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(CNSNews.com) - Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama received about $1.5 million in contributions this year from college professors and others in the education field, outpacing the party’s front-runner, Sen. Hillary Clinton, who got $940,000 from academics.Still, Clinton’s near-$1-million second-place finish was almost as much as academia’s total combined donations to leading Republican candidates Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani and John McCain. (See Complete Candidate Breakdown)

That many college professors and academics lean to the political left is no surprise — 76 percent of their donations went to Democratic candidates in the first two quarters of 2007. But the volume of their donations is increasing, according to an analysis by the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), which tracks money in politics.

“College professors and others in the education field have contributed more money than the oil industry and drug makers, with the nearly unanimous goal of putting a Democrat in the White House,” the report said. 

A former elementary school teacher in Tacoma, Wash., is behind bars for allegedly kidnapping and raping her 10-year-old student numerous times.Jennifer Rice, 31, is said to have met the fourth-grade boy shortly after being hired last year as a replacement teacher at McKinley Elementary School.

She was taken into custody Saturday and booked into the Pierce County Jail for investigation of kidnapping, five counts of first-degree child rape, and four counts of child molestation.

Rice pleaded not guilty yesterday as she’s being held on $500,000 bail.

Police documents indicate Rice took the boy with her when she left a party in his East Tacoma neighborhood around 3 a.m. Thursday. Authorities claim the two were headed for an amusement park in Idaho when they stopped at a rest area, napped and then had sex.

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Previous: Skank watch: What’s behind today’s epidemic of teacher-student sex?

For a decade now, the composite score on the ACT college entrance exam for homeschooled students has been higher than the national average – and the 2006 statistics, the most recent available, show the trend continuing, according to a report.The Home School Legal Defense Association said the 2006 scores for homeschooled students averaged 22.4, compared to the national average composite of 21.1.

A year earlier, the average for homeschoolers was 22.5, compared to the national average that includes public and private school students of 20.9.

“Now homeschoolers have an unbroken record for the last 10 years – since 1996, when testing officials started tracking them – of scoring higher on the ACT than the national average,” the world’s premiere home-school advocacy group said.

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Nothing earth shattering, just found it somewhat interesting.

You can learn a lot about a politician by how they hold their hands—or how much they talk about the future, or their feelings, or themselves. We live in an age of relentless focus-grouping, but a candidate’s unvarnished attitudes and values still peek through in every microexpression and personal pronoun. Content analysis can ferret out aspects of a person’s political agenda and personality based on word and gesture alone. Psychology Today asked a range of experts to scrutinize the 2008 front-runners. They uncovered a great deal, from the messages candidates want voters to know—Giuliani won’t let you forget that he’s a crisis manager, Hillary wants to seem middle-American—to the traits they’d rather hide: a negative worldview, a meandering message, an inability to connect with voters emotionally. And just for fun, we also asked graphologists to examine the candidates’ handwriting to see what they could glean about their personalities. Handwriting analysis is not rigorous or scientific, but we thought it would still be interesting to see if the graphologists’ conclusions matched those of the other experts.

The rest of this story from Psychology Today

Sphere: Related Content

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ABC News’ Rick Klein Reports: Former senator John Edwards on Tuesday plans to unveil a proposal to alleviate economic inequality in the nation’s public schools, as he decries “economic segregation” in school systems across the country.

“I think we still have two public school systems in this country,” Edwards, D-N.C., said Monday at a town hall broadcast on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “They’re not segregated just based on race. They’re segregated to a large extent based on economics, which has racial implications.”

“The result is, if you live in a wealthy suburban area, the odds are very high that your child will get a very good public school education,” Edwards continued. “If you live in the inner city or if you live in a poor rural area, the odds of that go down dramatically.”

Is this dude a fucken genius or what!?

When the Edwards family purchased a 102-acre plot of land to build a home on in 2004, they appear to have had those odds in mind.

Elizabeth Edwards said at the time that they chose their location — in a more affluent school district than the neighboring district — in large part based on the education the couple’s two young children would receive there.

