From World Net Daily(not the tabloid site World News Daily), with h/t to Green Hell Blog, something that if proven is quite disturbing. Yet given the kind of treatment I’ve recently received at the hands of an eco-zealot who can’t tolerate my views on climate, I’m not surprised.
Some people have no scruples and no shame. – Anthony
Democrats attack Republican candidate’s children
By Art Robinson
In an effort to do my part in rescuing our country from the out-of-control Obama administration, last year I ran for Congress in Oregon’s 4th District against 12-term incumbent, far-left Democrat Peter DeFazio, co-founder of the House Progressive Caucus.
Although I won the nominations of the Republican, Independent and Constitution Parties and the endorsement of the Libertarian Party, a massive media smear campaign by DeFazio, paid for with money raised by MoveOn.org and from special interests favored by DeFazio in Washington, resulted in a 54.5 percent to 43.6 percent victory for DeFazio in a race that was expected to be much closer.
Although I had never run for public office before, I immediately announced my candidacy for Congress again in 2012.
However, when you take a stand for what’s right, sometimes there is retribution.On Nov. 4, 2010, as soon as the election results were in and they were sure their candidate had won, faculty administrators at Oregon State University gave new meaning to the term “political payback.”
They initiated an attack on my three children – Joshua, Bethany and Matthew – for the purpose of throwing them all out of the OSU graduate school, despite their outstanding academic and research accomplishments. OSU is a liberal socialist Democrat stronghold in Oregon that received a reported $27 million in earmark funding from my opponent, Peter DeFazio, and his Democrat colleagues during the last legislative session.
Read full story here: Democrats attack Republican candidate’s children
UPDATE: I decided to pull the direct link to the website that hurled unspeakable insults to me by an eco-zealot, they don’t deserve the traffic WUWT will generate for them. Such things are best handled by other means. So, I used WebCite to permanently log the website, and you can view it here, scroll all the way to the bottom and note “corrections”: http://www.webcitation.org/5x0pgZdgl
UPDATE2: OSU has posted a statement which you can read here
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Robert:
As Gneiss has shown quite clearly,his interpretation of the rules for that particular department appear to be correct. You state the following:
most doctoral programs require students to go through both written and oral exams
I have no idea what most doctoral programs do, but there are no overarching rules on this…Different departments do different things. In my physics grad program, there was only an oral qualifying exam. (And really, that was only much of a hurdle if you had done poorly in your courses; they always had the students go out of the exam room twice…once before they started and once after they finished so they could ostenstibly make their decision. But most people said…more seriously than jokingly…that it was the first time that you stepped out of the room that they decided really whether you were going to pass or fail.)
I have heard of other departments where there is only a written exam. It appears that the particular department that Robinson’s son is in has a two-tiered system where there is a written exam and then the additional hurdle of an oral exam for the ones who didn’t totally bomb the written but didn’t do that well either. You have to investigate the particular department’s rules to see what their rules are, as Gneiss has done.
Joel, thanks for your input. I actually did go looking for the “OSU Graduate Student Manual” (or whatever the hell Joshua called it in his letter to his chair) but I was searching the graduate school web pages rather than the department web page. Even with Gneiss’s hint it took another 30 minutes to locate the @ur momisugly#$%!!! thing, and it took a little bit of in-depth reading to realize that Joshua had just passed his qualifying exam after nearly four years of study…. so perhaps I am more reading challenged than I thought, ’cause Gneiss got that one right as well. Where I believe Gneiss is wrong is in casually tossing out the statement that young Joshua “did poorly” on the exam (which was actually more than one) and that “conditional pass” was somewhere between a pass and a fail (the handbook never once uses the term “conditional” and the word “conditionally” only once – I actually suspect that “conditional pass” was Joshua’s term rather than one used by the department) all of which has the effect of impugning Joshua’s scholarship. As I mentioned in my previous comment, he could have scored an 89 total on the exam series but just barely missed on one of the components and been required to take the oral…. not exactly a robust description of “did poorly”. We also do not know if being required to take the orals is common or rare… if Joshua was the first in 20 years, that might say something about his level of scholarship, but again, we just don’t know and OSU would have quite a few good reasons to not enlighten us on that matter (I mean, picture it, Joel, a department admitting “well, most of our students just aren’t well enough prepared to pass their qualifying tests first time around….”).
Gneiss does not know young Joshua’s scores.
Gneiss does not know how young Joshua’s scores rank compared to others like him.
Gneiss did not speculate… “hmmmm, is there a possibility young Josh did so poorly on the written exam that his father felt compelled to pull the ‘politics card’?”… rather he simply stated that young Joshua did poorly on the exam, and a year from now people who have never investigated will remark, “oh yeah, Joshua Robinson. The kid who did poorly on an exam and his dad made a big stink about it…”
So yes, I still think Gneiss is basically dishonest (though not a liar). He made something sound like a statement of fact when he had no evidence and impugned the character and ability of a person. Yes, skeptics have done much the same… hell, if I do that, please call me on it… but keep in mind that I am one of the few skeptics on this thread that have pointed to the lack of ….. substance?… backing up Dr. Robinson’s claims. Facts matter.
Robert E. Phelan writes,
“meaning that Joshua could have scored as high as an 89 on the total score and still been required to take an oral exam. I would not consider that score to be “doing poorly”, a term which would impugn the man’s scholarship. In point of fact, you have no evidence that he “did poorly” any more than I would have to claim that he did well. Neither do we have any evidence to suggest that taking the oral followup to the qualifying exam is common or rare among OSU students. Your comment, lacking additional context, is not honest.”
That’s some fancy dancing, Robert.
I said that the conditional pass was a grade between pass and fail. That was true.
You said that it was not. That was false.
You accused me of lying. That was false too.
