RACINE, Wis. (AP) –Two employees of a Racine child care center are facing felony child abuse charges.
Police say a video surfaced on social media showing three young children restraining and beating a 2-year-old boy at the Bundle of Blessings Kid Kare center last month.
Sgt. Jessie Metoyer says one of the employees, a 22-year-old Caledonia woman, is the mother of two of the children who physically assaulted the toddler. Metoyer says the three children held down the 2-year-old and punched and kicked him. Police say the video was taken by one of the two women.
The Caledonia woman and a 23-year-old Racine woman are each charged with child abuse by failing to prevent bodily harm. Both women appeared in court Friday and remain in jail.
Metoyer says the 2-year-old is doing OK.
When I first heard this, I didn’t know what to think. Punching and kicking a 2-year-old? And the daycare worker films it, and then posts it to Facebook??
Everyone keeps saying that we buy more and more online, and that the bricks-and-mortar stores are suffering. Well, someone neglected to tell that to the people in my city. I live near a large shopping district anda mall, and the only way to get more folks in here on the weekends is if we airdropped them in like relief packages.
So, whether you’re venturing out to just purchase one present or all of them, you should probably read this first. It’s some good information to have freshly tucked away, before you and your MasterCard leave the house. The merchants have been waiting all year to see you, …and they’re intent on having you spend some cash during your stay.
Here’s hoping you enjoy the ‘hustle-and-bustle’ of the stores (that sounds more festive than ‘crazed mobs‘, don’t you think?), and be sure to wish everyone a Merry Christmas!
–JTR
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BEFORE YOU GO SHOPPING TODAY….
(***Originally posted 6/23/2012)
….you may wish to check out Kathryn Blaze Carlson’s excellent article in the National Postfrom earlier this month. It touches on something that we all know in our hearts, but we usually feel we’re smart enough to avoid: Marketing.
The marketers are everywhere: Google, the supermarket, where we buy gas…….we can’t escape ‘em. To deal with being constantly saturated by marketing, we simply believe we’re so savvy that we can see through all of the marketer’s ploys.
Not all that long ago, a not wholly inarticulate gentleman wrote a book in which he declared that All I Really Need To Know I Learned in Kindergarten. Mind you, this was not a tongue-in-cheek expose on the shallowness of thought in the modern liberal era; it was a proud declaration of the fact that the author knew that had he been morally and intellectually retarded at the age of five, he’d be exactly as smart and “accomplished” as he is today.
Last week we covered the egregious assault from the CA Teachers Union, as they created and released the most nakedly dishonest, Left-wing piece of video twaddle (to be shown to school children, IN SCHOOL) I may have ever seen.
Shocking? Horrifying? Oh, yeah. But it was just the latest volley lobbed at our kids in a 40+ year attack, and the results are already worse than depressing:
“In particular, schools in America do an incredibly poor job of teaching our students subjects such as history, economics and geography that are necessary for understanding the things that are taking place in our world today.
For example, according to a survey conducted by the National Geographic Society, only 37 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 can find Iraq on a map of the world. According to that same survey, 50 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 can’t even find the state of New York on a map.
If our students cannot even find Iraq and New York on a map, what hope is there that they will be able to think critically about the important world events of our day?”
So says Dr Laura de Rooy, a consultant neonatologist at St George’s Hospital NHS Trust in London writing in response to an article published in the British Medical Journal of the placement of disabled infants on the Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP).
The LCP was developed to help push those clinging for life off the cliff, so to speak. The elderly and terminally ill.
I remember, as I’m sure we all do, exactly where I was on 9/11/2001. Based on the timing, at approximately 10:00am that morning Flight 93 had to fly almost directly over my car as I was driving to State College, PA. In addition, my little brother was working in Manhattan at the time, and I obviously couldn’t reach him on his cell phone.
It’s been eleven years, and still I have no words, no pithy summation. I have nothing but prayers for the survivors and the fallen, their family and their loved ones.
This video has been around for a few years now (2007), and has accumulated over 3 million hits. You may have already seen it. Regardless, I’m including it here due to its power, and because being mindful of history is the only way we can hope to notrepeat it.
Came into the office today, and work is 3 feet high. Both of my sons have grown out of most of their cloths, even though I swear we just bought them new stuff a day or two ago. And to top it all off…..my youngest needs braces.
I am, of course, thrilled.
Just another day for us parents, right? Well, with that in mind, thought I’d share the best video I’ve seen for a very long while.
***And, for the record, if ALL hip-hop was this entertaining, I’d listen to it waaaay more often.
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(Thanks to our friend Art, over at The Peanut Gallery for finding this...)
Yesterday we covered the new rules for tenure in NYC and New Jersey, and the reasons these changes were significant. We also made a pitch for everyone to watch the film ‘Waiting For Superman’, which discussed the problems of our public schools. I didn’t realize it yesterday, but the movie exists on YouTube in its entirety. It is broken up into eleven segments, but it’s there.
