Below is a partially imported article from World Net Daily and American Power Blog, above this writing is a couple of doors where liberal professors post their rhetoric. The conservative professors door hangings are called offensive while the liberal professors door rhetoric is not. Typical.
A college in Michigan has decided to allow harsh criticisms of President Bush to be posted on university property, but has banned criticism of violent terrorists and abortion, according to an educational rights group that is challenging the school's practice.
The issue involves Lake SuperiorStateUniversity in Sault St. Marie, which has ordered Professor Richard Crandall, a nearly 40-year veteran of teaching, to remove the expressions of opinion from his office door and practice his academic freedom with "responsibility."
"LSSU is displaying serious disrespect for faculty rights by demanding that Professor Crandall remove materials about public concerns from his office door," said Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. "The political double standard in this case is striking."...
The first complaints date back to 2005, and the professor, Richard Crandall, was ordered to remove the materials from his door in 2007 (he eventually complied). Items included a photo of Ronald Reagan, pictures mocking Hillary Clinton, a sign posting a “Notice of the Weekly Meeting of the White, Male, Heterosexual Faculty and Staff Association (WMHFSA),” and various cartoons about abortion, Islamic terrorism and other topics. One depicts two hooded women looking over a photo album. One says, “And that’s my youngest son, Hakim. He’ll be martyring in the fall.” The other replies, “They blow up so fast.”
The university argues that the postings contribute to a hostile environment and therefore do not fall under First Amendment protections, although such arguments have not fared well historically in the courts. No lawsuit has been filed, but in the past some professors whose cases have been publicized by FIRE have pursued legal action. The university did not respond to requests for comment.
FIRE and Crandall, who could not be reached for comment, point out that other professors at the university are able to post politically charged pictures and phrases on their doors without consequence, presumably because their perspective is liberal or leftist rather than conservative or right-wing. (The university appeared to argue that it wasn’t the political perspective but the denigration of religious minorities that was the problem.) In photographs provided to FIRE, one Lake Superior State professor’s door features an “Exxpose Exxon” slogan and an “Honor Veterans: No More War” bumper sticker, while another door bears a sign asking if the Bush administration works for “Big Oil and Gas.”...
Below is a couple of the pieces of rhetoric professor Crandall was forced to remove or originally caused the hoopla.
SACRAMENTO - Joe Six-pack will have to pay a lot more to get his buzz on if Assemblyman Jim Beall has his way.
The San Jose Democrat on Thursday proposed raising the beer tax by $1.80 per six-pack, or 30 cents per can or bottle. The current tax is 2 cents per can. That's an increase of about 1,500 percent.
Beall said the tax would generate $2 billion a year to fund health care services, crime prevention and programs to prevent underage drinking and addiction.
Detroit (my home town) is a mess... from the liberal city council on down!
Detroit Council hearing adjourned amid shouting match - Post Media Reply “You're not my Daddy. You're not going to disrespect me. Grow up! Control your house and learn how to treat women.”
A Detroit City Council special investigative session into a police whistle-blower lawsuit settlement erupted into a yelling match when President Pro Tem Monica Conyers, left, made claims that she was being disrespected. Also shown are Council President Kenneth Cockrel Jr. and Councilwoman JoAnn Watson.
A Detroit City Council special investigative session into a police whistle-blower lawsuit settlement erupted into a yelling match when President Pro Tem Monica Conyers made claims that she was being disrespected.
The argument began when Conyers asked an independent attorney who was testifying if the council could be sued by Detroit residents for approving the $8.4-million lawsuit settlement.
Councilwoman JoAnn Watson said: “They can sue you; I voted no.”
Conyers told Watson to stop interrupting and disrespecting her. She added: “We all know how you voted; you don't have to keep repeating it.”
Moments later, Conyers interrupted Council President Ken Cockrel as he was questioning Carl Edwards, the Detroit attorney. Cockrel reminded Conyers that he had the floor and banged his gavel repeatedly.
Conyers railed: “You're not my Daddy. You're not going to disrespect me. Grow up! Control your house and learn how to treat women.”
Cockrel told Conyers that she was “one to talk.”
Conyers also made repeated mocking reference to Cockrel as Shrek, the green, grumpy and rotund ogre from the animated film.
As the council members yelled at each other, residents attending the hearings yelled, as well. “You're disrespecting the citizens!” and “This is a shame!”
Cockrel took a quick recess to regain order before then breaking for lunch. 4/11/2008 Detroit Free Press
(IsraelNN.com) Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has turned down a request from former American president Jimmy Carter for a meeting during his visit to Israel next week. The Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni both said that their schedules will not allow a meeting, but an anonymous Israeli official told the Washington Times, “You draw your own conclusions.”
