Category: ZT & PC

Zero Tolerance policies — where (in the instance of schools) being caught with anything that could be used by someone in some strange, parallel universe as a weapon, or carrying (let alone, my God, sharing) OTC medications, or other such heinous crimes, is punishable by suspension, expulsion, or flogging — continue to come under fire.

Interestingly enough, conservatives, who once led the charge for ZT, are realizing how really stupid these laws and regs are.

It’s still an uphill battle, though, as legislators are concerned that backing off from ZT might make them look “soft on crime,” and as administrators of the laws worry about being stuck with the responsibility to act responsibly, not the comfort of having a knee-jerk reaction to rely on. Take for example the experience of this Virginia legislator who tried to get his statehouse education committee to take some reasonable steps.

Marrs sought no revolution; he proposed only that exceptions to the zero tolerance rule be carved out for students who defend themselves, children caught possessing a plastic cafeteria utensil without threatening or attacking others and students who possess a nonprescription medication with a parent’s permission. “On any given day, any number of teenage girls are walking around with a Midol in their pocketbook,” Marrs said. A crime worthy of expulsion?
But a procession of lobbyists representing principals and school boards defended zero tolerance as our last line of defense against terrible children eager to turn schools into war zones. A member of the Henrico County School Board, desperate to save a system that teaches children the opposite of discretion, even played the terrorism card, arguing to lawmakers that plastic utensils are a primo tool for budding hijackers.
Marrs’s bill died in a 13 to 8 vote.

Still better examples of ZT run amok can be found in the article.

(Via OpinionJournal)

We are at war. Every penny counts.

Homeland security is drawing on all our economic resources.

Profligate government spending is on the administration hit list, as it tries to cut taxes and thus government expenditures.

The workers at Enron have lost their life savings. They desperately need money to pay the mortgage, the rent, utilities.

There are people hungry in this country. People hurt. People who need help, clinics to help them get off drugs, doctors to cure their illness.

Money. There are so many places that we need to spend it, save it, apply it with wisdom and compassion and commitment.

Then why the flying flimflam is our nitwitted US Attorney General spending over eight thousand dollars buying draperies to cover up the huge art deco statues in the Great Hall of the Justice Department?

Was it because …

… one of the statues, “The Spirit of Justice,” is of a woman wearing a toga, one breast (gasp!) exposed? While the other, “The Majesty of Law,” is a man weaing a loin cloth?

… Ashcroft, a staunch religious conservative, found the statues offensive?

… particularly when reporters photographed him in front of them?

… because he’s got money to burn in the DoJ budget, and he thought having the statues destroyed would seem too Taliban-like?

Well we now know that he’s not only a religious conservative (which is not, per se, a bad thing), but he’s a nut about it (which is). And petty. And, based on the ongoing false stories fed to the press, denying any plans to buy the draperies, willing to lie about it.

Oh, and we know that the Spirit of Justice and the Majesty of Law will be under wraps for the rest of this administration.

(Via Sekimori)

The state of Georgia, miracle of miracles, is realizing that Borg-like zero tolerance laws are creating travesties of justice.

The most notorious case was in Cobb County in suburban Atlanta, where sixth-grader Ashley Smith was suspended for 10 days for bringing to school a Tweety Bird wallet with a long keychain attached. The school district said the chain was a weapon and violated its zero-tolerance rule.
“Certainly that little girl had no harmful intent in wearing that Tweety Bird chain around her waist,” Marable said. “I think there are some gray areas we are looking at.”
Marable also brought up the case of a Georgia Eagle Scout who returned to school from a weekend expedition with a broken ax in his car. The ax was discovered during a random search of the car, and the boy was punished, Marable said.
“He had no history of an intent to do harm and yet he had been treated as if he had brought a gun onto campus,” he said. “We’ve had many cases along that line.”

ZT laws always remind me of the prototype law enforcement robot in the original Robocop movie — the one that would get it into its head that you were a threat, ignore all evidence to the contrary, and machine-gun you into a bloody pulp. We need some rationality, some leeway put back into the system, and the proposed amendments to the law let school boards (in this instance) know that they have such leeway.

The only thing we need to remember is the reason some of these laws got so tight-assed is (a) folks were using that leeway as an excuse not to do anything in what were clearly dangerous situations, largely because (b) unjustly accused folks were suing the asses off of school districts who acted at their discretion, while (c) cases where stuff slipped through the cracks also led to massive law suits.

School districts (and others) have tended to like ZT laws (even while they hate them) because it removes the risk. Where they miss something, they can show how diligent they’ve been in so many cases. Where someone didn’t enforce a ZT law, it gives them a scape goat. Where folks were unjustly raked over the coals, they could point to the letter of the law and say they had no choice.