I had a different post for today ready to go, but this is more important than the subject I was going to address. Our children are getting an inferior education to the one we received 30 years ago. America can’t continue to be the beacon of freedom for the world if we continue to mass-produce ill-educated children. We are sentencing these kids to lives of mediocrity, and we are dooming our country in the process.
I’ve included the first three segments of ‘Waiting For Superman’ below. The others are easily found on YouTube, as well.
It doesn’t matter if you have kids in the system or not. We allpay for the public school education of our children. We owe it to them, and to ourselves, to have that education be superior, rather than substandard…or worse.
Since school is starting up again, this topic is timely ….at least in my house.
Most of us are aware of the problems inherent with public school teachers and tenure: once tenured, too many teachers are not fulfilling their basic obligations. Many need to be retrained or simply let go. However, their tenured status makes them almost impossible to fire, and the unions won’t hear of it. It’s all about power: being able to fire bad teachers could eventually lead to a merit system and once thatis in place, …bye-bye union.
It’s a sad, sad state which describes our public school system, countrywide.
However, there was a recent article in the New York Times about an unusual occurrence in NYC. Seems that almost half of that city’s teachers didn’tget tenure in their first shot at it. It also appears that, amazingly, this was on purpose:
Nearly half of New York City teachers reaching the end of their probations were denied tenure this year, the Education Department said on Friday, marking the culmination of years of efforts toward Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s goal to end “tenure as we know it.”
Only 55 percent of eligible teachers, having worked for at least three years, earned tenure in 2012, …compared with 97 percent in 2007.
An additional 42 percent this year were kept on probation for another year, and 3 percent were denied tenure and fired. Of those whose probations were extended last year, fewer than half won tenure this year, a third were given yet another year to prove themselves, and 16 percent were denied tenure or resigned.
“This is an interesting trend which may be sending a message to the teachers’ unions, but it’s not a long-term solution. Teachers failing to receive tenure are simply given another season or two to get it or they drop out. The end goal for all of them – and the unions – is stillto land tenure so they can stay on indefinitely on the taxpayer dime once they get it.
It’s no surprise that unions would be pushing back against this. We’re talking about a group which also fights like the devil against the idea of things like merit pay, despite the fact that studies show that it works. It’s a culture unlike virtually any other in the nation, where outrage greets the idea that competition for a job should result in the best candidates and that pay might be linked to performance.”
Jazz is right: instead of proficiency or mastery of the job, far too many teachers have tenureas their #1 goal. It has been more of a hot-button topic for the past few years, though, helped along not insignificantly by Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey:
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Gov. Christie just signed a teacher’s tenure reform bill into law a couple weeks back, which ended the “job-for-life” thinking he spoke of in the video. This new law is another gigantic step towards reclaiming control of our children’s education, and wresting it away from the unions. We could stand to see similar bills pop up across the country.
THE major obstacle is, of course, the teacher’s unions. Anyone who has worked for the public school system knows how they work. For everyone else, you can get the general idea by watching the film ‘Waiting For Superman’, which was released in 2010. Since it only grossed about $6 million stateside, there’s a safe bet that most folks reading this did NOT see it, though…and you need to.
‘Waiting For Superman’ was directed by admittedly left-leaning Davis Guggenheim, director of Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. However, Guggenheim is highly critical of the hundreds and hundreds of “failure factories” which dot the landscape, and he saves special disdain for the teacher’s unions themselves, which are preventing the necessary changes to be made for the betterment of the students.
Trust me: you will never again be able to hear the phrase, “It’s for the children”without thinking of this particular film.
Even though my wife and I don’t have kids in public school (we home school), we couldn’t help but be moved to tears at the plights of these families. The parents’ dogged determination to secure even a decent education for their daughters and sons, and the massive hurdles which keep being placed in their way, is heartrending. In only 90 minutes, you will possess a deeper understanding of just how important these changes in tenure in New York and New Jersey truly are, because the findings in ‘Waiting For Superman’ are being played out, right in front of our eyes.
So today we have two routines from one of my favorites, Bob Newhart. I don’t recall either of these, so we must not have owned this particular album as kids. Too bad: they made my boys laugh, so it’s a good bet we’d have liked them at that age, too.
By now, hopefully most of you have heard about Hercules Industries, which won a small reprieve from the healthcare mandate last week. This is only temporary win, a ‘stay-of-execution‘, if you will. The ruling will most likely be appealed to the 10th District Court of Appeals.
However, it’s important to remember that, just like the other internal battles which we were discussing last week, this mandate is another such fight which is being waged largely on our behalf. Are we supporting these warriors’ efforts? Are we even keeping up with their results?
