Free Republic

CONCORD, N.H. – Speculating about a new chef at the White House has become — as one culinary insider puts it — fantasy football for foodies. But as tempting as it may be to see the Obama family's choice as the ultimate "Top Chef" competition, former White House chefs say the job is about selfless service, not star power. Walter Scheib, White House executive chef for Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, believes there's a 90 percent chance the new administration will stick with his successor, Cristeta Comerford. And if the Obamas do hire someone new, it won't be...

I just got an email from our new Provost telling me that I – like everyone else working at the university – must start attending mandatory sexual harassment awareness training sessions every two years. The good news is that I’m going. The bad news is that I’ve gotten some other angry white men together to help me completely disrupt the training sessions. On October 20th, there will be a meeting of a new campus group called “Faculty Against Sexual Harassment Initiatives and Sensitivity Training” - or FASHIST. I’m the founder of the new group. And the reason I’ve chosen the...

Vanessa Alikhan was at a Democratic ''unity party'' when she overheard another guest indignantly refute the rumor that Barack Obama is Muslim, as if it was a racial slur. She later recounted the conversation to a friend. ''She told me that this is politics and that I should just deal with it,'' said Alikhan, a Fort Lauderdale graphic artist who converted to Islam about five years ago. ``To me this is the same as telling an African American or a Jewish person they should deal with discrimination because people aren't ready to embrace them as a group.'' She and other...

Next summer, the 2008 Olympic Trials will be held in Eugene, Oregon. But anyone that volunteers to work the event must undergo special training ... in diversity. http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/O/OR_BLACKS_TRACK_OROL-?SITE=ORBEN&SECTION=STATE&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT The Blacks on Track Team committee wants to make sure that black athletes and their families feel at home in the city, which has a black population of less than 2%. The committee is in charge of educating 1,800 volunteers about "the need for cultural sensitivity." Volunteers will all be required to undergo this training, but hundreds of workers from local businesses, restaurants and retail stores will also be invited to the...

HOUSTON (AP) - A school district suspended a police officer as it investigates his distribution of a "Ghetto Handbook" and the three-month lapse before top district officials were informed of it. The eight-page booklet, subtitled "Wucha dun did now?", was handed out to about 15 Houston Independent School District police officers at a May meeting, district spokesman Terry Abbott said. Officials declined to identify the officer who handed them out, but said he had been ordered to attend diversity training. A supervisor immediately collected the booklets, Abbott said, but district officials said they didn't learn about the incident until someone...

The story of the Three Little Pigs' battle with the Big Bad Wolf has delighted children since it was written more than 150 years ago. But the tale highlighting the merits of hardwork and practicality has become the latest to fall victim to political correctness. A junior school production of the children's story has been renamed the Three Little Puppies for fear of offending Muslims. Organisers of a children's music festival have altered the popular characters and lyrics because of the multi-cultural nature of the youngsters involved and their parents in the audience. But yesterday Islamic leaders condemned the politically...

It's a good thing to be aware of other people who are different from you, but it's another thing when politically correct "diversity training" runs amok. That's what happened at Arizona State University. Ryan Visconti, a 22-year-old senior and dormitory resident assistant, took part in mandatory sensitivity training for dorm employees. In a role-playing exercise, he was asked to portray a gay Hispanic seeking admission to a church. A woman with a Southern accent told him he was a hopeless sinner and would go to hell and could never join the church no matter what he did. In the course...

Here is an interesting little slice of contemporary English life. The police go to a pub in a small town in Devon, looking for a suspect. They see a man there who they think resembles the suspect, and approach him. He becomes abusive and they arrest him and take him down to the station. He is drunk. After a couple of hours in a jail cell, he says he feels sick and demands a doctor. The police call the police surgeon. When he arrives (he is an Indian), the arrested man says, “I want an English doctor, not a f*cking...

Global warming 55 million years ago suggests a high climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide, according to research led by Mark Pagani, associate professor of geology and geophysics at Yale and published in the December 8 issue of Science. For some years, scientists have known that a massive release of carbon into the atmosphere caused the ancient global warming event known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) that began about 55 million years ago. The geologic record shows that the resulting greenhouse effect heated the planet as a whole by about 9 F (5 C), in less than 10,000 years. That...

From kindergarten through college, returning students may not be coming back to more difficult reading, writing and mathematical tasks, but they will be able to ascend to the next level of sensitivity. But to what avail? Gender-Bending Etiquette For example, students may graduate high school not ready to read at college level but they will know what to say to someone who just had a sex-change operation. “There’s news today that students at Batavia High School in New York will be greeted by administrators, counselors, and psychologists when they return on September 6th for forums and question-and-answer sessions about ‘gender...