According to a local newspaper report shortly after the purchase, Elizabeth Edwards said that “the family plans to move there because she and her husband are interested in the school district there.”

More than a year after the purchase, when local bloggers began buzzing about the fact that the new home would be in an unincorporated part of the county that’s part of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro school district, Mrs. Edwards wrote into the blog and cited the “great public schools” among the reason for their decision to relocate to the new piece of land.

“Our older children attended public schools in Wake County, and I knew well the reputation of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro School System,” she wrote in October 2005. “But there are other reasons, too, including the level of political involvement of the people here, the proximity to UNC where John now has a position and works, and good and long-time friends who live here.”

The Edwards children, Emma Claire, 9, and Jack, 7, attend Chapel Hill-Carrboro public schools. The family’s sprawling home sits about a mile outside the boundary for the more rural Orange County school district, which has complained about funding shortfalls in recent years.

Unlike the Edwards family, the front-running Democratic candidates have sent their children to private schools. Sen. Barack Obama’s two daughters attend private schools in Chicago, and Chelsea Clinton attended the exclusive Sidwell Friends School in Washington while she lived in the White House. 

The Edwards campaign says Edwards is the only candidate with a comprehensive plan to address income inequality in schools.

“John and Elizabeth Edwards sent their kids to the school district in which they live,” said Eric Schultz, an Edwards spokesman. “The difference between John Edwards and the Bush administration is that he wants to make sure that every child in America gets to the same opportunity to attend a great public school — they just want to close public schools.”

The plan Edwards is to announce would give federal bonuses to schools in affluent communities that enroll low-income students; double federal funding for magnet schools to promote “economic integration”; and establish new housing vouchers that would allow low-income families to move to better neighborhoods.

A little side note as I found this pic:

Having been the only black kid in a class, I know what this little girl is asking, because a idiot little white boy did ask me!

1) Why is your skin so dark, is it burned?

2) How did your hair get like that?

3) Did you use a vacuum to make it puffy?

*****

By Juan Williams

LET us now praise the Brown decision. Let us now bury the Brown decision.

With yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling ending the use of voluntary schemes to create racial balance among students, it is time to acknowledge that Brown’s time has passed. It is worthy of a send-off with fanfare for setting off the civil rights movement and inspiring social progress for women, gays and the poor. But the decision in Brown v. Board of Education that focused on outlawing segregated schools as unconstitutional is now out of step with American political and social realities.

Desegregation does not speak to dropout rates that hover near 50 percent for black and Hispanic high school students. It does not equip society to address the so-called achievement gap between black and white students that mocks Brown’s promise of equal educational opportunity.

And the fact is, during the last 20 years, with Brown in full force, America’s public schools have been growing more segregated — even as the nation has become more racially diverse. In 2001, the National Center for Education Statistics reported that the average white student attends a school that is 80 percent white, while 70 percent of black students attend schools where nearly two-thirds of students are black and Hispanic.

By the early ’90s, support in the federal courts for the central work of Brown — racial integration of public schools — began to rapidly expire. In a series of cases in Atlanta, Oklahoma City and Kansas City, Mo., frustrated parents, black and white, appealed to federal judges to stop shifting children from school to school like pieces on a game board. The parents wanted better neighborhood schools and a better education for their children, no matter the racial make-up of the school. In their rulings ending court mandates for school integration, the judges, too, spoke of the futility of using schoolchildren to address social ills caused by adults holding fast to patterns of residential segregation by both class and race.

The focus of efforts to improve elementary and secondary schools shifted to magnet schools, to allowing parents the choice to move their children out of failing schools and, most recently, to vouchers and charter schools. The federal No Child Left Behind plan has many critics, but there’s no denying that it is an effective tool for forcing teachers’ unions and school administrators to take responsibility for educating poor and minority students.

It was an idealistic Supreme Court that in 1954 approved of Brown as a race-conscious policy needed to repair the damage of school segregation and protect every child’s 14th-Amendment right to equal treatment under law. In 1971, Chief Justice Warren Burger, writing for a unanimous court still embracing Brown, said local school officials could make racial integration a priority even if it did not improve educational outcomes because it helped “to prepare students to live in a pluralistic society.”