Obama's church gave a "Lifetime Achievement Award" to this guy. Remember that he believes he was taken up in a UFO and told explicit things about himself and white people.Here are four pages from a wonderful book that I enjoyed from front to back (click on them to enlarge – and again to get it even bigger):
Easily then one can read for themselves the lunacy involved in the black community.But I will post a couple of videos below so you can hear for yourselves how off the wall this guy is and then you should wonder why a “christian” church would give an award to such a man... NUTS I SAY!
A dude in his car lays it out nicely. Step four is scarry!! This will bring in the leftist ideology of state control again... leading to what the Left always leads to... death and control.
I wanted to import this small article over to my site to keep the few readers I have up to date on the imbedded racism inherent in organizations that are often thought of as helpful to the black community:
The Detroit chapter of the NAACP has invited none other than the Reverend Jeremiah Wright to give the keynote address at the annual NAACP Freedom Fund Dinner: Guess who’s coming to town for dinner?
I got to thinking about Martin Luther Kings speeches and writings, including his doctoral dissertation.So I decided to import the entire Wikipedia article to my blog so others can chomp on it a bit.
I wish to note however, that once again the Republicans were on the cutting edge of racial issues leaps and bounds ahead of the “Party of Slavery,” i.e., the Democrats.
Dissertation and other academic papers
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s papers were donated by his wife Coretta Scott King to Stanford University's King Papers Project. During the late 1980s, as the papers were being organized and worked on, the staff of the project made a discovery that dismayed them — King's doctoral dissertation at Boston University, titled A Comparison of the Conception of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman, included large sections from a dissertation written by another student (Jack Boozer) three years earlier at Boston University.[1]
As Clayborne Carson, director of the King Papers Project at Stanford University, has written, "instances of textual appropriation can be seen in his earliest extant writings as well as his dissertation. The pattern is also noticeable in his speeches and sermons throughout his career."[2]
Boston University, where King got his Ph.D. in systematic theology, conducted an investigation that found he plagiarized major portions of his doctoral thesis from various other authors who wrote about the topic.[3][4]
According to Ralph E. Luker, who worked on the King Papers Project directing the research on King's early life, King's paper The Chief Characteristics and Doctrines of Mahayana Buddhism (available here) was taken almost entirely from secondary sources.[5] He writes:
Moreover, the farther King went in his academic career, the more deeply ingrained the patterns of borrowing language without clear attribution became. Thus, the plagiarism in his dissertation seemed to be, by then, the product of his long established practice.[5]
Although several newspapers had the story for over a year, none published it, later prompting speculation that the story had been withheld due to political correctness. The incident was first reported in December 3, 1989 edition of the Sunday Telegraph by Frank Johnson, titled "Martin Luther King--Was He a Plagiarist?" The incident was then reported in U.S. in the November 9, 1990 edition of the Wall Street Journal, under the title of "To Their Dismay, King Scholars Find a Troubling Pattern." Several other newspapers then followed with stories, including the Boston Globe and the New York Times. Numerous newspaper editorials defended King, saying he was still a great man regardless of his actions. Some articles questioned why the plagiarism went unnoticed.
BostonUniversity decided not to revoke his doctorate, which provoked another controversy,[citation needed] saying that although King acted improperly, his dissertation still "makes an intelligent contribution to scholarship." However, a letter is now attached to King's dissertation in the university library, noting that numerous passages were included without the appropriate quotations and citations of sources.[6][1]
Ralph Luker has questioned whether King's professors at Crozer held him to lower standards because he was an African-American, citing as evidence the fact that King received lower marks (a C+ average) at the historically black Morehouse College than at Crozer, where he was a minority being graded mostly by white teachers and received an A- average.[5][7] However, BostonUniversity has denied that King received any special treatment.[6]
The Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project addresses authorship issues on pp. 25-26 of Volume II of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., entitled "Rediscovering Precious Values, July 1951–November 1955," Clayborne Carson, Senior Editor. Following is an excerpt from these pages:
The readers of King's dissertation, L. Harold DeWolf and S. Paul Schilling, a professor of systematic theology who had recently arrived at BostonUniversity, failed to notice King's problematic use of sources. After reading a draft of the dissertation, DeWolf criticized him for failing to make explicit "presuppositions and norms employed in the critical evaluation," but his comments were largely positive. He commended King for his handling of a "difficult" topic "with broad learning, impressive ability and convincing mastery of the works immediately involved." Schilling found two problems with King's citation practices while reading the draft, but dismissed these as anomalous and praised the dissertation in his Second Reader's report....
