lots of articles
By Jamie Malernee
South Florida Sun-Sentinel
May 5, 2006
A 10-year-old Coral Springs girl won't be allowed to sing a controversial President Bush-bashing ballad at her school talent show after her principal deemed it inappropriate and too political.
The song, Dear Mr. President, performed and co-written by the singer Pink, criticizes the president for the war in Iraq and other policies, including his stance on gay rights.
Parent Nancy Shoul says her daughter Molly should be lauded for choosing lyrics that are full of substance rather than pop music fluff. She said the principal's ban sends a bad message and violates her daughter's right to free speech.
"If this was a student singing a pro-administration song, no one would quibble with it," Shoul said. "The principal is just running scared and doesn't want to upset any parents."
The principal of Park Springs Elementary, Camille Pontillo, could not be reached for comment Thursday. In an e-mail provided by the mother, Pontillo explained that the song Molly "chose to sing is a political song and does use the word hell in it." A Broward County School District official said the principal has every right to determine what music her students should hear at a school function.
"This is a fifth-grade student that wants to perform a song filled with lyrics about drug use, war, abortion, gay rights and profanity," said district spokeswoman Nadine Drew. "This is an elementary school that includes kindergarteners and pre-K students."
The song does not mention abortion, and the profanity mentioned is the word "hell." The drug use refers to Bush's alleged conduct before he became president.
Some of the lyrics read:
… What kind of father would take his own daughter's rights away
… And what kind of father might hate his own daughter if she were gay
… I can only imagine what the first lady has to say
… You've come a long way from whiskey and cocaine
Another portion criticizes Bush for the war:
… How do you sleep while the rest of us cry
… How do you dream when a mother has no chance to say goodbye
Molly said Thursday she thought the song was "really cool" because it spoke about important subjects like war and homelessness.
Molly said she liked the way the song addressed the president directly.
"He should try to listen to what other people say, not just himself," she said.
The decision to pull the song comes about a year after the School Board decided to allow a high school student to wear a T-shirt with the face of President Bush and the phrase "International Terrorist."
Initially, the Nova High School student was told he would be suspended if he did not remove the shirt, but later the American Civil Liberties Union threatened to sue and the board changed its dress code rules, removing the word "offensive" from the description of prohibited clothing. "Students have a right to give their opinions and points of view," says the free speech section of the Student Code of Conduct. Principals may censor, it states, only if the material is obscene, slanderous, likely to disrupt, profane or sells a commercial product.
Howard Simon, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, disagreed with Pontillo's decision. He expected the school to reverse course after checking the law.
"It's as if the principal's worst nightmare is for intellectual debate and controversy to break out in a classroom," Simon said.
Nancy Shoul, a teacher of Spanish at Coconut Creek High and a veteran of more than two decades in Broward public schools, said there would probably be no issue if her daughter wanted to sing the song in middle or high school.
Assuming the decision stands, Molly said she plans to select a new song for the show later this month with a message she thinks school officials wouldn't object to: A hip-hop song about two girls fighting over a boy.
Jamie Malernee can be reached by jmalernee@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4849.
Copyright © 2006, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
NY Times
One of the abiding curiosities of the Bush administration is that after more than five years in office, the president has yet to issue a veto. No one since Thomas Jefferson has stayed in the White House this long without rejecting a single act of Congress. Some people attribute this to the Republicans' control of the House and the Senate, and others to Mr. Bush's reluctance to expend political capital on anything but tax cuts for the wealthy and the war in Iraq. Now, thanks to a recent article in The Boston Globe, we have a better answer.
President Bush doesn't bother with vetoes; he simply declares his intention not to enforce anything he dislikes. Charlie Savage at The Globe reported recently that Mr. Bush had issued more than 750 "presidential signing statements" declaring he wouldn't do what the laws required. Perhaps the most infamous was the one in which he stated that he did not really feel bound by the Congressional ban on the torture of prisoners.
In this area, as in so many others, Mr. Bush has decided not to take the open, forthright constitutional path. He signed some of the laws in question with great fanfare, then quietly registered his intention to ignore them. He placed his imperial vision of the presidency over the will of America's elected lawmakers. And as usual, the Republican majority in Congress simply looked the other way.
Many of the signing statements reject efforts to curb Mr. Bush's out-of-control sense of his powers in combating terrorism. In March, after frequent pious declarations of his commitment to protecting civil liberties, Mr. Bush issued a signing statement that said he would not obey a new law requiring the Justice Department to report on how the F.B.I. is using the Patriot Act to search homes and secretly seize papers if he decided that such reporting could impair national security or executive branch operations.
In another case, the president said he would not instruct the military to follow a law barring it from storing illegally obtained intelligence about Americans. Now we know, of course, that Mr. Bush had already authorized the National Security Agency, which is run by the Pentagon, to violate the law by eavesdropping on Americans' conversations and reading Americans' e-mail without getting warrants.
