Cheri Hartman:

Sharron Smith:

Clonnie, I'll bet there are few things in your children's experiences in school that caused you concern.  Your notion that teachers are invariably liberal and try to inculcate personal beliefs does a real disservice to the teachers with whom I have worked.  The challenge is to get students to think, to reason, and to use evidence and logic to support a point of view.  There is no conspiracy to transform young potential conservatives into flaming, adult liberals.  This is becoming an urban myth.  Most teachers wish they could just get students to read a text, do a little homework, and use their minds.

Teaching today is made immeasurably more difficult because our schools have become a political battleground.  This is the great tragedy that has and continues to erode and in many ways undermine our public schools.  The recent controversy at William Byrd is a prime example.  Everything is politics.   

Sharron  

 

 Thought, reason, use of evidence and logic to support a point of view.  Argumentative, persuasive skills - informed debates.  The stuff that sharpens the mind and hones the verbal arrows intentionally flung at clearly identified targets.  You have hit the mark again, Sharron, as you so often do - right on! 

Informed opinions - as Sharron has said "knowledge over ignorance" - further the dialogue toward higher levels of analysis.  Critical thinking relies on clarifications of concepts - using contrasts and comparisons - connections and distinctions.  Fear-based hyperbole stirs emotional overriding of analytical capabilities - when it is combined with power plays that prevent knowledgeable professionals from being heard and from having the positive influence that is possible - we all lose! 

Thanks for the "I-wish-I'd-said-that" posts, Cheri & Sharron!  I haven't had time to read the entire book, but just from reading exerpts I'd say that Sharron's book answers Clonnie's questions (rhetorical or not) perfectly!   [and the "911-as-an-inside-job" was immediately tossed into the nutjob file as quickly as Bill White's rants]

Sandi..."Gip, I am sorry if you or anyone else took my question as a trap or a trick.  I may be flip, but I am sincere."

Sandi, No, I'm sorry. I thought we had met...I'm Gip, I tell stupid jokes often, write stuff that sometimes applies, have some quirks, live in Salem, and I respect you. Can't change that.

Sandi Saunders:

Mr. Foster, I do not know whom you are quoting when using "strong statements of disagreement or dislike." but that was never my contention or implication.

 

 Sandi,

I did not intend to quote anyone, just put it in quotes to emphasis what I was saying.  My mistake...I thought after I posted it that someone might think I was quoting someone.

Gibson Brown:

Hey Marvin. I think you were the blatant victim of "entrapment," and Sandi is evidently setting us up for Dave to pounce on our rookie mistakes, and then Sandi is coming back to finish us off. I know you "get it," and I applaud your many fine deductions referencing big guv'mAnt. Gip

 

 Thanks Gip.  I hesitated to respond to that one at all because I also sensed a trap.  But sometimes you just can't resist!!  Thanks for defended me!

Marvin..."Thanks Gip.  I hesitated to respond to that one at all because I also sensed a trap.  But sometimes you just can't resist!!  Thanks for defending me!

Hey Marvin. As if you need me to defend you. Visa versa is closer to the truth. Anyway, Nick showed me one day how to "roll the wrist" just so, to get the bait, or most of it anyway, and pull it through the squares in the wire. He makes it look easy, and is cool under pressure like yourself. I saw the trap being built you see, and I had seen Sandi talking to Dr. Dave under the guise of "a history question" of all things. I don't know exactly what they are up to, but I think they have a plan to pair up, and take us down one at a time, until the many prognosticators are proved correct about the 12-21-2012 end of the Mayan calender, and only Clonnie remains. Then, finally, and as predicted, Clonnie is awakened from his long nap at the fire house, and saves the world with his common sense brilliance...destiny. Gip

Clonnie Yearout:

I would answer that a lack of critical thinking does seem to be an exclusive trait of the extreme right. Need proof?  "9-11 was an inside job.")  As for the birth question, I looked at the evidence and considered it myself -- for about thirty seconds -- then concluded that it was a dead end distraction at best and extremely harmful to the over-all health of the country at worst.  President Obama had no control over the circumstances of his birth and I see no evidence that he set out to mislead me about it.  I have no doubts about the President's legal citizenship, although I sometimes (I said sometimes) worry that he sees his responsibility to the world as more important than his duty to his country.

