A Lincoln County, West Virginia Sheriff and Clerk are to plead guilty to charges of vote fraud in the 2010 Democrat primary after the pair were arrested during an election fraud investigation conducted by state and federal authorities.

Sheriff Jerry Bowman and Clerk Donald Whitten were caught in a scheme to file fraudulent absentee ballots in an effort to get Whitten elected Circuit Clerk. Whitten will also plead guilty to lying to an FBI agent hired by WV Secretary of State Natalie Tennant to investigate the false absentee ballots.

Sheriff Bowman, who is at the tail end of a second term and is term-limited from running again, conspired with Whitten and a thus far unidentified candidate for county commissioner to help Whitten win a close election with the fraudulent absentee ballot scheme.

“The Candidates further agreed that they would complete absentee ballot applications for voters,” the agreement documents said. “The Candidates also agreed that on those applications they would state certain reasons that voters were legally eligible to vote absentee, regardless of whether those reasons were true.”

In 2004 several Lincoln and Logan County officials were convicted of vote fraud in a federal vote-buying case. Convicted included Lincoln County Circuit Clerk Greg Stowers and county Assessor Jerry Weaver. Amazingly, Weaver is now running for county sheriff.

But, remember… left-wingers and Democrats say there is no vote fraud in the USA.

Superintendent Todd Carlson of Shawano High School in Shawano, Wisconsin is sorry a student observed his First Amendment rights and had his article published in the school newspaper that denounces homosexuals adopting children. And so Superintendent Carlson is making amends by punishing this Christian kid for being so darn Christian. Superintendent Carlson has also decided in his infinite wisdom to censure this article by having it sent down the memory hole so that no one else will be confronted with this evil Christian’s views.

That’ll show that darn Christian kid, won’t it?

The article, “Should Homosexual Partners Be Bale to Adopt?,” was written by Brandon Wegner who was assigned the task of writing a counter-point to another student’s pro-homosexual adoption article. The piece was then published as an insert in the school newspaper, the Shawano Leader.

Shortly after the newspapers containing the insert were distributed, Superintendent Carlson issued a formal apology to the school and parents, removed the insert from surplus issues of the paper, and censured young Mr. Wegner claiming his article violated the school’s “anti-bullying” policy.

Wegner says that Carlson grabbed him up out of class and began to brow beat him in an attempt to get the kid to disavow his religious-based beliefs. According to Liberty Counsel, a First Amendment law firm, Wegner was quixotically bullied by Superintendent Carlson in an attempt to deter bullying.

Brandon was hauled before the superintendent on charges that he had violated the school’s bullying policy. Superintendent Todd Carlson told him that the column “went against the bullying policy,” and asked him if he “regretted” writing it. When Mr. Wegner stated that he did not regret writing it, and that he stood behind his beliefs, Superintendent Carlson told him that he “had got to be one of the most ignorant kids to try to argue with him about this topic,” that “we have the power to suspend you if we want to” and that the column had “personally offended me, so I know you offended other people!”

Carlson’s action is itself “ignorant.” Ignorant of our American laws, ignorant of tenets of tolerance, ignorant of public comportment, ignorant for abuse of his position as an authority figure, and just plain ignorant in a moral fashion.

Carlson’s bullying also makes the lie to the claim that our schools are meant to teach our children. The truth seems to be that Mr. Carlson simply wants to indoctrinate, not help students come to their own conclusions when offered all sides of the issues.

In fact, the school newspaper deserves kudos for having handled the issue properly. It gave room to advocates of both sides to air their views so that readers could make up their own minds. But Carlson doesn’t want any of this horrid teaching going on. He wants to tell kids what to think based on his own warped, left-wing ideology. None of this freedom of choice nonsense in HIS school, I’ll tell you what.

Superintendent Carlson should be fired. Not because he’s an extremist liberal, but because he has violated this kid’s rights at worst and violated the principals of actual teaching at best. He is no educator. He is an indoctrinator and that is just un-American.

(H/T Moonbattery.com)

(Washington Post) Dozens of police maintained a late-night guard around City Hall following daylong protests that resulted in 300 arrests. Occupy Oakland demonstrators broke into the historic building and burned a U.S. flag, as officers earlier fired tear gas to disperse people throwing rocks and tearing down fencing at a convention center.