CHICAGO, June 30 (UPI) -- Chicago White Sox Manager Ozzie Guillen, fined for using a gay slur against a columnist, says he'll spend an off-day at the Gay Games on July 17. He also plans to attend sensitivity training sessions soon, the Chicago Sun- Times reported. Guillen said he had already planned to attend the Gay Games, and his visit is not related to the trouble he got into with Major League Baseball for calling Sun-Times columnist Jay Mariotti a "fag" during a locker room interview. Guillen has apologized.

Before the raids came the sensitivity training: Tactical-squad Mounties learned how to properly handle Korans prior to arresting 17 terrorism suspects on the weekend. And that's not all. The RCMP also made sure there were clean prayer mats on hand for their suspects when they were sent to jail cells. Then, after everything wrapped up, authorities met with a number of Muslim leaders to impress upon them that officers were going after specific individuals, not the community as a whole. "Our officers need to be respectful," said RCMP spokeswoman Corporal Michele Paradis.

Recently, Oprah Winfrey aired a special show featuring author and Holocaust survivor, Elie Weisel. Oprah and her guest toured Auschwitz, a Nazi death camp in Poland. Weisel was a survivor of Auschwitz. Winfrey...uttered a statement that was an insult to the millions of Americans and others who fought against Hitler's war machine. Speaking to Weisel, Winfrey said of the Holocaust, this all went on while the world did nothing. Winfrey made her comment based on Weisel's statement that the Allies knew of places like Auschwitz as early as 1942. The truth is, some historians do not agree with Weisel's take...

Hats off to the UC Riverside College Republicans. They recently hosted a program that contrasted the sort of vile anti-Semitic slander that saturates the Muslim media, with the cartoons of Mohammed that sparked riots throughout with Muslim world. Of course this exercise in Constitutionally protected free speech was noisily protested by the campus Muslim group, the same people who when they’re not squealing about “hate speech” are hosting speakers like Amir Abdel Malik Ali, who recycles the standard catalogue of anti-Semitic lunacy repackaged as “pro-Palestinianism” and “anti-Zionism.” You know how that slight-of-hand works: instead of decrying the sinister Jewish control...

Responding to the international furor about the publication in Denmark of cartoons of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad, a Bay Area education initiative, sponsored by local Muslim groups, will begin Sunday."Explore the Life of Prophet Muhammad," an educational presentation, will be held at the Muslim Community Association, 3003 Scott Blvd., Santa Clara. It will be held from 2 to 4 p.m.The event is part of a yearlong initiative to increase public awareness about Islam. The event is sponsored by the Northern California chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a civil rights organization; the American Muslim Voice, a Fremont-based educational group;...

Couples looking to tie the knot in Liverpool, England, no longer have an image of a traditional marriage overseeing their wedding, as the painting has been deemed potentially offensive to homosexual couples. This portrait of a bride and groom was removed from the Liverpool Wedding Registrar's office, as it was ruled potentially offensive to same-sex couples [...] The old paintings have been replaced with portraits of Victorian landscapes. [...]

In Paris, Tough Talk Isn't EnoughPublished: November 4, 2005 The suburbs of Paris have a long history of violent uprisings by enraged residents. But the nightly clashes in the grimy northeastern environs over the past week have been grimly contemporary. The rioters torching cars and pelting the police are mainly the sons of African and Arab immigrants, most of them Muslims, who have never been integrated into French society, who work for the lowest wages and who live in ghettos rife with crime. The daily images of helmeted police officers and angry youths silhouetted against blazing cars near dilapidated apartment...

Bristish banks are banning piggy banks because they may offend some Muslims. Halifax and NatWest banks have led the move to scrap the time-honoured symbol of saving from being given to children or used in their advertising, the Daily Express/Daily Star group reported today. Muslims do not eat pork, as Islamic culture deems the pig to be an impure animal. Salim Mulla, secretary of the Lancashire Council of Mosques, backed the bank move. "This is a sensitive issue and I think the banks are simply being courteous to their customers," he said. However, the move brought accusations of political correctness...

SENSITIVITY HAS TAKEN OVER OUR society, and nowhere more securely than in our universities. To see what has happened, consider this small fact. Half a century ago, a liberal Harvard psychologist, Gordon W. Allport, published a book, The Nature of Prejudice, that began the social science study of stereotypes. Though of course hostile to stereotypes, he allowed they might have a kernel of truth. For example, he said, fewer Jews are drunks than Irish. A remark like that could not be made at a university today except in private to trusted friends. And if you made it, you would be...

