Americans and as strong individuals,” said Arizona’s Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tom Horne. “It’s not the job of the public schools to promote ethnic chauvinism,” the daily reports.

National Review Online’s Jay Nordlinger reminds us of the time Vice President Al Gore misstated the national motto when he translated it — E Pluribus Unum – “Out of one, many,” which Nordlinger says is “bassackwards.”  Score one for Paton and Horne, zip for Gore.

May snow job at Notre Dame

The inane and recently popular comeback of those who have no argument in the face of facts is, “Let’s just agree to disagree.”

That was essentially the message of the most radically pro-abortion U. S. President, Barack Obama, as he spoke at the commencement ceremonies at Notre Dame University. 

Obama, who as an Illinois state senator, was the lone vote for denying medical care to newborns who survived a failed abortion attempt – in effect supporting infanticide – yielded not an inch. He gave the same tired platitudes that became de rigueur during the Clinton years, saying those on both sides of the debate “Can still agree that this is a heart-wrenching decision for any woman to make…..So let’s work together to reduce the number of women seeking abortions by reducing unintended pregnancies, and making adoption more available, and providing care and support for women who do carry their child to term.”

His clichés attempt to ring the bell of middle ground when the unspoken truth is that life is being taken, often brutally, each time an abortion is performed.

The American people are not with Obama. A recent Gallup survey found that 51 percent of those polled on the question of abortion identify as “pro-life” and just 42 percent “pro-choice.” This is the first time a majority of U.S. adults have identified themselves as “pro-life” since Gallup began asking this question in 1995.

But abortion wasn’t his sole focus. Obama also got in the same Socialist message he gave to the graduates at ASU last week. He told then they were part of a “generation that must find a path back to prosperity and decide how we respond to a global economy that left millions behind even before this crisis hit an economy where greed and short-term thinking were too often rewarded at the expense of fairness, and diligence, and an honest day’s work.”

At the expense of fairness? 

He admonished that too many Americans view life through the lens of desire for prosperity and diminished America’s position as a world power by saying, “We too often seek advantage over others. We cling to outworn prejudice and fear those who are unfamiliar. Too many of us view life only through the lens of immediate self-interest and crass materialism; in which the world is necessarily a zero-sum game. The strong too often dominate the weak, and too many of those with wealth and with power find all manner of justification for their own privilege in the face of poverty and injustice.”

So hard work that results in wealth is suspect?

The graduates were even given the bill of goods on global warming, as he told them “Your generation must decide how to save God’s creation from a changing climate that threatens to destroy it.”

What about saving God’s most vulnerable creations, Mr. Obama? The babies whose lives are snuffed out by the abortion industry that has been a steadfast supporter of your campaigns?

The complete text of Obama’s Notre Dame speech is available here.

The Republic: Awed by Awebama

Today’s daily devotes three pages, an editorial and a Benson cartoon to the Second Coming Of Obama – since his January inauguration. The front page is bannered with his exhortation to the assembled Arizona State University grads and their fainting families to “Change the course of history.”

The first paragraph begins with gushing adoration by describing Obama’s “eloquent message” and  his “witty response” to swaggering university president Michael Crow’s stinging embarrassment over the withholding of an honorary degree for Obama’s lack of a “body of work.” After recovering from the snafu, the school quickly backpedaled, naming a continuing scholarship in his honor.

The Leftist Obamessiah said Americans could benefit from “a fundamental change of perspective and attitude” for America, causing approximately 130 people to feel faint and dozens other to require hospitalization — one of whom suffered a seizure upon hearing such words from a sitting U.S. President.

J. D. Hayworth, a former 6-term Republican Arizona Congressman and popular KFYI-AM radio host, led a crowd at Tempe Marketplace where he did a remote broadcast of his political talk show.

Notre Dame: The controversy escalates

Speaking at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in Washington,  a top Vatican official said  that Notre Dame’s intention of granting an honorary doctorate to “anti-life and anti-family” President Barack Obama at its graduation ceremony this coming Sunday is “a source of the gravest scandal.”

Archbishop Raymond L. Burke, who serves in the Vatican on the church’s highest court, expressed his feelings in the strongest of terms.

“In a culture marked by widespread and grave confusion and error about the most fundamental teachings of the moral law, our Catholic schools and universities must be beacons of truth and right conduct,” said Burke.

“Clearly, the same is true of our Catholic charitable, missionary and healthcare institutions,” he said. “There can be no place in them for teaching or activities which offend the moral law. Dialogue and respect for differences are not promoted by the compromise and even violation of the natural moral law. The proposed granting of an honorary doctorate at Notre Dame University to our President who is aggressively advancing an anti-life and anti-family agenda is a source of the gravest scandal,” CNS News reports.