That’s a whole lot of peace, isn’t it? And yet another in a line of flag burnings.

Saturday’s protests — the most turbulent since Oakland police forcefully dismantled an Occupy encampment in November — came just days after the group said it planned to use a vacant building as a social center and political hub and threatened to try to shut down the port, occupy the airport and take over City Hall.

Apparently, their copy of the Bill Of Rights says something about the “right of the people mostly peaceably to assemble, break and enter, trespass, and threaten”.

An exasperated Mayor Jean Quan, who faced heavy criticism for the police action last fall, called on the Occupy movement to “stop using Oakland as its playground.”

“People in the community and people in the Occupy movement have to stop making excuses for this behavior,” Quan said.

No, Liberals in the community need to stop making excuses for this behavior. They needed to do it from the get go. Except, liberals like you, Mayor Quan, put up with it from the get go. More on that in a moment.

The group assembled outside City Hall late Saturday morning and marched through the streets, disrupting traffic as they threatened to take over the vacant Henry Kaiser Convention Center.

The protesters walked to the vacant convention center, where some started tearing down perimeter fencing and “destroying construction equipment” shortly before 3 p.m., police said.

Peaceful.

Quan said that at one point, many protesters forced their way into City Hall, where they burned flags, broke an electrical box and damaged several art structures, including a recycled art exhibit created by children.

She blamed the destruction on a small “very radical, violent” splinter group within Occupy Oakland.

Who’s making excuses now, Mayor Quan?

Here’s the photo of the day for the protest

I have no idea the background of the photo, but, the KosKidz and the DUmmies seem to think that it is emblematic of the problems in America, and that it is shameful. At the DU we see

• Horrifying…What kind of orders are the police getting? Are we still a free people?
• Makes me want to drive up there and protect the kids- you too? It’s so horrifying to think this is happening in our country.

Well, gee wiz, are we a free country that sees riots that require tear gas, with parents bringing their kids to potential riots, needing gas masks? One DUmmy does mention that perhaps the parents should protect the kids by getting them the hell out of there. And some of the Kos Kidz get that bringing the child is a Bad Idea, but many others are on this wavelength

That photo of a child and her mother wearing…gas masks says it all about the current [disgraceful] state of American society.

That single iconic image should resonate sadly and profoundly with every American for a very long time.

D.C…. WAKE THE HELL UP!!

See, it’s not the fault of the mom who brought their child, knowing they would need a gas mask. It’s the fault of American society! And D.C.! They also blame the Oakland PD. Like this one

I don’t see an encampment. I see a mother and a child standing on the street, but since you never know when the police will attack the citizens, I guess it’s best to make sure you have your gas mask around the clock.

The police wouldn’t need to if you Leftists would stop rioting, breaking and entering, starting fires, etc. But, please, keep it up. Especially in Charlotte.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

The gauzy puffery that the Old Media slathers upon the Occupy Wall Street movement has helped keep most Americans in the dark about how nasty, how violent, how outrageous, and even how incredibly lacking in integrity this movement is. On the conservative blogs the truth is well known, of course, but the fact that few Americans seem to know how bad the OWSers are shows that as conservatives we are not effectively getting our message out there.

For the initial two years of its existence the Old Media spent its every waking moment destroying, maligning, and out right lying about the Tea Party movement. Even today you’ll see an occasional swipe at the Tea Patiers made by some hater from the left and the Old Media is happy to “report” the slander, naturally.

You might remember when Obama operative Anna Park tried to start a counter movement that she prosaically called “the Coffee Party” during the heyday of the Tea Party. You may also recall that those Old Media mavens, while daily lying and lambasting the Tea Partiers, fell all over themselves to play up the silly and quickly failed and forgotten “Coffee Party” effort.

Similarly, when the Occupiers hit the scene, the Old Media went into paroxysms of ecstasy over the whole thing. Even today, after conservatives have so effortlessly ripped away the veneer from the absurdity and essential anti-Americanness of the OWSers, the Old Media is still slathering OWS with unearned and illicit praise.

Most Americans are unaware that real communists and socialists and other anti-American groups form the core of OWS. Few Americans understand that these people are drug addicts and criminals that have indulged every imaginable crime at these events. From property destruction to child abandonment to rape to gun crimes, just about every crime imaginable from small to large have been committed at these events. People have even died at these things!