I showed that you had made false accusation. I wondered if you would man up or spin harder. And look what you chose.
Carry on.
REPLY: You can use the term “man up” here when you use your full name like Mr. Phelan does. Otherwise you are just noise in that context. – Anthony
Anthony, thank you.
Gneiss: do you really want to insist that OSU has a “conditional pass” status that is defined in the OSU handbook? If anyone cares to check, it can be accessed here:
http://ne.oregonstate.edu/current/PDFs/GradHandbook2009_2010.pdf
I’ve already apologized for the insinuation you lied. Your description of the oral exam as a sort of “makeup” for a deficiency in the written qualifying exam is correct and my interpretation was wrong. Your assertion, however, that Joshua Robinson “did poorly” on the exam, in the absence of his actual scores and how those scores compare to those of his peers, is defamatory. If you had framed your remarks as speculation then it would have fit in with so much else on this thread, but you didn’t. You took a cheap shot and I think you know it was. That is dishonest.
Oh, and Gneiss, when I screw up here and am called to account, it is under my own real name. Just sayin.
Robert E. Phelan says:
March 9, 2011 at 12:26 am
Johanna:
You are probably a nice lady but I was sure you wouldn’t understand and you don’t. You’ve made quite a few erroneous assimptions about what I believe… and it would be a sucker.s bet to wager that my knowledge and understanding of intellectual history is any less than yours. You might be surprised to discover just how much the American experience shaped and inspired those Utilitarian thinkers. Read de Tocqueville and you’ll begin to get a glimmer of American Exceptionalism. Read Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and you’ll get an idea of what the stakes are today.
—————————————————————–
Firstly, I am not ‘a nice lady’. I am a poster on this site whose statements or views have nothing to do with being either ‘nice’ or a ‘lady’. If my username was ‘johan’, would you say that I was “a nice man”?
Secondly, I have read the authors you cited, and broadly agree with your take on them.
Thirdly, while there is undoubtedly something called “American Exceptionalism”, and it is an admirable and robust stream of democracy, it is not a Received Truth. I do not for a moment believe that the form of democracy in my country is perfect. The word ‘perfect’ does not appear in our constitutional history, unlike in yours.
During the British Empire, many Britons were deluded into the view that their idea of the world and how it should operate represented the height of civilisation. The problem was not that their ideas were wrong (as they sometimes were) , but the assumption that they should be imposed because they were right. I suppose that this is a characteristic of all empires, including the US one.
Having visited the US, I never cease to be amazed at the monolithic public image (exemplified in your posts) as opposed to the astonishing, extraordinary and dynamic reality. Unlike England, China, Spain and other previous imperialists, the US is constantly infused with new ideas from people all over the world. It is a restless beast, constantly chafing, never satisfied, perhaps always seeking the perfection or happiness that were promised in the Constitutional documents.
That is great. But, stepping over the line by saying that no-one understands liberty except Americans (actually, a subset of Americans) is at the heart of many failures in the wider world. That mentality carried into the climate debate is counter productive as well. The notion that people have to convert to being Republicans (even if they live outside the US) to disagree with CAGW is self defeating. Constant derision of ‘liberals’ and ‘lefties’ is not the way to get people to consider changing their views. Similarly, trumpeting that the US is the only democracy of any worth in the world is not the way to win sympathy, let alone respect.
johanna,
I agree with just about all of your comments – except this one:
“The notion that people have to convert to being Republicans (even if they live outside the US) to disagree with CAGW is self defeating.”
First of all, IANAR. [Or a Democrat, for that matter.] My view is that Climategate/Copenhagen was a turning point, where the AGW debate became highly political. The CAGW beast was badly wounded and lashed out using politics.
In other words, they started it. But when someone declares war on you, you can’t just cede them the battlefield, you have to fight back. And the more the green beast loses the CAGW debate, the more political its response will be.
I agree that the U.S. isn’t any special democracy. I’ve seen massive voting fraud up close. Too many groups have learned to game the system. The U.S. isn’t the EU – yet.
Johanna:
If your were Johan I would say your were a nice man. If I haven’t said it before, I also think Smokey and even Willis Eschenbach, prickly as he can be, are both nice men, as is our long-suffering host Anthony. Michael Mann and Gavin Schmidt are definitely NOT nice men. “Nice” is a question of character and character matters.
Like Smokey, I find a lot to agree with in your postings and, like Smokey, IANAR – but I think I am still a registered Democrat – more to do with local politics than anything else….
You keep ascribing to me things I don’t believe and argue against things I’ve never said. You keep trying to define things in a kind of liberal/conservative democrat/republican dichotomy that just plain is not accurate. My original point was that a lot of commentors wanted the Americans to be more like Europeans, but that if the Americans were more like Europeans we wouldn’t be Americans and the kind of leadership you are expecting from us wouldn’t exist. My point also is that the American perspective is a unique and valuable contribution and it is one that transcends the labels of party. There is a significant segment of America that recognizes that our parties and our democracy are being hijacked, but you are not comfortable with that segment. CAGW is but one front in a struggle over this hijacking. It is very political, but not in the terms you understand. The Marxists, and later the Frankurt School, developed the idea of “false consciousness”, the failure of the oppressed to recognize their commonality of interests with other oppressed groups, adopting instead the justifications of their oppressors. Interpreting my remarks as some kind of narrow, ignorant, partisan Republican point of view rather confirms my point.
PhD candidate cut off from his own thesis equipment as political payback against his father, GOP candidate Dr. Robinson. See:
GOP candidate says son suffering political payback
Claims professor seized doctoral project from award-winning student
Posted: March 18, 2011 9:10 pm Eastern © 2011 WorldNetDaily
This is the worst abuse of power I have heard of in American science. Please call/write.
See Oregon State Outrage and links above.