Published: March 30, 2008 05:23 pm      

3/30/2008 Letters to the Editor

What choices?



Have you been in an ice cream store and asked for fresh peach and been told, “Sorry, we don’t have that, but you need to try our tooty fruity cantaloupe flavor.” Never heard of it, but I know how the other tastes. How about ordering a steak cooked medium rare and then have it served well done? Should you eat it or wait for the right order?

Years ago, I bought a pickup over the phone and was assured that it was a pleasing color of tan but when I traveled out of state to pick it up, I was heartbroken to find that it was burnt orange. I had to grit my teeth and drive that sucker for two years.

Even though many superior products are available somewhere at any time, what we desire or need is not always what we end up with at the right time. I feel that way right now about what is needed for a president and what we are offered and will accept.

Of the candidates now offered, I cannot find the one that will satisfy all of my desires for this country’s leader’s qualifications. None are statesmen, one is an ambitious truth bender with no common sense whose husband is a liar and a cheat, one is strong for illegal alien amnesty but works with both parties and is a proven patriot with lots of congressional experience, and one is glib of tongue and of doubtful religious and patriotic background with a wife who has only recently claimed to like America.

They are all congressional politicians and all promise the moon or at least the south side of it. The elective office will demand our honor and respect and as good citizens we must remember that, so which candidate can you honor and respect? Your president will also be my president. Are any of these actually dangerous to the future welfare of the U.S.? Will we pick one with the most positive assets or the one with more negative characteristics and baggage?

We all will be challenged in November, although by then we should have decided on our best of the two finalists. I hate to think of accepting less than the best this country has to offer but that rationale may not be as bad as being swept away by the promises offered and putting the emphasis on favorite criteria without studying the whole picture.

All presidents make some mistakes, therefore a bipartisan, commonsense Congress and a Supreme Court strong on the correct interpretation of the Constitution are vital for this country to continue functioning as a great nation. Hopefully, we will soon finish this war with lasting beneficial results.

Social Security and Medicare continuation with prompt elimination of many fraudulent entitlements are vital actions for Congress. There is a push for unification of Mexico, Canada and the U.S. while Britain is being led into a Uni Europe in a similar fashion. We must be aware of pressures being applied for us to lose our sovereignty to the U.N. in the form of international law. Let’s pin down the presidential candidates and congressional members of each party concerning the serious decisions ahead for this country and its citizens.



Monte Swatzell,

Cleburne



Hillary is downright evil



In first part of March I sent a letter to the editor about Bill Clinton’s TV commercial attempting to sell Hillary to the voters. He made eight statements of which only one was accurate. Her approval of that advertisement is proof that she, like Bill is a liar. Now Hillary, in an attempt to inflate her diplomatic prowess, uttered on TV a lie where she “remembered” a trip to Bosnia in 1996 where she said, “the airport was under sniper fire, and we had to risk our lives running from the plane to a bunker.”

Unfortunately for her there exists a film clip showing her, Chelsea and several others sauntering off the plane and chatting with each other for a few moments before walking off. (It is a shame that there were no film clips when Kerry received his battle wounds in Vietnam.) Hillary now says she simply misspoke.

Misspeaking is when you make an error about what time of the day it was when something happened, who was the first person you spoke to at an event, what town you were in on a particular day while on a month-long trip last summer, if you had ham and eggs for breakfast last Wednesday and similar happenings. Claiming that your life was in danger and you had to run for shelter when it did not happen is simply lying. It is not misspeaking. It is not being forgetful. It is attempting to inflate her rather pitiful capabilities by lying.

It is no secret that I do not care for Hillary. Actually, I am afraid of her. We know she is a liar (she has had the best training in the world listening to Bill), and her thirst for power drives her to forget the truth if it doesn’t reflect her view of the incident (which also seems to be the way of most Democrats). Her speeches and past history indicate she is going to try to convert America to at least a socialist country and perhaps if she gets lucky a communist one where she can rule as a dictator for life as did Joseph Stalin in Russia.

And with the likes of Pelosi, Feinstein, Boxer, Kerry, Kennedy and Schumer in Congress it is not an impossible scenario. In theory it shouldn’t and couldn’t happen, but there have been so many things in my 73 years on this earth that couldn’t possibly happen, but have happened, that I cannot rule out anything happening no matter how bizarre or unlikely it might seem. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I think that she is pure evil and capable of doing anything. If Revelations didn’t indicate that the Anti-Christ was a man, I could believe her to be him.

If she is going to misspeak whenever she is tired, do we really want her answering the red phone at 3 a.m.? “Oops! I just started World War III. Forgive me. I misspoke, but then I am only human.”

Once in my life I was able to vote for a candidate for the presidency of the United States of America that I wanted. And again this time there are two Democrats who I believe would be disruptive and possibly harmful to the quality of the balance of my life and one (McCain) for whom I must vote who will hopefully not impact my future too severely.