As was true of King's other academic papers, the plagiaries in his dissertation escaped detection in his lifetime. His professors at Boston, like those at Crozer, saw King as an earnest and even gifted student who presented consistent, though evolving, theological identity in his essays, exams and classroom comments.... Although the extent of King's plagiaries suggest he knew that he was at least skirting academic norms, the extant documents offer no direct evidence in this matter. Thus he may have simply become convinced, on the basis of his grades at Crozer and Boston, that his papers were sufficiently competent to withstand critical scrutiny. Moreover, King's actions during his early adulthood indicate that he increasingly saw himself as a preacher appropriating theological scholarship rather than as an academic producing such scholarship....
Speeches
Perhaps most notably, the closing passage from King's famous "I Have a Dream" speech partially resembles Archibald Carey, Sr.'s address to the 1952 Republican National Convention. The similarity is that both speeches end with a recitation of the first verse of Samuel Francis Smith's popular patriotic hymn "America" (My Country ’Tis of Thee), and the speeches share the name of one of several mountains from which both exhort "let freedom ring".
Keith Miller, in Voice of Deliverance: The Language of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Its Sources and elsewhere,[8] argues that such "borrowing", which he terms "voice merging", follows in a long tradition of folk preaching, particularly in the African American church, and should not necessarily be termed plagiarism. On the contrary, he views King's skillful combination of language from different sources as a major oratorical skill.
Charles A. Radin. "Panel confirms plagiarism by King at BU". Boston Globe, Oct 11 1991, p. 1.
Clayborne Carson; Peter Holloran; Ralph E. Luker; Penny Russell. Martin Luther King, Jr., as Scholar: A Reexamination of His Theological Writings. The Journal of American History, Vol. 78, No. 1 (Jun., 1991), pp. 93-105.
Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers Project. The Student Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.: A Summary Statement on Research. The Journal of American History, Vol. 78, No. 1 (Jun., 1991), pp. 23-31.
David Levering Lewis. Failing to Know Martin Luther King, Jr. The Journal of American History, Vol. 78, No. 1 (Jun., 1991), pp. 81-85.
David Thelen. Becoming Martin Luther King Jr: An Introduction. The Journal of American History, Vol. 78, No. 1 (Jun., 1991), pp. 11-22
...Is She an Excellent Archetype of the False Prophet?
(One must keep in mind that Oprah toured with a man that will have an enormous impact on the world if he becomes President... here I am speaking of Obama.) A reader sent this video to me, and it is a great compilation of actual footage with Oprah being the largest watched progenitor of New Age beliefs the world has seen.she brings in many new age thinkers who otherwise wouldn’t have the audience that she offers them.Her rhetoric is very easily refuted, but knowing and having a coherent worldview is just the beginning of one’s journey to refuting such nonsense... watch the video first and then I will post a portion from my writings that will explain with examples from more learned men than I:
A great example of this “foundational error” can be found in the wonderful book Philosophy for Dummies that fully express the crux of Dr. Adler’s point:
Statement: There is no such thing as absolute truth.[47]
By applying the law of non-contradiction to this statement, one will be able to tell if this statement is coherent enough to even consider thinking about.Are you ready?The first question should be, “is this an absolute statement?”Is the statement making an ultimate, absolute claim about truth?If so, it is actually asserting what it is trying to deny, and so is self-deleting – more simply, it is logically incoherent as a comprehensible position[48] as it is in violation of the law of non-contradiction.
