Tag Archives: The Sacramento Bee

No, It’s Not A Level Playing Field

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Not every American high school student took part on the much-publicized anti-gun march in Washington last month. However, you might not have known that if you depend on the mainstream media for your news. Some California students wondered if a pro-life (anti-abortion) march would be treated equally by schools and in the press. Yesterday The Sacramento Bee posted an article that answers that question.

The article reports:

Rocklin High School junior Brandon Gillespie wanted to test school administrators when he planned a walkout Tuesday to protest abortion. Would the school punish anti-abortion protesters for leaving classes for 17 minutes, the same amount of time that students taking part in the National School Walkout left classes on March 14, without discipline?

The answer was no.

About 40 students holding pro-life signs left classes at about 10 a.m. and squared off peacefully in the quad with 10 or so students holding pro-choice signs, according to district officials, who would not allow media near the protest. Another dozen students looked on, according to officials. There were a few speeches, but after about 17 minutes, the students returned to class.

District officials said there were no plans to discipline the students.

The article also notes that about 350 schools nationwide participated in the march on Tuesday. How much news coverage did they get?

The article also notes another difference between the two marches:

Gillespie and Benzel both say that Tuesday’s protesters were not treated the same as the participants in the National School Walkout, who were given tents to shelter them from the rain and a public address system. Teachers also were directed not to discipline students who participated in the March 14 protest, Benzel said. She said similar directives were not given to teachers about Tuesday’s protest, although the district did say it would not punish students who participated in the protest Tuesday.

No, it’s not a level playing field. The media is not doing the job the American people need done. The death of the mainstream media will be the result of their own actions–they have no one to blame but themselves.

 

Laws That Really Don’t Make Any Sense

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Just when you think state legislators couldn’t pass any more weird laws, someone comes up with a new idea. The law I am about to describe is not only unnecessary and useless, it doesn’t even apply where it might matter.

Hot Air is reporting today that California has politically gone off the deep end.

The article reports:

A California lawmaker has introduced a bill that would ban government-funded travel to states with laws that he says discriminate on sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression.

“No one wants to send employees into an environment where they would be uncomfortable,” said Democrat Evan Low, Jon Ortiz, a reporter for the Sacramento Bee, reported this week.

Low said he decided to introduce the bill after Indiana signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act into law in March 2015.

Does the law include government-funded travel of women to Saudi Arabia and other countries where they do not have equal rights?

I believe that America is made up of states. The last I heard, each state had the freedom to make laws that applied in that state. California is perfectly within its rights to limit the travel of government officials or employees to places where they will not be uncomfortable. Obviously, being within your rights does not mean that what you are doing can be described as logical or sensible.

It gets worse. The article explains:

Low said he doesn’t know which states his bill would apply to yet. He said it would not cover lawmakers and political trips but would affect administrative travel.

So what, pray tell, is the point of this legislation?

 

Unintended Consequences Can Be Brutal

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One of the recent news stories has been the granting of driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants in California. Breitbart.com posted a story yesterday reporting how that is going.

A few snippets from the story:

Many illegal immigrants at a Northern California DMV reportedly were failing the written exam when applying for driver’s licenses on Friday.

…At a DMV in south Sacramento, Veronica Oropeza, a 28-year-old illegal immigrant who has reportedly been driving without a license for six years, reportedly failed her written exam twice.

“Nobody’s passing,” she told the Sacramento Bee in Spanish.

…When Nevada allowed illegal immigrants to apply for licenses last year, 71% of illegal immigrants in the state reportedly failed the written exam in the first three days. Wanting to avoid what happened in Nevada, immigrant groups like the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA) had provided free test prep classes to illegal immigrants in the final months of 2014.

Oropeza had “already spent more than three hours at the DMV,” and “she couldn’t stay to take the exam a third time, she said, because she had to get to work.”

Maybe the American education system is better than we thought.