Unfortunately, she is not the first politician to lie and will not be the last. I’m beginning to wonder whether being a lawyer is the reason so many politicians are unable to tell the truth.



W.V. Bonds

Cleburne



Columnist needs to ask for tuition back



Your columnist, Michael O’Connor, is entitled to voice his opinion as to whether the proposed Burleson High School yearbook article about teen motherhood is appropriate for a high school audience. However, Mr. O’Connor’s March 13 column crosses the line of harmless opinion and purports to convey as fact Mr. O’Connor’s uninformed belief as to the law governing school censorship. Because students may read Mr. O’Connor’s poorly researched column and take away a false impression of their rights, some clarification is in order.

Mr. O’Connor’s column betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the First Amendment. That Mr. O’Connor’s editors may correct or withhold his columns — a right they regrettably failed to exercise here — is in no way analogous to a school setting. A school principal is a state official, and a state official may not use the power of the state to censor indiscriminately, any more than the mayor of Cleburne could tell Mr. O’Connor what to write in his column.

To be quite clear that there is no misunderstanding, the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Hazlewood cannot rationally be interpreted as giving schools a free hand to dictate the content of student publications at will. Even under the most permissive of Hazelwood standards, it is the burden of the school administrator to point to a legitimate educational justification before censoring. That the principal’s telephone might ring a few times with irate calls from members of the community is not, in any court in America, a legitimate educational justification. Indeed the “educational message conveyed by Burleson’s policy is that journalist should refrain from publishing information they know to be truthful and relevant to their readers out of fear that some will find the information upsetting. If this is the type of journalism education that Mr. O’Connor received in school, he should ask for his tuition back.

Reputable professional journalists understand that courage in the face of opposition from authority is fundamental to the practice of good journalism, and for that matter, the practice of good American citizenship. It is the student editors of Burleson High who are the teachers here, and no matter what one thinks of the yearbook photo spread, we can all learn a lesson from their fortitude.

Mr. O’Connor is of course correct that editors should take account of community values in exercising discretion as to what they publish. Student editors learn this best when they learn it themselves through experience. But whatever Mr. O’Connor’s low opinion of his readers may be, ignorance of the law and blind obedience to authority are not community values.



Frank D. LoMonte

Executive Director

Student Press Law Center



Columnist responds to scathing letter



Editor’s note: This is Michael O’Connor’s response to the SPLC letter.



Mr. LoMonte’s disagreement with my column may charitably be said to center on the interpretation of Hazelwood as applied to the Burleson High School case.

My comments proceeded from the assumption that Hazelwood applies in this case and then explored the implications of editorial control. I was not trying to imply that principals may whack away at student publications willy-nilly. But I also did not spend time dealing with the details of the decision.

Hazelwood recognizes that students do not lose their First Amendment rights when they walk on campus but also states that their rights are not the same as those afforded adults in other settings.

The Supreme Court’s decision was summarized later by Justice Samuel Alito as allowing “a school to regulate what is in essence the school’s own speech, that is, articles that appear in a publication that is an official school organ.”

A central issue for the court was that the school’s regulation of published material be governed by a legitimate pedagogical, or teaching, concern. In Hazelwood, the court noted that the student newspaper was part of the journalism curriculum, so students should be learning how to apply journalistic standards to the publication. At BHS, the yearbook is part of the school’s journalism curriculum, so the pedagogical concern would be much the same as in Hazelwood, including the appropriateness of the material for the yearbook. Though LoMonte and the students would disagree, the argument could be made that the article in question was not appropriate for the yearbook. In addition, the article’s inclusion could be seen as countering the school’s curriculum in sex education, which is abstinence based.

In addition Hazelwood specifically calls the school the publisher of the material and says it may “ ‘disassociate itself,’ ... not only from speech that would ‘substantially interfere with [its] work ... or impinge upon the rights of other students,’ ... but also from speech that is, for example, ungrammatical, poorly written, inadequately researched, biased or prejudiced, vulgar or profane, or unsuitable for immature audiences. A school must be able to set high standards for the student speech that is disseminated under its auspices — standards that may be higher than those demanded by some newspaper publishers or theatrical producers in the ‘real’ world — and may refuse to disseminate student speech that does not meet those standards.”

SPLC finds this language to be overly broad, allowing school administrators too much leeway. But until the court reviews its decision, the language sets the standard.

I would encourage readers to read the full decision and the dissent that was written by Justice William Brennan and joined by Justices Thurgood Marshall and Harry Blackmun. You can find a copy at www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/comm/free_speech/hazelwood.html. In addition, readers should look at SPLC’s analysis of Hazelwood, which is more extensive than LoMonte’s letter and may be found at www.splc.org/pdf/HazelwoodGuide.pdf.



Michael O’Connor