The comment was interrupted by a 34-second standing ovation by about 1,300 people in attendance. More than 60 American Catholic bishops have objected to Notre Dame honoring Obama.

Displeasure over President Obama’s appearance at Notre Dame has caused some seniors to boycott their own graduation ceremony and instead join a prayer service on the university grounds.

Watch this video put together by the Notre Dame students who take a stand for life. Their statement is available at NDResponse.com

Obama will be the featured speaker at the Arizona State University commencement tomorrow.  He shares the stage with shock rocker Alice Cooper, according to Rolling Stone magazine.

Another day another randy teacher in the news

Today’s champ is Tamara Hofmann. And unlike the ones recently making headlines, Hofmann prefers male students.

In the early hours of November 1, 2006, the Marcos de Niza High school math teacher was found by Chandler police with one of her teenaged students her car. The boy had her bra in his pocket. Hofmann had been having an ongoing relationship with him since his junior year of high school.

But that incident didn’t keep her from finding employment elsewhere. According to a report in the daily, she then found employment at a Chandler public charter school — despite the police report and an open investigation by the state Board of Education.

It gets better.

State officials said they would have divulged the information to the new school, if they would have asked. The administrators at El Dorado High School said she had a valid teaching certificate and fingerprint card, along with letters of recommendation from her previous colleagues, when they hired her so had no reason to suspect she was under investigation.

Now the former student, who alleges he is Hofmann’s fiancée, is in jail on second-degree murder charges stemming from a “love triangle” in which he found the teacher naked with yet another of her teenage students last week. Student Number One was so enraged that he stabbed Student Number Two to death.

Sexual predator Hofmann will likely have her teaching certificate revoked.

Seeing Red AZ is seeing red. Read these recent posts on the topic here, here and here.

Nothing wrong with these teachers a good raise in salary couldn’t fix

In the post Much more than a double standard, Part Deux, we detailed the rash of lesbian teachers engaging young girls in sexually exploitive relationships and the ridiculously light sentences they have received for the harmful impact they have had on their victims.

Not only are these women, in positions of authority, abusing the trust placed in them by the schools that hired them and parents who entrusted them with their children, but they have betrayed their youthful victims in myriad ways.

Today, we present yet another in the seemingly endless parade. Apache Junction High School girls basketball coach Raeanna L. Jewell, 25, has admitted to luring a minor girl into a relationship, sending her flowers, making 6,000 minutes of phone calls and sending nude photographs to the student.

The news report in the daily quotes Jewell as admitting to having assignations with the girl in the gymnasium’s restroom. “I did it all,” she says.

We are repeatedly told that teachers are underpaid and taxpayers need to “get more money into the classroom.” How about emulating the novel approach used in business, which is rewarding work product with higher salaries? Basing increases on test scores is an idea whose time has come. And rewarding criminal behavior with reduced sentences must come to an end.

Another Catholic University capitulates to Obama

Georgetown University, one of the nation’s most prestigious universities, has covered over the monogram “IHS” — symbolizing the name of Jesus Christ — at the request of the Obama administration. The letters are inscribed on a pediment on the stage where President Obama spoke earlier this week. This is amazing in view if the fact that the university is run by Catholic Jesuit priests.

Notre Dame University has invited the pro-abortion Obama, (who voted three times to deny medical care to babies who survived botched abortions), to give the upcoming commencement address — resulting in an overwhelmingly negative response from Catholics who hold true to the teachings of the Church. Much to the chagrin of many, Obama will be the recipient of an honorary doctor of laws degree.

And although the “IHS” reference to Jesus Christ did not pass Obama’s muster nor did he mention the name directly during his address, he did refer to Christ’s Sermon on the Mount for political purposes:

“There is a parable at the end of the Sermon on the Mount that tells a story of two men…’the rain descended and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house…it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock,’” Obama said.

“We cannot rebuild this economy on the same pile of sand,” he added. “We must build our house upon a rock.”

“Economic recovery surcharges” hit AZ university students

Proposed tuition hikes place Arizona universities above national average

At a time when personal income is down and Arizona’s three state universities have previously increased fall 2009 tuition and fees, a proposal is on the table to include a $1,200 surcharge addition to Arizona State University tuition bills this fall. University of Arizona students could pay an extra $1,100. Officials at Northern Arizona University confirmed that the school is seeking a surcharge of $350.

Surcharges? Would those be what are commonly known as increases?

The Arizona Constitution (Article 11, Section 6) stipulates that public higher education be “as nearly free as possible.”

Arizona courts have seen cases filed on the issue of tuition increases.

The presidents of all three state schools, jumping on the political bandwagon, are proposing “economic recovery surcharges” to make up for cuts in their state funding. The proposals could be approved by the Arizona Board of Regents as early as April 30.

Read the article in the daily here.