It seems like every day I run across an article that informs me that some state's school has taken Jefferson and Washington out of the mandatory coursework, only to replace them with Cesar Chavez and Betty Friedan. As if only the white male students should be inspired by the Founding Fathers. Other school districts have cancelled dodgeball because inferior athletes may feel, well, inferior. Many school districts have disallowed birthday parties and/or cupcakes in the classroom because some students have summer birthdays and can't have their own days of attention in the classroom. The inane list goes on and on....

Prompted by the police shooting of a distraught transient and guided by a federal consent degree, the LAPD will begin training its officers how to better deal with the hundreds of mentally ill suspects they encounter each year. Beginning in April, the Los Angeles Police Department's 9,100 sworn officers will take Internet courses to learn common symptoms of mental illness and how to cope with people who display them. "There's a new vision toward the mentally ill. We're much more sensitive," said LAPD Sgt. Alan Green, who is developing the online program. LAPD officers are involved in about 25 use-of-force...

London - Red hair may be the genetic legacy of Neanderthals, according to a new study by British scientists. Researchers at the John Radcliffe Institute of Molecular Medicine in Oxford were quoted by The Times as saying the so-called "ginger gene" which gives people red hair, fair skin and freckles could be up to 100 000 years old. They claim that their discovery points to the gene having originated in Neanderthal man who lived in Europe for 200 000 years before Homo sapien settlers, the ancestors of modern man, arrived from Africa about 40 000 years ago. Rosalind Harding, the...

JOHNSTON -- Fourteen students at Johnston High School have been suspended for producing a 25-song rap CD that, among other things, refers to violence, binge drinking and sex with other students. Schools Supt. Margaret Iacovelli said a four-day investigation into who made the CD ended yesterday, when the students involved were given five-day suspensions, and ordered to perform 10 hours of community service and receive some in-school sensitivity training. "We had to address the disruption at the school that the CD caused," Iacovelli said. "We looked at it in a different light because it also disrupted the community. So we...

Sore, WV, 1/14/05, Zarr Chasm Public School Superintendent, Doctor P.C. Macher, has issued guidelines for implementation of the new NAME (Non Abhorrent Moniker Exchange) program beginning with the 2005-6 school year. "To prevent anyone from being offended by religious names and to insure absolute separation of church and state in Sore County, all children must have a voluntary name change upon attendance at our public schools," explained Macher. "Obviously, children named Christian, Mohammed or Moses are going to be mutually offensive to one another--and to atheists; and, it is additionally illegal to allow the very mention of their names in...

Our civilization is suffering what could be called a cultural death by a thousand cuts. The open sores are ubiquitous, but what happens to irk me at this moment is that quite some time ago I learned that my birth date is not what my parents always told me it was. Moreover, no one else’s is either. You see, those who are contemptuous of tradition have decided to take it upon themselves to change our calendar and replace B.C. [Before Christ] and A.D. [Anno Domini] with B.C.E. [Before the Common Era] and C.E. [The Common Era]. The latter two designations...

If nothing else, we have to admit that the dorks on the left are certainly fun to watch. The so called unbiased "media elite" came to work dressed in black after the election. Most of what we hear coming from the left these post-election days is a perpetual whine. There have been no real specifics about what they are whining about. Other than the fact that their socialist candidate lost, they just seem to want to be difficult. Yeah, it's very interesting to hear the constant vitriol coming from the very same liberals who gave us perpetual sensitivity training. Their...

DURHAM — Timothy Garneau can move back in to a University of New Hampshire dorm and stop living in his car after school officials dropped further sanctions imposed on him for joking about female freshmen gaining weight. The UNH sophomore said yesterday that Esther Tardy-Wolfe, director of UNH's Judicial and Mediation Programs Office, told him he can relocate to Gibbs Hall but not move back in to his former dorm, Stoke Hall. "I wish I was back in my original room but at the same time, it's a relief to be somewhere to be able to put your clothes in...

WASHINGTON, Aug 17 (AFP) - US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said late Tuesday that US troops pressing an offensive in Najaf against an anti-government militia led by radical Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr were "unlikely" to storm the Iraqi town`s holy places where the militants are holed up. "It`s unlikely that the US forces would be the ones that would deal with the holy places," Rumsfeld said, appearing on PBS`s "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" program. "That`s just not something that we are likely to do," he continued. "I would think that the Iraqi forces would be the ones that...

The Department of Homeland Security wants to restrict the U.S. Border Patrol's arrest of illegal aliens in the nation's interior, concerned that the recent apprehension of 450 illegals by agents in inland areas of Southern California failed to consider the "sensitivities" of those detained. According to department sources, a formal written policy under review would limit Border Patrol arrests to areas along the nation's 7,000 miles of international border and give U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) the responsibility for enforcing immigration laws in the nation's interior. But ICE officials have acknowledged that it has neither the manpower nor the...

