And On the Not-So-Light Side...

Here's something to infuriate you...

6 current and former San Francisco school employees face charges they embezzled millions

SAN FRANCISCO – Six current and former San Francisco school district employees are facing charges that they embezzled some $15 million in grant money from the district.

District Attorney George Gascon and Schools Superintendent Richard Carranza announced the felony grand theft and embezzlement charges on Tuesday. Prosecutors say the six diverted the federal and state grant money into hidden slush fund accounts through several nonprofits over a 10-year period.

Now, there's a whole bunch going wrong here. The six people charged bear the responsibility for the theft and fraud, of course, but where the hell was the oversight? In ten years, no one from the state or federal offices that oversaw grant distribution ever followed up? These grants were given to the San Francisco school district with no follow up on how the money was used? Shouldn't there be reporting requirements from using the grant money?

And then, there's the tidbit that three of the six are an associate superintendent and "two former senior executives". Say what? Why on earth does a city school district even HAVE "senior executives? How much, I wonder, do these "senior executives" earn in a year? And, lastly, I wonder how many "senior executives" have ever been faced with pink slips when there are budget shortfalls - like teachers and teacher's aides often are.

Don't answer that - it's rhetorical.

That is all.

Another dispatch from...

(image courtesy of Robb Allen)

What Is the Sound of One Hand Bitch-Slapping?

I imagine it would sound something like this:

SAF CONDEMNS TEXAS LAW PROF’S CLAIM THAT OH SCHOOL SHOOTING IS ‘EXERCISE OF 2A’

BELLEVUE, WA – The suggestion by a University of Texas law professor that Monday’s deadly school shooting in Ohio was a “typical exercise of the Second Amendment” is an outrage, the Second Amendment Foundation said today.

Calvin Johnson teaches law at UT in Austin, and his comments appeared in an e-mail that was exposed by a reporter for the Washington Free Beacon. The story also revealed that Johnson defended the City of Chicago’s handgun ban, which SAF successfully challenged before the U.S. Supreme Court in McDonald v. City of Chicago. Prof. Johnson has also suggested that it is “quite reasonable” to dismiss James Madison’s motivations for including a right to keep and bear arms in the Bill of Rights as “historical trivia.”

Read the whole thing. Alan Gottlieb essentially goes up one side of the perfesser and down the other. It's pretty shocking that someone with an alleged higher education degree in law is so grossly ignorant of the meaning of the Second Amendment - or so blinded by ideology that he willfully misrepresents it...

"Historical trivia". You know, that just sets me off. I wonder what else Professor Johnson thinks is "trivial" about our Bill of Rights. He obviously doesn't think that the First Amendment is trivial, else he'd be concerned about losing his cushy state job over mouthing such ignorant comments. I half-expected him to start talking about how we could only have muskets, since those were the only firearms around at the time of the BoR.

I think I can safely scratch UT Austin off the list of serious law schools for my kids...

That is all.

Basketweaving 102...

Skidmark sends in this story about real, honest-to-goodness college courses. Folks, I couldn't make this up if I tried...

I got an A in Phallus 101

THE "DIRTY DOZEN" list of "America's Most Bizarre and Politically Correct College Courses" is out — and Los Angeles-area institutions of higher learning have walked away with one-fourth of the ranked honors (or dishonors). Occidental College, an 1,800-student liberal arts school in Eagle Rock, is the only college on the list to collect not one but two citations for excellence at offering trendy theories of gender, skin color and white-male oppression at the expense of actual academic content.
...
The list comes from the Young America's Foundation, a 40-year-old nonprofit funded by conservative individuals and foundations. Its No. 1 slot this year for bizarre class offerings went to Occidental, for a course called "The Phallus."

This is a for-credit college course where they discuss "the meaning of the phallus". You know, even Freud admitted that, sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar... Sometimes it's just too damn hard to mock stuff like this, because the truth really is stranger than fiction. Go read the article and see what passes for classes in college these days...

I mean, I felt kinda bad when I was in college and I took a class called "History of Film". It was a full three credit course that met once a week for a three hour stretch - we would have ~ 45 minutes of classroom teaching, watch a 2 hour movie, then discuss for the remainder of the time. We had four papers over the course of the semester, no tests. It was, hands-down, the easiest course I took in college with the possible exceptions of Basic Programming (yes, I went to school some time in the Dark Ages) or Intro to French (I was fluent at the time).

But I never took a class on "The Art of the Guido" or whatever feelgood BS passes for higher "learning" today...

That is all.