-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: March 30, 2007 6:01:00 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Red State Blues: The Far Right and Their 'Confederates' in
Georgia
ATTACK OF THE CONSERVATIVE CLONES ON ACADEME
LAW WOULD ENFORCE 'AFFIRMATIVE ACTION'
-- FOR RIGHT-WING EXTREMISTS
By John F. Sugg
03.28.07
http://atlanta.creativeloafing.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A220971
FIGHTING THE RIGHTWARD TILT:
The Nation magazine's Charles Bittner warns that it will become
"very difficult to attract top scholars."
Students, please be quiet. Like now. Quiet, I said. SHUT UP!
Thank you. I'm Professor Sugg, and I'd like to welcome some guests
to our class -- state representatives Tom Rice, Bill Hembree, James
Mills, Ron Forster and Brooks Coleman.
These fine Republicans are here to refresh their memories about
free speech and Georgia history – two subjects that, as we'll see,
are often at odds with each other. The learned gentlemen are
sponsoring a bill to remedy what they see as a horrid lack of right-
wing psychotics among university faculty members.
What's that you said under your breath, representative? That you're
going to "get" those pointy-headed, liberal professors? Yes, I've
heard all about House Bill 154, the, um, alleged "Intellectual
Diversity in Higher Education Act." For you gentlemen who want to
muck about with Georgia's colleges, we need to review a chapter in
our textbook about the late Gov. Gene Talmadge.
Yes, I know Talmadge was a Democrat, but he was the type of
Democrat we'd call a Republican today. No worry about Gene
apologizing to blacks for slavery.
When it came to higher education, Gov. Talmadge in 1941 jumped
headfirst into a heaping pile of doo-doo. He didn't like the fact
that too many educators were "liberal" – they had the wildly
insane, leftist idea that blacks, too, deserved access to
universities. The gubner began firing educators, university
administrators and members of the Board of Regents. A key casualty
of the crusade was Walter Cocking, a dean at the University of
Georgia.
Talmadge assumed the generally passive professors would crumble
under his reign of intimidation. Wrong.
When 41 senior professors protested Cocking's firing, and the
Regents balked at the academic pogrom, Talmadge denounced all those
who advocated "communism or racial equality." He referred to an
educational fund with which Cocking was associated as "Jew money
for niggers." He then packed the Board of Regents, which
obsequiously fired the dean.
Academe fought back. Time magazine reported on Oct. 27, 1941:
"Students gaily gathered on the campus of the University of Georgia
last week, marched up 'Ag' Hill shouting 'To Hell with Gene,'
hanged and burned Governor Eugene Talmadge in effigy not once but
twice. Women students at Lucy Cobb dormitory had a third private
hanging of their own."
Educators around the nation gathered to do battle. Georgia's
universities were stripped of accreditation – which sorely angered
all of those families who had invested in educating their children,
only to be told the degrees were worthless.
And Gov. Talmadge? Heads up, legislators, you'll want to heed this
message. The guv lost re-election in 1942 to Ellis Arnall.
Across the nation, there's a deceptively named document called the
"Academic Bill of Rights" that's been surfacing in state
legislatures -- more than two dozen so far. We saw it here three
years ago, when it was properly consigned to oblivion. But, like
Dracula, this bit of corrosive legislation has arisen from its
grave in the form of HB 154.
The measure is the mischief of former leftist and current neocon
David Horowitz. He wants to enforce an ultraright, ultra-
neoconservative, ultra-anti-Arab catechism on campus. He claims
students are being muscled by professors to adopt liberal
viewpoints. The remedy, he asserts, is legislation that would
mandate universities to pack their staffs with those deemed [more]
politically acceptable.
Enter Ruth Malhotra. She gained brief fame in the last year by
suing Georgia Tech for enforcing rules that banned students from
intolerant speech. The conservative graduate student was absolutely
correct, when, as she told me, "There shouldn't be rules protecting
people from being offended."
But Malhotra was one of the GOP props three years ago who testified
about alleged abuse at the hands of a liberal professor. Malhotra
wanted to skip class so she could go to Washington, D.C., and hang
out with other right-wingers. Her professor apparently thought her
priority should be class. Malhotra claimed discrimination – and
asserts her case is justification for the McCarthyite HB 154.
"Look, students always have a grievance process if they think
there's been discrimination," says Charles Bittner, the Atlanta-
based academic liaison for The Nation magazine – an unabashedly
leftist journal that is the largest-circulation political magazine
in America.
Malhotra did complain and – defying her own rationale for the law –
was allowed to switch professors. Accusations of political pressure
being put on students generally turn out to be anecdotal if not
delusional.
Many, perhaps most, professors are Democrats and liberals. Maybe
it's because they're smarter, and don't buy the simplistic anti-
intellectualism of Fox News. Whatever, affirmative action for
intellectually impaired right-wing extremists isn't a solution.
HB 154 would require universities to report on their political
"diversity" – meaning professors would have to confess their
leanings. You can hear the screams from the administration
buildings: "Oh, please, no more waterboarding. I confess, I
CONFESS, I'm a liberal."
The ramifications could be serious to the quality of Georgia's
colleges; why would a professor who believes in the sacred tenant
of "academic freedom" want to teach in a state where it doesn't exist?
"It will become very difficult to attract top scholars," Bittner
warns. "People will leave. The universities will be overwhelmed by
the cost of enforcing the law, monitoring professors' beliefs."
No doubt. We'd see "diversity" on campus, all right, as the
Republicans demand that, for example, Bible-waving creationists be
installed in biology departments.
A petition against the bill being circulated by Bittner already has
been signed by more than 150 of Georgia's top professors.
Professors, journalists, unionists, human-rights activists and
others have seen the dark clouds gathering in the past.