Are you cherry-picking my remarks and twisting them around to be ornery?  That is a foul.  I did not say a deficiency in critical thinking is an exclusive trait of either left-thinking or right-thinking folks.  I said the opposite.  I would wager that the percentage of folks who doubt the citizenship of President Obama is considerably larger than the percentage of Americans who think 9-11 was an inside job; but in either case, that is poor critical thinking.  I know you are not in league with the Birther lunatics,  Your opinion that our commander-in-chief cares more about the rest of the world than his country strikes me as a tad bizarre (evidence of that seems thin, to me, making it a huge leap of biased thinking), but it's stated as merely your personal opinion and not a matter of fact.  To your credit, you do acknowleged that he is our president and legitimately elected.

You know there is a vast sea of difference between an arithmetic problem and, say, whether or not Obama wants to "nationalize" health care as part of a socialist agenda.  Most of life on earth, outside of math class, is shades of gray.

P.S.  I do not believe 9-11 was an "inside job."  I do think warning signs were missed, but one does not have to be a historian to appreciate the saying, hindsight is 20/20.

Gibson Brown:

Marvin..."Thanks Gip.  I hesitated to respond to that one at all because I also sensed a trap.  But sometimes you just can't resist!!  Thanks for defending me!

Hey Marvin. As if you need me to defend you. Visa versa is closer to the truth. Anyway, Nick showed me one day how to "roll the wrist" just so, to get the bait, or most of it anyway, and pull it through the squares in the wire. He makes it look easy, and is cool under pressure like yourself. I saw the trap being built you see, and I had seen Sandi talking to Dr. Dave under the guise of "a history question" of all things. I don't know exactly what they are up to, but I think they have a plan to pair up, and take us down one at a time, until the many prognosticators are proved correct about the 12-21-2012 end of the Mayan calender, and only Clonnie remains. Then, finally, and as predicted, Clonnie is awakened from his long nap at the fire house, and saves the world with his common sense brilliance...destiny. Gip

 

 And Hey Clonnie, just so you are aware, you, Gip, Marvin and Nick, I have not forsaken you, I have just been so busy at work, home and play, I have not had much time to join in the frey other than put my humble two cents worth in when I can.  But remember, just as Sharron once dubbed me an "old warrior", I haven't gone away and I, too, am in support of most of your contributions.  So far yall have been handling yourselves quite well but I do keep an eye out and I've got your backs.  Keep on truckin.

Deleted by the writer,

Liniel..."But remember, just as Sharron once dubbed me an "old warrior", I haven't gone away and I, too, am in support of most of your contributions.  So far yall have been handling yourselves quite well but I do keep an eye out and I've got your backs.  Keep on truckin.

Liniel, I'll be shocked if I'm the first to respond on this rainy gloomy kinda krappy boring day(which grows the flowers, and provides great fall color blah blah, I know), that makes a nap hard to resist. I WILL sleep better tonight, knowing the back is impervious to attack, due to your sharp eye watching our front door knobs now and again, and as you drive by on occasion, in case we tie the proper stain-coded boxer shorts to the door knob, as a silent alarm to muster, and for all to respond. I've had to face the wrath of Sharron a time or two. She's a force, and I put her in the "Don't poke THAT bear" catagory. She's sweet if you are kinda thing with her and me maybe. As a matter of clearing the table of some guilt I have been carrying for too long(we carry guilt with us daily until remedied, as we know), I'll state that upon further review...my final answer for Sharron...she is one smart kind person. So smart, I caught her messing with my head with her fancy words that are all there when you look them up, and make the sentence read like a poem, and I suspect purposely. By the time I caught her word game fun, it was the next topic. She can make me think, which hurts, and I get grumpy. I hope to be half as classy as she, when I grow up. Mean it.

I digress,

I sure do enjoy your post every time you put it out there Liniel. Thanks for sharing. Sincerely, Gip

Sandi Saunders:

I may be flip, but I am sincere.  I am in a quandary over my own puritanical streak when I see such offensive "free speech" and think that it mocks and denigrates the meaning of the right and the protections it offers.  Limbaugh can wish for Obama to fail and Beck can call Obama a racist, but is there to be no line when Obama is in the cross hairs with "Kill this N&%%@r! in a poster?  Can we only protect free speech by protecting hate speech?  Talk me down.

It is not only possible but common here in our panel discussions to combine seriousness and flippancy in the same commentary.  It reminds us that none of our remarks should be taken too seriously, and we mean no offense when we spar.  I am a card-carrying member of the ACLU, which some folks might say confirms my un-American stripes as a communist liberal, but I prefer to think of myself as a civil libertarian.  The First Amendment is first and foremost in our Bill of Rights.  Without freedom of religion, speech, press, and assembly, all the rest will crumble into dust. 