But today a high court with a conservative majority concludes that any policy based on race — no matter how well intentioned — is a violation of every child’s 14th-Amendment right to be treated as an individual without regard to race. We’ve come full circle.

In 1990, after months of interviews with Justice Thurgood Marshall, who had been the lead lawyer for the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund on the Brown case, I sat in his Supreme Court chambers with a final question. Almost 40 years later, was he satisfied with the outcome of the decision? Outside the courthouse, the failing Washington school system was hypersegregated, with more than 90 percent of its students black and Latino. Schools in the surrounding suburbs, meanwhile, were mostly white and producing some of the top students in the nation.

Had Mr. Marshall, the lawyer, made a mistake by insisting on racial integration instead of improvement in the quality of schools for black children?

His response was that seating black children next to white children in school had never been the point. It had been necessary only because all-white school boards were generously financing schools for white children while leaving black students in overcrowded, decrepit buildings with hand-me-down books and underpaid teachers. He had wanted black children to have the right to attend white schools as a point of leverage over the biased spending patterns of the segregationists who ran schools — both in the 17 states where racially separate schools were required by law and in other states where they were a matter of culture.

If black children had the right to be in schools with white children, Justice Marshall reasoned, then school board officials would have no choice but to equalize spending to protect the interests of their white children.

Racial malice is no longer the primary motive in shaping inferior schools for minority children. Many failing big city schools today are operated by black superintendents and mostly black school boards.

And today the argument that school reform should provide equal opportunity for children, or prepare them to live in a pluralistic society, is spent. The winning argument is that better schools are needed for all children — black, white, brown and every other hue — in order to foster a competitive workforce in a global economy.

Dealing with racism and the bitter fruit of slavery and “separate but equal” legal segregation was at the heart of the court’s brave decision 53 years ago. With Brown officially relegated to the past, the challenge for brave leaders now is to deliver on the promise of a good education for every child.

Found this on Moonbattery 

You can find the strangest things on the Internet, including a collection of the ravings of demented college professors who aren’t buying the government’s attempts to blame the atrocities of 9/11 on the Muslims who committed them. A lot of these folks aren’t just insane — they are visibly insane. 

You have to read the rest on Moonbattery

Below are the full paragraphs of the three controversial sections. The bold text is the portion O’Reilly highlights giving fuel to the controversy. Without reading the entire text it does sound bad, but any reasonable person would see that what these people said although somewhat inappropriate was certainly not over the top.

Watch the clip, then here is the link to the transcript

But, they’re tricky. And even through in your teens, even when your 16 and 17, you could have thousands of erections, sometimes 50 in a day, and you know because you counted (laughter from audience), [indecipherable phrase] the act of putting on a condom, for me at least, makes me lose my erection almost every time. That’s the thing they don’t tell you about condoms. If you’re lucky enough to get them on, and you still stay hard, it’s hard to stay hard. (laughter from audience) And it doesn’t feel as good. And sometimes you hurt the woman because you can’t feel her, because you didn’t know, when you were 16, that lubrication like KY helps you stay hard and makes her feel better. And I know how hard it is to talk like that to a girl. It’s even hard now for me as an adult. So I don’t know how it is for you to be able to say so.

***

Joel Becker: I would add onto what Sanho said in terms of that same thing I was talking about, in terms of your emotional development. I mean, I agree with Sanho that the human animal has seemed to want to change its consciousness to some other consciousness since the beginning of time, and I think that people are going to continue to do that. But, I think we have to find a way for people to do that in the safest way possible—harm reduction. And there’s no question that people’s worlds are changed after their consciousness is changed. Well, you have to really sort of think, am I ready to have my world changed? I’m 14 years old. Maybe I’m not ready to see what one sees on LSD. Maybe I’m not ready to have the feelings that mescaline provides in my body, or ecstasy, because a lot of those feelings have to do with feelings of being out of control, and they can be very scary to a person who doesn’t have a strong enough sense of themselves, and that’s why people end up having bad trips at young ages. They’re just not ready. As a psychologist, I know the history of the use of psychedelics. There’s a very famous man named Timothy Leary at Harvard who did therapy with LSD. Even today, there are psychiatrists who will do sessions under the influence of ecstasy. If I had some, maybe I’d do it with somebody, but I don’t, (laughter from audience) you know. I haven’t tried it but there are people that do it.