As the great Princeton political scientist H.H. Wilson wrote in
1954, during one of the darkest periods for intellectual freedom:
"Those who are conducting this campaign against our colleges are
not misguided. ... Using words like 'freedom' and 'diversity,' but
fundamentally authoritarian and anti-democratic, they have a
contemptuous attitude toward education and human intelligence.
Believing that students are like the children of Hamelin, ready to
follow the first Pied Piper that comes along, they are determined
to pick the Pied Pipers."
Of the bill's five sponsors, two are salesmen, one owns
miniwarehouses, one is a "consultant" – and, yes, one works for the
Gwinnett school system. Is this a group we want selecting our Pied
Pipers for our universities?
-------
STUPID SECESSIONISTS
A PLAGUE OF NEW CITIES AND COUNTIES
UNTIL EVERY HOUSEHOLD IS A MUNICIPALITY
By John F. Sugg
02.21.07
http://atlanta.creativeloafing.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A202868
Sen. David Adelman says townships would "balance the power of
developers with the interests of local areas."It's obvious there is
only one rational solution to the aspirations of north metro
Atlanta suburbanites for their very own governments. I'm speaking,
of course, of the movement to incorporate every single-family home
as a "city." Apartment buildings and homes on a single block would
become "counties."
Indeed, truly creative minds in the Confederate ... er, Republican
Party should find ways to make the new cities and counties grand
expressions of Georgia's never-dying secessionist fervor.
Each new "city" would be entitled to collect taxes, build roads,
deport illegal aliens (such as the neighbor's dog), impose capital
punishment and, in the spirit of the Second Amendment, wage armed
warfare.
OK, I confess. I made that up. As of this date, no legislator has
proposed "single-family cities." But they're getting close.
First we had Sandy Springs, an unincorporated patch of land that
has long been aggrieved by being in the same county with so many
poor Atlantans (commonly called "black," although this has nothing,
absolutely nothing, to do with race, according to secessionists).
The new city immediately privatized itself, a concept inspired by
the Halliburtonizing of both Washington, D.C., and Baghdad.
Then, last December, the burgs of Johns Creek and Milton were born.
It appears that Johns Creek's entire purpose is to keep people from
renting naughty videos from a place called the Love Shack. With my
uncanny instincts as an investigative reporter, I visited the Love
Shack recently, and noted a parking lot full of Beemers and Benzes.
I'm sure they were all there for the non-porn items in the store.
No God-fearing Johns Creekian would countenance such, ugh, filth.
And the oh-so-Republican Legislature -- just to prove they know
there are non-white folks in Georgia -- later this year will let
south Fulton County areas called South Fulton (isn't it amazing
those Gold Dome guys discovered South Fulton is in south Fulton?)
and Chattahoochee Hill Country vote on incorporation.
That's just the beginning. In the spirit of our noble Southern
secessionist heritage (do-dah do-dah), any part of north Fulton
that isn't in the cities of Sandy Springs, Johns Creek or Milton
would come under the jurisdiction of a new county called Milton. I
guess the intellectual struggle to devise new names finally
overwhelmed the suburban rebels.
DeKalb County residents, meanwhile, have hoisted their rebel
banners and declared that Dunwoody must become a city. A bill was
introduced last week in the Legislature to do just that.
Also, in an exercise social scientists describe as "balkanizing the
already ridiculously balkanized," the trust-fund and backdated-
stock-option clan along West Paces Ferry wants to revolt from the
city of Atlanta and become the Nearly All White and Entirely Filthy
Rich Grand Duchy of Buckhead. The city's proposed motto: "We Keep
What We Plunder."
Speaking of that last case of what is commonly called "really,
really stupid thinking," former Atlanta Mayor Sam Massell had a few
words that are applicable to all of the northern secessions. "It is
ill-conceived, racially motivated and bad government," says
Massell, who heads the Buckhead Coalition and who is perfectly
happy to be part of Atlanta.
Massell notes that if north Fulton is carved into new cities and a
new county, what it leaves behind will be perhaps the poorest
county in the nation. Which is exactly the plan of the hate-
Atlanta, rural neo-Confederates in the Georgia Legislature.
Milton County has run into an obstacle, that silly old state
Constitution, which limits the number of counties to 159. So,
either the legislators must start the process for an amendment, or
(and I'm not making this up) find two rural counties whose
officials are so abysmally moronic they'd agree to consolidate. I'm
sure there's no shortage of sheriffs and county commissioners
willing to give up all of their bribes, graft and cronyism to
benefit Atlanta suburbanites who in all likelihood are Yankees by
birth.
It's a given that the Atlanta metro area -- especially Fulton
County -- is honest-to-God screwed up. But this has a lot more to
do with so many tiny governments and agencies -- each a fiefdom for
self-important, often-corrupt officials -- than it does with the
straw tiger of "big gummint." The solution isn't to starve Fulton
and Atlanta by stripping away all of the affluent suburbs. If folks
don't like being associated with an urban area with all of its
cultural and economic benefits -- and, true, problems -- then maybe
they should move. Perhaps to the 18th century. Because in 21st-
century Atlanta, we need regional government and regional thinking
for transportation, water, law enforcement, health care and many
other issues.
There are voices of reason, not many, but a few. One is state Sen.
David Adelman, D-Atlanta, who has proposed a constitutional
amendment allowing "townships." These city-lite enclaves would be
limited to allowing residents to decide zoning and planning for
their neighborhoods. They wouldn't stand in the way of
regionalization. "Developers are a source of money for county
commissioners," Adelman says. "This would balance the power of
developers with the interests of local areas."
Balancing interests is part of government. Secession, however,
isn't a balance. It's merely larceny of public resources.
See what's free at AOL.com.
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