Don't stop with Confederate flag
Left-wing darling Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam group, thinks the country shouldn't stop at taking down the Confederate flag in South Carolina and elsewhere. No, he said amid cheers at the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., last week, "we need to put the American flag down. Because we've caught as much h-- under that as the Confederate flag."
"White folks march with you because they don't want you upsetting the city," he said. "They don't give a d-- about them dead [nine people in Charleston, S.C.]."
Farrakhan went on tell the crowd that when the Charleston police took suspected slayer Dylann Roof to Burger King, they told him, "You did a good job. Kill all them [expletives]." In fact, police did not take him to the fast-food restaurant but went there to obtain food for Roof, who was in custody.
The Confederate flag, he reiterated, is not the big deal. "Who are we fighting today?" he asked. "It's the people that carry the American flag."
So much for not fanning the flames.
Ban the vowels in C-v-l W-r?
The suggested removal of the Confederate flag from the state capitol grounds in Columbia, S.C., following the horrific killing of nine black people by a white supremacist in Charleston, S.C., has set off a frenzy of requests or demands. Chances are you've heard about the possible removal of the bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest in the Tennessee capitol building and the Confederate flag symbol from the Mississippi state flag, but here's a few you may not have heard about:
* Warner Bros. has stopped licensing toy replicas of the General Lee, an orange Dodge Charger with a Confederate paint theme from the television series "Dukes of Hazzard."
* Apple has removed Civil War games from its app store.
* A New York film critic has called for banning "Gone With the Wind," which was voted the best movie of all time in an ABC "Greatest Movies Of Our Time" presentation in 2011.
* A CNN host asked a guest whether the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., needs to be torn down because Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner.
* New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu has been discussing whether a statue of Robert E. Lee and others in the city "still have a relevance to our future."
' Stars and Stripes reported that talk for years about whether the names of nine United States Army bases named after Confederate generals should be changed has come up again.
* ESPN commentator Keith Olbermann compared the resistance to changing the Washington Redskins' nickname to a Confederate flag, both actions that can "invoke and encourage racism, and violence, and madness, and murder, and treason."
Trumping plans
Reality TV star and all-around rich guy Donald Trump is surging in Republican presidential polls in some states, but don't look for his surge to have much staying power. In the meantime, though, he will find ways of keeping himself in the news, and on at least one count, he has a good reason.
Trump plans to sue Univision over its decision to renege on its contract to air the Miss Universe pageant, but he said the suit will include the social media comparison of him to accused Charleston slayer Dylann Roof by Alberto Ciurana, Univision's president of programming and content.
Ciurana, who said last week Univision would cut ties to the pageant because of Trump's criticism of Mexican illegal immigrants, posted photos to the social media website Instagram of Trump and Roof side by side with the words "No Comments."
Trump, who owns a share of the pageant, said Univision had no "out clauses" on the pageant deal, so "they'll be sued for a tremendous amount of money, and I'll win." And as for the photo, he said, "they put a picture of me up next to that horrible human being who killed nine people. You know what that picture's going to cost them? It's going to cost them a fortune."
Gender bonus
Cornell University professor Sara Pritchard says female professors should receive a gender bonus on their student evaluations because she said research shows they are more likely to get evaluations filled with personal attacks and "comments that have nothing to do with their teaching abilities or competencies."
"Female faculty should receive an automatic correction - that is to say, a bonus - on their quantitative teaching evaluation scores," she wrote at The Conversation. This bonus for being a woman "should be determined by average gender bias in teaching evaluations at their institution or national averages."
Pritchard, according to Rate My Professors, has good reviews - in a small sample size - but she complains that students often call females "bossy" but term male professors "funny" and "brilliant."
If her suggestion catches on, look for something similar to be requested for all job evaluations and, if no satisfaction is received, a possible Supreme Court case.