I know some folks think it is the Second Amendment that ultimately stands between liberty and tyranny, and that's a matter of opinion.  I will simply point out that it is placed in the context of a carefully phrased reference to a "well-regulated militia" as the first line of defense (by implication, against foreign invasion and domestic insurrection).  Think of Shays' Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion, both crushed by the militia.  Rising up against King George's Tea Tax was one thing (incited and applauded), but farmers taking up arms and marching on the state arsenal or customs house was another (denounced and repressed).  But I digress....

Free speech should and does include outrageously offensive, disgusting, ignorant, and hateful speech.  It does not include obscenity, libel, slander, sedition, or inciting violence.  Volumes of constitutional law have charted the murky waters of what constitutes some of these abuses of free speech and press.  It can be very subjective (in the eye of the beholding plaintiff or prosecutor, jury, and judge). 

Hate speech is vile but legal.  Hate speech that incites violence is not.  The question with regard to Mr, White is whether his words posed a clear and genuine threat or were just harmless rhetoric.  At his keyboard, he did not seem concerned about the distinction.  Now that he is a defendent, his defense attorney is insisting it was just the idle musing of an unhappy citizen.

Clonnie Yearout:

It's not always easy or possible to see, but it's out there.  I have made countless math mistakes during my lifetime, but that doesn't make me question whether two plus two equals four.  There has never been a month when I didn't balance my check book, and I know that some people just take their bank's word for for it, but I don't -- even though I've never found them to be in error.  Trust, but verify, that's my motto.

 

Dear Mr. C.,

I adore my lesser half (at least most days) for his many adorable and admirable qualities.  One of his admirable ones is his ability to balance a checkbook despite my unintended efforts to make the task more challenging than it should be.  While I am very good at the "two plus twos", I recognize my limitations when it comes to numbers.  (I can balance a checkbook if forced to under the threat of dire consequences.)  What is important to remember is that it takes all kinds -- numbers people and non-numbers people.  The art of it all is appreciating what each brings to the table.  Sometimes we can trust and verify, but sometimes we just have to trust.

Sharron

Gibson Brown:

Liniel..."But remember, just as Sharron once dubbed me an "old warrior", I haven't gone away and I, too, am in support of most of your contributions.  

Gibson Brown:

in case we tie the proper stain-coded boxer shorts to the door knob, as a silent alarm to muster

 

Gibson Brown:

I caught her messing with my head

Dear Mr. Brown,

Rest assured I would never mess with your head.  I suscribe to Ricky's philosophy -- let sleeping dogs lie.  However, I am searching for a book on the use of naval signal flags that would allow you to keep your boxers in the house and communite a "distress" call to the boys fellow warriors in the valley.  Thank you - - - - - - I think?   

Sharron (: ) 

Sandy Light:

Thanks for the "I-wish-I'd-said-that" posts, Cheri & Sharron!

 

Dear Sandy,

I still remember your post at the end of our discussion on texting/cell phone use while driving.  I still LOL!  This was one I wish I had been clever enough to say! 

Sharron

Luanne Traud:

How should schools handle challenges by a parent to books, videos, curriculum?

 

(Pretend you see a large white signal flag emblazoned with a large smiley face!  I did not have a pair of boxer shorts.)

I hope you all have time to read the editorial page and the commentary by our own F2.  Nice job Frederick!

Page 9 (Teachers tense after complaint, Cutright) follows up on the book controversy that sparked this weeks's question.  The article made me very sad -- just think, one parent managed to create this event -- yet the damaging ripples continue to lap our schools, teachers, and libraries. 

Sharron    

Sharron..."(Pretend you see a large white signal flag emblazoned with a large smiley face!  I did not have a pair of boxer shorts.)  I hope you all have time to read the editorial page and the commentary by our own F2.  Nice job Frederick!"

Sharron, our very own "F squared times the M in the middle" knows how to micro-rant with class alright. I took notes, and will try to implement what I can with regard to not stepping over the "civil" line when writing. You say the word Sharron, and boxer shorts via UPS are on your way. Tied to the front doorknob, they make quite the fashion statement, all the while functioning as a signal flag too. My neighbors can't help but stare and point, as they are so jealous whenever I signal with my shorts. As to the doofus wanting the book banned, I'm not sure when the scales of justice went digital, but one person surely can't outweigh the rest of the population when weighed with the old school scales. Funny how out of all the stuff that is wrong and unfair in this world, this book bigot picked a "See Tag run" book or such to focus on, as the #1 problem needing repair. Go figure. Gip

Frederick...I admire your writing skills and depth of knowledge. We all get to appear smart by association, just for hanging out with you in this forum...thanks. Gip