There is even a website dedicated to chronicling the arrests made at OWS events. As of the writing of this article they had noted 5,975 arrests at OWS events across the nation. And this is a left-wing hosted website, too. You see they are proud of these arrests.

Compared to the several years of Tea Party events, the OWS events have been a criminal’s paradise. Not only have the Tea Partiers never had any arrests, or fights, or criminality, at their events they’ve even left every park they used cleaner than they were when they started their events!

Just because the OWS movement is dying down right now — maybe only due to the winter cold — that doesn’t mean the outrages of the OWSers is slowing. Just recently a church that made the foolish mistake of helping these criminals found its facilities vandalized. A $12,000 baptismal fount was stolen along with laptops and other items. These creeps even urinated on Church property. There have been other churches that have been vandalized when they tried to assist the OWSers, too.

With all the criminality that has occurred at these supposedly peaceful events, the public should have long ago turned against OWS. Yet polls still show that Americans have not turned against OWS. Why? Because the Old Media has told them how great it all is and has made a concerted effort to hide the truth from people.

By contrast, the Tea Party’s image has been thoroughly battered with Americans. Is it any surprise with the near daily barrage of hate the Old Media bludgeons the Tea Party with?

If no other example is believable to show how the Old Media establishment is sold out to the far left, the difference in the way it has treated the Tea Party movement and the Occupy Wall Street movement is solid proof of that bias.

Sadly, even after we’ve exposed all the criminality at the OWS events in conservative media outlets from newspapers to TV to blogs, the fact that Americans still have not turned foursquare against the Occupiers shows that we have made little headway in reaching the country with the truth.

It is more common everyday. A man buys a house, the market collapses and suddenly his house is worth less than the mortgage, then he loses his job until, as a single father, he finds himself in foreclosure with no place to raise his two preteen daughters. It’s a case made for the Occupy Wall Street movement to swoop in and right wrongs, right? Maybe not because the OWSers in New York stole this poor guy’s home away from him in order to give it to one of their own members. Confused? Read on.

A Brooklyn man living in an apartment with his two daughters was alerted to the fact that his in-foreclosure-home had been broken into and occupied by Occupiers, as in Occupy Wall Street activists. When he rushed to his home he found a group of strangers that had broken into his home claiming to have “reclaimed” the house and given it to another family.

“They’re trying to take a house and say the bank is robbing the people because the mortgage is too high — so contact the owner!” fumed Wise Ahadzi, 28, who owns the home at 702 Vermont St. in East New York.

Apparently Ahadzi had bought the house in 2007 for the princely sum of $424,500 but during the housing bubble of 2009 the house ended up being worth only half that. Then, when he lost his job and got behind on the mortgage, the bank foreclosed on the property.

Enter — illegally, mind you — Occupy Wall Streeters who discovered the home in foreclosure and decided that they’d steal it away from “the bank” with the ostensible goal of helping the needy.

Ahadzi is rightfully indignant that they didn’t contact him so that they could help him retake possession of his own house. Ahadzi also asked why they didn’t try to help him and his two daughters to which the Occupiers claimed he “didn’t qualify” because he wasn’t in their group. “Why can’t you fight for me?,” he wondered.

So, who did they want to “give” the house to? An organizer for VOCAL-NY — a gay rights activist group. A fellow with a job and one that belongs to their own group, yet.

Worse, when Ahadzi got to his home he discovered that the Occupiers had taken all his personal belongings and shoved them in a pile in the basement and then began to tear out walls and “remodel” the place, spending, they claimed, over $9,000 in the effort.

This isn’t a lone incident, either. It is apparently an idea that the OWSers are going to try and push nation-wide. At a recent Chicago OWS rally, for instance, a purported Lutheran pastor preached an OWS sermon urging OWSers to do the same thing in the Windy City.

John Ruberry attended the speech and notes that Reverend Tom Gaulke told those assembled that they were going to repeat the New York efforts.

“We will be supporting a homeless family in reoccupying a vacant house,” the reverend claimed.

As Ruberry notes, this is called trespassing.

So, what have we learned form this? We’ve learned that OWS is not altruistic in anything they do even as they claim the mantle of Mother Theresa — well, Mother Theresa if she engaged in rapes, drug abuse, deaths, racism, anti-Semitism, property destruction and general lawlessness, anyway.