Many will try to reject logic in order to accept mutually contradictory beliefs; often times religious pluralism[49] is the topic with which many try to suppress these universal laws in separating religious claims that are mutually exclusive.Professor Roy Clouser puts into perspective persons that try to minimize differences by throwing logical rules to the wayside:
The program of rejecting logic in order to accept mutually contradictory beliefs is not, however, just a harmless, whimsical hope that somehow logically incompatible beliefs can both be true…it results in nothing less than the destruction of any and every concept we could possess.Even the concept of rejecting the law of non-contradiction depends on assuming and using that law, since without it the concept of rejecting it could neither be thought nor stated.[50]
Dr. Clouser then goes on to show how a position of psychologist Erich Fromm is “self-assumptively incoherent.”[51]What professor Clouser is saying is that this is not a game.Alister McGrath responds to the religious pluralism of theologian John Hick by showing just how self-defeating this position is:
The belief that all religions are ultimately expressions of the same transcendent reality is at best illusory and at worst oppressive – illusory because it lacks any substantiating basis and oppressive because it involves the systematic imposition of the agenda of those in positions of intellectual power on the religions and those who adhere to them.The illiberal imposition of this pluralistic metanarrative[52] on religions is ultimately a claim to mastery – both in the sense of having a Nietzschean authority and power to mold material according to one’s will, and in the sense of being able to relativize all the religions by having access to a privileged standpoint.[53]
In other words, John Hicks is applying an absolute religious claim while at the same time saying there is no absolute religious claims to religious reality.It is self-assumptively incoherent.Another example comes from the belief that that all morality can be explained in naturalistic, cultural terms.Anthropologist William Sumner argues that “every attempt to win an outside standpoint from which to reduce the whole to an absolute philosophy of truth and right, based on an unalterable principle, is delusion.”[54]Authors Francis Beckwith and Gregory Koukl respond to this self-defeating claim by pointing out that:
Sumner is making a strong claim here about knowledge.He says that all claims to know objective moral truth are false because we are all imprisoned in our own cultural and are incapable of seeing beyond the limits of our own biases.He concludes, therefore, that moral truth is relative to culture and that no objective standard exists.Sumner’s analysis falls victim to the same error committed by religious pluralists who see all religions as equally valid.[55]
The authors continue:
Sumner’s view, however, is self-refuting.In order for him to conclude that all moral claims are an illusion, he must first escape the illusion himself.He must have a full and accurate view of the entire picture….Such a privileged view is precisely what Sumner denies.Objective assessments are illusions, he claims, but then he offers his own “objective” assessment.It is as if he were saying, “We’re all blind,” and then adds, “but I’ll tell you what the world really looks like.” This is clearly contradictory.[56]
Philosopher Roger Scruton drives this point home when he says, “A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely negative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.”[57]Professor J. P. Moreland adds to the above by pointing out that self-refuting claims collapse under their own weight:
When a statement fails to satisfy itself (i.e., to conform to its own criteria of validity or acceptability), it is self-refuting….Consider some examples.“I cannot say a word in English” is self-refuting when uttered in English.“I do not exist” is self-refuting, for one must exist to utter it.The claim “there are no truths” is self-refuting.If it is false, then it is false. But is it is true, then it is false as well, for in that case there would be no truths, including the statement itself.[58]
You see, the believer doesn’t need in this case to quote a Scripture or insert something into another’s belief.All the believer has to do is show how a person’s idea or belief or statement destructs under it own weight.This idea will come up again, but this is a good introduction to what a worldview is and some of the principles that every worldview must first assume, that is, first principles.
One last example of a self-refuting/incoherent worldview comes from A Handbook for Christian Philosophy, by L. Russ Bush.After giving a basic definition of what a worldview is,[59] Dr. Bush goes on to explain how differing worldviews can view reality and then he applies some first principles to the matter:
… most people assume that something exists.There may be someone, perhaps, who believes that nothing exists, but who would that person be?How could he or she make such an affirmation?Sometimes in studying the history of philosophy, one may come to the conclusion that some of the viewpoints expressed actually lead to that conclusion, but no one ever consciously tries to defend the position that nothing exists.It would be a useless endeavor since there would be no one to convince.Even more significantly, it would be impossible to defend that position since, if it were true, there would be no one to make the defense.So to defend the position that nothing exists seems immediately to be absurd and self-contradictory.[60]
Take note that Dr. Bush didn’t pit Christian theism against pantheistic Hinduism, it wasn’t East vs. West, he merely enlightened the reader to the self-refuting nature within pantheism itself… it was East vs. the laws of logic.While this chapter was not expressly a chapter to refute any particular philosophical or religious position, the adept reader will find – for sure – some great offensive explanatory power herein.
Footnotes
[47] Tom Morris, Philosophy for Dummies (Foster City, CA: IDG Books; 1999), p. 46
[48] Ibid.
[49]Religious Pluralism – “the belief that every religion is true.Each religion provides a genuine encounter with the Ultimate.” Norman L. Geisler, Baker Encyclopedia of Apologetics (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1999), 598.
[50] Roy A. Clouser, The Myth of Religious Neutrality: An Essay on the Hidden Role of Religious Belief in Theories (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame Press, 2005), 178.
[51] Ibid.
[52]Metanarratives or Grand Narratives – “big stories, stories of mythic proportions – that claim to be able to account for, explain and subordinate all lesser, little, local, narratives.” Jim Powell, Postmodernism for Beginners (New York, NY: Writers and Readers, 1998), 29.
[53] Alister E. McGrath, Passion for Truth: the Intellectual Coherence of Evangelicalism (Downers Grove, IL: IVP,1996), 239.
