Posted: 16 Apr 2010 04:46 PM PDT

The United States is becoming a welfare state and creating "legal fictions" to justify practices like abortion, former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum said at a press conference Friday afternoon.

Santorum, a longtime pro-life advocate, came to Louisville to speak at the Right to Life of Louisville's 40th anniversary dinner at the Crowne Plaza Hotel.

Santorum said he wants to energize the pro-life movement in Louisville and elsewhere.

"It is the core issue of our time. It is the great moral issue of the day," he said while meeting with reporters before the dinner. "Our country will never be the country it should be — it'll never be the country it has always aspired to be if we do not protect the innocent lives of the children in the womb."

Santorum, who said he is "kicking around the idea" of running for president in 2012, also criticized the Obama administration, saying its political agenda threatens the country's values.

He singled out health-care reform and economic stimulus spending, saying they have led to increased government control.

"One of the things I think is being lost is the moral dimension of all this," Santorum said.

The government under Obama is creating new rights, such as the right to health care, that are moving the U.S. farther away from its founding values and leading to more government control of citizens' lives, he said.

Santorum said rights such as the right to health care and the right to same-sex marriage are not "God Given rights" and instead represent one group of people exercising its will over another.

"To me that's a very disconcerting movement in this country," he said.

Santorum served as a U.S. representative and then senator for Pennsylvania from 1990 to 2007 before being defeated for re-election.

He now serves as chairman of America's Foundation, a conservative political action committee.

Santorum praised the work done by Right to Life of Louisville, which began even before the U.S. Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision, which legalized abortions.

"Without this movement, there would be no public officials standing up and fighting this battle," Santorum said.

Margie Montgomery, executive director of Right to Life of Louisville, said it was an honor to have Santorum speak at the dinner. She called him "one of the leaders in the pro-life movement."

Reporter Sean Rose can be reached at (502) 582-4199.

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REPLAY: Golden Apple Teacher Recognition Banquet - News-Press

Posted: 16 Apr 2010 06:12 PM PDT

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What her student, Molly Oak, said: "Miss Kirk wants the best learning experience for every child, so once you step into her classroom, you never know what's going to happen."

NANCY LOUGHLIN

School: Island Coast High

Job: English teacher

Experience: 10 years

Age: 42

Excerpt from speech: "In my classroom, we're not just addressing the tales locked in textbooks or novels. Life is overflowing with interesting fictions and it's one of the many goals of a language arts teacher to help people figure out their roles in their life stories, as authors, yes, but also as protagonists, antagonists and any smattering of villains and anti-heroes."

What her student, Parker Cauble, said: "For the longest time, I thought that sports were the only ways I meant something in my own mind. But I've learned that isn't true. I can think. I can write. I can win by passing more than a ball."

KATHRYN MCKINNON

School: Trafalgar Middle

Job: Science teacher

Experience: 9 years

Age: 35

Excerpt from speech: "As a teacher, I'm proud and excited to share my love of science with our students. At my core, I'm just a science junkie, indulging my passion with an audience of 150 kids who allow me to share with them this crazy notion that learning science is beyond cool."

What her student, Theodore Kanefke, said: "Before school starts every year, I pray to God for a great teacher. I got more than I bargained for this year when I asked for a great teacher. I instead got an excellent teacher. I'm not saying that all my other teachers aren't great, but Mrs. McKinnon stood out like a sunflower on a prairie."

LISA VAZQUEZ

School: Mariner High

Job: Engineering and drafting teacher

Experience: 19 years

Age: 41

Excerpt from speech: "The teenage years can be as tumultuous as a hurricane: angst and passion, heartbreak and joy, failures and successes. There are periods of calm, glorious weather and bands of fierce winds and rain that strain even the strongest of structures."

What her student, Bernice Chavez, said: "Mrs. Vazquez is the epitome of a strong, well-educated and bold woman, one who many students view as a friend and confidant. Day by day, she tirelessly helps each and every one of her students, and makes learning more interesting and fun."

RENEE WAGNER-PACHIVA

School: Allen Park Elementary

Job: Hearing-impaired teacher

Experience: 4 years

Age: 44

Excerpt from speech: "I hope success is also measured by the child who, because of a teacher, is made to feel strong, worthy, valued and capable. I hope success is also measured by the child who, because of a teacher, stands straighter, walks more purposefully and looks you straight in the eye. This child will be truly educated. This is why I love being a teacher."

What her student, Nerli Aguilar, said: "She is the best teacher because she makes learning fun and exciting. She also teaches us to be nice because it makes us feel good in our hearts. I have learned to do things for myself because Ms. Renee always says, 'You can do it!'"