We’ve learned that, like any self-interested Wall Street Banker, the OWSers only want to enrich themselves and help their own members. They aren’t really interested in helping defend the poor and downtrodden. Just helping themselves.

(USA Today) Dozens of Occupy Wall Street protesters were arrested on New Year’s Eve as they tore down barricades surrounding New York City’s Zuccotti Park, the former home of their encampment that was dismantled several weeks ago.

About 500 protesters gathered in the park Saturday evening, where they rang in the new year with songs and their now-familiar chant of “We are the 99 percent.”

About 11 p.m., after a relatively quiet evening, some protesters began to tear down the barricades that have surrounded the park since New York police officers evicted Occupy Wall Street members on Nov. 15, protesters said Sunday. Police then moved in.

“They (police) got very aggressive and started pushing people and pepper-spraying people,” protester Jason Amadi, 27, of San Jose, California, said Sunday. “I got pepper-sprayed in the face.”

Well, yeah, you’re tearing down barricades around a privately owned park. The NYPD told you not to do that. You were rushing in in small teams to grab the barricades and put them in the middle of the park. You got what you deserved. You should feel lucky the NYPD didn’t release the dogs to munch on your testicles.

The New York Police Department said 68 people were arrested, and at least one person was accused of assaulting a police officer, who suffered cuts on one hand. Other charges included trespassing, disorderly conduct and reckless endangerment.

Yeah, that cop was assaulted with a pair of scissors. Nice of the AP to include that part in their story, eh?

“Many of us there felt that it was a symbol of the new year, of what was to come,” he said. “People protesting peacefully, but without fear.”

If tearing down barricades and assaulting police officers is “peaceful”, can you imagine what happens when they get violent?

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

On Monday morning a story whipped through the liberal blogosphere (and unfortunately one generally conservative news source) that had the left gleefully attacking the Tea Party Movement. They were thrilled, you see, to find a Tea Partier advocating for the assassination of President Obama and his entire family. Only they didn’t. Find such a Tea Partier, I mean.

Keith DeHavelle outlined this great example of how the left wing blogs glommed onto this story of an idiot that wrote on his Facebook page that Obama and his family should be assassinated and then assigned it to a “Tea Party darling” when in truth neither the nut in question nor any part of the story itself is connected in any way to a Tea Party group or Tea Party sentiment.

The story began when unsuccessful candidate for the Carson, California City Council, Jules Manson, decided it would be a great idea to post on his Facebook Page all about his hope that Obama and his family would be assassinated.

.

In an acute example of how erudite this Jules Manson is, he wrote, “Assassinate the f—ing n—er and his monkey children.”

I hope this ignoramus realizes he just committed a federal crime.

Anyway, it wasn’t long before this guy’s Facebook account was canceled and pulled off the web for its hate-speak. Rightly so, too.

But as the morning rolled on the left-wing blogs went nuts defining this guy variously as a “Tea Party Darling,” a libertarian supporter of Ron Paul, along with other labels. Unfortunately, they seemed to have a little trouble taking the time to find out about the real facts about this guy before posting.

Worse was the incorrect description by the New York Daily News — usually a conservative news source — that called Manson “A rabid Tea Party wannabe politician.”

The truth of what Manson “is,” however, is a bit different.

It turns out that Manson explained quite clearly on his own webpage that he does not identify with either of the two main national parties.

I am a mechanical engineer working usually within aerospace and defense industry. For a long time I switched between the two parties but found they were not representing the best interest of the general public. I believe honoring the constitution, a contract between the government and the governed, is key in a free democracy. I recently became a member of the Libertarian Party because they mirror many of my views. Such views include smaller government, less taxation, representation for the people, a free market system which allows small business to prosper, and individual liberties and rights. This means I am a constitutional conservative for reforms to return representation back to the public where it belongs. At the city level, such as Carson, this can be done by banning all campaign financing and requiring each candidate to fund their own campaign. This is key to restoring democracy. I believe this can and must be done.

There is also nothing on any of his various webpages and blog posts that identified him as a Tea Partier.

