Dos Palos students protest after school forces sophomore to remove American flag shirt
School officials have apologized to student, American Legion
By Danielle Gaines

DOS PALOS -- Students at Dos Palos High School protested Thursday -- by wearing patriotic regalia to school -- after a sophomore student was forced to remove a T-shirt depicting the American flag.
Officials at the Merced County school confirmed Thursday that Jake Shelly was forced to take off a red, white and blue tie-dyed American flag T-shirt on Tuesday. The shirt said nothing offensive, just: "United States of America, Washington, D.C."
The school's assistant principal issued Shelly a bright yellow T-shirt that read "DCV: Dress Code Violator" to wear for the rest of the day. He was given his shirt back after classes ended.
"It was really embarrassing and humiliating to have to wear that all day -- and just for supporting your country," his sister Kaycee Shelly said.
Kaycee Shelly told members of the media at lunchtime that her brother was overwhelmed and did not want to do any more interviews.
Earlier in the day, he was speaking with a local news station when an unidentified teacher walked up to him, ripped off the microphone clipped to his shirt and told him he was not allowed to talk to the media.
District officials said they apologized to the student, his family and the local American Legion on Wednesday -- Constitution Day.
"In reviewing the dress code at the time, an administrator felt the shirt was in violation of that section of the dress code," said Superintendent Brian Walker. "She asked him to remove it and he did."
The assistant principal initially thought Shelly's T-shirt violated a clause of the school dress code that does not allow "shirts/blouses that promote specific races, cultures, or ethnicities."
School officials said they will now interpret that clause of the dress code -- which was written at the beginning of this school year -- differently.
Defiance when asked to remove an article of clothing is an automatic 3- to 5-day suspension, according to the dress code.
"Certainly we are taking responsibility for it and it will not happen again," Walker said. "A shirt that has an American flag, a shirt that has a Chinese flag or a Mexican flag, is certainly not a violation of that part of the dress code."

Article continues... http://www.mercedsunstar.com/275/story/460170.html

 

"First and foremost if I were the student I would have refused and argued the fact that the United States of America represents a melting pot of people. And to deny the American flag is to deny the idea of cultural expressiveness and acceptance. To say that the flag only represents one group of people is to deny the ideals that America is founded on and it lends to the idea that the vice president is making the assumption that the flag only represents those who are Anglo-Saxon. Which is ironic seeing as Anglo-Saxons are no longer the majority of America. She fails to realize, or denies the fact that America has grown out of an Anglo-Saxon rebellion to represent a rebellion against oppression from any institution. And if people like her are educating the youth of America no wonder there is no respect for our country or a lacking of identity as an American.

How frustrating."

Thoughts provided by my better half.

I am personally not a fan of the European Union.  Many Europeans see this as jealousy, seeing as the EU market is now quite the power house compared to the US.  This is not the case.  I don't agree with the European Union, because I see it as more levels of bureaucracy that will eventually take away the power of the people.  The EU tried to continue the unification of Europe through the Lisbon Treaty, which would create another level of bureaucracy.  It would establish a European Union President and Foreign Minister.  This would hurt the democracy and the power of the people and especially the sovereign status of each country.  In order for the treaty to pass, all 27 countries that are the European Union must approve the treaty.  But today Ireland voted against the treaty and dealt a blow to the European Union movement, which I believe is pushing more and more for a single country of Europe.  There is already a "parliament" of the European Union and the Lisbon Treaty would establish the executive branch.  From there the lower levels of democracy (local and state) could be dissolved or reduced to no power. 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/14/eu.ireland1

If you look at what this treaty is trying to accomplish, the whole conspiracy of a one world government isn't that far of a stretch.  If the EU succeeded, other countries would follow suit.  Some already are following the path of the EU in order to stay competitive in the world market.  Look at the United States and establishing NAFTA, that was just one step.  Do a search of the Amero, or check out www.spp.gov     . Steps are being taken to bring America, Mexico and Canada together at price of our democracy.

Not much I can say about this, but urge you to watch this video.  Discusses the propaganda that the Pentagon has been spewing out that the media has been "reporting" as truth. 

We have all seen the news where they bring in a military analyst to make sense of the situation or have a different viewpoint.  But these analysts have turned out be hired by the Pentagon, briefed on what to say and then appear on the mass media to discuss Pentagon propaganda to influence the American public. 

PBS has broken the story, and the rest of the networks declined to comment as they are in fault.

Here is the PBS link, where you can watch the video...

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/media/jan-june08/tvgenerals_04-24.html

Or you can simply watch it on YouTube.

