Because Nothing Is Too Crazy for Oklahoma
I am a fifth generation Texan. I was pretty near fully grown before I knew that Oklahoma Sucks was two separate words.
So now their state legislature is coming real close to taking the cake.
State Rep Sally Kern heard a rumor that some student was suspended for eating his Pop Tart into the shape of a gun. That’s what she heard and she’s sticking to it. The fact that it wasn’t in her state and might have happened somewhere in Maryland was not cause for her to shrink from the horror of little children doing what comes naturally.
Oklahoma schoolchildren could not be punished for chewing their breakfast pastries into the shape of a gun under a bill introduced by a Republican legislator.
Rep. Sally Kern said Wednesday that her measure, dubbed the Common Sense Zero Tolerance Act, was in response to school districts’ policies that she believes are too strict or inflexible. She cited a recent Maryland case where a boy was suspended from school for chewing a Pop Tart into the shape of a gun.
Under Kern’s bill, children could bring “small” toy weapons to school which ought to cause some real fun guessing games for other students and teachers. “Is It Real,” is such fun in the cafeteria line!
Yes, the menace of pop tart art is first and foremost on Ms. Kern’s mind and Oklahomans should sleep better tonight knowing that.
Thanks to Texasmiatafrank for the heads up.
Maybe Federal election laws should be changed to the effect that if you are an elected official and you meddle in the affairs of other constituencies, those voters should be able to cast votes in your precincts on your election day.
My momma’s first rule involved minding your own bidness and encouraging those around you to mind theirs.
1I started to write “You wouldn’t believe some of what she has said or proposed.” but it’s not any crazier than some of the other stuff published here.
I just hope we can get some good Democrats elected in this reddest of the red states next election. State Representative Joe Dorman, who tried to get storm shelters in schools through a petition drive that was opposed by the governor and attorney general and didn’t get enough signatures in time, is planning to run for governor I’m still amazed at people who wouldn’t sign it.
Our congressional delegation may not be as noisy as yours but some are like the stopped clock that’s right twice a day (make that a month or year in their case) and others don’t even come up to that standard.
2Did this Damn Fool (sorry Momma, that’s as polite as I can be) ever stop to ask TEACHERS, you know, the PROFESSIONALS, what they might want, or NOT, in their classrooms? And what the HELLl (sorry again Momma) is “Common Sense Zero Tolerance” pray tell?
This (please use other expletives) “person” needs to spend real time, six weeks minimum, in a classroom and lengthy consultation with teachers before she earns the right to offer opinion about what should be allowed in schools.
3“Stupid is as stupid does.” – Forrest Gump.
She should introduce an amendment to the Oklahoma Constitution to protect the state’s citizens’ inalienable right to be stupid. (Although that may do away with Oklahoma’s public school system entirely.)
4Well, she had to do something to prove that she was actually awake and in the legislature. Ten to one she’s done nothing to date and this was her last chance which would allow her to go home and brag to her constituents just how good she is at her job.
5My grandmother would have said (sweetly) “That is some kind of dumb— looking for a place to perch”. It obviously found Ms. Kern and is renting out space in her head.
6Damnedest bit of news I’ve hear in the last 10 minutes.
7In the case of the kid with the pop tart, I’d be more interested in what he had to say about it to the other kids and who all copied him and what they were doing with all the toy guns and their fists when they only had 3 minutes left to finish eating. And why would anyone serve PopTarts at lunch? Dang budget cuts. The kids need better lunches. Big old 14 year olds need to get more for lunch and it shouldn’t cost as much as going to eat at Tres Amigos or somewhere. And that lady needs to learn history and how to write decent laws or find someone to help her who knows that stuff. I have a friend who finally had it with teaching with budget cuts and retired. Enough already. Legislators oughta have to go eat school lunch and, without any help, monitor one whole huge cafeteria full of kids for a week before signing laws.
8Make that six weeks, (ref. monitoring cafeteria) in deference to RA.
9Wonder how much that little tart bill cost the taxpayers.
10Maryelle, THAT would be a good research project for someone: the cost of useless bills in Congress.
11I think Kern is–may the FSM be praised–a STATE legislator in OKloma and thus has yet to inflict her particular package of teh burnin’ stoopit on the U.S. Congress. One can only hope that she never gets the chance.
12A lot of toy guns look real, so why not bring a real gun and say it’s a toy? Daddy lets me play with it…..
13Thanks Marge. One week really isn’t enough for the uninitiated or arrogantly ignorant to fully experience what it’s really like in a school.
I didn’t want my children to have guns, but my oldest saw his dad go hunting and from early on made guns out of anything he could– fingers, sticks, Lego blocks. Yeah, those words are very chewy. He grew up to be a Marine (for college money HAHAHA!!!) He still likes guns and owns several. He even has a conceal carry permit. Now he’s a social studies teacher. There is NO WAY he would condone any such legislation as proposed by Ms Damn Fool. She is in desperate need of some real education.
14Yep. And kids will make guns of anything, including a finger and thumb. Remember? My mama would not let me have a toy gun like all the cousins and neighbors did so I just used a stick. It worked fine. And I feel kinda sorry for that lady in Oklahoma. Imagine going home and everyone saying “Did you get any bills passed”? What’s she gonna say? “Well, at LEAST I got this very important bill passed to protect our precious childerns’ minds and hearts” and everyone will go ooooooh, ain’t she great. Who’s running against her?
15Marge, as for the cost of useless bills, someone calculated that the GOP House’s useless voting over and over to repeal Obamacare cost us over $52 million, given that it took over 80 hours to do it.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-57470643/health-care-repeal-effort-worth-the-time/?tag=stack
16My question is why the kid, when he got caught, didn’t quickly dispose of the evidence?
17Actually, I think they’re going about this in entirely the wrong way. After all, lots of food – sandwiches, pop tarts,etc. – could all be eaten or shaped to look not just like a gun but a bomb, knife, or hand grenade.
The real solution is obvious: ban solid foods in school.
This would not only reduce the threat, but also cut costs as students could drink directly from the bowl so no implements need be used. Even better, put up a whole bunch of microwaves, have the students heat their own food, and throw away the containers. Now we’ve also eliminated the need for cafeteria workers!
Trying to be helpful,
18AlanInAustin
While I agree this isn’t the way to go about it, I will say that the whole weapons in school hysteria has gone a little far. My special needs son likes history. Especially military history. He was a slow reader (although now he reads really well, yeah!) and so if he asks me for a book, I pretty much get it. I’m a retired librarian, and I think ideas are good, censorship is bad. My son asked for a book that was Weapons of WWII or something similar and took it to school, his high school. He got in trouble for sitting quietly and reading his book because the pictures might scare someone. Now these were not pictures of the war, just pictures of the weapons and descriptions. No blood, no gore. He wasn’t hitting anyone or saying bang. A few weeks later he got in trouble for looking at a picture of an antique weapon that is smaller than a derringer. Again, nobody was actually complaining, but a teacher (not the classroom teacher but a spec ed teacher who just dropped in to the classroom) saw the word gun and yanked him off the computer. My son wasn’t disrupting the classroom or disturbing anybody’s studies, but the resulting argument did. That just seems dumb to me. The kicker is that the HS library has books that are nearly identical and he checks those out and looks at them at school all the time. You try explaining why one is ok and the other is not to a literal minded kid.
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