The best coverage of this seems to come from a left-winger blog called Angry Black Lady Chronicles. Left-wing or no, the poster there did a good job tracking down all the particulars of the story and comes to the proper conclusion that this nutcase, Manson, has no connection whatever with the Tea Party movement. As DeHavelle notes, Manson has statements showing him to be anti-Tea Party, even. Not only that but Manson was the editor of SupportAtheism.com. So, he’s not religious, either. This guy seems to be quite far from the Tea Party movement.

Sadly, what we see here are all sorts of bloggers and news sources leaping to a story, labeling a kook, but not taking the time to get down to the truth before hitting that post now button. We saw this when that criminal, mental case shot Gabrielle Giffords, as well. That shooter was labeled a Tea Partier even before anyone even knew his name. How one can claim they know a person’s entire history before they even know a name… well, that one was never explained to me.

While this particular bad actor’s name was known ahead of time, too many leapt to their keyboards to lay claims as to what he “was” and was not before any of them bothered to learn anything about him. That is bad form no matter who does it.

It’s heartening, but not entirely surprising that the Catholic Church overturned the decision of the Sacred Heart Primary School in Broken Hill to reject the enrolment of a young girl whose at-home parents, two women, are in a lesbian relationship.

Heartening for the little girl, even though the mums have wisely decided to spare her the inevitable unpleasantness of attending a school where she’s not wanted. But not entirely surprising, because if the Church had allowed this story to spin out of control it risked having to answer some very awkward questions about just how much money it sucks off the public tit, when it’s unwilling to comply with public standards as expressed in legislation such as the Anti-Discrimination Act.

The Catholic Church and its fellow travelers in the other denominations are pretty much out on their own when it comes to punishing kids for the sexuality of their parents. And be assured, that’s what was at stake here, and what Bishop Kevin Manning has avoided airing in public with his order to Sacred Heart to enrol the child.

All religious schools in this country, not just Catholic ones, enjoy the benefits of a grotesque double standard, where they put their hands out for a hand out, and a massive one at that, draining off billions of dollars from the education budget, while not having to measure up to the same standards demanded of public schools, most of which are woefully underfunded because of subsidies to the private sector.

Surely if the private religious schools are to trouser billions of dollars in taxpayer funds, at the expense of taxpayers who can’t afford to send their own children to those privileged institutions, more might be demanded of them when it comes to, say, not behaving like ignorant, medieval bigots. There’s no reason they can’t hang onto their vile opinions, but there’s no reason the rest of us should have to pay for them.

As long as they enjoy a free pass from the Act, however, we will continue to subsidise their ignorance, stupidity and hatred.

They know it too. Or at least the smart ones do. That’s why they moved so quickly to shut down debate on this most recent outrage.

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here

**UPDATED** Hammerman removes paragraph from story
**UPDATE 2** Rabbi scrubs offensive post

In the category of bigotry and hatred spares no religion, we find such hatred hiding behind religion in one “Rabbi” Joshua Hammerman of New York City. Hammerman has indulged his inner Father-Coughlin-in-reverse by proclaiming that if Tim Tebow wins the Super Bowl, why, Christians will go on a rampage that will result in the burning of mosques and the bashing of gays. Now, are you ready for some football?

Hammerman disgorged his absurd claims at his New York Jewish Week blog posted on December 12 titled, “My Tim Tebow Problem.” It is instead Hammerman’s civility problem. Tim Tebow has nothing to do with this neer do well’s extreme hatred of Christians.

Calling Tebow the “poster boy of the Christian right,” Hammerman is disgusted by the fact that the footballer — oh the horrors — “thanks Jesus after every game.” It all makes the “rabbi” expound upon his “fear” about “what will happen if the hulky Denver Bronco quarterback wins the Super Bowl.”

And what will happen you might ask? Let’s let this so-called rabbi take it from here:

If Tebow wins the Super Bowl, against all odds, it will buoy his faithful, and emboldened faithful can do insane things, like burning mosques, bashing gays and indiscriminately banishing immigrants. While America has become more inclusive since Jerry Falwell’s first political forays, a Tebow triumph could set those efforts back considerably.

Rabbi Coughlin is serious, here. He really thinks that Christians will riot in the street because Tim Tebow is part of a Superbowl winning team. Yeah, because there is such a long contemporary history of Christians taking to the streets and rioting because they are jubilant over football.

He goes on to hyperbolically wonder if “legions of Southern Baptist missionaries” will “hit the college campuses the very next day, spreading this new gospel of Tim?” And he laments that already there is a “Jews for Tebow” Facebook page. This nut will even hate fellow Jews just for admiring the inoffensive Tebow.