So we are in Afghanistan, Iraq and now it seems they are pushing Iran again...

China is often criticized for the censorship of knowledge.  The internet has made this much harder for China, but so far the Communist party is retaining their hold over the people of China.  A quick search will reveal countless news articles on this subject. 

For Google to operate in China, it was forced to censor the searches of controversial topics that may cast China in a bad light.
China censorship damaged us, Google founders admit

The popular Wikipedia is banned from China, as it would not conform to the censorship policy of China.
Wikipedia defies China's censors

China’s Evil Censorship Continues: Bans LiveJournal

Well, America has now begun to censor websites also.  Are we no better than China?

The website, Wikileaks, is a site where people can post up articles that may expose government or corporate corruption.  This all started when a report was posted to the website which exposed The Bank Julius Baer & Co of money laundering and corruption.  They filed a suit in California against Wikileaks and their host DynaDot, on the premise that it posted "stolen and confidential financial data."  The district judge ordered the entire website to be shutdown, which they complied. 
US Court shuts down leaked doc emporium
Web Site 'Wikileaks' Shuttered Over Post

The government is now shutting down a website that might incriminate a corporation or the government itself.  Is this not the land of the free?  Are we not guaranteed our free speech and free press?  Why is our government sacrificing our constitution in order to protect a Swiss bank, that could be ultimately corrupt and should be charged for illegal activity?

We can only find hope in that Wikileaks has since moved the information to a different host and different websites outside of the United States, so that the people can still read the documents.
Wikileaks

If you have the time, I highly suggest poking around Wikileaks has it has many eye opening documents, such as operating procedures of Guantanamo Bay.

I hope this is an isolated case and government censorship of the internet does not become the normal.  But it is also telling and makes me worry for the future. 

"Princeton computer professor Edward W. Felten and two graduate students Ariel J. Feldman and J. Alex Halderman discussed a common Diebold machine. They showed that anyone who gets access to the machine and its memory card for literally a minute or two could easily install the group's invisible vote-stealing software on the machine. (Poll workers and others have unsupervised access for much longer periods.) Changing all logs, counters, and associated records to reflect the bogus vote count that it generates, the software installed by the infected memory card (similar to a floppy disk) would be undetectable. In fact, the software would delete itself at the end of Election Day."

"Even more ominously the memory cards that are used to install this or similar vote-stealing software can act like a virus and infect many other machines if the bad cards are used to amend these machines. This is normal practice with pre- and post-election updates, and no attachment to a network is necessary. Moreover, since memory cards are removed from all voting machines in a given region and inserted into a single machine that accumulates the votes for the region, something worse is possible. "By planting a virus far enough in advance, [a hacker] can ensure that a significant number of machines can steal votes on Election Day" even if he has access to only one or a few machines."

• A Democratic governor, a senator, or a member of the House of Representatives
• A member of the Democratic National Committee, elected by party activists in her state
• A distinguished party leader, such as former presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, or former House speakers Jim Wright and Tom Foley
• An at-large DNC member such as Richard Michalski, appointed by party chairman Howard Dean and ratified by the DNC membership.

Michalski is the vice president of the 720,000-member International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, whose political action committee has given heavily to Democratic candidates. The Machinists union has endorsed Clinton.

So, the last example of a superdelegate is a person that has personal power and money that has backed a nominee.  An elite per say. 

Superdelegates are allowed to vote for either candidate regardless of the way the district they represent voted for.  So if District A voted for Clinton in the primary, but their representative endorses Obama, the representative can vote for Obama.  This is a total disregard of the peoples' vote. 

The idea of superdelegates was created to help against a stalemate at the DNC, but it is undemocratic.  Theoretically the superdelegates could go against the popular vote and then the Democratic Nominee would be decided by 800 people instead of the voice of the nation (at least the democrats voice).  The nominee should be decided by which ever candidate is closest to the desired number of delegates it takes to win the nominee. 

From the CNN article, Democrats fear superdelegates could overrule voters, "It's in a total contradiction of the way the Democrats have set up their primary process, with all this proportional representation," said CNN political analyst Amy Holmes. "The whole point of it was that no one could walk away with the elites. And if this is decided by superdelegates, I think the Democratic Party morally is going to be looking at each other and say, 'What did we just do?' "

I'm writing on this subject to show how un democratic our election process has become.  Superdelegates go against the vote of the people, but it seems as if no one realizes this or cares.  If anything I hope it comes down to the superdelegates to decide and they stupidly go against the popular vote.  Maybe then, the people of America will wake up and realize the government is side stepping them and doing what it wishes.