A different America By Elizabeth Scanlon Thomas August 10, 2004 THE FIRST CLUE I had that today's America is different from the America I grew up in came shortly after my son and I flew in from England to attend a funeral. I was trying to drive my normal-sized rental car carefully because I hadn't taken out collision insurance, and I was surrounded by enormous vehicles larger than run-of-the-mill SUVs. My little car was overwhelmed by these monsters. I had trouble pulling out of places as they blocked my vision the way skyscrapers steal sunshine from city dwellers.

WOOD RIVER JUNCTION - In an apparent attempt to make a home movie based on the popular "Matrix" film series, three teenagers were arrested on Tuesday afternoon with pellet rifles and a paintball gun outside of Chariho Middle School. The teens - two 15-year-olds from Richmond and a 16-year-old from Charlestown - were seen walking on the regional school district campus on Switch Road at 2:55 p.m. by a school clerk who called 911, said State Police Major Steven O'Donnell. The boys were dressed in black trench coats with black gloves and dark glasses, the major said. Upon receiving the...

Ignoring Jewish Humanity by Bruce S. Ticker Oct 31, '03 / 5 Cheshvan 5764 On Saturday, I learned of the Israeli soldiers who were murdered in their sleep in Gaza, where they were stationed to protect their fellow Jews. Two of them were 19-year-old women and the other a 20-year-old man. I saw a photo of one victim and thought how cute she was. If she lived in America, she probably would have been sleeping in her college dorm room. On a given Saturday night, she might be dating her future husband and father of her children instead of...

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 16 — A senior editor at The New Republic has published a column on the Internet that deplores the violence in the film "Kill Bill" and criticizes Harvey Weinstein, the co-chairman of Miramax, which released the film, and Michael Eisner, chairman of the Walt Disney Company, as "Jewish executives" who "worship money above all else." The article by the senior editor, Gregg Easterbrook, appeared Monday on The New Republic's Web site. Within the site, Mr. Easterbrook has his own "Easterblogg" column. Mr. Easterbrook said on Thursday that he planned to apologize "for a really bad choice of...

Well, for those of you brave enough to still lay claim to the land of the “fruitier and nuttier” as home on the Left Coast—and not yet taken up residence in an undisclosed cave somewhere in upper-Montana—then, perhaps you have heard of the reckless abandon on the part of Gov. Davis for not only signing SB 60—“Driver’s Licenses for Illegal Immigrants”—into state law, but also of his latest attack on foster care families and the Golden State’s credibility (or, rather, what’s left of it)—by penning his authorization to a bill that would require all foster parents, and foster parents who...

Florida Senate Alert - Urgent! - Senate Bill 1498 A bill entitled "dignity for all students act" will be voted on in the Florida Senate Judiciary Committee. This bill will require: Christian public school teachers, administrators, and counselors to attend homosexual and transsexual (cross dressers - men who dress as women) sensitivity classes as a condition of employment. Children in Kindergarten to attend for homosexual and transsexual tolerance classes. It will ban Christian students from sharing their faith in Christ to homosexual students. It is urgent for you to contact the Vice-chairman & chairman of this Senate Judiciary Committee to:...

<p>The soldier being held in a deadly grenade attack on a 101st Airborne Division command center in Kuwait spent much of his youth in California and was described by family and friends Sunday as a brilliant student and mild-mannered practicing Muslim.</p>

<p>The political correctness extremists are at it again. This time they've targeted Victor Hugo's literary classic, "The Hunchback of Notre Dame." Over the summer, a theater group in London launched a production based on Victor Hugo's classic novel -- but called it "The Bellringer of Notre Dame."</p>

Play nice, kids By Jim Caple Page 2 columnistWe are one step closer toward raising a generation of paste-devouring Ralph Wiggums. Is this what you want, wussies?If you thought some schools went overboard when they banned dodge ball last year, consider this: A Santa Monica elementary school principal recently banned tag, saying the game can only be played under the strict supervision of physical education teachers and not at all during the lunch hour recess. That's due to: one, the risk of injury; and two, a "self-esteem issue," because whoever is "it" could be considered a "victim." "We had some...

Suzanne FieldsJune 10, 2002The dead white males, they are a changin'Most of our teachers and students don't know much about history. We knew that. Now we learn that they don't know much about literature, either. This time the educationists wrap their ignorance in principle: They don't want creative writers, those weavers of words, to pass on their pride and prejudice, sense and sensibility to the young and vulnerable. We all know how insidious writers can be, with their robust verbs and colorful adjectives. To paraphrase Lord Acton (the educationists could look him up), fidelity to language can corrupt absolutely. To...