We know from this sort of bitter experience that the president is not simply expressing philosophical reservations about how a particular law may affect the war on terror. The signing statements are not even all about national security. Mr. Bush is not willing to enforce a law protecting employees of nuclear-related agencies if they report misdeeds to Congress. In another case, he said he would not turn over scientific information "uncensored and without delay" when Congress needed it. (Remember the altered environmental reports?)
Mr. Bush also demurred from following a law forbidding the Defense Department to censor the legal advice of military lawyers. (Remember the ones who objected to the torture-is-legal policy?) Instead, his signing statement said military lawyers are bound to agree with political appointees at the Justice Department and the Pentagon.
The founding fathers never conceived of anything like a signing statement. The idea was cooked up by Edwin Meese III, when he was the attorney general for Ronald Reagan, to expand presidential powers. He was helped by a young lawyer who was a true believer in the unitary presidency, a euphemism for an autocratic executive branch that ignores Congress and the courts. Unhappily, that lawyer, Samuel Alito Jr., is now on the Supreme Court.
Since the Reagan era, other presidents have issued signing statements to explain how they interpreted a law for the purpose of enforcing it, or to register narrow constitutional concerns. But none have done it as profligately as Mr. Bush. (His father issued about 232 in four years, and Bill Clinton 140 in eight years.) And none have used it so clearly to make the president the interpreter of a law's intent, instead of Congress, and the arbiter of constitutionality, instead of the courts.
Like many of Mr. Bush's other imperial excesses, this one serves no legitimate purpose. Congress is run by a solid and iron-fisted Republican majority. And there is actually a system for the president to object to a law: he vetoes it, and Congress then has a chance to override the veto with a two-thirds majority.
That process was good enough for 42 other presidents. But it has the disadvantage of leaving the chief executive bound by his oath of office to abide by the result. This president seems determined not to play by any rules other than the ones of his own making. And that includes the Constitution.
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: May 2, 2006
Abortion may be the single most polarizing issue in America today, but there's one thing Democrats and Republicans mostly agree on: it would be better if Americans had fewer abortions.
The best way to reduce the number of abortions, in turn, would be to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies. Every year, Americans have three million unplanned pregnancies, leading to 1.3 million abortions.
So it should be a no-brainer that we increase access to contraception, and in particular make the "morning after" pill available over the counter. That would be the single simplest step to reduce the U.S. abortion rate, while also helping hundreds of thousands of women avert unwanted pregnancies.
Plan B, the emergency contraceptive, normally prevents pregnancy when taken within 72 hours of unprotected sex - although it is most effective when taken within 24 hours. It is now available in most of the U.S. only by prescription, but the American Medical Association and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists have both endorsed it for over-the-counter use.
President Bush's Food and Drug Administration has blocked that, apparently fearing that better contraception will encourage promiscuity. But unless the libidophobes in the administration mandate chastity belts, their opposition to Plan B amounts to a pro-abortion policy.
One study, now a bit dated, found that if emergency contraceptives were widely available in the U.S., there would be 800,000 fewer abortions each year. And even though they are generally available only by prescription, emergency contraceptives averted 51,000 abortions in 2000, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
That's one of the paradoxes in the abortion debate: The White House frequently backs precisely the policies that cause America to have one of the highest abortion rates in the West. Compared with other countries, the U.S. lags in sex education and in availability of contraception - financing for contraception under the Title X program has declined 59 percent in constant dollars since 1980 - so we have higher unintended pregnancy rates and abortion rates.
Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium have abortion rates only one-third of America's, and France's is half of America's. France has made a particular push for emergency contraception to lower its abortion rate by making free morning-after pills available to French teenagers, without informing the parents. Nurses in French junior high and high schools are authorized to hand out emergency contraception pills.
That broad availability is the global pattern. While American women cannot normally obtain emergency contraception without a prescription (by which time the optimal 24-hour window has often passed), it is available without a prescription in much of the rest of the world, from Albania to Tunisia, from Belgium to Britain.
One thought that paralyzes the Bush administration is that American teenage girls might get easy access to emergency contraception and turn into shameless hussies. But contraception generally doesn't cause sex, any more than umbrellas cause rain.
The reality is that almost two-thirds of American girls have lost their virginity by the time they turn 18 - and one-quarter use no contraception their first time. Some 800,000 American teenagers become pregnant each year, 80 percent of the time unintentionally.
So we may wince at the thought of a 15-year-old girl obtaining Plan B after unprotected sex. But why does the White House prefer to imagine her pregnant?
Indeed, Plan B may be more important for teenagers than for adults, because adults are more likely to rely on a regular contraceptive. Teenagers wing it.
Granted, making contraceptives available - all kinds, not just Plan B - presents a mixed message. We encourage young people to abstain from sex, and then provide condoms in case they don't listen. But that's because we understand human nature: We also tell drivers not to speed, but provide air bags in case they do.
The administration's philosophy seems to be that the best way to discourage risky behavior is to take away the safety net. Hmmm. I suppose that if we replaced air bags with sharpened spikes on dashboards, people might drive more carefully - but it still doesn't seem like a great idea.
So let's give American women the same rights that they would have if they were Albanians or Tunisians, and make Plan B available over the counter. It's time for President Bush to end his policies that encourage abortions.