News For A Friday

This one is a little long but it's been a busy news week.

It seems everyone is getting into the "white privilege" game. Recently it was announced that the University of Notre Dame is going to offer a seminar on the topic called “White Privilege Seminar: An Introduction to the Intersections of Privilege.” The purpose of the seminar is said to be to “educate and train” students “on the definitions of, historical/current paradigm of and causes/effects of white privilege.”

The seminar will be headed by Iris Outlaw, director of Notre Dame’s Multicultural Student Programs and Services. She also serves on the national board of the American Association of Blacks in Higher Education.

That's correct. Notre Dame is going to offer a seminar on white privilege to be taught by a black woman who, according to Republican campus activist Mark Gianfalla, last year "helped organize protests against the College Republicans’ hosting of Ann Coulter on campus under the premise that Ms. Coulter was a perpetrator of racial hate speech."

"Nothing is stopping her, however, from spewing the idea of white privilege and consequently white guilt in a University sanctioned course," Gianfalla says.

The seminar's description says that students will experience “personal transformation” and become “more aware of injustices and be better equipped with tools to disrupt personal, institutional and worldwide systems of oppression.”

At the end of the seminar students will be required to attend a White Privilege Conference in Louisville, Kentucky for three days. This conference “examines challenging concepts of privilege and oppression and offers solutions and team building strategies to work toward a more equitable world,” according to its website.

“The problem I see with this course is that it is teaching a flawed and inherently racist sociological theory as fact,” says Gianfalla. “This isn’t education. It’s indoctrination. Where is the required counterpoint course on affirmative action? It does not exist because that idea does not fit with the social and racial agenda of the professor.”


Speaking of universities - at least two universities in the United States have postponed exams for any student who "feel traumatized by the grand jury decisions in the Mike Brown and Eric Garner cases.

Really?

Pete Hegseth, a veteran of three tours in Afghanistan and CEO of Concerned Veterans For America, was interviewed by Megyn Kelly last night and naturally found this idea to be ridiculous. He drove home the point by talking about his own history and our military members.

"I was a student at Princeton on 9/11. I didn't get bereavement time," he said.

Hegseth went on to say he knows about the “Ivy League bubble world with adult children who don’t know what the real world is like and want to be coddled in their beliefs.” Hegseth attended Harvard after Princeton.

“Tell that to the soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan who didn’t get a day off; who watched their buddy get blown up, who saw their kids get born while they were overseas or their buddy killed. They didn’t get to sit back and wonder; they did their job no matter what.”

Megyn's other guest, a child and adolescent psychiatrist, says that the minority community is traumatized and there is nothing wrong with delaying the exams. Apparently he's not too worried about how these students will function in the real world when they have to deal with tragedy or traumatizing events and will still be expected to maintain their responsibilities.

The student at Columbia who are asking to delay their exams are law students. Kelly suggested each of them get an asterisk placed on their diplomas and should be required to tell perspective employers that they may not be able to go to court in the event of a traumatic situation.

World War II produced "The Greatest Generation." Today it seems the United States is producing "The Pantie Waist Generation...."


In other news, Senator Dianne Feinstein, who once called Edward Snowden a traitor for releasing government information to the public that she felt should not be released, released her own government information that most people don't think needed to be released. Feinstein released the Senate Intelligence Committee's (an oxymoron?) report on the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques (EIT) the other day saying the American people "need to know" when the United States screws up. She released it knowing full well that it could endanger Americans all over the world, particularly our military and civilians in the Middle East, and gave those people a 96 hour window to prepare for the potential increase in violent attacks before making the report public. Is this not also treason?

The CIA says the report is full of misrepresentations and untruths. Director John Brennan made a public statement yesterday contradicting Feinstein's claim that waterboarding and other EITs accomplished nothing and did not yield any information that could not have been gathered in more conventional ways. Dianne Feinstein apparently is an expert in interrogation and intelligence gathering techniques.

President Obama and John McCain support the release of the report. Neither of those two surprise me at all. McCain insists that you can get no valuable information by using EITs - even as the current CIA director and several  previous CIA directors (Leon Panetta, Michael Hayden, George J. Tenet, and Porter J. Goss) all say that very valuable intelligence came from using those techniques including information that eventually led to locating and killing Osama bin Laden. But again - Feinstein and McCain obviously know better than the directors because.... well, just because.

It is highly believed that Dianne Feinstein released the report for two reasons. First, she is angry at the CIA for spying on Senate computers. And second, in January she will most likely lose her position as Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

No Republicans members of the Senate Intelligence Committee supported the release of the report. Dianne Feinstein and the other Democrats who did should be removed from office. Oh wait... some of them will be in January!


Finally, it it believed by some members of the House of Representatives that Speaker John Boehner made a deal with President Obama last year about amnesty and that it was his intention to fund Obama's Executive Order on illegal immigration all along. I have said before that I believe amnesty, or at least a path to citizenship is coming for the illegals that are already here. Neither side really wants to deport them. Democrats see illegals as future Democrat voters and Republicans see deportation as the possibility of losing Hispanic voters (which historically has been disproved.)

Listening to Boehner's bold speeches then watching what he does has some wondering who got to him; who's pulling his strings. Is he a genuine RINO or does someone have something on him that they're using to get him to become a closet Democrat?

One thing is certain - in my lifetime this is the first time the majority party in the House of Representatives has elected an apparent member of the minority party as Speaker...