But it shouldn’t surprise that this anti-Christian bigot might come to these conclusions. The key to this is in how he mischaracterizes Tebow’s belief in his God and in himself. Hammerman claims that Tebow is, “absolutely confident that God is on his side.” I can see why he might be worried that Tim Tebow might be a new, destructive sort of charismatic leader if he thinks that.

But this is not what Tebow has ever said or even intimated. Tebow has said that God has guided his career but he has not placed himself as equal to God’s interests. Only a supremely arrogant man would think God has taken sides with him as opposed to simply being there for him. The arrogance to assume God reveres the man and his goals enough to “side” with him is not what Tebow has displayed. Tebow simply has never exhibited this kind of arrogance. In fact, just the opposite. Hammerman is just wrong in his characterization of Tebow’s Christian character.

This yutz winds up his anti-Christian screed claiming that he doesn’t fear Christians — a claim hard to square with the other ten paragraphs of his piece so chock full of loathing, mistrust, and hatred. Instead he claims he “fears people of certainty.”

This is probably the most ignorant part of Rabbi Hammerman’s muddled thinking. It isn’t “certainty” that causes the problem, rabbi. It is what people do with that certainty that causes the problem. Thomas Aquinas was probably one of the most certain Christians in history yet he is responsible for some of the most loving and peaceful explications of Christian belief in human history. No one is rioting after football games because of Thomas Aquinas!

In this, though, Hammerman proves that he employs a prosaic modernist’s lack of critical thinking. He displays the sort of empty, nihilistic, modernist’s blather that assumes that there can be no right or wrong, that everything is relative and anyone who believes in something with anything approaching certainty, then they must be dangerous, unstable, and prone to violence.

But, the problem with this sort of modernist’s “thinking” is that it is logically untenable. Hammerman is sure “certainty” is dangerous… yet he is certain that this is a fact! By his empty thinking, then, he is just as dangerous as those rampaging Christians that infests his fevered imagination because, well, he’s certain of something, isn’t he?

He is hoisted on his own petard with his lack of critical thinking. But his is a perfect example of why most universities and modern liberalism is both dumbing down our nation and growing hatred everywhere its baneful influence appears.

I don’t fear Tim Tebow winning the Super Bowl. I do fear morally deficient cretins like this rabbi infesting in others his rabid hatred of others.

**UPDATE**

Since my criticism of Hammerman’s Tebow anti-Christian screed, he’s gone into his post and edited out the paragraph I reported here. Hammerman did not note on the story that he edited the piece to remove offensive material. So, down the memory hole goes the truth once again.

I have a screen shot of the original, though. CLICK HERE to see it.

**UPDATE 2**
Hammerman’s edited piece has now been completely removed from The Jewish Week website. Hammerman has also removed the piece from his own blog and replaced by a message that reads: “The piece has been taken down and I apologize to all those whom it has offended. Some additional reflections will be forthcoming. Thank you.”

One hopes that the rabbi will reflect on his personal animus against both Tim Tebow and Christians and that a more acceptable apology is forthcoming.

**UPDATE 3**

Now “rabbi” Hammerman has deleted his entire blog. Talk about memory hole, now he’s trying to deep six everything he’s ever written! Driven out of the gates and into the wilderness!

**UPDATE 4**

The Jewish Week Has Issued the following statement:

We apologize for posting an Opinion column on Dec. 14 by Rabbi Joshua Hammerman entitled “My Problem With Tim Tebow,” the Denver Broncos quarterback who is an Evangelical Christian. The column, in fact, violated our own standards calling for civility in posting comments on our website. The policy statement notes that “name calling in any form will not be tolerated, and comments that denigrate any religion or Jewish religious stream will always be rejected.”

The column was removed from our website later that day.

Rabbi Hammerman is a respected spiritual leader and longtime Jewish Week columnist whose writing over the years has been exemplary. This column, however, was more inciting than insightful, and we erred in posting it, which we deeply regret.

Repentance and forgiveness are cornerstones of all major faiths, as is the recognition that we all make mistakes. We trust that the sincerity of our remorse, as expressed by the rabbi as well, will be taken into account by those whom we offended.