[54] William Graham Sumner, Folkways (Chicago, IL: Ginn and Company, 1906), in Relativism: Feet Planted firmly in Mid-Air, Francis Beckwith and Gregory Koukl (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 1998), 46-47.
[55] Francis Beckwith and Gregory Koukl, Relativism: Feet Planted Firmly in Mid-Air (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 1998), 47.
[56] Ibid., 48
[57]Modern Philosophy (New York, NY: Penguin, 1996), 6.Found in, Does God Believe in Atheists? by John Blanchard (Darlington, England: Evangelical Press, 2000), 172.
[58] J. P. Moreland, Scaling the SecularCity: A Defense of Christianity. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 1987), p. 92.
[59]“A worldview is that basic set of assumptions that gives meaning to one’s thoughts. A worldview is the set of assumptions that someone has about the way things are, about what things are, about why things are.” L. Russ Bush, A Handbook for Christian Philosophy (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1991), 70.
[V]irtually every significant racist in American political history was a Democrat. – Bruce Bartlett
Democrats, seen as the civil rights party, supported slavery, opposed civil rights legislation, instituted the "Black Codes," and created the Jim Crow system. The Republican Party, in contrast, was founded in opposition to slavery, and supported post-Civil War and Civil Rights Movement-era legislation.
"All of the racism that we associate with [the southern] region of the country originated with and was enforced by elected Democrats," writes Bruce Bartlett, a former domestic policy advisor to President Ronald Reagan and a Treasury official under President George H.W. Bush. In Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party's Buried Past, Bartlett goes deep into the history of the Democratic Party and attempts to set the record straight.
Bartlett discusses the motivations of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson to maintain slavery and how Andrew Johnson ("a Democrat his whole life") tried to block post-Civil War legislation designed to protect newly freed slaves. He includes obscure figures like Senator Benjamin Tillman from South Carolina, whose "consistent theme…was that black men had some sort of compulsion to mate with white women," and Senator Theodore Bilbo from Mississippi, whose "permanent resolution of the race problem" in 1938 was to send blacks back to Africa and/or create a 49th state for them "somewhere in the West."
Woodrow Wilson, a liberal who implemented progressive reforms while in office, also instituted racial segregation throughout the federal government. And Bartlett notes that Wilson's attorney general "did far more to repress free speech and political freedom" than Senator Joe McCarthy, a Republican, ever attempted. But when was the last time Hollywood made a movie about A. Mitchell Palmer?
Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had a "reputation for being a progressive on the race issue," wasn't much better on civil rights. He appointed a Klan member to the Supreme Court and ordered the internment of Americans of Japanese descent during WWII. Republican Dwight Eisenhower, "conventionally portrayed as having done nothing for blacks during his eight years," passed civil rights bills in 1957 (the first since Reconstruction) and 1960. Eisenhower also sent federal troops to enforce school desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Bartlett praises Democrat Harry Truman for signing an executive order establishing a presidential committee on civil rights, an unpopular move in the party, but spares none for President John F. Kennedy, who receives far more credit on civil rights than he deserves. Kennedy did nothing substantive on civil rights, contends Bartlett, and what he did do was largely symbolic as he tried to avoid antagonizing Southern Democrats. He credits President Lyndon B. Johnson for "finally repudiating both his own segregationist past and the Democratic Party's" in the wake of Kennedy's assassination.
And what about the so-called Southern strategy? Bartlett calls it a myth. There was no strategy "to carry racist votes through coded messages about crime and welfare, as is often alleged." During his campaign in 1968, President Richard M. Nixon emphasized his support for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and picked Spiro Agnew as his vice president, a man reputed to be strong on civil rights.
The shift in Southern voting patterns from Democratic to Republican had to have been about race, right? According to Bartlett, economic changes in the South were the primary factor. During the Democrats' political reign, the South had been the poorest region. As the South's wealth increased, southerners became receptive to Republican messages of low taxes and small government.
People tend to forget that Nixon pushed to desegregate schools, denying federal aid to segregated school districts. "Just one month into his presidency," Bartlett writes, "any idea that Nixon was pursuing a Southern strategy had been thoroughly discredited."
Unfortunately, Nixon also implemented government race preferences.
Bartlett's meticulously researched Wrong on Race concludes with suggestions on how Republicans can reach out to black voters, including connecting on immigration policy and this stunner: getting behind the idea of slavery reparations. Bartlett tries to make the case on legal, public policy, and political grounds.
If reaching out to black voters has to involve reparations race pandering, don't bother. Despite that shocker at the end, Wrong on Race provides ammunition for Republicans fed up with being called racists.
La Shawn Barber is a freelance writer and Townhall.com book reviewer who blogs at www.lashawnbarber.com.