I happen to live in the state of California in the city of Los Angeles, which has been described as America’s Amsterdam. We have legalized medical marijuana in the state of California. There are 110 marijuana clubs in the city of Los Angeles. There was an article on the cover of the Los Angeles Magazine that said “When Did LA Become, Like, the Capitol of Marijuana, Like, in the US?” And it is. If you want to get marijuana in the city of Los Angeles, all you’ve got to do is go to a doctor who will write you a ‘script. You go to a club. You go and you buy somewhat regulated production marijuana so you know you’re not getting stuff with chemicals in it. They not only sell marijuana, they sell hash, they sell baked goods. We have brownies, we have cookies, all the things you might want, so come on over. (laughter from audience)

BHS Student: This is for anyone. I hear a lot of debates about whether smoking marijuana or drinking is worse. Which, like, in your opinion, which do you think is worse?

Andee Gerhardt: Having done both, personally I’ve actually come to a point where, and this took a long time—I’m 38 so it took I long time to get here—I don’t find either of them to be fun anymore. In high school I didn’t really like drinking alcohol because that was, you know, more about getting into cars with people that were drunk, and there was a lot of risk in that, where I’d have to call my dad to come pick me up, and that was always a pain in the ass. So, getting high was a lot easier. What I found over time was that getting high was just sort of not as much fun. I wasn’t silly. I’d be lethargic for days afterwards. I didn’t do really well in school, so I did get in trouble. You know, I think that there’s an experimentation, and I don’t know that one is better than the other, and I don’t want to endorse either of them, but I think that some people are going to react differently than other people to different drugs.

***

Sanho Tree: Also, there’s an unintended consequence, again, of abstinence-based models, particularly when they’re combined with religious fundamentalism and indoctrination. If it works for you, well, great, it works for you. But what if it fails? What happens then to a person who perhaps may have made a mistake. We all make mistakes; this is how we learn. This is a very important way of learning, from mistakes. But you know, taking someone who may have made a mistake, and you make them feel much worse about themselves—that they have betrayed their covenant with God, that they’re dirty, they’re impure, something is wrong with them. It’s a mistake. We all make mistakes. We all experiment. It’s very natural for young people to experiment with same-sex relationships. Perhaps you don’t talk about it much. A lot of people experiment and never go on to become homosexual. They go on and lead very productive lives, etcetera, etcetera. Well, if you’ve had that indoctrination, you think, “Well, maybe there’s something wrong with me. Maybe I’ve sinned, I’m dirty,”—all these other things that take a bad situation and make it much worse, in my opinion.

McKinney a commencement speaker!?? WTF!

This from Moonbattery 

The loony Left’s grip on academia is nowhere near loosening, to judge by the speakers chosen for this year’s commencement addresses. Young America’s Foundation found that lefties outnumbered conservative speakers 8 to 1.

This year’s speakers included:

• Impeached President B.J. Clinton at University of Michigan.
• Madeleine Halfbright, the toast of Pyongyang, at UNC-Chapel Hill.
• Race-baiting demagogue and Fidel Castro bootlicker Charles Rangel at New York University.
• Gray Lady propagandist Thomas Friedman, who says oil at $100/barrel “would make my day,” at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
• The Communist News Network’s Wolf Blitzer, who would like to know, “Why would it be so bad if this Iranian regime had a nuclear weapon?” at George Washington University.
• Physically violent, racist 9/11 conspiracy kook Cynthia McKinney at Antioch College.

As Jason Mattera of YAF notes,

[C]ollege administrators are using commencement ceremonies to send their students off with one more predictable leftist lecture.

At least liberal icon and convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal isn’t giving any recorded commencements from his prison cell this year — so far as I know. In the past he’s provided them for UC Berkley, UC Santa Cruz, Antioch College, Occidental College, and Evergreen State College.