Yesterday, I heard mid-comment from my son's school that it will broadcast President Obama's speech Tuesday. Today, the daily newspaper tells me this will be the exception, that as a policy the school district will call for schools to tape the speech for review.
Here is the link.
http://www.theledger.com/...
Below the fold is the letter I wote, which ignores the school option unfortunately because I wrote it mad.
Editor:
Let me get this straight: For the last eight years, it has been the official policy of the Republican Party that the President of the United States is a "unitary executive" whose powers allow him to violate the fourth, fifth and sixth amendments to the constitution and decide without judicial review about the application of international law to the (illegal) practice of torture, but apparently does not extend to speaking to public-school students about their upcoming school year.
I don’t know whether state G.O.P. chair Jim Greer is stupid, presumptuously partisan, racist or merely cynical for taking this piece of hypocrisy to the national media. I do know that his goal is to diminish President Obama without any real evidence and in a manner consistent with the assortment of hooligans who confuse disrupting town halls with winning elections.
That the Polk County School District has decided to cave to this partisan putsch and subject President Obama’s speech to prior restraint is, to me, one of the worst civics lessons an educational institution can give its students. What it has done is contribute to a generation of eroding what has become pejoratively referred to as civics-class democracy. When the president addresses Congress, they don’t set their Tivo and wait for a staff review. We listen when the president wants to speak. Polk County students did this when President Reagan and both Presidents Bush addressed the nation’s school children, and in each case they attempted to advance partisan arguments.
I don’t know whether Superintendent Gail McKenzie is a coward, is her own kind of unitary executive who believes that the Supremne Court-granted powers she has to limit free speech on her campuses extends to the President, or a poor student of history or simply someone who doesn’t understand the consequences of an action. I’m eliminating the possibility that her own decision was racially motivated, but there will be others less kind. The end result was to cave to a specious argument for expedience's sake.
In addition, this was not open government. No period of comment was set. No hearing held. A mob jammed phone lines. Under this logic, we should have abandoned the bus system after the lines were jammed Aug. 24.
This was a disastrous decision, one which gives absolutely the wrong message to my son who studies at a Polk School, and I would be remiss if I didn’t add that The Ledger news report’s characterization of this loud minority within a minority as a larger and more respectable movement than it is contributes to the problem.
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