Well, now they do, and they’ll have to take responsibility for their actions. By the same token, I desperately hope that where districts do act in good faith and with reasonable judgment, that litigation-happy idiots will not roll back what good the Georgia legislature is now trying to do.

Maybe it was a matter of sufficient motivation.

Israeli prosecutors say Munther and Muzhir Badir, two young and mischievous Israeli Arab brothers, managed to tap into an Israeli Defense Force radio-station switchboard last year and make international phone calls. Piercing such sensitive networks would seem to be an achievement for two members of Israel’s marginalized Arab community – especially since the brothers, who aren’t college-educated, have been blind since birth. Even prosecutor Doron Porat calls Munther Badir, the alleged “cybercrime” ringleader who prosecutors say had other accomplices, a “genius … who has clearly overcome this disability.”
As the Badir trial begins in a Tel Aviv district court, other Israeli Arabs are either taking delight in seeing Israel annoyed by the two brothers, or casting the Badirs as innocent victims of an Israeli conspiracy. After all, some ask, how could a blind person engineer such a scheme?

While this is a few years old, Mary heard in passing a mention of one of the brothers being sentenced today.

(Via Mary)

Somehow I expect that there are more critical social needs to be met out there than tracking down Possibly Offensive License Plates. Nonetheless, that’s what someone evidently did. Now Dale Atkeson, a former player for the Washington Redskins, has to turn in his 1REDSKIN vanity plate.

(Via Ken Layne)

Over the last decade or so, there’s been an increasing deification of Muhammed Ali, culminating in the current film. Unfortunately, the film’s tagline, “Forget what you think you know,” seems to mean, “Forget what the historical record shows.” Ali, a very talented boxer, was no saint.

Under the influence of Elijah Mohammad – who preached that blacks should refuse to integrate with “white devils” – Ali made a point of dating only black women and lashed out at men and women who engaged in interracial sex. In an interview with Playboy, he declared: “A black man should be killed if he’s messing with a white woman.” When the interviewer asked about black women crossing the colour barrier, Ali responded: “Then she dies. Kill her, too.”
It’s unlikely that a white athlete who made such remarks would receive the praise that Michael Mann heaps on Ali. He says that the fighter “personified racial pride and self-knowledge”. The Playboy journalist, who interviewed the boxer, was closer to the mark when he observed of his subject: “You’re beginning to sound like a carbon copy of a white racist.”

(Via Andrew Sullivan)

John Walker, the American-turned-Taliban, has become the favorite whipping boy for various conservative pundits who see him as the archetypical leftist loonie from Marin County. Never mind that joining the Taliban is not exactly a leftist thing to do, the point of their critique is that Walker’s parents — and, more importantly, their wishy-washy left-leaning fuzzy-headed liberalism (the brush with which Marin is widely painted) — are to blame for Walker being a mess.

But, as Steve Chapman points out in the Chicago Tribune, that’s not a fair conclusion.

The rush to blame Walker’s crimes on his free-thinking parents and his wealthy, liberal hometown is way too facile. Timothy McVeigh came from what conservatives might call a “refreshingly unenlightened” place–Pendleton, N.Y., a blue-collar town of 5,000 people near Buffalo. He was also an Army veteran who saw combat during the Gulf War. But I don’t recall any conservatives saying that something rotten in the culture of Pendleton or Ft. Riley, Kan., brought on the Oklahoma City bombing.
Likewise, Theodore Kaczynski grew up in the heavily Catholic, salt-of-the-earth Chicago suburb of Evergreen Park, which is known as “The Village of Churches.” But when the Unabomber was finally caught, no one blamed his murderous attacks on the pervasiveness of Christianity and patriotism in his youthful surroundings.

(Via Overlawyered)

A woman who was injured in a terrorist attack on a McDonalds in France is suing McDonalds.

Nell Sanders Aspero, 54, says she was eating in a Paris McDonald’s on Jan. 7 when several men wearing hoods walked into the restaurant and dropped a canister bomb and pro-Iraqi leaflets picturing Saddam Hussein and then fled, according to a suit filed in federal court in Denver on Wednesday.
She said the canister released an unknown chemical into the air and a liquid that spread across the floor and into the leaflets.

The chemical attack has evidently left Aspero with vision and neurological problems.

So why pick on McDonalds? (Aside from their being much easier to sue than terroirsts, that is.) Aspero says McDonalds was warned something like this might happen, and failed to take proper steps.

The US State Dept. had issued a global warning a few days earlier, noting a “concern about the possibility of terrorist acts abroad” against American targets, as it was the 10th Anniversary of the Gulf War.

However, what was McDonalds to do? Close their stores worldwide? Hire armed security guards for each location? Put a big warning sign on their doors?

It doesn’t matter, of course. It’s a shame that Ms. Aspero was injured, but McDonalds has no more responsibility in the matter, that I can see, than she had in taking the personal risk of being “an American abroad.”