In this case, the folks in the trenches are from Alliance Defending Freedom, a coalition of Christian lawyers formerly known as Alliance Defense Fund. From the ADF website:
Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys obtained the first-ever order against the mandate on behalf of Hercules Industries and the Catholic family that owns it. The (Obama) administration opposed the order, arguing, contrary to the U.S. Constitution, that people of faith forfeit their religious liberty once they engage in business.
“Every American, including family business owners, should be free to live and do business according to their faith. For the time being, Hercules Industries will be able to do just that,” said Legal Counsel Matt Bowman. “The cost of freedom for this family could be millions of dollars per year in fines that will cripple their business if the Obama administration ultimately has its way. This lawsuit seeks to ensure that Washington bureaucrats cannot force families to abandon their faith just to earn a living. Americans don’t want politicians and bureaucrats deciding what faith is, who the faithful are, and where and how that faith may be lived out.”
These guys from ADF are heroes, engaged in a fight that truly is Biblical in size and scope. But, what can WEdo? Well, if we wish to see other victories follow this one, we can’t just stand by, inert, and “hope for the best”. We need to contribute to these causes with either time or money, and we can add our voices to theirs.
We can also speak to our pastors.
We can speak to our friends.
We can speak to our representatives.
And no, obviously not in the annoying, overly self-righteous, illogical, talons-on-chalkboard approach of the militant Left, either. You know, like our best buddy Nancy:
***Who, lest you forget, was one of those primarily responsible for us having Obamacare in the first place. Just a reminder….***
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Speaking of the need for reasonable discussions as a means of outreach: There is a wonderful YouTube channel from WordOnFire.org featuring Fr. Robert Barron as its primary speaker. Fr. Barron is not a fire-and-brimstone guy, and he’s not a comedian. Nonetheless, he is quite compelling in his arguments.
Below is a recent clip where Fr. Barron articulates exactly why freedom lovers of ANY and ALL beliefs should be equally horrified at and unified against this law.
I’ve been visiting with one of my very oldest friends this weekend, and won’t be home ’til Monday night, so this abbreviated post will have to do until tomorrow.
Actually, there isn’t a ton more to be said about this: “White House considers executive order, leaves Internet takeover a possibility“.
And if that headline doesn’t scare you enough, have no fear: the article will.
The White House has left open the possibility of enacting its Internet agenda via executive order after the failed effort to bring the Democrat-supported cybersecurity bill to a full vote in the Senate last week.
In response to a question from The Hill, a Washington, D.C. political newspaper, about whether President Obama was considering advancing his party’s cyber-plan through an executive order, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney didn’t rule out the possibility.
“In the wake of Congressional inaction and Republican stall tactics, unfortunately, we will continue to be hamstrung by outdated and inadequate statutory authorities that the legislation would have fixed,” he said via email.
“Moving forward, the President is determined to do absolutely everything we can to better protect our nation against today’s cyber threats and we will do that,” added Carney.
The failed cyber security bill, which could be revived by Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid when the Senate comes back from recess in September, would have given federal agencies in charge of regulating critical infrastructure industries like power companies and utilities the ability to mandate cybersecurity recommendations.
Shortly before the Senate’s August recess, Obama penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed in which he threw his support behind the Cybersecurity Act of 2012.
An executive order would be another action from the Obama administration to extend executive branch authority over a largely free and open Internet.
See? Obama and his buddies just want to help you.
Sorta reminds me of the scene in ‘Mars Attacks!‘ where the Martians are chasing everyone around, as they simultaneously keep repeating “We Come In Peace”.
The marketers are everywhere: Google, the supermarket, where we buy gas…….we can’t escape ‘em. To deal with being constantly saturated by marketing, we simply believe we’re so savvy that we can see through all of the marketer’s ploys.
Virtue or Vice? The Battle for our Children in Today’s Culture…
What is wrong with our culture?
From the Associated Press, via WEAU.com:
RACINE, Wis. (AP) –Two employees of a Racine child care center are facing felony child abuse charges.
Police say a video surfaced on social media showing three young children restraining and beating a 2-year-old boy at the Bundle of Blessings Kid Kare center last month.
Sgt. Jessie Metoyer says one of the employees, a 22-year-old Caledonia woman, is the mother of two of the children who physically assaulted the toddler. Metoyer says the three children held down the 2-year-old and punched and kicked him. Police say the video was taken by one of the two women.
The Caledonia woman and a 23-year-old Racine woman are each charged with child abuse by failing to prevent bodily harm. Both women appeared in court Friday and remain in jail.
Metoyer says the 2-year-old is doing OK.
When I first heard this, I didn’t know what to think. Punching and kicking a 2-year-old? And the daycare worker films it, and then posts it to Facebook??
Sadly, yes…
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Posted in family, politics, Social commentary
Tagged behavior, children, family, Kermit Gosnell, manners, parenting, society, Virtue, vocation