Hammerman has made his blog publicly visible again and has posted this statement:

This week I wrote an article for the Jewish Week in which I attempted to explore the phenomenon of Denver quarterback Tim Tebow to make broad points about society and extremism. I now realize that some of my statements had the reverse effect of what I had intended and for this I deeply and sincerely apologize.

As many of you know, I have spent my entire career engaged in dialogue with people of all faiths while speaking out passionately against all forms of bigotry. I have the deepest respect for those who are committed to their faith, including Mr. Tebow. I realize the way in which I attempted to make my points was clumsy and inappropriate, inadvertently suggesting the kind of intolerance and extremism my article was intended to disparage. I sincerely apologize to Mr. Tebow, his family, the Broncos and Patriots and all those whom I may have offended.

(H/T All American Blogger)

Jose Antonio Vargas is the perfect example of media bias. He presents himself as both an activist for illegal immigrants and a “journalist.” He’s uniquely suited to this claim in today’s PC world, too, because he is himself an “undocumented American,” as he styles it. And in a new interview he also claims that being an illegal alien made him a better journalist.

Vargas has been blurring the line between journalist and activist since it became public knowledge that he has been in the United States illegally since he was a child. After his coming out, Vargas launched himself into being an advocate for illegals. Only in the Old Media establishment can someone be an advocate for a political viewpoint yet still be considered a just-the-facts journalist. Vargas isn’t the only one, of course. Remember such “journalists” as Sanjay Gupta, Chris Matthews, Jay Carney, or Linda Douglas. Well, if you are a left-wing activist it works, anyway.

In the new interview with The Ithican’s TinaMarie Craven, Vargas posits that his status as, in his words, an “undocumented American” (nice conceit, that) made him a more careful reporter. He had to exhibit the utmost veracity, he said, because if not people might start looking closer at him and his background.

My job was to do the best job I possibly could. I was too paranoid to make a mistake, God forbid being charged with plagiarism or having a lot of corrections or people saying I needed to check a quote. I am a very diligent reporter. I’ve had maybe one dozen corrections in like almost a 12-year reporting career. That’s pretty good. And there are days where I think, yeah, I had to lie about my immigration status to get the jobs, but I don’t think my journalism — the work I produce — I don’t think people would question the quality of the work or the veracity of the work.

Well, that is some kind of justification, isn’t it? I mean, at that rate perhaps a crack dealer would make a good reporter, eh? Not that being illegal is like being a crack dealer, of course, but being illegal has no bearing on the “veracity” of a reporter’s work, either!

But what might impinge on that veracity is that since coming out as an illegal immigrant, Vargas has become a vocal and ardent activist in favor of illegal immigrant’s issues. So, how can one be an advocate for something yet still claim to be an impartial journalist? Well, one can’t, really, but since he’s in the proper, politically correct area with his activism the rest of the Old Media gives him a pass.

Aside from his current colleagues, Vargas has a lot of people to thank for his being able to fool employers and readers for several decades. Even as a High Schooler, Vargas was facilitated in his law breaking by highly placed members of California’s education establishment — two in particular.

In High School Vargas relied on Rich Fischer and Pat Hyland, two high-ranking California public school officials, to help him with his criminal activity.

As a teen Vargas was helped to get an illegal Oregon Driver’s license by these California teachers and this fake ID is what he used for years to get away with his lawbreaking.

Pat Hyland was the principal in the high school Vargas attended (Vargas wrote of her back in 2005). Like a good, militant leftist, Hyland has proclaimed her intentions to help even more lawbreakers if she can.

For his part Rich Fischer has had a storied career in California’s public schools sector. He has been a celebrated schools administrator, a recipient of the Superintendent of the Year award, and was a nine-year Superintendent of the Mountain View-Los Altos Union High School District. He has also won the Los Altoan of the Year award. Additionally Fischer managed two statewide professional development programs, one of them being the Executive Leadership Center (ELC). And all the while he’s been helping illegal immigrants get one over on the law.

To recap Vargas’ trajectory, for years he’s been lying to millions of readers not to mention countless employers, broken laws, elicited the help of others to help him break those laws, then after “coming out” he’s become an activist and endeavored to shove his law breaking in all our faces as if it is all our fault… yet he still wants us to take him for a true journalist? Well, as the left measures things, I guess he is just that: the perfect leftist journalist.