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Battling about the Bard - Irish Times

Posted: 16 Apr 2010 05:50 PM PDT

The Irish Times - Saturday, April 17, 2010

BOOK REVIEW,SHAKESPEARE: Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? By James Shapiro Faber and Faber, 367pp. £20, reviewed by DANIELLE CLARKE

COMPARED TO HIS 2006 hit, 1599, (and comparisons are inevitable) James Shapiro's new book on Shakespeare struggles to locate its subject – the book is not really about Shakespeare at all, but about the array of fictions and mysteries woven around the black hole that is the lack of biographical or documentary evidence of the life. His intention is to analyse not the hoary authorship question in relation to Shakespeare's plays (who wrote which bits? What if it wasn't the son of a provincial tradesman? What if it was?) but to investigate the weird and wonderful by-ways of the controversy itself. And weird and wonderful they certainly are, proving that well-connected and important people will, if conditions are right, abandon all reason and invest time, money and reputation in schemes that are doomed to failure. There are many of these detailed in this diverting and entertaining book – my particular favourite is Orville Ward Owen, a wealthy Detroit doctor, who on the basis of messages derived from a complex cipher decided that the "manuscripts" of Shakespeare's plays were buried in lead-lined boxes at the bottom of the River Severn. And yes, he did go and look.

Contested Will brings the forensic skills of the academic researcher – Shapiro has visited archives all over the US and British Isles – to a topic within Shakespeare criticism that provided the foundational assumptions for the interpretation of the plays and poems. The question of who really wrote Shakespeare's plays was decisively abandoned by the academy in the 20th century in favour of more broadly based textual, material and historical issues. Yet, as Shapiro's book suggests, readers of Shakespeare cared not a jot for academia's dismissal of their desire to understand the man behind the texts, even if this meant countenancing acts of fabrication that surely would at least have amused the Great Man with his domed head. As Shapiro notes, on the one hand, material relating to the authorship question (and ever more novel candidates) continues to proliferate at an almighty rate outside academia, whilst on the other, those inside academia insistently ignore and appear to be embarrassed by these issues. The evidence provided in this book helps to explain why. A dazzling array of individuals, particularly in the 19th century, were drawn into mad-cap schemes to either prove or disprove Shakespeare's authorship, including Mark Twain, Emerson, Helen Keller, Carlyle (curmudgeonly and skeptical), Freud and more. The twin tracks of this story – the holy grail of bardolatry – are biographical evidence (other than documents relating to money and property) and manuscripts of the plays. And even the most dispassionate and eminent of scholars have not been immune to temptation (or subsequent ridicule) on this score – the most recent example being the Cobbe portrait from Newbridge House. The portrait surfaced in Newbridge House last year; everyone decided it was a lost portrait of Shakespeare before deciding that it was in fact of Thomas Overbury.

The American focus of this story is particularly intriguing, although Shapiro is largely uninterested in national investments in the figure of Shakespeare (he doesn't for instance mention the Irishness of Edmond Malone, the founder of Shakespeare scholarship), especially given that attempts to "solve" the Shakespeare question coincided with a period of rapacious acquisition of English books and manuscripts from the 16th and 17th centuries (Henry Folger, oil; Henry Huntington, railways; Walter Newberry, banking, property).

Equally, the desire to "fix" an authentic Shakespeare to whom the complex, plural and unsettling meanings of the plays might be referred, is enhanced by the development of new technologies – that of the cipher, for example, where the substitution and transposition ciphers familiar to Francis Bacon (one of the front-runners for the mantle of author of the plays, despite any evidence in his vast extant writings that he had the slightest interest in drama) were developed and enhanced by the development of encryption machines in the 19th century and by computer- assisted statistical analysis in the 20th.

The book takes a broadly chronological approach to dissecting the false trails, made-up evidence and spurious interpretations that make up the case for each of the key candidates. It begins with a fascinating account of how Shakespeare criticism came to be auto/biographical – until the 18th century it clearly never occurred to anybody that the plays might be read in relation to the life. The key figure is Edmond Malone, born in Dublin in 1741, who maintained links with his family here all his life and is buried in Ireland.

Academically gifted, tenacious and well-connected (Goldsmith, Boswell, Johnson, Burke and Joshua Reynolds were amongst his friends), he managed single-handedly to put Shakespearian scholarship on to a professional footing through his extensive textual work on Shakespeare's extant plays and poetry.

Shapiro admits that he has been "hard on Malone in these pages" , and indeed he is. Malone did not always behave generously to fellow scholars, and made errors that have been subsequently corrected by later editors, but all subsequent editors (and therefore, readers) are in his debt. The problem is that Shapiro does not like biographical readings, and holds Malone primarily responsible for them – yet Contested Will provides abundant evidence of a very human desire to prefer the ballast of the life to the unreliability and inconsistency of the imagination.

However, the final section, Shapiro's own case for Shakespeare's authorship of the plays and poems, reveals all the strengths that led readers to embrace 1599 so enthusiastically – it is accessible without being simplistic, and uses the accretion of textual and circumstantial evidence to make a compelling case, based not on spurious missing documents, batty readings and even battier readers, but on the complex tale that the textual history of Shakespeare's plays has to tell us.

Danielle Clarke is Professor of English Renaissance Language and Literature at University College Dublin

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Fiction

Jumat, 16 April 2010

“Former U.S. senator says "legal fictions" justify ... - Courier-Journal” plus 2 more

“Former U.S. senator says "legal fictions" justify ... - Courier-Journal” plus 2 more

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