The courts have consistently ruled that students have the right not to recite the pledge in public schools. But now some First Amendment advocates are arguing that the law compels educators to inform kids at the beginning of school that the decision is hat the decision is entirely up to them as to whether or not they wish to recite the pledge. The original article doesn’t bring this up, but while some students have political concerns, there are others who have religious concerns, including Jehovah’s Witnesses. Also, I think, but am not able to find any information on it, that reciting the pledge presents halachic (Jewish legal) issues, and possibly also Muslim legal issues as well. Given all this, I don’t see a problem with letting students and their parents know that reciting the pledge is optional, and I certainly don’t believe that any student should be humiliated for not reciting the pledge. Read the whole thing for the complete story.

Rabbinic Conversion Court judges are more likely to reject prospective converts who were partially trained via the Internet, a senior source in the Conversion Authority said Sunday.
According to the source, about 70% of prospective converts who are interviewed by the conversion court are accepted. However, among prospective converts who were trained in part via the Internet, only about half are accepted, said the source.
The issue of conversions comes to the forefront ahead of Shavuot, which is celebrated with the reading of the biblical story of Ruth, the archetypical convert to Judaism.

According to the above-referenced conversion court source, the court can tell the difference between people who study partially using the internet, and those who study using only books and a face-to-face teacher. I maintain, however, that this isn’t a matter of the internet producing lower-quality students, or the internet providing lower-quality material, but students either not utilizing it properly, or students finding alternative oppinions of rabbis who don’t necessarily hold like the rabbis sitting on the conversion panel, and thus these students are disqualified. During my conversion studies in 1999/2000, if it hadn’t been for the internet, I would have never gotten the information I needed. I devoured JewFaq, and to this day I use it as a partial reference, along with Project Genesis and Aish Hatorah due to the almost complete inavailability of seforim in any sort of accessible format. And until this complete inavailability is changed, I’ll continue to do so, or I’ll have to buy print seforim and then scan them, correct the mistakes that creep in through OCR, and then, finally, read it. So in my eyes, this annti-tech decree strikes me as a luddite one at best.
Hat-tip.

A Beeville grandmother who sent tea bag tabs to Washington and Austin earlier this month found herself at police headquarters Monday answering questions about her intentions.

“I’m just a normal person. I’m a single grandmother raising two granddaughters,” said Faye Freeman Tuesday morning.

So imagine her reaction when Texas Ranger Andy Lopez and Beeville Police Department Staff Sgt. Richard Cantu came to her door Monday and told her they wanted her to go to the police department for questioning.

The reason? Freeman had mailed the tags from 64 tea bags to different elected representatives in Austin and Washington on April 4 to protest government spending. And one of the recipients had called the authorities to report her, saying he or she had received something suspicious in the mail from a woman in Beeville.

“If you were on the receiving end of something like that, what would you think?” Freeman said Lopez asked her.

“If I’d got something like that, I would have called the person back and said, ‘Can I help you?’” was her response.

Now now, we can’t have common sense entering into this discussion. It’s just not proper for the common folk to criticize our benevolent government. They plant fear in the hearts of our harried political overlords, and that’s just a horrible thing to do.

Freeman was doing what thousands of working taxpayers are doing this month as part of a protest against increased government spending and coming tax increases.

Instead of sending tea bags, the grandmother decided to send the tabs from the bags and use the tea herself.

When she was asked why it was that she did not include a note in the letter explaining why she was sending the tabs, she had a simple answer. “That would have been an awful lot of writing.”

Freeman sent the envelopes to everyone in Washington and Austin she thought might listen. That included President Barack Obama, her U.S. senators and a number of representatives, state senators and representatives.

“When you do something like this you want to cover the chain of command,” she said.

But she never expected lawmen to show up at her door asking her to go downtown.

“I’m really surprised it happened,” Freeman said. “You should have seen my neighbors. I’m just a normal person and when the Texas Rangers came looking for me, they said, ‘Oh my goodness, what’s going on?’”

“I was stunned to start with,” Freeman said. “I didn’t have any idea. They kept assuring me that I wouldn’t be arrested.”

Your tax dollars at work fellow citizens, sending the cops after little old ladies. Absolutely pathetic.

source, via.